Week 4: Considering strategic formalism with Williams

I want to start with Raymond Williams not because his chapter on forms was short and sweet, but because his book Marxism and Literature profoundly influenced my own ideas about the relationship literary criticism has with the political and social everyday. Williams, more than Marx, Jameson, or Adorno, got me really thinking about the “embeddedness” of the individual within social processes. I came to understand subject-formation as deeply embedded in many overlapping and contesting processes that communicate and negotiate meaning, value, and cultural perception among individuals in a given community. With this idea of the self in mind, it’s not hard to anticipate what Williams’ view of literary form might look like. Form, like anything else, is also caught up in these overlapping and contesting processes in such a way that they are never really “fully formed” in a manner of speaking, and they are often not even intelligible as forms. Williams writes:

This whole range of conscious, half-conscious, and often apparently instinctive shaping—in an intricate complex of already materialized and materializing forms—is the activation of a social semiotic and communicative process, more deliberate, more complex, and more subtle in literary creation than in everyday expression but in continuity with it through a major area of direct (specifically addressed) speech and writing (Williams 191).

Williams locates the development of form in the same “social semiotic and communicative process” that forms individual and collective subjectivity. You can see Williams resisting any kind of closing off of form as a product of a fully “conscious” (preferring to conserve other levels of awareness) or fully materialized network of shaping forms and processes because the very network(s) themselves are constantly undergoing revision, just as the material conditions of life shift and change. In Williams’ view, form, embedded in social process, is the “common property” of writers and readers. It is therefore constantly being communicated and contested among communities of writers and readers and never a (completely) intelligible or materialized whole.

With Williams’ in mind, conceiving form as “common property,” I want to consider Levine’s strategic formalism. She defines form as “shaping patterns,” “identifiable interlacings of repetitions and differences,” “dense networks of structuring principles and categories” that involve “reading particular, historically specific collisions among generalizing political, cultural, and social forms” (Levine 632). For Levine, the critic should not reduce literary form into its ideological, social, or cultural referents, as though to decode literary form into an underlining ideological narrative. Instead, the critic should conceive of literary form as one among many that shape and contest each other through a text. Literary form stands among political and social forms, for example, and the ordering principals of these “rub up against each other.” The text registers these “encounters among forms” and the critic detects the “politically significant possibilities” (Levine 633) that emerge within a text when forms vie with each other.

Although I understand that Levine’s pantheon of different forms does not foreclose the possibility that forms may overlap and interconnect, I wonder whether she inadvertently closes off and thereby stabilizes form as a concept. She makes a point of saying that form has “no intrinsic political efficacy” (Levine 647) and that it’s politicized only when it encounters other forms. She claims 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” (Levine 647). Strategic formalism seems to require not only an apolitical and ahistorical concept of form but also a vague ideal notion of a “plane” on which these forms compete and politicize each other. In other words, Levine seems to require a stable category of “form” whose structuring principals are sealed off from any kind of material reality.

With that being said, I like what Levine is doing here because I think it’s in line with the project that Williams, Spivak, Jameson, et al advance: trying to articulate the connection between the literary and the social so that literariness isn’t privileged into an ideal category of taste and aesthetics that has little connection with the material conditions of everyday life. By articulating that connection, they politicize literary criticism and identify the stakes in reading texts in particular ways that may contribute to ongoing recuperative or revolutionary discourses. Levine tries to disarm and eliminate Marxism’s reductive tendencies by decentering “ideology” and “politics” as master categories and agents of “historical causality” into which literary form is subsumed and reduced. I get that, but I think we lose what I like most about Williams’ view of form as embedded in social process, the common property of readers and writers. The communicative property of the social process leaves form available for constant revision, reorganization. Form is unstable, and so different forms—be they literary, social, political, etc.—do not merely “rub up against each other” as organic totalities (with ordering principals of their own) but communicate parts of their form and profoundly interpenetrate each other. Form, as common property, admits into its operation within a text the everyday experience of its readers and the position of the writer, so that we may properly conceive of literary form as not existing prior to the social or political, but as caught up in their processes (just as they are caught up in the literary), a product that is not fully made and closed off but constantly being rewritten, revised, and contested, along with the countless other cultural practices that constitute human life.