"Formalism" would be a prescriptive/normative approach to form, based
on the codification of the by-products of formal imagination.
Formalists assert not only the existence of a (more or less
variegated) tradition, but also the existence of underlying rules that
determine, or generate, the contents of that tradition ("the key to
all mythologies"...). These rules place limits on the scope of
experimentation, and authorize a variety of judgements about (for
example) "skilled" and "unskilled" usage.
Obviously the formal imagination doesn't operate in a vacuum - it does
no harm to recognize formal traditions, or to try to think
systematically about their contents. The difference is perhaps the
difference between taking a given systematisation as a fixed point of
reference, a centre to which all excursions must either return or get
irrecoverably lost, and taking it as material for transformation.
Dominic
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