Atmosphere

Seminar presented on 4 September 2024

AMBIANCE, AMBIGUITY, CIRCUMSTANCE, CONSEQUENCE, CIRCUMSPECTION

Ambiance, ambiguity

Two key features of ambiance are, firstly, that ambiance relates to an arrangement or assemblage: that is, to a gathering of parts, aggregating to a whole; and secondly, that ambiance is an effect, that it is the result of or that it is an emergent condition or property of that assemblage.

My contention is that ambiance is strictly speaking a property of spatial assemblages or arrangements—or rather of places—that have distinctive cultural and social dimensions. Such places are affective: they are capable of eliciting experiences, emotions and affections, depending on the prevailing moods of those who find themselves there. Moods are not properties of places but of human beings, situated within affective ambiances, and engaging or otherwise transacting with their circumstance or context. Atmosphere is then an emergent condition, resulting consequentially from the transactions between affective situational and circumstantial ambiances and human moods.

Ambiance derives from the etymon *AMBHI, meaning around, and *EI, to go. This might refer to a gesture of going-around or vacillation; but also to a state of being surrounded: that is to an ambit. The sense of going around implies something like restlessness, instability, wavering or hesitancy: what ambles is not at rest, and hence is indeterminate, equivocal, ambivalent, thereby producing something like a virtual tracery that surrounds the ambient space with a halo, an atmosphere: something simultaneously limiting and insubstantial, emergent and emarginating.

The ambivalent character of an ambient setting in turn makes it ambiguous. Another sense of *AMBHI is double: a duality or diremption, and the separating interval between, that causes meaning to remain indeterminable and open to multiple possibilities. Not being able to close that interval, to resolve the discrepancy, ambiguity profusely alternates, multiplies and produces alternate sense. This at least is a positive reading of ambiguity, opposing its normative sense as a sign of doubt, hesitation, confusion, deceit—all counter to what is widely valorised: doubtlessness, decisiveness, clarity, honesty.

Empson

In Seven Types of Ambiguity (1949), William Empson broaches the theme of ambiguity in literature, but implications abound for architecture and cinema. Empson defines ambiguity as: "any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language."[1] Ambiguity arises when two or more meanings are possible and complicate a statement in terms of its implications.  

Empson's seven types of ambiguity is a convenient framework, arrayed in stages of advancing logical disorder, producing increasing levels of ambiguity. The simplest type of ambiguity occurs when "a detail [such as a word or a grammatical structure] is effective in several ways at once.”

Empson’s analyses of ambiguity foreground the important tactical values of semantic indetermination, suspension and deferral of meaning. These are precisely constructed, and yet they produce in the reader an inability to definitively situate the boundaries of sense in a word or phrase. Meanings connote, imply, deploy and proliferate. This kind of semantic relay builds density, texture and richness; but in such a way as to keep the material porous, to aerate it, to precipitate in it an ekstasis of irradiating sense, a vaporous circumambiance.

Hopkins

The Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins coined the terms, `inscape' and `instress,' to describe two motifs in his poetry. Inscape is the characteristic identity of a thing or a scene—the internal dynamic system that assures unity as well as the force that conveys it to a beholder who experiences it through the sound-body of the poem. Instress is the corresponding recognition and affect of inscape, experienced by a kind of consilient resonance between what is there to be heard, the hearer and the hearing; between object, subject and art.[2] In the terms I have been using so far, inscape corresponds to the ambiance of a setting, subsequently experienced by a mooded being as the instress of atmosphere..

Ambiguity and uncertainty are central to the ambiance and affect of Hopkins' poetry. An extreme case of this can be found in Hopkins’ That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection. Here, ambiguity builds in the mirroring of sound patterns by Hopkins’ linguistic tectonics: how he deconstructs words into their compounds and syllables, and disperses them across the versification to form rhymes, echoes, reflections and symmetries, producing a semantic ambiance of multiple compossible senses.

The spatial implications of these linguistic tectonics are self-evident. They suggest an architecture built of superimposed or juxtaposed configurations, patterns and rhythms that coexist, yet without fully fusing into a singularity. Hopkins’ alliteration, assonance and complex orchestrations of sound can be paralleled, in architecture, to the layering of repeated configurations in spatial depth that can be read over-against each other or encountered in a sequence of spaces that unfold and echo as so many iterations to build spatial complexity, density, texture and rhythm.

CIRCUMSTANCE AND CONSEQUENCE

If ambiance is the distinctive assemblage that delineates and qualifies a surrounding world—an affective, charged setting in which we happen to find ourselves—then the components of that assemblage constitute a circumstance; they stand-round-about us in such a way as to circumscribe the setting as a place. A circumstance is a charged field of forces, tensions and propensities within which we can build a lifeworld. Circumstance, circle, circumscription, circumspection all derive from the etymon *SKER/*KER meaning to turn or bend. The ring of a circle is what successively bends to delineate a circumference, a corona, a boundary: more or less vaporous, dense or incorporated. The spatial connotations here parallel an equivalent range of temporal registers.

Circumstance is essentially perimetrical: it is the outskirts of a region. It lays out a boundary that functions as both limit and origin. But the perimeter is not simply a geometrical borderline. Rather, it is a charged interface—or, more properly, a surface as surfeit, as excessive production whose originary and terminal capacities are two phases of its radical scintillation and radiance.

Circumstance functions as a setup, infrastructure or frame that enables happenstance: an organised set-out of multiple opportunities that can be procured, and whose procurement constitutes the emergent capacity or ambiance of place. Here, circumstance parallels contingency. The contingent is uncertain and unpredictably dependent on circumstance. It might be a chance occurrence, or an accident. It might never happen. Events are always contingent-on: that is, what happens depends. A possible sense through this is that in circumstance, a provisional assemblage of components is brought into a neighbourhood, into proximity, into contact. Once in touch with each other, those now contiguous components become charged and mobilised as relays open up between them. That charge might be the palpable ambiance of circumstance.

We are familiar with different kinds of circumstance: fortunate, felicitous, inopportune, suspicious, unforeseen, extenuating, mitigating, prevailing, circumstances beyond our control, circumstances that enable, prohibitive circumstances, circumstances that demand, living in reduced circumstances, ceremonial pomp and circumstance. Each of these comports a different ambiance and makes possible a different set of emergent possibilities. This means that circumstances are not passive or static but resolutely affective and activating.

The negative connotation of the circumstantial aligns it with the vague, unprovable, immaterial, indirect, inessential, indemonstrable, unverifiable, unconfirmable and unevincible. We might say “what were the circumstances of your birth,” by which we might mean how did it come about, where did it take place, when, who was there, and so on. But we might also imply “why did it happen in that way, what were the causal events and settings that led up to it.” In that sense, we might be referring to an assemblage, to a cluster of conditions that happened to align and come into contact at the time and place of your birth, by accident, in an unplanned manner, in an undesigned way. Likewise, incidentally, such and such a place, at such and such a time, plus such and such a person, in such and such a mood, produce such and such an atmosphere.

Circumstances have consequences: conditions follow or flow from them, they have implications. A particular set of circumstances is something like a section cut through a potentially indefinite field of possibilities, manifesting at a particular time in a particular place. Circumstances and their consequences might be usefully read, respectively, in terms of Francois Jullien’s motifs of efficacious disposition and propensity. A given setting is so (pre)disposed as to be open to the efficacious and strategic mobilisation of its inherent potential—potential that has a distinct inclination or trajectory, a particular leaning or tendency-towards, a specific capacity-to-become, that constitute its propensity.[3]

The accidental alignment of conditions that we call circumstantial is decisive in that it has the potential to unclench consequences for us, to bring something about, to cause something to befall us: the very definition of an accident—from Latin ad-, to and cadere, fall. The cognate lexicon is suggestive: cadence, cadaver, cascade, casual, casualty, chance, chute, decadence, decay, deciduous, incident, occasion. What follows befalls; and the befallen find themselves ensnared within circumstances and their consequences (Old English befeallan, from fealle, snare, trap). What happens takes place, establishes itself, pervades, spreads its influence, its ambiance. There is a fascinating nuance here around the idea of happening, of what happens (by hap), what comes to pass, comes about or emerges. The implied sense is of an unforeseen occurrence: something resulting from chance or good luck; and further, something that is lucky, favourable, propitious: some kind of success, some profit flowing from succession. At the same time, to befall is to happen to one as if from a great height. To fall is to drop, sink, subside; to fail, decay, die. Empires, governments, cities, bodies and nights all fall. Some fall on their sword; others fall asleep, or into traps. We have our downfall, we fall out with others, or we fall upon (something unexpected).

CIRCUMSPECTION

What happens takes place, establishes itself, pervades, spreads its influence, its ambiance.  But how is ambiance detected? How do we see the circumstantial and its consequences?

The apprehension of circumstance is necessarily circumspective. We perceive circumstance not by looking at anything but by looking about, by averting the gaze. Circumspection literally means to observe round-about, to look-around. Circumspection is not inspection; and the one looking is not an inspector but a circumspector. To inspect is to look-into, to look-at, to scrutinize.

Significantly, scrutiny—investigation, close examination, search—implies, through the etymon *SCREU, to cut. It is a practice of division, diremption, severance; it literally means to cut to shreds. Inspection is cognate with analysis; though the violence done to the inspected is of a different order to the `softer’ deconstitution of the analysed. In the latter, there is a loosening up of connections and bonds, but only sufficient to see the various parts while they still maintain their relationships within a whole.

The word circumstance dates to the fourteenth century when it meant "`careful observation of one's surroundings, attention to details and probable consequences’ (with a view to choosing the safest course).” [4] The sense is not simply observation but foresight: not merely seeing (something that is already there) but seeing-for (something that is not yet there, that has not yet happened), interpreting what is seen for the implications it has for what might come, for what might take place. Here, the idea of implication is pivotal. Circumstances imply: that is, they are constituted of multiple folds of virtualities and potentialities that give it density and texture, but that can also be unfolded to yield complex actualities.

The way we look (at) is first of all a matter of ethics, as Heidegger pointed out, foregrounding the calculative over against the solicitous in terms of the look and the gaze; and how the solicitous gaze involves a particular kind of “grasping.” He distinguished between a looking “which makes presence possible... (and) at the same time shelters and hides something undisclosed,” and “the look of a being that advances by calculating, i.e., by conquering, outwitting and attacking... the look of the predatory animal: glaring... But the basic feature of this grasping look is not glaring, by means of which beings are, so to say, impaled and become in this way first and foremost objects of conquest.”[5]

Heidegger’s call is for a kind of looking that does not grab and 'lock' onto a subject, in order to incarcerate, eliminate or consign it to irrelevance by defining and categorising it. On the contrary, this looking proceeds by way of attentiveness and care towards the arrival of whatever manifests itself in a given situation. It is not a matter of foreclosing but of unlocking and releasing. Likewise, what one might posit as architecture's foundational purpose: to make possible a circumspective seeing, to enable (a being, a place, a people, a circumstance, an event, a performance, a learning) to appear, to take place.

For Heidegger, circumspective, concernful looking is seeing in terms of the wither, towards that to which the equipmentality of the world (that is, things in the world as collective apparatuses that enable us to work, to produce) might be applied; and this looking—which is a determination (stimmt) enabled through our mood or attunement (Stimmung) to that world—opens up a space of possibility, a region, a whereabouts, a situated circumambience.

Circumspective, concernful attentiveness is geared to noticing the ready-to-hand as so many indices of ambiance, as so many signs that signal the potentialities of circumstance. The components that together constitute the assemblage of an ambient environment are not there prior to circumspection; rather, it is circumspective concern that brings them into presence.

Circumspection gives space to and makes room for the entities encountered within the world.[6] For Heidegger, this is principally an ethical matter, a matter of concernful surveillance that raises the question of care.[7] Being is always Being-with—it is always a matter of inclination, of clinamen—which, “like concern, is a Being towards entities encountered within-the-world… These entities are not objects of concern, but rather of solicitude (Fürsorge).”[8]

The terms care (Sorge), concern (Besorgen) and solicitude (Fürsorge) are not limited by any sense of patronising sentimentality, personal fondness for, anxiety towards and the like, which the common understanding of `care’ suggests.[9] Rather, sorge should be read in relation to English `surge,’ Latin surgere, to arise, ascend, swell. The general sense is one of emergence and ekstasis; so that care, sorge, becomes that disposition (to a circumstance, an ambiance, a region, a being or those entities encountered within-the-world) that is attentive to the letting-be, the letting-arise, the letting-emerge of that which concernful circumspection has in view. In that way, concerful circumspection frees other beings into their own radiance and reign by being-there-with them as they emerge and come to presence.

ON THE LOOKOUT

Tracking

We can think of circumstantial ambiance and circumspective, concernful surveillance in terms of Australian First Nations concept of Country, and the consequential practices of tracking that characterise being-on-Country.

In this concept of place, what matters is not territory or landscape—understood in terms of abstract, cadastral and calculable spatial extent, as aesthetic category or pictorial representation—but the preferred idea of ‘Country.’[10]

Unlike the countryside or alienated wildernesses that lie beyond the city, or the gardens, squares and courtyards within, Country is an indissoluble, inalienable complex of ecological, hydrological, geological, climatic, cultural, societal, ceremonial, ritual, mythical and symbolic registers. These registers align to give every Country is own distinctive ambiance, circumstantiality and consequentiality. Likewise, every Country demands its own distinctive practice of circumspection.

Tracking is a complex practice calibrated to these multiple registers of place. The tracker works within an extensive, heterogenous and resonant world, using tacit knowledge and tactics handed down and practiced over generations.

The circumspective attentiveness of the tracker is one of foregrounding—that is, of enabling something within a circumstance to come forth, out of its dissimulated state as part of a woven complexion of place. Tracking delineates the various layers of a situation; and the tracker is not concerned with stable or firm territorial conditions but with those elements that have been disturbed. Hence, territory is always turbulent and the tracker must read scales and velocities of fluxion and turbidity in order to note anomalies or inconsistencies.

The tracker reads for traces rather than form. Tracking tracks gaps and absences. It follows interstices so as to read the signs left by absenting presences. It reads for the designs that beings have on places and on other beings. Tracking is a practice of consequential anticipation, furbishment and enablement: that is, a design practice.[11]

On the lookout

In the ABCdaire, Gilles Deleuze broaches, in philosophical practice, a technique that parallels that of tracking.[12] The French term is être aux aguets: to be on the lookout.

What does être aux aguets mean? Firstly it is a comportment, a disposition, a countenance, an attitude to the world: it is a clinamen, a being-towards, and a certain manner or mode of being, a certain mood. It necessitates a distinctive practice—to be on the lookout, granted, but even more so, to be on the lookout-for, to be attentive-to. The etymology of aguet is instructive here. The word is cognate with guard, aware and wary, through the etymon *WER, prudent, careful, alert. But to perceive what exactly? This -for, this -to, is not anything anticipated. We find the etymon *WER equally in words like aware, beware, wary, regard, revere, steward, warren, ward, warden, wardrobe, warehouse, garment, garrison, guard. As Latin verire (observe with reverence), Greek houros/horan (see, guard, watch) and English ward (watchman, guard, keeper) imply, the prudent gaze is at the same time cautious and attentive. And to watch is equally to watch out-for, to be ready-for what comes, to enable the watched to come-forth, or even to summon them forth. Attentiveness to what might be encountered must be solicitous, tactful: it must be such as to enable it to surge forth, to come into presence.

To be on the lookout: this mode of alertness constitutes a rigorous, precise technics of circumspective, attentive solicitude, through which the circumstantial comes to presence and presents itself to view. The final sequence of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film l’Eclisse is a striking cinematic instance. Here the camera functions as a neutral, disinvested frame that simply witnesses the passage of the everyday: empty streets, sprinklers, water on shimmering leaves, building sites and hoardings, vapor trails of distant airplanes, reflections and shadows, people disappearing into the folds of neighbourhoods.

Architecture can be construed to function likewise, framing the place in which it stands, soliciting attentiveness towards it, letting place be. Here the various elements of architecture—siting, orientation, geometry, form, materials, structure, light, sound—also function as enablers of a heightened apperception and appreciation of place: a low, long, horizontal window highlighting the seasonal changes in a garden; a high zenithal window registering diurnal and seasonal variations in the sun’s path; a building sited along the ridge of a hill to magnify its topographical form; a public square that generously accommodates multiple trajectories of circulation that criss-cross it, while also affording multiple zones of pause, rest and gathering.

In such examples, cinema and architecture are made to be on the lookout, to be attentive to those multiple components of a circumstance; and by doing so, to foreground its ambiance and consequences. A tracker looks about circumspectively so as to be able to notice signs of the slightest change, alteration, movement or disturbance in a place, and thereby deduce the consequences of those changes. In a parallel way, films and buildings can circumspectively frame their respective settings so as to enable a viewer, a resident or a citizen to notice the ambiance of a place, to have a heightened sense of where they are, how they have come to be there and what consequential opportunities present themselves.

Notes

[1] William Empson. Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: Chatto and Windus, 1949), 1.

[2] Stephen Greenblatt et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of English Literature (New York, London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), 2159.

[3] See François Jullien. The Propensity of things. Towards a history of efficacy in China, transl. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1995).

[4] Online Etymological Dictionary: circumstance. https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=circumstance. Accessed 5 December 2021.

[5] Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, transl. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 108.

[6] Heidegger, Being and time, 146.

[7] Heidegger, Being and time, 157.

[8] Heidegger, Being and time, 157.

[9] Heidegger, Being and time, 157 fn. 4.

[10] See my Place, country, chorography: towards a kinaesthetic and narrative practice of place, in Architectural Theory Review 7, 2002, 45-58; and Agencies of the Frame, 57-59.

[11] See my Theorising the project: a thematic approach to architectural design. (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020), 42-43.

[12] Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze (Paris, Éditions Montparnasse, 2004). DVD. The following exchange is drawn from the segment on C for culture.