The Legibilities of Mood Work

Abstract

Mood is a contact zone for the strange and prolific coexistence of sense and world. An orientation alert to something already set in motion, it is a mundane register of labours to sense out what is actual and potential in an historical moment or a situation. (1) Mood work marshals bodies, objects, technologies, sensations and flights of fancy into forms of partial coherence. Its legibilities are inchoate and yet pronounced in practices, socialities, scenes, social circles, events, and landscapes. Here we attend to these legibilities themselves as emergent forms, or breaking events. They press, promise, enfold, and ponder worlds being thrown together. Our ethnographic approach follows mood work's legibilities in two case studies: the United States of the 1950s and Germany in the early twenty-first century. These sites serve as catchments of compositional modes of being in the world. Or, in other words, we take the ethnographic objects of these case studies to be experiences/experiments (2) of and in self and society that are attuned to the contingent sensory-aesthetic-concrete materials at hand. (3) We take the self, experience, and the social itself as kinds of circulation, as a motion of re-associations and reassembling, (4) as nodes of impact, and as engines of ordinary initiation. With Derek McCormack, we foreground experience/experiment as a 'milieu through [which] new refrains might emerge' (Thinking in Transition, p217), attending to emergent patterns in everyday life and their poetic force. We approach our two cases, then, with an experimental openness to what might be happening and to what could happen. We also approach them as lived experiments in themselves, as experiences that draw their energy of openness to the world precisely through their intensely affective-material rooting in the mundane. In the United States in the 1950s, the mood work of the good life leant texture, tone and sensuous design to the labours of ordinary living and coalesced into energies and trajectories that modelled a life by enacting it in minutely designed systems of living. As contemporary Germans negotiate a transition to renewable energy sources and environmental governance, the mood work of keeping house enfolds novel materials into mundane infrastructures for everyday living, where promise lies in a well-kept home, and, by extension, in a well-kept life. Each of these cases of mood work is a singular affective-material circuit of reaction to the twisting, cross-cutting forces of modernity, technoscientific promise, and precarity. (5) Each has energetics that surge, settle or deflate, inspire or depress. Each establishes trajectories through landscapes of living even while existing as a diffusion across the field of incommensurate objects and bodies of all kinds (human bodies, bodies of thought, bodies of rhetoric). For us, mood work is a way of considering how a community throws itself together not through identity categories or a representational order but more directly and mundanely through common orientations to breaking forces and events and their catchment areas. Neither subjective nor objective, mood work displaces conceptual hierarchies between the big (important) and small (off-register, invisible, everyday) as it hits its mark in a middle range (6) of forces, lending colour (7) or tone to social and material forms. It is both an event and an endurance, both a distribution across a field of subjects, objects, orientations, agencies, boundaries and institutionalised kernels of force or ideology and a fine point of affective sense that takes root in subjects to become the small and strangely shared lines of a life. We also approach mood work as an attention and an attachment to form, its flourishing and its maintenance. Mood work takes shape as a form that is similarly used or co-recognised between agents in a shared scene, a sense that something is happening and an attachment, however inchoate, to sensing out what that something is. …