More-than-human affinitive listening

Air is a ‘very thin matter’ (Bachelard, 1988). According to Luce Irigaray (1999: 14): ‘It allows itself to be forgotten even by the perceptual ability of the nose’. Nevertheless, the politics and aesthetics of air, manifested especially in respiratory economies and aeromobility, have begun to feature in the social sciences. In the article on which I comment, Peter Adey (2015: 55) remarks ‘human geography suddenly seems afloat with airs and winds, fogs and aerial fluids, with volumes, verticals and objects in the air’. But unlike the ‘mist fogging Diller and Scofido’s Blur building’, these ‘aerographies’ do not swirl and hang together in a coherent or operable way (p. 59). They are ‘fragmented “dissolutions”’, and they fail to attend thoroughly to air’s simultaneous political, affective and material impressions (Jackson and Fannin, 2011). Moreover, according to Adey, disciplinary scholarship on air ‘appears just a bit too human’ (p. 59). It is the task of Adey’s text to develop a concept of the element of air, as a ‘tangible agent’, with ‘gathering tendencies’ anterior to our perceptions of the world; and to comment specifically on this element’s capacity for affinity in physical and conceptual registers alike (p. 61).

Adey identifies three valences in the work of human geography on air and atmosphere, namely, the representative, the phenomenological and the virtuous or urban political. If representative accounts of air, such as climatological descriptions of urban air pollution, give insufficient attention to the ways air is lived and encountered, phenomenological writings work in spaces apart from the stories of legal and class struggles in the highly polluted airs of megacities (Adey, 2013). Still, an ‘elemental geography’ is there, hovering between these somewhat ‘fractured approaches’ to ‘aerography’ (p. 55). It is there in the inheritance of the ‘humours’, those four fluids that typified character in Shakespeare’s plays, and 19th-century accounts of shared urban life. It is there in the ‘material–existential imagination of air’ circulating in the poetry of Shelley and Poe (Bachelard, 1988), and permeating atmospheric politics and “air-mindedness” (Adey, 2006). Adey asks, what if we could articulate the commonalities in these extant approaches to air, moving towards a method that also respects air’s propositions and heterogeneity?

It is a definition of elemental air as more than human, wholly ungraspable and even monstrous, which patterns Adey’s method of ‘affinitive listening’ to the elemental. The difference between air, as it has been lately addressed, and the element of air, is that the latter precedes and exceeds the specific compositions of air masses and is not reducible to the descriptions and metaphors with which we attempt to ‘grasp’ air and atmosphere (p. 76). If air can be ‘designed’ (Sloterdijk, 2009) and climate can be engineered (Crutzen, 2006), elemental air is closer to a cosmic or ‘imponderable force’ (Grosz, 2008). Adey apprehends the way air ‘penetrates language’ and ‘gives shape’ to the writing of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities and Margaret Gaskell’s North and South, so that we can read the inequality of labour relations in these texts as emerging, in part, through the elemental (p. 65). Moreover, Adey relates Carl Schmitt and Ernst Jünger’s accounts of war as a palpable and anticipated, even meteorological phenomenon; and travels between these early 20th-century accounts and more contemporary literature: Reza Negarestani’s (2008) petro-political novel Cyclonopedia figures the miscibility of multiple ‘anonymous materials’, namely, oil, air and Earth, in twisting and mingling configurations. In this way, Adey’s writing delivers its promise of an ‘unfurling collage’ of historical and fictional, modern and contemporary sources. Still, in most of these examples, elemental air is addressed primarily through its impressions on human subjects. But part of the promise of a concept of elemental air is how it urges us ‘to open up and question the limits and boundaries that shape the coexistence of atmospheres’ (Anderson and Ash, forthcoming). The rest of this commentary experiments with the concept of elemental air and, in particular, the method of affinitive listening, in a space further removed from the human.

Affinitive listening takes inspiration from the affinities of chemical compounds, namely, ‘strange attractors, odd repulsions and apparently backgrounding exorbitant character’ (p. 63). Adey reads Esther Leslie’s (2005) history of the chemical and aesthetic development of colour as an approach that registers the ‘curious collisions’ of science, industry and narratives of painting. Apprehending elemental affinity requires a delicate method, a suspension of predetermined structures or logics in place of a receptivity to ‘the close knitting of … ideas, culture, science, industry and crucially power that bring forth elements and substances’ (p. 63). Through affinitive listening, the aim is to give an account of the element of air as it dissipates ‘in the midst of these relations of class, power, inequality and politics, and a whole host of immersions, sensations and embodiments’ (p. 59). Given these propositions, we might ask what other kinds of beings and things might practice affinitive listening attuned to the element of air?

As James Ash (2013) has investigated in relation to technologies such as the iPhone 4, ‘technical objects relate to one another and to human beings outside of human consciousness or intentionality’ (p. 20). Through sensitivity to various ‘perturbations’ (or lack thereof), non-human “allopoietic” objects produce distinct atmospheric space times (p. 20). Indeed, the accounts of atmosphere in Ash’s work, which draw from speculative realist thinking on inter-object relations ‘could be read as another way of “listening” to the materiality of the world’ (p. 21). The iPhone 4 affects and is affected by the heat, sweat and pressure of human hands, the range of signals from cell phone towers and the frictions of air currents. In other words, the device performs an affinitive listening to signals transported and buffered by airy masses and dampened in landforms and bodies. Taking this approach, we might consider another allopoietic object that has an elegant affinity with air: the Montgolfier infrared (MIR) balloon.

The MIR is a solar balloon employed by the Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES), or the French Space Agency. Originally invented in the 1970s, the MIR is constructed of aluminized mylar and transparent polyethylene. It can hold around 45,000 m³ of air and lift a 60-kg payload. The name of the balloon refers to the fact that it rises by maintaining a difference between hot air on the inside of the envelope and colder air in the environment around it. Unlike traditional Montgolfier balloons and pressurized balloons, the MIR balloon requires neither the burning of fuel to generate heat nor helium gas. Instead, the MIR achieves buoyancy by trapping the sun’s short wave energy inside its membrane during the day and infrared radiation from the Earth at night. Once launched, the MIR can remain aloft for months, circling the globe on jet streams, or riding the turbulence of the polar vortex. Since daytime short wave radiation is more energetic than infrared, the MIR rises to about 30 km in altitude during the day, and sinks to approximately 18 km at night. Open to the air, the Sun and fluxes in Earth’s climate, it is an extremely sensitive ‘atmospheric thing’ (McCormack, 2014); its shape, altitude, velocity and orientation are entirely dependent on the element of air and the solar and cosmic forces that move it).

Whilst there are many facets to the MIR that convey its choreographic affinity with air, one of its potential qualities is especially relevant to affinitive listening. In the last few years, scientists have tested balloon-borne ‘global positioning system (GPS) radio occultation’. A balloon equipped with a radio occultation package receives a signal from a GPS satellite. The signal has to pass through the atmosphere to reach the balloon and along the way it is refracted. The magnitude of the refraction, ‘derived from Doppler shifts of the carrier frequency of the GPS signal’, is dependent on the temperature, humidity and the structure of the atmosphere (Haase et al., 2012: 2). As the balloon moves, continuously receiving these signals, it ‘sounds out’ the refractions caused by vertical layers of air. Such data will become increasingly relevant for accurate modelling of weather and climate in polar regions (Haase et al., 2012: 2). However, the data transmitted by the MIR is not autonomous, but a product of the ‘thingness’ of the balloon in the air (Ingold, 2011), emerging from the balloon’s volumetric changes and rhythmic motion through atmospheric strata (Ingold, 2011). These insights suggest that the MIR is a device that not only listens but also senses the forces of elemental air/space.

The ‘listening’ of the balloon is translated into various maps and charts. Terms such as isotopic pressure, float altitude and potential vorticity describe the MIR’s sensing spacing: its capture and exchange with atmospheric space devoid of humans, although bearing the chemical signatures of anthropogenic climate change. These inscriptions allow us to trace the affinities between the balloon and ‘an enveloping air that veils the whole in an imperceptible transparency’ (Irigaray, 1999: 61). From a non-technical perspective, the sensual experience of the MIR is not so foreign to the material–existential imagination of the elemental described by Adey, following Sallis (2000) and Bachelard (1988). For Bachelard, dream flight is not aerodynamic but aerostatic: ‘Do we not have here the great timeless memory of an aerial state, one in which everything is weightless, in which our very own matter is innately light?’ (Bachelard, 1988: 33). An aerostat is a body of air not so different from our own, generative of both affective and material vectors that are “more than visual, always in excess of dreams of transcendence” (McCormack, 2009: 38). Perhaps this is one reason why accounts of aerostatic flights are strangely memorable: ‘The [MIR] drifted toward the vortex edge.… On March 8 after 17 days of flight, it was automatically cut down after reaching 55 degrees North off the Labrador Coast, where it was lost…’. (Pommereau et al., 2002)

Air transcends the singular and the universal (Choy, 2011). ‘What we know as the “open air” is in fact no such thing. It is heterogeneous, spasmodic, tremulous, given to crisis’ (Connor, 2004, http://www.stevenconnor.com/bbs/). Conveying the patterning and surfacing of air in social, political and aesthetic modes, as Peter Adey has done in this journal and elsewhere, is a task very different from attending to one of these dimensions alone and may be furthered by accessing an elemental imaginary (Adey, 2013, 2014, 2015). In doing so, the practice of affinitive listening should be widened to different styles of sounding- sensing. An ‘atmospheric method’ that encompasses the affinitive listening of the more-than-human world does not require us to:

pretend to understand what it is really like to be a light bulb or a breath of air [or a balloon]. Rather it is to focus on forms of exchange and communication which often exist beneath [or above] the thresholds of humans’ conscious awareness, or indeed do not phenomenally appear to humans at all’. (Anderson and Ash, forthcoming)

Instead of a faculty of the human, affinitive listening might mean the capacity to affect and be affected by interference patterns. And so we can find other ways to listen to the political, material and aesthetic echoes of air, oscillating in aerography and resonating outward.