Formlessness at the End of the World

What is the relation between disaster and formlessness? How does a no longer postponable reckoning with ordinary ecocide and ongoing extinction alter the very format of what humanists do? More specifically, how does an overdetermined sense of a predicted yet disavowed “end” of the world (often narcissistically identified with the human) affect the engagement with form that all humanists negotiate in our various disciplinary and sub-disciplinary endeavors? In this panel, we encourage speakers to reflect on how their own practices of academic, para-academic, and creative writing are conditioned by catastrophic dread, an ever-growing queasiness or shuddering in the face of collapse, or radical dissociations produced by the pressure to keep moving on as a way to resist despair. Many of us have internalized this pressure to keep going by aligning our discursive production with institutional dictates that prohibit the “bad” form(at) of formlessness:  the weird, the wacky, the exorbitant. Maintaining a fantasy of worldedness has required that we not deviate too much from the kosmos of medial legibility or safe notions of formedness meant to protect our position and standing, our (academic) world. Staying with acceptable—recognizable, academically codified or regimented—forms of writing allows us to keep going: to participate in a “field,” to occupy an epistemic allotment, to inhabit a formed cognitive, aesthetic, and social space. These territorial occupations are indissociable from the logic of a proprietary or colonialist apportioning of that which is deemed to have or hold a form. Our focus on formlessness in the context of irreversible planetary collapse is an attempt both to acknowledge this imbrication of form with occupational violence and, more constructively, to re-form or un-form our own participation in “humanistic” discourse by doubling down on the de-formation of the medium in which our alleged message is expressed. A range of panelists from the theoretical humanities will explore the need for an academic discourse disrupted, altered, interrupted, reshaped, perhaps even contaminated by form’s undoing. The panel invites papers from practitioners and theorists whose wacky, exorbitant, or fanciful experimentation is conceived as a written doing whose difficulty—dis-facilis, paradoxically “not doing”—de-forms the very notion of academic form-ation. We invite reflection on a making provisionally realized in the very erosion of the medium, a tentative, tenuous, tender poiêsis of the formless.