I just started reading Caroline Levine’s fascinating, provocative, and inspiring book Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton UP, 2015). I decided to write a short reflection on the first chapter, and I may or may not continue doing this as I proceed through the book. Like most people who have studied literature over the past twenty years, I’m probably more than a little skeptical of Levine’s return to formalism. But I’m also so dazzled by the way she implements her vision of multiple, colliding, colluding, and struggling forms that I wanted to work through my thoughts by writing.
The idea that particularly fascinated and frustrated me in the first chapter was Levine’s account of the relationship between form and matter, particularly as it impacted how she discusses the iterability of forms. While I work primarily as a Romanticist, I approach my work through media studies and the digital humanities where analogous arguments about iterability have been waged — particularly as they address the relationship between semiotic systems and material mechanisms in computing. N. Katherine Hayles, for instance, argues in Electronic Literature that the way to understand computing is to be found “within the horizon codetermined by media conditions and cultural formations” (100). In other words, we can’t understand computing for Hayles without understanding the computer as a technological mechanism and as a semiotic system.
Why a semiotic system? Apart from their mechanical affordances, computers also rely upon iterable programming languages like Python, Javascript, C#, and others that can be easily ported from one machine to another. In fact, computing is quite good at portability and iterability, since it can recreate images and texts that are so similar that it is impossible for a human eye to tell them apart. Often functions on computers can happen so quickly as to seem instantaneous. But they aren’t instantaneous. On a material level, what causes the letter “M” type to iterate or appear on the screen after I type the key “M”? Consider all the steps highlighted by this PC Guide (or just note how many steps there are).
This process happens in a fraction of a second. So, iterability in computation isn’t simultaneous, it only has the appearance of being so. It happens, to use a word often invoked by media archaeologists, in a micro-temporal context. Computing depends upon the illusion of material iterability, when what’s really occurring is that graphics, sounds, and effects are only functionally iterable.
Does the adjective matter in this case? When Levine discusses formal iterability and portability in the first chapter, I also wondered about the difference between material and functional iterability. Forms are portable because we ignore (or are made to ignore) the material differences in things. For instance, the commodity form enforces a functional equivalence between two material objects: either the monetary paper exchanged for a good or two instances of the same product. When Levine discusses the competition of the bildungsroman literary form and the gender binary in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, iterability similarly depends upon the recognition of functional equivalence (either between two books representing the bildungsroman or between two people of the same gender).
This seems obvious. And I’d like to suggest that it is precisely this distinction between formal and material iterability that might allow us to start to acknowledge the “longues durees of different forms” mentioned by Levine in the chapter. Perhaps the most powerful aspect of computing is its ability to compute in radically different granularities. Yes, computing only happens by ignoring micro-temporalities and micro-differences between materialities — but it also enables the recognition of scales of patterns often impossible to see with human capabilities alone. Think, for instance, of the argument that Ted Underwood has made about gradations of literary change in the digital humanities. Think also about the way computing technology makes it possible for us to predict large scale patterns of global warming. Perhaps “forms” seem more portable than other materials because they act on different temporal scales.
How could we analyze the temporality or historicity of different forms? For instance, could we understand how gender identities and forms change as having a specific (if long) history that’s similar to the curved histories Ted Underwood uses to discuss literary change? I look forward to reading more of the book to see if Levine discusses the intricacies of iterability further.