“I love a party with a happy atmosphere”; notes on the ontology of interpersonal atmosphere

Abstract

The common English term ‘party’ is often used to refer to a gathering of people (often assembled for the purposes of celebration). This short article considers the ontology of parties and gathers some ways to describe the party as a social atmosphere produced by certain kinds of aesthetic work. It suggests that a party as a ‘thing’, an assembly or gathering of objects and people (Latour, 2004), is characterised and perhaps catalysed by affective exchange achieved and maintained through an assemblage of material and interpersonal ingredients and actions. Parties are relational events characterised by and comprised of what goes on in the ‘in-between’ space between individuals, groups, and environment. This porous interface is what we might refer to as ‘atmosphere’. Here I draw on the work of scholars who have thought about atmosphere and it's implications for understanding the subjectivity, bodily presence and meaning in aesthetics as constitutive of the things that they apprehend, for example Gernot Böhme’s “ecological aesethetics” (Chandler, 2011, p.553). Applying this work to the commonplace English phrase ‘party atmosphere’ shows how the party can be most satisfyingly understood through a relational ontology.