We’re delighted to publish a short blog by society member Alexandrina Vanke on her new book and ongoing engagement with one of Williams’s most enduring concepts. Alexandrina writes…
More than half a century has passed since Raymond Williams introduced the concept of structure of feeling in the mid-1950s within film and literature studies. According to Williams, structures of feeling shape cultural patterns and forms reflecting a particular spirit of the time or atmosphere of the age. Consisting of two words, ‘structure’ and ‘feeling’, contradictory at first glance, this metaphoric concept looks at both collective (structure) and individual (feeling) experiences. In his theory of culture, Williams suggests a dialectical relationship between structure and feeling that opens an opportunity to examine not only culture but also everyday life in its diverse manifestations.
I was lucky to present my ethnographically grounded development of structures of feeling in the study of Russia’s industrial neighbourhoods at ‘Raymond Williams @ 100: A Centenary Conference’ in April 2022. Despite having to present remotely (being in Moscow at that moment, two months after the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war), discussions with delegates about my application of structures of feeling helped formulate an understanding of how to grasp the atmosphere in a particular place or country during wartime. Structures of feeling appeared especially relevant to the examination of everyday struggles widely implemented by ordinary people that I consider in my new book The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia: Engaging in everyday struggle (2024).
I extend Williams’s concept by bringing it to the space of two deindustrialising neighbourhoods with mixed social compositions located in Moscow and Yekaterinburg. Drawing on multi-sited ethnography, I conceptualise structure of feeling as an affective principle regulating senses, imaginaries, and practical activities of local communities within socio-material infrastructures (Vanke, 2023, 2024). Thus, according to my approach, structure of feeling is a triadic concept assembling sensorial, imaginative, and practical experiences within physical space. This allows for a further understanding of structure of feeling not as a spirit of the time but as a multiple spirit of the time and place. And it is also partly influenced by Doreen Massey’s understanding of place as multiplicity imbued with temporality.
At the same time, Williams’s vision in Marxism and Literature (1977) of structure of feeling as a signifying principle makes this concept relevant to the analysis of moral and symbolic signifiers of social structures and inequality. In the case of Russian society, the post-Soviet system of stratification, consisting of the elites, the middle classes, and the working classes, has replaced the Soviet one which consisted of the working class, intelligentsia, and nomenclature (i.e. the bureaucratic elite). This has lead to the symbolic devaluation of workers in contemporary Russia (Walker, 2011) and challenged them to reinvent themselves as a class entity in a neoliberal neo-authoritarian regime. In the book, I explain how Soviet structures of feeling co-exist and sometimes conflict with the emergent ones. This also makes us think about how workers and ordinary people resist dominant structures and what alternatives they generate in everyday life when the opportunities for open protests are significantly restricted.
Alexandrina Vanke is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences and a Research Associate on the project ‘Deindustrialization and the Politics of Our Time’ at Concordia University. She studies the lived experiences of working-class communities in post-industrial cities. Alexandrina is an expert in sensory ethnography currently developing the concepts of everyday struggle, structure of feeling, consciousness and habitus through the lens of critical social theory. You can order her new book here and read her work in The Sociological Review here.
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