by Heinz Bude
Contents
Cover
Copyright
Preface Note
How We Are, and How We Are Faring Notes
In the Mood for ‘Mood’ Notes
Cycles of Contagion and Spirals of Silence Notes
Disappointment and Engagement Notes
The Relationship Between the Generations Notes
The Established and the Outsiders Notes
The Feeling of the Sexes Notes
The Mood of the Future Notes
End User License Agreement
‘It is as though his eyes had no lids.’
Hugo von Hofmannsthal
The Mood of the World
Heinz Bude
Translated by Simon Garnett
polity
First published in German as Das Gefühl der Welt. Über die Macht von Stimmungen © Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich, 2016
This English edition © Polity Press, 2018
Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1997-2
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bude, Heinz, author.
Title: The mood of the world / Heinz Bude.
Other titles: Gefühl der Welt. English
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity Press, [2018] | Translation of: Gefühl der Welt : über die Macht von Stimmungen. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018004123 (print) | LCCN 2018020354 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509519972 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509519934 (hardback) | ISBN
9781509519941 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Mood (Psychology)--Social aspects. | Emotions--Sociological aspects.
Classification: LCC BF521 (ebook) | LCC BF521 .B83 2018 (print) | DDC 155.5/124--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018004123
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
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Preface
Explaining the power of mood confronts sociology with its popular image. The sociological perspective is supposed to reveal ulterior causes and processes: how the popular press manipulates the public mood, the alienating effects of the neoliberal dictate of positivity, how the scandalous facts of increasing social division are suppressed by the feeling that ‘there is no alternative’. This book will disappoint any such expectations of sociological explanation.
Mood is not the opium of the people. Moods form a reality of their own and cannot be understood solely as the reaction to biographical circumstances and systemic conditions. While the events of 2008 showed how moods influence events on the financial markets, it has always been assumed that shifts in public mood are responsible for political shifts. It is also abundantly clear just how far our consumer behaviour is dependent on mood. Moods have fundamental significance in a literal sense, in that they convey to us a feeling of the world. Depending on my mood, I am capable of anything or nothing. This goes not only for individuals, but also or groups, collectives and societies as a whole.
The sociology of mood is thus as fundamental as mood itself. Perhaps more than the sociology of media, the sociology of finance or the sociology of sexuality, it has to do with the social existence which determines our consciousness.
The fifth volume of Karl Ove Knausgård’s monumental autobiography My Struggle begins with the words:
The fourteen years I lived in Bergen, from 1988 to 2002, are long gone, no traces of them are left other than as incidents a few people might remember, a flash of recollection here, a flash of recollection there, and of course whatever exists in my own memory of that time. But there is surprisingly little. All that is left of the thousands of days I spent in that small, narrow-streeted, rain-shimmering Vestland town is a few events and lots of sentiments.1
Note
1. Karl Ove Knausgaard (2016), Some Rain Must Fall: My Struggle Book 5, trans. Don Bartlett, London: Vintage.
How We Are, and How We Are Faring
Have all the melodies of world improvement been played? Does the possibility of the whole appear faint at best? Amidst it all, has the self grown weary of itself? Today, anyone claiming that all truths are relative and that nothing can be trusted is preaching to the converted. Yet the applause is hesitant because many nurture the silent hope that perhaps there is something to believe in after all. That a beginning is possible, despite the complexity of social relations in a world without limits.
Let us not be deceived: the public is watchful and informed enough to know the game of intellectual critique, in which good news about economic growth and job creation is turned into bad news about global warming and the burn-out of the workforce. People don’t turn a blind eye to contradictory developments in society and their ambiguous consequences for the individual. Yet intellectual cleverness is considered suspect when it leads to nothing. It appears we have reached the end of a period of perhaps thirty years that many well-known diagnoses of the present see as the grand finale to a longer process of decline. The end of capitalism has again become conceivable;1 we can imagine a global society that no longer revolves around Europe;2 and we cast about for metaphors for an Anthropocene3 that has no equivalent in the millions of years of Earth’s history. Yet outrage that the world as we know it has been allowed to self-destruct merely conceals fear about not knowing where to go next.
The mood of our situation can be defined by looking at two complexes. The first is rootless anti-capitalism. It can be found among skilled autoworkers with union membership cards,4 as well as engineers from R&D departments,5 among high-performing individualists from Eastern Europe, as well as established conservatives from the West,6 among ‘precariously affluent’ singleparent families, as well as two-breadwinner households from the world of high achievers with three or more children.7 At ‘my’ workplace, in ‘our’ family, among ‘us’ locals the world is in order – but outside, predatory capitalism rages, tearing everything to pieces and holding nothing sacred. We will probably be all right. But how our children will manage, heaven only knows.
Anti-capitalists of all classes and nations see the reason for the ubiquitous ‘imperialism of disorganization’ in the politically willed and driven transformation of what is now barefaced capitalism. Neoliberalism is the name for a cult of the strong self, one that demands the sacrifice of social community, care for the weak and the collective property of the welfare state. The ideological armies that came to power with Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping at the end of the 1970s replaced the ‘social market economy’ with the ‘ownership society’. Only when society served the economy, so the neoliberal credo goes, could the economy serve society. Although they knew the dangers, p
olitical majorities worldwide subscribed to this reversal of social relations.
The results are visible today. What is positive about the fact that income inequality in the United States has reverted to levels last seen a century ago?8 How can it be acceptable that, in a rich country like the United Kingdom, material hardship is increasing despite increasing economic strength? (According to a 2014 study, the proportion of UK households unable to properly heat their homes in winter rose from 14 to 33 per cent in three decades, while national economic performance doubled over the same period.)9 What explains the fact that, according to a long-term study of wealth and income over the last two centuries, the capital gains of the wealthy few have grown faster than the earned income of entire national economies?10 Having lost its counterpart after the collapse of socialism, capitalism now lacks all restraints. ‘Lunch is for losers’ is the motto of the capitalist ideal of relentless competition and wholesale social desolation. The conventions of the good life have been swept away by a regime of total mobilization. Sleep and you risk sleeping through what’s new, stay awake and optimize your presence through yoga. All just to turn money into more money.
We saw where this mania of extended and accelerated self-exploitation leads to in 2008. When capitalism finds its apotheosis in a financial industry compliant only with the profit demands of a class of monetary asset holders, then the floodgates are open for the financialization of the world.11 This rests on the notion that everything that exists and that we attach importance to can be assigned a market value.12 Money rules the world, not because it is a necessary means of satisfying our needs but because it is the sole and all-encompassing end that justifies all means. No longer are we the owners of labour power that we are obliged to sell to an employer, who rewards us for the passivity with which we submit to his demands. Rather, we have turned ourselves into asset individualists who exploit our own talents and potential for the purpose of total self-commercialization. We thought that, by astute calculations and rational investments, we could take control of our own future; however, we failed to notice that we had become the agents of a ‘privatized Keynesianism’,13 covering the risks of others who, relying on us to repay our debts, placed mad bets on an uncertain future.
When the miraculous process of money creation came to a halt, because suddenly the rumour went around that a million or so families in the United States who wanted to live in an area where they could confidently send their children to school could no longer service their mortgages, everyday asset individualists with their savings and pensions had to pay up so that banks ‘too big to fail’ could offload their toxic assets. In the 2008 crisis and the national debt crises from 2011 onwards, ordinary tax-paying citizens were ultimately held liable for crises that had got out of hand for others.
Whatever form of capitalism they hold responsible, be it turbo-capitalism, predatory capitalism, casino capitalism or finance capitalism, the conclusion of the helpless anti-capitalists is always that humanity has painted itself into a corner. Of course, with our pension funds and building society accounts, we too have become part of the system of self-commercialization that apparently can no longer manage its own risks. All the political class has to say, however, is that there is no alternative. The combined anti-capitalist front of ultra-liberals and residual communists, disillusioned social democrats and muted conservatives, alter-globalists and ethnonationalists is for democracy and the people but against banks, the media and party politicians.
But who speaks for those who would speak for themselves if only they knew what to say?
The anti-capitalism that sees itself as the ‘socialism of capital’14 cannot be compared to the organized anti-capitalism that defines itself in the confrontation between capital and labour. When the factory was the predominant form of socialization, you knew that the bosses sat upstairs while their stooges kept watch from the windowed offices. However, in the ‘factory without walls’, where the boundaries between life and work blur, the contradiction between wages and profit, between labour value and capital yields, has been shifted onto the individual. People no longer trust in their own collective strength and instead distrust and demonize the system. The society of distrust feels trapped in a closed system of ubiquitous dependency whose parts are individually animated by selfishness and arbitrariness, rather than somehow combining to produce a rational whole. The terrifying instability of the world elicits a universal indignation triggered by one thing one moment and something else the next. It is the expression of an unease in the world unable to decide whether to reject the world or to affirm it.
The opposite of the outraged anti-capitalists are the relaxed system fatalists. They have long since abandoned the idea of a rational whole with honest merchants, socially responsible entrepreneurs and strong popular parties. They respond to the neurotic anti-capitalists with their hopeless fixation on traditional certainties by pointing to new opportunities, hidden gains and unexpected hybrids. Like it or not, systems are based on the arbitrary will of individuals and the randomness of effects; only these produce the brilliant ideas and daring projects that guarantee the ability of the system as a whole to react to changing circumstances and unpredictable domino effects. Looking back in anger only distorts the view of the future, which you need in order to survive. Overall, relaxed fatalists make a more civilized, versatile and intelligent impression than rootless anti-capitalists, with their suppressed anger, allconsuming hatred and craving for approval.
Relaxed fatalists prefer to sit back and watch than to fret the whole time that things aren’t as one might wish. For them, it is more important to survey the field than to improve the world. This allows you to identify your options and be on the ready for the next opportunity. When developments appear to have come to a dead end, then it is simply because of the self-reflexivity of processes with no aim or logic. Because everything could be different, I can change nearly nothing, as the systems theorist Niklas Luhmann put it in the early 1970s in a prescient essay on the risks of truth and the perfection of critique.15
In their assessment of the situation, both sides may actually concur: today’s younger generation is growing up in a world of uncertain career prospects, increasing income inequality, global political instability and deepening ecological crisis. As the debate on intergenerational equity proves, these facts have become a predominant issue between the generations. The only difference is that fatalists both young and old prefer to scale back their expectations in an attitude of imperturbability, rather than to exhaust themselves through inward or outward resistance.
To make life easier, if nothing else, system fatalists are less pessimistic when it comes to capitalism. It is merely a matter of perspective. After all, 1989 was a hiatus in two senses.16 The fall of the Berlin Wall marked a historic watershed in the development of worldwide inequality in that, after the collapse of socialist or even communist alternatives caused by economic growth in the newly industrialized countries, the process of divergence between the industrialized countries of the global North and the developing countries of the global South, underway for the past two centuries, went into reverse. The success of China, India, Brazil, Vietnam and South Africa in incorporating and developing the technologies, organizational models and financial practices of the core capitalist nations enabled them to make enormous leaps in growth and to significantly reduce the disparity in living standards between nations. This economic growth steadily diminished the proportion of the poor in the global population. Whether, given population growth as a whole, the relative decrease in global poverty has been sufficient to prevent its increase in absolute terms is an open question. However, one thing is certain: for the first time since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, economic progress is outpacing population growth.
Simultaneously, however, intra-societal inequalities in living standards, both in the growing economies of the South as well as the once dominant economies of the North, have grown significantly. Everywhere, the social gulf between high ear
ners, median earners and low earners within individual countries has deepened and become more intractable. Things in the world have thus got better and worse at the same time, the system fatalists note wryly. What they don’t say, however, is whether they support an attitude of escapism or engagement.
On the overheated property markets of London, Paris and Milan, rich Russians, Indians and Chinese are driving the local middle classes out of the respectable central districts. In Infernetto in Rome, in Neukölln in Berlin or in Bradford in northern England, sub-proletarian survival camps have emerged for people from all over the world; they form a permanent poor population lacking any significant prospects. In the OECD countries, the middle class is splitting into a wealthy upper segment and a precarious lower segment that chafes under the increasing cost of educating its offspring, expensive health insurance – particularly for family members needing care – and rising housing costs in the better locations. In opaque social landscapes like this, it seems prudent, particularly to those not fortunate enough to have inherited or acquired rank, to be cautious, to hold back and to avoid breaking cover, rather than to protest, to stick their necks out and to speak up. In a rapidly changing world, people increasingly wonder whether they feel as at home in society as their parents’ and above all their grandparents’ generations did during the long post-war era.
Neither the anti-capitalist nor the fatalist position is based on a developed interpretation of the world that one might submit to counter-argument, proof of inconsistency or factual correction. Both are attitudes towards the world corresponding to a particular mood in the world. The mood is the ground from which the figures of the ‘rootless anti-capitalist’ and ‘relaxed fatalist’ stand out. Only in light of this figure–ground relationship is the reason for the relentless antagonism between the two comprehensible. Mood raises the question that prompts the one or other response. It is a question that calls into question how we live and why we live.