Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Daniel Shore. Cyberformalism: Histories of Linguistic Forms in the Digital Archive. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. 320 pp.  

Review by Michael Dango

29 March 2019

In many accounts, what computational approaches to literature offer is a reconciliation of form and history, for in the history of forms we find a form of history. Genres come and go, for instance, in response to the waves of social anxieties or political contradictions they fantastically repair or resolve. What has been more difficult to understand is the relation between text and texts, or between the singular work and the categories (generic, formal, periodic) in which it participates. Corpus analysis tends to assume equality among the works it surveys; in its most creative variations, it helps erode the unit of the work altogether, as we see linguistic phenomena that transcend any container: not just death of the author but death of the book. Yet even if we agree literary history can be understood in terms of categories, and even if we are not polemically close readers, how do we tell a story in which some novels are major cultural players and some are not; in which some texts are more paradigmatic—are better case studies—of a cultural phenomenon than others? It is in these interstices of work and category, form and history, the one and the many, “close reading” and “not reading,” that Daniel Shore's excellent book, Cyberformalism, takes residence.

Instead of treating a literary text as a “bag of words” whose organization or categorization can be determined by its vocabulary, Cyberformalism searches archives for specific, replicable syntactic structures. The aim is not to graph, map, or taxonomize the archive, but to locate individual utterances worth reading even more carefully; not to construct a master narrative of linguistic trends or generic change, but to find “variability within fixity” as the same form becomes populated with different words. In thus abandoning both the “lexicographic” or “summative” varieties of computational stylistics, while also insisting that forms travel through and transform by way of large numbers of texts instead of the singular work fetishized by close reading, the four case studies of Cyberformalism intervene both into digital humanities approaches to literary history and into current debates in literary criticism about the status of form. 

Shore’s first case study is "Was it for this," a seminal phrase for William Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1850). Scholars have long sought a “source” for the phrase, but searching for it in archives like Google Books or Early English Books Online does not simply add more candidates for the position. Rather, the great abundance of the phrase’s appearance—over a thousand before Wordsworth—shows a discursive plurality irreducible to a singular source. At the same time, it would be wrong to assume this abundance makes the phrase a mere “commonplace” Wordsworth plucked from the air. For these thousand utterances are still material rather than ethereal: there are real texts through which the phrase travels. In particular, Shore tracks the emergence of the phrase as a “classical formula” over the course of the seventeenth century, not because it appeared in classical sources, but because it came to “be a standard translation of four, fully distinct Latin phrases: Ovid’s ‘silicet idcirco’ and ‘ergo,’ Virgil’s ‘hoc erat . . . quod’ and ‘hoc illud . . . fuit’” (p. 84). In turn, the story of this form is not one of singular influence—as if Wordsworth simply imitated Virgil—but a “network of diffusion” (p. 85). The participants in this network belong more to a “set” defined by a similarity of form than to an “association” of “actual, material connections” (p. 88); this is not, in other words, a social network in which authors are actually related to or corresponding with one another. Indeed, a network of utterances liberates us from what Shore calls “personalism,” or the tracking of relationships between people, without descending into its opposite, “impersonalism,” which reduces persons to texts. Instead, we glimpse the “heterogeneity” of agents in the diffusion of form (p. 91): authors as well as translators; schools as well as presses; libraries as well as booksellers. 

The second and third case studies of Cyberformalism consider innovations in theological discourse that take the early modern as a critical point of inflection. The form [verb] as if [sentence], whose paradigmatic instantiation is act as if …, directs behavior under the influence of a proposed, rather than proven, belief and so holds special importance in Western societies during a period of increasing secularization when faith in God cannot be presumed. Shore finds primarily two varieties of the form, the first a Kantian “regulative” in which the counterfactual sentence is not itself trying to become factual (we dance as if there’s nobody watching without actually trying to “scare away all observers”) and the second a “pragmatic” imperative associated with William James, whose “Act as if the thing in question were real” (quoted on p. 118) actually “aims to make the thing real” (p. 118).  In a similar exploration of an essentially imperative form, Shore considers the use of the conditional in directing Christians to do what Jesus “would do”—a precursor to the contemporary WWJD?—as opposed to what he actually did do. He discovers the first instance of the conditional in 1590 and argues it allowed Protestant English theologians in particular to mine the historical figure of Christ for modern advice or allow modern believers to imitate Christ even though Christ had never been in their particular historical situation.  

Shore presents his case studies in increasing order of “abstraction,” his word for how undefined a form is or how unfilled a form is with lexical content. Whereas Was it for this is the least abstract because it a “fixed phrase,” Shore’s final case study is “entirely abstract” without any given lexical or syntactic organization. He turns to the “depictive adjective,” which—as in the “luxuriant” for John Milton’s “mantling vine” that “Lays forth her purple grape, and gently creeps / Luxuriant” (Paradise Lost 4.257-60)—modifies the subject of a sentence (“vine”) but is attached to and dependent on the verb (“creeps”). Shore argues these depictives, which often come in this polysyllabic form in Paradise Lost, are a key “marker” of Milton’s style. As a more abstract form, however, they’re harder to search for, and so Shore resorts to looking for verbs followed by specific adjectives he finds Milton prefers, including “[verb] magnificent” and “[verb] innumerable” (“locating a linguistic form,” Shore explains, “whether using search engines or print finding tools, is considerably simplified when it travels with a particular lexical content” [p. 176]). Searching for luxuriant (for instance) also locates Milton’s influence in contemporary poets including Wallace Stevens. 

In tracking the travel of such a stylistic marker, Shore revises earlier approaches both to the theory and the history of style. He abandons “holistic” approaches to style that would identify it wholly with a specific person (Buffon’s “style is the man himself”), period, genre, identity category, or other “principle of integration” (p. 159). Instead, “style markers”—such as a particular linguistic form—travel across many different peoples and locations; and individual texts collect many different markers, not wholly defined by one form even if that form is a central feature of it. This raises difficulties, however. If we abandon tethering style to an author, then why is this chapter principally about one author? Shore offers that “depictives are an unexceptional part of English “ and yet “Milton puts them to special use in his epic poem” (p. 155). But the status of “special” is an empirical question that would require Shore to compare this poem with all other poems in English, while in this chapter, Shore primarily searches Milton’s corpus. Moreover, in his attention to how forms travel across corpora in such a way that “it scarcely matters” if a given author adopts one “consciously or unconsciously” (p. 164), it is odd to give a “special” role to a single author at all. 

Periodically throughout Cyberformalism, Shore points to limitations related to technological sophistication; part-of-speech taggers, for instance, are less accurate when parsing “texts with nonstandard spelling or syntax” (p. 41). This raises further questions, which Shore does not quite explore, about how a history of style might be biased by those features that different technologies have the capacity to identify. Shore’s analysis of texts begins after the original material markings on a page have already been converted into the digital characters studied by machines. Stylistic markers in this approach could not include, for instance, typography or font size or the distribution of white space on a page or the use of non-semantic markings. That is, although Shore extends a lexicographer’s focus on a bag of words to a grammatician’s interest in syntactic form, his understanding of text remains necessarily linguistic, even if accommodating multiple languages; and although Cyberformalism consistently grounds abstract notions like the “commonplace” in empirical instantiations, there is still something always abstract about the digital text string as opposed to the material page. 

Shore reserves most of his discussion of possible limitations to the kind of inquiry Cyberformalism pursues for a final chapter, which is an extended meditation on Nietzsche’s phrase “God is dead.” Cutting across competing interpretations of the phrase from Heidegger to Badiou that deliberate over semantics (e.g., what is the meaning of “God” or “dead”?), Shore points out the phrase is also ambiguous syntactically. The phrase could be participating in the form God is P, where P is either a definitional noun or adjective (e.g. God is love; God is just). Or perhaps the phrase is of the form S is dead, as in “The king is dead! Long live the king!” The point is not that we should assign one form to this utterance (and there are others beyond these two from which to select), but that the multiplicity of forms that might collude on this particular utterance complicates any singular story we could tell about it. The overdetermination of cultural phenomena is a challenge for any method, but what may impede Shore’s is not too many, but too few, determiners. It is not just that a literary style may have non-literary influences, for instance pressures from developments in the plastic arts whose forms evade philological study. It is also that any genealogical inquiry moves perpendicular to the formalism of someone like Caroline Levine, who considers homology rather than causation, that is, how an aesthetic form might run parallel to, rather than come after and in response to, social and political forms. Although expansively lateral in its discursive networks, Cyberformalism tends to require an already constituted social field in which to emplace the network.         

These limitations aside, Cyberformalism provides an important redirection of our thinking about form and style, drawing us both to the small scale of the phrasal, rather than verbal, unit; and to the large scale of its social and political emergence and travel. I think it is best read as a series of experiments, not aimed at summing up history but at provoking attention to the unsung minor forms through which historical language passes.