This is a first draft of a paper which might fit in Sociological Theory or someplace like that. Many footnotes are missing. Cite as: Erik Ringmar, "What Are Public Moods?," manuscript, Dept of Political Science, Lund University, December 2014. Comments are very much welcome.

What Are Public Moods?

Erik Ringmar, Dept of Political Science, Lund University

In laymens and journalists' accounts of society, references to public or national

moods are common.1 Public moods are invoked as a way to describe the affective

state of a nation but also in order to explain people's opinions and how they act.

Consider the following examples:

There has been a distinct shift in mood in Russia after the annexation of the Crimean peninsula, New York Times reports, and even the considerable cost involved has not dampened the public mood.2

As Hong Kong protesters assembled for another mass rally on Tuesday, observers saw it as the next important gauge of the public mood.3

There is a crisis of political representation throughout Europe, says Kenan Malik, and Scottish nationalism is an expression of this public mood.4

If these accounts are correct, and public moods influence people's opinions as well

as their actions, we would expect references to public moods to feature prominently

in the explanations which social scientists provide.5 This, however, is not the case.

There are a few social psychologists who invoke the notion when explaining, for

1 I am grateful to Jorg Kustermans who originally started me thinking about moods. See Kustermans and Ringmar, Modernity, Boredom and War.

2 Macfarquhar, After Annexing Crimea, Euphoric Russia Turns Thoughts to Ukraine.

3 Buckley and Forsythe, Hong Kongs Democracy Supporters Chafe at Inequality and Beijings Sway.

4 Malik, United Kingdom, Divided People.

5 References to public moods are common also in economic analyses. See, inter alia, Shu, Investor Mood and Financial Markets.

1 / 26

example, the impact of public moods on public opinions, and the occasional

historian may refer to public moods when explaining events such as an urge for

revenge after a loss in a war or, say, the spirit of the 60s.6 Although the

sophistication of these analyses should not be doubted, the key concept has

remained elusive. Whatever else they may be, moods are impressionistic and

fleeting and do not easily lend themselves to statistical analyses. It seems you

have to be an artist a Beatles or a Bob Dylan to define and capture the mood of

your time.7 To social scientists this only confirms what they have known all along:

that accounts of social life must be based on more solid foundations than

expressions of affect.

Reading further, however, we may come to doubt this conclusion. Studying

various pathological conditions, the neuroscientist Vittorio Damasio concludes that

background emotions play a crucial role in determining how we carry out high-

level cognitive tasks.8 There is an underlying feeling to what we do which

determines how we plan our activities and organize our lives. Individuals with

impairments in areas of the brain responsible for affect are thus far poorer decision-

makers even in cases when brain areas responsible for rational calculations have

suffered no damage. Damasio refers to such affects as background emotions but

they could just as easily be called moods.9 Intriguingly, the philosopher Martin

Heidegger reaches a similar conclusion, if from an entirely different starting-point.10

It is by attuning ourselves to a mood, he says, that we find a place for ourselves in

6 Casti, Mood Matters; Rahn, Kroeger, and Kite, A Framework for the Study of Public Mood; Rahn, Affect as Information; For references from historians, see for example Dallek, National Mood and American Foreign Policy; Yankelovich and Doble, The Public Mood; Rielly, The Public Mood at Mid-Decade.

7 Or possibly investors, see Bollen, Pepe, and Mao, Modeling Public Mood and Emotion.

8 Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, 000000; Damasio, Descartes Error, 000000.

9 Ratcliffe, Heideggers Attunement and the Neuropsychology of Emotion, 296.

10 Damasio and Heidegger are brought together by Ratcliffe, Heideggers Attunement andthe Neuropsychology of Emotion.

2 / 26

the world, and moods thereby come to determine our stance towards everything we

encounter. Moods are a precondition for understanding, cognition and emotion.

[A] mood assails us. It comes neither from the outside nor from inside, but

arises out of being-in-the-world, as a way of such being.11

This opens up a slightly worrying possibility. If Damasio and Heidegger are

right, journalists and laymen may be right too, and the social scientists may be

wrong. The professional students of society would have missed what every one

else instinctively seems to have understood. The challenge is obvious. Somehow

or another the intellectual tools which social scientists employ must be reconfigured

to allow public moods to be studied. The aim of this article is to provide a

contribution towards this aim. Happily, help is at hand from a number of scholars

and disciplines. Apart from neuroscientists and philosophers, the concept has been

discussed by psychologists who study mood disorders, but also by art historians

interested in the mood conveyed by a work of art, by architects who study the

feel of a built environment or by musicologists interested in how music creates a

certain mood.

As we will discover, there are three main metaphors which structure how

moods are conceived: mood as a question of bodily posture, as attunement to a

situation, or as the atmosphere of a certain place. These metaphors lead thought

in slightly different directions to be sure but there is nevertheless a family

resemblance between them. Although this discussion relates to the moods in which

individuals find themselves, there are direct implications for how we discuss public

moods too. A mood, we will conclude, concerns how we "find ourselves" in the

world, and this "ourselves" can refer either to an individual or to a collective

subject. Indeed, it is in a certain mood above all that we find "the public"

understood as a subject which is more than the sum of its individual parts.

11 Heidegger, Being and Time, 136; Cf. Han-Pile, Affectivity, 245.

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1. Moods, emotions, feelings

Affect is discussed by means of a large and rather imprecise vocabulary. Compare

moods with what we commonly talk about as emotions.12 In everyday usage

moods and emotions are closely related and the one is often discussed in terms of

the other. Thus to be depressed or excited denotes an emotion but we also talk

about a depressed or an excited mood. A common way to distinguish the two is

to say that emotions are directed towards a particular object whereas moods are

direction- and object-less.13 If you knock into my bicycle, the accident is the cause

of my subsequent anger and you are the object of it. This is an emotional reaction.

However, if I am in a cranky mood and I snap at you, you are neither the cause nor

the object of my reaction but rather something akin to an innocent bystander.

Realizing as much we may even apologize, saying Sorry, its not your fault, Im

just in a bad mood today.

Emotions, that is, are triggered by things that happen in the world and they

have a cognitive content. The emotion helps us understand, order and edit, the

world around us and it connects the interpretations we arrive at to the actions we

perform.14 If we see a leopard come charging towards us, we get scared.15 Our

emotion is the result of a discreet event, and our fright helps us understand the

event by identifying its most salient features while editing out the irrelevant ones.

As such the emotion is connected to an array of possible actions.16 Moods do not

work this way. Moods are not anchored in particular objects or persons; they have

no direction and no cognitive content.17 A mood is not interpreting, editing and

12 Carroll, Art and Mood, 000000; Goldie, The Emotions, 143151; For a statistical survey of the difference between emotions and moods, see Beedie, Terry, and Lane, Distinctions Between Emotion and Mood.

13 Carroll, Art and Mood, 000000.

14 Ibid., 000000.

15 James, What Is an Emotion?

16 Carroll, Art and Mood, 000000.

17 Ratcliffe, The Feeling of Being, 46.

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organizing specific facts but instead, like a prejudice, it knows what it judges before

it comes into contact with it. As such moods do not depend on acts of

interpretation but are instead a precondition for acts of interpretation. The

interpretation arises out of the mood and not the other way around.

Since moods have no objects, they have no direction, and hence they present

no array of possible options for how to act. Or, differently put, moods cannot be

narrated.18 If a story is an account of the actions of individuals, moods have no

stories to tell. As such moods cannot be the causes of what we do. Stories, on the

other hand, have a mood, and the mood of the story sets the limits for what is

likely to happen. Moods determine our dispositions what we consider to be

possible or not and thereby the range of actions available to us rather than any

particular option within that range. Someone who is in a confident mood will

entertain possibilities not open to someone who is in an anxious or insecure mood.

At the limit, a depressed mood will obliterate all possibilities, while panic opens up

too many alternatives everything must suddenly be done at once.19

Although the distinction between emotions and moods is clear enough in

theory, actual cases of affect will sometimes blur the lines between them.20 There

are emotions that are quite vague and not clearly directed towards a certain object.

There are also moods with a degree of direction, even if the best description of their

object is no more precise than "nothing in particular." Moreover, an emotion can be

transformed into a mood.21 If we repeatedly are scolded by our boss, we might

want to react emotionally, but taking our career prospects into consideration we

decide to keep mum -- instead our mood turns increasingly sour as the day

progresses. Finally, a mood may dispose us towards having particular emotional

18 Goldie, The Emotions, 147, 3749.

19 Heidegger, Being and Time, 000000.

20 Goldie, The Emotions, 143.

21 Carroll, Art and Mood, 000000; Goldie, The Emotions, 148.

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experiences and thereby making certain emotions more likely. If we are in a

cheerful enough mood, nothing seems to annoy us.

And then there are feelings.22 Feelings and emotions are often regarded as

interchangeable terms. Feelings too are object-oriented and they have cognitive

content. An emotion of anger which we direct at a car-driver can also be described

as a feeling of anger, with the only difference that feelings emphasize the

experiential, the felt, aspect of the emotion. While emotions are embodied events

above all, feelings are more psychological.23 But there are also feelings that are

closer to moods. When a doctor asks a patient how he feels, she makes an

inquiry about a general condition, about how the patient is getting along." This is

not a question about anything object-oriented and cognitive, or about a plan of

action, but a question about how the patient "finds himself in the world." Such

questions probe what we could call our "existential feelings," a category which

includes being "at home," "in control," "overwhelmed," "abandoned," torn,

disconnected from the world, invulnerable, unloved, watched, empty,

powerful, trapped and weighed down, part of a larger machine, at one with

life, there, familiar, real.24 These are not descriptions of our inner

psychological states but of our relationship to the time and place in which we find

ourselves. As such existential feelings are closely related to moods.

2.1. Mood as bodily stance

Moods have an obvious embodied quality, and as a result they can often be

interpreted already from a person's posture, gait, and general demeanor.25 Moods,

22 Ratcliffe, The Feeling of Being.

23 Lange and James, The Emotions, 1:000000; Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, 000000.

24 To pick some examples from the list in Ratcliffe, The Feeling of Being, 45.

25 DMello, Chipman, and Graesser, Posture as a Predictor of Learners Affective Engagement, 5.

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according to the first metaphor we will discuss, is a matter of a certain bodily

stance. A bored person rests her head in her hands; she is slumped on a sofa in a

limp and listless position. I'm so bored, she says and yawns. Similarly, a

depressed person is often literally pressed down by life: his head is bent, shoulders

lowered, arms fallen to his sides and he moves is slow, short, steps.26 Curiously,

because of its physiological expression, the mood we are in may be obvious to

others before it is obvious to ourselves.27 You are in a very chipper mood today!

someone might tell us as we climb the stairs in a few sprightly steps while whistling

a cheerful tune. Indeed, it may only be once others find us in a certain mood that

we find ourselves there too.28 Our bodies are in a mood before we are; or perhaps

better: we are in our bodies before we are fully present to our conscious selves.

It is consequently not surprising that many moods seem to have physiological

rather than psychological causes. Many moods depend on our physical constitution

on our state of health or on how well we have slept the night before. Like

Scrooges ghosts, many moods are the result of gravy rather than the grave.

Thus a headache may put us in a dejected mood while a morning jog can make us

confident about the day ahead. And even if their ultimate causes may remain

obscure, moods are easily manipulated with the help of drugs drugs

administered by doctors, recreational drugs, or everyday drugs like coffee and

alcohol.29 Compare the way mood disorders such as schizophrenia are treated

with pills rather than with psychoanalysis. The mood, and thereby the problem, is

not in our minds as much as in our bodies. Or rather, trying to locate a mood we

find that the body cannot easily be separated from the mind. The mood has both a

physiological basis and a psychological expression.

26 Straus, The Upright Posture, 549.

27 Gunes et al., Bodily Expression for Automatic Affect Recognition, 133.

28 Straus, The Upright Posture, 543.

29 Deijen, Heemstra, and Orlebeke, Dietary Effects on Mood and Performance, 275283.

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This connection is hinted at by the etymology of the word. Mood is derived

from the Anglo-Saxon modt, referring to a mental disposition. Anglo-Saxon

examples include modcrftig strong of mood -- meaning "intelligent," and

modful -- full of mood, meaning "proud. In Scandinavian languages there is still

a whole panoply of mood-related terms, including vredesmod, in anger, hgmod,

arrogance, vankelmod, irresolution, jmnmod, equanimity, frimodig,

frankness, modstulen, downhearted, etc. By itself, however, mod means

courage, and it is in turn related to mda, meaning effort or drudgery, the

labor, that is, of the body. Fittingly, courage is a mental disposition which implies

an embodied engagement with the world.30 A courageous person plants her feet

firmly on the ground, with a straight back, steady eyes and muscles flexed. A

mood, we can conclude, is the mental disposition of our bodies; it is the way we

keep our bodies when facing the world; or perhaps the posture in which we are

kept by our bodies when facing the world.31 A mood is the bodily stance in which

we find ourselves while waiting for the next moment in time to occur.

Since the body necessarily always has a certain posture, we must always be

in a certain mood.32 There can be no mood-less engagement with the world just as

there can be no body-less engagement. This is what philosophers have discussed

as a matter of intentionality, meaning "directionality," "engagement," or what

Heidegger referred to as Sorge, "care." "The most primordial intentional act," as

Iris Marion Young puts it,

is the motion of the body orienting itself with respect to and moving within its surroundings. There is a world for a subject insofar as the body has capacities by which is can approach, grasp, and appropriate itssurroundings in the direction of its intentions.33

30 Bremmer, Walking, Standing, and Sitting in Ancient Greek Culture, 23.

31 Ratcliffe, Stance, Feeling and Phenomenology.

32 Heidegger, Being and Time, 136.

33 Young, Throwing Like a Girl, 145.

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This is true even if we are bored and seemingly completely disengaged.

Disengagement, after all, is only another bodily stance; disengagement too

constitutes a mood.

Differently put, moods are closely related to what sometimes is referred to as

a bodily schema.34 A bodily schema is a set of procedures through which the body

orientates itself in the world the way it apprehends surfaces, feels textures,

scans the environment, detects smells and registers sounds. Compare the

differences in the way boys and girls learn to throw balls at least the differences

that existed back in the 1970s.35 A boy swings his arm, crouches together, lifts his

leg to gain momentum, and follows the action as the ball leaves his hand. A girl,

by contrast, "throws like a girl": there is no swing, no crouching, no lifted legs and

no follow-through. Men and women, as Young concludes, are guided by different

bodily schemas; they fit into the world in different ways; they are in different

moods. Most men are in a "confident" mood most of the time, assuming that the

environment will yield to their wishes, whereas most women are in a "hesitant"

mood, unsure of their abilities and reluctant to make demands.36

Our bodily stance comes to influence how we understand the world. It is not

only that we understand things differently depending on where we stand, but also

depending on how we stand. Clearly, in the 1970s boys and girls understood the

world quite differently. Yet such an understanding was not the result of an explicit

interpretation as much as a precondition for an explicit interpretation. We see the

world through the mood, as it were, but since the mood makes seeing possible, the

mood itself is not available for inspection.37 At most we talk about our feelings.

The mood makes us feel a certain way and when people inquire about our mood we

34 Gallagher, Body Schema and Intentionality, 000000.

35 Straus, The Upright Posture, 552553.

36 Young, Throwing Like a Girl, 143.

37 Heidegger, Being and Time, 136; Ratcliffe, The Feeling of Being; Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, 000000.

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tell them how we feel.38 To the extent that we are in a different mood, we will feel

differently.

2.2. Mood as attunement

Consider next the ways of thinking opened up by the second metaphor mood as

attunement. In German and Germanic languages a mood is generally referred to

as a Stimmung, from the verb stimmen, to tune.39 To tune is what we do with a

guitar when we adjust the pitch of the strings to establish a interval between them

which sounds natural and harmonious. The strings, we say, are in or out of

tune; that is, in our out of tune with each other. To be in tune is to be correct

das stimmt! Using the attunement metaphor we can say that we are "in tune," or

"in harmony," with our environment and with other people; we are "in sync," we

"jive" or "groove."

The persistent references to musical metaphors and (outdated) jazz jargon

are not coincidental. Music is a preeminent way of conveying moods. As a non-

representational medium, music is bad at tellings stories and providing information,

and it is not even very good at expressing emotions since emotions have a

cognitive content which music lacks.40 However, as object- and direction-less,

music is able to instantaneously set the mood of a scene. Compare muzak. In a

shop with music playing in the background a mood is created which you enter at

the same time as you enter the shop itself. The mood is supposed to be calm yet

upbeat and thereby, supposedly, consumption-inducing. Or compare how music is

used in movies.41 As all film directors know, the mood, and thereby the meaning,

of a scene can be radically altered if we change the music that accompanies it.

38 Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World, 171.

39 Heidegger, Being and Time, 000000.

40 Hanslick, The Beautiful in Music, 000000.

41 Cohen, Music as a Source of Emotion in Film.

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Symphonic music conveys an entirely different mood than do Latino rhythms or

death metal and the expectations which the audience have regarding the unfolding

of the story will vary accordingly. This illustrates nicely the connection between our

moods and our understanding. Although we certainly may understand the plot of

the movie without the music or understand it if we turn the sound off and the

subtitles on -- the mood conveyed by the music places the story in the world in a

certain way. Consider what happens if there is a sudden twist in the plot. The

change in music prompts us and leads our expectations in a new direction and if we

miss the change of moods we are likely to miss the turn in the story.

The reason why music is so good at conveying moods is that it speaks directly

to the body without a need for prior cognitive processing.42 Music consists of

patterns of relaxation and tension, rhythm and pitch, which correspond to the way

we move our bodies. Music is compelling and enticing, and what is compelled and

enticed are our bodies and not our conscious minds. The music, we might later

explain, made it "impossible to sit still; we just had to get up and dance.

Because it makes our bodies move seemingly by themselves, music has always

been viewed with suspicion by those who put their faith in explicit ratiocination.

Music -- from the Middle Ages to Elvis Presley has been associated with madness,

sexuality and witchcraft and the upholders of moral standards have often warned

about its impact. There is a fear of music which is a fear of animal spirits, of the

irrational and non-European, which also is a fear of the body.

Mood understood as attunement can be given a neurophysiological

explanation. Experiments have shown that people who go through the same

movements, recite the same words or sing the same tunes, gradually are entrained,

that is, they gradually come to adjust to each other.43 Some of this synchronization

42 Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, 204245; Dewey, Art as Experience, 8384.

43 Phillips-Silver and Keller, Searching for Roots of Entrainment and Joint Action in Early Musical Interactions, 3.

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is conscious but much of it is not. For example: the breathing patterns of people

who sing together in choirs gradually come to be synchronized and thereby

eventually their heartbeats too.44 Singing together we explore the same rhythmic

patterns and if we simultaneously perform coordinated movements this sense of

joint exploration is enhanced.45 As scientists have shown, coordinated bodies are

more likely to share the same objects of attention, to show concern for each other,

to cooperate, to identify with each other, and even to think alike.46

The neurological processes involved here concern the activation of so called

mirror neurons.47 Neuroscientists have shown that whenever we observe

someone doing something, areas of our brains responsible for processing visual

information are activated but so too are the areas responsible for carrying out the

action itself. The observer's brain is not only watching but also doing, and this

mirroring takes place directly, automatically, and without involving our explicit

cognitive awareness. Such embodied simulation, scientists have argued,

constitutes a mechanism for empathy, and, more generally, for understanding

another person's mind.48 Mimicking the facial expressions of your partner is good

for your relationship even if this means that you will grow to resemble each other

because you repeatedly use the same facial muscles.49 Conversely, people with

damage to their mirror neuron systems such as patients with autism or

schizophrenia find it impossible to attune themselves to the situations they are in.

They cannot understand other people and thereby they cannot understand

themselves.50

44 Vickhoff et al., Music Structure Determines Heart Rate Variability of Singers, 1.

45 McNeill, Keeping Together in Time, 2.

46 Vacharkulksemsuk and Fredrickson, Strangers in Sync, 399400; Hove and Risen, Its All in the Timing; Repp and Su, Sensorimotor Synchronization.

47 Gallese and Goldman, Mirror Neurons and the Simulation Theory of Mind-Reading; Rizzolatti et al., From Mirror Neurons to Imitation.

48 Gallese, Eagle, and Migone, Intentional Attunement, 131.

49 Niedenthal, Embodying Emotion, 1004.

50 Gallese, Intentional Attunement.

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Yet neural mirroring is not by itself sufficient.51 For example, parents who

mirror the actions of their baby and start to cry when the baby is crying are not

well attuned to the situation they are in.52 Instead, the baby's cry is a prompt

which is supposed to elicit a reaction which is appropriate under the circumstances.

What the well attuned parent does is not to interpret the situation as much as to

automatically respond to the solicitation.53 Compare what it means to successfully

participate in a conversation. Clearly it is not enough to simply repeat what others

are saying. Instead, we are supposed to add our contribution to the contributions

of others and take the conversation into territory which they are happy to explore.

Disagreeing is fine, as long as you do it in a fashion which opens up rather than

closes down opportunities. To be attuned to a conversation is consequently to look

for a voice which can complete the chord which achieves a harmony or,

alternatively to produce a discord which can be harmoniously resolved as others are

attuning themselves in new ways. For most people this looking for a voice is a

social skill which requires little or no thinking, except when the conversation

occasionally falls silent.

2.3. Moods as atmosphere

Consider next the possibilities opened up by the third metaphor mood understood

as atmosphere.54 If someone inquires about the new restaurant where we ate last

night, we might respond that it has a very nice atmosphere. Likewise, a meeting

may be conducted in a constructive atmosphere, a derelict building may have a

spooky atmosphere, a summer evening a serene atmosphere, and a small

Italian seaside town a romantic atmosphere. Works of art can have atmospheres

51 Rochat and Passos-Ferreira, From Imitation to Reciprocation and Mutual Recognition.

52 Gallese, Eagle, and Migone, Intentional Attunement, 151.

53 Silver, The Moodiness of Action, 199200, 209; Cf. Heidegger, Being and Time, 138; Dreyfus and Kelly, Heterophenomenology, 52.

54 Silver, The American Scenescape; Silver and Nichols Clark, The Power of Scenes.

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too a book may convey a cheerful atmosphere and a painting a claustrophobic

atmosphere.55 Here the Greek atmos refers to vapor or steam, and it is in turn

related to an Indo-European root meaning to blow or to spiritually arouse. A

sphaira is a "ball" or a "globe." The metaphorical implications are clear: there are

spheres which surround certain locations and, much as a gas which expands to fill

whatever room to which it is confined, these spheres are infused with a certain

feeling. An atmosphere is a spatial bearer of moods.56

Curiously, atmospheres are at the same time elusive and perfectly obvious.

Although they are difficult both to define and to capture there is no doubt regarding

their singular qualities.57 We are, for example, highly unlikely to mistake a tense

atmosphere for a melancholic or an erotic atmosphere for an uplifting. The

reason we never make such mistakes is that our ability to understand atmospheres

is a precondition for successfully navigating social situations. Even though we may

not be able to explain how it is done, we understand atmospheres automatically,

often in a flash, and without much explicit interpretation. This does not mean,

however, that atmospheres cannot change, and some changes may be sudden.58

Melancholia may turn into wistfulness and the uplifting seminar may become

unbearably boring. And these changes may take place although everything else in

the situation remains much the same as before.

Compared to the other two metaphors through which we understand moods,

an atmosphere has more of an inter-subjective quality. An atmosphere is closer to

a physical fact which different people will describe in similar terms.59 That

atmospheres are not subjective states is also obvious from the fact that we may

55 Atmosphere.

56 Bhme, Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics, 119; A synonym for atmosphere is ambiance, from etymological roots meaning encircling, lying all around." Harper, Ambiance.

57 Anderson, Affective Atmospheres, 78.

58 Ibid.

59 Bhme, Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics, 122.

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interpret them differently from the mood we ourselves are in. Although we are in a

gloomy mood, we realize that the party is cheerful. Indeed, as external to us,

atmospheres may have something akin to a causal impact on our moods, altering

them and thereby attuning us to the situation we are in.60 At the same time,

atmospheres are clearly not fully external facts. Atmospheres are perceived and

they would not exist but for those perceptions. In this respect atmospheres are

similar to colors. Neither colors nor atmospheres exist in the objects themselves;

instead they come to appear through the interaction in which sentient beings

engage with the world.61

Atmospheres are often consciously created. This is obvious in the case of

works of art where the atmosphere is conjured up by the artist responsible, but the

creation of atmospheres is a part of the craft of all designers, decorators and

architects. Or take the case of theater directors who rely on scenographers, clothes

designers, and light- and sound-engineers to provide the effects which together

create a certain atmosphere. The performance, once under way, sets a scene and

thereby realizes a certain atmosphere which, much as the music which

accompanies a movie, is essential to our understanding of the plot. Or consider

garden design. There are three kinds of scenes in a Chinese garden, the English

architect William Chambers explained in A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening, 1772

-- the pleasing, the horrid and the enchanted.62 While pleasing and enchanted

scenes were well known in Europe, the idea of a horrid garden was something

new. In order to achieve it, said Chambers, the Chinese combined gloomy woods

with deep vallies inaccessible to the sun, impending barren rocks, dark caverns

60 Ibid., 119.

61 Ibid., 122; On the interpretation of colors, see Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, The Embodied Mind.

62 Chambers, A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening; See, further, Ringmar, Liberal Barbarism, 000000.

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and impetuous cataracts rushing down the mountains from all parts.63

This is not to say that all atmospheres are explicitly designed or that only

certain places have atmospheres. Natural sceneries have atmospheres too and

man-made environments have atmospheres even if they are not consciously

created. Indeed, all places have an atmosphere of some kind or another, although

most atmospheres are rather bland and for that reason not easily described. It

follows that everything we perceive is perceived only as set within, and surrounded

by, a certain atmosphere. If we go on to assume that the atmosphere in question

influences our experiences, there can be no such thing as a pure experience,

unadulterated by an atmosphere. Entering into a meeting, a nightclub or a place of

religious worship, we begin by taking in the atmosphere and we do it both

automatically and in a flash -- and only later do we come to pay proper attention to

the items and people which the setting contains.64 It is only against the

background of a certain atmosphere that something stands out as a certain kind of

thing.65

Atmospheres solicit action.66 The atmosphere of a meeting, a nightclub and a

place of religious worship make different demands on our attention and require

different tasks to be carried out while pushing other tasks into the background.

Atmospheres "say" something, soliciting a response from those who experience

them -- even though, admittedly, their solicitations may be more or less insistent.

This is not simply to say that a situation provides opportunities for action.

Opportunities must be interpreted and an interpretation is a cognitive process

which takes time to complete. In an atmosphere, by contrast, actions are

automatic, they make little demand on our will, and in carrying them out we

63 Chambers, A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening, 37; Cf. Hench, Designing Disney; Ringmar, Imperial Vertigo and the Themed Experience.

64 Bhme, Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics, 125.

65 Ibid.; Ratcliffe, Heideggers Attunement and the Neuropsychology of Emotion, 290.

66 Silver, The Moodiness of Action, 209210.

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expend no effort. In fact, the more we think about what to do, the less clearly the

atmosphere will speak to us.67 Take the example of a theater on fire. The reason

we run for the door is not that we first assess the situation and then consider how

to react to it; what we react to is instead the atmosphere of panic which quickly

spreads in the building. There is no time to think and there is no act of the will

involved. Or, to take a less calamitous example, consider the atmosphere of a

place of religious worship. Sacred places teach not by verbal communication but by

inducing an atmosphere which draws the congregation into a sense of reverence

and awe.68 We bow our heads and pray since this is what the situation requires.

4. What are public moods?

There are family resemblances between these three metaphors but also differences.

They are all concerned with affect but not with emotion and they point to

physiological rather than psychological factors; they are pre-cognitive and identify

the preconditions for our being in the world rather than our explicit understanding;

they describe how we fit, how we are placed, how we find ourselves. Not

surprisingly, all three metaphors are notoriously hard to specify and as a result the

corresponding definitions of moods remain elusive. On the other hand, moods are

obvious we know a bored person when we see one, and we would not mistake the

atmosphere of a church for that of a prison. As for the differences between the

metaphors, mood understood as bodily stance most directly concerns our person

and mood as atmosphere most directly concerns the environment in which we find

ourselves. Mood understood as attunement is the metaphor which brings the two

together it describes the way our bodily stance is attuned to a certain

atmosphere.

67 Ibid., 210211.

68 Ibid., 213.

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We are now in a position to return to our discussion of public moods. What

does it mean to say that there has been a "distinct shift in mood" in Russia after

the annexation of the Crimean peninsula; that a mass rally in Hong Kong is an

"important gauge of the public mood"; or that Scottish nationalism is an

expression of a public mood? What, first of all, is the relationship between these

examples of collective affect and the moods pertaining to individuals? Initially the

issue at stake here would seem to involve the same parts/whole conundrum which

has plagued other fields of social science inquiry. Taking the position of a

methodological individualist, we could consequently argue that a public mood is

nothing but the aggregation of individual moods -- and this is indeed the solution

proposed by many a social psychologist. Yet this cannot be correct since moods, as

we have defined them, are impossible to describe as attributes of individuals. A

mood is not something that we have, instead it is a state in which we find

ourselves; it is not we who have the mood but the mood that has us. As pre-

interpretitive and pre-intentional, moods have ontological priority over individuals

understood as conscious, rational and calculating, agents. The self-conscious self

arrives too late on the scene as it were, once moods already have placed us into a

certain situation and in a certain fashion.

It makes no sense to add together these various "ways of being placed" since

all ways of being placed are and must be local. To add the atmosphere of a public

park to the atmosphere of a cathedral, a kindergarten and a check-out counter in a

supermarket, is quite pointless. No such aggregation adds up to a public mood.69

The same is true of mood understood as bodily posture. The way a person keeps

her body depends on the situation she is in, and bodily postures cannot be

aggregated while ignoring the situations to which they respond. Much as the

terracotta army of the First Emperor of China, which is being displayed at museums

69 See, however, Silver, The American Scenescape.

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around the world, we would strike our poses entirely out of context. The same

goes for mood understood as attunement. Aggregating all the processes of

attunement which take place in a society would be as cacophonic as playing all a

societys songs at the same time. Moods just do not add up.

This is not to say that we cannot ask people how they "feel" and summarize

the answers they provide. What we would end up with here is an aggregate of

individual feelings, and surely such research can yield important insights of various

kinds.70 But this would not be a study of moods. A feeling reports on a mood but a

report regarding something is not the same as the thing itself. It is because of this

distinction, we argued above, that we do not always know which mood we are in.

Another way to put this point is to say that all moods already are public, at least if

we by public refer to something "shared" or something "out there in the world."

Moods are not psychological states as much as social facts. Yet this is clearly not

the sense in which "public moods" are discussed by laymen, journalists and

historians, and this in turn only highlights the fact that the word "public" is at least

as polysemous as moods.71

There are, lets suggest, only two ways to proceed here. The first is to

conclude that laymen, journalists and historians never actually had an interest in

public moods. All they were trying to capture was the state of "public opinion," a

"widely shared sentiment" or "the feelings" of the general public. The other

alternative is that laymen, journalists and historians have had an entirely different

subject in mind the public understood not as a collection of individuals but as a

collective agent which represents society as a whole. There would consequently be

a sort of person called "the public" who is in a certain mood, and the public mood is

the mood of this sort-of super-person. Although we may doubt whether there

70 One example would be Dolan, Happiness by Design.

71 See, for example, the contributions to Weintraub and Kumar, Public and Private in Thought and Practice, 000000.

19 / 26

really is or could be such a collective entity, there is no doubt that we often talk as

though there were. We often talk about a public that "desires," "fears" and "act,"

and about a country that "goes to war," "concludes peace treaties" and "makes

friends" with other countries.72 What we refer to here is not merely the aggregate

of individuals but a being in its own right, even if he or she or it is fictional. There

is nothing mysterious about this. After all, we routinely imagine the existence of all

kinds of other fictional beings and we take them to exist not absolutely but in

relation to some specific cognitive framework.73 The "public" is simply the way we

talk about ourselves as a collective.

This is consequently the public to whom moods are ascribed. Take the

example of the terrorist attacks in the United States in 2001.74 The soundtrack

which accompanies life in America suddenly changed and Americans were

struggling to follow the corresponding plot-twist. For a moment it was impossible

to tell what sort of a story "America" was a part of and how the country fit in with

the rest of the world. And yet, except from the damage to a few buildings in New

York and Washington, everything remained much as before. Although people were

anxious, they were more anxious on behalf of their collective than their individual

selves. Intuitively grasping this distinction, president Bush encouraged Americans

to go on shopping -- a piece of advice which, given the public mood, was widely

regarded as insensitive at the time. But president Bush was right: public and

individual moods can vary independently of each other.

A study of moods provides a way in which we can approach this public super-

person. Much as we as individuals find ourselves in a certain mood, we can find the

public in the public mood. Consider atmosphere. As the 9/11 attacks vividly

72 Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 000000.

73 Ibid.

74 Hall and Ross, Affective Politics after 9/11; Watson, Brymer, and Bonanno, Postdisaster Psychological Intervention Since 9/11.

20 / 26

illustrate, and as we know from many other examples, atmospheres often come to

envelop an entire society. Thus there was a revolutionary atmosphere in France on

July 14, 1789; a jubilant atmosphere in Germany at the outset of war in August,

1914; a celebratory atmosphere in England on May 9, 1945, and so on. The reason

why an atmosphere can envelop an entire society, lets suggest, is that people share

the experience of watching the same public performance. Something is being

staged, something is being shown, some story is being dramatized, and all

members of society attend as members of the same audience. All performances,

we said above, convey a certain atmosphere, and when the performance in

question is experienced by society as a whole the result is a shared public

atmosphere. Thus the French Revolution was not a series of events that just

happened; the French Revolution was staged and the same can be said about

9/11, the outbreak of the First World War, and the victory parades of 1945.75 Less

spectacular political events are spectacles too and this includes the examples with

which we begun the Russian annexation of the Crimean peninsula, mass rallies

held in Hong Kong, and manifestations of Scottish nationalism.

This is the atmosphere to which we as a member of the audience become

attuned, and in the process we become attuned to the other members of the

audience too. Sharing the same object of attention, going through the same

movements, experiencing the same emotions and reacting in the same way, we are

gradually entrained to each other. This is why rituals play such an important role in

constituting the nation. We hoist and hail the same flag, read the same pledge of

allegiance, pray for our king or president, cheer for the same athletes in the same

international sporting competitions. National anthems, not surprisingly, are sung in

unison and the melodies are simple enough for everyone to join in. Revolutions are

75 On 9/11 from this perspective, see inter alia Alexander, Performance, Counterperformance; On the French Revolution, see Ozouf, La fte rvolutionnaire, 1789-1799, 000000; On the victory parades in 1945 as spectacle, see Sumartojo, Dazzling Relief.

21 / 26

always characterized by such opportunities for attunement, and so too are the

initiation and the conclusion of wars. In just the same manner, Russians, Hong

Kongers and Scotsmen became attuned to each other through the collective actions

in which they engaged, and many more of their compatriots became attuned to the

public atmosphere by watching the performances on television.

It is through such attunement that the public body eventually comes to

appear. Atmospheres solicit action, we said; they are not just providing

opportunities for action but they constitute an environment in which some actions

are both required and expected. As long as the atmosphere is solicitous enough,

people act without exercising their will and without expending any appreciable

effort. Attuned to a public atmosphere people often get carried away.76 We scream

at a rock concert; we raise our fists at a political rally or we speak in tongues at a

religious convocation. These are physical reactions, performed by us, yet they are

in a sense not ours. Although it is our body moving, we are really moving as a part

of a collective whole. Afterwards, once the public performance is over, we often

cannot understand what came over us. It is in this performance and in this body

that we come across ourselves as a public. It is in the public mood that the public

finds itself.

76 Moscovici, The Age of the Crowd, 000000; Le Bon, The Crowd, 000000.

22 / 26

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