It is certainly superfluous to insist on the atmospheric potentialities of light, which is mainly “responsible for our impressions” (Böhme, 2006, 103). In fact, be it the object of thetic perception or (more often) the holistic and intransitive condition of successive (correspondently attuned) thetic discrete perceptions, light (just as other forms, some of which I have already analyzed in the previous chapters) engages in a felt-bodily communication with the perceiver. As already mentioned, such communication develops in the pericorporeal space the (dialogical or antagonistic) dynamic that is already present in individual intracorporeal feeling (narrowness vs. vastness).
Although contemporary art has long ago adopted it as a special and not only decorative material, it is not so obvious that light should be (and act as) a quasi-thing. Also, it is far from evident that it should be one (i.e., a quasi-thing) while lacking haptic qualities but being fleeting, tending to expansion, and not normally malleable—in short, the least thingly being there is. Besides its privileged role in the Western scopic regime as the guiding metaphor of life (of truth, being, but also God and therefore sacredness and power),2 I here examine two ideal types of light (glare and twilightness), to assess their quasi-thingly atmosphericness.
Of course not much is known of the luminous experience of “rebirth” that (in 1600) induced a young shoemaker named Jacob Böhme to feel “introduced into the inner most Ground or Center of the recondite or hidden Nature,” to the point of being inspired for his own monumental theosophy. However, it seems that this “Light of God” was nothing more than “an instantaneous Glance of a bright Pewter-Dish, (being the lovely Jovialish3 Shine4 or Aspect)” (Franckenberg, 1780, 7–8)—that is, a reflection, the glint of a banal object,5 one that was normally alien to beauty due to its opacity and mere functionality.6 Therefore, gleam is here only the ephemeral flash of a hetero-lit object: an idea which, not surprisingly, was assumed in the same period both by mystical experience and by painting.7 Could this mean that the “true” atmosphere of light lies in blinding splendor, brilliance, and sparkle (certainly key symbols, albeit today a bit “shadowy,” of luxury in advanced capitalism and therefore objects of reveries)? Not at all. In fact, blinding lights have surely played an important role in art and custom history as symbols of nobility (gemstones, glass, precious metals, ceramics, the decoration of the Bible), power (ceremonies as feasts for the eyes, splendor imperii) and, more generally, of transcendence, be it external (penetrating rays of light, luminous apparitions, solar visions, etc.) or internal8 (sudden “enlightenments,” the soul as inner light, prefall and/or eschatological man of light,9 etc.). However, they do not really seem to be particularly favorable to the generation of atmospheres.
In fact, irritating and disorienting the perceiver, made unable to locate the source of light, glare induces an (almost) painful contraction that ceases only when the glaring object and/or the perceiver move away. A blinding light may well irritate and fascinate at the same time, non-iconically alluding to the divine (escaping the gaze by principle);10 but it hardly favors the mediacy and emotional vagueness that, in my view, characterizes atmospheres more than anything. This is rather experienced, therefore, in phenomena of mitigated light.
Indeed, if bearable, brightness does no longer push one away but rather attracts one’s attention, producing the purely atmospheric pleasure typical of adornment.11 The latter potentiates the normal “human radioactivity in the sense that every individual is surrounded by a larger or smaller sphere of significance radiating from him; and everybody else, who deals with him, is immersed in this sphere.” Such sphere “flows over, that is, it flows to points which are far removed from its origin [and] lays a vaster precinct which, in principle, is limitless” (Simmel, 1997, 207), the more efficaciously so the more the combination of “distance” and “favor” (ibid., 209) has strictly quasi-thingly bases—in the sense that the purest jewels are nothing more than their light radiation. In any case, atmospherology should not deal with the epiphanic and inaugural appearance of the light, be it otherworldly or inner. On the contrary, it should focus on its contingency and its material contamination—in other words, the light should be regarded as belonging to the intermediate realm of qualities that are subjectively felt without being subjective and whose features are very much inhibited both by the light and chromatic bulimia of our time12 (i.e., by the ubiquity of artificial light) and by the (much more hypothetical) inner or higher light. After all, the light is a “‘letting-appear’ that does not itself appear” (Blumenberg, 1993, 31), not only when it stands for the transcendent—think for instance of cathedral windows—but also when it functionally lights up a simple store. From an atmospherological point of view, what matters is that it is not the supposedly absolutely pure light (lux) of the first day of creation, but rather the light become perceivable (lumen) as muddied by the things on which it falls and which, at least relatively, it dematerializes. The brightness and chromatic vividness that the twentieth century has accustomed us to are also mere tonal gradations of light, and not signs of a total exposure to it.13
But then we really should “urbanize” Heidegger (and his followers). In fact, for him the fascinating character of the Lichtung (clearing) lies in the absolute and unlightable darkness (the extraphenomenological dark light) which is its condition of possibility; for me, on the contrary, it lies in the perceived relative darkness or brightness (lucus) made possible by the silva, on pain of a glare that leads to muteness.14 The silva, in fact, surely hides the clearing—which, in the case of the work of art, hides the Earth, inexhaustible compared to the world—but it also generates the mild light of a clearing in the woods. To rightly counter the excess of blinding light, demanded by the traditional metaphysics of light, it is not necessary to look up and refer to the (transcendental) overlight.15 It is more than enough, looking down at what actually appears in the light, to turn to the light that is blurred, which only thus can powerfully create atmospheres thanks to its interaction with things.16 Be they due to Neoplatonic metaphysics and Abbot Suger’s negative theology17—which, upon closer inspection, is “on the one hand an objectified theology, on the other hand the cultural enacting of the believers’ conversion (conversio) in view of their regeneration in the true light of God” (G. Böhme and H. Böhme, 2004, 157)—or not, the atmospheric architectures of light we find in gothic cathedrals are ultimately numinous only because the light is expertly inhibited—that is, (to use my own terms) because things are attacked by a quasi-thing. To excessively spiritualize the light, in fact, means to (gnostically) transform nature into a huge cave platonically fraught with deceits and falsity, seeing “a projection, a play of shadows, in all that exists” (ibid., 153): in short, it means to guiltily disregard the rich semi-bright18 and even fully nightly19 atmospheric character of our Lebenswelt.
Thus we are specially immersed in atmosphericness when the light—perhaps without ceasing to be a biologically attractive factor—blurs the objects,20 depriving them of any intolerable vividness21 and symmetry,22 thereby preventing the subject from linking things to their genus (which is a rationalizing activity favored precisely by vividness). As we see, this happens regardless of the fact that light vagueness is such de dicto (produced iconically or as a consequence of the perceiver’s psychophysical state) or de re (ontological vagueness). The first atmospheric (and therefore definitively quasi-thingly) effect of light vagueness is that it turns the almost tangible presence of things into unapproachable shapes, thereby endowed with an aura of their own, regardless of their actual distance from the perceiver. In painting this happens through the so-called film color, which confuses the object and its illumination, or by reducing the contrast.23 In ordinary perception it happens by weakening the light: things are deobjectified by appearing at a distance24 and therefore require (Klages would say) the soul’s oneiric contemplation at a distance par excellence—the same that is demanded by “images” (in the strong sense).25 But distancing in (experienced) space is such also in time. It is the wear and tear of things that atmospherically evoke their differed presence, contrary to an abstract concept, which is ontologically and pragmatically correlated exclusively to something new and not yet “experienced.”26 In the same way, a perceived object made vague (because of the indistiction between figure and ground) by a blurred light invariably arouses a peculiar eros of the distance (both physical and temporal).
I have already recalled this: the ordinary encounter with things in a strict sense depends less on their shape and focus and more on their being immersed in a “casing” that is eminently atmospheric, precisely because it is formed by a constellation of non-focusable and often ephemeral qualities. In fact, today’s artistic use of light seems to refer exactly to its intermittent and transitory (quasi-thingly) existence: be it to dematerialize specific substances such as (among others) aluminium and plexiglass, or to materialize light itself by expanding it in space,27 art generates, more and more often, objects that have “an optical presence, even without being physically tangible” (Schürmann, 2003, 350)—thus recreating, maybe, “in the aesthetic context the now lost qualities of the lived experience typical of places of worship” (Wagner, 2001, 268).
But what is it that fascinates us, in these cases? Probably the deobjectifying flicker of things and the sudden glint of an object, the shadow cast temporarily by things (shade) as well as that projected on them by other things around them (shadow). What is atmospherically fascinating therefore is the ephemeral appearances that, as such, cannot be reduced to thingly properties. Contrary to the conception that light is the expression of Platonic ideas and in opposition to the Hegelian sense,28 these luminous quasi-things spread around a deeply immersive affective tone, not despite but thanks to their transience, which was always guiltily underrated by traditional aesthetics and ontology in the name of duration and even eternity.29 Testifying, at best, the incessant metamorphic movement of the world, the ephemeral and the momentary can be rendered (somewhat contradictorily) by multiplying fixed images,30 but mostly by dimming the light. It is in this sense that I like to interpret the nineteenth-century admonition, later partly upheld by the light effects of Impressionism, to preserve “poeticness” by refraining from “sunlit scenes”; my interpretation could also hold for the predilection (already stigmatized by Constable) for the “gallery tone” granted by the paintings’ old varnish (Gombrich, 1984, 39, 45).
The quasi-thingly atmosphere of light is also created by haziness.31 It can be a “misty transparency”—that is, the brightness devoid of sharpness that, for Goethe, is typical of the Mediterranean landscape;32 it may be fog in the strictly climatic sense,33 but is also artificially produced haziness (thanks to the sfumato, for instance). In any case, haziness wraps everything. Therefore it is not surprising that, wrapped in unspecified fumes and vapors and especially in the fog, an insignificant portion of space becomes powerfully atmospheric (as an undetermined quasi-thingly constellation), capable of generally suggesting34 (also through impalpable humidity) a feeling of oppression that is both unlocalized and omnipresent, like a veil.35 Without salience, things thus acquire a “newly menacing character,” analogous to the “total dematerialization of the surrounding world” produced by a candid snowfall. To have a “foggy mind” thus means “suffering” the atmosphere of a shrunken world in which every prevision becomes impossible: a world in which we find ourselves in the sole company of sounds, which become in turn menacingly autonomous—hence “a feeling of loss of one’s own nature, of a floating in empty space” (Bollnow 2011, 206, 208). No wonder, then, that—wrapped in unspecified fumes and vapors and especially in the fog—an insignificant portion of the space becomes, as indeterminate quasi-thingly constellation, powerfully atmospheric, capable of suggesting a great degree—with sometimes distressing and sometimes reassuring effects)—the Kantian free play of the faculties. This paradoxically happens not through variety but through the unitary tonality given to the optical field at the expense of the details. For example, immersed in nebulosity, a tree is nothing but a dark, looming mass that seems to have suddenly emerged from nowhere, thus evoking the status nascendi typical of the transience of every quasi-thing36 that can atmospherically inspire a whole culture.37
It is well known and easy to retrace in literature that some days, and mainly some parts of the day, are very atmospheric:38 from the unbearable inaugural vividness of the dawn to the paralyzing midday demonicity (both Nietzschean), up to the thousand colors of the night. The primitive and poetic atmosphere of the night wraps and disorientates us, reifying the sound and dissolving all distinctions between perceiver and perceived, leading to a certain lack of motor freedom and to a regression to a surfaceless, animistic, prelogic and extraobjectual spatiality39—one in which everything is terribly possible but where, at the same time, the self finds its own irreducible identification.40
But if blinding brightness does not generate atmospheres, neither does the darkest night.41 What does create atmospheres, all the more so in the age of universal illumination, is the light hardly emerging from the dark, or resisting it,42 giving life to a struggle that (also pictorially) carves matter out. Think of the (both artistic and commonsensical) topos of the seducing and protective candlelight, or of the so-called gum print used by early photographers to achieve a more haptic and kinaesthetic perception,43 but mostly of the diminutio of light and the felt-bodily tension typical of twilight. The latter, thanks to the blurring of contours and the generation of a vague overall impression, is much more favorable than daylight to arousing various moods.44 That’s why even what is an ugly “sea of houses” during the day becomes an architecturally fascinating play of light in the evening, especially if it’s foggy:45 in fact, twilightness—an indistinctly emotional dimension, both felt-bodily and climatic, ultimately impossible to analyze46 as it is intermodally and synaesthetically “suffered”47—” falls” (not metaphorically!) on everything from the outside, by virtue of a naturalistically irreducible quasi-thinghood. Twilightness creeps in, making things less discrete,48 dissolving the distinction between identity and difference that, after all, is supposed by any rationalization,49 and forcing the light into a striking residual fragmentation. In fact, the sole surviving luminous points, increasing the fascinating character of the whole, are the stars, the lights of the houses, but also those objects with their own light that in daylight are normally devoid of salience, but now, in the semidarkness, sparkle magically,50 revealing their unexpected kinetic independence.
Inhibiting any spatial direction, twilight makes us strangers also to familiar things, reducing them to simple silhouettes, thus suggesting a necessary dematerializing experience both of the perceived and of the perceiver; even as semidarkness, it evokes an impression of numinousity51 and immemoriality.52 It also evokes a vague feeling of sadness53 generated by the threatening sense of the vainness of things54 and, sometimes, (especially when the farewell to light alludes to other farewells, as in Gottfried Benn’s blaue Stunde) real despair. The fact that we are assaulted by it as a quasi-thing is also evident from the fact that, just as “the brightness of objects on earth is seen basically as a property of their own rather than as a result of reflection” (Arnheim, 1974, 304), their shadowness is also felt not so much as an absence (in contrast to the ancient tendency, ever since Eleaticism, to deontologize darkness) but as a positive and felt-bodily active quality—in short, more as an enigmatic emission of darkness than as a banal statistical relativization of the bright values of the field of view.
One should not exclude the possibility that, with the loss of thingly orientation, twilightness might awaken in different subjects relatively different moods. For instance one could feel deep concern or mature self-reflection. However, what is certain is that what generates these feelings is an intersubjective and quasi-thingly atmosphere whose felt-bodily resonance, before being declined in a more individual way, is for everyone the ‘’horrified retreat into the narrowness of one’s felt-body in front of an extraneous vastness that surrounds us”(Schmitz, 1964, 157) and the intensification of hearing as (following Nietzsche) the organ of fear.55 The twilight atmosphere is surely less intense in latitudes or seasons in which the transition from day to night is almost immediate, but also in urban life, which today inhibits its charm by the simple gesture of turning on the light. However, if it were there, it would still reduce the subject to his or her “primal and ultimate element: an ominous feeling” (Böhme, 1998, 32). It is a slightly nostalgic feeling that, incidentally, is always much needed, as emerges from the large diffusion of dimmers in the very age of 24/7 work and the ubiquity of artificial light. Also, wanting to generate an intimate atmosphere in our living rooms, we tend to reject natural light, cold light (neon) and uniform light—in short, we don’t want the light whose effect, intolerable unless you’re performing sophisticated analytical operations (such as a surgery), makes all objects appear at the same and flat distance from the observer, as opposed to haziness and twilightness.
As we have seen, atmosphericness is therefore particularly intense (and, for this reason, quasi-thingly and felt-bodily very active) when a parte objecti, the perceived is (or is made) vague and dusky and/or when, a parte subjecti, the attention (normally pragmatically oriented to fitness) is (or is made) less efficient. In other words, this happens when the “releasement” makes perception into more of a suffering than an action. Here ultimately emerges an oriental forma mentis (broadly defined) that radically opposes the Western privilege granted to fulgency and the technical pride of getting the shining out of dull rock, dark earth, and raw metal; in fact, such forma mentis choses blur, haziness, and burnish over the shining, also because of the unintentional temporal patina it evokes.56 But let’s simply take a candle and ask ourselves why its light fascinates us. It is evidently not only because of the elusive and hypnotic mobility of the fire but, above all, because of its ability to dynamize all the objects it casts its shadow on while highlighting (in contrast to the flatness imposed on them by electric light) their beauty and presentiality.57 Differently put, what fascinates us is its being an “indirect light,” “light, but giving no impression of brilliance” (Tanizaki, 1977, 18, 21). But thanks to what specific felt-bodily communication?
At first approximation one could talk not of a conflicting or antagonistic resonance but of a complementary and contemplative one, especially when, escaping the teleology of sharpness often embodied in its very representational tool, art expresses vagueness thanks not only to the chosen theme but also to various artificial devices.58 Perhaps one could talk, more precisely, of an extended-privative resonance that is intimately contrasted: that is, one in which the felt-body is first encouraged by the quasi-thinghood of semidarkness to abandon the original narrowness for the peri-corporeal a-directional vastness it is presented with, only to be inexorably restrained in that (even just felt) motion, given the impossibility to specify the objects any further (objects are such only if they are “clear”).59 Thus the felt-body is forced to anxiously look for certain (luminous) points, be they even just the headlights of cars cutting through the night.60
It is a very common experience that twilight vagueness is the most intense (and slightly melancholic) luminous atmosphericness: the “aesthetic work” merely intensifies it. For an eighteenth-century theorist of garden art such as Hirschfeld,61 for example, the landscape characterized by a “soft melancholy” is a perfectly feasible “scene.” The overall view has to be barred (depressions, tall trees, shrubberies), and the water must be stagnant and hidden by reeds and bushes; all must be quiet and seemingly lifeless, and there should be a few lights (but light cannot be completely absent, otherwise the atmosphere is no longer melancholic but authentically terrifying): this is enough for the hoped-for state of “reverence” and pensive suspension (Hirschfeld, 2011, 171ff., 180).
Of course choosing twilightness as a basic atmosphere and therefore as an eminent example of a quasi-thing excludes a limine any attempt at prejudicially identifying the atmospheric scope (including the artistic one) with a cryptic message able to transform the perceiver’s existence. The already underlined pragmatic (if not utopic) urgency suggested perhaps by Rilke’s “you must change your life” is not, from the atmospherological point of view, more significant than the condition of silence, reflection, and privacy, or even nostalgic languor, promoted by semidarkness. But is all this a sign of an anima naturaliter orientalis? Of course it is, because the harmonious brightness of reason—suggested by Western oculocentrism and by a (temperate) climate represented by eternal midday, but also promoted by a nature that is so “rational” and predictable that it significantly seems (to an oriental person) almost artistic62—appears to be atmospherically inferior to a softened light. It is prototypically inferior to the crepuscular candlelight, whose consequences include (apart from the predictable and commercially all-too-exploited romantic effect), the disappearance of the self/world boundaries and a certain predisposition to reflection.
Even (and precisely) in totally electrified cities in which paradoxically the night is sometimes even brighter than the day and thus loses its dramatic character, twilight has not fully lost its atmospheric charm. When a certain architectural illiteracy seems to frustrate the wish for diversification by the “isotropic extension of the light onto isotropic surfaces,” the rare shadows become all the more evocative.63 After all, without concessions to obscurantism,64 we can atmospherologically say that “the true project of light is to praise the shadow” (Pierantoni, 1998, 19, 11). It shall be enough not to seek, neurotically, the focus in everything, especially not in every quasi-thing: to begin with, “we can turn off the electric lights and see what it is like without them” (Tanizaki, 1961, 42).