120 Marxism and Literature AS a result of thi ly convit xy this form of displace- ing by the 8. Dominant, Residual, and Emergent is, a cultural pro- oss is seized as a cultural system, with determinate dominant features: feudal culture or bourgeois culture or a transition from one to the other. This emphasis on dominant and definitive lineaments and features is important and often, in practice, effective. But it then often happens that its methodology is preserved for the very different function of hist examine how these relate to the whole cultural process rather than only to the selected and abstracted dominant system. Thus ‘bourgeois culture’ is a significant generalizing description and hypothesis, expressed within epochal analysis by fundamental is th ‘feudal ‘ process, over four or five cen- turies and in scores of different societies, it requires immediate historical select supporting and exclude ‘mar secondary’ evidence. retaining the epochal ‘ognize not only ‘stages’ ic relations of any actual speak of the ‘dominant’ in these senses of the hegemonic. But we find that we have also to speak, and indeed with furtherMarxism and Literature tion of each, of the ‘residual’ and the ‘emergent’, in any real process, and at any moment in the process, both in themselves and in what they reveal of the f the ‘dominant’ mean something different ice these to distinguish! past, but their tural process is profoundly vari- the ‘archaic’ that which is wholly recognized the cultural process, not only and often not at all as an element of the past, but as an effective element of the present, Thus certain experiences, meanings, and . | values which cannot be expressed or substantially veri terms of the dominant culture, are nevertheless lived and prac- tised on the basis of the residue—cultural as well as soc and cultural institution or formation. Itis, muish this aspect of the residual, which may ‘an alternative or even oppositional relation to the domin. turo, from that active manifestation of the residual (this boing its distinction from the archaic) whi large tween some practically alternative and opposi- tional meanings and values (absolute brotherhood, service to others without reward) and a larger body of incorporated mean. ings and values (offi , oF the social order of which the other-world] neutralizing or ratifying com- ral community is predominantly ynal to urban industrial capitalism, incorporated, as idealization or fantasy, or as an ox: Jeisure function of the dominant ord in monarchy, there is virtually nothing that jual (alternative or opp but, with a heavy and rate additional use of the archaic, a residual function has ture, but some part of it and especially ifthe residue is from some: past—will in most cases have had to be incorporated if the effective dominant culture is to make sense in these areas. Moreover, at certain points the dominant culture cannot allow new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationship are. = being created. But it is exceptional iguish between those which are really elements of some -mergent in the strict sonse, rather than merely -e we are always considering relations within a cul- ‘of the emergent, as of the residual, can124 Marxism and Literature human experience, aspiration, and achievement which the dominant culture neglects, undervalues, opposes, represses, or even cannot recognize, ‘The case of the emergent is radical the structure of any actual soci structure, there is always a s¢ cultural process that are altern: dominant elements. One kind of doscribed in the central body of Marx: 4 new class, the coming to consciou: is, in actual process, elements of a now cultural form: working class as a class in nineteonth-« to the degree.that it is © process of attempted can be seen, incorpor: emergence and vorking-cl 8, where f clearly revealed, since spor such cases, dominance of received say, which already condi development is always rectly Dominant, Residual, and Emergent 125, that much incorporation looks like recognition, acknowledge- ment, and thus a form of acceptance. In this complex process there is indeed regular confusion between the locally residual (es a form of resistance to incorporation) and the generally emergent, Cultural omergence in relation to the emergence and growing strongth of a class is then always of major importance, and always complex. But we havo also to s is not the only ind of emergence. This recognition is very difficult, theoreti- jough the practical evidence is abundant. What has to be said, as a way of defining important elements of both the residual and the emerge Js a way of understanding the character of the dominant, 10 mode of production and therefore no dominant social order and therefore no dominant culture ever in reality includes pote all human practice, ention) This is not merely a nega: ion, allowing us to acobunt for significant things which happen outside or against the dominant mode. On the contrary it is a fact about the modes of dominat expressed, since what the dominant has effectively seized is \deed the ler changes, in terms of its own develop- jus in advanced126 Marxism and Literature ‘reserved! or ‘resigned’ areas of experience and practice and ‘moaning. The area of effective penetration of the dominant order into the whole social and cultural process is thus now signific- antly greater. This in turn makes the problem of emergence especially acute, and narrows the gap betweon alternative and oppositional elements. The alternative, especi impinge on significant areas of the dominant, is of oppositional and, by pressure, often converted into, fecognize. Elements of emergence may indeed be incorporated, but just as often the incorporated forms are merely facsi the genuinely emergent cultural practice. Any significant ‘emergence, beyond ista dominant modo, is very difficult under these conditi itself and in its repeated confusion residual practic: dominant culture. ngent—the olass and the excluded social (human) area—are byno means necessarily contradictory. At timesthey can be vory close and on the relations between them much in political prac tice depends. But culturally and as a matter of thoory the areas can be seen as dist What matters, final distinct from both # that it is never only a matter of immediate practice; indeed it depends crucially on finding new forms or adaptations of form, Again and again what we have to observe 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. It 4s to understand more closely this condition of pro-emergonce, Dominant, Residual, and Emergent 127, ‘as well as the more evident forms of the emergent, the residual, and the dominant, that we need to explore the concept of struc tures of feeling.9. Structures of Feeling mand analysis, culture and society are expres- mngest barrier to the recog- of hum is immediate and regular conversion of experien products. What is defen- UE a proce conscious Hisory. hee on oersin assumptions many ai ly taken US ago epee Aira substance of the past, but into contemporary life, in which and formative processes. is tions between these produced etc fecal aot eayeaieicoe/ iTbnicorrakrthh produced past, only the fixed explicit forms exist, and living ition, receding. past its edges, we can under- at separation of the social from the per- | mations, positions—all that is present and moving, | escapes or seems to escape from the fixed and the ex, | the known, is grasped and defined as the personal: thi can presently recognize as thinking, that we set against it more active, more floxible, less singular terms—consclousness, || experience, feeling—and then watch even these drawn towards | Structures of Feeling 129 fixed, finite, receding forms. The point is especially relevant to works of art, which really are, in one sense, explicit and finished ature. But itis not only rrocess, we have to make them isalsothat the making tory, primacy of such presences and such process es, have been power ions, are relatively powerles speci Of one dominant strain in Marxism, with its habitual abuso of the ‘subjective’ and the ‘personal’, this is especially true. the reduction of the social to fixed forms that remains ‘error. Marx often said this, and some Marxists quote him, in fixed ways, before returning to fixed forms. The mistake, ‘as 60 often, is in taking terms of analysis as terms of substance. ‘Thus we speak of a world-view or ofa prevailing ideology or ofa class outlook, often with adequate evidence, but in this regular slide towards a past tense and a fixed form suppose, or even do not know that we have to suppose, that these exist and are lived specifically and definitively, in singular and developing forms, Perhaps the dead can be reduced to fixed forms, though their cords are against ‘the living will not be rast in the first person; living third persons may be ‘different, All the known complexities, the experienced tensions; shifts, and uncertainties, the intricate forms of unevenness and confusion, are against the terms of the reduction and soon, by130 Marxism and Literature extension, against social analysis itself. Social forms are then often admitted for generalities but debarred, contemptuous from any po: turn by this act of debarring—the ‘human imaginati f el e ‘human imagination’, the ‘human psyche’, the ‘unconscious’, wi ‘functions’ in art laced forms of social the range from tions to formations and traditions. We can see it again in the range from dominant systems of belief and education to systems of explanation and argument. All these have more. than_systematic.exchanges_be- tween fixed units. Indeed just because all consciousness social, ‘Seprocesses compet only batween but with the relationship and the related. And this practical consciousness is always m than a handling of ie Eaquant tension betweer received interpret experience. Wher i made within a dimension of re as often an unease, a si latency: the mn not even coming. And comparison is by no means the only process, though it is powerful and important. There are the experiences to which the fixed forms do not speak at all, which indeed they donot recos re are important mixed exp the available meaning would convert part to all, or And even where form and response can be ‘without apparen ty, there can be quali we: what the agroement seemed almost always different from o' not only a matter of relative freedom or control. For prac consciousness is what is actually being lived, and not only what it is thought is being tual alternative to the received and produt absence, the unconscious, which bourgeois cul cized. It is a kind of feeling and thinking which is indeed social and material, but each in an embryonic phase before it can become fully articulate and defined exchange. Its relations with the already articulate and defined aro then exceptionally com- plex. ‘This process can be directly observed in the history of a 10. In spite of substantial and at some levels decisive continuities in grammar and vocabulary, no generation speaks quite the same language as its predecessors. The difference can be defined in terms of additions, deletions, and modifications, but these do not exhaust it. What really changes i quite general, over a wide range, and the descr fits the change bes ‘style’. It is a general change, rather thana ces, yet choices can be deduced from it, as well as effects. Similar kinds of change can wnd other similar forms It is an open question—that is to say, a sot of ical questions—whether in any of these changes. this or that group has been dominant or influential, or whether they are the result of much more gé is a particular quali ly distinct from other particul: , which gives the sense of a generation or of a peri ‘and the other specifying hi tions, formations, and and economic rel ‘an open question: that is to say, a sot of specific histori stions. The methodological consequence of such a definition, howover, is that the specific qualitative changes are not assumed to be epiphenomena of tions, formations, and beliefs, or merely secon dary evidence of changed social and economic relations be- ‘lasses. At the same time they are from the perience, rather than as ‘personal” sly superficial or incidental ‘small change’ of society. social in two ways that distinguish them from reduced senses of the social as the institutional and132 Marxism and Literature the formal: first, in that they are changes of presence (while they a ing lived this is obvious; when they have been lived it is their substantial characteristic); second, in that although emergent or pre-emergent, they do not have to await tion, classification, or ration: tion before they exert palpable pressures and set effective on experience and on action. Such changes can be defined as iges in structures of feel- ing. The term is difficult, but ‘feeling’ phasize a tion from more formal concepts of world-v is not only that we must go beyond formal systematic beliefs, though of course we have always to include them. It is that we are concerned with meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt, and the relations between these and formal or systematic be ice variable (includ- ing historically variable), over a range from formal assent wi Private dissent to the more nuanced interaction betwe xd and interpreted boliefs and acted and justified experi. ences. An alternative definition would be structures of experi- is being defined. We are talking about charac- ements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically ents of consciousness inst thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: ical c isness of a present kind, i By that time the case is different; a ne usually already have begun to form, in the true soci Methodologically, then, a ‘structure of feeling’ is a cull hypothesis, actually derived from attempts to understand such Structures of Feeling 133 elements and their connections in a generation or period, and needing always to be returned, interactively, to such evidence. It is initially less simple than more formally structured hypotheses of the sox matters more) in our present cultural process. The hypothesis, hhas a special content is in a significant number of cases of this present and affective kind, which cannot without loss be reduced to belief neral relationships, though it cludes elements of social and experience which may lie beyond, certain elements in art which are not covered by (thoug! ‘one mode they may be reduced to) other formal system: the truo source of the specializing categories of ‘the aesthetic’, “the arts’, and ‘imaginative literature’. We need, on the one hand, to acknowledge (and welcome) the specificity of these cloments—specific feelings, specific rhythms—and yet to find ‘We are then not only content inits full sense, that ofa generative immediacy. The idea of a structure of feeling can be specifically related to the evidence of forms and conven- tions—semantic figures—which, in art and literature, are often among the very first indications that such a new structure is forming. These relations will be discussed in more detail in subsequent chapters, but 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: not by der ay in turn be seen as the articula- fully available articulation) of structures of |ing which as living processes are much more widely experi- enced. For structures of feeling can be defined as social experiences in solution, as distinct from other social semantic formations134 Marxism and Literature which have been precipitated and are more evidently and more immediately av: ‘Not all art, by any means, relates to a contemporary structure of feeling. The effective formations of Most actual art relate to already manifest social formations, dominant or residual, and it is primarily to emergent formations (though often in the form of modification or disturbance in older which, because it 2 many of the characteristics of a pre-formation, until specific articulations—new semantic figures—are discovered in mater- ial practice: often, as it happens, in relatively isolated ways, which are only later seen to compose a significant i often, in turn, the generation th to its successors. It is thus a specific lar linkages, particular emphases and sup- pressions, and, in what are often its most recognizable forms, Particular deep starting-points and conclusions, Early Victorian ideology, for example, specified the exposure caused by poverty or by debt or itimacy as social failure or deviation; the contemporary structure of feel semantic figures of Dickens, specified exposure and isol connecting instances. An osure to the nature of the formed: offering explana- luced tension: the social explanation fully ity of experienced fear and shame now dis- persed and generalized. The example reminds us, of the complex rol differentiated structures of fee! lifferentiated classes. This, in be readily distinguished, id elsowhes groups orto their formal s relations. At times the emergence of a new structure of fooling is best related to the rise ofa class (Engl other times to contradiction, fracture class (England, 1780-1830 or 1890-1930), when a formation appears to break away from its class norms, though it retains its tions by its Structures of Feeling 135 ion of presence. at once lived and sures. Any of these