...Raymond Williams on Structure of Social Feeling...

Raymond Williams. Marxism and Literature. Oxford University Press, 1977 - 217 pages

• "In most description and analysis, culture and society are expressed in an habitual past tense.  The strongest barrier to the recognition to human cultural activity is this immediate and regular conversion of experience into finished products... [It] is habitually projected... 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" (128). 
• We have to find other forms to express present social being, not only the temporal present but also "specificity of present being, the inalienably physical, within which we may indeed discern and acknowledge institutions, formations, positions, but not always as fixed products, defining products" (128).  
• Some of the fixed forms deal with this sense of process and instance and get from is its power (grater due to this than the power of traditional social forms such as production) - e.g. aesthetics and psychological - but he calls them "great modern ideological systems" as they generalise and finalise this processuality and immediacy.  "Yet it is the reduction of the social to fixed forms that remains the basic error".  
• Inability of the social forms to grasp any phenomena of consciousness as it leave aside the lived, active character.  "just because all consciousness is social, its processes occur not only between but within the relationships and the related.  And this practical consciousness is always more than a handling of fixed forms and units" (130).  
• But alternative to the fixed forms is not the silence.  It is "a kind of feeling and thinking which is indeed social and material, but each in an embryonic phase before it can become fully articulate and defined exchange" (131).  Feeling is not against thinking but as involved in thinking - "practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and inter-relating community" (132).  
• Another definition - 'structure of experience" but the experience refers to the past for him.  
• "Specific rhythms" (133).  
• Art and literature where this feeling make appearance before taking social forms.  
• On the example of English literature mention "complex relation of differentiated structures of feeling to differentiated classes" (134).