Post #4: Adorno and Levine, crime fighting team

Guys, I really liked the Caroline Levine article! But first, let's struggle a little bit with Adorno.

So, I really only got half of the Adorno article...maybe. I mean, it's Adorno, right? One of his essay's most provocative moments was when he said "The essay, however, does not try to seek the eternal in the transient and distill it out; it tries to render the transient eternal" (11). Rather than assume the object of the essay is fixed/eternal/whole, Adorno seems to be saying that it is the essay itself that takes the object (whose meaning is always shifting depending on history/interpretive communities/whatever) and turns it into a concrete object. The essay speculates-in both the cognitive sense and in the sense that it literally sees the thing and attempts to make it real through its articulation of that moment of seeing. Does that make sense? That was a bad sentence. Let me attend to the first meaning of speculate for a minute though: in its tentative approach, its desire to apprehend rather than to confer or transmit ready knowledge, it is the form that most closely resembles thought itself. Adornoa says "The essay, however, takes this experience as its model, without, as reflected form, simply imitating it. The experience is mediated through the essay's own conceptual organization; the essay proceeds, so to speak, methodically unmethodically" (13). The essay doesn't simply seek to recreate the process of thinking; it is a process of thinking that consists of immediate mediation-translating thought into physical words on the page. Thus, Adorno says that the essay is the best way to lay bare ideology because the essay apprehends other levels of mediation like the reader does and uses that reading knowledge to illustrate the ways ideologies are working.

I think that this is very similar to Levine's "strategic formalism." In fact, I think she echoes Adorno when she says "It is 'strategic' because it invites us to take up a new position with respect to the questions of forms and abstractions--a position not of flight or disavowal, but of critical engagement with the terms of our own discourse" (635). By adopting her strategic formalism, the critic is forced to pay attention to what they didn't pay attention to-like Adorno's essay, strategic formalism interrogates the text with the text's own terms. Or, in this case, forms. For Levine, the answer is that there is no "beyond the form," only more forms. It seems to me that strategic formalism is a melding of Greenblatt's thick description and symptomatic reading. By using other forms to describe/interpret/analyze/juxtapose each other, Levine argues that it is this collision of forms that produces the social: it "invites us to read cultures as dense networks of different kinds of interacting forms" (636). The phrase "read culture" here is key; rather than arguing that text-object is separate from culture, Levine invites us to think of culture itself as a text-or rather, many texts.

I particularly like the idea of viewing a text as a way of imposing order, just like ideology imposes a kind of social order: "The Panopticon is a new way of ordering space; the time-table is a new way of arranging time; the novel is a new way of producing a disciplined subjectivity" (637). I think the linkage (paratactical relationship maybe?) of the Panopticon and the novel is really interesting because both operate on the principle of self-policing. By reading the novel and internalizing it, it (re)makes us as a subject with our own permission and participation. Think of that novel you read about ballerinas or drummers or whatever as a kid and then you immediately wanted to become like that character and you modeled yourself after that character. You chose to remake your identity according to the novel. 19th-cent. American reading practices also embody this theory. Society believed that women should be kept away from novels for fear that their too-impressionable selves would be brainwashed by these texts and they would act immorally.

While this function seems more like an effect of us identifying too much with a text,  I was particularly convinced by Levine's discussion of the Victorian bildungsroman. The genre itself attempts to organize British nationalism as "the metaphor of childhood carries with it its own form-the lifespan-that itself suggests that Britain will decline and age..." (638). So while we might attribute childhood to mere genre convention as the phase that the character leaves behind, Levine argues that shape of the plot, the form, enforces the same kind of ideological processes that we might have tried to dig deep for.

I like strategic formalism because it doesn't attempt to explain away the contradictions between literary and social. Levine says that strategic formalism "links literary forms to social forms as if they inhabited the same plane, as if poetic techniques and social formations were comparably iterable patterns, each struggling to impose order" (648). Here, I think of the conflicting discourses that Hayot saw Greenblatt ignoring. Strategic formalism doesn't try to explain the struggle away, but instead take note of the struggle and the strategies of either side. It describes the ways one side will win while pointing to its weakness and vice versa. I think this is a much more suitable methodology as symptomatic reading can often take the form of exegesis and then we have to struggle to make everything fit. Instead, we take the text as it is and see it in relation to the social and see how each defines the other.