Form contra Aesthetics

Enjoying a second act that seemed all but inconceivable a couple decades ago, form has recently reclaimed center stage in academic literary studies. This time around it claims greater power than ever before. For many scholars, attention to form has miraculously become a means of both re-establishing the discipline's specificity and of expanding the range of contexts upon which it might claim interpretive purchase. If formalist analysis is the one thing literary scholars can assert as their own peculiar skill by virtue of years spent close reading poems and novels, forms also happen to be everywhere one looks.1 Curiously enough, however, this rekindled passion for form has not in every case meant a renewal of enthusiasm for that mode of response often thought to go hand-in-hand with form, namely aesthetic appreciation. While formalism has returned to being a wholly respectable critical posture, aestheticism has not. Why is this?

That aesthetic and formalist criticism could ever find themselves at odds might seem surprising, a sign even of theoretical confusion. Immanuel Kant, after all, imagined a symbiotic relationship between the two. What distinguishes aesthetic judgment from the mere appreciation of agreeable sensations is its attention to form, i.e. the shape or play, the design or composition, of an object's various elements.2 But if form demands the operation of aesthetic judgment, giving the latter a task to perform, then aesthetic judgment is also the response that grants form its particular value. According to Kant, the composition of a beautiful object represents a mere "form of purposiveness" or a "purposiveness without a purpose," in that it serves no direct practical use; it simply keeps the subject in a state of attention, producing a "quickening of his cognitive powers" "without any further aim," allowing us to "linger in our contemplation of the beautiful."3 Form's value, in other words, derives from the aesthetic pleasure it yields.

Kant, of course, was not the only one to link form and aesthetics; the two have generally remained yoked together within the history of Anglo-American criticism, including much of the New Formalist work that has emerged in the past two decades.4 Many critics use the two terms interchangeably, a conflation that makes the schism I am seeking to identify difficult to discern. Furthermore some observers might argue that the aesthetic, far from being relegated to the sidelines, has in fact made a comeback no less noteworthy than that of form.5 Indeed, the ascendance of affect theory, with its emphasis on reader's visceral bodily responses would seem to represent the triumph of an aesthetic orientation.6 Arguably both categories — form and aesthetics — have been reimagined in ways that have dramatically expanded their scope and interpretive powers. In point of fact, however, many of the most prominent proponents of a renewal of formalist analysis in the past five years, including Caroline Levine, Walter Benn Michaels, Nicholas Brown, and Eugenie Brinkema, have actively disavowed aesthetic criticism. In this essay, I will seek to explain why this is the case — why formalism, in order to present itself as the way for forward for twenty-first century literary studies, has attempted to cast aesthetics aside.

Form's Rigor

In recent years, as I have suggested, scholars have worked not merely to recover form as a legitimate subject of intellectual inquiry, but to redefine it. Thus while continuing to reference the verbal or narrative patterns of a text, form is also being made to signify structures in the world beyond the text. Caroline Levine has provided the most influential reconceptualization:

"Form" always indicates an arrangement of elements — an ordering, patterning, or shaping. Here, then, is where my own argument begins: with a definition of form that is much broader than its ordinary usage in literary studies. Form, for our purposes, will mean all shapes and configurations, all ordering principles, all patterns of repetition and difference [emphasis in original].7

Similarly, Sandra Macpherson has sought to broaden form's referential scope, defining it as the "shape matter (whether a poem or a tree) takes."8 For Levine, focusing on form entails an enhanced capacity to describe and critique contemporary political arrangements; for Macpherson, it entails a better understanding of ontology.

Assessing these and other recent efforts to redeem formalism, Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid Nersessesian persuasively contend that form's applicability to so many different contexts and its capacity to reference so many different phenomena is partially responsible for its appeal.9 I would add that many scholars seem to hope that formal insights, when deployed correctly, can remedy the inadequacies of a range of influential methodologies, including both New Criticism and Marxism. Formalism for Levine no longer means, as it did for its midcentury practitioners, sequestering the text and oneself from the larger world; it means marshalling one's expertise to achieve an understanding of the underlying patterns governing the social order. At the same time, a return to form can apparently mitigate the excessive abstraction of certain modes of political criticism and their tendency to prioritize invisible structures of power while ignoring the more concrete and immediate aspects of everyday life. At least this is what Carolyn Lesjak believes Marxist critics can learn from the reparative-interpretive approach championed by Eve Sedgewick and from the surface reading advocated by Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best.10 "Sedgwick's attentiveness to the sensory aspects of experience," Lesjak maintains, can productively unsettle "the Marxist tendency to unequally weight structure over lived experience."11 Thinking about form, it seems, can enable us to attend both to the hidden political and ontological bases of our social reality and to the palpable textures of the world — and to imagine strategies for transforming both simultaneously. What could be more appealing?

There is, however, one catch: in order to achieve its full potential, form must, according to certain influential critics, be wrested away, in all of its gem-like brilliance, from the merely subjective experience of form. In The Forms of the Affects, Eugenia Brinkema urges a redefinition of affect that locates it not in the mind of the beholder, but within the formal properties of the work of art: "In place of a limited, aims-oriented model of affect as the psychological experience of any one subject, the presencing of grief through the photograph suggests a theory of affect as a force that takes form in texts."12 For Nicholas Brown, the only thing that distinguishes a work of art from a commodity - and thus enables it to express a politics - is its capacity to bear an intentional meaning embedded within its form independent of any consumer's response to it.13 Elaborating a similar position in The Beauty of a Social Problem, Walter Benn Michaels praises works of art whose self-referential formalism (what he calls their aesthetic of absorption, borrowing art historian Michael Fried's term) insists on the "irrelevance of the beholder."14 This refusal to appeal to the viewer's affective responses, Michaels maintains, can serve to expose the parallel reality of a neoliberal market whose impersonal structures thrive regardless of people's attitudes toward them and whose cruelties cannot be mitigated by adjusting people's feelings.15

While these scholars do not categorically deny that even highly impersonal artworks aim to produce reactions in audiences, their tendency to privilege autonomous forms over the aesthetic experiences they elicit makes it difficult for them to explain how these forms might actually influence the world, an elision that leaves the politics of form undertheorized. This problem is most conspicuous in Caroline Levine's analysis, where various forms are endlessly "competing and colliding and rerouting one another," "with minor forms sometimes disrupting or rerouting major ones."16 So active and mobile are these forms that they seem able to operate entirely without the help of human beings. As Langdon Hammer succinctly puts it, "In Forms, forms, not people, do things."17 But it is hard to imagine how the forms in a literary work, say a sonnet, might successfully engage with, redirect, or disrupt any given institutional or social form without first producing some impact on an actual reader.

Why, then, this urge to bracket the beholder's experience? One might read it as a backlash against the discipline's overvaluation of affect, which has, as I have noted, been freighted in recent years with all variety of theoretical and political functions. Citing Ruth Leys's influential critique, Michaels accuses the affect theorists of prioritizing noncognitive affective experiences so as to exclude the act of interpretation, i.e. the conscious effort to discover the artwork's intention.18 Rejecting the widespread celebration of inchoate feelings and bodily impulses, Brinkema enlists New Critics W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, whose 1949 essay "The Affective Fallacy" famously sought to ban consideration of the reader's psychological responses from the effort to evaluate a poem.19 "This criticism," avers Brinkema, evincing far more enthusiasm than one might expect for a position that has come to be seen as retrograde, "is as appropriate today as ever."20 But if New Critical dogmas have fallen out of fashion, the disciplinary anxieties they confronted have persisted, and in appropriating their stance, Brinkema registers at least implicitly the same crisis of legitimacy that motivated their intervention.

Responding to a university culture in which the hard sciences were increasingly coming to monopolize prestige and resources, the New Critical prohibition of affect aimed to make the methods of literary criticism more scientific, by excluding extraneous material from consideration, most importantly the critics' own feelings and biases, and by focusing scrutiny on the purportedly objective features of the literary work.21 A similar imperative seems to mobilize Brinkema's intervention when she laments "the way in which subjective, vague accounts of a reader's or critic's feelings shut down critical inquiry instead of opening up avenues for thought and investigation," or when she complains that arguments based on "some theorist's or spectator's kinesthetic strivings and pleasures" are immune to refutation.22 Form, of course, is her solution. Yet again, form has come to serve as the basis for the discipline's assertions of rigor, allowing it to inoculate itself against accusations of impressionism or subjectivism by referencing the hard, durable, objective entities that literary studies is uniquely capable of explaining.23

Political Formalism

But the privileging of form over the affective responses it inspires is also premised, as I have suggested, upon political commitments. Brown and Michaels regard the prioritization of consumers' emotional experiences as the symptom of a market-oriented neoliberal ideology that forecloses any possibility of understanding or transforming the real source of our problems, i.e. the economic structures of capitalism. They reject the notion that modes of affect can resist or subvert these structures. In defending their view, they see themselves as entering a political debate with the goal of discrediting certain ideological positions to the left and the right of their own, not launching a wholesale attack on aesthetic criticism per se. And yet in subtle ways they and other political formalists suggest that an undue interest in aesthetic experiences might be an obstacle to the radical political work that forms might otherwise be made to perform. Indeed, one might say that for Michaels the problem with prevailing modes of political engagement in contemporary U.S. society is that they are actually aesthetic in character.24 They prioritize altering ways of seeing or feeling over transforming economic structures or redistributing resources. For Levine, the term aesthetic invariably signifies a limitation on our ability to recognize all that forms can be and do in the world. The problem with literary critics, she avers, is that they regard "form as the exclusive domain of aesthetics."25 Fortunately however, "form has never belonged only to the discourse of aesthetics."26

In treating the aesthetic as a bounded territory, Levine is of course implicitly relying on the definition first offered by Kant. For Kant, the aesthetic designates a relatively circumscribed experience: of merely beholding a beautiful or sublime object, without striving to possess or make use of it, and without any aim other than remaining in a state of heightened attentiveness. Under this definition, attempts to restrict formalism to the aesthetic domain will necessarily constrain its political potential. But not everyone defines the aesthetic so narrowly. Moreover, Kant himself never argues that the work of art cannot serve other functions besides promoting aesthetic satisfaction; the aesthetic is merely a category for articulating a particular mode of response, not a categorical delimitation of the powers we might attribute to particular artworks. The question remains, then: why has the new investment in form among literary scholars seemed to coincide with a systematic snubbing of the aesthetic? What threat does the aesthetic pose?

Levine, Brown, and Michaels' commitment to offering plausible accounts of art's political efficacy might explain their reluctance to include the subject's experience within the causal sequence leading from the artwork to the larger political effects it purportedly produces. What happens after a work of art inspires a particular set of feelings or thoughts? How do these feelings and thoughts translate into material or institutional transformation? In many cases it may not be possible to offer a persuasive account of how the effects on a particular readership or audience lead to actual political change. The experience of the subject threatens, in other words, to exhaust all of the powers that the artwork can wield. Better, then, to avoid the subject altogether, and imagine, as Levine does, that textual forms somehow operate directly upon the institutional and economic forms that structure our world. To put it another way, a full account of aesthetic experience might reveal that what appears to be form's radical force is actually just an aesthetic effect dressed up in heroic political rhetoric. Indeed, Michaels in particular never even tries to describe the processes by which the photographs and literary texts he interprets might effect change. Their supposed challenge to the neoliberal order is, in his account, nothing more than a quickening of our perceptual faculties - Kant's aesthetic response par excellence.

But how do aesthetic effects get recast as radical political interventions? To answer this question, I turn to the description of the reader's experience offered by I.A. Richards in his 1924 Principles of Literary Criticism.27 Richards's approach was a prime example of the affective fallacy and thus represented precisely what the American New Critics wanted to proscribe when they sought to redirect attention from the experience of the reader to the purportedly objective, formal features of the poem. According to Richards, we cannot understand poetry unless we understand what it does to the reader's mind. In his view, serious works of literature reconcile our competing urges, producing experiences that activate more of our neurons, simultaneously satisfying a greater number of competing appetencies than other experiences can: "[t]he equilibrium of opposed impulses, which we suspect to be the ground-plan of the most valuable aesthetic responses, brings into play far more of our personality than is possible in experiences of a more defined emotion."28

Richards maintains that literature's function is emotive rather than referential: it does not derive its value from its capacity to reveal the truth about the world, and the statements it makes "are not the kind of things which can be verified."29 His pragmatic account is designed to counter the tendency exemplified by theorists ranging from Aristotle to Coleridge to treat literature as a source of revelation. But he fully understands why literature has inspired so many misconceptions about its purpose. The state of psychic harmony it inspires is, Richards argues, immensely satisfying, and "lends itself inevitably to transcendental descriptions."30 "There must be few," he elaborates," who have not by one arrangement or another contrived from these visionary moments a philosophy which, for a time, has seemed to them unshakable because for a time emotionally satisfying."31

In particular, profound aesthetic experiences resulting from a felicitous equilibrium of the neural impulses frequently masquerade as religious epiphanies. "Thus when, through reading Adonais, for example, we are left in a strong emotional attitude which feels like belief, it is only too easy to think we are believing in immortality or survival, or in something else capable of statement, and fatally easy also to attribute the value of the poem to the alleged effect."32 Although Richards emphasizes mystical or religious beliefs, radical utopian fantasies are another potential byproduct of aesthetic experiences. He acknowledges this possibility when seeking to explain the misapprehensions that the surprisingly pleasurable experience of tragedy can encourage:

The joy which is so strangely the heart of the experience [of tragic literature] is not an indication that "all's right with the world" or that "somewhere, somehow, there is Justice"; it is an indication that all is right here and now in the nervous system. Because Tragedy is the experience which most invites these subterfuges, it is the greatest and the rarest thing in literature.33

During intense aesthetic experiences, Richards asserts, we sometimes mistake what is happening in our brain for something that is or could be happening in the world. We project the psychic harmony we are experiencing outward, envisioning the ultimate triumph of justice even in the face of evidence to the contrary. Though Richards argues that such fantasies can disrupt the full release of feelings that constitutes the ideal aesthetic effect of tragedy, he also suggests that the latter genre frequently invites these fantasies, leading readers to conclude, erroneously, that the text has somehow provided confirmation of their faith in a better world, and that this confirmation is the basis for their pleasure.

To deduce the existence of heaven or the possibility of justice from the experience of reading is, Richards avers, a mistake. At the same time, he suggests that literature produces its psychological benefits by instilling in readers certain beliefs. There is just one caveat: these beliefs must be understood as "objectless": without reference to anything in the actual world.

That an objectless belief is a ridiculous or an incomplete thing is a prejudice deriving only from confusion. Such beliefs have, of course, no place in science, but in themselves they are often of the utmost value. Provided always they do not furnish themselves with illicit objects. It is the objectless belief which is masquerading as a belief in this or that, which is ridiculous; more often than not it is also a serious nuisance. When they are kept from tampering with the development of reference such emotional attitudes may be, as revelation doctrines such strange forms maintain, among the most important and valuable effects which the arts can produce.34

Reading literature is valuable because of its immediate effect on the brain, not because the religious or political beliefs that sometimes arise during the experience of reading refer to external states of affairs. Indeed subscribing too fervently to the revelation doctrines aroused can, Richards suggests, endanger the aesthetic effect by predicating the latter on an empirically indefensible conviction that can easily fall prey to skepticism or mockery. And yet, Richards also maintains that the indication of a good, healthy aesthetic experience is precisely our submission to certain mystical or providential visions of the world: "Such are the occasions upon which the arts seem to lift away the burden of existence, and we seem ourselves to be looking into the heart of things. To be seeing whatever it is as it really is, to be cleared in vision and to be recipients of a revelation."35 Having such revelations is valuable — indeed it is the most important thing that literature can do for us — but we must somehow find a way to have them, and to find the language that supports them meaningful, without treating them as "implying knowledge," without granting them any referential purchase on the world.36

According to Richards, critics endlessly seek to make aesthetic pleasure into something more than it is, treating it as the basis for metaphysical certainties, religious hopes, or utopian fantasies, all of which mistakenly treat the limited transaction between the book and the brain as a revelation of the world's hidden essence. Political criticism is no exception to this pattern and Richards's conception poses a challenge to its methodological premises in at least two ways. First, he restricts the scope of the literary work's agency to the mind of the individual reader, and second, he suggests that any utopian visions provoked by reading literature are illusory symptoms of aesthetic pleasure. To be sure, he does maintain, as Joseph North has observed, that literature can be an important agent of change, but not a revolutionary one.37 It can incrementally reorganize people's minds and thus support a "civilization" where "free, varied, and unwasteful life" is encouraged, but the utopian image of a just society wherein "all's right" is a "subterfuge" dependent upon a projection of the reader's private mental experience onto the world. 38 The aesthetic saturates the circumscribed time and place of its existence with pleasure by appearing to transcend the boundaries within which it emerges. Thus it is no surprise that scholars would be tempted to treat literature as a world-making and world-remaking force. Or to put it another way, Richard's argument suggests that aesthetic pleasure invites precisely the illusions to which political critics fall prey when they overestimate either the subversive capacity or visionary power of literary forms.

It is not necessary to conclude that Richards's demystifying description applies to all literary texts and all moments of reception to recognize it as an unsettling possibility. Whether or not his theory is categorically accurate, in other words, it lends expression to a pervasive, if frequently repressed, anxiety within literary studies about its own importance. Namely, what if the beliefs we entertain about the role literature plays in shaping society are merely an expression of wishful thinking, rooted in a desire to make more of our personally satisfying but far from earth-shattering aesthetic experiences than they merit? What if literature is nothing more than a massager of minds? Would this be enough to justify a discipline organized around its study? The New Critics thought not. They worried that Richards's arguments trivialized literature, making it a mere therapeutic tool and separating it from the important affairs of the world. To be considered a serious subject of academic study, literature, they argued, must be a form of knowledge no less robust than that offered by the sciences.39 Indeed, despite the reputation they eventually came to acquire, the New Critics did everything they could to distinguish their interpretive practices from mere aestheticism.

The Cognitive Critics

Ironically, Richards, no less than the American New Critics, was seeking to make literary studies more scientific. Both claimed to be in pursuit of knowledge, but whereas the latter promised a robust ontology of the world via poetry, Richards aimed to produce an objective, neurological account of the reader's experience. In the short term, the New Critics won the debate, and Richards had no immediate successors. In the past decade or so, however, a group of scholars has taken up his mission of investigating the impact that exposure to art and literature might have on the brain, namely the cognitive critics, including Paul B. Armstrong Alan Richardson, G. Gabrielle Starr, Blakely, Vermeule, and Lisa Zunshine.40 These critics are far more willing than others to focus serious attention on the temporally delimited experience of reading as an object worthy of study in its own right and not merely as a component within a larger ideological process. Unlike many among the New Formalists, they take aesthetic pleasure seriously, but do so only by making it an object of scientific inquiry. Thus their work, along with Richards's, suggests that the aesthetic may be able to achieve legitimacy within academic discourse, not as a significant feature of a person's intellectual life that needs to be nurtured within an academic setting, but only when framed as a phenomenon to be studied and explained by means of disciplinary methods borrowed from psychology and neuroscience. So fully have the cognitive critics internalized scientific criteria dictating what constitutes legitimate academic work that several among them argue that literature is important primarily as a repository of information about how the brain works, as a potential contributor to science.41

If the cognitive critics ask the same questions as Richards, they also reach many similar conclusions. Several of their findings seem to bear out Richards's hypothesis that more of the brain participates in intense aesthetic experiences than in other situations.42 Moreover, G. Gabrielle Starr's research, based in part on fMRI brain scans taken while subjects were shown paintings, lends support for Richards's claim that aesthetic satisfaction can promote religious or utopian visions. Central to Starr's argument is what we imagine when we concentrate on a work of art, and these findings suggest that the brain's response is not limited to fabricating a realistic image of a particular scene. Rather, motor imagery causes our bodies to feel, through kinetic perception, the movements we behold, and this happens not only when we observe something in motion, say in a movie, but also when we follow a particular line in a painting or a rhythm in a song or poem. These actions provoke a feeling of imagined movement in our bodies. By appealing to this motor sensitivity, which responds to and thus brings together all variety of visual, auditory, and haptic stimuli, art can produce a kind of synesthetic experience, wherein we seem to move through an imagined space in a way that is impossible in actual life. In Elizabeth Bishop's "At the Fishhouses," Starr explains in a tour-de-force reading, "The sense-strewn landscape of the poem's images ultimately melds onto a world of words, words that gesture toward what we could not ever properly sense. That thing which we 'imagine knowledge to be' — something beyond perception — is counter, original, spare, strange."43 The poem gestures to a world beyond empirical experience, one whose apprehension feels like an epiphanic glimpse of the truth.

But if the aesthetic invites readers to imagine themselves transcending the parameters of the empirical, the scientifically-minded cognitive critics, including Starr, get their revenge by translating the aesthetic back into a purely empirical phenomenon, a physical operation of the brain that can be observed in laboratory experiments. Their procedures thus demystify the illusions that aesthetic pleasure propagates, reducing metaphysical transports to neurochemical processes. In doing so, their work not only eschews but may in fact discourage the cultivation of the aesthetic pleasures whose benefits they aim to study. Ironically, political criticism, including contemporary formalism, has actually served more effectively to promote rewarding aesthetic experiences. It performs this function, paradoxically enough, by seeming to disavow the aesthetic in favor of a radical project: asking literature to reimagine the world. Cognitive criticism generally restricts what it treats as the primary effect of literature to the circumscribed domain of the brain and thus denies the fantasies that the aesthetic would otherwise inspire. Political formalism, by contrast, provides a rigorous correlative to the utopian yearnings that reading literature arouses, thereby fostering the aesthetic fulfillment whose significance it discounts.

 

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Timothy Aubry is professor of English at Baruch College, CUNY.  He is author of Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures (Harvard University Press, 2018) and Reading as Therapy: What Contemporary Fiction Does for Middle-Class Americans (University of Iowa Press, 2011), and the co-editor of Rethinking Therapeutic Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2015).  His essays and reviews have appeared in The New Republic, The Point Magazine, The Chronicle Review, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Music & Literature, n+1, Best American Essays 2014, PMLA, Criticism, American Studies, and other academic journals.

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In This Issue

Part 1

Introduction: Formalism Unbound
Timothy Aubry and Florence Dore

Good for Nothing: Lorrie Moore's Maternal Aesthetic and the Return to Form
Florence Dore

On Philosophical Imagination and Literary Form
Yi-Ping Ong

"Now can you see the monument?" Some notes on reading for "form"
Gillian White

Transformation and Generation: Preliminary Notes on the Poetics of the Memphis Sanitation Strike
Francisco Robles

The Sight of Life
Sarah Chihaya

Beyond Desire: Blackness and Form
Amber Jamilla Musser

Part 2

Form contra Aesthetics
Timothy Aubry

Zadie Smith's Style of Thinking
David James

Queer Formula
Joan Lubin

Formalism at the End Times: A Modest Account
Danielle Christmas

Furnishing the Novel, Feeding the Soul: Aimee Bender's The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
Benjamin Widiss

Notes on Shade
C. Namwali Serpell

Afterword: Form Now: as Limit and Beyond
Dorothy J. Hale

 

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References