The Politics of Feeling

[jondwhite]

A quote from an abstract from the Historical Materialism conference this Friday

Quote:

The Politics of Feeling: Feminism and Documentary in 1970s Britain

Writing in 1977 at the height of the women’s movement, Raymond Williams critically describes a dominant strain within Marxism that rigidly opposes the political analysis of the social to questions of the personal, emotional or subjective. Challenging such a view, he asserts instead the significance of feeling as an important category for analysing cultural works. In this paper I draw upon Williams’ concept of “structures of feeling” to explore the feminist idea of the “personal is political” in relation to new documentary practice in Britain in the 1970s. My argument will focus on the Berwick Street Film Collective’s Nightcleaners (1972-5) and the London Womens’ Film Group’s Women of the Rhondda (1975) Williams’ argument places a particular emphasis on the temporality of the present and thus offers a valuable approach to the kind of documentary work addressed to the day-to-day dynamics involved in grassroots activism. The Marxist criticism he rejects understands the social through the model of institutions and is therefore always located in the past. This view leaves, he argues, all that is present and moving, all that escapes or seems to escape from the fixed and explicit and the known . . . grasped and defined as the personal: this, here, now, alive, active, ‘subjective’ (Marxism and Literature, 128). While Williams’ concept is clearly compatible with the feminist conceptualization of the political during this period, how does it help us to think anew about the critical significance of documentary in the 1970s?

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