Formalist analysis of social forms reveals strategic sites for action

Evidence

Levine’s signature work in this vein is her book Forms: Whole Rhythm Hierarchy Network (2015), which proposes that the category of form as it is articulated in literary study also illuminates social phenomena, and reciprocally that the skills of formalist analysis are generative beyond the study of literature. Formalists attune to wholes, to rhythms, to hierarchies, and to networks, resulting in practical knowledge about what these forms afford and what they hinder, or about distributed agency and therefore sites of strategic action, or about how social power arises not just from the operation of a hierarchy when CEOs are compensated more highly than hourly workers, but from the interaction of that hierarchy with rhythms like the 24/7 working day and its different opportunities for composing wholes like unions. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 368

Categorization

• XREF: Levine’s ‘whole, rhythm, hierarchy, network’ taxonomy intersects with the structuralist-formalist tradition the reader engages via Jameson; and the 24/7 working day connects to cultural exhaustion arguments in the immediacy thesis.