The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space

by Anna Kornbluh

In literary studies today, debates about the purpose of literary criticism and about the place of formalism within it continue to simmer across periods and approaches. Anna Kornbluh contributes to—and substantially shifts—that conversation in The Order of Forms by offering an exciting new category, political formalism, which she articulates through the co-emergence of aesthetic and mathematical formalisms in the nineteenth century. Within this framework, criticism can be understood as more affirmative and constructive, articulating commitments to aesthetic expression and social collectivity. 
 
Kornbluh offers a powerful argument that political formalism, by valuing forms of sociability like the city and the state in and of themselves, provides a better understanding of literary form and its political possibilities than approaches that view form as a constraint. To make this argument, she takes up the case of literary realism, showing how novels by Dickens, Brontë, Hardy, and Carroll engage mathematical formalism as part of their political imagining. Realism, she shows, is best understood as an exercise in social modeling—more like formalist mathematics than social documentation. By modeling society, the realist novel focuses on what it considers the most elementary features of social relations and generates unique political insights. Proposing both this new theory of realism and the idea of political formalism, this inspired, eye-opening book will have far-reaching implications in literary studies.
 

Genres: Philosophy, Theory, Literary Criticism, Nonfiction, 21st Century, Literature, Criticism

240 pages, Paperback

First published November 20, 2019

About the author

Anna Kornbluh is Associate Professor of English at UIC. She is the author of Realizing Capital, and the manuscript, The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space. Articles on Marxist aesthetics have appeared in Mediations, Novel, the LARB, Understanding Film: Marxist Perspectives, Lacan & Contemporary Cinema, and the Bloomsbury Companion to Marx.

Reviews

[Andrin Albrecht · Rating 4 out of 5]

Proposition 1: This book emblematizes as many tendencies I find problematic about literary academia as facilities that I love it for.
Proposition 2: Read the conclusion before the rest, and “The Order of Forms” will not only become a lot clearer in its argument, but also a lot more convincing.
Proposition 3: If you’re not in literary academia yourself (or have such a singular interest in its debates and practices that you might as well be), don’t even think about reading this book – it is so unapologetically abstract and field-specific that the gorgeous cover feels a bit like a trap rather than an asset.

In other words: Kornbluh is a literary scholar writing for a very specific type of other literary scholars, and if she makes claims to working towards a general politics, then it is only ever vicariously through those. In “The Order of Forms”, she advocates for a shift towards “political formalism”, a critical approach that, broadly speaking, focuses on the creative potential of institutions (using that in a very abstract sense) rather than anti-institutional deconstruction. She posits the value of literature as imagining alternative ways in which our political reality could be formed while at the same time arguing that it must inevitably always be formed––there is no freedom in formlessness, no collective without antagonism; all we can hope to and should achieve is developing positive propositions of how to mitigate our various social antagonisms a little better, weighing one institution against another, never settling into the status quo while also never taking a radical stance against it. This is a philosophy I can certainly get behind, which to me seems a great deal more productive and hopeful than any variation on “burn it all to the ground!”, no matter how desperately one might sometimes want to see fire.
The caveat here is that this brief summary of mine is already a significant concretization of what Kornbluh does in her monograph. She is hardly ever concerned with practical conclusions, illustrations, considerations or even advice; rather, she tries to lay out the most fundamental, abstractly formal pattern of what such a mode of political thinking would look like. Her chapters – which are nominally readings of several pivotal Victorian novels, but de facto rather use a few select passages from and statements on them as launching pads for further theorization – are occupied with things like mathematical set theory, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and re-evaluations of novelistic semiotics rather than real-life struggles, political debates, concrete issues or derivate utopias.
And that’s fine, don’t get me wrong! More than fine: I find her attempt to use mathematical models for novel literary analyses enormously fascinating and original; her argument for literature as world-making rather than world-scrutinizing speaks to me both on an academic and a deeply personal level. Kornbluh is a masterful theorist and proponent of interdisciplinary work; you can feel the passion with which she approaches her subject, her genuine personal investment, and the sparks that fly in the moments she might actually be on to something.
However, I do believe that her critical originality would actually have benefited from concretization, from more analogies, examples, re-formulations and drives towards less academic vocabulary. As it is, she provides little to no orientation to the reader, defines key concepts and terms at best once and at worst just supposes one already knows them from a broad previous exploration of critical theory, hints at conclusions rather than spelling them out and making them shine, and already leaps on to the next. Of course, there is no mandate for reader guidance whatsoever in a work of abstract theory, but if that work at the same time positions itself as aiming not just to contribute to scholarly debate, but to real-life politics, one cannot help but maintain that it lets a lot of chances towards that end slide for the sake of making an intellectual impression. The epitome of that, for me, is Kornbluh’s propensity for unanswered questions, which she will oftentimes end a chapter with after she has outlined the mathematical principles underlying a more constructive way of formalist thinking, questions along the lines of “What would be a letter of the law that openly entailed the deliberation pursuant to its incompletion, a party that openly courted the other sides of its discursive formation?” Yes, Anna, what? These moments did irk me: Readers with an interest in coming up with potential answers to such questions, ideally taking political formalism into account, will to so regardless of Kornbluh spelling it out for them. For all the others––those desperately hoping that Kornbluh herself might dare to step from theoretical considerations to practical conclusions––being confronted with the silence after these questions, they might feel like a taunt.
That is one of the reasons why I suggest starting with the conclusion, since it is the only place where Kornbluh actually does become more reality-specific, and it is not only a big relief, but genuinely powerful. Having that as a starting point and moving from it towards abstraction, to me, seems significantly more effective than starting with claims about the political potential of set theory and only illustrating them a few pages before the end.
Throughout the book, there are certain chapters that work better than other––Kornbluh draws from a vast host of analogies and interdisciplinary inspirations, alludes to thousands of pages of novels as well as photographs, critical theory, and architecture. Some of them she discusses in depth, others she brushes past, seemingly more intent on explicating her own theoretical propositions than on presenting convincing readings of her primary texts––but, truth be told, nobody picks up this book in the hopes of a comprehensive analysis of Dickens’ “Bleak House” anyway. So that’s fine as well.
In conclusion, I found “The Order of Forms” highly fascinating and inspiring in my own academic work, but I did have to answer a lot of the questions of what exactly in it was to fascinate, what it was to inspire, for Kornbluh. It goes to show that, if the author of a book like this is professor at the University of Illinois, readers will be willing to take that extra step because they assume she must have a point for sure, whereas if a graduate student presented those very same brilliant pages, the feedback would be something along the lines of “didn’t make sense, too idealistic, you need to illustrate your claims and define your terminology.” Yes, that’s how the world works, and in fact, there are a few good reasons for it working just like that––it does make a difference that Kornbluh is an acclaimed professor and not a graduate student, taking on such subjects. However, that doesn’t mean it’s not worth criticizing her relying a little too much on that power imbalance, expecting the reader to in every possible case give her the benefit of the doubt and spell out her conclusions for her. The effect of that will inevitably be that a few select literary scholars will actually read her book, be fascinated by it, and incorporate it into things they are already working on, whereas anyone concerned with politics in any shape or form beyond the formalist analysis of canonical novels won’t have any use for it.
Luckily (well, the verdict on that yet stands out) I find myself among those few scholars. I am fascinated by “The Order of Forms” and will incorporate it into what I’m already working on. I’m deeply impressed by Kornbluh, if for her theoretical prowess rather than her educational or visionary. Even if this book isn’t necessarily the monograph we need, she seems to be the kind of academic we do. And the cover is gorgeous. So, for the fourth and last time: that’s fine!

[Colin Cox · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the conclusion to her categorical celebration of form and its necessity, Anna Kornbluh writes, "Theory must prepare to build things up, and literature models that building" (156). Unfortunately, as hard as I tried, I could not find a quote that succinctly articulates Kornbluh's theoretical project in The Order of Forms. This is because The Order of Forms is one of the most ambitious theoretical texts I have read in some time.

As I see it, to begin to understand The Order of Forms, we must reckon with why and how forms matter. In the introduction, Kornbluh writes, "forming is a value unto itself: a value that animates literature...Formalism should study how to compose and to direct—rather than ceaselessly oppose—form, formalization, and forms of sociability. A formalism that professes such constituency might be deemed 'political formalism' on account of its willingness to entertain the political imagining that can issue from studying forms, and even more so because its elementary affirmation addresses the formed quality of the political as such" (4). Here Kornbluh celebrates form, not necessarily content, for its ability to imagine political realities. Contra traditional formalism, Kornbluh imagines form possesses distinct "agency" which enables it to approach "politics and aesthetics from the purview of the constitution of social form, not just destituent dismantling" (4). In short, form shapes and produces possibilities; it does not shape and produce limitations.

Kornbluh's theory of forms is highly affirmative of form itself. Throughout The Order of Forms, Kornbluh uses a word like "build" to signify form's potential. Because "humans cannot exist without forms," we must consider what forms permit, produce, and encourage (5). Kornbluh argues that forms "scaffold sociability, even though the particular forms that human sociality takes are not fixed" (5). This is why forms matter so much; they articulate impossibilities by revealing "the ungroundedness of all socialities" (7). Kornbluh writes, "The forms in art may themselves theorize the forms in life, and questions of social configuration may be abstractly posed in art in ways that the concretude of experience blocks" (6). Concrete experience sans formal consideration has the potential to foreclose possibilities because concrete experience sans formal consideration ignores abstraction. Kornbluh writes, "Although we often cherish literature's concretization—its texturizing of lived experience, its sensualization of language, its specification of social constructs—in this book I advocate for its unique abstractions. I argue throughout for recognizing those abstractions in the plastic syntheses by which novels suspensively integrate multiple ideas, and in the projective models of relations through which literary realism discloses the ungroundedness of all socialities while building them up anyway. Attending to these literary abstractions opens up the power of literary form to reveal and revalue the abstractions at work in social life, including ideology and institutions, laws and calculations, and our foundationaless socius itself" (6-7). In short, formalism in literary realism stages a necessary confrontation with the abstractions at work in our social forms, which is to say, the forms our lives assume.

Another important aspect of The Order of Forms is mathematics because "Formalist mathmatics...crystallizes what forms do: provide structure for new possibilities" (7). Kornbluh continues, "Mathematical formalism thus powerfully recognizes what forms do: forms inscribe, thereby making relations among abstractions fathomable and reconfigurable" (8). In this way, form is more than a framing or staging ground for whatever content it holds; form mediates the multitude of notions and concepts we mean when we say "content."

In this way, forms are forward-looking because they operate a "striving toward futures" (32). As I mentioned earlier, for Kornbluh, forms create and produce. Forms build; they do not restrict. Therefore, when Kornbluh writes about "the order of forms," she considers "the order made by forms and the forms made by order" (27).

[Drew Cunningham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Formative!

[Dylan Levine · Rating 4 out of 5]

🫡

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

A bravura performance that serves as an encapsulation of the recent excellent work on formalism in literary criticism & critical theory (especially from Caroline Levine, Tom Eyers, Walter Benn Michaels, & Anahid Nersessian) & a hopeful prolegomenon to the essential constructive work we as critics can do to revivfy our critically & economically stunted profession & play our part in the move to create political & social forms adequate for the climate catastrophe & for human life & social reproduction that we should name as at least social democracy. Form for Kornbluh names both the specificity of what critics work from (as opposed to mere description of surface readers or the flat data of DH) & a vital bridge from literature to a theoretical understanding of the necessary yet variable & malleable forms that (antagonistically) structure human political, social, & psychic life. Kornbluh broadsides the anarcho-vitalism of contemporary theory, which rails against the state, collectivity, & society itself that contributes to the inability of critics to effectively organize on an industrial scale as well as our abjuration of a Utopian & ambitious imaginary to a circumscribed & ineffectual individualism that mirrors the values of the brutal & unsustainable contemporary order that anarcho-vitalism purports to absolutely reject. Kornbluh masterfully stitches together her political formalism from marxism, (Lacanian) psychoanalysis, (post)structuralism, platonic-aristotelian philosophy, & careful analysis of realist novels, photography, & mathematical formalism of the Victorian era. It's an essential book for literary critics as well as critical theorists who've been inspired by the recent political interventions of Jodi Dean, Fredric Jameson, Eliane Glaser, Elaine Scarry, & Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams. Also, it has a Lewis Carroll photograph that will haunt you to the end of your days.