A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meaning of words, but their tasks. Thus formless is not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down in the world, generally requiring that each thing have its form. What it designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an earthworm. In fact, for academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take form [trans. mod.]. All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is, a mathematical frock coat. On the other hand, affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or spit.
Georges Bataille, “Formless”
Slavery’s technologies were not the denial of humanity but the plasticization of humanity. . . . Arguably, plasticization is the fundamental violation of enslavement: not any one form of violence—animalization or objectification, for instance—but rather coerced formlessness as a mode of domination and the Unheimlich existence that is its result.
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World
Spiders and Earthworms
This special issue delves into the freighted and often-debated relationship between form and formlessness, and we begin by positing that formlessness as a concept arises as the result of an attunement to form. Scholars calling for a renewed attention to form often decry the political impoverishment of formlessness, which is deployed to characterize the fragmented, interstitial, liminal, immaterial, evanescent, hybrid, unstable, unruly, unbounded, shapeless, or indeterminate. Formlessness is affiliated with gaps, dehiscence, play, disruption, dissolution, disorder, failure, excess, decomposition, or “anarcho-vitalism.”1 In service of a maximalist formalism, formlessness is simply presented as form’s opposite, at times becoming a straw man to better define formalist engagements and justify the necessity to attend to form. Yet we argue that, far from leading us into the fantasized ether or magma of shapelessness at the cost of our ability to say something for the real world—an often positivist anxiety—the formless sharpens our formalist eye. While we distance ourselves from the kinds of formalism that insist that “everything is form,” this issue assembles articles that take on the task of discussing form in relation to formlessness from multiple perspectives. As the epigraphs to this introduction hint, this reassessment of form and the formless is not done in a theoretical vacuum: this conversation on the relevance of noticing and notioning formlessness is indebted to Georges Bataille and contemporary Black studies.
We draw on Bataille’s coining of the adjective informe (formless) in his eponymous text of 1929: “Thus formless is not only an adjective having a given meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down in the world, generally requiring that each thing have its form.”2 Words, for Bataille, are not separate entities flatly applied to the reality they describe; instead, they intervene and act in the world. Formless refers to what is declassed and stripped of any rights, while the formed is endowed with historical force by the institutions that bestow norms upon things. Such a conception of form stages it as the marker of a metaphysical ordering of the world, as function rather than mere feature. From within this hegemony, formlessness signals the debased, declassed, and abject, unrecognized in form. The valence given here to form as norm and to the formless as that which has “no rights” implies that form and formlessness are dynamic, agentic categories: not simply describing shape but lending it ideological function.
Using the examples of “spider” and “earthworm” as incarnations of formlessness, Bataille writes at a time of widespread fascism across Europe—eugenicism and political theories of race are only some of the formalizing discourses he has in mind. Indeed, “Informe” was published in the first issue of Documents, a journal soon home to another widely circulated text of Bataille’s: “Abattoir” (“Slaughterhouse”),3 where an anti-bourgeois critique of sanitizing discourse both implicitly invokes the massacres of World War I and foreshadows the genocidal program of National Socialism and fascism leading up to World War II. It is notable that the current resurgence of formalisms and a return to the evocative force of the formless happens to coincide with a historical moment of widespread authoritarianism and ongoing genocide. In an article on the Bataillean informe and the war in Gaza, Abdaljawad Omar argues that anticolonial resistance emerges from within the structures of colonialism with the capacity to “deform the colonial order.”4 Bataille allows us to hold form and shape as distinct and to understand form and the formless as political categories not only because they arrange the world’s hierarchies but also because form and the formless become the ideological layer tinting all shapes that exist.
In 1996 Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss leveraged Bataille’s concept of formlessness to stage a conceptual battle against modernism in an exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In the accompanying catalog, Formless: A User’s Guide, they present each of the exhibition’s organizing categories as a subversion of four pillars of modernism: horizontality (against verticality), base materialism (against the visual and the elision of matter), pulsation (against the instantaneous), and entropy (against structure and sublimation). They explicitly distance themselves from the association of formlessness as abject, which, to them, would reproduce the formless as figure. Although the exhibition was widely celebrated, its legacy has recently been subjected to reevaluation.
The 2021 issue of November magazine, “On L’informe,” calls into question the alleged radicality of this canonical exhibition. In particular, a roundtable conversation among three of November’s editors, the art critic Bruce Hainley, and the curator Ruba Katrib draws our attention to the fact that, while the show featured artworks from 1935—only a few tumultuous years after the original publication of “Informe”—to 1975, it completely elided the multiple wars and genocides that took place in that period. By resisting the possible figuration of the formless, Bois and Krauss’s dedication to an asocial abstraction “seemingly allows them to obscure what was being done to bodies during the period that their show covered.”5 In her article “Black Bataille,” published in the same issue, Aria Dean notes base materialism’s affinity with Afropessimism and advocates for an “absolute counter-modernism” in Black art.6 The reassessment of Bataille’s relevance for Black studies is continued in a 2024 issue of liquid blackness, “Informalisms,” in which “form comes down to a question of value, insofar as form is the precondition of value’s legibility, its operations, its logistics.”7 For these artists and writers, the relation between form and the formless is critical to the consideration of what lies outside form, or is beneath it, or, indeed, of what it squashes.
While Zakiyyah Iman Jackson does not engage directly with Bataille, her notion of plasticity resonates with the Bataillean informe precisely through the sustained analysis of this relation. In Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Anti-Black World (2020), Jackson analyzes the advent of the category of the human to show how it comes to exist as a specific raced and gendered formation, a pillar in the Enlightenment’s metaphysics and its ordering of the world. “Plasticization” describes the assignment of formlessness as an ever-malleable ontology onto the “black(ened) subject.” Not unlike how Bataille highlights the function of informe and of form in both bringing down and elevating different figures, Jackson shows that the black(ened) subject is constitutive of shaping the world as it is through a humanity made plastic.8 In this order of forms, the abject is a formless, plastic figure—which is not to say that it lacks shape. Rather, we might say, with Rizvana Bradley, that it is “anteaesthetic.”9 In Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form (2023), Rizvana Bradley states that she shares with Denise Ferreira da Silva and Calvin Warren an “interest” in Bataille’s notion of informe10 but that her intervention turns to the specificity of a Black informe and posits it as anterior to form.11 In other words, for Bradley, “blackness is the condition of (im)possibility of form,”12 anterior to ontology, aesthetics, metaphysics. In this context, the formless and form are irreconcilable yet not in total separation, as anteaesthetic practices “deconstruct the modern order of forms” to provide its foremost, albeit entangled, critique.13
We thus bring informe, plasticity, and anteaesthetics into the current conversation on formalism as form’s discontents, the objects of those modern phobias fueling the organization of the world in a hierarchical metaphysical order. To understand form and the formless as political categories means to wager that form, while everywhere, is no more anodyne than formlessness and performs tasks that the formalist readings in this special issue seek to at times undo, uncover, or theorize. Thinking through reconfigurations of form in discourse, aesthetics, and social thought, this issue’s contributions, without turning their back on abstraction, probe the affordances of formalism to consider what may be called formless while staying rooted in embodied experience or social reality, in and beyond a Bataillean key.
Formal Discontent
To undo the simplistic dichotomy of form and formlessness, it is necessary to attend to the complex configurations of what form itself has come to name. Rather than reinscribing a dualistic split of form and content, contemporary interventions draw attention to form as an agentive force. One could say that matter inheres in form, but material properties have affordances that produce forms, and forms are constraints that exert their own pressure, which may be constructive as well as violent. As Raymond Williams identifies in Keywords, the word form has been used ambiguously to refer to both outward appearance and internal organizing principle, the latter having contributed to the redirection in formalism toward examining historical processes.14 This inherent tension in the word has given rise to a split between aesthetic form and social form, in which the former refers to what we designate as “formal” qualities, such as line, structure, or color, and the latter refers to a historical articulation of socioeconomic interaction.
Against the aestheticist strands of formalism that ignore the profane provenances of rhyme and meter, we insist that form encompasses both the aesthetic and the social. As the articles in this issue demonstrate, acknowledging the social does not require an abdication of formalist concern or discernment. We do not wish to beleaguer the disciplinary tug-of-war within new formalism that Marjorie Levinson delineated nearly two decades ago between a historicist “activist formalism” that embraces ideology critique and a “normative formalism” invested in the disinterested autotelic play of art.15 Our inquiry into the dynamic between form and formlessness interrogates the possibilities of formalism while maintaining purchase on the political. Without seeking to carve out a niche among the various camps under the broad umbrella of new formalism, the articles in this issue grapple with the stakes set forth by this existing conversation.
To be sure, formalism has provided a bulwark against the fear of politics running roughshod over humanities scholarship. Urging us to “turn away from history without shame,” Sandra Macpherson, for instance, writes that form is “nothing more—and nothing less—than the shape matter (whether a poem or a tree) takes.”16 In a sympathetic vein, the editors of the 2020 post45 issue “Formalism Unbound” wonder, “What might a true departure from political criticism and its commitment to assessing all cultural forms in ideological terms look like?”17 In turn we ask what is overlooked when “political criticism” is framed as a necessarily reductive operation, in which sensitivity to formal play is understood as incompatible with political consciousness and, indeed, critique. After all, the shapes of trees emerge in relation to their environments. Trees themselves are razed for development, incinerated in wildfires, or planted on the ruined landscapes of Palestinian dispossession.18 As the post45 editors anticipated in attempting to grasp a way out, we “reject the apparent dichotomy between political and formalist criticism as a false one.”19
In this sense, we feel more aligned with recent proponents of formalism in literary studies who embrace a materialist approach to aesthetics. For Caroline Levine, form indicates an “arrangement of elements—an ordering, patterning, or shaping,” identifiable in the disciplinary rhythms of timetables and the periodizations that alike enable literary study.20 To view forms in this manner recasts the world as forms encountering forms, each ordering our senses, attention, and experiences. Far from rarefied literary ontologies, what is at stake for Levine is no less than the ability to organize against capitalism. Building on Levine, Anna Kornbluh asserts that “humans cannot exist without forms that scaffold sociability,” positing relationships as formalized and foundationally social. This architectural metaphor stresses the importance of active construction—to figure new types of relations, in addition to dismantling those of exploitation and oppression, to “provide structure for new possibles.”21 In a utopian gesture, Kornbluh argues that aesthetic productions can figure, or prefigure, social relations that do not yet exist.
Not only do forms allow us to reimagine collective social life, but they also encapsulate existing social lives and circulate, intermingling with new contexts and accruing meaning. In other words, forms are portable and repeatable; they travel and transform. We may think of how appropriations of iconic historic photographs, most famously the Tank Man, skirt censorship and amnesia, sustaining public secrecy in the People’s Republic of China by means of what Margaret Hillenbrand has dubbed “photo-forms.”22 While Levine and Kornbluh theorize forms as figures that make legible social abstraction, Hillenbrand demonstrates how forms carry sociohistorical traces, allowing them to recycle through different contexts.
Yet we are wary of the subordination of formalist reading methods to political commitments. Wielded clumsily, political interpretation allows foregone conclusions imposed by ideological leanings to clamp down on critical interpretations of film, literature, and art. Insufficient regard for formal strategies can lead to instrumental readings. Eugenie Brinkema stakes her method of “reading without guarantee” against Fredric Jameson’s injunction to “always historicize,” in stark contrast with theorists like Levine and Kornbluh. Brinkema emphasizes reading as risk-taking. To delve profoundly into formalist analysis, for Brinkema, is to relinquish a predetermined sense of what interpretation might yield, in terms of political efficacy and moral righteousness.23 Following Brinkema, this issue seeks to think “without guarantee” about form: to maintain an openness to form and to understand form as resolutely open.
This special issue constellates articles that neither take a key definition of form for granted nor respond to any one prescribed concept of form. Although the contention over form and formalism laid out thus far draws primarily from intradisciplinary disputes in literary studies, the articles in this issue situate themselves within and against the fields of Asian American studies, queer studies, Black studies, film and television studies, contemporary art, philosophy, digital media, and literature. As Jonathan Kramnick and Anahid Nersessian have argued, form necessitates constant redefinition and reinterrogation: “That form appears sometimes as shape, sometimes as pattern, sometimes as habit, line structure, model, design, trope, and so on suggests not that formalism is incoherent but that form, like cause—perhaps like any useful and compelling term—is not a word without content but a notion bound pragmatically to its instances.”24 By underscoring its rich multivalence, Kramnick and Nersessian note how form requires, even demands, explanation whenever it is used as a governing concept, to “make form visible within an evolving set of practices and norms.”25 Form has an air of the intellectual; it can make sensible and make sense.
As Bataille writes in the second epigraph above, “For academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take form.” This universe of forms becomes a grimy subway filled with apparitions and junk in the epic poem The Descent of Alette, by Alice Notley. A painter tells Alette:
Notley tries to reclaim speech through the staccato of quoted text, to leverage ventriloquy as a way to speak through, or around, these forms that syncretize the injustices of the world. Pauses propel themselves through the formalizing quotation marks, contouring the rhythm of breath. This repeated interruption mimics crackling ice, frozen forms moving in articulated segments.
The use of em dashes in phrases pertaining to the tyrant’s ownership, “doesn’t own—” and “not a thing at all—,” plays on the negative expressions of the sentences. There is nothing at all that he doesn’t own, visualized through yet another punctuation mark that makes silence felt. The world proper to the tyrant, in the sense of what he possesses and what is characteristic of the tyrant, is a total one: forms, shapes, legibility. For Notley, the claustrophobia of forms squeezes out everything, even air. Shortly after, the painter states that she wants to “do something like / paint air.” To her dismay, her attempts always turn into shapes, which have all already been “invented” by the tyrant—in other words, they have all been made into forms.27
In this issue, the articles unfold form over and over, rethinking form in relation to formlessness. We ask, How do form and formlessness function as social operations, which stage differentiations and hierarchies in the world? What relationship does form have with the body? In particular, what is the relation of race, queerness, animality, or intoxication to embodied formlessness? What positions and postures might forms assume? How does the formless function as a condition that makes form possible or makes perceptible its limits?
The first reconfiguration of form in this issue is the tent, a bad form. Mario Telò elaborates his theory of the tent form in an expanded version in “Poor or Pure Form: On the Political Aesthetics of the Tent,” originally delivered as a talk at a Berkeley conference shortly after the dismantlement of the pro-Palestinian student encampment on campus. Veering away from an argumentative mode, Telò stretches the possibilities of the tent informe on the tenters of what Brinkema calls “speculative form,” allowing formal tensions to proliferate. The drooping lineament of the an-architectural tent, associated as it is with homelessness, displacement, and migration, connects it to the provisional over the stable, the horizontal over the vertical—making it a space, in other words, of what Werner Hamacher dubs afformation, an “unforming in forming.”28 Reading the tent isomorphically with the giant spider in Louise Bourgeois’s Maman, Telò underscores the threat to the liberal order embodied in the spider’s “closed openness,” which is also linked to trans-animality. By invoking Jacques Derrida’s fourmis, a play on forme (form) and fourmis (ants), Telò conjures a swarm of sprawling tents, a corporeality undifferentiated by gender or species but resolutely grounded. Just as the swirling dresses in a ballroom scene in the film The Leopard (dir. Luchino Visconti, 1963) liquefy the gaze, the tents of the student encampments challenge the existing relation between form and state.
Turning our attention to moving images, Tess Takahashi poses a direct challenge to the common practice in film criticism of understanding experimental films through a hermeneutic rubric based in cultural and biographical truisms. In “Form for All: Traversing the Skins of Human Bodies and Bodies of Discourse,” she reads Emma Hart’s Skin Film (2005–7) to rethink the form of skin. To create Skin Film, Hart transferred the entire surface area of her body by sticking clear adhesive tape to her skin and then to 16mm film. Skin, the principal site of racialization, evokes the crudest of social abstractions, stereotypes, which blinker even sophisticated viewers, who, when faced with the opacity of experimental art, give in to the temptation to reach for easy interpretation. Takahashi adds her own response to Donna Haraway’s question in the 1991 Cyborg Manifesto: “Why should our bodies end at the skin?”29 Takahashi demonstrates how Hart’s film transforms our concept of skin from a form that binds and contains a whole—in this case, an ostensibly stable self—to a “site of transit” that opens significative possibilities. Placing the film in conversation with Hortense Spillers, Leo Bersani, and others, Takahashi avouches that the film, by detaching skin from the body, both undermines self-evident embodiment and identity and reinforces the way that whiteness is granted the possibility of abstraction. However, rather than a critique of whiteness, what Takahashi elaborates is a method that opens all artworks in the experimental idiom to the pleasures and intellectual rigor of contending with the semantic difficulty of abstraction.
What kind of labor enables and maintains the performance of form? What is invisibilized to make form visible? Through close analysis of artworks on museum guards, Amber Jamilla Musser argues in “Excess and Formlessness: Abang-guard and the Atmospheric” that formlessness is the condition of possibility for perceptible form. At the heart of this article is a 2018 performance piece at the ARoS Museum in Denmark and the accompanying short film, Work Habits, by Abang-guard, a Filipinx art group comprising the filmmaker and photographer Maureen Catbagan and the painter Jevijoe Vitug. Instead of remaining silent and still, Catbagan and Vitug walk around, stretch, dance, and sing. Musser places Abang-guard in conversation with earlier works of art, namely Fred Wilson’s Guarded View (1991) and Mierle Ukeles’s Washing/Tracks/Maintenance: Outside (1973), to draw out the racialization and gendering of labor. Rather than putting labor on display, however, Abang-guard actively engages the attention of viewers. Musser reveals that their playful subversion of the role of museum guards enables an understanding of formlessness as atmospheric, an excess of form that engulfs and enmeshes, eroding the distance between subject and object. Her extended inquiry into the use of sound in Work Habits shows how formlessness is not just empty space but also affect and energy.
Meanwhile, in “Unable to Be Titled: Form/lessness, Asian Americanist Critique, and the Destitution of Worlds,” Suiyi Tang examines anti-humanism and negativity in the 2020 solo exhibition of the American artist Catalina Ouyang, it has always been the perfect instrument. By reading the exhibition via Bataille’s nondialectical materialism, Tang argues that the anti-relationality of Ouyang’s artworks extends the Asian Americanist subjectless discourse in new directions, revealing the formlessness kerneled in aesthetic and social form. Tang leads us through Ouyang’s assembly of sculpture, poetry, and film, showing how their truncated forms permit viewers to tarry with their base materiality, resisting sublation into homogenizing form. By remaining with the raw, the artworks propose an “architecture against architecture,” to borrow Bataille’s formulation, which “forecloses” subjectification and elucidation. Just as architecture, for Bataille, exerts an oppressive political structure, the identitarian subject is a force of containment and restriction. Like Takahashi, Tang casts doubt on the ostensible unity of the racialized subject and its explanatory capacity, lauding instead the heterogeneity of Ouyang’s art and their refusal to present their work as a decodable cipher for themself. As subjectless discourse wrangles anxiously with the difficulty of consolidating Asian American identity, Tang questions whether this direction further traps minoritarian worldmaking in the “world already made.” For Tang, radical asociality does not sap the artwork of its political impetus but discloses the compulsion at the heart of social wholes.
Turning to televisuality, Nick Salvato thinks through the notion of deformation using a modestly popular American police procedural in the 1990s in “Deformation; or, Catachresis and Silk Stalkings.” He unfolds with verve a deconstructive reading of its pilot episode, reflexively prompting us to consider whether poststructuralist methods and the deconstructive essay are indeed “deformed” forms, anachronistic as they have become. Building on Derridean catachresis as a metaphor that can twist and generate force, Salvato argues that deformation is never simply distortion but a multipart process that reforms as well as distorts, refashions as well as misshapes. Moments when form comes undone, then, provide the most fruitful opportunities to learn more about form. Salvato makes the important case that what may seem as overreading to its detractors is simply reading and that formalism can and must “open itself to the textures of collaborative work.” In recuperating deconstruction from the dustheap of humanities scholarship, Salvato rebuffs criticism from detractors of poststructuralism that this method attends insufficiently to material conditions. What Salvato describes as the “semiotic baroqueness” of Silk Stalkings emerges not from a pure text but from shared experiences—his own, with his professors, colleagues, and students, as well as those of the crew who worked on the show.
In “The Intoxicating Image: Antonin Artaud and Jean Epstein’s Impossible Search for Formlessness,” Juan Camilo Velásquez reveals that formlessness, far from a concept indebted wholly to Bataille, was a broader modernist fascination in 1920s France. By investigating intoxication as a type of embodied formlessness through examining the works of Bataille’s contemporaries in early cinema, Velásquez places the dichotomy between form and formlessness in conversation with the Nietzschean Apollonian and Dionysian, opposing form and force. States of altered consciousness, facilitated by substances like laudanum, opium, and alcohol, allow us to think through fluid systems of knowledge, as can cinema and poetry. The quest for the dissolution of the individual—the evaporation of self and matter—resonates with Bataillean sovereignty, a state beyond boundaries. Velásquez contends that this total abnegation through intoxication is both euphoric and impossible, rendering formlessness a “limit concept” that one can only attempt to grasp. Although both filmmakers evinced interest in cinema’s capacity for intoxication, their approaches and preoccupations differed notably. Epstein’s cinematic vision favored metamorphosis and mobility, conveyed through cross-dissolves and superimpositions, while Artaud, after an initial faith in filmic sublimity, rejected cinema for theater, whose expression of liveness could more effectively obliterate the boundaries between art and life.
Moving away from form and aesthetics, the following articles inquire into the importance of form in Marxist thought. Karen Ng asks us to reinterpret Marx’s concept of species-being as a continuation of the Kantian project of critique in “Species-Being, Metabolism, and Natural Limits.” She demonstrates how, understood in this manner, the concept of species-being is not confined to the early Marx but continues to play a central role in Capital. Indeed, Ng identifies species-being as the normative framework of Marx’s critique of political economy, demonstrating that project’s connection with questions of living form through claims about capital’s limitlessness. To say that capital is limitless (maßlos) is to recognize its incompatibility with the fundamentally purposive—and therefore limited—activity of self-conscious living beings. Crucial to Ng’s analysis is a revised understanding of natural limits, in which species-being is understood in terms of its power to grasp natural limits, or “the determinate shape and powers of [its] purposive activity.” Ng further argues that this philosophical account of limits provides a necessary corrective to recent currents in eco-Marxist scholarship, which rely on an empirical account of Earth’s finitude—an argument that too easily lapses into Malthusianism. Ng thus argues that capital is irrational, not merely because it pursues the wrong ends but because it does not—properly speaking—pursue any ends at all.
While Ng argues that Marx’s critique of capital is about its formlessness in the sense that it lacks purposive activity, Alan Díaz Alva directs his critique to the formalizing logic of capital. He troubles the possibility of “technological neutrality” through an articulation of the formal relations between digitality and capital, artfully inscribing the operations of form and formlessness in a Marxian framework. Following Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Díaz Alva frames form as distinctly historical and social, as a “mode of existence” produced from capitalist abstraction, which may be extended to the digital domain not only as a historical process but also in its formalizing logic. This formalizing logic, in Seb Franklin’s words, is a process of “differential allocation of form and formlessness,” which is to say that these processes both endow form and deny it via interconnectivity and proximity to the value network. Abject social forms, such as the “surplus population” of prisoners or the unemployed, are the “underside” or “immanent exterior” of this formalizing logic. Essential to his argument is that this differential allocation has historically been articulated through race in a process isomorphic to the racial logic of computation, which, building on Jonathan Beller, functions according to and even requires “the economic calculus of the dialectics of social difference.”30 It is thus insufficient to propose a decolonization through the repurposing of technologies. Rather, Díaz Alva asks, Might it be possible to decolonize and remake abstractive processes themselves?
Furthering our investigation more dialogically are two interviews and a book review. In “The Enduring Problem: An Interview about Form,” Brinkema argues that form, rather than a category to be analyzed and typologized in subsets of categories, or forms in the plural, poses a renewable problem activated by the practice of reading without guarantee. For Brinkema, reading without guarantee is a methodological wager that takes the risk of reading form without prescribing meaning or political value in advance. To read formally is a commitment to thinking as work, to work as process, to a process as a temporal investment without a return. The value of formalism becomes precisely a resistance to the formation of value derived from utility, whether political, moral, or pragmatic. In this manner, the “disaffordances” of her radical formalism focus on destabilizing, wrecking, and undoing the terms of analysis. Similarly dynamic, formlessness could be better thought of as a formlessnessing, the “continual ruination of form” toward a “differently ordered form.” Reading without guarantee as a speculative practice extends to thinking, writing, and teaching without guarantee, embracing form as infinite undoing.
Form plays a more central role in Ramzi Fawaz’s thinking than the formless, as it does in Brinkema’s. In fact, in an interview about his monograph Queer Forms, Fawaz contends that formlessness has held queer studies in a chokehold for far too long.31 For Fawaz, the field of queer studies is perilously attached to the formless, understood both as a description of the phenomenological transience of the world and as the elevation of mutability to a radical ideal. As he argues in “For the Sake of Appearing: An Interview on the Diversity of Queer Forms,” form enables the identification of coherences from the morass of formlessness to perceive difference, and, critically, to examine the specific ways in which representations appear and take on significance. For example, lifted from its white, middle-class associations, the feminist consciousness-raising circle of the 1970s can become, in a gay film classic, the form that gay men use to negotiate homophobia and other stressors in their personal lives, doubly demonstrating the interdependency of women’s liberation and gay liberation movements. Despite their different methodologies, Fawaz and Salvato both demonstrate the intellectual value of interrogating “low” cultural objects; Fawaz whets the edge of his formalist intervention to reclaim academic space for popular culture, lived experience, and the public impact of humanities scholarship.
This issue closes with “Pattern beyond Form,” by Carmen Faye Mathes, a review of Sarah Dowling’s Here Is a Figure: Grounding Literary Form. In sparse, lyrical prose, Mathes leads the reader through chapters on horizontal bodies, a felicitous echo of one of the four markers of the formless in Bois and Krauss’s art exhibition. Along with dead bodies, the monograph gathers, inter alia, sleeping figures, protesting figures, ill figures, exhausted figures—“those who are made overlookable by a culture that encourages not looking down.” Dowling’s self-reflexive style and occasional use of what Mathes identifies as “procedural writing” leads Mathes to accept the invitation to the reader to attend to these forms that are brought and kept down and participate in a process of collaborative meaning-making. Indeed, on reading Dowling’s discussion of the Penn Museum’s possession of human remains, Mathes recalls the ongoing conflict between her employer, McGill University, and the Mohawk Mothers of Kahnawake over the development of the Old Victoria Hospital, which may be built on the grave site of Indigenous children tortured at nearby institutions. This leads us to pause and remember the bones of Indigenous people stored in a basement beneath a swimming pool on our own university campus at UC Berkeley.
We are writing thirteen months into the latest phase of an ongoing genocide in Palestine. In July 2024 the medical journal The Lancet estimated, conservatively, that more than 186,000 people had been killed in Gaza, not counting deaths resulting from Israeli aggression in the West Bank and Lebanon.32 The government of the United States, where we live and study, has demonstrated its wholehearted support for Israel’s actions through words, weapons, and funds. As we propose to think and write about form and culture, Israel has murdered with impunity scholars, writers, poets, artists. It has decimated schools, libraries, museums, cultural centers, publishing houses, religious and archaeological sites, and every university in Gaza. While we strive to examine through Bataille the violence of operations of form and informe, the statelessness of Palestinians, enforced by the most powerful militaries in the world, is never far from our minds. We cannot by any means map the stakes of this special issue onto the specificity of Palestinian history, yet we see clearly the parallels between the logic of the informe and the justifications for upholding apartheid and genocide. After insisting that each resurgence of formalism corresponds to its historical moment, we would like to emphasize that this is ours.
Notes
Omar, “Bleeding Forms,” 307. See also: “[Resistance] as anticoncept resists conceptualization and flows from the very structures that it ultimately seeks to decompose, degrade, and destabilize, to bring down in the world, in Bataille’s phrase. However, resistance is also a historical category, a set of actors, a constellation of wills, and an organizing assemblage that takes shape through its interplay of various relations and forces . . . . Therefore, it is only a formless operation insofar as it flows from the regime of forms that the colonial condition establishes, and only in its immediate effect as an operation that attempts to decompose and deform the established syntaxes, forms, structures, institutions, and categories that this colonial regime seeks to stabilize” (309).
“Anteaesthetics contends that, if we can indeed speak of black existence or the existence of blackness, it is clear that neither ontology nor phenomenology can provide the conceptual tools for tending to the inhabitations of this existence which emerges before, but not within, the aesthetic. Making sense of the artistic practices discussed in this book requires a provisional understanding of the theoretical efforts to grapple with the logics that subtend the foundational interdiction of blackness from ontology and the indispensable role of the aesthetic in securing this interdiction” (Bradley, Anteaesthetics, 11).
In a way, Notley’s exploration of form through and as language echoes Pierre Fédida’s psychoanalytic reading of Bataille’s “Informe.” Fédida writes, “[We] could add that the informe is, in Bataille, not an absence or a loss of form, but the setting in motion effected by the language of that which passes itself off at first as a form” (“Movement of the Informe,” 54–55). The forms of art and language move Alette forward and downward through the subway system until her confrontation with the tyrant.
