Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari influentially celebrated constant processes of change over
any graspable structured
order—shifting “aggregates of intensities,” in A Thousand Plateaux: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 15. Literary and cultural studies scholars have continued to stress plasticity, multiplicity, heterogeneity, instability, elusiveness, slippages, and contradictions—all ways of refusing and unsettling the binary forms of an essentialized contemporary heteronormativity. See, for example, Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Post- Modern (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1999), and Carla Freccero, Queer/Early/Modern (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2006). 21 Henry S. Turner, “Lessons from Literature for the Historian of Science (and Vice Versa): Reflections on ‘Form,’” Isis 101 (2010): 582. Turner argues that form “is an attribute of being, of ontology.” 22 Bruno Latour too argues that form is best defined as the material medium that connects things, people, and ideas to each other. One example he offers is voting. Nothing if not material, the pieces of paper, reports, check marks, accounts, and maps that connect things, people, and ideas at work in an election are what Latour calls “forms.” Latour, Reassembling the Social (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 223. 23 Stefanie Markovits, “Form Things: Looking at Genre through Victorian Diamonds,” Victorian Studies 52, no. 4 (summer 2010): 598. 24 Herbert F. Tucker, “Of Moments and Monuments: Spacetime in Nineteenth-Century Poetry,” Modern Language Quarterly 58 (1997): 289. 25 Wolfson is responding to Jerome McGann’s now-classic reading of Romantic writers in The Romantic Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). Susan Wolfson, Formal Charges, 19, 14, 231. 26 These alternative economic forms did not survive without a struggle: private utilities did everything they could, including launching advertising campaigns filled with outright lies, to drive the cooperative and state-owned enterprises from the market. Marc Schneiberg looks at the sites where they endured nonetheless and notes that they flourished most often in places where there were “legacy effects”—holdovers from previous times that managed to last effectively into the present. “What’s on the Path? Path Dependence, Organizational Diversity and the Problem of Institutional Change in the US Economy, 1900–1950,” Socio-Economic Review (2007): 66, 72. 27 For an example of the fusing of genre and form, see Jason Mittell, “All in the Game: The Wire, Serial Storytelling, and Procedural Logic”: electronic book review (March 18, 2011): http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/serial. See also my response to Mittell: “From Genre to Form” (electronic book review, May 1, 2011): http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/firstperson/serialrip. 28 For a brilliant account of the plasticity and historical situatedness of a genre and its effects, see Carolyn Williams, Gilbert and Sullivan: Gender, Genre, Parody (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). Dimock also argues against the stability and simple endurance of genre: “bending and pulling and stretching are unavoidable, for what genre is dealing with is a volatile body of material, still developing, and still in transit, in some unknown and unpredictable direction.” Through Other Continents, 73–74. 29 Ferguson, “Emma and the Impact of Form,” 160. 30 Hayden V. White, The Content of the Form (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), x. 31 By 1896, fifty editions of the novel had been published in England alone. Beverly Lyon Clark, Regendering the School Story: Sassy Sissies and Tattling Tomboys (New York and London: Garland, 1996), 11. 32 Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) (Oxford: World’s Classics, 1989), 57. 33 Moretti, Distant Reading, 59. 34 “The collection of such past and future orders is not a closed list or a predetermined sequence, governed by law-like constraints or tendencies. To understand the internal constitution and the occasional remaking of these orders requires a style of social analysis that breaks with the assumptions of deep-structure social theory and positivist social science.” Roberto Mangabeira Unger, False Necessity (1987) (London and New York: Verso, 2001), 54. See also Democracy Realized (London and New York: Verso, 1998), 20. 35 See Rancière’s account of Rosa Parks in Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran (London and New York: Verso, 2006), 61. 36 Carolyn Lesjak, “Reading Dialectically,” Criticism 55 (spring 2013): 233–77. 37 Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 2009), 18. 38 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) (Chicago: Open Court, 1907), 198, 210. It is possible to capture cause-and-effect relations in statistical charts and mathematical equations, but typically these modes of representation are accompanied by narratives. See, for example, Oxfam’s 2009 report on the impact of the economic crisis on global poverty rates: http://www.oxfamblogs.or