Lawrence Grossberg wrote of Raymond Williams that he did not locate himself within the culture and society tradition, but could not actually escape the separation of culture and society:

For those authors whom Williams located in the culture and society tradition, the separation is taken for granted; culture is simply appropriated and transformed into a position from which that very separation can be described and judged. But Williams refused such a separation. Cultural studies had to reinsert culture into the practical everyday life of people, into the totality of a whole way of life. Yet Williams was never able to actually escape the separation, both in his privileging of certain forms of culture (literature) and in his desire to equate culture with some sort of ethical standard.¹

I think this criticism should be looked into, and what follows is a defence of Williams and his cultural studies project.

Williams's theory of culture
In his critique of The Long Revolution E. P. Thompson took issue with Williams's definition of theory of culture. For "the study of relationships between elements in a whole way of life" he substituted "the study of relationships between elements in a whole way of conflict." Williams had not overlooked conflict and struggle, but the point Thompson wanted to make was that "any theory of culture must include the concept of the dialectical interaction between culture and something that is not culture." Thompson then added:

We must suppose the raw-material of life-experience to be at one pole, and all the infinitely complex human disciplines and systems, articulate and inarticulate, formalised in institutions or dispersed in the least formal ways, which "handle," transmit, or distort this raw material to be at the other. It is the active process -- which is at the same time the process through which men [sic] make their history -- that I am insisting upon.²

Thompson was indeed insisting on the active process through which human beings make their history, but so was Williams, using concepts and descriptions to emphasise that it was human beings who kept society and culture together in the whole way of life. We perceive this when we notice that the authors of the "Theoretical Overview" in Resistance through Rituals picked up Thompson's two-pole argument in their definition of culture to propose that "culture is the way the social relations of a group are structured and shaped: but it is also the way those shapes are experienced, understood and interpreted." Now a different problem emerged: human beings were positioned between structured social relations and experience shaped by those social relations, and the active process, experience as part of the active process of history, disappeared from the argument. Here a separation of culture and society re-occurs, as making sense of society becomes possible through the mediation of culture.

I may perhaps best address the problem through a brief quote from a famous contribution to cultural studies. As Stuart Hall pointed out, that human beings

can become conscious of their conditions, organize to struggle against them and in fact transform them - without which no active politics can be conceived, let alone practised - must not be allowed to override the awareness of the fact that, in capitalist relations, men and women are placed and positioned in relations which constitute them as agents.³

But one can alternatively point out -- alternatively being here meant as belonging to Williams's cultural studies project -- that in modern and late-modern capitalist relations men and women are positioned in relations which constitute them as agents must not be allowed to override the awareness that human beings can become conscious of their conditions, organise to struggle against them and in fact transform them.

The inherent dominative mode
Williams was committed to overcoming the separation of society and culture, and noted that understanding of the long revolution "lies at a level of meaning which it is not easy to reach" -- the unlearning of the "inherent dominative mode":

This is a real barrier in the mind, which at times it seems almost impossible to break down: a refusal to accept the creative capacities of life; a determination to limit and restrict the channels of growth; a habit of thinking, indeed, that the future has now to be determined by some ordinance in our own minds. We project our old images into the future, and take hold of ourselves and others to force energy towards that substantiation. We do this as conservatives, trying to prolong old forms; we do this as socialists, trying to prescribe the new man.⁴

To unlearn the dominative mode was a decisive cultural studies move, both in cultural and in political terms. Edward Said once said that he always struggled to realise one sentence in Williams's work, "the need to unlearn the inherent dominative mode: the kind of badgering, hectoring, authoritative tone which has even come through in Cultural Studies." In fact, it was by unlearning the dominative mode, inherent in modernity established as the North-Atlantic modernity, that the long revolution could begin and develop, be perceived and understood, as a real alternative both to the contingent configurations which modern power structures effectively produced -- and successfully maintained as necessary -- and to the established systems, regimes and logics of thought, knowledge and culture effectively instituted and institutionalised as modern in Europe and North America.

This unlearning of the dominative mode brings me to the emergence of cultural studies in Britain in the 50s and 60s and Williams's leading role in the development of a theory of culture.

Williams on the emergence of cultural studies
This is Raymond Williams on the emergence of cultural studies: "We have to look at what kind of formation it was from which the project of Cultural Studies developed, and then at the changes of formation that produced different definitions of that project"; "Indeed, it can hardly be stressed too strongly that Cultural Studies in the sense we now understand it, for all its debts to its Cambridge predecessors, occurred in adult education: in the WEA, in the extramural Extension classes"; "intellectual questions arose when you drew up intellectual disciplines that form bodies of knowledge in contact with people's life-situations and life-experiences."⁵

Habermas noted, in his analysis of the unfinished modern project, that "scientific discourse, moral and legal enquiry, artistic production and critical practice are now institutionalized within the corresponding cultural systems as the concern of experts . . . . That is one side of the issue. On the other side, the distance between these expert cultures and the general public has increased."⁶ The expert cultures have failed to translate their emancipatory potential into the lifeworld as fully liberating, democratic everyday practices. The logic of mediation is here evident. But Williams had covered part of this ground a quarter of a century before Habermas, and because his perspective was different from Habermas' he argued for a common culture.

What is the significance, and what are the consequences, of that drawing up of intellectual disciplines that form bodies of knowledge in contact with people's life-situations and life-experiences? It is possible, but not enough to say that cultural studies emerged in Britain with the intellectual questions which arose in the endeavour, at once political and cultural, to bring the spheres of expert knowledges into contact with the sphere of the quotidian and its practice. Because you can bring them into contact with the quotidian, enrich its practice with their knowledges, and leave their whole structure intact and the increasing distance between them and the everyday in place.

Alternatively, you can bring the expert cultures into contact with the everyday life of people and rearticulate them on people's everyday life and practice -- that is, you can change their structure in order to do away with the distance which divorces them from the people. Clearly, in a decisive sense, Williams's contribution, as a socialist politics of culture, and as the project of a common culture, constituted an alternative to the modern structure of expert knowledges divorced from the people and their everyday. Williams's project opened a countermodern perspective in cultural studies: it was not only that the disciplines were brought into contact with the lived, it was also that lived experience questioned the disciplines, challenged their discourses and logics and gave rise to a new intellectual practice.

The question of the common culture
Francis Mulhern has recently argued that "by the turn of the 1960s Williams had established the irreducible distance between Kulturkritik in all its variants -- reactionary or reforming -- and an integrally socialist politics of culture."⁷ It is a useful point: Williams's socialist politics of culture opened new ground beyond the culture-society divide. But as I see it, it is necessary to add that Williams's politics of culture, because it was socialist, led him to articulate the project of a common culture as part of his theory of culture "as the study of relationships between elements in a whole way of life."

One aspect of that articulation was recognised by Jim McGuigan when he positioned Williams at the entrance to cultural studies "because his vision of a 'common culture' founded in participatory democracy remained on the agenda, at least sentimentally, through the various theoretical twists and turns over the following years, which at times virtually displaced it."⁸ A common culture, as defined by Williams himself, is "an educated and participating democracy, and the idea of a socialist democracy is based, very firmly, on those values"; and it has remained on the cultural studies agenda because cultural studies emerged as an intellectual practice which moved from the expert knowledges to the everyday practice and from the everyday practice to the expert knowledges -- and aimed at reconstituting the productive unity of society and culture.

Another aspect of the same articulation has now been foregrounded by Terry Eagleton. Williams wrote that

the culture of a people can only be what all its members are engaged in creating in the act of living; . . . a common culture is not the general extension of what a minority mean and believe, but the creation of a condition in which the people as a whole participate in the articulation of meanings and values, and in the consequent decisions between this meaning and that, this value and that.⁹

As Eagleton has pointed out,

Only through a fully participatory democracy, including one which regulated material production, could the channels of access be fully opened to give vent to this cultural diversity. To establish genuine cultural pluralism, in brief, requires concerted socialist action. It is precisely this that contemporary culturalism fails to see. Williams's position would no doubt seem to it quaintly residual, not to say positively archaic; the problem in fact is that we have yet to catch up with it.¹⁰

We have yet to catch up with Williams's position, which is part of his theory of culture.

I turn now to Lawrence Grossberg's recent comment that Williams's

project for a cultural studies which would refuse the separation [of culture and society] -- to study all the relations among all the elements in a whole way of life -- failed because he could not avoid reinscribing the separation and privilege of culture. The question is why the separation is apparently so difficult to overcome.¹¹

I agree that the separation is difficult to overcome, and that Grossberg is right to argue that cultural studies must escape culture -- "Its task is to understand the operations of power in the lived reality of human beings, and to help all of us imagine new alternatives for the becoming of that reality";¹² but I do not agree that Williams's cultural studies project failed -- his is an "uncancelled challenge," as Nicolas Tredell called it,¹³ and we have indeed to catch up with it.

Raymond Williams's cultural studies project
Williams stressed that cultural studies "remained a kind of intellectual analysis which wanted to change the actual developments of society" --

taking the best we can in intellectual work and going with it . . . to confront people for whom it is not a way of life, for whom it is not in any probability a job, but for whom it is a matter of their own intellectual interest, their own understanding of the pressures on them, pressures of every kind, from the most personal to the most broadly political.¹⁴

Now, I ask, what if the formation becomes bureaucratised and "the home of specialist intellectuals," what if "new forms of idealist theory" radically divert the project by regarding "the practical encounters of people in society as having relatively little effect on its general progress, since the main inherent forces of that society [are] deep in its structures, and . . . the people who operat[e] them [are] mere 'agents'"?¹⁵ Will you then say that it was Williams's project which failed?

Tredell defined that project as "an attempt, in deeply unpropitious conditions, to further a common project, the 'long revolution,' that had been and could be continually created, shared, shaped, changed and carried forward together." The literature on Williams and Grossberg's critique itself are indeed evidence that Williams's cultural studies project has not failed.

It should now be noticed that Grossberg wrote that

Williams compensated for his failure to actually escape the separation of culture and society, an escape that he imagined in the trope of the "structure of feeling." Through this trope he privileged certain forms of culture which most clearly and powerfully cristallyzed the structure of feeling (literature) and he equated culture with some sort of ethical standard of judgment (enabled precisely by that very same structure of feeling). In so doing, he had to postulate a third term, that of culture as a process, . . . the most human of all processes, the process of communication which, it turns out, is the process of meaning production, which is the process of mediation and the space of ideology.¹⁶

Considering Williams's structure-of-feeling concept and analytical practice, I think I ought to make three points: first, common culture and structure of feeling belong together constitutively in Williams's principled critique of Eliot's cultural authority and his approach to the definition of culture; second, structure of feeling is the Williamsian concept which brings the lived, not only the observed, to the focus of the intellectual practice which re-articulated the life-world and the everyday with the production, and not only the consumption, of culture; third, that structure of feeling, or rather structure of experience, is an articulation of presence -- its "affective elements of consciousness and relationships" produce "changes of presence" and "exert palpable pressures and set effective limits on experience and on action."¹⁷

Whichever examples Williams may have selected throughout the years in order to organise, test and communicate his definition of structure of feeling, I think we must recognise that structure of feeling articulates the social with the personal, emotion and affect with meanings and values, the lived with the desired, experience with change, material practice with semantic availability, the known with the knowable. The significance of structure of feeling is that it points to and affirms what Williams once called "the creative capacities of life" -- the possibility and the reality of change as produced and lived by human beings making history in conditions not of their choice, and making history, the conditions of their making history, and the possibility and reality of change, knowable.

I agree with Lawrence Grossberg that

Practising cultural studies involves constantly redefining it in response to changing geographical and historical conditions, and to changing political demands; it involves making a home for it within specific disciplines even as it challenges the legitimacy of the disciplinization of intellectual work. But how cultural studies is to be defined and located in any particular project can only be determined by doing the work of cultural studies, by mapping/reconstructing the relations between discourses, everyday life and the machineries of power. This is the peculiar logic of cultural studies: it begins with a context that has already posed a question; yet the question itself defines the context. Thus, cultural studies always has to begin again by turning to discourses as both its productive entrance into and a productive dimension of that context. In the end, it is not interested in the discourse per se but in the articulations between everyday life and the formations of power.¹⁸

That mapping and reconstructing the relations between discourses, everyday life and the machineries of power is the work of cultural studies, as in his principled argument Grossberg puts it, is what I have learned from Raymond Williams, and what I always come back to Raymond Williams's cultural studies project for. That cultural studies always has to begin again I also learned from Raymond Williams and from my daily experience of work, if it is to go beyond the known and its easy certainties and plausible orthodoxies.

Williams remains central in my work for a number of reasons. Some of them have by now become clear, but I'll focus especially on one. Williams made freedom, development and change part of our common human reality as a practice of community, but was careful to distinguish between what was contained in culture, according to the hegemonic or incorporated by it, and what is not yet culture, because it is pre-emergent and emergent, but real, enabling and productive of new social reality.

I know: that which breaks away from and escapes incorporation and culture will later again become culture; Williams himself speaks of emergent cultural practice. But he also said that

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 is to understand more closely this condition of pre-emergence, as well as the more evident forms of the emergent, the residual, and the dominant, that we need to explore the concept of structures of feeling.¹⁹

I venture to suggest that Williams's concept of structure of feeling does not privilege literature, as Grossberg contends. "Practising cultural studies involves constantly redefining it in response to changing geographical and historical conditions, and to changing political demands" -- in the end, cultural studies is not interested in the concept per se, but in the articulations between everyday life and the formations of power it makes knowable and productive.

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Notes

1. Grossberg, L. (1997) "Cultural studies, modern logics, and theories of globalisation" (McRobbie, A. ed. Back to reality? Social experience and cultural studies, Manchester: Manchester University Press, p. 14-5). [back]

2. Thompson, E. P. ([1961]1995) "[Review of Raymond Williams's] The Long Revolution" (Munns, J. and G. Rajan, eds A Cultural Studies Reader: History, Theory, Practice, London: Longman, p. 185). [back]

3. Hall, S. ([1980]1996) "Cultural studies: two paradigms" (Storey, J. ed. What is Cultural Studies? A Reader, London: Arnold, p. 43). [back]

4. Williams, R. ([1958]1963) Culture and Society 1750-1950, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, p. 321-2. [back]

5. Williams, R. ([1986]1989a) "The Future of Cultural Studies" (The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, ed. by Tony Pinkney, London and New York: Verso, p. 152, 154, 156). [back]

6. Habermas, J. ([1981]1996) "Modernity: An Unfinished Project", transl Nicholas Walker (d'Entrèves, M. P. and S. Benhabib, eds. Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 45). [back]

7. Mulhern, F. (2000) Culture/Metaculture, London and New York: Routledge, p. 72. [back]

8. McGuigan, J. (1992) Cultural Populism, London and New York: Routledge, p. 27. [back]

9. Williams, R. ([1968]1989b) "The Idea of a Common Culture" (Resources of Hope, ed. by Robin Gable, London and New York: Verso, p. 36). [back]

10. Eagleton, T. (2000) The Idea of Culture, Oxford: Blackwell, p. 122. [back]

11. Grossberg, L. (1998b) "The Victory of Culture. Part I: Against the Logic of Mediation" (Angelaki 3:3, p. 11). [back]

12. Grossberg 1997, p. 31. [back]

13. Tredell, N. (1990) Uncancelled challenge: the work of Raymond Williams, Nottingham: Paupers' Press. [back]

14. Williams [1986]1989a, p. 162. [back]

15. Williams [1986]1989a, p. 157. [back]

16. Grossberg 1998b, p. 11. [back]

17. Williams, R. (1977) Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 132. [back]

18. Grossberg, L. (1998a) "The cultural studies' crossroads blues" (European Journal of Cultural Studies 1:1, p. 67-8). [back]

19. Williams 1977, p. 126-7. [back]