Resisting modernist primitivism: Dr Mabuse’s exclusionary aesthetics

Abstract

Formalism is having a moment. While across disciplines, methodological questions never truly go out of style, in the past two decades the advent of ‘new formalist’ criticism – particularly in its most controversial incarnations as ‘surface reading’ and ‘post-critique’ – has pushed debates around the methodological and pedagogical responsibility of scholars to the centre of humanities discourses, debates whose urgency is no doubt amplified by a widely perceived (and perhaps actual) existential threat to the academic humanities itself. Two major contributions to this discourse, spanning the fields of literature, philosophy, critical theory, and film and media studies, are Caroline Levine’s award-winning Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network, and Eugenie Brinkema’s twin towers, The Forms of the Affects and Life-Destroying Diagrams.1 While Brinkema’s enigmatic, playfully seductive style could scarcely be more different from Levine’s direct, unambiguous prose, both authors operate from the same premise – that the organizing forms of literature, film and society are not readily perceptible and require sustained, careful attention to be detected and understood – and both authors fashion their studies as exemplars of a pioneering formalist methodology, indeed an ethical formalism. Unapologetic about her progressive agenda, Levine insists that thinking through the overlapping forms that constitute literary texts will translate to rethinking the overlapping forms that organize society, effectively clearing the way for an English-major-to-political-consultant pipeline. Wary that by securing its ‘terms, affordances, and stakes’ beforehand, such an instrumentalizing approach to form may prevent one from reaching the formal ‘ground’ of a given text, Brinkema proposes a ‘radical formalism’ that returns to the roots (radix) of a given text ‘without guarantee’ of humanistic reassurance.2 She presents a vision of organizing forms as resolutely anti-humanist, sublimely impervious to human affect and social arrangements. Despite her irreverent emendation to Fredric Jameson’s famous claim that the political perspective constitutes the absolute horizon of all reading and interpretation, Brinkema’s ‘radical formalism’ is ultimately compatible with Levine’s political agenda – there are, after all, an infinite number of formal arrangements that can be implemented via public policy, some of which might be lurking beneath the mainstream horror films that Brinkema lovingly excavates. Where Levine and Brinkema differ methodologically is in Brinkema’s call for a suspension of political desire in the act of ‘reading’.