“Climatic-affective atmospheres”: A conceptual tool for affective scholarship in a changing climate.

Blanche Verlie.

Find or cite the published paper: Verlie, Blanche. "“Climatic-Affective Atmospheres”: A Conceptual Tool for Affective Scholarship in a Changing Climate." Emotion, Space and Society 33 (2019): 100623. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2019.100623

Abstract

This paper engages with the concept of affective atmospheres which has gained prominence in affect studies and suggests that in this era of global climate change, we need to ‘acclimatise’ this term. Working with a range of empirical examples, I argue that we can understand the climatic and affective to be entangled processes that co-produce each other. Working with the conceptual affordances of affective atmospheres offers much potential for research investigating the emotional and affective dimensions of climate change, enabling considerations that go beyond the individualism and anthropocentrism of more conventional approaches. Additionally, attuning to the climatic dimensions of affective atmospheres lessens the representational baggage of this term by moving beyond a metaphorical use of ‘atmosphere’. The refined concept I propose, climatic-affective atmospheres, offers promising opportunities for contributing to more effective and ethical social responses to climate change, for example, by enabling attention to how climate change reconfigures, disrupts, shapes and directs humans, and how everyday human affective practices contribute to changing or stabilising climate.

Introduction

Discussing climate change grief, Susanne Moser recounts a story her friend who researches coral told her. ‘When the truth about a future without corals finally sank in, she had to run to the bathroom and vomit, it was so devastating’ (Moser 2012, 904). Devastating, yes. But interesting too, as corals do something similar under the stress of climate change. In warming waters, they expel their algal symbionts which become toxic to them at higher temperatures, thus starving themselves of food and transforming into the calcified skeletons that so upset the researcher. The stressed corals vomit algae, and the stressed researcher vomits in response. Coincidence? Or an elusive example of the entanglement of bodies, climate and affect?

I conducted the fieldwork for my PhD in a climate-controlled classroom. Inside our ‘thermal enclosure’ (Rickards and Oppermann 2018, 100) my students and I were physically disconnected from the direct meteorological or ecological realities of climate change, such as coral bleaching, sea level rise or bushfires. For ethical reasons, as a researcher, I wanted to avoid engaging in the anthropocentric and representational climate ontologies that could easily arise in such a ‘secessionary climate’ (Adey 2013, 301), but climate change forced my hand anyway. Despite our insulated classroom, we experienced climate change in visceral, intense, embodied and emotional ways.

In response to the methodological challenge of trying to attend to climate’s materiality in our climate-controlled classroom, I conceptualised climate change to manifest as an affective atmosphere (Anderson 2009). I found this term very useful as it enabled me to consider our coherent emotional responses to climate change as well as our more puzzling affective experiences, and thus to explore how students and I were becoming (with) climate change. But doing so still took considerable conceptual work, as I needed to take the atmosphere in affective atmospheres seriously if I was to attune to climate change’s material agency. The term affective atmosphere usefully alludes to an engagement with the affectivity of the atmospheric, gaseous, meteorological and/or climatic. Yet in much of the literature using this term, atmosphere is mainly employed as a metaphor to represent the morphology and mobility of affects (Bille, Bjerregaard, and Sørensen 2015), rather than understood as something that is entangled with them.

I believe we need to pay far more attention to the co-constitution of the climatic and the affective, and in this paper I seek specifically to ‘acclimatise’ the concept of affective atmospheres as one move towards this. In everyday contexts ‘climate’ and ‘atmosphere’ are frequently used to refer to either the meteorological or the affective. I suggest we should take such common linguistic usage not as mere dualistic coincidence but as evidence of their always-already entangled nature. Definitions of the two can be eerily similar: what is climate, if not a set of relationally composed forces that literally press, shape, form, emanate from, and filter between ecological bodies, as affect has been defined (Anderson 2009, Ash 2013, Brennan 2004, Ahmed 2004)?

‘Climatic-affective atmospheres’ elaborates upon the valuable scholarship that has, in various ways, brought attention to and theorized the entanglement of the affective and the meteorological, gaseous or airy (Adams-Hutcheson 2017, Adey 2013, Ingold 2015, Jackson and Fannin 2011, McCormack 2008). It does so in part by emphasising the more expansive temporal and spatial scales and patterns that compose climate, in contrast to the (relatively) localised and momentary scope of such work, and by bringing an attention to how changes in affective or climatic patterns effect changes in the other. By integrating the important offerings of the concept of affective atmospheres with research on emotional responses to climate change, climatic-affective atmospheres can enable us to attend to enigmatic climate relations such as the cascades of multispecies purging mentioned above, as well as to the myriad, multiscaled, networked ways in which climate and (human and more-than-human) bodies affect each other.

Atmospheric affects: Atmosphere as metaphor for affect’s morphology

‘Affective atmospheres’ is a concept advanced by geographer Ben Anderson (Anderson 2009) and deployed and refined in geographical work exploring the spatiality of affects (Buser 2013, Fregonese 2017, Lupton 2017, Michels and Steyaert 2017). Anderson (2009) argues that affective atmospheres, as a concept, can bridge the divide that has been built up between emotions (as individually contained, easily identified, and coherently meaningful) and affect (as distributed, more-than-representational, and beyond comprehension) within affect theory (Vermeulen 2014, Gregg and Seigworth 2010). For Anderson, affective atmospheres are enveloping, spatially diffuse sensual or somatic forces which ‘emerge from, enable and perish with’ human and more-than-human bodies (2009, 80). They are coproduced by those they affect (Edensor 2012). Affective atmospheres are not-fully-tangible intensities that radiate from and surround entities. They are ‘enigmas and oblique events and background noises that might be barely sensed and yet are compelling’ (Stewart 2011, 445), and despite their ambiguity, the ‘qualities that are given to this something by those who feel it are remarkable for their singularity’ (Anderson 2009, 78, italics in original). Affective atmospheres can elicit emotional responses, as well as emerge from them (Bissell 2010, Zhang 2018). Affective atmospheres are ‘socially and historically contingent’ (Bille, Bjerregaard, and Sørensen 2015, 32) and thus ‘always in the process of emerging and transforming’ (Anderson 2009, 79). Yet affective atmospheres also accumulate through reiterative practices (Edensor 2012); they ‘accrue, circulate, sediment, unfold, and go flat’ (Stewart 2011, 446). Affective atmospheres transgress boundaries while connecting ‘people, places and things’ (Bille, Bjerregaard, and Sørensen 2015, 32), and thus trouble standard classifications as they are definitively relational (Edensor 2012) and ‘in the middle’ (Buser 2013, 234). As such, affective atmospheres are ‘impersonal in that they belong to collective situations,’ however, they ‘can be felt as intensely personal’ (Anderson 2009, 80), and as such they draw ‘our attention to the transmissions between the singular and the collective’ (Closs Stephens 2015, 185). Thus, affective atmospheres enable us to understand ‘affective experience as occurring beyond, around, and alongside the formation of subjectivity’ (Anderson 2009, 77), ‘across human and non-human materialities, and in-between subject/object distinctions’ (Anderson 2009, 78, italics in original).

Much engagement with the term mainly uses ‘atmosphere’ as a metaphor to represent the morphology and movement of affects (Bissell 2010, Edensor 2012, Anderson 2009). Analyses typically consider ecological, non-human and material objects and forces to collectively compose the affective atmospheres they are investigating (Edensor 2012, Shaw 2014). Yet despite this attention to the more-than-human and an explicit desire to be ‘non-representational’ (Anderson and Ash 2015) many studies working with the terms ‘atmosphere’ and/or ‘climate’ as figures for affect pay limited attention to the meteorological, gaseous, or climatic in their analyses. In some, ‘atmosphere’ or ‘climate’ function almost entirely as metaphors (Fregonese 2017, Gottzén and Sandberg 2017, Sørensen 2015). Perhaps not every study needs to focus on climate change, sure. But as we use affective atmospheres to investigate issues such as domestic violence (Gottzén and Sandberg 2017), it may be important to recognise that incidences of domestic violence increase following extreme weather and higher temperatures (Parkinson 2017). Or to take another example, the affective atmospheres of digital health (Lupton 2017) will surely be influenced by different or extreme weather, as this can affect people’s health directly as well as influence the effectiveness of the device they track and manage their health with.

Some scholarship exploring affective atmospheres mentions the weather or meteorological conditions, but not as key participants. For example, Closs Stephens (2015) notes that the sunny skies during the London 2012 Olympics may have been related to the emergence of the happy nationalistic atmosphere during those two weeks, but how or to what extent this may have occurred is not explored. Perhaps this is because the ‘affective materiality’ (Adams-Hutcheson 2017, 14) of weather is ‘so present and enabling as to be forgotten’ (Jackson and Fannin 2011, 438). But an understanding of how the uncharacteristically warm weather may have amplified British patriotism is surely an interesting question in the context of climatic changes that may see such weather events become more frequent, especially as discourses of ‘climate refugees’ also threaten to heighten ethnocentric anxieties (Seigel 2018).

Other studies more closely attend to how the qualities of the air in which bodies are directly situated contribute to affective atmospheres. Zhang (2018) and Healy (2014) explore how conditioned (i.e. cooler and drier) air contributes to the affectivity of shopping malls and stores which influence, direct, nudge or even ‘condition’ (Healy 2014, 37) people into purchasing consumer products. Edensor’s investigation of an autumnal illumination event in a British town acknowledges that its ‘atmospheres are not solely produced by the lights but by other elements within the affective field [including] the weather’ (2012, 1109). In recognition of this, Edensor pays some attention to how different meteorological conditions influenced the atmosphere of the holiday attraction: one evening ‘the promenade was windswept and icy, largely bereft of humans. The lights insistently and impassively carried on but were visible to few, the cold weather and desertion created a lonely, melancholy scene’ (1110). Michels and Steyaert (2017) explore how unanticipated adverse weather conditions disrupted the intentions of some urban musical performers, contributing to a more ‘poetic’ (96) and even ‘disturbing’ (95) and ‘apocalyptic’ (98) ambiance.

There is a growing field of research that explicitly seeks to consider ‘atmospheres as simultaneously meteorological and affective’ (Adey 2013, 293, italics in original, Ingold 2015, McCormack 2008). For example, Adey (2013) attends to the oppressive and effervescent polluted airs of megacities and McCormack (2008) to the buoyant anticipation of the Swedish explorer Andrée’s hot air balloon flight to the North Pole in 1897. As Adey (2013) puts it, understanding atmospheres as ‘a material-affective ecology’ (293) enables attention to how we ‘simultaneously exist within and produce a climate’ (297), both living and embodying the ‘vitality, corporeality and expressiveness’ of atmospheres (293). Such work is a promising move, however these analyses generally focus on (relatively) local and consistently patterned atmospheres, which limits their analytical relevance to a planet whose climate is undergoing rapid reconfiguration.

Little work uses affective atmospheres to explore that quintessentially atmospheric and affective phenomenon, climate change. Gannon’s exploration of the affectivity of everyday weather encounters usefully encourages attention to how atmospheres have an elusive agency that ‘incites relations and provokes changes’ (2016, 85), which she argues is important in the context of ‘the monumental and … global’ issue of climate change (2016, 88). Adams-Hutcheson’s (2017) important paper explores the role that different weather conditions¾both those occurring as seasonal changes throughout the year, as well as those that related to climate variability between years¾played in her research encounters with dairy farmers. Adams-Hutcheson provides an explicit and consistent investigation into how deeply enmeshed climate, weather, affect and bodies are and how changes in one dimension can elicit changes in another. But Adams-Hutcheson also concludes that more empirical work is required to investigate how this operates across larger spatio-temporal changes such as those of global climate change.

The phenomena typically described by the term affective atmospheres are potentially better understood with the term atmospheric affects (see e.g. McCormack 2008, 446). This term more honestly acknowledges that it uses ‘atmosphere’ as an adjective, and thus as a metaphor, something that represents what affective intensities are ‘like’. If we are to work towards more-than-representational ontologies, we must recognise that how we represent the world matters. An ontology that sees the climatic and/or atmospheric as just a metaphor for how human affective relations operate is in fact deeply representational, despite claims to the contrary. Living with the affected atmospheres of climate change demonstrates that we need to understand that the climatic is intimately enmeshed with all the ways in which we are becoming-human.

Acclimatising affective atmospheres: Attuning to the entanglement of the climatic and affective

I propose more rigorously and consistently ‘acclimatising’ the term affective atmospheres. Research and insight into the affective and emotional experiences of encountering climate change (Brugger et al. 2013, Cunsolo Willox et al. 2013, Drew 2013, Roelvink and Zolkos 2011) demonstrates that while affects may be atmospheric, climatic atmospheres are also affective (Adams-Hutcheson 2017, Rooney 2018, Gannon 2016). For example, weather conditions are found to influence people’s moods and mental states (Dodd et al. 2018, Brandl et al. 2018, Baylis et al. 2018); emotions influence people’s carbon mitigating behaviours (Burke, Ockwell, and Whitmarsh 2018, Stevenson and Peterson 2016); and potential future climatic changes arouse intense emotions in people (Cunsolo Willox 2012, Head 2016). In a subtle but important contrast to the linguistic structure of atmospheric affects, affective atmospheres as a term should acknowledge that meteorological atmospheres are affective: air, wind, clouds and precipitation have affective agency, they affect the bodies they interact with (Banerjee and Blaise 2013). And a close attention to the relational composition of atmospheres can ensure that this agency is not understood in a one-way flow from the gaseous to the more solid, but attends to how atmospheres are also affected by those they affect (Neimanis and Walker 2013). I am advocating for the ecology and materiality of the climatic to be considered in full when we use the term ‘atmosphere’. However, given that affective atmospheres often omits the climatic, I work with the term climatic-affective atmospheres to ensure I avoid this erasure.

Considering atmospheres as climatic-affective does not equate the affective with the climatic. Each is more than the other, and dissolving differences is unlikely to offer much. Rather, it considers the climatic and affective to be always inter-related and co-constitutive of each other. Affective atmospheres, in an acclimatised account, refers to the affective nature of the relations and exchanges between the gaseous and the corporeal and the agency of the climatic and atmospheric in affective life. Climatic-affective atmospheres account for how atmospheric affects both produce and emerge from the affected atmospheres that constitute climate change. The affective life of the atmospheric, meteorological, and/or climatic may constitute a climatic-affective atmosphere, as may the climatic implications of more general affective forces. Climatic-affective atmospheres can therefore be understood to be distinct from the entirety of both ‘the climate’ and ‘the affective’ in that they attend specifically to how the meteorological, climatic, ecological, emotional and affective are entangled and how they affect each other. An ecologised account of affective atmospheres therefore understands affective and climatic atmospheres not as separate, nor indistinguishable, but as enmeshed, mutually co-composed phenomena.

Attending to atmospheres while considering them to be always climatic and affective offers important opportunities. This includes attuning in more nuanced ways to how and why particular people do or do not engage with climate change, including through consideration of how everyday affective practices and relations co-create climate change; that is, how the affective is climatic. For example, Bissell’s (2010) paper insightfully demonstrates how non-verbal modes of communication between strangers influence people’s experiences of public transport. Analyses of the frustrated atmospheres that emerge during delays or in response to others’ poor personal hygiene, as Bissell argues, can be useful for understanding why some commuters may be loath to ditch their private car for public, and thus more climate friendly, forms of transport. That is, Bissell shows us how the atmospheric affects of public transport may affect our climatic atmosphere. But meteorological atmospheres can also influence the affective experiences of public transport. In Melbourne, Australia, extreme heat as well as extreme rain rather frequently delay our public transport, and when carriages are crammed full of sweaty bodies on a 40 degree day or people slip over on the muddy floors, such atmospheres of frustration are certainly amplified. How increases in extreme weather and the commuter frustration that arises might perversely encourage more people to choose to drive, creating affective-climatic feedback loops, is an important area for analysis, and one in which an acclimatised account of affective atmospheres may be useful. Equally, Edensor’s exploration of the affectivity of lighting (2012), Lin’s of the manipulation of comfort, efficiency and care on board airplanes (2015), and Shaw’s of the diverse participants that compose the affective ‘placed assemblages’ of nocturnal urban economies (2014, 93) can be read for their insight into how fossil fueled economic practices are encouraged and normalised, and thus, how they might be resisted or transformed. A keener attunement to the role of the meteorological and climatic within such practices might also offer promising avenues for research. For example, globally, overnight temperatures are increasing more rapidly than day time ones which is reinforced by the urban heat island effect. Consideration of how such disruptions to the cooling of urban atmospheres in the evening might influence the affective atmospheres, and thus the practices and participants of such bustling twilight spacetimes, could be worthwhile.

Considering atmospheres as climatic-affective also opens up our understanding of the ways¾that is, both the mechanisms and the outcomes¾in which climate change ‘impacts’ people and the more-than-human world. Most of my research has focused on this element of climatic-affective atmospheres: how the climatic is affective. Across the remainder of the paper I draw on a range of examples which explore this, including some from the undergraduate course Climate Change Responses which I taught in 2015 in Melbourne, referred to as CCR15. The examples chosen are ones that caught my attention due to the close affinity between the affective and climatic states, for example people feeling drained in response to empty rivers. This selection of examples should not be taken to suggest that climatic or affective qualities are maintained, rather than transformed, when they traverse bodily boundaries, but they do assist in making such processes apparent. Through this exploration, I argue that an attunement to the atmospheric affects of climate change would be beneficial for research into climate change and emotions, and that we need to engage more explicitly with the climatic when researching affective atmospheres.

I conceptualise climatic-affective atmospheres as multiply scaled, transcorporeal, more-than-human forces which can literally accrete, sediment, blossom, disperse, mushroom, melt, condense and precipitate. These embodied, ecological energies can be intense, heavy, hard, clear, elusive, indeterminate, intangible and/or visceral. Climatic-affective atmospheres move, disrupt, reconfigure, shape, solidify, and/or dissolve selves and relationships, and they thus contribute to the ongoing becoming of the world. They may be readily sensed, interpreted, measured, named and intentionally responded to, but equally they may fly below our radars, taming, shaping and directing us in ways we are not even aware are happening. They are historically situated, as patterns of affective relating, yet they are dynamic and ever shifting. As such they are implicated in how the past, present and possible interact, and thus how the world unfolds in the future. They therefore demand our attention.

Climatic-affective atmospheres: Example analyses

My development of this concept emerges from the intersection of the affective turn and anti-anthropocentric approaches to climate change (Neimanis and Walker 2013), intellectual inheritances which both suggest that the world is more complex than humans can fully perceive, know and control (see e.g. Verlie 2017). Thus perhaps the first thing that needs to be noted is that an attunement to climatic-affective atmospheres does not offer stable, completed, exhaustive or coherent analysis. Rather, it enables us to attune to, but not fully decipher, the curious ways that climate and humans can become entangled. That is, not all encounters with climate, weather and the atmosphere are easy to identify, document, or understand, either for those experiencing them or for those of us studying people’s experiences. Climatic-affective atmospheres thus offers us a promising, but always partial, analytical capacity.

As one example, on October 6th 2015 a planned fire in Lancefield (just 70km from Melbourne) exceeded authorities’ control and went on to burn over 4000 hectares, prompting the official start of the bushfire season to be moved forward a month. The next day in our climate-controlled classroom in CCR15 (in Melbourne), our guest lecturer from the business school provided us with a lecture akin to that he gives to the business community¾those with generally little concern or understanding about climate change, unlike us in CCR15 who were generally highly engaged and informed having already completed ten weeks of study on climate change. The lecture was thus designed to arouse concern, and featured images and stories from the Black Saturday bushfires, the worst fires in Australia’s history which killed 173 people in 2009. It also included a photo of a woman holding her grandchildren in a dam to try to survive the Dunalley bushfires in Tasmania in 2013, surrounded by a hazy orange atmosphere, with looks of desperation and terror on their faces (see Figure 1). The lecture then discussed the despicable practices of multinational corporations who have known about climate change for decades, funded misinformation, and continued to extract, sell and burn fossil fuels. In our tutorial after this lecture, when I asked students if they wanted to discuss the week’s topic (capitalism) or work on their assessments first, one who had to leave mid-way said he would rather skip the discussion of capitalism because he was ‘in a fiery mood,’ and so, he would prefer to work on the assessments first before he had to go.

Figure 1: Tammy Holmes, second from left, and her grandchildren take refuge under a jetty from a bushfire in the Tasmanian town of Dunalley, January 4, 2013. Photograph: Tim Holmes, Reproduced with permission of Guardian News & Media Ltd. Available at https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/jun/05/guardian-firestorm-tasmania-dunalley-competition-docfest

How can I make sense of the student being in a ‘fiery mood’? Where do we draw the spatial and temporal boundaries between bushfires and bodies? To what extent can I say that the student was affected by the Lancefield fires, blazing out of control at that moment 70km away? Can I say that he was affected by the Dunalley fires which had occurred two years earlier, but were in some ways present through the photo in the lecture? And what about Black Saturday, a dark and horrifying period six years earlier which has altered most Victorians’ understandings of the terror of bushfire? Could the experience of living through a state on fire for days have been burned into his embodied memory, and then been triggered by the discussion and flared up? Gibbs suggests that

bodies can catch feelings as easily as catch fire: affect leaps from one body to another, evoking tenderness, inciting shame, igniting rage, exciting fear. … Communicable affect can inflame nerves and muscles in a conflagration of every conceivable kind of passion. (2001, n.p.)

While affects may function like fire, fires are also affective, and perhaps this student caught fire’s affects, or caught fire affectively.

Working with the notion of climatic-affective atmospheres suggests that potentially these three bushfire events permeated him through media such as the photograph in the lecture and news reports (Cunsolo Willox 2012). While bushfires might also generate resigned, panicked, or other moods, the use of ‘fiery’ to describe a mood suggests that the aggravated and unpredictable intensities of combustion can exceed the spaces, times and bodies usually considered within their bounds. This apparently momentary encounter with climate change could therefore be understood as a process which extended over a period of at least six years and across the mountain range that separates Melbourne and Lancefield, or the sea that separates Tasmania from mainland Australia. This is the ‘inbetween of encounter’ (Hayward 2010, 581) in ‘affective ecologies’ (Hustak and Myers 2012, 96), the transferal and reconfiguration of intensity and expressivity across kinds which generates movement, infoldings of relations, and emergent difference. It emphasizes, as Zoe Todd suggests, that climate is a ‘sentient commons’ (Todd 2016, 20), and the transtemporal, transpatial and transcorporeal (Alaimo 2008) nature of climate change, a rapidly morphing set of multiscaled, non-linear relationships. It further indicates the ambiguous distinction between meteorological conditions and affective forces (Gannon 2016, Rooney 2018), as the smoke, haze, charcoal and cinders of Black Saturday, the Dunalley and/or Lancefield fires potentially infiltrated this student’s body-mind, arousing particular sensations and moving him into particular actions. But of course, this is somewhat speculative. Perhaps it was purely coincidental, maybe his choice of ‘fiery’ to describe his mood was unrelated to the fires that had swirled into our classroom; I can’t be sure. Such phenomena exceed capacities for identifying, tracing, and disentangling particular occurrences from their constitutive relations (Gannon 2016). To reiterate, an engagement with climatic-affective atmospheres may offer increased understandings of how humans and climate interact, but it also emphasizes that humans will never have full command over such intricate complexities.  

However, one of the analytical affordances of acclimatising affective atmospheres is an expansion of the temporal and spatial scales considered. Climatic-affective atmospheres acknowledge the long histories and the far-reaching tendrils of the complex patterns of more-than-human interactions which compose atmospheres, no matter how ephemeral they may seem (Gottzén and Sandberg 2017). While climatic-affective atmospheres may be composed through local and short-term conditions and participants, they are always situated in much larger spatial and temporal cycles, schemes and ranges (Anderson 2009, Edensor 2012, Zhang 2018), including planetary spatialities and deep time. In Anderson’s (2009) influential paper on affective atmospheres, he notes that epochs may have an (affective) atmosphere and I think this is worthy of further consideration. For example, aberrations in Holocene atmospheric patterns may disrupt dispositions as we enter and/or resist the Anthropocene.

That is, given the planet’s climate is changing, affective patterns must also be changing. Exploring Australia’s 2018/2019 summer through its climatic-affective atmospheres provides a useful demonstration of how changes in long term global climates produce affective variations. This summer has been dubbed another ‘angry’ one. Temperature records have again been smashed. January has been the hottest month Australia has ever experienced, with some places experiencing more than 40 consecutive days above 40 degrees. Drought experienced throughout the last decade in NSW and QLD is only getting worse (ABC 2019). And of course, it is not just the climate that is angry. Many Australians are getting angry in the heat, and about the heat (Davies and Allam 2019), although anger is just the start of it. In Melbourne, we have read the news reports of the thirty or so wild horses which were found dead, from dehydration, all together in a bone-dry river in the Northern Territory (Garrick 2019). These leathery bodies are a mammalian echo of the millions of rotting fish which have died in the Darling River due to insufficient water in the same period. Some of the fish are estimated to be 70 years old, a fact which has been reported in order to clarify the novelty and thus devastation of this particular event, which is being blamed on long term irrigation corruption upstream in Queensland and New South Wales, as well as parliamentary ineptitude in Canberra (McCarthy et al. 2019). The news tells of farmers, fishers and Indigenous elders alike shedding tears, leaking moisture as if to try to fill their rivers (Davies and Bowers 2019). As Walgett local Vanessa Hickey put it, ‘20 years ago … we had two beautiful, flowing, fast rivers. … We would jump in, trying to touch the bottom. … Today, we got nothing. … We are river people … [and] when we’ve got no water in our rivers, it feels like we’re drained as well’ (cited in Allam and Earl 2019, n.p.). Elders ‘haven’t got words’ for this ‘deep grief’ (Rhonda Ashby cited in Allam and Earl 2019, n.p.) that emerges in response to the consistency of the literally baking heat. The temperature is 49 degrees, and that matters. But it is not just the weather of the day, or of just this summer, that contributes to the climatic-affective atmosphere of such time-places. Complex networks of colonialism¾the theft of land and transformation of ecological management practices over the last two and a half centuries, in the context of 60,000 plus years of Indigenous cultural relation with the rivers (‘we are river people’)¾and the spread of fossil fueled consumer capitalism and thus global climate change have all contributed to the affective experiences arising from this acutely intense interaction with the summer’s scorching atmosphere.

Such multiply scaled, more-than-human, socio-ecologically composed climatic-affective atmospheres in turn exude beyond the local time-places in which they coalesced. Collectively, they interact with other climatic-affective atmospheres to contribute to the ongoing becoming of climate/change. Ahmed (2014, n.p.) points out that ‘atmospheres surround certain words, hovering, a thickening of air,’ and ‘climate change’ is one such phrase which carries complex and intense affective baggage. Stories of climatic events such as the angry summer and the desiccated rivers infiltrate my climate change classrooms as learning resources, and contribute to the condensation, accumulation, sedimentation and transformation of the climatic-affective atmospheres of the classes. As Adams-Hutcheson puts it, the meteorological has the ‘power to impact on bodies inside dwellings’, infiltrating ‘thoughts, feelings and actions’ (2017, 4). Or to put it more explicitly, as Rousell, Cutter-Mackenzie, and Foster (2017, 666) do, climate change is a ‘geo-traumatic’ event that can ‘enter into the classroom not only as discursive topics, but as transcorporeal forces that pass through and infect the very structures of bodies.’ In CCR15, we were not in direct bodily contact with drought, floods or ocean acidification in our climate-controlled classrooms, yet despite this ‘thermal monotony’ (Healy 2014, 37) the ‘contagious’ (Bissell 2010, Knudsen and Stage 2012) affective forces of climate change permeated the insulation and mutated through interaction with us. This ‘viral’ (Rousell et al. 2017, 655) affective capacity of climate change meant that during the course we experienced a range of identifiable emotions, such as isolation, desperation and cynicism, as well as more visceral, embodied and affective responses such as sweating, crying, leaning back in our chairs, rolling our eyes, losing sleep, feeling ‘hit a little hard’ or like we were ‘living in The Matrix.’ There was often a temporal disjunction between stimulus (e.g. the provision of information about climate change) and these affective-emotional responses, which demonstrates the ‘affective residue’ (Watkins 2016, 73) of climate change: its capacity to lie latent and then precipitate, coagulate and leach out under particular conditions.

Scholars have been drawn to the term atmosphere for its affordances for the study of affect, but also due to how the gaseous epitomises porosity and interconnection, enmeshment, and co-becoming (Zhang 2018). Attending to the material-affectivity of the gaseous offers a nuanced attunement to how climate change can both unravel us and knot us together with others. Writing about his experience in Houston during Hurricane Harvey, Timothy Morton’s anecdote articulates how the more-than-human relations that comprise climatic-affective atmospheres induce inter/personal change, not to mention spatio-temporal ontological disruptions:

In the hurricane, a visceral feeling lets loose, the feeling that you are never really living in a humans-only world. You’re on hurricane time. And the big problem with hurricane time is that it unleashes hurricane you. In my case, hurricane Tim (pun intended) was a jerk, which embarrassed me a lot. I got cross with friends for not checking in, until I realized: This is a whole world inside here, and unless you’ve been in one, you can’t really know. (2018, n.p.)

Morton’s reflection demonstrates how the hurricane ‘literally gets into the individual’ (Brennan 2004, 1), reconfiguring the self’s relations with human and more-than-human others in unpredictable ways. An attunement to climatic-affective atmospheres affords attention to how the climate is not only ‘out there,’ impacting bodies, but that bodies are engaged in socio-affective processes of becoming (with) climate change. As another example, describing a class which discussed Australia’s massive per capita contribution to carbon dioxide concentrations in the Earth’s atmosphere, one of my students in CCR15 stated: ‘I remember a unanimous feeling of frustration shared by the whole class.’ This student’s comment suggests that we were ‘feeling other people’s feelings in the air’ (Zhang 2018, 126). But it also demonstrates that gaseous conditions can affect us, including in ways that exceed local, immediate interactions: while we were feeling each other’s feelings in the air, that air had a concentration of over 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide which is what we were frustrated about. The affective intensity of such gaseous conditions accrued throughout the course and amplified our experiences of such climate induced frustration, as well as anxiety, grief, guilt, overwhelm and hope. These affective and emotional experiences decomposed individualised, neoliberal subjectivities and cultivated a vague yet undeniable collective subjectivity (Verlie 2019), as described by one student:

A group formed to discuss the challenging aspects of [the course]. We had the tutorial and each other to help guide our understandings and relationship with climate change. The class felt like a home for ideas and discussions.

As Adams-Hutcheson argues, ‘climatic atmospheres do exert some kind of embodied “affective force”’ (2017, 10). Across the semester the gaseous not only physically infiltrated us, but affectively permeated and bound us together. We had become climate-changed, a process which not only changed individuals, but changed how they related to each other and to the world. Through the practices of listening to each other’s fears and hopes without judgement we created a ‘safe atmosphere’ (Gottzén and Sandberg 2017), a kind of ‘little world’ or collective subjectivity ‘that some people immerse themselves in, or dip in and out of … or build a light and temporary link to before they move on to something else’ (Stewart 2011, 452).

Emphasising the entanglement of the affective and climatic is not to suggest generalised, universal or definitive patterns of climate/affect/subjectivity (Adams-Hutcheson 2017). Rather, different bodies/subjects will interact differently with climatic-affective atmospheres (Ahmed 2014, Michels 2015). Ahmed terms this the ‘angled’ nature of affective atmospheres: even ‘when [affective] atmospheres seem thick and palpable, like something that can fall and settle, almost like pollen in the air’ people can still experience them very differently (2014, n.p.). Indeed, the actual pollen in the air is changing as the climate changes, and Melbourne’s deadly 2016 thunderstorm asthma event which saw over ten thousand people rush to emergency rooms and ten people die while others were obliviously unaffected demonstrates that it is not just the intangible, immaterial, or emotional affectivity of atmospheres that is angled (Kenner 2018). The materiality of climate change’s atmospheres is experienced radically differently by different bodies in different places and different times (Kaijser and Kronsell 2014).

Oftentimes social identities are also a means through which climatic-affective atmospheres are angled. Ahmed further argues that ‘racism can be experienced as a storm’, a ‘violent disturbance of an atmosphere,’ which can hit a body of colour as hard as a wall (2014, n.p.). Yet as climate justice advocates having been telling us, for increasing numbers of people of colour around the world, this is more than metaphorical. Unfathomably intense storms like Hurricane Katrina, Typhoon Haiyan and Cyclone Idai, interacting with systemic racism, colonialism and fossil fueled capitalism, hit communities of colour hardest all around the world and reconfigure affective relationships in myriad ways as they do so (White et al. 2007). Such life-threatening events lead to intense affective and emotional responses such as anger, family breakdown, suicide, and post-traumatic stress disorder (Manning and Clayton 2018), and these also emerge differentially according to differentiated ‘angles’ (White et al. 2007, Bray et al. 2018).

Conclusion: Affective scholarship in a changing climate

All atmospheres are now climate changed. In such times, we cannot afford to consider the climatic as mere background or as simply a metaphor to represent our apparently more significant human experiences and practices. As Anna Tsing argues:

Too often, we cultural analysts seize on a figure—and forget the world. We celebrate Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomes without recalling settler colonialism’s invasive plant dispersions. … We need metaphors and figures; we can’t think or speak without them. We also need to do our best to keep them in the world. (2018, 75)

To ignore the meteorological while using the term affective atmospheres is to engage in anthropocentrism. If scholars are serious about doing non-representational work, the meteorological will feature more prominently in their analyses of affective atmospheres, so as not to forget the world. As Ingold reminds us, temper and temperature have the same etymological root (2015). But we cannot stop there: our planet’s temperature is increasing at a rapid rate, and to consider the weather while omitting climate change is, to put it bluntly, a form of climate denial (Norgaard 2011).

Climatic-affective atmospheres is one concept that can help acclimatise affective scholarship, in part by attending to how geological temporalities and planetary geographies manifest in momentary minutiae, and vice versa. Climatic-affective atmospheres enables us to attune to the intimate, surprising, unpredictable and never-fully-representable ways humans are themselves shaped by climate. It thus helps to decentre humans¾including those who conduct research¾from our understandings and studies of climate change.

But while climatic-affective atmospheres emphasizes the limits to human knowledge, it also offers important opportunities for socially responsible research. All human undertakings are either contributing to, or reducing climate change. Whatever affective practices we are engaging in, we are participating in our shared climate’s ongoing becoming. Scholarly work which seeks to attend to how particular affective atmospheres influence human activities and experiences could add significantly to our understanding of how seemingly mundane everyday situations contribute to the ongoing normalization of climate changing practices (e.g. Michels and Steyaert 2017). Understanding (more about) how intangible, non-representational, subconscious and affective forces move us into fossil fueled habits, and how to disrupt such hegemonic affective atmospheres (Verlie and CCR15 2018), may offer climate change mitigation efforts important avenues for intervening and creating more sustainable life worlds.

An attunement to affective atmospheres also offers promising potential for climate change research. While research attending to the emotional dimensions of climate change (Hayes et al. 2018, Manning and Clayton 2018) is increasing, this often limits ‘the affective’ to an internal, psychologized experience which centres the individual human, providing little capacity to explore the more elusive, surprising, more-than-human relational ways in which climate change affects us. Research into the climatic-affective atmospheres of bushfires and emergency management regimes, of sea level rise, of disaster recovery, of renewable energy policy, of IPCC reports and other more specific manifestations of climate change could contribute important insights into how and why people do and do not engage with climate change (see Ryan 2016 for an interesting example), and how and why such non/responses may exceed expectations and rationality. It is my hope that this paper can stimulate such explorations of how the climatic and affective are enmeshed.

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