The Moodiness of Action

Abstract

This article argues that the concept of moodiness provides significant resources for developing a more robust pragmatist theory of action. Building on current conceptualizations of agency as effort by relational sociologists, it turns to the early work of Talcott Parsons to outline the theoretical presuppositions and antinomies endemic to any such conception; William James and John Dewey provide an alternative conception of effort as a contingent rather than fundamental form of agency. The article then proposes a way forward to a nonvoluntarist theory of action by introducing the notion of moodiness, highlighting how the concept permits a richer conceptualization of actors' prereflexive involvement in and relatedness to nonneutral, demanding situations. Effort is reconceptualized as a moment in a broader process of action, where the mood is fragile and problematical. Finally, the article draws all of these elements together in an outline of a unified portrait of the pragmatist action cycle that includes both creativity and moodiness as essential moments.

Outline of a Non-Deliberative, Mood-Based, Theory of Action

“…A mood is not an affective state which we have as much as an affective state in which we find ourselves. If you find yourself in a mood, the mood is determined outside of your conscious awareness, it organizes the world in a certain fashion or colors it in a certain hue (Carroll 2003, 529–531; Silver 2011, 207–15). Moods thus understood affect our bodies and not only our minds, and as a result they can often be interpreted already from a person’s posture, gait and general demeanor.…”

Doctor Distrust: Pragmatism, Intersectionality, and the Confluence of Expertise and Interests

“…That is, rather than picture individuals as consciously selecting lines of actions based on any preferences that they have, Whitford (2002) claims that, a la Mead and Dewey, individual action is better characterized as a stimulus response that is funded by one's various stocks of knowledge in the moment. Because the moment of action is centered on the present, the constraining effects of one's context, one's mood (Silver, 2011), and myriad other factors can come into play and fundamentally change the shape of one's preferences. In this sense, preferences are not ends or goals that people store, but rather are ends-in-view that one can continually change both over time and spontaneously in the moment.…”

What Are Dual Process Models? Implications for Cultural Analysis in Sociology

“…Accordingly, it is the degree of effort, controllability, automaticity, and awareness involved in action initiation and action execution that becomes a main analytical (and, from the actor's perspective, phenomenological) differentiating factor between Type I and Type II culture in action processes (Bargh and Chartrand 1999). For instance, Silver (2011) argues that some actions, fitting the prototype of the classic Parsonian schema, require purposeful (and presumably "reflexive") effort, where one has to make oneself "perform." He also notes that a different class of actions (which fall under the Type I culture in action process) are actually elicited by the qualitative affordances ("moodiness") of the situation and thus do not require (nor are they experienced) as effortful.…”