Atmospheric Architectures

A New Aesthetic Humanist Education

Objectives of aesthetic education

A curious oscillation between resigned modesty and exalted claims is typical of art as a teaching subject in schools. Just as physics lessons cannot turn students into little physicists, or mathematics turn them into mathematicians, the task for art education in schools cannot be to turn students into artists or even art critics. All the same, a substantial part of art teachers’ efforts consists precisely in conveying elementary knowledge in this direction and to develop corresponding skills. Students are supposed to learn about art techniques, to train their perceptive abilities and to know how to express themselves. In addition, they are expected to acquire knowledge about visual arts genres: it is anticipated that they will construct categories, analyse works of art and discuss them competently. All this does not amount to much and holds manifold disappointments for both teachers and students. It would better, then, to be modest about aesthetic education.

Regardless, the expectations of this discipline are extremely high and amis to establish fundamental principles to contribute to self-development, to develop individuality and the capacity for emancipation, to nurture innovative thinking, inventiveness and problem solving, to provide cultural orientation, and, finally, to contribute to career guidance. These aims are taken from the Hamburg Rahmenplan bildende Kunst (Framework for Visual Arts) for lower secondary classes – similar expressions can easily be found in other frameworks. The peculiar collection of objectives shows that expectations of art as a school subject significantly transcend subject specific aspects: Bildung (education) is expected – not in the sense of knowledge acquisition but in the sense of character formation. This expectation may be justified, but its expression reads like a smorgasbord of assorted goals, since neither beginnings nor ends are guided by education. Neither are we told what the subject of art, in its efforts to form human beings, has to engage with (that is, the world in which we live and the way in which humans, including children, are determined by it), nor is there a question about the meaning of being human, that is, what the goals mentioned above are to achieve.

I will try to explore these two questions by turning, as one might expect, to Schiller’s letters in On the Aesthetic Education of Man.

Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a series of letters

To understand Schiller’s letters today, one must remember when they were written: in 1795, that is, under the impression of events during and immediately after the French Revolution. This is a text by the Republican Schiller, who shared the goals of the revolution but was dismayed when faced with the bloody violence by which it proceeded. If one of the general concerns of the Enlightenment was the transition from the given to the man-made (or, from nature to technology),1 this was equally characteristic of the project of modernity. In particular, the transition from the state of Nature to the state of Reason was considered necessary by Schiller (Third Letter, 2004). His thesis is that the direct transition from the state of Nature to the state of Reason leads into barbarism, because humans are not properly prepared and their liberation from one compulsion, that of Nature, causes them to fall under another, the constraint of principles.² Consequently, Schiller concludes that the transition to the state of Reason (or a moral state, as he occasionally puts it) requires humanistic education. For the contrast between Nature and Reason is also found in humans themselves, and it is there, inside, that it must be mediated and healed.

FIGURE 7.2 View of the Botten, Greifswald / 2005 Gernot Böhme.

The disintegration of sensuousness and reason is, according to Schiller, a product of social organization, particularly of the division of labour. In his view, the desire for efficiency causes individuals to be educated entirely one-sidedly, and thereby also utterly incompletely as human beings (Sixth Letter, 2004). He sees the same separation of abilities, or their asymmetrical development, reflected in the class divisions in society. The ‘lower and more numerous classes’ (Schiller, 2004: 35), as he puts it in the Fifth Letter, turn towards sensuousness, whereas the ‘civilized classes’ (he obviously thinks of the bourgeois and feudal classes here) are alienated from it and try to organize their lives rationally. From his Eurocentric perspective, he reflects this difference once more as the difference between savages and civilized states (Fourth Letter).

The solution, he thinks, lies in aesthetic education, which is given the task of reconciling the conflicting human capacities via a third, which he will call play impulse. With this proposal, he follows certain lines Kant sketched out in the Critique of Judgement. It is worth remembering those here, because they help make Schiller’s propositions easier to understand and more plausible. Following Kant, an object is called beautiful if its presence gives rise in the imagination to a free play between sensuousness and reason.3 The enjoyment of beauty consists in the freedom of this play – hence the important role play assumes for Schiller. Simultaneously, Kant assigns beauty – incidentally in accordance with Edmund Burke – a role in the formation of society. Our ability to arrange our environment with taste (i.e., to furnish it with beautiful things) allows us to let other people share in our sentiments. Hence, Schiller’s idea of socialization through beauty, which culminates in the concept of an aesthetic State. Finally, Kant justifies moral appearance, that is, the endeavour to give oneself the appearance of being good through civilized behaviour. His hope is that that a person will become moral in the long run, that is, goes beyond appearance. Anyway, in the education of humans to become human, which, according to Kant, leads from civilization to cultivation to moralization, moral appearance represents the middle phase. In Schiller, one could be led to believe that cultivation is the real goal or, at least, the conditio sine qua non for true humanity.

Decisive for Schiller is the connection between play, beauty, and freedom. The aesthetic education of man to become human consists in stimulating the play impulse. It is given the task of mediating the tendencies allocated to sensuality and reason respectively – that is, sense and form impulse, as he calls them. Schiller deduces that the play impulse is about beauty, because the sense impulse is about material, the form impulse about form, and both together and in combination are living form, which, for Schiller, is beauty. When following the play impulse, one is thus concerned with beauty, and in this way achieves freedom both from the demands of Nature and the laws of Reason. Schiller does not hesitate to illustrate this by way of the contrast between play and seriousness. Life loses its seriousness in play: ‘In a word, as it [the mind] comes into association with ideas, everything actual loses its seriousness, because it grows small; and as it meets with perception, necessity puts aside its seriousness, because it grows light’ (Fifteenth Letter, 2004: 78).

So, how does aesthetic education take place? One might think that Schiller foregrounds performance, that is, theatre. However, this is not at all the case; rather, he obviously expects the mediation of material and form to be already completed in the work of art, so that the aesthetic education of man can take place in the contemplation of art. Through the latter, he believes, humans end up in a middle disposition, which he calls aesthetic (Twentieth Letter, 2004: 78). For, while humans are receptive and let themselves be determined when in a sensuous condition, they want self-determination when in a condition of reason or rationality. The play between both, which Kant had already identified as the play of the imagination, is the floating aesthetic condition.

The mind, then, passes from sensation to thought through a middle disposition in which sensuousness and reason are active at the same time, but just because of this they are mutually destroy their determining power … This middle disposition, in which our nature is constrained neither physically nor morally and yet is active in both ways, pre-eminently deserves to be called a free disposition …. (Twentieth Letter, 2004: 98–99)

Schiller does not seem to deploy the expression disposition here in the sense of mood but rather in the sense in which one speaks of the tuning of an instrument. For aesthetic education is not supposed to lead to a fleeting sentiment but to a new state of mind.

This raises the question concerning the goal of aesthetic education. The reference to Kant and the reflection on the French Revolution might suggest that the aesthetic condition is only a passing phase, and that play is merely an exceptional situation. After all, the overall goal is the state of reason, and the particular goal the moral human being – and there is no way of getting rid of the serious side of life.4 This, however, is not at all clear in Schiller’s text; he concludes his letters with the idea of the aesthetic state, and he identified true humanity as play already in the Fifteenth Letter:

For, to declare it once and for all, Man plays only when he is in the full sense of the word a man, and he is only wholly Man when he is playing. (Fifteenth Letter, 2004: 80)

Aesthetic humanist education under the conditions of technical civilization and aesthetic economy

When asking how one could reconstruct Schiller’s idea of humanistic aesthetic education under our current conditions, the very first thing one has to learn from him is: education is not about writing on a tabula rasa nor about the delicate care for a self-developing little plant. Rather, education always takes place on the basis of a predisposition by, and in competition with other, educational instances. Like Schiller, who took account of an already alienated human being and a divided society, we must take into account that the project of aesthetic education in schools involves young people who are conditioned by a powerful life and consumer world. Pedagogy must therefore ask itself the question which corrective, if not therapeutic role in the development of young people it might take on. To that end, the life world and present society have to be explored as educational entities. It seems expedient to do this under the headings of technical civilization and aesthetic economy.

Over the last decades, our life world and society – the world of work and transportation, communication, perception, and art – have been subjected to a rapid process of technification. The most recent phase of this process involves the technification of the human body. With regard to aesthetics, what does life under the conditions of technical civilization mean? Human communication and perception in technical civilization are extensively and, regarding means and possibilities, even dominantly impacted by technical media. A very large part of social activity, from communication to, more recently, shopping and banking, are processed telematically. Even where unarmed (i.e., occurring without equipment) perception is dominated by norms and models of technically mediated sensing. Seeing is oriented by camera and video, not the other way round. The need to adapt to, and to act adequately in, a technified world of work and transportation has led to an habituated objectivity, a radical separation of functional behaviour and emotions. Emotional needs are sated less in reality, and more likely within worlds of images, that is, in film, television, and so on.

The second organizational form that dominates our life may be called aesthetic economy (see Böhme, 2003).5 It characterizes that phase of economic development in which we find ourselves at present in Western industrialized nations. The economy is still capitalistic and can therefore function only as long as there is growth. The necessity for continuous economic growth, however, contrasts with the fact that basic needs have long been sated within the realm of this economy. It, therefore, necessarily banks on needs, or better, desires that are not slaked through gratification as thirst is quenched through drinking but rather intensified. These are the desires for decorations, staging, or consumption as such. Commodity production, therefore, can no longer rely on the use value of goods but has to create stage values – and that is characteristic of an aesthetic economy. In sum, our economy is no longer based on scarcity but on extravagance. Puritan ethics, according to Max Weber the foundation of early capitalist development, becomes obsolete in its late phase. The maxim is no longer saving but spending, no longer stock but turnover. This style, this way of thinking shapes both the reproductive and the productive sphere, the private as much as the public. Our society has therefore correctly been called a consumer and event society.

What do technical civilization and aesthetic economy mean to the people who live in them, and how are the people shaped by those social structures? Asking this question, and looking back to Schiller, one has to say the phenomena of separation and alienation are no longer class specific phenomena; likewise, the one-dimensionalities of human development are no longer assigned to specific groups of people. Rather, they concern everyone, and the rift runs right through each individual. With Kant, Schiller spoke of the separation of sensuousness and reason. He diagnosed a life of lust and receptiveness, a life of inclination and materialism on one side, with one type of person, or one class. On the other side, with the other type of person, the other class, he found a dominance of rationality, a rigidity of principles and the development of will and autonomy. What would be the equivalent today? As I already said: the rift runs right through each person today, depending on the situation, competencies and abilities are called on differently and they are trained one-dimensionally and in isolation by the definitive forces of the respective spheres. On the side of reason according to Kant and Schiller, there is today the personality shaped by work and transportation. He or she is objective, punctual, functional, and mobile, intensely fungible, but precisely not autonomous. In today’s consumer society, the sensuous side according to Kant and Schiller should find its correspondence in a human type who relishes life beyond the reality principle. However, we know already from Marcuse (2011) that the reality principle as performance principle dominates even the realm of free time and consumption. For some time now, we meet people who are not socialized by enjoyment but rather tuned for turnover and consumption; who are at bottom incapable of passion; live at a distance from their bodies; represent themselves as cool and unreceptive in their social relationships; and become increasingly relationship-poor, if not unable to commit.

It would be wrong to think that our young people still grow into these structures. As participants in public transport, as consumers of music and fashion, as nodes of telecommunication networks and floating, permanently changing social relationships, they were socialized into the entire system of technical civilization and aesthetic economy a long time ago. What can aesthetic education mean in such circumstances, and what is the task of the arts subject in schools?

Atmosphere as the object and medium of aesthetic education

Under contemporary conditions, I propose that atmospheres could take on the role Schiller once assigned in his aesthetic education to play. But what are atmospheres? To use an expression by Elisabeth Ströker, atmospheres are attuned spaces, or, following Hermann Schmitz, quasi-objective moods. I would define atmospheres as the spheres of felt bodily presence. Much better than such definitions, though, everyday language can lead us to an understanding of atmosphere. We speak of a serene valley or of the tense atmosphere in a discussion, we speak of an autumnal atmosphere or the atmosphere of the Twenties. These are turns of phrase by which one can easily communicate about a mood that is in the air, or about the emotional climate that prevails in the room. Here, I do not wish to repeat in detail the theory of atmosphere as a central element of Aesthetics as a General Theory of Perception (Böhme, 2001a),6 rather, only sketch some basic traits in outline.

An atmosphere must be palpable, which presupposes bodily presence – one must be in a landscape or a space, or one has to expose oneself to the aura of a work of art. One can feel the atmosphere in one’s disposition towards a particular mood. One is tuned by an atmosphere.

Each atmosphere has its own distinctive character. Indeed, we habitually talk about atmospheres by describing their character, and everyday language provides a surprisingly rich repertoire for this purpose. To start with, some of these characters are moods, so that people call an atmosphere serene or serious. Then, movement suggestions: atmospheres are felt as uplifting or oppressive. Next, synaesthesia: these are atmospheres that are identified by qualities that, as it were, cross sensory fields. Accordingly, one speaks of a cold or a rough atmosphere. Further, there are atmospheres of communicative character: they prevail during conversations or meetings between people. An atmosphere can be tense, for example; a conversation can be conducted in a rough tone; or the atmosphere can be engaging or aggressive. Finally, there are social atmospheres, which are determined particularly by their conventional aspects. Thus, one can talk of a petty-bourgeois atmosphere or of the atmosphere of the 1920s.

Another important aspect of the theory of atmospheres is the fact that atmospheres can be produced. They are, then, not just something one feels but something that can be generated deliberately by specific, indeed material constellations. The paradigm here is the art of scenography, where stage designers habitually produce a climate by arranging things, spatial constellations, light and sound in specific ways. As a result, a space of a particular basic mood arises on stage, within which the drama can then unfold.

We must now ask regarding aesthetic education in schools, is there something like atmospheric competence? To pursue this question, we first have to remember that atmospheres are exceedingly commonplace. They are what we live our lives in; we are determined by atmospheres and we determine them. We sense the atmosphere of a conversation we are part of. We feel the atmospheres of the rooms we enter, which are created by their architecture (i.e., physical mass and volume) and also by lighting conditions, acoustics, colours, and so on. Architecture and interior design, however, are not alone in providing atmospheres for spaces. There are also specific atmospheres we experience that are partially consciously produced: the sales atmosphere in boutique clothing and department stores, or the leisure atmosphere on promenades and in hotels. We are also familiar with atmospheres in the theatre and, generally, in art. Atmospheres prevail particularly in music, be it in concerts or as acoustic furnishings of everyday spaces that envelop us in atmospheres. In everyday life, we experience these atmospheres in passing, mostly unconsciously, and yet they have a great effect. An atmosphere provides us with a basic mood and affects us precisely because we do not specifically pay attention. It determines our disposition – even to the extent of potentially causing psychosomatic upsets.

Considering the ubiquity of atmospheres and the fact that we do not notice them explicitly, even as they affect and influence us, the first call of an aesthetic education must be to learn to perceive atmospheres. This has immediate, far-reaching consequences. First, it teaches us the meaning of bodily presence. By contrast with a telematic society, particularly, bodily presence stands out and gains greater appreciation. This is relevant particularly for the visual arts subject, where reproduction and representation are too easily the norm.7 Second, the body itself is rediscovered as a medium of emotional participation: dispositions are felt physically, and they are always dispositions in a spatial setting. Finally, we must learn or practise an attitude of patience: to perceive atmospheres takes time and openness, and we must allow ourselves to be involved and touched by them.

Just as we have to learn to perceive atmospheres and to be consciously involved in them, we also need to learn the opposite, productive side of atmospheres: we have to learn to make them. In this context, as said, the paradigm of scenography can provide an orientation. We must further realize, however, that the aestheticization of our world occurs, in large part, according to this paradigm: the design of cities, parks and landscapes; the mise-en-scène of the commodity world in department stores; the production of atmospheres in bars and hotels. We can learn a lot from the practitioners in this field, particularly that they do not operate by sign-posting or by suggesting meanings but, rather, by attempting to endow things, constellations, spaces or art works with an aura. By practising the production of atmospheres in the design of spaces or communicative scenes, young people learn to understand the function of generators, acquiring a dynamic relationship with the atmospheres they live in. Above all, however, they will be in a position to critique the production of atmospheres and the resulting manipulation as well.

There are, thus, atmospheric competencies consisting of the ability to perceive atmospheres, on the one hand, and the ability to make them, on the other. The backdrop to the explicit development of these competencies is, however, the fact that we always already live in atmospheres. We principally know our way around them and discover in our work with them that we even have a rich vocabulary to name them.

This, however, does not yet get us to our destination. The practice of atmospheric competencies could indeed be framed within the modest claims of visual art teaching, namely as an introduction to basic artistic techniques and to culture as art world. Is there more at stake with atmospheres? Does work on atmospheres stake a claim comparable to Schiller’s aesthetic education of humans to be humans? I would say so. To start with, there is a formal relationship: like play, an atmosphere is something medial, or mediating; it is an in-between, between subject and object, between determination and reception, between action and passion. And, just as play was meant to help Schiller’s contemporaries to achieve integrity between sensuousness and rationality, so can atmospheres help us overcome the split between consumption and functional objectivity. Except that people today are even worse off than the depraved individual Schiller had in mind in the eighteenth century. While Schiller still trusted his contemporaries possessed sensuous passion, on the one hand, and moral rigidity, on the other, there is reason to fear that our contemporaries lack the characteristics of the respective opposite of pleasure and autonomy. What is at stake, then, is not just the mediation of lopsided capacities but the fulfilment of depraved forms of life. The worlds of work and consumption fall apart and do not yield what they stand for: pleasure and autonomy. So, let us once again return to the two faces of atmospheres: perceiving and producing.

To perceive atmospheres means to open oneself emotionally. This can offset the externalization of the environment and counteract the lack of contact, the coolness of modern individuals. Getting involved in atmospheres is tantamount to wanting to participate and to expose oneself to impressions – a prerequisite for the experience of pleasure in life and the discovery of one’s body as a medium of being. Considering the immense pressure exerted by telecommunication, and how young people regard themselves as terminals in telematic networks as a matter of course, this rediscovery of bodily presence is of great importance. They can again feel that they are carriers and recipients of emotions and, rather than avatars in virtual space, bodies of flesh and blood, in traditional parlance.

Producing atmosphere, one steps out of slavish consumerism. The permanent staging of our everyday world, with its aesthetic emanations and acoustic furnishings, ensnares people in an entirely passive attitude of consumption, and particularly so in the area of aesthetics. Exercises in which atmospheres are shaped hone critical potential at the same time as possibilities of atmospheric creation are introduced, and they thereby strengthen the ability to resist economic and political manipulation. Finally, young people learn that they factually always co-produce atmospheres, particularly communicative atmospheres. Therefore, they will learn to take responsibility for what they contribute atmospherically to a discussion, a peer group, or a class session and, with that, retrieve part of their autonomy – precisely in an area in which everything appears to simply evolve by itself.

To conclude, it is worth noting that the appeal to Schiller’s letters, particularly, might suggest that the plea for an aesthetic education as the education of humans to become humans is a plea for a conservative project, or even a critique of contemporary culture. However, a conscious engagement with atmospheres does not reject the contemporary world. Quite the contrary, it is open to basic features of contemporary life, precisely, and engages with them critically. Atmosphere as the basic concept of a new aesthetics has been suggested by the leaning of contemporary art towards the performative, the tendency of new music towards spatial art, and the aestheticization and staging of everyday life. To learn to engage with atmospheres enables each individual to participate critically and to contribute to this world in which we live today.

1See Böhme (2001b), Chapters I.2–I.6.

²The archetype of this catastrophe for Schiller is probably the figure of Robespierre.

3Regarding this interpretation of Kant, see my book Kants Kritik der Urteilskraft in neuer Sicht (1999b).

⁴Kierkegaard’s sharp opposition between aesthetic and ethical life, in which he contrasts the playful with the serious, may well be a reaction to Schiller’s letters.

⁵See also pp. 33 and 66.

⁶Ästhetik als allgemeine Wahrnehmungslehre (Aesthetics as a general theory of perception) is the subtitle of my book Aisthetik (2001a).

⁷Regarding the reclamation of aura as a principal characteristic of modern art in the late twentieth century, see Dieter Mersch (2002).