Using Raymond Williams’ “Structure of Feeling” as an Analytical Tool

In Marxism and Literature, Williams’ review of Marxist cultural theory includes discussion of homology, Benjamin’s correspondences, and the Frankfurt School’s notion of dialectical images. His analysis of alternative Marxist cultural theory is not entirely critical. In particular, Williams approves of Gramsci’s notion of hegemony because hegemony supposes the existence of “something which is truly total” (“Base and Superstructure”, 167) in a deep sense, not merely ideological, or superstructural.

It is lived; it saturates society in that “it constitutes the substance and limit of common sense for most people under its sway” (“Base and Superstructure”, 167-8), and it corresponds to social experience. But he worries about versions of hegemony which do not account for “real and constant change”’ (“Base and Superstructure”, 168), referring instead to “the hegemony” or “a hegemony”.

Williams argues that “the best Marxist” (Marxism and Literature, 121)

approaches to cultural analysis tend towards the epochal rather than the historical, but the problem with this is that epochal cultural analysis can produce a selected and abstracted view of culture as a system. The notion of hegemony counteracts the tendency towards the epochal, and his famous contribution to Marxian cultural theory, the emergent-dominant-residual model of cultural practices within “a contingent hegemony” (Jones, 2004. 73), is an attempt to find a way of showing the

“internal dynamic relations of any actual process” (Marxism and Literature, 121), allowing for challenge or modification, for alternatives, and the process of change (“Base and Superstructure”, 168). At the heart of the model is the notion that in any society at any given moment in time there is a “central system of practices, meanings and values, which we can properly call dominant and effective” (“Base and

Superstructure”, 168). He emphasises that it is a central or a “corporate” (168) system, “a central, effective and dominant system of meanings and values, which are not merely abstract but which are organised and lived” (168). It is a whole body of practices and expectations, and it constitutes a sense of reality for most people (169).

We are incorporated into these practices through educational institutions, the

“selective tradition”, the processes of history, “the tradition”, “the significant past”, and history of various practices (169). Other areas of practices are neglected or excluded, or some of the meanings and practices are “re-interpreted, and diluted or refashioned to fit the effective dominant culture” (169).

But there are alternatives meanings and values, opinions and attitudes, which can be accommodated and tolerated. Williams’ sense of alternative refers to practices that do not go beyond the limits of the central effective and dominant tradition (“Base and Superstructure”, 170). There are also other forms, which go beyond alternative, and these Williams calls oppositional (170). He distinguishes between residual and emergent forms, both of alternative and oppositional culture.

By residual, he means “some experiences, meanings and values, which cannot be verified or cannot be expressed in terms of the dominant culture, are nevertheless lived and practised on the basis of the residue – cultural as well as social – of some

previous social formation” (170). The residual “has been effectively formed in the past, but is still active in the cultural process, not only and often not at all as an element of the past, but as an effective element of the present” (Marxism and Literature, 122). This is distinguished from the active manifestation of the residual, which has been wholly or largely incorporated into the dominant culture (Marxism and Literature, 122).

In Marxism and Literature Williams writes that the emergent elements in any culture “are those that point to new meaning and values, new practices, new

relationships and kinds of relationships [that] are contiually being created” (Marxism and Literature, 123), while in the essay “Base and Superstructure” he explains that the emergent refers to “new meanings and values, new practices, new significances and experiences, which are continually being created” (“Base and Superstructure”, 171). Williams explains that it is difficult to distinguish between those that are really elements of “some new phase of the dominant culture (and in this sense ‘species-specific’) and those which are substantially alternative or oppositional to it” (Marxism and Literature, 123).

For Williams, what matters in understanding emergent culture is that is “is never only a matter of immediate practice; indeed it depends crucially on finding new forms or adaptations of form” (126). The emergent culture is ushered in through a means of pre-emergent “structures of feeling” (127). He uses the history of language to illustrate the process of change from “structure of feeling” through to the more formal concept of emergent culture. He argues that in spite of continuities in grammar and vocabulary, no generation speaks quite the same language as its predecessors.

The shift can be found in small changes, in deletions, additions, modifications, but more generally, the differences are “over a wide range” (131), and can be best described as changes in style. Similar kinds of changes can be seen in “manners, dress, building, and other similar forms of social life” (131). They are lived and experienced, emergent or pre-emergent, and before they are necessarily classified, defined, and rationalised, they “exert palpable pressures or set effective limits on experience and on action” (132). These changes are Williams’ “changes in structures of feeling” (132). He uses the term “feeling” to distinguish the idea from the more formal terms such as “ideologies” or “world-view”. He emphasises that these meanings and values are lived and felt, and seems to believe that the more formal terms abstract and distance the concept from the immediacy of lived experience.

Structures of feeling are social in origin, specifically described by Williams as “social experiences in solution” (133), as distinct from “other social semantic formations which have been precipitated and are more evidently and more immediately available” (134).

Paul Jones (2003) provides a useful table that outlines the key features of Williams’ account of hegemony. This table includes examples of socio-cultural practices or forms pertaining to dominant, residual, emergent and pre-emergent/

“structure of feeling elements”.

Position of socio-cultural

practice/form

Definition/role in hegemony Example

Dominant Central system of meanings and values which is dependent for

Residual Formerly dominant forms which have survived to play a reduced but active role at present (unlike the fully incorporated archaic).

Emergent New forms whose most likely sources are a rising class, new formations or new social in solution” at a stage prior to their achieving an objectivated form.

That which is (later) rendered in historical semantic shifts in Keywords.

Figure 3: The key features of Williams' account of hegemony (Jones, 2003, p. 73)

The table helps to make some of the terms more concrete, and suggests, in the choice of examples illustrating the emergent and the residual, that Williams favoured the emergent as the conduit through which emancipatory change could emerge.

Williams’ emergent-dominant-residual model, even when it is helpfully rendered in

diagrammatic form by Jones, operates at a fairly abstract level and cannot be used helpfully in the micro-analysis that is the focus of the present study.

The micro level analysis of the novels using the modified version of Hall’s encoding-decoding model goes some way towards identifying the alternative and oppositional in the set of primary data. An overview of the patterns emerging from that analysis shows the codes and conventions, the “structures of feeling”, that operate within the specific logonomic framework, shared across a number of novels.

The theme of the “love-across-the-barricades” theme operating not only in love stories, but in other generic forms, might be considered one such “structure of feeling”. Evidence of pre-emergent, “structure of feeling” changes in representation of paradigmatic elements can be found, for example, in the representation of the sympathetic repentant Republican activist, a representation that emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s. An interesting example of this figure is M.S. Powers’ IRA godfather, Seamus Reilly. Reilly is represented as cynical and violent in the 1985 novel, The Killing of Yesterday’s Children, but by the 1987 novel, A Darkness in the Eye (1987), he is represented as an IRA dove negotiating with the RUC and the British Army and betraying the IRA hawks, in a highly modal link with the real politics of the time. It might be possible to suggest that Jack Higgins’ Martin Fallon, in Prayer for the Dying was one of the first such representations, ushering in a motif that becomes more commonly used.

The “structure of feeling” analytic tool, evidence of which in this study takes the form of an empirical measurement of the metrics that emerge from an analysis of the texts in Part B, is not applied across the whole range of primary texts to interpret

novels published in every year of the time period forming the basis of this study.

Instead, the CAIN Troubles timeline was consulted to identify important sub-periods within Troubles history, and the notion of structures of feeling was deployed to interpret generic shifts and changes within those sub-periods.