by Heinz Bude
Moods are ways of being in the world. A mood of empathy assails us when, on holiday, we drive through a village and come across a funeral procession; a dramatic mood overcomes us during a thunderstorm amidst a landscape; after dreaming about one’s childhood, one wakes up in a wistful mood; after a long day, I try to put myself in another mood by listening to a John Coltrane album or a string quartet by Franz Schubert. Just as it is impossible, according to Paul Watzlawick, not to communicate, since silence is also eloquent and ignoring someone is a way of paying attention to them, it is also impossible, according to Martin Heidegger, not to be in this or that mood because contentment is a mood no less than depression, pensiveness a mood no less than exuberance, lassitude a mood no less than agitation.17
For Heidegger, mood determines ‘how one is, and how one is faring’ (wie einem ist und wird):18 how reality becomes accessible to us; what feelings, memories and thoughts suggest themselves and what are excluded from the outset; what kinds of behaviour are deemed appropriate and what are rejected as inappropriate; and, above all, how the world represents itself to us as a whole. However, moods should not be understood as purely private conditions and merely personal feelings. On the contrary, they form the basic tone or general coloration of the understanding and experience of an objectivity that challenges the self to become itself. In mood, the self in a sense becomes aware of itself, and it cannot make excuses for itself through something else that it has nothing to do with.
In Heidegger’s deliberately stilted formulation, which on first reading seems impenetrable: ‘In having a mood, Dasein is always disclosed moodwise as that entity to which it has been delivered over in its Being; and in this way it has been delivered over to the Being which, in existing, it has to be.’19
But where does the mood come from that leaves me, when driving past a funeral procession, caught outdoors during a storm, waking up in the morning or listening to music in the evening, feeling this way or that? Mood emerges from the situation I am in, with the impressions, demands and modes of connectivity that it directs at me, and asks me what I understand to be the purpose of my existence and the kind of life I want to lead.
In biographical terms, that may make sense on the basis that a succession of formative moments occurs in the course of one’s life,20 such as starting school, the crisis of puberty and severance from one’s parents, the transition from education to work, the decision to enter a permanent relationship or the birth of one’s first child. But how can we understand the process whereby mood is determined through a social-historical situation?
Here, Heidegger offers a methodology of ‘world disclosure’ (Welterschließung) that, as Karl Jaspers puts it,21 asks how the world as a whole discloses itself within time.22 Do I understand the world in terms of its vulnerability or in terms of its mutability, futility or meagreness? The mood that currently predominates, or that is covertly signalling its arrival, can thus be traced.
Uniting the rootless anti-capitalists and the relaxed system fatalists in their contentious co-dependency is a mood of fundamental tension, one that oscillates between negation of the world and affirmation of it, between escapism and engagement. Just as the anti-capitalists are capable only of pathos, so the fatalists can only do bathos. It is as if the one needs the other as an excuse to start a fight. While the anti-capitalists rage against a politics without alternatives, against ‘fake news’ and ‘dumbing down’, the system fatalists celebrate everyday compromise, mass-media self-reference and the relativity of truths. Both positions are so entrenched that dialogue between them about the essence of politics, the production of the public sphere or the meaning of truth seems almost impossible. The certitude of the raging anti-capitalists provokes the arrogant insouciance of the system fatalists – and vice versa: the glass bead game of the serene voyeurs provokes the angry engagement of the world improvers. The one group shuts itself off from the other and withdraws into a bubble of self-semblance.
The general mood of tension underlies the sudden rise of social movements like PEGIDA in Germany and the Tea Party in the United States. Under the banner of anti-politics, distrust and self-empowerment, the worried, the neglected and the aggrieved join forces to voice en masse the constitutive power of the people. ‘We are the people!’ has been the slogan of all the recent protest movements. Those who feel ignored, downgraded and hard-done-by seek mutual resonance and strength by rising up as a group from a levelled-out middle class.23
Publicly, the adherents of refined social observation deplore these campaigns for the restoration of self-respect.24 As pedagogues of relaxed fatalism, all that they can see in them are the futile exercises of social groups that have not yet understood the lessons of postmodernity. Neither violence nor idealism can change the fact that the age of collective self-determination is past. This unwillingness to accept universal co-dependence in complex systems is seen by the other side as the root condition of grievance, ill will and xenophobia. In terms of its public manifestation, the controversy between rootless anti-capitalism and relaxed fatalism thus becomes the struggle over the minimum of indifference and non-engagement necessary for civilization.
It can’t be denied that we find ourselves at the end of a strange period of thirty years, beginning in 1989, during which global social conditions have been getting simultaneously better and worse. For all of us, the world has expanded, opening up new questions of self-realization and new opportunities for self-revelation and re-combination. Unmistakable, at any rate, is the return of the long-ignored Romantic motif of the poeticization of the world, of arrival from the periphery and the reconstruction of disparate fragments.
This underlying mood first reveals itself in a break with the phobic dispositions of the previous era. There is a sense of wanting to free oneself from negative attachments that make one narrow, obstinate and rigid. Just as neoliberalism recoils in panic from anything to do with the state and society, so postmodernity is defined by its fear of the truth.
Thinking about neoliberalism’s early days in the late 1970s, what comes to mind is its liberating blow against social sclerosis,25 against the mentality of vested interests26 and diagnoses of ungovernability in ‘late’ capitalism.27 The ‘dream of eternal prosperity’28 was suddenly shown to be a short-lived and irreversibly defunct ideal, dependent on unique circumstances. However, as the years passed, the energy of mental liberation itself became a structure of intellectual enslavement. Both neoliberals and their critics are driven by a furore trapped in what feels like the automatisms of abhorrence.
Similarly, the postmodernist credo according to which all knowledge and understanding is socially constructed, and hence the ethos of recognizing the manifold ways of knowing and understanding, was originally a huge liberation of the intellect from narrow-minded methodologies and provincial cosmologies. In what at the time felt like a fresh and optimistic mode of thought, postmodernists argued that if we can understand the conventional status of our knowledge and methodologies, then – crucially both for the politics of science and for everyday morality – we will come to see that it is we and not reality who are responsible for what we know.29
However, what began as an assertion of openness became in time a doctrine of closure. If the relativity and limitedness of knowledge and understanding are clear from the outset, then what is left to make us want to try to know and to experience the joy at being able to understand? ‘Fear of knowledge’30 came to be an albatross around the necks of a younger generation of researchers, artists, philosophers and intellectuals.
But where are the signs of the emergence of a new mood? One clue can be found in the debate in the visual arts.
Postmodern irony, which once resisted modernist enthusiasm for progress, utopia, functionalism and purism, has lost its appeal here. The combination of nihilism, sarcasm and distrust of grand narratives about the ‘irreducible individual’ and suchlike has been discarded as stale and empty. One no longer wants merely to endlessly defer the end, to demonstrate the impo
ssibility of narrating the world, to denounce the whole as untrue, but to begin something, to try something, to assemble something. People seek an art of engagement,31 assembly32 and vitality.33 The new claim is: ‘Engagement not exhibitionism, hope not melancholy’.
CEOs and politicians, architects and artists alike are formulating anew a narrative of longing structured by and conditioned on a belief (‘yes we can’, ‘change we can believe in’) that was long repressed, for a possibility (‘a better future’) that was long forgotten. Indeed, if, simplistically put, the modern outlook vis-à-vis idealism and ideals could be characterized as fanatic and/or naive, and the postmodern mindset as apathetic and/or skeptic, the current generation’s attitude – for it is, and very much so, an attitude tied to a generation – can be conceived of as a kind of informed naivety, a pragmatic idealism.34
A very different indicator of change in the general mood, this time pertaining to the global situation, can be found in Achille Mbembe’s Critique of Black Reason, first published in 2013. The book analyses the inherent connection between racism and capitalism, showing how the racial subject was concocted on the plantations of colonialism in the shadow of the bourgeois subject, appearing to the hysterical white ruler as an object that was both threatening and seductive. The term ‘negro’ was invented as an expression of exclusion, condemnation and humiliation, marking a difference in skin colour that to this day continues to be invoked and detested. Like Frantz Fanon, Mbembe stresses that the colonized person can experience his or her life only as the permanent struggle against a death that is atmospherically ubiquitous. Hence, for the person degraded to a racial subject, the urge for revenge is irresistible, and emancipatory violence is inevitable. The book shows that we continue to live in a racist world where, for the colonized, it is a question of giving meaning not to one’s life but to one’s death.
Nelson Mandela, who unlike Ruben Um Nyobé, Patrice Lumumba, Amílcar Cabral, Martin Luther King and the rest escaped murder, thought differently. Meditating endlessly in his cell, he arrived at the idea of ontological semblance and proximity between human beings, despite the best efforts of his guards to convince him otherwise. Achille Mbembe comes to a similar conclusion in his epilogue, entitled ‘There is only one world’. Given the irreversible intermingling and interweaving of cultures, peoples and nations in this one world, he writes, only a process of reassembling amputated parts, of repairing broken links and of relaunching forms of reciprocity can guarantee progress for humanity and offer a politics for the future.35
Notes
1. Wolfgang Streeck (2015), ‘Wie wird der Kapitalismus enden?’, Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik 60(3): 99–111.
2. Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000), Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton.
3. Paul J. Crutzen (2002), ‘Geology of Mankind’, Nature 415 (3 January): 23.
4. Klaus Dörre, Hajo Holst and Ingo Matuschek, ‘Zwischen Firmenbewusstsein und Wachstumskritik. Empirische Befunde aus einem Industriebetrieb’, WSI-Mitteilungen 67(7), Grenzen des Wachstums – Grenzen des Kapitalismus?: 543–50.
5. Stine Marg, Lars Geiges, Felix Butzlaff and Franz Walter (eds) (2013), Die neue Macht der Bürger. Was motiviert die Protestbewegungen?, Reinbek bei Hamburg, p. 48ff.
6. Gero Neugebauer (2006), Politische Milieus in Deutschland. Die Studie der Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn.
7. Hans Bertram and Carolin Deuflhard (2014), Die überforderte Generation. Arbeit und Familie in der Wissensgesellschaft, Opladen/Berlin/Toronto.
8. Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez (2003), ‘Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998’, Quarterly Journal of Economics 118(1): 1–39.
9. Heinz Bude (2015), ‘Brennpunkte sozialer Spaltung’, in Steffen Mau and Nadine M. Schöneck (eds), (Un-)gerechte (Un-) Gleichheiten, Berlin, pp. 16–26.
10. Thomas Piketty (2014), Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge, MA and London.
11. Joseph Vogl (2017), The Ascendancy of Finance, Cambridge.
12. Joseph Vogl (2015), The Specter of Capital, Stanford, p. 71.
13. Colin Crouch (2009), ‘Privatised Keynesianism: An Unacknowledged Policy Regime’, The British Journal of Politics & International Relations 11(3): 382–99.
14. Christian Marazzi (2012), Sozialismus des Kapitals, Zurich.
15. Niklas Luhmann (1971), ‘Die Risiken der Wahrheit und die Perfektion der Kritik’, unpublished manuscript, Bielefeld.
16. Francois Bourguignon (2015), The Globalization of Inequality, Princeton.
17. I am referring here to the circumplex model of James A. Russel (1980), ‘A Circumplex Model of Affect’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 39: 1161–78.
18. Martin Heidegger (2001 [1962]), Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Oxford, p. 173.
19. Ibid.
20. This is the approach to the biography in developmental psychology and sociology. See e.g. Paul B. Baltes (1990), ‘Entwicklungspsychologie der Lebensspanne: Theoretische Leitsätze’, Psychologische Rundschau 41: 1–24; or Steffen Hillmert and Karl Ulrich Mayer (eds) (2004), Geboren 1964 und 1971. Neue Untersuchungen zu Ausbildungs- und Berufschancen in Westdeutschland, Wiesbaden.
21. Karl Jaspers (1979 [1931]), Die geistige Situation der Zeit, 8th edn, Berlin and New York; English trans. (2010 [1933]), Man in the Modern Age, London.
22. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 176.
23. Heinz Bude (2015), ‘Die Selbstgerechten, die Übergangenen und die Verbitterten. Die Gesellschaft der Angst und der Protestbegriff des Volkes. Eine Dresdner Rede’, Theater heute 3 (March): 30–5.
24. Peter Sloterdijk (2000), Die Verachtung der Massen. Versuch über Kulturkämpfe in der modernen Gesellschaft, Frankfurt am Main, p. 47.
25. Herbert Giersch (1985),Eurosclerosis, Kieler Diskussionsbeiträge 2, Kiel.
26. Mancur Olson (1985), Aufstieg und Niedergang von Nationen, Tübingen.
27. Claus Offe, ‘“Unregierbarkeit”. Zur Renaissance konservativer Krisentheorien’, in Jürgen Habermas (ed.) (1979), Stichworte zur ‘Geistigen Situation der Zeit’, vol. 1, Frankfurt am Main, pp. 294–318.
28. Burkart Lutz (1984), Der kurze Traum immerwährender Prosperität, Frankfurt am Main/New York.
29. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer (1985), Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life, Princeton.
30. Paul Boghossian (2006), Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism, Oxford.
31. Nicolas Bourriaud (2002), Relational Aesthetics, Paris.
32. Bruno Latour (2004), Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter, Cambridge, MA.
33. Brian Massumi (2010), Ontopower: War, Powers and the State of Perception, Durham, NC.
34. Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, ‘Notes on Metamodernism’, in David Rudrum (ed.) (2015), Supplanting the Postmodern: An Anthology of Writings on the Arts and Culture of the Early 21st Century, London, pp. 309–29, here pp. 314–15.
35. Achille Mbembe (2017), Critique of Black Reason, Duke University Press, p. 182.
In the Mood for ‘Mood’
For a long time, ‘mood’ was a rather disreputable concept – and for many it still is. It is associated either with public mood and its manipulation by the mass media, with their lurid headlines and tales of tragedy, or with mind and mood management, yoga and swimming, muzak and colour theory, feng shui and ambient lighting, and notions of holism and world harmony. Mood belongs to an entertainment and wellness industry that, in societies like ours, offers respite to the battle-weary soldiers of the wars of competition. Mood’s lack of appeal is compounded by the fact that the word’s roots are Germanic, and hence not graspable in the Greek and Latinate terms of English scientific and technical language. The word’s Germanic etymology also makes it difficult to translate.1 The problem isn’t just one of nuances. Rendering ‘mood’ as the French word humeur captures the emotional constitution of the self,
which may be in a good or a bad mood, but this misses the atmospheric reality of a landscape or a group of people, which conveys a sublime or dangerous mood and is separable from the self. In French, this is atmosphère. The same distinction is also made in Spanish (humor, atmósfera) and in Italian (umore, atmosfera). In German, the word for mood – Stimmung – can also mean the ‘tuning’ of a musical instrument, as well as the specific behaviour of people brought into a feeling of, say, panic or enthusiasm. In its full semantic breadth, the German word Stimmung has no exact translation in any other European language.
If these problems are not enough, the concept of mood can also seem like a nebulous compensation for the complexity, disunity and plurality of society. ‘Mood’, one suspects, is intended to conceal the extent of our own displacement, disillusionment and deracination in the world. Reconciliation that fails to take place in reality is replaced by the mood one brings oneself – or is brought – into. Sorrow immediately alleviated by comfort; pain that takes on cosmic meaning; soul vibrations that send audiences into raptures. Surely mood is kitsch?2
This essentially ideological rejection of the concept of mood has for some time been contested since it ignores crucial aspects of human existence. After all, people navigate the world using not just their reason, their categories, their theories and their values but also their feelings, intuitions, emotions and sensibilities. To play one off against the other is to divide human beings’ relationship with the world in half.