Free Essay. Atmospheric Attunement

Atmospheric attunement by Kathleen Stewart is an article that describes the changes in all human aspects and their atmosphere in their daily life. The article describes the way changes forces are generated in the people's atmosphere, how these forces spawn the world, formulate forms of detachment and attachment, and became the basis of people's lives. According to the article, atmospheric attunement is a process in which people dwell in places the bears, gestates, gestures in the world. In this case, things matter to people because they have forces, rhythms, movements, relations, and qualities. In people's daily lives, there is an attunement to worlding, with all sorts of spaces getting occupied. Using the poem Bees by Jane Hirshfield, Stewart describes the ordinary buzzes characterized by the background noise of ruts, resting points, and intensities. Similarly, an atmospheric fill hums with promising reverberation that is either developing or fading away, with materialism expressing itself by coming into existence (Stewart).

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In the article, Stewart tends to discuss the nature of existence in the atmosphere. In the discussion, the atmosphere is not a static condition, but instead, it is a field of force where individuals find themselves being either players or spectators. It is how living affects various aspects of life because it can push current events into different compositions (Stewart). As a result, the atmosphere is an attunement of the labors, imaginaries, and senses to possible ways of living or existing in or through things in society. The pressure to live through things pool up and culminate to worldlings and different ways of reacting to the events such as developing redemption cultures, forms of cocooning, trauma cultures, public feelings as a result of rage, sarcasm or humor, recreational worlds, worlds of self-help, volunteering, exercise, activism or art (Stewart). These reactions are aspects of people's lives that some individuals find themselves in and out, or others build in or make fun of temporarily before moving to another event. According to Stewart, atmospheric attunement, therefore, an ability to sense the occurrence and creating an attachment to such an event.

The arguments in the article concur with non-representational theory (Thrift), including 'fictocriticism' (Muecke) and 'weak theory' (Sedgwick), and Latour (2007), material-semiotic of actor-network theory. All these approaches, similar to atmospheric attunement by Kathleen Stewart, attempt to new ways of imagining or thinking about events that are happening in society. Stewart attempt to outline the concept 'geography of what happens' by Thrift (2007), which is a speculative topography of daily sensibilities as a result of living through events or things. All these works, first attempt to dedramatize theory, to loosen the formal story by using heavy presumptions and moralism of an automatic and proper relationship forged between thinking subjects, world, and concept.

The author argues in the article tends to create a sense of critical questioning about our feelings, behavior, or actions in society. After reading the article, I began to question some of the meaningful choices and decisions that I have made in life, especially whether those choices were personal or were as a result of the effect of atmospheric attunement. After critiquing most of my decision, I am convinced that my attempt to live through things motivate most of my choices. For example, my academic career choices are as a result of my family's economic conditions. My current career choice offers a better opportunity for improving my family's social welfare. In this case, if my family were financially stable, I would have chosen a different career. Because of my career choice, I am convinced that people make decisions as a result of the condition of their atmosphere, while at the same time, the state of people's atmosphere is as a result of their choices.

From the above discussion, it is evident that the atmosphere is a force that people find themselves in it. These forces push the existence and events in society into their current expressivity, composition, and sense of potentiality. The atmosphere thus acts as forces that tune people's senses, potentials, and behaviors towards living through certain circumstances in their daily lives. Besides, the atmosphere is characterized by the buzz of activities that forces people to react, think, and behave in specific ways.

Works Cited

Hirshfield, Jane. "The lives of the heart." The Yale Review 85.1 (1997): 54-55.

Latour, Bruno. "Reassembling the social." Politica y Sociedad 43.3 (2007): 127-130.

Muecke, Stephen. "The fall: fictocritical writing." parallax 8.4 (2002): 108-112.

Sedgwick, David. Introduction to Jungian psychotherapy: The therapeutic relationship. Routledge, 2003.

Stewart, Kathleen. "Atmospheric attunements." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29.3 (2011): 445-453.

Thrift, Nigel. Non-representational theory: Space, politics, affect. Routledge, 2008.