Cultural Feelings

Mood, Mediation and Cultural Politics

Ben Highmore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780415604123
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136474651
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Cultural Feelings: Mood, Mediation and Cultural Politics sets out to examine the role of feelings and mood in the production of social and cultural experience. By returning to the work of Raymond Williams, and informed by recent 'affect theory', it treats feeling as a foundational term for cultural studies.

Ben Highmore argues that feelings are political and cultural forms that orchestrate our encounters with the world. He utilises a range of case studies from twentieth-century British culture, focusing in particular on Home Front morale during the Blitz, the experiences of Caribbean migration in the post-war decades, the music of post-punk bands in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and more recent 'state of the nation' film and television, including Our Friends in the North and This is England. He finds evidence in oral history, in films, photographs, television, novels, music, policy documents, and journalism. Through these sources, this book tells a vivid and compelling story of our most recent history and argues that the urgent task for a progressive cultural politics will require the changing of moods as well as minds.

Cultural Feelings is essential reading for students and researchers with an interest in affect theory, emotion and culture.

1

Feeling Our Way and Getting in the Mood

(An introduction)

This book is about feelings and moods. But it isn’t about moods and feelings as internal states, experienced by individualised sovereign subjects. Or it isn’t primarily about that. We live across mood-worlds. We live through a plethora of feelings. Some moods and feelings are dramatic and intense; their presence is emphatic, insistent. Other feelings are relatively inconspicuous because they occur too often to be noticeable, or because they saturate a particular situation. Some are just a low hum. We don’t notice the mood of the place where we work until it is somehow ‘off’. But the day-to-day mood of our workplace isn’t the absence of mood. We know this because it is significantly different from the atmosphere in our homes, even though we might not notice that mood either. All of the feelings we experience are relational – my boredom, for instance, is directed towards something even though it feels so internal and empty to me – and to a greater or lesser extent those relations are deeply entwined with the social worlds that we inhabit.

This book is concerned with moods and feelings as social and historical qualities. As a modest claim, I want to suggest that moods and feelings are an important aspect of the world, and that we need to take account of them. More immodestly, I want to claim that unless we attend to moods and feelings we are not engaging in the sociality of social and cultural enquiry. How the world feels to us, and how it has felt to us, is the phenomenal form of the social: this quality is the sense of promise and defeat, of opportunities found and lost, of ease and disquiet, of vibrancy and dourness.

In the chapters that follow, I work both theoretically and historically to chart some of the ways that mood, feeling and atmosphere help us to describe various periods and moments of British post-war social and cultural history. In the next chapter I will explain more precisely why I’m using a word like ‘feeling’ rather than the more theoretically elaborated term ‘affect’, and why I’m conjoining feeling with the equally vague term ‘mood’. For now, I just want to say that I don’t subscribe to the definition of ‘feeling’ in a statement such as: ‘feelings are personal and biographical, emotions are social, and affects are prepersonal’ (Shouse 2005, emphasis in original). My interest in the term ‘feeling’ (and my claim for its usefulness) is precisely because it isn’t locked into the personal and biographical. Indeed, in ordinary speech we use the verb ‘to feel’ in a whole range of ways that include forms of learning and habit (‘she was getting a feel for the job’), intuition and insight (‘they had a feeling that it wasn’t going too well’), tactility and practice (‘they felt their way in the dark’), and these uses often relate to collective and social experience. I want to use the terms ‘feeling’ and ‘mood’ precisely because they can range across the habitual and the emotional aspects of experience, because they can incorporate both the mundane practicalities of everyday life and the intense eruptions of more sensational moments.

In the case studies that I pursue in this book, I’m particularly concerned with tracking patterns of feeling at a national level, and this has meant that my focus is often on cultural texts such as films, novels and music. I have been less concerned with the feelings that are attached to material culture.¹ In this introduction, however, I’m going to write, often anecdotally, about mood and feeling as a way of showing how they matter and function at the level of everyday life, in both the ordinary things that surround us and the elaborated forms that supply us with imaginative articulations of moods and feelings. My anecdotes congregate around a number of themes that can be written as a set of axioms. These axioms don’t itemise distinct aspects of feeling and moods; rather they point to active forces that are always in play simultaneously in the arena of cultural feelings. If cultural feelings and social atmospherics constitute something like the ‘chemical’ solution of the social, then these axioms name the active processes that are always at work in such a solution.

The first axiom is that moods and feelings are material. I want to pursue an approach to mood that refuses to treat mood or feeling as some sort of ethereal spectre that is manifest by sympathetic magic, whereby we all start feeling what others feel as a mimetic chain reaction. Instead I want to insist that moods are embedded in cultural forms (in narrative and musical genres, for instance, or in institutional protocols and conventions) and that these forms often have technological delegates that perform mood work (dimmer switches, corporate furniture, customer feedback forms, and so on). This is simply to say that I want to privilege the conveyors and mediators of mood and feelings, whether these exist in vernacular figures of speech or in complex narrative forms, or whether they are active in a style of clothing or in the architecture of a workplace. The second axiom is that moods and feelings are a form of labour. Moods and feelings don’t just happen; they are produced, and most of the time their production is the result of specific work. Mood work, for instance, is undertaken by the ‘caring professions’ (populated predominantly by women), but also by journalists, media producers and by the hordes of ‘spin doctors’, publicists and advertisers working for governments, charities and large corporations. We are all, in some way, involved in mood work through our roles as citizens, daughters, prisoners, teachers, students, sons, lovers, customers, criminals, patients, consumers, parents, carers, workers, voters, et al. Such social roles (which of course overlap) implicate us in networks of work relations with their concomitant hierarchies and power relations. Today’s social media has greatly increased the way we can be seen to participate in mood work, even if we don’t all use emoticons☺.

The third axiom, and probably the one that is most central to this book, is that moods and feelings are historical. To put this simply we could say that what makes this moment different from another is often the orchestrations of mood, atmosphere and feeling. Of course, all sorts of things change over time but we could claim that a moment’s this-ness (its presence, for want of a better word, or its deictic character, to use more technical vocabulary) is to be found at the level of mood and feeling. We know this when we think about our own past and the specific atmospheres and moods that give a time and a place a particular flavour that is different from the flavour of another time and place. How we remember the past, and how the past is remembered for us (in films, novels and on TV) is often accomplished through the registration of mood, of generating the right atmosphere, which is often secured by incorporating material items that resonate with the social feelings of a time (the furniture that doesn’t just signify a period but embodies a series of cultural practices and social attitudes, for instance).

The last axiom is most fundamental and encompasses all the previous ones: moods and feelings are social. By this I simply mean that the shape and texture of social experience is often best grasped as a pattern of feeling and mood. There may well be moods and feelings that aren’t directly social (for instance, forms of psychosis) but they are not the subject of this book (hence the qualifier ‘cultural’ in my title). But what exactly does it mean to claim that something is social? It doesn’t mean, I don’t think, that something is simply shared by a population (in the way that the national electrical grid is, for instance). After all, one of the defining characteristics of contemporary capitalist society is that it is riven with social hierarchies: class and gender differences that are aggravated and extended by systemic and widespread racist proclivities and discriminations aimed at sexual minorities, those with disabilities, and so on. To say something is social, then, is to claim it is simultaneously collective and existing within a diverse and divisive arena. It is the quality of being both generally felt and specifically articulated that is mood’s domain.

To fill out these axioms and to make them palpable, I am going to tell some anecdotes: some of them are mine, some are not. I will start out with a fairly lengthy description of a job I used to have working as a projectionist in a regional arts cinema. It was the second half of the 1980s, a time when new digital forms of video production were just beginning to be incorporated into film, but where the future of digital projection wasn’t yet fully imagined. It is a particular cultural form that was experienced by many as a form of leisure. As a form of labour it wasn’t, I don’t think, particularly unique. The interlacing of labour, material circumstance and the specifics of cultural feelings are constellations that can be found in any number of situations. The following then is just one situation in particular.

Moods and feelings are material

The trick was synchronicity. The trick was fading out the background music just as you’re bringing down the house lights and opening up the curtains and starting the projector running, so that at the key moment when the house lights are nearly out and when the curtains are over halfway open and when the silence is just beginning, you can flip the switch that allows that intense beam of light to be thrown from the projector onto the screen and connects the speaker system to the soundtrack of the film. It took a bit of practice. To start with I’d panic and forget to dim the lights or not flick the switch that opened the light source on the projector. Or worse; I’d not quite get the bottom reel to take up the film and it would jerk, causing the film to snap, followed by the manic spooling of film onto the projection-booth floor (which meant I had to stop the film before I drowned in celluloid). But as I started getting it right, I’d take pride in choosing some pre-film music that I liked, cueing it up so that the song itself was just fading out as I doused the lights, opened the curtains and started the film. If I liked the film, I’d try to find some music that shared some of the same resonance. But often I felt that Nina Simone singing the title song of her 1978 album Baltimore did the job.

The song ‘Baltimore’ was written by Randy Newman, and Nina Simone’s vocals seemed to imbue each phrase of the song with a world of hurt and a lifetime of picking yourself up off the floor and carrying on. Simone seemed to have a way of taking the songs of melancholic men (I’m thinking of her versions of songs by Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen) and amplifying the misery while also dialling up the feeling of buoyant resilience. Her voice and her approach seemed to act as a sort of tough-love resonator. ‘Baltimore’, the song at least, is filled with pitiful exclamations: ‘Hard times in the city, in a hard town by the sea … Oh Baltimore, ain’t it hard just to live.’ No doubting that it’s a hard life: no questioning that Nina Simone is going to live it, and live through it. But it’s that voice, singing those words, set in that sonic landscape of surging strings punctuated by reggae guitar chops that struck a chord with me. It seemed like a good prelude to a film.

It was 1987 when I started: the film titles that I screened easily spring to mind – Something Wild; Roxanne; Withnail and I; Angel Heart; Raising Arizona; Jean de Florette; Manon des Sources; The Lair of the White Worm; The Moderns; Torch Song Trilogy; Distant Voices, Still Lives; Patty Hearst; High Hopes; Red Sorghum; Rita, Sue and Bob Too; Prick Up Your Ears; House of Games; Bagdad Cafe; Babette’s Feast; I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing; and so on and so on. I can remember some of the films exceptionally well, but mostly as fragments or as sensual particulars. I can remember the colour of Bagdad Cafe but not the story; I can easily call to mind a couple of scenes in Distant Voices, Still Lives – the part where everyone is smoking in the cinema and then someone falls in slow motion through a glass ceiling; I think I could still impersonate the manner of enunciating in House of Games. I think I would remember something of any of them if I chanced upon them unwittingly now. Searching them out wittingly, however, was often disappointing. When I watched bits of the film during twice-nightly screenings for two weeks as a projectionist I just loved Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (especially the long travelling shot through people’s apartments that starts the film), but when I sat and watched it in the auditorium it seemed to be mainly about a middle-aged man falling for a younger woman with strikingly tousled hair (like the films of Tarkovsky: the existential dilemma of fancying someone). The cinema where I worked was, and still is, an ‘art house’ cinema, which showed the usual diet of quirky, indie fare, as well as more experimental avant-garde programmes compiled by the British Film Institute (always in the small second cinema). I remember meeting the wonderful Margaret Tait who ate her sandwiches in the projection booth while her windswept filmic poems were showing in the smaller auditorium. She seemed slightly shy about showing her films, maybe because they slowed down time.

I can remember most of the films I showed in the two years of being a projectionist, not because I was diligently checking to make sure that they were in focus (although I was) or because I loved movies (I did then, much less so now) but because I was scared. I was scared most of the time, anxious about messing up. I just never got the hang of it. Not in two years. My boss tried to teach me something about electronics. I even read books about it. But when things went wrong – and they did – I was always flummoxed; my default position was panic. I was totally unprepared. For some reason I thought that it would just be easy work and that I could work my way up from the bottom: start as a projectionist and end up as a film programmer, perhaps a curator of film festivals. What I wasn’t prepared for was the fact that being a projectionist at this pre-digital time was a fairly heavy, dirty, technical and industrial job. I didn’t mind the dirty, heavy work, it was the technical aspect that panicked me. What they needed was someone with a bit of technical know-how – someone who might be able to tell a resistor from a carburettor at least! Not someone with a fine art degree who liked arty movies.

I thought of myself as a filmmaker-in-waiting doing my rotation in the ‘back room’. Really I was being cured of acute cinephilia. The projection booth was like an overdose of Brechtian alienation effects by way of an ultra-materialist concentration on the filmic apparatus. It blocked a good deal of the mood and tone of the film that was supplied by the soundtrack (the grain of an actor’s voice, the soundscape of place and so on). I can remember getting ready for change-overs (when you have to start the parallel projector to take over the film as the reel on the other projector came to an end). In my anxiety, I’d often get ready too soon, so I’d end up crouched, looking through the glass, staring and staring at the top right-hand corner of the screen waiting for the little scratched circle to appear. Sometimes I felt that I was ogling this corner for hours, but it was often at least a few minutes. The industrial whir, clank and clang of two Gaumont Kalee 21 projectors supplied the insistent soundtrack. However mellow and languorous it was down there in the auditorium, up in the booth it was always the frenetic snatching (24 snatches a second) driving that large mass of celluloid through the machine that provided the overarching soundtrack and tempo.

Sometimes if I was particularly keen on a film, I would watch it on my days off in the auditorium. This was usually a mistake: I’d be too concerned with the quality of the focus; too jumpy when the change-over marks appeared; overly concerned with aspect ratios and volume. I’d managed to turn every ‘classic-realist text’, with all that character identification that it was meant to promote, into a structuralist-materialist experience of ‘film-as-film’. Sitting there I would try to get the measure of the experience of those around me – a sense of the theatricality of the presentation. Listening to my much-loved Nina Simone from down there was awful: it just sounded like wine-bar good-taste. But it was amazingly ignorable. What wasn’t ignorable and worked like some sort of hallucinatory charm was the dimming of the lighting. Dimming the lighting was like turning the volume down on the audience. You could see them adjust themselves in their seats; reorient themselves in relation to their companions, their seating and the screen. The dimming, recalibrated space, made neighbours recede and intensified the pull of the screen. People hunkered down; we were in for the long haul.

And as the curtains opened and the film began you could feel people feeling their way into the film (I was one of them of course), picking up cues and clues. Scrutinising the pre-title sequence; listening to the soundtrack; anything that might indicate what sort of pleasures and pains were waiting to greet us. Would we need an armrest to grab? Should we sit forward slightly in apprehension of someone being apprehended? Or will we arch back so as to laugh out loud? Films were genre cues, mood enhancers and mood introducers: little signs to prepare yourself, to sensitise yourself towards a future that may turn out well or badly or hilariously or indifferently.

So far this section could be thought of as a ‘mood memoir’, but if so it is one of a particular hue. It does not particularly dwell on the emotionality of mood, nor does it spend much time thinking about my own emotional mood beyond mentioning a certain amount of work-anxiety and disappointment in relation to film experience. I could have described a different set of experiences (visiting a hospital, the first days at school) and made them similarly moodful. This sort of mood description pursues the presence and absence of expertise (someone who can work a projector, for instance, or someone who can diagnose diseases), some form of institutional setting (although it could be very informal like a cinema), and a set of material techniques and associated sensual and sensorial material supports. In the previous section I have chosen to concentrate on settings where concentration and attention, as moodful orientations, are foregrounded. And in this the sensorial ‘supports’ seem to be hugely important: indeed, the light dimmers and curtain motors might well be doing the bulk of the mood work, or at least in this setting they might be doing more preparatory mood work than the sentiments conveyed by the Nina Simone song (where the surging strings and choppy guitar, rather than the lyrics, might be carrying the bulk of the atmospherics). Also important was the fact that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Epigraph
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 Feeling Our Way and Getting in the Mood: (An introduction)
• 2 Cultural Feelings: (Some theoretical coordinates)
• 3 Morale Work: (Experience feeling itself)
• 4 Bombsites and Playgrounds: (A wrecked, indifferent calm)
• 5 City of Strangers: (Qualities of disappointment)
• 6 Deep Doubts and Exorbitant Hopes: (Something is happening)
• 7 Mood, Generation, Nation: (Feelings and cultural politics)
• 8 Post-Referendum Blues: (Postscript)
• Bibliography
• Index