Levine: "What this book proposes, first and foremost, is a method. I aim to show that paying attention to subtle and complex formal patterns allows us to rethink the historical workings of political power and the relations between politics and aesthetics. Foucault was right to focus on the shapes and arrangements that structure everyday experience. But I have come to believe that he was wrong to imagine that these forms converge in massive regimes of coordinated power. The world is much more chaotic and contingent, formally speaking, than Foucault imagined, and therefore much more interesting— and just a little bit more hopeful as well. Literary formalists have precisely the tools to grasp this formal complexity and, with them, to begin to imagine workable, progressive, thoughtful relations among forms—including containing wholes, rhythms of labor, economic, racial and sexual hierarchies, and sprawling, connective networks of capital. For those who care passionately about unjust arrangements of power, this book argues that formalism offers a promising way forward."