Atmospheric Architectures

A Contribution to the Critique of Aesthetic Economy

A golden ladle

In his dialogue Hippias Major, Plato shows us Socrates in a discussion concerning beauty with the Sophist Hippias. To Socrates’ question as to what the Beautiful is, Hippias had initially answered: ‘a beautiful maiden is beautiful’. As we would expect, Socrates then clarifies that he is not concerned with a singular case, nor with a list – apart from maidens, one also calls flowers, horses or pots beautiful – but with beauty itself, with what makes the beautiful beautiful. To that, Hippias gives a second answer:

Hippias: This that you ask about, the beautiful, is nothing else but gold […] For we all know, I fancy, that wherever this is added, even what before appears ugly will appear beautiful when adorned with gold. (Plato, n.d.: 289d)

But Socrates is not content with this reply, either. He draws attention to the fact that other materials, like ivory for example, are also considered beautiful and adds:

Socrates: […] is beautiful stone also beautiful? Shall we say that it is, Hippias?

Hippias: Surely we shall say so, that is, where it is appropriate.

Socrates: But ugly when not appropriate? Shall I agree, or not?

Hippias: Agree, that is, when it is not appropriate.

Socrates: What then? Do not gold and ivory […] when they are appropriate, make things beautiful, and when they are not appropriate, ugly? Shall we deny that […]?

Hippias: We shall agree to this, at any rate, that whatever is appropriate to any particular thing makes that thing beautiful.

Socrates: Well, then, […] when some one has boiled the pot of which we were speaking just now, the beautiful one, full of beautiful soup, is a golden ladle appropriate to it, or one made of fig wood?

[…]

Socrates: […] Which of the two ladles shall we say is appropriate to the soup and the pot? Is it not evidently the one of fig wood? For it is likely to make the soup smell better, and besides, my friend, it would not break the pot, thereby spilling the soup, putting out the fire, and making those who are to be entertained go without their splendid soup; whereas the golden ladle would do all those things, so that it seems to me that we must say that the wooden ladle is more appropriate than the golden one, unless you disagree.

Hippias: No, for it is more appropriate, Socrates […]. (Plato, n.d.: 290c–291a)

In this 2,400-years-old text, basic design problems are already clearly stated – moreover, certain basic concepts are shaped that would determine all subsequent discussion. It is from the process of craft production that the nature of a thing is grasped, and what is given to that process is material (Greek: and Latin: materia both originally mean wood, or timber). Human activity gives the material a form according to the function of the thing, and this makes the thing what it is. This model of the thing, as a whole made of form and matter, already holds the potential for form and matter to enter into a relationship full of tension, to be in harmony with, or to be indifferent to each other. Socrates’ plea here is that the material of things must also correspond to their function. Gold is not appropriate for a ladle; the Greek expression here is to prepon (τὸ πρέπον, the appropriate. In more recent design discussions, likewise, a quasi-moral term was chosen in discussing ‘the truth to material’.

Along with this tension, that is, between matter and the form determined by a thing’s function, another one appears: between functionality and aesthetics. According to the Sophist Hippias, these two dimensions have nothing to do with each other. All that glitters is beautiful. In which case, argues Socrates, a ladle must also be made from gold to be beautiful. Via a detour, namely that other materials are also considered beautiful as long as they are ‘appropriate’, Socrates then inveigles Hippias into identifying the proper with the beautiful. For that is his opinion: beautiful is that which is, in form and matter, entirely functional. A golden ladle, therefore, cannot be beautiful.

Apart from these well-known dichotomies of form and matter, function and aesthetics (which are nevertheless formulated here for the first time in cultural history), something we may not have thought of also shows up. In his plea for fig wood as the most appropriate and therefore most beautiful material for a ladle, Socrates not only cites practical aspects but points out that the ladle made from fig wood ‘make[s] the soup smell better’. These words articulate an everyday sensuousness from which we, in our distanced dealings with things, are worlds apart. Yet, if one remains faithful to the Greek word aisthesis, aesthetics is all about this sensuousness. Aisthesis means the sensuous-affective attendance to things.

Material aesthetics

The aestheticization of reality is essentially a matter of material aesthetics. Materiality, in this context, does not refer to an ahistorical or global reality but to our own; that is, it refers to the reality of advanced, usually Western, industrial nations, which, despite all crises and catastrophes, unfold a Babylonian splendour in their metropolises. Marble and stainless steel even in some subway stations; gold, silver, and precious timber panelling in restaurants, department stores, and airports. In addition, the colourfulness of flowers, the elegance of fabrics – and above all the flickering and glitter of light emitted by spots or halogen lamps bounding up and down, hither and thither, between mirrors and glass panes and marble floors. To guess the archetype of these staged settings is not difficult: it is the royal castle that has, by the splendour of its lights, lent its aesthetics to late capitalism (which is still capable of intensification).

The aestheticization of our reality consists in the first instance of an extensive presentation of materiality. Neither form nor style determines contemporary aesthetics. More likely, it is light, or perhaps indeterminacy, or space – the atmospheric as I would call it. In any case, it is materiality as it emerges and shows itself. There are astonishing parallels in the visual arts, where one could almost speak of a return of materiality or about the fact that, in many works, art turns into the presentation of materiality as such. Think of the works of Nicholas Lang, Gloria Friedmann, Magdalena Jetilová, or Stefan Huber: wood, little coloured sand piles, pollen, beeswax – or, not to forget Beuys, fat and felt. The aesthetics of the commodity world differs from the presentation of materiality in art, in the first instance, only because it holds on to the trivial identification of the aesthetic and the beautiful.

What does this aesthetics of materiality have to tell us? What does it radiate to us? Splendour, solidity, wealth, nature?

Splendour: We are attending a great festival, the festival of capitalism.

Solidity: Everything is reputable, reliable and secure.

Wealth: This is ours, we participate.

Nature: This here is life.

Only by taking a step back does one fully realize the fascination that is exerted by this festive atmosphere of arcades, shopping malls, airports and railway stations, restaurants, hotels, and, of course, derivatively, also private interiors. For example, when remembering the atmosphere of the German Democratic Republic and its beautiful Einheits-Design,1 one realizes that the capitalist system’s victory was, inter alia, also a victory of design. Perhaps even not just inter alia: when it comes to motivations, wishes, and desires, what matters most is not what capitalism achieves, but what splendour it unfurls.

Material beauty

In what sense is material beautiful? In trying to answer this question, established aesthetic theories forsake us. Ever since antiquity, but also in modern aesthetics from Kant to Adorno, the question of beauty has been posed as a question of form: of proportion, harmony or symmetry. Even where, as in Kant, attention is directed to the free play of the imagination, its occasion is sought in form. Even today when, invigorated by new mathematics like chaos theory and fractal geometry, old questions are posed again, beauty is still identified with form.² In the process, materiality is usually overlooked, or it is even denied the honorific of beauty. For materiality is not form but ‘amorphic’ – that which has no form as such. For Kant, it belongs to the agreeable rather than the beautiful and, at most, generates appeal and emotion – materiality does not admit aesthetic judgement (Kant & Walker, 2007).

Contemporary aesthetics is dominated by semiotics, that is, by the theory of signs.3 Signs need to be understood, they mean something or refer to something, and both reference and understanding are possible only insofar they are embedded in culture: signs are conventional. The semiotic dominance in aesthetics implies an orientation towards language and, to a certain extent, this orientation indeed helps one understand the aesthetic role of material. Splendour, solidity, wealth, nature: one can speak of a language in which material speaks to us. However, the linguistic paradigm is deficient even for conventional aspects of material aesthetics. While a golden ladle signals: ‘I am gold, I am valuable’, the material’s aesthetic effect would be inadequately apprehended simply by understanding what there is to understand. This is drastically evident in the purely symbolic stage sets from the period of disillusionment in Brechtian theatre: one will indeed understand the messages tree or lantern written on cardboard signs; however, they are worlds apart from the look and feel that emanates from a tree silhouette, however poorly painted, or from an ever so dim lantern. Therefore, I propose speaking of a material’s social characteristics and distinguishing them from its synaesthetic characteristics.

The term character here is taken from the tradition of physiognomy.⁴ However, diverging from physiognomy, the character traits someone or something possesses are understood as impressive, rather than as expressive qualities. Here, in the realm of the aesthetics of matter, those qualities are to be called characters through which a substance makes a particular impression on someone who deals with it or is in its presence. It is actually definitive for material aesthetics that the impression we get from a material in no way comes about through an investigation of it, or through any dealings with it as an object. Rather, it is sensed atmospherically. It may well be true that the potential of this atmospheric sensing (and the correlative estimation of material in its concreteness) is initially formed through much more intimate, bodily experiences in childhood. This is why pedagogical reformers have always set great store by imparting a diversity of direct experiences of materiality. Today, in our distanced forms of life, the presence of materials is by contrast only felt atmospherically. Only in italics because, strictly speaking, it is not simply a question of a weaker feeling but of a different one. We sense a material insofar as the atmosphere it radiates enters into our disposition. We sense the presence of materials today by finding ourselves to be in a particular way, in response to their being present. The decision to call the characteristics that are relevant in this context synaesthetic indicates that this mode of experience differs from that of direct bodily or, more precisely, corporeal engagement.5

To give a few examples of expressions that indicate the character of a material: a material can be hard, soft, rough, warm, cold, moist, dry, light, or dark. Those are extremely general characterizations, of course, but they nevertheless demonstrate the decisive point, namely that we are dealing properly here with synesthetic, or intermodal qualities as psychologists call them. synaesthetic are qualities that occur in more than one sensory field. Thus, a tone is also referred to as high or sharp, a colour as warm, or a voice as course. Many people regard these phrases as metaphorical, in the sense that the expression rough, originating from the sensory field of touch, is transferred to the field of sound, for example. However, this is at most related to sequences of familiarization in early childhood, which could of course be quite different from person to person.

Decisive here, and particularly so for material aesthetics, is the fact that atmospheric sensing involves characteristics of atmospheres, which emanate from things and can be produced by quite different qualities in a thing. This can be demonstrated particularly nicely in the case of a material’s coldness or warmth. Strictly speaking, of course, these expressions cannot designate any objective property of the material concerning its material specificity. What one can feel by touching a material (and what one may then call warmth or cold) is, after all, not its temperature but its thermal conductivity. However, what one calls a material’s coldness or warmth in atmospheric sensing is something completely different and this, its synaesthetic characteristic, can be produced by various objective properties. Thus, cold can be produced by smooth, glassy surfaces, but also by the colour blue. Warmth, by contrast, can be produced by the colour red and also by characteristics pertaining to wood, such as a mat surface. True, particular materials are prototypical of some of these characteristics, or the latter are named after the first, as in icy or wooden. But that does not mean that ice always has to appear icy, or wood wooden. Just think of a frozen pond under a lantern’s light, or of a Rococo armchair’s legs. Again, a material’s character is named after the atmosphere that emanates from it, and the same character can derive from qualities belonging to quite different sensory fields. Thus, the term synaesthetic character.

A distinction must be made between the synaesthetic and the social character of materials. At stake here is what Goethe called sinnlich-sittliche Wirkung der Farben (the sensuous-ethical effect of colours) in his Theory of Colours (1840). In the context of current language use, however, the German term sittlich is likely to lead to misunderstandings. Goethe employed the expression sittlich not in a moral sense but in the sense of the Greek expression ethos, meaning form of life. Materials possess social character insofar as they radiate an atmosphere that belongs to a particular form of life. Splendour, in the sense of grandeur, can be such a character, and so are wealth and solidity. Other social characters are, for instance, rustic, elegant, and noble. These, too, represent only the most general characterizations. What is important is that these characters are subject to cultural change and even fashion. This applies both to social characters as such – thus, cool as an atmosphere of a form of life, for example, has emerged only recently – and to the question of which objective material qualities constitute a social character in each case. Goethe already noted this concerning colours: depending on cultural context, for example, either black or white can be a colour of mourning. And in Goethe’s time, grey would have certainly not contributed to the character of elegance, but it does so today in many areas of design.

Thus, the aesthetic qualities of materials cannot be linked immediately to their objective properties, nor to those established through sensuous-practical dealings. Rather, these qualities consist in their character, that is, in the specific mode in which they are atmospherically experienced or, respectively, contribute to an atmosphere. This character is experienced not through direct physical contact, or even just through sense perception, as the uptake of sensory data by the classical five senses – rather, it is experienced through bodily sensing. A material’s aesthetic quality is the most characteristic way in which it is sensed.

In speaking like this about aesthetic material qualities in general terms, a great spectrum of possible characters opens up. Thus, the question arises as to which among them counts as beautiful. The example of the golden ladle shows that even entirely diverse characters can contribute to the formation of the complex character beautiful. Surely, in the case of gold, the social character of wealth adds to its character, but there are also its splendour and gentle warmth. As for fig wood, what matters is its character of naturalness, its scent and warmth. In any case, one can probably say that materials are considered beautiful if they increase the feeling of vitality. Which material can do this in each case will certainly depend on the chosen form of life or, conversely, on a material’s belonging with the atmosphere of a form of life.

Particle board

To return to the golden ladle: the material aesthetics that unfolds for us in the conversation between Socrates and Hippias remains, however reflected, in one respect naive. Socrates and Hippias discuss the question of material aesthetics as a question concerning what things should consist of. The golden ladle is rejected, inter alia, because it would be heavy and massive and might therefore smash the earthenware vessel in which the soup is cooked. But how about a ladle that looks golden but does not consist of gold? In fact, delusion and imitation are rare in the Greek classical age. The Greeks painted their sculptures and buildings for the sake of chromaticity, not to dissemble materials other than those actually used. The latter occurs extensively later, though, in Rome, where brick columns were frequently veneered with marble, and especially in Egypt. One could even say that ancient Egypt is the origin of surface finishing, and one can recognize the origins of alchemy in the range of glazes, enamelling, dyeing techniques, imitation precious metals and stones on which Egyptian art drew when dealing with material. The two oldest alchemy papyri, kept today in Leyden and Stockholm, are full of pertinent recipes – in which one can also observe that gold making (later such an ideologically charged term) originally meant, quite soberly and naively, producing the appearance of gold (Stillman, 1960: 80f).

By now, modern design of materials has far exceeded the goals of original Egyptian alchemy. Gold making, by anodizing clocks and jewellery with titanium nitrite, for example, is so successful that the question of whether something is really made from gold touches not on the aesthetics of the matter but merely on its economy.

In particle board, paradigmatic of modern design, the characteristic of contemporary materials design becomes evident, namely the separation of interior and surface design. Particle board: on the inside messy, brown, without character; on the outside imposing as beech, oak, but also as marble or metal, and in that case shining variously as decorative Formica. A similar parting of materiality and surface, of being and appearance, is found in plastics. In the case of plastic, though, which has positively been referred to as the epitome of anaesthetic material, the aesthetic presentation is usually defined by form or colour and not – or at least rarely – by the fact that, via its surface, it presents itself with the character of a material that it is not.

The interior design of particle board is determined by a twofold rationality, namely, of function and of economy. Characteristically, both mesh in the rationality of production. The interior design of particle board is determined by the preferred manufacturing qualities of this material in the process of production; a high adaptation to its designated use or function, for instance in furniture or cladding; and, finally, by the economic imperative of guaranteed quality. Over all this, however, dominates the principal demand for homogeneity. Some quotes taken from Michael Paulitsch’s standard work on Modern Wood-Based Materials illustrate the latter:

It is imperative to source, over long periods, raw material of a similar kind, made as homogenous as possible through classification. The tensile strength of the wood grain […] is about five times as high as that of flawless wood. The log’s inconsistencies can reduce the strength of a regular wooden body to approx. 25 %. […] For mass products, we are left only with the methods of homogenisation through crushing and recombination. […] Globally, composite wooden boards have enabled many people for the first time to purchase furniture with wood character. This is inseparably connected with the development of a versatile surface finishing technology, be it through veneer, paint coating, or laminating. (1989: 25, 50, 141)

The latter quote, in particular, clearly shows the concurrence of aesthetic and economic aspects that leads to the separation of the design of interior and surface. Aesthetically, the surface design is of primary relevance. It complies with an economy that is quite different from the economy of production. While the latter is all about low material prices, the possibility of standardized production techniques, and the prospect of predictable and thereby guaranteed material qualities, the former hinges on saleability, customer wishes and the aesthetic production of forms of life.

Internal design and invisible aesthetics

Even though material aesthetics is a matter of surface design, this does not mean that surfaces do not also have their own specific function, that of use value. The separation of internal and surface design is also a consequence of the different functions a material’s surface and interior have. This parting of ways between the external and internal functionality of things, sometimes to the point of a dichotomy, is a consequence of modern technology. For one no longer uses modern equipment as one would have used a ladle – rather, one touches it externally, if at all. This has important consequences for surface design; thus, abrasion and scratch resistance move into the foreground. But this functional surface design, too, is basically internal design and concerns not the material’s appearance but its construction or composition.

Apart from the production of alloys, there was no internal design in antiquity. According to the classical model of form and matter, humans contributed form to the being of things during their production. Matter, by contrast, was considered to be given by nature. Today, the construction of materials is a highly developed science and technology, which should actually be called internal material design. It is tasked with constructing materials for precisely specified functions and applications. The set of possible materials, as a consequence, expands towards infinity. Here are but a few examples:

In high performance switches, that is, switches that close very high voltage power circuits, these high voltages cause arcs. Therefore, cadmium oxide is embedded in the switch material, which consists of highly conductive silver. Characteristically, cadmium oxide evaporates at high temperatures, which means that it quickly extinguishes an arc when it occurs.

The material for the pistons in an Otto motor essentially has to have three properties. It has to be light, stable and resistant to abrasion on the cylinder wall. Therefore, aluminium is selected as the base material, into which silicon is embedded in two forms: very small silicon particles ensure the solidity of the whole, and larger, lamella-shaped particles prevent abrasion. Such highly sophisticated structural design takes place out of sight, as it were. It is irrelevant for material aesthetics. However, microphotography presents us with fascinating and sometimes even very beautiful sights. The latter reference could be regarded as an aside but this aspect of material aesthetics is not without significance, for these images matter to materials scientists and engineers, that is, to the makers of the internal design. They strengthen the makers’ motivation and self-understanding, and they also help with the identification of a material. Thus, images of the beautiful internal aesthetics adorn the title pages of professional journals for material science which otherwise, as to be expected, contain measured data, formulae and graphs. Such images can occasionally also be found in advertisements for new materials.

Another reason makes the reference to the invisible (or at least observable only with the aid of technology) material aesthetics more than a mere excursion: the technically mediated aesthetic experiences that can be had here are by no means isolated cases. Rather, in technological civilization, human perception is increasingly technically mediated and the most relevant aesthetic experiences – one could almost say aesthetic socialization – take place within technically mediated perception. Views through the microscope, televised images of outer space, colour and light experiences while diving or through televised underwater photography, clouds and atmospheric impressions during flight – these are fundamental experiences that shape viewing habits, not to mention taste. It is even fair to assume that beauty is typically sought after in such experiences, in a turning away from the mêlée of objects in the modern world. Characteristics of the contemporary sense of beauty are not regularity and symmetry but precisely indeterminacy, event, and atmosphere. In this way, the artificially visualized internal design of materials might indeed be related to the external design, after all. For this, the frequently asserted relationship between microphotography and modern painting may provide a clue.

Contribution to the critique of aesthetic economy

The results of this analysis so far could be summarized in the following paradoxical thesis: the aesthetics of material is not the same as material aesthetics. The extravagant presentations of materiality, which constitute a basic feature of our reality, are not about a coming-into-appearance of the matter of things. In this respect, the correspondence asserted at the beginning, namely between material aesthetics in modern art and the presentation of materiality in industrial design, is an illusion. In reality, these developments work in opposite directions. Artists present stones, sand, bird feathers and wood as art works precisely because, in the world of commodities, the experience of these materials as concrete matter is diminishing. Here, we have to speak of an anaestheticization of material and a dematerialization of aesthetics. The oppositions that break open here demand a socio-critical interpretation. Not only does economy, as the paradigm of particle board has already demonstrated, determine aesthetics in the prevailing aesthetic economy, but, conversely, aesthetics also determines the economy. The aesthetics of material that is characteristic of our present must be understood within an aesthetic economy.

Aesthetic economy denotes a particular phase of developed capitalism which can be characterized in two ways:

1. Aesthetic work, or the work of staging, represents a large part of the work of society as a whole. Aesthetic work generally refers to the production of appearance and atmospheres, that is, all those activities that are not about production, or the maintenance of processes, but aim to give things and people a particular appearance and to present them in a favourable light. Designers are of course among the aesthetic workers but then also cosmeticians, stage designers, interior architects, advertising and fashion professionals, and many others. In statistics, aesthetic work is not yet aggregated into a separate category, as is the case for service operations or data processing. However, aesthetic work is likely to amount to a large and ever-increasing part of the total work of society.

2. The values produced in this phase of developed capitalism are increasingly aesthetic values. In fact, the category aesthetic value really only emerges during this phase, even though it has of course always existed as a side effect. Karl Marx’ binary distinction between the use value and the exchange value of commodities proves inadequate today. The use value of a commodity is composed of all the qualities that make it useful, or by which it can be used. To increase a commodity’s exchange value, further qualities are added that are likely to make it particularly marketable. Among those are presentation and packaging. To be sure, use value and exchange value can indeed enter into an opposition, and the exchange value can, as Haug has shown in his well-known book Critique of Commodity Aesthetics (1986) dominate over the use value. Now, a commodity’s aesthetic value is, in a manner of speaking, the exchange value turned use value, but it is also what exceeds both exchange value and use value. In any event, the pure exchange value of a commodity also has a use value, of course, for example when it serves as a status symbol. On the other hand, there are more and more commodities that serve exclusively the staging, or let us say the beautification of the world and intensification of life. This shows that the aesthetic or stage value is indeed an autonomous type of value. The aesthetic economy, then, is marked by the transition to independence of this value type and by the relative increase of commodities that have only aesthetic value.

This relative increase in the production of aesthetic value can be explained by an analysis of the structure of consumer needs. In the case of human needs, a particular distinction must be made between needs, strictly speaking, and desires. Needs in the strict sense can be satisfied, that is, saturation can occur; examples are hunger and thirst and also the need to clothe oneself. Other needs, which I shall call desires, are not slaked but intensified by their gratification. Of this kind are the desires for wealth, recognition, and generally everything that does not serve reproduction and the bare maintenance of life but rather its intensification. Aesthetic values, particularly, belong in this last category. Since capitalism as an economic system can only stabilize through growth, its basis cannot be needs in the narrow sense but must be desire. In developed capitalism, exactly, where needs are in principle already satisfied, the arousal of desire and its intensification are of increasing importance. In this way, developed capitalism has turned into aesthetic economy.

Certainly, this outline casts a critical light on the economy of developed industrial nations. In view of the fact that, globally, people’s elementary needs remain unsatisfied, a large part of these economies’ production can only be regarded as luxury production. Nonetheless, not only life but also the intensification of life is a fundamental feature of human existence. To show oneself, to step into appearance, to stage oneself and one’s world: beauty is a legitimate human concern.

Material splendour, the parting of ways of surface design and internal design, the dematerialization of aesthetics, and the anaestheticization of material are expressions of the aesthetic economy as an advanced phase of capitalism. It is about the staging of commodities and the self-staging of people. It is about the staging of politics and the self-staging of companies. It is about the staging of whole cities (Durth, 1988), even of the great capitalist festival itself.

1Einheits-Design (standardized design) refers to design from the ex-GDR (see Bertsch, Hedler, & Dietz, 1994).

2See Cramer (1992) and Küppers (1993).

³When this essay was first published in the 1990s, aesthetic discourse was strongly focused by questions concerning signs and signification and impacted by linguistic models. While art and aesthetic discourses are more varied today, mediation through language, and thereby necessarily semiotics, continues to be an important practice in art commentary, as, for instance, in catalogues, museum tours, and art criticism.

⁴Character also refers implicitly to Hirschfeld’s theatrical terminology. In his work Theorie der Gartenkunst (2001), Hirschfeld used very specific means to create scenes in a park or garden, and his frequent use of the expression character has the inflection of characters appearing in a scenographic setting. See p. 26ff, above.

⁵Whereas corporeal here refers to the body as experienced from the outside, through sight and touch and particularly objectified in the observation by others in medicine and natural sciences, bodily refers to the body as the nature we ourselves are (Böhme, 2010a), or as given to our own sensory perception, within (but not necessarily limited to) our material body.