Page 82 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

THE NEW LEFT

new meanings and values, practices, relationships and kinds of
relationship, which are substantially alternative or oppositional to
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the dominant culture, that most interest him. The primary source
of an emergent culture is likely to be the formation of a new social
class. But there is also a second source of emergence peculiarly pertinent
to the analysis of artistic and intellectual movements: “alternative
perceptions of others, in immediate relationships; new perceptions
and practices of the material world”. And at this second level, the
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situation is often much less clear than in that of an emergent social
class: “No analysis is more difficult than that which, faced by new
forms, has to try to determine whether these are new forms of the
dominant or are genuinely emergent”. 112
In Marxism and Literature, Williams offers an unusually interesting
formulation of this problem, which significantly redefines his earlier
notion of “structure of feeling”. An emergent culture, he argues, unlike
either the dominant or the residual, requires not only distinct kinds of
immediate cultural practice, but also and crucially “new forms or
adaptations of forms”. Such innovation at the level of form, he
continues, “is in effect a pre-emergence, active and pressing but not
yet fully articulated, rather than the evident emergence which could
be more confidently named”. Structures of feeling, writes Williams,
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in a strikingly arresting formulation, “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… The effective formations of most actual art
relate to already manifest social formations, dominant or residual,
and it is primarily to emergent formations…that the structure of feeling,
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as solution, relates”. Structures of feeling thus represent not so
much the general culture of a period as its more specifically counter-
hegemonic elements.
Williams’s cultural materialism also signalled a renewed critique
of the base/superstructure formula. This was no simple return to
culturalism, however, but an entirely new argument seeking to convict
Marxism of an insufficiently, rather than excessively, materialist
understanding of “the superstructures”. What the base/superstructure
formula fails to acknowledge, Williams charges, is precisely the
materiality of the superstructures themselves. Hence, his judgement
that: “The concept of ‘superstructure’ was…not a reduction but an
evasion”. The way forward, he insists, is “to look at our actual
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