["The present, fixed in a moment, but the perennial flow of water..." (Toronto 2016). Foto Rb]
Raymond Williams, "Structures of Feeling", In Marxism
and Literature, Oxford University Press, 1977, pp. 128-135
Williams adopted the concept of “structures of feeling”
for two main reasons. One reason is that his definition of historically variable
social sensibility involves affects and emotions but it is different from psychoanalysis,
which Williams saw as “absence” and irrationality. A second reason is that in
approaching the past culturally we often see it as “fixed” rather than alive
and “present” precisely because we pay attention mostly if not exclusively to cultural
and political institutions, and finished artistic and literary products, instead
of taking into account more complex factors including sensibility and emotional
reactions. One example could be the structure of feeling towards injustice and
social mistreatment as expressed in writers such as Dickens in Victorian England.
It is probably better to use a long quotation in order
to specify more clearly what structures of feeling are:
“An alternative definition would be structures of
experience […]. We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse,
restraint, and tone; specific affective elements of consciousness and
relationships: not feelings against thought, but thought as felt, and feeling
as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating
continuity. We are then defining these elements as a ‘structure’: as a set,
with specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension. […]
Methodologically, then, a structure of feeling is a cultural hypothesis,
actually derived from attempts to understand such elements and their connections
in a generation or period” (pp. 132-133).
[Roberto Bertoni]
