Thought broke down for us at How to Live just after the United States elected Barack Obama as their next president. Narrow aversion of global financial and moral meltdown was met by a meltdown in thinking. We were momentarily incapacitated by anger – an emotion we’ll be thinking about more in a series that will also consider jealousy, pleasure and hunger. Simon Critchley, in an article about Obama in November’s edition of Harper’s Magazine, suggests that ‘[a]nger is the emotion that produces motion, the mood that moves the subject to act. Perhaps it is the first political emotion.’ We weren’t sure of how to direct our anger in the face of a general mood of rejoicing and self-congratulation, which we shared in, but which made us unaccountably cross. We wanted to express the truth, however, that any other result on November 5th would have been an abomination.

This truth was the occasion of a memorable eruption by Gore Vidal, interviewed by David Dimbleby – who retained his composure in the face of Vidal’s blind questioning (a questioning blinded and fortressed by anger):

There was another breakdown, this week, on Radio 4’s In Our Time. Helen Hills, Professor of Art History at the University of York, in attempting to define the Baroque, described baroque spaces as machinic in as much as they produced new forms of social relation (thinking, perhaps, of architectural enfilades, access to which might be determined by one’s place in society). Melvyn Bragg pursued the suggestion that an architectural space might revolutionise social relations, but, unfortunately Hills’s thinking broke down (about 20 minutes into the programme!).

Her suggestion, however, is worth pursuing. In his work on The Melodramatic Imagination, Peter Brooks locates the origins of melodrama ‘within the context of the French Revolution and its aftermath’: ‘It comes into being in a world where the traditional imperatives of truth and ethics have been violently thrown into question, yet where the promulgation of truth and ethics, their instauration as a way of life, is of immediate, daily, political concern.’ Think of the words of Saint-Just: ‘Republican government has as its principle virtue; or if not, terror.’ Melodrama put both principles into play, and could be seen as the art of paranoia: the symptom of a newfound sense of meaninglessness.

When a particular ordering of the social sphere collapses, we must make the world anew. But how can we do this without violence, without ‘machine’, and without paranoia? How might we weave a new (open-ended) narrative of the future of life? This thinking only begins as we recognise the emotion or the anguish at the heart of consciousness. Hold that thought.