On the communication of atmospheres and moods

Abstract

The relationship between humans and their environment is a bilateral relationship. It affects and is affected. The same is true for ecological transformations. Human everyday actions can contribute to ecological transformations and also be affected by that.

Human experience of the environment and their susceptibility to environmental changes depend on various factors. Part of it is due to the physical changes in the environment and another part is influenced by the political, social, and media behaviors that are being formed based on ecological transformations such as climate change. Depending on these matters, a person’s experience of the environment and daily actions can also be formed.

The political “way of dealing” with global warming owes much to an immersive politics of effect. The mass media support the governing parties by providing directional (dis)information. German climate policy is based exclusively on statistical data and forecasts that have been prepared on the basis of natural science methods. Sensual “approaches” to climate change do not play any role. This makes the question of what politically generated moods communicate and in what way all the more urgent. And: how do the moods generated in social fields have an effect on political atmospheres and these in turn on (collective) moods? This also raises the question of the mode of crisis-management. In other words, of the relationship between human capacities of understanding (Verstand) here and those of reason (Vernunft) there, but also of the power of the irrational acting on this process.

On the other hand, the presence of environmental activists in public spaces, such as weekly demonstrations in city centers, is continuously affecting people’s environmental experiences. As a result, even if climate change itself cannot produce any sensual perception, the actions and practices can touch people’s everyday lives and affect them. Based on that the questions arise: How climate change affects people emotionally as a consequence of the socially and politically discursive ways of dealing with it? How do discourses “about” climate change, demos, and absurd actions (activists who stick to the street) have an emotional influence on the relationship to nature and the relationship to politics, which pretends to put this relationship to nature on new feet? And also in which way these discourses and actions are emotionalizing?

In this context we discuss the following questions:

• Are there sensory ways of understanding climate change? How could they appear and be used for the political management of the crisis?
• How do moods and atmospheres intertwine in crisis communication?
• What influence do ways of non-verbal communication have on the course of climate discourses (thematically as well as methodologically).
• Which forms of affectedness (via mind and emotion) have an impact on the process of political crisis management?