welcome to glacial structures of feeling!
an experiment in cultural criticism as living presence
“The strongest barrier to the recognition of human cultural activity is [the] immediate and regular conversion of experience into finished products.”
–Raymond Williams, “Structures of Feeling”
This weekend at a Halloween party, I watched the drag artist Untitled Queen perform a medley of ethereal, vaguely spooky poetic texts, ending with Mary Ruefle’s 2013 essay “Observations on the Ground.” The piece is literary sleight of hand, a simple but deft series of sentences that abstract common human behaviors into something strange and beautiful. Ruefle describes her subjects as if to a non-human audience, defamiliarizing everyday words: trash, flower, cemetery. She invokes life and death in the same verb—to bury a body or bury a seed—and performs subtle grammatical transformations to illuminate shifting layers of meaning. In one line, we fear “being overcome” by the remains of the dead; in another, the scent of fresh flowers is “capable of overcoming us.” In Ruefle’s hands, language that first appears static reveals itself to be fluid, alien—always in barely perceptible motion.
Untitled, too, was engaged in a form of intangible magic. As she lip-synced to a recording of Ruefle reading “Observations” aloud, her embodied presence gave life to the text. Slivers of green and purple light refracted off her sequined black gown as she produced a bouquet to punctuate the essay’s final line: “These flowers belong to the dead.” Though Ruefle is very much alive, the performance felt like a séance. The poet spoke through the queen’s body, each of them channeling the essay’s vibrating core.
It is that ineffable heart of the work that I am interested in here. The thing that came alive in that room cannot be accessed again, not exactly. (I have already tried listening to the voice memo I recorded at the party and reading Ruefle’s original text—though worthwhile, they can only approximate the full performance.) But the felt experience leaves an impression, a neon thrum beneath my ribcage.
Marxist critic Raymond Williams articulates something akin to this imprint in his 1977 essay “Structures of Feeling.” Feelings are not separate from thought, Williams argues, and both are ongoing: what he calls “living presence” is always unfolding, despite our attempts to stabilize it through analysis. These “structures of feeling” leave their traces in art and literature, which continue to form us in turn.
I envision this as a space to explore pop culture criticism as “living presence,” a project that is by necessity nonlinear, accretive, and slow. Poet and psychoanalyst Nuar Alsadir theorizes criticism as extraction: “Critics, after all, tend to gravitate toward what they can write about (What’s your central idea?), use familiar tools to cut into a work, and pull out what they already know—even if, in so doing, they kill it.”
Here, I aim to practice a criticism that keeps its subject alive. Whether I like an album/movie/book or not is beside the point, because writing about it allows new dimensions beyond e/valuation to unfurl. No cultural criticism can be “too late” because culture keeps living after its immediate consumption. Some texts are animated by the moment in which I found them—not just this book but this copy of it, softened by a friend’s fingertips and perspiration—so I name my own positionality and experience as it filters the work.
Thank you for joining me in this experiment <3 and special thanks to Brandon Brown for the title of this newsletter, borrowed from his phenomenal poetry collection Top 40.