Aerostatic spacing: on things becoming lighter than air

Abstract

The development of practical aerostatic or lighter than air balloon flight in 1783 marked the emergence of a new way of being and becoming mobile, one that also involved an important technical and experiential transformation in earth-atmosphere relations. This paper narrates an account of the distinctive kinds of spaces of which aerostatic flight is generative. At the centre of this account is the claim that the affective materiality of aerostatic flight is simultaneously processual and possessing of what political theorist Jane Bennett calls 'thing-power'. In developing this claim, the paper draws from a range of historical and contemporary accounts of aerostatic flight in order to elaborate upon three aspects of the spaces of things becoming aerostatic: the distinctive kinds of sensing of which aerostatic flight is generative; the differential qualities of affectivity in which the movement and materiality of aerostatic things participates; and the kinds of vertiginous events in which the felt movement -actual or anticipated -of aerostatic things is implicated. The paper concludes by speculating upon how attending to the distinctive and sometimes disquieting materiality of aerostatic things might contribute to geographical engagements with the spaces of air and atmosphere. key words air affectivity atmosphere balloon materiality mobility PreambleIt begins rather suddenly, torque-like: a sense of anchorage giving way to tensile instability. It happens as a minor corporeal reorientation, an incremental rebalancing of body-space, an unthinking adjustment of feet: the sensing of a kind of torsional ungrounding. This sense is quickly replaced however by something else: steady uplift, generated by 5500 metres cubed of enveloped helium, the force of which is balanced by the steel cable unwinding, slowly, from a point hidden somewhere below the ground. And so commences the experience of ascent, one which, save for wind, metalcreak and audible cablestrain, is largely silent.Derek P McCormack Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 34 25-41 2009

Visuality, Hybridity, and Colonialism: Imagining Ethiopia Through Colonial Aviation, 1935–1940

“…Furthermore, geographical emphasis on the spatialities of transport has identified the key importance of the spatial dimension of transport in mediating interactions and discourse(s): Social and cultural categories are constructed through their representation and enactment within the volumetric space of an airliner's fuselage and wider spaces of transport, such as those of the airport (Adey 2004b(Adey , 2008. Spaces of transport, and spaces in transit, become loci for the constitution of discourses specific not only to the technologies of travel but also to the interactions experienced or represented within those spaces (Watts 2008;Bissell 2009;D. McCormack 2009).…”

The art of parachuting: Embodied geopolitics, aerial aesthetics and dance‐based combat training at Ringway Aerodrome, 1940–1946

“…Of particular interest are the human–non‐human encounters with the aerial realm. While McCormack () has turned to the development of lighter‐than‐air aircraft in providing new possibilities for sensing aerostatic space (see McCormack, ), it is arguably the rapid expansion of aerial warfare during the 20th century that heralded a new breed of aerial men (Adey, ; on airspace as gender neutral see Millward, ). Daring, resourceful, and patriotic, these men embodied the geopolitical aesthetics of dominance and spectacle (Van Riper, ; Wohl, ).…”

Toward a poetics of air: sequencing and surfacing breath

“…Indeed the notion that air gathers a constellation of political and scientific concerns, epitomised in Barry's () explication of air as an ‘informed material’, enlivens crucial debates on the public understanding of air quality and respiratory health (Bickerstaff and Walker ; Cupples ) and the security of air in times of protest (Nieuwenhuis ). Resonating with the disciplinary interest in affect and emotion, Anderson () has theorised the qualities and ambiguities of ‘affective atmospheres’ and McCormack ( ) has argued fluently for a conception of atmosphere that enfolds both meteorological and affective registers, taking the balloon as an object whose ‘thing‐power’ generates modes of ‘sensing stillness in motion’. Crucial to this scholarship and to my own is the understanding that affects have airiness: emanating, circulating and circulating, circumventing (Anderson ) from vibrations (Bissell ), bodies (Colls ; McCormack ), words and gestures (Stewart ) and technological perturbations (Ash ), among many other things.…”

“…Against this interdisciplinary context, this paper addresses two sets of provocations. The first is the challenge set forth by McCormack, Dewsbury and Edensor among others to explore new ways to register and trace the materiality of atmospheric space (Dewsbury ; Edensor ; McCormack ). To this end, at the core of my study is a borrowing of cultural anthropologist Tim Choy's concept of ‘air's poetics’ that in its broadest sense denotes a mode of attentiveness to the deeply affective and personal resonance of airy matters.…”