Formalist Methodology Research Articles

Toward a Dialectical Understanding of North Indian Drumming Traditions: Musical Labor, Dance, and the Folk/Classical Distinction in Banaras

Abstracts: The distinction between “ folk” and “classical” is frequently invoked in discourses about North Indian music. This article investigates drumming traditions in the North Indian city of Banaras (Varanasi) to explore the nature of this distinction. Drawing on historical, ethnographic, and formalist methodologies, it proposes a dialectical approach to the study of drumming in North India. Particular attention is given to the structure of hereditary musical labor, the intertwined history of dancing and drumming, and the relationship between folk and classical drumming traditions in Banaras.

Agentic misrecognition in the global monetary system

This article employs the framework of agentic misrecognition to explore the institutional dynamics and distinct forms of agency operative in the global monetary system. The analysis is framed by the concept of “political recognition,” exploring the relationship between the dominant actor and subordinate actors, and showing the complex ways by which misrecognition is performed through, as well as shaped by, the sociopolitical logics of the monetary system. It shows how with the employment of formalist methodologies, the dominant actor protects its status by misrecognizing and resisting pleas for greater concern and more coordination, seeing subordinates not as creative agents but as challenges to its dominance. The analysis also explores how and why subordinate members come to support the misrecognition scheme even though it perpetuates instability and systemic inequalities. Similar to most studies on recognition theory, this article pays close attention to the plight of the misrecognized, but the analysis is also concerned with understanding the underlying cause of the misrecognition scheme and how the dominant actor as misrecognizer contributes to dysfunctions in the monetary system. In demonstrating the underlying features of the misrecognition scheme, this critique challenges established theories and methodologies in the monetary sphere.

Resisting modernist primitivism: Dr Mabuse’s exclusionary aesthetics

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’.

Suffering with Style

Suffering with Style

The New Formalism in Private Law

Abstract: Private law scholarship is experiencing a reawakening in the United States with the rise of the New Private Law. New Private Lawyers have emphasized our common commitment to the scholarly interest and practical importance held by legal concepts; a belief that private law ought to be analyzed (in part) from an internal point of view; and a conviction that functionalist and conceptual analyses of private law doctrines, procedures and institutions are, or can be, complementary. We are also joined in criticism of aspects of American legal realism and in lament over some of its continuing legacies in private law. However, New Private Law scholars have yet to articulate a scholarly methodology that defines and differentiates our work. I argue that the New Private Law is rooted in a shared—if implicit—new formalist methodology and provide the first programmatic explanation of it. The Article does several things. It provides a clear statement of methodological tenets of the new formalism. It relates these to wider developments in general jurisprudence, with particular attention to scholarship on law and practical reason. It explains the sense in which the new formalism is novel, especially relative to older varieties of legal formalism. It distances the new formalism from foolish and implausible claims prominent in pejorative renderings of legal formalism. It shows how the new formalism is reflected in New Private Law scholarship. And it explains how a clear grasp of new formalist methodology enables reconciliation of the otherwise baffling eclecticism in the New Private Law while promising new and fruitful avenues for its future development.

Mexican Notary Publics in the Fight Against Money Laundering

main task of the Mexican notary is to provide, at the request of individuals, certainty and security to legal acts and facts through the exercise of public trust, which is characterized by the specialization of its function and the expertise required to perform the activity. However, in modern times, its obligations have been expanded to include assisting national and international authorities in the fight against the crime of money laundering and its provenance, such as drug trafficking, extortion, theft, corruption, embezzlement, tax and investment fraud, terrorism and its financing, among others. Therefore, the main objective of this note is to analyze the mandatory burden on notaries within the national legal framework, which has been established in accordance with globally imposed demands to combat the perpetration of such illegal behaviors. Similarly, the possible penalties that may apply in the event of non-compliance with the applicable provisions shall be examined from a critical and theoretical perspective. The research problem is addressed from a dogmatic and formalist methodology consistent with the subject of study, providing an explanation based on the factual, regulatory, and axiological dimensions.

The New Formalism in Private Law

Private law scholarship is experiencing a reawakening in the United States with the rise of the New Private Law. The New Private Law is an intellectual movement characterized by a confluence of different non-legal methodologies and diverse normative commitments. Its eclecticism gives it a perplexing, if not paradoxical, appearance, and the ties that bind those of us allied to it might seem tenuous. New Private Lawyers have emphasized our common commitment to the scholarly interest and practical importance held by legal concepts; a belief that private law ought to be analyzed (in part) from an internal point of view; and a conviction that functionalist and conceptual analyses of private law doctrines, procedures and institutions are, or can be, complementary. We are also joined in criticism of aspects of American legal realism and in lament over some of its continuing legacies in private law. However, New Private Law scholars have yet to articulate a scholarly methodology that might define, motivate, and differentiate our work. This Article fills that gap. In it, I argue that the New Private Law is rooted in a shared – if implicit – new formalist methodology and provide the first programmatic explanation of it. The Article does several things. It provides a clear statement of methodological tenets of the new formalism. It relates these to wider developments in general jurisprudence, with particular attention to scholarship on law and practical reason. It explains the sense in which the new formalism is novel, especially relative to older varieties of legal formalism. It distances the new formalism from foolish and implausible claims prominent in pejorative renderings of legal formalism. It shows how the new formalism is reflected in New Private Law scholarship. And it explains how a clear grasp of new formalist methodology enables reconciliation of the otherwise baffling eclecticism in the New Private Law while promising new and fruitful avenues for its future development.

Sho’ah: Plasticity of Horror. Aesthetics, Reality and Commitment in Art History

Post-holocaust artistic or literary production has undeniable documentary value. However, it does not contribute so much to clarify what happened but to express what we are feeling now. This production explains better the attitude we have decided to adopt to relate to that past. The main objective of this work is undoubtedly to warn of the danger of ending up considering something as merely aesthetic what must first and foremost be a document and a perennial monument to remembrance and memory. Likewise, we intend to make art historians aware that this task of warning corresponds to them since they have a stark link to the systems of knowledge about these pieces. So we have used an essentially formalist methodology that is common in art history. We have analyzed texts and testimonies as a corrective measure that gives meaning to the pieces. And then we have studied the image itself and its value as a signifier. We intended to build a professional commitment structure for art historians.

The Art of Testimony: David Boder and his Archive of Holocaust Survivors’ Audio-Interviews

ABSTRACTIn July/August 1946, American psychologist David Pablo Boder visited displaced persons (DP) camps in France, Switzerland, and Germany, where he recorded audio-interviews with recent concentration camps inmates. In 1948, Boder proposed for publication a selection of interviews recorded verbatim, together with a brief historical survey and a detailed analysis of one of the interviews from his selection. For his analysis, Boder chose the Formalist methodology of textual reading. Evidently inspired by interest in the phenomenon of the sounding word in turn-of-the-century Russian culture, he believed that the collections of victims’ audio-testimonies would be perceived, using today’s terminology, as multi-media art of the catastrophe. This article focuses on the aesthetic component of Boder’s project, namely, his interpretation of victims’ testimonies from the point of view of literature as art, while also analyzing his concept of the particular aesthetic value of the testimonies and their broader relevance.

American Poetry After Modernism: The Power of the Word by Albert Gelpi

American Poetry after Modernism: The Power of the Word, by Albert Gelpi. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 316 pages. Albert Gelpi has now completed his critical trilogy on US poetry, a project nearly fifty years in the making. The trilogy--composed of The Tenth Muse: The Psyche of the American Poet (1975), A Coherent Splendor: The American Poetic Renaissance, 1910-1950 (1987), and this present book, American Poetry after Modernism: The Power of the Word (2015)--is a rare scholarly enterprise. It closely examines high points in American poetic history from Edward Taylor to Susan Howe. I can think of a handful of similarly ambitious projects over the years: Roy Harvey Pearce's The Continuity of American Poetry (1961), Hyatt Waggoner's American Poets: From the Puritans to the Present (1968), Edwin Fussell's Lucifer in Harness: American Meter, Metaphor, and Diction (1973), and Mutlu Konuk Biasing's American Poetry: The Rhetoric of Its Forms (1987). But none of these was published recently, and none took three volumes and almost a half-century to complete. None has quite the scale and sustained ambition of this enterprise. Gelpi's trilogy is unique. It must be admitted that the trilogy has a major limitation, of which the author seems aware--a fatal flaw in the project's highest aspirations. But let's defer consideration of that issue for a while as we consider the very real achievements of the trilogy and of the present, culminating volume. The Tenth Muse, essentially a study of nineteenth-century American poetry though it does find a foundation in the seventeenth-century writings of Edward Taylor, sought to pursue a formalist methodology while still associating the poetic text with the living consciousness--and the unconscious--of the poet who produced it. Indeed, Gelpi saw the close engagement of the poem with the poet as a feature that differentiates American poetry from British. The book attempted to modify the discursive orientation of honored precursors, the New Critics, with a humanistic and psychological awareness. It was a study of words on a page that arise within the discursive institution of poetry, yet remain attached to an embodied author with a certain way of perceiving and ordering experience. As Gelpi put it, his purpose was integrative: to combine a literary-historical and textual reading of the poems with a psychological sensitivity (1975, xi). Relatively traditional in its views of both textual artistry and the psychic process of creativity, the book was nevertheless quietly innovative in its effort to synthesize the two. Equally important, the book implicitly established a canon of American poetry before 1900, consisting of Taylor, Emerson, Poe, Whitman, and Dickinson. The book's most memorable and influential achievement is its emphasis on Dickinson, who was still a contested figure in 1975. Floyd Stovall's canon-making Eight American Authors: A Review of Research and Criticism first appeared in 1956 and is still in print today; a revised version, edited by James Woodress, appeared in 1963, and was further revised and republished in 1971. This volume, in all of its iterations, included the same eight writers: Emerson, Hawthorne, James, Melville, Poe, Thoreau, Twain, and Whitman--but not Dickinson. So when Gelpi concluded his study with a chapter on Dickinson--a chapter that was far longer and more intense than any of the others--he was certifying that the US literary canon had a new, female member. Gelpi argued that Dickinson was, in fact, the most complex and even heroic poet in nineteenth-century America. He found much more fundamental inconsistency in Dickinson than in Whitman, for all his talk about self-contradiction, precisely because she accepts interplay and counterplay as the condition of consciousness and takes the risks involved in living them out (1975, 222). A Coherent Splendor (1987), arriving a dozen years after The Tenth Muse, had two different, though related, arguments to make. …

The Thought and Feel of Virtuous Wifehood: Recovering Emotion in the Legend of Good Women

Abstract Despite studies arguing for an ironic or sincere depiction of loving women in the Legend of Good Women, scholars have not yet sufficiently examined the cognitive, affective, and performative processes that constitute love in either the poem itself or its late medieval cultural context. Adopting formalist methodologies, this article identifies Chaucer's Legend as an important document in the recovery of late medieval formulations of marital affection, particularly as they relate to women. Chaucer's Legend suggests that marital affection was a contentious emotion in the later Middle Ages subject to multiple, competing formulations. Because marital love was an emotion in progress, the Legend presents love as both an ethical injunction and an epistemological quandary in which the stakes for women are especially high.

Formalism, Mere Form, and Judgment

The origin of this essay is sense of disappointment at what had seemed to me at first one of the most interesting of recent developments in literary studies. I mean here the reemergence, on critical scene dominated since the alleged death of high by historicism, of self-conscious formalism, to borrow the term employed by Marjorie Levinson in her 2007 PMLA review—What Is New Formalism?—which looks back to the March 2000 issue of MLQ — Reading for —and which anticipates the topics of some of the most recent meetings of the English Institute: Form (2013), Medium (2014), and Figure (2015). If, despite its having unsettled some critical commonplaces, and despite its having given rise to some interesting metacritical work, this reemergence of formalism (or this emergence of formalism) has been disappointing, the reason is that, while the ascendancy of the old formalisms—of the Yale School (minus the antiformalist Harold Bloom), or of the New Critics (expanded to include Rene Wellek and Austin Warren), or even of Aristotle—tended to coincide with an increased attention to or anxiety around the question of literature as such, the rise of the new formalism has not. It has, rather, affirmed some older formalist methodology once denigrated for its apolitical or ahistorical leanings all the while insisting on this methodology's real political or historical significance. I am thinking, for example, of the flourishing Adorno industry, and there is the somewhat different rehabilitation of Clement Greenberg in the criticism of visual art. Or, the new formalism has sought to innovate through the application to literature of ever more ingenious drawn from other fields—so the literary work is no longer an organism but machine or network; literary is not static but dynamic, processual. The tendency of formalism to move in this direction was already noted by Fredric Jameson in 1972, in The Prison House of Language , where he writes that, with structuralism, we find ourselves ultimately before the conclusion that the attempt to see the literary work as linguistic system is in reality the application of metaphor . And it was noted year later by Paul de Man in Semiology and Rhetoric, where, having discussed the prevailing model of literature as a kind of box that separates an inside from an outside, de Man concludes that metaphors are more tenacious than facts. In any event, the new formalism has done nothing to answer the question: what is literature? As far as I can tell, it has not even tried. And if it did try, it would fail. It would fail because it begins with set of assumptions about its object, and about its relation to its object, that are more than two hundred years out of date—two hundred twenty-seven years out of date, to be exact. For it was the publication in 1790 of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment that demonstrated, once and for all, the impossibility of deriving theory of the art object from reflection on that object's formal properties. Somewhat counterintuitively, this impossibility is what Kant's discussion of mere form (in the sense that judgment of taste, according to Kant, is pure when it is judgment of the mere form of thing) should help us to understand. And it should help us to see the limitations not only of the new formalism, which I shall stop discussing presently, but also of any formalist critical practice that attempts to move from the formal properties of its object to characterization of that object as literature or as art.

Rhyme’s Crimes

This article shows how rhyme came to be devalued critically. It argues that formalist methodologies alone cannot explain why rhyme once dominated and then fell in importance. Nor can formalism save rhyme by pointing to the reasons why humans enjoy it or by showing how it adds to poetry’s value. Instead, in historicist fashion, I focus on how political factors have determined the meaning of rhyme in the last three hundred years. I link rhyme’s fall to a series of ideological disavowals that tied the technique to subject positions deemed unfree. From political conservatism and aristocracy to femininity, childishness, and popular vulgarity, rhyme was positioned in aesthetic discourse as a device not fit for liberal professors of poetry. The case of rhyme illustrates that literary form can never be abstracted from the political contests by which culture is riven.

The Art and Politics of Artists' Personas: The Case of Yayoi Kusama

This essay presents persona as a trajectory of contemporary art in the post- industrial art world, in which artists’ “work” increasingly includes non-art activities such as networking and media publicity. After discussing pressing issues in art scholarship in regards to the disciplinary tradition and persona studies, I analyse the image of the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) who has been operating in the Western-dominated international art world since the 1960s. Arriving in the U.S. in 1957, Kusama quickly became one of the most prolific and notorious artists in New York. However, by the early 1970s she returned to Japan and has since been living voluntarily in a psychiatric hospital. Art historical assessments of Kusama’s work have generally been confined within the Western theoretical parameters of feminism and psychoanalysis. Here, I draw attention to her persona: a “non-art” topic that has largely been ignored within the modernist discipline of Art History, which insists on an object-based formalist methodology. I critique this tendency by demonstrating how an artist’s persona can become a medium of art and politics, and how an artist’s artworks can become by-products of the artist’s larger-than-life public persona. I trace Kusama’s effort at persona cultivation from New York in the early 1960s, and particularly explore her satirical and ironic use of the cultural, racial, and gendered stereotypes about Japanese women. Based on archival research and aesthetics analysis, I argue that Kusama exploited the commercial value of her Japanese body and identity at a time when escalating Cold War national pride and xenophobia jeopardised her career in New York. By discussing how she pursued self-promotion and commercial success, this paper also portrays the commercialization of art and artists during the 1960s.

The Modernity of Western Tragedy: Genealogy of a Developing Anachronism

Since the shift from modernist, formalist, and old historicist methodologies of mid-twentieth-century criticism, tragedy has been a problematic term. In the earlier age of the American New Critics and their British analog F. R. Leavis, it was one of the classic instances of a “timeless” literary category that embodied the “news that stays news” that Ezra Pound thought epitomized the literary. Tragedy was an example par excellence of a genre tied to a permanent human condition—death. As such, however, it was also largely taken for granted in the practice of the New Critics, American and British—one of the large-scale literary categories that could be safely ignored in favor of the strategies of close reading and detecting complex ironies. At times the whole project of defining a larger genre was simply ruled out of order. Kenneth Muir spoke for many in this critical generation when he wrote, “There is no such thing as Shakespearean tragedy. There are only Shakespearean tragedies” (12).

The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England

The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England

Adultery Behind Purdah and the Politics of Indian Muslim Nationalism in Zeenuth Futehally’s Zohra

Drawing on postcolonial, feminist, historicist, and formalist methodologies, this article reexamines an almost unknown novel Zohra (1951), among the first to be written and published in English by an Indian Muslim woman writer (Zeenuth Futehally). This article argues that Zohra works on two fronts, combining the private/personal and public/political: it critiques the systems of purdah and arranged marriage that shackle women in a secular nation desirous of modernity and insists on the rightful claims of Indian Muslims to belonging and citizenship in modern India (after Partition) on the basis of their anticolonial, anticommunalist struggles for social reform and national independence.

Introduction to an Alternative History of Money

This paper integrates the various strands of an alternative, heterodox view on the origins of money and the development of the modern financial system in a manner that is consistent with the findings of historians and anthropologists. As is well known, the orthodox story of money’s origins and evolution begins with the creation of a medium of exchange to reduce the costs of barter. To be sure, the history of money is “lost in the mists of time,” as money’s invention probably predates writing. Further, the history of money is contentious. And, finally, even orthodox economists would reject the Robinson Crusoe story and the evolution from a commodity money through to modern fiat money as historically accurate. Rather, the story told about the origins and evolution of money is designed to shed light on the “nature” of money. The orthodox story draws attention to money as a transactions-cost-minimizing medium of exchange.Heterodox economists reject the formalist methodology adopted by orthodox economists in favor of a substantivist methodology. In the formalist methodology, the economist begins with the “rational” economic agent facing scarce resources and unlimited wants. Since the formalist methodology abstracts from historical and institutional detail, it must be applicable to all human societies. Heterodoxy argues that economics has to do with a study of the institutionalized interactions among humans and between humans and nature. The economy is a component of culture; or, more specifically, of the material life process of society. As such, substantivist economics cannot abstract from the institutions that help to shape economic processes; and the substantivist problem is not the formal one of choice, but a problem concerning production and distribution.A powerful critique of the orthodox story regarding money can be developed using the findings of comparative anthropology, comparative history, and comparative economics. Given the embedded nature of economic phenomenon in prior societies, an understanding of what money is and what it does in capitalist societies is essential to this approach. This can then be contrasted with the functioning of precapitalist societies in order to allow identification of which types of precapitalist societies would use money and what money would be used for in these societies. This understanding is essential for informed speculation on the origins of money. The comparative approach used by heterodox economists begins with an understanding of the role money plays in capitalist economies, which shares essential features with analyses developed by a wide range of Institutionalist, Keynesian, Post Keynesian, and Marxist macroeconomists. This paper uses the understanding developed by comparative anthropology and comparative history of precapitalist societies in order to logically reconstruct the origins of money.

Policy in the wake of the banking crisis: taking pluralism seriously

This paper explores a pluralist approach to policy with respect to the financial system in the wake of the crisis. We consider first what is involved in a pluralist approach to policy more generally, and how this may be justified. This includes a pluralist stance with respect to different approaches to economic theory, pluralism in the sense of interdisciplinary enquiry, pluralism in terms of the range of methods employed, and pluralism with respect to recognition of the plurality of culture and values in society. Implications are drawn for how the banking crisis is framed, how it is explained by theory and thus how policy is designed. In addressing these issues, current mainstream theory focuses on a narrow definition of rational behaviour which, within competitive markets, generates a socially-optimal outcome. This approach is governed by a mathematical formalist methodology, and encourages policy to incentivise this kind of rational behaviour, with respect, for example, to inflation targeting and addressing moral hazard. Pluralist theory would instead recognise the socio-psychological and institutional/evolutionary foundations of money and banking, such that policy needs to focus on rebuilding confidence and addressing moral (including distributional) issues. The relevant analysis would require a range of methods and would address pluralities within society.

Posner’s Pragmatism and the Turn Toward Fidelity

It is no secret that formalist methodologies like originalism are not nearly as scientific as they pretend to be. Banking on this fact, pragmatism offers a prescriptive alternative: instead of expending intellectual energy attempting “fidelity” to antecedent “authority” (precedent, Framers’ intent, etc.) judges should embrace their inevitable roles as de facto policy makers, and focus on producing the best social results they can through the cases they decide. This article discusses the current state of legal pragmatism, with a focus on the archetypal species espoused by Judge Richard Posner, and asks whether it has proven itself capable of contributing anything useful to modern adjudication. Through a dissection of the essentials of Posner's pragmatism, the article demonstrates that pragmatism serves only as a method of justifying outcomes that comport with the personal temperament and intuitions of those applying it. The article then explores how the increasing obviousness of pragmatism's failings has renewed interest in a concept central to formalist approaches: to exalted principles of political theory. Thus, the article concludes that a primary legacy of pragmatism will be its contribution to the advent of soft formalism, characterized by an insistence that indeterminacy and subjectivity in law does not excuse the abandonment of fidelity as a central hallmark of legitimate adjudication.