The Mood of the World

by Heinz Bude

  Early sociology concerned itself with how the autonomy of collective mood was to be understood. In 1898 and 1899, the long forgotten but recently rediscovered Gabriel Tarde published two treatises devoted to the topic of the public, the mass and public opinion. In his day, Tarde was the great adversary of Émile Durkheim, whose ideas about collective representation and solidarity Tarde considered a dangerous mystification of the social.1

  How, Tarde asked, do individuals who live apart from one another in the city or scattered across the country, or far away from one other on the same continent, come to feel that they share the same social world? The answer was: by reading a national or foreign newspaper. The difference between newspapers and books is that the scandalous, terrifying or repellent thing that I’m currently reading about is, at this very moment, being shared by a large number of other people. Each for themselves, they too are reading the same newspaper on the way to work or wherever else. The keen curiosity with which the subscriber, still in his pyjamas, collects the daily newspaper from his letter box in the morning, is accompanied by the unconscious illusion that numerous others are also on their way to their letter boxes. Herein lies the secret of the constitution of a public.

  According to Tarde, this feeling of topicality depends not on the pressing facticity of the events, but on the thrilling simultaneity of their cognizance. What is topical is not what has just taken place, but what at the moment is awakening broad interest – even when it is an event that happened long ago. The First World War is suddenly topical again, or a picture of Angela Merkel in her youth. Topical is what is being talked about.

  The oddly feverish interest in current events is what underlies the association of a newspaper-reading public, which is subject to suggestion from afar. Journalists are the agitators, authenticity comes from images, truth is claimed through characters in newsprint.

  What Tarde observes is contagion without contact, the transmission of thoughts across random distances and group formation founded on mutual excitements. As Niklas Luhmann said, no one believes everything in the newspaper, but newspaper readers have become used to being second-order observers who decipher everything communicated according to who is communicating it.2 This means that, as a rule, we read the newspaper whose principles most closely approximate our own assumptions about social morality, so that we can get properly angry at someone else together with someone else. Moreover, we think we know so much about the methods of the mass media that we cannot trust their sources anyway. That doesn’t mean that we don’t take an interest every morning in what is reported and how it is reported, together with all the other people that form the public. The passion for topicality, as Tarde put it,3 makes the consumers of mass media sensitive to shifts in the relational messages being communicated along with every piece of information: whether fears of decline are on the rise or, on the contrary, whether obsessions with the past are surfacing; whether commentaries and reports emphasize the mess we’re in or whether a desire for change has become tangible; whether journalism means cynical irony or the sincere quest for truth.

  The different publics in society form spaces of mood. Maintained by a constant flow of relevant information and mutual excitement, they intensify the experience of society. The social public emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century, along with mass-media technology and the rise of working-class literacy. This brought a democratization of mood, as the spread of literacy throughout society removed the prerogative of the educated classes. It was no longer the colour, smell and light of the garden that, as with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, composed the mood, but rather, as in Alfred Döblin’s novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, the boomboom hiss-hiss of the steam piledriver, the collage of posters on the advertising columns and the hustle and bustle of the electric age. The invasion of the boulevard newspaper at the beginning of the twentieth century, which at first was available only from street vendors and not on subscription (hence the term), is evidence that, alongside the elaborated mood code, a more restricted mood code emerged, and that this gradually asserted itself as the central register in the communication of mood. The first boulevard paper sold in Germany, the BZ am Mittag, appeared in 1904. The mass media generate a mass public made up of very different social groups. This public wants from its media topicality, emotionality and visuality. The journalistic technique of the ‘human touch’ caters to this desire by using the face in the crowd to show what could happen to any one of us, and what every one of us longs for. The evolution of the mass media brought the close-up of the human face, the music of existential searching and spiritual negation, and the moving images of everyday lives. With photography, jazz and cinema, the societal communication of mood became a quintessential function of the media; as a configuration of words, images and sound, mood could now reach all social classes equally. The visual aesthetics of Leni Riefenstahl, which inspired the Nike advertisements, the sound of dance-floor king Giorgio Moroder, a Hollywood production like Avatar, which shows how artificial figures develop real feelings, or the Marlboro slogan ‘Don’t be a Maybe’ can all be seen as the ‘expressive form’ of a contemporary moodcomplex with global resonance.

  Although the inventors of the internet held traditional media in disdain, the principle that anything that is in vogue is news has not been overturned. On the contrary: online news services that deliberately confuse the classical distinction between reporting, advertising and entertainment have only confirmed it. When you need a new headline every three hours to maintain traffic on your website, then the principles of topicality, emotionality and visuality are paramount. The only question is what online media’s inherent imperative of acceleration means for the generation of collective moods. A newspaper’s journalists give it a consistent idiom that sends out a message. The online provider, however, dispenses with the unique journalistic voice and promotes only the headline or the snapshot, which ideally comes from a ‘citizen journalist’. On the web, the contribution with the greatest impact is the one that smears, ridicules, accuses and harms. The model is not the eccentric and digressive gonzo journalism of a Hunter S. Thompson, but the carnival with its titillations, wordplay and slurs. The statistics of ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ show what works; whether it is based on the corrupting affects of ridicule and hate is unimportant. The propagandists of online journalism welcome the polarizing effect of such provocations, which they see less as a sign of the extinction of quality journalism than as an intensification of the experience of socialization.

  The mood created by online journalism therefore derives less from the content communicated and the relational messages it contains than from the method of direct, affective public address. This suggests a disjunction between an official, serious public, catered to by the traditional media, and an unofficial, popular public that doesn’t wait for the interpretations offered by the media but takes the medium into its own hands. Netizens, with their claim to a different kind of sovereignty, constitute a demos opposed to the established representatives of the public interest – to a ‘media elite’ and ‘political elite’ that, in the liberal democratic system, presume to speak for the people through the press and parliament, instead of letting the people speak for themselves. It is only logical that this concealed but potent-feeling demos eventually emancipates itself from its origins in the forums of citizens’ journalism and instead moves to the blogs and social networks, where it constructs the communicative catacombs of a deep and underlying mood of rebellion. The affects of rebellion – anger and rage – are directed at all those who became immeasurably rich and incredibly corrupt during the ‘frivolous years’ of neoliberalism. The comedians Beppe Grillo in Italy and Dieudonné in France, both typical spokespersons of this mood, have blogs that are followed by hundreds of thousands of people. They express distrust in the system by reintroducing a vertical divide in political discourse: the divide between the palazzo – the home of the indifferent, slick and cruel bearers of power – and the piazza, where the people are growing restive and
angry.4

  Gabriel Tarde knew that a febrile public can quickly turn into a belligerent mass that marches through the streets and assembles on public squares, chanting its demands and voicing its opinion, extolling something or blaming someone for something. In this sense, the public can be understood as a virtual mass: the public prepares what gets vented by the mass. For Tarde, the transformation of an essentially passive public into an active mass can be extremely dangerous; however, fortunately it occurs only very rarely.

  Nevertheless, the transformation is always possible. As Tarde says elsewhere,5 the public normally leads a quiet life that takes the world for granted. However, random events such as extreme weather, the death of an icon, a single tweet or an image or video shared on Instagram can change things in an instant.

  A mob is a strange phenomenon. It is a gathering of heterogeneous elements, unknown to one another; but as soon as a spark of passion, having flashed out from one of these elements, electrifies this confused mass, there takes place a sort of sudden organization, a spontaneous generation. This incoherence becomes cohesion, this noise becomes a voice, and these thousands of men crowded together soon form but a single animal, a wild beast without a name …6

  Unruly though mass behaviour may appear, for Tarde the mass is not a form of degeneracy. On the contrary, he sees it as an intensification of the social. The mass makes people equal since on the street or the square no one is more important or better than another. The mass channels a diversity of passions in a single direction and towards a common grievance, causing vibrations between individuals based on heightened mutual awareness and diminished self-consciousness. In the mass, the person disintegrates into an assembly of partial objects, which combine and connect with others in their own ways, thereby generating the whole. Shouts combine with shouts, hands with hands, steps with steps. The mass impresses itself with the immensity of its own anger, its grotesque pride, its pathological sensitivity and frightening irresponsibility, thus endowing itself with the illusion of its omnipotence.7

  On the one hand, then, there is the power of the public, whose mood determines the popularity ratings of politicians, the reputation of a brand or the share value of companies. On the other hand, there is the power of the mass, which as a desiring and demanding, outspoken and potentially violent collective generates the proverbial mood of the street. Finally, both are complemented by the power of public opinion, which is said to predominate within a community and to define the general mood. Motivated by the public, it appears momentarily in the mass, but functions as the ‘law of opinion and reputation’ like an anonymous censor who, through approval and rejection of suggestions, opinions, conjectures and visions, haunts the spaces of experienced presence. John Locke, who developed the first theory of public opinion at the end of the seventeenth century, during discussions with friends in his London home,8 explains public opinion in connection with place, in order to clarify that it was a matter of local processes occurring among people belonging to a particular community. He had in mind a civic society of clubs, in which lively discourse was cultivated between parliament, the editorial offices of newspapers, coffee houses and domestic circles. People paid attention to each other, talked among themselves, conversed about events and exchanged opinions. Measured against the views, principles and customs belonging to that particular place, behaviour was either applauded or rejected. At stake for each individual was their good reputation among their fellows.

  ‘Nor is there one of ten thousand,’ noted Locke on the basis of his conversations with his friends, ‘who is stiff and insensible enough to bear up under the constant dislike and condemnation of his own club.’9 That means, of course, that the basis of our own opinion is what we presume is the opinion of the other. Every opinion we express anticipates in its very formulation the reaction of the addressee. We do not want to be misunderstood or, if we have a completely different opinion, at least hope that others will be sympathetic. If not, one acquires a reputation for being a ‘difficult person’, an ‘awkward character’ or a ‘constant moaner’. This led Locke to conclude that what we call our opinion is just a reflection of the opinions of others and doesn’t really belong to us.

  Two hundred years later, in the mid-nineteenth century, Gabriel Tarde – like Gustave Flaubert in Madame Bovary – was thinking more of the French provinces and less of the far-off and urbane capital. In the provinces, debates didn’t take place in clubs; instead, conversations of a more or less sophisticated nature were conducted at dinner parties, at the pub or across the garden fence.

  In such everyday conversations, the highly personal and the highly general combine quite naturally. We talk about illnesses, neighbours’ bad behaviour, quarrels at work and what handymen charge these days; but also about the security of our pensions, the madness of civil wars, conditions in schools and the refugee burden. The tone can alternate between annoyance, despair and relief. Overall, however, the topics, tone and structure of our everyday conversations seem to reflect the situation in which we find ourselves as contemporaries.

  There is the anthropological constant of talking about the weather, about aches and pains and other people’s incompetence; however, these conversations are repeatedly intersected by the stuff of the moment, as it features in the evening news, the local newspaper or the internet. One gets together, whether seated or standing, to do nothing but talk. Out of this, however, there develops of its own accord ‘a chain and an interlacing of questions and answers, or exchanged advice and mutual objections’10 concerning matters of interest to everyone, or at least what no one can ignore. Facial expression, tone of voice and gesture inform participants about each other’s interest in the subject. Mild irony can unintentionally turn into deadly seriousness, or a silly remark trigger a heated argument. This can happen in Japanese reserve, French nonchalance, Italian volubility or German bluntness. These conversations are founded in human sociability, but the mood of the social situation also develops in them. The eclecticism of everyday conversations is what makes them so receptive to the feeling of the world and the thoughts of the age.

  The power of mood is thus expressed through its articulation in people’s opinions. No one is behind it, pulling the strings. Instead, it emerges through exchange and stabilizes itself through repetition. We return to it automatically, surprised that a feeling of finality, change, inertia has again come over us.

  Suddenly, the conversation can take an oddly portentous turn and adopt a national ‘master narrative’.11 A mood of national demise, social division and irreparable loss descends, the reaction to which varies. The American way is to place one’s hopes in a charismatic leader who can sweep aside all intellectual misgivings and restore meaning to the nation. The French way is to collectively invoke the Republic, which will turn everyone back into children of the revolution and opponents of globalization. The Germans, meanwhile, appeal to the authority of the law and let regional civil society replace the concept of popular protest. In other words: in Richmond, Virginia, people yearn for a figure who takes the lead and makes America great again; in St Étienne, people vote for a party that despite the schism between the left-wing establishment and the right-wing populists can unite the nation, while at the same time reconfirming the values of the Republic, despite diversity; and in Stuttgart, people express their belief that the law is the law and that the Swabians will never go under.

  Yet in the way it communicates itself through movements within the public, through manifestations of the mass and through the vagaries of public opinion, mood is never unequivocal. Paul F. Lazarsfeld, coauthor of the famous 1933 study on the ‘Unemployed of Marienthal’ and, after emigrating to the United States, pioneer of psephology and opinion polling, explained citizens’ preferences through the notion of the hierarchy of stabilities. At the very top of this hierarchy were voting intentions. It is often still the case that the first voting decision of one’s life determines how one votes from then on. Generally, it takes a long time before people change
their minds, whether on the basis of new options, experiences or developments. At the same time, the mood of the moment often decides election results.

  For psephologists, this poses numerous problems. They identify relatively stable preferences, compute them, make a prognosis and on election day get it spectacularly wrong. There are always hangers-on, who at the last minute choose to vote for the probable winner rather than the probable loser.12 People don’t want to be one of the idiots who didn’t realize who the majority candidate was. The candidate of the party I prefer, on the basis that it most closely matches my own beliefs about good policy, is not necessarily the one I vote for. Very often, I will opt for the candidate of another party because I think that she is the leader of the majority, and in my social circles I don’t want to belong to a distrusted or patronized minority. Better to howl with the wolves than to speak out.

  Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann adopted Lazarsfeld’s ideas and, drawing on the political philosophy of John Locke and others, developed the theory of the ‘spiral of silence’. This holds that predominant moods result from individuals’ fear of isolation.13 The desire to be on the side of the winner is caused by the fear of rejection and disrespect. I keep quiet about what everyone seems to be saying because I fear being alone with my opinion. Thus a vacillating mood can spread; sometimes, a mood swing may even occur. As a convinced social democrat, I unexpectedly discover positive aspects to the conservative candidate; as a habitual conservative, I am suddenly impressed by the freshness and elan of the social democratic challenger. Mood creates pressure to conform.