Abstract Anna Hickey-Moody

Keynote talk

Atmospheres of joy

There is no life without air. The atmosphere in which we live co-constitutes our capacity to act and how we are in the world. Unless there is an environmental emergency, we often ignore the atmosphere around us, clean air can be an assumed human right. Experiences of living in local air are germane to the affective economy of our everyday lives. The breath as a site of political and affective activism might be seen as a nomad science of carbon, along with the highly gendered ways that multiples economies of carbon are distributed across the globe. Carbon fibre masculinities, V8 car culture, cultures of fast fashion and AI chat, carbon capture methods, there are multiple carbon economies that subsist outside the royal science of carbon trading but are, in fact, the reason for its very existence. Atmosphere might not be something we can take for granted. As Spinoza reminds us “whether a man is conscious of his appetite or not, the appetite still remains one and the same” (p. 104). We need to breathe whether we are aware of it or not, and economies of air pollution are shaping a new global order. “Joy is a man’s passage from greater to lesser perfection” (Spinoza p.104) a passage that is enmeshed with ecologies and environments. Engelmann (2020) argues we need new, experiential and creative knowledges about the atmosphere as a political artefact. The rise of what we know today as atmospheric science was created to track radiation in the atmosphere. After Engelmann (2020) and others, we can consider that, royal, or State, science “only tolerates and appropriates perspective if it is static” (Deleuze and Guattari 1984 p. 402). The fixed financial values of carbon trading markets offer static points of entry into overcodings of a matter that is, in fact, germane to all life. Molecules, objects, knowledges, images are held in place in order to be overcoded, appropriated by royal science. Within royal science we find a suite of official knowledges about carbon. Climate change is the product of particular forms of fiction about carbon upon which capitalism relies. These fictions are enmeshed with the cultures of specific pleasures, that are sutured to ideas of class, gender, ability and race. An intersectional analysis of the pleasures that make climate change shows us that affects, or feelings, are key to why global warming is occurring (I want that dress, I want that car, I have to mine cobalt for money to live), but so too are certain ways of seeing the world: enlightenment methods for understanding carbon, “royal science” and largely uncritical engagements with what carbon is made to do in popular culture. Outside these official discourses, we breathe out carbon, we are partly composed of carbon, multiple economies of carbon cultures connect people, places and things. This is a question of affect: of feelings and social movements. What we have not yet done it break open the fictions of identity, the fantasies and realities of social power that are sustained by scientific constructions of carbon, and the value systems held up by these ideas. This task is now urgent. If we are to have breathable air, if we are to even entertain the possibility of atmospheres of joy, we must dethrone the royal science of carbon and engage with the reasons behind the multiple affective economies of carbon production and consumption. The needs driving these economies will not change, so our methods of understanding must.

Works cited

Deleuze, G. and Guattari. F. (1984)  A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.  MIT Press, Massachusetts.

Engelmann, S. (2020). Sensing art in the atmosphere: Elemental lures and aerosolar practices. Routledge.

Spinoza, B. (1996) Ethics. Trans Edwin Hurley Penguin Books, USA.