Reviving Formalism in the 21st Century

Herman Rapaport (bio)
Wake Forest University

A review of Eyers, Tom. Speculative Formalism: Literature, Theory, and the Critical Present. Northwestern UP, 2017.

Some ninety years ago, C.D. Broad argues in “Critical and Speculative Philosophy” that “the discursive form of cognition by means of general concepts” can never “be completely adequate to the concrete Reality which it seeks to describe.” According to Broad, “thought must always be ‘about’ its objects; to speak metaphorically, it is a transcription of the whole of Reality into a medium which is itself one aspect of Reality.” Speaking of F.H. Bradley, Broad opines that he cannot agree with the conviction that “this scheme involves internal contradictions.” Broad thus imagines a scheme of Reality and a process of thought that is “about” its objects as free of internal contradictions.

Central to Tom Eyers’s brilliant Speculative Formalism is an interrogation of the correspondence of formalized thought in the form of imaginative writing and what Broad calls Reality. Contrary to Broad, Eyers maintains that there are internal contradictions within discursive forms of cognition, and further, that such contradictions exist as well in the material life world, something that has been made clear by Marx and Engels and many others. Eyers writes, “Form, as it will be understood in what follows, becomes the conflicted, multiply distributed, and plastic site where truths specific to literature are rendered contingent but also given their only opening to the world, and from which other formal logics in other domains may be better understood” (6). In this context, the speculative refers to the conviction that we can only apprehend the Real by means of the mediation of forms: imaginative, logical, paradigmatic, and so forth. The speculative must necessarily recognize, therefore, that it is determined by interfaces in conflict that enable a “creative capacity of impasses” (8), a view not so different from the New Critics’, who saw literary writing as a medium for speculation that opened on significance in terms of ambiguities, paradoxes, and ironies.

Along these lines, Eyers writes: “Literature stages better than most phenomena the manner in which, far from shutting down the possibility of meaning, the impossibility of any final, formal integration of a structure and its component parts is the very condition of possibility of that structure” (8). The possibility of structure and meaning, we’re told, is predicated upon its incompletion (the impossibility of integration): “central to my argument will be the claim that form resists meaning as much as it enables it” (9). Again, he tells us, “it is [the] very resistance to semantic recuperation that, paradoxically enough, lies at the root of literature’s capacity to refer, even to transfigure, annul, boost or remain strikingly indifferent to, its historical and political conditions” (9–10). This idea of indifference likely would not be accepted by traditional historians who place considerable emphasis on historical contextualization, about which, they would claim, by definition the work cannot be indifferent.

Speculative formalism, as may already be evident, makes claims for literary readings that cannot be verified by means of naïve, direct reference to the things themselves, including the facticity of historical context. For the speculative is defined in terms of a thinking that recognizes and works through the strictures of formal systems or logics, which, according to Eyers, may be internally contradictory. Not only literature, but history, politics, economics, and culture may also be considered as formal contradictory logics, as posited by French theory of the 1960s that invalidated totalizing programs of literary and cultural study (Derrida), along with the invalidation of a naïve Cartesianism whereby subject and object (observer and observed) are thought to be self-evidently given as intelligible, congruent substitutes for one another (Foucault).

As we can see, although Eyers makes a case for returning to formal literary analysis, his speculative formalism is by no means a return to the kind of formalism that pits the work as a static artificial construct against the teleological historical givens of the life world. This work/world distinction, of course, is endemic to long discredited traditional historicist practices of scholarship wherein researchers simplistically attempt to connect the dots between a work and its immediate historical context in order to forensically determine the meaning of the work on the basis of what exists on the outside, whether that be the writer’s biographical experiences, the time’s cultural conventions, or historical events. Eyers writes, “history is not to be conceived of as ‘context’ per se, as an externality ranged dynamically against the passive content [that is, the work] that it molds; rather, literary history and politics are especially vivid folds in literary form as such, envelopes that both determine and are determined by the textual or conceptual scientific structures that too often are assumed to be their mere passive products” (10). The work, according to Eyers, should not be treated as a passive entity, like data or mere information.

In terms of the politics of the profession of literary study, Eyers repudiates a state of affairs that has become evident since 2000, namely, the large-scale obviation of theory in favor of a return to a pre-New Critical moment of crude forensic research that is information-based and not sensitive to hermeneutical problems and methods. Whereas interpretation has always been sensitive, to some degree, to the non-correspondence of words or discourse and what Broad called Reality, emphasis on information presumes the self-evident, passive transparency of data in relation to world. Whereas hermeneutics has usually been skeptical of logocentric clotûre (see, for example, the Rabbinical tradition or Buddhist tradition), informatics (big data) is predicated on cybernetic programs that are aggressively totalitarian and logocentric in ways that make us take them for granted as a reality that is grounded in fact, or numbers.

Eyers’s five chapters cover a dazzling range of figures drawn from the present and immediate past that represent what we could call high culture. Chapter one critiques the opposite of the speculative approach, namely, positivism. The immediate target for critique is Franco Moretti, whose “distant reading,” Eyers claims, “remain[s] at such an abstract scale, of reified patterns of consumption and distribution, that he is prevented in advance from being able to understand the more obscure kinds of cultural forms that pool between the cracks of their ostensible networks of distribution” (47–48). Moretti’s reduction of literature on a large scale to big data is, of course, part of a wider trend in literary studies that is opposed to close reading. Since the mid-1980s, close reading, a mainstay of the Yale School, has receded into the background as an influence on literary critical analysis. Among Eyers’s aims is the rehabilitation of close reading and interpretation, and he criticizes Moretti for taking market forces as a natural determinant for plotting relationships between works that have been statically rendered. In addition, he claims that Moretti embraces a social Darwinist model that gauges the success and failure of various kinds of works in terms of their popularity and dominance. As a whole, Eyers makes the point that distant reading forecloses speculative formalism, which is, among other things, an appreciation of the inconsistency, incompletion, and catachrestic dimensions of formal relations that invalidate the reductiveness of the quantitative method.

For Eyers, New Historicism had been very much allied with an emergent positivism as early as the 1980s and 90s, which accounts for at least one reason the positivist turn came about, though the computer has, of course, played a huge role. According to Eyers,

That New Historicism generally, and Greenblatt in particular, have at least rhetorically resisted the lures of a totalized understanding of historical context is without question, but what remains, as unapologetically anecdotal as it so frequently is, lacks a sufficient sense of its a priori theoretical investments. Jameson himself has referred to this obscuring of a priori theoretical commitments as an insistence on immanence over the transcendence of abstract analysis and interpretation, even as transcendent principles—not least the very transcendentality of the injunction to reject the transcendental—persist beneath the cover of darkness.(43–44)

In other words, missing in New Historicism is sufficient attention to structuration and structure, or “formativeness.” Not to be overlooked is the question of how speculative formalism concerns overdetermination, something that is lacking when forms are denuded of their formativeness as in New Positivism and New Historicism. Greenblatt’s privileging of practice over theory is, in Eyers’s view, an explicitly anti-theoretical position that impedes conceptual speculation (or the cognition of structures) as opposed to direct experience, of which the anecdote is a species.

Chapter two concerns the word/reference relation. To what extent do words correspond to things? The two figures of interest here are a French poet and a scientific thinker, Francis Ponge and Jean Cavaillès. Both Ponge and Cavaillès are suspicious of “any delimitation of a pure space of perception impervious to its apparent linguistic or conceptual opposites” (29). Although Ponge’s poems often describe objects in ways that seem to capture their essence, he registers “in the formal paradoxes of his poetry the inability of language to latch neatly onto the object-world” (29), although he also claims that the “surface logic” of the poetry presents “a phenomenologically pure account of the things-in-themselves” (30). Eyers looks at Cavaillès’s notion of thematization, which concerns a resistance to empirical transparency that inheres in a reflexivity that is the consequence of formal structuration. This formal structuration is, to some extent, frictional, agonistic, unstable, and hence refuses a “static relation between an object and the symbols that would, in vain, wish to correspond with it. Cavaillès’s name for this paradoxical form of generative impasse or productive misprision is thematization” (81). This “particular kind of abstraction” (81), oriented around horizons, is reminiscent of Roman Ingarden’s phenomenological conception of the schematized aspect. Indeed, it is hard to read far into Eyers’s book without wondering if Ingarden wouldn’t count as a speculative formalist par excellence, excepting his Husserlian grounding. That raises a question Ingarden might have asked: why is Eyers stripping consciousness away from a conception of the speculative? Eyers doesn’t seem to imagine one could talk of formativeness as a construction of consciousness along Husserlian lines.

Chapter three discusses Wallace Stevens, a poet who seems to be of endless interest to philosopher-critics. Eyers situates Stevens between two contemporary philosophers, Simon Critchley and Alain Badiou. Critchley and Badiou “reflect the two sides of [a] neo-romantic totality, with the former arguing for the quiet pathos of acquiescence in the face of the fallen world, and Badiou projecting a faith in the power of poetic language to recover the epic or heroic tendency otherwise lost in the attempt to translate the expanses of epic verse into the alienated spaces and temporalities of modernity” (99). In short, resignation is contrasted with heroism. These states may be akin to what the early Heidegger called moods. Of interest to Eyers is how modernist form subtracts itself from “the ideology of the sensible” (100). Describing his admiration for Stevens, Eyers identifies a core principle of his book:

It is in poetry’s determinative inability to present the whole, an inability written into the very productive constraints exemplified in poetry by the marshaling of language into meter, that it gains momentary access to the similar failures of completion and rational totalization that define its referents, referents otherwise assumed to lie submissive in anticipation of poetic representation; Stevens, needless to say, instantiates for us this paradox better than most.(101)

We have to resign ourselves to incompletion and the failures of rational totalization, though we could just as easily look upon this as a heroic triumph brought about through the resolve of the poet. Some may wonder about the choice of Stevens because this kind of resolve is much stronger in someone like Pound, who was much more self-conscious about failure and his responses to it. In The Cantos, one picks up from Pound not only resignation, despair, and an overall sense of powerlessness, but unbridled ambitions concerning knowledge and aesthetic power on an epic scale that are in direct conversation with political philosophy and the rise and fall of civilizations, something I imagine to be more in line with Badiou’s thinking.

Chapter four is a meticulous analysis of Paul de Man’s materialist reading of Kant. Eyers writes, “One of the tasks of this chapter is to demonstrate how de Man’s deconstructive literary theory was as concerned with the paradoxes of the material world as it was with the riddles of language per se, even if, in his strictly literary analyses, the linguistic tended to win the day” (125). At issue for Eyers is de Man’s “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” in which a “repressed kernel” is retrieved from Kant, namely, his materialism, “understood as in opposition to the neutralization of the language of literariness, its disquieting effectivity in opening up a space for what Tom Cohen usefully describes as the ‘the site of memory, a mnemotechnics…which, in advance of every hermeneutic system, marks the inevitable materiality and exteriority accorded the human apparatus’” (127). Presumably that site is ambiguous, external and internal to the mind, and, I’m guessing, though Eyers doesn’t specify, that it probably relates to écriture. The argument that the signifier is a material trace doesn’t seem to require the painstaking unpacking of Kant’s critiques that Eyers performs. Philippe Sollers, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Derrida have all made this case more directly. Eyers tells us that “de Man, far from being the linguistic idealist of legend, seeks to find in Kant the ontological limits of the aesthetic as a kind of materiality (insofar as it must be expressed through the more general texture of language as itself a material thing, at least of a kind): as something, at any rate, that is not simply a passive, ideal vehicle of correlational sense” (131). Again, I wonder if we need the kind of back-breaking analysis of Kant that Eyers develops in order to establish this. Isn’t the point made quite clear in Apollinaire, Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Beuys, Annette Messager, Kara Walker, and Nam June Paik?

In another complicated formulation, which a viewer of Picasso’s Three Musicians could comprehend quite independently without recourse to Kant, we’re told that “[i]nsofar as, for de Man, the aesthetic figures both a projected unity for Kant’s philosophy and, more pressingly, the sign of the necessary failure of that unity, this resistance in Kant to viewing the corporeal as a unity while it is under the aesthetic gaze helps us underline the importance of that constitutive disunity for Kant’s system more generally. Kant, that is to say, explicitly links the body as disunified with the aesthetic point of view that might otherwise have served as the broader system’s unifying cement” (133). I fully appreciate Eyers’s interest in a materiality related to aesthetics that concerns the “impasses of the world, of the density of things, [and] the unpredictable circuits of the word” (134), but you could also find this on the surface of, say, Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego. If my criticisms appear to be taking the side of empirical observation, this isn’t really the case, as I’m not talking about the literal, something that wouldn’t lead one to imagine “unpredictable circuits of the word” in Poussin, given that this requires interpretation or speculation. Rather, I’m talking about conceptual constructions we can much more easily infer in art that preempt the lengthy and prolix sort of analysis undertaken by de Man. This is not to say that I’m unappreciative of the fact that elsewhere de Man has written brilliantly and originally on literature.

Chapter five turns to language poetry, psychoanalysis, and the formal negotiation of history and time. The chapter offers a very suggestive and interesting reading of Ron Silliman’s “Albany”:

History appears here as another formal logic, at the moment at which an agent, whether linked to collective political action, to sexual violence, to ethnic classification, both appears and is effaced by the temporal movement of the verse’s underlying structure, by the inevitability of the end of one sentence and the beginning of another; temporality, that is, gives out onto signs of historical events, only for history to succumb to the temporal once more, in a movement of repetition that is also defined by the power of retrospective assimilation, neutralization, and erasure. (159)

“Albany” is written in what amount to short non-sequiturs (it appears at the outset of the collection The Alphabet). In “Albany” Silliman lists disjunct aggressions, occurrences, and observations that, as Eyers says, efface each other simply in terms of their substitutive emergence, leaving a sort of historical trail while existing always in the present. Whether these sentences are supposed to relate to one another is left in ambiguous or even contradictory suspense. In any case, something is always ending and beginning, coming to light and being suppressed. Eyers contrasts “Albany” with Bruce Andrews’s “Blueier Blue,” in which temporal plotting is freed: “its gusts of nouns and neologisms form nothing but a blowsy temporal grid, albeit one powerfully distinct from the austerity of Silliman’s” (164). Andrews’s poem “can be read as a testament to the repression of historical depth, one only ever incompletely achieved in ‘Albany’” (167). The unpredictable patterns of Andrews’s poem resist interpretation, which is to say, the poem requires the kind of provisional reading that we’re all incapable of getting beyond, given that there isn’t sufficient closure to make truth claims relative to content. Eyers is a very good observer of poetic details, and these may be two of the best readings of language poetry to be published in a long time. He does quite a bit of synthesizing, however, and one might ask whether his readings of Silliman or Andrews aren’t like interpretations of a Rorschach test. Correlation is under erasure, but that’s probably at work in any reading of abstract poetry.

Speculative Formalism is one of the better theory books to have appeared in recent years. Because it is written for a sophisticated audience well versed in philosophical parlance, it probably won’t do the work of rolling back the positivist turn, given that positivists don’t read this kind of thing and wouldn’t be converted if they did; however, the book draws an important line in the sand with respect to reclaiming a space for the interpretation of literature and culture, and makes a claim for the revival of the humanities generally, which have become impoverished of late in the absence of serious hermeneutical reflection and practice.

Works Cited

Broad, C.D. “Critical and Speculative Philosophy.” Contemporary British Philosophy: Personal Statements (First Series), ed. J.H. Muirhead. G. Allen and Unwin, 1924, pp. 77–100. Digital Text International, www.ditext.com/broad/csp.html. Accessed 28 December 2017.