#structures of feeling

In most description and analysis, culture and society are expressed in an habitual past tense. The strongest barrier to the recognition of human cultural activity is this immediate and regular conversion of experience into finished products. What is defensible as a procedure in conscious history, where on certain assumptions many actions can be definitively taken as having ended, is habitually projected, not only into the always moving substance of the past, but into contemporary life, in which relationships, institutions and formations in which we are still actively involved are converted, by this procedural mode, into formed wholes rather than forming and formative processes. Analysis is then centred on relations between these produced institutions, formations, and experiences, so that now, as in that produced past, only the fixed explicit forms exist, and living presence is always, by definition, receding. When we begin to grasp the dominance of this procedure, to look into its centre and if possible past its edges, we can understand, in new ways, that separation of the social from the personal which is so powerful and directive a cultural mode. If the social is always past, in the sense that it is always formed, we have indeed to find other terms for the undeniable experience of the present: not only the temporal present, the realization of this and that instant, but the specificity of the present being, the inalienably physical, within which we may indeed discern and acknowledge institutions, formations, positions, but not always as fixed products, defining products. And then if the social is the fixed and explicit—the known relationships, institutions, formations, positions—all that is present and moving, all that escapes or seems to escape from the fixed and the explicit and the known, is grasped and defined as the personal: this, here, now, alive, active, 'subjective.'

It should be clarified that in “Structures of Feeling” Williams is not really talking about emotions or even affects. For while “structures of feeling” do designate “affective elements of consciousness and relationships” or “social content... of [a] present and affective kind” (132, 133), Williams defines them more broadly (and at the same time much more precisely) as “structured formation[s]… at the very edge of semantic availability” (132). His term thus represents a “cultural hypothesis” derived from efforts to understand “a social experience which is still in process" (132), and thus has “many of the characteristics of a pre-formation, until specific articulations—new semantic figures—are discovered in material practice” (134). Hence, Williams’ “structures of feeling” cannot be equated with what we ordinarily think of as emotional qualities, since the former are defined as formations that are still in process and barely semanticized, while the latter have distinct histories and come heavily saturated with cultural meanings and value. It is easy to understand the impulse to conflate these two terms, for Williams presents us not only with a concept which is strikingly broad and inclusive (“structures of feeling” designating nothing less than “all the known complexities, the experienced tensions, shifts, and uncertainties, [and] intricate forms of unevenness and confusion” which “do not have to await definition, classification, or rationalization before they exert palpable pressures and set effective limits on experience and action”), but also with a concept adduced primarily in negative fashion. A “structure of feeling” is precisely that which “escapes . . . from the fixed and the explicit and the known”; it is a social experience which is not fully semanticized, yet does not require this semanticization in order to exert palpable pressures and generate concrete effects. Yet Williams is not analyzing emotion or affect, but, rather, strategically mobilizing an entire register of felt phenomena in order to expand the existing domain and methods of social critique. This is a subtle yet crucial distinction which Williams foregrounds in his own writing. Having spoken of changes in “qualit[ies] of social relationship” traditionally misperccived as “‘personal’ experience or as the merely superficial or incidental ‘small change’ of society” (131), and then defining these changes as “structures of feeling,” Williams acknowledges: “The term is difficult, but ‘feeling’ is chosen to emphasize a distinction from more formal concepts of ‘world-view’ or ‘ideology’” (132). While a structure of feeling thus cannot be reduced to “‘personal’ experience,” it comes to represent something equally irreducible to ideology. Once again using a negative definition, Williams writes that the term designates social content “which cannot without loss be reduced to belief-systems, institutions, or explicit relationships” (133, italics added). It is clear, however, that structures of feeling remain inextricably intertwined with belief systems, institutions, and explicit social relationships; in fact, Williams describes all of the latter as encompassed by the former, though in a “lived and experienced” manner. Yet when he clearly states his methodological reasons for introducing his concept—to find a way of grasping social formations distinct from “more formal” concepts of ideology—it becomes clear that his primary aim is to mobilize an entire affective register, in its entirety, and as a register, in order to enlarge the scope and definition of materialist analysis. This is something quite different from the goal of offering “a materialist analysis” of affect itself.

Culture, change, and ‘structures of feeling’ as signals

Creating a politics of the future

"The mistake, as so often, is in taking terms of analysis as terms of substance. Thus we speak of a world-view or of a prevailing ideology or of a class outlook, often with adequate evidence, but in this regular slide towards a past tense and a fixed form suppose, or even do not know that we have to suppose, that these exist and are lived specifically and definitively, in singular and developing forms. Perhaps the dead can be reduced to fixed forms, though their surviving records are against it. But the living will not be reduced..."

With the term ‘structure of feeling’, they refer to British philosopher Raymond Williams (1920-1988), who invented this concept as an alternative to very general terms such as ‘worldview’ or ‘Zeitgeist’. To Williams, a ‘structure of feeling’, very broadly speaking, refers to a shared set of values, notions, and meanings of a culture, subculture, or generation, which mainly reveals itself in the artistic practices of that culture, subculture, or generation (Marxism and Literature, 1977).”

We need, on the one hand, to acknowledge (and welcome) the specificity of these elements – specific feelings, specific rhythms – and yet to find ways of recognizing their specific kinds of sociality, thus preventing the kind of extraction from social experience which is conceivable only when social experience itself has been categorically (and at root historically) reduced