Air’s affinities

Introduction

Rifts are breached here, in segues that are more or less reasonable. (Leslie, 2005: 23)

We are on the point of apprehending them in all their power and distinctness; such natures as, when they come in contact, at once lay hold of each other, and mutually affect one another, we speak of as having an affinity for the other. (Goethe, 2008: 54)

This is how Charlotte, a character from Goethe’s Elective Affinities, begins to understand the chemical force of affinity as explained by her husband Edward and the captain, a visitor at their house. Affinity, the power of chemical attraction, had entered the writing of authors such as Goethe who was already interested in the science of modern meteorology (Hamblyn, 2001). ¹ Goethe would bring affinity to life in the couple’s household as a manner of a relation, and it was affinity that would describe the disruption and violence of love. It is affinity as social, affective and magical that animates the Elective Affinities with passion, disquiet and eventually marital discord. The story, as Charlotte notes later on, is an entanglement of forces, characters and backgrounds moving into and away from one another. The literary geography of the novel is a chemical landscape told through airs of appearance, attraction and repulsion, new pairs and bondings forming. Heavy and light atmospheres distribute longing and expectancy as if an air hanging about the protagonists that could be caught or touched.

In this article, I explore a series of diverse examinations within human geography that have sought to take the matter of the air seriously. These include physical geographic writing inspired by cultural geographical and predominantly representational accounts of the meaning of air in a ‘cultural climatology’ of clouds, sky and the climate, histories of science concerned with the burgeoning systems of thought and classification of the weather or urban air, political economic accounts of particular bodies of air that threaten financial stability (De Goede and Randalls, 2009; Thornes and Randalls, 2007) and the governing of air through science, risk (Barry, 1998), insurance and financial products to produce what Mark Whitehead (2009) has called the making of ‘atmospheric selves’. Then there are a more contemporary series of forms of power that intervene on the atmosphere through production, science, models, ways of living and other levers in order to anticipate, moderate and secure climate change or that seek to secure life in emergency. An important body of work concerning urban airs is difficult to separate from these studies as recent research has begun to explore the emerging epistemologies and disciplinary makeup of an urban climatology within which particular kinds of lives and living conditions endure. There is the study of air that examines its entanglement with a politics of life, an approach Peter Sloterdijk (2009) pursues through the explication of air in technologies of killing and in the consumer-oriented practices of capital accumulation to finally a more phenomenological orientation of scholarship, what Jackson and Fannin (2011) have recently labelled an ‘aerography’ (see also McCormack, 2008), which encounters air as simultaneously meteorological and affective. What also follow these arguments are particular kinds of writing and representation that might be called atmospheric (Stewart, 2011).

Even if this list is not exhaustive, human geography suddenly seems afloat with airs and winds, fogs and aerial fluids, with volumes, verticals and objects in the air. ² But with what import? Is there now a moment to take stock and consider a wider trajectory of geographical research and thinking around air, particularly air and the elements? How might geographies of air interact with other facets of the discipline or other materials such as water, which has received far more critical attention within areas such as political–ecology (see e.g. Loftus, 2009; Swyngedouw, 1997)? The task of this article is partly to bring this diverse body of research together for the first time thematically but more substantively to attune with far more precision air with the elemental and, in so doing, explore the elemental to be more than its current rendering as physico-material agency but into a different register of more than chemical affinity. The article outlines what an elemental geography of air could look like in two main ways.

First, the article responds to Fannin and Jackson’s particular concern to preserve the incisive analyses of political economy and other formulations of power, especially in approaches to air that directly attend to the minutiae of practice and experience. That is, the article attempts to bring air to account in some way that does not demarcate the expressiveness of air’s encounters from a politics and rendering of power. Second, the article examines what other avenues Jackson and Fannin’s (2011) ‘aerographies’ might follow in the pursuit of a geography which has perhaps only begun to scratch at the surface of an encounter with air and the ‘elemental’. For what is Jackson and Fannin’s ambitious call but a demand to interrogate the element of air more seriously? What, however, might we mean by element or the elemental?

Gaston Bachelard (1988), in his famous treatise on the elements, describes them as ‘hormonal’ inspirations for the imagination (see also Anderson and Wylie, 2009). For Bachelard, there is something essential about elements, which could be to suggest that there are different orders of matter or substance, varying differences and intensities of the elemental that call for quite a different study of materiality. An elemental geography may be far more concerned with an ambit of air that is not reducible to the new theorizing of things in the recent writings on materiality, affect and enchantment or other geophysicalist epistemologies and ontologies. Elemental approaches might draw on some more familiar ways of considering affect and emotion, elemental philosophies that reaffirm older senses of the elements as anterior to human perception and notions of affinity – thought more as method – which listen to unlikely affinities, marriages and disjunctures between art, industry, poetics and conflict.

The article proceeds as follows. First I go some way towards mapping some broad areas of existing studies and a potential typology of how and where air is approached. The article then turns towards theorizations of chemical and affective affinity, elemental philosophy and towards some form of method. The final section deploys an analysis of air’s affinities through several fields of enquiry where an elemental geography of air might be encountered and taken further, first, in forms of writing about air, gender and modernity and, second, most substantially, in the geopolitics of air.

Geographies of air

In this section, the different ways human geographers have examined air is explored. It is suggested that current approaches remain relatively fractured and distanced from one another. An elemental geography that has perhaps never left the discipline’s concern might be rediscovered, but before we can begin to reconcile those differences, let us explore them in more detail.

Affinities for air

What if we reflected on the matter of an elemental consort with air. (Jackson and Fannin, 2011: 438)

Do we require other sorts – perhaps even older sorts – of thought, politics and vocabulary to address and write the air as elemental? Is there demand for more precision in the way that we write and conceptualize the elements as more than shorthand for a particular order of materiality? The approach to air developed in this article is influenced by a different set of what might appear to be quite opposing and contradictory sets of genres, taking at first inspiration from chemical notions of the elements, especially the idea of affinity and its reception in alchemy, science and literature, before moving to an emergent philosophy of the elements themselves. Through these literatures, we will establish theorizations of elemental air as a backgrounding condition, structure or ‘force’ but also, and, just as crucially, as method of affinitive listening.

First, we must notice that affinity has a different kind of genealogy to that usually explored within the more popular histories of the revolutions in elite science (Gyung Kim, 2003). Affinity is attributed as a particular and innate forcefulness held by elements and the mixtures and combinations they come to assemble and reassemble. Affinities defined certain properties and characteristics to elements and materials – tendencies to complement and attract one another. Indeed, affinity is usually told as an alchemic magic of attraction outside of the rationalities of the chemical revolution, even if it would become absorbed into the locus of chemical compositions and the tabularization of elements and their properties.

It is important to note that beyond Goethe’s application of affinity as an analogy for love, desire, familial relationships and morality discussed earlier, affinity was not a popular notion. Instead, it penetrated the circles of a small number of intellectuals and scientists. For example, Max Weber (Howe, 1978; McKinnon, 2010) (influenced by Goethe and a German elite tradition in the humanities) would draw on elective affinity as a way to understand quasi-causal systems of thought – between religion, ethics and science. Mellin would go on to even order the notions of concepts in Immanuel Kant into a table of ideas and their affinities. To that extent, the late 18th century would see the laws of affinity or attraction catalogued across different elements, first for Etienne-Francais de Geoffrey in over 24 substances and then in Torbon Bergman’s De attractionbus electivus – a table of 51 elements in 1775.

In this article, we are interested in the actual forces of intimacy and attraction implied in the notion of affinity between elements, especially air but also of the thing or element itself, in such a way that thing may not be an appropriate category to think about air or the elemental. In modern chemistry, of course, air is not an element but a combination of others that it holds in compositional suspension. In remaining true to this earlier spirit, however, the article will try to hold on to some sense of elemental wholeness such that attuning to the elemental does not simply demand an ever closer finer microscope on material–human relations. Instead, the elemental thinking discussed below requires that we partially withdraw the elements to a position anterior to our perception.

Departing modern chemistry to take earlier ideas of affinity seriously demands particular methodologies sensitive to the elements that may help us towards quite other senses of the air. Affinities can bring certain compositions together whilst destroying others. Affinities mean leaping beyond material substances but to a wider and yet intimate terrain of bodies, practices, cultures and technologies. Furthermore, the wider use of chemical or elemental affinity may help us make sense of the ways in which particular affinities and elements make and remake certain kinds of conditions that can be subjected to critique.

In this manner, a geography of elemental and chemical attraction, dissonance or repulsion can help to remind us that the relations encountered in and through air and other elements, do not just arrive unconditionally, or out of thin air. Indeed it is worth pointing out the relation to Katherine Stewart’s notion of atmospheric attunements. What this approach does differently, albeit attuning to similar kinds of practices of writing and representing, is to bolster existing modes of critique (e.g. of difference, order, power and invisibility) and attempt to illuminate them rather than eluding them. Let us turn our attention and critique through the elemental and its affinities in three main ways.

Novel air

Mary Elizabeth Lewis (2012) has written of the ‘novel’ associations that gave rise to the novel itself and the very writing about air. She describes these backgrounds as literary atmospheres or, ‘negative spaces registered […] [as] atmosphere’ (p.8), as conditions as and for elements, experience and expression. In other words, the consideration of elemental affinities in this way means oxymoronically that something like air is registered, perceived, experienced and written about only in the right conditions.

Take Cromer on the North Norfolk Coast. Elizabeth Gaskell’s Margaret Hale seeks mental and bodily strengthening upon the death of her parents and a family friend. In North and South (Gaskell, 2005 [1855]), we see an emerging autonomous and independent mobility of a woman (see Parkins 2008) taking advantage of the Victorian railways extending their way to the seaside resorts, pulled in by the good and healthy air. Margaret, now tragically relinquished of her father and mother, goes to Cromer for the sea air and solace. Whilst other characters move about her, Margaret’s is a less passive submission to the air. Braced by the wind, on Margaret’s return to town she takes her life into ‘her own hands’ and from this chrysalis a new woman is born.

Like Goethe and more recently Primo Levi’s writing through the gaseous materialities that inspire his Periodic Table (Levi, 2012), Gaskell’s North and South is a book full of air and atmospheres that foretell of Hale’s modernity. Writing through air expresses a wider societal concern for a certain sort of bad atmosphere, borrowing from the humoural temperament of melancholy which Robert Burton would comprehensively explore in his The Anatomy of Melancholy (Burton, 1651). In literature and writing, we can discover other sorts of elemental encounters that directly parse classical elemental and humoural notions of air with some kind of background or what we have called ‘literary atmosphere’, from which the form of the novel would emerge. For Lewis, such an approach is possible as writing may register those very ‘surrounding backgrounds’ and as we will explore certain political–economic conditions. Exploring writing, as Lewis asks, is to examine what ‘are such things like once we understand them to be ‘in the air’, subject to our suspended convictions about them?’ (Lewis, 2013: 23). In this section, we explore how elemental air gains shape in writing and, in so doing, the writing of air mediates between a particular set of urban labour and living conditions and a micropolitics of gendered voicings and affects.

Melancholy was a temperament that would commonly affect the literate and artistic classes circulating 19th-century literary communities and the people they were writing about. Its airs appear thick, cloudy, foggy and impure. Melancholy expresses an air of dejecting spirit, infections of the heart, melancholic air attacks from without and within. Such is the kinds of air that plague Margaret before Cromer. They immerse her, express her moods and suffocate her mother with dampness. But there are also airs that she eventually confronts and through that process restores some sense of power back to herself. In Cromer, Margaret takes the air for her own, whilst earlier in the book in Milton she battles it. It starts as her father leaves his role as a minister for a position in the north in Milton, Darkshire. The winds of change in this part of the book set up an inevitability that Margaret cannot change however much she voices her concerns. Unpacking the house into the rented accommodation they take at first outside Milton, Margaret sees ‘a thick fog’ surrounding the house. It is said to creep with searching fingers, feeling their way into the house through the windows in white unwholesome mists.

In Gaskell, and similarly Dickens, the novel expresses a literary atmosphere of class and gender inequality, urban pollution and publishing networks and rather different sorts of registers of air that we might also call elemental. As Yeats argues of Dickens,

Air’s material and metaphorical qualities are so intimately connected for Dickens that the phrase with which he signed off a letter to Elizabeth Gaskell, ‘London looks gloomy,’ might be read as a complaint about either the national or the meteorological outlook, or possibly both at once. (Yeats, 2011: 329)

According to Yeats, in Dickens, the air surfaces in a way that does not suppress but articulates the conditional affinities of the socioeconomic, the meteorological and the affective. Thus, a novel like Little Dorrit can be seen as an expression of theories of humoural pneumatics (Connor, 2002) along with an emerging urban climatological and public health discourse advocated by the likes of Luke Howard and Edwin Chadwick. These affinities would create new ‘equivalences between insalubrious socioeconomic climates and physically dirty atmospheres’ (Yeats, 2011: 334). Authors of the time could not but help express the contemporary conditions of working disputes and public health legislation, cholera outbreaks, polluting industries and developments in miasmatic theory – even the terms of epidemiology penetrates their language. But there is also an essential notion of air possessed by external, larger forces at work which the characters seek to endure, challenge and ultimately possess and be empowered by.

In North and South, the character Bessy is famously poisoned by the fluff, the suspended particles of cotton from the textile mills destroying the workers lungs. Air, body and spirit are conflated in these novelists’ pseudo realism, as the element of air appears a force outside of hope or intervention. Characters like Bessy become full of analogies that dissolve their boundaries with the surrounding spaces. Bodies become like chimneys or steam engines adding to the pollution of the city, women appear to struggle with the wind while men are set against it. ⁴ The mill owner Mr Thornton in particular battles the elements, he moves in spite of them – to spite the air itself. When it is announced that Mr Thornton is coming to tea, Mrs Hale fatalistically announces, ‘But, east or west wind, I suppose this man comes’. Mrs Hale and Margaret can only wonder at the man’s indifference, ‘The more it rains and blows, the more certain we are to have him’.

In this elemental metaphysics, gender empowerment means not only physical and social mobility, but learning to confront the air and even to use it as breath, as voice. We see this as labour relations in Milton breakdown. Things come to a head when Mr Thornton stands his ground in the factory forecourt as a growing mob of workers congregate to voice their dissatisfaction and verge on rioting. In Milton, it is Margaret and not Mr Thornton who is ‘struck’ metaphorically by the crowd whose motion and atmosphere are ‘buzzing’ with ‘excitement’. The crowd takes on the ‘thunderous atmosphere’ of a storm which boils morally as well as physically, around her, starting in ‘a low distant roar’, reminiscent of Dickens’ description of the storming of the Bastille (see below). The turbulence builds as a volatile mixture of air and fluid, first from the ‘slow-surging wave of the dark crowd’, atmospheric disturbances which forced ‘themselves on Margaret’s notice’ (Gaskell, 2005 [1855]: 170). The crowd’s bodies are turned into battering rams against the gates of the mill, the strong gates aquiver, ‘like reeds before the wind’. In the standoff, and losing the moment, Mr Thornton’s authority is arrested as he fails to speak or move. Folded up, his arms crossed as if a barrier and his body taught – as ‘still as a statue’ – his silence almost lets the raging whirlwind free. At this moment, Margaret anticipates the uproar and the possible explosion of men, boys and passions that will easily sweep beyond them. She sees some boys about to give flight to their wooden clogs, their missiles a potential spark to the unrest – perhaps taken by the devil’s opportunity to agitate their spirits for ‘when the humours by the air be stirred, he goes in with them’. She rushes to confront the crowd but cannot speak. Margaret’s effect is an almost equal and opposite force as her air vacates her – she cannot speak – but it halts the tide and causes the atmosphere to waver. Margaret gasps, breathless.

The accounting of air in writing like this enables us to distil the inequality of labour relations, working and living conditions through the elemental. Air penetrated language and gave shape to Dickens, Gaskell and others making sense of an emerging public health discourse and the bigger machinic, economic and spiritual forces at play in the fates of their characters.

Even if we have to be very careful in the comparison (and developmental narrative loops that posit how non-Western cities follow the path of the west), these accounts are not dissimilar to those that can be found in writings of the city and its class relations today. For example, Katherine Boo’s journalistic novel (2013) rejects the romanticism of qualitatively different airs that appear in writing describing the living conditions of slums in Mumbai or Delhi, cities often lent a troubling and potentially orientalized ‘urban charisma’ (Blom Hansen and Verkaaik, 2009). Boo’s journalism of the Annawadi slum does not simply direct our attention away from humours of the devil’s command to the ecological systems that make up megacities. Rather Boo juxtaposes concentrations of bodies, buildings, industry and traffic, biometerological effects of micro- and nanoparticles causing countless lung and pulmonary health problems (poor health, the source of so many resident’s woes) as almost elemental conditions, quite ungraspable.

In the pockets of life in between the ‘elegant modernities’ of Mumbai international airport and its ecologies – in the thresholds between slum and airport, under- and over-city – the airport road and the rapidly accelerating development of the site are understood as ‘a smogged-out, prosperity-driven obstacle course’ from which not only exploitation but ‘wads of possibility had tumbled down to the slums’ (2011). In the embodied, metabolic exchange with the children, like Abdul, rooting through the garbage spewed out by the airport which turns his snot black, it almost appears that the elements are governing their fate. The slum is subject to the monstrous expansion of the airport amidst turbulent global economic changes, the distant roar of Mumbai’s terror attacks and environmental migrants flooding the city.

In Boo’s narrative air and affects attune in affinity or resonance sparking off micropolitical contestations. The book hinges around the events that unfold from a known prostitute whose half-hearted (but obviously quite desperate) self-immolation goes wrong. Blaming and victimization, the fire, and the smell of burning leg in the air, sets off a chain of events that threaten the already vulnerable informal economy of the slum by police, prison officials and corrupted state officials who routinely terrorize the inhabitants. Air as element provides a way of writing and making sense of social, economic and ecological conditions.

Geopolitics

An elemental notion of air may challenge a series of burgeoning efforts to reconsider geopolitics in relation to its constitutive materials; these include its objects and agencies or ‘force relations’ (Meehan et al., 2013), the geophysical and volumetric constructions of territory (Elden, 2013) and the assemblages into which matter may be enrolled as ‘more-than-human’ (Depledge, 2013; Dittmer, 2013). As Steinberg puts it in relation to the seas, we might be compelled to take notice of a range of different actors and expertise ‘as they interact with and are co-constituted by the universe of mobile non-human elements […] including ships, fish, and water molecules’ (Steinberg, 2013: 159). An elemental geography, however, may attend to these co-constitutive parts and relations rather differently to address not the makeup of the oceans, their internal processes and torsions or those things that traverse it (Hasty and Peters, 2012; Lambert et al., 2006), but other sorts of elemental forces and relations.

In this section, we will explore an elemental account of conflict, as firstly, the elementals of air and war that composed a structure of feeling to mediate an 18th- and 19th-century wartime of anticipation. Secondly, the way air and war would be produced through the affinities of systems of production, war-making and representation that would create the conditions to make war and accounts of it possible in the early 20th century. And thirdly, how the writings and technologies of air war – focusing specifically on the writings of Carl Schmitt – have drawn on elemental notions of air as quite monstrous and exorbitant. ⁵

The association of air and conflict is not new. Ernst Jünger (2004) would locate war as a meteorological phenomenon – a storm of flying mettle and violently compressed air. ⁶ There is a comparable longer and romantic tradition of human conflict and air in which air and war become interchangeable and intractable bedfellows. For Mary Favret (2009), tracing the history of weather and war, their affinity competed with others to mediate weather/war and ultimately offering ‘a history of affect, even perhaps the ‘climate we call modern wartime’ (2009: 122). In Favret’s study of late 18th- and mid-19th-century writings and georgic poetry, the turbulent weather in Barbauld, Campbell and Coleridge divine what is to come in war, bringing news from the French revolutionary wars in Hohenlinden, Marengo near Alessandria, and further trouble in the colonies. Favret’s is a history of precipitating affects that coupled conflict with the scientific development of modern meteorology beginning to relinquish the shackles of a tradition of climatology, perhaps closer in association with the environmental determinism of the early 20th century. War is expressed meteorologically and the air is understood through war in an ambivalent and confusing set of conditions, ‘here or there, felt or unfelt, strange or known, aberrant event or on-going condition – extends itself into the circumambient air, the atmosphere’ (Favret, 2009: 145).

Arguably, and ironically, the accounts of conflict borrowed heavily from the emerging science led by John Woodward, John Flamsteed and Edmund Halley who theorized the violent agitations caused by exhalations of gases from the earth mixing dangerously with those in the air (Jankovic, 2001: 28). As with the georgic writers, the elemental and meteorological air in these accounts almost compelled conflict and foretold of dangerous clouds on the horizon in other parts of Europe. The explosive analogies could even be found in accounts well after the French Revolution, whose writers would write of and in an atmospheric style of dangerous chemical and disharmonious mixtures of air mixed with water and gunpowder (earth).

French Historian Jules Michelet (discussed in relation to Schmitt below) described the moments before the capture of the Bastille fortress in his distinctive historical semi-fiction. It was an evening that ‘had been stormy, agitated by a whirlwind of ungovernable frenzy. With daylight, one idea dawned upon Paris’ (Michelet in Chase and Goldstein, 2009: 743). This was revolution and the air bubbled, ignited in the account. Something has ‘impregnated the air, the temperature has changed; it seems as though a breath of life has been wafted over the world’ (Michelet, 1860: 53). A tempestuous air describes the movement of the revolutionary crowd. The noise is immense, gathering, ‘like the growling of distant thunder, resounds nearer and nearer, rushing on with the rapidity and roaring of a tempest. The Bastille is taken’ (Michelet 1860, 53). In A Tale of Two Cities (1859), Charles Dickens reconstructs a similar scene. Revolution is a dangerous mixture of air and water, moving together as one. The sound of the crowd is all the breath of France, whilst their movement is a living sea, ‘Through the fire and through the smoke – in the fire and in the smoke’ movements, materials and air multiply. Dickens repeats these pairings and compositions, over and over, for example, ‘muskets, fire and smoke’, ‘cannon, muskets, fire and smoke’, ‘cannon muskets, fire and smoke’, slight displacements of the raging sea, ‘blazing torches’, ‘shrieks, ‘volleys’, a boiling tumult that bursts and spits, leaping ‘into the air like spray’ (Dickens, 1859: 94).

And so from revolution to mediating the events of the Napoleonic wars and the fate of the British Empire, 18th- and 19th-century poets and novelists brought the turbulence of war and political change home in and through the air. Air prophesized – selling the doom that would follow – making imminent war palpable through air, if a ‘not fully articulate’ and yet total elemental voice heard on the winds of change (Favret, 2009: 139–140).

These affinitive conditions of the romantic experience of mediated war would meet differently in the mechanized conflict of the early 20th century, as Peter Sloterdijk explores in the 1915 release of poison gas at Ypres during the First World War. Sloterdijk’s suggestion that air and climate theory are the ‘primary forms of post-terrorist knowledge’, is patently some claim, but his broader exploration of air’s explication and its apparent excess to power’s intervention is the more successful one, signalling an intimacy of body, environment and expressiveness in war that are drawn together by air’s affinities to make gas warfare and the modern experience of war possible.

Both Connor and Leslie anticipate Sloterdijk’s exemplary moment of explication of the 20th century in movements in art and industrial production as Britain’s modernist Vorticist movement found in their publication Blast an affinity of body, machine and violence, ‘Interiority expelled like dust by a sharp gust of Blastish air’, writes Leslie (2008: 124). The ‘metallicized nature’ of the battlefield war begins to appear more like the environment of a factory of machinery in Enrst Jünger’s witnessing of gears, levers, arms, the ‘air quivering’. Whilst the very atmospheres that were produced and captured in photography relied upon, as Leslie shows, ‘the same technologies and the same mined and processed materials as the synthetic colours of the new rainbow’ produced through the revolution of chemical production in Germany (2008: 127). In this affinity, the ephemeral and visceral meet as colour, conflict and climate.

Whilst in Sloterdijk we see an account of environmental explication with air in war, it is possible to identify affective, chemical and visual affinities in a wider system of production and photographic reproduction in wartime Germany. The chemical chlorine released by the Germans was manufactured by the chemical production capabilities of BASF, Bayer, Agfa and others. Phosphorous, mustard and Lewisite were all part of this chemical production but particularly chlorine. They were also heavily involved in the production of colours indigo and sulphur black. Thus advanced mining and chemical production would be necessary for those nations competing in gas warfare, the visual testimony that revealed its brutality, and as James Robinson has shown recently, even in the paint, dyes and materials used to camouflage the landscape, to make it disappear from the view from above (Robinson, 2013). In this sense, air’s affinities reveal a broader system of material, political, visual representational and economic conditions for war making as well as its defence (and as Leslie goes on to show, a wide poetic and philosophical climate).

At almost the same time, elemental air would permeate 20th-century geopolitical thinking, a diffusion we can see if we turn to Carl Schmitt’s writings on sovereignty, territory and law to explore this further (Legg, 2011). Schmitt’s treatise on the The Nomos of the Earth (1950) and, as Steinberg has explored (2011) in his ‘bridging’ book, Land and Sea (Schmitt, 1997 [1942]), is particularly important for its elemental writing and assumptions. ⁷ Schmitt is explicit in his interest for the geopolitical import of particular kinds of territory which he calls elemental, locating them in the classical form of land (earth), sea (water), air and fire. Schmitt is, however, careful not to relinquish the construct of international law for either a ‘geographical–scientific or an elemental–mythological approach’ (in Steinberg, 2011) – approaches he reads into the verses taken from Goethe in Schmitt’s forward to Nomos. Indeed, it is precisely in that potential determinism where Schmitt rejects an entirely deterministic elemental geopolitics by the affinities we have been exploring. As Schmitt explains the possibilities of so doing:

the different human types belonging to the four elements, such as for instance, the exclusively terrestrial and the exclusively maritime, would have little to do with each other. They would be strangers to each other, and the mutual isolation would be all the greater, as their “exclusivity” increases. The mixed breed would produce good and bad specimens and entertain friendly or hostile relations on the pattern of chemical affinities or repulsions […] There would be no human history in the sense of a history of man’s acts and decisions. (Schmitt, 1997: no pagination)

However, neither does Schmitt want to discount those affinities nor could he be accused of the same environmental determinism found in the geopolitical legacy of early 20th-century geographers, even if he would come to similar conclusions as Mackinder (Legg, 2011). Instead, Schmitt’s geopolitics comes from a different kind of orderings that we are understanding as elemental. According to Mitchell Dean, he cannot ‘avoid mythology and poetry’ (Dean, 2006: 3), for by drawing on Goethe and the postulates of a strange chemical and mythic geopolitics, Schmitt blurs the scientific with the mythological and the theological to account for the affinities of air with the other elements in a kind of succession. Schmitt’s indebtedness to elemental thinking even go further than Goethe. Jules Michelet (mentioned above) is also mentioned in both Nomos and Land and Sea. Schmitt’s evidential loyalty to a branch of geo-mythological thinking is nowhere more obvious than his references to Michelet’s The Sea, a book packed full of elemental sympathies and the melancholic pathos of the humours.

These ideas are especially evident in the exploration of Schmitt’s favoured pairs, namely, the land and the sea in relation to the air and fire, towards the constitution of new nomos. In this context, geopolitical contestation is understood in some teleological move that foresees a transition from classical understandings of the elements – such as the seas – as a lawless space outside of human influence. Civilizational progression means the march forward, what would be a history or a ‘voyage through the elements’. In the presumption of evolution from one element to the other, in Schmitt, as with Mackinder (with whom Schmitt finds affinity), there are special affinities between the elements that coincide and feed each other. Schmitt argues that it is in fire that the colonization of air is made possible. As Michael Marder explains, the element of fire signals a kind of ‘pyropolitics’, so that the ‘energy needed for the politics of air literally to take off the ground derives from the fire (which, itself, requires oxygen for burning) of combustion engines’ (Marder, 2012: 264).

Schmitt’s is an articulation of a different kind of geopolitics that is not reductive to a thingness, associations or the physical properties of objects in assemblages. The space of the sea, although soon striated with the laws and assertions of states and, as Steinberg explores the internal geophysical properties that internally order, structure or resist any notion of an open or free space, is overtaken by the frontier of the air. The aeroplane – as winged bird – whose natural element is the skies, overcomes the sea’s dominance of the land. Thus, it is ‘air’, argues Schmitt, which is ‘the new elemental space of human existence’, setting up the sorts of iconography depicted in Disney’s famous production of De Seversky’s air power doctrine in Victory through Air Power, the iconic battle of Japan’s Octopus strangling the pacific with America’s eagle pouncing with its razor sharp beak and talons, to defeat the creatures characterizing the existing nomos of the land or sea (see Kaplan, 2006).

The monstrous and the elemental often go hand in hand. For example, in Nomos and Land and Sea, Schmitt frequently invokes mythic creatures and monsters, tying up cabalist myths of behemoths tackled by leviathans with flaps and fins (see also Dixon and Ruddick, 2013 for these debates in geography). There is an essential and monstrous sense of force bound up in these elemental myths because the elemental, as Sallis (2000) notes, takes on a sense of being both from but also outside nature, a hypernature that is uncontrollable or merely harnessed for a while. The elemental space Schmitt renders of air, in contrast to the air and sea, appears almost limitless in its infinitude, what Bachelard calls the obliteration of dimensions (Bachelard, 1988: 9). Perhaps, however, elemental magnitude and monstrosity should come as no surprise, given some very common ways of thinking about sovereign power (Derrida, 2011). Mark Neocleous (2014) shows that pairs of monsters have often characterized the different but antagonistic qualities of modern sovereign power in the form of policing. Indeed, Dean notes how Schmitt would characterize the domination of the new element air as a police action, air power deployed ‘as vertically as St. George used his lance against the dragon.’ (Dean, 2006 [1950]: 321).

Equally, the alchemic and mythic origins of geopolitical thinking around air power would be diverted to explore how the anticipations of the progression to aerial bombing Schmitt was announcing could be made sense of in the rather different register of Jungian psychology. Consider Jung’s interpretation of a dream of a Parisian air raid. A warning is sounded, the Champs Elysees is emptied and the dreamer instead of seeing expected bombers perceives a flying saucer, ‘a metallic sphere shaped like a drop […]’. Jung’s dreamer has the impression that they are being observed by the drop, the ‘atmosphere was most uncanny’ (Jung, 1959: 26). In Jung’s analysis, the appearance of the unidentified flying object amid the panic of an air raid signifies the presence of a ‘heavenly fluid’, the ‘deus ex machine of alchemy’ and an expression of a Mercurian object – threatening and dangerous, and about to fall from the skies. The flying object in this case is a projection of material volatility, as if the psychology was an alchemic moment of transformation. The unidentified object appears suddenly; it is a disappearance and reappearance as if the vaporization of water or quicksilver. In Schmitt, the threat of elemental air is likely to be total. According to his now often used quote, ‘It is conceivable that the air will envelop the sea and perhaps even the earth, and that men will transform the planet into a combination of produce warehouse and aircraft carrier. Then new amity lines will be drawn’ (Schmitt, 2006 [1950]: 49).

The affinities of an elemental geopolitics are also explored by geo-philosopher Reza Negarestani (2008) who deploys another work of fiction. His novel Cyclonopedia is about a young woman who arrives in Istanbul and finds a manuscript of writings from an academic Hamid Parsani who has written a cultural and political archaeology of the Middle East that is animated by primordial elements. The scientist’s elementalism is aligned with Schmitt’s reorderings, refusing political–geographical boundaries and scales, ‘how is it possible’, the scientist asks ‘for one to geographically stick to the middle east when it is territorially obscure […] when it evidently has sentiments, a life and interests of its own?’

Negarestani’s world is a ‘cosmos crafted by its outside […] fiendishly indifferent’ (2008: 98). Oil and air are some of the primary elementals in Cyclonopedia. Petropolitial distribution shapes how society makes sense of politics, economics, war: ‘history and progression are determined by the outflow and influx of oil’. As with Sallis (2000), this is a thing that cannot be politically distilled, ‘cannot be broken into its constituent elements or main constituents’ (Negarestani, 2008: 98).

This tellurian materiality of elements exhibits other affinities. The earth holds qualities of dryness and wetness, tendencies that attract and repulse. Negarestani writes his own mythology of the political–mythic. Ancient Assyrian and Babylonian figures like Pazuzu appear as a timeless bringer of plagues and death, the figure of wind and dust. Pazuzu is embodied as a winged bipedal humanoid with talons instead of feet. It also has two pairs of wings, an almost fleshless head, like a dog or a lion’s skull. The demon is a radical outsider, ‘its exteriority of the demon cannot be captured’. These elements and myths surface in bedtime stories and social memories that emphasize the intervention of elements that come to ‘storm’ the normal course of events.

It is impossible not to explore the broader ways that these different elements and affinities could persist in the contemporary industries and economies of the military. Take the presence of the politico-mythic in the romantic naming of US military technologies, such as the drone’s infamous Gorgon Stare, which turns as Derek Gregory has explored, suspects into targets, just as Medusa’s ‘Gorgon’s stare petrified its enemies to death, turning them into stone, so this too is a deadly gaze’ (Gregory, 2013; see also Gregory, 2012). The so-called Gorgon Stare, sold and advertised by Exelis and Sierra-Nevada Corp., as seen in Figure 1, has also to be seen in the context of similar technologies of airborne sensors like Autonomous Real-Time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance Imaging System (ARGUS), which mimics the wakeful alertness of the God Argus Panoptes, a primordial giant with 100 eyes and the Blue Devil – the now grounded surveillance blimp – able to survey up to 64 km² at a time, although it had to settle for an Angel Fire sensory system which limited its acuity to just 4 km. Jordan Crandall paints a vivid picture of just these kinds of elemental myths in action: OPEN IN VIEWER

So far from absolving our ideas of air and more romantic notions of the elements potentially divorced from the political or geopolitical, we find that elemental air and associated elementals pervade the fetishized technological aesthetics of the military and its economies.

There are perhaps, then, clear differences between these approaches and existing investigations of the material and the geophysical that I would just like to make more clear. Air’s affinities might expound, as we have seen in accounts of air and conflict in romantic poetry and writing, broader affinities of material, political and economic conditions of war making and visual representation. Air expresses the anxieties of elemental alchemic magic and the geopolitico-mythic obtrudences persisting in today’s geopolitical and militaristic discourse. In this new light, recent accounts of the material certainly have the promise to deepen investigations of borders, territorial disputes and sovereignty claims, but what is elemental about these measures or registers of material association, physical force and composition of things born from empirical and scientific observation and capture? As Sallis argues, it is the ‘indefinite’ in the elemental, its particular giganticism that is exactly what constitutes the elemental as elemental. As he argues:

Not that certain meteorological measures could not be applied: yet as soon as the rain and the wind are submitted to such measure, their character as elemental will have been reduced and the difference sustained at every site of manifestation, between elementals and things will have been levelled out. (Sallis, 2000: 158)

In short, as soon as we reduce the elements to the epistemologies and ontologies of networks, science and geo-physics, we may remove precisely what is elemental about them.

Conclusion: For an elemental geography

I appreciate that an elemental geography of air might appear to be something of a step backwards to what could be perceived as an older, certainly dangerous and outdated sense of the elemental. But it should not be a necessarily regressive move to ways of contemplating the elements that we have been careful to surpass and, in some contexts, heavily reject. Instead an elemental geography of air might mean drawing our attention to particular sets of materialities and imaginations, material imaginations that still persist and can be taken seriously, despite their reductionism and essentialism.

Of course, accounting for air in these relations is not easy because it appears that the air is almost what Steven Connor (2010) has called a ‘pure mediation’, which makes it particularly difficult to grasp or fix. Air is accompanied by an ideal, it is posed as a metaphor, it is filled with thought, projected onto by images, and yet, it is also somehow so intractable because we are already caught up with it. Air’s ‘inextractibility’ makes air ‘the thing that is nothing’ (Connor, 2010: 31) or ‘mediation itself’.

The kinds of accounts of air developed in this article do not go deeper into a flatter sense of networked assemblies in which air is but a part or a thicker reach into the microphysical forces at play in a moving atmosphere. Rather, in the affinities of air opened out between chemical alchemy, affinitive listening and a rejuvenated political mythology of the elements – an elemental geography that can be written and explored in writing – is more closely attuned to backgrounds, to conditions and to the exorbitant. As Sallis suggests, this is a manner of depth but from a slightly different point of view to the extent that we can consider an elemental geography as fundamentally about thinking with, feeling with, living with an element like air as an indefinite and incomprehensive background. To take the air as elemental, therefore, is to already be ‘encompassed’ by it so that ‘one can not readily take distance from it as from a thing’ (Sallis, 2000: 161). An element like air occasionally obtrudes into appearance, but most of the time it is endured and worn, and particularly difficult to abstain from because of its anteriority.

What this article has tried to achieve is to give space to the seemingly unspaced, to the negative spaces of air – or absences of a thicker materiality – that coalesce into certain conditions or possibilities, ephemeral structures of feeling and affinities between things and other elements that might have been completely unreasonable to assume. Furthermore, it is to potentially re-embrace Bachelard’s insistence on the elemental in the imagination, a remembering of the elemental and its proclivities in the texts and things that describe and populate the world, from literature to military rhetorics. Taken further, Sallis’s material imagination may help us challenge some of the phenomenological tenets of non-representational theories and where they locate thought, perception and experience.

This should not mean the loss of any kind of critical edge. Should the affinities of air enable us to bring air to account, then they will do so by not disguising power, production, representation, aesthetics and experience through the clouds of doubt that divorce them from scrutiny or relation. Indeed it is probably in the confusion and disorientation of different airs that such an approach becomes possible. Moreover, this should not circumscribe its excesses to the scripts of power or technology either. In the affinitive writing practiced above, the tendency to begin to shape or discipline air and the elements into a series of relations – and potentially infinite affinities – must be warned against. Care should be taken not to deny the excess of the elemental from thought or writing, to ignore its capacity to withdraw from us, being brought to or taken into any kind of account. A more modest sense of affinity is required. Affinity should not become a surreptitious and totalizing force, steering attention away from the relations or non-relations that may constitute breaks or caesuras in the ways that elements give form and force to life.