ABSTRACT
Contours of feeling move across helium as matter and affective force. I trace this movement along helium’s forms as it comes into perceptibility and withdraws the pleasure of its lift turning to the melancholy of loss. This play across matter and affect settles in the concept of “atmosphere,” which tends to be conceived of as alternately air or affect, the gaseous medium that makes earth habitable or mood, the elemental or a mode of attunement. Atmosphere affords attention to the diffuse and indeterminate, to that which falls outside of objective categories, and to its coalescence as elemental, sensory-affective, and concept. Helium itself withdraws. Generally inaccessible to immediate human perception, helium is present in its traces. These both contain (or release) helium and anchor affect, doing work that is at once physical and discursive.
