Abstract
The tent, the shelter of pro-Palestine protests on American campuses in the spring of 2024 and of global metropolitan marginality, is an infrastructure of the unthought, constantly under the joint attack of capital and common sense. This essay attempts to welcome the tent’s interpellation to think and experience the unthought, specifically the informe, issued every time a home-dwelling observer encounters it. For hierarchical discourses, the tent is an expression of bad form or poor form, two ordinary norm-enforcing phrases that should perhaps spur us to correct or supplement, with a punning, prepositional negativity or heuristic tentativeness, the “return to form” still informing the theoretical zeitgeist. Explicit or implicit carriers of this negativity, Georges Bataille’s informe, Jacques Derrida’s fourmis, and Werner Hamacher’s afformative are various expressions of the poor (or pure) form that the tent’s an-architectural structure embodies. The relevance of these three alterations and supplementations of form, as a word and concept, to an-architecture is exemplified through comparative discussions of two artworks (Rebecca Belmore’s From Inside and Louise Bourgeois’s Maman) and a film (Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard). Collectively, these works illuminate the aesthetico-political implications of the tent’s inclination away from verticality, placement, and solidity toward horizontality, displacement, and liquidity.
