Speculative Formalism: Literature, Theory, and the Critical Present by Tom Eyers (review)

In Speculative Formalism: Literature, Theory, and the Critical Present, Tom Eyers writes, "Humanities scholarship in the United States and United Kingdom is perhaps more fragmented now than at any time in recent memory" (33). We might think of this fragmentation in terms of the ongoing culture wars, accounts of critical history that continually condemn the past in favor of the new, the never-ending supply of "theoretical subcultures" (33) competing to fill the void left after the demise of the romantic–modernist literary assumptions underwriting the paradigms that governed criticism through the 1980s, and of course, a job market that each year brings the university sponsorship of literary studies one step closer to extinction. Responding to this context, Eyers "propose[s] a new formalist apparatus for thinking literature" (33) that seems to return to the problem Paul de Man identifies in Allegories of Reading: the inability to move beyond the challenge of interpretation to history. Many would continue to argue that the fragmentation produced by deconstructive readings directly led to the current fragmentation of literary studies. They would also be quick to link provincial theory that goes under the guise of rigorous close reading to a restrictive canon and therefore welcome the multiplicity of approaches the academy now offers. It is the gambit of Speculative Formalism, however, to demonstrate how "it is by no means a concession to linguistic insularity to insist on the paradoxes and stumbling blocks of literary language … [and that] only by cleaving to those phenomena that a true understanding of literary reference … may come to light" (197).

The theory of speculative formalism "reimagine[s] such an older species of literary theory" as, for example, deconstruction by revealing it to be a "more positive path for critical-theoretical study, one as concerned with construction as it is with the inevitable dissolution of a text's foundations" (6). To this end, speculative formalism assumes "a shared incompletion across both literary language and its various outsides—materiality, history, politics, nature—that, far from preventing literature from interfacing with those outsides, rather makes such a nonmimetic reference possible, in a connective moment that puts impasses to creative use" (1). It is a new spin on an old assumption. Rather than see the doomed attempt of literature to emancipate itself from the "various outsides" that would lay claim to meaning as a failure (e.g., literature's inability to achieve absolute coherence or totalized form), speculative formalism implies that the "incompletion" of literary form ironically enables a text to revise, transfigure, or put "to creative use" whatever we identify as its contingencies. Eyers thus sees form as spatial and temporal process of literary production whereby literature makes contact with the world precisely at the moment the mimetic capacity of its language fails. In addition to an introduction, conclusion, and opening chapter that situate speculative formalism in relation to contemporary critical fashions, four chapters turn to Francis Ponge, Wallace Stevens, de Man, and language poets such as Ron Silliman to address the ways in which the inability of poetry to latch onto the world it references becomes a unique way of thinking about literature, history, politics, or world-making more generally, as an on-going process of formalization.

Although Eyers devotes only one chapter to de Man, his work seems to underwrite the theory of speculative formalism. Instead of accepting what many would see as the grim vision of "Shelley Disfigured," Eyers finds a "constructive paradox" (134) in de Man's late work on aesthetic ideology that allows us to see "the uncanny persistence of texts even after their apparent detotalization" (125). His subsequent reading of "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant" alongside "Anthropomorphism and the Lyric" as well as two Baudelaire poems offers a refreshing approach to de Man insofar as it recovers the perceived limitations of deconstruction and appropriates them to many critical concerns of the present. Yet the limited scope of the book...