Bois, Yve-Alain and Rosalind E. Krauss. Formless. A Users Guide.

New York:
Zone Books, 1997.
In this operation of slippage we see a version of what Bataille calls the
informe (formless) even less in hope of delineating a genealogy of the term,
as one might do with the history of an idea; but precisely because it is an
operation (which is to say, neither a theme, nor a substance, nor a concept)
and that to this end it participates in the general movement of Batailles
thought, which he liked to call scatology or heterology (and of which
historically the informe constitutes the first operation specified in his writings)
(15).
Thus he refuses to define informe: It is not only an adjective having a given
meaning, but a term that serves to bring things down [dclasser] in the world.
It is not so much a stable motif to which we can refer, a symbolizable theme, a
given quality, as it is a term allowing one to operate a declassification, in the
double sense of lowering and of taxonomic disorder. Nothing in and of itself,
the formless has only an operational existence: it is a performative, like
obscene words, the violence of which it derives less from semantics than from
the very act of their delivery The formless is an operation (18).
This division into four operations (which for the purposes of brevity will be
termed horizontality, base materialism, pulse and entropy) (21).
Matter cannot be reabsorbed by the image (the concept of image presupposes
a possible distinction between form and matter, and it is this distinction, insofar
as it is an abstraction, that the operation of the formless tries to collapse)
(29).
Base materialism (of which the informe is the most concrete manifestation)
has the job of de-class(ify)ing, which is to say, simultaneously lowering and
liberating from all ontological prisions, from any devoir tre (role model). It is
principally a matter of de-classing matter, of extracting it from the
philosophical clutches of classical materialism, which is nothing but idealism in
disguise: Most materialists have situates dead matter at the summit of a
conventional hierarchy of diverse types of facts, without realizing that in this
way they have submitted to an obsession with an ideal form of matter, with a
form that approaches closer than any other to that which matter should be.
This should be is a mode of homological appropriation; it presupposes a
standard or normative measure. On the contrary, the formless matter that base
materialism claims for itself resembles nothing, especially not what it should
be, refusing to let itself be assimilated to any concept whatever, to any
abstraction whatever. For base materialism, nature produces only unique
monsters: there are no deviants in nature because there is nothing but

deviation. Ideas are prisons, the idea of human nature is the largest of the
prisions: in each man, an animal is locked up like a convict. (53).
If subjectivity is born through reflexiveness, through the possibility of
consciousness folding back on itself to take cognizance of itself in the I think,
it is the merely repetitive possibility of the reflex that undoes the subject,
depriving the statements thinking of its ego. Such is the case of the praying
mantis, for which the automatism of playing dead, which can occur from the
vantage of either death or life, makes it possible to imagine the impossible
statement I am dead to be projected within this situation. This utterance,
which no person can truly pronounce from the horizon of its occurrence, but
which the mantis exemplifies, demonstrates the way the simulacral condition is
coupled with a radical desubjectivization. For in the case in point, the am dead
is true; but either way, alive or dead, the I is not possible.
I am seeing is the analogous statement at the level of visual form. Reflexive
modernism wants to cancel the naturalism in the field of an object in order to
bring about a newly heightened sense of the subject, a form that creates the
illusion that it is nothing except the fact that I am seeing [it]. The entropic,
simulacral move, however, is to float the field of seeing in the absence of the
subject; it wants to show that in the automatism of infinite repetition, the
disappearance of the first person is the mechanism that triggers formlessness
(78).
Metaphor, figure, theme, morphology, meaning everything that resembles
something, everything that is gathered into the unity of a concept that is what
the informe operation crushes, sets aside with an irreverent wink: this is
nothing but rubbish (79).
The work of the matrix is then to overlay contradiction and to create the
simultaneity of logically incompatible situations. Thus it is at total variance with
the transparent self-explanatory structuralist grid (107).
The formless, however, is not just an erasure of form but an operation to undo
form, and thus a process of generating bad form. And the matrix figure
displays this in its own paradoxical condition. For while it is made up of totally
unstable and changing parts, it is the vehicle of compulsive repetition and this
must be able to secure its own identity, its own sameness over time. To do this
it must have a form, yet the difficulty of thinking of this producer of disorder
and disruption is obvious (108).
Without consciousness of mirror symmetry the subject itself would dissolve
into space, and the world, anthropocentric for the Gestalt-oriented human,
would be stripped of its qualities, made characterless, isotropic. We would lose
our marbles there: signs themselves would become empty, flat: there would be
smoke without fire. Even the most immediate elements of communication, the

index or indices, for example, would no longer point to anything. In a worlds

with no differentiation of regions within space, to put it as Kant did, imprints
would become illegible (171).