FORM with
reference to Tom Eyers’ Speculative Formalism (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 2017)
This post
follows on from the speculations on form, after my reading of Caroline Levine’s
On Forms: Pages: From My Journal: On Form
(again) and Caroline Levine’s Forms
6th
February 2026
I’ve
returned again to look at Tom Eyers’ Speculative Formalism. Yesterday I
worked through the introduction, reading each sentence out loud and summarising
or even translating terms into those which I could understand. Additionally, I
decided to avoid, quite deliberately, his frequent allusions to philosophy and
his side swipes at other kinds of approaches to literature, which he will
critique later in the book. Let’s keep it focussed.
He opens
with a bold claim: ‘This book proposes a new theory of literary form and’ - and I think I have paid less attention to
the next word – : ‘formalisation’. (1) A word to which we shall return. He
offers a theory for how literature works. Mimesis is rejected, as is the ‘over-running’
– his word – of form by context (he later calls these the ‘outsides’). Text
breaks free from those bonds between form and world and – being very crude
about it – re-form in a different way, a way which gives some power to the
formal, indeed renders it a ‘speculative’ instrument. This power stops the
texts being written back into their occasions, into their materials, into
content. (It is perhaps impossible to avoid that word, though Eyers does). But
whereas someone like Adorno might see this as ‘the critical function of the
work of art’, and that's how I've read it in The Meaning of Form, Eyers
sees it resulting in an impasse, a blockage. This will become important for his
later argument.
This blockage
will enable a different kind of relationship between the text and the external
world. (This clearly rejects all kinds of formalism or negative views of
formalism that suggest the text is sealed hermetically from the world.) Indeed,
he suggests that this incompletion is ultimately useful in connecting with the
outsides, and he posits the existence of a ‘non mimetic reference’, a new
connection, opening up new creativity.
The
productivity of impasse is absolutely central to his argument.
We’re back
to formalisation. It is presented as a synonym of ‘categorization’ at one point.
Again, he argues that this formalism does not lead just to self-reference or self-reflexive
introspection or insularity (‘formalism’ in a bad sense). These ‘gaps’, this ‘impasse’,
this ‘dehiscence’, to use some of the terms that he uses, impede direct access but
‘open the path to a different kind of reference’. (2) He makes it clear that
these impasses occur in a number of places outside of the literary work too, whenever
we try to categorise or catalogue or formalise, well… nearly anything, really. This isn't
represented as a negative aspect of form and formalisation, but as a positive, and
indeed Eyers allows himself to refer to this new approach as opening to ‘pastures
new’. (3) This feels momentarily almost utopian in this productivity. There is
a negative, for me, or a problem, or at least the presence of a different kind
of resistance, when he says: ‘Such attempts are never entirely generalizable; rather,
they are always routed through and transformed by the more particular texts
that are put in their service and that may come to resist or deny them in turn.’
(3) This suggests there could be no general theory, no apparatus equivalent to
that of Derek Attridge’s clearcut structures of form, as in The Singularity
of Literature. Or as in Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s theory of poetic
artifice.
This
account of form is linked to formalisation (or categorisation) as much as
Levine’s sense of form (which Eyers critiques) is linked, or held to be
analogous to, social forms and formations. Why can’t we just talk about literary
form? I want to ask at this point, but I’m following Eyers as closely as I can.
‘Such attempts are never entirely generalizable,’ is telling me, to some
extent, there can be no ‘talk about form’; there can only be talk about form,
formulations, the powerful impasses of literary texts, only with reference to
particular literary texts, for (I’m guessing) they exert their productivity in
individual ways: hence, one might say, the many investigations of the book.
Will Montgomery in his even more text-focussed study Short Form American
Poetry (where I first came across Eyers) calls the impasses ‘generative
opacity’ (3), which I think might be a better term (for me) for the blocks that
form throws up to re-divert our perceptiveness. Though that is, for a moment,
to accept Eyers at his word, as it were.
There is some categorical stability, though, when Eyers identifies two
kinds of incompletion or opacity. The first is in literary language. The second
is in the ‘outsides’ of literature, which I found easiest to concretize as ‘history’,
but others may prefer to use the word ‘contexts’. Both defeat mimesis, but that
is not (as is clear from what has been looked at before) the end of the story,
but its beginning. Both of these areas share their limitations to totalisation.
‘Speculative’ formalism wouldn’t in the final analysis favour one or the other
(or indeed concur to the division between the two, but this is an early stage
of the argument. Remember: Eyers comes from a philosophic background.)
I feel I
must stop here and take stock. I have, of course, read the whole book, but I am
returning to the originating thoughts (the first section of the Introduction!) which
I don’t think I understood at the beginning last time. Whether much of this (or
any of it) would influence my attempt to develop my formalist thinking is
unclear. Even less so in terms of writerly poetics.
7th
February 2026
Eyers’ use
of the term ‘speculative’ is defended against assumptions that arise from the
use of the term (philosophical baggage) which I shall pass over at this point in
order to focus on his central points. One is that his work is influenced by
Marxist attitudes to literature, secondly that his formalism avoids obsession
with mimesis and with what he calls ‘interiority’, which could mean formal self-reflexivity,
or it could mean a fixation on ‘interior’ states of selfhood. I suspect both
are rejected (or resisted) in this way of thinking. Rejected (or resisted) in
favour of production.
He is also
in favour of critical theory. That would seem blindingly obvious, but the era
of high theory is past, and he knows he will need to distinguish his formalism
from other schools of theory (again, let us focus on his focus, or we will go
astray). Those other schools have lessened the lessons of what he calls ‘the
formativeness of form’ (5). (This term is not just used for notions of literary
form, but for the ‘forming’ of other discourses too.)
The
question to ask of literary form would be how it somewhat frees itself of
determining histories and yet how it may reproduce those histories. That's
almost a quote from Eyers. But does that mean he's moving on from thinking
about impasses and outsides? I don’t think so. To turn away from form
would mean not knowing what literature could achieve, produce or do,
other than simply being or becoming a receptacle for history: content as the
important element and form simply as something fixed and derivative, a power of
secondary order, a container. (That’s how many people think of it, of course: formal
kinky boots for the fetishized flesh of ‘content’. A tight fit.)
His answer
to this problem is to divert briefly into deconstruction, which I want to leave
to one side at this early stage of engagement with this: thinking about form
acknowledges that paradox is important to these counter-intuitive ways of
thinking. To avoid precisely the kinky boots theory of form. The first section (I’ve
only reached page 6 of the Introduction) which I have been labouring through,
ends with an informative plea that I will quote in its entirety. ‘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. In other words, the
truths that literature imparts should be more, not less, visible when its
formal features are more comprehensively mapped.’ And presumably he means ‘mapped’
through engagement with the impasses, with the ‘generative opacities’ we find.
Or are
there easier ways of talking about ‘the infection of content by form’? (28)
Ways developed by other formalists (Wolfson and others) and by a more
comprehensive theorist (Attridge again)? I.e., the methods I’ve adopted before?
(See some of the links below.)
8th
February 2026
Oddly I’m
typing these notes for the blog, rather than putting excerpts in my poetics
journal. Perhaps that is because I can see quite clearly that the unfinished
business of examining Eyers – I’ve been at this for over a year! – will perhaps
not yield poetics, but it is equally clear that I am unlikely to use its
thinking much in any future critical work. But others might find my incomplete
notes (this is not a review of the book at all!) useful in some way, if
only in diverting attention towards Attridge’s work (which Eyers mentions once)
or others who ‘read for form’, Susan Wolfson and others, who are given short
shrift here, unfairly, but not with too much opprobrium. Levine’s book is given
generous space to be critiqued (and passages of his online review here, Tom Eyers – The Revenge of Form:
Review of C. Levine’s “Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network” – b2o:
boundary 2 online,
reappear in his Introduction. Other schools of literary theory and criticism
are severely attacked: the digital humanities in their antipathy towards close
reading, and versions of distant and surface reading that seem, I agree, to
deny a role for FORM, which to me is unthinkable. New Historicism also, for its
obvious re-focussing on the contexts of literature to ‘solve’ a text. (Of
course, some of its discoveries are quite illuminating; certainly, a New
Historical reading provided much for my versioning of Michael Drayton’s sonnets
in Bad Idea.)
Deconstruction
he engages with, more sympathetically, to push de Man’s thinking onwards to
something like his own ‘position’ – as far as I’ve been able to understand it. One
of the reasons it can’t be summarised neatly is that his theory is a contingent
one: the contention that ‘Such attempts are never entirely generalizable;
rather, they are always routed through and transformed by the more particular
texts that are put in their service and that may come to resist or deny them in
turn.’ (3) This suggests we will find a
fuller representation in actual readings (close readings, we might say). Even
in the introduction we find this passage on Wallace Stevens:
Steven’s
verse evinces what I'm calling a speculative formalist interest in the
simultaneous distance and proximity that the verse form, whether metered or
free, forces upon its objects, such objects at the same time serving to
distress poetic form from a topologically obscure ‘inside’ – even as … such
objects are presupposed as externally opposed to the language that
would, in an initial moment, seek to capture their inner essences. (31)
He calls
this ‘the simultaneous recognition in Stevens of the formative and deformative
potentialities of poetic language’ (31) but I still wonder whether this could
be more clearly expressed. Whereas his statement that in language poetry ‘such
formal logics will be shown to inhere in a back-and-forth between history and
text that finally renders the distinction between the two porous, if not
untenable’, rings true to my readerly experience. (31)
As said,
this is not a review of the book, but there is a good online one by
Herman Rapaport
here on Postmodern
Culture: Reviving Formalism in the 21st
Century – POSTMODERN CULTURE.
I’m not going to review a review, of course, but I have tracked his quotations
from Eyers, in an attempt to do what he purportedly is not: offering some sort
of general theory.
*
Rapaport
quotes the most generalisable sentence in the Introduction, which I quote
above, but let’s revisit it to see if my discussion has rendered it more
concrete: “Form [is] 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). This seems – perhaps with the
exclusion of the final clause – perfectly lucid.
The
following contention seems to use Derek Attridge’s sense that a literary text formally
‘stages’ its content: “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)
This is,
of course, a re-assertion of the “creative capacity of impasses” (8), which we
have encountered before, but in a more deconstructive mode.
Therefore,
it is worth being reminded: “central to my argument will be the claim that form
resists meaning as much as it enables it” (9).
The work
of Francis Ponge is described in ways that demonstrate the existence of such
impasses and blockages, for “in the formal paradoxes of his poetry the
inability of language to latch neatly onto the object-world” is legion. (29)
This reads Ponge against a lot of other representations, of course.
‘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) Wallace Stevens, again, is the philosopher’s friend.
On the new
reference that form affords: “Its 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).
Qualifications
of the ‘outsides’, or of one of them: “History is not to be conceived of as
‘context’ per se, as an externality ranged dynamically against the passive
content 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)
In 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)
Reading
this, as you probably are, without benefit of either Silliman’s text, or Eyers’
subtle and fulsome reading, this is rather opaque. But, read in context, this
is an astute summary of this particular Silliman ‘new sentence’ work, and such
readings give weight to the notion that that ‘Such attempts are never entirely
generalizable; rather, they are always routed through and transformed by the
more particular texts that are put in their service and that may come to resist
or deny them in turn.’ (3) One such text is ‘Albany’ by Ron Silliman. You can’t
look at form, except through forms, and in acts of forming (which means the
processes of making and the processes of (close) reading).
*
This post
refers, in its way, to others. Initially, the thesis of my 2016 book The
Meaning of Form, is expounded here: here: Pages: Robert Sheppard The Meaning
of Form: forms and forming in contemporary innovative poetry (Summary and
Weblinks).
There are
some updates on my encounters with Derek Attridge’s thinking here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: The Meaning
of Form and Derek Attridge’s The Work of Literature.
I tangle
with, tango with, Adorno’s aesthetics here: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Form, Forms
and Forming and the Antagonisms of Reality in Criticism, Poetics and Poetry, as I do in The Meaning of
Form.
BUT the
immediate predecessor of this post is:
Pages: From My Journal: On Form
(again) and Caroline Levine’s Forms
Other
workings around notions of form may be found in my book The Necessity of
Poetics: Shearsman Books buy Robert Sheppard
- When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry.
The images on this page are formal re-workings of a painting by Patricia
Farrell to form the cover image of the book. They seem appropriate.
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