Abstract
Ambiance is rooted in a fragile, spectral and precarious mode of existence. What of its ability to infuse everyday experiences and to atmospherize ordinary situations? What happens when we approach ambiance along its influences and its operational modes? Being of a lesser existence, ambiance exerts impregnating powers. Three complementary perspectives are explored. First, ambiance can be addressed as an in-between that phenomenalizes the world and makes any situation perceptible. Second, ambiance can be addressed as an attunement that highlights our ability to be affected by our surroundings and in turn affect them. Third, ambiance can be addressed as a background that helps us to understand how it infuses our various ways of being together. Ambiance does not operate through narrow determinism or strict causality, rather as an unobtrusive influence. It proceeds by continuous accompaniment which infuses and steers experience. Ambiance’s powers of impregnation reveal five key features: (1) we are dealing with the pervasive, multi-sensory influence of a singular, sensory environment; (2) this influence takes hold over time, durably and continuously; (3) it proceeds mainly at a corporeal and molecular level, usually going unnoticed; (4) this unobtrusive influence involves a specific mode of propagation proceeding from one neighbouring body to the next, by contagion and imitation; and (5) this type of impregnation is fundamentally anonymous and impersonal in nature, with no clearly identifiable author.
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Acknowledgements
This chapter has previously been published in French in a slightly modified version. See: Thibaud, J.-P. (2018). Les puissances d’imprégnation de l’ambiance. Communications, 102, 67–80.
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Thibaud, JP. (2019). The Lesser Existence of Ambiance. In: Griffero, T., Tedeschini, M. (eds) Atmosphere and Aesthetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24942-7_10
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