Form, theory, and language of agency.

Wind, like pain, is difficult to capture.
The poor windsock is always striving, and always falling short.

 -- Eula Biss, The Pain Scale

The Wiki definition of formalism is pretty close to what I had assumed already, which is: "criticism having mainly to do with structural purposes of a particular text...the study of a text without taking into account any outside influence." I'm sure this is a reductive and simple definition of the methodology/school, but served to confirm that the focus is exclusively on (surprise surprise) the form of a text. I'm taking the difference between formalism and structuralism to be that structuralism identifies those forms and texts as part of a larger structure; either formal and/or ideological. 

(If anyone can clarify this for me further, or if I'm missing something dire, that would make for a great comment!) 

The 'pure literary terms' that Spivak suggests she'l use to read Kincaid's Lucy suggests a sort of 'formalism' but performs something much closer to structuralism. As a few of us discussed - and as Spivak acknowledged in her introduction to her essay, we're working from a foundation of post-colonial studies, theories of diaspora, Marxism, psychoanalysis, etc. So when Spivak identifies parataxis as a formal method that performs a complex theoretical idea, I struggle to believe in a 'pure' textual critique that happens to coincide with her other working theories. But maybe she's not making that claim. Of course it would be rare, even impossible to identify parataxis as the textual representation of the ideological abyss, the inability for Lucy to connect, and the never-closable gap between signifier and signified without knowing what you've set out to find from the get go; without that foundation of post-colonial, diasporic, subaltern knowledge that Spivak commands so well. Let me pose it as questions:

Are pure textual analyses void of theoretical frameworks, foundations, or assumptions? Is that possible? If so, what do they hope to suggest? And if they end up supporting or performing a critical theory - what have they become?

My hangups are the same as the ones I had with surface reading; to intentionally negate theoretical horizons without setting goals to establish new ones seems counterproductive. But that's not what Spivak does at all. She comes away with an intensely complex theoretical claim that's worked out formally. So perhaps I'm being too reductive. Do other people see more clearly how this works out to a functional method?

I found Hayot's reading of anecdote and language of agency to be more streamlined in the way it described itself and the way it performed. This begins with Hayot's basic definition of how anecdote works (calling on Greenblatt and Fineman):

As a "narrative form" specifically dedicated to the real, the anecdote binds story to history. And, in this binding, the anecdote..."produces the effect of the real," but...only insofar as its narration in some sense reports the story it tells and reports itself reporting that story, indicating its referential content and its narrative structure all at once (41). 

Here I see Hayot as identifying a formal element that has textual and theoretical implications. By taking both elements into account and even identifying that they're required to for the anecdote to function, Hayot makes a claim that is situated in the local/formal but which has a broader horizon. We see in the figure of the anecdote the struggle of language, of literature, of semiotics, to express the real. 

Naturally, this broader claim pulls threads out of deconstruction, post-structuralism, new historicism, you name it. But Hayot doesn't attempt to ignore this. Instead, it seems as though it's assumed and serves as silent support system that he knows we're calling upon mentally. 

(Does this assume too much? The flip side is singing the same old songs over and over) 

There was a lot to Hayot's essay that I found extremely compelling and useful, but I'd like to skip over to his section on Language of Agency (50). Again, this idea is not original, and seemed to me to wink heartily at Derrida's idea of the supplement - that which substitutes for but also adds to - working at once to identify what is not and signify what is. I also thought of this piece of creative nonfiction by Eula Biss (that quote at the top of my blog is pulled from this essay). In writing about her chronic pain and the way that pain is described, backs up Hayot's claims about the description of pain and the need for language of agency to describe it. 

(Aside - When you think about it - most of the issues that bring critical relevance to our readings, that drive us to do this work - are impossible to describe and require similar linguistic crutches. It's the beauty and demise of this profession.)

Language of agency suggests the process of reproducing something without representing or being it. Hayot maps it as a threefold process: 

• First, you need a metaphor of X (described in terms of a casual agent)
• Then a metonym (a word, name, or expression used as a substitute for something else with which it is closely associated)  so that the the agent's effect can be deduced from its cause
• Finally, an identification (what kind of effect would that cause me?) 
  

In this way, a literary act creates a constructed fiction of the real: by describing something it is not. What a shockingly useful way to think about the text and how it plays. Of course, there is potential for mistake or error, "because it occurs in language, this descriptive act is not without its pitfalls, which depend precisely on a confusion between the signifers and signifieds," but I'm not sure this can ever be avoided. This is the struggle to understand, and to refer back to Spivak, the process of being human; of never truly knowing the Other. It's a risk we don't have to accept taking, it just is. 

In the end, I appreciate Hayot's approach. It's getting back to the basics while maintaining a conscious presence in the theoretical. It's a practice of simultaneity that I aspire to; a two-pronged awareness of what the text does intentionally, what it aspires to, what it fails to do, and what it therefore achieves by failing. "Language about pain shares the anecdote's double bind: it is a detour from reality that leads to a powerful sense of the real" (53). Again, the subject here is pain, but couldn't it also be any contested aspect of subjecthood or identity? Couldn't it be any concept, or any thing? That's the trouble and the magic of what we're doing here.