by Heinz Bude
For Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, the public sphere is not a realm of public consultation and mutual recognition, as it is for Jürgen Habermas.14 Rather, the individual experiences it as a field of threat, somewhere a person can lose face. I exercise restraint, note what others say and, if in doubt, follow the lead of the opinion formers. For Noelle-Neumann, people are fearful and cautious by nature. To think otherwise would be unrealistic.
Whatever one thinks of this sceptical anthropology, it is supported by the sociological diagnosis that, as Norbert Elias put it, we live in a ‘society of individuals’.15 Depending on the strength of their attachment to large-scale collective categories such as class or citizenship, and the extent to which advertising, entertainment and journalism address the public in national or merely local terms, individuals become the playthings of stimuli, seductions and amusements. The self experiences itself as an affective being dependent upon reinforcements and exposed to mood. When it feels alone, the self is scared and silent; when it believes that many others think and feel as it does, it thrives and meets approval. Whether in retirement or in public, the self is determined by mood. All that matters is its assessment of the mood of the majority – whether the self, together with all those who hold their tongues, vanishes into a spiral of silence; or whether, in unison with those willing to talk and be seen, it masters the mood.
Notes
1. Gabriel Tarde (1989 [1901]), L’opinion et la foule, Paris, online at: http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/tarde_gabriel/opinion_et_la_foule/tarde_opinion_et_la_foule.pdf
2. Niklas Luhmann (2009), Die Realität der Massenmedien, 4th edn, Wiesbaden, p. 104.
3. Gabriel Tarde, L’opinion et la foule (1989 [1901]), p. 10.
4. Jacques de Saint Victor (2014), Les antipolitiques, Paris; see ch. 1: ‘La défiance n’est plus une “exception” française’.
5. Gabriel Tarde (1999 [1893]), La Logique Social, Paris, p. 256ff.
6. Gabriel Tarde (1912), Penal Philosophy, trans. Rapelje Howell, Boston, p. 323.
7. Gabriel Tarde (1989 [1901]), L’opinion et la foule, p. 30.
8. John Locke (1997 [1690]), An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, London.
9. Ibid., p. 321.
10. Gabriel Tarde (1989 [1901]), L’opinion et la foule, p. 47.
11. On the theoretical form and institutional anchoring of these national ‘master-narratives’ (Hayden White), see Richard Münch (1986), Die Kultur der Moderne, vol. 1, Ihre Grundlagen und ihre Entwicklung in England und Amerika, vol. 2: Ihre Entwicklung in Frankreich und Deutschland, Frankfurt am Main.
12. Lazarsfeld calls this the ‘bandwagon effect’; see Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson and Hazel Gaudet (1944), The People’s Choice: How the Voter Makes up his Mind in a Presidential Campaign, New York and London, pp. 107–9.
13. Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann (1980), Die Schweigespirale. Öffentliche Meinung – unsere soziale Haut, Munich and Zurich.
14. Jürgen Habermas (1991), The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence, Cambridge, MA.
15. Norbert Elias (1991), The Society of Individuals, Oxford.
Disappointment and Engagement
It would certainly be wrong to see the 1950s solely as an era of personal advancement, withdrawal into the private and social conformity, the 1960s solely as a decade of political passion, sexual liberation and general non-conformity, or the 1970s solely as an era of self-realization, egoism and lawlessness. This would be to overlook the futuristic World Expo in Brussels in 1958, featuring André Waterkeyn’s ‘Atomium’, which represented the elementary cell of the ice crystal enlarged 165 million times over, and Le Corbusier’s electronic poem, composed with Edgar Varese and Iannis Xenakis. It would be to overlook that the 1970s saw the rise of the ‘new social movements’ for peace, women’s rights and the environment, together with new social status for the respective milieus. The story sounds more simplistic still when you concede that, while it may apply to the OECD countries, the situation was very different in Vietnam, where the Americans were waging war, or in South Africa, which was under apartheid rule, or in Iran, which was suffering under the Shah regime.
Yet it can’t be denied that the shift from Frank Sinatra to Elvis Presley, and from the Rolling Stones and the Beatles to ABBA and the Bee Gees, marked a change of mood. When Frank Sinatra – dressed in casual suit and holding a heavy whisky glass – sings ‘In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning’ in 1955, he is invoking the dark side of a strong desire for security and comfort. When Elvis, dressed in black prison denims, gyrates to ‘Jailhouse Rock’ in 1957, then the floodgates have been opened to ‘sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll’. ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ by the Beatles in 1964 and ‘Satisfaction’ by the Rolling Stones in 1965 strike a completely different register of excitement than ‘Money, Money, Money’ by ABBA in 1976, and ‘Stayin’ Alive’ by the Bee Gees in 1977, from the film Saturday Night Fever starring the young disco phenomenon John Travolta. Here, a shift reveals itself from the pathos of liberation to the art of survival: a confession of the impossible (‘I can’t get no’) is replaced by an assertion of perseverance (‘stayin’ alive’).
Economic historians place this development in the context of the post-war boom and the recession in the 1970s;1 analysts of political culture emphasize the shift from the materialist values of duty and conformity to the post-materialist values of self-realization and individual development, and then to an unclear synthesis of both;2 sociologists of the family look at how practices of socialization went from being authoritarian to permissive.3 However, none of these perspectives is able to grasp changes in people’s emotional experience of their lives, which are based on mood change. How, then, is collective mood change to be understood?
A highly instructive model for understanding collective mood swings was provided by Albert Hirschman in the 1980s.4 Interestingly, Hirschman was neither a sociologist nor a psychologist, but a political economist. Hirschman found the key to explaining moods through studying experiences of disappointment. Moods, he argued, become collective via a history of shared disappointments or, more precisely, disappointments in relation to one of the central aspects of modern human experience: consumption.
We all know what it’s like to spend lots of money on a smart car, an elegant chair, a new-generation tablet or some other expensive item, only to have doubts about its usefulness soon afterwards. The tablet’s ID isn’t as easy to set up as the manufacturer says; the narrow chair looks elegant when other people sit in it, but you yourself find it uncomfortable; and when you drive around in your SUV, it isn’t looks of respect that you garner but derisive remarks about its exorbitant fuel consumption and senior citizen-friendly seat height. Did I make up my mind too quickly? Did I consider the costs of maintenance, cleaning and system compatibility thoroughly enough? Isn’t all this status-related consumerism not terribly irritating and strenuous?
Consumption must be learned, above all when it comes to durable commodities whose mere presence confronts us incessantly with the possibility of having made the wrong choice. When ideological disappointment about the ‘cultural meaning’ of the product – as Max Weber would say – is added to the mix, then consumption stops being pleasurable and becomes a torment.
The manifold forms of consumer asceticism, from veganism to car sharing to fair-trade guarantees, can be interpreted as signs of habitual uncertainty about real enjoyment and its conspicuous display. This explains the astonishing anger that consumer ascetics have towards consumer virtuosos. Instead of seeking inner peace, they are mainly concerned with the behaviour of others – people whose meat consumption causes animals to be tortured and killed; people who, because of their style of consumption, squander valuable resources, hasten global warming and endanger the survival of the species.
For Hirschman, consumption was the most important sphere in which groups and individuals participate in modern, complex and highly diversified society. Through our opportunity and
capacity to consume, we demonstrate our sociability and get the feeling we belong to the party. Without consumer means or consumer skills, we soon feel excluded from society as a whole.
It is natural, then, that upwardly mobile groups are particularly enthusiastic consumers, celebrating their rise with new forms of consumption. The mobile phone cult among young people with migrant backgrounds or the passion for German cars among social climbers generally can be seen as evidence of this. At the same time, however, they are particularly susceptible to disappointments when their expectations completely fail to be met. This usually happens with second-generation migrants, whose education makes them particularly sensitive to false promises. Electronic gadgets and convertibles are then no longer enough. They want exclusive hotels for the romantic holiday and top-of-the-range Dutch prams. Of course, when mixing with the upper class, swimming with the tide often means having to swim against the tide. Conspicuous consumption becomes a source of nagging doubt and recurring uncertainty.
According to Hirschman, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a sense of disappointment spread en masse amongst the upwardly mobile groups of the post-war era. The 1961 novel Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates tells the story of a perfect young couple living a suburban existence in Connecticut, USA, in the mid-1950s.5 Like a post-war Madame Bovary, April is trying to make it as an amateur actress; Frank, who was conscripted at eighteen and is just old enough to have taken part in the spring offensive against the Germans, has a well-paid job selling office machinery in Manhattan. Living in a single-family house in the ‘Revolutionary Hill Settlement’, with their two children, French windows, lawn mower and electric cooker, they soon lapse into states of mutual silence lasting days. Seeking escape from the ‘desperate loneliness’ of life in the post-war boom, the couple talk about moving to Paris, where Juliette Greco sings ‘L’Éternel féminin’ in the basement bar Tabou, and Simone Signoret and Yves Montand live out a very different kind of relationship. Away from the sterile neighbourhood idyll, from the dire advertisements for the revolutionary concept of computer-aided data processing, from the grinning void of the television and from their acute feelings of guilt and endless selfreproach about their wasted lives. Above all, away from the optimistic, permanently jocular, breezy sentimentality that everyone views life with. Neither clinging to one another for dear life nor the illicit adventure of sexual infidelity can prevent this young couple, during the post-romantic phase of their relationship, from feeling trapped. At the beginning of the 1960s, this parable of personal failure amidst an exploding world of commodities expresses the yearning for an existence beyond the truncated ideals of private happiness and personal advancement.
Hirschman points out that consumers’ silent experiences of disappointment require public articulation before one can feel what one feels. In 1960, the 31-year-old German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger published an article in Die Zeit entitled ‘The Plebiscite of the Consumer’. In it, West Germany’s long-awaited ‘angry young man’6 analysed the autumn catalogue of the mail-order company Neckermann, describing the ‘petty-bourgeois hell’ of a consumerism without alternative. Customers could choose between IRISETTE and OPTILON, SUPREMA and KINGFLASH, TURBOFLEX and DANUFLOR, MINICARE and ERBAPRACTIC, SKAI and LAVAFIX, NO IRON FINISH and NINO-IRIX-AUTO-MAGIC. Moreover, this mumbo jumbo was presented in an insidious mix of moronic sentimentality (‘our dear customers’) and catchy progressivism (‘mainframe computer’). Enzensberger anticipated how his critique would be answered. These are the concerns of arrogant intellectuals who only wish to deny ordinary people’s pleasure at being able to participate through consumption. Objections of this kind, however, do nothing to diminish the sureness of his verdict on the disappointments of consumerism:
Never before have the German proletariat and the German petty-bourgeoisie lived in a state so close to idiocy than today, in 1960. Is it snobbery to note this dangerous fact with a cry of regret? It is by no means our intention to defend Mr N., the publisher of the catalogue we have before us. His company’s willingness to please is the sort that would do whatever was demanded of it. However, no one will be able to blame Mr N. alone for what, with such diligence, he registers and exploits: a social failure for which all are to blame. Our government, for whom the stultification of the majority appears convenient; our industry, which is grateful for the thriving business; our trade unions, which do nothing about a mental exploitation inconceivable during the material impoverishment of the past; and our intelligentsia, which wrote off the victims of this exploitation long ago.7
There must be a pause to allow a mood change to take place. All at once, stability loses its charm and change becomes appealing. Hirschman speaks of a repulsion effect where one wants to get rid of something that has become boring and painful. With the student movement of 1966–1968, a mood of political passion suddenly spread across Western European societies and some Eastern European societies too. The withdrawal into the private sphere stopped being seen as a reasonable reaction to world war and genocide and began to be condemned as an evasion of questions of social responsibility and a diminution of human possibilities. A new generation raised its voice, condemning the absence of any concept of public happiness and instead searching for emotive formulas for political engagement. In Paris and Prague, Berlin and Berkeley, Tokyo and Caracas, Amsterdam and Seoul, students took to the streets, as the saying goes, to herald the mood of a new era.
Hirschman was not interested in momentary moods that decide elections. Instead, he wanted to understand epochal mood swings that intersect the histories of national societies and define historical periods. Willy Brandt, in his inaugural speech as German chancellor on 28 October 1969, famously declared, in accord with the general mood across the western world:
We want to dare more democracy. We will reveal how we work and want to satisfy the critical need for information. We will give every citizen the opportunity to participate in reforming the state and society, and not only through hearings in the Bundestag, but also through our constant contact with representative groups within the population and by offering transparency about government policies.8
The word used by Brandt for this new form of ‘contact’ with the population is the strange term Fühlungsnahme (literally ‘testing of feelings’), thus making clear that mood is the currency of politics.
We know today how quickly this mood evaporated. Brandt, who achieved the biggest electoral victory in the long history of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, resigned in May 1974. The 1970s went on to be dominated by politicians who raised no hopes for the future: Jimmy Carter in the United States, who in July 1979 made his depressing ‘malaise speech’, criticizing the materialism and consumerism of his countrymen and reminding them of the limits of growth; Leonid Brezhnev in the Soviet Union, who could do nothing to prevent the increasing obsolescence and paralysis of socialism; Zhou Enlai in China, who turned the final phase of the cultural revolution primarily against artists and journalists; and Helmut Schmidt in Germany, whose car-free Sundays lent his crisis-management style a distinctly ascetic character and who, as a veteran of the Second World War, accepted the Red Army Faction’s domestic ‘declaration of war’. The left-wing terrorism of the Red Brigades in Italy, the Japanese Red Army, the Weathermen in the United States, the Tupamaros in Uruguay and the Red Army Faction in West Germany9 are evidence of the huge disappointment at the perceived failure of political engagement in complex societies, which for the socially critical and engaged wing of the student movement turned out to be a system of inconceivable expansion and elastic boundaries. It seemed simply impossible to do anything about the falsehood of the world (or ‘the bullshit around us’, as Jefferson Airplane put it).10
The arrival of punk at the end of the decade – after the beatniks and the hippies – marked the third and perhaps last distinctive sub-culture of pop, after the beatniks and the hippies. With their slogan ‘No future!’ – intended as a positive assertion – they consistently refused socialcritical
interpretation as a way of improving the general capacity to live meaningfully. The mood of the punks was an aggressive affirmation of the present without obligation to the past or responsibility for the future. After the Sex Pistols’ band member Sid Vicious stabbed his girlfriend Nancy Spungen in the Chelsea Hotel in New York on 12 October 1978, Vivienne Westwood, the ‘Queen of Punk’, made a T-shirt emblazoned with the words ‘She is dead I’m alive …’ in red smears on white jersey.
According to Hirschman, collective moods come in two basic forms. Central to the first is the endangered self, which seeks to secure its narrow life-world against the incursions of strangers, the demands of society and the claims of the state. The aim is to get ahead, to make use of the opportunities that arise and to lead a peaceful and respectable life both individually and as a family. Things requiring long-term investments are valued highly: building or buying one’s own home, educating one’s children or a hobby like collecting stamps, first editions, vinyl or football paraphernalia. The people that run society are expected to stabilize the conditions for running one’s life and to ensure a certain degree of law and order.
It is conceivable that such a mood emerges after periods of exaggerated collective spirit, false promises and exploited enthusiasm. Experience has shown that a politics of excessive engagement can destroy everything. It seems more civilized, cleverer and more humane to reject abstract principles, to withdraw into small units and to get on with one’s life.
The second mood is sustained by the feeling that there must be more to life than the pursuit of personal interest. The world is regarded as space of opportunity with few givens and much that can be done. A sense of unease prevails that contains both the fear and the hope of another way of being. All you have to do is open your closed self to the other. In a state of ‘sweet delirium’, as Pier Paolo Pasolini put it in a poem called ‘Dunckler Enthusiasmo’ of 1950,11 you will see that, together with others, you can move mountains. This mood of participation, of discussion and collaboration, is founded on an experience of synchronicity with others with whom all you share is the urge to move forward in unison, to leave behind the silence, the repression and the suspicion. You guess perhaps that you will end up alone, but crossing boundaries seems more interesting than drawing them.