Afterword Form Now: As Limit and Beyond

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The title of this double special issue of Post45 invites us to consider whether each individual essay endorses, condemns, practices or in some way "unbinds" formalism. It also raises the question about the relation between a practical criticism that attends to form and a theoretical approach that self-consciously addresses formalism, understood as a critical tradition. Is criticism that focuses on artistic form necessarily formalistic? Do the rich and substantive essays in this special issue, taken together, represent a new formalism — an old formalism, or any formalism at all?

Interestingly, most of the contributors to "Formalism Unbound" are not particularly worried about whether formalism should be defended or attacked on theoretical grounds. On the contrary, the essays taken as a whole display high confidence that the study of form can go forward without a robust theoretical engagement with formalism. While a few of the contributors explicitly identify themselves as new formalists, most make the strong positive case for the study of form through the analysis of specific artworks.1 Across the essays, the term "formalism" references more often than not the relatively recent critical debate, developed over the past ten years or so, about what a refashioned formalism might mean, what its potential value and detriments might be. Timothy Aubry, in the critical genealogy that he provides in "Form contra Aesthetics," identifies many of these key contemporary theorists. His perspicacious characterization of the new philosophies of form, as well as the specific arguments for a new formalism grown out of these philosophies, powerfully elucidates many of the most important ideas circulating under the sign of "formalism" now. Aubry's project also implicitly raises the question of how the current debates about the pros and cons of a new formalism function as a shared starting point for understanding the positive value that form holds for each contributor to this special issue.

Like Aubry, I am interested in bringing to the contemporary conversation a deeper sense of the philosophical depth and complexity of twentieth-century formalisms. Which ideas in which formalist traditions are carried forward? Which are superseded? For example, many of the contributors to this special double issue seem, like Victor Shklovsky, to credit literary form with the power of defamiliarization, the capacity to renew the reader's perception of the social world by breaking habits of thought. And in their focus on the particular formal features of artworks, taken as expressive wholes, many of the essays also raise, implicitly or explicitly, the issue of whether close reading can be recuperated for a new formalism or whether a new formalism is better served by other theories of readerly practice. An inquiry into close reading as "formalist" would benefit from an understanding of what close reading meant to the New Critics themselves, a set of investments and practices that are far from monolithic, and also from a study of the kinds of reading performed by other schools of criticism that also valorize literary form: Marxian, psychoanalytic, postcolonial, Foucauldian, etc. 2

Because the contributors to this special double issue overwhelmingly explore the idea of literary form through prose fiction, it is especially interesting to ask how the current understanding of the novel as form relates to earlier formalist theories of the novel. Such an inquiry might begin by noting the resonance between Sarah Chihaya's description of the idea of form she finds in the novels of A.S. Byatt and that developed by Percy Lubbock in The Craft of Fiction, which at the time of its publication in 1921 was regarded by Virginia Woolf and others as the first serious, Anglo-American study of novel form.3 On Chihaya's view, literary form for Byatt is that which cultivates in novel readers "an active receptiveness to the text that verges on the physical." Chihaya seems to want to suggest that Byatt's understanding of form (form as produced through the reader's imaginative experience of embodied contact with fictional objecthood) marks a break with an older, less adequate idea of form developed through Anglo-American formalism. Chihaya argues that Byatt's formal goal is to produce not the "well-wrought urn itself, but the wrighting, as it were, of the urn in the mind's eye and mind's hand of the reader."But while she is right to distinguish Byatt's reader-based notion of novel form from Cleanth Brooks's object-based notion of poetic form (the urn), this doesn't mean that the "truly 'formalist'" approach (with truly carrying the connotation of truly laudable) that Chihaya finds in Byatt begins with Byatt.4 More than twenty years before Brooks, Lubbock reaches for the same verb that Chihaya uses to make a similar case for understanding novelistic form as that which is actively "wrought" in the mind of the reader.5 And in the extended figure of the clay plot that Chihaya uses to distinguish Byatt's notion of form from Brooks's, the strong connection with Lubbock becomes even clearer. Chihaya describes Byatt's use of ekphrasis as promoting in the reader "a kind of textural depth of feeling." The rhetorical form of Byatt's descriptions, on Chihaya's view, incites the reader to imagine themselves in an embodied connection to the object being described. And in this model of form proposed by Chihaya, the reader's imaginative experience of embodiment expands to include the apprehension of the literary work as a form that can be touched, whose imagined materiality gives a feeling of "the clay's wet slip and mineral grit, of the smudged print of the potter's thumb, of the tremble in the hand of the person who holds the fragile, finished pot." On this view, the particular illusion of materiality that Byatt has evoked through her narrative effects seems to allow for a tactile intimacy between maker and receiver, novelist and reader. Lubbock also seeks a figure that will convey the soft materiality of literary form, its capacity both to make an impression and take impressions. He argues that, because the author cannot transfer "his book like a bubble into the brain of the critic," the "shaping of thought and feeling" into form requires that the "man of letters is a craftsman, and the critic cannot be less. He must know how to handle the stuff which is continually forming in his mind while he reads; he must be able to recognize its fine variations and take them all into account."6 For Lubbock, the imaginative transformation of abstract text into touchable textures connects reader and author as co-producers of literary form. But notably, the reader's role as craftsman is to reconstruct rather than invent. Open to and ready to receive "the thing" the author has made, readers use their creative powers to "mould . . . images in thought."7 The importance of readerly openness in Lubbock's formalist model of novel form is on a continuum with the more explicitly ethical value that underwrites Chihaya's notion of what she deems the "truly" formalist approach. Byatt's textural imagination turns out for Chihaya to depend on a readerly openness understood as an implied ethics of "vulnerability" that makes possible what for Chihaya is the ultimate social good of literary form: the "unpredictable confluence of the beholder and the beheld."

Seeing ideas shared across a century — about the reader and the author as co-producer of literary form, about the weirdness of the "mind" serving as a materializing space for literary form, about the conception of literary form as possessing a materiality that is at once hard (comparable to a physical object) while also being imbued with a life of its own ("the accrued vitality of an object" as Chihaya puts it) — calls attention not just to the continuing influence of past theorists of form (dispersed into received ideas), but to the way a particular literary tradition, in this case the Anglo-American novel tradition, develops cultural expectations about what "true" literary form should be or do.8 As Aubry's analysis of I.A Richards powerfully demonstrates, recovering the philosophical seriousness and disciplinary investments of foundational formalist movements can enrich our understanding of what critics want from form now and what problems abide in the contemporary political, affective, and cognitive approaches to form.9 But rather than situating these twelve essays in relation to either a past theoretical school of formalism, a long literary tradition, or the most up-to-the-minute debates about formalism, I want to follow a thread of thought that I believe unites this special issue in its own terms. Why are so many contributors to this issue confident that they know form when they see it, that what counts as form is not a question that needs to be asked? I want to propose that this confidence comes from the contributors' shared sense of the value of art (literary art and, in one case, of visual art) in our current moment. In other words, although across these essays literary form is variously defined, the shared belief in why literature and literary criticism matter stabilizes the value of form — and the stabilization of form's value thus for many critics naturalizes the form form takes. To put it another way, when reading for form, the critics gathered here care less about making the case for a particular idea of form and more about assigning a set of shared values to what they intuitively identify as the formal properties of the particular artwork that is the focus of their respective attention. Understood heterogeneously as genre, ideological structure, social form, hidden macro-narratives, embodiment, a certain kind of poetic practice (e.g. resignification), or a certain kind of narrative mode (e.g. ekphrasis, bildungsroman, effacement or collective narration), the specification of form inspires little consensus and hardly any overlap among the critics in this special double issue. But read together, the essays also suggest that there is clear, positive value to form, however exemplified, and that value is derived from the shared belief that what makes art worth studying and producing is the profound ethical and political work art is believed to accomplish. This may seem like an uncontroversial observation. But since the term formalism, as it emerged in the twentieth century, can connote a desire for apoliticism, a desire to define "the literary" in purely literary terms — which historically has been allied with the refusal of politics, ethics, biography, science or history — the shared ethico-political investments of the contributors are well worth nothing, especially when so many of the contributors cast the ethico-political work of form in a very particular way: as the problem of the new.The artworks that most of the contributors value are those, on their view, that admit the weight and force of the structural impediments to a just society, impediments that are operational in the present moment, while also bringing to light the potential for future action that will lead to positive social transformation. Form, in its many exemplifications across the essays, contributes to this positive ethico-political project by symbolically representing or, as some argue, enacting the move beyond impediments to social justice. In many of the essays, the critical description of form's social value is bolstered by considerations of ethico-political constraints and possibility mobilized by the artwork's diegesis and/or its paratexts. But it is as form, or through the privileged symbolics of aesthetic form, that the social structures that foster injustice (conceived as social hegemony, institutional power, environmental exploitation, capitalist commodification, and/or racism) are confronted by forces that are credited with holding the possibility for social betterment: ethical action undertaken by individuals, the refinement of sympathy, participation in collective enunciation, the refusal of the identitarian imperative to account for one's sexuality, and political intervention "down the road."10 For some of the critics in this issue, the encounter between social possibility and determination staged through the form of the artwork is itself a step beyond the current conditions of social injustice. In those cases, an artwork is credited with the power to create the new, to bring into being a better social world, if only with a single step forward. For others, the artwork, steeped in its own social determinates, cannot provide the positive terms of a way of being outside or beyond these limits, but, through the operation of aesthetic form, can reconceive at least some of those limits as themselves limitable. On this view, aesthetic form can register new and better ways of social being through the disruption of hegemony, or by pointing to a utopian ideal, or by creating in the reader the conditions for ethical transformation.

Given the complexity and substance of the essays collected here, it's impossible to treat them all with the detailed attention they merit. Instead, I'll work synecdochically, with the idea that if I can show a shared underlying belief about the value of art and the working of form by focusing on essays that treat very different types of artworks and which draw on different conceptual vocabularies to describe the form of an artwork, that the logic of my argument might usefully be extended to a more in-depth consideration of each essay's specific stakes and disciplinary contribution. I'm especially intrigued by the dialectical model for understanding aesthetic form that emerges from these issues, and more specifically by the way the essays in this double special issue generate two different accounts of how that dialectic works. Critics who believe that the artwork forges a step beyond limitation are able to articulate in positive terms the new and better ethico-political goods that artistic form brings into being. Other critics locate the ethico-political potential of the artwork in its refusal of positive description. On this latter view, the form of the artwork offers a new and enabling position of social and political critique precisely by not specifying an alternative set of values or a program for political action. Instead, the form of the artwork, by gesturing toward an undefinable and inexhaustible realm of positive potential, makes visible the shortcomings or outrages of existing social structures while affirming the artwork's distinction from these social structures.

As we can see in a comparison of Amber Musser's "Beyond Desire: Blackness and Form" and Florence Dore's "Good for Nothing: Lorrie Moore's Maternal Aesthetic and the Return to Form," the two different dialectical models of form have much in common, even when the philosophical touchpoints for each critic are miles apart. Musser seeks to move forward the understanding of Black identity by moving past the power of "negation" that theorists have assigned to blackness. Dore reaches back to Emmanuel Kant and his idea of the aesthetic for a way to think past the specter of futurelessness posed by climate change. The artworks under discussion also could not be more different. Musser's focus is on the material objects and sounds that comprise a 2015 multi-media art installation called Black is the Color by Paul Stephen Benjamin. Dore's study of two works of prose fiction by Lorrie Moore (A Gate at the Stairs and a short story, "People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in the Peed Onk") analyzes the way Moore's narrative technique transforms "non-canonical and even non-literary texts into useless aesthetic objects." But my characterization of the two projects already begins to suggest common ground: both critics are invested in describing a certain type of "form" (blackness, aesthetic totality) that possesses the potential to ameliorate or move beyond negative social forces: racism for Musser and, in Dore's interpretation, the exploitation of the environment for Moore. So even though Dore's reading of Moore gives us a dialectical model in which the positive power of literary form lies in the "unsayable" potentiality of aesthetic value — a value that exists in a realm outside and beyond the ideological forces of social life — and Musser's theory of "brown jouissance" gives us a dialectical model in which the positive definition of blackness is both sayable (as brown jouissance) and situated within an unjust social world — even though, that is to say, that the critics hold different ideas of how form partakes of ideological restriction while also moving past that restriction, both agree that it does.What is the idea of the aesthetic as the realm of the unsayable that emerges from Dore's analysis of Moore? As Dore explains, for Moore the artwork achieves aesthetic totality not through a signature act of authorial style but through a textual bricolage which enacts the "transformation" of heterogeneous social texts into an aesthetic whole. And as Kant helps Dore to argue, for Moore the goal of aesthetic transformation is not to propose a new and better social use for these texts, but to refuse the notion of use as an all-determining social value. Prose fiction as achieved form (heterogeneous texts transformed into an aesthetic totality) proclaims its inutility as a critique of the instrumentalization it abhors. But, as Dore stresses, Moore's narrative performance of social critique threatens to reinscribe the use value of literary form. For the aesthetic whole to carry sayable meaning, even if this meaning is a salutary warning against the deplorable diminishment of a social life whose value and possibility are determined by cultural use values, is for art to forfeit its ethical capacity to serve as an alternative source of value, a source of value located in the indeterminable, the positive potentiality that lies outside and beyond the material relays of social power. The aesthetic whole thus must dialectically point to its own ethico-political limits, the limits that constitute it as a useful form of social criticism, while pointing as well to the ethico-political potentiality — the "refusal of ends," the "unsayable," the new understood as "the sense of futurity" — that is at stake in its aspiration to useless beauty. The idea of literary form that emerges from Dore's essay is one in which the "limited life" of the social world is made bearable by the ethical value of art's "comforting infinity." But as Dore points out, the antinomy that structures Moore's dialectical model of form is never fully overcome: the degree to which the meaning of Moore's art can be made sayable is also the register of its unsuccessful transformation of text into aesthetic form, its continuing instrumentalization by readers for whom the ethical comfort of infinity is no escape from the need for "narratives offered up as ways to save sick babies."

In the same way that "use" is the bad condition of ideological inscription against which Moore posits the freeing power of the aesthetic, for Musser, the definition of blackness as negation (understood as a social subordination, racial critique, or ontological blankness) instrumentalizes Black identity: negation "interpolates" blackness "into the [ideological] space that others have designated for it." Her theory of brown jouissance thus proposes instead a positive definition of blackness and a positive form for blackness. On Musser's view, the political and social limits of blackness defined as negation are countered by the affordances of blackness understood as "excess." Although excess as an idea resonates with Dore's characterization of Moore's "infinity," in Musser's theoretical model the ideological space of subordination is countered with the empowerment Musser attributes to personalized bodily space: the form of the flesh, that allows for a self-affirming "reflexivity . . . explicitly routed through and felt in the body." As with Moore's notion of the unsayable meaning of the aesthetic, for Musser the value of understanding blackness in terms of excess is that its meaning "always exceeds its capture." But for Musser it is embodiment rather than the beyond that "refuses to allow blackness to conform to one particular thing." Moore's ideal of the aesthetic whole finds a fleshly corollary in Musser's notion of the body as a force of transformation. As for Moore, multiplicity (in Moore's case textual heterogeneity) becomes an ethico-political good when it is transformed into a whole — in Musser's case the whole understood as a personal subjectivity, whose embodied experience of the world unifies "flesh and sense." The body on Musser's view is a fruitful limit: its containment of excess allows the meaning of blackness to obtain the achieved condition of potentiality, to make the "impossible possible," and thus to move the social meaning of blackness beyond the injustice of racialization.

The value that Musser places on the affordances of flesh guides her interpretation of artistic form in Benjamin's multi-media installation. She finds that Benjamin highlights the "physicality" of the objects and sounds that he artistically repurposes: the way the sound loop draws attention to the technology of music production; the tonal qualities of the music and Nina Simone's voice; and the way televisions "take up space, flicker, and emanate heat." But, Musser argues, to see these objects for their physicality is not to turn them into stable signifiers directly expressive of "blackness." On the contrary, for Musser Benjamin's rendering of black form is a "sensual space" of blackness that is itself "an invocation of multiplicity." Thus Musser finds in Benjamin's art installation not only objects that provoke an embodied response from the viewer, but also, in the qualities of the objects themselves, manifestations of "surface and flesh" that homologically figure the good of blackness, understood as the fruitful limit of embodiment. For Musser, Benjamin's knowing deployment of object-physicality contributes to the dismantling of the limits placed on Black being by opening up a new social space where "frames of knowledge circulate outside that of mastery," ushering in "entirely other modes of knowledge." This is the realm of the possible and the new that, on Dore's view, Moore could only point to.How might the other essays in the special issue be grouped into these two distinct dialectical models for understanding form? I see the value of the unsayable that is operative in Dore's account of Moore's aesthetic essay at work in Joan Lubin's "Queer Formula" and also in David James's "Zadie Smith's Style of Thinking." For Lubin, literary form — defined as genre — performs the limits of hegemonic views of subaltern identities by holding out the good of abstraction as an increasingly available social form of being, a material space that confers belonging by dispensing with the sayability demanded by identitarian narratives of group alliance and self-definition. For James, form — defined as narrative's capacity to elicit real readerly emotion toward fictional characters — performs its limits by gesturing toward but not bringing into being a politically efficacious mode of sympathetic response. Lubin and James both mount highly complex and powerful arguments, which makes it all the more interesting to see how they both cast the ethico-political potentiality of literary form in terms of the unsayable.

Lubin advances the idea of "queer formalism" through her study of Marijane Meaker's oeuvre, which includes the fiction Meaker wrote through her various pseudonyms, including Ann Aldrich. As in Dore's account of Moore, Lubin views textual — or in Lubin's formal terms "generic" — heterogeneity as the first step in a process of politico-ethical transmutation undertaken within the artwork: "Fictionalized vignettes, anxious epistolary inquiries, ad hominems, sedate expert appraisal — all of these and more rub shoulders in Aldrich's pages to generate the texture of a queer world in the interstices of interlarded formulas for subordinating minor genres to the culture that sets their terms." Fragmented and juxtaposed, the artwork's formal collocation of various minor genres exposes the socially hegemonic position from which queer life is rendered a diminished thing. The artwork's capacity for social transformation thus begins, for Lubin, with the new form it gives to social forms: the "interlarding" that is a figure for the artwork's specific materiality and, it turns out, is also the means for creating a new positive space for queer being. Through Meaker's queer formalism, Lubin argues, "the texture of a queer world" becomes visible. But in a way that makes the comparison with Dore particularly powerful, Lubin does not assign positive identitarian attributes or qualities to the new social space created by the form of the artwork. Located only "in the interstices of interlarded formulas" a queer world manifests itself as an aesthetic "texture."11 It's interesting to think about the way Dore's notion of aesthetic "infinity" corresponds to Lubin's idea of "texture." Although the materiality of texture would seem opposed to the unsayability of the aesthetic and the transcendent realm of the beyond to which it points, in fact "texture" fulfills the same function in Lubin's dialectical understanding of literary form: it gestures to a realm of value that exceeds social determination, a realm defined by its indefinability, its refusal to be limited to sayable qualities or attributes that have been institutionally produced or otherwise ideologically determined.

For Lubin, texture is not (as it is for Chihaya and Lubbock) the imagination of literary form as a virtuous plasticity. Nor is texture a figure for the ethical value of an imaginary embodied encounter with the novelist through the work of art. On the contrary, for Lubin's notion of queer formalism, understanding literariness as texture is to understand "literary form" as "a shaping force organizing and disorganizing, ordering and reordering, the dynamics of the [social] field, less a property of a given work than an interposition that sets the terms for relations within it and to it." In other words, texture here is an abstract force, more like a wind that rearranges a pile of leaves than the feeling of wet clay. Lubin concludes her essay by extending her dialectical thinking to mark the limits of even Meaker's queer formalism to enact the degree and kind of abstraction that would better the social condition of queer lives. It turns out that for Lubin the positive (but unspecifiable) revision of the social world accomplished by the force of the literary can't compete with the form of anonymity afforded by computers and "data" more generally. Numeracy offers the positive conditions for the good of unsayability: a life of "minimally revealing self-registration," a form of social being that allows a "way to count in the scene without having to give an account of oneself."While the term "dialectic" is not explicitly used by Dore, Musser, and Lubin in their description of form, it is a key term for David James in his analysis of The Embassy of Cambodia by Zadie Smith. For James the social injustice that Smith addresses is that of class difference: how can those who "have" be responsible to those who "have not"? According to James, Smith poses her ethico-political inquiry more specifically as a question about the potential of emotion to inspire beneficial social action. To the degree that James believes that through her handling of form Smith offers a strong answer to this question, his argument might seem to be more like Musser's in the sense that the critique of social limits performed through form (the critique of class privilege) is matched by a sayable positive vision of how ideological limits can be overcome through the cultivation of a new and more politically useful kind of feeling. James argues that Smith's expert deployment of narrative positioning teaches the reader to consider that "the dialectical imbrication of assent and demurral, involvement and withdrawal, [might] amount to something like a responsibility in its own right — pointing to a tougher, more unpredictable route for readers than those offered by the pieties of antiseptic equability [authorized through sympathy] or the veiled self-importance of analytic 'distance'" (my emphasis). James works out this argument persuasively, and, for my purposes, I would want only to add that, although James seems to imply that Smith's dialectic of form ultimately produces a synthetic third term — a new and better type of emotion that is the result of the felt limitations of both sympathy and analytic distance — the endpoint of the reader's emotional education is in fact unspecifiable in positive terms. As in Dore's essay, it is the "pointing to" that seems the positive ethico-political act of Smith's form, rather than the description of the form responsible emotion should best take. For James, what makes Smith's novel so interesting is the way it engages the reader in the felt tension between and among conflicting emotions, creating an awareness of the limitations to each, their political insufficiencies, but withholding the sayable formulation of the right kind of sympathy, or empathy, or emotional distance. The dialectical nature of Smith's form, as James interestingly describes it, ultimately leads the reader out of the realm of feeling and into the realm of reason: the experience of the emotional insufficiency gives the reader "reason to contemplate the ethical expectations and political destination of our own responsiveness — including our own inclination to act in response to whatever privileges critical practice itself allows us to exercise." The novella's critique of emotion through the solicitation of emotion thus ultimately turns the reader away from the suffering characters depicted in the fictional social world and toward self-conscious self-critique. But if this dialectic provides readers with a new view of the ideological limits that constitute their own class privilege, we still don't know, or perhaps can never know, what the better emotional response to hardship and precarity might be.

While Dore, Lubin and James all locate the social good of the new in the potentiality that literary form points to and/or enacts but cannot say, the essays by Benjamin Widiss, Francisco Robles, and Danielle Christmas share Musser's view of form as generating positive terms for moving beyond social inequity and individual alienation. Widiss interprets a novel by Aimee Bender as encouraging viewers/readers to subscribe to a new, specifiable philosophy of self. Robles discovers in the poetry of the Memphis Sanitation strike a call to "comrades" to perform concrete types of revolutionary social action. Christmas finds in fiction written by white nationalists "data" on racism that can support, in the future, effective political intervention. As I elucidate these arguments, I want to show how they each invoke the dialectical model of form to describe how the artwork does not just portray but transforms ideological limitation into the good of ethico-political possibility and futurity.

In "Furnishing the Novel, Feeding the Soul," Benjamin Widiss argues that readers who criticize Bender's novel as being formally incoherent, as being split between Rose and her brother, fail to appreciate Bender's larger formal design. On Widiss's view, Bender intentionally cultivates formal dissonance — by switching protagonists, by putting together narrative modes that are usually kept apart, by using lists to disrupt narrative order, etc. — in order to offer a new idea of the nature and affordances of aesthetic unity in the age of high commodification and individual alienation that is the contemporary moment. Widiss interestingly argues that "Bender reconstitutes a whole greater than the sum of its parts" precisely through the demand she makes on the reader to interpret her form "formalistically." For Widiss, to read formalistically is not only to do justice to the many ways Bender's novel cultivates narrative "disparity," and it is not just to find a strong basis of logical connection that unites these parts into a coherent whole. To read formalistically is to match form to content: to have the aesthetic whole come into focus through the philosophy of self that for Widiss is the idea that Bender writes fiction in order to express. As Widiss carefully elaborates it, that philosophy of self, fully articulated and articulable, is conceptualized as a post-postmodern recovery of a unified self. Reading the meaning of the novel through the symbolics of its form, and especially through the way that symbolic meaning is staged through the narrative organization of form as signifier of content, Widiss finds that Bender dramatizes the realization of a new kind of agential self, one that can step beyond the negative social forces that have interpolated youthful identity and thus step beyond alienation toward what in another context the philosopher Robert Pippin calls having a mind of one's own, and what Widiss, working through Franco Moretti, calls the "reconstituted" unified self of the bildungsroman hero.12 In Widiss's version of the positive dialectic staged by form, the ills of commodification are offset by the sayablity of form's hopeful, future-oriented message: that potentiality is stronger than determinism, that better forms of sociality are possible ("belonging is conceivable"). Formalistic to the end, Bender delivers this message allegorically, through a narrative that closes, in a way that Jean Paul Sartre would admire, with its invocation of futurity: positing the better forms of social being as "a potential outgrowth of the novel's closing events."13The ethico-political good of individual agency and community membership is also the positive value that Francisco Robles attributes to form in his study of protest poetry written about the 1968 Memphis sanitation strike. Robles focuses on two anonymously authored poems, both of which mount a critique of social injustice (understood as the authoritarian response to the strike) by a political rewriting of two Biblical texts: the King James version of Psalm 23 and the "Lord's Prayer" (Matthew 6:9-13). Of course, this kind of rewriting has a long literary history that has generated a wide variety of terms to designate different modes of relation between source and revision — as parody, satire, lampooning, citationality, signifyin', intertextuality, etc. Robles offers two new terms to describe the ethico-political work accomplished by "The 23^rd SLUM" and the "Sanitation Workers' Prayer": "transformation" and "generation." Through transformation, the poem's formal and thematic revision of its source texts, comes social regeneration: the "production of possibility to create both material and imaginative space for previously unconsidered meanings and contexts." In other words, through its formal methods, protest poetry both exposes social injustice and brings new ways of being into social consciousness. The sayability of this new consciousness is crucial to Robles idea of a "justice-oriented poetic corpus." Indeed, on his view, one of the defining moves of textual transformation is to replace "abstract figurations with concrete action." Also key for Robles are the forms of "collective enunciation" that these poems make available. Thus whereas for Widiss the good of the aesthetic whole analogizes and helps bring into visibility the ethico-social good of the reconstituted agential self who can at last find present and future social belonging through membership in local communities, for Robles (following Adorno) the good of lyric form resides in its power to organize into a new social whole "human beings between whom the barriers have fallen."14 The dialectic of lyric form, on Robles's view, thereby brings into being new social conditions for collective belonging by providing an "understanding [of] the nuances of our comrades, particularly as we work toward liberation." The privileged power of lyric form to break social limits (the barriers that have hitherto prevented understanding) allows for the apprehension of not just the particularity (the nuance) that distinguishes one social group from another (in the present or from a historical perspective) but also the specifiable emotion that unites particular social groups into a collectivity, a political unity: a "revolutionary desire [that is] a fullness that is not yet sated, a political and theological completeness that is nevertheless interested in continuity and further extension." Thus for both Widiss and Robles, literary form understood as a dialectic produces the new it values, the new as the socially-enabling sense of futurity.

While Widiss and Robles both work out the positive dialectic of literary form through artworks that they admire, which is to say artworks that deploy form to express in positive terms and as a positivity what a better social whole might be (in one case as the individual self, in the other as the collective), Danielle Christmas, in her study of white nationalist fiction, engages with a genre whose values she deplores and whose artistic merit she deems negligible. But for Christmas, the privileged power of literary form redeems this fiction by making it politically valuable. In the same way that Robles believes that lyric form offers the good of intimate human understanding (the "nuances" of comrades), Christmas believes that fiction gives us access to the nuances of political oppressors: narrative form makes available, in her words, "the interior logic and mythology of a movement that would at a minimum relocate brown people and Jews, and at worst would brutally annihilate them." What makes the form of fiction a privileged site for ideological study? Why not simply read tracts written by white nationalists? Christmas credits fictional form with powers of objectification. On her view, the imagined materiality of literary form makes ideology visible prior to interpretation. And because she regards fictional texts as autonomous material objects, she can also think of them as stratified. Thus Christmas can describe the critic/reader as a "data miner," reaching beneath the mimetic surface of the text to pull out the "hidden macro-narratives" of racial xenophobes. As for Lubin, data is thus a positive mode of form for Christmas — but for very different reasons. For Lubin, numeracy designates a material condition of contemporary life, a social form that creates specific conditions (that Lubin deems favorable) for social interaction and positionality. For Christmas, by contrast, data is that which is made available to the reader of literary texts, thanks to the transformative power of literary form to make the ideological mind graspable. Literary form as data allows Christmas to take for granted a nonmediated apprehension of otherness: form gives "a familiarity with the language and imaginative eccentricities of the opponents in question." The transformational power of literary form, on this view, lies in its ability to bring the defining qualities and attributes of deplorable otherness into visibility, which for Christmas is an ethical way forward on the path toward social betterment that opens up from this approach to literary texts: data-gathering enables "intellectual honesty in the counter-attack." For Christmas, the positive dialectic of literary form thus lies in the separation it accomplishes between fact and value. It is precisely because Christmas credits form with a happy objectifying quality (literary form instantiates ideology, literary form instantiates ideology as facts) that she can theorize form as making the other apprehensible before interpretation, before critique. Thanks to the separation of fact and value, form works dialectically to give readers not only a deep understanding of the ideological identity of the other, but also fosters social betterment by promoting the ethical good of "intellectual honesty" that on Christmas's view is foundational for positive social change.In keeping my focus on the shared ethico-political understanding of the value of form, I necessarily haven't been able to attend to the many other interesting issues at stake in this special double issue. Had I taken as my starting point Namwali Serpell's "Notes on Shade" or Yi-Ping Ong's "On Philosophical Imagination and Literary Form," no doubt the basis of comparison would shift, and different threads of connection would emerge. As for my own view of form, I can do no better than to cite Gillian White's essay, which forwards a theoretical position with which I agree, and helps make the case for the interest and importance of studying, as I have done in this Afterword, the normative values that are ascribed to art as form and the naturalization of form in a given cultural moment. White's lucid analysis of the changing values ascribed to poetic form by twentieth-century U.S. poets and critics (epitomized for White by the contradictory claims Marjorie Perloff makes over the course of her career for the textual politics of Eliot's "Prufrock") can be extended, I believe, to the tendency of literary critics to make absolute claims about the ethico-political value of literary form more generally. I agree with each of the points that White makes in this eloquent statement of her position:

I tend to disagree with arguments in which this or that form 1/ is what will either overthrow or perpetuate this or that political or social reality or 2/ is thought to be radical or conservative in and of itself, or 3/ is held responsible on its own for any particular lived results in the world. Form (in the way I've been using it) is an abstraction, and particular forms are contingent.

"Formalism Unbound," by bringing together these serious engagements with contemporary artforms, provides a powerful vision of what this generation of younger scholars wants from form now. What they most want is an idea of form that emphatically refuses apoliticism. The essays gathered here work to unbind the study of form from past formalisms that sequester the artwork from the social world. This new political description of form is fueled by a remarkable generational optimism about the power of post45 art to initiate positive social transformation. If these scholars don't wear their optimism on their sleeves, if it is expressed through a guarded, abstracted, or minimalist sense of the change that art can make, this is a register both of the scale of the political problems addressed by post45 artworks—environmental exploitation, capitalist commodification, racism, classism, etc.—and of the critics' shared sense that art's power for social change is not unbound. Tied to the social conditions it critiques, art can at best take a step toward a better future or point the way forward.

Dorothy J. Hale is Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.  She is the author of The Novel and the New Ethics (Stanford, 2020) and Social Formalism: The Novel in Theory from Henry James to the Present (Stanford, 1998) as well as the editor of The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1900-2000 (Blackwell, 2006).

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

References