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The Ethics and Aesthetics of Formalism: Shklovsky and Agee

2012; Routledge; Volume: 23; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10436928.2012.649685

1545-5866

Bill Solomon,

Contemporary Literature and Criticism

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes "Shklovskii's 'Art as Device' is probably the most typical article of early formalism" (Bakhtin/Medvedev 61). "If one wanted to put a date on the beginnings of the transformation which has overtaken literary theory in this century, one could do worse than settle on 1917, the year in which the young Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky published his pioneering essay 'Art as Device' " (Eagleton vii). Levinson finds fault with new historicism for having ignored the "wider array of formalisms" that begins with Russian formalism (563). It should be noted that translator Benjamin Sher prefers the term "enstrangement." As Bakhtin/Medvedev see it, "[M]eaning, thought, artistic truth, social content … do not exist for Shklovskii; there is only the naked device. A polemical and even mocking tone penetrates the very nucleus of this basic formalist concept (61). The rationale behind the disclaimer seems to be that Shklovsky does not want to be misunderstood as claiming that metaphor is aesthetically superior to metonymy; nor does he want to appear to be proposing (as subsequent work by Roman Jakobson and Jacques Lacan does) that the two figures of speech should be correlated respectively with poetic and prosaic uses of language. See Derrida (251–77). Given the high esteem in which Shklovsky held Tristram Shandy, it is worth noting that Spencer's treatise takes as its point of departure a sentence from Sterne's novel. Susan Buck-Morss notes that "Taylorism had been introduced into eight Russian factories before World War I," which makes it at least feasible that Shklovsky's aesthetic principles were situated as a reaction to the priorities driving industrialization in the economic arena. She adds that in "April 1918 the decision was made, despite the opposition of Russian trade Unions, to set Taylorist organizational goals for Soviet industry" (2000 Buck-Morss , Susan. Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in the East and the West . Cambridge , MA : MIT P , 2000. Print. [Google Scholar]: 310n.28). Tellingly, Rebecca West asserted in a 1913 introduction to a selection of Pound's verse that "Just as Taylor and Gilbreth want to introduce scientific management into industry so the imagistes want to discover the most puissant way of whirling the scattered star dust of words into a new star of passion" (86). See also Raitt: "[E]fficiency, economy, organization … are … central to the evolution of modernist theories of literature" (2006 Raitt , Suzanne. "The Rhetoric of Efficiency in Early Modernism." Modernism/modernity 13 . 1 ( 2006 ): 835 – 51 . Print. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]: 840). Literature's historical commitment to the production of surrogate sensualities is a topic Friedrich A. Kittler has dealt with extensively: See Kittler esp. 9–15; as well as his Optical Media, esp. 108–17. The burgeoning field of affect studies indicates that this preoccupation is not as old fashioned as one might have assumed; for a solid point of entry to this rapidly expanding field of inquiry, see Gregg and Seigworth). Shklovsky's neglect of the rest of the essay may be partially mitigated by the fact that the essay was heavily censored when first printed. This imperative explains why Shklovsky goes on to cite a footnote from "Shame" where Tolstoy makes ironic reference to other equally "stupid, savage method[s] of inflicting pain," such as pricking their shoulder with needles or squeezing their hands or feet in a vise (quoted in Theory, 6). The content of the footnote adds little to the analysis of terminological restraint as a formal device; but it does increase one's awareness of the physical hurt torture causes. For a related assessment of the work of lyric poetry, see Stewart. In "In the Darkness," the first chapter of her study, she comments on many canonical affirmations of poiesis as an enunciation of somatic pain, as a demand for recognition that in turn enables the subject to attain a position from which to speak. For instance, Sappho's "'Peer of the Gods' serves as Longinus's example of sublimity because he contends the representation of sublimity in art is the repetition and mastery of physical and cognitive pain" (51). It is not certain that Tolstoy would have agreed with such a characterization of his rhetorical strategy, for in "Shame" he declares that "Of such deeds we must either not speak at all, or we must speak straight to the point, and always with detestation and abhorrence" (http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Shame!). See along these lines Gillo Pontecorvo's 1966 film The Battle of Algiers. During a press conference, the colonel heading the operation to halt rebel activities is challenged by an exasperated reporter to stop answering questions indirectly and talk about torture directly. The film goes on to present a series of grisly scenes showing the physical abuse of captured members of the FLN, with recurrent cuts to the face of a tear-stained woman situating her as witness to the horrific events, thus intensifying the pathos of the images. See also Jean-Luc Godard's Le Petit Soldier (made in 1960 but banned until 1963). Later in life Shklovsky would return to this story. In The Energy of Delusion he asserts that "Strider was saying that human happiness isn't the same as equine happiness," and that it is necessary to change the psychology of the former (324). Sigfried Giedion notes that whereas in the past cows were killed with a pointed spear thrust between the eyes, "Today [the late 1940s] a four-pound hammer is used to smash in the skulls of the cattle" (245). See Corey (55–60). For another literary account of the human costs of efficiency in the meat industry, see the brief yet powerful depiction in Tillie Olsen's Yonnondio: From the Thirties of the sped-up process of hog slaughtering (114–15, 125–26). One thinks here of Agee's frequently cited declaration near the beginning of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men that even were he to offer his reader material artifacts (fragments of cloth, lumps of earth, phials of odors, plates of food and excrements, etc.) it is still likely that the "majority" would treat his ethnographic work as if it were "a parlor game." "A piece of the body torn out by the roots might be more to the point," but this too would probably not be enough to make people really care about the "other," human or not (1973: 12–13). Eisenstein lists numerically the components of this climax as a demonstration of his experimental filmmaking technique in his 1924 essay "The Montage of Film Attractions" (1998: 38-39). My allusions to Chaplin and Eisenstein are hardly casual, for even the most cursory glance through Agee's film criticism reveals that the two directors were among his great heroes. For Shklovsky's critical encounter with the silent screen comedian, see (40, 64–67). I borrow the technical terms for the two halves of a metaphor from I.A. Richards (96), with whom Agee studied at Harvard, enrolling in the spring of 1930 in two courses taught by the English critic, one on modern literature, the other on poetry (Bergreen 83). There are of course additional interpretive possibilities. For instance, the cattle's helplessness and state of ignorance in regard to what is in store for them, in conjunction with their being herded into boxcars, evokes the Holocaust, the slaughterhouse in turn becoming a figure for the concentration camp. Cary Wolfe notes that this comparative motif has become of late rather ubiquitous. In stark contrast, Agee's biographer takes the story as a "symbolic fable" expressing Agee's personal "worries over his uncertain health and sullied marriage" (Bergreen 353). One could also take the story as a fable about the loss of individual freedom under totalitarianism; and the narrative would even bear a reading that considers it to be a reflection in the aftermath of two world wars on the dire consequences of patriotic enthusiasm and the draft, on the lack of preparation on the part of individual soldiers for the nature of their experiences on the battlefield. For Sontag, the prestige at the time of interpretive methods of dealing with works of art was socially harmful because such methods perpetuated the environmentally determined atrophy of the living body's natural or organic resources. Serving a "reactionary, stifling" function in the historical present, interpretative projects were analogous to "the fumes of the automobile and of heavy industry which befoul the urban atmosphere" (7). In poisoning "our sensibilities," interpretation signals "the revenge of the intellect upon art." In sum, in the context of capitalist modernity, the prevailing investment in discovering hidden significations was occurring at the expense of humanity's "energy and sensory capability" (7). Formal analysis emerges as a kind of rehab for our exhausted senses. As the authors note, the special issue of the journal has its origins in a 2006 conference convened to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Jameson's The Political Unconscious. Marcus and Best comment on Levinson's aforementioned articulation of the New Formalists' purported belief in literature as constituting a "deep challenge … to the flattening, routinizing absorptive effects associated with ideological regimes" as follows: "Immersion in texts frees us from the apathy and instrumentality of capitalism by allowing us to bathe in the artwork's disinterested purposelessness" (14). Although Marcus and Best share the epistemological inclination that once distinguished American Deconstruction, the difference between their stance and that of the earlier disciplinary trend is profound. I am thinking in particular of Paul de Man's recurrent methodological insistence that critical readers should strive not to discard referential meaning (and thus the illusion of semantic depth) but to account for it as an unavoidable (albeit inevitably aberrant) by-product of linguistic communication. A passage from "On the Porch," the most rigorously reflexive section of Agee's Famous Men, makes a comparable point in a tropologically concentrated manner (2). In the context of a rhetorical analysis of journalistic conventions, Agee identifies the discourse's ethical and epistemological shortcomings as one of its defining traits. "Journalism can within its own limits be 'good' or 'bad,' 'true' or 'false,' but it is not in the nature of journalism even to approach any less relative degree of truth. Again, journalism is not to be blamed for this; no more than a cow is to be blamed for not being a horse. The difference is, and the reason one can respect or anyhow approve of the cow, that few cows can have the delusion or even the desire to be horses, and that none of them could get away with it even with a small part of the public. The very blood and semen of journalism, on the contrary, is a broad and successful form of lying" (212). Yet a few paragraphs later, Agee extends this critical allegory, paradoxically justifying the verbal duplicity or inaccuracy he simultaneously feels compelled to denounce as ultimately an inherent or innately determining condition of using words: "words like all else are limited by certain laws. To call their achievement crippled in relation to what they have tried to convey may be all very well: but to call them crippled in their completely healthful obedience to their own nature is again a mistake: the same mistake as the accusation of a cow for her unhorsiness. And if you here say: 'But the cow words are trying to be a horse,' the answer is: 'That attempt is one of the strongest laws of language just as it is no law at all as far as cows are concerned.' In obeying this law words are not, then, at all necessarily accusable, any more than in disobeying it. The cleansing and rectification of language, the breakdown of the identification of word and object, is very important, and very possibly more important things will come of it than have ever come of the lingual desire of the cow for the horse: but it is nevertheless another matter whenever words start functioning in the command of the ancient cow-horse law. (214). Whereas animal species stay true to their classificatory essence, language cannot help but strive to transgress the taxonomic or categorical distinction between words and things, cow-words always seeking to metamorphose into what they can never become, horse-things. On this interdisciplinary trend and its relation to the animal rights movement in general, see DeKoven (361–69). Cary Wolfe mentions Deleuze and Guattari's concept while listing the most important precursors to animal studies (565). In Corporal Compassion Acampora affirms this kind of "somaesthetic nexus" as an exemplification of what he calls a "symphysical morality." His argument is that such a "densely physical orientation" towards a living ("convivial") other enables human beings to care about the welfare of non-human animals; see (72–79). In A Thousand Plateaus, however, Deleuze and Guattari consider the "involutionary" process of becoming-animal as an "unnatural participation" that does not entail feelings of "pity of sympathy;" instead, the two thinkers valorize the affective force of becoming-animal on the grounds that it is an "effectuation of a power of the pack that throws the self into upheaval and makes it reel" (240). Still, there is a some type of ethical imperative operative in the kinds of passage between two heterogeneities in question, for shortly thereafter Deleuze and Guattari assert that it was by studying (from an ethological standpoint) what a body can do, what its affects are, that Spinoza "wrote a true Ethics" (257). Additional informationNotes on contributorsBill SolomonBill Solomon is Associate Professor of English at the University at Buffalo. He is the author of Literature, Amusement, and Technology in the Great Depression (Cambridge UP, 2002) and has published articles in Modern Fiction Studies, Novel, American Literature, Arizona Quarterly and several other journals. He is currently working on a book manuscript titled Slapstick Modernism.