Forging Forms with Raymond Williams and Caroline Levine

From the outset of her argument, Levine begins to couch her “strategic formalism” in a Marxist discourse. In the first paragraph she even turns to Jameson to contextualize her outlook. Afterwards, she writes, “Focualdian and New Historicist critics, too, [like Jameson] have argued that literary forms do not merely reflect social relationships but may help bring them into being.” (Levine 626). Further on, she lays out her central argument:

This essay draws on these models to arrive at a new hypothesis. It develops the idea that literary forms are socially and politically forceful but concludes that they do not derive their power from their fit with existing or emerging patterns [Williams’ material and relational processes?]. Instead, literary forms participate in a destabilizing relation to social formations, often colliding with social hierarchies rather than reflecting or foreshadowing them. Literary forms, that is, trouble and remake political relationships in surprising, aleatory, and often confusingly disorderly ways (626).

Here, Levine seems to sidestep the issue of the origin of form that Williams so carefully attends to: “Thus a social theory can show that form is inevitably a relationship.” That is, forms always correspond to material conditions and processes. Levine may have also overlooked the fact that just because forms may destabilize “relation to social formations” instead of reflecting or foreshadowing them, does not mean that said forms were not forged in material realities… In Marxist terms, wouldn’t a clash of classes produce a clash of forms?

For Levine, one gets the impression that ‘the social’ might look more like the collision and contestation of, more or less, radical-free-agent, renegade forms. Maybe she infers an agency of form? While for Williams, ‘the social’ remains firmly grounded in the material, the historical. Levine’s claim that the “form” of her  “strategic formalism” is in fact “all about the social,” seems like a last-ditch effort to align her approach with the Marxists critical project, which continues to be one of the most prolific and productive critical modes in literary studies, instead of with the outmoded and stringent methods of New Criticism and Structuralism (632).

Williams, after all, in “Forms,” lauds formalisms emphasis on material and concrete articulations, but criticizes the parameters and probing practices that prevent its resonance in the realm of material and social reality. Formalism “cannot be extended to a principle of form,” which, for Williams, is a relational dynamic between the social (collective) modes and individual projects: “There is thus no abstract theoretical relationship between collective modes and individual projects. The degree of distance between them, within the continuing reality of each mode of consciousness, is historically variable as a function of real social relationships, both general and specific” (190). He begins his next paragraph with the declaration, “These modes of consciousness are material. Every element of form has an active material basis.” Williams, then, traces all form, (all forms of form?) back to material conditions/relations, while Levine seems to argue that forms may operate independently of social and historical realities, and in fact, take on a sort of autonomy in which they actively antagonize social structures and institutions and instigate historical change.

As we may have gathered by this point, Williams doesn’t agree: “What is at issue in form is the activation of specific relations, between men and men and between men and things. This can be recognized, as it often is in modern theory but then distanced into an abstraction of rhythm, or proportion, or even ‘symbolic form.’ What these abstractions indicate are real processes but always physical and material relational processes”(Williams 190). That is, form, for Williams, is a function of material reality, an abstract reflection of it, and even when it appears to contradict, destabilize, and collide with social formations rather than affirm them, it still corresponds to material conditions (or conflict). In using Williams’ sense of form to interrogate Levine’s, we might ask, How could a collision of forms alert us to the imminent conflict? How might detecting such formal conflicts reveal material, social struggle?