[P2P-F] the new structures of feeling, strongly recommended

Michel Bauwens michel at p2pfoundation.net
Tue Sep 13 07:19:40 CEST 2011


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 Feeling our way forward Hilary Wainwright maps structures of feeling and
resistance

Where there is oppression there will always be resistance, sometimes overtly
organised, sometimes deeply buried and undefined. Moreover, where there is
resistance there is invariably a sense, however implicit, of values contrary
to those of the oppressors, although these can be ambivalent and fragile -
oppressed people often accept the prevailing values that sustain the social
order because the vulnerable often feel they need order.

It follows, then, that strategies for change should pay attention not only
to overt resistance or refusal, not simply to fully articulated opposing
values, but also to feelings of unease arising from the tension between
official discourse and practical experience. Here can be alternative values
and institutions in formation.

I want to map contemporary trends of this kind. They concern values of
solidarity, co-operation and fairness, and organisational logics of
openness, plurality and mutual inter-connection. These trends - and all I
can offer is an impressionistic snapshot - undoubtedly involve only a
minority of the population, certainly in the UK. But the feelings from which
they are emerging are shared by a large proportion of the public, across
many different social spheres.

I want to argue that they are fundamental for - among the many challenges
faced by the left - overturning the widespread public acceptance that there
is no alternative to sacrificing public services to deal with debt; and for
countering the persistent racism and scapegoating of immigrants and
claimants, a perverse sign of unease, often expressed alongside revulsion
with the political class, its dishonesty and its self interest.

To understand the emerging practical consciousness that could be a basis for
meeting these political challenges, I recommend a conceptual tool from the
work of Raymond Williams. An influential socialist theorist, from the late
1940s until his death in 1988 he used critical cultural inquiry to write
about society.

Social and personal

One of Williams' concerns was to overcome the way that 'relationships,
institutions and formations in which we are still actively involved are
converted into formed wholes rather than [understood as] formative and
forming processes'. Linked to this, he argued, was a separation of the
social from the personal that tended to equate the social with fixed and
explicit wholes, while all that is moving and unformed - and to some degree
unknown - is described as 'subjective' and 'personal'. Williams was trying
to capture the process of change in the physical present, to understand the
social and material character of the process of emergence, implied by the
idea of 'forming and formative processes'. He arrived at the idea of
'structures of feeling'.

It is a deliberately contradictory phrase to convey that there is a pattern
recurring across social spheres and cultural forms - hence a structure.

But the structure is not of finished, articulated thoughts. Rather it lies
in the processes of creating 'meanings and values as they are actively lived
and felt' - summed up in the concept 'feeling', which combines emotion,
intuition and thought. Williams uses 'feeling' to emphasise a distinction
from the more formal concepts of 'world view' or 'ideology'.

Williams differentiates between dominant and residual social formations that
are already formed and manifest and the emergent, which is where structures
of feeling come in. Here he distinguishes between 'oppositional' and
'alternative', the former posing an unassimilable challenge to the dominant
order, the latter restyling or otherwise inflecting it. He adds that the
latter can very often look like the former at first.

Williams recognises, therefore, that structures of feeling might never
entirely emerge but rather might be absorbed, incorporated into the dominant
social formation - sometimes, I would add, as a new, 'outside' source of
innovation and renewal. This was, in significant part, the fate of much of
the undoubtedly distinct structures of feeling of the late 1960s and 1970s.
These were appropriated, and partially absorbed, by the credit-driven
capitalist revival of the 1980s. Through its idea of the 'big society', the
government is attempting, crudely and so far unsuccessfully, to carry out a
similar appropriation of long-established but now vulnerable traditions of
radical community organising.

It is clear that Williams' concept, or something very like it, could be
useful in understanding today's 'forming and formative' processes of new
social and political institutions. The concept seems particularly useful at
a time when there is widespread opposition and unease around different
spheres of capitalism, but no coherent ideological or institutional
framework for going beyond it. 'Structures of feeling' can help us to
understand the renewed unease at the social consequences of the rampant free
market system on daily life, and provide insight to the lived experiences of
co-operative, solidaristic values and open, anti-authoritarian
organisational logics that are in a process of formation. Maybe, too, it can
help us to ground new strategic thinking.

Lived mentalities

Two such recurrent lived mentalities strike me as especially important.

First, there are a number of trends clustered around resistance to, or
unease over, an expansion of commodification, or to what David Harvey terms
'accumulation by dispossession'. These mentalities, or feelings, involve a
common rejection of the official discourse of efficiency, choice and
competitive success justifying the privatisation of public services, the
casualisation and degradation of labour and dominant forms of development,
and with it patterns of consumption and control over our cities. We must
now, happily, add the way that anger at the driving, predatory control of
the media by corporate interests has turned the concerns of a persistent
campaigning minority into a dramatic glasnost of the politics of the past 30
years, whose consequences and depth are uncertain.

Let's consider each in turn. In struggles against privatisation it is
increasingly common to find a shift away from economistic trade unionism
focused only on jobs and conditions. This is being superseded by a trade
unionism shaped by public sector workers, who organise in a way that draws
explicitly on their knowledge and feelings about the value of their work to
service users and the harm that will come from outsourcing to private
businesses.

A current example is the particularly sharp conflict over Barnet council's
'easyJet model' of public services. Unison's ability to resist - so far - is
rooted in a determined insistence that there is a public path to reform,
based on improving the quality of services rather than maximising
contractors' profits. This is guided by the knowhow of citizens and staff.
The Association for Public Excellence reports workers across local
government resisting outsourcing with public alternatives. And anyone
listening to delegates at this year's Unison conference would have witnessed
trade unionists concerned simultaneously - and integrally - with their jobs
and with those whose needs they were serving.

Here are workers acting as citizens, mobilising their organised strength to
insist, against marketisation, on the use value of their work as public
servants. This structure of feeling is apparent beyond the organised
movements and experienced in day-to-day interactions between patients and
medical staff, pupils, parents and teachers and other interactions on the
front line, out of sync with the messages coming over in the dominant media.


The defence of meaningful jobs in the public sector is also a rejection of
casualisation and work without a future. This is a theme with far wider
echoes. It is another sphere of unease in the disjuncture between the
experience of degraded labour and the official discourse of responsibility
and empowerment.

Corporate consequences

A concern with the concrete consequences and often negative use value of
capitalist production is evident in campaigns against the destructive
environmental impact of corporate - and state - driven modes of development.
With regard to consumer products such as GM food and the products of
agribusiness more generally, petrol-driven cars or clothes made with sweated
labour, popular campaigns are in effect challenging the profit-driven
decision-making processes of capital accumulation. And here again, as Kate
Soper points out in relation to dominant models of consumption (page 28),
there is tension and unease experienced beyond the world of campaigns, and
an attraction to greener, more sustainable patterns of consumption and
development.

Similarly, consider the kinds of struggles and alliances emerging in
relation to the cities. These are challenging the kind of class-biased and
speculative development that denies the mass of people the opportunity the
city provides for conviviality, accessibility and a good life (see Red
Pepper, Jun/Jul 2011). They are implicitly - and increasingly explicitly -
using whatever spaces can be won to experiment with visions of how to
organise a city to realise these values.

Again, here are cases of lived experience out of sync with the official
claims of 'world' cities. And again, this practical consciousness is echoed
less politically but more broadly in all kinds of complaints and objections
to prestige, commercial developments that disregard civic life.

In all these spheres, newer values - for example, autonomy, cultural
diversity and harmony with nature, influenced by feminism, anti-racism and
green movements - are coming to the fore. They are often emerging in
combination with the enlivening and transformation of older values, such as
solidarity, public ethics, co-operation and things held in common. These
trends, pressing questions of social purpose and relations with nature
against the predatory forces of the capitalist market, are frequently
associated with innovations towards more democratic, participatory forms of
organisation.

New organising

Here we can discern the second cluster of under-the-surface trends: around
new organisational values and forms. These recur across strikingly diverse
spheres. Picking up where the rebellions of the 1970s left off - cut off in
their prime by Reagan and Thatcher, and failing to produce much by way of
lasting institutions - these new forms are founded on a rejection of
authoritarianism and hierarchy.

The emerging forms of collectivity are collaborative as well as deliberative
in their decision-making. Their methodologies stress solutions drawing on
the computer software metaphor of 'open source' - opening up the process of
problem solving. Their notions of co-ordination stress enabling platforms
and facilitating centres and above all the democratisation of the means of
communication. Such features are common to the movements resisting corporate
globalisation since the late 1990s - from the anti-capitalist mobilisations
at the end of the last century to the World Social Forum and the networks it
spawned and encouraged, through the 'free culture' movement in its
self-consciously plural form to the movements now reaching a high point in
Spain and Greece against the imposition of austerity (see page 33).

These structures of feeling also have a wider reach, producing an everyday
refusal of authoritarian behaviour and hierarchical institutions, and a
positive desire for co-operative and egalitarian relationships.

The concept of structures of feeling stresses the formative, emergent or
pre-emergent character of these lived values. They are experimental,
problematic and unfinished, mostly unconsolidated in completed institutions.
How then can they be strengthened in the face of the political challenges
outlined earlier?

Beyond the

traditional left

A first suggestion is stimulated by the way that applying the concept of
structures of feeling draws attention to potential allies way beyond the
organised movements of the left, even in its broadest terms. Here we can
learn from modest but effective initiatives such as UK Uncut. These tap into
and give material expression to such structures of feeling. And it's
important to note that they combine culture and politics in ways that relate
to masses of people's everyday lives.

How can such initiatives at every level be more widely supported, enabled
and multiplied?

Here the positive support of the PCS and Unite, both for the campaigns of UK
Uncut and, learning from initiatives of their own branches, to encourage
more decentralised forms of organisation, reaching out to communities, opens
up hopeful possibilities. In particular, it raises the question of whether
and how far organisations that have been part of an older, previously
dominant and to a significant degree defeated or exhausted institutional
framework can leap - or be pushed - into an emerging institutional frame. As
social democratic institutions fracture and weaken, this issue's interviews
with Len McCluskey and Mark Serwotka (page 16) indicate that something in
this new direction is stirring. This is a result of both the imperatives of
organisational survival and a recognition that the interests of working
people require unions to remake themselves as agencies of radical change.

The importance of this new openness in the unions and elsewhere - in the
co-operative movement for example - lies in the possibilities for promoting
and linking up otherwise isolated and marginal instances of collective
democratic initiative. So many of these exist but as yet are almost
invisible.

Some emerge in the course of resistance. One example is the speech
therapists in South London who, with no experience of strike action, brought
together a whole community by organising their strike in such as way as to
involve everyone from grandparents to children to defend a service valued by
all. Others struggle to create spaces, in schools or community centres for
example, for co-operative projects that provide a daily challenge to the
forces of competition and austerity. The new spirit of practical
alliance-building needs to extend in a generous-minded way to include the
full range of those working to create inclusive, collaborative and
democratic forms of collectivity.

There is an impressive variety of sources reinforcing the new structures of
feeling associated with alternatives to commodification and exemplifyng
open, co-operative forms of organisation. This points to the importance of a
democratic infrastructure of communications as a condition for the emergence
of new social formations. Here I'm thinking of the ways in which the
burgeoning media initiatives associated with these structures of feeling,
online and offline, blurring traditional divisions between culture and
politics, can reinforce each other and be supported by unions, radical NGOs,
student and community organisations.

The objective is to improve collaboratively our ability to reach a wider
public and also to strengthen our arguments and vision through the creative
debate that can accompany collaboration. This process is already underway;
we need to make it more concerted. The means are there without having to
come under anyone's umbrella.

These trends are taking place in a context in which the institutions
associated with the state - and hence political parties as we have known
them - have failed as the prime agents of change. As a consequence, new
forms of unity are being built from below, with organisational hubs or
centres acting as means of facilitation and support - and posing for the
future new questions about how to engage with states. Here, communication is
central in building cohesion out of plurality and diversity.

In this way, the spreading of the lived experience of alternative values -
presently fragmented and dispersed - will help structures of feeling to
develop. These, in turn, can prepare the way for new institutions and
breaking points in the old institutional order. n
Hilary Wainwright <http://www.redpepper.org.uk/by/hilary-wainwright> is a
founding editor of Red Pepper and research director of the New Politics
programme at the Transnational Institute (TNI).

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