Form is back.

In various corners of anthropology, the word and its cognates emerge from a long hibernation. Anthropologists of infrastructure explore ‘promising forms’ (Degani 2017; Larkin 2018; Maurer 2012); work on the intersection between politics and aesthetics examines the power of empty forms (Boyer & Yurchak 2010; Lefort 1986; Yurchak 2006, 2015); the old trope of the ‘informal economy’ is sparking new ethnographic interest in formality itself as an organising aesthetic (Appel 2019; Gandolfo 2013; Stinchcombe 2001); meanwhile in the anthropology of personhood, questions of the form of persons and their action – of character, role, habit, behaviour (Candea 2018; Kavedžija 2018; Reed & Bialecki 2018; Reed 2019; Strathern 2018) – surface once again at the intersection between the shaping of collective and individual persons (Bashkow 2014; Du Gay 2007); finally, anthropologists of epistemology and epistemologists of anthropology are paying increasing attention to the form of concepts and epistemic devices (Candea 2019; Corsín Jiménez 2011, 2013; Helmreich 2011; Holbraad 2020; Howe & Boyer 2015; Jiménez & Willerslev 2007; Rumsey 2004).

It would be tempting to dismiss these various recent evocations of form, formalism and formality in anthropology as coincidental and unrelated. After all, form is a protean concept, as Carol Levine notes

“Over many centuries, form has gestured to a series of conflicting, sometimes even paradoxical meanings. Form can mean immaterial idea, as in Plato, or material shape, as in Aristotle. It can indicate essence, but it can also mean superficial trappings, such as conventions—mere forms. Form can be generalizing and abstract, or highly particular (as in the form of this thing is what makes it what it is, and if it were reorganized it would not be the same thing). Form can be cast as historical, emerging out of particular cultural and political circumstances, or it can be understood as ahistorical, transcending the specificities of history.” (: Levine 2015: 2)

Yet I will suggest that there is something more happening here than a merely coincidental riffing on a polysemic term. Certainly, these anthropological evocations of form do not yet explicitly reach out to each other or present themselves as anything like a ‘paradigm’ or ‘turn’. And yet, they share at first glance a certain ‘vintage’ vibe, the sense of reaching for something long cast away, dusting it off, polishing it and finding in it unsuspecting beauty and practicality. This return to form is not however a move back in time. There is no such thing in the history of theory, where every return is a reinvention, and every new turn a return of sorts (Abbott 2001). Yet the (re)turn to form does look back, in important ways. Once one pauses to ask why ‘form’ feels old, this initial whiff of the vintage opens up onto something more precise. What these various (re)turns to form in anthropology share, I would suggest, is a dissatisfaction with the anti-formal mood which has shaped the past half-century of anthropological theorising.

Once the shared common currency of otherwise radically opposed theoretical factions – Functionalism, Structuralism, Marxism, amongst others – form fell out of favour as a result of two intersecting critiques. The first sought freedom from form in the pursuit of formlessness, openendedness and play. The second sought to reach a reality behind or beneath the bloodless abstractions of form, in materiality – substance, embodiment and things. These two waves of critique, let us call them - all too simplistically - ‘post-structuralism’ and ‘the material turn’, overlapped and intersected in many ways, yet they are frequently narrated as sequential and mutually opposed. First, we are told, in the 1980s a playful postmodernism broke with the strictures of structure (although some, like (Culler 2018) to whom we return below, have helpfully complicated that story). Then, from the mid-90s onwards, a concern with the Real (embodiment, materiality, ontology…) came as a reaction to the merely ‘literary’ postmodern turn. There is something to that sequential story - as an anthropologist training at the turn of the 21st century, I certainly thrilled, together with many of my generation, at the vivid sense that we were finally leaving the long shadow of ‘the 80s’ behind, and reaching out to a new real. The problem at hand was not structure or anti-structure, but rather how to move beyond the whole concern with trope, epistemology and evocation in order to get at the real: ontology, actor-networks, and the agency of matter held the promise of a return to the properly substantial. But that periodization obscures what those two – actually broadly coeval – waves of critique shared, namely a joint, pincer-like, rejection of a concern with form.

The postmodern or post-structuralist critique of form has sometimes been caricatured as a mere enthusiasm for ‘free play’ (a mistranslation of Derrida’s more ambiguous ‘jeu’ as Culler 2018 points out) as against ‘boring’ structures. But it had a more serious edge, as a simultaneously an epistemic and a political project, grounded in an association of form and structure with a particularly unpalatable form of power. As Levine notes for the parallel developments in literary studies,

“We have tended to assume that political forms are powerful, all- encompassing, and usually simple in themselves: a sexist or racist regime, for example, splits the world into a crude and comprehensive binary, its stark simplicity black and white, masculine and feminine— contributing to the regime’s painful power. We have therefore learned to look for places where the binary breaks down or dissolves, generating possibilities that turn the form into something more ambiguous and ill- defined—formless. Scholars in recent years have written a great deal about indeterminate spaces and identities, employing such key terms as liminality, borders, migration, hybridity, and passing.” (ibid.)

For that critical imaginary, a Bataillean attention to the formless was a promise and a hope:

It is to recall what our structures and systems produce and suppress as they impose order in the world and to affirm [formlessness] as capable of breaking or deforming those structures and systems from within their limits. In social terms, formless “testif[ies] to something in excess of regulative and homogeneous forms,” an excess that explodes sense and system through their “intense and incomplete movement within and away from governing structures” (Botting and Wilson 2001:2–3, 7 in : Gandolfo 2013: 282)

At the same time, as Hiro Miyazaki perceptively noted some time ago, anthropology’s turn to an analytics of provisionality and indeterminacy, in which the attribution of causality and agency are eschewed – what Miyazaki terms “an aesthetic of emergence” (: Miyazaki 2004: 137)– was a reaction to a particular kind of epistemic anxiety, “anthropologists’ acute collective awareness of their belatedness in relation to the now of the world they seek to represent.” (ibid). An aesthetic of emergence, a rejection of form in analysis, was a way to allow changes in the emergent world to drive changes in our accounts, a way to reestablish some kind of congruity, to close the uncanny gap between the world and our accounts of it (ibid). This aesthetic explains the tendency for at least some accounts produced since that period to “dissolve into a processual-relational haze” (as Humphrey 2008: 358 writes more particularly of anthropological accounts of personhood).

The material turn approached form from another albeit equally critical angle. As Larkin notes, in reference to the work of scholars such as Bruno Latour or Jane Bennet,

“One consequence of the new materialism is to counterpose the material to form, or at least to certain definitions of form. If the problem of Aristotelian hylomorphism was that Aristotle saw form as something imprinted upon matter, reducing matter to a passive receptacle without any agency, materialism has maintained this split while reversing its hierarchy, placing the material as primary. This is why the material turn prefers “unformed” synonyms—matter, material, objects, things—which describe substances in their amorphous, “unformed,” elemental state.” (Larkin 2018: 5)

Of course, in their own terms, these theorists did not, as Larkin claims, seek a simple reversal of the priority of hylomorphism. They sought more radically a dissolution of the very distinction at its heart. Almost comical in its hubris, Ingold’s proposal “to overthrow the [hylomorphic] model itself” (: Ingold 2010: 92) is nevertheless fairly characteristic in intent. The material turn was, in its own imaginary, a nondualism (Evens 2008). But the point is recursive: to dissolve the distinction between form and matter is to get rid of (the) form (of the distinction). Every nondualism is also an anti-formalism.

The past half-century, in sum, has been intensely antiformalist. In its valuation of life, transformation, flow and mutability, as against the vague sense that “Form, to recall Klee’s words, is death" (Ingold 2010: 92), the material turn echoed and amplified the post-structuralist strictures on the imposition of form as power. While they came from different angles, and at times seemed to be in tension, these two critiques of form met in the middle.

What the current – and as yet still dispersed, appeals to form suggest, is a mounting dissatisfaction with this antiformalist consensus. One of its organising intuitions is that antiformalism has always been in practice parasitic on what it claimed to reject. Culler, writing specifically about the poststructuralist turn, notes that

“The strange result of the American positing of poststructuralism is that the vocabularies, procedures, and results of structuralist thinkers are preserved and celebrated but the frameworks of systematic projects are often bracketed or set aside, as if they had been discredited.” (2018: 93)

The observation applies more broadly, however, to rejections of form. The various antiformalist critiques of Durkheimian and Marxist accounts of social structure and social function all posited an interest in gaps, change, dysfunction and exception. Yet none of these could be imagined or posited without an underlying account of social form, an account the possibility of which these critics nevertheless disavowed. To attend to liminality, borders, migration, hybridity, and passing, one still needs a social morphology. More broadly, it has become banal to note that nondualism itself is necessarily a dualism - it still claims after all that there are two kinds of people, those who divide the world in two kinds of people and those who do not.

A second common theme is a recognition that distinctions, including binaries and dichotomies, do important work both in the world and in anthropology’s own conceptual life (Candea 2019; Candea et al. 2015; Yarrow 2008). This is not to re-establish a primacy of form over matter, but just to recognise that, however mutually imbricated, the two need to be at least conceptually separable. Levine notes for instance that “One cannot make a poem out of soup or a panopticon out of wool. In this sense, form and materiality are inextricable, and materiality is determinant.” (Levine 2015: 9). Yet that very observation itself relies on the capacity of separating matter and form in order to describe their interplay.

Beyond such broadly shared intuitions, however, is there more afoot in these diverse strands of contemporary anthropology than a common rejection of a rejection of form? Can ‘form’ be made to do more precise work? Does anthropology have, or need, “a new formalist method” (cf. Levine 2015)?

I leave these questions hanging as a provocation. The aim of this short piece is not yet to articulate a fully-fledged manifesto for a return to form (although see Candea 2019 for something more programmatic). The aim here is merely to highlight the contours of an older theoretical moment, one which is coming more clearly into view precisely because it is receding. Anti-formalism is becoming visible as a theoretical moment we can look back on. One might start to teach it in a lecture course on anthropological theory. Which is to say, it is on the cusp of extinction or eclipse. By contrast, anthropology’s return to form is as yet – paradoxically – inchoate. And that’s an open invitation.

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