ABSTRACT
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.
