ABSTRACT
Hermann Schmitz’s seminal writings on atmosphere have been brokered to a wider anglophone audience by Gernot Bohme. Bohme’s seminal monograph Atmosphare: Essays zur Neuen Asthetik and his essay “Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics” advocated a new theory of aesthetic perception that centred on the comingling of body and environment. In music and sound scholarship, for instance, both terms have been mobilised in an effort to challenge a reduction of music to immaterial form and to oppose naïve notions of listening as mental perception tout court. While “affect” is an important notion in Schmitz’s theory of atmosphere, he explicitly distances himself from the Baroque notion of affect by insisting that the work of early Enlightenment scholar Baruch Spinoza is too speculative, and that Spinoza’s monist ontology is too mechanistic and too simplistic. Patrick Eisenlohr’s writings on atmosphere and sound relates Schmitz to Brian Massumi’s theory of affect in terms of the question of meaningfulness.
