FORMALISM

Formalism

Formalism

Formalism is the view that theoretical information about an object, or practical guidance about how to treat it, is to be derived from attention to its form rather than its matter or content. The idea originates in ancient Greek metaphysics. Plato (c. 427-347 b.c.) argued that to understand an object is to graph the forms in which it “participates.” Aristotle (384-322 b.c.) developed this theory by contrasting the form of an object to its matter. In Aristotle's account, the form of an object is its functional construction, the arrangement of the matter or parts that enable it to serve its purpose or engage in those activities that are essential to it. The members of a species all have the same form, while each individual has its own particular matter.[1]

In the criticism of fine art, formalism was a movement which flourished in the early part of this century, and then again from the 1960s onwards, in the work of such writers as Clement Greenberg. It offers a corrective to the obsessive interest in authenticity and individuality of connoisseurs, who label anything they are unable positively to identify as either 'after X', 'School of X' or a forgery. Formalism treats the characteristic appearance of, for example, Romantic painting, as an expression of 'a way of seeing' special to that period. It seeks to subsume the many different stylistic expressions of a period into a kind of meta-style, a dominant mode of seeing whose validity is confirmed by examples of the art of the period in question. There are two main problems: first, that this stance is too narrow to encompass a complete explanation of the meaning of any given work of art, and second, that only those works which support the formalist construction are considered important, the rest tending to be marginalized—a formalist equivalent of the connoisseurs' 'inauthentic' label. Nonetheless, formalism was and is a salutary discipline, and was an important component in the development of modernism at the beginning of this century, when the notion was prevalent that artistic styles could be codified, and when artists themselves were more fascinated by such programmes and 'isms' than in almost any other period in history.[2]

In literature, formalism was a critical theory developed in immediately post-Revolutionary Russia, by a group of writers and academics led by Roman Jakobson. The basic idea was that 'literature', as distinct from any other kind of writing, is achieved by ...