Atmospheric Things: On the Allure of Elemental Development by Derek P. McCormack (review)

In the author's design, this book is about the processual relation between "atmospheres and envelopment mapped by a deceptively simple thing—the balloon." Atmospheresmean "elemental spacetimes that are simultaneously affective and methodological," while envelopmentrefers to the condition of being immersed, which allows for "a shaping of things in relation to an atmospheric milieu." The balloon is less an object of scholarly inquiry than a "speculative" probe that charts the "material continuity between entities and the elemental conditions" (pp. 4–5). It is construed as a "particularly useful and alluring" device for "doing" atmospheric things—"objects, processes, or events that in some ways disclose, generate, or intensify the condition of being enveloped" while in other ways remain "beyond cognition or tangibility," evanescent and vague (p. 10). The adjective "elemental" is used throughout the book to indicate the material and affective forces being woven into atmospheric things.

This self-consciously experimental endeavor to configure the "affective materiality of the elemental spacetimes" (p. 7) can be seen as an exercise in cultural epistemology/ontology which, if successful, would fundamentally undermine the existing mode of doing material history as a biography of the object—one that depends on the steely analytic gaze to stabilize the object of inquiry and to discern a set of causes for its genesis, development, and metamorphosis. "Thinking with the balloon" (p. 12) as an epistemological device and asking "how atmospheres are sensed" (p. 8) allow the author to claim a "semi-random" (p. 13) access to the elemental (admittedly Western) spacetime configurations and to scramble philosophical, social, or historical epistemology/ontology. The "allure of elemental development" (title) promises an epistemological experiment by lending agency or "sensing" capacity to non-human subjects without binding them to the metaphysically prescribed role as subjects or objects—non-relational entities withdrawn from us. Their inevitably "partial" (p. 4) sensing configures dynamic things that transgress the existing ontological and space-time frameworks.

Nine chapters in the body—each titled envelopment, sensing, allure, release, volume, sounding, tensions, hail, and elements—invite readers to think with various cultural theorists on a range of atmospheric things, be it a literary construct, a political event, a cultural phenomenon, etc. How we grasp the "sensory capacities" (p. 35) of various devices and bodies is a central, yet difficult issue that remains speculative. If the balloon enhances our affective engagement by placing our vision within aerostatic sensing, exactly how the balloon expands, ascends, and senses depends ultimately on our interpretive strategies in dealing with the contemporary and literary examples that shape our real or imagined environments. Our sensory and affective capacities become an inseparable part of their envelopment to constitute an atmospheric thing. In other words, the author's atmospheric things in their framework-engendering capacity differ from Hans-Jörg Rheinberger's "epistemic things" which, despite their "characteristic, irreducible vagueness," are defined as "material entities or processes … that constitute the objects of inquiry" ( Toward a History of Epistemic Things, p. 28). Subject to scientists' steady analytic gaze, they generate research questions within the given framework.

More than a speculative experiment, the deliberate epistemic experience emerging in the contemporary cultural environment is meant to encourage atmospheric politics—not a naïve advocacy of solidarity but an experiment in "producing infrastructures for generating values" (p. 9). Although these values remain as ambiguous as the atmospheric things in flux, the call for a scholarship that is politically engaged at the point of knowledge production (rather than insisting on the neutrality of knowledge production whatever its political use) makes the book a compelling critique of the postmodern scholarship that is often hyper-analytic without critical purpose. Except for the insistence on things as processual units (rather than analyzable assemblages), the author's project shares a concern with Bruno Latour's Dingpolitik—"a risky and tentative set of experiments in probing just what it could mean for political thought"—to take things seriously ( Making Things Public, p...