Feeling It/Not Feeling It: Mood Stories as Accounts of Political Intuition

Abstract

Abstract What does it mean to speak of a society being nervous, a demos angry, a polity depressed or a population exhausted? Are these merely frothy terms of journalistic description or can such moods be captured in meaningful ways? This article responds to two tendencies: the dismissal of mood as affective blur and claims to represent mood through scales of empirical measurement. The argument presented here is that mood is a definable phenomenon, relating to perceptual confusion between objectivity and subjectivity; diffuse affective sources and cumulative sensations rather than temporally containable events. To speak of the mood of a social situation is to acknowledge this ambiguous juncture between subjective determination and objective constraint. More like background feelings that persists over time, moods frame not only immediate situational experience but scope for future thought and action. In this sense, moods frame political agency. This framing is primarily intuitive rather than conventionally cognitive.This article explores one method for capturing the ways in which mood shapes agency. In interview-based mood stories, interviewees are invited to focus upon how the mood affect them as political actors. Mood stories are neither traditional representational narratives nor simple impressionistic portraits of feelings, but accounts of how people find meaningful ways of constituting their own experience. Mood stories aim to get at the intuitive work involved in forming political experience. The empirical context for the mood stories examined here are 42 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with British citizens aged between 18 and 80 with a view to understanding how Brexit made them feel.