Page 234 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

LITERATURE/SOCIETY: MAPPING THE FIELD 223

which determine consciousness which determines actual ideas and works’—is
not only ‘near the centre of Marxism’ but ‘indicates an appropriate methodology
for cultural history and criticism and then of course for the relation between
social and cultural studies’. But his own way of handling this problem is to
substitute for some sophisticated version of the base/superstructure framework
‘the more active idea of a field of mutually if also unevenly determining forces’. 8
The key concept, for Williams, in his attempt to ‘think’ the relationship of
ideas or works of art and literature to the social totality, is structure of feeling.
This concept locates both the internal order and values of a literary text and the
pattern of experience at a given historical moment. The pattern of experience,
however, is not defined in terms of a set of explicit beliefs—for example, an
ideology—but in terms of the implicit structure which social life exhibits at the
level of experienced values: thus ‘structure/of/feeling’, an apparently
paradoxical concept. The literary text is one concrete instance of the ‘structure of
feeling’ in a particular society at a particular moment. In practice (and often, it
seems, somewhat at odds with his theoretical position), Williams does seem to
treat literature as qualitatively different from other activities. This is partly
because he stresses the active, creative process by which society organizes
‘received meanings’ and discovers ‘possible new meanings’. This, indeed, is
change—the ‘long revolution’. This process depends on the ability to
communicate these new meanings, to find a language and form as a description
for new experiences. Every social individual takes part in this process— ‘culture
is ordinary’: but—it follows—the moments of the most intense exploration,
those embodied in art, are a very special aspect of a common activity. Williams’s
engagement with Marxism only begins with these subtle formulations. His work
poses the whole question of whether ‘culture’ can be simply and easily
assimilated into the Marxist notion of ideology, or whether it requires new terms,
concepts, ways of establishing its relationship to its social base. In his most
recent work Williams seems to have discovered, via the work of Goldmann and
Lukács, a more direct and sympathetic route between his own thinking and the
Marxist tradition. Though this has not yet borne fruit in substantive terms, he has
gone so far as to pinpoint certain key convergences between his own work and
Lukács and Goldmann: (a) the concern, in both, with the notion of the ‘social
totality’; (b) the search for homologies or correspondences between a work and
its social base at the level of structure (rather than of content); (c) similarities
between Williams’s ‘structure of feeling’, Lukacs’s ‘potential consciousness’ and
Goldmann’s ‘world vision’.

Reformulating the ‘break’
Much of what has been said indicates the absolute centrality of Marxism to the
literature/society problem. Many who explicitly dissociate themselves from
Marxism implicitly acknowledge its centrality by the very form of their
disavowal. Williams’s work progressively reveals the complex tension it