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Abstract
Experiences of sensing of and finding oneself in a place largely depend on the design of atmospheres. Against the background of an increasing interest in ecological perspectives across various disciplines and regions, this text revisits Gernot Böhme’s respective aesthetic concept from the early 1990s. Arturo Escobar’s recent publication, “Designs for the Pluriverse,” which aims at restructuring relations between local design practices and global connections, will serve as a contemporary space of resonance for this exploration. How far might the aesthetic concept of atmosphere help to bridge gaps within today’s pluriversal thinking?
1. Introduction
Atmosphere is supposed to designate something given, something that’s just out there. A naturalizing subtext resonates with the expression. And yet, we find ourselves as part of atmospheres that have been designed in many ways. Although it may barely be noticed in the course of daily routines, experiences of sensing of and finding oneself in a place largely depend on the design of atmospheres.[1] Against the background of an increasing interest in ecological perspectives across various disciplines and regions, I revisit Gernot Böhme’s respective aesthetic concept from the early 1990s: Atmosphäre.[2] As it connects sensations of finding oneself in an environment to what has been designed for it, this perspective could perhaps help to broaden the discourse on design in transcultural relations today. Arturo Escobar’s recent publication, Designs for the Pluriverse,[3] which aims at re-structuring relations between local design practices and global connections, will serve as a contemporary space of resonance for this exploration. Could the airy—and yet physically affecting—notion of atmosphere help to bridge gaps within a pluriverse? Even if Böhme and Escobar depart from different moments in history, disciplinary fields, and actual places in Western Europe and South America, they both call for a transcultural ecological thinking in a broad sense and design’s distinctive role therein.
2. Situating Böhme and Escobar: 1995/2018
The particular position of an atmosphere in between something and nothing, surface and matter, nature and culture, remains quite unique in philosophical discourses of the past few decades. Above all, the approach spans across various disciplines, theories, practices, and cultural backgrounds. In place of clear-cut category distinctions, Atmosphäre focuses on physical sensing and finding oneself in a place. The two conditions form the main components of Böhme’s ecological approach towards aesthetics, embedded in and affected by many interdependencies. Experiencing one’s vulnerable physical existence within the environmental crisis of the 1970s/1980s has certainly had an impact on developing this perspective. Böhme’s holistic concept was first elaborated in the context of an interdisciplinary initiative at the Technical University of Darmstadt, consisting of philosophers, activists, geologists, ecologists, and nature historians, among others. This multifaceted exploration aimed at developing alternatives to disciplinary splits between technical, biological, and aesthetic perspectives. It comes as no surprise that its transgressing tendency provoked skeptical reactions from the academic side at that time, while starting to circulate predominantly among practitioners of architecture and art. Even though Atmosphäre takes design as its primary theoretical basis and exemplary field of observation, it has rarely found its way into design theory discourses.[4] Looking at ecology and design from an aesthetic perspective also provokes critical questions on the notion of the aesthetic itself. At the beginning of the 1990s, an Aesthetics with capital “A” was still defended by many philosophers as a realm concealed from too much environmental influence—across German-speaking regions in particular.[5] It seems as if Böhme has been searching for a way out of this high-minded cul-du-sac by trying to think through the aesthetic work and experience of the very discipline that has been maligned by many of his colleagues during this time: design. But is it not a rather contradictory move to employ the very field widely considered to be the synonym of the artificial as the primary example for ecological reorientation? It may be exactly this quality to transgress inherently Eurocentric dualisms that could enable the theory of atmosphere to play an important role in today’s transcultural debates.
Taking communal practices of indigenous groups in South America as a point of departure, Arturo Escobar has recently called for a pluriversal turn in design. To leave the path of environmental and social devastation that modern development policies have caused across many South American regions, design should establish alternatives to what has been predominantly tied to linear forms of growth and upscaling in globalized capitalism. With the help of what Escobar has termed “communal autonomy,”[6] pluriversal relations between local protagonists, the earth, and other regions could be renegotiated by design. In opposition to the masterplan drafted by specialists, design already always happens in interconnected, “autopoietic” processes. The term is borrowed from Humberto Maturana and Francesco Varela’s contributions on how self-establishing cognition is constantly constructing and reconfiguring what we call reality.[7] Thus, reality is neither something given—waiting to be observed by the arts, sciences, or humanities—nor is it something that waits to be realized by design. According to this constructivist and process-oriented understanding, multiple design processes are already at work before design planning starts. One might notice a call for the environmental broadening of human perspective here, quite like Böhme’s focus on paying attention to “finding oneself in a place.” Both try to articulate a response to the ecological and social crisis that followed modern development schemes, although based on quite different methodological backgrounds. Where Böhme’s perspective starts primarily from an aesthetic experience of relations between material and environment, Escobar instead departs from anthropological field studies, theories of cognition, and organization. Escobar first published a fundamental critique of neoliberal globalization and development strategies in 1995—coincidentally, the same year when Böhme’s Atmosphäre was published. By connecting to ongoing debates on the “(de-)futuring” potential of design throughout the past decade,[8] Escobar has recently emphasized the discipline’s importance for post-development discourses once again. Thus, Designs for the Pluriverse has circulated almost as a blueprint reference across the field of design studies, employed to articulate a broadly shared need for planetary-scale change—but without dismissing design as planning-a-future method altogether.
3. Atmosphere: a way out of modern aesthetics?
To speak of atmosphere is to refuse to accept a singular and privileged subject position from which one would perceive an environment separate from oneself. Instead, the aesthetics of atmosphere turns away from its legacy with a capital “A”—an Aesthetics that has been closely connected to a certain tradition, distinction, and judgment. Parallel to a process that defined the place and primary concern of aesthetics within the disciplinary boundaries of fine art about 200 years ago, industrial development contributed to the emergence of design in a modern sense. Where the Eurocentric and bourgeois phantasma of autonomy has been—and, to some extent, is still —exclusively exemplified in the realm of fine art, the “dependent beauty”[9] of design was soon criticized for superfluous “aesthetization.”[10] To avoid this accusation at all costs, functionalist tendencies created a rigidly guarded blind spot around aesthetics throughout the twentieth century. [11] Of course, there have been attempts at broadening the notion of aesthetics across disciplinary contexts, and also movements to relocate its reference system beyond the narrative of Eurocentric autonomy. Nevertheless, the notorious legacy with a capital “A” was still a dominant one in 1995. At the same time, Central Europe had just experienced the breakdown, global opening, and capitalist aestheticization of its eastern and former communist parts. Looking retrospectively, Atmosphäre searched for ways out of both cul-de-sacs: aesthetics narrowed down to fine art and as a blind spot in functionalist design. Moreover, Böhme had marked a distinct turn towards processes, practices, and work, that is, the making of aesthetics.
As the primary perceptional basis for this reorientation, Atmosphäre mentions a human body “in the passing of natural media.”[12] “Nature” is put in a transit position here; it addresses neither a stable nor a self-contained entity. A Haiku poem by Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694) serves as instructive example in this respect:
“Fading temple bell,
the fragrance of flowers strikes
at evening.”[13]
By commenting on each line of the Haiku, Böhme highlights the emptiness of the scene, while it brings an atmosphere into presence. This very emptiness is addressed by a transcultural move towards Japanese poetry.[14] To identify a prototypical emptiness with East Asian thinking sounds like notorious Western clichés, on the one hand. On the other hand, the author does not stop at this point, where many others have just left a sealed-off token of the erratic and inscrutable East Asia.[15] Rather, one observes an ecological-aesthetic process happening here.
Insofar as emptiness carries no substance but enables a space of passage for others, it brings a media function to the fore. A “nature that we are ourselves”[16] indicates the continuous transgression through diverse elements that may be present in an atmosphere—in place of the concept of nature as surrounding environment, separated from ourselves. And yet, we are not fully immersed in oneness, but able to notice a media function of nature that affects us. There is still something that is to be mediated and thus distinguishable from a physical self, however dispersed it may have been conceptualized. A twofold perspective on “nature that we are ourselves” and that is passing through ourselves appears to be fundamental to Böhme’s ecological approach—an ecology that establishes the framework for processes of “finding oneself in a place.”
Thus, nature is not installed as an essentializing or naturalizing force here, but as a mediated and mediating one. In opposition to fine art’s privileged position in European nineteenth- and twentieth-century aesthetics, which has been closely tied to the essentializing notion of nature, in Böhme’s approach design and technology are put first. In terms of how material is designed and how it affects a physical experience, design appears to be particularly close to a mediated ecological experience.[17] While targeting a Socratian functionalism where sensual and material qualities were supposed to be congruent, Böhme observes a growing split between the design of material structures inside and surfaces outside in the light of aesthetization and advanced (im-)material technologies of the 1990s.[18]
Böhme takes three steps to navigate through the conceptual consequences for design and ecology before the background of this development[19]:
1. According to a debate between Socrates and Hippias in ancient Greece about a whisk’s beauty, the one made of fig wood is favored over the one made of gold. Due to wood’s atmospheric sensual qualities, its smell could amalgamate with that of food, for instance. And, in relation to mixing movements in a jar, the wooden one would always work gently, avoiding damage.
2. As far as the above example establishes a functionalist aesthetic, even if it may be an ecologically related one, this approach seems pretty insufficient in the light of the aesthetization and advanced (im-)material technologies of the 1990s. While targeting a still dominant Socratian functionalism in design, Böhme observes a split between the design of material structures inside and surfaces outside.
3. Design under the conditions of aestheticized economies serves these very economic structures, on the one hand; but, on the other hand, maybe it is also engagement in critically questioning them. In both cases, the “making of atmospheres” is mentioned as the “primary task of design,”[20] a kind of aking that often involves an excess far beyond the functionalism of making something work.
Technology plays a key role for Böhme’s split between an inside and an outside in design: “That the outer and inner functionalities of things split, sometimes even establishing an opposition, is a consequence of modern technology.”[21] In other words, before the emergence of technology that allowed for assembling a structural core and an aesthetically appealing outside, there was no such split. Furthermore, a material core once made from natural resources is designed and produced artificially today, with the help of sophisticated technologies. As relations between technology and nature have changed in the course of this development, they have also been aesthetically negotiated by design. What was once perceived in terms of a material’s “nature” is now subject to design processes.
Apart from reconstructing a dichotomy in parts, the split between an in- and outside design also indicates a relation that is mediated and negotiated, a relation that cannot be presumed to be essentially grounded or given by some nature. Moreover, “a making of atmospheres” is considered to be design’s primary task. From the 1990s until now, technology and design have been integrated broadly into environmental networks; just think of permanent physical interactions with algorithms, sensors, and devices.
4. Design and aesthetics in the pluriverse
While recent design theory quite broadly resembles a turn towards ecological embeddedness and transcultural relationality,[22] you will hardly find any specific notion of the aesthetic there. On the contrary, it seems as if the term must be marginalized, avoided, or even explicitly rejected. A particularly critical view is taken with regards to any aesthetics conveyed in terms of superficial style and taste, as a marginal addition to an ontological being in the world, or as part of a Eurocentric tradition with a capital “A.” On the other hand, a side note in Arturo Escobar’s Designs for the Pluriverse explicitly appreciates a tradition of “non-dualist” aesthetics. At this point, I would like to elaborate on potentially fruitful connections to an expanded notion of the aesthetic.
Escobar demands a turn away from “functionalist, rationalistic, and industrial traditions [of design, BM] from which it emerged, and within which it still functions with ease, toward a type of rationality and set of practices attuned to the relational dimension of life.”[23] The notion of design points in two directions here: on the one hand, an industrial, modernizing tradition from the Global North that still dominates its disciplinary understanding, and, on the other hand, alternatives to form an interconnected “pluriverse” of local design practices.
Alternatives have emerged in many places under the banners of transition initiatives, such as degrowth and the commons in the Global North,[24] or postdevelopment, Buen Vivir, and the rights of nature in the Global South.[25] Escobar in particular focuses on alternative approaches from Latin America and Colombia. At the same time, there is no “designlessness,”[26] even within indigenous communities, on the globe. Therefore, any alternative approach is somehow still connected to design as a discipline and supposed to be related to its existing modern heritage.
Escobar’s call for the discipline’s reorientation primarily departs from practices of autonomy, community, and relationality performed by relational social practices. Thus, design processes do “creat[e] a ‘world- within-the-world’ […],” aiming to establish an understanding beyond functionality and servility, where “all design is for enactive use (not involving just users), produces operational effectiveness (but not narrowly defined utility), fosters the autopoiesis of living entities and heterogeneous assemblages of life […].”[27] An autopoietic yet relational design culminates in a manifest for «autonomous design».[28] In opposition to an Aesthetics with capital “A,” that very autonomy does not imply an autonomous subject in control. On the contrary: an ongoing design process by social negotiation aims at “communal autonomy.”[29] Escobar mentions five key characteristics of how this could happen[30]:
- “Every community practices the design of itself […]”
- “[…] people are practitioners of their own knowledge […]”
- “What the community designs […] is an inquiring or learning system about itself.”
- “Every design process involves a statement of problems and possibilities that enables the designer and the group to generate agreements and objectives […].”
- “This exercise may take the form of building a model of the system that generates the problem of communal concern.”
Although not committing to a masterplan notion, “autonomous design” still bears a model-like function for debate, sharing knowledge, but also for communal planning processes. While a potential outcome seems to be produced “autonomously” by the group, there is a specialist “designer” at work, too. The design process referred to here obviously is not intended to happen in isolation, but in relation to existing professional protagonists, technologies, and markets.[31] What might differ from conventional operating modes of design is the focus on a communal concern in the first place. However, the forms that respective processes, knowledge, and models might take have hardly been considered by Escobar’s study, just as with the forms that have already been designed before or elsewhere.
Even if the aesthetic does not play a key role in Designs for the Pluriverse, a few side notes point in this direction: remarks on autopoiesis vs. straightforward functionalism, on mutual relations with the environment vs. aesthetization in capitalism,[32] and, not least, on a marginalized “nondualist” tradition of aesthetics in the West.[33] While these positions might share some (critical) perspectives with Böhme, Escobar’s claim to transform the design discipline by a pluriverse of social practices drafts a different path—a path that leads away from modern dualisms, such as that of nature and culture, and questions the divide between technology and living beings, for instance—and quite contrary to the dichotomy that might reappear with Böhme’s split into an in- and outside design. Respective practices in Colombia such as Open-University gatherings, a transformation design draft for the Cauca Valley, or feminist struggles for communal autonomy (though always in relation) open specific, situated fields to think through. Furthermore, Escobar connects the concept of autonomy-yet-interdependence to other territories, for instance, to indigenous voices in New Zealand and Australia and also to Buddhism.
The final chapter of Designs for the Pluriverse concludes with some objectives for an exemplary Cauca Valley transformation project. One of them aims at “creating a sense of the region different from the ‘folk’ regional narrative that prevails, particularly in Cali, dominated by sugarcane, salsa music, sports, and commerce. This would require articulating a pluriversal bioregional notion […]”[34]—a projected future pluriverse that largely is based on existing indigenous initiatives for self-governed land enclaves and, first and foremost, a series of joint meetings of activists and academics in the region throughout the 2010s, called Conspiracies and Collaborations for Buen Vivir [Tramas y Mingas para el Buen Vivir]. Although Escobar points to the antagonistic nature of the existing contexts and his future vision, such as the pressures from an existing globalized capitalism, the traps of colonial “developmentalism,” or new forms of oppression within the Buen Vivir movements;[35] but it remains unclear how exactly design practices are supposed to deal with respective antagonistic forces.
5. Towards an ecological aesthetics for the pluriverse
Although there are some remarkable parallels between Böhme and Escobar’s perspectives on interdependence and ecology, in a broad sense, one key difference can be identified: the position of the aesthetic. While Böhme’s concern primarily was to develop an ecological approach towards aesthetics reflecting the experience of industrially designed atmospheres, Escobar focuses on the transformation of design by alternative social practices. The ultimate question of the former seems how to deal with a physical experience of the designed, while the latter is exploring alternatives to conventional production methods and economies in design. There are many good reasons to be skeptical about the role of the aesthetic today —from transcultural perspectives in particular.[36] Böhme’s concept, his reference to the Haiku as the ultimate other to European aesthetic expression, and the potential reproduction of modern/colonial dualisms (the so-called developed countries as standard) raise doubts of this sort.
And yet, the aesthetic question, or in Böhme’s own ecological and perhaps less Eurocentrically loaded terms: “How one finds oneself in a place?,” could perhaps provide more of a specific access to the complexity of design practices, experiences, and distributions in the pluriverse—an access that would not imply a universalist claim, but a shared ecological sphere on earth.
Where Escobar outlines some visions for “autonomous design,” there often appears to be a gap of what happens in between organizational principles and the form practices may take. While there seem to be some paragraphs where these issues are tackled implicitly, others imply a rather straightforward path to transformation. Referring to a pluriversal design without raising questions of mediating comes rather close to an instrumental, tool-like understanding of the discipline. Even if linear development policies are criticized broadly in Designs for the Pluriverse, the particular way design is employed does sometimes imply the masterplan-discipline that is to be overcome. Although, for instance, “emergence” and “autopoiesis” are given priority on a concept level, when it comes to actual design projects, there are many methodologies but hardly any discussion about their form at hand. Raising the question of how to find oneself in a particular place entangled by a pluriverse of forms and atmospheres may have brought some more insight, for instance, into the rather vague projection of a “pluriversal bioregional notion.” In taking a closer look at the Cauca Valley transformation design project, it also may have helped to translate between multiple existing and possible alternative design cultures; this may have helped determine how far one finds oneself entangled by commercial “folk” narratives[37] and in search for communal autonomy at the same time. Apparently, the actual place of aesthetics in such terms cannot be located within the confined realms of a discipline, an institution, nor a judgment. Rather, one could find it at work in processes of mediating—practiced in moving across and relating in between diverse experiences. It is at the edges of Escobar’s anthropological approach, where productive openings towards the aesthetic seem to occur, that is, in sidenotes on environmental relations or non-dualist aesthetic concepts.
Apart from different approaches towards the aesthetic, both positions appear to be transculturally entangled in their ways of thinking. Moreover, they seem to be in search for such entanglements—just think of Böhme’s references to East Asia, however fragmentary or close to cliché they may appear, or Escobar’s pairing of design philosophy and indigenous knowledge from various regions. In terms of their understanding of design, both favor a notion of process and transformation, in place of ready-made products. It seems as if the discipline has become like a device to understand designed environments in plural, connected by communication technology and experiences of shared atmospheres. Interestingly, design is not situated as dichotomous counterpart to some “nature” here, but is employed as a relating agent and an integral part of environments. Looking at discourses across the humanities, science and technology, and design studies, one could speak of a broadly shared environmental turn throughout the past decade or so,[38] to the extent of proclaiming a general ecology.[39] In parallel, the understanding of design has been shifting from an instrumental to an environmental one. In terms of the development of a broader environmental notion across disciplines, transcultural perspectives on design have certainly played an important but at times also ambivalent part: by expanding concepts of space, relation, and organization on the one hand, but reintroducing modern/colonial narrations of progress on the other.
[1] German original: “spüren” [sensing] and “befinden” [finding oneself in a place]. Gernot Böhme, Atmosphäre. Essays zur neuen Ästhetik (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1995), 31. I’ll refer to the German original with my own translations here, since important design-related texts are missing from a collection of essays that have been translated into English for a volume with the same title: Gernot Böhme, The Aesthetics of Atmospheres (New York: Routledge, 2016).
[2] Gernot Böhme, Atmosphäre. Essays zur neuen Ästhetik (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1995).
[3] Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2018).
[4] Annette Geiger is one of the few exceptions in that respect. Cf. Annette Geiger, Andersmöglichsein. Zur Ästhetik des Designs (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2018).
[5] Cf. Rüdiger Bubner, Ästhetische Erfahrung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989), 143–48.
[6] Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds, 61.
[7] Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (Dordrecht/Boston/London: D. Reidel, 1980).
[8] Tony Fry, Design as Politics (Oxford: Berg, 2011), 3.
[9] Jane Forsey, The Aesthetics of Design (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 72-136.
[10] The accusation of “aestheticization” has been raised by critics against design since a discipline was formed in the course of nineteenth-century industrialization. Probably the most influential voice in that respect has been: Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment : Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr and transl. by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 94-136. On the development of this narrative in twentieth-century aesthetics, see also: Burkhard Meltzer, Das ausgestellte Leben. Design in Kunstdiskursen nach den Avantgarden (Berlin: Kadmos, 2020), 191-204.
[11] Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, “Functionalism Today,” in Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neal Leach (London/New York: Routledge, 2005), 5-18.
[12] Böhme, Atmosphäre. Essays Zur neuen Ästhetik, 14. My translation.
[13] Jane Reichhold (transl.), Basho: The Complete Haiku (Tokyo/New York/London: Kondansha International, 2008), 111 (No. 398). A German translation by Ralph-Rainer Wuthenow is quoted in Böhme, Atmosphäre. Essays Zur neuen Ästhetik, 66.: [“Das Läuten verklingt – der Blütenduft steigt herauf, das ist der Abend.”].
[14] Böhme, Atmosphäre. Essays zur neuen Ästhetik, 66.
[15] Rey Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 65.
[16] Böhme, Atmosphäre. Essays zur neuen Ästhetik, 14. My translation.
[17] Ibid., 18.
[18] Ibid., 59.
[19] Ibid., 59.
[20] Ibid., 34-39. My translation.
[21] Ibid., 59.
[22] Cf. Tony Fry, Design as Politics. Cf. Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Cf. Nina Paim and Claudia Mareis, eds., “Design Struggles: An Attempt to Imagine Design Otherwise,” in Design Struggles: Intersecting Histories, Pedagogies, and Perspectives (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2021), 11-22.
[23] Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds, X.
[24] Ibid., 144.
[25] Ibid., 147.
[26] Ibid., 214.
[27] Ibid., 133.
[28] Ibid., 184-185.
[29] Ibid., 76.
[30] Ibid., 207-208. Italics in original.
[31] Ibid., 189.
[32] Ibid., 39.
[33] Ibid., 102
[34] Ibid., 196. Italics in original.
[35] Ibid., 167.
[36] Ruth Sonderegger and others have recently launched some elaborated attempts at resituating aesthetics as a philosophical discipline in terms of transcultural, non-Western perspectives. Interestingly, the context of contemporary art is favored in these discourses again, while design is hardly mentioned at all. Cf. Ruth Sonderegger, Vom Leben der Kritik. Kritische Praktiken – und die Notwendigkeit ihrer geopolitischen Situierung (Wien: zaglossus, 2019), and: Sofia Bempeza et al., eds., Polyphone Ästhetik (Wien/Linz/Berlin/London/Malaga/Zürich: transversal texts, 2019).
[37] There may be a hidden elitism at work here, where Escobar speaks despicably about a “commercial folk” or “sucarcane-culture,” in general. Moreover, this inability to relate to popular forms of an existing design culture recalls infamous academic traditions of accusing design of aesthetization (see endnote 10).
[38] Both Escobar and Böhme relate to these developments explicitly: Escobar to relational academic discourses in the West such as Actor-Network-Theory or Posthumanism (Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds, 95–96.), Böhme to Actor-Network-Theory in a subsequent publication (Gernot Böhme, Leib. Die Natur, die wir selbst sind (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2019), 16-19.
[39] James Burton and Erich Hörl, eds., General Ecology: The New Ecological Paradigm (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).