“The air, the air is everywhere,” they sang back in the hippie days in the musical Hair . That was 1967, when we still thought air pollution was the only thing wrong with the air. Since the age of industrialization, air pollution in the form of smoke and soot has been seen as a symptom of modernization, both hailed as a sign of industrial progress and loathed as a transformation of breathable atmosphere. 1 Today, with climate change, we know better. Air quality has moved from a local predicament to a global disruption, affecting not just local biotopes, landscapes, and settlements, but the entire life system of the planet. This brings into focus a substance so basic to life on earth that we are hardly ever aware of it. Yet, what is air ? We breathe it, we feel it, we travel in it, and we are touched by it. We see and hear only through and within it. Air is generally defined as the atmosphere of the earth, the layer of different types of gas surrounding the planet. Chemically, air contains 78.09 percent nitrogen, 20.95 percent oxygen, 0.93 percent argon and other trace gases, and 0.04 percent carbon dioxide, as well as some other greenhouse gases. In addition, air can contain a variable amount of water vapor, depending on location and weather conditions. Most of these components are imperceptible to the human body unless their proportion in the atmosphere changes significantly. What we usually do feel is air temperature, humidity, and— with strong winds or high altitudes—changes in air pressure. Finally, microparticles and aerosols, generally known as “air pollution.” With unprecedented levels of pollution in cities such as Beijing, Delhi, or Riyadh, we can feel and see the profound alteration that modern life has brought upon the air.

Seen this way, air is a chemical formula, a complex, yet clearly defined scientific object studied in disciplines such as climatology, atmospheric chemistry, physics, and medicine. Air, in the words of Bruno Latour, is “a matter of fact.” 2 Be it in the form of pollution or rising levels of greenhouse gases, the changing composition of air is also one of the biggest environmental problems we face— a “metaproblem,” as it were, composed of many changes and disruptions, such as rising levels of greenhouse gases, the acidification of the oceans, the ozone hole, and so on. As such, the air has become a “matter of concern”: a highly contentious object of political debate and human decision-making. Even if, in the last decades, we have improved our models and simulations of the chemistry and p. 8 dynamics of the earth’s atmosphere and enlarged our knowledge about how potential future behavior will influence this hypercomplex system, “air,” currently mostly referred to as “climate” or “atmosphere,” remains elusive, both as a matter of fact and as a matter of concern. 3 Air radically transcends traditional scales and instances of political decision-making from municipalities to nation-states and even supranational institutions. One of the most important yet most difficult challenges politics faces today is, in Latour’s words, “to assemble a political body able to claim its part of responsibility for the Earth’s changing state.” 4 The question is how and on what basis such a political body might be assembled. How could we conceive of air as a novel political entity that demands new forms of knowledge, decision-making, and consensus? As Jim Dator writes, the problem is not just one of conflicting interests but of the scale at which these conflicts play out: “Environmental, economic, technological and health factors are global, but our governance systems are still based on the nation state, while our economic system (‘free market’ capitalism) and many national political systems (interest group ‘democracy’) remain profoundly individualistic in input, albeit tragically collective in output.” 5 The air is both global and local, and it is a hybrid between human politics, scientific knowledge, and processes of nature. Yet it is also, paradoxically, an object that defies its scientific “objectification” and a matter so elusive that it refuses to be mere “matter.” “The air is unique among the elements in … signifying the being of non-being, the matter of the immaterial ,” Steven Connor writes. 6 Air is an issue that is so close and so omnipresent that we still have a hard time even grasping it as an “issue”—and not just taking it for granted as mere background.

AN ELEMENTAL MEDIUM

To seize the complicated nature of the air, this article proposes an understanding of air not so much as mere matter but as a medium . This means looking not only at what air is and how it behaves —considered from the standpoint of the natural sciences—but also at the functions attributed to it as a medium: more specifically, as a medium of life . I will therefore focus mostly on its epistemology ; that is, on the current and historical functions attributed to the air and its various synonyms such as climate , atmosphere , or weather . Instead of seeing air as an externalized object of scientific investigation, this means undertaking a historical and cultural epistemology of air not only as an environment but also as an intrinsic element of human civilization, human knowledge, and phenomenological experience, as Luce Irigaray suggests: “Is not air the whole of our habitation as mortals? Is there a dwelling more vast, more spacious, or even more generally peaceful than that p. 9 of air? Can man live elsewhere than in air?” 7

How might air be understood as a “medium”? A medium is that which is “in the middle,” between two entities (the word is originally derived from Greek metaxy —“in between, among”), or “a substance regarded as the means of transmission of a force or effect … a surrounding or enveloping substance.” 8 Recent media theory tells us that media are not just human-constructed tools and technologies of communication, data processing, storage, and representation. The notion of “media” cannot be reduced to technology and “aesthetics.” As John Durham Peters argues, media are, more elementarily, “vessels and environments, containers of possibility that anchor our existence and make what we are doing possible.” 9 Elements of nature such as air, climate, the ozone layer, fire, water, and soil are not just the material basis of life; they are its conditions of possibility , its “infrastructure,” as it were. Based on the antique theories of the four elements, David Macauley suggests that rediscovering “an elemental connection with the natural world and earth, fire, air, and water, … we might find once again … that the elements are also our … means of constructing and connecting with the cosmos.” 10 The elements are the basis not just of biological life but of life in a cognitive and social sense. In this context, however, I would like to focus on the specificity of air, precisely because of its “medial” qualities, its constitutive function not just for biological life as we know it but for the social dimension of human life. The philosopher Emanuele Coccia has recently argued for understanding the medial nature of air as the principle of mixture and connection: “The climate is the system of cosmic fluidity… . In order for a climate to exist, all the elements within a given space must be at once mixed and identifiable—united … through the same ‘atmosphere.’” 11 The air enables movement and perception (hearing, sight, and smell), as well as communication, travel, situatedness, and dislocation, inasmuch as it joins the members of societies and cultures in a common climate. To treat air as a medium is above all to take a methodological approach that facilitates a broader understanding and appreciation of the role air plays in conditioning and articulating forms of life. I therefore suggest observing and analyzing the ways in which, historically and epistemologically, air has been addressed as a medium. Historically, air has served as an interface by means of which discourses on identity, social institutions, and human bodies could be linked to landscapes, the atmosphere, the vagaries of the weather, and the heavens. As such, air has been the medium that has both linked and differentiated society and nature, the local and the global, cultural identity and difference. Finally, a media analysis of air may bring back into focus a complex cultural understanding of climate that has been lost with a modern understanding of atmosphere.

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PLACES AND FLOWS

To come to an understanding of the strange status of air as a medium linking natural and social spheres, one may start by looking into a genealogy of the conceptions and approaches humankind has developed to understand and describe the nature and effects of the air. While today we tend to externalize and objectify air—or, more generally, the “environment”—as a fact of nature that must be separated from the constructions of human civilization, older discourses on air challenge this separation. Human bodies, minds, and mentalities were once considered to be profoundly formed by the climates in which they dwelt. This tradition, which ranges from antiquity to the Enlightenment and beyond, offers an epistemologically “messier” but richer definition of air than today’s definition of climate as the “average weather.” The older definition is based on the antique theory of the four elements—air, water, fire, and earth—established by the Pre- Socratic philosophers. The Milesian philosopher Anaximenes considered air the primary substance from which all other elements are made, thus claiming that all matters are, in essence, one and the same. While Pre-Socratic theories of the elements have recently been revived as a fundamental alternative to the Cartesian separation of matter and spirit, nature and culture, one of the earliest treatises in medicine, “Airs, Waters, and Places,” attributed to Hippocrates, develops a more specific theory of air as human environment . 12 “Whoever wishes to investigate medicine properly,” the treatise begins, “should … consider the seasons of the year, and what effects each of them produces, for they are not at all alike … the winds, the hot and the cold, especially such as are common to all countries, and then such as are peculiar to each locality.” 13 The text, which dates to the fifth century BCE, develops a theory of the influences of “air”—here used as an umbrella term incorporating multiple natural factors such as wind, air quality, rainfall, the nature of the soil, water sources, and seasonal weather patterns. The text argues that human life is intricately bound to what we would call “environmental conditions.” As bodies are marked by the peculiarities of the locations and climes that people dwell in, so are the mentalities of the inhabitants. The climate, used in this broader sense, was even thought to have a profound influence on human life, culture, and social institutions. For better or worse, human beings were seen as fundamentally marked by the places ( topoi ) where they lived. The air was considered to be the link between bodies, civilizations, and their environment.

Derived from the Greek klinein (to lean, rest, recline, bend), “climate” was originally a purely geographical term, denoting a position on the earth defined by latitude (i.e., the specific inclination of the sun on a given place at summer solstice). Early on, however, the heat or cold of any locale within the known p. 11 world was seen to account for the mentality, the ethnic features, and the cultural institutions of the human beings living there. Shaping the life in a given place, the air served to explain the differences between cultures, religions, social institutions, and mentalities. For a long time, cultural differences were strongly attributed to the differences between the climatic zones. Hot climes, the argument went, produced cultures and mentalities prone to laziness and lust, while cold or temperate zones were said to foster cultures governed by rationality, discipline, and a lack of imagination, as Montesquieu, for example, claimed. 14 Air here is a predicament that binds together individuals, bodies, metabolisms, mentalities, social institutions, and political forms. It can even account for aesthetic styles, tastes, forms of thinking, or the preponderance of certain psychic dispositions such as melancholy. 15 This idea of a causal link between climate and society is today largely rejected as climate determinism, which has historically been exploited to promote racist and colonialist arguments about the alleged superiority of cooler climates over hot zones. Yet it can also be understood as a way of theorizing the bond between civilization and its material living conditions, without necessarily falling prey to the deterministic or racist fallacy. It is a way of understanding culture and civilization not as forms of human independence from nature but as negotiations with the environments in which they find themselves implicated.

While drawing on Enlightenment theory of climate as an important factor in the formation of civilizations, the eighteenth-century philosopher Johann Gottlieb Herder sought to escape the deterministic conclusion. Making a pun on the Greek verb klinein , he writes, “The climate does not force but inclines” (“Das Klima zwinget nicht, sondern es neiget”). 16 Climate creates a cultural and anthropological disposition that influences how human beings establish their forms of life in a given location, yet it does not forcibly determine them. Every organism and every community has a degree of freedom within the climate she, he, or it inhabits. Herder may not have been the first thinker to observe some of the human effects on meteorological and climatic phenomena, but he was one of the first to see the relation of climate and culture as a mutual transformation: human beings are not only influenced by climate; they, in turn, actively transform landscapes and local climates. 17 Culture, in Herder’s perspective, starts with elementary cultural techniques such as agriculture and canalization that profoundly change landscapes and climates:

Once, Europe was a dank forest; and other regions … were the same. They are now exposed to the rays of the Sun; and the inhabitants themselves have changed with the climate… . We may consider mankind, therefore, as a p. 12 band of bold though diminutive giants, gradually descending from the mountains to subjugate the earth and climates with their feeble arms. How far they are capable of going in this respect futurity will show. 18

According to Herder’s model, human cultures are in a feedback loop with climate: by changing the climate, humankind changes itself. Culture is a self-transformation through the transformation of nature, yet always inclined, bent, twisted by the gentle or brutal forces of the air. Dwelling in the air means coming together as living beings, being formed and transformed by weather, winds, seasons, and temperatures. Cultures, in turn, must be seen as working the air , transforming it into an inhabitable, productive, and even exploitable basis of life. Opposing a Kantian understanding of human culture and freedom as freedom from the forces of nature , such an understanding of climate offers a model of human freedom as embedded in its local environment. Culture’s condition of possibility is this “place” marked by its air; a climatic condition can be attributed neither solely to nature nor to humans. Retrieving this mostly forgotten meaning of climate involves recalling the embeddedness of any human civilization in the place in which it dwells.

Yet dwelling in the climate is not the only way of being in the air. Climate, as Herder writes, “is a compound of powers and influences, to which both plants and animals contribute, and which every thing that has breath forms as an allencompassing system.” 19 Climate is thus not just a local predicament constituting a “sense of place,” as Ursula Heise notes, but also a link between places, living beings, microclimates. Thus creating a global network of influences and differences, this “sense of place” is also a “sense of planet,” a medium of relations and differences. 20 Alongside the history of air as a theory of “place” is an equally long tradition of thinking about “meteors,” the emanations of air floating in the space between the earth and the moon. While “climate” indicates a locality, “meteorology,” as defined by Aristotle, deals with the evanescent, unpredictable flows and dynamics of the air—such as comets, clouds, winds, hail, and thunderstorms. 21 Meteōros means “floating,” “lofty,” “raised up high.” Meteorology thus does not look at given states and localities but at flows, movements, and singularities. Such are, for Aristotle, the exhalations and emanations of the air, the forms and formations hovering in it (e.g., clouds, boreal fires, rain, hail), as well as its complex dynamics. Meteors are transient mixtures of the elements fire, water, and earth with and inside the fourth element: air. 22

The meteorological approach to the realm of the air thus focuses on the dynamis , the power or energy of the air, the air as the medium of movement. 23 Here, air is seen not so much as determining a specific location but as a system p. 13 of fluxes and forces, a conveyor belt of movement and transport, a medium of events. It is also the ever-moving carrier of the seeds of life. Alexander von Humboldt refers to the atmosphere as an “aerial ocean [ Luftozean ] in which we are submerged,” and in his maps of the “isotherms” of 1823, he charts for the first time its thermic states as they depart from the system of geographical latitudes. For Humboldt, life floats and hovers in the air in the form of “fertilizing dust or pollen,” “seeds of plants,” “eggs of insects,” and microorganisms. p. 24 Humboldt writes, “Even on the polar ice the air resounds with the cries or songs of birds, and with the hum of insects. Nor is it only the lower dense and vaporous strata of the atmosphere which are thus filled with life, but also the higher and more ethereal regions.” 25

The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries would speak of climates as circumfusa : that which flows around organisms, engulfs and transports the bodies of living beings, be they plants, animals, or human beings, in an ever-moving, ever-changing medium. Circumfusa could be the beneficial effects of “good air” (e.g., in mountain resorts or by the coast), or it could be the deleterious emanations that bring diseases and epidemics. “The circumfuse,” writes the French doctor Michel Lévy,

(i.e. the things that surround us), represent that which Hippocrates called the airs, the waters and the places… . In all latitudes, human beings demarcate a space for their homes where they create a special milieu, a climate within a climate… . Mankind is bound to the atmosphere by these relations that are necessary, constant, uninterrupted, they are in harmony with his organization, and his living conditions. 26

Meteorology—in this wider sense—is about the surprising bounties and unpredictable disasters brought forth by air as a system of movements and flows, of forces both merciful and destructive.

What this brief genealogy conveys is the twofold nature of air as both “climate” and “weather.” A climatic understanding of air, on the one hand, involves a territorializing principle of place, of environment, of a culture’s situatedness in nature and nature’s gentle force within culture, a sense of seasonal cycles, of repetition and stability. Air, in this sense, is about states and conditions; it determines the quality and the many different modes of human life. On the other hand, air understood as “meteos” or weather refers to a deterritorializing principle of planetary dynamics and forces, of unsteadiness and singularity. Air, in this sense, is about events and energy, not states. Air as weather carries surprise and even disaster; it is a bearer of life or death. While air used to be understood as the p. 14 principle of dwelling and of flowing, of place and of planet, a link between all living things, today it seems to be neither of these.