Raymond Williams: A Brief Word

Son of the welsh borderlands, lifelong—third generation, at that—Labour Party member, was Raymond Williams. He was that literary critic who always located the production of literature in its historical moment, attentive always to the conditions that made the literary artifact possible, that shaped it, that gave the literary its “structure of feeling,” a phrase for which he is perhaps most famous.

But Williams was by no means a literary man only. Far from it, as his work in Culture & Society makes evident. No surprise, then, that in the course of his critiques Williams developed a tripartite understanding of ideology. He offered three categories, explicating how one ideology was never quite singular. It contained, the ideology of the day, three distinct articulations: dominant, emergent, and residual. The emergent is that which is (already) lodged within the dominant but has not yet risen to prominence; the dominant is self-explanatory. What preoccupies us here is the residual: it is that mode of being (those “structures of feeling,” those economic modes, those political ideologies, those social mores, and so on) that is still operative in the dominant but only as the remnant of the previous dispensation.

The residual ideology, sedimented within the dominant, can be absorbed into the dominant because it no longer threatens the dominant. It can, if truth be told, be useful to the dominant ideology to retain within itself traces of its antecedent. Perhaps even antecedents. Broadly speaking, Marx and Williams are aligned in their thinking on the transition from one mode of production to another and are, as is obvious, ideologically aligned in their critique of the immanent effects of capitalism on the human experience, to say nothing of the costs it exacts on the human psyche. If Marx’s critique tends more toward a discourse of exhaustion, an economic mode can only be replaced when the mode that preceded it has been thoroughly exploited, Marx and Williams converge around the emergent. Marx’s metaphor of incipient maternal (re)production, “the womb of the old,” finds its corollary in Williams’s category of the emergent. (Williams’s thinking, we can say, turns on the possibility of the trace; the trace as residue—containing within it that which, chronologically speaking, belongs to the past—and the trace as germ—the trace l’avenir, the present containing within it the—economic—mode to come.) In Pretty Woman, Marx and Williams’s critiques find reinforcement in each other even as we acknowledge that there is a useful precision in Williams’s terminology.

Following Williams, then, we can name late industrial capitalism “residual.” However, we can do so only if we keep in mind that the imperative(s) of postindustrial capital is singular. Unlike Williams’s dominant ideology, postindustrial capital will not tolerate the residual to persist in any way into its era, a tension to which Marx’s critique would appear to be sensitive. The residual mode of economic production must be, not to put too fine a point on it, liquidated. The only purpose of the residual, insofar as it still exists (despite postindustrial capitalism’s ongoing efforts to render it obsolete), is instrumental. Whatever value resides in it must be exploited to the full.

Unlike Williams’s dominant ideology, postindustrial capital is ruthless. It has no time for that which preceded it. Having outmoded industrialism, postindustrial capital refuses to absorb the residual into itself. Succinctly phrased, postindustrial capital is brutally unsentimental. The past must be abandoned to itself. Not a single trace of it must be allowed to remain. If nostalgia cannot return a profit, what value has it? None.

But then, ruthless though its logic be, what postindustrial capital had not reckoned with is a singular cinematic force: a pretty woman. A pretty woman who uses her body to make a living and, as such, it is unsurprising that she will take her cues from the labor modality of late industrial capitalism. (In fairness to the history of the prostitute, however, we should recognize that the basic tools of her profession have changed very little since time immemorial.) The working body, what postindustrial capital takes to be, in the age of private equity finance, a relic, maybe even an economic dinosaur.

In Pretty Woman we encounter an old man, James Morse (Ralph Bellamy, in his final performance) who still clings to his truth.1 That it remains possible to “Make things in America.” James Morse is a retiring ship builder who is refusing to sell his company to Edward Lewis unless it continues to be productive, under the terms of his residual economic rubric. James Morse is accompanied by his grandson, David (Alex Hyde-White). (There is no mention of David’s father, so we are free to speculate that he has either passed on or figures as the missing generation. Have we found in the absent father that male family member who has succumbed to the logic of postindustrial capital and has abandoned the family business?)

What we have, then, is an unlikely triumvirate of actors who are making this last stand against postindustrial capital. (Grand) father, (grand) son, and woman of the streets. And alongside this trio a smooth, suave PEF who is surprisingly open to—maybe even sentimental about—the prospect of accommodating one of the last scions of late industrial capitalism.

A case of postindustrial Goliath going up against late industrial David. Hardly a fair fight, one would imagine.

Still, stay tuned. After all, as the neighborhood crier hollers into the blankness of the day at the end of the movie, “This is Hollywood, where all your dreams come true!” Especially dreams condemned to the dustbin of history decades ago.