On August 21, 2021, it was devastating news when scientists announced that the Gulf Stream, a system of currents in the Atlantic Ocean, was showing signs of instability that could dramatically impact the planet’s weather system — and, consequently, life on Earth. The Gulf Stream is part of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) that helps to regulate the energetic balance of the Atlantic Ocean. It functions like a conveyor belt, taking warm surface water from the tropics and distributing it to the north Atlantic. The colder, saltier water then sinks and flows south.¹

Over the past century, this circulation has weakened dramatically, as a consequence of anthropogenic climate change,² which might indicate the impending collapse of this central weather regulation system. Currently, this development cannot be represented by existing models,³ and it is thus hard to foresee if and how fast this might occur. And if science runs out of models that can capture the environmental crisis and its impacts, how are we to relate to environmental changes in our everyday life? Many scholars have stressed the necessity of finding ways to translate the global scale of climate change into comprehensible terms in order to allow for more sustainable behavior without escalating the paralyzing effects of climate change anxiety.⁴ The ability to connect the climate crisis to one’s own life is thwarted by the fact that those processes often remain opaque, since they occur on a-human temporal and spatial scales. The Gulf Stream as a dynamic system that influences global and local weather phenomena will serve as a point of departure and ongoing reference for these reflections. By examining two works by the architect Philippe Rahm, I explore how they are designed to implement the dynamics underlying the Gulf Stream as an aesthetic of transition. Thereby, this article proposes that architecture can offer new tools to mediate the affective and usually invisible processes that underlie our relationships to, and influence our interactions with, our environments. Deploying arguments from phenomenology⁵ and process philosophy,⁶ I will then argue that we need an aesthetics capable of preparing us for those processes that are invisible to our eyes and resistant to objectification.

One such approach is suggested by Rahm. Rahm’s practice deals with climate change in a way that puts the body and its sensitivity to atmospheric processes in the foreground. In the following section, I will describe his project “Digestible Gulf Stream,” which embodies climatic conditions similar to the actual Gulf Stream. “Digestible Gulf Stream” embeds us in a space through our capability to sense climatic changes in the form of shifts in temperature, humidity, and light intensity. As I will demonstrate in the following, Rahm intensifies transitions here between atmospheric states and their modes of sensing. In this way, his work adds an ethico-aesthetic dimension to the discussion of climate change by foregrounding how our capacity to be affected by climatic changes impacts how we feel and act.

“Digestible Gulf Stream” was first exhibited at the 2008 Venice Biennale. At first glance, there is not much to see: a construction consisting of two horizontal metal planes is placed inside the pavilion (Figure 1). Both planes are close to the ground, with one being slightly higher than the other. The key feature of this installation is the difference in temperature between the metal planes. Whereas the lower plane is heated to 28°C (82°F), the upper one is cooled to 12°C (54°F).

This difference in temperature leads to convection: rising hot air cools down upon contact with the upper cool sheet and falls, only to be reheated upon renewed contact with the hot plane. As a result, a constant thermal flow is created, substantiating the installation’s reference to the Gulf Stream. Visitors can experience these different climate zones and — and this is Rahm’s idea — adapt their activities and clothing accordingly. Whereas the colder area demands warm clothes and activity, the hot area invites relaxation and less or no clothing. The opportunity to experience these climatic changes first hand is limited in the context of the exhibition, but actors who inhabit the platform for the duration of the installation demonstrate the functions of the different conditions through clothing and behavior. Lazing on the platforms, the actors’ clothing and activity illustrate the different levels of comfort particular to the micro climates. In the warm area, they are naked, lying down or sitting relaxed as if in a sauna. In the intermediate area, the actors are dressed in everyday clothes, working on laptops. In the cool area, they are dressed in warmer clothes, engaged in various activities, such as playing instruments. The actors, and how they embody this thermal landscape, thereby become the visible center of the installation.

The body itself becomes part here of what Rahm calls “thermal architecture.” With this phrase, Rahm wants to expand architecture such that it includes — or rather, emanates from — invisible factors such as humidity, light, temperature, and air. He is concerned here with how these factors relate to the formation of space and how we act in it: “We want to re-establish the language of architecture with the knowledge of this shift toward the invisible and to stretch architecture between the infinitely small and the infinitely large, between the physiological and the meteorological.”⁷ Attending to the way that architecture fluctuates between the infinitely small and the infinitely large not only expands the relationship between the living body and the space it inhabits, but, furthermore, establishes a new understanding of this body in relation to space: the body is not only the social, habitual body, but also the biological body that is connected to space in an intangible way.

When I speak here about the biological body, I do not intend to evoke ideas of a body-mind binary. Rather, my thinking of the biological dimension of the body is informed by feminist and political theory about the living body as inherently strange,⁸ the attentive body⁹ as the sum of creative forms of meaning-making inherent to life processes. Once our assumptions of a unitary body that hosts and enables an essential subject are complicated by paying attention to the ongoing processes through which the biochemical dimension of our being embeds us into and extends towards constantly changing environments, our ideas about causal and spatial relations get complicated. If we no longer assume that space and the objects it contains are simply there and available to our perception and manipulation, but are instead co-created through a permanent engagement with our body, an engagement that permanently changes the body itself, then we need new models of the subject and of space that are based on the experience of transitions rather than on the experience of objects. Rahm’s architecture offers such experience through what I call here an aesthetic of transitions: Meaning, narrative, and the functions attributed to space by an intentional subject dissolve and are replaced by a foregrounding of transitory, fluctuating phenomena, which not only affect our biological bodies but ultimately are meant to change the way we think:

We want spaces with no meaning, no narrative; interpretable spaces in which margins disappear, structures dissolve, and limits vanish. It is no longer a case of building images and functions, but of opening climates and interpretations; [...] moving from metric composition to thermal composition, from structural thinking to climatic thinking, from narrative thinking to meteorological thinking.¹⁰

Rahm’s vision of this climatic thinking becomes most apparent in his illustration of the relationship between atmospheric processes and the navigation through, and use of, space. In “Digestible Gulf Stream,” we see the actors inhabiting different climate zones just a stone’s throw away from each other, expressed in their clothing and activities. If, instead of visual cues, it is the flow of hot to cool air that organizes how we move through environments and act in them, then a different kind of orientation is needed, one that centers around the body’s sensitivity toward invisible forces. Such a form of orientation and navigation of space has fundamental consequences for our subjectivity and our experience of the world. This becomes clear if we make recourse to phenomenology — in particular, Edmund Husserl’s work on anticipation. According to Husserl,¹¹ anticipation is an integral part of our perception. In the next section, I will argue that a shift from structural thinking to climatic thinking affects our anticipation, which can ultimately open us up to new potential experiences through an increased attention to sensory perceptions, especially beyond the visual sense.

To understand the role of anticipation in Husserl, we have to consider it in the context of his theory of temporality. This is a challenging topic in its own right, and many scholars have provided great analyses of it.¹² Therefore, I will offer only a brief summary of those key points that pertain to my main argument. Husserl understands experience as a constant flow, rather than as a series of events. He defines three interconnected phases of perception that allow for its description: retention, the immediate present, and protention.¹³ In retention, past experiences are preserved in consciousness; they serve us as a kind of reference to reality based on what happened before, and are available to our consciousness and memory. These experiences impact the way we perceive our immediate present — this is the second phase — and what we expect to happen in the (near) future, which is protention, the third phrase. According to this model, our experience is structured according to an anticipatory directedness toward the world. We do not experience the past as separate from the present; our present seems to be a logical continuation of the past, and we anticipate a certain experiential route to be followed.

The fact that our experience is structured in an anticipatory way means that it is inherently indeterminate, since anticipation always runs the risk of not being met. Husserl describes this aspect of experience as “open uncertainty.” If we hold in our hand an object that has a certain color, we expect it to express the same color on the side we cannot presently see. Even if we turn the object and notice that its color changes, we would not be too surprised. We anticipate the fact that objects possess the property of color, and even if the color changes, our world continues to make sense to us. While we assume that things have certain perceptual qualities, such as color and shape, we may learn that our judgments about these qualities can be mistaken. According to Husserl, this leads to a questioning attitude toward the world: “[T]o the extent that, in the theoretical attitude, we know that notions [Meinungen] are sometimes fulfilled, sometimes disappointed, in the working-out of a theoretical intention of fulfillment, we adopt, as a rule, the questioning attitude.”¹⁴

The experience of uncertainty can take on different categories of intensity — ranging from benign to problematic — through which the experience of doubt comes into play. Husserl contrasts this doubt, which is part of our theoretical attitude toward the world, with habitual certainty. Even though we might doubt our identification of an object’s color, we never question the ground under our feet, or that we will land on a flat surface if we move our foot forward.¹⁵ Habitual certainty is a practical confidence and a feeling of being at home in the world. According to Husserl, habitual certainty forgoes all intentional directedness toward the world, and furthermore embeds us into the world.¹⁶ Because the world in which we are embedded is populated by elements that are characterized by certain properties, such as duration,¹⁷ we are able to anticipate some aspects of the future, such as the ground’s presence under my feet if I turn a corner. In this way, the world appears as pre-given to our senses. Intimately embodied, this world becomes part of our habitual reference and a basis for our meaningful engagement day to day, which gives rise to an immediate certainty that the world, as it appears to us, persists. Thus, it is through habitual certainty that we have an anticipatory relation to the world. While habitual certainty gives us the impression that the world we inhabit is stable, we know today that the profound disruptions to the planetary system, including anthropogenic climate change, are challenging that stability. Global warming, the increase in heavy rains, droughts, and storms will make parts of the world that seemed so stable and safe unlivable in the near future. Unlike phenomenological objects, indicators of this development, such as the slowing of the Gulf Stream, cannot be apprehended with our senses, and we cannot relate to them by way of habitual certainty. The Gulf Stream can be understood as a hyper object,¹⁸ Timothy Morton’s term to describe phenomena like climate change that are so massively distributed in time and space that they cannot be grasped by our human sensorium. Being a hyper object, its weakening does not become part of our experience. However, the conditions that underlie phenomena like the Gulf Stream can become part of our experience. And it is these conditions that Rahm places at the center of his architectural practice. The sensitive body incorporates these conditions, and they become part of its habitual embeddedness in the world, which is the basis for anticipatory directedness.

How is this shift in the habitual dimension expressed in “Digestible Gulf Stream”? First of all, the sense of being at home in the world is expanded here and centered around the ability to sense temperature and airflow. In Rahm’s vision, our body leads the way in engaging with these environments. The body maps itself on the thermal landscapes, and becomes part of an atmosphere. The actors lazing on the platforms illustrate how a being at home in thermal architecture might look (Figure 2).

The body’s biological capacity to regulate heat or cold becomes part of the place, just like the function of clothing or diet:

The concept of thermal comfort depends not only on external temperature, but also on clothing, the physical activity of those who live in the space and their diet. For example, when we feel too hot, we have five ways of cooling down, which act on different scales: 1. reducing the air temperature in the room, for example by air conditioning (atmospheric solution); 2. drinking (physiological solution); 3. taking off clothes (social solution); 4. resting (physical solution); 5. stimulating a sense of coolness with the mind (neurological solution).¹⁹

The material and atmospheric conditions of space merge with humans’ biological bodies to offer a new way of being at home in environments involved in climatic changes whose very meaning is based on convection, the circulation of air in response to local differences in temperature. To emphasize how the body is part of the climatic situation, Rahm integrates smells that have a certain effect on how we perceive temperature:

We … propose to add two culinary preparations to the two plates that directly stimulate the sensory receptors of hot and cold at the cerebral level and that can be eaten or applied to the body. The first preparation, on the upper cold plate, contains mint, which has molecules of crystalline origin known as menthol that cause the same sensation in the brain as the coolness perceptible at a temperature of 15°C. The menthol activates the TRPM8 (transient receptor potential) molecular sensory receptors on the skin and in the mouth that stimulate the group of peripheral sensorial neurons known as cold-sensitive units. The second composition, on the lower hot plate, contains chili, in which one of the molecules, capsaicin, activates the neuro-receptor TRPV1, which is sensitive to temperatures over 44°C.²⁰

By incorporating the neurological effects of certain smells into architecture, Rahm not only makes an explicit connection between spatial experience and lived experience; the subject in Rahm’s spaces is not only embodied and synesthetic, but also biological. The subject is biological insofar as bio-chemical processes of the body are involved in self-perception, perception of the environments and the actions carried out in these environments. These biochemical processes maintain the fragile balance between the body and its environments. They are driven by a sensitivity to internal processes, such as the oxygen saturation of the blood stream, and external conditions, such as temperature, humidity, and oxygen saturation of the air they breathe. The ways neurological and metabolic processes participate in the creation of a meaningful relationship with the environment are deliberately used here to (thermally) design a space. Rahm’s thermal landscapes, and how they are expected to direct our attention, extend beyond Husserl’s explanation of anticipation as basic perception. It is not what we see that directs our actions in space, but also what we sense and feel. Tactile sensations, smells, and bio-chemical processes inside our bodies replace visual prompts given by a metric and structurally organized space. I propose that Rahm’s example of thermal landscapes extends the temporal phase between retention and protention to include bio-chemical processes inside and outside of the perceiver’s body, which allows it to be pulled toward other affective qualities of space. Rahm’s landscapes foreground the affective pulls of thermal processes by which the borders between environments and bodies become porous. When Rahm claims that architecture needs to be extended to include new perceptions, “from the physiological to the atmospheric, from the sensorial to the meteorological, from the gastronomic to the climatic,”²¹ then we also have to extend our understanding of meaningful interactions with space.

In this section, I will address two questions. First, how do we account for the newly introduced uncertainty and intangibility of thermal processes and their affects, understood here as the vital forces that impact how we feel and act beyond emotion,²² in this new architecture? This question is relevant because, although these processes evade representation, they nevertheless impact our feelings and behaviors. The second question follows from the first: if it is true that architecture can enable new experiences that attune us to the meteorological condition of our being, how can this potential be framed in a way that allows it to describe a new kind of phenomenology — perhaps an ecological phenomenology — that might be able to respond to the lived experience of climate change and how it might give rise to new scales of experience?

If we follow Husserl, we could argue that a redesign of our living environments, as proposed by Rahm, might lead to a reconsideration of what it means for us to feel at home in the world so that thermal, meteorological processes start to matter. But if the meteorological dimension of our world is one of instability, then our habitual certainty might turn into problematic uncertainty: our very being in the world would become filled with doubt, uncertainty about our basic anticipation of the ongoing relationship between us and the world. The latent instability of our world becomes concrete in the impending collapse of the Gulf Stream:

A collapse of the current AMOC state would have severe impacts on the global climate system and would increase the risk of a cascade of further transitions in other major multi-stable components of the Earth system, such as the Antarctic ice sheet, tropical monsoon systems and Amazon rainforest. Critical transitions between different equilibrium states of natural systems are preceded by characteristic properties of the fluctuations in the systems’ dynamical behaviour that are referred to as critical slowing down. For components of the Earth system that exhibit multiple stable equilibrium states, and in particular for the AMOC, indications of critical slowing down can provide key information for predicting future abrupt climate transitions, but also for climate change projections, climate model evaluation and the identification of adaptation and mitigation measures in general.²³

In the Western world, we find it extremely difficult to think of different equilibrium states existing at once. Equilibrium — the balance between opposing forces — is central to our worldview and is inscribed in our idea of comfort as tempered.²⁴ One of the reasons for this is that the design of our built environment aims to create a balanced, static atmosphere: the constant temperature and humidity of indoor environments contrasts with an outside that is subject to constantly changing weather conditions. Already in the very first comments on the role of architecture, formulated by the Greek Vitruvius ca 25 BCE,²⁵ architecture is described as a mediator between man and nature. Still today its function is to provide a shelter against an alien and uncontrollable outside, a function that was taken to the extreme by the invention of air conditioning at the early 1920s. Thus, (indoor) climate became something that can be controlled. However, the thermal equilibrium thus established indoors cannot be transferred to natural phenomena. The thermal dynamics that keep the gulf stream in existence are based on different equilibrium states. If we reduce the complexity of the AMOC to our common understanding of equilibrium, we are running the risk of taking the same measures in the face of the impending collapse of the Gulf Stream, measures that have contributed to the acceleration of the climate crisis in the first place. In reference to Brian Massumi, these measures can be identified as prediction and prevention. Following Massumi’s analysis of new power structures in the current culture of insecurity, we can state that the available representations of the slowing of the Gulf Stream reintroduce a system of prediction and prevention that promises the mitigation of a series of catastrophic events by recognizing cause-and-effect relationships. But this promise is deceptive. In Ontopower,²⁶ Massumi defines epistemological prevention as assuming “an ability to assess threats empirically and identify their causes. Once the causes are identified, appropriate curative methods are sought to avoid their realization. Prevention operates in an objectively knowable world in which uncertainty is a function of a lack of information, linear course from cause to effect.”²⁷ In this way, systems of prevention are used as a means towards a given end, an end defined according to the values of the existing power structures. If prevention fails, Massumi argues, deterrence takes over: “The epistemology of preemption is distinguished from that of deterrence in that it is unabashedly one of uncertainty – and not due to a simple lack of knowledge. There is uncertainty because the threat has not only not yet fully formed but … it has not yet even emerged. In other words, the threat is still indeterminately in potential.”²⁸ While deterrence is centered on an objectifiable cause, preemption is centered around a “proliferative effect.” The figure of today’s threat described by Massumi works like a facsimile of the descriptions of the impending collapse of the Gulf Stream.²⁹ It is

the suddenly irrupting, locally self-organizing, systemically self-amplifying threat of large-scale disruption. … Its continual microflapping in the background makes it indistinguishable from the general environment, now one with a restless climate of agitation. Between irruptions, it blends in with the chaotic background, subsiding into its own preamplified incipience, already active, still imperceptible. The figure of the environment shifts: from the harmony of a natural balance to a churning seedbed of crisis in the perpetual making.³⁰

In the turn towards an epistemology of preemption, Massumi, with reference to Michel Foucault, identifies a shift toward ontopower. This form of power is inherently environmental in that it stops trying to normalize the environment, instead regulating its effects, because “environment has stormed out of reach of normalization.”³¹ Similarly, the slowdown of the Gulf Stream cannot be reversed – what seems to remain is a management of the factors contributing to it, for example, by reducing carbon emissions, and the modification of local infrastructures that promise to withstand storms and floods.

In contrast to an architecture of shelter and stable climate, Rahm displays the environment as a thermal flow, in which our bodies are intimately integrated. Although his architecture goes against the conventional understanding of indoor climate as static and contradicts our habitual certainty based in a stable climate, his compositions bear no sign of disruption. In light of Massumi’s critique, an engagement with disruption would seem necessary in order to avoid falling back into a system of prevention, which leads to a closing off of danger, and possibly to the paralysis of climate anxiety. And yet, I argue, Rahm’s work engages with indeterminacy and disruption, but in a way that blends so naturally with our lived experience that it is almost unnoticeable. What I mean will become clearer with a look at a project that translates the mechanisms Rahm developed with “Digestible Gulf Stream” into a public space: the central park of the city of Taichun, Taiwan.

About ten years after the Gulf Stream exhibition at the Venice Biennale, and after over five years of construction, Rahm applied the principles developed in the “Digestible Gulf Stream” piece on a larger scale. His reconstruction of the central park of Taichung, Taiwan, which was named “Jade Eco Park” after its remodeling, offers an experience of different climatic conditions. The park offers cool zones equipped with humidifiers for refreshing, dry zones for sports activities, and temperate zones. In all three zones, the air is consistently freed of most common pollutants. Tellingly, the three zones are respectively called Coolia, Dryia, and Clearias, and the paths that connect them bear the titles of Cool path, Dry path, and Clear path (Figure 3). The maintenance of these different climatic zones is ensured by numerous sensors that perceive the city’s current weather situation and compare it with the park’s zones, adjusting them accordingly in order to maintain a climatic balance between the three zones and the actual weather.

Rahm employs a mix of natural and technological elements to provide the respective micro-climates. Sensors are used to monitor local temperature, air pollution, and humidity. Furthermore, in the cool area, a “Stratus Cloud” emanates a cooling mist. “Moon Light” is the title of a canopy, made of reflecting materials, that filters the sun’s light and heat. Additionally, trees with full foliage are densely planted to provide shade. The park appears to be a tranquil oasis for both rest and physical activity. While it seems impossible to have a lived experience of dynamic systems at the planetary level — an impossibility that also has consequences for the discourse on climate change in the case of the Gulf Stream slowdown — Rahm’s architecture, as I argue, allows for lived experiences of the atmospheric conditions that underlie these systems. What the dynamic system of the Gulf Stream and the Park have in common, to a certain extent, are multiple equilibrium states. In the park, these can be experienced through physical adaptation processes.

Instead of creating one climatic zone with a tempered atmosphere aimed at an agreeable level of comfort, the park offers the experience of different climatic pockets, in which atmospheric processes are intensified in such a way that allows them to be consciously experienced, and even to become the basis for our behavior. For instance, if I want to exercise, I will most likely choose the dry area instead of the cool, humid area. The experience of these different climatic pockets is not that of a sudden change of climate, as if entering a greenhouse in a zoological garden. Rather, it is subtle, which is due to the fact that the different climatic zones are connected by paths that can be followed at a pace of one’s own choosing, so that the body can slowly get used to the atmospheric changes. The different climatic zones can be experienced through these adaptation processes, which are to a certain extent individual, i.e. they depend on the respective metabolism as well as on the type and manner of movement. Moving in this way from one climatic zone to another, choosing one’s own pace, can in this way offer an individualized experience of being part of a larger sensory world. Intimately embodied in this way the experience of different equilibrium states might become part of what Husserl describes as our immediate certainty. The question that I am interested in is in how far the experience of different equilibrium states can then become part of our habitual reference and ground for our meaningful engagement with the world on a day to day basis.

Walking between the different climatic zones of the park and the experience of how our bodies adapt to them would likely not lead to a sense of disruption of our meaningful reference to the world. Instead we might feel surprised by the different sensations enabled by the movement from one climatic zone to another. The different micro-climatic zones and their distinct effects on the human body can stand in stark contrast to each other, causing what normally lies in the background of our perception — the weather — to move to the foreground. Dimitriu attributes the phenomenon of surprise to the role of protention in Husserl’s understanding of temporality. If we are able to be surprised, our protentions cannot be limitless; in the moment of surprise, our protentions are not fulfilled. In fact, what replaces an expected event is something new to us. Otherwise, we would be disappointed or frustrated.³²: “Surprise, however, is experienced when there is an intervention of an unexpected object or event which is outside the scope of the things we protend …, but not because our motivation is frustrated.” We are surprised by the “impossible possible.”³³ that breaks into our world.³⁴ If protentions are not without limit, then there is a field of potential outside our engagement with the world. The environment is always more than what we perceive, but because we find ourselves in an affective relationship with it, certain elements that we did not previously perceive — and therefore did not retend — can become perceptible, retended, and ultimately change what we will anticipate in the future.³⁵

The increased interest of humanistic scholarship in the human body and its bio-chemical dimension in light of a new materialism, offers a valuable framework for understanding, how affective relationships of bodies and their climatic environments can impact our anticipation. In his analysis of contemporary feminist studies of the body, Nathan Snaza points out that “life” is increasingly theorized without a focus on the body as such.³⁶ Instead, scholars are finding ways to get “below” the level of the body to energetic, cellular processes, embryonic becomings, and circulating affects, as well as “beyond” the body to global processes, computational fields of data, and the constitutively more-than-human mechanisms of distributed reproduction. One of the chief references in these accounts of the body is the process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. By placing a “blind feeling” at the center of his ontology, he offers a different way of thinking the relation between bodies and the environment.

This blind feeling, which Whitehead terms prehension,³⁷ is attributed not only to humans, but to all organic and non-organic elements. In this feeling, the subject takes the world into itself and, at the same time, becomes part of the world. Ultimately, this theory argues that the dichotomy of subject and object emerges out of an ongoing process of becoming. This idea also enables a different way of thinking about events. An event is no longer imagined as a single occurrence, as a single effect of a cause. Events are instead units of experience in which the elements that compose them become the ingredients and conditions for what is then experienced as an event. But events, or basically all of experience, do not only arise due to a positive capture. That which is excluded, that which is negatively prehended, is conditional for the experience as well:

Prehension is defined by Whitehead as the grasping-toward through which experience makes itself felt. The event—or the actual occasion, in Whitehead’s terminology—is pulled into experience, its force of actuation tied to what Whitehead calls the data of the occasion. These data are not objects or substances but relational fields in the parsing. … Whitehead has a concept for that which is not actualized but nonetheless affects experience. He calls it negative prehension. Negative prehension is what must be actively excluded in order for the event to have consistency. To achieve consistency, there must be elimination. What cannot conform to the color of this singular experience must be backgrounded in order that this experience be fully what it is.³⁸

Although I would like to point out the potential of Whitehead’s concept of negative prehension in order to re-examine an aspect of Husserl’s theory that has not yet been sufficiently explored — namely, the “scope of things that are not protended, and the role that these events might play in our perceptual experience”³⁹ — I will limit my focus to one particular aspect of experience that pertains to Whitehead’s concept. Most significant for my argument is that experience, and thus all events as such, is thought of as being composed by things that are other than ourselves. Though some aspects of the encountered occasion influence my experience and become part of the event being felt, other aspects are neglected but still affect my experience. Otherness becomes self and thereby generates further otherness, which remains in the world. Otherness necessarily becomes part of our composition as subjects, but not through assimilation — instead, these alien elements, in fact, remain actual:

That part of the bodily event, in respect to which the cognitive mentality is associated, is for itself the unit psychological field. Its ingredients are not referent to the event itself; they are aspects of what lies beyond the event. Thus the self-knowledge inherent in the bodily event is the knowledge of itself as a complex unity, whose ingredients involve all reality beyond itself, restricted under the limitation of its pattern of aspects. Thus we know ourselves as a function of unification of a plurality of things which are other than ourselves. Cognition discloses an event as being an activity, organizing a real togetherness of alien things.⁴⁰

Hansen further explores this point in Whitehead arguing that the model of subjectivity suggested here allows for a shift from agent-centered perception to what Hansen calls “environmental sensibility,”⁴¹ a worldly sensibility that designates a larger domain of experience. The notion of a worldly sensibility allows us, in the following, to tie this theory back to Rahm’s thermal architecture and to the question of how the experience of his thermal landscapes might offer a different approach to the news about the collapsing Gulf Stream, an approach that does not fall into the category of preemption. But first, the concept of worldly sensibility requires some explication.

Hansen interprets twenty-first century media in light of Whitehead’s philosophy, and concludes that contemporary media networks create environments that are characterized by a double function: they are saturated with data that, by sensing what is normally inaccessible to our senses, are sensitive but simultaneously also generate a different sensitivity, making us more sensitive to the world of data.⁴² This has consequences for the modes of subjectivity enabled by these environments. They enable a distributed subjectivity whose agency is based on experiences that largely exceed conscious perception, whereby the implication in a larger, imperceptible context becomes experiential:

This subjectivity, which may be ‘anchored’ in a human bodymind, does not however belong to that bodymind. Indeed, far from constituting the interiority of a transcendental subject, this subjectivity is radically distributed across the host of circuits that connect the bodymind to the environment as a whole, or, more precisely, that broker its implication within the greater environment. Human bodyminds … are always implicated within—and always acquire their agency from—experiential situations that exceed their perceptual grasp. This implication generates a perspective that, … without being the sole or dominant agents of situations that exceed the scope of our survey, we nevertheless experience such situations, and their excess over our modes of apprehending them, from our point of view and in relation to our interests.⁴³

What is made possible by the new media networks, according to Hansen, is that the implication in these networks can be made explicit and can thus become a new basis of being in the world. The fact that we cannot perceive environmental processes like the slowing of the Gulf Stream outside of scientific models does not mean that we are not implicated in these processes or that we cannot experience this implication on some level. Crucially, Hansen concludes that this experience of implication results in a sense of appreciation and expansion of apprehension or anticipation: “Our implication within larger situational ecologies thus goes hand in hand with a newfound capacity to appreciate such implication, a capacity that, as I have underscored here, is facilitated by the technical feeding-forward of environmental information into just-to-come apprehensions of consciousness.”⁴⁴

Twenty-first century media permanently operate outside of our perception and constitute the infrastructures that are necessary to provide us with information. What is new, according to Hansen, is not only that today we have an awareness of this relentless world-building, but that how it takes place is part of our experience. Though Husserl distinguished between our habitual certainty and our doubtful attitude about judgments, this categorical division between preconscious bodily being in the world and perceptual judgments becomes fragile, to say the least: “Twenty-first-century media, insofar as they involve an ‘aboutness’ and a ‘just being,’ combine in one technical operation what cannot be so combined in the operation of consciousness.”⁴⁵ Instead of being a stable category of human subjectivity, consciousness appears as emerging from a compositional process that involves human and nonhuman elements, never fully actualized, and always to come. This leads, as Hansen claims, to the “need to embrace the coexistence of multiple experiential presents—multiple, partially overlapping presents from different time frames and scales—as what composes the seemingly more encompassing, higher-order syntheses of consciousness.”⁴⁶ Being involved in this destabilized world through network media then leads to a new sense of being in the world, a sense of being at home as part of distributed processes whose reality does not rely on being objectified. The experience of being that is implicit in environmental phenomena like the Gulf Stream would therefore also influence what we anticipate and, consequently, our actions. If aesthetic situations, such as Rahm’s thermal landscapes, implicate us in thermal processes such that their changing equilibria can be experienced, this experience may ultimately prepare us for a disruption of equilibrium states on a larger scale. That is, the human visitor does not participate in a landscape, a privilege accorded to the autonomous subject. Instead, the visitor is having ingression into the landscape, as Whitehead would put it, a process that grants potentiality to actualize in ever new forms. The body of the visitor becomes implicated in the park through an intensification and explication of climatic processes.

Rahm’s architecture, in this way, contributes to a “phenomenology of implication that is equally an ontology of potentiality.”⁴⁷ A visitor to the park will probably first notice that the purified air allows one to breathe more deeply. If it is a hot day, the cool path would already have a cooling effect, an effect that would be intensified in the “Coolia” area. The cool mist dispersed by the apparatus therein would facilitate a noticeable refreshment. Even if a visitor chooses the dry path, they might notice that a certain agility returns, despite the heat. The purified dry air provides ideal conditions for physical activity, even at higher temperatures. These are experiences of multiple transitions, transitions that constitute an event.

These experiences have in common that they are experiences of transitions, transitions from differently tempered climates and their effects on our bodies. I argue here that it is precisely this experience of the transitive that becomes meaningful for our engagement with the world. In order for the experience of transitions as part of meteorological processes to become meaningful, they must be retended according to Husserl’s model. And in order to be retended and to be protended in the future, they must affect us. What we are affected by in Rahm’s "Jade Eco Park" is a matter of the intensity between the different zones. It is the contrast between the cool, the dry, and the normal zone that determines what is positively prehended and becomes a feeling, and what is negatively prehended and is thus excluded from feeling. While walking through the different paths, people positively prehend their climatic surroundings and let themselves become affected by them. While this might lead to feelings of surprise, it might also lead to a greater familiarity with climatic processes, even on a planetary scale.

In this article, I have taken the dramatic slowdown of the Gulf Stream as an example of a world in crisis that is not accessible to our conscious grasp. I suggest that aesthetic projects like Rahm’s “Digestible Gulf Stream” and “Jade Eco Park” can lead to new aesthetic experiences that allow us to take an active role in the face of intangible catastrophes. This is because, in this aesthetic of transitions, the intertwinement of bodily processes with environmental processes is made tangible. Walking down a path to one of the climatic areas, the body will already be engaged with a changing climatic landscape, which will become intensified once the area itself is reached. This experience of transitioning suggests an implication in processes that are elusive, and yet influence our feelings and actions, as well as our meaningful engagement with the world. I have argued, with reference to Husserl, that such a sense-able implication with processes of transition can lead to new forms of anticipation, whereby the past experience of an autonomous subject plays less of a role than the sensing of a distributive subject. In this context, Whitehead’s philosophy — Manning’s and Hansen’s readings of it, in particular — provide an update of Husserl’s phenomenology and of lived experience as such. For Husserl, sense perception is central, as it is that of an aware consciousness. For Whitehead, experience and becoming extend beyond sense perception. It includes nonconscious processes and even elements that are not sensed — elements that do not become part of experience, but are conditional to it. This puts a larger emphasis on potential: for Whitehead, the potential is inherent to the actual. While potential becomes actualized in experience, it is also eternal and therefore outside the temporal schema that underlies Husserl’s understanding. Where Husserl places judgement as a central faculty in categorizing percepts, Whitehead uses the term “feeling” to describe a processual relationship between the subject and the world, in which both are at the same time feeling and felt, and constantly in the process of actualization. In this view, the world has ingression into us while we simultaneously have ingression into the world. In doing so, some alien elements become part of the composition of our subjectivity, while other alien elements remain in the world, co-determining our experienced reality.

This conception makes Whitehead’s process philosophy a more appropriate tool to think through processes like the slowing of the Gulf Stream, and its consequences. And it helps to understand how transitional landscapes like “Jade Eco Park” might open us to a world beyond the equilibrium state. This is because transitions signify potentiality. Being in the middle, in the midst of a transition from a before to an after, opens possibilities for new experiences. An aesthetics that foregrounds transitions, and thereby allows for a sense of potentiality to arise, can make us feel at home between stable equilibria. Through environments like Rahm’s “Jade Eco Park,” the process of ingression and the role of alien elements in the composition of our experience can be felt. This leads to a new subjectivity because we get a sense and an appreciation of the fact that “sensations are elements of the world even if they are lived by a perceiver.”⁴⁸ These sensations, as elements of the world, are mediated here through natural elements, conductive materials, sensors, and devices that purify and humidify the air. Rahm’s work thus suggests that we need both technical and natural elements — and, above all, an aware and sensing body — in order to be at home in the world of the in-between of multiple equilibrium states. To what extent such a sense of being integrated into a destabilized world can lead to an appreciation of it, and ultimately to a consideration of catastrophic events such as the slowing of the Gulf Stream, remains to be seen.