I think it’s right that each age can be understood as having its own “structure of feeling” (Williams 1979: 223), a narrative structure for understanding material limits to change, or how one settled and conditioned within these particular structures will necessarily be influenced by them (Gilmore, 2017: 237).
In this configuration, these structures are not like ideology. They are not distinct or immediately available.
They are murky and to some degree ineffable.
Stories are not an active confluence, there is a gap between my description, the experience, and what is being experienced; structures of feeling are dynamic, continuous, and never finished.
Somewhat unhelpful, an unreasonable tension between the experienced and articulable, but there are two things here: while process is not articulable, feeling is identifiable; and feelings, sometimes the most unreasonable aspects of the human experience, have a dynamically substantive shape.
Feelings are embedded into the landscape.
They shape space. They shape experience, and possibly even more important, limit conceptions of possibility.
People will work their way through the world, being met with these ebbs and flows through time, deeply textured by those who came before them, and erode their own paths.
The landscape projects onto them, and they project onto the landscape.
This accumulation produces a narrative arc towards something, and this arc, in this moment in time, has produced a crystallization of process in the form of a radical action.
This is not a true representation of process, this is fundamentally impossible, but it is insight into what is occurring, what happens in this gap between experience and description and what is to come.
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