Williams replaced base-superstructure with a field of mutually determining forces

Evidence

Here is the negative, which he sees as linking his work to Goldmann’s: “I came to believe that I had to give up, or at least to leave aside, what I knew as the Marxist tradition: to attempt to develop a theory of social totality; to see the study of culture as the study of relations between elements in a whole way of life; to find ways of studying structure … which could stay in touch with and illuminate particular art works and forms, but also forms and relations of more general social life; to replace the formula of base and superstructure with the more active idea of a field of mutually if also unevenly determining forces.” … But then I found Goldmann beginning … from a concept of structure which contained, in itself, a relation between social and literary facts. This relation, he insisted, was not a matter of content, but of mental structures: ‘categories which simultaneously organize the empirical consciousness of a particular social group, and the imaginative world created by the writer.’ By definition, these structures are not individually but collectively created.” … A correspondence of content between a writer and his world is less significant than this correspondence of organization, of structure.” — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 187

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the pivotal theoretical move — Goldmann’s genetic structuralism and Williams’s structure of feeling both relocate the base-superstructure relation into mental structures collectively created, not content.
• XREF: The ‘field of mutually but unevenly determining forces’ and structure of feeling resonate with Raymond Williams’s Marxism and Literature (1977), the fuller elaboration of this position.