Formalistes

Formalistes, or formalists, are adherents of formalism, an approach that emphasizes form, structure, and rules over content, origin, or external factors. The term spans several disciplines, and its exact meaning varies by field, but it generally centers on analyzing phenomena through their formal properties rather than their historical or social context.

In literary and film criticism, formalism focuses on textual or visual form: syntax, melody of language, imagery, montage, and the organization of elements within the work. Russian Formalism in the early 20th century, led by figures such as Viktor Shklovsky and Roman Jakobson, argued that literariness arises from devices that defamiliarize the ordinary. In the United States and elsewhere, New Criticism and related approaches treated the work as an autonomous object, prioritizing close reading of its formal features.

In philosophy of mathematics and logic, formalism is associated with the view that mathematics consists of symbol manipulation according to rules. David Hilbert’s program sought to justify mathematics through formal derivations and consistency proofs, rather than through interpretation of mathematical objects. This program faced challenges from Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, which showed limitations to a purely formal foundation.

In other domains, formalist approaches appear in music theory, where emphasis is placed on formal properties like harmony, rhythm, and structure; and in social sciences, where some researchers apply formal, rule-based models to study phenomena, sometimes in tension with context-rich, substantivist explanations.

Overall, formalistes prioritize form and systematic analysis as the primary lens of understanding, with the precise emphasis varying by discipline and historical moment.