Page 50 - Decoding Culture

THE WAY WE WERE 43

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' (ibid: 64) . The distinctiveness of this
'community of experience' is not captured by 'social character' or
'pattern of culture' which terms, for Williams, lack the appropriate
experiential dimension. The alternative expression that he pro­
poses is 'structure of feeling'.
It is not always easy to grasp quite how 'structure of feeling' dif­
fers from, say, pattern of culture. In part it is to do with abstraction.
Social character and pattern of culture are, for Williams, the terms
of an external analyst abstracting pattern from concrete social
activities. Structure of feeling, on the other hand, seeks to capture
something about the 'actual experience' in which these abstract
patterns are lived. Y e t when Williams claims to detect a 'popular
structure of feeling' in, for example, the novels of the 1840s (ibid:
81-86) he, too, is inevitably abstracting from the 'lived culture'.
There is surely an epistemological confusion here, stemming per­
haps from Williams' failure (at this stage of his work) to consider
more openly the status and role of theorizing. Hall (1980a: 19)
observes of The Long Revolution that 'it attempted to graft on to an
idiom and mode of discourse irredeemably particular, empirical
and moral in emphasis, its own highly individual kind of "theoriz­
ing"'. This is an apposite description, catching both the strength of
the empiricism and moral concern inherited from Leavisism and
Williams' feeling that, although theoretical reflection was so much
more than an unnecessary afterthought to the real work of analy­
sis, it still had to be, as it were, contained within that work if
misleading abstraction was to be avoided. In invoking 'structure of
feeling' he seeks to work from within the cultural terms in which
real lives are lived, yet seems reluctant to concede that this
account is no less abstract, no less irreducibly theoretical, than

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