An obvious step from a discussion of the concept of structure of feeling is to a consideration of the category of experience. Williams continually referred to experience, across the diverse range of his writing, but it was also crucially linked to 'structure of feeling" itself. As we have seen, it is through the attempt to make sense and meaning of social and historical experience, in ways which challenge existing ideological positions and discourses, that structures of feeling are generated. Summarising what has been said somewhat over-schematically, in the movement from the "lived" experience to the articulation of emergent expressive form, consciousness becomes crystallised in a particular social semantic figure or set of historically defined thematics which then come to stand as a collective response to a collective experience. Experience in its manifold sense is then in this movement a site of emergence, and in this respect it grounds the structured process of crystallisation from "lived" solution to precipitate forms. We need therefore to go on from what I have described as the "experience" of experiences to deal with the relatively indeterminate category of experience itself. There is perhaps a somewhat less obvious reason for doing this in immediate connection with Williams's concept, and this is that in thinking about both 'structures of feeling" and "experience", we cannot have recourse to any easy, off-the-peg forms of explanation.