Paper short abstract:

Starting from recent concepts that understand political engagement as embedded in the everyday world, this presentation discusses the challenges faced by empirical research in tracking and qualifying atmospheres relevant for the dynamics of this engagement.

Paper long abstract:

The political is often considered as a specific sphere that is separate from the everyday world. More recently, different concepts have arisen (e.g. social capital, ordinary citizenship processes, development of political subjectivity) that take into consideration the embeddedness of civic or political engagement in the everyday, but without explicitly addressing the role of atmospheres. Nevertheless, there are evident possibilities of connectivity to the concept of atmosphere on a theoretical level that enable an understanding of why atmospheres can matter for the development of political engagement. Even if there is evidence at a theoretical level, it is a less obvious matter to grasp the relevant atmospheres in empirical research projects.

The presentation will focus on the three concepts mentioned above, and will discuss research designs and the challenges for tracking and qualifying atmospheres relevant to the dynamics of political engagement. Research on atmospheres in ordinary citizenship processes can build on the ethnographic research tradition in this field. The task is much more difficult for research on political subjectivity, which is based on a biographical approach and faces the problem of grasping atmospheres in biographic accounts. The concept of social capital (Putnam) raises the question of scale in the research on atmospheres, because its development refers to affective spacetimes of larger spatial and temporal extent.

Although this presentation focuses on methodological challenges of research on atmospheres in the context of dynamics of political engagement, its concerns can be of general interest for the research on social atmospheres.

Paper short abstract:

Based on 24-months of fieldwork conducted in Egypt between 2010 and 2016, this paper examines the political potential of sound in space to transform public feeling. It argues that sonic atmosphere is an important site where differently-positioned social actors vie for power.

Paper long abstract:

After an initially successful revolution in 2011, military rule returned to power in Egypt in 2013. Ruling through a palpable "barrier of fear," it criminalized "unauthorized" music performance and public gatherings. In these conditions, many "do-it-yourself" (DIY) musicians have opted to abandon "politics" to focus instead on musically engaging "energy," "mood," and "atmosphere." Through listening, they seek to transform public feelings of depression and paranoia to more positive affective registers that they believe will make "the coming revolution" successful. This paper examines the political potential of sound in space under conditions of authoritarianism. Based on 24-months of fieldwork conducted in Egypt between 2010 and 2016, it argues that sonic atmosphere is an important site where differently-positioned social actors vie for power via a manipulation of affect. In conversation with theories of the public, sound studies, as well as queer and feminist theories of the body, this paper demonstrates that Arab and Islamic philosophies on the affective potential of sound expand ongoing feminist interventions in Western scholarship by foregrounding how listening, space, and the body intersect to produce political subjects.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines how collective bodily practices in the multi-sensorial atmosphere of an intercultural center in Berlin affect, transform and empower people of different sociocultural backgrounds, integrating and re-tracking their lives in a cosmopolitan city.

Paper long abstract:

Several worlds in one place: throughout 11 years, Forum Brasil became more than a meeting point in Berlin for Brazilian migrants and for German sympathizers of the far away culture. It is at once an intercultural center offering Capoeira and Portuguese classes as well as artistic and political events; a religious temple for the practice of the Afro-Brazilian religion of Candomblé; and a protected space for People of Colour to exchange experiences through the recent project Afropolitan, which also attracts LGBT communities. Despite their contrasting sociocultural backgrounds, many frequenters perceive Forum Brasil as a comforting place, where they feel at home and allowed to be themselves. In my paper, I will examine how not only music and dance activities, but also the multi-sensorial atmosphere of Forum Brasil, enable such transcultural identification. Therefore, I will track affects arising in individuals through their "mutually engaged involvement" (Ingold 2000), in order to explore how bodily practices transform subjects and their attitude towards the world, establishing more "resonant self-world relations" (Rosa 2016). Subjects "learn to be affected by differences" (Latour 2004), both by their own as by the differences of others, feeling empowered by the embodiment of alterity. The collective self-transformations taking place at Forum Brasil reveal to be decisive for coping with social and psychological constraints, such as gender and racial discrimination, as well as for integrating and, hence, re-tracking subjects in the everyday life of a cosmopolitan city.

Paper short abstract:

We explore whether/how/when collective singing of Yugoslav partisan songs is able to produce a sensorial rupture in the political atmosphere structured affectively by apathy and political exhaustion.

Paper long abstract:

The agentive potentials of music and sound are usually seen as capable of producing changes in the atmosphere, social climate or certain social relations but their long lasting "effects" in producing "real" social or political change are seen as deeply dubious. Recent ethnomusicological writings aim to offer new insights into the role music and sound play through affective technology in the current realities (see Gershon 2013; Gray 2013; McCann 2013; Krell 2013; Tatro 2014; Hofman 2015a, 2015b, 2016; Gill 2017) and critically discuss the general uneasiness with music and sound's efficiency in bringing a concrete political change. Building on such approaches, we focus on the affective potentials of collective sound making in order to explore whether/how/when affectively produced encounters make room for new forms of social relations beyond the musically-bounded context. We analyze the practices of collective singing of Yugoslav partisan songs (songs of antifascist resistance during WWII) that are experienced as affectively rich and mobilizing and seen as able to produce a sensorial rupture in the political atmosphere structured affectively by apathy and political exhaustion. We discuss the ways both the songs themselves and the collective nature of choral performance enable the politics limited to "here and now" to be extended into other aspects of political everydayness primarily in practicing alternative ways of living, being and doing in the post-socialist neoliberal Southeastern Europe.

Paper short abstract:

The sublime is an aesthetic category and a structuring affect that emerges from an ek-static encounter with a sublime object. Examining Sufi song, I ask what a phenomenology of affect contributes to an ethnographic study of the auditory sublime, delineating what I call an "aesthetics of proximity."

Paper long abstract:

The sublime is both an aesthetic category that structures philosophical thought about aspects of human and non-human being; and it is a structuring affect as well - something that co-creates human sociality, like mourning, anger, or effervescence. It relies on an interaction with a "sublime object," and thus exists in the "ek-static" encounter of human and other. In this paper I take up writings on the sublime in continental and post-modern philosophy in order to ask what a phenomenology of affect might have to contribute to such thought. I sketch out a theory of what I call the "auditory sublime" - a sublime produced through listening. Unlike the sublime of the romantic era, evoked through the majesty and terror of visual distance, the auditory sublime is based on an experience of aesthetic proximity. Whether sublimity arises in relation to a visual object or an auditory one has important repercussions not only for the experience of the sublime but also for the work it does in the world (thus bearing on ethics). I illustrate what I call the "aesthetics of proximity" by examining Sufi sounds of worship as I have recorded and experienced them over the last two decades in Morocco and France.

Paper short abstract:

Resonant violence is a term that describes the affective force of genocidal violence, which has the capacity to endure--to resonate--long after the actual physical violence of genocide has ended. This presentation details the effects of this affective violence when left untended.

Paper long abstract:

The effects of genocidal violence remain present in populations for years after the actual physical violence has ended. To depict this phenomenon, I employ the term resonant violence, which describes the affective power of large-scale violence to continue to resonate within the individual or social "body," undergoing various stages of amplification and intensification, until or unless it is transduced through acts that allow this energy to resonate less or differently. By drawing on the sound theory of Viet Erlmann and Jean-Luc Nancy, this theory of resonant violence stresses the possibility that the subjective experience of violence can change, grow, and transform in a group context when it encounters other experiences of violence to resonate with. The presentation also adapts Daughtry's theories of belliphonic sound to conceptualize the damaging role of affect in post-atrocity contexts. At the same time, it theorizes how these dissonant forces can be transduced so as to resonate differently. By drawing examples from several post-atrocity contexts, it will demonstrate how the proliferation of resonant violence facilitates the institutionalization of systemic forms of violence against vulnerable groups. The presentation ends by illustrating some of the ways this affective force has been transformed through collective, embodied practices performed by grassroots, civil society organizations.

Paper short abstract:

In 1946 United States Supreme Court case The United States versus Causby, affective responses of humans and chickens anchor an atmospheric composed of sense, law, and air. The atmospheric emerges in "substantiations" of noise, moments in which noise matters.

Paper long abstract:

Noise from the sky experienced almost a century ago continues to provide a basis for airspace territoriality. The 1946 United States Supreme Court case The United States versus Causby provides the basis for airspace property rights below the "public highway" designated by the Air Commerce Act of 1926. Causby, a North Carolina chicken farmer, charged that the sounds of military jets taking off over his coops had caused his chickens to take fright and die. Affective responses of humans and chickens anchor an atmospheric composed of sense, law, and air. As something that is always coming into being, noise is necessarily immanent, providing, thus, a way of exploring sound as such. With nothing outside its matter-immanence, sound is not instrumentalizable, containable, or objectifiable. In this way, listening can be approached as similar to senses of touch, proprioception, and thermoception - senses that do not distinguish between sense and that which is sensed. Listening, thus, is affective, an energetic entanglement across forms of matter or a mode of (bringing into being) an "intensity of relations" (Deleuze). Listening as affect casts sensation and affect as coextensive, with an emphasis on the physicality of intensities, a concrete poetics of encounter in which affect is embodied and the sensory is relational. The atmospheric emerges in "substantiations" of noise, moments in which noise matters. Like noise, the atmospheric is not "out there," either physically or conceptually; rather, it is present, pervasive, and immanent, it imbues, becomes, and permeates, it is perceived, sensed, and felt.

Paper short abstract:

This essay is a philosophical gesture towards thinking about affects through the phenomenon of dust haze. Elaborating on the formal affinities of affects and dust haze, I investigate how affects work as visual apparatuses of capture and form particular modes of sensorium.

Paper long abstract:

In this essay, I take the phenomenon of dust-haze as a model that can shed light on the idea of "atmosphere," "affect," and possible forms of ethnographic attunement.

During my fieldwork in the southwest of Iran, I became interested in the occupation of the city by the dust-haze and people's encounter with it. The dust-haze has captured the face of the city and has claimed a new territory over all previous subjective and topographical objectifications of the city. The moment of encounter between the body of the people and the body of the city has turned into an "impersonal" arena. The dust-haze has fundamentally transformed the sensory experience of the citizens and their orientation in the day to day life.

Like affects, the dust-haze enfolds the local and challenges the detachment between inside and outside. By drawing a comparison between the dust haze and affect, I intend to reflect on the possible ways of thinking both materially about affect and material forces of affect.

In order to achieve this goal, I start from the traditional zār ritual in my field site, where people believed some "winds" are harmful and held wind-possession ceremonies, and I continue to new forms of capturing the affective force of weather through photography. At stake will be, on the one hand, the modes of ethnographic attunement with atmosphere, and on the other, the emergent forms of "impersonal" politics in this "in-between-ness."

Paper short abstract:

I will explore how sound and the material settings of a Brazilian favela play into the construction of moral atmospheres. I will also examine how the moving bodies of my informants occupy that nocturnal intensity, and the sort of agency they seek to attain through participation in the nightlife.

Paper long abstract:

I step out on my balcony and look towards the red neon sign some hundred meters away, Stop Time. The temperature is pleasant, and the sun far beyond sight. The favela and the lives that unfold therein are received differently by the senses depending on what time of day or night one is out and about. In particular, the madrugada, or the dawn, transformed my informants' perception of their surroundings. Away from the light and heat of the tropical sun, there was a change in the demographics of the people who were seen in the streets, the kinds of activities which took place, in the affective states (Favret-Saada, 2009) and the moralities of what could and should be done. The favela became another. The madrugada was the time when youths would be out for the street parties; it was a time of bodies dancing, of drinking alcohol and consuming illicit drugs, of buzzing motorbikes, all the while with the beats of different music genres colliding in the audioscape. A time of pulsating energy and seduction. This favela comes to life at night, shielded by darkness and filled with funk music. In this presentation, I will explore how sound and the material settings of the favela play into the construction of moral atmospheres (Bille, 2013). Furthermore, I will examine how the moving bodies of my informants occupy those nocturnal intensities, and the sort of agency they seek to attain through participation in the nightlife of the favela.