No abstract

This paper introduces Spinoza's notion of conatus as the principle of desire that animates how we strive to persist in the world. Spinoza argues that our conatus is affected by the encounters and relations that make up socio‐spatial life, meaning that the desires that animate our striving are more often than not shaped by external powers. Centralising the notion of conatus therefore highlights how what geographers have come to term “affects” can be understood to be thoroughly imbricated in complex conditions of desire. The paper then pulls out the ethico‐political consequences of thinking with conatus. First, this involves engaging the political problem of the “passions” as the affective trace of the processes in which our desires are shaped by powers greater than ourselves and which, Spinoza argues, often leave us striving in ways that are contrary to our flourishing. Second, the paper turns to what Spinoza calls the ‘common notions’ as a way of thinking ethics as a practice for composing more joyful modes of persisting in common. Ethics becomes a practice of thought aimed toward the expression of the numerous ways in which the “I” that desires is inseparable from the powers of others – be they people, ideas, events, institutions, or anything else – such that the very identity of that “I” is thrown into disarray. Throughout, the paper draws on Gilles Deleuze's interpretations of Spinoza for the way that Deleuze foregrounds passivity, the capacity to be affected, not as necessarily a weakness but as a rich field of ethico‐political potential.

No abstract

This paper examines the cultural popularity of ‘ambient music’ playlists on digital streaming platforms as a paradigm of the technical fabrication of atmospheres and the modulation of affect in some of the media environments of contemporary capitalism. Ambient music names a style of non-intrusive, gentle background music designed to assist the listener in relaxing or focussing on work. At the centre of the paper is the argument that ambient music demonstrates how the intimate tonalities of human behaviour are increasingly shaped through media technologies in ways that hold significant implications for how we feel and perceive our senses of being in the world today. Developing this argument, the paper advances two claims. First, drawing on the work of Peter Sloterdijk, that ambient music exemplifies the ‘immunological’ character of atmospheric envelopment. Second, that ambient music points towards the role of digital technologies capable of supporting new atmospheric envelopments as facilitating what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call ‘investments of desire’, new conjunctions between flows of information, behaviours, value and affects that are central to the processes of contemporary capitalism. Finally, the paper speculates on ambient music in its relation to the atmospheric conditions of life in contemporary capitalist societies.