Mood

Interdisciplinary Perspectives, New Theories

Birgit Breidenbach, Thomas Docherty, Birgit Breidenbach, Thomas Docherty

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429535116
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Mood is a phenomenon whose study is inherently interdisciplinary. While it has remained resistant to theorisation, it nonetheless has a substantial influence on art, politics and society. Since its practical omnipresence in every-day life renders it one of the most significant aspects of affect studies, it has garnered an increasing amount of critical attention in a number of disciplines across the humanities, sciences and social sciences in the past two decades. Mood: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, New Theories provides a comprehensive theoretical and empirical exploration of the phenomenon of mood from an interdisciplinary angle. Building on cutting-edge research in this emerging field and bringing together established and new voices, it bridges the existing disciplinary gap in the study of mood and further consolidates this phenomenon as a crucial concept in disciplinary and interdisciplinary study. By combining perspectives and concepts from the literary studies, philosophy, musicology, the social sciences, artistic practice and psychology, the volume does the complexity and richness of mood-related phenomena justice and benefits from the latent connections and synergies in different disciplinary approaches to the study of mood.

1 Changing Moods

Hagi Kenaan

Introduction

We are all familiar with the fact that moods change. But what is the significance of this familiar fact? Is change merely a factual characteristic of moods, or can it also offer us a lens for gaining a deeper understanding of mood’s essence? The central point of this chapter is that the changing of moods is a key for the understanding of moods’ inner structure and consequently of what it means to be in a mood.

The changing of moods is clearly not a new topic for philosophy, whose interest in this subject goes back to antiquity and is, in this sense, as old as its interest in moods themselves. For Seneca and Plutarch, for example, moods and their proneness to change are thematised in the context of a discussion of questions about how to regulate and adequately negotiate the effects that moods have on the human soul, a discussion that is ultimately inseparable from a horizon of questions about the living of the good life. In both Seneca and Plutarch, the quest for a tranquillity of mind grows out of a sensitive understanding of the intrinsic volatility of moods. But since both thinkers frame the unpredictability of moods and their proneness to change as a problem that needs to be overcome, the changing of moods never receives specific attention as a positive phenomenon and only appears in the negative form of that which philosophy aims at doing away with (Plutarch 1962; Seneca 2004).

Philosophers have not always been as pronounced regarding their partiality for certain kinds of mood. But even when the question of moods’ value remains unspoken, philosophy typically operates with the assumption that certain moods are more evocative of philosophical reflection or more conducive to doing philosophy than others. Philosophy’s manner of grounding itself in a mood is at times accompanied by an explicit privileging of a specific mood as philosophical (e.g., wonder in Plato and Aristotle or anxiety in Kierkegaard and Heidegger). However, also in those many other cases when the question of mood does not at all surface, the underlying presence of a regulating mood can often be traced out. When Descartes, for example, experiments with doubt in the Meditations (Descartes 1999), his renowned suspension of the immediacy and efficacy of the surrounding world would not have been possible without an enabling condition of detachment. It is, in other words, a mood of radical disengagement that enables the thinker to distance himself from the ordinary and radically challenge the rootedness of his thinking in the habits of the everyday. I have dealt elsewhere with the question of how philosophy relates to its moods apropos certain mood paradigms that, in my view, have been essential to the philosophical tradition (Kenaan and Ferber 2011). What I did not pay attention to in that discussion and wish to underscore here, however, is that the very possibility of a ‘philosophical mood’ (whether implicit or explicit) is itself dependent on a shift in moods. That is, when embracing a specific mood as conducive to doing philosophy, the new orientation created by this mood—the opening of new reflective possibilities—first of all means that a change has occurred in one’s standing vis-à-vis the ordinary. In this respect, it is also, but not only, in addressing the question of philosophy’s moods that we first need to come to terms with the structure that allows moods to change and to do so while considering the implications that this grounding structure carries for our understanding of moods.

Before I begin to discuss the question of change, however, let me say something more general about how I understand moods, apropos the renewed philosophical interest in them in recent years. The immediate backdrop for the contemporary discussion of moods is the significant wave of philosophical literature on the emotions in the past few decades. One of the central focal points of that philosophical preoccupation with the emotions was their cognitive dimension. This implied not only an integration of emotions into our intricate space of reason but also, more generally, an understanding of emotions as unique forms of knowing the world,¹ which, in a corollary manner, underscored the need to problematise and offer alternatives to an age-old paradigmatic distinction between the conceptual and the affective. Being one of the upshots of that discussion, the current philosophical turn to moods is typically construed in terms of moods’ affinity to, and their ways of differing from, the emotions. While moods are typically framed as emotional phenomena—‘to understand the nature of moods one has to first understand the nature of emotions’ (Solomon 1993: 71)—they are concomitantly marked as distinct from full-fledged emotions. Moods are taken to ‘share many properties with other emotions, especially in their physiological and motivational aspects,’ but they are ultimately taken to form a class apart. The main reason for thinking of them in contradistinction to emotions is that, unlike emotions, moods seem to lack a clear structure of directedness towards an object. They are not intentional states. As De Sousa put it, a mood is what affects ‘how you feel about everything, [but] isn’t about anything specific’ (De Sousa 2015). Underlining the non-intentional structure of moods, the ‘grammar of moods’ is thus typically severed (or at least, distanced) from the logic of objects, its commitment to objectivity and dependency on thought.²

The divide between intentional and non-intentional mental states is motivated indeed by a discerning intuition, but it all too easily covers up two important dimensions of moods that I wish to underline in making a beginning.³ First, it blurs the presence of the dynamic relationship that exists between emotions and moods and that, as such, complicates any clear-cut distinction between the two: with a certain degree of intensity, emotions and moods not only tend to influence each other, but, under certain conditions, emotions may develop into moods just as moods may take on the distinctiveness of an emotion. Furthermore, what the common aforementioned distinction all too often obfuscates is the difference between the experiential orders in which moods and emotions operate. This means that while a clear-cut distinction between the two is lacking, emotions cannot serve as the benchmark for understanding moods. Unlike a distinction that can be made, for example, between different kinds of geometrical shapes on a plain, emotions and moods are not two kinds of phenomena that are jointly and uniformly positioned in the same field of experience: whereas emotions occupy a (more or less) determined place in experience, moods manifest themselves as experiential frameworks, as embodied schemas that pervade, anchor, and, in a certain sense, hold together the multifaceted aspects of our field of experience. In other words, moods are not episodes in our field of experience but basic modes of that field. Furthermore, by framing moods as non-intentional, we need to overcome the temptation to identify the non-intentional with the merely affective. Moods are modes of experience that typically bear an affective dimension, but they are not simply modes of affect. What kind of modes are they? They are modes—and here I bring Heidegger into the picture—of our being-in-the-world.

Moods as Modes of Attunement

To make the point briefly through Heidegger, let us recall his basic motivations in turning to moods. Heidegger’s famous treatment of moods appears in Being and Time in a chapter titled ‘Being-in as Such’ (Chapter V, Part I, Division I) which is the last in a sequence of chapters analysing the existential structure termed ‘being-in-the-world’ (Heidegger 1996). In this context, the novelty of Heidegger’s analysis of ‘being-in’ stems from his ability to reinterpret the term ‘in’ in a manner that is no longer founded on the common model of physical containment. For him, our human situatedness in a world cannot be understood in terms that are typically used for describing a relation that exists between an object and the factual confines of the given space in which it is located (as, for example, a chair’s being in a room or a key in a drawer). These terms would be inadequate for capturing the intrinsically human essence of our embeddedness in the meaningfulness of our surrounding. And, this is primarily because human existence is not a closed, self-identical, and self-sufficient entity, but rather a process of self-determination, one that depends on a ceaseless interaction with its surroundings. Being-in a world is thus a condition of immersion and involvement through which the human being can fulfil itself and become what it is. Or, in other words, ‘being-in’ signifies the essentially entangled character of human existence that is always already caught in a web of relations whose ongoing determination is the condition for its meaningfulness and whose originality is ineluctably lost when the idea of being human is conceptualised as independent and prior to that relationality.

In Division 1 of Being and Time, Heidegger gradually unpacks the structure of being-in-the-world by posing and answering three consecutive questions: What? Who? And how? What is world or what is worldliness? Who is that being which finds itself in the world, i.e., who is Dasein? And finally, in Chapter V, how—in what manner—is Dasein in the world? What are the basic parameters of our human situatedness? How does our entanglement in a world manifest itself? The ‘how?’ is the question of mood, a question that allows Heidegger to focus on the phenomenal dimension of our human entanglement which he terms Befindlichkeit (translated by J. Stambaugh as ‘attunement’). Attunement is a fundamental existential structure that manifests itself in the fact that our existence is always already affected by—always finding itself in—some mood.

What we indicate ontologically with the term attunement (befindlichkeit) is ontically what is most familiar and an everyday kind of thing: mood, being in a mood. Prior to all psychology of moods … we must see this phenomenon as a fundamental existential and outline its structure.

(Heidegger 1996: 126)

For Heidegger, moods are concrete manifestation of the existential structure of attunement that ‘discloses Dasein in its thrownness.’ Moods are not a consequence of, or a sign derivative from, that structure but rather the very actuality, the burden, of being unavoidably entangled in a surrounding that always already touches us, matters to us, and is meaningful to us in ways we can never fully contain. In moods, human existence ‘is always already brought before itself’ (p. 128), but this does not mean that moods enable us to understand ourselves or the structure of our entanglement which ‘has become manifest as a burden’ (p. 127).

One does not know why. And Dasein cannot know why because the possibilities of disclosure belonging to cognition fall far short of the primordial disclosure of moods.

(p. 127)

In their own unique, non-cognitive, way, moods have a disclosing capacity. They not only exhibit the psychological/anthropological ‘how’ of our being-in the world, but they primarily have an ontological lesson to teach us. What they disclose on the ontological level is that attunement lies at the heart of our ability to be touched by the world and, as such, grounds the possibility of having and encountering a world that matters to us. ‘In attunement lies existentially a disclosive submission to the world out of which things that matter to us can be encountered’ (p. 129).

The fact that things matter to us is not a given. It is, rather, made possible by the structure of our relatedness to them, one that draws us in. We are never neutral spectators, because our being-in the world is always already involved, implicated, affected in one way or another.

Being affected … by the character of things at hand is ontologically possible only because being-in as such is existentially determined beforehand in such a way that what it encounters in the world can matter to it in this way. This mattering to it is grounded in attunement, and as attunement it has disclosed the world, for example, as something by which it can be threatened.

(p. 129)

For Heidegger, ‘the moodedness of attunement constitutes existentially Dasein’s openness to world’ (p. 129). That is, we can experience the world in ways that matter to us only because we are always attuned to the world. In other words, the world appears to us in ways that touch us and that are meaningful to us only because of the attuned form of our being-in the world. Moods, in this sense, constitute the openness of the world to Dasein. But where or when can we most clearly recognise the actuality of attunement? The locus of such recognition is the changing of moods.

The way we slide over from one to another or slip into bad moods, are by no means nothing ontologically although these phenomena remain unnoticed as what is supposedly the most indifferent and fleeting in Dasein. The fact that moods can be spoiled and change only means that Dasein is always already in a mood.

(p. 126)

As we undergo a mood change, it becomes clear that we are always attuned in one way or another, ‘always already in a mood’ and, in this sense, the allegedly trivial fact that moods change is an indication of attunement’s underlying structure. Heidegger is thus fully aware of the changing of moods to which he even attaches a philosophical significance. And yet, this change does not interest him in and of itself, but becomes relevant to his project only in being indicative of the permanent underlying structure that ultimately concerns him. In other words, when Heidegger argues that ‘the fact that moods can … change, only means that Dasein is always already in a mood,’ he frames our ordinary shifts in mood as indicators of a fundamental existential structure that underlies the specificity of any particular mood. For him, a proper understanding of moods can be gained only once we recognise the basic human condition of always already being-in some mood, always bearing the touch of affect. Yet, is the changing of moods only a means to reveal the inherent depth of our permanent givenness to some mood, or is it a dimension significant onto itself? Putting the question in this way is already suggestive of the direction I wish to take here. Indeed, this is precisely where I wish to part ways from Heidegger who ultimately ends up privileging the changeless core (rather than the changeability) of our experience with moods. The fact that Heidegger has no further regard for the changing of moods is not coincidental, but reflects his wider concerns in Being and Time which include a notion of authenticity that is based on Dasein’s being-a-whole and, in a corollary manner, on the privileging of only one kind of mood as ontologically fundamental.

Moving beyond Heidegger, I wish to make a case for the need to understand change as the grounding condition of our being-in-a-mood, and consequently, to draw out some of the implications of what it means to philosophically embrace this condition of change. But let’s take things one step at a time.

When Moods Change

In growing up, we typically develop some understanding of our shifting moods. We usually become acquainted with the general fact that our moods change and we develop a certain level of understanding of how change is essential to our emotional life.⁴ This kind of understanding often comes in handy when trying to get through a bad mood or when comforting others: ‘Things will look brighter in the morning,’ ‘Tomorrow is another day,’ etc. But the volatility of moods may also be experienced as threatening and unsettling—‘Please don’t sink into that despair again’—especially, for people who have a history of drama...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Changing Moods
• 2 The Composition of a Mood
• 3 The Varieties of Mood Intentionality
• 4 Against the Grain: Heidegger and Musical Attunement
• 5 Modelling the Spread of Mood
• 6 From ‘Hard Rock Hallelujah’ to ‘Ukonhauta’ in Nokialand—A Socionomic Perspective on the Mood Shift in Finland’s Popular Music from 2006 to 2009
• 7 Translating Moods: Proust’s ‘Awkwardness’
• 8 ‘He wept for a way home’: The Stimmung of Odysseus’s Nostos
• 9 Altering the Mood: Boredom and Anaesthesia in Itchy Park
• 10 Registering the Charge: Mood and Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet
• 11 Of Mood: A Sonic Repertoire
• Name Index
• Subject Index