by Heinz Bude
The modern German concept of Stimmung first appeared in the sixteenth century as a musical term referring to the pitch of an instrument. In the eighteenth century, it was used to describe the basic constitution of the soul, and was extended to the relationship between a person and the world. This was the start of an astonishing lexical career that ranged from Johann Georg Sulzer’s theory of the dispositions and Wilhelm Wundt’s psycho-physical parallelism, to the Lebensphilosophie of Fichte and Nietzsche and the metaphysical poetics of Rilke and von Hofmannsthal, and to the existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger and Franz Rosenzweig.3 The free play of reason and sensibility in the ‘balanced temperament’ of aesthetic judgement; animation through the unknown forces of the soul; the discovery of an innermost and unique subjectivity; the concentration on stirrings, impressions and evocations in selfless lyrical expression; and, finally, the idea of the self-interpretation of being – throughout the intellectual history of the last two centuries, the concept of mood was constantly defined in new ways. Mood provides a key category for the human being as a whole, which not only structures and analyses the world through the intellect but also rationally comprehends and experiences itself as a part of the world in which it finds itself.
The return of mood as a serious category in the humanities is above all the result of aesthetic debate in literary studies.4 After the adventures in the ‘close reading’ of the single, all-revealing sentence, in the ‘distant reading’ of hundreds of documents in the search for common textual features and in the ‘re-reading’ of anything and everything in the name of the ‘linguistic turn’, literary criticism has again started looking at emotional and exploratory reading. Now that linguistically sophisticated readings no longer hold out the prospect of revealing anything new, it seems that intuition is back on the agenda.5 Perhaps what even the purely formal analysis of texts ultimately wants to do is to trace questions that have disappeared into history, leaving only the answers.6 That, at any rate, is the opinion of Franco Moretti, a critic of the ceremonial and solemn reading of a few select texts, who prefers graphs, maps and diagrams for charting world literature.7
One can sense a new mood in the humanities as a whole, a desire to break free from the fixation on language as the beginning and end of human self-understanding. Half a century ago, the shift from consciousness to language meant an intellectual revolution; now the new has grown old.
Exemplary of this trend is the new interest in feelings, whose importance to the thought, will and action of individuals, groups and societies is clearly far greater than notions of ‘speaking animals’ and ‘rational machines’ would suggest. When analysing feelings, we cannot exclude the ‘lower senses’ of smell, taste and touch which, unlike the ‘distance senses’ of sight and hearing, cannot easily be verbalized. It is possible to recognize someone very clearly from their smell but difficult to say what actually defines it. The haptic distinctions between cashmere and merino, between oak and lime, between sipping tea from a china cup or a stoneware mug, suggest that the spectrum is wide. Wittgenstein’s dictum that the limits of my language mean the limits of my world was certainly not the last word on the subject.
Feelings and sensations permit a new view of the communicative mechanisms of processes of socialization. Taking place beyond the rational coordination of different interests, points of view and preferences are processes of contagion, emulation and adoption, which have more to do with situational encounters than the intentions of actors. The spread of rumours, the dynamics of violence and market fluctuations all give an idea of this.
Finally, there are signs of a need to ‘return to the thing itself’ (Edmund Husserl). The age of theoretical bias, when what must not be could not be, has left behind the sense that theory distorts our understanding of reality. Human beings are certainly neither the oldest nor the most consistent of problems that human knowledge has posed to itself. On the contrary, after fifty years of self-analysis in the humanities, we know that human beings, with all their idiosyncrasies, differences and similarities, are a fairly recent invention of sixteenth-century European culture. At any rate, it doesn’t seem as if knowledge has been acquired or steps taken that might cause the human being as we know it to disappear, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea – as Michel Foucault evoked this supposed moment of parting.8 In a world where, year on year, advertisers, investment bankers and radiologists converge on the Nevada desert to witness the spiritual spectacle of the ‘Burning Man’, while youngsters from Bordeaux, Wolfsburg and Liverpool make their way to Syria to fight for ISIS; where millions of micro-decisions are made every second online, and yet where terminally ill patients cannot legally decide the manner of their death; where big data lets prosumers of the world be minutely categorized on the basis of preference, receptivity and aggregability, while the social gulf within societies between the privileged and the underprivileged grows ever deeper; where social rights have been universalized in some regions, while human rights have been suspended for specific groups in others – in such a world, Foucault’s image of the vanishing human being is out of place. More apt would be the ‘principle of unfathomability or the open question’, defined by Helmuth Plessner as the basis for a phenomenological methodology,9 thus making the term ‘human being’ the cipher for the enigma of what we are. Investigating mood can be one way to clarify what eludes us, what lies ahead and what remains entirely obscure.
It seems, then, that as a result of waning methodological certainties, we are increasingly in the mood for a concept of mood. Under such circumstances, there is a growing readiness to face up to things, to collect observations, to gradually gain experience and, step by step, to make generalizations. Freud’s remark concerning the empirical method of psychoanalysis is fitting here. ‘There is no incongruity,’ he said, ‘if its most general concepts lack clarity and if its postulates are provisional; it leaves their more precise definition to the result of future work.’10
In this mood, what can we say about the metaphorically strong yet semantically vague concept of mood?
As Otto Friedrich Bollnow pointed out,11 in the German language moods are often identified through the stems Sinn (sense) or Mut (spirit). Trübsinn (gloom), Frohsinn (joy) and Leichtsinn (carefreeness), or Übermut (high spirits), Wehmut (melancholy), Schwermut (depression), Gleichmut (calm) and Missmut (ill-temperedness) refer to different kinds of ‘being in the mood’ that envelop one. If these words are understood literally, the ‘sense’ of the world correlates with the ‘spirit’ of the self. This totality of feeling ‘comes neither from “outside” nor from “inside”, but arises out of Being-in-the-world, as a way of such Being’.12 Mood is perceived as problematic precisely because it undermines the self-evident scientific distinction between a subject that processes information and an object from which information emanates. The world is present in mood but, instead of being outside me, I find myself within it.
How, then, does a mood overcome me whose essence is neither in me nor in the world, but which expresses the way I am in the world?
Sometimes, one enters a mood seamlessly through ‘bodily stirrings’,13 for example in summer on the beach. It is only after three days that one notices one is starting to relax. Sometimes one adjusts to a social situation through the glances, gestures and movements of other people, at a ceremony, perhaps, or at a party or a football match, where there is no escaping the mood. Sometimes, images and stories of unimaginable cataclysms such as war, displacement, inflation and revolution convey the feeling that something is beginning or ending. However, a mood can also take over without there being any apparent cause or social convention that would explain it.
Mood is more than a sum of bodily states; rather, it dominates me as an overall feeling. Mood endures because of my willingness to feel certain feelings, to expect certain expectations and to predict certain predictions. Worry and bitterness refuse to pass, cheerfulness and contentedness cannot be deterred.
However, I am neither the author of
nor witness to my mood. Instead, I understand myself in this mood or that. I cannot escape my own skin, although of course I wonder how long things will go on as they are. This is true of good moods and bad moods, ups and downs. In the former I fear, in the latter I hope that the light will not stay as pallid, soft, cheerful or garish as it is now.
The consequence of this, however, is that the moods that I experience force me to ask myself what it means for me to be in this or that mood. Heidegger plays on this when he says that, in my mood, I am responsible for my being, for what I have to be. In other words, mood doesn’t place me in a relationship to the world but in relation to myself. The inward demand that I ‘have to be’ comes from the fear or the hope that the mood that I am in now will pass and make way for another one. Every mood knows other moods and, as a possibility of being, points to other possibilities of being. The question as to why I exist only arises because selfbeing as mood is always possible-being as mood.14 For Heidegger, famously, my certain death is the horizon of this question, which during adolescence, in mid-life or on retirement can suddenly rob me of my sleep in bouts of agitation specific to my stage of life.
Psychology solves the intractable problem of the connection between mood dependence and freedom to be oneself through a conceptual distinction between mood, feeling and affect. In affect I hit back, run away or laugh along with the others. My body takes over and I do what I normally wouldn’t. In retrospect, a long film plays before my eyes as if of its own accord. Feelings, on the other hand, are focused on something and allow me to deal with a concrete situation. I feel threatened by loss, exposure or rejection; I am relaxed and contented because of professional success, because my relationship remains sexually intact or after going to the gym in the morning; I am annoyed by the unpleasant remarks of a colleague or the run-down state of the public park. Moods, finally, are directed at nothing in particular. Fear remains, even when there is nothing left to be afraid of; cheerfulness disregards every frown and withstands all adversity; my composure refuses to be shaken even by the harshest criticism and severest of humiliations.
Affects are sudden and short lived, feelings are episodes with intense climaxes, moods last longer. The circumstances that trigger affects are usually obvious. The connection of feelings to specific events emerges through the signals, the explanations and the excuses of the person who has those feelings. With moods, all one has are conjectures about problematic biographical circumstances, failed support networks and irresolvable conflicts. Moods reveal themselves through effects, not causes.
As ‘unfocused evaluative states’,15 moods induce particular perceptions of situations. They encourage feelings, memories and thoughts appropriate to a particular mood and prompt a certain posture (for example, a stoop and a slow gait in a mood of dejection; a proud, erect stance and brisk stride in a mood of euphoria). Lastly, they prompt a certain range of behaviours while tending to prevent other, inappropriate forms of behaviour (uninhibited consumption when one is happy and relaxed; frugality when one is annoyed or depressed).16 This allows one to see and sense another person’s mood.
Psychology has also developed ideas about the interaction and reciprocity of moods, feelings and affects.17 A mood of irritation can turn into a specific feeling of anger at swindlers and freeloaders, which a spectacular tax-evasion case can cause to become an affect of hatred towards classical scapegoats such as ‘Jewish speculators’ or ‘economic migrants from the Middle East’. The role of what Heinz Heckhausen has referred to as ‘value bias’18 in the evaluation of moods is interesting here. Agitated moods are interpreted either positively or negatively, depending on the situation they anticipate (‘hope for’, ‘fear of’). A negative interpretation can trigger feelings of being overlooked and disrespected, which in turn can produce violent affects aimed at the supposedly guilty party.
However, interaction can also go in the opposite direction. Feelings whose occasion no longer exists subside and lose intensity, leaving a mood to simmer. When anger wears off, latent irritability may take its place; an isolated experience of erotic ecstasy may cause a lifelong sense of melancholy at a missed opportunity for love. Of course, moods can also be the result of a gradual accumulation of everyday annoyances or pleasures. Small everyday experiences can combine in a day-long mood of success or failure, when everything seems either to be going well or going badly.
Psychologists have been researching the impact of moods for over a century. From Wilhelm Wundt and the Gestalt theory of Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Metzger19 to the transactional theory of Richard S. Lazarus20 and Amos Tversky’s and Daniel Kahneman’s analysis of mood heuristics, emotional framing and the focusing illusion,21 there is now a vast literature on the impact of mood on readiness to help others, risk taking, attention span, powers of recollection, attribution tendencies, probability assessment, persuasiveness, cognitive performance, readiness to cooperate, and posture.22 All these explanations tend to produce models based on interaction, feedback and process, whose advantage is that they dispense with straightforward analysis of causality and no longer posit a connection between cause and effect. Physiological activation also plays a role, as do the five central personality variables of extraversion, neuroticism, tolerance, conscientiousness and openness to new experiences, as well as baseline motivation and, of course, the weather.
Yet psychology fails to understand mood if it clings to the concept of the ‘closed human being’ who possesses a personal and a private inner world, in which all experience is hermetically sealed.23 Mood doesn’t come into a person extraneously; it isn’t possessed and cannot be arbitrarily regulated. Rather, mood exists in the situation that I am in and through which I understand myself. Of course, the position of the sun at a particular time of day comes into it, as does my hormonal balance at any particular phase in my life cycle. What is crucial for mood, however, is how I am affected by a situation that is defined socially, spatially, historically and biographically, one that requires me to participate and play a role. In the mood of the situation, the self-generating self experiences itself as a self that is already generated by the demands, suggestions and syntheses of others. Every space of experienced presence24 has a mood to which, without much conscious effort, I seamlessly adjust, and which I perceive either consciously by way of social contrast or which I succumb to without inward resistance. It because of this passivity, wrote Jean-Paul Sartre in 1936/7, that the self is able to be affected at all.25
Notes
1. Leo Spitzer (1963), Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony: Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word ‘Stimmung’, ed. Anna Granville Hatcher, with a foreword by René Wellek, Baltimore.
2. Ludwig Giesz (1971), Phänomenologie des Kitsches, Munich, pp. 55–61.
3. See David Wellbery (2003), ‘Stimmung’, in Karlheinz Barck et al. (eds), Ästhetische Grundbegriffe, vol. 5, Stuttgart and Weimar, pp. 703–33.
4. See Anna-Katharina Gisbertz (ed.) (2011), Stimmung. Zur Wiederkehr einer ästhetischen Kategorie, Munich; Friederike Reents and Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek (eds) (2013), Stimmung und Methode, Tübingen. See also Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (2011), Stimmungen lesen. Über eine verdeckte Wirklichkeit der Literatur, Munich; and Gernot Böhme (2013), Atmosphäre. Essays zur neuen Ästhetik, 7th edn, Berlin.
5. See e.g. Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek and Lyrisches Gespür (2012), Vom geheimen Sensorium moderner Poesie, Paderborn and Munich.
6. Franco Moretti (2013), The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature, London and New York, p. 14.
7. Franco Moretti (2007), Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History, London.
8. The famous formulation at the end of Michel Foucault (1970), The Order of Things, London.
9. Helmuth Plessner (1931), Macht und menschliche Natur, Berlin, p. 40, now in idem (2003), Gesammelte Schriften in zehn Bänden, vol. 5: Macht und menschliche Natur, Frankfurt am Main.
10. Sigmund Freud, ‘Two Encyclopedia Articles’ (1955 [1923]), in J. Strachey (trans.), S
tandard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud (vol. 18), London, p. 253.
11. Otto Friedrich Bollnow (1941), Das Wesen der Stimmungen republished (2009) in Schriften, vol. 1, Würzburg, p. 22.
12. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 176.
13. The expression of Hermann Schmitz (2014), ‘Gefühle als Atmosphären’, in idem, Atmosphären, Freiburg and Munich, 30–49, 31ff.
14. On this interpretation of mood by Heidegger, see Ernst Tugendhat (1979), Selbstbewusstsein und Selbstbestimmung. Sprachanalytische Interpretationen, Frankfurt am Main, p. 204ff.
15. Brian Parkinson, Peter Totterdell, Rob B. Briner and Shirley Reynolds (1996), Changing Moods: The Psychology of Mood and Mood Regulation, London, p. 8.
16. Thomas Fuchs (2013), ‘Zur Phänomenologie der Stimmungen’, in Friederike Reents und Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek (eds), Stimmung und Methode, Tübingen, pp. 17–31, 25.
17. Lothar Schmidt-Atzert (1981), Emotionspsychologie, Stuttgart, p. 30ff.
18. Heinz Heckhausen (1977), ‘Motivation: Kognitionspsychologische Aufspaltung eines summarischen Konstrukts’, Psychologische Rundschau 28: 175–89, 177.
19. Wolfgang Metzger (1957), Stimmung und Leistung, Münster.
20. Richard S. Lazarus (1991), Emotion and Adaptation, New York.
21. Daniel Kahneman (2012), Thinking, Fast and Slow, London.
22. For an overview, see Brian Parkinson et al. (1996), Changing Moods.
23. Hermann Schmitz (2014), ‘Atmosphärische Räume’, in idem, ‘Atmosphären’, Freiburg and München, pp. 13–29, here p. 13.
24. Schmitz, ‘Atmosphärische Räume’, p. 19.
25. Jean-Paul Sartre (2004 [1957]), The Transcendence of the Ego, New York and Oxford, p. 35.
Cycles of Contagion and Spirals of Silence
In the nineteenth century, with the acceleration of life in big cities like London, Paris and Berlin, the universal ego of mood became communicative. Collective usages of the concept of mood emerged that are current today: the mood of the stock market, the political mood of a country, the mood of the masses. The communication of mood takes place below the threshold of consciousness, in non-linear, irregular movements. It produces collectives whose magnetism is not bound to established forms of representation and is therefore unstable. Mood can lead to herd behaviour that can be controlled neither extraneously nor from within.