Structure of feeling transforms identical campus behavior across eras

Evidence

In some ways, the campus of the sixties as described here is much the same as the campus of the present moment, which is also certainly a place of ”private people,” of ”commitment to businessas-usual, getting ahead, playing it cool,” of ”mass affirmation” devoted primarily to modes of popular culture, of general student indifference to, and sense of inevitability about, university rules and bureaucracies, of little interest in ”selflessness” or in the efficacy or meaningfulness of political involvement. However, the structures of feeling within which these comparable features of campus life reside, and which define their social and affective meanings, are radically different. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 473

Categorization

• DEFINE: Concrete demonstration of ‘structure of feeling’ as the affective container that reassigns meaning to identical social facts.
• DEEPTHINKING: Shows that the modernist critique’s very terms—apathy, complacency, private selfhood—collapse once the affective structure they diagnosed is gone; the denouncer and the denounced belong to different structures.
• XREF: connects to: Williams coined ‘structure of feeling’ to bridge the social-personal split — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 88