formalism

is a concern for deep structure, poetic and tropic modes of discourse.

Metahistory that 'my method, in short, is formalist,' where 'formalist' means a concern for 'deep structure' as well as 'poetic' and 'tropic' modes of discourse (White 1973. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe)

is the effecting of a 'break' with commonsense which involves a 'second break' with that form and a subsequent turn to relationality and context.

William Hanks (1996) has described how the formalism of linguistics effectuates a 'break' the with the commonsense, or outside, perspective on linguistic practices that are the ethnographer's as much as those of the subjects of study (6). He describes how this 'break' then invariably is followed by a 'second break' a turn to 'relationality' in which the analyst seeks to collapse the ' 'relationality' in which the analyst seeks to collapse the distance effectuated by form and to bring context back in (7). Form, then, serves as a classic device for achieving the distance that makes ethnography effective. The innovation of the Network form is that its formality anticipates this 'second break': it claims to take into account both system and heterogeneity, both models and real complexities at once' (Riles 2001:64)

formalism, n.Definitions

formalism