Form and Contentment

polemic: [Gr. war]
A. adj. of or pertaining to controversy; controversial; disputatious
B. sb.
1. A controversial argument or discussion; argumentation against some opinion, doctrine, etc.; aggressive controversy; in pl. the practice of this, especially as a method of conducting theological controversy; opposed to irenics.
1638 Drumm. of Hawth. Irene Wks. (1711) 172 Unhappy we, amidst our many and diverse contentions, furious polemicks, endless variances, . . . debates and quarrels!

--Oxford English Dictionary

The form of what follows is polemic. While its content falls short of the warlike and its tone is admittedly less than "furious," it does represent an effort to distinguish among the contending forces at work around the category of form at the present time. My polemical aim is unambiguously to defend the problematic of form as essential to both literary and cultural studies and to tie that defense intimately to the figure of reading. But this almost painfully straightforward project is immediately complicated by its awkward relation to the contradictory understandings of form and formalism now at play in cultural criticism.

Myriad constituencies have rallied in recent years in defense or defiance of the figure of form; even in what appear to be allied camps, the definitions, justifications, and hopes linked to the fortunes of formalism are often at odds. These pages cannot hope to reconcile the warring forces. Nor do they propose a singular theory of form, a definition that reorganizes the field in its own image. My more modest aim is to give an account of the critical consequences of the assumption that either literary or cultural studies might somehow evade or dismiss formalism. This effort necessarily puts into question certain investments in and fears of what is entailed by formalism: the too hasty identification of form with literature or the aesthetic, on one side, and the dismissive association of form with abstraction or the "merely textual," on the other.

I argue that the return to formalism is a development of the very trends that some of the "New Formalists" currently at work seem intent on reversing. ¹ To recover the category and the work of form in literary and cultural studies is thus not to transcend the New Historicism, poststructuralism, cultural materialism, feminism, semiotics, postcolonialism, or any of the other critical interventions marking literary studies in the late twentieth century. Rather, the renewal of form as an operation intrinsic to reading enables literary and cultural studies fully to take the pressure of those interventions. On this account, form is both the enabling condition and the product of reading, a paradox in the sense that Michel Foucault applied to the notion of discontinuity: form is "both an instrument and an object of research. . . . it divides up the field of which it is an effect." ² The problem of form encompasses our efforts to resolve it.

Formalism is an unavoidable moment in the projects of both literary and cultural studies, fields that remain sufficiently entwined to engage one another's serious attention and sufficiently distinct to yield autonomous scholarship and rival disciplinary formations. For a critical reader bereft of the category of form, the subject matter of literary and cultural analysis loses all standing as a theoretical object, an object situated and at work in a critical or disciplinary field. But the champions and the denigrators of form hold significantly different assumptions about what counts as a formal analysis and about the benefits (or dangers) that flow from the reemergence of formalism. ³ In some respects, these disagreements are neither new nor surprising. When Raymond Williams takes up the keyword formalist, he points out that it is "quite an old English word" and bears two senses from the early seventeenth century: "an adherent of the 'mere forms' or 'outward shows' of religion" and "one who explains a matter from its superficial rather than its substantial qualities." ⁴ Williams traces what he calls "the intricate confusions of more recent usage," which have only become more convoluted in the passing years, to the "complicated...