It feels like the momentum that I generated for writing about Immediacy has subsided a bit, and honestly, that’s how it goes sometimes. Some books stick around for a while in my brainspace, while others fade more quickly. I’ve been poking around in different directions over the past week—at Kornbluh’s prompting, I returned to a book that I’d picked up several years ago, Caroline Levine’s Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. (I originally grabbed it for the word “network” in the title.) Kornbluh herself has a book (The Order of Forms) that I haven’t looked through yet, but which suggests a cluster around forms and formalism that I’ve been mulling over a bit.
As I worked back through Levine’s book, I realized that its title/subtitle basically reads the table of the contents to the audience (there’s a sixth chapter on The Wire that could have just as easily been included in the subtitle). The book is very much about the four forms that the subtitle names. More to the point, though, the book attempts to make a case for a formalist approach to literary study (and to extend it beyond literature) that has been out of fashion for a fair spell.
“Forms are at work everywhere,” Levine argues, and thus are no less useful for understanding “sociopolitical institutions” than they are for explicating literature. She suggests that forms are “containing, plural, overlapping, portable, and situated,” a combination of features that lead to a much more flexible analytic style than formalism is traditionally understood to provide. The fact that “forms are everywhere structuring and patterning experience” intersects with the idea that they also compete, intersect, and collide to produce unexpected configurations and effects. Her goal is “to shift attention away from deep causes to a recognition of the many different shapes and patterns that constitute political, cultural, and social experience.”
If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because the sort of formalism that Levine advocates bears a strong similarity to the work that I’m doing with the rhetorical tropes. Honestly, I think that she and I arrive at a similar place albeit from different directions (I think that, in some ways, Levine takes the long way round to arrive at rhetoric). One potential distinction is that the forms Levine identifies (particularly whole and network) tend towards the macro, while my own work begins from the micro. But Levine remarks (rightly) that forms move across different scales, so I wouldn’t describe that as a particularly strict difference. It’s more a matter of where each of us has chosen to start.
History
You’re probably familiar with the line from George Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (or at least with the many paraphrase memes that float around the web) That sentiment hints at one of the issues regarding forms and formalism: what is it that we learn from the past? Ideally, according to Santayana, we recognize and carry forward patterns (forms), so that when we see those patterns recurring in our time, we can respond to them more quickly and appropriately. To a certain extent, we might say that that’s the value that we gain from (accurate) history, the ability to learn from and head off the mistakes we’ve made as a society.
Of course, it’s not quite that simple. Much of the critique of formalism comes from the suspicion that, if we reduce complicated historical processes to readily identifiable patterns or forms, we are ill-prepared to deal with contemporary complexities. And we tend to ignore the extent to which our present context differs from the past. (In some places, I’ve seen this described as “contextualism.”) Perhaps also, then, those who cannot forget the past are condemned to misread it?
I know: On the one hand, this can feel like fiddly, academic nitpicking. After all, surely our own circumstances result from some combination of historical pattern and contemporary context. Focus too much on the former and you end up with something like Isaac Asimov’s “psychohistory” (or what Ada Palmer calls “Great Forces history”) where there’s no individual agency; lean too hard towards the latter, and you get the “immediacy” that Kornbluh critiques or perhaps the mercenary relativism of Klein’s “mirror world.” It begins to feel obvious that the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle of the spectrum connecting form and context.
On the other hand, while I myself enjoy thinking about these ideas in the abstract, finding that balance point is not simply a theoretical question. The tension between formalist and contextualist interpretation is one that plays out on a daily basis in our courts, every time a judge rules on whether certain precedents apply to a given case. At the risk of ELI5ing, a great deal of legal discourse is generated to resolve precisely the question of whether or not a particular act is sufficiently similar (in form) to past incidents or whether it’s different enough (contextually) to establish new rules. We’re watching this play out currently in Arizona, where the overturning of Roe v. Wade has resulted in that state’s laws reverting to its most recent precedent, a law from 1864. As you might gather, the source of that “law” is not, shall we say, especially democratic:
So, in 1864, a legislature of 27 white men created a body of laws that discriminated against Black people and people of color and considered girls as young as ten able to consent to sex, and they adopted a body of criminal laws written by one single man. (Heather Cox Richardson)
We’re in the middle of this across a number of states, so it’s hard to predict where things will end up, but I’d like to believe that more than a few people are now waking up to the notion that allowing our laws (or foreign policy, for that matter) to rest on the whims of a single man may not be the best path forward. And of course, another version of the form/context tension that’s become popular in recent years centers around the emergence of fascism as a lens through which to view contemporary politics. It’s no accident that many of my colleagues are returning to pre-WWII Germany to examine the rhetorical patterns that preceded the rise of the Nazi party.
Rhetoric
I’m not going to dip too far into it here, but I spent some time this week with Hayden White as well (another writer on my secret syllabus). In some ways, it makes for a great pairing with Kornbluh’s book, because White spent most of his career agitating against the commonsense attitude that history is just “what happened.” It may feel obvious to say, but history is actually what other people tell us about what happened (as is the vast majority of “news” that we process daily). “[H]history must be written before it can be read,” he explains, and as a consequence, history’s fundamental logic is necessarily rhetorical. Even when our history includes events that we ourselves have experienced, we represent those events (to ourselves, to others), and we rely upon rhetorics in order to so. Even when we reduce history to a series of names, dates, places, and/or events, there is rhetoric behind the selection of those data. In the foreword to Figural Realism, White offers a line that we could easily fold into Kornbluh’s argument: “One can do very many important and valuable things without theory, such as talking and listening, loving and hating, fighting and making up, taking pleasure and causing pain, but thinking is not among them.”
The form/context tension that I’m sketching out is so much more involved and complicated than I have the time or energy to capture fully, but White is someone who, like me, sees that tension as fundamentally rhetorical. I don’t know how much of this will end up in my book, but it’s certainly one of the big issues that motivates my writing. More soon.