Structure of Felling

Konsep structure of feeling yg paling jelas!!!!

As a heuristic device to investigate organizations of life, Williams develops the concept of
structure of feeling. He elaborates his theory of culture in relation to his concept of
Structure of feeling. In one sense, the structure of feeling is the culture of a period. It is
not learned in any formal way, but each new generation creates it - using, in part, elements
from the past - as it shapes its response to the unique world it inherits. A structure of
feeling corresponds, in some ways, to the dominant Social character - Erich Fromms
term, which Williams uses to denote a valued system, of behaviour and attitudes(TLR
63), but more important, it expresses the interaction between the dominant social
character, alternative social characters, and lived, experiential reality. actual communities,
it is a very deep and wide possession, since communication depends on it: but it is not uniform
throughtout a society, and is primarily evident in the dominant productive group. At this level,
however, it is different from any distinguishable social character, as it has to cope, not only with
the public ideals, but also with their experiences.
The fusion of structure and feeling epitomizes Williamss approach in all his work - a search
for system combined with the desire to knowledge the most delicate and least tangible parts of
our activity. - We may ask with structure of feeling, as with the wholeness of a whole way
of life, what constitutes it as a structure - why structure; rather than, say, a field of attitudes and
emotions? How far is structure more than a metaphor for firmness and interconnectedness the metaphor the later twentieth century prefers to that of organic unity? The temporal
dimensions of the concept are also a problem. Structure of Feeling has synchronic implications,
but Williamss stress, throughout his work, is diachronic, concerned with history, change. But
how do structures of feeling change, and in what sense, when they change, do they remain
structures,? The Long Revolution seems to suggest that they change with the new generation....
feeling its whole life in certain ways differently, and shaping its creative response into a new
structure of feeling(TLR 65) But if a structure of feeling changes with each new generation, the
difficulties remain of delimiting a generation and of accounting for the possible persistence and
co-existence of structure of feeling across and within generations.
In recent years, the notion of structure has been much used to challenge the idea of the free,
autonomous individual: structures make men , not vice versa. Williams stresses in The Long
Revolution, however, the role of human agency, indeed human creativity, in shaping structures
of feeling - and the creativity is not confined to the artist, who partakes, rather, of a general
human process of creativity and communication.
recent literary and cultural theory there has been a strong drive, well fuelled by poststructuralism to deny any but a mystifying role to concepts of the individual. This is especially
strange when it is fused with a fervent urge for political liberation, since it is difficult to see who
or what is to be liberated, or to how or what the prospect of liberation is likely to appeal.
Williamss approach in The Long Revolution is more complex: it seeks not to deny individuals
nor to 93
negate the uniqueness of each , but to understand the processes and practices by which
individuation - much more than merely an Althusserean interpellation into imaginary subject
positions - takes place. And William does not aim, here, only to interpret the world, but to change
it; to contribute to the creation or articulation, of a new structure of feeling.

The phrase "structure of feeling" occurs somewhat casually in Williams's foundational Culture
and Society (1958). It first appears as a symptom of Carlyle's favorably interpreted "direct
response" to the con- dition of England: Carlyle captured "that structure of contemporary feeling which is only ever apprehended directly," and which is not to be identified with formal
systems or doctrines. It is further proposed as an attribute of the novels of the 1840s. And, in an
apparently different evaluation, the same structure of feeling is offered as the equivalent of a
negative definition of ideology: when George Eliot, in Felix Holt, describes the lives of working
people, Williams finds that her personal intelligence surrenders "virtually without a fight, to the
general structure of feeling about these matters which was the common property of her
generation." It is this "general structure of feeling" that characterises the reformist fiction of the
mid-nineteenth century: it sees that things are wrong, but it cannot become involved.14 So far,
then, the "structure of feeling" seems to define something very like ideology in its classic and
negative sense - the false consciousness emanating from a (ruling or emergent) class interest. But
we also have here an endorsement of some degree of direct apprehension, of felt con- viction (in
Carlyle), along with the implication that it is the gift of great literature to perform this
apprehension. The doctrinal content of the structure of feeling seems to be found wanting (in
Eliot), while the writer is commended for a committed and lively embodying of it. The structure
is unsatisfactory but the feeling is valued, both as it originated in com- position and as it conveys
us back from the present to an intuition of what things felt like. We seem here to have an unholy
alliance between
In The Long Revolution (1961), "an attempt to reach new ground"'" and to integrate a general
theory of human creativity into an account of the interrelation of cultural and political revolution,
Williams offers his first sustained account of the structure of feeling. Significantly, he here presents, as one of the basic problems in cultural history, that of recovering from the past a "felt sense
of the quality of life at a particular place and time." It is art, he opines, that can best give us this
sense, for art records something "actually lived through" and able to produce "an actual living
change." The structure of feeling is now glossed as something at once "firm and definite" yet
operative in "the most delicate and least tangible parts of our activity"; it is in one sense "the
culture of a period," but it is culture conceived as an aesthetic-individual experience, as "the
particular living result of all the elements in the general organization." It is espe- cially evident in
the arts, and it is at the heart of communication itself, and thus a "very deep and very wide
possession." It changes with the generations, and is never simply learned but always created.'
But here again there is a confusion of focus. On the one hand, the structure of feeling is said to
"correspond" to the "dominant social char- acter" and to be primarily evident in the "dominant
social group." This makes it, once again, look very like what others have called ideology. On the
other hand, it carries the signatures of an interaction between all the extant social characters, and
thus records, so to speak, ideology in fer- ment or in transition, and with an emphasis on a notion
of agency emanat- ing from the consciousness of the artist. Williams seems to want to offer art

and literature as the most complex barometer of movement at the ideological level, and to
propose the structure of feeling as a kind of super-sensitive indicator of such movement. (One
could say that it is made up of different ideologies, in ferment, or that it is in itself a particular
kind of mixed ideology). Thus, in the 1840s, authors do remain "bound" by a negative ideology,
but the best literature goes beyond this, straining it to breaking point by projecting a "radical
human dissent." It does this by humanization rather than by theory or argument, as it transcribes
the "deepest feelings in the real experience of the time," and it is this that defines a novel like
Wuthering Heights as the record of an emergent "new feeling."
In Modern Tragedy (1966) the innovatory, ahead-of-the-game aspect of the structure of feeling is
oddly underemployed. Instead, the phrase is used to describe something as general as the Greek
world-view, now forever lost. There is a "mediaeval structure of feeling," a bourgeois structure
of feeling (apparent in Lessing's work), and a liberal structure of feeling.19 But in Drama from
Ibsen to Brecht (1968) there is another sustained attempt to specify a definition, one which takes
over verbatim some of the phrasing of The Long Revolution and adapts it to the analysis of
modern drama. Here, structures of feeling are placed in dialectical relation to "conventions." The
exposition is somewhat obscure, but there seems to be implied a temporal metamorphosis;
conventions begin as inherited forms that are challenged by structures of feeling, which then
themselves become the new conventions to be challenged in their turn. In dwelling upon the
structure of feeling, Williams claims to intend a move toward totalities: "What I am seeking to
describe is the continuity of experience from a particular work, through its particular form, to its
recognition as a general form, and then the relation of this general form to a period." The
structure of feeling is first apparent as a strictly personal formation, even to the point of
signalling isolation or alienation. The artist will at first find himself rejecting and being rejected
by the "estab- lished formations," but gradually he will be seen to be speaking for others, and
eventually for "a new way of seeing ourselves and our world." The emphatic small-scale
innovation of the structure of feeling, together with its location in the work of literature, gives
Williams permission to reproduce the disciplinary preference of literary criticism for beginning
"quite locally, in what is still called practical criticism, with direct analysis," with a "first study"
that is "local, particular, unique."20 But what is never tested or proven is the relation of any of
these literary particulars to any more general social-historical formation. Formal novel- ties may
evolve, indeed, into new artistic conventions, and as such they have a teleological component.
But Williams gives us no tools for under- standing such conventions in precise relation to nonliterary and hence "total" history. The historical prescience of art then comes to be judged largely
as it develops forms which other artists replicate

Definition of Structure of Feeling

His object is whether the novel or poem provides knowledge of what he calls the "structure of
feeling" of a specific historical moment, and even more concretely of a given class
In contrast, Williams's readings are pieces in a puzzle: how to construct the space between
economic and political structures to forms of "thought"; how to get at the "structure of feeling."
For in the contexts he variously calls "feeling" or "experience" lies what may be called the "life
world," a sphere that theory-saturated abstractions such as "ideology" invariably miss.
From his writings on drama and criticism in the 1950s to his magnificent The Country and the
City, narrative fiction and poetry are the raw materials from which one can construct the ways in
which vast historical changes are interpretively configured and the ambiguous sphere of the life
world is revealed.
Williams pieces this world together from the fragments of experience of which literature is a
register rather than performing the conventional "connection" between pristine literary
representations and the world to which, putatively, it refers. Just as Bakhtin reads Rabelais's
Gargantua as a chronicle of the underside of sixteenth- century French peasant life, so Williams
grasps the meaning of the transition from agrarian to urban society as a multifaceted process of
which contemporary reflections are coded experiences.9
the unique quality of literature as "a whole way of seeing that is communicable to others, and a
dramatisation of values that becomes an action." Again, art records "the pressure and structure of
active ex- perience, creating forms, creating life," and at its heart is the structure of feeling,
something that is "lived and experienced but not yet quite ar- ranged as institutions and ideas."
21
the structure of feeling as a self-evident category, somewhat akin to but always more complex
and unstable than what he occasionally, here, calls "ideology
the obsession with making sure that the structure of feeling gets first into the patent book causes
Williams to identify it not just with emergence - already too fixed a category - but with "preemergence, active and press- ing but not yet fully articulated, rather than the more evident
emergence which could be more confidently named
It remains the signature of a "living presence," now explicitly a corrective to "the reduction of
the social to fixed forms that remains the basic error" of much Marxist theory. Williams is still
preoc- cupied with "something" about subjective experience that he imagines the mainline
theorists to be missing out: "the experiences to which the fixed forms do not speak at all, which
indeed they do not recognize" because they are beyond the "available meaning," being "actively
lived
and
felt."
Williams consistently argues, by description

more than anything else, that the object of knowledge is history, of which beliefs, values, and
especially "feelings" are an ineluctable
component and must be studied, in conjunction with economic
and political institutions, as a "whole."
On the
next page a modification of this formulation: "1 would now want to use the concept
much more differentially between classes. But it is important to note that this diversity is
itself historically variable" (p. 158). Williams tells us he first developed the concept in his
book A Preface to Film (1954) and then employed it more methodologically in The Long
Revolution (1961); (reprint, London: Pelican, 1975). In the earlier work, Williams notes that
the "structure of feeling" of a given generation may be discerned only in the work of art
itself because "there is no external counterpart," a formulation that infers that the work of
art is constitutive of what may be termed the "social" rather than a reflection of it.

rhetoric: "we are talking about charac- teristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone;
specifically effective elements of consciousness and relationship." The miniscule items of
complex literary language - "an unease, a stress, a displacement, a laten- cy" - are the heralds of a
future, "social experiences in solution," not yet "precipitated." But Williams nowhere proves that
the complex uses of "ideology" evident in the European Marxist tradition are inadequate for a
description of these literary phenomena. Moreover, his one example, the Victorian novelists who
intuited a general analysis for the condition of poverty which the "official" ideology could only
imagine as the result of individual failings, seems distinctly weak, and not at all incompatible
with a complex model of ideology. Furthermore, it is really not about literary forms at all.26

problems. He proposes that "the peculiar location of a structure of feeling is the endless
comparison that must occur in the process of consciousness between the articulated and the
lived." What we might choose to call ideology - the articulated - is constantly under pressure
from discordant elements in exemplary per- sonal experience
insist that the structure of feeling define only something in the past, something that we know,
with the wisdom of hindsight, to have been pre-emergent. But yet, because the conditions for
judging pre-emergence are so dominantly literary, we still have to worry about the danger of
disciplinary tautology, whereby certain forms are read as historically significant just because
later writers used them, without any testing as- sessment at any point in the process of what a
general history might be.28
Eagleton is right to pronounce that much of the time the structure of feeling is just another name
for ideology.29 By avoiding the obvious association, Williams avoids also the debate about it,
and thus permits himself an untroubled foundational rhetoric that either cannot be theoretically
factored out, or can be so factored only by adding in missing links and crucial limitations. All in

all, the structure of feeling is a symptom of Williams's vocalic idealism, or faith in the resonance
of the voice, so that it fails to embody itself fully in literary forms (as it occasionally promised to
do), and always remains content to appeal for verification to what is supposedly "lived and felt."
The emphasis on the personal and the particular that informs Williams's investment in the voice,
and in structures of feeling, is of course itself a familiar professional (de)formation peculiar to
literary critics: show us the rule, and we will show you the exception. Chris Baldick has
remarked on the compulsiveness of Williams's insistence "on the need for specificity, in the most
unspecific manner."'" It is as if Williams played out a ritual of self-inscription into the society of
hyper- vigilant literary-critical intelligences, those who seemingly have to keep on proving that
they see more finely, more sensitively, and more humane- ly than others. This professional
disposition favoring the individual against the system, if such it be, could only have been
enhanced by Williams's (very reasonable) disillusionment with the Labour Party, and with all
prospects of achieving worthwhile change by working through orthodox political channels. The
commitment to "unique individuals, in real relationships,"3 is at once the power and the paucity
of Williams's work.
As a corrective to any tendency toward theoreticism, toward a forgetting of the practical
implications and applications of any formally systematic paradigm, Williams's work, his voice,
can function as an urgent blast of the trumpet, the louder for being so softly "spoken." But
because such reminders are dependent upon the very evolution of events
in historical time and place, because they have to remain occasional, they cannot themselves be
theorized. His voice is thus the voice of a con- science, of our conscience. The degree to which
Williams's invocations of actual men and women in "lived experience" remain unspecified and
beyond prediction is also the degree to which they are available for incarnation within the mind
of a latterday reader, who must ask him or herself, constantly when reading Williams, "am I
missing something, someone, somewhere?," and "what would this mean to person A, or for
person B?" Williams's legacy becomes in this way a distinctly moral, ethical one, an attention to
the problems of any passage from the theoreti- cal cup to the practical lip, even as he does not
himself predict the outcome of that problem.

Pendergast
Williams insists that "no generation speaks quite the same language as its predecessors."15 Each
historical period can be associated with a certain "structure of feeling," a concept that has much
in common with the Foucaldian "episteme" but seeks to historicize emotional as well as
cognitive frameworks. The structure of feeling of a particular period refers to the terms in which
it is possible to understand social reality, or to posit the possibility of change; it describes the
characteristic fears, desires, and blindnesses of the period. This is not a static or monolithic
concept, since there are competing structures of feeling in any period. It does, however, allow
Williams to connect cultural vocabulary and literary form with the pressures of developing

historical forces. The most condensed version of Williams's attempt to identify changing
structures of feeling in the changing vocabulary of social and cultural criticism can be found in
his Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976), but the technique is widespread
throughout his writing.
Thus, in Politics and Letters, the New Left Review interviewers refer to a "fetishization of
experience" in Williams's work, arguing that his concept of structure of feeling is a not-sooriginal twist on the Leavis-Scrutiny theme of experience as "life" ("the living content of a
work") as well as the tradition from which that theme derives: English empiricism. For the
interviewers, experience is that which is "immediate," the "domain of direct truth," a "kind of
pristine contact between the subject and the reality in which the subject is immersed" (PL
167).25 Just such a notion of experience insinuates that Being precedes Language, that it is
somehow possible to get at (the Truth of) Being without mediation, without what one might call
the detour of discourse.
Against this reading, I would submit, first, that Williams's defense of experience should be seen
at least in part as a critique of, and a strategic response to, the structuralist and, in particular,
Althusserian elision of the subject (where experience is merely an effect of the system as
"structure"26); and, second, that Williams's "concept of experience" is an affirmation of the
"radical empiricism" that questions, a la Locke and Hume, "the existence of a knowing subject
and unmediated access to reality."27 From this perspective, Williams's concept of structure of
feeling is an attempt, however successful, to avoid a vulgar-empiricist understanding of
experience. Accordingly, Williams observes in Marxism and Literature that an alternative
definition of "structures of feeling"of those "specifically affective elements of consciousness"
as well as those "char acteristic elements of impulse, restraint and tone"is "structures of
experience" {ML 132). Though experience for Williams is the "better and wider word," he
prefers the term feeling because it alludes txrth to the processual character of "social experience"
and to "practical consciousness of a present kind, in a liberating and interacting continuity"
(ML 132). Feeling, in other words, is not so much a matter of "private expression," a function of
the individual subject, as a "form of sociality."
Less obviously but no less importantly, "structure of feeling" intimates that emotion, like
imagination, has a history. Which is to say that emotion possesses a cognitive dimension and,
hence, should not be treated as an epiphenomenon either of desire or ideology (to recollect
Althusser's reading of Lacan). Williams himself suggests as much in the conclusion to The Year
2000 (1983), where he recites the litany of negative, "materialist" objections against emotion in
order to posit its irreducible value to a society predicated upon "livelihood" rather than
production: "Emotions, it is true, do not produce commodities. Emotions don't make the account
add up differently. Emotions don't alter the hard relations of power. But where people actually
live, what is specialized as 'emotion' has an absolute and primary significance" ( F266).
this sense of historical specificity must also be balanced against another invariant in Williams's
argument: the structure of feeling that is the touchstone for the "real" lived experience of the
land. Williams puts this in the following manner:
The detailed histories indicate everywhere that many old forms, old practices and old ways of
feeling survived into periods in which the general direction of new development was clear and

decisive. And then what seems an old order, a 'traditional' society, keeps appearing, reappearing,
at bewilderingly various dates: in practice as an idea, to some extent based in experience, against
which contemporary change can be measured. The structure of feeling within which this
backward reference is to be understood is then not primarily a matter of historical explanation
and analysis. (48) This inaccessibility to historical explanation is in part caused by the fact that
the trope we have been examining, the figuring of an idealized past as nostalgic golden age, is
one of the primary ways in which we understand historical change itself. Because of this, the
"real relations, to past and future, are inaccessible" (99). The question that is rather loudly
begged here is what these "real relations" are if they too are not figured in some way. In other
words, Williams is at pains to distinguish a kind of false consciousness that is figured as history,
as our experience of the past and future, from the real lived experience constituting a "structure
of feeling" that is clearly supposed to be in some sense more authentic. The pressure around the
term real, which is everywhere present in the book, testifies to this rather awkward resistance to
a more thoroughgoing relativism. At the end of the day what is absolutely invariant is an
authentic relation to the land that can only be understood via an experience of a life lived in
extreme proximity to the land that sustains it.
Bahan lain ttg Structure of Feeling
Kantola 2
Raymond Williams adopted the concept of "structures of feeling" as a methodological tool for
understanding culture and cultural change. Emotional experience of art as well as various
popular cultural phenomena is conditioned by the material structures of the world we live in. The
structures can be perceived in several ways. However, only a few of the possible ways are
experienced at a time as meaningful, i.e. such that deserve feeling. Much of culture consists of
collective or shared feeling. However, in the case of new kind of material structures, typically
such as those that are brought by by technological development, we do not have any
preconceived way to attach feelings or social meaning to these structures. Instead of sticking to
an available shared way of feeling, we have to find out what would most probably be an
acceptable or defendable way or orienting oneself emotionally in a new situation. According to
Williams, it is an important task of art and literature to provide us with good orientations to new
material structures.
While Crozier and Friedberg focussed on the use of open fields by actors in organisational and
cultural structures, Williams confined his study into the area of feeling. An important, if not
altogether decisive, resolution by Williams was to introduce the concept of 'structures of feeling'
as a methodological orientation that would be able to capture cultural meanings without reducing
them to any pre-given material structures what so ever. On the other hand, Williams took care to
distanciate himself from anti-materialist culturalisms. Instead, he wanted to see culture as an
autonomous field of meaning-giving. (See Filmer 2003.)
Making it communicable
In the routines of everyday life the material structures we are living in are typically experienced
in our practices with rather weak, if not altogether nonexistant, emotional involvement.
However, when the material structures, e.g. one's own body or her physical environment,
somehow changes unexpectedly and unprecedently then a strong need emerges as to how to deal

with this new situation. And it is important to understand that the emerging lack of proper
orientation concerns the individual's feelings, too. How and in what ways should she feel this
new situation? That is now a question for her that begs a quick resolution. The observer engaged
in cultural studies la Williams will now be in a position to see, how the individual gives
meaning to the new kind of material structure she finds herself in.
The meanings, in order them to be meanings at all, must be communicable. On the other hand,
meaning-giving must satisfy the individual's need to organize her feelings and help her out of a
chaotic situation. The need to communicate and the need to organise one's feelings sum up in the
crucial importance of communicating the feeling in the first place. What is most interesting now,
from the point of view of the williamsian observer, is the fact that the communication of feelings
is analysable as a process of attachment of feelings to certain parts of the material structure the
individual finds herself in. But in no way can the resulting structure of feeling be predicted or
foreseen. It just, literally, remains to be seen. This is because the potentials of choosing the way
to attach one's feelings to the material structures are strictly multiple. Therefore, it is also correct
and quite up to the point to speak of the 'structures of feeling' in plural. Once the new material
situation has been equipped with a structure of feeling, one that is capable of organising the
individual's feelings and is communicable as well, the relation of the individual as well as the
community that accepts her communication, with the new kind of material structure, will
gradually settle and develop towards a routinely lived relation with the material world of the
everyday life. Communication of feeling will thus be replaced by sticking to a routine.
Quite often, it is poets, writers and artists, who do the job. The may serve as keynarrators for
their own generation about the way how the new things can be felt. On the other hand, there are
many situations, where the structures of feeling are invented locally and collectively,
spontaneously together in a group. Communication of feelings has a value in itself, too.
Therefore people may also seek situations, where they could enjoy communicating authentic
feelings.
the concept of structure of feeling as the drive for the emergent in the inarticulate experience
of the pre-stage of consciousness.
Dari 2
Konsep Struct of Feeling
To relate a work of art to any part of that observed totality may, in varying degrees, be useful, but
it is a common experience, in analysis, to realize that when one has measured the work against
the separable parts, there yet remains an 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. Though a very complex term, the only
way to simplify it is to say that it corresponds roughly to the culture of that time. It is not
necessary for the structure of feeling of a particular period to be common to all members of the
community, yet it is a 'very wide possession'23 and all communication depends upon it.
According to Williams, the structure of feeling is not to be equated with the documentary culture
or the social character of the period. Documentary culture, like fashions and buildings, provides
direct evidence of the period, whereas the structure of feeling is not so easily accessible-it can
elude people even in close contact with it. The structure of feeling can be said to correspond in
part to the dominant social character of a period, yet there is a crucial difference. Public ideals,

for example, honesty and hard work, constitute the dominant social character but the structure of
feeling is related to the effect that this does or does not have on the life of the people. Thus the
social character is the 'ethic' while the structure of feeling is the 'experience'25 which, without
being articulate, can exert 'palpable pressures'.26
While still in solution, a structure of feeling has elements of the dominant, residual and emergent
characteristics of a culture and is at first taken as personal.27 It is only later that this takes shape
as an institution or a formation that can be recognized as social. In fact, the term structure of
feeling incorporates subjective and objective aspects. For 'feeling' can be equated with the
Leavisite 'experience' and the Lawrentian 'felt life', while 'structure' implies pattern or form as
opposed to content.
Richard Dyer et al rom. are of the opinion that: The pattern of experience, however, is not
defined in terms of a set of explicit beliefs-e.g.. an ideology-but in terms of the implicit structure
which the social life exhibits at the level of experienced values: thus, structure of feeling, an
apparently paradoxical concept.28
According to Alistair M. Duckworth, the phrase 'structure of feeling' seems to imply: ... an
outlook shared by a number of writers in a period, to some extent limited by historical
consciousness, class allegiance, and a common inheritance of traditional topics, genres and
styles, but capable nevertheless in individual instances of pushing throughout these limits to the
picturing of things as they are.30
Referring to structure of feeling, Eagleton says that 'what this concept designates, in effect, is
ideology.. .',32 but by stressing 'feeling', that is, the very charge that Williams wishes to avoid.
Ideology may be boadly defined as the 'system of ideas appropriate' to a particular class or it may
mean 'illusory or merely abstract thought'.33 While this sense of ideology can have connections
with the dominant social character of a period, it is different from the structure of feeling which
cannot be equated with 'ideas' or 'thought', for it refers to: '. . .specifically affective elements of
consciousness and relationships; not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as
thought..
It is possible to see close connections between 'structure of feeling' and Gramsci's concept of
'hegemony.' For hegemony does not mean overt political control but is merely a subtle way of
influencing and shaping human nature and relationships. Hegemony is 'a realized complex of
experiences, relationships and activities, with specific and changing pressures and limits'.35 This
differs from ideology in that it does not solely 'depend for its hold on its expression of the
interests of the ruling class but also on its acceptance as "normal reality" or "common sense" by
those in practice subordinated to it'.36 Hegemony thus penetrates to all levels of society and
exerts pressures on all relationships. By adopting this concept, Williams is able to examine the
political angle of 'culture'. Hegemony is primarily concerned with domination and subordination,
and while it may influence the structure of feeling, it cannot be equated with it.
Eagleton has suggested that 'structure of feeling' is similar to Goldmann's 'transindividual
structures'. In this theory of genetic structuralism, Goldmann says that all human beings try to
respond meaningfully to the problems that they encounter in the course of social
life. The collective response is structured as a world-view. These world-views are not static or
fixed but in a constant state of structuration and destructuration, a process similar to the
formation of a 'structure of feeling'. While a world-view is structured by the social class
collectively, it is articulated by the writer who: '. . . achieves a coherent awareness of what,
among the other members of his group, remains vague and confused, and contradicted by

innumerable tendencies.'37 Williams too sees the writer as naming the new responses,
perceptions and interests of an age. But whereas in Goldmann this is an unconscious process, in
Williams the writer is conscious of the reality he is depicting. For the perception of the knowable
community is a matter of conscious choice on the part of the writer. Not only does he articulate,
but he also directs our attention to new ways of seeing ourselves and the world. For both,
Goldmann and Williams, there is no direct relationship between society and the novel in terms of
content, but the relationship exists between the ideology of a society and the fictional world the
writer is able to create.
'structure of feeling' is different from transindividual structures. According to Williams, at any
given time, there are three 'structures of feeling' operative corresponding to the three generations
then alive. The structure of feeling of the senior group has been articulated in the previous
generation whereas that of the younger generation has yet to be articulated. Therefore, it is only
the 'dominantly culturally productive group'39 which articulates the 'structure of feeling' of its
age. (This age specification seems rather arbitrary. Moreover, it ignores the psychological aspects
of the situation.) It would then seem that structure of feeling is generation-specific whereas
transindividual structure is class-specific. Later, however, Williams changes his position,
admitting that he would now use the concept 'more differentially between classes'.40 In spite of
this the difference remains, for transindividual structures are related to world-views, which are
already crystallized collective responses, whereas structure of feeling is experience 'still in
solution'. Goldmann's concept can be seen more as a 'structure of thought', for it is a tangible
philosophical position as opposed to Williams' fluid experiential category. This could well be
symptomatic of their overall historico-cultural positions-French classicism on the one hand and
British romanticism/empiricism on the other.
to recover in the present than in the past. But, as the interviewers point out in Politics and
Letters, it would be easier to recover in the past than the present, which is still in a state of flux.
Williams concedes this saying that 'while a structure of feeling exists
Pengertian Structure of Feeling 21,pdf
Williams concept of a structure of feeling addresses precisely the precarious balance between
the forces of structure and agency, between the forces of the social process and the willing,
intending, experiencing subject. Structure of feeling expresses the contradiction that our
personal, intimate, individual experiences (feelings) are always, at the same time, informed by
collective and historical prejudices, expectations, fears, desires, conventions, institutions, laws,
and modalities of the social that transgress even the most extended view of the feeling subject.
Structure of feeling connotes the sense that the feelings that belong to us, that animate us as
individuals, at the same time, exceed us, extend far beyond the individual, diachronically and
synchronically. The concept of a structure of feeling, therefore, for Williams, is an effort to
capture the complex mediations between the particular and the general that animate any specific
historical conjuncture.
The term structure of feeling aims, precisely, at a totalising and experiential that is, nonreified reconstruction of lived meanings and values as a particular historical reality organises
them. Yet these are not reducible to formalised systems of belief or consciousness; on the
contrary, the distribution is characteristically affective, and manifested in lived (and therefore
fluctuating) forms of individual and trans-individual experience. As Williams points out, this

cultural hypothesis is particularly relevant to descriptions concerning art and literature, for in
these, social content is distributed in the peculiar mode of an affective, indirect and informal
manner. As a result, structures of feeling can be defined as social experiences in solution, as
distinct from other social semantic formations which have been precipitated and are more
evidently and more immediately available
"structures of feeling" in an attempt to tread beyond bourgeois ideology's creation of the
past as fixed-the false "conversion of experience into finished products..." When we begin
to grasp this conversion, he affirms, "we can understand, in new ways, that separation of
the social from the personal which is so powerful and directive a cultural mode. If the social
is always past, in the sense that it is always formed, we have indeed to find other terms for
the undeniable experience of the present"

hubungan structure of feeling dan literature

What then is the relation of 'structure of feeling' to art and literature? Williams believes
that 'all art is made'. . . (from) . . . 'the structure of feeling that is lived and experienced but
not quite arranged as institutions and ideas. . .' (TEN, p.192). In fact a literary text can be
taken as a concrete instance of the 'structure of feeling of a particular society in a specific
historical moment. It would be easy to relate the structure of feeling to the content of a
literary artefact, but it cannot be simply reduced to it. As Williams says: 'The idea of a
structure of feeling can be specifically related to the evidence of forms and conventionssemantic figures-which, in art and literature, are often among the very first indications that
such a new structure is forming.'42 It is through relationships that are presented as 'lived'
and 'felt' that a work of fiction can indicate the formation of new structures. The novelist
does not merely depict these changes in social formations but makes us 'live' and
'experience' themn through his art.
The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence puts the notion to superb use: the novel, for
Williams, is one medium among many in which men seek to master and absorb new
experience by discovering new forms and rhythms, grasping and so constructing the stuff
of social change in the living substance of perceptions and relationships.43

Structure of feeling itu di Pre-emergent

Williams also points to a phenomenon of pre-emergence. The sense of a lacuna in the
present structure of consciousness might manifest itself initially in inarticulate attempts to
express "feeling." This could not be conceptualized easily in a traditionally Mlarxist or
bourgeois framework; each, in its own way, has neutralized the realm of the aesthetic as
productive
Kenapa namanya Structure of Feeling

the pairing of structure with feeling, because in linking structure with feeling he was able to
employ the sense of an elusive, yet discoverable, organisation of feeling, which extended beyond
the merely personal aspect of feeling
Contoh Structure of Feeling
He did not, at this time, associate it with the stance of particular individuals, except insofar as
their work or outlook could be said to realise some major change in the way human beings
understood themselves and their fundamental relationships with each other, with nature, the
firmament, and with God. He argued that the shift from the pattern of early miracle plays, in
which individual character is said to barely exist to the wholly different and more complex
pattern of an Elizabethan tragedy, in which individual character, in a particular sense, can be the
primary stress, were shifts in conventions which revealed radical changes in the structure of
feeling.
Similarly, in the course of a brief discussion in which he contrasted the conventions of the
religious drama of the ancient Greeks with those of modern naturalism Williams detected the
beginnings of analytical awareness of changes in dramatic conventions which exposed a major
shift concerning the gods, God, and the secular, in the writings of Ibsen and Strindberg, which he
thought were of fundamental importance because, All changes in the methods of an art like the
drama are related, essentially, to changes in mans radical structure of feeling. Such changes of
course did not have to be fully conscious or general. They might take root initially only among a
small minority, they might be attributed to purely personal originality on the part of the artist or
artists involved, but if they genuinely registered real changes in the structure of feeling, they
would eventually displace existing conventions and would themselves become the new standard
for new conventions.
Consequently, Williams did not believe that words like ideas or phrases like general life were
adequate to the task of grasping the role and force of the relatedness or consonance of all the
products and practices of a given period. He wanted to be able to refer to that element of a
culture for which there is no external counterpart. The element, which after everything else has
been analysed and accounted for in a particular period, remains ungraspable and unrealisable
except through the experience of the work of art as a whole.
In pointing to what a particular man has done, in a particular style, we are often in the position of
learning what that style is, what it is capable of doing. The individual dramatist has done this, yet
what he has done is part of what we then know about a general period or style. It is to explore
this essential relationship that I use the term structure of feeling. What I am seeking to describe
is the continuity of experience from a particular work, through its particular form, to its
recognition as a general form, and then the relation of this general form to a period.
It is as firm and definite as structure suggests, yet it is based in the deepest and often least
tangible elements of our experience. It is a way of responding to a particular world which in
practice is not felt as one way among others a conscious way but is, in experience, the only
way possible. Its means, its elements, are not propositions or techniques; they are embodied,
related feelings. In the same sense, it is accessible to others not by formal argument or by
professional skills, on their own, but by direct experience a form and a meaning, a feeling and

a rhythm in the work of art, the play, as a whole. Williams goes on to explain that it is easier to
see this structure in the drama of the past than it is to distinguish it while it is still being lived.
However: It is even possible, though very difficult even by comparison with the analysis of past
structures, to begin to see this contemporary structure directly, rather than only in the power of
particular works. Many such expositions are too early, too superficial or too rigid, but it remains
true that discovery of actual contemporary structures of feeling (usually masked by their
immediate and better recognized predecessors) is the most important kind of attention to the art
and society of ones own time. The artists importance, in relation to the structure of feeling, has
to do above all with the fact that it is a structure: not an unformed flux of new responses,
interests and perceptions, but a formation of these into a new way of seeing ourselves and our
world. Such a formation is the purpose of all authentic contemporary activity, and its successes
occur in fields other than art. But the artist, by the character of his work, is directly involved with
just this process, from the beginning. He can only work at all as such formations become
available, usually as a personal discovery and then a scatter of personal discoveries and then the
manner of work of a generation. What this means, in practice, is the making of new conventions,
new forms. (1968a: 11) It is in this respect, finally, that I see the usefulness of structure of
feeling as a critical term. For it directs our attention, in practical ways, to a kind of analysis
which is at once concerned with particular forms and the elements of general forms.
Function of Structure of feeling
he structure of feeling continued to function for Williams in four different ways: firstly, as a
means of registering epochal shifts in sensibility, secondly, as a way of identifying and naming
the sensibility of a particular period that could not be encompassed by the sum of its constituent
elements, thirdly, as a means of recognising the contention between different values and
emotional responses within the development of modern drama, and finally, as a means of
detecting and synthesising the social texture of the biography, views and aspirations which
informed the work of particular artists.
The four aspects of the structure of feeling were discerned in two different ways: firstly through
changes in convention registered by formal innovation, secondly, through analysis of the
problems presented by the content and viewpoint of particular works. Williams attempted to use
the structure of feeling as a kaleidoscope for registering the shifting patterns of feeling, which he
thought, were uniquely revealed by close analysis of works of art. Consequently, his use of the
figure cannot be properly understood by reference to any one of its aspects or to either of the
means by which he sought to detect the metamorphosis of the structure of feeling from one
period or sensibility to another. The structure of feeling retained its role of figuring large epochal
changes between Medieval Mystery plays and Elizabethan tragedy, or, for example, the change
between renaissance and modern drama. It was also used to trace movements within modern
drama, and to figure both the outlook of individual dramatists, and the work of those associated
in particular trends or movements. The structure of feeling could also stand for that element left
after close analysis of a work for which there was no external counterpart. Simultaneously, the
structure of feeling could be seen, through an analysis of convention that was capable of bringing
to the fore problems of form and method, which in turn revealed problems of content and
viewpoint. And, despite Williamss manifest desire to refuse priority to any one of the aspects of
the structure the feeling, it was these problems of content of viewpoint that always provided

Williams with a ground upon which to assess drama, poems and novels ultimately by how they
stood in relation to the positive values of social solidarity and progress and perhaps, more subtly,
how they stood in relation to exposing, in a positive manner, the contradictions between
realisable aspirations and a thwarting bourgeois environment.72
Concept Structure of Feeling
We shall begin once again with the notion of style: the content of a collective style, which marks
the historicity of language, is a structure of feeling. It is there that subjects conduct their
individual appropriation of the collective culture and this is where they construct their reality, in
interaction with other subjects and with the institutions that constrain this construction. The
structure of feeling is what constitutes the experience of the subject. The expression is
deliberately paradoxical; it is the very embodiment of the paradox that I have already described
and which is at the heart of Williamss thinking. Stage left, we have feelings, experienced by
individuals, whose experience they constitute (characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and
tone; speci_ cally 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
living and inter-related continuity).3 Stage right, we have structures, which have a collective
existence, are embodied in the collective medium that is language, and which are therefore
public, the object of relations and tensions, and intervene in the construction of relations of
forces ([w]e are . . . de- _ ning these elements as a structure: as a set, with speci_ c internal
relations, at once interlocking and in tension).4 The result is Williamss dialectic of the social
and the individual, the private and the public: We are also de_ ning a social experience which is
still in process, often indeed not yet recognised as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic,
and even isolating, but which in analysis . . . has its emergent, connecting, and dominant
characteristics, indeed its speci_ c hierarchies.5
The strength and weakness of this proposition is evident in his personally invented concept of a
structure of feelingthat firm but intangible organization of values and perceptions which acts
as a mediating category between the psychological set of a social formation and the
conventions embodied in its artefacts. What this concept designates, in effect, is ideology; but it
is a mark of Williamss originality that here as elsewhere he privately rediscovers an essential
category which is either objectively absent, or (as with the available definitions of ideology)
theoretically inadequate. The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence puts this notion to superb
use: the novel, for Williams, is one medium among many in which men seek to master and
absorb new experience by discovering new forms and rhythms, grasping and reconstructing
the stuff of social change in the living substance of perceptions and relationships. Yet the
calculated tension between structure and feeling is also the mark of a limit within his own
thought. For in striving to transcend the merely empiricist or phenomenological methods of, say,
Hoggarts The Uses of Literacy, in reaching beyond a notion of feeling-complex to feelingstructure, he nonetheless lacks the theoretical terms which might specify the precise articulations
of that structure.
His objective is to find out the nature of the values -structure of feeling - embedded in
particular literary works. Williams shares with Lowenthal the view that the social meanings of
the inner life of characters are related to problems of social change. Like Lowenthal, Williams
values literature as it provides human response to social forces.

Contoh analisis Structure of Feeling

Williamss attack is on the practice of criticism which reduces their works to what is called
private tragedy in which the whole attention is directed towards the family, and the
disintegration of the family is seen as a tragic theme. What Williams inquires into in the plays of
Eliot, Pasternak, Chekov, Pirandello, Ionesco, Beckett, Brecht, Sartre and Camus, is the
Structure of feeling they embody. He sees how the works of these writers are structurally
related in the total system of the society through the consciousness of the writers. The structure
of feeling Williams follows in these writers is not the result of a simple and direct determination
if it is the writers consciousness merging out of the complex network of inter- relationships.The
structure of feeling expressed by the major twentieth century playwrights is the experience of
hostility, guilt, illusion and meaninglessness. These are not metaphysical facts but lived
experiences, in the words of Williams. The hostile or neutral society that appears in modern
playwrights represents the twentieth century structure of feeling. This structure of feeling is the
real lived experience of a people who cease to understand their own fellowmen as well as their
relationship with society.
The nineteenth century realist tradition, according to Williams, reacted against the condition of
society. But the individual in the twentieth century literature reacts not against the condition of
society, but against society as such. Williams is of the opinion that the twentieth century concept
of anti-art and anti-hero are necessitated by the new structure of feeling. Rejecting the
contemporary theory of tragedy on the basis of the structure of feeling identified above, Williams
comes to the conclusion that Eliot and Pasternak end in sacrifice and resignation, while Chekov,
Pirandello, Ionesco and Beckett end in tragic dead-lock and stalemate. Sartre and Camus
remain locked in tragic despair and they present isolated, ineffectual gestures of revolt.
Cara analisis Structure of feeling
Williams insists that we see hegemonic structures as a dynamic and changing set of relationships
between "dominant" meanings, values, and institutions and "oppositional" elements (pp. 123-25).
Some of these oppositional elements are "merely novel"; others, which he terms "emergent," are
part of a process whereby new meanings, values, practices, and relationships are constantly being
Williams insists that we see hegemonic structures as a dynamic and changing set of relationships
between "dominant" meanings, values, and institutions and "oppositional" elements (pp. 123-25).
Some of these oppositional elements are "merely novel"; others, which he terms "emergent," are
part of a process whereby new meanings, values, practices, and relationships are constantly being
Williams insists that we see hegemonic structures as a dynamic and changing set of relationships
between "dominant" meanings, values, and institutions and "oppositional" elements (pp. 123-25).
Some of these oppositional elements are "merely novel"; others, which he terms "emergent," are
part of a process whereby new meanings, values, practices, and relationships are constantly being
Williams insists that we see hegemonic structures as a dynamic and changing set of relationships
between "dominant" meanings, values, and institutions and "oppositional" elements (pp. 123-25).
Some of these oppositional elements are "merely novel"; others, which he terms "emergent," are
part of a process whereby new meanings, values, practices, and relationships are constantly being

Emotional experience of art and cultural phenomena is conditioned by the material structures
of the world we live in. It is experienced and lived with the available collective or shared
feeling. However, when the material structure change unexpectedly and in unprecedented
way, the available shared way of feeling is no longer adequate to perceive the new change. In
this kind of condition, the individual have to find out what would most probably be an
acceptable or defendable way or orienting oneself emotionally in a new situation. Structure
of feeling is the way individual gives meaning and orientate the feelings to the new kind of
material structure. This kind of emotional orientation toward material structure change is
termed by RW as structure of feeling. According to RW it is an important task of art and
literature to provide us with good orientations to new material structures. It is poets, writers
and artists, who do the job to articulate the way how the new things can be felt by their
generation. This structure of feeling expressed in literature is not yet quite articulated into
institutions and ideas. RW termed this stage as pre-emergent cultural forms. A structure of
feeling has elements of the dominant, residual and emergent characteristics of a culture and is
at first taken as personal. It is only later that this takes shape as an institution or a formation
that can be recognized as social.
Once the new material situation has been equipped with a structure of feeling, one that is
capable of organising the individual's feelings and is communicable as well, the relation of
the individual as well as the community that accepts her communication, with the new kind
of material structure, will gradually settle and develop towards a routinely lived relation with
the material world of the everyday life. Communication of feeling will thus be articulated
into institutions and ideas. This stage is termed by RW as emergent cultural forms. Thus, the
concept of structure of feeling can be understood as the drive for the emergent in the
inarticulate experience of the pre-stage of consciousness.
The term structure of feeling incorporates subjective and objective aspects.
According to RW it is through work of art including literature that the structure of feeling
of certain class in specific historical moment can be identified. Because literature has unique
characteristics as a whole way of seeing that is communicable to others and a dramatization
of values that becomes an action.

The pattern of experience, however, is not defined in terms of a set of explicit beliefs-e.g.. an
ideology-but in terms of the implicit structure which the social life exhibits at the level of
experienced values: thus, structure of feeling, an apparently paradoxical concept

'structure of feeling' seems to imply: ... an outlook shared by a number of writers in a period,
to some extent limited by historical consciousness, class allegiance, and a common
inheritance of traditional topics, genres and styles, but capable nevertheless in individual
instances of pushing throughout these limits to the picturing of things as they are.

'structure of feeling' is similar to Goldmann's 'transindividual structures'. In this theory of

genetic structuralism, Goldmann says that all human beings try to respond meaningfully to
the problems that they encounter in the course of social
life. The collective response is structured as a world-view. These world-views are not static
or fixed but in a constant state of structuration and destructuration, a process similar to the
formation of a 'structure of feeling'. While a world-view is structured by the social class
collectively, it is articulated by the writer who: '. . . achieves a coherent awareness of what,

among the other members of his group, remains vague and confused, and contradicted by
innumerable tendencies.'37 Williams too sees the writer as naming the new responses,
perceptions and interests of an age. But whereas in Goldmann this is an unconscious process,
in Williams the writer is conscious of the reality he is depicting. For the perception of the
knowable community is a matter of conscious choice on the part of the writer. Not only does
he articulate, but he also directs our attention to new ways of seeing ourselves and the world.
For both, Goldmann and Williams, there is no direct relationship between society and the
novel in terms of content, but the relationship exists between the ideology of a society and
the fictional world the writer is able to create.
Structure of feeling connotes the sense that the feelings that belong to us, that animate us as
individuals, at the same time, exceed us, extend far beyond the individual, diachronically and
synchronically. The concept of a structure of feeling, therefore, for Williams, is an effort to
capture the complex mediations between the particular and the general that animate any specific
historical conjuncture.

In relation to literature
a literary text can be taken as a concrete instance of the 'structure of feeling of a
particular society in a specific historical moment. The author does not merely depict
these changes in social formations but makes us 'live' and 'experience' them through his
literary works
To identify a new forming structure of feeling can be done by identifying the change in
the forms and conventions in art and literature
All changes in the methods of an art like the drama are related, essentially, to changes in
mans radical structure of feeling.
The best literary form to articulate structure of feeling is novel. Novel is the best
literary form to articulate the social change in the forms of perceptions and
relationships in order to master and absorb new experience.

Contoh perubahan structure of feeling in English literature the change of form and convention
of play from middle age miracle plays to Elizabethan tragedy plays. The characteristic of miracle
plays in middle age is that the individual character is said to barely exist for the main themes of
the plays are to show the Gods designs. Most of the characters are personification of Good
deeds, fellowship, Kindred. This convention changes into tragedy plays, such as shakespeares
in which it depicts individual character in complex way. The plays become the way to explore
the weakness, flaws and qualities of human characters.
Transition of literary convention from Romantics/Victorian literature to modern literature
Change from traditional external realism or materialism that emphasizes on the plot development
and logical order which was not consistent with human experience into novel that emphasizes on
the psychological aspect, inner human experience which is nonlinear narrative and stream
consciousness.
All changes in the methods of an art like the drama are related, essentially, to changes in mans
radical structure of feeling. Such changes of course did not have to be fully conscious or

general. They might take root initially only among a small minority, they might be attributed to
purely personal originality on the part of the artist or artists involved, but if they genuinely
registered real changes in the structure of feeling, they would eventually displace existing
conventions and would themselves become the new standard for new conventions.
How to do it: In pointing to what a particular man has done, in a particular style, we are often in
the position of learning what that style is, what it is capable of doing. The individual dramatist
has done this, yet what he has done is part of what we then know about a general period or style.
It is to explore this essential relationship that I use the term structure of feeling. What I am
seeking to describe is the continuity of experience from a particular work, through its particular
form, to its recognition as a general form, and then the relation of this general form to a period.