Some Speculative Musings on COVID-19 Affectivity, Raymond Williams’ ‘Structure of Feeling’ and Zadie Smith’s Intimations

Zadie Smith’s Intimations: Six Essays (2020) is a partial history of affectivity of the present, which I am speculatively positioning as a type of transnational archive of privileged pandemic-circumscribed life. Raymond Williams’ work on a ‘structure of feeling’ is useful here to understand new patterns of experience that have emerged during this pandemic. Williams uses the phrase a ‘structure of feeling’ to distinguish between formally held beliefs or ideologies, and meanings and values as they are lived and felt in relation to those beliefs or ideologies. Theories of emotion, atmosphere and feeling broadly correspond to Williams’s correlation of material, social and affective structures. Smith can help us theorize emergent affectivity from inside a pandemic-strained world through the narration of the ambiguous operational logic that her essays describe. She has created a continuum made up of affective normativities and transformative affectivities on either end, with her essays tracing the rhythms of privileged life across locales, to help us understand pandemic inspired change.