In the Mood

Bibliographic Data

ID8238850
AuthorsIvan Marković (0000-0003-4312-4399, corresponding author)
Year2018
Volume14
Issue2
Pages281-284
Publication date2018-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCultural Politics an International Journal (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1743-2197 • E-ISSN: 1751-7435
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/17432197-6609312
OpenAlexW4229971846
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited4

More than a year on since Britain voted to leave the European Union, it is hard to tell what kind of mood saturates everyday life: is it a feeling of uncertainty; is it hope, indifference? For Ben Highmore, writing in the postscript to his latest book, Cultural Feelings: Mood, Mediation, and Cultural Politics, the lead-up to the plebiscite as well as its aftermath witnessed a cacophony of feelings and emotions ranging from the most extreme expressions of hate to the most generous eruptions of camaraderie. The dominant mood, however, that seems to prevail is one of cynicism, a “cultural form that is most suited to a culture that seeks to refute our collective condition and promote a form of alienated individualism” (162). It is precisely against this pattern of feeling that Highmore presents his non-cynical remooding of British postwar history.Marshalling an impressive range of sources from film and television to photography and literature, coupled with archival material and his own personal experience, Highmore’s aim is to map both conceptually and historically how mood, feeling, and atmosphere can help us describe various periods, moments, and spaces of the British social and cultural past. Eschewing any simple distinctions between affect, emotion, and feeling (cf. Shouse 2005), Highmore immediately makes clear that mood and feeling—the two core operating concepts—are not merely subjective or biographical but, as their use in ordinary parlance suggests, “often relate to collective and social experience,” ranging “across the habitual and emotional aspects of experience” and incorporating “both the mundane practicalities of everyday life and the intense eruptions of more sensational moments” (2). Highmore’s insistence on rooting national mood and patterns of feeling in the quotidian builds on an established career that figures him as a prominent scholar of everyday life. Currently professor of cultural studies at the University of Sussex, Highmore has published extensively on the everyday, and Cultural Feelings is in many ways a culmination of his most recent research into social aesthetics of which moods and feelings are the ultimate mundane expressions, and which readers of this journal might already be familiar with (see, for instance, Highmore 2013).In Cultural Feelings Highmore offers four main axioms, that is to say, simultaneous processes through which patterns of feeling might be conceptualized. One, moods and feelings are material; they are more-than-human assemblages generated by a relational “synchronising of humans and machines, bodies and tools, people and techniques that produce achievable and sustainable mood-worlds” (10). The word produce is key here, for, as the second axiom suggests, moods and feelings are a form of labor. For Highmore, mood-worlds do not simply exist out there, independently, ready for immersion but result from the capacity of these assemblages to sustain and promote “certain feelings and not others, specific atmospheres and not others” (8). Third, and for Highmore the most important axiom, moods and feelings are historical. Although it would be oversimplifying to describe any one epoch as, for example, optimistic and hopeful, there is no denying that “just as our own past is enfolded by feelings so too is our collective past constantly mooded” (11) through the work of popular discourse, by politicians, the media, filmmakers, and so on. Equally, as Highmore argues, to simply ignore that at any given moment certain patterns of feeling are more available than others would be a mistake. Finally, moods and feelings are social. This fourth axiom encompasses all the above and is simply to say that moods and feelings are at some point collective, whether experienced intensely within a circumscribed space such as a street protest or a classroom, or more indistinctly across time such as the 2007 global financial crash. In thinking mood across the four axioms, Highmore provides a useful mapping of what could otherwise be considered a vague concept. As an analytic approach, it is well grounded but plastic enough to be easily applicable in the field of cultural politics and beyond.The book is divided into eight chapters including an introduction and the already mentioned postscript, “Post-referendum Blues.” The structure is straightforward in that the second chapter offers an intellectual biography of cultural feeling, which is then explored through five related but not indivisible case studies (chaps. 3–7). The case studies are Highmore’s five attempts at remooding the past: the Blitz and the work that went into morale building on the Home Front (chap. 3), the ruinous landscape of the playground-bombsite following the war (chap. 4), the postwar West Indian migration and settlement in England (chap. 5), the music of the 1970s and 1980s, specifically punk and postpunk (chap. 6), and finally (chap. 7), using the example of the TV dramas Our Friends in the North and This Is England, how feelings and moods of one generation overlap with and seep into its successor. This history of cultural feelings, although chronological in its selection of examples, is far from linear, and the task Highmore sets out is not one of merely documenting how people felt at certain times in the past but asking “what cultural forms (of experience feeling itself) were available for such experiences to be fully articulated” (71) in the first place. It is here that the cultural politics of the book become most apparent. On the one hand, it describes particular moments in which “cultural and political aspects of mood and feeling become vivid,” and on the other, it pursues “its own political path in the choice of what phenomena to look at” (16), reinscribing them, rather successfully, with a heightened political sensitivity and without cynicism.For the more theoretically inclined reader, the first two chapters alone, which constitute about a third of the book, make for compelling reading. Drawing predominantly on Raymond Williams’s work on “structures of feeling” and weaving through Martin Heidegger’s writings on “Stimmung” with Lauren Berlant’s “historical sensorium,” Highmore lays the groundwork underpinning the four axioms presented above, offering at the same time answers to what the reader might see as the most obvious methodological concern, the question of scale: “How do we render an account of cultural feelings that can offer a sense of the general orchestration of feelings and moods at the level of national and global culture while also being sensitive to and articulating the ways in which these orchestrations affect different groups in different ways” (15). To use the example of black migration in the 1940s and 1950s, Highmore takes a series of photographs that were used to animate a white racist emotional economy that locked postwar settlement into a facile pattern of “innocence and guilt, problem and solution, sexual predator and sexual victim” and brings in oral history and film to remood the dominant archive by intensifying “feelings of pride and optimism in an archival force-field that has foregrounded problems and racial anxiety” (106). The theory is convincing, even more so when put to work in the case studies.Since theory occupies a substantial share of the book, Highmore’s oversight of a growing body of work particularly prominent in human geography that deals with atmospheres specifically (e.g., Edensor 2012 and Anderson 2009 are mentioned only in relation to affect) is curious to say the least, especially considering that throughout the book, the author employs a vocabulary that sees atmosphere as synonymous with mood and feeling. While much is shared between the two literatures, not least Heidegger’s work on “Stimmung,” an interesting conversation has been missed.In sum, Highmore’s engagement with culture by way of tracing and remixing national patterns of feeling demonstrates that what could be seen as vaguer analytic tools are in fact no less potent in analyzing and questioning well-established emotional economies with the added value of offering historically complex and politically sensitive countermoods. It is not difficult to see why Cultural Feelings is certain to become an influential work not only for cultural studies and cultural politics in particular but across disciplinary boundaries

Aesthetics · Affect (linguistics · Art · Cynicism · Feeling · Individualism · Mood · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Art, Politics, and Modernism · History of Emotions Research · Law · Photography and Visual Culture · Psychology · Social Psychology

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