Raymond Williams

It's a nationalism, I guess, of institutions.

It's a very kind of Raymond Williams idea, so this idea that Britishness is the NHS, it's the Coal Board, it's the Steel Board, it's Royal Mail.

Mm-hmm.

I think he says it's Marks & Spencers.

Just as the one Dickens novel we have covered in The Invisible College was about, it was not about London, it was about, essentially about Manchester, but it was about industrial life, the industrial towns.

So we have The Country and The City, as, as in the great, uh, famous Marxist, uh, book by Raymond Williams, which I've barely, uh, barely read.

I've never really liked Raymond Williams, but, uh, the book of his I know, uh, I know is Culture and Society and Marxism and Literature.

He always did this and that, this and that.

I don't know The Country and The City that well, and they didn't have it in the library.

I do think he had a lot to say about Hardy, which I think I did read.

He has a book, it's kind of a digest of the argument of The Country and The City on the English novel that I spent more time with than I ever spent with The Country and The City.

But this is not about Raymond Williams.

Yeah.

I think one of the things that we think is the reason that the literary has this kind of endurance is that it is about, like Raymond Williams says that the structure of feeling is the thing that we all share, but we can't put our finger on until it's captured somewhere, until it's distilled, until it's there.

It's this living thing, but it's there in a kind of, as a condensation in the literary text.

Sometimes also in a more kind of profane register of cultural production, but the literary text certainly does that.

And that actually harks back to the John Birch Society's hatred of world government.

Since you're talking about this vast and pervasive structure of feeling, to quote Raymond Williams, I'm wondering if you see a similar desire for a cleansing upheaval, a similar accelerationism, a similar belief in the virtues of violence and catastrophe on parts of the left.

Yeah.

I think you can find that if you search the Internet and find those corners where there are people with those kinds of politics.

Mm.

And I think this is where I'm just massively i- indebted to Raymond Williams, I think, like, the, and to think that we should think in a way that Raymond W- Wal- Williams thinks, and, uh, this is the counterintuitive bit, which is that, like, we have to think almost in the terms of the long revolution, uh, which is sad because we know in that moment what we may lose, um, and we know what we're struggling over, and we know what the stakes are.

Um, but we have, we do have to think about- What are the trends that are on our sides? What are the things that we can work towards and, and, and build out from that are on our side? Like, where are those moments of leverage? Where are those moments of, um, radical alternatives that don't collapse into a progressive, progressivism or a teleology? Um

R- Raymond Williams to tell people-

Sorry, yeah

... um, The Long Revolution, and if people have been listening to the podcast as Jonas and Annie have so far, they've heard me talk a little bit with, uh, with Paul Gilroy, um, Welsh Marxist, uh, uh, one of the founders of cultural studies.

Sure.

I mean, uh, structure of feeling comes from Raymond Williams, and it's basically an unconscious substrate of how people view the world and what structures their, uh, uh, understanding of what's possible and what's impossible.

So ideology understood as, as basically a series of coherent ideas that gi- that, that serve as a filter through which you understand events in the world.

Um, structure of feeling exists below that level.

Yeah.

So, so people love to quote this Raymond Williams line-

It's intransitive.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

People love to quote this Raymond Williams line that the, "To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing." And I understand why people say that, and I have some sympathy with the sentiment, but I don't like it because it, it seems to me cut off from things, yeah? I don't want hope from this government.

I want hope that the university system won't collapse, and that I might be able to make it to my pension.

I want hope that my kids' lives are gonna be good, if not better.

Yeah.

And hopeful, right? I think it was, well, I know it was, and it's referenced in the book, Raymond Williams, where he says the most radical thing that you can do is have hope instead of And hope is not a passive thing.

Hope is something that ignites, something that inspires, something that moves you forward.

And, you know, and I think each of these characters represent hope, but they reflect the hope that I've seen in my aunties and my grandmother and, you know, the indigenous women in my life.