Structure of Feeling

8/14/2019 Structure of Feeling

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arxism anditerature

R YMOND WILLI MS

Oxford ew orkOXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS


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9. Structures of Feelingrn most desc rip tion and analysis, cultu re and society are expres-sed in an hab itual past tense. The strongest barrier to the recog-nition of human cultural activ it y is thi s immediate an d regularconversion of expe rie nce into finished What is defen-sible as 8 procedure in i:O US(.; iQ ll Sassumptions man y actions can been ded , Is habitually , not tJ

produ cedof this procedu re, tolook into its centre possible past its edges, we can under-stand, in new ways, that separation of the social fro m the per.-sonal which is so powerftil ana-directi ve a cultllrill mode. If the _

,Qc iai is always past. in-the senSe that it is always we rhave indeed to ind other terms for the undeniab le experience or .- 'ii ?l2n Y tne temponil present. die realization of ah jsably physical. within which we ma indeed discern and- acknowledgifinstitUtfons. onnatIOiiS: position s. but not alwa sas11Xed'1ffiKlU'Cts 7d product s. n en the spei al is tho.C>;:pJ iClt Uie kn own relationships. institution s. for-mations. positions a ll that is ptesent and moving. a ll thatescapes or seems to escape from ilie fixed and the explicit and ....:known. is grasped and defined as tho personal: thi s, here,now alive. active. su bjective'.T ere 1S another rcialeddT..,tioction. As thought is described,in the same habitual pas t tense, t is indeed so (Jifferent . in itsexplicit and finished forms. from much or evell anyth ing that wecan presentl y recognize as thinking, that we set against it moreactive. more flexible, loss-'Singul ar terms consciousness.experie nce. feeling-an d th en watch even th eso dra wn towards

St ruct ures of Feeling 129fixed. fin ite. receding form s. Th e point is especia ll y relevant toworks of art. wh ich really are. in one sen se. exp licit and finishedforms-actual o bjec ts in the visua l ar ts. objectified convent ionsand notations (semantic figu res) in li terature. But it is not onlythat. to complete their inherent process, we have to make thempresent, in specifically active ' readings ' It isa lso that the makingoi art is never itself in the past fense. t is always a formativeprocess, within a specific present. At different moments in h is-tor y.and in significantly different ways, the reality and even theprimacy of such presences and such processes, such diverse andyet specific ac tualities. have been powe rfully asserted andreclaimed, as in practice of course they are a U h e time lived . Butthey are then often asserted as forms themselves, in content ionwith other kn own forms: the subjective as distinct from theobjective; experience from belief; feeling from tho ught ; theimmediate from the general; the personal from the social. Theundeniable power of two great modern ideological sys-tems- th e 'aesthetic' and the psychological is. ironica lly.systematica lly de rived from th ese senses of instance and pro-cess, wh ere experie nce, immediate feeling, and then sub jectiv-ity and personality are new ly generalized and assembled.Against these pe rsonal' form s, tho ideological systems of fi xedsocial generality, of categor ical prod uc ts. of absolute forma-tion s. are relatively power less. within their speci fi c dimens ion.Of one domina nt strain in Marxism. with its habitual abuse ofthe su bjective' and th e 'personal'. this is especially true.Yet it is the reduct ion of th e social to fixed forms that rema insthcoas lcem5 r. Mirx oft n said this, an d somcMaixistsquote

ways. before return ing to fixed forms ,The mi stake.as so often . is in tak ing terms of analys is as terms of substance.Th us we speak of a world-view or of a preyailingclass ou tlook, often with adequate evidence. but in th is regularsIfde-fowirds a past tense and 8 fixed form s uppose , or even donotkDow tha't we have to sU'J1PQse . that th ese exist and are li vedspecificall y and defini t ively, in si ngular and developing forms.Perhaps th e d ead can be red uced to ixed forms.surviving records are against it. But t e living will_redu ced, at leas t in the first person; living third persons may edifferent. All the known complexi ties, the experienced tensions.shifts, and un certainties. the intricate forms of un evenness andconfusion. are against the terms of the reduction and soon. by


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130 Marxism and Literatureextension, against social analysis itself. Social forms are thenoften ad mitted for generalities but debarred, contemptu ously.from any possible relevance to thi s immediate and ac tual sig-nificance of bein g. And from th e abstractions formed in theirtu rn by th is act of debarr ing the human imaginat ion , thehuman psyche . the un conscious , wi th their functions in artand in myth and in dr eam - new and displaced forms of socialana lysis a nd categorization, overriding all speci fic social condi-tions, ar c then more or less rapidly developed .Social forms arc ev ident ly more recognizable wh en they arearticulate and explicit. We have seen this in the range fromins titutions to formations and trad itions. We can see t again inthe range from dominant systems of belief and ed ucation toinfluent ial systems of explana t ion a nd argum en t. All these haveeffective presence. Many are form ed and de liberate, and someBre quite fixed. But wh en they have all been identi fied they arenot a whole inventory even of social consciousness in its s im plest sense. For th ey become social consciousness only whenthey are li ved, active ly, in real relationships, and mOreoverrelationships w hich are more than systematic exc hanges be-tween fi xed uni ts. Indeed just becau se all consciousness is social,its processes occur not only between but wit.hin the relationshipand the related. And thi s_practical consc iousn ess is always morethan a handling of fixed forms and uni ts. There is frequenttension between th e received in terpretation and practicalex perience. Where this tension can be made direct and exp licit,or where some alternative interpreta tion is available, weare stillwith in a dimension of relatively fixed forms. But the tension isas oft en an un ease, a stress, a displacement. a latency: themoment of conscious comparison not ye t come, often not evencoming. And comparison is by no means the onl y process,though it is powerful and important. There are th e expe riencesto which the fixed fo rms do not speak at all, which indeed theydo no t recognize. The re are important mixed experiences, wh erethe available meaning would convert part to a ll , or a ll to par t.And even where form and response can be found to agree,wi thout apparent difficult y, there can be qualifications, reservations, ind ications elsewh er e: what the agreement seemed tosettle bu t still sounding elsewh ere. Practical consciousness isalm ost always different from officia l cOnsciousness, and th is isno t only a matter of relative freedom or control. For practical

Structures of Fee ling 131consciousness is wh at is ac tually being lived, and not only whatit is thought is being lived. Yet the actual alt ernative to thereceived and produced fixed forms is not silence: not theabsence, the un conscious, wh ich bour geois cu lture has mythi.cized. It is a kind of feeling and thinking whi ch is indee d socialand material, but each In an embryonic pha se before t canbecome fully articu late and de fined exchange . Its relations wi ththe already articu late and defined are then exceptionally com -plex.This process can be d irectly observed in the history of alanguage. In sp ite of substantial and at some levels decisivecontinuities in grammar and vocabulary, no generation speaksquite the same language as its predecessors. The difference canbe defined in terms of addition s, deletions, and modifications.but these do not exhaust it . What really cha nges is somethingQuite gene ral, over a wi de range, and the description that oftenfits the change best is the literary term style , It is a generalcha nge, rathert h an a set of de liberate cho ices, yet choices can bededuced from it as \\ ell as effects. Similar kinds of change canbeobserved in manne rs, dress, build ing, and othe rsimilarf ormsof social life. It is 30 open qu estion- that is to say, a set ofspecific hi storical questions- whe ther in any of th ese changesthis or th at g roup has been dominant or influential, or whetherthey are the result of much more general interaction. For whatwe nre defining is a part icul ar qu_al ity of social experience andrelationship , historicall y distinct from other particular qualities, which gives the se nse of a generation or of a pe riod. Th erelations between th isqualityand the oth er specifying historicalma ks of changing institutions, formations, and beliefs, andbeyond these the changing social and economic relations between and within classes, are again an open Question: that is tosay, a set of specific histo rical questions. The methodologicalconseque nce of such a definition, however, is that the speCificqualitative changes are not ass um ed to be epiphenomena ofchanged institut ions. formations, and beliefs, or merely secon-dary ev idence of changed social a nd economic rela tions be-tween a nd within classes. At the same time they are from thebeginning taken as socia l ex perience, rather than as p ersona lexperience or as the merely supe rficial or inC idental smallchange of society. Th ey are social in two ways that disti nguishth em from redu ced senses of th e social as the institutional and


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132 Marxism and Lite ralur,e.r 1 the formal : first. in thai they they_.:-:: are being lived this is obvious; when they have been lived it is; . sti ll their substantial characteristic): second, in that althoughIhey are emergent or pre-emergcnt , they do not have to awaitJ ':t classification, or they. : palpable pressu.res and set effechve bmlts on expenence and on

action.,;X Such changes can be defined changes in stf}J2t. m{p]feel." ing,'The term is difficult. but 'feeling is chosen to emphasize a'dist inction from morc formal concepts of 'world-view' or 'ideol-ogy'. t is not on ly th at we must go beyond formally h?ld and

systematic beliefs, though of cour se we have always to IOcludethem. It is that we are conce rn ed with meani ngs and values asthey are ac tively lived and felt, and th e relations be tween thesean d formal or system atic beliefs are in practice variable (includ-ing historically variable), over a range from formal assent withprivate dissent to the more nuanced interaction betweenselected and interpreted beliefs and acted and justified experi-ences. An alternative definition would o stmctur.es.-Df....cxpcri-ence: in one sense the better and wider word, but with thedifficulty that one of its senses has that past tense which is themost Important obstacle to recognition of the area of socialexperience which is being defined. We are talking about chara c-teristic clements of impulse, restraint, and tone; speCificallyaffective elements of co nsc iousness and relationships : not feel-ing against thought , but thought as felt and feeling as thought:practical consciousness of a present k ind , in a living and inter-relating continui ty. We are then defining these elements as a'structure': as a se t, with specific internal relations, at onceinterlocking and in tension. Yet we are also defining a socialexperience which is st ill in p rocess, often indeed not yet recog-nized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and evenisolating, but which in analysis (though rarely otherwise) has itsemergent, connectin g, and do minant characteristics, indeed itsspecific hierarchies. Thesea re often more recogniza ble at a laterstage, when they have been (as often happens) clas-sified. and in many cases built into insUtu1:ions and formatiqns.

Y Thai time case is different; anew structure of feeling willusually already have begun tol orm, in the lr)Je prese nt.then, a 'structure of feeling ' is a cw turalhypothesis, actually derived from attempts to un de rstand such

rI Structures of Feeling 133"elmnants-and their connectjons in a generation or period, andnee ding always to be returned, interactively, to such evidence. tIS nit ially Jess s imple than moro formally suuctured hYPQthesesof the social. but t is more adequate to the actual range ofcu ltural evidence: historicaUy certainly, but even more(whereitmatters more) in our presen t c ultural process. The hypothesishas a special relevance toart and literature,where the true socialcontent is in a significant number of cases of this present andaffective kind , which cannot without loss be reduced to belief-systems. in stitutions ,or explicit general re lationships, though itmay include a ll these as lived and experienced, with or withouttension, as it also eVidently includes elements of social andmaterial (physical or natural) experience whi ch may lie beyond,or be un coverod or imperfectly cove red by, the elsewhere recog-nizable systematic elements . The unmistakable presence ofcertain elements in art which are not covered by (though inone mode they ma y be reduced to) other formal systems isthe true source of the specializing categories of the aesthetic ,the ar ts', and imaginative literature . We nood, on the oneha nd . to acknowledge (and welcome) the specificity of theseelements-specific feelings, specific rhythms-and yet to findways of recog nizing their specific kinds of sociality, thus pre-venting that ex tra ction from social experience which is conceivable only when social ex pe rience itself has been categorically(and at root historicaUy) reduced. We are then not only conce rned wi th the restoration of social content in its (ull sense, thatof a generative immediacy. The idea of a structure of feeling ca.nbe specifically related to the evidence of forms and conven-t ions-semantic figures-which, in art and litoratu re, are oftenamong the very first indications that such a new structure isforming. These relations will be discussed in more detail insubsequent chapters, but as a matter of cultural theory this is away of defining forms and conven tions in art and literature asinalienable elements o( a social material process: not by deriva-tion from other social forms and pre-forms. but 8S social forma-tion of a specific kind whi ch may in turn be seen as the artiqlla-tion (often the only fully available articulation) of structures offeeling which as living processes are much more widely experi-enced.For structures of feeling can e defined asin solution , as distinct from o ther social semantic formations


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134 Marxism and Literaturewhich have been precipitated and are more eVdently and moreimm ed iately ava ilable. Not all art. by any means, relates to acontemporary structure of feeling. The effective formations ofmos t actual rt relate to already manifest social formations.dominant or residu al, and t is primar ily to emergent formationsthough often in the form of modification or disturb ance in o lderform s) that the structure of feeling. as solution relates . Yet th isspeci fi cs oiution is never mere flux. t is a structured formationwhich, because it Is althe very edge of semant ic availability, hasmany of the characte ristics of a pre-formation. until specifi carticulation new semantic figures- are d iscovered in material practice: often. as it happens, in relatively isolated ways,wh ich are only later seen to compose a significant o rten in factminority) generation; this often, in turn, the generation thatsubs tant ia lly connects to its successor s. t is thus a specifi cstructure of particular linkages, particular emphases andpress ions. and . in what are orten its mos t recognizable forms,particular deep and conclusions. Early Victorianideology, for example, spec::ified the exposure caused by povertyor by debt or by illegitimacy as socia l failure or deviation; thecontemporary s tructu re of feeling, meanwhile. in the newsemantic figures of Dick ens. of Emily Bronte, and others,spec ified exposure and isolation as a general cond ition, andpoverty, debt, or illegitimacy as its oonnecting instances. Analt ernative ideology, relating such exposure to the natu re of thesocial orde r, was only later gene rally formed: offering expJanalions but now at a reduced tens ion: the social explanation fu llyadmitted. the intensity of experienced fear and sha me now dispersed and generalized.

The exa mple reminds us, finally. of the oomplex relation ofdi fferent iated structu res offeeling to differenti ated classes. Thisis historically very variable. In England be tween 1660 and 1690.for example. two structures of feeling among the defeated Puritans and in the restored Court) can e readily dis tingu ished,though neither, in its literatu re and elsewhere, is reducible tothe id eologies of these groups orto their formal in fact complex)class relations. At times th e emergence of a new structure offeeling is best related to th e rise of a class England , 170060); atother times to cont radiction, fractu re, or mutation with in aclass En gland. 1780 1830 or 1890-1930) , when n formationappears to break away from its class norms, though it re tains its

Structures of Feeling 135substantial affiliation, and the tension is at once lived andarticulated in radically new semantic figures. Any of theseexamples requires detailed substantiation, but what is now inquestion. th eoretica lly. is th e hypothesis of a mode of socialformation, ex plicit and recogn izable in specific kind s of art.which is di stinguisha ble from other social and semantic forma-tions by its articulation of presence .

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Structure of Feeling