The idea of a “structure of feeling” was first used by Raymond Williams in 1954 in a little-read book entitled Preface to Film, the manifesto for a project upon which he was then collaborating with the screenwriter and producer Michael Orrom.Footnote 1 When Williams abandoned the project in early 1957 he retained this portion of its intellectual capital, and deployed it in the works that established his public reputation over the following four years: Culture and Society and its quasi-sequel The Long Revolution.Footnote 2 During the subsequent decades it has formed part of the analytical vocabulary of some of the most innovative work in the humanities, particularly in literary scholarship that has developed the cultural materialism that Williams helped to pioneer, and in works of history that seek to elucidate the experience of subjects marginalized or excluded from traditional forms of inquiry. Almost immediately after Williams's elaboration of the concept, it achieved the distinction of being disparaged and then adopted by E. P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class, which helped to establish the practice of “history from below” in Britain.Footnote 3 As historical inquiry in general has shifted away from causal explanation towards the reconstruction of experience and sentiment, the “structure of feeling” has frequently served to connect subjectivity to broader social and material processes.Footnote 4 It has also been adopted by scholars following the more recent “affective turn” in the humanities, either as an analytical tool in its own right or as a pioneering step towards the development of a now densely constructed theoretical framework.Footnote 5
Despite its widespread usage over nearly six decades of scholarly production, however, this “notoriously difficult” concept, as one study of Williams has described it, remains enigmatic.Footnote 6 The secondary literature that has accumulated around Williams's work since his death in 1988 has interpreted the “structure of feeling” in widely divergent ways: his first biographer alone offered three subtly different definitions of the term, and in one early critical survey of Williams's work it was read, variously, as cognate with “ideology” and as an affective counterpart to Michel Foucault's epistème.Footnote 7 One recent attempt to elucidate it notes the confusion that the term occasions, yet shows greater certainty as to why its critics are mistaken than as to its actual meaning.Footnote 8 Williams himself, under interrogation from the editors of New Left Review in 1977, could offer “no simple answer, but perhaps some clarification,” in the course of which he was forced back again to a defensive acknowledgment of “the need to define the limits of the term.”Footnote 9 Part of its difficulty may arise from its deployment in different senses in different parts of Williams's own work: a difficulty which is often circumvented by the historically unsatisfactory procedure of reading the most accessible definitions given by Williams himself, in The Long Revolution and Marxism and Literature, as exegeses of its meaning across his entire oeuvre.Footnote 10 The effect of this ambiguity is that a concept which has formed a substantial underpinning of some of the most influential and tendentious developments in literary and historical scholarship since the 1950s carries no precise commitments: it functions rather to signify, and to command assent to, a broad set of intellectual and, perhaps, political principles without specifying the basis for their validity. In particular, the assumption—which is by no means integral to the concept itself—that it provides access to the experience of marginalized or subordinate historical actors has constituted a way of making “the subaltern speak” that evades the problems which scholars working within a different philosophical framework have recognized in this type of procedure.Footnote 11
If a history of the “structure of feeling” therefore illuminates some of the major developments in academic practice since the 1960s, it also casts new light upon mid-century intellectual history. Williams's first major works were interventions in debates over the place of moral values in democratic politics that that were a central feature of the “cultural Cold War,” but which had been a point of contention in Britain and elsewhere since at least the 1930s. Williams himself is often identified as a champion of cultural democracy, in opposition or contradistinction to a dominant “paternalism” in mid-century Britain.Footnote 12 This reading of Williams's early work can appear plausible insofar as his avowed concern was indeed to challenge theories of minority culture through a transfer or redistribution of cultural authority, or of the means of cultural production. But although Williams himself frequently espoused democracy in something like this sense, and developed the “structure of feeling” as a means of realizing it, the history of the latter concept demonstrates that this “democratic” impulse was constrained by Williams's concern to extend the tradition of moral criticism of industrialism that he himself traced from the early nineteenth century, and by the difficulty he encountered in conceiving of any change or renewal of the values underpinning that tradition other than through the agency of artists and critics, who thus retained a privileged role in cultural production.Footnote 13 In this respect, the theory of culture of which the “structure of feeling” was the central component did not succeed in redistributing cultural authority quite so radically as Williams intended, and exemplified the deeply problematic relationship between democracy and normative prescription in mid-century intellectual history.
This article opens by examining a reconfiguration of public discussion of “culture” and its capacity to sustain democracy that began at the end of the 1930s and continued into the Second World War and the cultural Cold War, which constitutes the “context of refutation” within which the idea of the “structure of feeling” was developed.Footnote 14 In the course of this historical reconstruction it becomes apparent that Williams's work was shaped within a much more eclectic intellectual culture than conventional descriptions of him as a “left-Leavisite” tend to imply.Footnote 15 In particular, I suggest that the heterogeneous intellectual formation of liberal anticommunism, and the dissemination of certain forms of holism within the mid-century social sciences, helped to shape Williams's signature concept and to limit the extent of the cultural “democratization” that it could support. Whilst the diverse influences upon which Williams drew in his attempt to escape the polarities of the cultural Cold War underpinned a novel theory of universal cultural production, the difficulties to which they gave rise—particularly in relation to the possibility of change in artistic and moral values—ultimately left him reliant upon the authority of the artist or intellectual. As a result, his work not only bore a closer resemblance to a modified theory of “minority culture” than is generally supposed, but also registered a fundamental weakening of the moral critique of capitalism of which Williams himself was a leading exponent, long before that tradition is generally thought to have fallen into desuetude during the later 1960s.
I
As Williams travelled to Cambridge to study English literature in October 1939, public discussion of culture in Britain was at a point of transition in which the political–intellectual moment of “the thirties” was being simultaneously constructed and consigned to the past.Footnote 16 The self-conscious concern of the politicized literary culture of the 1930s to articulate what one of its leading exponents called “a philosophy of life that would make them feel that they were participants in the social order, not fugitives or rebels,” was publicly recanted during what has been called “the long 1939” after the Munich Conference, and literature in particular was withdrawn from its recent social and political entanglements.Footnote 17 Auden himself personified this transition after his retreat to America at the beginning of 1939 itself, abandoning the boring meetings and complicity in murder that had been de rigueur during the Spanish Civil War to grapple with “[n]egation and despair” in a Fifty-Second Street dive.Footnote 18 The day before war with Germany was declared in Britain, the writer and publisher John Lehmann observed that “somewhere between the Munich sell-out of last September and the defeat of the Spanish Republicans early this year, a significant change began to develop in the attitude of the literary and artistic ‘Left.’ There are signs . . . of a revulsion from all political platforms.”Footnote 19
That recent intellectual fashion was supplanted by a conception of artistic and quotidian culture as spheres in which supposedly nonpolitical “democratic values” would be preserved from both the exigencies of wartime mobilization and the broader pathologies of modernity of which the war was commonly seen as a manifestation. This mode of cultural thought had been present in progressive circles throughout the 1930s, notably in the left-liberal New Statesman, whose socialist politics existed in an uneasy tension with the “Bloomsbury” affiliations of its art and literary pages.Footnote 20 At the end of 1939 an important editorial in the magazine claimed that the greater facility with which “totalitarian” regimes managed “modern” economies would require democracies to adopt the same techniques during the war—but predicted that liberty could be sustained in quotidian culture.Footnote 21 The same intellectual coordinates were followed in the famous celebrations of national culture that were penned amid the Battle of Britain and the Blitz during 1940–41. For example, George Orwell's lyrical evocation of plebeian England in The Lion and the Unicorn presented quotidian culture as a kind of preservative of individual liberty, counterbalancing the economic collectivism that the successful prosecution of the war demanded.Footnote 22 Orwell continued to weigh these conflicting priorities throughout the 1940s, but as he gradually came to view totalitarianism as a generalized pathology of modernity rather than as a particular state form, he became more doubtful of the capacity of national culture to withstand its corrupting influences.Footnote 23 As a result, the preservation of the democratic subject from totalitarianism was increasingly devolved upon the arts, which, with the values they ostensibly sustained, were consequently viewed in quasi-aestheticist terms as a sphere entirely apart from broader social processes.
This repudiation of the characteristic assumptions of “the thirties” had been led by Cyril Connolly, who presented the declaration of war in 1939 as an opportunity for artists to withdraw to “the ivory shelter” and shortly afterwards launched the journal Horizon as a haven for them.Footnote 24 Orwell was among its more notable early contributors, and shortly after The Lion and the Unicorn appeared he also gave a radio talk on “Literature and Totalitarianism” in which the writer was upheld as the paragon of individualism because his (sic) existence qua writer was dependent upon an ability to withstand the encroachments of “community.”Footnote 25 Likewise, in February 1942, Horizon warned that “a country that is socializing itself” was one of several factors making “the existence of the great artist, the free personality, of the solitary smouldering creative figure . . . more and more precarious,” and an oft-quoted editorial the following December complained of the baleful effects of state-led “culture-diffusion” upon the arts themselves.Footnote 26 Elsewhere, in 1943 the Sunday Times’s music critic Ernest Newman broke off from a celebration of Berlioz, “the most individual composer in the whole history of music,”Footnote 27 to launch an intemperate critique of the Workers’ Music Association and its president, the composer Alan Bush, for their socialized understanding of the artist and support for state patronage of the arts.Footnote 28
Newman's diatribe was directed against a quasi-Communist artistic and critical milieu that had survived “the long 1939,” and which over the course of the war established itself as the principal antagonist to the aesthetic politics diversely articulated by Orwell, Horizon and Newman. During the 1930s the philo-communist journal Left Review had fostered a program of writing, criticism and theoretical work in which the vogue for politically and socially engaged art was assimilated to the democratic verities of the Popular Front. The journal had closed abruptly in 1938 but was succeeded first by the mimeographed journal Poetry and the People and, from 1941, by the slightly more lavishly produced Our Time. The launch of Operation Barbarossa in June that year enabled the British Communist Party (CPGB) to lend its support to Britain's war effort, and Our Time attempted to situate itself at the head of a “democratic” or “people's culture” that it claimed was being revived through popularizing initiatives such as the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, recently re-formed along cooperative lines under the auspices of its communist former violist Thomas Russell.Footnote 29 In this “people's culture” the artist was held to exemplify not the autonomous individual celebrated by Orwell et al., but the socialized individuality that would underpin both the war effort itself and the subsequent work of reconstruction;Footnote 30 and the state was conceived as the highest manifestation of “the whole people,” the role of which in the planning of culture was therefore indispensably beneficent.Footnote 31
As this suggests, the communism espoused by writers in Our Time was highly unorthodox and in certain respects closer to an idealist form of modern liberalism than to any identifiable Marxist canons. It greeted the end of the war with an editorial under the Arnoldian headline “culture and anarchy,” and its accounts of a democratic “people's culture” continued to rely heavily on intellectual and artistic arbiters: an editorial manifesto in July 1943, for example, declared that “a people's culture” could only be created “from below, by the people, through the re-educated desires of the people.”Footnote 32 Nonetheless, Our Time’s cultural politics transgressed the opposition that had been set up elsewhere between collectivism and culture, in various forms, and the journal's promotion of communism and of popular Russophilia helped to reinforce the equation that Orwell had drawn between collectivism and totalitarianism. The same was true of attempts by philo-communist intellectuals to apply to wartime discussions of national culture the “purposive” social science for which John Dewey had called during the 1930s, among the most prominent of whom was the biologist C. H. Waddington. In 1941 he published a Pelican Special arguing that democracies suffered from a cultural conservatism incompatible with “modern methods of production”—which he unpejoratively called “totalitarian.”Footnote 33 Britain therefore required a new set of generally agreed “standards” according to which radical social reforms could be enacted; and Waddington identified the processes of biological and social evolution as the bases of a “criterion by which we can decide between advance and retreat” which, being factually grounded, should command universal assent.Footnote 34 This vulgar–pragmatist argument, which initiated a celebrated debate on “science and ethics” in Nature, aligned Waddington with other advocates of the extension of “planning” into the field of culture.Footnote 35 The sociologist Karl Mannheim, for example, had called for democratic planning of both the economy and social values, so that the “consistent way of life . . . without which modern society cannot survive” might be established without the straightforward imposition of uniformity.Footnote 36 But as Mannheim found in his exchanges with T. S. Eliot and the British Hungarian scientist Michael Polanyi in “the Moot,” an ecumenical Christian discussion group convened to discuss the application of religious values to issues of social reform, the question of how a purposive reconstruction of morality could be undertaken by democratic means was not easily resolvable in the mid-1940s.Footnote 37 As Tim Rogan has recently described, when Mannheim's proposals for state-directed moral reform were adopted by the subcommittee on educational reconstruction set up by R. A. Butler in 1941–2, they appeared to some contemporary critics as “stark totalitarianism.”Footnote 38
II
Historians of the “cultural Cold War” have long drawn attention to the way in which its antagonists laid claim to the virtues evoked by “culture,” and extolled the artist as an exemplar of the subjective attributes required to withstand the corrupting influence of the other side.Footnote 39 In Britain this mode of cultural politics was already established during the preceding conflict, and its structuring division was between opposing conceptions of the ideal political subject and their relation to the state. The sensitivities that were therefore raised by public discussion of the arts were signalled in J. M. Keynes's announcement of the Arts Council's foundation in July 1945, in which his teasing declaration that “[s]tate patronage of the arts has crept in” was immediately qualified by an emphasis that the new body did “not intend to socialise this side of social endeavour” and that the “individual and free, undisciplined, unregimented, uncontrolled” character of the artist would remain intact.Footnote 40 The months immediately following victory in Europe also saw a resurgence of the anticommunist cultural politics wherein any form of collective normative legislation was regarded as a precursor to totalitarianism. In the new journal Polemic (1945–7), to which Orwell was a leading contributor, this was reinforced with a vulgarized form of logical positivism, whose conception of value statements as fundamentally meaningless upheld a rigid fact/value distinction and thus undermined the capacity of culture to sustain moral values.Footnote 41 The philosopher A. J. Ayer, who had helped to disseminate logical positivism in Britain during the 1930s and who had also begun to popularize the existentialism of Sartre and Camus, conjoined the two anti-foundationalist philosophies in a celebrated essay for Polemic entitled “The Claims of Philosophy,” which concluded, “The question how men ought to live is one to which there is no authoritative answer. It has to be decided by each man for himself.”Footnote 42
This secular antinomianism, which permitted no qualification of the individual's moral autonomy, was antipathetic to thinkers who sought to situate moral values in culture and thus to submit them to purposive reform, or “planning.” Waddington's earlier argument for factually grounded reform of moral standards had been immediately recognized as a rebuttal of logical positivism, and when the CPGB relaunched its quasi-academic journal Modern Quarterly at the end of 1945 it identified the “fact/value” distinction among its principal intellectual antipathies.Footnote 43 In the same issue, the scientist J. D. Bernal reiterated Waddington's call for a purposive reform of morality in an essay which attracted a good deal of opprobrium, particularly for its declaration that moral values “based on excessive concern with individual rectitude need reorienting in the direction of social responsibility.”Footnote 44 As the ensuing debates intensified, news emerged of an “ideological hardening” in the USSR that had begun with the suppression of two literary journals and the official disgrace of the writers Anna Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko.Footnote 45 The “Soviet literary controversy,” as it rapidly became known, gained attention in Britain in September 1946 while the exchanges between Polemic and the Modern Quarterly were at their most intense, and in which Our Time’s tortuous apologias for the Soviet regime failed to convince more moderate cultural commentators who identified themselves with the “left.”Footnote 46 J. B. Priestley, formerly a sympathizer with communist cultural projects, now affirmed that the artist “must of necessity . . . be something of an individualist and an anarchist,” and the former communist fellow traveller Stephen Spender complained in the New Statesman that “the poet, driven out of his bourgeois ivory tower, is being chased through communal corridors and offices into a new kind of isolation amidst the machinery and slogans of the collective international world.”Footnote 47
In mid-1947 this formed the point of departure for a new journal launched by three recent Cambridge graduates with the title Politics and Letters, which urged that a resolution of the recent debate over the source and status of moral values be accomplished in “experience of literature and the arts. For in these the values which we must be concerned to preserve find their most actual and complete expression.”Footnote 48 In other words, what it called the “dichotomy” between its titular categories could be bridged by a conception of art as a realm governed by standards with universal validity, but which were enkindled and sustained in individual experience.Footnote 49 This was an overtly Arnoldian vision of culture's universal moral remit: the “values” extolled by the editorial resided in “the best that has been thought and known in the world” and their application to debates over economic and social planning, it was claimed, would resolve the opposition between the individual and objective social forms.Footnote 50 In offering this resolution of the impasse in the debate over “values,” the three aspiring public moralists were mobilizing onto the intellectual battlefield of the Cold War an account of the efficacy of literature derived from the Cambridge English teacher F. R. Leavis, under whom two of them—Wolf Mankowitz and Clifford Collins—had studied. However, his categories and assumptions created a fundamental intellectual tension in the journal that remained unresolved when it closed after only three issues. The values denoted by an Arnoldian concept of “culture” could not, by definition, reside in the experience of more than a minority of individuals; for the rest, they would appear as external moral and intellectual standards scarcely less alien and dominative than those for which Bernal had seemingly called in the Modern Quarterly. This tension was laid bare in T. S. Eliot's Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, which attempted to dispel visions of culture as an agent of democratic reconstruction by austerely stating its incompatibility with either democracy or equality.Footnote 51 Eliot famously identified “culture” with “the whole way of life of a people”—but a whole comprising a rigid hierarchy in which the arts were reserved to the highest social group.Footnote 52 Accordingly, he declared in a much-quoted passage, “culture” was inherently inegalitarian: the reader who wished to pursue equality as an overriding objective was enjoined to “stop paying lip-service to culture.”Footnote 53
III
Eliot thus redrew the connection between artistic and quotidian culture that liberal anticommunism had sought to disallow, but he also tacitly confounded the attempt that Politics and Letters had made to situate universal values in art, by pronouncing that “the best that has been thought and known in the world” could only be present in the experience of a minority. This was the difficulty to which the third member of the journal's editorial triumvirate, Raymond Williams, addressed his first full-length works, in which he responded to the formative debates of the cultural Cold War by envisaging artistic and moral values arising in universal experience—but without thereby being corrupted as proponents of minority culture feared they would be. In his first book he accordingly located standards of critical judgment in what he called “the structure of personal feelings of . . . writers and readers.”Footnote 54 Whilst acknowledging that at present this might merely reveal the “poverty and dissociation of feeling” among both groups, Williams nevertheless maintained that adequate standards “will not be created or sustained unless they arise from groups to which all contribute and all accept.”Footnote 55 His next work of socio-literary criticism pursued this concern through the critique of naturalism that would become a characteristic theme of his work over the following years, in which Williams presented art as a manifestation of the fundamental cohesion of “experience” within and between subjects—what he called “the pattern or structure of experience.”Footnote 56 At this stage, however, Williams was unable to reconcile this function with the normative content that he still wished “culture” to carry: in the “community of sensibility” that he envisaged between artist and audience, a special role was reserved for the artist, and even the audience comprised only a “minority” because the “pressure of a mechanical environment . . . which artists, and a few of like temper, reject only by conscious resistance and great labour” had resulted in a “lack of certain qualities of living, certain capacities for experience,” among the population at large.Footnote 57
These distinctive locutions point to the problems Williams encountered in attempting to escape a Leavisian theory of minority culture while working within its categories and assumptions. In an unpublished paper of the early 1950s Williams identified Marxism as the “principal and most challenging alternative to the various theories of minority culture,” but in print he was more disparaging, and in any case that tradition of cultural theory had fallen into abeyance by the early 1950s, after the closure of Our Time in 1949 and the tightening of CPGB control over its successors.Footnote 58 Instead Williams's development of a non-minoritarian theory of culture depended upon two very different aspects of mid-century intellectual culture. The first of these was what he called, in an unpublished report of 1954, “developments within Literary Criticism and Philosophy which have produced a greater emphasis on Language.”Footnote 59 The “extension” of these developments to adult education had included the “analysis of certain key words and concepts in relation to particular periods, and the development of society”—which he himself had designed and delivered under the rubric of “Culture and Society” since the late 1940s.Footnote 60 In July 1953 he published an extended study of “The Idea of Culture” itself, in which that term's ambiguity in contemporary usage was explained in terms of its codification of three entwined strands of response to “the industrial revolution.”Footnote 61 The effect of this analysis was to demonstrate that the antinomies of his own earlier attempts to develop a nonelitist theory of culture resulted from the historical development of the master category itself: culture was by definition reserved to a minority, and antithetical to the working class.Footnote 62 (At this stage Williams's redefinition of culture did not register other antitheses that would later be identified in his own work: like many of the thinkers with and against whom he argued, he conceived the nation as the fundamental cultural unit, imposing a system of exclusions and differences that were tacitly concealed by an espousal of universalism.Footnote 63) Williams's essay therefore supplied the “definition of culture” that Eliot's recent analysis had magisterially presupposed, by demonstrating that it was “the response of certain men, attached to certain values, in the face of change and the consequences of change.”Footnote 64 In other words, values were indeed contingent but the manner in which “culture” came to be understood as the “ground for ultimate valuation” during the nineteenth century demonstrated that their force was not thus diminished.Footnote 65 Indeed, the potency of the values inscribed in “culture” was derived precisely from their being not merely the formulation of “a series of isolated men or groups”—individuals, as Ayer had imagined them, articulating evaluative principles that applied only to themselves—but grounded in social life, arising from the “pressure of active or general life . . . the total environment to which [“culture”] is one kind of response.”Footnote 66
In accounting for that process of response to a “total environment”—in other words, for the process whereby art could be conceived as the forum for collective normative legislation—Williams appears to have assimilated the holistic emphases of cultural sociology and anthropology that had attained wide currency in Britain by the mid-1940s. Looking back during the 1970s upon his postwar return to Cambridge, Williams recalled noticing the prevalence of “an anthropological sense” of culture “which now, with increased American influence and with the parallel influence of such thinkers as Mannheim, was becoming naturalized.”Footnote 67 The American influence was almost certainly the “culture and personality” school of anthropology that was popularized in Britain during the 1940s by Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict.Footnote 68 (In a course syllabus of 1950 Williams described Benedict's Patterns of Culture as “so distinguished that it cannot wisely be omitted from an essential reading list” for literature students.Footnote 69) The most obvious respect in which Benedict and Mead's “influence” could be conceived as “parallel” to that of Mannheim is in its assimilation of the holism that was prevalent in discussions of “culture” in the mid-century social sciences.Footnote 70 Mannheim, whose work continued to be published and prominently discussed in his adoptive country after his early death in 1947, was best known for his “sociology of knowledge” wherein intellectual and cultural artefacts were conceived as products of the entire social order within which they emerged—an approach explained by E. H. Carr in an extended survey of his work in the Times Literary Supplement in 1953.Footnote 71 In particular, Mannheim held that a sociological analysis of the political ideologies that claimed to make good the absence of coherent values in contemporary societies would enable them to be understood as “structures” or “styles of thought,” among which a latent cohesion could be perceived by the sociologist of knowledge.Footnote 72 In his most influential work, Ideology and Utopia (1929, trans. 1936), Mannheim had termed this method “relationism” and presented it as a sociological application of gestalt psychology derived from the work of Alfred Weber, with whom he had studied at Heidelberg.Footnote 73 During the mid-1940s Mannheim's work was prominently criticized by both Friedrich von Hayek and Karl Popper—in the latter case, expressly on the grounds of what Popper took to be its misapplication of gestalt-ist holism (with its then famous understanding of perceptual “wholes” that were distinct both from their component parts and from the aggregate of the parts—yet were emphatically non-idealist).Footnote 74 Williams's attention may also have been drawn to Mannheim by his wife (who was a student at the London School of Economics during 1937–40, while Mannheim was lecturing there); a syllabus he prepared for a WEA course on “Culture and Society” in 1950–51 included Mannheim's Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (1940) among the assigned reading.Footnote 75
Williams's formal elaboration of the process whereby values arose as a response to a “total environment” appears to have responded to the distinctive mode of analysis that Mannheim had dubbed “relationism.” As we have seen, in 1954 he co-authored the manifesto for a film project to which he contributed a prefatory essay on “Film and the Dramatic Tradition,” in which film was presented as the medium par excellence in which the deficiencies of naturalist drama could be overcome. Here Williams presented the dual meaning of “convention” as evidence of the inherently social and consensual nature of “accepted standards.”Footnote 76 The success of dramatic performance, Williams claimed, depended upon its accordance with artistic “convention,” which meant “the terms upon which author, performers and audience agree to meet.”Footnote 77 The artist was always constrained by this need for the audience's prior consent to his or her methods and technique: Williams emphasized that “we shall not be able, merely by taking thought, to create an alternative convention” because “[d]ramatist, actors and audience must be able to agree that the particular method to be employed is acceptable.”Footnote 78 In other words, the operation of artistic “conventions” demonstrated that meaningful standards or values could never be determined by individual artists, but were the outcome of an interaction between the arts and “the life of the time in which they flourished”—which Williams here named “the structure of feeling.”Footnote 79
The invention of this category as the primary field of artistic creation enabled Williams to interpose a theory of socially generated value between the overt antinomianism of liberal anticommunism and the equally overt elitism of Eliot's recent attempt to conjoin social and artistic values. The Mannheimian “structure” or “style of thought” was here transposed into the realm of “feeling” to denote a latent cohesion that was always already present beneath the apparent fragmentation of contemporary values. “All the products of a community in a given period are, we now commonly believe, essentially related,” Williams explained, “although in practice, and in detail, this is not always easy to see.”Footnote 80 This “essentially related” quality, and the fundamental cultural cohesion it supposedly underwrote, was obscured by criticism that focused upon determinate aspects of social life, as naturalist drama focused upon character and personality instead of the whole:
We examine each element as a precipitate, but in the living experience of the time every element was in solution, an inseparable part of a complex whole . . . when one has measured the work against the separable parts, there yet remains some element for which there is no external counterpart. This element, I believe, is what I have named the structure of feeling of a period, and it is only realizable through experience of the work of art itself, as a whole.Footnote 81
The “structure of feeling” was therefore the distinctive quality of a “complex whole” that was not present in its individual parts, or in their aggregate: it was homologous with the principle of cohesion in cultural formations that Mannheim, in particular, had elaborated. The relationship that Williams thus established between artistic and anthropological culture differed from that envisaged by Eliot insofar as it precluded, by definition, as it were, the reservation of the arts to any particular social group: Williams identified them with the whole because they embodied standards subsisting in a “structure of feeling” that was itself composed of the relations between all “the separable parts” of a universal culture. The elucidation of those relations—of the “structure of feeling”—remained the task of the artist, but it was now ostensibly a secondary activity, the articulation of principles which all members of society were always engaged upon creating. In the arts, “A new convention . . . will become established because there are changes in the structure of feeling which demand expression.”Footnote 82 Whereas Politics and Letters had envisaged Arnoldian “culture” as instilling values into experience in order to reconcile the individual with objective social processes, Williams understood art as an expression of values that already pervaded individual and social experience. “The structure of feeling,” he emphasized in conclusion, “lies deeply embedded in our lives; it cannot be merely extracted and summarized; it is perhaps only in art—and this is the importance of art—that it can be realized, and communicated, as a whole experience.”Footnote 83 Although comparatively little noticed in 1954, Williams thus elaborated a theoretical framework within which culture as an ordered body of work and judgments could be restored to what he thought of as a universal social constituency, and in so doing established the means by which he would attempt to resolve the dilemmas that had animated debates over democracy and “values” since the early 1940s.
IV
The theory of culture that Williams outlined in these early works was a product both of the “cultural Cold War,” and of the moment in twentieth-century Britain that Harold Perkin characterized as “the plateau of professional society,” during which competing claims to public authority were made by various forms of expertise, on the grounds of distinctive or unique disciplinary competence.Footnote 84 Literary intellectuals were vigorous participants in this contestation of public authority during the 1950s and 1960s.Footnote 85 As we have seen, Politics and Letters had already claimed a unique public authority for literature amid the scientistic debate over “values” during the mid-1940s, and Williams presented Reading and Criticism as an extension of the Leavisian tradition of “culture and environment” studies that explicitly emphasized the efficacy of literature in the formation and maintenance of liberal subjectivity.Footnote 86 In this Williams was one of a group of young writers influenced by Leavis in the mid-1950s who upheld the capacity of literature to disclose ameliorative knowledge of the social, particularly in contradistinction to what were taken to be quasi-positivistic modes of sociological or philosophical knowledge. E. P. Thompson's biography of William Morris (1955) projected anticommunist deployments of logical positivism back onto early Victorian industrialism, demonstrating how the Gradgrindian mantra of “Fact, fact, fact . . . fact, fact, fact,” which nullified all “values” besides those of the existing economic and social order, was made to yield to the articulated moral principle of Morris's aesthetic politics.Footnote 87 The opening of Richard Hoggart's celebrated study of working-class and mass culture The Uses of Literacy dismissed “the detailed studies of working-class life which sociologists have made over the last twenty years,” and underlined the special ability of literary analysis to decode cultures—“to see beyond the habits to what the habits stand for, to see through the statements to what the statements really mean . . . to detect the differing pressures of emotion behind idiomatic phrases and ritualistic observances.”Footnote 88
Williams likewise claimed a special role for the writer and critic as legislators of social values in his emphatic statement that “it is perhaps only in art” that the structure of feeling “can be realized, and communicated, as a whole experience.” This emphasis became more pronounced as Williams attempted to demonstrate how change in the “structure of feeling” could take place: the extent to which his new category had diminished the role of the artist in cultural production seemingly foreclosed the possibility of any deliberate innovation in artistic and moral standards, and Williams attempted to rectify this by suggesting that changes in conventions originated in the structure of feeling, but were initially perceptible to “a few minds only” who would “promote and affect them.”Footnote 89 In other words it continued to be necessary to assign some measure of authority to a minority, which thus remained a spectral presence in his theory of universal cultural production. But Williams's overriding concern to dispel this presence subsequently led him to dispense altogether with any mediation between “experience” and “culture” so that, as he explained in an oft-cited essay of 1958, “Culture Is Ordinary”—it was composed of the “shape,” the “purposes” and “meanings” of an entire society, which were “also made and remade in every individual mind.”Footnote 90 In the same year, in his celebrated book Culture and Society, Williams unified the two strands of criticism that he had adumbrated in the essays of 1953–4: the “tradition” of thought about culture that he had identified in 1953 was presented here as the articulation of a “structure of feeling” which culminated in the contemporary figure of Orwell, whose work demonstrated the breakdown of the traditional concept of “culture” in the intellectual and social conjuncture of the early 1950s.Footnote 91
Williams claimed that there was now a dislocation between “immediate experience” and the “meanings” conveyed by the tradition, which it was his aim to overcome—but not, it appeared, through any conscious action.Footnote 92 In comparison with thinkers working within the ambit of the Communist Party, Williams was little concerned with the possibility of purposive historical change: he appears closer to what has been characterized as a liberal-communitarian response to modernity, wherein an instinctive valuation of “a densely structured traditional existence” leaves “no point of leverage for criticism.”Footnote 93 The conclusion to Culture and Society stated that any attempt at deliberate alteration of the structure of feeling was a manifestation of “the dominative attitude” or “mode,”Footnote 94 in contrast to which Williams demanded a “democratic practice” centering upon the recognition that nobody “can raise anybody else's cultural standard. The most that can be done is to transmit the skills, which are not personal but general human property, and at the same time to give open access to all that has been made and done.”Footnote 95 The Arnoldian treasury of “the best that has been thought and known” was here recast in more inclusive terms as “all that has been made and done,” and Williams attempted to demonstrate how working-class institutions could supply a new “structure of feeling” that would supplant the tradition of “culture” that had exhausted itself in the 1950s. The “basic collective idea” embodied in working-class institutions was accordingly set in a quasi-dialectical relationship with “the basic individualist idea” of “bourgeois culture,” and Williams claimed, “In our culture as a whole, there is both a constant interaction between these ways of life and an area which can properly be described as common to or underlying both.”Footnote 96 This did not overcome the fundamental problem posed by his theory of universal cultural and ethical legislation, however: the retained concept of the “culture as a whole” within which working-class and bourgeois cultures supposedly commingled suggested that the former had already been synthesized into the extant “structure of feeling” and its articulated “meanings,” rather than forming the basis of a new, future synthesis in the way that Williams's application of his historical analysis to contemporary debates about “culture” seemed to require.
Culture and Society became one of the seminal texts of the “New Left” that began to emerge in Britain in the late 1950s, seemingly in response to de-Stalinization in the USSR, Soviet repression of the Hungarian revolt in October that year, and the almost contemporaneous Suez affair; and as a forum for attempts by young intellectuals to reformulate socialist theory in response to the altered structures of postwar capitalism.Footnote 97 In fact most of the New Left's distinctive concerns—with “commitment” in the arts, with the relationship between socialism and “humanism,” with the politics of logical positivism and Oxford ordinary-language philosophy, and with the constraints of Popperian and structural-functionalist social science—were continuations of debates that had been underway for most of the postwar period, and in which competing disciplinary claims to public authority were clearly registered. It is therefore unsurprising that Williams's book, the culmination of his attempt to escape the intellectual deadlock that he perceived in the debates of the mid-1940s, should have gained so much attention in this milieu, which also shared his positive valuation of “democracy.” The inaugural editorial of Universities and Left Review, one of the constitutive journals of the new intellectual caucus, declared that its principal objective would be to renew what the journal called “socialist values” in such a way as to “change contemporary society so as to make it more democratic and more egalitarian, and yet . . . prevent it degenerating into totalitarianism”—an extraordinary qualification which is indicative of how far schemes of moral and cultural reform such as those advocated by the incipient “New Left” had been placed in tension with democracy during the debates of the 1940s.Footnote 98 The historian E. P. Thompson joined Williams as one of the dominating figures of the New Left through his editorship of the New Reasoner, and by supplying a distinctive theoretical framework for its pursuit of democracy in his vision of “socialist humanism,” a kind of corporate self-government that he counterposed to the bureaucratism of Soviet Communism and to the weaknesses and evasions of social-democratic politics.Footnote 99
In practice, however, the “agency” that stood at the centre of this renewal of democracy was a corporate faculty wherein working-class experience would be harnessed to the theoretical productions of socialist intellectuals.Footnote 100 This emphasis on intellectual leadership was retained in Williams's own work for the New Left, despite his attempts to dispense with it in Culture and Society. In an essay for Universities and Left Review in 1958, Williams presented the realist novel as the sole remedy for the conflict between “meanings” and “experience” that he had diagnosed in that book, contra the claims of “sociology on the one hand or psychology on the other”: in fact his hopes were vested in a particular kind of realist novel, closely resembling the one he himself was engaged in writing.Footnote 101 Williams's parallel attempts during the late 1950s to develop the formal theory of culture foreshadowed in Culture and Society seem to have encountered their greatest difficulty in establishing how the “structure of feeling” could mediate between culture and society without any delegation of cultural production or authority to intellectuals. His notebooks from mid-1957 contain outlines for “a general theory” of culture in which the different senses of that term and their relation to “society” are painstakingly elaborated, with the “structure of feeling” interposed as a “middle term” which bound individuals to culture by demonstrating that they were always tacitly engaged upon its construction.Footnote 102 This redefinition of the concept as a mediation of individual creativity appears as an attempt to resolve the problem of universalized cultural production that had arisen in Culture and Society, by understanding it not as a properly collective process but as one engaged in simultaneously and autonomously by (all) individuals. He still appears to have been uncertain whether the “structure of feeling” was the object of expression, or its medium; in a sequence of notes on “Art and Mind” it is presented as both:
Expresses what? : The structure of feeling.
Because expresses : communicates.
This is why the structure is necessary, [formulas?] and forms for communication: partic. channels into which personal energies & conflicts can be diverted, & through exercise, partially controlled.Footnote 103
In 1961 the “general theory” of culture for which these notes were a preparation appeared as The Long Revolution, in which the diagnosis advanced in Culture and Society was elaborated in greater detail. At the turn of the 1960s, Williams claimed, Britain had seen the ascendancy of the liberal-empiricist ideology of which he had formerly identified Orwell as the representative, wherein the reality of social ties outside the immediate circle of “family and friends” was denied.Footnote 104 It was thus a “mass” society, in the sense that the corollary of this mode of individualism was an “image of society” wherein other people were viewed as “the mass”—and, implicitly, “governed, organized, instructed and entertained by an élite or élites.”Footnote 105 (Williams also described this “image of society” in quasi-Mannheimian terms as a “structure of thinking.”Footnote 106) This mode of individualism was self-contradictory, however, since on its own terms it must either recognize the validity of other individuals, and thus concede some measure of social reciprocity, or culminate in the individual's own subsumption by the mass.Footnote 107 It was also confounded by the very nature of experience, which the “structure of feeling” was intended to render inherently social: as we saw, Williams's notes for the book indicate how he wished to use this “central concept” to bind individuals to “culture” by demonstrating that they were always tacitly engaged upon its construction. The Long Revolution opened with a reinforcement of that argument using the neuroscientist J. Z. Young's recent Reith Lectures, which Williams cited as definitive validation of his belief that creativity was a universal faculty exercised at all times, by the mere fact of consciousness.Footnote 108 He now inverted the claim he had made in 1958, that “Culture Is Ordinary”: Young's lectures, he claimed, demonstrated that “there are, essentially, no ‘ordinary’ activities, if by ‘ordinary’ we mean the absence of creative interpretation and effort. Art is ratified, in the end, by the ratification of creativity in all our living.”Footnote 109
The dominant “image of society” in Britain was therefore, by definition, at odds with “experience” because the latter category did not admit of any distinction between elites and masses. In this sense Williams attempted to demonstrate how the three components of his “long revolution”—democratic, industrial and cultural—were intertwined, and mutually inextricable: in effect, how processes of economic, social and cultural development were evincing and promoting a universal impulse towards self-government.Footnote 110 He also redefined the “structure of feeling” in accordance with his modified theoretical framework, placing more emphasis upon the intangible qualities that resided in “a way of thinking and living” of which there was no formal record or artefact: it was “a particular sense of life, a particular community of experience hardly needing expression, through which the characteristics of our way of life that an external analyst could describe are in some way passed, giving them a particular and characteristic colour.”Footnote 111 In this sense the structure of feeling was actually inscrutable even to the individuals who were present within it; but it could be approached through “the body of intellectual or imaginative work, in which, in a detailed way, human thought and experience are variously recorded.”Footnote 112 Williams claimed, in accordance with his quasi-democratic theory of universal creativity, that this encompassed all the artefacts of a culture, “from poems to buildings and dress-fashions,”Footnote 113 and proceeded to apply the reformed concept to an analysis of English culture during the 1840s in which he claimed that even novelists who opposed the dominant “social character” remained inescapably “bound by the structure of feeling.”Footnote 114
There was, however, an exception. In Wuthering Heights, “The creative elements in the other fiction are raised to a wholeness which takes the work right outside the ordinary structure of feeling, and teaches a new feeling.”Footnote 115 The problem that Williams had always recognized in his “central concept,” of how it could allow for innovation and change, was ultimately irresolvable without recourse to the tutelary role of the artist (in this case Emily Brontë). He was therefore constrained to assign a special status to “art” that set it apart from the more quotidian forms of creativity with which he had attempted to equate it: “Art reflects its society and works a social character through to its reality in experience. But also, art creates, by new perceptions and responses, elements which the society, as such, is not able to realize.”Footnote 116 Although he insisted on the “deep and central connections” between art and “the rest of the general life,” the possibility of artistic and ethical change ultimately required that those connections should not be reciprocal but run from one to the other, and the artist was again accorded the authority as cultural producer and legislator that it had been Williams's foremost purpose to disperse.Footnote 117 Accordingly at the close of the second section of the book, Williams tacitly modified the theory of universal creativity that he had outlined at its opening: “Reality is continually established, by common effort, and art is one of the highest forms of this process.”Footnote 118 In calling here for “a new realism” in the novel that would transcend the contemporary “structure of feeling,” Williams was therefore arguing for the special role of the artist as the legislator of a new way of life.Footnote 119 If Britain in 1961 was indeed in the midst of a “long revolution” of the kind that he had claimed, the constraint of his own theoretical work within the assumptions of “minority culture” was itself a sign of what he acknowledged to be the revolution's incompleteness.
V
The ambivalences and ambiguities that were therefore evident in The Long Revolution were also registered in wider attempts to reassert the role of moral values in political and economic debate in Britain during the early 1960s. In disputes within the Labour Party from the late 1950s, the new concept of “affluence”—partially derived from J. K. Galbraith's The Affluent Society (1958)—was harnessed to a moral critique of the impoverishment of the public sphere that resulted from treating economic growth and consumption as ends in themselves.Footnote 120 Around the same time there was a minor revival of interest in R. H. Tawney, whose works of the 1920s and 1930s inspired some of those moralistic usages of “affluence.”Footnote 121 On Tawney's death in January 1962, a New Statesman editorial explicitly situated contemporary critiques of capitalism in the lineages of Tawney's ethical socialism: “He had never claimed that capitalism was unworkable . . . He believed, quite simply, that it was wrong,” the paper explained:
Long before J. K. Galbraith reminded us of the contrast between private affluence and public squalor, Tawney had attacked the double standard of private and public morality. Both The Acquisitive Society and Equality are passionate assertions that man cannot be whole or dignified until he lives in a community where his private motives lead him to seek the public good.Footnote 122
Yet although this moralistic rhetoric was integrated into Labour Party policy statements during the early 1960s and into the “public doctrine” that Harold Wilson elaborated as Labour leader during 1963–4, it did not shift the fundamental priorities of Labour policy. Shortly after Labour's return to office in the 1964 election Williams acknowledged that, within the party itself, the tradition of “moral critique” that subsisted in working-class culture and in the literary tradition he had analyzed in Culture and Society had long been subordinate to the utilitarian and paternalist ideology of Fabianism, and would likely remain so under Wilson.Footnote 123
It has recently been argued that a version of this tradition of anti-utilitarian moral criticism, stemming from Tawney, was invalidated amid the antihumanist shift in Western intellectual life from the late 1960s because it had depended upon a notion of the human “personality” as an absolute end in itself.Footnote 124 Alongside that influential development, we have also seen here that the place of moral values in political debate had already become deeply problematic by the 1940s, when the compatibility of any form of normative legislation with democracy and liberty was called into question in fundamental terms. The complexities and contradictions of Williams's concept of the “structure of feeling” arose from his attempts to circumvent those difficulties. Exponents of this kind of moral criticism were therefore already in a defensive position by the early 1950s, not yet as a consequence of challenges to the normative validity of the human “personality” but in response to a dominant intellectual liberalism that sought a safeguard against totalitarianism in a tendentious equation of individual liberty with value pluralism.Footnote 125 The philosopher Richard Wollheim directly applied this criticism to Williams's theory of culture shortly after The Long Revolution appeared, counterposing his own conception of socialism as “a culturally plural society” to Williams's idea of a “common culture” which, in its apparent requirement for “widespread acceptance of . . . substantive values,” risked allowing “the modest ideal of a society in which people speak the same language” to be supplanted by “the more comprehensive ideal of a society in which people say roughly the same things”—a criticism which evinces the same pattern of response that was apparent in Universities and Left Review’s recognition that its pursuit of “socialist values” might slide into “totalitarianism.”Footnote 126
The alarming implications that this criticism raised demonstrate the sensitivities that had formed around holistic or unitary schemes of moral reform by the early 1960s, as a result of the debates over the relationship between democracy and values that have been examined in this article. Williams elaborated the concept of the “structure of feeling” in an attempt to develop a theory of culture that would licence a democratization of cultural production, while continuing to support the progressive historical developments that he referred to as “the Long Revolution.” Yet the difficulty of sustaining a thoroughgoing cultural democracy had already been recognized by Karl Mannheim in his essay “The Democratization of Culture” (1933), which appeared in English in 1956 in a collection that Williams listed in the bibliography to The Long Revolution.Footnote 127 Mannheim viewed cultural democratization as the normative path of development in modern societies, but also acknowledged “an inner contradiction inherent in the democratic organization of society”—namely its irreconcilability with the objective of order.Footnote 128 “Hence, all democratic societies need certain neutralizing devices involving undemocratic or anti-democratic potentialities,” he explained. “These devices, however, are not imposed upon democratic society from without; they consist essentially in a voluntary renunciation by the mass of the full use of its energies.”Footnote 129 As we have seen, Mannheim was strongly criticized for his abrogation of democracy, and even after his death T. S. Eliot wondered at what he called Mannheim's “dual personality,” in a letter to the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr of 1953: “I mean, that he always seemed to me to have the heart of a humane and highly civilised liberal and the head of a totalitarian planner.”Footnote 130 Williams, of course, sought to avoid any voluntary renunciation of cultural self-government and attempted instead to construct a theoretical framework within which what Mannheim called “the mass” could make full use of its creative faculties—but in which order, or the operation of cultural standards, could only be secured by the regulatory and innovative function of artists and intellectuals. His work, too, could thus appear to contemporaries to embody a dualism. “There are really two Raymond Williamses,” a reviewer in the New Statesman observed in 1962. “The first is a democrat,” while the second “half-subscribes to the romantic myth that the modern world has seen some kind of absolute deterioration in the quality of life . . . this is the Raymond Williams who has been attracted by Coleridge's dream of a clerisy.”Footnote 131
The perception that Williams risked being absorbed into the tradition he himself had traced in Culture and Society was also, half-jokingly, raised by E. P. Thompson amid their uneasy collaboration within the first New Left.Footnote 132 However, Williams himself had presented that book as part of the completion of “a body of work which I set myself to do ten years ago,”Footnote 133 and his growing engagement with what would later be called western Marxism was already evident in his article on Wilson for New Left Review: the contrast here between a potentially transformative moral critique and the corporatism of Fabian socialism, alongside his emphasis upon the political agency of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the New Left, demonstrated affinities with the work of Antonio Gramsci, which had long been known among British socialists before being adopted as an explicit theoretical reference point by Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn.Footnote 134 With the fuller development of Williams's cultural materialism during the 1970s, he attempted to reformulate the “structure of feeling” in quasi-Marxian terms:
The idea of a structure of feeling can be specifically related to the evidence of forms and conventions—semantic figures—which, in art and literature, are often among the very first indications that such a new structure is forming . . . as a matter of cultural theory this is a way of defining forms and conventions in art and literature as inalienable elements of a social material process . . .Footnote 135
The voluntarism that Williams had attempted to incorporate in his earliest elaborations of the concept receded in this redefinition, with neither artist nor audience credited with any special agency in the face of “a social material process” that appears more nearly determinative than Williams allowed in his work of the 1950s. This shift may reflect his recognition of the problems that the concept continued to raise, which he explicitly acknowledged in his interviews with New Left Review shortly afterwards; but it also demonstrates how strongly Williams's earlier work had been formed by the acute intellectual pressures of the 1940s and 1950s, a context by which it was less strongly bound by the mid-1970s.
Nonetheless, insofar as that passage in mid-century intellectual history saw purposive attempts to invalidate moral argument in political and economic discourse, and the valorization of an ostensible ethical neutrality characteristic of early or “first-phase” neoliberalism, its influence continues to be felt in the present day.Footnote 136 Calls for the restoration of moral critique to contemporary debates about capitalism will therefore have not only to circumvent the problems posed by the concept of the human “personality,” but also to address the difficulties of reconciling moral prescription with democracy that this article has suggested was a major issue in mid-century intellectual history, and the fundamental concern of Williams's early work. The history traced here suggests that those difficulties are not insuperable: as has been pointed out elsewhere, “views cast in a negative form,” such as the disallowance of moral prescription, “may not be, in any given situation, any less prescriptive than views cast in a positive form,” and democracy is not necessarily or obviously incompatible with all forms of intellectual and cultural hierarchy.Footnote 137 It was made so, however, in Williams's rejection of any form of normative legislation as a manifestation of “the dominative mode,” which also anticipated the radically antihierarchical impulses that were unleashed among the European and American left from the late 1960s. These, too, foundered upon their aversion to political leadership, while arguably lending themselves to new and more insidious forms of domination.Footnote 138 Some of the most influential recent work in modern intellectual history has been concerned with delineating a contemporary account of “the origins of the present crisis,” in the celebrated phrase associated with Williams's interlocutors on the second New Left, by pointing to the unintended consequences of intellectual transformations that were accomplished in the global conjuncture of the late 1960s and early 1970s.Footnote 139 If the effects of those transformations are to be undone or overcome, their lineages within a more extended intellectual history of the kind that this article has outlined will need to be more fully understood, and Williams's attempts to diagnose and respond to the intellectual convulsions of the mid-twentieth century may therefore retain some significance beyond the academy in the early twenty-first.
