Williams, Raymond. The Long Revolution. London, UK: Chatto and Windus, 1961.
Raymond Williams builds a model of cultural interaction in this book, and despite its language of moral judgement, the 'success' and 'failure' of art to do certain things he perceives as 'good,' the argument itself is fairly convincing. He starts with the demonstrable fact that human learn to see, learn to perceive our senses, and ends with 'structures of feeling,' the totality of lived culture as perceived from within a certain culture at a certain time.
The 'big idea' at the heart of this book is mutual determinism. Any time there is a relationship between two things (or potentially more, but he just does binaries), there is no question of which caused the other. Instead, they are described as one whole made up of different parts that do different things and defining each other's nature in the process. This theme starts with the human need to learn to perceive our own senses, a fact that has been verified by biologists and psychologists. Therefore, the world around us, as we receive it through our senses, defines how we see it, but how we see it is also determined by the unique sensory apparatus we happen to have, and idea that the posthumanists take up extensively. There is neither one, determinate, objective universe, nor a plurality of indeterminate, subjective perspectives. There is, however, an zone of understanding where groups of the latter try to make sense of the former, literally make sense, construct logical models for what our sense tell us.
Here, we get into some of the communication theory of the Birmingham School. Stuart Hall says some very similar things, and I can't imagine that's a coincidence. We're all looking at the same 'object' (the universe) with the same senses, and it's no surprise, then, that we arrive at a lot of the same conclusions. However, there is variation and texture, so each of us is still an individual, with an individual perspective, but it largely matches the perspectives of those around us. Williams works very hard to create a model of society that is both collective and initial, and if nothing else, I'd like to think that that's what humans are like.
By the same reasoning, different historical periods have different, mutually agreed-upon, basic perceptions of the universe. Each generation responds to the world differently because it's a slightly different world, and there are several generations alive at once, so perfect agreement on what the world is 'really' like is impossible, though we largely agree on the basics, which are themselves perceptual constructs, but constructs based on a way of seeing the external world.
The totality of a person's impressions of, and responses to, his or her own contemporary culture constitutes a "structure of feeling" (48), Williams explains, which is both highly subjective and systematic, as the word 'structure' implies. Because structures of feeling are culturally determined, there is hierarchy and form, there are rules, if only dimly understood, much like generic expectations. You don't have to be able to name them to be aware of them. However, those rules and expectations are of a decidedly subjective nature. They can be 'felt' primarily in reaction to that which is 'alien,' the slight accent of a long-since-assimilated immigrant, for example. It's at once almost impossible to define in tangible terms, and also quite obviously there. That we perceive it as 'obvious,' despite a lack of verifiable (can we say scientific?) evidence is precisely what Williams is talking about.
By the same reasoning, the structures of feeling of cultures that have passed into history are inaccessible. We can only try to understand them, to 'feel' them, via the artefacts they leave behind. "Once the carriers of such a structure [of feeling] die, the nearest we can get to this vital element is in the documentary culture, from poems to buildings and dress fashions" (49). And this, Williams explains, is where academia steps in, documenting past cultures, attempting to access their structures of feeling in case some aspect of a previous culture might 'ring true' for us, now. But herein lies precisely the danger of such a study.
Because we live within our own structure of feeling, our organisation, documentation, and perception of previous periods will always and unavoidably be in our culture's terms. "The survival [of a dead structure of feeling] is governed not by the period itself, but by new periods, which gradually compose a tradition" (50). These "selective traditions" are attempts to 'select' representative examples of a period's cultural artefacts, novels for example, made by people who do not live in that period. Their criteria for selection are, therefore, based on the values of their own period. The study of history is really a study of ourselves, whomever 'we' happen to be. Certainly, we can understand a great deal of a previous period's structure of feeling by studying their artefacts. Williams does not argue that we are so locked into our own culture that we can't think out outside of it at all, but we are unable to fully perceive that culture. We are always working backwards, from artefact to culture, and we can never expect to have the same immersion in that culture as it was lived.
But this brings up a real problem that Williams only tangentially addresses. Structures of feeling are not universal, according to Williams. They "can fail to be fully understood by living people in close contact with it" (49), but they are still "very deep and very wide" (48). They are, by definition, the perceptions and ways of perceiving that are at the very roots of our consciousness, and they are held by a majority of people in a given culture. I'd venture to say that, within Williams' construction, we would define cultural affiliation by the congruence of structures of feeling, which summons up the possibility that people can live in a given period and a given location, the 'present' in both temporal and spatial terms, and not share the same structures of feeling.
I, as white, de facto middle-class, graduate student demonstrably do not have the same structures of feeling as a Cree, working class, truck driver, living in the same city at the same time. Williams' push towards totality and interpenetration, it seems to me, occasionally deflects attention away from the dominance of one structure of feeling by another, in this example, those located within class and race. We must not mistake large-scale agreement for unity. I am limited by the fact that this is all the Williams I have read. I suspect he takes up the issue in some other place, and I assume someone else has already noticed it, but by focusing on temporal culture, periods in history, Williams seems to lose sight of contemporary culture and the possibilities of both intra- and inter-cultural power struggle.
Here's an example of the kind of scenario that Williams doesn't address, but which his theories lead to. Because one contemporary culture can, demonstrably, have a lot more influence than another--influence on media, art, politics, economics, etc.--it is possible to become alienated from one's own structure of feeling. Because this is such a subjective set of ideas, I will speak only from personal experience. As a child, I didn't understand that the television and movies I watched were predominantly from another country. I didn't perceive a break between my own culture and that which was presented to me in the entertainment I consumed. Somewhere around 6 or 7 years old, I was informed of the difference between 'us' and 'them,' Canada and America, but by then I had already formed a structure of feeling based on American media. Eventually, I came to identify America as both intuitively 'my culture' and, politically, very much 'not my culture.'
I grew up in Vancouver, and there are at least a dozen TV shows and movies filming around that city at a time. In the late 90s, one of them was Da Vinci's Inquest. It was only the second show to be both filmed and set in Vancouver. The first was Cold Squad, and the less said about it the better. Da Vinci made an effort to make the city a member of the cast, using its local culture, its geography, even its weather, as part of the narrative. It also wrote to the way that West-Coast Canadians speak. Apparently, we run our words together in unsegmented torrents, not leaving time for others to speak, just assuming that they'll jump in when they feel like it. Obviously, that's not a universal. It's a tendency that linguists have noticed. It's not an accent, per se, but it's fairly distinct. The first time I watched that show, I heard my own speech patterns for the first time on television, as opposed to the vaguely Californian accent that most Hollywood actors end up taking on, or the various Big City accents of the Eastern U.S., like Chicago, Boston, and most of all New York.
Da Vinci's dialogue welcomed me into one particular aspect of a structure feeling, but simultaneously alienated me. It forced me to recognise that I had taken as 'normal' the accents and speech of places and cultures that are technically 'foreign' to me. I had internalised that aspect of American culture to the point where my own culture was rendered alien, but only in the media, of course, because I actually talked and listened to West-Coast Canadians every day. On a screen, I had unconsciously attenuated myself to one kind of speech, and in person, a subtly different kind. I could shift between the two with ease, but I was unaware of the difference on a conscious level. Realising that I had been doing this unconsciously forced me to recognise that I was alien to both American culture and Canadian culture, all at once. I'm not American. I have spent almost no time there. However, I have interpellated large chunks of American culture, which is a disavowal of a distinctly Canadian structure of feeling.
This is a small, banal, pathetic example of the kind internal alienation that I suspect happens in much more disturbing ways for, as an example, black people living in America. They are both not American, because the norm in that country is whiteness, and not African, because they grew up in America. Collectively, they are a distinct subculture within the United States, but a subculture that is continuously disavowed and denigrated by the dominant culture, but also absorbed and metaphorically harvested for mainstream culture. Very similar things can be said about gay communities. Williams' theory forces us to ask what happens when a person or a community's structure of feeling just is alienation from the very norms that that structure maintains.
Posted by orion at July 19, 2006 6:57 PMthis is certainly interesting
Posted by: emma at July 21, 2006 2:16 PM