Feeling Our Way: Mood and Cultural Studies

Abstract

This essay is a contribution to an emergent investigation into the usefulness of “mood” as an analytic category for communication and cultural studies. In it I offer a number of descriptive moodscapes that demonstrate the way that mood can direct us to a material world of orientation, attunement, and atmosphere. I also suggest that cultural studies, as a writerly form, can also engage generatively with mood as a productive and political project.

Keywords:

• Mood
• Heidegger
• Attunement
• Sensorial Materialism
• Stimmung

Notes

[1] See, for instance, the recent special issue of New Literary History, 43 (2012) titled “In the Mood.”

[2] Rita Felski and Susan Fraiman, “Introduction,” New Literary History, 43 (2012): vi.

[3] Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, translated by Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 78.

[4] Jani Scandura, in Down in the Dumps: Place, Modernity, American Depression (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), makes the following point: “In the nineteenth-century United States, the term ‘depression’ was generally used with a modifier, such as ‘economic’; ‘melancholia’ was the term of choice for ‘blue devil’ moods. After the 1929 stock market crash, however, ‘depression’ came to refer simultaneously (and without antecedent) to psychological ill health and financial collapse in American clinical and popular discourse. The so-called Great Depression was marked both by economic and mass psychological depression,” p. 4.

[5] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 173 (first published in 1927).

[6] Charles Guignon, “Moods in Heidegger's Being and Time,” in What is an Emotion? Classic Reading in Philosophical Psychology, ed. Cheshire Calhoun and Robert C. Solomon (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 236.

[7] Charles Altieri, The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetic of the Affects (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 2.

[8] Guignon, “Moods in Heidegger's Being and Time,” 237.

[9] Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, translated by Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004), 13

[10] See the photographic essay and the testimony of detainees in Melanie Friend, Border Country (Winchester, UK: Winchester Gallery and Belfast Exposed Gallery, 2007) and online at http://www.melaniefriend.com/bordercountry/

[11] See James Thomas, “‘Bound in by history’: The Winter of Discontent in British Politics, 1979–2004,” Media, Culture and Society, 29, issue 2 (2007): 263–83, for an excellent account of this.

[12] Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven Randall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

[13] See Havi Carel, Illness (Durham, NC: Acumen, 2008).

[14] Particularly important for me as examples of work that has been attentive to mood while also opening up a space for a different mood of scholarly writing are the following: Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Ann Cvetkovich, Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); Jani Scandura, Down in the Dumps: Place, Modernity, American Depression (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); D. J. Waldie, Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (New York: St Martin's Griffin, 1996). Also it is worth mentioning the writing of Alphonso Lingis especially an essay like “Armed Assault” in Aesthetic Subjects, ed. Pamela R. Matthews and David McWhirter (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 28–43.

[15] Bertold Brecht, “The Popular and the Realistic” (written in 1938, published in 1958), in Brecht on Theatre, translated by John Willett (London: Methuen, 1964), 110.