Williams coined ‘structure of feeling’ to bridge the social-personal split

Evidence

Williams developed the concept of ”structure of feeling” to counteract the pervasive problem in political-cultural analysis of the ”separation of the social from the personal” (128). The relation of the social to the personal is at the crux of the shift from modern to postmodern in the sixties: ”the personal is political,” a slogan of the New Left, became the defining idea of second-wave feminism. … Further, in discussing structure of feeling, ”we are defining a particular quality of social experience and relationship, historically distinct from other particular qualities, which gives the sense of a generation or of a period” (131). — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 88

Categorization

• DEFINE: Williams’s key term: the experiential quality binding social structure to inchoate personal feeling that marks a generation or period.
• XREF: DeKoven’s pivot thesis — ‘the personal is political’ as basis of second-wave feminism — connects to second-wave feminism material and to the Frankfurt School’s concern with how the subjective registers objective structures. — connects to: Structure of feeling transforms identical campus behavior across eras — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 473; Marcuse’s account of self-recognition in commodities prefigures the postmodern structure of feeling — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 148; Social forms generate corresponding inner feelings, reversing the usual direction — Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 9148

Broader Connections

• Social forms generate corresponding inner feelings, reversing the usual direction #expands (0.80) — Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 9148
• Marcuse’s account of self-recognition in commodities prefigures the postmodern structure of feeling #expands (0.75) — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 148