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.

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

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

Malik, United Kingdom, Divided People.

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 highlevel 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 decisionmakers 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

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.

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

Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, 000000; Damasio, Descartes Error, 000
000.

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

10

Damasio and Heidegger are brought together by Ratcliffe, Heideggers Attunement and
the 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.

3 / 26

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.

4 / 26

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.

5 / 26

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.

6 / 26

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.

7 / 26

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 its
surroundings 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.

8 / 26

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-inthe-World, 000000.

9 / 26

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 nonrepresentational 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.

10 / 26

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.

11 / 26

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.

12 / 26

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.

13 / 26

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.

14 / 26

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.

15 / 26

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.

17 / 26

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 preinterpretitive 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.

18 / 26

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 superperson. 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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