Post #4: Williams and Adorno

This week, I will focus primarily on two texts: the Raymond Williams selection, “Forms,” and Adorno’s “The Essay as Form” to think about the definition of “form” in these texts, particularly in regards to the relationships a form can be in or have within itself. Right away, “form” for Williams rejects a simple definition: “From its development in Latin, which was repeated in English, it acquired two major senses: a visible outward shape, and an inherent shaping impulse” (186). I am more comfortable describing the first sense here than the second sense. This “shaping impulse” sounds two-fold for me: the form is shaped and also shapes something. Williams discusses the tendencies to think of form at the “extremes” of these two defining characteristics: at one extreme, I believe, there is an over-attention to the outward shape (neo-classical or "academic"), and at the other extreme lies the more romantic vision of the “internal formative impulse” (186). Williams appears to reconcile these distinct visions on the following page with his assertion that “neo-classical theories of form...unquestionably recognize and describe certain artistic forms, and even correctly identify their rules, while at the same time limiting understanding both of the forms and the status of these 'rules' by failure to recognize that forms were made, the rules arrived at, by a long and active process of active shaping, of trial and error, which can be described in the terms of the opposite theory, as an internal shaping impulse” (187). This romantic vision will in turn be unable to accurately describe new forms (187). Each vision lends something useful, but also has the flaws described. I think at the heart of this reconciliation is the “trial and error” which points to all the interactions that create, or shape, form. “Thus a social theory can show,” Williams argues, “that form is inevitably a relationship” (187). 

This “relationship” became most clear to me in his discussion of form as performance that becomes renegotiated (“made and remade”) depending not simply on audience but all the interactions that a “text” makes at a specific point in history. I’m interested in the ways Williams situates “form” historically: “Periods of major transition between social systems are commonly marked by the emergence of radically new forms” (189). Since I am taking Elizabeth Miller’s class on Victorian literature and the novel, the discussion here on the novel’s form caught my attention. Williams suggests that the novel rejects “‘form’ of an older, more stable, and more collective kind” (190). I find his quotation marks around “form” to be of interest here, since, I believe, this is the first time he uses them. It might be tempting here to suggest that such a theory about new forms emerging at historical transitions risks being reductive, but I think that Williams anticipates this point: “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…” (190). I am having some trouble understanding this inability to theorize the relationship, but I think Williams suggests that specific texts cannot be reduced to the “collective modes” surrounding them, or that the relationship between that project and its surrounding “collective modes” cannot simply be theorized.

Significantly, a text, its form and formation, is in relationship with its surroundings: “the ultimately formative moment is the material articulation, the activation and generation of shared sounds and words” (191, emphasis mine). From this analysis, I sense that “form,” for Williams, has a specificity in time and place due to its formation occurring as a shared experience. Adorno’s essayistic discussion of an essay’s form also includes this idea of relationship: The essay “starts…with what it wants to talk about” (4) at the same time as “the essay’s innermost formal law is heresy” (23), and so the relationship here, for the essay’s form, involves a kind of opposition to its time and place. The essay’s form shares this kind of “trial and error” that Williams describes, except for Adorno, the essay “takes place not systematically but rather as a characteristic of an intention groping its way” (16). In both connections to Adorno’s essay here, I understand that the essay’s form, for Adorno, has more autonomy than “form” does for Williams. The connection between form and relationship, for Adorno, seems more focused on the relationships between certain parts or concepts within the essay itself: the concepts are “made more precise through their relationship to one another” (12).

Adorno’s discussion of the essay’s form and positivism seems in conversation with Williams’s descriptions of the “extreme” visions of form. Adorno’s critique of positivism becomes clear: “In its allergy to forms as mere accidental attributes, the spirit of science and scholarship…comes to resemble that of rigid dogmatism” (5). Here, I want to draw attention to the phrase “mere accidently attributes,” which seems to resonate with Williams in his assertion that “forms were made…” (187). Both Adorno and Williams here, from what I understand, show what a “scientific” approach to form will miss: what is involved in the actual formation of form. Adorno acknowledges that art has borrowed significantly from the sciences, or that art has been “intertwined with the dominant tendencies of enlightenment” (7). I am left now trying to puzzle out Adorno’s analysis of the essay and art (according to Adorno, to what extent can the essay be “art”?).