Why the computational form of literary texts is mere form in the Kantian sense

Actually, it’s not me that’s taking the look at Kant. To be sure, I read some Kant years ago, and I do mean years, more like decades. But I don’t remember it and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the Critique of Judgment, which is the text in play here. It was put in play in a recent article:

Robert Lehman, Formalism, Mere Form, and Judgment, New Literary History, Vol. 48, No. 2, Spring 2017, pp. 245-263.

I’m thus in the precarious position of having to rely on Lehman’s presentation of Kant. But then, isn’t that what intellectual life is like, working in the community of scholars, always depending on the kindness of strangers?

What is formalism, what is literature?

Before looking at Kant via Lehman, however, let me give you the rough and ready on two matters: 1) what I mean by formalism, and 2) how I understand what literature is.

My basic approach to the second is a crude “I know it when I see it.” Of course, I’ve learned from others, starting with my parents. They taught me that, for example, Moby Dick is literature, The Voyage of the Beagle is not, and so forth. Now that I think about it, I’m not at all sure that I’ve ever had to determine, for myself, whether or not this text was literature or not. Good vs. mediocre vs. downright bad literature, yes. But literature vs. something else, I don’t think so.

But let’s assume that there may well come a time when I would have to make such a judgment. It might be an easy judgment to make, or it might not. Where the judgment is easy for me, I suspect it will be easy for others. Where it is difficult, there as well. But in that case, we might arrive at different judgments. In consequence we could enter into a discussion about the matter and give our reasons. Perhaps we’d reach agreement, perhaps not. If not, what of it?

Well, one might throw up one’s hands and say, but then, but then, isn’t the distinction between literature and non-literature pointless? No, difficult and fuzzy, yes; pointless, no. There are color patches that are obviously blue and other ones that are obviously green. That doesn’t mean that difficult cases, cases we decide, perhaps, by tossing a coin, force us to abandon any notion that blue and green are different colors. This or that virtuoso theorist may care to gum up the whole works by invoking a difficult case, but so what? That’s posturing, not thinking.

As for formalism, all I mean is that I’m interested in analyzing and describing the formal properties of literary texts. My big beef with existing literary criticism is that, for the most part, that project seems peripheral to the enterprise despite the fact that form is a central concept of the discipline and formalism a well-recognized critical stance, or family of stances. I find it odd that these formalists, for whom the general fact of form is so very important, show so little interest in specific instances that they cannot spend time analyzing texts for their formal features.

Kant on phenomenal vs. mere form

But I think Lehman’s article can help us sort this out.

He opens by observing (p. 245):

... the ascendancy of the old formalisms—of the Yale School (minus the antiformalist Harold Bloom), or of the New Critics (expanded to include René 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.

But these new formalists are no more interested in describing formal features than those old formalists were. What differentiates these new formalists from the old, it seems, is that “the new formalism has done nothing to answer the question: what is literature? As far as I can tell, it has not even tried” (p. 246). OK, I’m with them on that.

Here’s what Lehman thinks formalism is, both old and new, (p. 246):

At its most basic, I mean an approach to art objects—literature, film, painting, and so on—grounded in an attention to these objects’ spatiotemporal qualities, their phenomenal qualities, which might allow for the transmission of a content or a meaning but that are not themselves intrinsically meaningful. As a critical practice, then, formalism would prescribe consideration of meter, line, composition, rhythm, movement, shape: all those characteristics that are supposed to make an art object what it is. Now, I hope that this definition is broad enough to be relatively uncontroversial. I intend it to be prior both to Levinson’s distinction between “activist” and “normative” formalism—that is, between approaches that affirm and approaches that deny the compatibility of formalism and historicism—and to the question of what model of form ought to be adopted—static or dynamic, molar or molecular. And it does not depend on any especially rigid division of form from content, a division that certain varieties of formalism pride themselves on their having moved beyond.

Am I a formalist in THAT sense? Let’s be careful here.

Let us first note that he defines formalism over art objects in general, not just literary texts. Fair enough. That will be the range of Kant’s discussion too. And I’m certainly interested in a broad range of art objects. Most recently I’ve devoted as much attention to film as to literature and, for that matter, to graffiti too – though here I’m more interested in documenting it through photographs than analyzing and describing it. For that matter, a decade and a half ago I devoted a book to music – Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture (Basic Books 2001) – without, so far as I recall, hazarding a definition of just what music is.

But let’s stick to literary texts. In what sense is my descriptive effort devoted to the phenomenal properties of texts? The basic phenomenal form of texts is that of a string, a string of speech sounds for an oral texts, a string of graphic marks for a written text. Really, that’s all there is to describe because that’s all there is.

Without hazarding an answer to that question (am I describing the phenomenal properties of texts?), let’s soldier on. Lehman tells (p. 248):

Modern formalism is founded on the rejection of one of evaluative formalism’s guiding assumptions: that the essential quality of an art object—its beauty, or its perfection, or its character as art—can be decided through the calculation of numbers or the contemplation of rules, through a measuring of phenomenal (sensual, spatiotemporal) form against logical order. But modern formalism, even as it rejects this assumption, retains from evaluative formalism a notion of form as a real property of the object—as the vivid presentation of . . . something. It is not always clear what. In his 1966 letter to André Daspre, and sounding very much like Baumgarten, Louis Althusser writes that “the real difference between art and science lies in the specific form in which they give us the same object in quite different ways: art in the form of ‘seeing’ and ‘perceiving’ or ‘feeling,’ science in the form of knowledge (in the strict sense, by concepts).” 

And now to Kant (pp. 249-250):

Kant makes this point again and again, but most clearly, I think, by distinguishing two seemingly similar judgments: “this tulip is beautiful,” on the one hand, and “all tulips are beautiful,” on the other (CJ 5:285). Only the former is a judgment of taste, for it concerns a singular experience of a singular thing. While it is occasioned by an object—this tulip—a judgment of taste, Kant explains, “designates nothing whatsoever in the object”; it is referred, rather, only to the pleasure or displeasure of the judging subject, or to what Kant calls this subject’s “feeling of life” [Lebensgefühl] (CJ 5:203–204). The second judgment, “all tulips are beautiful,” is not a judgment of taste; it is, rather, “a logical judgment, which turns [beauty] into a predicate of things of a certain general kind” (CJ 5:285)... Kant rejects evaluative formalism for failing to distinguish between judgments of taste and logical judgments, and, thus, for failing to distinguish between art and paraphrase.

I found this example from Kant, of a utensil, helpful, as it leads to the notion of mere form (p. 252):

It is, then, a question of how we are judging the utensil, just as it is a question of how we are judging the flower—not a question of the object but of our mode of comportment (conceptual, practical, or aesthetic) to it. In this light, the significance of Kant’s discussion of the stone utensil is that it finds Kant recognizing that there is, in fact, no characteristic of an object—its formal organization, its status as manmade—that could ever guarantee or disqualify its being the occasion for a judgment of taste; and, as a result, it finds Kant driving a wedge between phenomenal form—the spatial, temporal organization of an object—and mere form, which is what we judge when we judge by taste.

 

Mere form is not a characteristic of the object. It does not appear vividly as the cause of an aesthetic judgment. It does not appear at all. Mere form is (merely) the subjective representation of an object insofar as it is constructed through a judgment of taste, constructed as the sort of singular representation that one cannot exchange for its concept, or its use, or another of its type. We fail to declare the stone utensil beautiful not because it lacks some certain formal something but because we fail to approach it as an occasion for aesthetic judgment, as the sort of thing that one might find beautiful. What begins to sound circular here—we fail to judge this utensil beautiful because we fail to judge it as the sort of thing that one might judge beautiful—is not evidence of the vacuity of Kant’s position but of the fact that aesthetic judgment does not have a ground outside of itself, and certainly not in any phenomenal feature of its object.

In what sense are the formal features that interest me an aspect of this Kantian mere form?

How MERE?

At first blush I’d have to say, Not at all. For my attitude has always been that those formal features are there, in the object, where I describe them to be. But is that really so?

Is that really the case, to use Wittgenstein’s phrase?

We are now in possession of a psychology unknown to Kant (& pretty much unknown to literary critics too). We know, for example, that color does not exist in the object, but rather is constructed in the perceiving subject – see, for example, my post, “Color the Subject” [1]. That is, there is not a rigid mapping between wave lengths of visible light and our perception of color. Rather, those wavelengths enter into a perceptual process that takes context into account and ‘calculates’ or ‘constructs’ color on that basis. The calculation is so consistent across individuals, with the exception of color blindness, that we think of color as existing ‘out there’ in the world.

It doesn’t. It exists in or ‘next to’ the same realm as Kant’s mere form. Well, that’s where we’ll find linguistic form as well. To be sure language strings, whether written or spoken, are physical things out there in the world. They have measurable physical properties. But the features that make them linguistically active, if you will, have the same relationship to the physical string that color has to wave lengths of light.

Linguists thus distinguish between phonETICSs, the study of the physical properties of speech signals, and phonEMICs, the study of the linguistically active aspects of those features. The phonetic characteristics of a given phoneme can vary widely. The same is true of the visual characteristics of individual letters. How many different graphic objects can represent the letter “W”?

One can hear the sounds of any language whatever, but one can make linguistic sense of them only if one knows the conventions of the language. And those conventions, we know, are largely arbitrary with respect to the physical characteristics of the linguistic signal. Linguistic signals exist qua language only to the mind in possession of the proper conventions. Otherwise, they are just noise, unintelligible noise.

If linguistic form exists in the same realm as mere form, and literary texts are constructed of language, then it follows that literary form, as I have been thinking about it, also exists in the realm of mere form. For I have been thinking of literary form as something that is apparent ONLY to a mind in possession of the appropriate literary competence, to use a term from Jonathan Culler’s Structuralist Poetics (1975). When I talk of describing the formal features of literary texts, I am talking of those features that are activated only by the literary mind. Literary judgments would thus apply to form as I have been talking about it.

And, as you may know, I have been talking about literary form as fundamentally computational. This is not the place to review those arguments; you can find them elsewhere [2]. For the purposes of the present argument, I am taking those arguments as given. It thus follows that the process of reading literary texts, in the ordinary sense of read, is a computational one, though the computation is largely unconscious – as so many perceptual and cognitive processes are. The mere form of literary texts is computational in kind.

So, what is literature?

Let’s return to Lehman (p. 253):

The inability of formalism, both old and new, to answer the ontological question what is literature? results from the tendency of formalism to look for the constitutive features of art in the object itself—in its specific form or in the vividness of its communiqués—rather than in the simple fact of aesthetic judgment. Kant provides us with a name for this tendency: “subreption,” by which he means an illegitimate transfer of properties from the judging subject to the object judged. This tendency is wide- spread, and we reinforce it every time that we tell a student who asks why, if he or she is interested in historical or economic or psychological matters, he or she should nonetheless study literature, that literature has the ability to make these matters appear in all their complexity, that in literature these matters are presented vividly.

 

My aim in this essay has been to resist this ill-considered recourse to vividness, and to do so by uncoupling phenomenal form—the proper object of formalist criticism—from mere form—the irreducible singularity of a representation insofar as it is constructed through an act of aesthetic judgment.

Here I should probably reason and quarrel. But I won’t. I’ll just indicate what the argument, as I see it, would be about.

By my account, the proper object of formalist literary criticism, is NOT phenomenal form, but in fact it is mere form. But mere form understood as I have outlined above. When I work on, ring composition [3], for example, I am delineating features of mere form, not of phenomenal form. Though – and here things get tricky – I must necessarily project my description of those features onto the existing phenomenal form (just as linguists identify phonemes in the phenomenal forms of phonetic signals).

One effect of uncoupling phenomenal form and mere form is that the need to define literature in terms of phenomenal form is loosened. My rough and ready “I know it when I see it” turns out to be all there is, at least ultimately. Given an collection of existing literary works, we can always define literature in terms of their computational characteristics (mere form). But there is not, in principle, any reason to think that the phenomenal vehicles of those computational ensembles exhaust the computational possibilities of literary form. One can always ‘impress’ computational form on new kinds phenomenal vehicles.

Finally, Lehman talks of aesthetic judgment (in the Kantian sense). Does the mere reading of a literary text, which is what interests me, constitute such an aesthetic judgment? I don’t know. Ordinarily, it seems to me, one takes the literariness of a text for granted (it the text presents as literary) and one judges whether or not one likes the text, perhaps picking out this or that feature for particular notice. “Aesthetic judgment” seems a rather high-toned term for the act of reading. Nor do I quite know what to make of “the irreducible singularity of a representation”.

But I AM working in a very different intellectual milieu than Kant was, with a much richer set of ideas about the mind than he had available to him. Just how all this works out, that I cannot tell. At the moment I am happy to see that a computational account of literary competence can that make contact with Kant. For that I thank Robert Lehman.

References

[1] William Benzon, “Color the Subject”, New Savanna, blog post, accessed October 13, 2017: https://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2016/07/color-subject.html

[2] My basic and most extended argument about the computation nature of literature is in Literary Morphology: Nine Propositions in a Naturalist Theory of Form, PsyArt: An Online Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts, August 2006, Article 060608, https://www.academia.edu/235110/Literary_Morphology_Nine_Propositions_in_a_Naturalist_Theory_of_Form

You might also take a look at a recent post, “Jakobson’s poetic function as a computational principle, on the trail of the human mind”, New Savanna, blog post, accessed October 13, 2017: http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2017/09/jakobsons-poetic-function-as.html

[3] You can find a number of working papers on ring-composition at my Academia.edu page: https://independent.academia.edu/BillBenzon/Ring-Composition