What is a cultural study ? Discuss Raymond William's contribution to cultural studies

Cultural study and Raymond William's contribution to cultural studies 

Ans . Raymond Williams's ( 1977 ) " Structures of feeling , " in Marxism and Literature To do with things we think of as currently present ' in our lives and as exerting an influence on them , i.e. , ' facts ' of the moment : ( 1950's - 70's - the nuclear threat ; 1990's s clear sense that ' swing is back ' ; that a new ' style - hip / hop ' is emerging ; that the campus is not a safe place at night for women ; that Washington is ' peculiar ' and not ' parallel ' to what goes on the rest of the country ) .Talk of " Culture " and " Society : " Tendency to take what we do as conscious , thinking , deliberately acting individuals as a model for how we conduct ourselves in our everyday practices Retrospective talk of finished , complete , systems . Of formed wholes rather than of forming Separation : then ... the social is always past , fixed , explicit , objective ... determining Ho Here , now , alive subjective , individual interpretation " In most description and analysis , culture and society are expressed in a habitual past tense . The strongest barrier to the recognition of human cultural activity is this immediate and regular conversion of experience into finished products .. relationships , institutions and formations in which we are still actively involved are converted , by this procedural mode , into formed wholes rather than forming and formative processes " . " If the social is always past , in the sense that it is always formed , we have indeed to find new terms for the undeniable experience of the present : not only the temporal present , the realization of this and this instant , but the specificity of the present being , the inalienably physical , within which we may discern and acknowledge institutions , formations , positions , but not always as fixed products , defining products " . " And then if a social is the fixed and explicit the known relationships , institutions , formations , positions - all that is present and moving , all that escapes from the fixed and explicit and the known , is grasped and defined as the personal : this , here , now , alive , active , ' subjective " " . 2 ) Talk of " thought " Thought in terms of explicit , logical , complete , closed systems So different from thinking that we talk of thinking of terms of consciousness , experience , feeling " There is another related distinction . As thought is described . in the same habitual past tense , it is indeed so different , in its explicit and finished forms , from much or even anything that we can presently recognize as thinking , that we set against it more active , more flexible , less singular terms - consciousness , experience , feeling - and then watch even these drawn towards fixed , finite , receding forms " . 3 ) Works of art They are , in one sense , explicit and finished But , we make them ' present ' in our lives in specifically ' active ' readings They come to play a part in our lives because they are all the time lived " . We have to make them present , in specifically active ' readings ' . It is also that the making of art is never itself in the past tense . It is always a formative process within a specific present . At different moments in history , and in significantly different ways , the reality and even the primacy of such presences and such processes , such diverse and yet specific actualities , have been powerfully asserted and reclaimed , as in practice of course they are all the time lived " . But there is still the tendency to re duce the practical sense we make of them to categories , to terms within a system of codes and decoding , etc ... " But they are often asserted as forms themselves , in contention with other known forms ; the subjective as distinct from the objective ; experience from belief , feeling from thought ; the immediate from the general ; the personal from the social . The undeniable power of two great inodem ideological systems -the aesthetic and the " psychological - is , ironically , systematically derived from these senses of instance and process , where experience , immediate feeling . and then subjectivity and personality are newly generalized and assembled "