Strategic Formalism: Toward a New Method in Cultural Studies

Since the demise of the New Criticism, literary critics have struggled to articulate links between literary forms and social formations. From Georg Lukács to Pierre Macherey and Fredric Jameson, Marxists have been inclined to understand literary forms as expressions of social and economic realities. To be sure, literary forms do not reflect economic arrangements in any simple way in this critical tradition. In The Political Unconscious (1981)—perhaps the most sustained articulation of a Marxist incorporation of formalist concerns—Jameson defines an attention to the ideology of form as an effort to grasp the "symbolic messages transmitted to us by the coexistence of various sign systems which are themselves traces or anticipations of modes of production" (76). Traces or anticipations: for Jameson, the form of the literary artifact is by no means simply an aftereffect of the "real"; it may itself promise or predict a new reality. Urging us to move beyond political readings that focus on a text's content—its representation of class relations, for example—Jameson argues that the "historical or ideological subtext  . . . is not immediately present as such, not some common-sense external reality," but "rather must itself always be (re)constructed after the fact" (81). Thus it is literary forms, read in their rich complexity as struggles among conflicting sign systems, that bear witness to a dialectical social agon, offering us our best access to both existent and emergent systems of social relations.

Foucauldian and New Historicist critics, too, have argued that literary forms do not merely reflect social relationships but may help bring them into being. Powerfully influential accounts of the nineteenth-century novel as different as Nancy Armstrong's and D. A. Miller's share the notion that the specificities of the genre shape new models of subjectivity, paving the way for the increasingly disciplinary power formations of bourgeois society. As Armstrong writes, "the domestic novel antedated—was necessarily antecedent to—the way of life it represented" (9). And Miller suggests that the novel undertook the "successful" task of forming "a subject habituated to psychic displacements, evacuations, reinvestments, in a social order whose totalizing power circulates all the more easily for being pulverized" (xiii). In both cases, the novel itself is capable of ushering in new power relations.

Despite crucial political and methodological differences, then, Marxist and Foucauldian critics have tended to share a conviction about the power of literary forms in the social sphere. Literary forms matter politically because they are indexes of social forms, expressing or fostering dominant social and economic relationships.

This essay draws on these models to arrive at a new hypothesis. It develops the idea that literary forms are socially and politically forceful but concludes that they do not derive their power from their fit with existing or emerging patterns of social life. Instead, literary forms participate in a destabilizing relation to social formations, often colliding with social hierarchies rather than reflecting or foreshadowing them. Literary forms, that is, trouble and remake political relationships in surprising, aleatory, and often confusingly disorderly ways. A range of critics in recent years—including Heather Dubrow, Dorothy Hale, Ellen Rooney, Herbert Tucker, and Susan Wolfson—have urged a new attention to form as part of a politically aware historicism. This article takes up their call. On the one hand, it relies on historicist work in the field to understand the ways that literary forms have force in the social world and are capable of shaping political arrangements. On the other hand, it extends formalist insights to make the case that social hierarchies and institutions can themselves be understood as forms. What emerges is a cultural-political field in which literary forms and social formations can be grasped as comparable and overlapping patternings operating on a common plane. Neither precedes or dominates the other, and they are less likely to reinforce each other than to clash, interrupt, or derail one another. This new formalism claims two benefits: it suggests a reevaluation of the force of the major cultural-political categories we have long recognized, such as gender, race, and class; and it reveals cultural...