Conclusion

This book has sought to map out “both sides” of ambient subjectivation, attending to both the real mobility and healing on offer and the potentially dubious aspects of mediated mood regulation and therapy culture. Nikolas Rose notes this doubled-edged quality as something inherent to neoliberal techniques of self:

On the one hand, in freeing many questions concerning the proper conduct of life from the authoritative prescriptions and proscriptions of political, religious, and social authorities, [neoliberalism] pluralizes the answers that can be provided, opening up a field of diversity within which each subject is obliged to locate themselves. On the other hand, in relocating these questions of the conduct of life within the field of expertise, in tying it to norms of truth and health, it binds subjects to a subjection that is the more profound because it appears to emanate from our autonomous quest for ourselves—it appears as a matter of our freedom.1

In closing the book, I want to similarly emphasize how ambient subjectivation results in both actual gains in personal freedom (a partial reprieve from the totalizing demands of an isorhythmic identity) and more insidious forms of social control (operating in ways more environmental and atmospheric and thus more difficult to consciously register and perhaps resist). As Rose notes, this places an immense amount of responsibility on people seeking to steer their own subjective well-being, asking them not only to monitor and design their own subjectivations but to remain vigilant against social environments increasingly mobilized to tune them in ways often well below conscious awareness.

Over the course of the book I have touched on some troubling aspects of the turn to therapeutic media, and it is worth continuing to question the type of mood-regulating self ambient media produce. There is always far more to life than how you feel about it. At the same time, however, ambient approaches to subjectivation hold out the possibility for attunement to something besides the status quo. I will end on a hopeful note by considering some of these alternative trajectories.

Ambient media may remain limited as tools of critique, but by providing “calm, and a space to think” they are never simply operating as a social anesthetic. While neoliberalism pretends the foreground can operate independently of the background, the rise of ambient subjectivation might also provoke a shift away from this modern conception of the strong self and its posture of independence from the surrounding environment. Ambient media might emphasize everyone’s entwinement with the affective attunements of shared space and call on audiences to become reflective and participatory agents in the design of these collective moods. An ambient understanding of self necessarily situates the person in an intimate relationship with larger ecologies, affirming our interdependency not only with other people but with the affordances of the objects and environments we live with and through.

Tellingly, experiences of physical weakness and vulnerability have often served as instigators for a turn to this type of ambient awareness. Consider Brian Eno’s well-known story of “discovering” ambient music while immobilized in his apartment, in bed convalescing after being run down by a taxi. A friend comes by and puts an album of harp music on the record changer on low volume and leaves while it is still playing. Eno feels compelled to adjust the volume but with his broken bones cannot get up to do so. Forced to keep listening, he discovers how the low-level music blends with the sounds of the street outside, mixing together into a restful soundscape and leading Eno to imagine an “ambient music” designed for this more environmental form of audition.2

Hosono Haruomi’s turn to ambience grew from a similar encounter with his own physical limits. In interviews from just before his ambient period, he is forthcoming about his own difficulties dealing with stress, particularly after achieving celebrity as a member of Yellow Magic Orchestra. In a 1984 interview with Yoshinari Mayumi, he describes using music as a technology of personal stress relief:

Lately, I tend to get neurotic. There are difficult times when I feel emotionally oppressed. At the same time as I feel it mentally, it also tends to manifest physically, and my stomach starts to hurt. I feel how the body and mind are connected. . . . The only thing that helps me for stress relief is making music. I don’t have any other way. It’s like music is a place to deposit stress [laughs]. During YMO, I used to joke that music was my “fatigue deposit box,” but lately this has become even more true. It feels like it’s reaching a critical stage. I really want to find some way to help use up all this tension [laughs].3

This growing fatigue eventually resulted in a painful but fortuitous experience not unlike Eno’s. Hosono discusses this in a casual 2000 conversation with former YMO bandmate Sakamoto Ryūichi:

Fifteen years before this interview works out to 1984 or 1985—not long after Hosono’s conversation with Yoshinari. As with Eno, broken bones forced Hosono to slow down and rethink what it means to be vulnerable to environmental influence, just as he was getting into ambient music as a style.

Arai Man tells a similar tale, recalling how he first developed an interest in ambient aesthetics after falling seriously ill while a college student at Sophia University in Tokyo. Losing half his body weight before recovering, he realized his life had been too much about “adding” and not enough about “subtracting.”5

For Kurita Yuki an ambient emphasis on recovery came about in the context of care for someone else. While writing her first novella, Hamisabeth, a close friend was hospitalized. As Kurita imagined her work being read by this sick friend, themes of illness and healing began to seep into her writing.6

Each of these ambient origin stories point to a growing awareness of personal vulnerability and a growing understanding of how media can serve as atmospheric tools for healing self and others. After coming face to face with physical weakness, these people found ways of transforming environmental susceptibility into an opportunity for healing. Riffing on Giovanni Vattimo’s concept of “weak thought” (pensiero debole), Hosokawa Shūhei describes the emergence of what he calls “weak listening” (yowai chōshu): an approach to recorded music that doesn’t call for or even allow the kind of concentrated focus of the modern concert hall setting.7 Weak listening blurs the dichotomy between audience and recording, allowing for a sense of self emerging with and through the influence of the surrounding world, rather than asserting the mastery of a unified subject over and above it. In weak listening, the listener (or hearer, since the listening/hearing distinction is largely meaningless here) submits to the recording and through this finds a kind of freedom based in and through its atmosphere. It is precisely this “weak” aspect of the sensing body ambient media embraces, carving out forms of environmental agency from within this seemingly passive position.

There need not be anything passive about this embrace. As Washida Kiyokazu notes in <Yowasa> no chikara (The power of “weakness”), looking at the world with an awareness of vulnerability and understanding the responsibility involved in looking after the weakness of others leads to a different set of principles for organizing human life.8 The pursuit of personal power gives way to the humility of collective care. At their most ethical, ambient media are rooted in both an affirmation of this weak self and an awareness of the environmental responsibilities accompanying it. As I hope this book has shown, Japanese ambient producers have already provided us with many compelling models of how this might work.

Alongside this affirmation of weakness, the foregrounding of ambience helps make clear how much atmospheres can serve to either reinforce or reconfigure normative social behaviors. While environmental media often seek to offer ready-made aesthetic solutions to the management of cosubjective feeling, they can also cultivate an increased awareness of the way designed atmospheres directly modulate the behaviors and attitudes of self and others. This leads to a number of important questions about the cultural politics of atmospheric design within shared space. Who determines the ambient mediation of everyday life, and how is this control established and maintained? What modes of social engagement and subjectivation do particular moods afford, and what forms do they inhibit? What principles should determine the selection and design of mediated atmospheres in public space? How can an atmosphere allow for a more inclusive range of beings to feel at ease and at home, without at the same time designing out the possibility for intersubjective encounters with difference?

Locations where these questions make themselves felt most acutely in Japan include the spaces in and around train and subway stations, the quasi-public parks surrounding new urban office towers, and the enormous retail/office complexes increasingly dominating the urban Japanese landscape, such as the Mori Group’s Roppongi Hills (2003) and Omotesando Hills (2005), the Mitsui Group’s Tokyo Midtown (2007), and Tōkyū’s Hikarie complex next to Shibuya station (2012). On the surface these are each open and inviting environments, and often welcoming and comfortable to wander through. At the same time, these spaces are implicitly oriented toward a particular demographic: those with the economic and cultural capital to blend in smoothly and behave as expected, without lingering too long.

For those who don’t “fit” this mobile and transparent neoliberal ideal, these ostensibly open and comfortable spaces can produce feelings of being alien and out of place. Any failure or refusal to “read the air” properly—loitering, making too much noise, partaking in what is often a long list of prohibited behaviors—will soon summon the security guards. Ahmed’s description of comfort gives a good phenomenological sense of what is at stake: “To be comfortable is to be so at ease with one’s environment that it is hard to distinguish where one’s body ends and the world begins. One fits, and by fitting, the surfaces of bodies disappear from view. The disappearance of the surface is instructive: in feelings of comfort, bodies extend into spaces, and spaces extend into bodies.” In contrast, “pain or discomfort return one’s attention to the surfaces of the body as body.”9 In this context atmosphere—built through the shape and texture of building materials, lighting, acoustics, background media, etc.—is a way to draw lines of inclusion and exclusion without making them obvious or explicit. Those for whom the spaces have been shaped can easily extend themselves through them, whereas others might find themselves on the defensive for being unwilling or unable to go with the flow.

As with neoliberal forms of governmentality more generally, this reliance on atmosphere as a mechanism of indirect social control often allows for increased freedom and self-determination at the local level. These are still, on the whole, fairly inclusive spaces, and as I have argued, cosubjective attunement remains an important method for allowing eurythmic diversity in tight quarters. At the same time, the lines the atmosphere draws become, in their transparency and ubiquity, all the more difficult to contest. With an atmosphere the rules lie hidden in plain sight, largely invisible until someone accidentally or willfully “misreads” the air.

As a successor to the environmental arts of the 1960s, one of ambient media’s most important roles might be to draw attention back to the subjective coordinates laid out by an atmosphere and imagine what else atmosphere might accomplish as a medium of collective life. As Eno envisioned in the late 1970s, whereas “canned” moods often attempt to eliminate all conflict and uncertainty from the affective landscape, ambient media might seek other ways to calmly confront the more contentious spaces of the contemporary world. In this sense, one of the main challenges taken up by ambient media is how to develop more inclusive and possibly even critical atmospheres, modes of subjectivation capable of maintaining a clear-eyed calm while moving through environments of uncertainty and difference. These atmospheres might even register the need to sometimes set aside a surface calm in the name of deeper and more unsettling truths.

At their best, ambient media help us to “remember the air,” to paraphrase Luce Irigaray. Echoing Newton’s description of air as an ambient medium, Irigaray notes how the air has qualitative dimensions—temperature, pressure, humidity—that inevitably shape the other energies passing through it, albeit in ways often so subtle these qualitative changes become attributed to the solid objects we see before us rather than the air that serves to filter our impressions. The air is often forgotten, and the space it fills comes to be regarded as nothing but an empty container across which “direct” perception can take place. To remember the air radically undermines this illusion of perceptual mastery at a distance.10

Ambient media might teach us to read the air itself as a site of subjectivation, providing a resource for recognizing how the atmosphere is tuning our affective lives. To learn to read the air in this way is to embrace the weak, partial, and embedded agency of the environmental self. On recognizing the atmosphere as an aesthetic force, people can begin developing personal and public strategies for the creation of moods more true to where they are and where they want to be. The strong self’s denial of environmental influence only contributes to a continued forgetting of the air and the power it helps render invisible. In contrast, the only way to not be led astray by ambience is to begin to understand how it works and how it might work better.