Capturing the Mood of Democracy: The British General Election 2019 [1st ed.] 9783030531379, 9783030531386

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-x
An Election Comes to Town (Stephen Coleman, Jim Brogden)....Pages 1-12
Looking for Democracy (Stephen Coleman, Jim Brogden)....Pages 13-30
Contesting Narratives: How Stories Fill Holes (Stephen Coleman, Jim Brogden)....Pages 31-60
The Poetics of a Real-Time Election (Stephen Coleman, Jim Brogden)....Pages 61-83
How to Capture a Political Mood (Stephen Coleman, Jim Brogden)....Pages 85-125
Back Matter ....Pages 127-129

Citation preview

Capturing the Mood of Democracy The British General Election 2019

Stephen Coleman Jim Brogden

Capturing the Mood of Democracy “If political science faces a single fundamental dilemma then it has to be how to assess and understand the changing mood of democracy. Capturing the texture and tone of an often angry and apathetic emotional landscape demands innovative methodologies which confront and lay bare the everyday realities of political life. Stephen Coleman and Jim Brogden’s powerful photography and delicate commentary underline the power of visual ethnography to capture the social context in which political events occur. This book is as much a challenge to political science to expand and enrich its methodological horizons as it is to those who seek to understand the contemporary democratic mood. In seeking to capture the democratic mood this is a very ‘BIG’ and hugely impressive little book.” —Matthew Flinders, University of Sheffield, UK “Capturing the Mood of Democracy recounts the compassionate journey of two ‘local’ scholars in a post-industrial city at election time, resulting in a nuanced and empirically rich account of what an election does, or does not, with a city and its diverse population. While situated in a particular place and time, this study also offers a profound meditation on the state of democracy as experienced and enacted in the everyday. Moreover, this study constitutes a stellar example of a lyrical multimodal ethnography, integrating brilliantly phrased observations and reflections with equally important expressive photography.” —Luc Pauwels, University of Antwerp, Belgium “Brogden and Coleman’s Capturing the Mood of Democracy explores modern British democracy via an exceedingly creative and even beguiling multi-dimensioned ethnography of the 2019 general election. Their book is ironic, nuanced, subtle and penetrating. It reads alternatively like a novel by Ali Smith and a full out exploration of modern Britain. Their book tells us what the current moment is like in England as it demonstrates how ethnography can get at the essence of an historical era, a place and a national social drama. Photographs by Brogden visualize the mood of contradiction, disappointment and possibility that this historical moment offers. The book’s magic lies in its ability to see and communicate at the oblique angle of a glance, a fleeting expression and a surprising insight, informed by the best of modern ethnographic thinking.” —Douglas Harper, Duquesne University, USA

“Rarely does one come across scholarly works on politics that combine multimethods and theory as well as Jim Brogden and Stephen Coleman do in Capturing the Mood of Democracy: The British General Election 2019. I highly recommend it for intelligent readers at any level who want a deeper understanding of how moods of various voting publics are created and impact on important political decisions. As a Visual Sociologist, I was especially impressed with how deftly images are knitted into both the thick description and, more importantly, the analysis of these critical elections in Bradford, a city described by the authors as a ‘microcosm of British history.’ In this way, the authors allow the reader to not only hear about the moods of voters but see them as well.” —Jerome Krase, City University of New York, USA “How do the thoughts, feelings and environments of normal life constitute electoral politics? Pacing the streets and homes of Bradford, the authors provide a vivid glimpse into the mood of the 2019 British general election, and a vital new perspective on how politics feels. By gathering together evocative and sensitive photographs with detailed diary entries, it opens an important new route to understanding how politics is made and made sense of in the everyday settings where it matters the most.” —Shanti Sumartojo, Monash University, Australia

Stephen Coleman • Jim Brogden

Capturing the Mood of Democracy The British General Election 2019

Stephen Coleman School of Media & Communication University of Leeds Leeds, UK

Jim Brogden University of Leeds Leeds, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-53137-9    ISBN 978-3-030-53138-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53138-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. Cover design: eStudioCalamar Cover illustration: John Rawsterne/patternhead.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

The general election took place on 12 December 2019. We began to write this book. Within weeks, we found ourselves in a wholly unexpected situation: pandemic; lockdown; crisis. The election in which a government swept to power with a commitment to ‘take back control’ had prepared no-one for what was to come. This book is a record of the mood that preceded that disruptive gust of wind. The book is a collaboration between a political communication scholar with an interest in the experiential dimensions of politics and a visual sociologist with an interest in the multisensory apprehension of situations. We were both extremely fortunate to have had Andrew Morris as a research assistant. Morris’s network of contacts, perceptive reflections and commitment to our research objective greatly enhanced the quality of this study. We wish to thank him, and also Dermot Bolton, whose intimate knowledge of Bradford and its politics was immensely helpful in navigating our research terrain. We are immensely thankful to the people who allowed themselves to be interviewed, chatted to and observed; to the many kind invitations to enter spaces that each gave us unique insights into communities within Bradford; and to the people who sent us their text commentaries about the election. We are responsible for any mistakes of fact or interpretation, but they are responsible for giving us access to the diverse flavours of experience that we have tried to reflect.

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We are each thankful for the support of our partners, Bernadette and Isabella. We dedicate this book to the memory of John Devereux (1939–2020): teacher, musician and friend. Leeds, UK 

Stephen Coleman Jim Brogden

Contents

1 An Election Comes to Town 1 2 Looking for Democracy13 3 Contesting Narratives: How Stories Fill Holes31 4 The Poetics of a Real-Time Election61 5 How to Capture a Political Mood85 Index127

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2 Fig. 1.3 Fig. 1.4 Fig. 1.5 Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.4 Fig. 2.5 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4 Fig. 3.5 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4 Fig. 4.5 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4 Fig. 5.5

Way in election morning. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden) 2 Newspapers, W H Smith. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden) 4 Wibsey Conservative Club. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden) 6 Bradford for Europe. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden) 8 Canvassers set off. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden) 11 Big rewards. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden) 14 Bankrupt. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden) 16 Street corner, Bradford. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden) 19 Dobre Bo Polskie. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden) 22 UK citizen course. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden) 28 The Broadway illuminated. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden) 34 Approaching the Broadway 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden) 35 Back street, Manningham. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden) 47 Pedestrian precinct, Bradford. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden)51 Bowling hair stylist. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden) 56 Above Dyson Street, Bradford. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden)64 Paradise Street. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden) 66 The cabinet. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden) 72 Autocare. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden) 77 Your rubbish. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden) 79 Happy Christmas, Bradford. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden) 88 David on the doorstep. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden) 90 Shop mannequins. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden) 99 White garage. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden) 101 Boy and Barrel. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden) 106 ix

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Fig. 5.6 Fig. 5.7 Fig. 5.8 Fig. 5.9 Fig. 5.10

Splash hand car wash. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden) We are nurses. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden) Global. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden) The future can be taught. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden) Star nails. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden)

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CHAPTER 1

An Election Comes to Town

Abstract  This chapter sets a context for the study of political mood in the city of Bradford during the 2019 general election. It explores the particular characteristics of the city and of the historical moment in which this election occurred. It focuses on the ways that events are experienced ‘from the inside’ and ‘from the outside’. It raises important questions about how political experience is formed. Keywords  Mood • Place • History • Brexit • Insiders • Outsiders

What does it mean to speak of an election as an event that is shaped by its mood? This is not a book about the policies voters wanted an elected government to enact; how they decided who to vote for; whether they conformed to the ‘swings’ identified by psephologists; or how many, and which socio-demographic groups, turned out on election day. There are plenty of informative books and articles addressing these questions. Some of them will include passing reference to ‘the mood of the electorate’, often as an impressionistic touch intended to add colour to an otherwise authoritative account. But such fleeting references beg the question we are asking in this book: What exactly is an election mood? Is it like the mood of a person who is feeling ecstatic or depressed, or a collective mood as in a street party or a funeral? Do elections reflect or generate moods? If so, © The Author(s) 2020 S. Coleman, J. Brogden, Capturing the Mood of Democracy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53138-6_1

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Fig. 1.1  Way in election morning. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden)

how should we read them? How should we tell their story in ways that make sense? (Fig. 1.1.) Our approach to answering these questions is threefold. First, go to a place where an election is taking place. Second, observe and hang out with people as they are in the midst of experiencing an election. Third, ask them how they feel. (Not what their political preferences or considered views are, but how they feel). It is hardly rocket science. But neither could it be done by sitting at a desk looking at a computer screen. We had to be somewhere—and have a real sensibility towards that place—if we were going to do this properly. We chose Bradford because we both live within its political boundaries and vote in its elections. We chose Bradford because it was not London. It was one of those places that people from London head up to when they want to see how ‘real people’ are making sense of the election. We chose Bradford because, in many respects, its story of imperial affluence and recent decline is a microcosm of British history. This is a place which at the beginning of the twentieth century was one of the most prosperous cities in Europe, just as Britain was the most powerful empire in the world.

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Twenty-first-century Bradford bears the scars of urban post-industrialism. But we were not there to expose scars. Our aim was to understand what happens when people are sent the message that their future is in their own hands; that they have the power to vote for their own destinies; that they are citizens of a democracy. Does it feel any different being a citizen of a democracy rather than a waged or salaried worker, a shopper, a worshiper, a native, an immigrant, a scratch-card player or a junkie? We know what the (uncodified, unwritten) constitution is supposed to allow citizens to do, but rather less about how it makes them feel. In this book we attempt to trace those feelings. Beyond the pages of politics textbooks, elections are not abstract phenomena. They are events that are located in particular places at specific times, with contingent cultural shapes. There is a qualitative difference between experiencing an election from the centre of the London bubble and the post-industrial wastelands of West Yorkshire. An election taking place in a hot summer amidst an economic boom will be experienced differently from one in the deep winter surrounded by precarious post-Brexit anxieties. People do not simply cast votes in elections but inhabit them as inclusive or estranging events. It is to these specificities of the Bradford election of December 2019 that we turn in this chapter (Fig. 1.2).

A ‘Grim but Not Mean’ Place1 Lost in its smoky valley in the Pennine hills, bristling with tall mill chimneys, with its face of blackened stone, Bruddesford [Bradford] is generally held to be an ugly city, and so I suppose it is, but it always seemed to me to have the kind of ugliness that could not only be tolerated, but often enjoyed; it was grim but not mean. (J.B. Priestley)

Bradford is mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086 as a farming area that had been ravaged by William the Conqueror in 1070. It took some time to recover, but by 1251 Henry III permitted a weekly market to be held in the town every Thursday. (Interestingly, the tradition of people coming into town for Thursday markets is the reason that British elections are always held on Thursdays). Bradford was hit hard by the Black Death, which first hit the town in 1359. By 1379, its population had halved to 300. Economic recovery from the plague took a long time and it was not until the fifteenth century that the town began to prosper as a producer of woollen clothes. There

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Fig. 1.2  Newspapers, W H Smith. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden)

were some disruptions when mainly Republican Bradford was besieged twice by the Royalists during the Civil War of the seventeenth century. After the Restoration, the worsted industry in the West Riding really took off, but it was only with improvements to canal and road links in the late eighteenth century that Bradford became the main economic centre of the region, rivalling Leeds, but outstripping Halifax. The city assumed the boundless confidence that came from industrial prosperity, even though both confidence and prosperity were never shared out equally. The first bank in Bradford opened in 1771 so that the new industrial capitalists could deposit their textile profits locally. The Bradford canal was built in 1774 and was connected to the Leeds-Liverpool canal three years later, turning the city into the hub of one of the richest economic networks in the world. Bradford’s first industrial mills, including newly invented spinning machinery, were established in the 1780s and by the middle of the nineteenth century it had become a global centre of the textile trade. German merchants came to settle in the town (in an area still known as Little Germany) and networks of overseas commerce were established. Industry

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attracted workers to the town; the population grew from 13,000 in 1801 to 103,000  in 1857. The railway reached Bradford in 1846 and from 1882 horse-drawn trams ran in the streets. Electricity was first generated in Bradford in 1889 and the first electric trams ran in the streets in 1898. The first motor buses in Britain began running in Bradford in 1897, the year in which city status was conferred. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the city stood as a model of industrial modernity. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Bradford’s textile industry began to face fierce global competition. Prosperity was maintained during the two world wars, but it was becoming clear that Bradford’s textile industry was facing fierce global competition. Industrialists responded by bringing in cheap labour with a view to cutting production costs. After the Second World War immigrants from Poland, Ukraine and Yugoslavia were recruited in large numbers. In the 1950s and 1960s, New Commonwealth immigrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh were recruited, mainly from villages in Azad Kashmir and Mirpur, to work on the night shifts which opened up with the introduction of 24-hour production. By 1971, 10% of the city’s population was Asian. This increased to 18% in 2001 and 27% in 2011. Bradford came to be seen as a national testbed of multiculturalism. When things go wrong in the city, it is too glibly described as a failure of race relations. However, Bradford, as a post-industrial city, is faced with a much deeper problem that cuts across ethnic divisions: poverty. The Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) states that Bradford is the fourth most income-deprived district in the country and has the largest gap between rich and poor of any local authority district in England. Within the poorest parts of the city, infant mortality rates are twice the national average. Bradford has the fourth-highest rate of child poverty of all local authorities within the UK, with over a third of all children in the district living in poverty. According to the city’s 2019 Joint Strategic Needs Assessment, ‘In Bradford District, children who grow up in low-­ income households have poorer mental and physical health and are more likely to leave school with lower educational attainment’. The city’s housing stock is the oldest in Britain: a third of its houses were built before 1919. A total of 60% of its privately rented dwellings are rated as being below decent standards. Mood is often assumed to be a product of ephemeral temperament and sometimes dismissed as a self-indulgent whim. But moods can be deeply rooted in material constraints. The mood of prisoner facing a life sentence is not a mere psychic proclivity, but a very understandable reaction to

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Fig. 1.3  Wibsey Conservative Club. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden)

coercive restraint. When people are in a mood there is usually a reason for it, and living in one of the poorest and unequal cities in the country where much of the housing is indecent, the mortality rates are obscenely high, and your children’s life chances are unjustly curtailed is probably a good enough reason to feel perturbed (Fig. 1.3).

Caught in a Long Moment We remember great political events as occasions in time. And we remember periods of time by their affective textures. We think of a date or an era and recall mood-states. The British general election of 1997 is commonly remembered as a moment of exhaustion from nearly two decades of Thatcherism, prompting the rhapsodic insistence of New Labour that ‘things can only get better’. Swept up in a mood of modernising renewal, voters did not simply elect a government, but signed up for a new ‘cool’ world. In 1979 Thatcher’s victory had responded to the metaphor of ‘the winter of discontent’, inducing a minatory mood which called for the protection of a strong government. The 1945 election is perhaps the best

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example of affectively inflected political time. To understand that great political turning-point, suggests the historian, Peter Hennessy (2006:88), one must consider ‘the atmosphere of 1945 – the grain of everyday existence, the humdrum as well as the hopeful and the glorious’. Consider Barbara Castle’s account of her eve-of-poll election meeting: the atmosphere buoyed one up because there was such excitement and such enthusiasm. Our eve-of-the-poll meeting at St George’s Hall in Blackburn, which was a very large public hall, was crowded … Every seat occupied, they were lining the walls, they were hanging over the balconies, and there was a sort of unbelievable buoyancy in the atmosphere, as though people who had had all the textile depression years, the men and women who had suffered in the forces and the women who had been working double shifts, making munitions and the rest of it, suddenly thought “My heavens, we can win the peace for people like us”. (in Mitchell 1995:44)

Voters in the 1945 election were swept along by a metaphor; they were building the New Jerusalem and if they were to be successful it would not be thanks to the financial projections of any ‘desiccated calculating machine’, but because they were galvanised by a mood of rejuvenation. Political analysts who ignore such moods or fail to decipher the temporal markers that define them are unlikely to know where the wind is blowing until well after the storm has passed. The mood of the 2019 election in Bradford was characterised by none of the affective bursts of 1945, 1979 or 1997. It was a December election. There had not been an election in this month since 1923. The early mornings were dark and by 5 p.m. it felt as though night had come. It was cold and wet. This was not a time for easily ignoring the insipidity of the post-­ industrial environment. And to add to the sense of temporal disorientation, it was the run-up to Christmas; a time of the year that demands its own affective spectacle and generates its own disappointments. If there was a mood at play in Bradford during the 2019 election campaign, it was one of weary polarisation. It seemed as if both political elites and lay citizens had become trapped within a revolving door of perpetual sparring. Politics had come to feel like an interminable altercation between predictable positions, replete with clichés and lazy caricatures. The election provided yet another opportunity to enact this over-rehearsed drama (Fig. 1.4).

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Fig. 1.4  Bradford for Europe. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden)

The most conspicuous sore was Brexit. The referendum had taken place three years earlier. Across the UK population, 51.89% voted to leave the European Union and 48.11% voted to remain, a margin of 3.78%. In Bradford 54.2% voted to leave and 45.8% to remain. It was a disagreement that neither political leaders nor voters seemed able to settle. Families fell out. Remainers were accused of being anti-democratic. Leavers were labelled Little Englanders. The 2017 election had been called to settle the matter but exacerbated the stalemate by electing a hung parliament and an impotent government. As the problem became more insoluble, it became more fractious and as it became more discordant, there seemed to be less chance than ever of resolving it through political compromise. The 2019 election was a direct consequence of this failure to transcend the silo of partisanship. Instead of generating heated debate, which it had in the aftermath of the referendum, the Brexit row had become tediously exhausting. This sense of seemingly irresolvable deadlock framed the mood of what promised to be a draining election campaign.

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Suffusing the Brexit debate in Bradford were enduring anxieties about belonging. Discursive constructions of ‘us’ and ‘them’ were inflamed by provocative metaphors about ‘invasion’, ‘breaking free’ and forcefully straightened bananas. Through such tropes, voters were reminded that there can be no nationalism without the Other as an imagined threat. White racist depictions of Bradford Muslims seeking to undermine English culture and populist opportunism of the kind that had flourished during George Galloway’s time as MP for Bradford West both contributed to mood of urban suspicion. Relatively recent events in the city’s history like the Honeyford affair of 1985, the Rushdie book-burning in 1988 and the riots of 1995 and 2001 have been invoked by some to suggest that Bradford politics could only ever be factional. But in fact, it might be argued that the city’s long experience of migrant waves has put it ahead of other parts of the country in learning to live with cultural diversity. Bradford became a City of Sanctuary in 2010 and has a reputation as a welcoming place to refugees and asylum seekers. Whether such hospitality should be regarded as virtue or flaw was played out as an electoral sub-text in 2019, as it had done in many local elections before it. Political polarisation over Brexit and broader questions of pluralistic belonging were exacerbated by aggressive divisions in both of the political parties that most people in Bradford were likely to vote for. The Conservative split had led to the political ascendancy of the Brexit party, which the Tory leadership was only able to defeat by adopting much of its programme and tone. The Labour Party was in a state of internal civil war between Corbyn supporters and their opponents. This complicated traditional party loyalties, with some Conservative voters supporting the Brexit party and some Labour voters refusing to vote for a Corbyn-led party, or only doing so by holding their nose. There was a significant number of Labour supporters and voters who would not cast a Labour vote until the party dealt seriously with its minority of members who were freely expressing anti-Semitic views. All of these factors contributed to pervasive feelings of political disorientation. Uncertainties about how Britain related to the rest of the world, who belonged and who were outsiders, whether parliaments could arrive at decisions or governments could govern, what parties stood for and how these quandaries would be worked out resulted in a political mood of weariness. But the wearier people became, the more they clung on to the illusive security of polarising mantras. There was a mood to this election, but it was more like a lingering headache than a song in anyone’s heart.

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Experiencing an Election from the Inside and Outside People find themselves positioned towards events. How they feel about them is often a matter of orientation. ‘What has this event to do with me? How can I escape this new intrusion upon my life? By what means can I make myself part of this thing and it part of me?’ These are tacit, orientational questions that serve to ground people politically. Without such grounding, events can seem incongruous or irrelevant. People orient themselves towards an election by asking where this event came from. Considering the provenance of an event entails distinguishing between ones that are natural and ones that are socially constructed. An earthquake is natural, although the vulnerability of the poorest housing to seismic shock is socially constructed. An economic depression is social, although it will often be figuratively described as if it were some sort of natural disaster. Political rhetoric is acutely involved in such attempts to ascribe causation. Beyond that dichotomy, people ask questions about whether an event is local or imported; Is it ‘one of ours’ or ‘one of theirs’? They want to know how much control they have over its semiotic make-up. We have referred to the election coming to town—like circuses or wandering theatre troupes that periodically turn up and turn on the excitement—because that is how it seemed to many of the people we met in our travels around Bradford. It was not only that the election appeared to be a London-produced affair, arising from a parliamentary impasse in the capital city and organised by parties based down there, but because its rhythms and language felt alien to many of the people to whom we spoke. They were being asked to adapt to the election. They were not insiders (Fig. 1.5). Being an outsider is both a state of mind and a political position. It is what journalists probably have in mind when they meditate about what ‘northern voters’ are thinking and feeling about an election. To be a northern voter is not just to be an eligible voter who lives in the north of Britain, but an imagined group, slightly exotic in being beyond the political interior. Outsiders are more dependent upon the ways in which events are represented to them—by the mass media, for example—than are insiders. They know that something is happening, but the crucial question for them is how much this event will impinge upon their lives. Is it an event, a near-event or a non-event? The contestation of the electoral event makes it a political form. As we talked to people in Bradford about the election,

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Fig. 1.5  Canvassers set off. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden)

it became clear that some saw it as having a very direct impact upon them, while others saw no point in trying to relate to it. In the case of most events, little effort is made to mitigate outsider indifference, but the civic nature of elections makes this different. Elections are presented as occasions for displays of civic duty. In a climate of political disenchantment and distrust, however, flagrant noncompliance with official expectations can be made to appear as a small act of rebellion. People’s experience of an election as an event will not only differ depending on whether they feel themselves to be insiders or outsiders, but it will be determined by how connected they are to the routines, patterns and customs that the event disrupts. Moments of eventfulness throw mundane normality into disarray. When an event like an election comes along, casting people in the role democratic citizens with voices and votes and the power to make big decisions, questions arise about what is being deferred, displaced or ruptured. What normality does this event unsettle? If elections are periods of democratic inclusion, how do they contrast with the much longer periods before and after them in which democratic rights are rather less conspicuous? Translated into colloquial expression, several

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of the people we met in Bradford asked us ‘Why is it that politicians only come around making big promises to us when they want our votes?’ It is, of course, a rhetorical question, the implication being that outside of the election period communication between representatives and represented is rather scant. We might say that the event of an election makes people think about the non-events of everyday democracy. John Dewey (1927 [1954]) once stated that ‘to form itself the public has to break existing political forms’. We tend to think of entities such as ‘the electorate’ and ‘the public’ as if they were fully formed groups who know what they are supposed to do. But what if they are uncertain about what is required of them? What if they do not want to perform the required role? What if they are not in the mood for the event that has been thrust upon them? Dewey suggests that if the public are truly to exercise agency, they must resist the formal functions ascribed to them by others and create their own practices of political action. In the pages that follow, we observe the social practices through which people respond to an election campaign. How people experience the electoral event is not always consistent with text-book citizenship, but it tells a story about the affective dimensions of democracy that highlights the perennial significance of mood.

Note 1. The historical account in  this section is drawn from  Bradford Council of Social Service (1923), Koditschek (1990) and Hall (2013).

References Bradford Council. 2019. Joint strategic needs assessment report. Bradford: Bradford Council. Bradford Council of Social Service, Bradford and Eng (Yorkshire). 1923. The texture of welfare: A survey of social service in Bradford. Bradford: Bradford Council of Social Service. Dewey, J. 1927 [1954]. The public and its problems. Athens. Swallow Press. Hall, A. 2013. Story of Bradford. Cheltenham: The History Press. Hennessy, P. 2006. Never again: Britain 1945–1951. Penguin UK. Koditschek, T. 1990. Class formation and urban industrial society: Bradford, 1750–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mitchell, A.V. 1995. Election ‘45: Reflections on the revolution in Britain. London: Fabian Society.

CHAPTER 2

Looking for Democracy

Abstract  This is an ethnographic chapter, inviting readers to walk through the city with the authors and observe the different ways in which election moods are expressed and manifested. People are encountered in shopping centres, workingmen’s clubs, mosques, schools and asylum centres. Mood is communicated slightly different in each site, and yet there are affective patterns. The chapter can be read of a mood tour of political disaffection, an up-close encounter with a moody electorate. Keywords  Mosque • Workingmen’s club • Refugee centre • School • Bank • Street

Bradford, West Yorkshire, England We walked for miles through this city, past nail bars and mosques, academy schools and phone shops (‘We’ll unlock any phone’), polskie sklepy and martial arts gyms, workingmen’s clubs and indoor shopping malls, banks and Sikh temples, law courts and refugee centres, abandoned cricket grounds and vegan cafes. We walked and we walked, believing that wandering might give us a kind of affective access that staying in one place never could (Fig. 2.1). We were looking for the election, for some small ripple in the atmosphere indicating the advent of a democratic moment. But what does such

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Fig. 2.1  Big rewards. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden)

a moment look, sound and feel like? How to discern the collective clearing of the throat that precedes democratic voice? For months the country had been locked into a political impasse. A limping, flustered government—a so-called zombie parliament, riven by tribal conflict, in which no single faction was able to assert authority. A febrile public debate: families falling out; the B-word banned from congenial gatherings. In/out; hard/soft; leave/remain: the empty signifiers of a perplexed polity. We walked through the city and the perishing winds reminded us that we were up here and not down there: the North and not the South. The election, which had started with a declaration down there, was now ‘an event’ up here. Would this moment of putative local democracy be a mere echo of the well-rehearsed drama being played out in the capital or might some local improvisation throw it off course? How would the messages and memes, narratives and tropes survive the journey to this place? Would voices raised up here be heard down there or, like so much else, would they be ‘left behind’?

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We discovered the art of the bad vox  pop, invariably failing to stop people on the street whose answers could be predicted from their faces. We asked knowing questions and were presented with responses that threw us off course. On the periphery of the Grand Mosque, we met a man pushing along a bicycle loaded with tins of baked beans. We asked him whether he attended this mosque and he said no, he was a Buddhist, originally from Sri Lanka. He had lived in Italy for several years before coming to Britain and spoke fluent Italian. He told us that he worked in a factory. We did not ask him about his massive cargo of baked beans. He told us that there were over a hundred mosques in this city and that he had to travel 8 miles to the nearest Buddhist Temple in Leeds. He asked us what we were doing, and we said we were looking for the election. Did he know where we might find it? He said no but that he was definitely in favour of Brexit. He would vote for whoever would get Britain out of the European Union. But he wasn’t sure whether his Italian status would allow him to cast such a vote. We began to prepare ourselves for the bewildering complexity of messy micro-preferences. Unlike macro-preferences, which can be neatly summarised in graphs depicting representative samples, the views we were encountering were squashed and mushed, filtered and fragmented within individuals who transgressed the laws of social-scientific prediction. These people were good to hang out with because they defied category, but hard to represent in a few hackneyed words—which, as we were also to discover, raised formidable complications for the election, the purpose of which was to make people representable. Walking down Kirkgate, we stopped to speak to a family—mum, dad, son, daughter—who appeared to be hovering between going somewhere and standing still. ‘Waiting for the election?’ we asked. They looked at us as if we were strange. They were from Clayton in the west of the city. The dad said they were Remainers who were feeling fed up. In the election they planned to vote Labour. They liked Jeremy Corbyn. ‘He seems to be a kind man’, the mother said. How could the election change their lives, we asked? ‘It won’t’. What needs to change? The dad said that half the shops were boarded up. It was a disgrace. Leeds gets all the investment. ‘But what exactly could be fixed by voting in the election’, we asked. The daughter spread her arms out, pointing at the empty, boarded-up shops: ‘Just look around you’, she said. The whole city was crying out to be fixed. Every other shop was boarded-up. Some were gutted. As we walked past them, we overheard snippets of conversation: ‘I work for an agency,

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but they won’t sort out what they owe me ‘til tomorrow morning’ – ‘The next thing that someone says to me, I’m gonna fucking go mad’. Most people in the city centre were either walking somewhere in a hurry, seemingly eager to ‘get something sorted’ or standing around as if they were waiting for something to turn up. A lurking unease, not threatening but nagging. The shells of industrial buildings, their gutted interiors emptied of purpose, stood as cruel reminders that this had once been one of the richest cities in the world. Memories of imperial significance weigh heavy. Loss is felt as an aching insult. A city that is post-industrial, post-imperial has to find a new story to tell itself. That often emerges as a story of what we are not. In the nightmares of Middle England, recurring images of this urban landscape hypostatise national decline. This is what cities become when they lose a sense of purpose. When it felt right to do so, we asked people about purpose. What is this city for? What must it do to do its job well? Could voting in this election make a difference to the city’s fortune? And if so, where was the debate about this difference happening? Where was the election? (Fig. 2.2).

Fig. 2.2  Bankrupt. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden)

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On Not Talking About Politics The grand edifice of the working men’s club, with its stone, crow-stepped frontage, reminds passers-by of its right to be there. It could pass as a museum to a dying culture, to a class-based community that once mattered but is now gripped by an acute sense of its fading economic and cultural relevance. The club was established in 1928 by workmen from a local sewage works and has been going ever since as a venue for drinking, weekend entertainments and playing and watching sport. When we arrived, the club was almost empty. One man was playing snooker on his own. We asked him whether he had any thoughts about the election. ‘I’m not a politician, me’, he said. And that was all he would say. It was a revealing comment, suggesting that to engage in the language of politics is to become a politician. In the pub down the road, we encountered a similar response. Five men and women were at or around the bar and we asked them if they’d be willing to talk to us about the election. One man answered for all of them: ‘I’m not gonna make myself look like a dickhead by talking into a tape recorder about what I don’t know about’. As we moved away from the bar, the few people gathered there began to talk to each other about why they weren’t interested in politics. Their mutual dissociation from ‘politics’ as they understood the term afforded them permission to speak freely. Thinking of politics as a certain kind of performance, they felt more confident being offstage. The barmaid in the working men’s club had told us that if we wanted opinions about the election we’d come to the right place. But at the wrong time. The domino players, who were not averse to vociferous altercation, rarely arrived before 4 p.m. We returned then to be told by the domino players that they were more interested in dominos than the election; that they didn’t want to be recorded; and that if we were there to canvass their votes for any of the parties, we could ‘bugger off’. When they began to talk about the election, it was through a mask of not talking about the election. Like the other people we had spoken to that day, the political leaked out through cracks of displayed indifference. They only felt free to speak politically by first distancing themselves from politics and politicians. The election was a spectacle they saw on television and read about in the papers. They acknowledged it grudgingly, but it did not belong to them.

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What belonged to them was an enduring sense of secure presence in their own space. ‘We’ve been coming here for fifty years’ said the oldest— for the youngest it was thirty years. They remembered when it had been crowded on Fridays and Saturdays, filled with workmen who came to ‘drink their fill’ and their wives, dressed up to mingle and be seen. It had been ‘a real community’ and these men saw themselves as its post-­industrial survivors, too often looked down upon these days as guardians of a tainted culture. They resented what they saw as their social displacement by people who would never have fitted in on the Saturday nights of their memories. They were keen to tell us stories about how ‘others’ had access to hospital beds and doctors’ appointments and good jobs, while they and their families were ignored and disparaged. Political opinion took the form of a moral narrative in which the recitation of wrongs and exclusions called for a permanently bitter tone. They told us that they had always voted Labour but were resolved not to do so this time. They would vote Conservative for the first time in their lives, even though ‘you can’t trust the Tories’. They would be voting again for Brexit and everything that it signified, having done so originally in the 2016 referendum, believing that it would change their world. They would be voting against Corbyn, regarded as an extremist who could never speak for people like them. They seemed neither proud nor embarrassed about this radical change of lifelong political preference. They described their decision as ‘going for the lesser evil’, as if the election was about having to choose between bad and worse offerings on an unappetising menu. Insofar as it had any meaning for them, electoral democracy amounted to one fleeting moment of consumer sovereignty in which they cast their vote. Surrounding this moment, on either side, was a political process from which they felt utterly excluded. The pre-election campaign, in which competing political values were articulated and policy visions deliberated, was something going on somewhere else, dominated by people whose voices could not be trusted. The post-election period, in which the aggregation of private preferences would be translated into the right to govern, was regarded as an affair of political elites whose legitimacy was bound to disappoint. Talk about the election was not an expression of democratic agency, but a lament for its absence (Fig. 2.3).

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Fig. 2.3  Street corner, Bradford. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden)

On Lost Connections Standing inconspicuously at the end of a long row of two-up two-down houses, the mosque was like a Tardis. Entering through its narrow front door, which looked like a typical entrance to a place where people would be watching East Enders and eating snack food, was the lively buzz of men and boys performing a religion. (There were no women or girls to be seen; they were ‘round the back’, we were told.) The men in the mosque seemed underwhelmed by the election. ‘It’s been too quiet’ the imam told us: ‘Normally you see placards … I don’t think it’s been fully realised that there is an election taking place’. We sat on the floor in a circle; behind us dozens of boys were practising reciting their prayers. ‘People are not inspired’ another man said. They referred to the event that was not inspiring them, in the language of media reportage, as a ‘snap election’: sudden; sprung from somewhere else; foisted upon people; precipitous. The imam said that he’d given a sermon the previous Friday reminding people to register to vote, but most of his congregants seemed unaware that there was an election to vote in.

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What do you talk about when the event you have come to discuss is not a conspicuous object of discussion? Do you persist in talking about it, as if there is some sort of civic duty to notice and care about it? Speaking to people across the city, it had started to become apparent that talking about the election tended to be regarded as a wearing burden; an obligation to register an interest in a not particularly engaging drama. Most mass spectacles depend upon voluntary attraction, but this one all too often elicited a sigh of grudging recognition: ‘OK, you want us to talk about that. What exactly do you want us to say about it?’ If the election was a TV show, its producers would be deeply concerned about the indifference of its target audience. A different way of responding to this lukewarmness was to reflect openly upon what was missing. What would need to be in place for this election to really matter to people? If the current political moment is ‘too quiet’, what would noisy, animated, humming democracy look and sound like? We asked the men in the mosque what it was about this election that seemed so lacklustre and unengaging. They said that ‘people are deflated at the moment because they’ve lost hope in politics’. We asked them what this sense of deflation feels like. ‘It’s hard to put a feeling into words’, said one of the men who had not spoken until then. ‘The main thing is the community thing’, he explained—and everyone nodded, as if to acknowledge a critical loss. The men in the mosque began to put this feeling into words by expressing their sense that the social world is shrinking; that what was once open and shared is now closed off and menacing. They spoke about how they had played in the streets when they were kids, but their kids are no longer allowed to do so. Parents these days are too scared, they said. Common spaces are too scarce. ‘Nobody plays out’. Confined to their homes and locked into private screen-worlds, they feared that their children lacked experiences of direct physical interaction likely to orient them towards lived community. The imam spoke about his concerns for the health of community and his mission to encourage people to peer out beyond the confines of their private experience and think about what it means to be part of an interdependent public. In an era of contracting public space and privatised relationships, the promotion of community begins to sound like an act of resistance. There was a similarity here between the mosque and the working men’s club. In both there was a visceral belief that the ties that had once bound people to community were waning, leaving them feeling adrift and

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unsettled. Community depends upon connection to a cohesive body through which mutual recognition is assured. In its absence, people live in fear that the world beyond their domestic bubbles is mean and intractable. They imagine the political as a realm in which all the unbound ties upon which a stable ‘us’ depend are precariously exposed. And they retreat into the security of homogeneity. On the surface, kids not playing in the streets doesn’t sound like an election issue. But what happens when the election itself does not play out on the streets, but only in the TV studios and party spin rooms? In such circumstances it comes to be seen as a distant event: a drama played out in remote venues. ‘Too quiet’ to sound like a community determining its future, the election comes to be regarded as yet another episode in the closing down of public life.

In a Mood Like political sniffer dogs, we proceeded purposefully, keen to sense anything resembling a democratic trail. But it was hard to find any evidence of an election taking place. No political billboards. No sign of stickers or badges. No graffiti on walls. No loudspeaker vans. No leaflets being handed out. On the first Saturday afternoon of the election, there were three political stalls in the city centre: one opposing Brexit and two others calling for socialist revolution. But none of these hardy activists were standing in the election. Walking across the city in the weeks before polling day, we came across a few lonely party placards attached to wooden poles in front of houses, but no other semiotic evidence of an election campaign. We followed party canvassers who were determined to take the election to people’s front doors, infiltrating the resonant silence beyond. The canvassed tended to be suspicious, more likely to say what they were ‘fed up’ with and who they ‘definitely won’t be voting for’ than to enter into doorstop deliberation. Watching these diligent party activists working their way through their instrumental scripts in the hope of eliciting minimal loyalties in the face of stubborn diffidence was both illuminating and disconcerting. The former because it exposed a gap between feeling and expressibility that made it difficult for people to engage with the approved patois of the political genre. As a mode of expression, people seemed to find ‘political talk’ inadequate to the task of translating private experiences, troubles and hopes into a language of public meaning. Sensing that there was more

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to say than could be articulated in the language available to them, voters expressed themselves in the tonal and gestural vernacular of mood. They spoke with defensive bodies, arms folded against the force of rhetorical artifice. They smiled cynically. They sighed, yawned and shook their heads. They took a literal step away from what felt like unwanted interruption in already complex lives. Political insiders might interpret all of this as abstention or apathy or indecision, missing its significance as an account of feeling rather than collusion with an authorised agenda. We were unsettled as we came to realise that, much like the party canvassers, we had been approaching people with a view to drawing formulated opinions from them rather than picking up on the underlying moods that prevented them from taking easily read positions (Fig. 2.4). We had spent many hours hanging out with diverse groups within the city: Sikh worshippers in their temple (gurdwara), martial arts enthusiasts in their gym, emergency service workers stopping for tea during their night shift, members of a Ukrainian choir preparing to rehearse, bank staff in their common room. What they told us was lucid and

Fig. 2.4  Dobre Bo Polskie. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden)

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thought-provoking, but its cogency came from tone more than content: a sentient thread emanating from something like a collective mood. The saying goes – you’ve probably heard this a lot of the time – it doesn’t matter who’s in, they’re all the same. (Sikh worshipper) They’re saying you’ve got a voice. You should vote. But at the end of the day, when you do vote I don’t think we’re getting what we’re being told that we’re going to get. (Bank worker) It’s always been the case, hasn’t it? You live in a fantasy world where you’re given a manifesto that they never accomplish. (Gym member) Because like I said, change doesn’t happen. We’ve had elections all the time. We’ve had a couple of changes like when Margaret Thatcher did poll tax and big things like that. But mostly little things they just continue. We’ll always be short of doctors. We’ll always be short of nurses. (Sikh worshipper) Pre-election promises are a bit like Black Friday: everything is discounted for you to buy it, and it’s only when you’ve got it home, you open the packaging and you realise it’s nothing particularly special. (Choir member) It’s a case of a lot of the people I’ve spoke to about it don’t know who to trust. (Emergency service worker) I think the majority of electors are mature enough to see it’s a sales pitch, they’re trying to win our votes to get them into parliament so they can carry on doing what they do in parliament. And I think the last three years is just a classic example of that: everyone is paying lip service. (Choir member) To be honest, I think everyone’s in the same boat, as in they’re quite unaware of what is happening and what the parties’ manifestos are. I don’t think they’ve made it easy for the public to understand. I think they’ve made it easy for them to understand and there’s a lot of blame from both sides, but not easy for the public to understand and say this is what we propose to do, without someone then coming in and saying well hang on a minute, that’s got holes in it. (Bank worker) You try to influence people, that’s the whole idea of an election, you try to influence the electorate. Sometimes you can say pretty much anything you want and

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there’s no comeback from it, there’s no accountability or proof that what you said prior is actually being enforced as well. (Sikh worshipper) When you look at them when they’re speaking, you’re thinking does this person really mean that or is he doing that political talk. And it’s hard to describe that and put it in a way, but when you hear some people talk you’re like is this guy just doing political talk, is he just saying words that don’t really mean anything, they haven’t got any feeling behind them. (Gym member) Everyone has the right to vote, which is a democracy. Whether you get the right information where you decide to vote, is another question. Are you given enough information for you to say ‘Yes, I’m confident my vote is going here and what you told me will be carried out’ is another thing. (Bank worker) Most people don’t have a lot of interaction with their MPs or … we just see what’s going outside on the roads, and most people wouldn’t know who their MP is. (Sikh worshipper) Your MP, to me they’re just a spokesperson, aren’t they, for the party. The clever people run the country from behind them. (Emergency service worker) Some of these MPs are very detached from reality … They don’t know how much is bread, what does shopping cost you. (Sikh worshipper) I don’t think the politicians will want to change it because they’re quite happy, aren’t they, in their little bubble. (Emergency service worker) A lot of youngsters who get to vote they don’t understand the polls, they don’t understand what’s going on, so they just look at their pops and ask ‘Who are you voting for this time, dad?’ And dad says ‘We’re voting Labour or we’re voting Conservative or voting Liberal’. ‘All right, I’ll do that too’. (Gym member) I don’t really know much what’s going on because … I don’t find there is many debates or anything going on locally, and I don’t think that young people actually know who to vote for. Like me, I was thinking maybe I shouldn’t vote because I don’t know, they’re all the same to me. (Bank worker) Your local MP’s only going to sit there and say yes/no, yes/no, because they don’t want to upset you in case they’re going to lose your vote, so they’re going to tell you anything you want to hear. (Emergency service worker)

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People are too busy for politics. People maybe don’t have the time … because people are so caught up in living their lives. (Bank worker)

As a stream of impressions flowing beneath the surface of propositional articulation, these comments possess a poetic tone. They refer to the texture and colouration of political experience, revealing an affective stance that frames possible action. We took them to be accounts of what was felt but could not always be properly said. As vindications of the inexpressible, reflecting deficits of knowledge, trust and time that made it impossible to speak as a steadfast citizen of democracy, these statements comprise a dispositional map of the electorate. We shall have much more to say about the task of capturing political mood in Chap. 5, but our immediate challenge was how to respond to a range of people, encountered in different social contexts, whose responses to the election were marked by the same affective inflection. We wondered how this mood had emerged. Were the people we met all worn down by years of political disappointment? But many of them were quite young, not old enough to have arrived at exasperated bitterness. Were these feelings shared by the youngest members of society, the next generation of citizen-voters who would either learn or revise this script of democratic disenchantment? We needed to ask them. We knew exactly where to find them.

On Getting Ready for the Future Schools are places in which young humans work out how to face their futures. The Academy school building was well built for the job. It looked less like a Victorian learning factory than a post-industrial knowledge space. We arrived between lessons and classical music was playing through the tannoy system. We signed in at the bright reception area, had our pictures taken by a machine that looked like it might connect to our medical records, and were given a security badge to wear round our necks. Mr Freely, the teacher who had agreed to let us meet some of his students, was there to meet us; an enthusiastic man in his early thirties who was clearly proud of the school and wanted us to see as much of it as possible. As he led us around, he told us that the academy drew its students from a very broad range of communities, speaking many different languages at home. We met with the selected students in the lunch area: a mixed-gender group of 20 year-10 16-year-olds. Our very personable research assistant used to be a high school teacher, so we asked him to lead the discussion.

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He began by showing them PowerPoint pictures of the three main party leaders. Did the students know who Boris Johnson was? ‘Idiot’ said one of them. ‘Pompous’ said another: ‘It’s the way he speaks. He has like this pompous attitude’. We reminded ourselves that we were in a solidly Labour area. ‘I don’t know a lot about him’ said a boy who seemed irritated by being put on the spot. Then click, a picture of the Liberal Democrat leader, Jo Swinson: Do you know who this is? No. Have you ever seen her? Dunno. Do you think she’s a boxer? I hope not. Anyone have any idea? Is it that Swinson lady? Well done. Do you know anything else about her? Yeah. Leader of the Lib Dems. She looks determined. Next came Corbyn. He was instantly recognised by around half the group. What did they think of him? Funny looking. Persuasive.

The discussion went on. It was established that something called an election was taking place, although few of them had seen any signs of it around the city. What was the election for? ‘To elect a new Prime Minister’. Broad assent. ‘Brexit’. Collective sigh. Then came a suggestive response: ‘The future … It’s about bringing change’. At that point, the discussion turned to 16-year-olds having the right to vote because ‘we’re going to be here longer’. It was hard to disagree: if elections are about making the future, then those with the most long-term investment in it should be involved. Here we were in an impressively futuristic building, in the company of young people whose sole task was to prepare for their futures, talking about what increasingly became clear to us as a contemporary future-­ making ritual. The students were right: elections are rare moments in which people pause to consider possible future realities. As the founder of American psychology, William James (1890:431), put it, when people are faced with ‘two mutually exclusive trains of future fact’, they determine

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their future by deciding that ‘one shall forever more become impossible while the other shall become reality’. Elections are our society’s way of addressing that dilemma, at least in the context of national governance. Being invited to plan the future—as opposed to predicting or prophesying it, as if it is pre-existing and can be foretold—forces people to dwell upon the potential and limits of their own agency. Just how capable are they of making a future that conforms to their interests and desires? Considered as reflections on democratic agency, most of the responses we were hearing to our questions about the election were spot on. To experience the election is to be faced with the possibility of a different future and the frustration of not always being able to realise it. The mood that we were perceiving was an expression of stymied agency. It was a kind of knowing unknowing: a confidence that there are things going on, forces at work, powers in play, that elude one’s comprehension or control. We asked the students why discussion about the election seemed to be so angry, with politicians shouting at one another, while voters raged at politicians. ‘Because of false promises’, said one of the girls. How would they feel if someone at home promised to do something for them and then didn’t do it? ‘I’d feel let down’, said the girl. Everyone agreed and started to murmur about how angry they’d get, how loud they’d shout and how they would never trust that person again. They were beginning to get into the mood for adult politics. Was this the best that electoral democracy could offer them? Was there nothing better to hope for than the generational reproduction of a pissed-off electorate? We left the school wondering whether we would ever find the election as a socially resonant moment. And then … (Fig. 2.5).

On Voting as Affective Solidarity And then we ran into an election, but not the election. It was an election for people whose voices were excluded from the election. An election for non-citizens, an ebullient outpouring of the hopes of the politically ineligible and electorally unregisterable. The Bradford Immigration and Asylum Support and Advice Network provides a place for asylum seekers and refugees to meet, make friends, learn new skills and get advice. It has existed for over twenty years. Entering the reception area of the building is a bit like arriving in utopia. There were people making themselves understood in many different languages. Some were cooking temptingly smelling food. Others were

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Fig. 2.5  UK citizen course. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden)

practising words and phrases in English. A few were recounting stories to anyone who would listen about how they got here and why they had to leave there. It was noisy. It was welcoming. We were told that a mock election was going to take place in which everyone present would have a chance to vote for the candidate with the most appealing vision for the future of the world. We were told that we could vote too; there would be no exclusions here. The election was organised by Francis, who taught the English class and was very eager to show his students what a British-style election looks like. He brought with him a cardboard ballot box and spent a lot of the time explaining to people how voting works. He was eager to name things, as if by doing so he would unleash their democratic potency. ‘This is called the ballot box because you fold your ballot paper after you’ve marked it with a cross and you put it in there to be counted’. ‘This is called the hustings. Yes, it’s a very old English word. It means that all the candidates stand up and give their speeches and you must listen to them and decide whose views you want to support’. Frank ran the election with the meticulous enthusiasm of the Home Guard mounting a wartime exercise.

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His students, aged between 25 and 50 and coming from many different countries, complied with a combination of fascinated and wry commitment. People were herded into the eating area. The three candidates—labelled by Frank as Red, Green and Blue—took their places at the front of the room. There were approximately a hundred asylum seekers gathered. The Red candidate was Japanese and said that she was not an asylum seeker, but a local student who was taking advantage of Frank’s free English classes. She spoke first, with an appealing hesitancy—such a contrast to the over-rehearsed bluster of the other election’s discourse. She said she wanted to create a society in which anyone can shape their lives, regardless of where they come from. ‘We don’t need armies and we don’t want to kill people inside or outside our countries’. To an audience of voters whose lives had been thrown into chaos by the opposite belief, this somehow came across as eminently sensible. The Blue candidate was from Sudan. He had been a stand-up comedian before he was forced to leave his homeland. He had charisma. He spoke about the need to imagine: ‘We cannot live without imagination’. And he told jokes, which went down well. The Green candidate was from Uganda and spoke in the soft tones of a young man who had been persecuted about the value of human equality. If people voted for him, he said, more trees would be planted, because the earth needs them. As all three candidates spoke, Frank hovered over them, throwing in words when they eluded the speakers. It was then time for questions to the candidates, but it was hard to hear them as we were sitting behind a woman who suddenly began to speak in a loud, distressed voice about her difficulties with her landlord. The contrast between the lofty ideals of the speeches and the mundane troubles of this woman told a story about politics that was difficult to miss. What should we be listening out for: the rousing provocation of propositional speech or the aching grumble of reactive anguish? Is there a way of enabling both to speak to one another? Is there a lesson here for the wider electoral discourse? The voting process was conducted with the seriousness of a new democracy learning to run elections for the first time. Official counters checked and re-checked their piles of ballot papers, sometimes counting them in three different languages. Frank ran around the room like an election observer on a pivotal mission. The Red candidate won the highest number of votes cast. She shook hands with the Green and Blue candidates and then climbed up on to a rickety table to give her victory speech which no-­ one appeared to listen to. But there was a surrounding buzz of

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accomplishment. They had voted in a fantasy election, but it had solidified them as a collective ‘we’. Beyond role-play lay the disclosure of collective voice, with potential to counter the political inaudibility of people who had become used to disacknowledgement. Between the election and the serving of food was a period of informal conversation and unprompted storytelling. It seemed that everyone had a story to tell. Qualification certificates lost in transit. Part-time, casual jobs for which no wages had been paid. Attempts to reconnect with siblings, cousins, friends. Toothaches that hadn’t been treated because it was impossible to register for a dentist. Favourite old tunes that nobody could trace in this new land of Americanised pop. If there was an election to be discovered, it inhered in these disparate narratives, each pleading for recognition. The domino players from the workingmen’s club and the worshippers in the mosque had wanted their stories about community and its loss to be heard and respected as legitimate grounds for looking towards the future. In the many mood-narratives about ‘politics as usual’ that we had heard, people cried out for a new narrative direction; an escape route from the impasse of political disenchantment. In the academy school, the students’ orientation to their promised future was framed by an inherited, anxious narrative comprising feelings of being let down. Perhaps the election was neither in the streets nor in the houses, but in the stories that surrounded them, sometimes connecting into a coherent political narrative, but more often fragmented by experiential chasms.

Reference James, W. 1890. Principles of psychology. New York: Holt.

CHAPTER 3

Contesting Narratives: How Stories Fill Holes

Abstract  This chapter is based on interviews with voters, probing their feelings about the election. Through a series of personal encounters, the chapter builds a picture of something rather different from public opinion: public feeling. It explores metaphors and clichés, biographical sensitivities and headline issues. The chapter explores the ways in which political stories frame and reflect moods. At a theoretical level, the chapter examines the interpretive conditions through which personal meaning is produced. Keywords  Mood stories • Holes • Interviews • Political attachments • Hermeneutics Something seemed awry. A pervasive disquietude at the core of the city. Despite the solidity of its central Victorian architecture, the undulating energy of its precipitous terrain, the adamant stamina of its vitally co-­ existing communities, there was something in the urban landscape that was conspicuously ungrounded; vacant; out of kilter. It was an imbalance that had to be accounted for in every conversation we had with people. Almost all of them said that they liked living in Bradford but then felt somehow obliged to account for a radical flaw in its axis. Every conversation about the city was overwhelmed by an affective atmosphere: an unfathomable confusion between visceral sensation and the impulse to describe or explain it. As Kathleen Stewart (2007:40) suggests, ‘Affects © The Author(s) 2020 S. Coleman, J. Brogden, Capturing the Mood of Democracy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53138-6_3

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are not so much forms of signification, or units of knowledge, as they are expressions of ideas or problems performed as a kind of involuntary and powerful learning and participation’. It was as if people were preparing themselves—and us—for adaptation to an uncanny ambience. This ethereal pressure had a tangible source, although it is unclear whether the source gave rise to a metaphor or the metaphor to the source. The metaphor was The Hole: the shameful void at the heart of the city that had for so many years marked it out as a broken place. Everyone had a view to air about it. It was a narrative frame—or perhaps a narrative vacuum—around which a blemished city came to define itself: Among the first things a visitor to Bradford will notice is the Hole. The remains of a crater created for a Westfield shopping centre, this massive swath of wasteland sat unused for about four years … The Bradford Hole is a sign of failure and a source of anger, but also a place of possibility and potential. After the bankruptcy of cities based on retail and speculation, what now could fill the empty spaces of British towns? (Guardian, 7 May 2012)

The Hole was a 12-acre crater that had been left empty and unsightly for over a decade following the plan to demolish a part of the city centre and build a state-of-the-art new shopping complex. Demolition work had started in 2004, but investment dried up in the financial crash of 2008. All that was left was a cavernous hole; a testament to the delusions of urban regeneration and post-industrial service-capitalism. The hole in the ground tormented the city with a fundamentally political question: what now could fill this empty space? As election talk returned again and again to The Hole and what it said about the city, we were reminded of what the French political theorist, Claude Lefort (1986:279) had written about democratic legitimacy: ‘The legitimacy of power is based in the people; but the image of popular sovereignty is linked to the image of an empty place, impossible to occupy, such that those who exercise public authority can never claim to appropriate it’. In such a ‘society that has become the theatre of an uncontrollable adventure … what is instituted never becomes established, the known remains undermined by the unknown, the present proves to be indefinable, covering many different social times’ (ibid:305). Did it make sense to think of the hole as an empty place that nobody could legitimately occupy; the scene of an uncontrollable adventure in which plans and outcomes rarely coincide?

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Over time, the hole became a metaphor for the vulnerability of the city’s future; a symbol of a city that was stuck, engendering a subjective feeling of irresistible stasis. One interviewee even wrote a poem lamenting the hole’s impact on the city1 Recalling the embarrassment of the hole, Camille, a French-born social worker who has worked in the city for many years, closed her eyes and looked pained: It was very sad. It was empty. It was really sad and … we felt we’d been left. I think there’s something about Bradford  – and I’ve heard it quite a few times -: the feeling we’re just being left out.

Bank cashiers, Noor, Ayesha and Khadija talked about the hole in almost metaphysical terms: Noor: It was a mystery, I guess. Ayesha (chuckling): Good things come from holes. ((Overtalking)) Khadija: I never thought anything would happen to it. It just literally looked like nothing was ever going to happen. The hollowness of the hole reflected the openness of the question: What will replace this mouldering shell of an industrial city, the mills and corner shops and cobbled pavements of which had come to resemble exhibits of a Victorian museum? The hole became an historical holding operation. One idea, when the money ran out, was to turn it into a nature reserve; an urban wetland. John, a retired mental health social worker recalled that ‘They had one guy who came and looked at it and he was going to extend the canal where the canal had finished and bring it through the wetlands and have all this wetland life’. Another city resident commented that ‘I quite enjoyed it when they turned it into an urban park, and we should have maybe just left it like that’ (Fig. 3.1). Finally, in 2015 the future arrived; the hole was dazzlingly occupied by a postmodern shopping mall, built at a cost of £260 million. The new mall hosts homogenous retail chains selling global brands to amorphous consumers. Like a vast airport terminal in the middle of a Victorian city, it exudes the stifling aura of placeless anonymity. Broadway replaced one metaphor with another. It stands as a simulacrum of commercial Manhattan in the middle of Bradford. Even its name, Broadway: ‘if you can make it there you can make it anywhere’. So it was

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Fig. 3.1  The Broadway illuminated. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden)

that the city overcame its enduring embarrassment by constructing an imperishable monument to ephemeral consumerism. The former Labour council leader, Leo, recalled his pride when the new retail complex opened (Fig. 3.2): I think when Broadway opened, and I’m not saying that just because I was so intimately involved in it, but I think that the Hole had been such a laughing stock for a decade that when it actually opened, I was absolutely gobsmacked … We went and we did the official bit inside … I’d been inside since half-seven and it was about ten o’clock that we were opening and the queues outside, I mean literally it was just on all four doors. They ended up having to put a one-way system in so that people could walk round because it was just so packed.

We spent time in Broadway during the course of our urban wanderings, returning to it as if to no-man’s land, artificially heated against the December weather and oppressively free of unpredictable cultural variation. The mall is patrolled by security guards, ever vigilant towards forms of social irregularity that might disrupt commerce. Brand logos are

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Fig. 3.2  Approaching the Broadway 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden)

inescapable. Fast-food outlets serve up globally recognisable fodder. A relentless muzak, briefly adjusted to the fabricated sentimentality of the seasonal mood, drones on and on. There are no signs that an election is imminent; that anything other than banal commercial ‘offers’ are up for grabs. Broadway is the kind of landmark that makes every city seem like every other city. As we stepped outside of its synthetic atmosphere we were hit by the strangeness of natural air. Shops that had gone bankrupt because they could not compete with the retail giants were boarded up; winos and junkies who could not make it past the security guards lounged in doorways; people tore up scratch cards and threw them in the overflowing public bins. The holes in people’s lives stood exposed, precariously unprotected, though overshadowed by this indecorous vestige of urbane modernity. We came to realise that a key function of elections is to fill the holes in people’s imaginations, enabling a narrative to be developed about who ‘the people’ are; what they need and want; and who is best placed to do the excavation work that filling an historical void entails. Much of this work is done by politicians, as would-be representatives of the people,

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who weave narratives around the latter’s experiences, thoughts and feelings in the hope of seeming to be indispensable allies in making their future. For, as the cultural sociologist Jeffrey Alexander (2010:18) argues, ‘To struggle for power in a democratic society one must become a collective representation – a symbolic vessel filled with what citizens hold most dear’. This process of creative design is described with great astuteness by Michael Warner (2002:114): Public discourse says not only ‘Let a public exist’ but ‘Let it have this character, speak this way, see the world in this way’. It then goes on in search of confirmation that such a public exists, with greater or lesser success – success being further attempts to cite, circulate and realize the world understanding it articulates. Run it up the flagpole and see who salutes. Put on a show and see who shows up.

Politicians tell stories and, like parents trying to get their children to sleep, wait to see whether they capture voters’ attention and have the desired soothing effect. For some people, such partisan narratives serve to frame the world and their place in it. But for many others they seem to be disingenuously artful accounts that irritate rather than seduce. When people say that politicians are ‘out of touch’—as so many encountered in the previous chapter did—they are perceiving a gap between the slick, seductive narratives of big-P Politics and the lived stories that frame and reflect the mundane experience of being in the world. At a more deeply democratic level, citizens use elections as tactical opportunities to make themselves representable on their own terms. Anyone can be spoken for. Only autonomous democratic actors can tell their own story. In order to become representable as a city, community or interest group people must articulate and share a common experience of what it is to be ‘us’. This entails a demand to be recognised in ways that respect particular experience. As we shall see in this chapter, it is through storytelling more than any other democratic means that people set out their terms of recognition. This is an aesthetic as much as political project. In popular parlance, ‘telling stories’ is associated with fiction, artifice and the risk of deception. But that is not the sense in which narrative is being understood here. Narratives neither invent nor faithfully report realities but connect sequences of real events with a view to expressing their meaning. As Hayden White (1980:14) has put it, narrativity is ‘a function of the impulse to moralize reality’. Walter Fisher (1994:4) considers

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narrative to be an alternative to the ‘rational world paradigm’ which holds that ‘the world is a set of logical puzzles which can be resolved through appropriate analysis and application of reason conceived as an argumentative construct’. Unlike the rational-world paradigm, which seems to infer that rigorous scrutiny of factual evidence and procedurally appropriate argumentation will lead to ‘truth’, narrativity is rather more pragmatic and pluralistic about the establishment of meaning. Often it is the resonance of a compelling story, rather than the blunt force of syllogistic logic or the imperious authority of propositional assertion, that opens up access to a sharable sense of reality. The suggestive verisimilitude of a forceful narrative cannot provide the final word, but, as Bruner (1990) astutely puts it, ‘Stories … are especially viable instruments for social negotiation’ (p. 55). Politics is what emerges in that space of social negotiation. As W. Lance Bennett and Murray Edelman (1985:160) suggest, The creation of a social world through narrative is […] compelling because there are always conflicting stories  – sometimes two, sometimes more  – competing for acceptance in politics. The awareness that every acceptance of a narrative involves the rejection of others makes the issues politically and personally vital. In a critical sense, the differences among competing narratives gives all of them their meaning.

Thinking of elections as moments of contested storytelling entails listening out for the ways in which people speak about the troubles and complications that interrupt and disrupt their lives, throwing them off course from logical predictability and mundane expectation. Bruner (1990:72) claims that ‘The object of narrative is … to demystify deviations’. That is to say, people tell stories to make sense of the irregular and the anomalous. Cities are supposed to have a solid, prestigious centre, not a gaping hole where millions of feet should be treading. When faced with such deviation from expectation people construct stories—about how things used to be; about nearby cities getting all the money; about incompetent or corrupt local politicians; about the vacuums in their own lives; about feeling ridiculous and embarrassed. People set out their own narratives and responded to others, searching as they did so for ways of reaching the rudiments of a common account; a language of shared reality capable of sustaining a framework for strategic priorities. As we listened to these narratives, we began to understand that, beyond the headline framing of the national election campaign, people on the

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ground were trying to make sense of their world and their agency within it. We began to listen out more carefully for what might at first seem to be throwaway remarks or non-political observations. Sometimes stories only became clear to us after we had heard several versions of them from different people and were able to discern patterns of affective emphases and symbolic imagery that ran through them. Often the political resided between the lines, translated into significance by a recurring gesture or a suggestive pause. In this way stories unfolded across sites, their fractured meanings providing compelling evidence of tensions—personal, interpersonal, societal, global—that could only be addressed or resolved by making them public. Many of the stories that people told us were strung together from tropes and memes that others—specifically, political elites—had projected into the public domain in the hope that they would catch on as sticky narratives. Other stories were specific to the teller; accounts of unique experience, such as an MP’s failure to respond to an emailed request for help, that shaped an idiosyncratic electoral perspective. We were primarily interested in a third kind of story. These were what we might call mood stories, a term that we have devised to describe the ways in which certain narrative accounts reflect qualia more than historical process. Mood stories are accounts of how it feels to be in the world at a particular time or place, caught up in an affective atmosphere that seems to infuse a situation or scene. They tell what it is like to be absorbed by an inscrutable ambience in which the details of emplotment are inundated by qualities of feeling. Ben Highmore (2017:141) captures the sense of such stories when he states that ‘What narrative drama often gives us is an exploration of a historical moment as it is refracted through the particularities and peculiarities of specific characters’. We were interested in the ways that people, in the midst of an election, struggled to find an expressive language that would do justice to their political sensibilities. In attending and attuning to the political world, people do not calculate their political positions and affiliations and then acquire feelings that are appropriate to them, but take positions rooted in feelings that seem to be implicit in their sense of self. It is clear from the stories that follow that not only is the political personal, but that both are enmeshed in opaque ways, leaving people confused between subjective feelings—of exhaustion, irritation or ebullience—and a seemingly objective affective climate. We had many stories to choose from and the ones that we have selected no doubt say something about our own political mood as much as those

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of the storytellers. We were interested in stories in which public affairs and personal disposition seemed to converge, turning the election into a scene of affective discombobulation.

‘A Barometer to How I’m Feeling’ The country had become obsessed by a neologism: Brexit—which, according to the infuriatingly hollow mantra of the day, ‘means Brexit’. It was a nagging word that could be depended upon to trigger aggressive finger-­ pointing and partisan suspicion. Everyone came to the election with their own Brexit narrative; their own metaphors for giving tangibility to this new ideological fault line. We heard stories from pro-Brexiteers like Tom, a man in his early 50s who had lived in Bradford all his life, who told us that ‘If we were to go to the point of having a second referendum and it was to go the other way, then I could see that there would be a breakdown and, yes, we could have civil unrest on the streets’ and we heard stories from anti-Brexiteers like Vashti, in her early 30s, originally from Iran, who told us that ‘when you read a book, you have an introduction, context, content and finish’, but with Brexit ‘you don’t know the introduction, what is considered to be the content, what is the conclusion, and every time you turn the TV on, it’s just you’re in the middle of it… It’s like so full of ingredients and you cannot identify them one by one’. On the face of it, Brexit was an odd subject to tell stories about. At its core were intricate economic and constitutional arrangements that one might have expected to be remote from popular discourse. How did technical debates about cross-border-tariffs, competition law, the establishment of a globally competitive financial sector and labour mobility come to be translated into the vernacular narratives of non-economists? What made people want to tell stories about Brexit? The answer would seem to be that Brexit stories were not primarily about Brexit as such, but about how it feels to be thrown into a political world in which the language of public disagreement is rarely equal to the acute sentience of personal experience. As one of us has argued elsewhere, how people talk about politics depends upon a capacity to translate deftly between the social and the personal (Coleman 2020). As a floating signifier, drifting between shared narratives and biographical intimacy, Brexit featured in so many of the mood stories that we heard that it makes sense to begin with one of them. We met Camille, a French-born social worker in her mid-40s, who explained to us in the first few minutes of our encounter that she was

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feeling a pressing need to protect herself psychologically from becoming depressed by the tone of the election debate. She felt worn down by Brexit, which she perceived as having paralysed parliament, split parties, agitated communities and thrown friendships into disarray. It was as if politics had permeated every social relationship, vitiating social energy and corroding civic ties. It was not that Camille was averse to engaging with controversial political issues. Even before she arrived in this country 24 years ago, she had considered herself to be a ‘political person’: When I came here, I was 21 and I’d already been part of I think three or four different demonstrations, anti Le Pen and whatever, as a student. And I think in France in primary school you have something called…I’m a bit out of touch with how things are now … but then you had, is it ‘civic education’? And that was very kind of strong and clear. You know, ‘You’re a citizen. Those are your responsibilities’. And actually, when you look at the percentage of people who vote in the presidential election over there it’s over 80% of the population, something like that. Whereas here it’s a lot lower.

Camille had grown up in a noisy household in the Loire Valley where arguing about politics was an everyday occurrence: I come from a family where yes, my dad was a Mitterand supporter, but my granddad wasn’t. He was more Chirac and so actually I remember loads of typical French sitting around the table, eating for hours and having those discussions and debates and sometimes heated … And storming off but then you always repair and make up and you still see each other.

But she felt that the Brexit debate over the past few years had been of a different quality: ‘It has definitely increased divisions between communities … it is increasing racism and division between people, all that kind of thing. That worries me’. She gave an example: I’ve got a friend who’s Polish. Her daughter was sworn at on the school playground and told to go back to her country.

But it is not only other people’s children that Camille was worried about. She explained that she did not have a British passport and her children did not have a French one:

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I’m not worried I will be deported. That’s not a worry, I don’t think. I do worry that some people could be actually, because there are some people who are a lot more vulnerable, maybe the Roma community or people who are, yeah … So, I’m not worried personally for me in terms of being deported or having to leave or not being able to carry on … I’m really established here, so I don’t wish to go back and live in France. This is my home. But then, because we don’t know what it will look like, depending on what sort of Brexit, you know ‘soft’, ‘hard’ or ‘no deal’, what that will look like, what it will mean, then will I need to apply for British citizenship, which I’ve not wanted to so far? I’ve not needed to. I don’t have the money for it. You know, if you include all of it, it’s near £2,000. But I may have to. And then I’ve got to think about my children, because at the moment they are British only and they’re young adults actually now. But I’ve started to look into it so that they can become EU citizens. But it’s such a complicated process actually.

All of this had upset Camille. Indeed, she told us how this anxiety had produced physical symptoms that were now affecting her capacity to do her job or engage with the election: This year it’s harder because … I need to look after myself as well. And sometimes that anxiety … I mean, my back is suffering from it, so actually I know this is a barometer to how I’m feeling. And there have been times when I’ve just had to put it here, to park it there, because it’s just too much.

Camille was almost tearful as she told us that I have to be very, very careful. So, after Brexit, you know, I was just feeling so, so down, I guess. So, it can lead into a sort of depressive state I guess a little bit.

As her story unfolded, it turned out that Camille’s worries about the acrimonious tone of the Brexit debate were quite personal. Its acrimony had come (literally) close to home for her, now interfering with her family life. Her husband’s parents, who live only two streets away from her, are ardent Brexiteers: They’ve always been Conservative supporters and members, quite active in the Conservative party, so I think that’s always been difficult, but I think we’ve always sort of managed to discuss it to a point and then kind of agreed to disagree. But I think Brexit has been bigger because they clearly voted

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Brexit and I think with us it was a thing about our children: ‘They’re your grandchildren. How can you do this! That’s been really hard … (sighs) and they are also very ‘We do not discuss’. So, I think it’s been difficult. We’ve tried. I’ve tried. But it’s been really hard.

This has resulted in there being very little contact between Camille’s family and her in-laws for some time. Brexit’s focus upon borders had erected them within her own family. For Camille, the election was not just about which story to believe, but how stories are told and discussed. Coming from a family in which political disagreements were ‘sometimes heated’, often involving dramatic ‘storming off’, but invariably followed by making up and still seeing each other, she found herself in a cultural environment in which politics is regarded as a furtively private matter. It was the ethos of ‘We do not discuss’ that Camille found ‘really hard’. She came to see the election as an enervating battle between competing cultures of storytelling. She began to see her aching body as a manifestation of a disorienting tension in the political atmosphere which made it increasingly difficult to separate lived subjectivity from objective pressure.

‘They’re Playing a Game, Aren’t They?’ While Camille seemed locked into a brace position, preparing herself for the affective turbulence of an irritable election, Tom appeared to be ensconced in his favourite armchair, a can of beer in one hand and a bowl of popcorn in the other, waiting for the game to begin. Tom’s mood-story was about the joy of political spectacle. Elections, for him, were occasions suffused by crowd atmospherics: I think they’re playing a game, aren’t they? Yeah, it’s like going to Bradford City and watching them versus another eleven players. I am a fan. I am watching that. And I’m ‘Oh, that was bloody good’ and ‘Oh, he’s rubbish, isn’t he’?

In elections, as in football matches, Tom is more interested in the game than the result: In fairness, if it’s a good game and it’s the wrong result you can still have enjoyed the game. Personally, I don’t think Labour will get in. I think it will

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be a small Conservative majority, which would be a good result in my eyes. But yeah, we want that cut and thrust of a good game, a hard tackle, a sending off.

There were moments when Tom seemed perturbed by the tone of the electoral debate, but he seemed to cope with these by returning to the reassurance of his ludic metaphor: ‘The arguments and the talking over each other is really irritating, but it’s all part of the game, I guess’. We wondered why some people enjoy this ‘game’, while other find it dispiriting and alienating. Tom referred us to the case of his wife: I drive the wife mad because she’s not into politics whatsoever. She just turns off. She will leave the room: ‘Okay, if you’re watching this, I’m off up to bed’. She doesn’t understand politics … It probably annoys her that other people are interested in it. She only ever voted once and that was in the Leave/Remain referendum, but she’s not voted before or since then.

We would have liked to have sat with Tom and his wife during one of the several televised leaders’ debates that took place during this election campaign. It would not be too hard to imagine Tom sitting there with the contented smile of a sporting connoisseur, looking out for strategic ruses and errors; scrutinising body language for giveaway signs; and nodding at moments of ideological mimesis. But what would Tom’s wife be doing in those moments between encountering the leaders in her living room and announcing that ‘I’m off up to bed’? What is Tom seeing that she isn’t? What is she seeing that he isn’t? Tom explained that he had not yet decided who to vote for. He was a Conservative by inclination but had not always voted for that party. He had once voted for the British National Party and would consider voting for a Brexit Party candidate in this election if there was one standing. The one thing he was sure about was that ‘I won’t be voting Labour’. He liked Boris Johnson whom he described as being relatable: How is he relatable to me? He probably isn’t, but I do like the bloke. His persona comes across. I’m not sure that he’s the bumbling fool that he’s made out to be. Again, going back to playing the game, I think maybe there’s a bit of gameplaying there as well. He probably sees that he has to do that because he’s very well educated. The way that he talks about stuff is so eloquent in his wording and a lot of people don’t understand what he’s on about because he uses such big words and strange analogies and stuff like

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that. But it’s that sort of thing that I like. I do like him because of the way that he talks and the way that he comes across … and I’m reasonably intelligent and I can get what he’s on about. And I appreciate that that isn’t always the case with some people that are watching.

As with almost everyone we spoke to, feelings like ‘relatability’ were rooted in complex biographies. Tom grew up in a Conservative-supporting family. The first election he could remember was in 1979: I was at my auntie’s house. We turned the news on and it was obviously all announced that Margaret had been elected as Prime Minister.

He knew that this was received by the collective gathering as ‘good news’, the use of ‘Margaret’, rather like the folksy ‘Boris’, suggesting para-­ personal connection. Tom went on to tell us that his mother was, and remains, an enthusiastic Conservative: I made a big mistake this year and got her on to Twitter. And I don’t follow her. Yeah, I don’t follow her. She’s Conservative, although she has her own views on it. To quote her, ‘I would never vote for Cameron again once he gave the gays the right to marriage’. Yeah, so she’s that kind of Conservative.

Caught between his over-engaged mother and under-engaged wife, Tom seemed to regard his own participation in the election as that of an interested spectator. When we asked him whether he would read the main party manifestos before making up his mind about how to vote, he explained that I never do. I take the key points, but I take that from the press, whatever the headlines say. I’ve never read a manifesto in my life.

We asked him whether he intended to stay up to watch the results on election night and he told us that The wife will be in bed by ten o’clock and I’ll follow at about three o’clock. To find out where it’s going. Unfortunately, I never get to last the whole way through … but I want to know how it ends.

This was a story of the election as spectacle. Unlike Walter Lippmann’s ‘deaf spectator in the back row, who ought to keep his mind on the

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mystery off there but cannot quite manage to keep awake’, Tom is wide awake and alert to the drama of the game, while well aware that he is closer to the back row than the front where his presence is registered from his enthusiastic applause and critical murmurs. Tom’s emphasis upon the election as an absorbing game generated a political mood-story in which all the players appear to share a common sense of the rules. The very concept of a game implies that there are normative conditions of participation. Wily players will engage in strategic jostling, bending the rules creatively in their own favour. But such canniness must be distinguished from cheating. The possibility of such normative breach moves the game metaphor into much less convivial territory. The mood-story becomes one of bitterness towards those who refuse to ‘play the game’. Tom believed that the electoral game in Bradford was tainted by such norm-breakers: The fact is that there are a lot of Asians and Muslims. I’m not too worried about the Eastern Europeans, like the Poles, et cetera, but I think … I think it’s happened a lot and it stems from local politics … I do believe that there are plenty of brown envelopes that pass around. Whether that then extends into the higher levels of politics … I’m not very certain because I can’t prove it. But I’m confident that it happens in  local politics and that then does pass through.

Suddenly the game metaphor becomes a vehicle for a much more insidious narrative. Groups that can be casually named, but rather less distinctly traced, emerge as the embodiment of the anti-game. Tom concedes that ‘I don’t think it will alter the result’, but that is not the point. Some people are not players; their adherence to the rules remove them from the protocols of legitimate citizenship. And such observations open up rhetorical space for the expression of much more sweeping prejudice: We are the youngest city, more under-25s than anywhere else. And it does sound really, really bad, but you open the newspaper, the [Bradford] Telegraph and Argus, and there’s been yet another car death because somebody’s been stealing a car and driving it at 70 miles an hour down Leeds Road. And it’s a black guy. It’s not a white guy. It’s a black guy. And whether that stems from family, or what, I don’t know, but I just think they don’t give a shit. ‘It’s Bradford and it’s a shit hole, so I’ll do what I like’.

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We were interested in the way that mood-stories can move so swiftly, but imperceptibly from one metaphorical plane to another. Tom’s initial description of the election as an innocent form of adult play implied that its appeal lay in its strategic predictability. To sustain the ludic mood, however, games depend upon shared norms. Tom’s suspicion that some players did not adhere to these norms—‘don’t give a shit’—stymied the consensual mood and revealed a more ominous dimension of the game metaphor. In this new mood context game-playing implied deviousness and mendacity. As Tom’s talk turned to rule-breakers and game-spoilers, the guilelessness of the game metaphor began to shatter. As Tom continued to speak about the election, his enthusiasm for the game gave way to a mood of ‘we was robbed’ resentment. Asked what he would like to see as an outcome from the election, Tom said After all this, I would like to see a good majority Government. Because I do believe that Parliament has stifled debate and it’s all been round Brexit. And again, going back to playing the game, that’s what’s been going on. They’ve been using lawful ways of doing it, but it’s been bloody frustrating as an outsider. And as a Conservative, yes, you blame … Corbyn and Labour. And I’m sure if you’re a Labour supporter you blame … Boris … So again, game playing.

What started as being ‘like going to Bradford City and watching them versus another eleven players’ ends up as a ‘bloody frustrating’ hoax by which debate is stifled and the will of the people is ignored. It is a mood-­ story in which the political game mutates from fun to trickery (Fig. 3.3).

‘Hanging On by My Fingernails’ Leo had been a Labour Party activist for 47 years. He joined the party when he was 15: ‘it was my birthday present from my mum, two and six it cost, junior membership’. He had been a city councillor for thirty years until recently had been the council leader. He described himself as a tribal party loyalist. But what happens to tribal loyalists when the object of their loyalty ceases to entice them? Leo was feeling deeply dejected: For the first time in decades, and I mean decades, I would say that I’ve gone into this election with very little hope, very little enthusiasm and very little

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Fig. 3.3  Back street, Manningham. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden) optimism. I have real concerns about my party …There’s an element of I’m doing what I’m doing for tribalism rather than some core belief.

We asked him why this was, and his voice dropped, as if encountering unwanted feelings: ‘All the stuff that’s gone on internally, with antisemitism et cetera. I mean, I’ve been hanging onto my party membership by my fingernails’. Leo described himself as being ‘of Jewish heritage’. His father was Jewish. His mother was not. His sister is a practising Jew. He is not at all religious. He is a long-standing supporter of the rights of the Palestinian people. The fact that there were some Labour Party members and supporters directing unacceptable insults towards Jews in general was a widely acknowledged problem during the 2019 election. While the party leadership had recognised and denounced this tendency, Leo remained unconvinced by its claimed determination to root it out: I moved the IHRA definition through Bradford Council and I still have the scars on my back from doing that … from within my own party. And that is still resonating. If you look at what the party at its top level is doing to deal with antisemitism, which whatever apologists say is an issue in the Labour

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Party, they’re not doing much. In fact, they seem to be putting them up as candidates.

Leo’s adversary was an atmosphere of dogmatic intolerance and disingenuous appeasement towards certain expressions of prejudice that seemed to have taken hold of his party: That’s not the party I joined. It’s not my core belief. And I’d feel the same if it was happening to any other group. You know, I’ve taken it in the neck over the years arguing against fascism, defending the rights of the Muslim community in Bradford to practise their religion, you know, Halal meat and all that. I’ve got the abusive emails. But it’s just that the Party seems to be going down a route that there is no room for debate or discussion or disagreement … It seems to be very much you’re either with us or agin us. And the party’s never been like that. There’s always been internal debate, discussion and everything else. And I just feel very uncomfortable within that.

Leo was a man who did not know where to turn. The party in which he had not only invested time and energy, but intense emotional commitment, seemed to be withering as an object worthy of his esteem. In her insightful account of what she calls ‘cruel optimism’, Lauren Berlant (2011:2) observes that ‘optimism is cruel when the object/scene that ignites a sense of possibility actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for which a person or people risks striving’. Why, she asks, do people maintain attachments to causes that are bound to disappoint? ‘Fantasy’, she argues ‘is the means by which people hoard idealizing theories and tableaux about how they and the world “add up to something”’. When such fantasies begin to fray, the committed are prone to ‘depression, dissociation, pragmatism, cynicism, optimism, activism, or an incoherent mask’. In Leo’s case, the effect was enervating sadness: It’s depressed me. I mean, I’ve been not well and some of that’s down to … If you’ve been in an organisation for 47 years and you find that there’s a bit of you that is still very tribalistically loyal to it, and to what I perceive as the values of it, but it’s disappearing and it’s going in a totally different direction and it doesn’t feel that there’s any room for that debate-discussion to move it back to … it is debilitating mentally. I don’t particularly enjoy taking part in politics at the moment because it is so black and white, so you are either right or you are wrong.

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Leo had to work out how best to cope with the indeterminacy generated by thwarted attachment. A part of him wanted to carry on as if nothing had changed: I have a lot of personal loyalty to individuals within the Labour Party – my fellow councillors. I’ve a lot of loyalty to the people I represent, and at a local, smaller level I can still make a difference to their lives.

But a mood of despondent doubt made him wonder whether the obstacles to his commitment could be overcome. There was a part of him that wanted to give up and another part that believed there was much to play for: As I say, I’ve come very very close, over the last six to nine months, I’ve come very very close. The reason I’ve not gone – and there’s a yet in there somewhere, I’ve not gone yet – is I still believe that we can deal with some of these internal things. And I think this election will clarify that.

But deciding what to do in politics is rarely determined solely by rational calculation. Leo’s story, like so many others that we heard, was entangled in mood memories and private impulses that are inexplicable outside of their particular biographical emotional trajectories. As he related his story to us, Leo would reach into autobiographical reminiscence to sustain the attachment that now seemed to be so weak: I’ve been brought up in the party. You know, I jokingly said I worked for Harold Wilson – but I did. I was delivering leaflets in the early 60s. My mum had a pram with my brother in it covered in Labour Party leaflets, and me and my sister were taking them off and running up and sticking them through letter boxes. It’s sort of been part of me for all my life really.

We asked Leo how he thought his mother would feel about him contemplating leaving the Labour party. He answered without pausing: ‘I think my mum would’ve walked away by now’. But then came a very long pause; one might call it a life-measuring pause, and he said But I think that if I walked away there’s … a large section of my life that is totally integrated into Labour Party politics. And I think there’s an element of ‘What do you fill that with?’ Okay, there’s lots of things, but it’s a big step.

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When we observed Labour Party canvassers going from door to door on a cold and wet Sunday afternoon the following week, Leo was amongst them, enthusiastically urging reluctant door-openers to vote Labour. There were no signs here of his self- doubt. Another canvasser commented that Leo could always be relied upon when there was party work to be done, ‘but he’s had a bad time in the party lately. Treated really shabbily. It’s affected him badly’. Elections are moments in which inventories of affect and interest are compiled and narratively shaped. The child whose earliest memories were of the pleasure of running down endless garden paths to post Labour leaflets engages with the activist mother who ‘would’ve walked away by now’. The respected council leader has to square his conscience with the man ‘of Jewish heritage’ who felt hurt by the slurs pronounced by some of his comrades. The man who is hanging on by his fingernails must decide whether and how to use those same hands to knock on doors and solicit support for the party that he describes as no longer the one he joined. Stories rarely provide cathartic resolutions to such dilemmas but they remain the most reliable form for containing them (Fig. 3.4).

‘I Don’t Really Know Much What’s Going On’ The bank building stood on the corner of a run-down high street populated by off licences, cash converters and, of course, those ubiquitous phone shops. A week before polling day, there was absolutely no sign that an election was taking place. The only posters and logos to be seen from the street were commercial. We had been invited into the bank to meet some of the staff and hear their election stories. Banks are sites designed to engender confidence. They are designed to make people feel that they can navigate their way through the labyrinthine byways of the frequently volatile and unfathomable financial market. As Mark Rouncefield (2002:202/3) notes in his excellent ethnographic study of everyday bank work, Customer work has both an instrumental and expressive aspect. While staff resolve uncertainty, suggest sensible courses of action, sell appropriate products they are also required to engage in appropriate ‘demeanour work’ or ‘emotional labour’ … learning the right ‘pitch’ for the voice, learning to respond to difficult enquiries, and learning to maintain customer flow and so on … In order to perform their work adequately and comfortably, staff

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Fig. 3.4  Pedestrian precinct, Bradford. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden) must be visibly competent to manufacture and maintain customer confidence (Randall and Hughes, 1994). This is manifest in the way, for instance, staff routinely explain as they go along the steps they are taking, what enquiries they are making of the screen, to whom they are telephoning, and so on. Competence is evident in the way the flow of interaction is maintained, without obvious gaps, in routine, minute by minute interactions.

The bank workers we met looked like people who were more than capable of managing displays of reassuring competence when interacting with their customers. But when we began to talk about the election it was (quite literally) a different story. They insisted on making clear from the outset that they were not experts. We tried to break the ice by wondering aloud what it means not to be an ‘expert’ voter. Ayesha explained that I don’t really know much what’s going on because … I don’t find there is many debates or anything going on locally, and I don’t think that young people actually know who to vote for. Like me, I was thinking maybe I shouldn’t vote because I don’t know.

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Her colleagues, Noor and Khadija, nodded their assent. We asked if any of them could say what the election was about. Noor answered with some hesitation: It’s mainly about Number 10 and whether Boris Johnson will remain as Prime Minister, or whether it will be Jeremy Corbyn who may be elected as the new Prime Minister.

And would it make a difference to them whether the Prime Minister was one or the other of these men? Ayesha told us that I think NHS is a big thing. That’s what I’ve heard a lot of conversations about … From what I’ve heard, if you have Labour NHS will still remain. If we have Conservatives, it won’t. That’s from what I’ve heard … I have a friend that works as a paramedic and she’s been very up for ‘Please vote for Labour, NHS is massive, we can’t lose it’ and whatever.

On the face of it, this would surely be a highly significant consequence of the election. But still the bank workers insisted that politics was beyond their competence. As Noor put it, To be honest I think everyone’s in the same boat, as in they’re quite unaware of what is happening and what the parties’ manifestos are. I don’t think they’ve made it easy for the public to understand. I think they’ve made it hard for them to understand and there’s a lot of blame from both sides. But it’s not easy for the public to understand when they say, ‘This is what we propose to do’, without someone then coming in and saying, ‘Well hang on a minute, that’s got holes in it’.

Perhaps, we suggested, people needed to spend some time weighing up the available evidence before they cast their votes. The women agreed, but without much confidence: Ayesha: Khadija: Ayesha:

I don’t think the information is available to us. And not everyone’s aware, I guess. Yeah. And people maybe don’t have the time. I think if it was put out there through every channel, social media, television, leaflets, and in black and white, in every household, people

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Ayesha:

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would look up and say, ‘This is what’s happening’. But because people are so caught up in living their lives which … Yeah, we’re so busy that you don’t get chance to watch the debates and stuff. Yeah. I think everyone in every area will probably feel the same. They will think that because in such a short space of time the Prime Minister announced a snap election, it’s now come to the point where we’re getting close to the election and nobody’s had time to process it and think what’s going on. Because it came off the back of Brexit and them not being able to decide. Now we’re approaching it and I think the nation is very split. Very split. Now we just don’t know who we’re voting for.

The mood seemed to be one of default bewilderment. It was as if they did not expect to be able to make sense of the complex choices before them in the election. In contrast to the professional competence and confidence required of these women as functionaries for the financial market, their unease as democratic citizens was striking. We asked them whether they believed they were living in a democracy. Noor was the first to respond: Everyone has the right to vote, which is a democracy. Whether you get the right information when you decide to vote is another question. Are you given enough information for you to say ‘Yes, I’m confident, my vote is going here and what you told me will be carried out’ is another thing. So, the answer to that is I don’t know.

Ayesha followed her: I think we claim to be a democratic country, but … They’re saying you’ve got a voice, you should vote, but at the end of the day when you do vote I don’t think we’re getting what we’re being told that we’re going to get.

There was something interesting going on here. As sellers of a range of banking ‘products’, these women’s job was to persuade customers that they would be getting precisely what they were being told they are going to get. Terms like ‘safe as banks’ and ‘financial security’ are rooted in such

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economic pledges. But when it comes to political pledges made by democratic politicians, there is no such confidence. Why might this be? High-street banks deal with personal finances. They focus on the contingencies of individual economic endurance. Customers separate them in their minds from the operations of the Bank of England or the World Bank or transnational money-traders. They are vaguely aware that there is a relationship between the macro-world of ‘the economy’ and their own micro-experience of balancing warily between debt, savings and income. To make sense of what a bank is giving and taking from them, people are not expected to engage with or comprehend the mechanics of quantitative easing, fluctuating share markets or global cartels. At the level of everyday communication, personal banking is routinely distanced from the macro-­ economy. Not so with politics. Engagement here is much more like being asked to contribute to decisions being made by the Board of Governors of the Bank of England. Politicians try hard to direct their appeals to the experience of individual voters, or target groups, but the detail of telling people precisely what they are going to get and how that will be achieved invariably drifts into regions of technical opacity. The story of bewilderment we were hearing was rooted in a failure to see how the election would make a direct difference to lived experience. This became very clear when we asked Noor, Ayesha and Khadija what they would most want to see changed if the election were to have a positive outcome. Without much hesitation, all three of them said ‘Driving’. And now we were the ones who were bewildered by a political concern that we had not registered until then. This was how it went: Noor: Khadija: Ayesha: Khadija: Noor: Ayesha: Khadija: Noor:

Driving. It’s horrendous. It’s always tricky in Bradford. It’s horrible. Yeah. And I don’t think there is enough… it comes down to not enough police. It’s to do with the way people drive … They just think they’re above the law. It’s really scary. It’s just driving on a normal day. It’s scary. Yeah, you take your life into your own hands. But that comes down to policing. If we had enough police officers to be visible

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on the streets, which in no way are we taking it away from the police force because they have enough to deal with, but there’s just not enough money put into the police force. Khadija: There’s certain roads, we know of that people speed down them fast and whatever … and you wonder why there’s no police there. Why is there no-one there to stop it instantly? Because once you see a police car that’s it, they stop, they won’t go there. And there’s certain roads you know that they’re there, and they’re roads that you drive on for a long time but there’s just no-one there to stop them. Noor: You’ve got to be careful driving anyway. And then it’s not just that you’re on the road, that you’ve got to be careful of other people. Say for example, I was once taking a right down the road, fair enough, you do look everywhere, but you look to see if there’s anything coming this way, that’s to go in that junction, not to see who’s coming on the wrong side of the road. [Murmurs of agreement] If I hadn’t have looked, within seconds something could have happened, and I just looked and thought, ‘Oh my god, I’m so glad I just didn’t take that’. But I saw this car shooting up like 60 miles per hour. Where’s that come from? Unlike any of the other answers to questions we asked the bank workers, this answer flowed with an energy driven by frustration. The bank workers’ concerns were ultimately about norms of collective respect and a desire to live in a society in which reckless behaviour could be curbed. The wish that ‘something ought to be done about it’ seemed to these women to be remote from the high-political talk of the election. Irresponsible drivers would not be particularly affected by leaving or remaining in the European Union; by rhetorical jousts between party leaders on televised debates; or by arguments about the rate of corporate taxation. The (again, literal) politics of the streets of Bradford was played out in stories that grated against the seductive mood-stories of the professionalised election campaign (Fig. 3.5).

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Fig. 3.5  Bowling hair stylist. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden)

Mood-Stories as Hermeneutic Clues When Camille speaks about the ‘Brexit election’ as a source of pain that begins with generalised slogans, moves into the intimacy of her family, fracturing its harmony, and finally imposes itself painfully at her somatic core, she is not talking about a motion to be batted around in a debating society. She is referring to what she perceives as an encompassing pernicious atmosphere from which she cannot quite extricate herself. When Tom invites us to see the election as a game which, as he continues to talk about it, transmutes from an account of time-honoured amusement to one of cheating and resentment, it becomes clear that this is a game involving deeply affecting stakes. When Leo speaks of being uncertain and depressed, he is not only reacting to what he sees as organisational and ideological errors. He feels lost and betrayed by a turn of events that saps his will to believe and belong in ways that had once given meaning to his political life. When Noor, Ayesha and Khadija present themselves as confused and unconversant citizens—in stark contrast to their day job as expert advisers -, but then go on to express latent outrage towards uncivic road users, they are making their own claim about what really matters in

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the world. They are not describing how the world is in terms of positivist science but interpreting how their world feels in terms of hermeneutic understanding. Mood-stories reveal how people come to register impersonal social forces as visceral sensations. They tell of a world that inhabits the teller and a teller that is inhibited in some way by the world. Hermeneutic investigation explores the ways in which people work their way through such entanglements and ascribe tenable meaning to their lived experience. As Gadamer suggests (1960), the task of hermeneutic enquiry is to understand the interpretive conditions through which personal meaning is produced. In the context of the present study, hermeneutics casts light on electoral storytelling by providing a perspective on how individuals construct their own narratives on the basis of presuppositions that they bring to lived experience. People do not, of course, work out afresh the meaning of each situation they encounter, but bring with them pre-formed ideas about what things mean. These presuppositions (or prejudices, as Gadamer refers to them) play a crucial part in determining the shape and tone of the stories that they tell. A person who assumes that ‘politics’ is not for them— for it is beyond their understanding or interest—might come to think that they have little interest in an election, assuming that their outrage about dangerous driving on local roads has nothing to do with political authority. The ways in which people make connections or sustain disconnections are often played out through the stories that they tell about their lives. By listening to such stories, one begins to understand how people engage in the work of practical interpretation. One way in which narrative accounts are made coherent is through the use of metaphor, whereby terms from one frame of reference are used within a different frame. Metaphors allow something that is difficult to comprehend, adjust to or describe to be seen from the viewpoint of something else. By thinking of an election as if it were a game or the Labour party as if it were a tribe or Brexit as if it were a toxic substance, it becomes possible to think about political experience on the basis of other biographical experiences about which one feels more ontologically confident. The hermeneutic endeavour is not simply about understanding how people understand but exploring the extent to which the subjectively detached frames of reference that underpin private meanings might give way to a language through which experiences can be rendered intersubjectively meaningful. Gadamer (1960:173) referred to this process as a

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‘fusion of horizons’ and stated that it ‘always involves rising to a higher universality that overcomes not only our own particularity but also that of the other’. This is not to envisage an apolitical point of consensus about how reality is or what things mean, but to imagine an enveloping atmosphere in which mutual communication becomes possible, perhaps even comfortable. Could it be that that is precisely what a democratic election should aspire to engender? There were three images of an election available for us to work with as we listened to these stories. The first is that of a contest between mutually incomprehensible narratives. To be sure, this ‘Brexit election’, as it was often labelled, often felt like that. Storytellers standing at shouting distances from one another (as if anticipating the social distancing that would become routine a few months later), firing off their accounts of the world into the unmoved ether. This is the democracy of horizons sedulously insulated against the whiff of counter-narrative. The second image is of utopian democracy: the election as a collective festival of deliberative effort committed to concerted accord. This would be the election that would transcend misunderstandings and disagreements, eradicating the necessity of politics. This was a difficult image to sustain on a dark, wet and windy afternoon in Bradford. A third image was of the election as a moment of intersubjective potential. For what is an election if not an opportunity for the people to get their story straight; to link the macronarrative of ‘we’ to the tens of thousands of micro-stories that at other times are confined to the solipsistic realm of autobiography? The stories that we have retold in this chapter are only a few of the many that we heard over the course of the election campaign, and the latter were a mere fraction of the stories being told by the people we never met or heard. If, as is commonly claimed, elections are moments in which every voter has a voice and every voice deserves to be heard, is it utopian to expect such common listening to be sustained by a desire to comprehend as well as hear the stories that are circulating? And if such a desire is not merely fantastic, but a necessary norm of democracy, what needs to be done to realise something resembling a fusion of horizons? We raise this as the increasingly burning question that each of the stories considered in this chapter prompted us to ask.

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Note There’s a famous old mill town called Bradford, That’s now viewed as a bit of a dump. As a result of the decline in the wool trade, Global recession, unemployment and slump. There’s a hole in the heart of Bradford, A hole where Forster Square used to be. It filled up over time with rain water, And is now a virtual wet-land sanctuary. As a TV documentary stock panning shot, It has proved just the site to convey, Austere inner-city desolation, And creeping urban decay. To reinforce this desired impression, (Albeit a tad tongue in cheek), The piece will be filmed on a foggy day To make things look even more bleak. A cursory mention of The Yorkshire Ripper, Followed by the stereotypical boast, That Bradford folk are friendly folk With hearts as warm as buttered toast

References Alexander, J.C. 2010. The performance of politics: Obama’s victory and the democratic struggle for power. New York: Oxford University Press. Bennett, W.L., and M. Edelman. 1985. Toward a new political narrative. Journal of Communication 35 (4): 156–171. Berlant, L.G. 2011. Cruel optimism. Durham: Duke University Press. Bruner, J.S. 1990. Acts of meaning. Vol. 3. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Coleman, S. 2020. How people talk about politics: Brexit and after. London: Bloomsbury Press. Fisher, W.R. 1994. Narrative rationality and the logic of scientific discourse. Argumentation 8 (1): 21–32.

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Gadamer, H.G. 1960. Truth and Method. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. London: Bloomsbury. Highmore, B. 2017. Cultural feelings: Mood, mediation and cultural politics. London: Routledge. Lefort, C., 1986. The Political Forms of Modern Society. Cambridge: MIT Press. Rouncefield, M.F. 2002. ‘Business as usual’: An ethnography of everyday (bank) work. Doctoral dissertation, University of Lancaster. Stewart, K. 2007. Ordinary affects. Durham/London: Duke University Press. Warner, M. 2002. Publics and counterpublics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. White, H. 1980. The value of narrativity in the representation of reality. Critical Inquiry 7 (1): 5–27.

CHAPTER 4

The Poetics of a Real-Time Election

Abstract  This chapter provides an account of the ‘lived emotional drama’ of an election campaign, as recorded at the time. It arises from a research decision to invite people across the city of Bradford to respond to a series of text-message questions about their recent experiences of the election. What emerges is something like a political prose poem, a flow of unedited mood expression. It does not tell all the story, but it tells a story in a way that political commentators cannot. Readers are invited to take in the text and feel a political mood. Keywords  Text messages • Poetry • Liveness • Experience • Intersubjectivity

Now is when we directly live our lives. Everything else is once or twice removed … The present moment does not whiz by and become observable only after it is gone. Rather, it crosses the mental stage more slowly, taking several seconds to unfold. And during this crossing, the present moment plays out a lived emotional drama. (Stern 2004:3–4)

This chapter offers an account of the ‘lived emotional drama’ of an election campaign, as recorded at the time. It arises from a research decision

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to invite people we met along the way to respond to a series of text-message questions that we sent them. These questions are inserted in italics in the text below. So, we are not claiming that what follows emerged spontaneously or would have been the same had it not be prompted by our questions. As in much diary-based social science research, there is implicit framing. Niall Bolger et  al. (2003:591) note that ‘diary studies often require detailed training sessions to ensure that participants fully understand the protocol’. The form and culture of text messaging undoubtedly influenced the ways in which our participants communicated. Nonetheless, the texts we received between the beginning of the campaign and the day after polling constitute an expressive outpouring that is qualitatively different from the kind of ‘data’ commonly derived from research questionnaires, interviews or focus groups. What is this difference? Firstly, there is a quality of liveness about this commentary on the election that defies the tendency to relegate immediate experience to the tempering reflections of the past tense or the impelling excitations of the future tense. Present-tense reflection is often characterised as a product of cognitive automaticity (Kahneman 2011) or normatively undesirable social acceleration (Rosa 2013; Eriksen 2016). Arriving at high-speed political perspectives and judgements is often criticised as a form of impulsive rashness, antithetical to the higher norms of prudent deliberation. (Stoker et al. 2016). Technologies designed to monitor real-time information processing remain largely crude (Coleman et al. 2018) and the most widely cited platform for real-time political commentary, Twitter, is widely associated with knee-jerk outputs comprising unreflective sentiment and raw prejudice. Despite these reservations, it would be a great mistake to underestimate what Emirbayer and Mische (1998:994) refer to as ‘the practical-evaluative dimension of agency’. By this, they mean the capacity to contextualise and problematise contingent situations, often by means of temporal improvisation and the adoption of locally prudential action. The first move in such practical-evaluative action is often realised through thinking or speaking aloud: ‘What is going on here? What does this situation mean? How do I feel being a part of it? What is it in this present moment that shoves us into or eludes consciousness?’ We regard the text that follows as a form of democratic thinking aloud. Not every word in every text message reflects a final position—or even what Richard Rorty (1989) calls ‘a final vocabulary’. Not all of the words represent thoughts or feelings that had been worked through or refined. Real-time responses to present moments are part of an unfolding emotional drama rather than

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an end point. But as guides to how people reach such political end points, they present us with valuable insights. Secondly, these texts have a poetic quality. Anyone who has read the brilliant work of Studs Terkel (1970, 1974, 1997) or Pierre Bourdieu et al.’s (1999) The Weight of The World will know what it means to read beyond the words of research subjects: the hues, textures and silences that constitute their ‘unthought known’ (Bollas 1987). The texts that follow point towards what Elliot Eisner (1997) refers to as the ‘thinking within the material’. Much has been written about how interview data can be represented poetically (Richardson 1992; Glesne 1997; Hill 2005), but what we have here is something different: a real-time tone poem, one might call it. Reading it, something moving becomes apparent – in both senses of the term. The indeterminacy of being within a present moment that is part of ongoing history generates a tension that few other forms of data representation can convey. It is as if we are with them on their journey, hurtling towards resolution, arrival or catastrophe. Thirdly, what follows can be read as an account of emergent intersubjectivity and its many hurdles. It is not easy to imagine what truly intersubjective democratic discourse would sound like, but reading the following texts aloud suggests something of its cacophonous energy. Democratic reflection and expression will always be messy. The simplest way to avoid the mess is to silence untidy speech and only allow slick performers near the microphone. What follows captures this messiness, but also the yearning of people not just to speak but be heard. Like listening into a conversation in a crowded pub, some voices will be more worth straining for than others. But no voices are barred. That is perhaps a metaphor for the election we wish we had observed (Fig. 4.1). 20.11.19. Did you watch the debate between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn on ITV last night? The debate was misnamed, it was simply an exchange of sound bites. The candidates were not given time to espouse policies or ideas and they spoke over each other and didn’t give straight answers to straight questions and the moderator failed to keep order. Not sure anyone learnt anything new nor was anyone’s mind changed. No one outside the political bubble has even mentioned it to me. About the quality of the debate: I don’t think there was a debate as I understand the term. Rather it was a hybrid, a cross between something that aspired to be a debate but was in fact a glorified Q&A session. The

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Fig. 4.1  Above Dyson Street, Bradford. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden)

exchanges between Johnson & Corbyn were disappointingly predictable with Johnson blatantly forcing Brexit into the dialogue at every contrived opportunity. Also, Johnson, to my mind, came across as arrogant in his refusal to conclude his comments when requested to do so by Ms Etchingham, again, was this a debate or a Q&A session? The cynical attempt to rebrand the Tory Twitter account simply lowers the view of politics and politicians. Didn’t watch debate live. Watched straight after, but only made it halfway through. Got a bit bored, social media began to filter through which gave me rest of highlights. As a debate very poor. As a resumé of stuff already put out by both parties via the media, adequate albeit a tad predictable. I found the debate too short. It left me with wanting more. The last question about the present to each other felt unnecessary and cheapened the debate. I watched it with my partner: we were in agreement. I discussed it with 2 colleagues at work: one of them was frustrated that Corbyn did not seem to answer Johnson’s question about Brexit. She wanted a clear answer. This conversation was tricky as it brought up anxiety about

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the election. I discussed it with a friend who felt the Corbyn showed a lot of integrity and she will vote for him. I did feel that Corbyn came across as more human than Johnson. Brexit obsession was dull and repetitive. Damning that our political discourse had become so dominated and side-tracked by such a pointless issue when there are far more pressing concerns that directly affect people’s lives. I watched the debate with my partner and early on in the programme we began to anticipate/predict both of the candidates answers and responses. We devised a point scoring system, there were high scores all around.! ! ! Johnson attempted to employ his bonhomie approach with seemingly scant success with the audience was an interesting contrast to Corbyn’s remaining calm and staying within time constraints. Talked a bit about it at a networking lunch today. They hadn’t seen it though. Judging by the ITV debate, and speeches/clips I have heard so far, I wouldn’t describe it so much a political debate as an almost constant exchange and repetition of the party line. Johnson time and time again steered his answers to his ‘brilliant brexit deal’….(which is still ‘oven ready’ whatever that means), and the fact that Corbyn won’t commit to which side he would fight on in another brexit referendum. Corbyn, for his part, was largely focusing on the fact that the Conservatives will sell the NHS to the Americans. Johnson will definitely will sell the NHS to the Americans, I just feel there was more of a debate to be had overall. I was watching the debate with my wife, and although we didn’t discuss it a great deal as she’s not especially interested, and I was largely swearing, she did say to me ‘are you sure Boris is a massive liar? He seems so plausible’….My wife is a nurse working for the NHS, so I felt it was important to confirm my accusations. After a quick internet search of newspaper sites she was astonished at how he not only lies about policy and commitments, but how he also lies about small pointless things like the fact that he’s stopped drinking. Other than that, I’ve not spoken to anyone today as I work alone. Poor ‘debate’, poorly led. Didn’t really discuss with anyone, wife went to bed before it even started to watch I’m a celeb. I tend to follow the BBC/fact check analysis. The debate was intense, and I expected that Corbyn and Johnson to continue their emphasise on what it seems to them matter most. Johnson

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insisted on delivering Brexit whilst Corbyn brought up issues such as inequality and poverty. I only watched half a debate and didn’t feel interested very much to watch whole debate. I did not get to discuss it with many people, and I feel talking about it, especially Brexit is pointless as everyone seemed to be confused about what’s going on and what’ll happen next (Fig. 4.2). 21.11.19. If you’re unsure about any claims made by politicians in this election, how do you check them? About fact checking, I think people need good more time to access unbiased data and think about them and then decide. This election was unexpected and I think people need more time to think about who in long term can better deliver for what people have in mind when they are voting. When we are talking about fact, the question is where data get collected from and how it gets analysed and by who and for what purpose. This can be a subjective process. I tend to look at BBC and national media for fact check and use several sources.

Fig. 4.2  Paradise Street. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden)

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If I don’t know of something Is true, I listen to and read journalistic commentary. Sometimes I go to Fullfact.org or Channel 4 fact check to get to the bottom of it. As a first point of call I will check the facts by asking close friends. Then I would Google with newspapers I trust for example the Guardian. As far as fact checking is concerned, I’m terrible. I’m fully prepared to accept ‘facts’ that fit with my beliefs and will search the internet until I can disprove any ‘facts’ that don’t…I should probably work on that. With regards fact checking, Google is usually my first port of call. I usually try to work back from the stated fact/statistic I’m trying to verify to the source. This is usually a straightforward exercise, however, if not I tend to view the ‘fact’ as unreliable. Tory ‘fact checking’ thing was very damaging to wider politics. Statistics are very much like a drunken man and a lamppost, inasmuch as they are used more for support than illumination. 24.11.19. How likely is the MP elected for your constituency in this election to speak for you? I would expect them to listen to any concerns but to act in a manner that suited them/their party. I expect MP will listen to my views and those of others in the constituency and to reflect those views in parliament. But she is fighting on a manifesto and needs to be seen to deliver. Very likely, I know her quite well. It is very very unlikely that Philip Davies will be speaking for me as he is conservative, misogynistic, and pro Hard Brexit. I am a socialist woman EU migrant. With regards my current MP, it has been my experience that they have upheld and championed in Parliament those values I hold as being conducive to an equal, fair and caring society. On a local constituency level my councillor is very active in the area and provides local issues feed back to the elected MP. I’ve never had reason to personally contact my local MP. However, I am led to believe that she is very approachable and is very hands on within the community. I feel confident that she would actually listen if I felt the need to contact her, and that she would represent me in Parliament. I expect and I’m confident that my MP represent me and echo my concerns. 25.11.19.

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Did you have any conversations with anybody about the election over this last weekend? Spoke with step-daughter (age 19) about the election, she asked who I was voting for. She knew the main party leaders, but not what the parties stood for. I have had several conversations both formal and informal. I think that there is more discussion happening but many of them are desultory and negative about the political environment and politicians. I have had a couple of conversation about the elections following candidates Q&A. Hope is increasing amongst people around me. Further conversations will take place tonight with 6 young adults some of them voting for the first time. I will feed back on tonight’s conversations with young adults :) Out of 6 young adults all will be voting labour. Three simply because their parents will be voting labour and they did not wish to discuss it…not watched debate or manifesto. One will be voting for first time as never voted before “all the same, not making any difference” however this year his new girlfriend convinced him to vote. Another 2 are active campaigners, leafletting and canvassing every day. The first 4 did not wish to discuss further as they did not feel they knew enough and it made them feel uncomfortable. The last 2 could not talk about anything else but the election but also talked about fall out between party members and how much pressure active members were in. Lack of organisation within campaigning team and “bullying” going on. A friend who was not a great Corbyn supporter, but a Labour supporter, told me that she was impressed by Corbyn during Q & A.  She thought that he had answered the Brexit question clearly. However, another friend who was part of this same conversation felt that he was avoiding the question. Another conversation took place with s friend who was also impressed by the manifesto. Especially re: student access to university (she is a social work student). Yes indeed, I’ve had several conversations this weekend relating to the election. On the whole I’m very much getting a feeling of apathy, ‘they’re all as bad as each other’, ‘I just can’t be bothered’….I’ve never been the sort of person to preach my beliefs to people who are clearly not interested, but I have found myself increasingly encouraging people who are bored of the whole thing to at least vote. A highlight of the weekend for me was on Saturday when I heard the manager of my local post office telling a lady ‘well, if The Conservatives get in again, this post office will probably have to close’….I asked him if

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this was true, and what was the reason? He told me it wasn’t true, but it’s just something he tells the older generation to dissuade them from voting Tory….(a little underhand but I like his style) largely however, as we talked about when we met, the people I socialise with are of a similar political view, and as such the conversation is generally a confirmation of our left wing beliefs. I spoke to few friends I met over this weekend. As we get closer to the date it seems more conversations occur around the election and its impact. On Saturday night a man in the casino was informing everyone (in between large gin and tonics) that ‘it doesn’t matter which way you vote because the Russians will fix the result anyway’….I was totally convinced by him, but I was quite tipsy by then. Many people just don’t believe anything that is being said. Brexit and the lack of progress has led to people feeling less likely to believe anything politicians say. Quotes: “Jeremy Corbyn lacks charisma” “Boris Johnson sees all this as a big game, he’s on an ego trip” “This country is in too big a mess for any one party to sort out, there needs to be a coalition government, and somebody needs to bang their heads together”. There’s also confusion about why we are having an election and why it is necessary. Lots of people who I’ve spoken to are pondering about whether to vote at all given the above. Had some long and good conversations but getting over the cynicism and negativity on the doorstep is difficult. My wife (an NHS nurse) is beginning to be more interested in the whole thing, and as such I find that we are having more conversations about political issues, and she’s very interested in knowing ‘where on earth’ these 50,000 new nurses are to be found that Johnson is promising. 27.11.19. There are all kinds of allegations of racism in the mainstream political parties. How do you think people in Bradford want the parties to deal with them? I certainly think Corbyn missed a chance to improve his parties fortunes by not apologising on national TV last night. The Tories seem to be riding out their own racism issues and I don’t expect the number of votes to be massively impacted, unlike the Labour vote. Sometimes, ‘sorry’ is all that is needed, and from there you can then make a commitment (although this then needs actioning) to working as a

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party to overcome these accusations by providing training/support to members that show racist (or sexist/homophobic/sizist etc) traits in their public duties. I think if people see this commitment happening it will go someway to improving reputations. My experience of the anti-semitism allegations now as opposed to 2017 is that people who felt it was smears then believe there is substance now. The folk of Bradford have not only had much experience of racism and intolerance over the past years but as a result have become savvy with the increasingly subtle ways in which it is still practiced amongst various groups, including political parties. Of course a significant section of the population would prefer a totally open and candid approach to eliminating racism and intolerance in any organisation or institution in Bradford, but talking with folk about how prevalent racism is in Bradford the general consensus of opinion is that it is still very much in evidence albeit acknowledged/condoned on a “nod and a wink” basis. Several of my friends, Muslim or non-Muslim, have told me that they are appalled by the fact that the conservative party did not speak against Johnson s “letterbox comment”. In Bradford there used to be a huge Council funded Mela festival in Peel Park….funds were cut and it does not happen anymore. The festival was attended by a large, very diverse group of people. Many wish for the political parties to be a lot more vocal about racism, there is a sense that Brexit and Trump have made it ok to be racist. Racism towards Bradford community has also increased. For example, a friend received a letter saying “punish a Asian” day through her letterbox. This election should be an opportunity to talk about it and say No more, but this does not seem to be very high on the Agenda. One friend who is a teacher suggested that combating racism should be a huge part of the education curriculum, especially in Bradford, and training to teacher should be given as there is a lack of confidence in dealing with racist abuse. Some Asian friends stated to me that racism will always be there … Hard to tackle … could not think of anything that political parties could do to improve the situation. The allegations of systemic racism have damaged further the image of politics and politicians, possibly beyond repair. There is a difference in the perceptions of the two issues and it can and has exacerbated community divides. I think people need want to see the parties taking action and accepting the need to do so not just mouthing platitudes.

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I despise this aspect of politics. In Bradford, a city I love (like a brother with a drug problem), I have personally witnessed 2 riots born in a veneer of ‘political beliefs’, (BNP), but actually in bare faced racism. In many ways, (and slightly depressingly), I think we are currently ‘together’ as a city with a common understanding that the city is broken, but we’re in it together…. it’s a very fragile unity. I really worry that this aggressive name calling style of debate, while being entertaining in places like Harrogate, could be incredibly divisive in Bradford. My answer would be that, as someone who lives in Bradford, I sense that people would like more investment to be made to improve the quality of life of the people, especially those coming from groups seemed to be under-represented. I think it’s important for politicians to take into consideration diversity that exists in the city and based on that, assess the needs of the population in order to identify means to meet them One way to make this happen is to provide grant and funding for activities which can bring people together such as art and literature festivals where all range of views can be discussed and reflected upon (Fig. 4.3). 30.11.19. Have you seen any visual signs of this election campaign? Quite a few Labour garden stakes and signs, not noticed many others. I have not seen any billboards or graffiti and only a few window posters. So far, i have not seen any posters or billboard and if there’s any I may have missed them. I was in town for couple of times this week and also I noticed nothing. I have noticed several assorted posters on my way around various areas of Bradford. Manningham/Oak Lane perhaps have the most noticeable/ conspicuous numbering my experience and a good representation of the three major parties: Labour/Conservative/Lib Dem, although where posters were on display they did tend to be a dozen or so at a time. In other areas of Bradford, Thornton/Allerton/Sandy Lane/Clayton/ Queensbury, not so proliferate but still perhaps a tad more than I have noticed at previous General/Local elections? With regards graffiti, I have not noticed any, but now you come to mention it. . .! ! ! There is an interesting correspondence on my local Facebook page for Thornton village whereby several contributors are managing to bring the up and coming General Election into discussion around issues of local road maintenance/children’s playgrounds and provision for youth activities. Interestingly the admin on this site has cautioned against “Bringing politics into the local Facebook group”.

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Fig. 4.3  The cabinet. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden)

One in my front garden. A few around Bingley and Shipley in people’s gardens. However. I saw several in the Heaton area of Bradford, again in people’s garden and windows. There seems to be less than previous years. All these were Labour. On the top area of Bingley-Eldwick I saw several conservative signs in people’s garden and one big banner at a roundabout. Driving passed an area that is usually clearly Conservative, I have just noticed a lot less signed in gardens this is in upper Eldwick. I don’t believe I’ve seen a single billboard, if I have it certainly hasn’t registered. I have seen a handful of posters in people’s windows, but the majority of advertising I’ve seen has been internet based. 2.12.19. How would you describe the mood of this election? I think people are bored of it already. ‘Sick of hearing about it’, ‘It’s just constant arguing’, ‘All as bad each other’. The misinformation and outright lies being peddled throughout the various available media make it really difficult but also really important to try and have debates and discussions based on policy and facts.

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Generally, I feel election is not exciting any more. At the same time there’s an understanding that this vote will give five years to any government that comes to power to implement their policies on NHS, Brexit etc. These two are the most important ones to people at the moment. I would describe the mood of this election as one of increasing momentum of the dawning realisation of what is at stake for the country, albeit coupled with a significant factor of single-issue voters who see the election as either as all about Brexit or the future/saving of the NHS. There is a dichotomy for many folk it seems, in particular for those who have always voted Labour inasmuch as they wish to leave the EU and suspect that Labour, (Jeremy Corbyn in particular), as not “really” wanting to leave the EU. With regards Boris Johnson’s honesty, the opinion of many seems to be, “Yes he does lie, but don’t all politicians? And besides I trust him to get us out of the EU”. I have heard quite a few folk making reference to the fact that in their opinion this election has the potential to effect a whole generation of the Tories are re-elected to power. The mood is very tense. “Did you believe so and so?” and “Can you trust so and so?” being the main questions. Interestingly I have not heard anyone say they are ‘sick and tired” of the election campaign as they have of Brexit. I think people are generally fed up with politicians. Brexit has dragged on and caused dismay. Both main leaders are unpopular and this is disengaging people in the political process. I think turnout will be lower than normal. As far as I can tell, the mood is still very much one of apathy. More or less everyone I know socially will continue to vote Labour, however, there is no sense of excitement or optimism. The only specific conversation that stands out to me is with a popcorn seller at The Odeon (I was doing maintenance work there), who is essentially a full time carer for his mother (who is dependent on the NHS), yet he said he ‘won’t be voting as they are all corrupt and racist, so what’s the point?’. Whilst I did try and convince him that this wasn’t necessarily the case, and that political rantings on social media and the press are not to be taken at face value, I could tell that he’d given up. I worry that people who don’t already hold fairly strong views will be lost to the toxic quagmire of spin and cut and paste ‘facts’ that seem to be dominating this election campaign. For those on the left there is a desire to talk about policies, but its hard to stay optimistic. Brexiters are single minded though.

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Johnson’s slipperiness (lying) is beginning to be known. Tories seem a little complacent. People have also expressed concerns about future under Tories, one friend said he was worried about McDonnell. He seemed to think he’d tax him more. Worry and anxious as the outcome of the election will define the direction the country is heading, to solve issues such as Brexit. Some see election as a chance to have their say on issues brought up and highlighted by the parties. So, they seemed to be hopeful and excited. The atmosphere is heavy. People not wanting to talk to each other for fear of relationship breakdown. I hear many of my friends describe the mood as mixed: a real fear if Johnson gets a majority and a feeling of hope by what Labour is offering. Including a coalition/agreement with SNP. This is how I feel too. 4.12.19. What can you – personally – do to make your voice heard in this election between now and election day? I will be continuing to engage with the public and candidates to try and influence policies and voting intentions but this campaign it has become increasingly difficult to have meaningful debates and discussions as the campaign has become poisoness and personal. Attend hustings; contact candidates via email/social media. Write letters. Join groups on social media and contribute. But I won’t. Already put a placard out in my garden. I’m not sure what can be done for my voice to be heard. I think what would be crucial is to go and vote as every vote matters and can form the outcome of the election. I make my voice heard by communicating with my constituency MP. Having said that I have yet to receive a visit from any of the candidates standing in my area. Unfortunately, as a council worker I received this message: “We are currently in a period of Purdah and you are not allowed to post or promote political parties, politicians or political opinions. Post comments on controversial matters from both professional or personal social media accounts. I still post Labour supporting messages. I’m going to be doing a lot more campaigning this weekend. Ultimately the only way I can make my voice heard is voting. But being in a safe seat it’s a quiet voice. From a personal point of view, I don’t imagine I shall be doing a great deal to make my voice heard. I have totally given up on social media as it is no longer a platform for discussion and contemplation of other people’s

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views and opinions. It is a soapbox from which to throw insults. I don’t feel an overwhelming need to contact my local MP, although I would feel confident in doing so, and I’m fairly sure that ranting to my friends is essentially ‘preaching to the choir’. If I come across anyone that is undecided I may try and convince them to vote (I’ll probably even try to convince them to vote my way), but I think my limited efforts are done, and I’ll stay crossed fingered and hope for the best. Oh, and as I know my MP, I can talk directly to her. That’s the exception though. Of course, if I become seriously impassioned about a particular election issue, I always have recourse to write a letter to The Times … 7.12.19. Has the time of year (December) made this election different from other ones? Currently, I don’t think so. If it snows, however….! I think as we go towards Xmas people worry less about finances (although poorer people worry more) as it’s a season of hope and goodwill. This is more likely to benefit the incumbent as people forget how bad things are. Also labour’s big advantage has always been people on the streets canvassing and leafletting. Colder weather and shorter days don’t help this. This is a hard question. I don t know. On one hand the election being on 12th many students registered in their home may miss the opportunity to vote as they will not have broken up for Christmas yet. On the other people can be more generous in spirit and thinking of others and therefore may vote more with vulnerable people in mind around Christmas. Other than people being perhaps a little preoccupied with Christmas preparations, I really don’t get a sense that the timing of the election has made a great deal of difference. I think generally that voters realise just how important this election is, and that it’s not like other elections, but I don’t think that the timing is necessarily a factor in this. Everyone I’ve spoken to about the upcoming election have been very vocal about the importance of voting, and in some cases how dismayed they are by the toxic political campaigning, but I don’t believe that anyone has mentioned the time of year. It has been my experience in talking with folk that the General Election has been brought about by the failure of the government to “Get Brexit done”, and therefore there are a significant number of folk who are using the election as a second referendum on Brexit. This does certainly seem to

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be the view that one particular political party is happy to engender, to the point of “Get Brexit Done” being used as a mantra at every possible opportunity. The timing certainly does, to my mind, give the election a sense of urgency, and even in a largely secular society. I feel its happening at this time of the year could, to some folk, give pause for reflection and an opportunity to make a real, radical change of course for the UK. Of course, I have heard many complaints about the timing and how inconvenient it is given how busy folk are preparing for Christmas. But I think that the importance of the outcome of the election could well concentrate the minds of many in the few days left to the 12th of December, and as a result I feel turn-out will be high and that forecasting an outcome at this stage is very difficult as the issues are still very fluid, and one gets the sense that there is yet time for a “bombshell” piece of propaganda from either of the two main parties that will have the potential to sway an currently “dithering” vote one way or the other. Overall, I think turnout will be lower than average despite what’s at stake. Yes. It has made campaigning difficult given the dark nights and poor weather. It has made people less likely to open their doors. People also have their minds on Christmas and less likely to engage. If the weather bad on the day turn out will be a serious issue. Having election in December means we start the new year with more certainty (hopefully). Whatever the outcome of the General Election, its proximity to Christmas is bound to be a significant factor in the traditional family get-­ together with strong political allegiances and oppositions being passionately expressed and “discussed” … (Fig. 4.4). 9.12.19. Have you seen the photo of the four year-old boy who was forced to sleep on the floor of an NHS hospital? It’s dominating the headlines. Has anyone said anything to you about it? Saw the video of the journo challenging Johnson to look at it. I am finding having discussions about the state of the NHS, Adult and Children social care harder and harder as the election approaches…Anxiety is very high. A colleague is finding the picture: “heart-breaking” saying Boris Johnson has no heart”. Comments from a couple of folk with regards the fact that although the photo clearly shows the child on the floor there is no indication as to

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Fig. 4.4  Autocare. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden)

whether or how long it was before a bed was found. The implication being that although the situation undoubtedly did arise as a result of adequate beds to deal with what appears to have been a particularly busy day, the photo opportunity and resultant mass exposure on newspapers/social media proved too good a propaganda opportunity to miss . . . Other comments have included, “disgusting”, “This is the NHS being run into the ground, they, (The Tories), know what they are doing”. And my personal favourite from a former Adult Mental Health colleague of mine: “Anyone who votes Tory after seeing that needs to be assessed as being a danger to themselves and others”. Another fall-out with a family member who does not believe that BJ would privatise the NHS. This picture is “being used against Johnson”. Comments on photo of kid in Leeds. Many saying it was faked, then rolling back when it was shown to be true. People talking more about tory lies and concerted efforts to spread disinformation with bits on social media. Criticism of mainstream journalists and how they amplify unverified claims. Some refusing to concede it was a real photo despite evidence

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and looking for conspiracies and asking questions about alleged ownership rights to photo. It’s proven to be a powerful image and the controversy surrounding it has highlighted the unashamed use of lies and fake news to manipulate opinion throughout the election by (mostly) the conservatives. Just flicking thru social media and come across the recent posts about the photo being staged. I’m now confused as to which side of the story is fake news and which is real news. One comment: “It’s a disgrace but sadly not isolated”. Many agree that there’s an ongoing crisis with NHS needs to be dealt with and the picture is an evidence showing how important it is for Labour to focus on it. I only heard a few comments from people saying ‘well, this just another example of how underfunded the NHS is now’ and ‘it doesn’t surprise me at all, I had to take my kid to BRI last week, and we were waiting for 6 hours’, then Boris Johnson happened….When Mr. Johnson refused to look at the photo of Jack on the hospital floor during an ITV interview, and was so very dismissive of the whole thing, deciding instead to hide the reporters phone (showing the photo) in his pocket, and bang on about ‘getting brexit done’, things livened up. The conversation quickly turned much more scathing about Johnson and his lack of regard and empathy for jack than it was about the original story. I heard a chap in my local cafe say ‘I didn’t believe he wanted to sell the NHS, but why else would he act like that?’ Then there was the fact that the Conservatives created stories about Jack’s mother staging the whole scene, and as far as I could tell for many, this was a lie too far. Facebook was alight with condemnation of this underhand deception, and I even heard people that I knew to be on the fence saying this had made up their minds to vote tactically to make sure Johnson didn’t win. I find it really interesting that this kind of bad publicity can be all it takes (despite everything that has preceded it) to change the minds of the previously apathetic. My mother, who never mentions politics said ‘I thought it was disgusting that he did that’, I now know for a fact she will vote tomorrow, when perhaps before she wouldn’t (Fig. 4.5). 12.12.19. It’s election day. What’s happening? Woke this morning, rolled over, went back to sleep. Voting could wait. Into work and a conversation with a colleague who lives in Keighley and was still unsure who to vote for. Had discussions over the £10 minimum wage Labour propose and whether its fair. Also discussed three-day weeks

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Fig. 4.5  Your rubbish. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden)

and energy rationing! Then had an on-line conversation with my 20-year-­ old daughter. She was being fed lines by Labour leaning colleagues, mainly about the NHS. I was countering the arguments and she got very confused, announcing she wasn’t voting. Conversation continued in the car on the way home. As I said to her, it doesn’t matter who she votes for as long as she voted. She did. We spoke to the tellers. They said it had been extremely busy and as we left, another group of people arrived. My daughter voted Labour, as did my step-daughter. I voted Tory. I was unsure whether it’d make a difference (Labour had a majority of around 7k in 2017) but if its been busy, who knows! Interesting to see Bradford South actually showing as possibly turning blue. Vote not wasted?! Ended up watching election results alone, sat up til 3. Wife asked for a top-level overview when I went to bed – large Tory majority. Then sleep. Had conversations at work, I sit with a couple of Conservative voters on my table, so we were in buoyant mood. Tired now! Quote from retired former female mental health worker: “I am very negative about the whole issue. I’m sure there are genuine people standing as candidates, but equally I feel there are a significant number who are

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in politics for the wrong reasons, who are driven by ego and in some cases have already proved they are not to be trusted to tell the truth”. Quote: newsagent/shop keeper: “Labour changed too quickly, it has become too Left Wing for some people. But I will be voting Labour because I do believe that they are committed to saving the NHS, and if they only get that right that will be something”. Quote, guy at bus stop: “I’m not voting at all, they’re all as bad as each other. These politicians promise you the earth, do fuck all and then blame the other side”. Quote, Grandmother: “I will be voting for my grandson’s future and to protect the NHS, and even though I’m not keen on that Jeremy Corbyn I’ll be voting Labour”. Still last-minute conversations with previous Labour voters. Distrust and dislike of Corbyn a/the major issue. Polling stations appear to be busy considering the weather. Not sure how to read this election. It seems that our recent promises are holding up and voting but it is the unknowns that are a concern. Feel a bit more confident than this morning but only seeing a small part of the constituency so don’t know how it’s all looking. The count is a weird experience. For the first time in years it’s seriously tense, with the mood changing with each box. Still no real feeling for the outcome. Conversation with my 19 years old daughter voting for the first time in general election: “I will vote Labour for you mum. I hate Boris he’s a racist” Son comes back from voting saying “of course I voted Labour. I don t know anyone around me who isn’t. Young people are voting labour” Hopeful comment! At polling station: Council staff commented that voting had been much busier than usual and steady throughout the day. Guy, mid 50’s, self-­ employed plumber/gas fitter said “I’m voting for Boris, I think he will get Brexit done. . . . . he has to do otherwise people will never vote Conservative again. I normally vote Labour but not this time, they want to stay in the EU. I don’t even know who the Conservative candidate is, I’m just voting for Boris.” (1) I had discussion with few friends at university about election. We all think it’s hard to predict the outcome. Some worry if it leads to hung parliament. (2) I couldn’t see anyone when I went to vote (it was a bad rain) but people I saw today seemed to care a lot about the outcome of the election and they were passionate. However, uncertainty about the result seems to have made them anxious. (3) Didn’t found a single person who ignore the election. There’s a belief that this election really life changing

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when it comes to issues such as Brexit NHS (4) I can’t believe that labour lost many seats and Conservative gained much more than I expected. I feel Brexit determined the outcome of this election whilst election in my opinion should be about a wide range of issues affecting people’s lives and Brexit is only one of them. (5) I read the result early morning, so I didn’t get see responses from others to the result of the election. However, during the conversation I had with people I saw, I noticed they are shocked or disappointed and some said they expected it. The mood in the house at the moment is pretty bleak on the strength of the exit polls … Received texts from my two sons: “Oh Christ.! ! !” and shortly after, “I fear we are fucked” … My partner and I were planning on watching the election results coverage on TV perhaps into the early hours, but in the event at around 00.30 hrs we agreed we had seen enough. My partner commented that she had always feared that the election was to be in effect a second, vote on Brexit, as evidenced by Boris Johnson’s, “Let’s get Brexit done” mantra. Both of us very disappointed at the outcome and as pensioners a tad apprehensive of the future in with regards the future of the NHS, but perhaps most of all we are both saddened by the fact that it appears a significant number of folk in this country are temporarily blind to the poverty, social division and hardship this Conservative government has presided over for nine years in the seeming blind faith that once the country is free of the EU all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.. . . . But perhaps our greatest fear is of the nationalism that seems to fuel Brexit. A friend has commented that the Conservatives have “been up to their old tricks”, and will no doubt use the current situation to “divide and rule”. “This too shall pass”. I don’t think I’m going to be of much use to you today. I’ve been alone in my workshop all day, so not seen a single person, and I was also the only person in the voting station….(the lonely life of a self-employed carpenter)….I’ve bought chips n dips and pizza to keep me going until the early hour … Well, that’s me. I apologies it wasn’t much of a commentary, but I’m devastated. I refuse to believe that I live in a racist country, but I’m now convinced that I live in a stupid country. What I have spent most time trying to suss out is just who comprises “the working class” nowadays. In future maybe elections will be won or lost on ideologies irrespective of social status or what vestiges still remain of class structure.

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8  a.m. finishing postcards round from last night. Conversation with labour activist: very hopeful, great response from candidate on social media Q& A previous day. Article came out about Conservative candidate wrong use of public money. There is hope that this will influence voters to not vote for him. Hope in Shipley as cards to remind labour voters to vote have all been delivered by 6 p.m. in Shipley. Great turn out! I however remain worried about the outcome. Will be out again from 5  p.m. to remind people to go out and vote. Absolute shock and disbelief at the results. All around me in shock. I cried. My poor daughter s first reaction “what was the point”. Heart-­ breaking. A strong feeling that I need to surround myself with like-minded people and “stick together” I fear the rise of hostility and racism in Bradford. The future is looking scary for children living in poverty in Bradford. I now need to apply for citizenship and to ensure that my husband and children get French nationality. Today we are starting the process for my husband to apply for French Citizenship.

References Bolger, N., A. Davis, and E. Rafaeli. 2003. Diary methods: Capturing life as it is lived. Annual Review of Psychology 54 (1): 579–616. Bollas, C. 1987. The shadow of the object: Psychoanalysis of the unthought known. New York: Columbia University Press. Bourdieu, P., A. Accardo, and S. Emanuel. 1999. The weight of the world: Social suffering in contemporary society. London: Alhoda UK. Coleman, S., G. Moss, and A. Martinez-Perez. 2018. Studying real-time audience responses to political messages: A new research agenda. International Journal of Communication 12: 19. Emirbayer, M., and A.  Mische. 1998. What is agency? American Journal of Sociology 103 (4): 962–1023. Eisner, E.W. 1997. The promise and perils of alternative forms of data representation. Educational researcher 26 (6): 4–10. Eriksen, T.H. 2016. Overheating: An anthropology of accelerated change. London: Pluto Press. Glesne, C. 1997. That rare feeling: Re-presenting research through poetic transcription. Qualitative Inquiry 3 (2): 202–221. Hill, D.A. 2005. The poetry in portraiture: Seeing subjects, hearing voices, and feeling contexts. Qualitative Inquiry 11 (1): 95–105. Kahneman, D. 2011. Thinking, fast and slow. New York: Macmillan.

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Richardson, L. 1992. The consequences of poetic representation. In C. Ellis & M. G. Flaherty (Eds.), Investigating subjectivity: Research on lived experience (pp. 125–137). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Rorty, R.M. 1989. Contingency, irony, and solidarity. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press. Rosa, H. 2013. Social acceleration: A new theory of modernity. New York: Columbia University Press. Stern, D.N. 2004. The present moment in psychotherapy and everyday life. New York: WW Norton & Company. Stoker, G., C. Hay, and M. Barr. 2016. Fast thinking: Implications for democratic politics. European Journal of Political Research 55 (1): 3–21. Terkel, S. 1970. Hard Times. New York: Pantheon. ———. ed., 1974. Working: People talk about what they do all day and how they feel about what they do. The New Press. ———. 1997. The good war: An oral history of World War II. New Press

CHAPTER 5

How to Capture a Political Mood

Abstract  This chapter describes a new method for capturing political mood. Ranging from lyrical form to urban ethnography to visual sociology, it explains how the authors went about conducting this study. It summarises the political mood in Bradford during the 2019 election, recognising the powerful affective currents that run through what is sometimes glibly referred to as ‘public opinion’. And it discusses why understanding political moods should be regarded as a vital feature of political analysis. Keywords  Mood • Moments • Structure of feeling • Feeling rules • Lyrical sociology • Visual ethnography If you stand at some distance from the scene of an election—let us say the distance of a television studio or an opinion pollster’s office—it is possible to acquire an aerial view in which everything that can be seen appears to follow a predictable pattern, and whatever does not becomes blurry and fades into the irrelevance of non-eventfulness. Through such a remote lens, it is possible to construct a view of the election in which everyone seems to know what they are doing. They have motives and interests; they act upon them; they are rationally calculating actors. We might say that distance (sociological and emotional as well as physical) engenders a complacent prospect through which the relationship between objective © The Author(s) 2020 S. Coleman, J. Brogden, Capturing the Mood of Democracy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53138-6_5

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conditions and fluctuations and subjective beliefs and actions can be effortlessly unscrambled. From such a perspective, the notion of political mood seems amorphous and superfluous; an arcane geological layer, best explored through the stock adjectives of op-ed columnists who deem particular social groups—or even the entire electorate—to be ‘angry’, ‘nervous’, ‘depressed’ or ‘irresponsible’. Beyond such sweeping characterisations, a few political scientists have attempted to analyse political mood rather more rigorously, but what they have had in mind is a quantitative representation of longitudinal attitude polling (Durr 1993; Stevenson 2001; Stimson 2018). Thus reduced to journalistic cliché or arid data, political mood becomes little more than a random twitch in the otherwise stable psyche of the rational voter. There is much to be said for the aerial view of an election. Distance induces a teleological clarity. In focusing upon the joined-up potential of the social jigsaw, analysis works backwards from the inevitability of a final election result. In this way, everything tends towards a grand moment of aggregation in which disparate experiences are ironed out through the mystery of quantification. All action is presumed to emanate from macro-­ structures, and all micro-variations from the norm are tethered to structure via reified variables. From an aerial distance, groups are more discernible than individual people and material interests much more vivid than nervous dispositions. Getting close up to the scene of an election is much messier. As an election unfolds on the ground and in real-time, one witnesses people feeling around for democratic agency. Lurching between confidence in self-­ volition and a faltering sense that their fate is vulnerable to extraneous forces, people are driven to confront the limits of their political efficacy. It is only from a close-up perspective that it becomes possible to observe in detail how people weave their way through the vicissitudes of historical indeterminacy, sometimes believing themselves to possess immense agency; at others feeling helpless in the face of forces beyond their control. The sociologist, Jack Katz (1999:309), addresses this paradox of agency when he asks, ‘How can people be so finely self-reflective and, at the same time, so powerfully and colourfully moved by hidden aspects of their being?’ To speak of the mood of a social situation is to acknowledge this ambiguous juncture between subjective determination and objective constraint. As Charles Altieri (2003:58) has so astutely stated, ‘Mood composes enigmatic states where the subject is not in control of what seems

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most intensely subjective about a situation’. In a similar vein, Hartmut Rosa (2019:383) argues that If feelings can be ascribed primarily to subjects, and atmospheres to (social or physical) space, then moods can be understood as that which exists between the two. Moods are the most basic components of relatedness.

Our aim in this book has been to take mood seriously, without allowing the term to drift towards the metaphysical intangibility with which it is sometimes associated. With that in mind, we attempt to address four key themes in this chapter. The first entails fleshing out the concept of political mood. Our aim here is to adopt what Dora Zhang (2014:124) refers to as ‘a mode of theorizing that aims less at defining or stabilizing a concept than at sensitizing us to it’. Rejecting the notion that moods are either internal subjective states or ethereal visitations from afar, we are primarily concerned to understand what political moods do; how public feelings come to be worked on through increasingly sophisticated processes of mediation. Having set out this account, we turn to the methodological challenge of apprehending and describing specific political moods, focusing primarily upon the methods that we have used in our study. We should then be in a position to say something insightful and intelligible about the mood character of the 2019 general election, as we witnessed it in Bradford. We conclude by presenting a modest manifesto for political mood studies which, like all democratic manifestos, is geared towards suggesting and stimulating rather than providing anything resembling a definitive blueprint (Fig. 5.1).

Riding Waves, Politically People devote considerable attentive energy to reading the mood of their world. Anyone who writes a diary will have reflected on how it feels to be caught up in a social mood, never quite sure whether it is your emotions that are framing your perspective, or your perspective that has agitated your emotions. Walking through a soulless street of boarded-up shops amidst relentless signs of economic despair, it is easy to absorb its drab forlornness; to internalise its mood as if it were a private feeling. Exposed at any length of time to a dull, unanimated speaker, people sometimes speak of ‘losing the will to live’, by which they are not literally admitting to suicidal thoughts, but to an enervating sense of being captured by

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Fig. 5.1  Happy Christmas, Bradford. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden)

something lifeless and unbracing. Watching a group of children happily at play might brighten a person’s day, perhaps distracting them from an intractable challenge or putting it into proportion. Margaret Wetherell (2012:140) writes about how people shift ‘from one affective zone to another, swept up, for example, in frets of communal anxiety and panic, by the warm ooze of sentimental pity, or the benignity of a shared joke’. She describes this as ‘riding waves of public feeling’. How do people learn to ride these waves? In what ways are encounters with moods social—or even political—events? It is tempting to dismiss moods as being too casual and fleeting to be of social or political significance. After all, they rarely hit us directly, but are enigmatic, background phenomena; lingering reverberations arising from stimuli that cannot be easily discerned or named. Commonly experienced ‘at the very edge of semantic availability’ (Williams 1977:134), comprising more or less than words can say, moods are easily minimised as mere sensations of the overwrought body. Being ‘in a mood’ possesses neither the status of an intellectual position nor the romance of a deep feeling. It is to be struck viscerally by an ineffable aspect of the

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environment; caught up in something that is neither private nor public, but incommunicable between the two. Impalpable though they may be, shared feelings are inherent features of human sociality. From earliest infancy, people learn how to ride the waves of feeling, sensing and adapting to the moods of others as an important feature of developmental growth (Stern 1985; Trevarthen 1998; Adamson 2018). The psychotherapist Daniel Stern (2004:76–7) makes a remarkably important claim about the extent to which humans are bound together intersubjectively: Our nervous systems are constructed to be captured by the nervous systems of others, so that we can experience others as if from within their skin, as well as from within our own …We live surrounded by others’ intentions, feelings and thoughts that interact with our own, so that what is ours and what belongs to others starts to break down.

Stern follows up on this statement by providing a compelling array of comprehensively referenced developmental, neuroscientific and phenomenological evidence to demonstrate the existence of what he calls ‘the intersubjective matrix’ (ibid:77). If we are connected to our affective environment in the way described by Stern, the implications for individualist accounts of socio-psychological agency are enormous. Far from being anomalous phenomena, shared moods would make perfect sense and claims about subjectively autonomous sensibilities would begin to seem rather eccentric. While the writings of Daniel Stern and many others in defence of an intersubjective interpretation of communicative interaction are of great value, they also beg some questions (Buber 1992; Crossley 1996; Mercer 2002; Stern 2010b; Benjamin 2017). If we live surrounded by others’ intentions, feelings and thoughts that interact with our own, why is it that we are more likely to be ‘captured’ by some than others? Are some feelings more ‘in tune’ with a historical moment than others? What sort of interventions might be taking place with a view to promoting the take-up of certain feelings and neglect or even suppression of others? Are there cultural ‘rules’ that make certain forms of mood expression more socially acceptable than others? These questions point us in the direction of the political dynamics of intersubjectivity. As with the allocation of anything of value, public feelings are neither equally nor innocently distributed. To speak of political mood is therefore not simply a matter of exploring the feelings that people have in relation to politics, but the many

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ways in which the circulation, adoption and value of public feelings are politicised. People are vulnerable to captivity not only by other people’s nervous systems but also by strategic attempts to make them feel certain ways. Active attempts to tell people how to process and make sense of their experience are ongoing, not only in traditional socialising contexts of family and community, but via highly resourced bodies dedicated to advertising, urban design, mood-regulating entertainment (such as muzak), religious belief and, of course, political rhetoric. There is rarely only one available feeling state on offer, but many different affective takes on the same experience in circulation at any one time. Inculcating mood is a prime cultural venture within the contemporary attention economy, not least in the political sphere where volatile preferences are regarded as rich pickings. Election campaigns can be seen as classic attempts to shape public mood: ‘You felt great under the last government. The last government let you down, leaving you with an ache of disappointment’. To take sides in an election is to buy into a mood (Fig. 5.2).

Fig. 5.2  David on the doorstep. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden)

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As we travelled around Bradford asking people what they were thinking about the election, they insisted on telling us what they felt about it. The semantic shift is subtle but, as political conversation moves into a sensory mode, its focus veers from voters’ interests, preferences and values to their dispositional readiness to be stimulated. Political movements emerge as political forces that move people. It is not only how to feel that is politicised but also how to express such feelings. People are under pressure to learn which feelings are appropriate to express to whom, and in what terms. Certain moods are read as disclosures of fine sensibility, others as overwrought excitability; sometimes these contrasting labels are applied to identical expressions of mood by two differently positioned people. Feeling rules (Hochschild 1979) determine expressive propriety in mood talk, classifying certain forms of speech or gesture as vulgar, foolish, disrespectful or simply unintelligible. Many of the people we encountered in Bradford refused to talk about the election or warned us that we would not want to hear what they had to say because they believed themselves to be in an inadmissible mood. To act upon what Alison Jaggar (1989) refers to as ‘outlaw emotions’ is to become vulnerable to stigmatisation. (A key convention-breaching device adopted by populist politicians is to flirt with mood-states that their mainstream opponents deem to be pathological). The politics of affective expression has long been used to downplay and dismiss women’s views by branding them as overstrung. In short, the politics of affective regulation legitimises and devalorises public feelings. Despite efforts to engineer and manage them, moods often have a life of their own as unruly registers of a historical moment or period. They reflect a temper of the times. Raymond Williams (1977:131) famously referred to these historically characterising affective states as ‘structures of feeling’: ‘a particular quality of social experience and relationship, historically distinct from other particular qualities, which gives the sense of a generation or of a period’. It is this sense of moods as phenomena that are ‘not fully articulated’, but ‘comes through as disturbance, tension, blockage, emotional trouble’ (Williams 1977:68) that have interested us in the current study. Like others who have written about Williams’ ‘structure of feeling’ (Ngai 2005; Anderson 2014; Highmore 2017), we acknowledge that the term lacks theoretical rigour and can sometimes appear to be saying more than it is. But it is precisely this openness to the amorphous ambivalence of affective experience, subverting the insensibility of the worst kinds of rigid materialism, that we find appealing. The search for

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political mood entails an endeavour to disclose what Thomas Pfau (2005:7) refers to as ‘the deep-structural situatedness of individuals within history as something never actually intelligible to them in fully coherent, timely, and definitive form’. As we observed people riding the waves of an election, it was not always easy to distinguish between when they were being swept forward by the swell and when they were driven by the force of their own agency. It is precisely within this interstitial space that political moods become conspicuous.

Ways of Witnessing an Election We liked to think of ourselves as flâneurs, walking without haste, at random, abandoning ourselves to the impressions and sights of the moment (McLean 1988:56, cited by Jenks and Neves 2000:1). But this was at best an ironic conceit, adopted to make ourselves feel more spontaneous than we ever were. The more prosaic reality was that we did a lot of walking about the city in the weeks before the election campaign officially started and then while it was going on. We walked because we knew that the political is a diffuse phenomenon, not confined to obvious places, such as political party meetings, local media sites or polling stations. In fact, it is legally excluded from the latter (Coleman 2012). We sensed that the political mood of this election would be discovered in spaces between its official manifestations, so we made a commitment from the outset to walk around as many streets as we could, talking to and hanging out with as many different types of people as would put up with us. We paid to sit in the back of taxis so that we could gather oral histories that almost every driver we encountered seemed capable of imparting. We spent time in religious establishments where we almost forgot that we were atheists. We wandered and we wondered. One of us felt compelled to devise routes that led us to grounds where he had played cricket as a boy (these were now mainly closed down). The other drove us into cafes, ostensibly to listen out for informal election talk, but in fact to satisfy his unquenchable craving for espresso. It might not have been Baudelairean flânerie, but there was method in our strolling. As Chris Jenks and Tiago Neves (2000:7) point out in their astute study of the flâneur as ethnographer, there is an important distinction between mere idling and sensuous engagement with an object of social investigation: ‘We must not forget expressed intention of producing a description, a comment, the intention of expressing feelings’. Working out how to realise these intentions was

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not easy, but in retrospect we were able to reflect on three distinct modes of enquiry: the performative, the visual and the textual. Performing an Election Elections are public events. They cannot be performed without a participating cast of actors known as citizens or voters. An election in which only the political elite are aware that anything is going on will fail as a cultural moment. The electorate must play its part and huge efforts are made to get them to do so. But what does performing this part entail? The most obvious act is voting. (On election day 2019, two-thirds of the people in Bradford who were eligible to do so did vote and one-third did not.) Beyond that, the performance becomes quite thin. A very small minority of the city’s population actively campaigned for a party or candidate; took part in public meetings or online discussions relating to the election; or read the manifestos on offer from the various parties. In terms of active citizenship, the electorate’s performance was somewhat lacklustre. We were interested in observing electoral performance from a close-up, cultural perspective. Baiocchi and Connor (2008:141) note that, while many ethnographically inclined political researchers have focused on the inner workings of political institutions and movements, a few have started to turn their attention to ‘the lived experience of the political’. In these latter studies, ‘the everyday in itself becomes a politically relevant site, whether or not recognizable “political actors” are present’. As researchers in the field, we were less interested in focusing upon the extent to which people met the normative expectations of constitutional citizenship than in how they thought they were supposed to perform during an election; how everyday displays of urban sociality might be interpreted as political, apolitical or anti-political and how the event of a general election impinged on lives dominated by many other calls for attention. We were inspired by Nina Eliasoph’s (1990, 1998) studies of the socially established codes whereby people avoided politics and distanced themselves from the burdens of democratic performance. Her normative focus upon ‘the process by which citizens collectively create a sense of empathic connection or disconnection to the larger society’ (1998:278) and her empirical decision to pay attention to political displays in context fitted perfectly with our interest in looking for electoral democracy through the cracks of the mundane.

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This involved a sensitivity to performances of citizenship, often within contexts in which people’s adherence to civic norms was frustrated by the exhausting struggle to keep going and make ends meet. We were interested in performative displays of two kinds. Firstly, there were displays that people enacted when they thought that their citizenship—or even selfhood—was being interrogated or appraised. These were the performances of indifference, concern, irreverence, resentment and agency that inflected people’s responses to many of the questions that we asked them. Just as there is no such thing as a totally innocent research question, there is no such thing as a wholly unperformed answer. As Goffman (1959) reminded us, performance of self is a feature of not only research interactions but also all communicative exchanges. People perform themselves even when they are not preoccupied by giving or making an impression. This leads us to a second, much less conscious, mode of display that interested us. As they move about in the city, performing the everyday routines of urban life, from attending to or avoiding countless strangers on the street to engaging in café talk, people adhere to habits and codes of public behaviour that both reflect and generate moods. Much of our time was therefore spent in silent watching with a view to spotting moments when performances of getting through the day were inflected by civic or electoral considerations. But our research entailed more than watching, however closely. It also led us to meet and speak with hundreds of people in a diverse range of settings. We conducted in-depth interviews; informal discussions with groups of people in sites that were familiar to them; and chats with people on the street and in cafes and taxis. If people were willing to give us their phone numbers, we asked if they would be willing to receive questions by text every three or four days throughout the campaign; and as a result, we ended up with thousands of words of live-text commentary on immediate experience of the election (see Chap. 4). Could this be described as truly ethnographic research? It certainly conforms to the four ethnographic commitments usefully set out by the anthropologist, Daniel Miller (1997:16–17). The first is ‘to be in the presence of the people one is studying, and not merely of the texts or objects they produce’. Apart from the historical and socio-demographic information about Bradford in Chap. 1, everything in this study emerged from direct interaction with people as agents in their own right. We were interested in finding out from people about their situated experiences and the stories that they told about them. We explored their accounts for patterns

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and discrepancies, but never sought to assume that we had special knowledge that could be substituted for the lessons derived from hanging out with real people. Miller’s second commitment, ‘to evaluate people in terms of what they actually do … and not merely what they say they do’, entailed a mode of critical questioning that pushed people to tell us about more than their intentions. We were interested in finding out what people did as political agents and how that related to their beliefs and feelings. We were mindful of Miller’s third commitment ‘to an investigation that allows people to return to a daily life that one hopes goes beyond what is performed for the ethnographer’. We were able to observe some of the people in our study in more than one setting—mosque and martial arts’ gym; interview room and door-to-door canvassing—and, by maintaining contact through text messages, were able to track them across sites and times. But, by its nature, a British election campaign (confined to an official period of 60 days) did not allow us enough time for the kind of long-term immersion within a scene that is characteristic of exhaustive ethnography. Miller’s fourth commitment, to examine people’s behaviour ‘within the larger framework of their lives and cosmologies’, summarised a central ambition of our research. We were not merely documentarists, naively setting out to record some sort of pristine reality. The ‘larger framework’ for us was the affective environment surrounding and shaping the election, identified through a constant toing and froing between the testimonies of actors and what could be conjectured on the basis of our own sensory encounters with the city. From this process emerged an interpretive representation of impressions rather than anything resembling hard positivist data. As Sarah Pink (2007:22) notes, Rather than a method for the collection of data, ethnography is a process of creating and representing knowledge (about society, culture and individuals) that is based on ethnographers’ own experiences. It does not claim to produce an objective or truthful account of reality, but should aim to offer versions of ethnographers’ experiences of reality that are as loyal as possible to the context, negotiations and intersubjectivities through which the knowledge was produced. This may entail reflexive, collaborative or participatory methods.

Our primary aim in this study was to develop creative interpretations of ethnographic data. As Rhodes and Corbett (2019:7) suggest, ‘interpretive ethnography is less concerned with generalizations than with raising new

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questions’ and ‘shaking the bag’. If this book contributes in any way to a shake-up of electoral studies by demonstrating that there is value in asking questions about the lived experience of a seminal political event like a general election, then our methodological choices will have been justified. Seeing an Election How can an election be made visible? How can its mood be recorded through photography? A long-standing resistance to photographic research within academia has rested on the assumption that it can only be valid as a data-gathering device, concomitant with its largely illustrative function. Photographs as evidential research artefacts are commonly viewed as being somehow subservient to a ‘central narrative’. While the photographic medium is often said to expose hidden truths, others argue that it inevitably distorts and obfuscates a research enquiry, skewing the sociological context of ‘making, taking and reading’ and rendering any worthwhile analysis untenable (Prosser 1998:99). The photographs that we have included in this book seek to counter these reservations by occupying a non-illustrative function. They contribute equally with the written text to a record of mood impressions. The decision to take photographs was based on our conviction that photography could not just record, but critically penetrate ‘the characteristic attributes of people, objects, and events that often elude even the most skilled wordsmiths’ (Prosser and Schwartz 1998:116). We were motivated from the outset by Elizabeth Edwards’ (1997:58) observation that Photography can communicate about culture, peoples’ lives, experiences and beliefs, not at the level of surface description, but as a visual metaphor, which bridges the space between the visible and the invisible, which communicates not through the realist paradigm but through a lyrical expressiveness.

It is not, in other words, that the camera gives us access to social reality in the raw, but that the images it captures enable us to witness not only what is manifestly present but also what is simmering beneath or hovering on the edge of presence. In relation to our election study, in which the atmosphere seemed replete with an absence of democratic vivacity, photographs caught the sense of what was not there: of conspicuous political

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silences. Speaking of photography as a record of absence, Les Back (2004:135) observes that [T]here is something to be listened to in these silent portraits. Part of what is compelling about them is that they contain voices that are present yet inaudible. We have to listen for them with our eyes. (Back 2004:135)

A similar sense of visual absence to that reflected in the photographs throughout this book can be found in William Eggleston’s (1977) photographic-­essay, Election Eve. Following in the tradition of the earlier beat-poets and the contemporary photographers who exhibited at the seminal 1975 New Topographies show at Eastman House, Eggleston decided to represent the rural area of Sumter County, Georgia, surrounding Plains, the hometown of Presidential hopeful, Jimmy Carter. Eggleston’s photographic essay records in ‘deadpan’ style a series of seemingly inconsequential American rural southern tropes featuring a detached melancholic middle-distance framing of train tracks, deserted gas stations and dilapidated wooden houses mostly devoid of inhabitants. Interestingly, in relation to the Bradford photographs, there are no explicit references to an election taking place in Eggleston’s photographic series. What is implicit in both Eggleston’s photographs and the Bradford images is how places can appear untouched by political events, even though these places may be most vulnerable to political changes. After Carter’s successful election as the 39th President in November 1976, Eggleston’s poignant photographs around Plains evoke a contrasting mood to the version promoted by the media: Eggleston’s intentions, in so far as they can be read, and the images he actually brought back from Plains are anything but obvious. The photographs have a quietude and unsentimental romanticism, as well as an edge of poignance [sic] which belie the expectations of hopefulness or portentousness suggested by a knowledge of the time and place in which they were made. On the eve of the election, when nothing had yet been decided, when everything–whatever that everything was–hung in the balance, Eggleston made an elegy […] a statement of perfect calm. (Fonvielle 1977: Preface to Election Eve)

Like Eggleston, our aim was to the capture a mood of indeterminacy in which ‘nothing had yet been decided’ and yet, looking at the corporate

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semiotics that pervaded Bradford in the absence of electoral symbolism, perhaps everything had been decided. Getting a feel for the mood of the city during an election period involved more than determining the best camera angles. It was a product of hours of walking and waiting for images to become meaningful. An average daily walk in Bradford would take place from 10 a.m. to 4.00 p.m., when the light was conducive to photography. Some photographs were also taken in the early evening, especially during the latter weeks of the election from December onwards. The photographs were taken with two lenses; a 50 mm lens to record specific places without people in the frame, and a 110 mm lens to emphasise specific iconography and the passage of people. To preserve a certain anonymity of the subjects captured, the framing concentrated on their relationship to particular spaces; on some occasions, it was essential that the environmental visual content (in a semiotic sense) was invigorated by the presence, and in some sense, the occupation of Bradford citizens. This approach often involved waiting for the subject(s) to enter the camera’s frame with a view to capturing a specific anthropological perspective, such as the omnipresence of advertising media instead of election signs in public space. The intention behind the photography was to reveal a series of unexpected aspects of everyday life in Bradford as the city experienced the political imposition of an event called an election. As we have already indicated, what was surprising ‘in the field’ was the bizarre absence of visual material relating to the election. Our task was to present what we saw as a reflection of the mood background to the election. As we point out in our critical reflections on the photographs, these are not supposed to be illustrative of, or subordinate to, the written text. Neither do we offer our interpretation of the photographs as being in any sense definitive. The point about mood is that it is never definitive: always open to polysemic readings. As Terence Wright (2004:87) notes, The captured moment which can never be repeated has been secured by the camera for reproduction and repeated viewing. The camera enables aspects of our perception to endure over time. It presents the opportunity to the viewer which goes beyond the bounds of everyday perception, offering time and space to imagine, examine or analyse in a way that would not normally be possible.

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Fig. 5.3  Shop mannequins. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden)

Grasping lived political experience by going beyond the bounds of everyday perception is a project of visual methodology that can illuminate the mood of an election in ways that are qualitatively different from and supplementary to the power of words (Fig. 5.3). Writing an Election The move from witnessing to testimony is a rhetorical exercise. As Paul Atkinson (1990:16) helpfully reminds us, sociological texts in general are inescapably rhetorical. Whether they adopt an explicitly exhortatory tone, or purport merely to report neutral ‘facts’, they rely upon devices of persuasion to construct plausible accounts, striking contrasts, historical inevitabilities; to link data into convincing sequences of cause and effect; to embed theory into data and vice versa.

Just as conventional political scientists attach special significance to certain facts and findings; select a few opinion poll findings from hundreds or thousands that they might have highlighted and seek to establish chains of

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causation that can only ever be products of theory—we had to decide which moments of witnessing were most striking and how to convey them. Every book includes invisible pages of deleted texts and neglected themes. The best that writers can do is to explain, and where necessary, justify their decisions. For us, the most important decision we made was to write lyrically rather than narratively. To be clear, this was not a decision to downplay narrative—indeed, our strong focus upon polyphonous stories reflects our sense that elections are first and foremost occasions for narrative contestation—but a methodological commitment to write about the election as something that was indeterminately unfolding as we witnessed it. As Andrew Abbott (2007:74), the principal theorist of lyrical sociology, puts it, accounts of this sort are written from the perspective of ‘an intense participation in the object studied’. In this spirit, we have written from a stance that is emotionally engaged and sensitive to a particular consciousness that is located in a specific place and moment in time. Abbott (ibid:76) contrasts the main differences between lyrical and narrative accounts in the following way: A narrative writer seeks to tell us what happened and perhaps to explain it. A lyrical writer aims to tell us of his or her intense reaction to some portion of the social process seen in a moment. This means that the first will tell us about sequences of events while the second will give us congeries of images. It means that the first will try to show reality by abstract mimesis while the second will try to make us feel reality through concrete emotions. It means that the first will emphasize the artifice through which his or her mimetic model is made while the second will emphasize the vividness of his or her passion toward the world the writer studies. These larger differences will be reflected in the details of writing. The lyricist will use more figurative language and more personification.

As a rhetorical strategy, we were less interested in looking at the election from the perspective of its predicted or actual outcome than in conveying a sense of its unfolding cultural impact. Political scholars often write about elections as if they are jigsaws, best analysed once they have been joined together. A common assumption of such scholars is that everyone involved in an election knows how it will end. People will vote. A decision will be seen to have been made. Some will be pleased with the result, others disappointed. Connections and discrepancies between local

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and national results will generate ambivalent feelings (as in Bradford, where Labour won in the city but lost nationally). While all of these upshots can be anticipated from day one of most election campaigns, our interest was in the uncertainty of unresolved history. We might say that we were more interested in hanging out with the jigsaw pieces, observing their imagined disconnections and random proclivities, than focusing on the foreseeable endgame. Experience in the present tense is inherently raw and indeterminate. The whole point of an election, like a horse race or chess game, is its lack of an inevitable result. Data might point towards a certain outcome, but the sensory datum always lives in the moment. Our aim in writing this book has therefore been to catch moods of contingent immediacy by remaining as close as possible to the unsettled moments in which people looked forward rather than points of historical resolution from which they looked back. Not only does such writing approximate to how people actually experience the political in their everyday lives, but it speaks to the mutability of affect that constitutes mood (Fig. 5.4).

Fig. 5.4  White garage. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden)

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The Mood of the 2019 Election in Bradford It was a moody election. Brexit had made people fractious. A sense of being ‘left behind’ had caused many people in post-industrial areas like Bradford to feel distrustful and resentful. The highly polarised media debate drove many to distraction—and many more to disengagement. There were few signs of an election taking place as we walked around the city, but when we approached people and poked a metaphorical stick at their democratic sensibilities, it was hard to miss a lingering moodiness. The declaration that we were conducting research about the election was typically met with degrees of weariness and disdain. It was as if we personified an event that was never going to end very well. People would ask us why we cared. Of course, as in any city, a minority of people cared passionately and actively. They had ‘skins in the game’. Conservative activists tended to seem quietly confident, expecting a good outcome nationally if not locally. Some Labour activists were hopeful in ways that they never had been before, while other Labour supporters sounded half-hearted, clearly believing that their chances were hopeless. The vivacious energy of the intensely engaged minority was palpable; they seemed like a small group of excited trainspotters amidst a vast crowd of frustrated commuters waiting for a train that they knew would be late and overfull. The contrast between the ardour of the activists and the inertia of everyone else spawned a chasm that it was hard to ignore. Some of this mood was rooted locally in the city’s long, hard experience of post-industrial decline; its relatively recent history of divisive and disruptive riots; its reputation as a symbol of strained multiculturalism; the impact of George Galloway’s opportunist arrival in the city as MP for Bradford West and, of course, the infamous hole. Mood is invariably inflected by local specificity. And yet there was much going on here that could only be explained beyond the overworked accounts of Bradford as a ‘problem city’. How people feel about the world depends upon not only where they are but also where they are not. When an election seems to come from a centre of power that is afar and aloof; when the messages from the most authoritative leaders are nearly always in accents that do not resemble your own; when the mediation of news is invariably produced by people whose educational backgrounds and homes and tastes are nothing like your own, such distance becomes mood-framing. People feel defined not by their

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position in the world but by their detachment from positions that count. As we spoke to people who regarded themselves as non-political, conversation would often turn to ‘the people with big money down in London’ or how Bradford had lost out because Leeds (a mere 10 miles away) had taken all the investment. Not relating to politics rarely meant that people had no views about how society could be improved or injustices addressed, but that they saw themselves as outsiders, misunderstood by a political class whose members knew little about how they lived. As one public transport worker put it when asked why he had no time for politicians, ‘They don’t respect us, so why should we respect them?’ More than once people imitated what they considered to be a typical politician’s voice, and each time they assumed a posh southern accent. If, as democratic idealists hope, elections are occasions for a ‘national public conversation’, it seemed to many people to be a discussion conducted in voices that did not sound like theirs. People’s sense that the election was as an event that would begin and end in Westminster rather than Bradford was not simply a reflection of parochial disdain for the capital, but of an emotional disconnect between the everyday pressures of holding things together in a post-industrial city and the grand claims of political campaigners who talked about spending billions on this and hundreds of millions on that. A jarring contrast between political rhetoric and mundane life made the former seem like rude intrusion: an attempt to enmesh a population in a drama, even though they had already been written out of the script. The ‘safeness’ of the city’s constituencies as Labour strongholds exacerbated a sense that voting was more a confirmation than a decision. Walking through the streets of Bradford on those cold, dark November and December days, we began to see patterns in the ways that people moved; the spaces between them; and the looks on their faces that were suggestive of a collective mood. In field notes after one day of walking, one of us noted that People on the street move quickly. Everyone appears to be trying to get something done. No window shopping. No casual conversations. No sitting on any of the public benches. It’s freezing cold and it makes sense to keep moving. But there was more to it than that. A nervousness in the face of the precarious economy. A lot of pinched faces and chary movements. Not a lot of eye contact  – cultivated urban inattention. There were a lot of people who were clearly facing poverty. (There are everywhere, but there was a

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v­ isible abjection here, indicative of a badly failing welfare system). A lot of people standing in doorways waiting for … waiting to … Shops that could only profit from desperation: cash converters; bookies; used clothes and shoe stores. Everyone going somewhere fast, but a dispiriting sense that nothing good was ever going to happen fast.

This brings to mind Lauren Berlant’s (2011:8) notion of impasse as a condition of being stuck in an historical rut. She urges us to consider how a new contemporary state of affairs is characterised by ‘impasse shaped by crisis in which people find themselves developing skills for adjusting to newly proliferating pressures to scramble for modes of living on’. In an impasse, forms of everyday social survivalism become routine, with barely suppressed trepidation as the default affective condition. Might these qualities of social experience point to what Raymond Williams had in mind when he wrote about ‘structures of feeling’? Such affective tendencies, that seem to characterise an historical mood, are far from easy to measure empirically but loom impressionistically as indicators of collectively internalised crisis. As people sensed a withering of their socio-economic agency, they turned inwards to the skin and bones of their own bodies. It seemed that every row of shops contained another nail bar. Every derelict industrial estate contained a gym. What was going on here? After spending a particularly cold day in the city a week before the election, one of us observed in our field notes that It seems as if, having lost hope in possessing any meaningful kind of social power, people’s bodies are all they have left to work on. Painting nails; building muscles; the body flexed and decorated. These places are oases of self-care in a world that has become uncaring and careless. Standing outside Greggs, watching people eat sausage rolls out of paper bags, it seemed as if these bodies desired forms of feeding that the electoral menus on offer had failed to make appetising. How many nail bars or cross trainers does a city need?

And it was the run-up to Christmas: a season replete with hyper-­ stimulated affectivity. The semiotic tropes advertising synthetic goodwill were ubiquitous. Democracy and its electoral moment simply had no capacity to compete with this ersatz festivity. The election faded into the background as the mood muzak of Silent Night and Ding Dong Merrily on High worked their dubious charms. But even Christmas never quite

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managed to counter the mood of alienation that hung over the city. Hartmut Rosa (2019:310) describes this mood as ‘a fundamental anxiety’ of ‘being or becoming an unconnected relationless “atom” in a mute or hostile world’. Rosa contrasts this to successful—or, in his terms, resonant—relationships to the world ‘defined neither by the relative abundance of resources and opportunities, nor by one’s share of the world, but by the degrees to which one is connected with and open to other people (and things)’ (ibid:27). This sense of relational estrangement overshadowed the city, overriding more abstract metrics of material deprivation. The existence of neighbouring communities that hardly spoke to one another and expressed suspicion towards one another; the pervasiveness of mobile phones as prosthetic substitutes for face-to-face communication; the glazed insensibility of the city’s countless drug addicts and drunks; the whispered undertones of racism … all of these pointed to a mood in which it was easy to stumble into what appeared to be a mute and hostile world. We do not want to paint a mood of total bleakness. We encountered many people who seemed to be as contented as anyone can convey through their public demeanour. There were a lot of congenial micro-­communities. The mosque was clearly more than a place of worship; it was filled with dozens of children for whom it was a venue for amity and play. The gurdwara included an impressive kitchen in which collective cooking for the community took place, and the adjoining fitness gym was regarded as an integral part of their spiritual endeavour. The working men’s club was not only about booze but also about the perpetuation of a way of life. We spent an evening at the wonderful Ukrainian club, listening to their choir practising, and witnessing a community that seemed truly at home within its cultural history. The asylum centre struck us as an uplifting oasis of hospitality and fellowship. We visited other centres and workplaces in which people seemed at ease with themselves. But did these communities speak to one another? When asked how they felt about Bradford as a city rather than their own social networks, some were keen to tell us that they liked living there, although this was usually followed by ‘despite its problems’. There was a widespread belief that Bradford was not well regarded by people from other cities: it is seen as a troubled city. Perhaps it is no more troubled than any other city that has lost its industrial foundations and been starved of public funding through years of austerity. Perhaps it is simply more honest about its mood of disappointment (Fig. 5.5). In the midst of all this was the general election: a moment in which people are invited to participate in an event that is supposed to be

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Fig. 5.5  Boy and Barrel. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden)

empowering. This invitation tested the promise of universal democratic efficacy. For some people, the election provided an opportunity to exercise their political agency, to become active and excited rather than demoralised and alienated. But for many others, the invitation to participate was taken as an unwanted demand upon their time. Recall ‘Brenda from Bristol’s’ vox-pop lament when she was asked by a journalist what she thought about Theresa May calling an election in 2017, after the Brexit referendum in 2016 and a previous general election in 2015: You’re joking! Not another one? Oh for God’s sake… I can’t stand this … There’s too much politics going on at the moment. Why does she [May] need to do it?

The 2019 election was the fourth national plebiscite in four years, and we met many Brendas on our journey. People had become used to the repetitious rituals of elections: the speeches and slogans, abundantly lavish promises, relentless polls, televised debates, online targeting. This was described as a ‘Brexit election’, and many people were exhausted by the

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over-rehearsed arguments surrounding that subject. Those who wanted Brexit to happen considered that they had already been victorious in the referendum in 2016 and should not have to win another election in order to implement their will. Opponents of Brexit were frustrated by the fact that no party likely to win the election took a firm stand against what they regarded as the reckless act of leaving the European Union. With its often unsubtly coded messages about whether immigrants should be made welcome in Britain, the Brexit saga was beginning to feel like a bad-tempered argument that had dragged on for too long. Making it the centrepiece of the election felt rather like an opportunity for a divorcing couple to take a holiday together so that they could dwell on the issues that drove them apart. From the outset, the media-staged political debate was polarised and nasty, its online echo often noxiously intransigent. Several of the people we interviewed at length (see Chap. 4) were feeling despondent, even unwell. If the election contributed to the mood of the city, it was to exacerbate a tenseness that was already well established. As election day drew closer, it was hard to feel a political pulse. Beyond an isolated band of partisan enthusiasts who had populated the few husting events and were preparing to attend the Count where they would cheer or lament dutifully, there were few discernible signs of public emotion. The notion of democracy as an affective coming together of the represented seemed as hollow as the notion that the lit-up Christmas tree in the city centre signified collective exultation. If there was an eve-of-­ election mood, it was one of ambient indifferences. Not an absence of mood, but a mood of absence; nobody at home to greet the historic transition to be ushered in via the tinny, official ballot boxes. The polling stations were neither crowded nor deserted. People went in and came out, usually with the same gait and gaze in both directions. They had ‘turned out’, as the political term has it. They had not shouted, cried, laughed, proclaimed, denounced or whispered private manifestos, but turned up and entered the makeshift secrecy of the polling booth. Then they went home to find out what they’d done, in the confident expectation that a few months hence nothing very much will have changed. How very wrong they were about that …

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Why Study Political Moods? Our election study was motivated by two questions: How do moods impinge upon political consciousness? How do people make meaning out of their everyday feelings? These are not usual questions to ask within election studies, the typical foci of which are patterns of public preference formation; the role of parties as intermediaries between public opinion and state action; the priming and framing efforts of the mainstream media; and strategic attempts to shape public values. Such concerns routinely underestimate the ways in which democracy is more than an aggregation of individual interests. While it is the case that electoral logic is rooted in expressions of privatised preference, the thought and experience upon which such personal judgement depends is rarely autonomous. Before entering the covert sanctuary of the polling booth, people are embedded in social environments that expose them to the thoughts and feelings of others. Selective exposure to circulating ideas is the basis of intellectual pluralism. No evidence or rationale is so cognitively unassailable that everyone is bound to accept it; hence, the inevitability of political disagreement about the most fundamental questions of what is true, important, valuable or right. The same applies to affective exposure. People who are in the same situation as one another often feel differently about it, sometimes to the extent of refusing to recognise that they are in the same situation. Elections are moments in which these exclusive perceptions are made explicit. They are occasions for making the imbalance of affective dynamics visible. The challenge for election scholars is to understand and explain these affective dynamics. Doing so entails moving beyond individualised accounts of political agency, focused on voters as rationally calculating atoms in pursuit of sovereign interests, towards an understanding of citizens as beings who are always entangled in social webs of interdependence. Voters are interactants. They not only speak to and learn from one another, but they are, in Stern’s terms, surrounded by others’ intentions, feelings and thoughts that interact with their own. The decision to study political mood is therefore an acknowledgement that the dynamics of affective interaction are at the core of how voters feel. For example, how any particular person feels about an election will depend upon the contingencies of the intersecting life spheres (Passy and Giugni 2000) and chance path-crossings through which they find themselves entering different domains of what Randall Collins (2001:27) refers to as ‘emotional

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attention space’. Voters who are forced to spend their time in jobcentres are likely to see an election differently from voters just returning from a holiday abroad. People’s electoral moods depend upon immediately available stimuli. Of course, going back to the early voting studies of Paul Lazarsfeld and his colleagues (1954), voters were studied in the context of their personal networks. These studies demonstrated that the values and preferences people acquire from direct contact with their family, friends and neighbours are key to determining their political outlooks. More recent work by Robert Huckfeldt and John Sprague (1995:1197) has returned to a focus upon social networks, arriving at the important conclusion that ‘political information is processed and integrated not by isolated individuals but rather by interdependent individuals who conduct their day-to-day activities in socially structured ways and who send and receive distinctive interpretations of political events in a repetitive process of social interaction’. We welcome this turn to political sociality but wish to see it extended to a more penetrative account of affective interdependence, or mood. Such an account would involve an endeavour to trace the ways in which political proclivities and dispositions are shaped by changes in people’s affective environments. Much attention is currently being paid to the identification, tracking, measurement and indeed modification of personal moods. Writing about ‘the contemporary spread of interfaces facilitating “real-time” nonverbal—and sometimes unquantified—affective feedback’, William Davies (2017:35) observes how many contemporary individuals submit themselves to a kind of private panopticon in which they are told how they are feeling. What is being collected is a record of their emergent and fluctuating subjectivity, rendered into ostensibly objective metrics. Deborah Lupton (2016:18) argues that ‘self-tracking conforms to a conservative political agenda that represents citizens as automated/autonomous subjects, ideally engaging in self-responsibilized practices of dataveillance and life optimization and emitting valuable “data exhausts” for repurposing by other actors and agencies’. In short, the pursuit of individual, objectivised mood misses the relational context within which people tend to be captured by waves of feeling, often pre-reflectively. Only by shifting the focus from individual feeling-states to public moods as products of interaction between people and their environment will election analysts be in a position to understand the relational dynamics of political affect. The theoretical case for relational sociology is now well established (Emirbayer 1997; Burkitt 2002, 2016; Dépelteau 2013), but

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it has yet to be taken up in any systematic way by political scholars. What would this entail? A first move would be to abandon the search for moods as phenomena that act upon inert subjects—like the weather—and attend instead to affective practices (Wetherell 2012) as ways in which people learn to express the quality of their relationships to the world. Emotional responses to political situations should not be thought of as unthinking gut reactions, self-reflective feedback upon experiences and constraints. Affective practices should be thought of therefore as socially rehearsed responses to situations ‘where normality is first a biological matter and then very quickly becomes a cultural one’ (De Sousa 1990:121). The questions for election researchers concern how voters—and, of course, non-voters—work out how to express their feelings of being thrown into or caught up in or disengaged from an election. What vocabularies do they have available to them for articulating not only their interests, preferences and values but also their disappointments, embarrassments or wishes to be somewhere else? How do citizens learn to perform political enthusiasm or frustration? How might they distinguish between feeling in a bad mood about an election and a good mood about democracy? We have become familiar with the agonising of political commentators regarding the disconnection between citizens and the institutions of democracy. No recent election study has been complete without a concerned reference to popular disenchantment. By way of shorthand description, mood-states are often lazily ascribed to electorates, as if they were tetchy infants. But we would argue that rather than thinking of affective political responses as passive reflexes, they should be understood as astute and often artful ways of appraising the qualities of a relationship. Elections in this sense are not simply tests of what or who people believe, but how they feel about what is on offer and their capacity to make a difference. A second move in the direction of relational election analysis would be for researchers to acknowledge the difference between narrative political studies that look back on the course of an election and seek to explain its historical trajectory and more lyrical studies of unfolding political experience and mood which are sensitive to the radical ambiguity and inconclusiveness of the present moment. The latter approach requires researchers to stay with people as they are being moved by forces that they might not have time or capacity to reflect upon, and which are always surrounded by historical indeterminacy. Unlike narrative accounts, in which beginning, middle and ending have been structurally arranged, engagement with

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history as it unfolds in the present tense calls for a degree of unknowingness that is inherent to the human state of permanent vulnerability. In the context of an election campaign, people often do not quite know what to think or feel about claims being made or images being thrust upon them. They often do not know how to connect their ethical values, material interests and voting intentions. They certainly do not know how the political event they find themselves part of will end up. By approaching people as they are in the thick of a political moment, experienced in the present tense as both transitory and unsettled, researchers are more likely to ‘hear the whisper of possibility and the sigh of passage’ (Abbott 2007:90). Our aim in the present study has been to catch political feelings as ‘forms of vitality’ (Stern 2010a), not yet assembled as attitudes or opinions. When people told us how they felt, they were not referring to a point of arrival but to an affective journey that might lead them to a range of different destinations. This emphasis upon the present moment is important because, although sophisticated democratic consciousness should take both past experience and future consequences into account, it is in the present that situationally based judgement occurs. People live their lives in real time, subject to the mediating effects of passing or lingering moods. Asked how they would vote, many people told us ‘I’ll see how I feel when I get to the polling station’. They were not being entirely capricious or reckless in saying this but were simply registering the influence of mood upon their intentions. As we have already stated, political campaigners exert considerable efforts to put voters in the right mood for actions they want them to take. It is hardly irresponsible for voters themselves to reflect on their susceptibility to moods—or for researchers to explore the dynamics of such susceptibility. By taking present-tense feelings as critical variables for understanding the motivation and volatility of the electorate, the study of democracy becomes less a record or explanation of outcomes and more a textural account of a state of flux in which decisions might be made. This leads us to a third move, which is rather more methodological. Researchers hoping to access the complex relationality of an election as it unfolds in real-time need to rely upon more than written description and numerical representation. Elections are multisensory events, best captured through a range of research modalities. We share Sarah Pink’s (2011:263) argument for multimodal ethnographic research. She states that

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it is our assumed ability to perceive the world around us – and as such the modes of communication that produce meanings/representations in the form of media – through the five (differentiated) senses that is pivotal for multimodality scholars. In that it facilitates a connection between how we perceive the environment as different forms of sensory ‘information’, how these understandings as sensory categories are thus understood as communicative gestures, textures, smells and so on, and thus how they are subsequently represented in textual forms and human performances (or at least forms that might be read as if text).

In our election study, we failed to employ the broad range of sensory methodologies that Pink recommends, but our decision to combine different forms of writing (from interview data to text messages) with a visual account of the election mood enabled us to resist the temptation to reduce the event to predictable narrative. By avoiding ‘methodological complacency’ (Varvantakis and Nolas 2019:375) in election studies, researchers will have a better chance of grasping the diffusive presence of political moods, which typically hover between discrete sensory modalities. We are not decrying the study of elections as competitions between interests and ideologies. Nor would we wish to underestimate the value of strategic, psephological or narrative analyses of elections. If the only focus of election studies were upon mood, they would be seriously deficient. But if systematic investigation of how voters feel their democratic citizenship is either neglected or reduced to offhand adjectival journalese, we will be in danger of failing to identify a key element of civic and political consciousness.

Critical Reflections on the Bradford Photographs What is celebrated in these photographs are heterogeneous visual elements of Bradford in which often bizarre collisions construct alternative urban narratives and, importantly, moods. We do not wish to claim any definitive interpretation of the photographs discussed here that might foreclose the reader’s own semiotic encounter. The visual ethnographic intention throughout our research has been motivated by a desire to reveal a series of unexpected aspects of everyday life in Bradford as it experienced the election as an event. As we have indicated throughout the book, what was surprising ‘in the field’ was the strange absence of visual material relating to the election. After many days

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walking the streets of Bradford, we could not see any sign that an election was happening. It was life as normal. If the election was visually absent from Bradford’s public spaces, what method would enable us to capture the elusive mood of democracy? It became obvious to us that we should represent whatever mood existed in the invisibility of the election. There would be no opportunities for ironic photographs framing pedestrians or queuing citizens against large political campaign posters, and none of the subversive intertextual delights of gorilla-style-graffiti re-purposing of political slogans, reaching its apogee in the radical interventions of the Guerrilla Girls (1985–). A consistent theme throughout the Bradford photographs is the attraction of ontological ambiguity, a desirable state to pursue in that it avoids the documentary urge to explicate for the reader/viewer. In this sense, ambiguity is the ideal ontological companion for representations of mood. Bradford presented an interesting range of mood ‘situations’ through its surprising juxtapositions, some of which (however inadvertent these may have been) spatially conflated the relative value of institutions. For example, in the photograph Splash hand car wash (2019; Fig.  5.6), we

Fig. 5.6  Splash hand car wash. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden)

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encounter a successful car valeting business situated in front of the Al-Jamia Suffa-Tul-Islam Grand Mosque (Bradford Grand Mosque). The authoritative elevated yellow and blue signage uses a condensed bold san serif typeface to puncture this area of public space. The promise is strong, yet intimate: the washing of your vehicle will be administered by hand, although there is the additional bonus of ‘Splash’, with its teasing guarantee of pleasurable fun. Even the winter tree behind suggests an exuberant splash in its splayed dormant canopy. An unintentional connotation resulting in the slicing of a more expansive view of the mosque, aided to a certain extent by the photographer’s framing, of course, might be the question: Which service do we value here? What kind of cleansing is promised in this photograph? Is it spiritual or material? Or is the car wash a portal through which you then enter the temple, after your material needs have been satiated? Does the photograph suggest a cultural clash, a competition for the attention of the same audience? Yet in relation to the production of mood do the two distinctive uses of architectural design, one traditional, the other adopting an aesthetic from commercial America, contribute to our sense of mood within the unique context of Bradford? In considering the subjective position of both ethnographer-­photographer and reader, would the conventional reading be that the car wash should not have been granted planning permission so near to a place of worship? Would a car wash have been granted planning permission in the proximity of St Paul’s Cathedral in London? And does this potentially contentious photograph speak to any pre-existing negative perceptions of Bradford, in which planning laws are less obstructive than in central London? Or alternatively, would a positive interpretation of this photograph suggest that Bradford is a successful exemplar of multiculturalism, in which different forms of cultural identity and enterprise coexist in harmony, the entrepreneurial with the spiritual? As this rather ludic interpretation suggests, photographs can never be axiomatic; they do not function as realist truth-artefacts. The photographer has carefully framed the visual information in this photograph to provoke the readers’ responses to these latent ontological ambiguities. Therefore, the only tenable axiom is that the photographic frame will never achieve the ontological purity intimated in Alexander Pope’s ‘eternal sunshine of the spotless mind’. The frame is already contaminated (to varying degrees) by the autobiographical and subjective life of the ethnographic-photographer, even though he/ she might approach each pressing of the shutter with the aspiration of neutrality—a ‘complete reality’. Each photograph’s relationship to

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objective truth will remain partial and porously open to subsequent multiple interpretations. Continuing our discussion of how Bradford’s urban space is (like most UK urban centres) often imbricated through different visual impositions, some constructed by the graphic communication media industry, often juxtaposed with everyday events, such as queuing for a bus, we can reflect on the photograph, We are nurses (2019; Fig. 5.7). The first impression when encountering this photograph might be how loud the environment is: the passing traffic on a green light in the distance. The use of full-colour photography emphasises the visceral situation, with its atmosphere of vulnerability and cold winter conditions signified by the waiting woman’s choice of clothes. Yet the central third of the photograph is occupied by two protagonists who are not present in a temporal or purely physical sense—the two nurses—or are they teacher and nurse? Whichever roles are being played out in the ad-shell recruitment poster, the key signifiers are the enlarged hands, relative to the hands and feet of those waiting for the bus. The exposed forearms and hands connote nursing as a caring vocation. The two women, their gaze intra-­ diegetic within the frame of the portrait format poster, produce a mood of

Fig. 5.7  We are nurses. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden)

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genuine engagement. There is obvious rapport. The older woman wearing the headphones in the poster appears oblivious to the noise emanating from the passing traffic. The bold san serif typographic assertion, ‘WE ARE NURSES’, eradicates any preconceived notions that the nursing profession is anachronistic or holds onto a sentimental stereotype of the subservient caring woman. Therefore, the overall message here, its signification in a semiotic sense, is that these women are nurses and they don’t have to look out of the frame at you because they have a calling—they have important duties to perform. If you have the same devotion and energy, then why not join us? In the light of our own quest to capture the mood of democracy, and signs of the election, this ad-shell poster appeared to be the most politically charged in its relationship to the election issue of who could be trusted to safeguard the NHS, and the contentious debates surrounding the promise of an extra 40,000 nurses if the Conservatives held on to power. In more general terms, the photograph employs the formal cliché of the ‘rule of thirds’ (supposedly the most harmonious compositional arrangement of form) to compartmentalise concomitant ethnographic events: the left third of the photograph depicts an anxious space, in which vehicles speed downhill, whilst the pervasive double yellow lines signify restrictions, and offer no real barrier to potential traffic air pollution. The recently refurbished Bradford textile mill in the distance acts as an index for the past heritage of the city, whilst suggesting its repurposed function as ‘city-living’ accommodation. The ad-shell poster imposes a larger-than-life celebration of opportunity, public service and empowered women (although there are male nurses), yet the woman waiting for the bus remains anonymous as she turns in the opposite direction to the NHS invitation. So much of our urban experience is navigated through the various media messages displayed, and further ‘integrated’ through forms of online promotions on mobile devices. The photograph, Global (2019; Fig. 5.8), provides an irresistible ironic intervention within the current debates surrounding the absence of overt political campaign messages in Bradford’s public space, as opposed to the relative ubiquity of promotional advertising campaigns. This large outdoor advertising billboard space is owned by Global, one of the UK’s leading outdoor media companies, who promise on their website to ‘capture and captivate the urban audience on the move’. In contrast to this market aspiration, we witness a very seductive open-air rectangle, not dissimilar to a neglected Italian Renaissance fresco. The surface invites the audience to consider time and erosion, where no

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Fig. 5.8  Global. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden)

message is permanent. The abstracted palimpsest field of decayed communication offers the spectator new opportunities for visual construction, more associated with imaginary landscapes than capitalist persuasion. In the wider context, the photograph alludes politically to the global movement to ban urban billboards, first witnessed in São Paulo in 2007. The Mayor of São Paulo introduced the Clean City Law, referring to outdoor advertisements as ‘visual pollution’. During this period, other cities followed this rejection of outdoor billboards, including Chennai, Grenoble, Tehran and Paris. Yet in relation to the contribution to mood in Bradford, the temporal and inchoate state of this billboard and its rather elevated location in relation to the centre of the city below, we are offered an unexpected secular encounter for quiet reflection, an urban version of the rooms allocated to the meditative paintings produced from 1958 to 1959 by the American artist, Mark Rothko, located in Tate Modern, London. Moreover, in the context of Bradford in winter, this inadvertent Sublime outdoor ‘painting’ offers some serendipitous respite—an opportunity, perhaps, for individual

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escape from either personal issues or the collective concerns over the divisions caused by Brexit and the current election campaign. We might broaden the analysis of this photograph to include its contextualisation within photographic history. In doing this, we enter the intentionality of the ethnographic photographer, encountering and choosing the billboard visual trope as a suitable subject amongst the many photographs produced during the research study. This will have to be a truncated journey due to the scope of the book, but the visual appearance of the theme of decay and the void has been an enduring fascination for artists, film-makers and photographers. One is reminded of the austere photographic series produced by the American artist-photographer, Hiroshi Sugimoto, his minimal “Seascapes” (1980–) photographs featuring various locations within the world’s oceans looking towards the horizon, and his highly conceptual project Theatres (1978–2016), in which various cinema screens are subjected to an exposure matching the duration of the film. This method resulted in a series of photographs showing the theatre interior with a screen burnt out white, with no visible content: ‘As soon as the movie started, I fixed the shutter at a wide-open aperture. When the movie finished two hours later, I clicked the shutter closed’ (Hiroshi Sugimoto). In addition to the sublime aesthetics of a weather-ravaged billboard, there is the sociological interpretation to consider; one which interprets the evidence of a dormant billboard (currently showing no content) as symptomatic of a socio-economic problem. The billboard site has not attracted a client to hire the available space—a market failure. Does that suggest that this specific area of Bradford does not provide the required target audience to risk an advertising investment? Or, given the move to online political communication, is the advertising industry retreating from public space as well? On reflection, one might speculate that the use of ‘old-school’ communication sites as opposed to the online realm may have had a greater impact in capturing voters’ attention and imagination than the over-saturation of online strategies? The semiotic fecundity of the billboard trope is pervasive in the next photograph considered here. Almost a mile apart, the photograph, The future can be taught (2019; Fig. 5.9), frames a central Bradford billboard on Barry Street. This shows part of BT’s multi-million pounds ‘Beyond Limits’ integrated campaign, launched through additional television video on 18 October 2019. In our view, there is a powerful irony in the entire BT

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Fig. 5.9  The future can be taught. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden)

campaign, in that its Orwellian edict embodies the simplistic rhetoric of the Conservative Party’s mantra ‘Get Brexit Done’, Labour’s ‘It’s Time for Real Change’ and the Liberal Democrats’ ‘Stop Brexit. Build a Brighter Future’. That BT chose to display their slogan in public space, whilst the main political parties failed to display their slogans say something interesting about contemporary democracy. The photograph frames the elevated billboard in the middle distance to allow the context of its siting to become dialogic; for in this urban milieu, the declaration appears to go unnoticed by the passing female pedestrian. There are also no children in the frame who might be the recipients of BT’s largesse. The poster relies on the user-friendly (much researched) deployment of sans-serif lower-case typography to enable clear fluid reading, providing movement towards this promised future. From the level of the pavement, each pedestrian and motorist would have to look upwards, while people travelling on the upper deck of a bus would have a parallel view of this message. Moreover, the customers drinking in the outdoor beer garden would perhaps find comfort in the pink and ultramarine hues, reminding them perhaps of summer evenings somewhere else. The chance

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juxtapositions of other signs within the frame add to the rather low-­budget Bladerunner film ambience. The black and white sign stating ‘UBER’ is idiosyncratically pointing downwards to the entrance, whereas the original German word über literally means above. The white arrow on the blue background road direction sign is slightly off, further suggesting that the future might not be easily navigated. And although the CEO of the BT consumer division, Marc Allera, has declared that his company will help people to ‘break down barriers and realise their potential’, the photograph here shows several physical barriers, restrictions. In this way, the ethnographic photograph posits an argument in which the viewer must renegotiate with the existing communication messages situated in their so-called reality. By suspending what is essentially a temporal campaign, the still photograph invites other potential narratives to enhance or debunk such vainglorious claims made by the private sector. Such impositions affect and contribute to our sense of mood. They are often in our field of vision, whilst also operating in a subliminal way. These graphic attention-seekers are concerned with disrupting other in-the-moment discourses and forms of sociality. An intimate sociality seems to exist in the photograph, Star nails (2019; Fig. 5.10). The image provides a planar axis view through the Star Nails façade windows, where specific illuminated areas reveal the ‘professional nail care’ taking place. This now-ubiquitous ritual across UK town centres turns out to be prophetic, as we observe the nail specialist technician wearing a protective face mask. The dramatic realisation offered by reflecting on this photograph is that the etiquette of the face mask is a professional demonstration of respect towards the client undergoing beauty treatment. Yet within the broader retail context of Bradford (and indeed beyond), one must reflect on why similar nail bars are flourishing, whilst other retail outlets are forced to close because of the so-called decline on the city centre high street? Could we explain this retail success as a comfort response to the misery of austerity, whereby places like Bradford suffered more than most? As we walked around various areas of Bradford, we observed that the small retail businesses which seem to be succeeding are connected by the haptic. These include specialist Asian hairdressers and barbers and the numerous small outlets advertising mobile phone offers, and the promise to effectively ‘unlock’ your mobile phone. If the viewer scans the photograph carefully, she will notice that there are other services on offer beyond the beautification of nails. Reasonable rates exist for both ‘eye lash’ and ‘eye brow’ treatments. If Barthes had

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Fig. 5.10  Star nails. 2019. (Photograph by Jim Brogden)

joined us in this critical reflection, he may have highlighted the linguistic semiotics of the eye in relation to the act of looking, made more engaging by the popular aphorisms of ‘scratching one’s eyes out’, now ‘weaponized’ by improved nail function? Yet on a more serious note, this is the only photograph in the book that reveals a direct view from those represented out of the frame towards the photographer. The seated woman-client with blonde hair and dark spectacles meets the lens of the camera with an impassive expression. At the time of taking the photograph across a busy lane of traffic, the woman’s direct stare went unnoticed in this tableaux vivant framing. What was of importance was the inclusion of women walking by this retail façade, in addition to the inclusion of the ‘cheques cashed here’ exterior signage on the right-side pavement which leads eventually to the Broadway shopping complex. The fact that cheques are still being used in the age of cashless and ‘contactless’ transactions is noteworthy. We wonder about the narrative sequence in this cashing of cheques. Who possesses the cheques and who has paid the cheques in the first place? These often missed visual ‘incidents’ have the potential to add to the accretion of mood.

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But the blonde woman’s stare now dominates this photograph. It is haunted by her physiognomic centre-stage performance which functions as an everywoman—a disposition that conveys an acquiescent response to her situation in a nail bar and her awareness of a distant man taking a photograph of a nail bar in broad daylight. Due to the distance between camera and subject(s), the blonde woman may not be totally convinced that she is becoming the key protagonist. She is inside, the photographer is outside. Each is looking through a form of glass surface at the other. The important critical element within this reflection is that it is only through subsequent engagement with the photograph on the computer screen through the Photoshop enlarging tool that the blonde woman’s performance is observable. This experience recalls the work of Walter Benjamin (Sliwinski et al. 2017) and his preoccupation with photography’s potential optical unconscious. Benjamin proposes that ‘photographs reclaim from the unconscious domain, for the re-engaged conscious mind to consider’ (Brogden 2019: 116). This opportunity to re-visit the photograph for subsequent analysis beyond the field is a crucial factor in the production of more expansive ethnographic analysis. The photograph, Star Nails (2019), shares a particular iconographic promise with the photographs of the Broadway shopping centre, in that both places offer a superficial sense of community. This view does not preclude the social benefits of both destinations, as both offer experiences with inviting illumination in the winter months whilst offering a sense of communal interaction. What punctures this apparent spirit of sociality are the financial transactions that dominate such places, making self-fulfilment forever beyond reach. These are places where desire and disappointment coexist. All the photographs reproduced in this book, and the ones that exist outside the editorial process, attempted to represent the complex mood that existed in Bradford during the election. Each photograph explores through an ethnographically informed lens the inherent ambiguities and visual contradictions that coexist in places such as Bradford, where citizens are compelled to navigate the private and public domains. It is hoped that the representations honour the mysterious passage of people in such circumstances without promulgating an agenda. The intention was to discover through walking the streets of Bradford some less well-known aspects of this unique city, with its own elusive accretions of mood.

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Index

A Abbott, Andrew, 100, 111 Alexander, Jeffrey, 36 Altieri, Charles, 86 Asylum Support and Advice Network, 27 B Bank, 4, 13, 22–25, 33, 50–55 Berlant, Lauren, 48, 104 Bradford, 2–5, 7–10, 12–16, 19, 31, 33, 39, 45, 46, 51, 55, 58–59, 64, 70–72, 80, 82, 87, 88, 91, 93, 94, 97, 98, 101–107, 112–122 Brexit, 8, 9, 15, 18, 21, 26, 39–42, 46, 53, 57, 64–66, 68–70, 73, 74, 76, 80, 81, 102, 106, 107, 118 Bruner, Jerome, 37 Buddhist temple, 15

C Canvassers, 21, 22, 50 Citizen, 3, 7, 11, 25, 36, 40, 41, 53, 56, 93, 98, 108–110, 113, 122 Community, v, 16, 18, 20, 21, 25, 30, 31, 36, 40, 41, 48, 67, 70, 71, 90, 105, 122 Conservative, 9, 18, 41, 43, 44, 46, 52, 65, 67, 69–72, 78, 80–82, 102, 109, 116 Corbyn, Jeremy, 9, 15, 18, 46, 52, 63–66, 68, 69, 73, 80 D Democracy, i, 3, 12–30, 53, 58, 93, 104, 107, 108, 110, 111, 113, 116, 119 Dewey, John, 12 Diary studies, 62 E Eggleston, William, 97 Election, i, ii, v, 1–13, 32, 61–82, 85

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INDEX

Eliasoph, Nina, 93 Ethnography, i, 95 F Flâneurs, 92 G Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 57 Goffman, Erving, 94 Gurdwara, 22, 105 H Highmore, Ben, 38, 91 Hochschild, Arlie, 91 Hole, 23, 31–58, 102 I Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD), 5 Insiders, 10, 11, 22 Intersubjectivity, 63, 89, 95 J James, William, 26 Johnson, Boris, 26, 43, 52, 63–66, 69, 70, 73, 74, 76–78, 81 K Katz, Jack, 86 L Leeds, 4, 15, 45, 78, 103

Lefort, Claude, 32 Listening, 29, 37, 57, 58, 63, 105 Little Germany, 4 Lyrical sociology, 100 M Metaphor, 6, 7, 9, 32, 33, 39, 43, 45, 46, 57, 63, 96 Miller, Daniel, 94, 95 Mood-story, 38, 39, 42, 45, 46, 55–58 Mosque, 13, 15, 19, 20, 30, 95, 105, 114 Muslims, 45, 48, 70 N Narrative, 14, 18, 30–58, 100, 110, 112, 120, 121 National Health Service (NHS), 52, 65, 69, 73, 76–81, 116 New Labour, 6 North, the, 10, 14 P Performance, 17, 93, 94, 112, 122 Photograph, 14 Photograph/y, i, ii, 2, 4, 6, 8, 11, 17, 19, 22, 28, 34, 35, 47, 51, 56, 64, 66, 72, 77, 79, 88, 90, 96–99, 101, 106, 112–122 Poetry, poetics, 61–82 Polarisation, 7, 9 Polling station, 80, 92, 107, 111

 INDEX 

R Recognition, 20, 21, 30, 36 Rhetoric/al, 10, 12, 22, 45, 55, 90, 99, 100, 103, 119 Roma, 41 Rosa, Hartmut, 62, 87, 105 S School, 5, 13, 25, 27, 30, 40 Stern, Daniel, 61, 89, 108, 111 Stewart, Kathleen, 31 Swinson, Jo, 26

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T Terkel, Studs, 63 Thatcherism, 6 V Visual, i, v, 93, 96–99, 112, 114, 115, 117, 118, 121, 122 W Warner, Michael, 36 Wetherell, Margaret, 88, 110 Williams, Raymond, 88, 91, 104 Workingmen’s club, 13, 30