Performing Preformations: Elements for a Historical Formalism

Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton University Press, 2015), 3. Emphasis in the original. Levine's work is also discussed by Tom Holert in a book chapter hat has a number of (very welcome) resonances with my own work, though I've come across it too late to discuss it here: Tom Holert, "Matters of Form," in Knowledge Beside Itself (Berlin: Sternber Press, 2020), 86-119.

Levine, Forms, 2.

Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Harvard University Press, 2015); Jonas Staal, “Assemblism,” e-flux journal, no. 80 (March 2017) →.

Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (1970; Bloomsbury, 2013), 200.

Levine, Forms, 14, 17.

Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 192. Foucault traced the rise of the form/content dichotomy back to his “classical episteme” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while acknowledging that it only became consolidated in the nineteenth century. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1966; Routledge, 2002), 88.

Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 198.

Yve-Alain Bois (unsigned), “Formalism and Structuralism,” in Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism (Thames and Hudson, 2004), 33.

Yve-Alain Bois, “Whose Formalism?,” in The Art Bulletin LXXVIII (March, 1996), 11.

Bois, “Whose Formalism?,” 11.

Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, trans. Charles Beecher Hogan and George Kubler (1934; Zone Books, 1989), 96.

This exact phrasing is from Bois' close colleague Rosalind Krauss, The Picasso Papers (Thames and Hudson, 1998), 28.

Bois, “Formalism and Structuralism,” 38.

Bois, “Formalism and Structuralism,” 32.

Lu Märten, “Wesen und Veränderung der Formen und Künste,” (1924), in Formen für den Alltag. Schriften. Aufsätze, Vorträge (VEB Verlag der Kunst, 1982), 107.

As Stefan Helmreich and Sofia Roosth have argued, the biological discourse on Lebensform in the early nineteenth century was indebted to a Kantian and Goethean understanding of form as “aesthetic, self-determining, and teleological, as well as (generously assuming sufficient knowledge of the mechanism of its formation) deductively predictable.” Lebensform was thus used in a “broad biological sense,” even while there was increasing emphasis (following Alexander von Humboldt) on Lebensform as custom or habit, as adaptation by organisms to their environment. Lebensformen can thus only ever be deviations from Goethe’s Urform, from an ideal prototype. By the early twentieth century, this “social turn” of the concept led to a veritable glut of books about Lebensformen in the German-speaking world. See Stefan Helmreich and Sofia Roosth, “Life Forms: A Keyword Entry,” in Stefan Helmreich, Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond (Princeton University Press, 2016), 19–34.

Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, 33.

Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, 61.

Rudolf Arnheim, “Gestalt Psychology and Artistic Form,” in Lancelot Law Whyte, Aspects of Form (Lund Humphries, 1951), 197. However, whereas Focillon insisted that form is never a modelling of a passive mass, in a 1951 essay, Arnheim indulged in a masculinist fantasy of submission: “Dancers and actors, who use their own bodies, and to some extent photography, which uses the direct registration of physical objects,” are “suspected of being hybrids of art and nature. The artists prefer the submissiveness of amorphous matter.” Arnheim, “Gestalt Psychology and Artistic Form,” 197.

Arnheim, “Gestalt Psychology and Artistic Form,” 196.

Arnheim, “Gestalt Psychology and Artistic Form,” 196.

Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods (Les Presses du réel, 1998), 18.

Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 74.

Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (Routledge, 1997).

See Butler, Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly and Staal, “Assemblism.”

Staal refers to his own and related practices as organizational art. I use the broader term to indicate a potential opening toward practices that are not primarily based in the art world—and in an ironic nod both to relational aesthetics and to a network and a journal that define organizational aesthetics in terms of consultancy aiming to improved organizations through “arts-based methods.”

Paul Chan, “Our Data, Our Selves,” Los Angeles Review of Books, September 19, 2019 →.

Christopher Shields, “A Fundamental Problem about Hylomorphism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy →.

Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher S. Wood (1924-25/27; Zone Books, 1991), 66.

Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, 67.

Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 3: The Phenomenology of Knowledge, trans. Ralph Manheim (Yale University Press, 1957), 7.

Yuk Hui, On the Existence of Digital Objects (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 6–8.

S.G. Lofts, Ernst Cassirer: A “Repetition” of Modernity (State University of New York press, 2000), 227 (note 5).

Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 1: Language, trans. Ralph Manheim (Yale University Press, 1955), 106.

Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Geistige und Körperliche Arbeit. Zur Theorie der gesellschaftlichen Synthesis (Suhrkamp, revised second edition, 1972). The English version of Sohn-Rethel’s book is an anglicizing reworking rather than a pure translation; it sometimes adds clarifications, but is in many ways an inferior digest of the original. I refer to the English version only when it contains a particularly apt expression of one of Sohn-Rethel’s crucial points. I use the second (1972) German edition, which was revised and expanded in response to the book’s critical reception. The “versioning” of Geistige und körperliche Arbeit doesn’t stop there: Sohn-Rethel published a revised German edition in 1989, which is remarkable for its acknowledgment that his “thought-forms” are closer to those of mechanistic natural science than Kant’s categories, and for his dialogue with Cassirer, which is missing from previous editions.

“The value-form denies and veils the quantitative relation of value to labor through the ‘reified appearance’ (gegenständlichen Schein) of commodity value.” Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1 (1867), chapter 1.3 →. Referenced in Sohn-Rethel, Geistige und körperliche Arbeit, 77.

Sohn-Rethel, Geistige und körperliche Arbeit, 20–21.

Sohn-Rethel, Geistige und körperliche Arbeit, 22.

Sohn-Rethel, Geistige und körperliche Arbeit, 139, and more generally, 123–146.

Anselm Jappe, “Sohn-Rethel and the Origin of ‘Real Abstraction’: A Critique of Production or a Critique of Circulation?,” in Historical Materialism 21, no. 1 (2013), 3–14.

Gilbert Simondon, L’Individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d’information (1958; Millon, 2013), 40–51.

Karl Marx, Capital: Volume One (1867), Chapter 1.1.4 →.

Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology (MacMillan, 1978), 43; for the (more or less) equivalent passage in the German edition, see page 70.

From the Rembrandt and Ravachol Appreciation Society’s submission for the Rijksstudio Award, February 27, 2020. The submission, which was rejected, was previously available on the Rijksstudio website but has since been removed.

Sohn-Rethel, Geistige und körperliche Arbeit, 57. My translation.

Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano, “Race, Real Estate and Real Abstraction,” in Radical Philosophy, no. 174 (November/December, 2015), 9. Meanwhile, Christoph Menke has proposed an ambitious critique of the modern conception of rights as a form that needs to be understood historically. See Christoph Menke, Kritik der Rechte (Suhrkamp, 2015), especially part II.

See my “The Juridical Economy: Notes on Legal Form and Aesthetic Form,” New Left Review, no. 106 (July–August 2017), 105–123.

Sohn-Rethel, Geistige und körperliche Arbeit, 48. English translation in Intellectual and Manual Labour, 27.

The more general German “Begriffe der Naturerkenntnis” becomes “the concepts of natural science” in the English edition; see Geistige und körperliche Arbeit, 42; Intellectual and Manual Labour, 20.

Sohn-Rethel, Geistige und körperliche Arbeit, 167–172, 179–182.

Alexander R. Galloway, The Interface Effect (Polity, 2012), 81–83.

Hui, Existence of Digital Objects, 52.

Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 47–57.

Krystian Woznicki, Undeclared Movements (b_books, 2020), 25–37.

Week 5, on “Professional Englishes,” includes a discussion of International Art English →.

Galloway and Thacker, The Exploit, 3. Emphasis in the original.

Lovink, for his part, has long been skeptical of Silicon Valley-style technolibertarian net utopianism, insisting on the importance of building “organized networks” with strong links, à la the Jesuits, against a situation of platforms on which we are connected through weak ties, and “we pass around status updates.” See Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter, Organization after Social Media (Minor Compositions, 2018), 34, 130.

Galloway and Thacker, The Exploit, 44–45.

Galloway and Thacker, The Exploit, 41.

For Foucault’s historicization of sovereignty, see lectures 1–5 and 11 of “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, trans. David Macey (Picador, 2003). In contrast to what Joshua Clover suggests, Foucault here tends to oppose sovereignty to biopolitics, rather than defining biopolitics as a new form of sovereignty. What Clover calls “the famous formula of biopolitics: the sovereign power to make live and let die” is Clover’s own rewrite of a passage on page 241 in which Foucault pointedly refrains from calling this biopolitical power sovereign. Joshua Clover, “The Rise and Fall of Biopolitics: A Response to Bruno Latour,” Critical inquiry blog, March 29, 2020 →.

Clover, “The Rise and Fall of Biopolitics.”

Agamben drew simplistic conclusions from his own work on the basis of a “COVID-19 is not much worse than the flu” assessment—but he is hardly the only philosophical Methuselah to have made a fool of himself in these days. For a good analysis, see Tim Christaens, “Must Society Be Protected from Agamben?,” Critical Legal Thinking blog, March 26, 2020 →. For Agamben’s latest missive, “Requiem for the Students,” see →.

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford University Press, 1998), 51.

Agamben, Homo Sacer, 52. Both Virno and Agamben will have encountered the term in Wittgenstein, who in turn was likely informed by W. Fred’s Lebensformen (1911). In addition, the concept was used by Weimar-era reactionary thinkers with whom Agamben must have at least a passing familiarity. Carl Schmitt, a crucial reference for Agamben, quoted or discussed Eduard Spranger’s Lebensformen (1921) as well as the Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjellén’s Der Staat als Lebensform (1917).

Agamben, Homo Sacer, 52.

Carl Einstein, Die Fabrikation der Fiktionen (late 1930s), ed. Sibylle Penkert (Rowohlt, 1973), 311. English translation from Kerstin Stakemeier, “Breaks with the Future: A Halt? Confessions, Some Notes,” in Eric de Bruyn and Sven Lütticken (eds.), Futurity Report (Sternberg Press, 2020), 54–55.

Stakemeier, “Breaks with the Future: A Halt? Confessions, Some Notes,” 55.

Stakemeier, “Breaks with the Future: A Halt? Confessions, Some Notes,” 50–51, 53. See also Stakemeier, Entgrenzter Formalismus. Verfahren einer antimodernen Ästhetik (b_books, 2017).

Werker Collective, “Imaging Dissent: Towards Becoming a Collective Subject,” Art & Education, January 15, 2020 →.

The indictment can be downloaded from →.

Magdalena Taube und Krystian Woznicki, footnote Magdalena Taube and Krystian Woznicki, “Zusammenarbeiten trotz ‘Corona-Krise’? Warum der aktuelle Netz-Hype unsere Gesellschaft gefährdet,” Berliner Gazette, April 8, 2020 →.

Editorial comment by Frank Böckelmann and Herbert Nagel in their anthology Subversive Aktion. Der Sinn der Organisation ist ihr Scheitern (Verlag Neue Kritik, 2002), 168.

After the publication of this article, I came across a text by Heidi de Mare I edited more than twenty years ago, when I was a grad student: “Gedisciplineerd kijken. Van kunstgeschiedenis naar historisch formalisme,” in Kunstlicht 20, no. 3/4 (1999): 14–20. I cannot exclude the possibility that De Mare’s use of “historical formalism” had lodged itself somewhere in the recesses of my mind, though my derivation and usage of the term are markedly different. Through a discussion of developments in Dutch art history, De Mare proposes a renewal of art history through “historical formalism,” or the combination of synchronic and diachronic methods; the latter do not include dialectical materialism, which was anathema in the highly depoliticized field of Dutch art history in the period in question.