Here, then, despite the many significant differences, is the outline of one significant line of thinking in Cultural Studies—some would say, the dominant paradigm. It stands opposed to the residual and merely reflective role assigned to “the cultural.” In its different ways, it conceptualizes culture as interwoven with all social practices; and those practices, in turn, as a common form of human activity: sensuous human praxis, the activity through which men and women make history. It is opposed to the base-superstructure way of formulating the relationship between ideal and material forces, especially where the “base” is defined as the determination by “the economic” in any simple sense. It prefers the wider formulation—the dialectic between social being and social consciousness: neither separable into its distinct poles (in some alternative formulations, the dialectic between “culture” and “non-culture”). It defines “culture” as both the meanings and values which arise among distinctive social groups and classes, on the basis of their given historical conditions and relationships, through which they “handle” and respond to the conditions of existence; and as the lived traditions and practices through which those “understandings” are expressed and in which they are embodied. Williams brings together these two aspects—definitions and ways of life—around the concept of “culture” itself. Thompson brings the two elements—consciousness and conditions—around the concept of “experience.” Both positions entail certain difficult fluctuations around these key terms, Williams so totally absorbs “definitions of experience” into our “ways of living,” and both into an indissoluble real material practice-in-general, as to obviate any distinction between “culture” and “not-culture.” Thompson sometimes uses “experience” in the more usual sense of consciousness, as the collective ways in which men “handle, transmit or distort” their given conditions, the raw materials of life; sometimes as the domain of the “lived,” the midterm between “conditions” and “culture”; and sometimes as the objective conditions themselves—against which particular modes of consciousness are counterposed. But, whatever the terms, both positions tend to read structures of relations in terms of how they are “lived” and “experienced.” Williams’s “structure of feeling”—with its deliberate condensation of apparently incompatible elements—is characteristic. But the same is true of Thompson, despite his far fuller historical grasp of the “given-ness” or structuredness of the relations and conditions into which men and women necessarily and involuntarily enter, and his clearer attention to the determinacy of productive and exploitative relations under capitalism. This is a consequence of giving culture-consciousness and experience so pivotal a place in the analysis. The experiential pull in this paradigm, and the emphasis on the creative and on historical agency, constitutes the two key elements in the humanism of the position outlined. Each consequently accords “experience” an authenticating position in any cultural analysis. It is, ultimately, where and how people experience their conditions of life, define them, and respond to them, which for Thompson defines why every mode of production is also a culture, and every struggle between classes is always also a struggle between cultural modalities; and which, for Williams, is what a “cultural analysis,” in the final instance, should deliver. In “experience,” all the different practices intersect; within “culture” the different practices interact—even if on an uneven and mutually determining basis. This sense of cultural totality—of the whole historical process—overrides any effort to keep the instances and elements distinct. Their real interconnection, under given historical conditions, must be matched by a totalizing movement “in thought,” in the analysis. It establishes for both the strongest protocols against any form of analytic abstraction which distinguishes practices, or which sets out to test the “actual historical movement” in all its intertwined complexity and particularity by any more sustained logical or analytical operation. These positions, especially in their more concrete historical rendering, are the very opposite of a Hegelian search for underlying Essences. 20 Yet, in their tendency to reduce practices to praxis and to find common and homologous “forms” underlying the most apparently differentiated areas, their movement is “essentializing.” They have a particular way of understanding the totality—though it is with a small “t,” concrete and historically determinate, uneven in its correspondences. They understand it “expressively.” And since they constantly inflect the more traditional analysis toward the experiential level, or read the other structures and relations downward from the vantage point of how they are “lived,” they are properly (even if not adequately or fully) characterized as “culturalist” in their emphasis: even when all the caveats and qualifications against a too rapid “dichotomous theorizing” have been entered.