Эпоха «остранения». Русский формализм и современное гуманитарное знание

In addition to these two camps, Manfred Kridl and his Vilna students (Jerzy Putrament, Maria Renata Mayenowa) tried to hover over precisely these opposite poles – Phenomenology and Formalism. The theory of Kridl may have been formulated somewhat earlier than the positions of the members of the Warsaw Circle, but it pays to present the intensity and extension of their rejection of Phenomenology, so that one may appreciate the thoroughness of the corrections of Phenomenology which were by Kridl in his attempt to fuse Formalism and Phenomenology.

Polish Formalism struggled against intersubjective, general noemata of Phenomenology in the name of perceptual habits, which may be broken, intimate (if not private) languages of poets, and individual psychological experiences. Just like the Petersburg Formalists rejected the essentialist Aesthetic fragments by Shpet and the conceptions of his Moscow followers, whom they perceived as traitors to the fundamental assumptions of the circle [Виноградов, 1975: 264], the anti-phenomenological Polish Formalists specified their stance in the polemic with Phenomenology: the most interesting theoretical debates in pre-war Poland were the two that took place between Roman Ingarden and Leon Chwistek on the one hand, and between Ingarden and the poet Julian Tuwim on the other, concerning the existence (or the lack) of general meanings of sentences in literature [Chwistek, 2004: 195 ff.; Tuwim, 1934; Ingarden, 1934]. The existence of general meanings would be a strong argument in favor of treating the presented world and the aesthetical and metaphysical values conveyed by it as the essence of the literary (the essence of literary cognition). Is the reception of a literary work first and foremost the cognition of the presented world, as Ingarden claimed, or is experiencing an unheard-of metaphor or an interesting grouping of sounds central in this regard? What is the highest or most important facet in the moment of reception? Is it Ingarden’s revelation of the metaphysical qualities, enclosed in the intersubjecive structure of the presented world, or the jouissance that arises when a form breaks a habit of perception? Both sides of the argument stress the cognitive values of literature, but one aims at noetic recognition while the other at energetic cognition.

A solution for this conflict was proposed by Manfred Kridl, whose integral method really seems to have achieved a compromise between Phenomenology and Formalism. Phenomenology had to give up its claim for the existence of noemata, whether general meanings of sentences or “inner forms” of works; Formalism, on its part, was obliged to acknowledge the central role of the presented world in literary works. In order to conduct the synthesis, Kridl took Phenomenology back to the positions of Kazimierz Twardowski, the seminal figure of the Lvov-Warsaw School [Twardowski, 1894][82]: this was a Phenomenology that did not recognize the intuition of abstract essences and took meanings to be individual mental products, so that this approach could be effectively combined with the formalist nominalism. Not only may this kind of Phenomenology be combined with Formalism, but it seems to suit better Formalism’s declared intentions to study artistic experiences, because it explicitly takes the first person position as its point of departure. In short, Kridl proposes that the method of studying literary works be phenomenological but he refrains from subscribing essentialist meanings to words that make up a literary work and, as far as form is concerned, he remains nominalist in proclaiming that only unique literary entities exist.