Introduction Rethinking the Form/Matter Divide in Feminist Politics and Aesthetics

In part 1 I have worked through the opposition between the narratives of female revolutionary and melancholic modernism in order to propose a feminist aesthetics of potentiality. In part 2 I want to confront more directly the issue that was already implied in the previous chapters, namely, the relationship between female embodiment, aesthetic form, and political violence. At first glance, this heterogeneous constellation of form, violence, and materiality brings seemingly apolitical, gender neutral aesthetic debates about experimental forms in modernism together with a gender/race politics of the body. I argue, however, that form and materiality are both feminist political and aesthetic issues. On the one hand, as Luce Irigaray and Judith Butler have shown, the form/matter binary or, as is more often used in feminist theory, the materiality of the body/discourse—are crucial issues in feminist politics because the philosophical genealogy of these terms is deeply implicated in the history of racism, sexuality, and power. Associated with passivity and receptivity, “matter” is a site of the exclusion of the feminine, an exclusion that “secure[s] a given fantasy of heterosexual intercourse and male autogenesis.”¹ On the other hand, as Frederic Jameson, one of the most insightful political critics of late capitalism shows, formal experimentations in modern literature are intertwined with significant political stakes because they disclose more readily the possibility of revolutionary change that otherwise “is unclear in the reified world” of politics and economics.²

My analysis of form/matter/violence replaces the aesthetic form/political content opposition that structures most debates about aesthetics and politics. I use the term materiality not only in the Marxist sense of labor and power relations but also in the feminist sense of gendered, racialized matter and violated bodies. By bringing together these divergent domains and theoretical paradigms, which have usually been discussed separately, I focus on the problem of formal abstraction in political life and its correlative, political and economic violence. At first glance this approach might seem like a contradiction or a categorical mistake, since it is often claimed that the dialectical tradition replaces the older, Aristotelian form/matter distinction with the dynamic, historical notion of material forces of production seeking expression in new social forms. As Jameson argues, the Hegelian and Marxist notions of form are to be “sharply distinguished from the older idea of form which dominates philosophical thinking from Aristotle to Kant and for which the conjugate term is … matter, inert materials.”³ Following Irigaray, I argue, however, that feminism has to work with both pre-Marxist and dialectical notions of materiality. First of all, as we have seen in Butler’s reading of Irigaray, the notion of passive and formless matter, one of the original scenes of the exploitation of the feminine framing the fantasy of heterosexual intercourse, is what is still contested in feminist theories of embodiment and sexuality today.⁴ More importantly, what the form/content dialectic cannot account for is the violent schism between abstract forms and damaged materialities inflicted by modern biopolitics. What is nonetheless important in the dialectical tradition for feminist theory is the idea of a new, interactive model of mediation between matter and form. Ultimately I argue that formal experimentation in women’s literature has to be considered a critical response to the operations of form and violence inflicted on women’s bodies in political life and as an aesthetic invention of a new interaction between form and materiality.

In aesthetics, multiple uses of form are often collapsed under a single term.⁵ Dating at least since romanticism, form is regarded as either a generic static structure that is indifferent to a particular work, for example, the form of the novel or the lyric, or, on the contrary, as the manifestation of the singularity of an artwork. Most commonly opposed to the content, that is, meaning, political context, or a theme, of the work, form is defined as the outer sensible shape of the inner signification. But form can also be regarded as an active intelligible principle of the work, articulating the relations between its materials or component parts (different components of plot, language, narrative structures, and so forth). It is in this sense of a dynamic process, similar to and different from other productive activities, that aesthetic “forming” can be most productively compared with political praxis and its impact on collective life.

In discussions of the politics of modern literature of the last sixty years or so, there have been numerous proposals for the overcoming of the experimental form/political content binary advanced by postaesthetic, poststructuralist, and Marxist theories. Most of them rely on the dynamic or active notion of form as the process of shaping meaning and social relations.⁶ In the poststructuralist tradition, Derek Attridge, for example, insists on the necessity of overcoming the form/content binary in order to account for the singularity of literature, its difference from other cultural productions. And, instead of the static opposition between form and content, he proposes the performative understanding of literary form as the “staging” of meaning and its otherness.⁷ By contrast, Adorno famously claims that political antagonisms themselves, which, in this study, include the antagonisms of race and gender in addition to class conflicts, return as immanent problems of aesthetic form. Yet, as I will argue, political antagonisms are also intertwined with the violence of political forms, and that is why they can be contested or reproduced on the level of form in literature. In his response to Adorno, Jameson, already in the 1970s, proposed that the relationship between literature and politics has to be investigated on the level of form rather than on the level of thematic content.⁸ Jameson understands form in two different ways: first, as the form of the work of art and, second, as the historic relationships between art and social reality, between subject and object. For Jameson, however, the primary terms are form and content. As he famously puts it, what Engels learned about French society from the content of French novels, Marxist criticism has to learn from the form of modern literature because formal innovations are indexes of new political content seeking articulation.⁹ Thus, in the cultural realm, the terms form and content “transpose” the oppositions between “subject and object,” existence and the world, and individual and the external network of things and institutions.¹⁰

Yet, despite these divergent proposals, the fixed form/content binary keeps reasserting itself either as the source of embarrassing formalism, as a manifestation of new formalism (a reaction against content-driven political interpretations of literature and art), or as the persistence of content-based psychological, philosophical, or political interpretations of literary works. There are many good reasons why these oppositions of form and content keep recurring as if they were a symptom of the return of the repressed. This recurrence is not only an effect of a faulty methodology but also of the historical persistence of abstract sociopolitical formal relations that are indifferent to the particularity of objects, bodies, and matter. Paradoxically, what the Marxist tradition calls “material relations” of production and exchange are also characterized by the abstract formalism that is a source of damage, domination, and violence. And in fact one of the great contributions of the Marxist tradition in this respect is the analysis of commodity exchange as the question of abstract form. Can we say, then, that political materialism diagnoses a political formalism (by which I mean the constitution of values, political forms, rights, and meaning in total separation from the materiality of the body/matter/object) of advanced capitalism, a formalism that coexists with the disciplinary regulation and normalization of bodies? By critiquing Marx’s numerous references to feminized “bodies” and the prostitution of commodities, Luce Irigaray extends this critique of political formalism to monologic heterosexual intercourse and the ideological split of the so-called natural/social bodies of women. And she argues that the abstraction of social forms from the particularity of bodies, “formless” matter, and desire is evidence that the work of mediation between subjects and objects is performed by the work of death and its correlative, money.

To overcome the static aesthetic binaries of form/political content and literature/politics, I begin with a diagnosis of the violent schism between abstract forms and damaged materialities in political life and then focus on the literary contestations of this divide. This task entails, first, an investigation of the violence inflicted on bodies by political formalism and, second, an analysis of literary responses—ranging from reproduction to transformation—to this formalism. Through the juxtaposition of Irigaray’s interpretation of the commodification of women’s bodies with Orlando Patterson’s discussion of slavery and Agamben’s biopolitics of bare life, I show that what the commodity form and biopolitics have in common is the violent severance of collective forms from remnants of materiality, which then become the target of violence. In the case of the commodity form, the split occurs between the abstract exchange of value and use value or “the natural body” of objects. Yet feminized commodity form mirrors not only reified relations of exchange but also the biopolitical fracture in the structure of citizenship, namely, the split between bare life and abstract human rights. In both cases the remnants of materiality excluded from value and common forms of life are targets of violence: the sovereign violence directed at bare life and the violence of commodification directed at bodies and nature. Consequently, the politics of recognition and even the politics of redistribution are insufficient for feminism because they cannot address the violent split between violated materiality and form.¹¹

Ultimately, the question that the political diagnosis of violence and formalism poses for feminist aesthetics is whether the composition of the work of art can reveal a different model of mediation between form, bodies, and materiality. In opposition to political formalism, the aesthetic model of mediation that I want to propose stresses the inseparability and interaction between form and materiality in the dynamic structure of the artwork. In this sense the specificity of art and literature stands in an implicit opposition to both the violent production and destruction of bare life in contemporary biopolitics and the increasing commodification of the world. Such interaction between matter, form, and embodiment becomes a source of resistance and creation of new meaning. Thus I propose to read the materiality of aesthetic form, traditionally acknowledged by aesthetics, as an intervention into the violent abstraction of commodity form and the form of citizenship. In opposition to conservative formalism—for instance, T. S. Eliot’s abstraction of mythical structure from the disorder of everyday life—the experimental literary works I analyze provide a new model of interconnection, or mediation, between damaged materials, violated bodies, and literary forms.