Structure of Feeling

This term emerged out of the work of Raymond Williams. He used the idea as a key organizing concept with which to make sense of, and find expression for, the day-to-day experience of culture as it is lived by generation or during a particular historical period. In Williams’ early (1961) work the structure of feeling of any generation tends to be embodied in the ‘dominant’ social group in the more general culture, while in his later writings (1977) it is more closely aligned with ‘emergent’ (as opposed to ‘dominant’ or ‘residual’) cultural formations ‘in solution’, in the process attaching to the idea counter-hegemonic possibilities. We can grasp this idea best if we try to understand how an explicit emotion arises out of the structuration between the official consensus of any historical period, as codified in its societal and legislating institutions, and the everyday lived experiences which together define the meanings, justifications and values articulated. However, because the structure of feeling also emerges out of the interaction between unconscious and conscious awareness, as well as the feelings of the culture rather than its thoughts, the full extent of these meanings, justifications and values can never be fully articulated. It is this attention to tacit knowing that led Blackshaw in his (2003) ethnography of the leisure life-world of ‘the lads’ to argue that, if there will always be more about culture than we are able to say, it is nonetheless intuition, with all its ‘large, daring short cuts and approximations’, to paraphrase Bruno Schulz (1998), rather than analysis in the scientific meaning, which is better suited to revealing the truth about culture.