Anna Kornbluh's The Order of Forms offers a bracing defense of the power of literary realism, whose utopian commitment to the “drafting and projecting of worlds” (16) discloses “the ungroundedness of all socialities while building them up anyway” (7). In making this claim, The Order of Forms works against several contemporary trends in literary scholarship. The first is the persistence of the view that realism is fundamentally mimetic, a conceit that “bolsters today's hegemonic consensus that literature is information, and that the task of the critic is to tabulate information . . . with ever more granularity” (16). Kornbluh here takes aim at the “quantifiers and contextualizers” (44)—which is to say, digital humanists and new historicists—as well as those institutional pressures that would instrumentalize literary study; but her book is also pitched against a range of theoretical positions she names “anarcho-vitalism” (2). “For Agamben and the critical matrix he epitomizes,” Kornbluh writes, “freedom means nothing more than destituent play, deforming and unforming, ceaseless tearing down. Formlessness beomes the ideal uniting a variety of theories, from the mosh of the multitude to the localization of microstruggle and microaggression, from the voluntarist assembly of actors and networks to the flow of affects untethered from constructs, from the deification of irony and incompletion to the culminating conviction that life springs forth without form and thrives in form's absence” (2). Against this impressive array of theories committed to the dismantling of form, Kornbluh “embraces projects of building” (4). And this commitment has a decidedly political cast: “Embracing form serves as the foundation for projects to constitute and institute collective values” (5). Literary realism is thus utopian “in the strict sense . . . defined by Ernst Bloch as the endeavor to build ‘a space adequate for human beings’” (5). “Novels know that the worlds they build are artificial, artifacted, designed,” Kornbluh concludes, “and this is how they know that the same is true of any world” (55).What makes this idea so powerful is its recognition that since there is no natural order of things, there is, consequently, nothing that can be appealed to in order to ground the various hierarchies and injustices endemic to extant social orders. Once we understand human collectivity as constituted by forms that, constitutively, have no transcendent guarantees, we can see that “every form is open to the promise of building differently” (9). Drawing on Marxist materialism, which “holds axiomatically that humans cannot live without forms that scaffold sociability,” Kornbluh develops a notion of political formalism defined by “the struggle to create a just collective amidst desperate interdependence” (5). “Constructing knowledge not from the vantage point of the individually lived experience of consciousness, but instead from the vantage point of the collectively lived experience of social relations,” Marxist materialism rests on the “premising of collective social life” (19). Novels, for Kornbluh, similarly embody the political formalism she here sets against anarcho-vitalism in all its manifestations.This defense of form—in particular the analogy made between aesthetic forms and the forms of our collective life—will immediately put readers in mind of Caroline Levine's influential Forms. But Kornbluh is careful to distinguish her work from Levine's in two key ways. Levine's desire to avoid “‘too strong an analytic emphasis on deep structures’ like ‘causality’” means she does not pay enough attention to the “domination of political assignations by the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production” (3; internal quotations from Levine). At the same time, what Kornbluh calls Levine's “Latourian catholicism” means that she sees “no order among forms. For Levine, aesthetic forms have no distinction from cultural or political forms. . . . Art, in other words, is not required to help us to think about experience” (168). For Kornbluh, in contrast, some forms “exhibit greater capacity for inciting formalist regard: a novel engaged with a phenomenon stands a better chance of provoking thought of the phenomenon's contingency and design than does the phenomenon itself. This is the privilege of art” (168). Crucially, the two principles are constitutive of one another. Art's privilege is precisely the result of its determination, of the fact that it “works with available materials and emerges in specific contexts” (168). The Order of Forms is thus explicitly a defense of the literary as a distinct sphere of cultural production that produces its own form of insight into our social world.But there is a third element in Kornbluh's book. Alongside Marxism and the realist novel, The Order of Forms enlists nineteenth-century developments in formalist mathematics, which similarly abandoned the idea of a mimetic relationship with the world. “For a [mathematical] formalist,” Kornbluh writes, “the value of a formula depends upon its integral coherence and therefore upon what in excess of nature or present reality it renders thinkable” (7). Marxism, literary realism, and formalist math all practice “abstraction as the opening of new possibilities, rather than the cementing of old givens” (14).The Order of Forms starts with Henry James, Georg Lukács, and Fredric Jameson, building a model of literary form out of their continual recourse to architectural metaphors, most famously in James's “house of fiction,” though equally present in all three. For each of these critics, literary form “works architecturally because it projects coherent spaces independent of preexisting spaces but dependent upon laws of composition” (33). What makes architecture an especially fruitful instance of form-making for Kornbluh is its fundamental utility (indeed necessity) for human life, alongside its decidedly nonmimetic structure. Literary form's independence from the world, then, does not render it useless. Rather, and seemingly paradoxically, literature's ontological disposition to “exceed what already exists” helps us see the similarly ungrounded structures of our social life (165). These ideas are developed in chapters on Wuthering Heights, Bleak House, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and Jude the Obscure, each of which is tied to a particular element of formalist mathematics: set theory, mathematical limits, formalist logic, and non-Euclidean geometry. Kornbluh then turns her attention to psychoanalysis to build a model of the state and, finally, to the utopian promise in recent works by Jodi Dean and Jameson.As this brief survey suggests, The Order of Forms covers a lot of ground, and it is filled with insights into both the literary texts and the various theoretical paradigms it examines. Perhaps the best chapter is the one on Wuthering Heights, which constellates Emily Brontë's 1847 novel with the almost exactly contemporary Communist Manifesto (1848). Fixing on the “all” in Marx and Engel's famous phrase—“the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle”—Kornbluh detects a contradiction between this “universal unsolvable problem” and the “particular solution” the Manifesto provides (58). “The communist horizon,” here, “gets falsely conflated with ending antagonism as such” (58). Wuthering Heights suggests something different, for here we encounter “the unending negativity of the social” (59). Indeed, the opening of the novel situates itself in both a specific historical moment—“‘1801’ is the novel's first word, impressing the year of the General Enclosure Act—and the Act of Union with Ireland—as the origin of 1848”—but also in the seemingly endless repetitions that will dominate the structure of the book, while also signaling “the irrelevance of diachronic origins” by dating the house back to 1500 (66). What is, of course, most striking about Brontë's novel is the extraordinary violence that occurs, primarily, in its two domestic spaces. The hearth itself, “the spatial heart of the house and the elementary space of sociality,” becomes here “an inferno of insuperable conflict” (68). On the one hand, then, we have the realization that “everything is conflict,” which would seem to defeat any attempt to remedy our unjust social life (69). On the other hand, we find a text whose “highly crafted, highly stylized, highly patterned, exuberant form” instances a continued investment in social construction even against the impossibility of ever overcoming the constitutive antagonism of our social life (74). And this is precisely the point. Given that “there is no unideological appearance” because “the form of relationality is always ungrounded,” there is no imaginary future that will resolve ideological struggle (20). Even imagining ourselves to inhabit a more equitable social world, we will nevertheless need to continue to work to maintain its structures. The conflict between the unceasing negativity of its content and the calm assertion of its form, therefore, defines Wuthering Heights's belief in the necessity of social constructions even as it recognizes the unending hostility that will always permeate them.This same struggle is central to Kornbluh's reading of Jude the Obscure, which becomes a kind of allegory for the book's main opposition between anarcho-vitalism and political formalism. The novel's epigraph—“The letter killeth”—seems to announce Hardy's agreement with Saint Paul that “any formalizing of social ordering . . . will inevitably commit lethal violence” (122). But this opening opposition between letter and spirit is undone by the fact “that Jude and Sue both professionally work at what the novel calls ‘lettering’ and ‘relettering’” (133). The constant working and reworking of Sue and Jude's relationship suggests an internal opposition between distinct forms of the letter, a realization that leads to an impressive summary of the core conflict in the text, which opens convincingly onto the book's largest argument: Sue wants, in her relationship with Jude at least, to remain “outside all laws except gravitation and germination,” while Jude pursues a path “to make our natural marriage a legal one.” Sue asks the law to leave her alone; Jude asks the law for recognition. Sue imagines that there is a way outside of law; Jude assumes that there is law, and seeks reform. . . . It is because she is thus an anarcho-vitalist and he a political formalist that we must remark the extent to which the novel is his; not only titularly, but narratologically, not only the total story of his life and death (whereas Sue remains living at the end) but the expulsion of Sue from focalization in the final part of the novel, the impossibility of concluding the narrative from her point of view. (138)As with Wuthering Heights, then, the recognition of the constitutive violence of the social order does not lead to the abandonment of social construction; in each case the form of the text situates and works on its own content and, in doing so, defends the human need for form's constitutive sociality.The violence of the law is also at the center of Bleak House, but although Wuthering Heights and Jude might seem initially to be opposed to form, Dickens's novel suggests quite the opposite, asking us how we might be able to hold such disparate worlds as Tom-All-Alone's and Chesney Wold together in an optic that is also, famously, split between third- and first-person narrations. Dickens, in other words, openly avows form's ability to think totality. Kornbluh approaches it from a different angle. Working against the critical consensus that the novel is expansive, she argues instead that “the form of this novel turns out to be conspicuously delimited in ways that pinpoint a surprising minimalism” (79). If we are tempted to dismiss this claim, consider the ways in which “all the largeness of London” nevertheless accommodates Dickens's characteristic “relational” and “spatial coincidences” (90). “London turns out to be so small,” Kornbluh writes, “as to consist of only one poor crossing sweep in the whole of the place, so findable that Lady Dedlock alights upon him the instant she tries” (91). Similarly, the text's split narration offers another instance of “delimitation: far from shoring each other up and achieving some total narration via perspectival supplementation, the first- and third-person and the oscillations between them serve to underscore the limits of each mode” (101). We encounter here “a profound point about political forms: there is no total scheme for the relation of the world” (101). This seems exactly right to me, even if I find it harder to see the ending of the novel—its famous ellipsis—as “distill[ing] its fascination with the limit” (99). This ending, rather, seems to suggest the opening up of possibilities the novel can't quite conceive. But put this way, one immediately sees Kornbluh's point. What the novel can't show us—the endless possibilities that might occur outside its representational apparatus—is simultaneously a claim about the infinite and the bounded, which is to say the precise idea embodied in the mathematical limits the chapter has correlated to the novel.Of course, this being a review, it is necessary to quibble. As the preceding chapter descriptions have no doubt shown, it is possible to summarize Kornbluh's main arguments without much attention to the mathematical ideas on which they are based. It is transparent that the concept of mathematical formalism—and the sheer fact of its development alongside the realist novel—has been generative for the book's main argument. But it is not, at least to this reader, clear that the individual chapters' claims would be much changed if the specific mathematical concepts were not there. I found it hard, too, to see the structural necessity for the chapter on psychoanalysis. Though its arguments are insightful, I would have preferred to see Kornbluh continue her movement through Victorian master texts. In particular, it would have been interesting to see how she would address George Eliot, whose novels seem particularly apt for developing a formalist notion of politics (though perhaps here the connection is already too clear).But these are minor complaints about a book that is remarkable in its multilevel interventions. Critiquing our general tendency for tearing down in favor of building up, abandoning the reification of textual particularity in the name of abstraction, opposing the vogue for formlessness with the virtues of form, Kornbluh “outlines a way of reading and thinking conducive to the affirmative project of revaluing the structuration of sociality by reappraising aesthetic form's capacity to mediate that structuration” (156). Here is perhaps the book's most vital claim: “[L]acking a robust positive representation of what the study of literature, art, and culture offers beyond historicist preservation or cautionary catalogues of domination, humanists have been unable to think their own faculties for composition—for making ideas of public goods” (157). In these lines we see the culmination of the book's argument, not simply the tearing down of existing frameworks for literary study, but the construction of a model upon which others can build, one that values the novel's utopian ability to create worlds in excess of the one that exists. In doing so, Kornbluh intervenes in the discourse of our historical moment, suggesting the possibilities of affirmation in a climate consistently hostile to humanistic endeavor. Taking seriously our own objects of study offers one, admittedly utopian, way out of this seemingly inevitable decline. And yet if we take seriously the book's core insight—that forms are constructed against the recognition of their essential ungroundedness—then we can realize that what seems inevitable is, in fact, contingent, which might give us some measure of hope. Decline, too, like all historical projections, is a narrative, necessary for understanding the world but constitutively ungrounded and, therefore, open to the revisionary struggle of politics.