tures of feelings”can be used here to make sense of the growingoppositionto
emotional socialism duringacrucial period in the history of German Social De-
mocracy.Williams introduced the often-citedterm as part ofafundamental re-
consideration of therole of culture in forging identifications and attachments.
Culture, he argues, must be seen as an expression of social relations.Not only
are its forms and practices multiple and dialogic, they also belong to different
social and historicalformations that he calls residual, emergent,and dominant.
Residual culture, in this context,refers to culturaltraditions formedinthe past,
closelylinked to older social formations, whereas emergent culture includes new
forms and practices and the relationships established through them.Against a
static conception that treats cultureonlyinhegemonic and epochalterms,Wil-
liams’sclose attention to residual and emergent cultures (in the plural)brings
out thedynamic, contested, and nonsynchronous qualities that,inthe case of
nineteenth-century working-classculture, are most evident in its heavy debts
to older folk traditions and its close allianceswith other emergent forms. The
same relational qualities characterize dominant cultureasanongoinginstitu-
tional and ideological project that,for the time period under consideration,
must be located at the intersection of(bourgeois) high culture, national culture,
and imperial culture.
It is as part of this ongoingstruggle among residual, emergent,and domi-
nant cultures that structures of feelingsaccordingtoWilliams acquiretheir
all-important communicative functions as“meanings and values as they are ac-
tivel ylived andfelt.”These structures,heexplains, establish internal relations
and fluid processes in ways that defy existingconceptual binaries, namelyas
“not feelingagainst thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought.”²⁶For
Williams, the usefulnessofthis formulation asaculturalhypothesis lies in iden-
tifying social experiences in the state of becoming. In the context of this chapter,
“structures of feeling”describes perfectlythe individual experiences of political
radicalization shared by manySocial Democratic leaders, beginning with that
transformative moment when the personal turns into the political.The discursive
divisions enlisted to narrate this process of formation,includingits own mech-
anisms of exclusion, are most apparent in the forms ofgendering that imagine a
socialist public sphere by convertingfeelingsofweakness into feelings of
strength and, in the process, purge all residues of emotional socialism.Sustained
by the collective imaginaries and theirtheoretical foundations offered by the
term“proletariat”analyzed in Chapter 2, socialist mobilization around the
Williams,“Structures ofFeeling,”Marxism and Literature(Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press,
1977) 132–133.
Emotional Socialism and Sentimental Masculinity 75