What is Formlessness? The antagonism between formlessness and form has come under varying emphases across traditions. Formlessness for a Buddhist may not resemble formlessness for a painter. As such, there can be no fixed definition of formlessness. Nevertheless, to discuss formlessness must entail recounting what has already been said about it. What follows is Georges Bataille’s definition, quoted in its entirety from Visions of Excess. This is a passage I return to frequently, perhaps obsessively: “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 shape. 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.” There cannot be one thing that is The Formless. A spider or spit. A spider or an earthworm. Formlessness cannot refer to anything singular, for the perception of self-sufficiency is the function of form. It’s worth noting that the spider is used twice—where does a spider sit but at the center of a web? The web is itself the crystalline pinnacle of form (yellow garden spider, suspended between my grandfather’s tomatoes) and an emblem of disorder (cobweb spider, who I’ve permitted to colonize the underside of an unused chair in the garage, but no further). The spider seems to suggest that form and formlessness can never be fully disentangled. If the formless inspires a shudder of revulsion, then we can never say about the formless that nothing is there. A year ago, I began by making a list of things tending toward formlessness: vaporwave album cover art, shoggoths, Jackson Pollock’s paintings, AI-generated art, the architecture of Bernard Tschumi, the sublime, the alien in Carpenter’s The Thing, Piranesi’s prisons, the music of Nurse with Wound… But formlessness cannot be a catalog of merchandise, even if lists are often themselves examples of formlessness. The formless is more like Wallace Stevens’ firecat in “Earthy Anecdote”: Every time the bucks went clattering Over Oklahoma A firecat bristled in the way. The bucks in Stevens’ poem swerve to the left and right, but they can’t escape the firecat. It’s less the unfinished geometries traced by the bucks (this too, but not alone) than the fact that they require resistance to appear in the poem. The firecat is an obscurity, a word that comes from the French obscurete, meaning vagueness, gloom, delirium. A ghost fire is necessary to bring the bucks up short on their path across Oklahoma, a limit residing within the poem to instigate a meandering, the motion necessary to weaving webs, textiles, and texts. It is a boundary that sets the bucks apart from those who would cross the plains in peace. Form is a shelter—the walls of a cabin are a boon under the big cat’s night call.
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