Formless Formations

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FORMLESS FORMATION
Vignettes for the End of this World
Sandra Ruiz & Hypatia Vourloumis

Formless Formation: Vignettes for the End of this World
ISBN 978-1-57027-381-0
Cover image by Yiannis Hadjiaslanis

Cover design by Haduhi Szukis
Interior design by Casandra Johns (www.houseo!ands.net)
All images in this book by Yiannis Hadjiaslanis (www.hadjiaslanis.

com)
Released by Minor Compositions 2021

Colchester / New York / Port Watson
Minor Compositions is a series of interventions & provocations

drawing from autonomous politics, avant-garde aesthetics, and
the revolutions of everyday life.
Minor Compositions is an imprint of Autonomedia

www.minorcompositions.info | minorcompositions@gmail.com
Distributed by Autonomedia
PO Box 568 Williamsburgh Station
Brooklyn, NY 11211
www.autonomedia.org
info@autonomedia.org
Contents
MOMENTUM ............................6
SWARM ....................................24
VIBRATION ..............................36
ENSEMBLE .............................. 52
ORCHESTRATE ...................... 66
DIMENSION............................82
ADDITION .............................. 96
MAGIC .................................... 114
RESPIRE ................................. 128
ENDNOTES ............................ 141
BIBLIOGRAPHY .................... 169
To the formless formations that are all the artists, thinkers, teachers,
writers and soldiers who make this book possible; and to all our
friends who carry us, in and across their different life forms, in
these and other dimensions.
MOMENTUM
I n Soldier of Love, Sade sings of how, at the hinterlands of devotion,
she does her best to survive the “wild wild west.”1 Following a horn’s
plaintive range at “the borderlines of my faith,”2 Sade’s “Soldier
of Love” arrives on the scene by moving from a sparse tinkle into
the heft of a snare, a heavy off-beat bass cut by rustling drum rolls.
Song and video unfurl, their ominous screeches and backbeats
trouble militarized sonic and choreographic orders. Sade’s call to
arms, the fight to survive, to stay alive in the wild wild west, is to
listen for the sound, to dance out a different formation with other
soldiers. “I am love’s soldier! I wait for the sound,”3 she intones.
In a scene from another space and time, Flawless Sabrina stands

on the bar of the LA club Silver Platter, a decades-long beacon for
the Latinx gay, queer, and trans immigrant community. Ascending
the bar, Flawless Sabrina celebrates, in a shout-out, the ways in
which “the fist is still up!”4 This insistent call from Wu Tsang’s
2012 film Wildness echoes the collective stance and scene of the
hoisted clenched fists and bowed heads that close Sade’s 2010
music video.
As we write this, the abolitionist anti-fascist and anti-racist US

rebellions of 2020 are unleashing a proliferation of coordinated
dissent. Amid a pandemic, thousands and thousands of masked
demonstrators charge the streets of cities, states, countries. Collec-
Formless Formation
tive and singular signs, songs, street art, dancing, skating, chanting,
toppling, vogueing, shouting, accompany raised fists across the
globe, gestured by a vast array of staunch soldiers.
In rehearsing these scenes, the aesthetic-life-world (the inherent

entanglement of aesthetics and politics) manifests otherworldly
social compositions. For it is not incidental that life’s momentum
often mirrors art and art’s momentum parallels life. These are the
very stages of the everyday as the everyday is always staged.
Minor aesthetic performances stage chance convergences and

divergences across formless formations. Formless formations
relinquish the idea that one fulfills revolutionary promise by
replacing one structure of power for another. Moving from reform
to total abolition, ungovernable social swarms refuse to represent
themselves in the name of anything but liberatory uprising. In
abandoning its own legitimacy, the formless formation is the
assembly of our obligations to one another.
What if our modern capitalist world system experienced its own

demise, one enforced by a new social (dis)order motivated by
those forming affinity against catastrophe? What if our collective
momentum surpassed spatial and temporal confinement and gal-
vanized revolution across overlapping differences? All structures
have the potential to be abrogated and suspended from their
organizing precepts, making form just a thing we do, not a thing
we must follow.
Making form just a thing we do, not a thing we must follow.
Our Formless Formation, a thing we must follow, is composed of a

series of borderless vignettes written for the end of this world. Each
8
vignette stands with the other, offering an opening for the minor
voice to resound in otherwise form. Short suggestive narratives
or accounts, or miniature images or portraits which fade into the
mise-en-scene, vignettes reject the solidity of a frame. Particularly
drawn to the second definition in its evocation of the fade, our
formless formation visually echoes auditory resonance unbound
by time, perspective, and perception.
In their surging motion, like rising and falling waves, forms shift,
some visibly and others imperceptibly; for as you read, your eyes
move: this inexorable visual and haptic movement is what creates
legibility itself. There are perceived shapes to these vignettes,
material forms in the spacing of words, syntaxes, silences, and
the articulation of images and verses. To think of form as formless
does not mean to emphasize a lack of form, but to unleash it from
deterministic structure, to attend to form’s momentum and its
inseparability from other configurations.
The formless occurs in the in-between, the overlaps across the pulse
and dissipations of communication, compositions of infinite parts
and patterns lingering in assonance, dissonance, and resonance.
Only possible by way of gaps and encounter, resonance is found

in the spaces it travels, occupies, and makes between chance meet-
ings. Resonance’s inherent transdisciplinarity breaks down the
limits of individual subjects and objects, as well as fixed notions
of time and space. It does this practically and materially as well
as metaphorically, theoretically, and magically.
Resonance is the decibel frequency of (dis)harmonious amplitude.
Amplitudes of resonance are described by theoretical physicists
9
Formless Formation
as the fluctuations of multidimensional vibration. Working in

string theory (where dimensions within dimensions coexist
simultaneously across many universes), Michio Kaku suggests that
each universe can be thought of as a bubble that bounces, splits,
and in consequence, creates a type of musicality. Each “bubble’s
membrane is a subatomic particle,”5 representing a note on a
vibrating string. This cosmic music resonates across an “eleven
dimensional hyperspace,”6 reverberating through the multiverse
of universes. Some of these dimensions we are able to perceive,
while others are only mathematically known. Floating over and
around us and brewing beneath and within us, multidimensions
are possibilities for new world orders.
Our vignettes are multiverses, hanging about even when we cannot

see the residual spark and smoke from the atomic fire, from all
existing matter itself.
Multiversal resonance relays in tandem, and the reverb causes a

plurality of reflections across disparate dimensional formations. In
acoustics, it is the augmentation of sound by reverberation when
soundwaves from any sound source reflect off other surfaces in
space. In physics, resonance occurs when one object vibrates at the
same frequency of another object, propelling that second object into
vibrational motion. Etymologically, resonance stems from the Latin
resonantia meaning “echo,” and from resonare “to sound again” or
to resound. And the word itself reverberates across other meanings
and fields such as in mechanics, crystallography, mathematics, and
mycology and runs through music, noise, quotidian life practices,
literature, astronomy, sociology, and chemistry. Resonance is also
a signifier for the transmission of feeling, thought, senses, and
memory. Moving between and beyond genres, media, disciplines,
politics, and affects, resonance is constant tessellation and oscillation.
10
Yet resonance does not make for an easy and simplistic gathering of
wholeness, for it is often a discrepant engagement; its movements
through time and space are simultaneously integrative and disin-
tegrative. Fissure, fracture, incongruity, the rickety – “the creaking
of the word” – these practices inhabit discrepancy, as Nathaniel
Mackey writes.7 Discrepant engagements are necessary, for they
reveal the ways in which “creative kinship and the lines of affinity
it effects are much more complex, jagged and indissociable than the
totalizing pretensions of canon formation tend to acknowledge.”8
Rather than suppressing noise, discrepant engagements acknowl-
edge it. It is the “anti-foundational acknowledgement of founding
noise”9 and where we locate the noisy paradoxical encounters of
discrepant thought, politics, social life, and sound; all conjoined, all
congruously incongruous.
Such discrepant engagements also provide the avenue to the

paradoxical incongruities built into Georges Bataille’s antifoun-
dational idea of l’informe (the formless), described in his surrealist
art magazine Documents published in 1929. Through the creaking
of words, the magazine sought to act as a “war machine against
received ideas”10 and as a direct challenge to the hierarchies and
mainstreaming of art and humanism as exemplified by surrealist
artists of the time turned commercial entrepreneurs. Bataille’s
suspicion and satirizing of form leads him to dismantle conven-
tional form by valorizing the formless.
Formlessness, here, becomes a series of certain operations removed

from modernism, refashioning both high and low culture and the
opposition between form and content in art.11 This is a necessary
“attack on architecture”12 as Bataille phrases it, on man, humanism.
In his own counterattack, he offers an expansive meaning for the
term formless: “It is not only an adjective having a given mean-
11
Formless Formation
ing, but a term that serves to bring things down [déclasser] in the
world.”13 In eradicating the architecture of high art, Bataille finds
refuge in the underground as a sphere for art making. In staying
down, in being down, one transfigures not only the meaning of
the adjective as he shares, but the fundamental premises of artistic
and social order.
The formless is a performative project, or as Bataille notes, “form-

less is . . . a term serving to render déclassé the requirement that
each thing have its own form . . . . Actually, for academic men to be
happy would require the universe to take shape.”14 He adds: “on
the other hand, to say that the universe resembles nothing and
is nothing but formless is the same as saying that the universe is
like a spider or a blob of spit [crachat].”15 In acknowledging the
philosophical potential of nothingness, he compares what could
be seen as a void without meaning as living entity, a living mark,
a living dribble, that in their own existences offer thought and
create the infinite forms that make up a web of life. In other words,
a spider, a blob of spit – seemingly meaningless actors – help
establish a schematic democracy of entities, all brought down to
the ground. Bataille equalizes all life through the nothingness
and everythingness of universal formlessness.
Composed of multiversal resonating performances that constantly

form and deform, the formless alters the content of design and
the design of content. A fluctuating ensemble of operations, the
formless performs borderless arrangements. These ensembles,
for us, happen in and across the spatial-temporal continuums of
anticolonial aesthetics that serve to bring things down [déclasser],
for the anticolonial has always been lurking behind the categorical
imperative of form itself, violent designs meant to be destroyed
through aesthetic strategy, study, and battle.
12
Such critical study, battle, and deliberate aesthetic strategies are also
elusive in form. In an interview for Transversal Texts titled “From
Cooperation to Black Operation,” Stefano Harney and Fred Moten
argue that: “Study is not transformational. It is deformational,
subformational, formless formation.”16 This is to say that the uni-
versity can be sabotaged but never transformed by undercommon
Black study and fugitive planning. Study, as a “mechanism of and
for attunement,”17 is not a critique of information, just as it is not
a mobilization of critique as system building. Rather, study is a
generative operation that is shiftless and aimless.
In a move away from cooperation to operation, because as they

note, cooperation often leads to a “breakdown of being together,”18
Harney and Moten think of operation as the gathering of oscil-
lating social forms. In creating a “difference engine” or “making
what you say sound like something,”19 operation resonates with
song’s and poetry’s capacity to blur dissensus and affirmation. This
generative machine sounds out in ways that cooperation cannot
in its breakdown and subtraction of a resonant being together.
As forever students, our vignettes resist the canons and separations

of academic fields and read epistemic categorizations as the colonial
structuring of university departments’ need to shape, marketize, and
control knowledge production. “The form” is too often a colonial
construct that eviscerates options for multiplicity and the forms
of formless plurality that exist in the evolution of ideas.
Thus, formal limitlessness has to do with questions of method, of

doing, rather than knowing, of dismantling the epistemological
elite, not upholding it. For as The Invisible Committee notes in
Now: “what we need . . . is precisely a continual creation of forms.
It suffices to perceive them, to accept allowing them to arise, to
13
Formless Formation
make a place for them and accompany their metamorphosis.”20

The anonymous authors call for the destituting of institutions
and emphasize that the revolution will only happen through
the encounter and collaboration of and between different social
forms. Or as they note, “revolutionary movements do not spread
by contamination but by resonance.”21
If life, as noted above, is a constant metamorphosis of forms, how

can we shift the ways we socially operate to allow for the avowal
of their rising and falling change? By this we allude to forms that
are actually perceived across their overlapping differences. While a
seeming abstraction, The Invisible Committee lays bare the attri-
butes of such forms by adding that “a habit is a form. A thought is
a form. A friendship is a form. A work is a form. A profession is a
form. Everything that lives is only forms and interactions of forms.”22
It is in these “interactions of forms,” that we see the accessibility

of difference as vital to transformation in which convergence
and divergence meet and equally depart according to inclined
beat and rhythm.
Modelling her own beats and rhythms of interacting forms

directly inspired by the findings of quantum physics, Denise
Ferreira da Silva lays out a complex modernity informed by
“difference without separability.”23 Thinking through questions
of social difference and organizing by way of quantum physics’
notions of non-locality and entanglement, Ferreira da Silva
troubles the three “ontological pillars that sustain modern
thought:”separability, determinacy, and sequentiality.24 In her
construction of elemental interactions, the world is a plenum
where all life forms are indeterminate, non-local, and “without
space-time”25 in their enmeshment: “When nonlocality guides
14
our imaging of the universe, difference is not a manifestation of

an unresolvable estrangement, but the expression of an elemen-
tary entanglement.”26 This kind of multiversal, multidimensional
formlessness does not eradicate material difference, for all that
makes up the shifting plenum is also at once singular.
To be formless, then, is to be in solidarity. It is to be open to options,

and to be open to the option of a future of the future even if, and
especially when, we can’t see past the end of this world. What is
at stake, according to Ferreira da Silva, as it is for us, is the end
of the world as we know it. Or, as the band R.E.M. sang in 1987,
“it’s the end of the world as we know it” or like “a government for
hire and a combat site; left of west and coming in a hurry; with
the furies breathing down your neck.”27 These types of knowing are
never separate from epistemologies that produce racial grammars,
which is to say, modern grammars that simultaneously exclude
and catch sight of minor voices.
Like the band, we feel fine knowing that this world is coming
to a close and see Formless Formation as collective vignettes for
new planetary practices of social border breakage: the necessary
undoing of the political economy and its “terms of order,”28 as
Cedric Robinson shares; the end of this world as we know it
on a global level if the fluctuations of different life forms are to
survive and flourish (for formless formations bring instantly to
mind the swarms of life in all their manifestations, most partic-
ularly more-than-human ones); the current findings that most
existences (including ours) have only a few decades left on this
planet according to recent climate change studies.
Although formless formations find ways to exist outside of the given

terms of political and social order, such high stakes necessitate an
15
Formless Formation
underlining of the dispositifs of the world as we know it. For natural

disasters and pandemics are not natural, or supernatural agendas
imposed on bad, inept, and indebted subjects, but rather symptoms
of capitalism and colonialism. Instead of “punishing” subjects,
Nature is responding to economic greed and aggression, where,
for example, in the last couple of years alone, entire continents
from Australia to Asia to Africa to Latin America have been on fire,
under water, breaking in winds, and cracking at the earth’s center.
Take for instance the deadly hurricanes of Puerto Rico in 2017 and
2018 and the ongoing daily earthquakes of 2019 and 2020; the
repeated colossal flooding in Jakarta, Venice, and Bangladesh; the
disappearing islands of the Pacific and the Indian Ocean; a 20
degrees Celsius Antarctica and 30 degrees Celsius Arctic; Australia,
the Amazon, and Equatorial Africa genocidally aflame.
At the same time, protest and rebellion persist across the world in
mass uprisings from Beirut, Hong Kong, Haiti, Chile, France, Bra-
zil, Iran, Iraq, Canada, Peru, Columbia to major cities of the USA.
It is not inconsequential that from 2019-2020 those protesting
the death cult of neoliberal economic policies are also faced with a
roiling pandemic activated by the machines of extractive capital. The
persistence of capitalism is the endurance of colonial profiteering
under the rubric of global resource wars, their genocides perpetrated
in the name of profit. In facing the staggering violence of our every-
day we heed the words of Thomas Sankara, which remind us how
“Debt’s origins come from colonialism’s origins. Those who lend us
money are those who colonized us.”29 Our formless formation is a
rally for resistance indebted to inseparable difference.
At the center of these vignettes sits the essential proposition

that the anticapitalist is anticolonial and anti-self-approbative.
Through shifting strategic coalitions and resonances that bypass
16
the nation-state’s containing and expelling borders, the formless

formation of sociality moves outside and across all spilling borders.
Because “something that is constituted here resonates with the
shock wave emitted by something constituted over there,”30 the
formless formation encompasses an agglomeration of multiple
uprisings across planetary struggles.
Thus, these vignettes are a compositional folding into immeasurable

improvisational passages always-already performed and shared.
A sense and practice not granted, resonance is an operation we
labor toward and arrive at together. And communicability in and
across multiversal, multidimensional difference is a formless
formation best illuminated via the poesis of aesthetic-life-worlds.
But what exactly is this aesthetic-life-world, and how do we find

its formless operation?
The aesthetic does not merely index the beautiful, the visual, and
its effects, all divided from sociality and culture, as Raymond Wil-
liams notes, but marks both the experience of sense perception
and feeling.31 Or as bell hooks suggests: “aesthetics is more than
a philosophy or theory of art and beauty; it is a way of inhabiting
space, a particular location, a way of looking and becoming.”32 The
aesthetic imagines and manifests other worlds and pleasures, inti-
mate and expansive senses of inhabitation and becoming across
space and time. It evokes and re-imagines not only representa-
tions and judgments of beauty and taste, but the relational and
intertwined bonds that form between objects, subjects, entities,
histories, and narratives.
Advancing past the intellectual domain of the cultural elite, aes-

thetic-life-worlds move through and across cultural manifestations
17
Formless Formation
informed by minoritarian life.33 The aesthetic travels with and from

visual practice to include the particularities of sound, touch, taste,
smell, and the full sensorial capacities of the body. The aesthetic
also challenges transparent representational norms of difference
in both form and content. Just like “an insurrection is not like a
plague or a forest fire – a linear process which spreads from place
to place after an initial spark,”34 the aesthetic-life-world “takes the
shape of a music, whose focal points, though dispersed in time and
space, succeed in imposing the rhythms of their own vibrations
. . ..”35 Echoing across terrain, the full vitality of the aesthetic is
never removed from the worlds of struggle, abolition, and labor.
The aesthetic harbors both singular details and the interactions

of forms of life, world, and politics, from the everyday to the
everywhere. Released in the aesthetic-life-worlds of ritual, song,
dance, music, literature, politics, and poetry, all arts and all cultures
vibrate in and make up the plenum in their own variant “wild
star-burst of metamorphosis.”36 Therefore, the enmeshment of the
aesthetic and political is centered within its own entanglement of
difference where although intertwined, the distinction between
them honors their singular/plural internal logic.
In taking “cues from artists and dreamers rather than from gener-
als, politicians, and other po-faced figures more commonly asso-
ciated with the easier connotations of strategizing,”37 Stevphen
Shukaitis approaches aesthetic practices as implicitly containing
plans for quotidian social action. Considering the ways that art,
aesthetics, and activism inform each other, he argues that we
can rethink strategy by attending to the conversation between
artistic avant-gardes and autonomist political movements. For
Shukaitis, this essential conversation refuses the separation
between art and daily life as well as the cooptation of strategic art
18
by capital and modes of governmentality. Endeavoring to modify

the domain “where strategy occurs as an ongoing socialized pro-
cess,”38 Shukaitis retraces aesthetic strategies that create spaces
for activist organizing, for insurrectionary aesthetic forms, as
shifting modes of quotidian strategy may outline “the composi-
tions of movements to come.”39 At the same time, the uprisings of
wild star-bursting aesthetic-life-worlds and compositional social
movements must always, as Randy Martin contends, attend to a
type of preemptive politics.40
This preemption is manifold and negotiates the ways in which

social movements and aesthetic strategies may be co-opted and
defeated if completely absorbed or appropriated by power. On the
other hand, preemptive politics is also about sensing social move-
ment, aesthetic-life-worlds, and civil disobedience as integrative
and disintegrative formless formation, and thus, preempting their
internal calcification and capture. This undulating “tidalectic,”41
to borrow from Kamau Brathwaite’s poetry, directs our sentiments,
not by way of mere terror, but via the promise of the to and fro
of aesthetics, all imaginations brimming against the limitation
of their own freedom.
Such a tidalectical preemption also always keeps an eye on the

ways that fascist formations are built upon aesthetic strategies and
traditions as well. Capitalizing on certain aesthetics that precede
and exceed its terms of militarized order, the fascist nation state
imposes its own directory of resonance. This is to say that fascism
has a revolving resonance that pulls from its own objectives, ones
which violently work to fulfill a lethal program.
If the word fascism etymologically stems from an aesthetic symbol

of an axe cutting through a bundle of wood, then the bundle, the
19
Formless Formation
sheaf, is the formless formation. In a counter strike, the resignifying

bundle calls for a radical connectivity across difference, warring
against chronological fascist orders. Neither time nor space suf-
ficiently augment our limitless capacity for inventive intertwine-
ment, entangled not by ordering systems, but by resonance as
mutual aid. Anti-fascist resonance is the condition of possibility
for political organizing across difference, not for a programmatic
utopia, but unruly revolt.
Unruliness doesn’t abandon full structure; from the space of

paradox and intricate tidalectical turns, the formless formation
works from and against definition. For, many will ask, what is a
formless formation? How can a form be formless in the process
of forming something without or from form? How does this par-
adox open up possibilities for social organizing? The questions
answer themselves: generative contradictions materially engender
formless formation.
Take, for instance, the generative contradiction of the murmura-

tion, where flying starlings swoop out a collective nebulousness
contingent on intricate internal organizing. The murmuration’s
paradox lies in that it’s magically shifting forms and shades depend
on each bird coordinating with the seven birds nearest to it. Thus,
combined movements for total coordinated change rely on small
overlapping units of collaborative resonance. The manipulation
of form is a conducing concert in which deeply listening is the
new world (dis)order.
As the murmuring starlings express, formless formation is a

practice and praxis; a principle of social organizing and direct
action; an inherent solidarity; and the method of resonance. If
this definition still requires a new sound order, we might imagine
20
listening to where the rhizomatic, the assemblages, affective and

sensuous affinities, ephemera as evidence, discrepant engagement,
and fugitive planning always-already break into lines of flight.
In refusing “structuralization ahead of time,”42 the formless
formation’s potential of touch and cut is found in contradictory
configurations of fleeing flow. So, if asked more questions, like
for example, where does one find this paradoxical yet material
formless formation? Can one hold it? Is it practical? We would
have to answer: “imagine touching dynamism.”43
In conversation with an uncountable number of dynamic voices,

the following vignettes echo across boundless ideas, thoughts, and
feelings from artists and activists to revolutionaries and theorists.
Never detached from the ensemble, our formlessness works to
break through and build upon emergent sounds and strategies44
while staying attuned to a potential “tyranny of structureless-
ness.”45 Working across circulating sites of responsibility, rotation,
re-distribution, diffusion, and access to resources, to name a few,
the formless formation consists of practices of mediation across
sonorous incitations and recitations in choric resonance and
dissonance.
Formless Formation is an insurgent walking and flying side by side

with planetary anticolonial organizing and in direct solidarity with
all Indigenous, Black, Brown, feminist, queer, ecological, migrating,
diasporic soldiers of love; imaginations and movements living
and loving against, and in spite of, predatory capitalist forms
and formations.
Sensed as both keenly acute and suffusedly formless, these agglom-

erations in and across difference arkestrate46 multitudinous col-
laborations.
21
Formless Formation
The formless formation resonating across discrepant aesthet-

ic-life-worlds is the wild in the wild.
Fists up.
Wait for the sound.
22
SWARM
T he swarm is a fragmentation in collective inhabitation, a
transmission of social feeling and creative kinship, an affinity
guided by the exquisite life and death of the aesthetic.
It is a sensual discrepancy, a creak, a split, a speculative history,

an abstracted choreography. Wayward, anarchistic, an unordinary
chorus, the swarm is an encounter, an entanglement, a diffracting
enclosure releasing a string of light (a way out, a way in, a way
to the elsewhere).
But the swarm is also riotous: subjects get vibrated out and
brought back in, for the swarm is frequent and inhabited by its
own frequencies. Because swarming harbors sound and carries
the murmuration, it is a type of feedback, a gathering cadence, a
rebellious composition, a formless formation in the form of a
danced score.
A type of sociality in which the riotous unmute the silent, the swarm
listens for dissonance, for the sonically deranged re-arrange us. It
locates the brutality in a beat and enables the swarm to counter
narrativity through exceeding communicability.
In the space between noise and sound, swarms refuse linearity,

for linear time is both the syndrome and symptom of the singular
Formless Formation
non-continuous. The singular non-continuous is soundless, not

becoming, and never plural.
Chasing the future instead of waiting for it to arrive, the swarm

soars in exodus. In developing a “storyless story,” Vijay Iyer theo-
rizes against the linearity of narrative and sound, and articulates a
model and method that follow the contours of a swarming form-
less formation. Iyer argues that the consistent impulse “to tell a
story” in jazz musicology presumes a chronological and “coherent”
representation of the improvised solo.47 If exodus necessitates
explosion, Iyer ruptures narratives which ascertain that musical
stories perform linearly, and not by “the changes themselves,”48
within musical composition.
Considering a deeper understanding of discursive encounters within

and between listening and playing, Iyer contends that performance
is a “sustained antiphony”49 in which sound and embodiment work
together to shatter linear storytelling. In the “traces of embodiment,”50
the body not only keeps the score, but engenders it. This is to say
that the story created by the musician and listener is “not a simple
linear narrative, but a “fractured, exploded one”51 that extends
beyond words and sounds. Bodies, like notes, chords, and intervals,
reference one another, all working from both the listening ear and
the “hearing body.”52 This is to also say that listening and bodily
motion have similar neurological functions; as such the practice of
music (its full sensorial evolution, from rehearsal to showtime, to
the listener’s movement in said time) is a “whole-body experience,”53
occurring across musical verses in their sonorous forming.
So, if listening is about the bodily present-continuous, then it is

also about the explosion of sound at the collapse of conventional
narratological structure. If we know this to be listening, then how
26
does sound do its sounding? How does the structure of the story
leave traces formed in formlessness? And if sound settles in the
“trace of embodiment” what is the full property and potential of
sound’s swarming resonance?
Iyer discovers the resonance of this resounding within and outside

the paralinguistic, in which the body’s cognition conjoins the full
scope of the aesthetic-life-world. For example, he notes: “many
sophisticated musical concepts develop as an extension of physical
activities, such as walking, strumming, hitting, cutting, scratching,
or more figuratively, speaking.”54 Since this speaking can also be
the breath outside the syllable, speech, too, must undergo a new
listening time scale.
Like speech, “musical performance is a process,” antiphonal, and

formed via “semiotic dimensions.”55 The dimensional is swarmlike,
for as Iyer adds, “sonic symbols”56 refer “actively to other parts of
the same piece, to other music, or to the contextual and extramusi-
cal phenomena – as with the rhythmic correspondences between
the finger motion and speech itself.”57 Hence, “saying something”
need not harbor the vestiges of narratological form, for in each
utterance and musical iteration the listener helps to co-perform
the piece, disrupting the temporality and signature of the story
itself. In other words, the narrative not only explodes, but leaves
remaining traces to be uncovered and followed; and these frag-
mentary traces speak in tongues, sounds, and bodily endurances.
Moving between “telling your story” and “keeping it real,” in the

name of “the athletics of black musical performance (or perhaps
the performativity of black musical athletics),”58 Iyer sees the cre-
ation of the changing story along the lines of Black social life and
its ensuing labor. For as he notes, “what one hears is necessarily
27
Formless Formation
the result of much effort, time, and process – in short, of labor

(meant with all this word’s attendant resonances).”59 This here
is the work of resonance, where sounds bounce off one another
and the beat hits against beating bodily rhythms, all in a sonorous
constellation of new social order – in which to work is to play is
to listen is to cultivate new worlds.
Improvisational strumming and listening are like a swarming

storm of motion in every limb that extends out and across. Untitled
Duet (the storm called progress),60 a work by the movement-based
performance artist boychild, in collaboration with dancer Josh
Johnson and DJ and sound composer Total Freedom, labors to
tell a story in the athletic process of keeping it real. A whole-body
experience entailing techniques of improvisation, the performance
seeks to undo and explode historical chronologies, linear narratives,
and progressivisms. For boychild, “certain spaces call for certain
durations.”61 Taking place in 2020 at the Gropius Bau in Berlin, a
vast space with deep dark histories, the performance piece unfolds
over five hours on two separate days.
This durational performance of ten hours in total is a reworking of

Walter Benjamin’s angel of history; a thinking with what he terms
“the storm of progress”62 as improvisation. While attempting to
gesticulate outside regimes of power in an underground where
legibility is disavowed, the performers’ dance catalogues trauma,
technology, scripture, and storytelling. Moreover, in asking her
collaborator Total Freedom to think music as debris, boychild’s and
Johnson’s performed motions and stillnesses in the storm called
progress are inextricable from the ways sounds catalogue history.
Through two musical sets, these prepared improvisations of inter-

twined sonic emanation and embodied movement become the
28
condition of possibility of one another, literally ripping each other

to shreds. Both Johnson and boychild escape angels spotted in the
light. Moving backwards, hair frozen but blowing in one direction,
their movements become trapped in sincere glitches. Shrouded in
clownlike, wide, and long billowing costumes of indeterminate his-
torical period, they drag each other through and across propulsion
and force. But their rigorous movements deteriorate from exhaus-
tion against the hum of drones, obscured verbal language, illegible
talking, possessed sound. In the similar operations of listening
and bodily motion, Untitled Duet (the storm of progress) hauntingly
swarms through the dark space and among the audience members.
“You have nothing left, so you dance,” explains boychild.63
As the performance becomes more flayed and shredded, the space,

audience, and the performers become increasingly embroiled; a
storming enmeshment that alters the aura of the room and its
history. This is not the imagining of touching dynamism; this is
the touch of dynamism.
In a desire that unfolds with the audience, boychild’s dance

stumbles and breaks apart as she strenuously triggers electricity.
Through an embodiment of circuits of hapticality, transmission,
and physical and spatial reordering, boychild discharges non-
linear beginnings and endings. Her angled swirls limp, stretch
in ordained slow motion and hyperspeed cracks, where in a pull
of a shoulder or a gathering shudder, listening movements reach
out from under the pit.
Everyone and everything dances, all matter generated from this

magnetic field. For the swarm is not a social click; it’s an opening,
a flock, and a swarm of singularities.
29
Formless Formation
A sensuous becoming that occurs within how one moves, lives

and feels with others, such swarming surpasses identity, as José
Muñoz notes.64 For the author, this social opening is a magnetic
field in which a Brown commons is enlivened against individual
desire. Brownness “offers us a sense of the world . . . represents a
swarm of singularities” that exceed the “sole province of people
who have been called or call themselves brown.”65 For Brownness
is a liberating complication and a tangled uprising. It is “the shar-
ing out of a brown sense of the world.”66 It is also a distributing
energy that carries out to then drift in, through a choreography
as overture for swarm.
As boychild performs in her collaborative work, it is also “a flowing

into the common, that nonetheless maintains the urgencies and
intensities we experience as freedom and difference.”67 Leaving
resonant traces, glimmers, and passages in the world, Brownness
is also the shared historical transience of dispossessed people.
It is the illuminating and entangled vectors of the unshareable,
invaluable, incalculable moments of connection that inevitably
share out. A Brown sense of the world is where singularities swarm
into a common unfolding fold and where when you have nothing
left, you dance, and you dance together.
For Brownness is always a “shared sense of endurance”68 between

objects, subjects, dimensional planes that exist as much in how
one waits-on with how one waits-with – a meeting point of political
and aesthetic commitments figured into, within, and between
enduring and constantly moving bodies.
Knowing no boundaries, no borders, the swarm moves out as

much as it shifts in, a shareability invoking senses across direc-
tion and time. And this swarming shareability, a being together
30
as “an apartness together”69 retains the building refrain of the

aesthetic-life-world.
Marking Brown space by moving from aesthetic form to aesthetic

practice across moments of shareability, Gayatri Gopinath builds
an archive that also surpasses identity.70 By curatorially tracing and
bringing together indigenous and diasporic aesthetic-life-worlds,
Gopinath points to how an abiding legacy of colonial modernity
is its institutions of seeing that work to categorize and separate
difference. Shedding light on the particularities of region via
a queer curatorial lens, she suggests that the queer curation of
swarms of singularities be understood as a type of “caring-for”
and “caring-about.”71 Sustaining a “south-south relationality”72
that bypasses and exceeds the nation-state and dominant visual
fields, the aesthetic practices of queer diaspora undo measured
space and time, displacing conventional rubrics of knowing,
locating, and mapping. Through queer regional imaginaries and
their encounters and collisions, transtemporal relays of affective
relationality are unleashed between seemingly discontinuous and
unrelated aesthetic practices.
Through this attention to curatorial affection as critical intention,

curation reassembles the region to accentuate affinities across
resonance – a gesture that understands the aesthetics of cura-
tion along political and ideological lines. By way of unruly visual
practices, which include a bird’s-eye view, or a cross-eyed one, or
a reframing of frames, the parameters of staging sight and seeing
are expanded. And by visually decentering the nation-state to
understand movement, dispersal, and dispossession, Gopinath
asks that one simultaneously see and sense affiliation between
manifold aesthetics and entities.
31
Formless Formation
Radical resonances trace lines of connective and unruly vibra-

tion across indigenous and diasporic regional spaces. Aesthet-
ic-life-worlds, in other words, the aesthetic enactments of queer
regions and diaspora, are performances of affiliated disorientation
and suspension in their energy and excess.
The diaspora is a complete controlled chaos of swarm. Sometimes

a storm.
As dispersions, scatterings, flights, and landings, storms of unruly

regional and diasporic swarms are parts of things taken together
through decentralized systems. Therefore, they must also, in turn,
always exceed categories of seeing and mapping that mark divi-
sions between human and more-than-human life-forms. Taking
a bird’s-eye view, for example, of echoing archipelagic formations
that know nothing of nation-states, birds (like fish) form visions
of formless collectives, flying and swimming ensembles. Waterward
and skyward inhalations for life otherwise reorganized, groups of
birds and fish are gliding communists, aerial and aquatic units
that surrender the singular exhale for a communal horizontal
inhalation. The birds and fish know when not to land, know how
to watch and when to glide again. The choreography of these
gliding animals swoop and sweep across borders, moved by their
deliberate motions.
Forming structurally into moving groups like a congregation,

shoal, gang, committee, parliament, herd, colony, party, bazaar, a
glaring, murmuration, study, and the band, these planetary friends
are in danger from, but quintessentially never tarnished by, the
mystification of individual human want in a culture of poverty
and dispossession. Units defined by gatherings of particular
species, swarms are also flocks, schools, murders, assemblies,
32
teaching us that the delineations within the limitless swarm are

in all interplanetary quantum matter, collective assemblies, and
micro-biological existence. The swarm resonates in all life forms,
from the most miniscule entity to how social life is organized
among all sentient beings.
Maintained by colonial modernity’s legacy of mapping and see-

ing, however, human directives of swarming acts of flight can
become exercises in lethal surveillance. Contemporary militarized
procedures in their choreographic routes identify the swarm that
operates as a fugitive coalition, on the one hand, and on the other
hand, the one that thrives as necropolitical warfare. The latter
swarm is like a borderless formation of armed security circulating
our atmosphere under the aegis of Empire and nation. Hovering
and wavering over the sky since 9/11, national security measures
extend their campaigns from conventional military intervention
and bio-weaponization to “the armed drones of the near future”73
in everyday routines.
In the name of the war on terror, these roving drones “are expected
to resemble dragonflies and honey bees – an everlasting multi-
species swarm of intel, misery, and sovereign power from above.”74
Performing their panoptic duty through aerial warfare, this example
of the swarm patrols communities, towns, villages, regions, and
nations – not to aid or cure the disenfranchised but to punish
them. The US global security state and its allies, in this act of
panopticism, carry out the neoliberal tactic of decimating the most
fragile of life through the agency of surviving the fittest.
This droning dehumanizing design for organizing social order

is not devoid, however, of counterinsurgency. Involuntarily, the
global security state generates “new sensuous alliances and coa-
33
Formless Formation
litions between groups of people who might have not previously

seen themselves as allied with each other, or who might not have
understood how they were involved in overlapping struggles
against imperial policing, racialized punishment, and gendered
militarism at home and abroad.”75 Despite the forever war across
the Greater Middle East “radical diasporic affiliations and trans-
national belonging”76 are formed by transformational aesthetic
workers. In figuring out the possibilities of collective and sensuous
affiliation, Kapadia puts his finger on the resonating forces found
across diasporic aesthetic-life-worlds, a kind of formless formation
that vibrates global breath for reshaping the world.
The swarm is at times a simulation, a perception of the symbolic

whereby reality is a model made hegemonically, copied and sustained
by force. At times fragile, the swarm is a modulation, a resting point
between charging forward and laying back. At other times, the
swarm is a sensorial affinity between coinciding sites of struggle.
So, while a swarm may murder and incite grief, the swarm also
erupts into revolution. With the flip of capital and the promise of
a new labor power, the swarm recognizes their own dispossession,
fleeing the scene of the crime into the space of abolition, where nar-
ratives explode and dancing together remakes historical precedent.
The swarm story leaves traces formed in formlessness, sounding

and gesturing against the linear storm of progress and debris.
For as boychild danced, her improvising shadow in the play of
shifting light and sound startlingly revealed an intermittent trace
of embodied wings.
From an angel’s-, bird’s-, or fish’s-eye view, the swarm traces

unforeseen and enduring embodiments. Across sensual affiliation
34
and exploding transtemporal relays of queer aesthetic-life-worlds,

diasporic and regional commons counter colonialism’s legacies
of seeing, mapping, and droning. Swarming storms sustain
rupturing antiphonies; sounding, gliding, and dancing out an
“apartness together.”77
Sometimes the swarm is a lagging type of brutality at the fade

of both a slow death and an emergent beat at the precipice of
unruly vibration.
Sometimes a swarm of singularities meet at the edge of profundity

and the center of solidarity, for in murmuring trajectories, and
changes as stories, the schooling swarm transports magnetic
frequency.
The swarm is social resonance lingering in the interstices of forever.
Listen for the buzzing, the swaying, the cadenced tremors.
Follow the swarm into the beat of the sound.
35
VIBRATION
E verything, felt and unfelt, is held in motion. Invisible to the
human eye, vibrational energy is both everywhere and everyone;
its forces undulate in animating frequency. To vibrate-with is to
resonate in emphatic and electrifying structurelessness, a formless
formation that transmits a boundless series of actions. All motion
reverberates in the interstices and excesses of existence, for to
become is to also oscillate in the void’s plenitude.
Listen for the wave beating and breathing across atomic seas.
Sense the senses.
Contingent upon overflowing frequencies, both free and forced,

vibrations swing and sway from disturbance to restoration into
equilibrium. To vibrate is to be unclosed to encounter: the how of
conjoining reverberations driven onward by vulnerable frictions
and troubling tensions.
Listen for listening.
Vibration is a quivering wave, a sensing out across diverse magnetic

energy that surpasses the logic of logic. To sense out is to also draw
in, for the senses recuperate frequencies, fluttering dynamically
to touch abundance.
Formless Formation
Frequency’s deepest beat is its capacity to deep listen.
A listening across space and time can be found in the domain

of infinite details; or as Alexandra Vazquez contends, listening
is an invitation to apprehend the “detail” or those moments of
engagement when “wonderfully disruptive fissures” may “crack
many a foundational premise behind all sorts of narratives.”78
Listening, then, is not about remembering, but about arresting
the detail and being arrested by it.79 In listening this way, one cap-
tures all apparent sonic disappearances: the silences, tiny sounds,
gestural hums, ruptures, all the noise that is both (un)intelligible
and thought-producing, for in the excess of sound one finds new
pathways for a poetics and ethics of affinity.
Listening, for Vazquez, is a developmental and relational process:

one listens in detail to also be heard, and to be heard is to have
produced a sound to be listened to. Putting your finger on the
evolution of sound means encountering the evolution of deep
listening. And as Iyer shared previously, this evolution of sound is
not necessarily a linear one, but best illuminated in the changing
eruptions within composition, in the disturbance of narrative
itself.80 In this assorted choreography where the changes are the
stories, sense’s reverberations undo form by necessitating the desire
for the vulnerable other, another that lends an ear as fervently as
a spirit, both awoken and lifted by vibratory ambulations.
In her writing about groundbreaking composer Pauline Oliveros’s

idea of “deep listening,”81 Julie Steinmetz also investigates the
principles of “sonic relationality.”82 This praxis, for the author,
is “a fundamentally relational act”83 that begins by undoing the
implied connection between hearing and listening. If listening
38
is an intensely “psychological act”84 as Barthes contends, then

as Steinmetz argues, “listening as a practice invites us to listen
to silence as well as noise, to speech as well as what is not said,
and to the patterns of sound and silence in all of their many
orchestrations.”85 In saying so, she also intimately asks “what can
listening do?,”86 a question that in its multidirectionality might
also ask, who can listening do?
Following Oliveros’s lead, Steinmetz lays bare the psychodynamic

components of deep listening in which every detail of the rela-
tional moment says something about someone. In its most critical
capacity, deep listening as Oliveros’s aesthetic movement promotes,
“strives for a heightened consciousness of the world of sound and
the sound of the world.”87 Listening is mindful and receptive, yes,
but at its best, it is unwaveringly generous, rigorously benevolent,
and humane. It is a process of self-analysis and world-discovery
in which every detail, even those unseen but always shimmering,
vibrates new social scenes. Every article in the scope of sonic
relationality contributes to the transformation of the subject, of
the world, of multiverses within verses.
As Steinmetz and Vazquez equally share, listening is a two-way

street that one actively discharges, a deliberate crossing of feelings
that ignores no sound. The apparent nothingness of silence is a
robust symphonic score; one must listen deeply to grab the note,
one must gather the note to retrieve listening.
Deep listen to the rhythmic contours of the earth.
Sometimes the note and its meaning live in the paralinguistic

excesses of language’s measurement through expressions of the
39
Formless Formation
sounds that are materially integral to language. Sounds make words

different from one another; sense relies on nonsense – infinite
nonsensical combinations of sonic difference. It is in these realms
where communication recedes and becomes communicability
instead; and it is in this communicability that the materialization
of the unthinkable and unimaginable is enabled. The study of
paralanguage disrupts and resists the power that determines the
sovereign. Especially since sounds oscillate and reverberate, one
can’t follow sound linearly.
The sound might take you out before it moves you back and for-
ward: an escape hatch of dwelling resonances where linear time
collapses and listening exceeds its own excess and instrumentality.
Noise and experimental performance artist Erica Gressman under-

stands the intricacies of “sonic relationality”88 by reminding us of
two important matters: first, sounds alone “are very lonely,”89 they
need one another to build composition and to set the scene for
the listener; and second, sometimes sound is also light flashing
and shimmering, blaring, bodies in movement; sometimes sound
happens within the spaces of queer luminosity and synesthetic
occurrence, in which “the lonely” is never about sound, but the
listener’s ability to relate to their senses. It’s the non-linear posi-
tioning of resonance and listening that produces the composition,
as Gressman notes – one filled up with the exuberance of the
lonely, too.
On April 1, 2020, a few weeks after the rise of the global viral
pandemic within the United States, Gressman performed an
experimental performance piece live on the internet entitled
COVID-19.90 For almost twenty-five minutes, the artist works to
match the temporality of this viral strand through both sound
40
and light. In typical fashion, Gressman places quotidian life

against the backdrop of urgency through the aesthetic-life-world.
She lays on her side, across her sofa, with a bowl of popcorn in
front of her on her living room table, and stares into the camera
as if she is watching us while we might listen in on her. Wearing
a gas mask, pajamas, and socks with holes in them, she models
the position of one quarantined: she files her nails, checks her
phone and responds to messages, stretches her arms and legs
while in resting position and watching the screen, and attempts
to eat popcorn against the inflexibility of the mask.
At the same time, flashing lights in blue, green, pink, yellow, and
orange mirror the volume and speed of Gressman’s noise score as
feedback attempts to match the speed of virality, producing sonically
and visually the current state of emergency. In the background, wet
paint falls from the wall like the spread of the virus – an equally
fast and slow drip resembling colors of everyday violent precari-
ousness. Scholar Fiona Ngô has described Gressman’s work as an
example of “the violence of becoming,”91 both in quotidian life and
within the medium of the avant-garde. Becoming with and against
the tension embedded in the violence of a pandemic, Gressman
produces a performative scene on screen in which the relational
conditions of existence surface their reverberatory urgencies.
Gressman, the Colombian and queer experimental sound/per-

formance artist and design engineer, is not new to producing
evocative musical composition from homemade analog elec-
tronic instruments that are both sensitive to light and reactive
to movement. Her live performance Wall of Skin,92 for example,
is a sensorially immersive noise, light, and movement piece
with Gressman covered in cybernetic skin. This performance
represents an enlivened musical score that literally highlights the
41
Formless Formation
psychological and social effects of skin. Creating live biofeedback

performances (blending science and aesthetics) for over ten years,
Gressman has transformed her body into various entities – from
cyborgs, animals, monsters, and witches to aliens and shamans,
and now a quarantined zombie. All of these figures elaborate upon
the ideas of embodiment, sound, and technology by coalescing
the sentiments of the racialized, colonized, sexualized subject
in quotidian life.
A series of vibrations on high alert, Gressman’s body of work traces

energies that mark a pathway for something other, somewhere else.
Replete with a type of energy that travels outside the known

five senses, all sense is a visceral experience beyond empiricism.
Pulsating outwardly and inwardly they expose how resonating
manifestations are the paradoxes of the ephemeral being mate-
rialized. Everything is coming from something and everything is
connected by anything in nothingness.
Everything material is not always seen.
Everything unseen is also material.
So how does the body listen in order to disclose the healing capacity
of listening?93 What is the sonic score of genre, style, medium?
And how do we listen for the form that inexorably deforms itself
in the name of deep relation?
In the forming and deforming 2016 performance minor matter,94

choreographer and dancer Ligia Lewis moves us to deeply listen
with her collaborators Jonathan Gonzalez and Hector Thami
42
Manekehla. Demanding an attention to details, the performance

begins in complete darkness as we hear Lewis intone excerpts
from Remi Raji’s poem ”Dreamtalk.” Lewis speaks the words, “I
would like to turn you inside out, and step into your skin/To be,
that sober shadow in the mirror of indifference” whilst reaching
out towards “the ultrasound of hidden bleeding . . . images.”95
Beating sounds of rhythmic percussion interweave with the spo-
ken words (that attest to the poet’s desire for removing barriers
between skin, while reaching out towards ultrasonically bleeding
images). Slowly, as the black box theatre space lightens, we hear
the segueing lilts of classical baroque music and see three huddled
figures at the rear of the stage. Arms open outwards in shifting
diagonals and axes; upholding stretched limbs, they rise and lean
into each other. Violently, they become entangled across deviating
levels and vectors of embodiments and holds.
As the performance progresses, a haunting aria fills the space

where the athletics of huddled struggles ensue, a continual
sparring between Lewis and Manekehla as Gonzalez detachedly
speaks words into a mic: “this can’t just be my problem . . .
thissssssssssssssssssss.” Speaking of the importance of “disci-
pline, choice, legacy, quality” Gonzalez’s speech speeds up and
disintegrates into paralinguistic sounds. But then Lewis takes
her turn at the mic and the voice we hear emanates into a deep
basslike register, where the high and low frequencies of the vocal
c(h)ords simultaneously vibrate outwards. “I would prefer not
to,” “it’s not a thing, it’s nothing,” the eerily doubled voice says.96
Music quickens and screeches and changes of light eventually

unveil three separate solos tracing repeated steps and twisted
bodily abstractions. Gesturing hieroglyphic angles, Lewis, Gon-
zalez, and Manekehla thump their bodies and clap their hands
43
Formless Formation
in sync, expressing an urgent militancy and emphatic strength

through frenzied yet cogent movements. Standing in formation
and raising defiant fists together, their faces become distorted.
As their fists break down, they link up with each other, leaning
back as if pulled. Holding hands as they fall backwards into the
darkness, Donna Summer sings “I feel love”97 and a blue light
casts shadows on their constant exertions.
Then from total darkness a single light shines down on Manekehla

as he moves to the front of the barely lit stage. He slaps himself
on his torso and jerkily dances to turn his back to the audience.
In deafening silence as complete darkness descends once again,
we hear breath and glimpse the fades of flesh, inaudible talking,
and notice barely discernible limbs and shimmering skin. Red
lights slowly flood the space as the three performers’ outstretched
limbs vibrate against a faint mechanical hum. The dancers hold
onto each other’s extremities, as they lie on the floor.
In horizontal attachment, they connect to each other in

grounded slides and linked rolls; their bodies as lines
as if on the line.
Through performative modes of embodiment that never settle,

Lewis’s choreography undoes facile delineations of the dancing
body. minor matter unthreads the relationship between politics and
legibility, for Lewis’s desire to tear down the confines of black box
theatre walls and representations in dance are inseparable from
questions surrounding the representations of the Black Lives
Matter Movement. Lewis asks: “Can we institute a practice of
togetherness in the minor? Can the black box be host to a Black
experience that goes beyond identity politics?”98 For Lewis, the
44
matter of Blackness then is no minor matter, but matter as practice,

as vibrational animation, where light, color, sound, and movement
blur in space, and space itself is manifested through undefined
configurations. Exploring the color red to materialize “thoughts
between love and rage,”99 Lewis offers a post-apocalyptic space
that is both haunting and exultant.
Thinking of sounding bodies and images, minor matter’s drama-

turgy is a resonating operation where text becomes texture and
a holding space for sound, color, hue, and cry. These intertwined
performances of sound, chromaticity, voice, affect, and gesture,
as choreographer and scholar Anh Vo writes, are “the interstices
of space, time, poetics where . . . black aesthetics and black pol-
itics can fugitively emerge, occupy and concurrently disperse.”100
Assemblages of limbs trace and traverse across intense embodi-
ments because “feelings matter”101 in the mattering of the charged
physicalities of coming together and apart.
In resisting formal representations of black box theatre, identity

politics, and the “dancing body,” minor matter creates an unresolved
indeterminate present through interwoven aggregations, where
minor matter is all about losing the self to be radically with the
other. These experiments for Lewis are bound up with notions of
abstraction and nothingness and how nothingness is always-al-
ready a kind of matter. Flesh vibrates across choreography, not just
legible bodies. And Lewis importantly describes this particular
work as the musical genre “noise.”102
Towards the conclusion of minor matter, red lasers cut through the
black box in slanted axes as the three dancers recline in inclines.
Their bodily axes deviate into a mass of rolling flesh as they become
knotted. From a horizontal enmeshment, the three dancers shift
45
Formless Formation
into an intertwined verticality, and we hear a moaning inseparable

from singing. The space is lit again and frenzied dancing, falls,
and throwdowns ensue. Progressively, they engage in a strenuous
exercise of awkward and precarious balancing acts, attempting
to hold each other up; “hold it!” one of the dancers shouts, but
they keep on falling and falling again and again. Sometimes they
use the side walls of the black box so as to be able to hew onto
each other, their hewing bodies keep on trying, as one says, “I
got you.” Lewis screams “Blaaaaaaccccck!” and the performance
ends in pitch darkness.103
Mobilizing different layers of Blackness, minor matter includes the

tensions between resonance and dissonance, holding, touching,
and collapsing across a choreography of noise. In its explicit desire
to exhaust the limits of singular and representational form and
materiality, Lewis asks: “what does the dancing body sound like
as opposed to look like?”104
What are the frequencies of the dancing body, and how do these
frequencies materialize and stimulate other bodies through the
mattering of feelings?
For sociologist Hartmut Rosa, social “resonance comes into being

only if and when, through the vibration of one body, the frequency
of another body is stimulated”105 and proposes that these vibra-
tions are deeply transformational world relations. At the same
time, for the author, resonance can never be instrumentalized
and is always ambivalent; it is a differentiated response rather
than a repeated echo across the pluralization of singularities. At
the core of Rosa’s work is the idea that resonance may instigate
the unraveling of social alienation and capitalist acceleration
since desires vibrate in and across all experiences of the given
46
world-system. As unpredictable, strained and fragile as Lewis’s

balancing acts, social resonance, for Rosa, is experienced through
a rapport that can never be forced.
These desires tremulously transverse quotidian life-worlds and in

their manifold dimensions lean toward a harbored promise of the
not-yet. A way out of the capitalist colonization of our marketized
everyday, and the everyday matter of violence, as both Gressman
and Lewis flesh out, is to tap into an unacknowledged social res-
onance that rings of noise. Such resonance can never be pinned
down philosophically, as it is an “immediate experiential reality”106
fostering (dis)harmonious singular and social dispositions.
If Rosa’s study provides a critical theory of the “resonance of res-

onance,”107 then in disrupting the relationship between legibility
and politics, both Gressman and Lewis show how marginalized
populations are framed within specific pre-formed contexts and
imbued with pre-formed content determined by scientific norms
and their sociological axes. Rosa’s resonance-focused method
of sociology traces dimensions of reverberation by way of a dia-
grammatics of resonant “axes” and how these “axes of resonance”
construct different “world-relations.”108
Yet, Gressman’s and Lewis’s “noise” complicate Rosa’s delineation

of axes by exposing how making noise is also about remaking flesh,
through engaging non-representational and non-linear frequen-
cies. Their respective performance practices reveal how, although
operational, the force of resonance across aesthetic-life-worlds
insistently escapes administered imperatives.
So let us repeat the question:
47
Formless Formation
how do we listen for the form that deforms itself

in the name of deep noise?
From axes of resonance to axes of noise, Gressman and Lewis

rethink the sounds of the moving body as opposed to its situated
visuality. Challenging sensual orders to land us in the realm of
immersive embodiment, these artists know that the resonance of
resonance is a politics of solidarity held intimately in the sensorium.
The senses, while matter, are hardly only minor. The intergalactic
dark matter of Sun Ra’s Arkestra creates a dynamic life-world by
embodying his and their own sensoriums. The Arkestra, who have
been playing together for almost 80 years, still follow their misfit
band leader from Saturn, Sun Ra, to sonically and visually travel
in interstellar dust.109 Deeply listening to the details tremoring in
the revolutionary orchestrations of the Arkestra, we hear resonant
shudders across practices, galaxies, and axes, not just respiring
in the form, but living in continuous formlessness. From nuclear
war and space travel, the Arkestra’s songs, compositional inter-
vals, and improvisational jazz and noise travel to the unknown
and impossible because it is the “unknown you need to know in
order to survive.”110
These travels to unknown spaces entail risk, chance, collaboration,

improvisation, and trust, as the aesthetic-life-worlds of Gressman,
Lewis, and Ra disclose. Listening to the details of the unknown,
our unknown is antithetical to Empire’s anti-galactic fascism. For
within all forms of planetary organizing there are orchestrations
and choreographies moved by the quivering rhythms of vibrational
solidarity and ethics.
48
As the Arkestra teaches, these orchestrations must be ones of

lanquidity, love, and open doors to the cosmos. These communal
echoes rub up against each other, performing their coordinate
and discrepant sonority because as Ra knows, with all love to
spaces of other places, comes the violence of Earth. In this violent
soundscape, Ra sings that “radiation, mutation, hydrogen bombs,
atomic bombs,” are a “motherfucker” waiting to blast “yo ass” in
the name of nuclear war.111
Thus, in moving into the quotidian orchestra of things, entities,

assemblages, and ecologies against all war, our anticolonial is
already anticapital; the contexts and contents that separate the two
cannot be used as principles to understand the mythic qualities
of our formless formation.
For like Ra, we, too, believe that “we hold this myth to be potential/
Not self-evident but equational/Another Dimension Of another
kind of Living Life.”112
Vibrated differently across interstitial shareability, resonances are

never a singular experience. To transmit signals from the formation
of other refrains is the resonance of resonance.
In the constant violence of becoming and exertions

that seek to exhaust form, they open doorways to the senses,
dropping us into minor realms of matter and astro-loveology.
To vibrate, to touch, not like a tap but a grasp, is to deeply listen in

order to connect with another living life of another kind and place,
to know when to hold back, to retain the refrain, or to decelerate
frequency to change the band widths.
49
Formless Formation
Feel vibrations under skin.

Play the track.
Listen to the
sound.
50
ENSEMBLE
I f the ensemble is a portal and passage, then resonance is the
necessary way through, a getting through to get on the way. And
the way through is a tinkle, a stroke, a push, an out-of-breathness.
It’s both a listen and a response: a place where there is no sound
without the tempering of the ear. This getting through is often
off-kilter, or an ongoing start and stop in which the show is just
another rehearsal. Without practice, there is no ensemble.
“Wait for me,” a member of the ensemble says, and then another,
then another, then another, because the leader of the ruckus is
never absolutely clear. The underpull and the flight all happen at
the same time, for swaying towards others is to want to be sin-
gled out, knowing that the solo is no solo without company. The
rhythmic section makes a segment, inviting an opening that’s cut
by key changes breaking through rhythm’s frames.
Sometimes the only way up is down, where down is up and

simultaneously a type of sideways.
But to move sideways one needs skill to know when to lean on

something, someone. This leaning and splitting ensemble is an
aggregation in composition, an accumulative shedding, a making
do, a getting through, a collective travelling to another place that
Formless Formation
is also this place and that space. It’s a roving together with a one
way ticket, for there is no going back to what the ensemble once
was because the ensemble loses and gains itself at the same time.
The ensemble is the ebb and flow of encounter, a concession

to share desire while following a sound, a rhyming, a constant
eruption in time, an appearance and disappearance in the name
of imagination.
Collaboration is a verbing born out of “the unfinished genesis of

the imagination.”113 Like listening, imagination is collaborative, a
type of relationality that is animated by actively sharing labor. For
one is not the single author of aesthetics and culture, but shares
the process. Sometimes, in the deepest of connections, art writes
the writer. Ensnared in tension and harmony, objects, ideas, and
subjects activate and generate imaginative scenes. As resonance
predicts, most conversations, while not yet documented, were
always-already informally and innovatively entangled and endured.
By privileging imagination, creativity, curiosities of care over

identity, resonance guides forward an ideology and consciousness
that necessitates solidarity. Moved by the Motion is but one exam-
ple of the capability of collaboration. An ensemble of fluctuating
members, created by and including artists such as filmmaker Wu
Tsang, boychild, Asmara Maroof, Josh Johnson, and many others,
Moved by the Motion is made up of DJs, musicians, dancers, art-
ists, poets, writers. This ensemble is a formless formation where
members come and go and return constantly. In one of their live
performances, Sudden Rise,114 Tsang recites a poem115 written with
both Fred Moten and boychild. While written together, the poem
harbors another voice as it is inspired by a line in one of W.E.B.
Du Bois’s essays116 – that line becoming the title of the poem.
54
As Tsang incantates the poem, boychild and Johnson dance to

the reading as well as to Maroof’s electronic sounds and Patrick
Belaga’s cello. Without a script and in an improvised manner, the
music responds to the interlaced projected images and movements
of the dancers. The dancers' bodies are captured by images in real
time on huge screens behind them, enabling an eerie doubling
of their dance; a choreography composed of countless falls from
a raised platform and mirrored in different temporal registers.
Sudden Rise echoes Tsang’s films We hold where study117 and One
emerging from a point of view118 in which the artist uses the filmic
techniques of overlapping, blurring, and splicing images to join
two horizontal screens. Expressed in the inseparability of difference
through stills protruding into one another, the channels conjoin
in the middle. Fluctuating and folding in formless formation,
the borderless, cinematic panoramas bleed and melt into each
other to meet between spaces and times that are at once singular
and also adhered through the assembly of images. Cinematically
stunning and politically convicted, Tsang’s blurs and fades into
other worlds are the studious affections of intricate embroilment.
Blurring and fading are aesthetic strategies as much as they are

political accomplishments. Tsang’s courageous ensemble reflects
Édouard Glissant’s archipelagic thinking to promote a shared
unknowability that breaks through the dialectical limits of opacity
and transparency. Enacting a visual and sonic poetics of relation,119
Tsang encapsulates the ensemble of resonance across space and
time by way of non-linear associative principles. Like Glissant
calling the reader to listen to the echoes (the feedback) and chaos
spiraling within what he calls la totalité-monde,120 Tsang evades the
ambush of transparency by embracing opacity. For both, opacity is
an analytic for reading, thinking, creating, performing, and also
55
Formless Formation
a practice for being with others – one that privileges traversing

operation over reductive delineation.
Striving across resonant frequencies, a praxis of accompaniment

promotes the recording of archipelagic aesthetic-life-worlds in
which the imaginative openings of opacity ensure transformative
modes of historical overlap between entities. Multiversal relation-
alities attempt to rescore existence by what gives-on-and-with, not
by the representational clarity and absolutism that often violently
consume all life energies.
Tsang tracks down the violence of representation by following

the ways in which the camera operates. “There is no non-violent
way to look at somebody”121 argues Tsang, a proposition that is
also the title of a 2019 exhibition that draws from a sentence
in the text “Sudden Rise at a Given Tune.”122 Revealing how
theoretical and aesthetic forms advance into other formations,
Tsang suggests that the double negative in the title highlights
the layers of intention within filmmaking. These intentions are
seen across points of critical understanding: 1) how the recording
of documentation is always pre-intentional and can be thought
as conjoined to histories of social movement as documented; 2)
how documentarian choices are imbued with the filmmaker’s
desire to not be violent to their subjects, and in consequence, do
justice to their stories; 3) how giving voice to the voiceless often
leads to sinister operations within documentary filmmaking as
a genre. The violence, for Tsang, is situated within the intention,
desire, and execution, none removed for the trap of transparency.
The ensemble responds to this violence through a turbulent and

unpredictable aesthetic assault on the capturing frame itself. Aware
that the aesthetic life world is interlaced with the violence of the
56
apprehending image as well as the violence of everyday life, Tsang

denies their separation. But what does one do when the camera
looks back, initiating a visual hail that reorganizes documentation
itself? For Tsang, the answer lies in fully admitting that violence
overshadows the system of seeing.
Inherent to the act of viewing and recording, then, is the negoti-

ation with representation, for there is a necessary cut to touch, a
necessary conflict within entanglement and relationality, like the
elemental forms engendered from the camera. From the recurrent
still, the shot-reverse-shot, the splice, close-up, zoom out, or the
show and tell of a manipulative lens, the camera exposes how there
is no non-violent way to hold a camera, to look, to fundamentally
see one another. The ratification to violence lives in the tangled
particulars of the ensemble.
And Tsang’s ensembles are immersed in the intricate details of

social movements across entangled performances. This is also
to share that the aesthetics of the ensembles of rebellion are
never removed from the aesthetic practices used by the state to
mobilize against political uprising. Although capitalist economies
and police apparati attempt to erase the ways we are conjoined,
planetary protests seek to transcend the capitalist nation-state’s
necropolitical social structure funded in the name of anti-Blackness,
anti-queerness, anti-subalternness that leave the most vulnerable
for dead. In response to such violence, Tsang offers the blurring
image as an act of counterinsurgency; still upon still, Tsang dis-
closes the right to be complex, opaque, to be interarticulated in
an aesthetic strategy of collaboration.
If collaboration is methodological, then the aesthetics of protest

and rebellion must also disclose the compositional frameworks
57
Formless Formation
and organizing principles of social resistance. Such a claim also

unearths how regional rebellions comprise an ensemble of plan-
etary protests via the urgency of resonance.
Resonating frequencies of rebellion across the globe are performed

in how planetary protestors mobilize their aesthetic choreo-dis-
cursive-politics, seen in how they walk, run, lie down, and sit,
along with their linguistic advances in signs and chants, all col-
lectively reverberating demands, dreams, and declarations. Take
for instance the choreo-politics performed in Santiago, Chile at
the end of 2019 against rampant femicide and sexual assault in
an anti-state collaborative dance and song mobilized by militant
feminist organizers. Since its inception, this choreographic insur-
gency has been danced and chanted by women across the globe,
communicating a planetary solidarity that exceeds governmental
preeminence. Chile’s “Un Violador En Tu Camino”123 is just one
aesthetic example of the shared planetary struggle against the
possession of life.
Or take the contemporary events against anti-Black fascist policing

in the USA that are countering the state’s mandate by a collective
rebellion across a staggering number of cities and continents.
The ongoing US uprisings of Summer 2020 advance the idea
that the occupation of land and life is never defensible. As such,
the ensemble emerges throughout the motley colors of clothing,
the white masks of milk and antacids used against tear gas, the
bandanas and balaclavas that shield and mark their underground
intermingling cultures. Countering occupations of all accords,
from the human body to the ecological, are heard in the resonating
urgencies echoing across the plenum. As social media captures
the violence of looking at somebody, rebellion maintains and
transcends the shot.
58
For this time, the ensemble is televised.

For this time, the revolution is on screen.
The desire to respire in solidarity has travelled far and wide. For an
unprecedented example can be found with Black indigenous resistors
on the other side of the globe shuddering in resonance with the
US rebellions as they, too, fight from within their own experience
of colonialism and genocide. The West Papuans have sounded out
their solidarity, expressing how they stand together with those
fighting against anti-Blackness in the USA.124 Their own struggle
against the Indonesian military that kills them in the service of
American and Canadian gold mines uncovers the endless pursuits
of colonialism that they wear singularly but feel planetarily. Their
battle in solidarity, only another example of a new world social order
formlessly forming against occupation and oppression, vibrates
similar yet different contexts in which anti-anti-Black genocide is
at the apex of all revolution and liberatory domain.
Unearthing the swerving poetics of protest through clamorous

details, the revolution manifests in the aesthetic-life-worlds of
the part and the crowd.125
And neither the part nor crowd, like the aesthetic

and the political, serve in metaphor.
On the flip side of these uprisings, the planet’s police also have their
aesthetic tactics in the form of robocop gear, the design of hold
and attack, the helmets, gas and rubber bullets, wailing cars, and
raining batons. The logic of the police’s ensemble is a militarized
one, an order that protects a certain sociality that is defined and
motivated by property and profit. All logistics for social organizing
59
Formless Formation
commence with militarization, for “the military-industrial complex

stabilizes capitalist activity, absorbing its excesses by producing
armaments, surveillance tactics, and ever-diversifying uses of
security technology.”126 Created from hierarchical efficiency and
observation, to think further with Foucault’s birth of the pris-
on-industrial complex, militarized existences rely on structures
of surveillance, obedience, discipline – all working in favor of the
marketization of the state; for to resist those designs used to mold
“docile bodies”127 is to commit to lawlessness itself.
Every component of social order is regulated by the smallest

detail, technicality, scheduling, and specialty. Observed across
institutional parameters, from schools to churches to prisons and
orchestras, in attire and speech, to movement and silence, these
are the “means of correct training”128 that Foucault imagines as
the dissolution of a complicated sense of being.
Enforced by governing institutions, the aesthetic follows a sched-

ule as well, often marketized and commercialized, mobilized as
propaganda; a mainstream cultural perception of leisure; an after-
joy occurring once the ideological program has been completed.
But let us not forget that even when neoliberalism perpetuates
the violence of the aesthetic, the aesthetic-life-world shows us
how to live off beat and to breathe together against traditional
constructions of space and time.
So how might we critically communicate the seriousness of the

aesthetic within the crisis of representation? How might we score
the interarticulation between the violence of representation and
the burden of liveness? How does the aesthetic-life-world lead us
into new constructions of being alive/live, unfamiliar modes for
remodeling existence?
60
Like the violence of the governing frame, the burden of liveness is

never removed from the institutionalization of the aesthetic. For
as Tsang critically expresses, the violence of representation both
defines and directs the living by how one comes to understand
the process of viewing. Often led by a transparent notion of the
senses, both the crisis of representation and the burden of liveness
withdraw from opacity as a strategic mechanism for social relations.
In theorizing this burden, Muñoz claims that there is a constant
“need for a minoritarian subject to ‘be live’ for the purpose of
entertaining elites.”129 That is to say that the transparency of the
subject produces its circulating value and in enacting modes of
difference that appeal to elites, the minor voice, in all its different
tenors, is subdued for the major. Called upon to perform in the
now with no recourse to the past, minoritarian subjects are also
denied the future. With no future and no regard for the subject
as a historical one, the crisis of representation, across bodies and
aesthetics, delimits the conditions of possibility for collaboration.
In fact, the burden of liveness becomes the very crisis of represen-
tation all uprisings seek to abolish.
By insisting on the histories and futures of those uncounted and

unconsidered, Patricia Nguyen’s ensemblic practices reject such
burdens of liveness and slick categories of representation. Working
against the separation of aesthetics and politics, Nguyen sees their
connection as inherently symbiotic as she travels across diverse
cultural spaces and encounters with subjects who must negotiate
everyday histories of violence and trauma.
In an interview regarding survivors of sex trafficking on the borders

of Vietnam with China, Nguyen addresses how she collaborated
with groups of women from ethnic minorities and indigenous
backgrounds, across linguistic and educational barriers in order
61
Formless Formation
to create a large mural that encapsulates their singular stories

into a collective voice.130 For Nguyen, it is precisely the aesthetic
practice of producing a common project that helps surpass the
divisions and differences between disparate peoples.
In a later work where she collaborated with survivors of police tor-

ture in Chicago, Nguyen, along with collaborator and co-founder
of their Axis Lab, John Lee, designed the Chicago Torture Justice
Memorial Project to privilege survivors' stories. Most important for
the survivors was the visible inclusion of their names and mani-
festos within the site. Nguyen and Lee envisioned a “monumental
anti-monument”131 functioning as an archive for the struggle for
reparations, while simultaneously offering a community space
for organizers.
Nguyen describes her approach to community engagement as

“rooted in performance studies, women of color feminist theory,
and Black radical thought,” along with her staunch belief “in
the power of cultural production to shape our collective futures”
across “working class communities of color to resilient transna-
tional struggles for liberation.”132 Through performance and visual
art, movement analysis, and theatre, these connections conjoin
human sentiment and heal trauma through the fortitude of the
aesthetic. Nguyen notes that her practice is grounded in “the
belief that political struggle is a collective durational performance
carried forth across generations.”133 In its multitude, this collective
durational performance mobilizes the aesthetic to make visible an
ensemble of stories, for all of Nguyen’s collaborations with others
are, at heart, acts in catharsis.
In redressing state violence through storytelling, Nguyen reorders

historical precedent and deliberately asks, “what is our role as
62
cultural producers in the face of continued war, police brutality,

mass incarceration, and poverty in our nation’s history?”134 Unable
to disconnect activism, art, and academia, Nguyen brings to light
their entangled solidarity in all of her projects and performances.
Entangled solidarities extend beyond human relations for Nguyen.

Critically combining different materials and elements to link the
human with the earth, her performances precipitate new ecolog-
ical resonances. In a work that underscores what she terms the
“materialities of confinement,”135 Nguyen interlaces choreography,
lighting, concrete flooring, and a mylar blanket in her performance
Echoes.136 Nguyen covers her body with the mylar blanket and
vigorously rolls on the floor, producing a moving terrain of silver
and colored lights that express how all material is intertwined and
experienced simultaneously by those in confinement. In each turn
left to right, she depicts the duress of South East Asian refugeeism
as well as a seascape and landscape that reflects the refugee body
in spatial suspension with all elements of the world. The aesthetic
and performative particularities of this piece, as captured through
video, impress upon the viewer the full sensorial undertakings of
those ensnared by the state. As Nguyen sways from side to side,
her face extrapolated from the scene, the viewer feels the tight
enclosure that collectively impedes the dispossessed from escaping
their everyday imprisonment.
Her work is an ensemble across elemental solidarities, recalibrat-

ing the potential of being and breathing together, of holding on
against the afflictions of representation and liveness through
ecological solidarity.
Ensemblic living is a practice of rigorous connectivity across

aesthetic-life-worlds. It is the active refusal to live apart, while
63
Formless Formation
staying a part, being a part, a particle of the void. It is also about

declining to be the exception because exceptionalism is always an
anti-anticolonial project. This double negative, as Tsang cautions,
is to also acknowledge that to frame something is to cut some-
thing out. For the cut is more than erasure: it is an entry point
into something else and a simultaneous escape from everything
other, a kind of breakout caught not only on screen, but lived in
everyday life.
As these aesthetic-life-worlds summon, to tear a cut into the world

is to intimately remake it, not through the singularity of a sense,
but through the intricacies of the sensorium. For the senses are
never removed from the social scenes that implore them, instead
they work in tandem, in ensemble. That is to say that the aes-
thetic-life-world is a sensorial and active affective mapping that
underlines how existence happens through an “ensemble of the
senses.”137 For it is impossible, as Moten argues, to create a dis-
tinction between the “ensemble of the sense” and the “ensemble
of the social.”138 For Moten contends that “there’s a sociality of
the senses – which is a formulation Marx makes, when the senses
become theoreticians in their practice . . ..”139 Emphasizing the inex-
tricable nature between the multi-sensorial and the multi-social,
Moten, in turning to Marx, understands that when we critically
attend to the senses as theoreticians we go “against the grain of
a whole lot of commonplace formulations people make about
aesthetic experience, and about the place of aesthetic experience
in the formation of the subject.”140 For us, the senses harbor
the potentiality of new social orders as the ensemble divulges
the serious intentions of the aesthetic. Never removed from the
conditions of the social and the subject, the aesthetic-life-world
regenerates global breath.
64
These ensembles are inseparable from world study and integral

to the aesthetic-life-world, where the social, psychic, and material
bind in sentiment and action. Or as Tsang, Nguyen, and countless
other artists/activists/scholars show, to understand the senses as
the social, as an exercise of the ensemble, is to counter the limits
of seeing, knowing, and doing. But it is also to bypass the bound-
aries of representation and liveness, to push past their crises and
violence in order to instantiate embroiled formless formations.
The ensemble is always the flux and influx of encounter, the greeting
of spirits and the tenacious agreement to hunger together while
chasing a sound, a sight, a timing, a rhyming, an animated burst,
a flight into an appearance and disappearance.
65
ORCHESTRATE
T o orchestrate is to mobilize divergent coordinates, the arrange-
ment of the bassline undaunted by the melody; the major chord
and the minor key, registers varied and altered in dynamic pull.
From the heavy weight of a deep beat to the dark expression of
abysmal feeling, the changing lead sheet deranges the arrangement.
Assembling bodies, feelings, and fists, orchestration is where the

swarm and ensemble multiply the score; and their discrepant
union is visual, haptic, a kinesthetic composition of tuned and
toned instruments – all notes, big and small, tweaking key changes
against the scrim of an impending hiss. From the trumpet to the
trombone, sound references the body, just like the enduring body
instills and changes the measures of composition.
Think of Louis Armstrong blowing out a new social order to lead the
band: in his breath, a facial twitch, the horn player knows when to
blast scatting vibrations. Listen for the trumpeter Satchmo blaring
in sonic elegance to then hail in the band because the solo has
ended: this is an exegesis for life, where sounds let bodies stand
in. There’s no solo without company, and there’s no record playing
without the player; corporealities in exquisite collaboration moved
by the practice of practicing itself.
Formless Formation
Armstrong’s unique diaphragmatic compositions and improvisa-

tions have irrevocably altered the planetary soundscape. His epic
and enduring transformation of the trumpet’s sonorities speaks
to how instruments have always been deconstructed by artists and
their orchestrations to shatter the militarization and “civilizing”
of musical form. Armstrong’s aesthetic interventions include the
alterations of music, sound, sense, voice; he produced countless
collages, correspondences, two autobiographies. A prolific archivist,
he called his type writing “gappings” mobilizing multiple registers
through bizarre uses of punctuation, underlining, and ellipses of
varying length. From the trumpet to the typewriter, Armstrong
seemingly “revel[ed] in appropriating the technology of rational-
ization,”141 where his writing can be read as the usurping of the
“rational technology of the interval (“gappings” – in the sense that
the typewriter structures and spatializes an access to language)
. . ..”142 Armstrong’s practices of improvisational pluralism across
multi-media collapse the divisions between high and low culture,
class structures, and formal registers and, in their criss-crossings,
traverse the gaps between transnational culture domains.
In breaking down the scoring system to outrun Empire’s violence,

Armstrong is just one example in a string of artists and insurgent
creators who appropriate colonial instrumentation and rational
technologies through performative modes of alterity. Like the
orchestration of new sounds, these anticolonial practices occur
within a shattered continuum, and it is the listener’s (reader’s)
job to decipher the sequencing order of content and context in
the gappings of reanimated form.
The social ordering of Westernized human life historically works

through the appropriative structuring of logistical militarization,
and such an operation is an orchestrated assembly working in
68
capitalist service and servitude. The proletarian struggle against

such orchestrations is determined by the colonial one in Aimé
Césaire’s poetics of revolt. He refers to “the colonial problem”
as the dilemma that essentially creates the equation “colonial-
ism=thingification.”143 In noticing the “extraordinary possibilities
wiped out”144 for the world by colonial violence, Césaire points to
the connections between colonialism and “proletarianization” –
the latter works to produce subjects into “civilized” laborers and
commodities. Simultaneously anticapitalist and anticolonialist in
its diagnosis of Western civilization’s eternal strickenness, Césaire’s
treatise confronts the disease that is the colonial enterprise.
The liberating power of anticolonial revolt, as Césaire sees it,

happens through orchestrations that do not conform to “narrow
particularism.”145 Working between the dialectic of a particu-
lar-universal, Césaire divulges that he does not “intend either to
become lost in a disembodied universalism” for he has a “different
idea of a universal.”146 Césaire’s universal is “rich with all that is
particular, rich with all the particulars there are, the deepening of
each particular, the coexistence of them all.”147 Poetically raging
against European civilization’s universal profiteering propelled
by racial hierarchies, Césaire announces how in its abhorrence
to the coexistence of deep particulars, fascism is inherent to
colonial atrocities.
If the “civilizing” conventions of colonizing Western orchestra-

tions are ritualized following a standard hierarchical order of use
instructions, masters, lead instruments, Césaire’s and Armstrong’s
orchestrations are ones that continue a “fleshing out” of coex-
isting particulars whilst challenging the material conditions of
commodification and alienated labor. In thinking with Césaire
and Armstrong, what would it mean to advocate for orchestrated
69
Formless Formation
aesthetic-life-worlds that decline the monolithic labels for social

order, and that in their rejection of thingification galvanize mil-
itant, poetic, and sonic resistance?
To orchestrate is to score the rearrangement, planning with the

elements of the world to produce a desired effect that will land
us in the future of the future still imagined.
The aesthetic-life-worlds we imagine resonate with worldly compo-

sitions for abolition and liberation. Take for instance the Zapatista
Army of National Liberation in Chiapas, Mexico who call for “a
world in which many worlds fit.”148 Engaging in what Manolo
Callahan calls “convivial research,”149 the habits of assembly at
the heart of Zapatismo move beyond mere critique in order to
work out collective tools for communal safety, conviviality, and
sustenance. Zapatismo requires a move away from simple soli-
darity to direct action in the face of global paramilitarism. These
collective obligations are ones that conspire (plan and breathe)
together in order to organize against lethal states of ongoing war.
The Zapatistas’s militant operations are defined by all-masked

orchestrations in which singular identities and leadership roles are
pushed aside for ideality and direct action, or as they declare: “para
todos todo, para nosotros nada”150 (everything for everyone; nothing
for us). The slogan “para todos todo, para nosotros nada” celebrates
the coexistence of all particulars, whilst abolishing the subjective
voice that speaks in the name of a separatist “us.” This slogan “runs
so counter to anything any of us – the resource-hungry individuals
of the so-called First World – would ever think of demanding.”151
Theirs is a crucial reminder to the necessary planetary organizing
against climate change today: “no one ever rioted for austerity. Yet,
without feeling cheated, we need to build our capacity to live by
70
another old saying: enough is better than a feast.”152 In this regard,

the Zapatistas’s demands for regional autonomy and the general
strike work against corporate globalization: theirs is an anticapitalist
anticolonial movement that counters our current no-future in the
name of an ecologically sound world formed by many worlds.
To insist on terms like anticolonial and anticapital is to look for

exits from Western temporal and spatial containment. It is to
refuse modernity’s reliance on linear time and chronology as the
dominant frameworks to perpetuate the illusion of global devel-
opment and historical progress. It is to resist the epistemological,
ontological, and genealogical labels that compartmentalize the
colonial enterprise into postcolonial, decolonial, neocolonial,
settler-colonial, developed First world, developing Third worlds.
And it is to disentangle the spatial politics embedded in each
prefix, so that geographical and discursive contexts (for example,
postcolonial: India, decolonial: Latin America, settler-colonial: US
and Australia) do not overdetermine a synchronous anticolonial
project in which multi-directional resonance scrambles traditional
temporal and spatial orchestrations.
To orchestrate solidarity and direct action is to constantly place

pressure on these terms, underlining how the prefix often marks a
temporal misfire in its spatial containment. If the prefix is meant
to be a temporal marker, but really performs a spatial one, what’s
the plural project of anticolonialism across borderless regions?
To be clear, formless formational organizing resists essentializing
or conflating anticapitalist struggles. Orchestrations informed
by resonance contain all the myriad cultural logics, internal con-
tradictions, and the gaps between them, that sustain particular
histories and experiences of colonialism and empire. However, as
the representations internal to the capitalist logic of class struc-
71
Formless Formation
tures are always-already racialized, gendered, and sexualized, then

anticolonial, anticapitalist formations consist of praxes seeking
to abolish systemic capitalist social and economic relations in
an orchestrated coalition of reconstruction across discrepant
imbrications of materiality.
Colonial structures cultivate form, defining exception, contextual

property, value, permission, and the refusal to “consent not to be
a single being.”153 An anti capitalist orchestration is the antithesis
of exceptionalism because orchestrated exceptionalism has always
been the first tenet of fascism, the first motivating momentum
of the singular. In locating radical connections and deliberately
enacting these types of discrepant arrangements, resonance is our
guiding method. What may appear as jumps in logic, or clumsy
object relations, is rather an intentional act of both ethos and
epistemology. In other words, to subvert the lines separating our
fields of anticolonial and anticapitalist study is to orchestrate a
form of monster migrations.
Until the conditions of possibility for a future encourage multiver-

sal existences, the future will always be marred by the deadly and
intertwined politics of colonialism and capitalism. Contrary to the
idea that the anticolonial and decolonial are different sides of the
same coin, they harbor unique ideological properties neither of
which are to be used as metaphors. “Because settler colonialism is
built upon an entangled triad structure of settler-native-slave, the
decolonial desires of white, non-white, immigrant, postcolonial,
and oppressed people, can similarly be entangled in resettlement,
reoccupation, and re-inhabitation that actually further settler
colonialism.”154 Or, the contest to survive in competitive capital
is what furthers “settler colonialism.” The metaphorization of
decolonization makes possible a set of evasions, or “settler moves
72
to innocence” that problematically attempt to “reconcile settler

guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity.”155 This is also to
say that colonialism’s preservation is dependent on the workings
of a settled identity as property of capital itself.
The sounds of the oppressive and colonizing apparati of form are

everywhere: identity, time, fields, methods, disciplines, interactions,
genres, histories, and even movements. Often indexed visually,
form relies on facticity to define, separate, and catalogue; however,
a resonating sensorium undoes sight for the benefit of the plenum.
If the phylum is the ordering of all classes made up of infinitely
materialized particulars within the plenum, then the plenum of
the pineal eye of Western rationality is incapable of ever sensing
how resonance senses.
Writing during the 2020 pandemic, Indigenous Action warns in

“Rethinking the Apocalypse: An Indigenous Anti-Futurist Manifesto”
that colonialism “has infected all aspects of our lives, which is
responsible for the annihilation of entire species, the toxification
of oceans, air and earth, the clear-cutting and burning of whole
forests, mass incarceration, the technological possibility of world
ending warfare, and raising the temperatures on a global scale, this
is the deadly politics of capitalism, it’s pandemic.”156 Capitalism is
the ultimate deadly disease that increases force through constant
acts of violence against Indigeneity, all life. It rests on the death of
the Indigenous and the destruction of entire species by engineering
time and propagating annihilation; “it is apocalypse, actualized.
And with the only certainty being a deathly end, colonialism is a
plague.”157 If colonialism is a plague and capitalism the pandemic,
then their embroiled infections are the organizing principles that
attempt to decimate Indigenous life, one that refuses to disappear
in the name of profit.158
73
Formless Formation
Indigenous Action are accurate in attesting to the non-future of

the most vulnerable. The swarming viral pandemic of the 2020s
affirms the mortal/immortal speed of catastrophe. While one does
not have the capacity to outrun the veracity of the strain, our vulgar
conception of human exceptionalism presumes to monitor the
speed of tomorrow. Viruses, like pollution, work rhizomatically
and galactically; they do not abide by the human rules of time and
spatial order and yet they unveil the class disparities of wealth
and oppression under luxury consumerism and racial capitalism.
Although it appears that the virus’ only border is its symptoms, the
dormant and asymptomatic power of contagion disputes this logic.
By seeing ancestral insight as outdated, living in the past of

premodern ideas, the colonizer privileges corporate value over a
multiversal future. But Indigenous Action smash this fallacy by
expressing that “they (the ancestors) understood that the apocalyp-
tic only exists in absolutes. Our ancestors dreamt against the end
of the world.”159 In other words, ancestral insight and knowledge
already predicted contemporary life and its movements forward in
time, seeing the future before the epistemological elites plundered
culture, Indigenous life, and land into proprietary sellable form.
This means that our enemies are often members of the same
orchestra. Not only as the colonial police, but those that seek a
seat at the table, a cut of the profit, or our death at the expense of
their exceptional walking careers; all of this conducted in the face
of their anti-relational no-future theory that celebrates a perceived
exceptionality propelled by global mediocrity.
So, let us not forget that form is a colonial project. It is advanced

by capitalist and colonial structures unable to escape their own
indexical present. This present, dismally, annihilates the presences
74
of future life by deliberately bypassing past injustices and the

constant furthering of colonialism and war.
And yet, all is not lost: new orchestrations across transnational,

identitarian, and regional pluralisms constantly emerge. See how
the Arab Spring of 2011 directly inspired and propelled the Indig-
nado and Occupy movements that followed it, and how surprising
practices of mutual aid are ongoingly orchestrated. Such as in 2011
when Tahrir Square protestors in Cairo ordered pizzas online for
striking workers occupying the state capitol of Wisconsin. Or
when in 2015 Palestinians advised Black Lives Matter organizers
in Ferguson, St. Louis as to how to handle tear gas, and then a
year later we witnessed US military veterans fighting side by side
with Indigenous warriors at Standing Rock.
Today, the 2020 US rebellions have discharged profound rever-

berations of rage across the world and unexpected forms of
solidarity such as the K-Pop stans’ sabotaging of racist hashtags,
rallies, and US police radio signals. These global aesthetic soci-
alities of protest are made possible by “the organizing networks
of algorithmic technologies of the common” that express “the
possibility of alternative cartographies of the political.”160 Social
movements in ongoing processes of transformation disrupt mass
media’s attempts to compartmentalize emergent configurations
of defiance and heterogeneity. By way of embodied practices that
shift boundaries across struggles against the proletarianizations
of colonization, a common recognition for the necessity of orga-
nizing shared dissent arises.
These orchestrations of solidarity across experimental improvisa-

tions of form require the obliteration of conventional and main-
stream “maps and mappings” in order to “try to imagine something
75
Formless Formation
else.”161 An aesthetics of cognitive mapping162 that recognizes gaps

and gappings, at the same time as it resists subjective dislocation,
orchestrates radical cartographies of the present.
Our formless formation consists of traversing acts of mutual aid

and direct actions that surpass the metaphor in place of orches-
trated praxes.
New cognitive mappings and orchestrations exceed nation-states’

and diasporas’ spatial and temporal conditions. These aesthet-
ic-life-worlds tracing alternative cartographies are queer in their
crossings, gaps, and off-centering tilts.
Creating an orchestrated Caribbean sensoria that models trans-

national solidarity and diasporic unruliness are the monster
migrations of the six-foot tall Dominican and queer novelist,
multi-media artist, songwriter-singer, model, musician, and
trombonist Rita Indiana.163 “Known as la montra (the female
monster),”164 the monster migrations of her band Rita Indiana
y Los Misterios blur sound, image, and embodiment through the
art of musical and linguistic fusion. While demonstrating the
expansion of chord progression and sonic notation, her fusionist
practices also parallel the migratory transitions of the aesthetic
cognitive mappings of diaspora. These monster migrations are
found in tempo changes and new rhythms that accentuate the
galloping beats of merengue, but also the rushes of emergency
that move within notes and across bodies of land and water.
In the video for the song “Da Pa Lo Do,”165 for example, Indiana
attends to the particular nationalist strains between Haitians
and Dominicans by overlapping musical, historical, and visual
aesthetic forms associated with diverse cultural scenes embroiled
76
in Caribbean history.166 Indiana positions migratory crossings

between Haiti and the Dominican Republic through the ascension
of revolution, race, religion, and the overlays of musical compo-
sition by performing as a queer force conjoining nations amidst
a long history of colonial violence.
But it is in the video for the song “La Hora de Volve (The Time to
Return)”167 that the avant-garde monster dynamically takes on the
other-worldly components of migratory passings. In this video,
dancers fly on vinyl records/flying saucers in an apocalyptic land-
scape in outer space as the artist sings of and into a dreamscape
of another planet for the possible return home. Yet where is home
when the snowy streets of New York City seep into tropical veins
and numb labor? How is the return home not another term for
departure when “your time is up, papi?”168 As vinyl records and
alien creatures fly out of her singing mouth, against a constantly
repeated choreography of shoulder shrugs and some merengue
four-beat-feet keep a syncopated pulse, Indiana sings: “Take a
plane dammit!/An upside down raft./ You don’t see?/ It’s time
to come back!”169
As her call to return home progresses, the video itself returns to

the MTV-era DIY aesthetics of the late 1980s, with its ad hoc
collaging and bright garish colors amidst all black costuming. As
she sings, “Sometimes people want to move/They wanna go and
see/How is the other bembe/You left, you got hit, you came and
you made”170 two very tall male backup dancers multiply into an
infectious rhythmic line of many dancers, queerly migrating in their
joyously convivial moves against straight times and straight scenes.
Indiana brings to the fore cultural remixes that land migration in
queer science fictions and queer multiverses.
77
Formless Formation
By listening to the politics of race, sexuality, and gender in her

intergalactic songs and music videos, one can hear “her multifac-
eted style” mixing “merengue with elements of hip hop, techno
and Afro-Caribbean sound” including rock and Dominican dia-
lects.171 Indiana’s aesthetic-life-worlds orchestrate linguistic and
sonic transnational Caribbean migratory and diasporic crossovers
that are informed by an enmeshment of Blackness, Brownness,
Indigeneity, and queerness.
These intercosmic stylings are queer gappings and mappings

that undo the colonization of, and the race for, space.
As she vigorously touches other modes of difference and genre,

Indiana communicates the full mobilization of queerness. Or as
Eve Sedgwick claims, the term queer may apply to “the open mesh
of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses
and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of any-
one’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made)
to signify monolithically.”172 The use of queer gaps and overlaps as
method to disrupt the monolithic makings of subject formation
animate a monstrous type of dissonant resonance in Indiana’s
writing and music, imbuing her entire body of migrating work.
In deforming form with this definition of “queer,” we are reminded

of what has too often been lost in queer studies today: “that queer
is not a label”173 as terrorist drag performance artist and icon Vag-
inal Davis might say. It is, instead, an intergalactic choreography
of mess, use, and ceaseless flux performed in the disidentifying
blur, in Indiana’s fade in and out of desire across style, category,
nation, and musical genre.
78
All key and chord changes in Indiana’s art are alterations for
life’s ongoing queer compositions, in which her expansive car-
tographies acknowledge the intervals within the aesthetics of
cognitive mapping.
This is “the time to return,” in Indiana’s resonant call, to Arm-

strong’s cognitive musicianship and writing, collaging, archiving
where cognitive mapping performs as gappings “because the
music already is criticism.”174 Critical of written scholarship on
music that thinks the writing of musicians as supplemental to, or
like their sounds, Brent Hayes Edwards argues that music itself
produces thought and rearranges the production of knowledge.175
The use of the writer, the use of sound, the writer’s, musician’s
and sound’s usages, in all their gappings, reorient newly deranged
orchestrations. These twists and turns make queer use “audible.”176
If to orchestrate implies an audibility that escapes functionality,

then at the heart of the rearrangement of aesthetic cognitive
matters exist questions surrounding the performativity of orches-
tration. In their shifting structures, the orchestrations inherent
to formless formations practice “queer use.” These vital practices
of misuse are vibrant animations where to queerly orchestrate is
“the work you need to do to be.”177
For Sara Ahmed, to queer use is to promote and engage in a van-

dalism that refuses “to use things properly….”178 The vandalizing
orchestrations innate to the aspirations of formless formations
are, following Ahmed, aware that the “demand to use something
properly is a demand to revere what has been given by the colonizer.
Empire-as-gift comes with use instructions.”179 Thus, anticolonial
direct actions are about taking risks that put queer use to use in
79
Formless Formation
order to imagine and move beyond formal colonial instructions

(and mere critiques of them).
The contingencies of risk create new potentialities that provide

ways “of making connections between histories that might oth-
erwise be assumed to be apart.”180 For Ahmed, this queer use of
history and form endeavors against the “weight of history” and
the ongoing institutionalization of colonial use instructions for
thinking. The risk taking involved in the queer uses of thought
helps cultivate divergent aesthetic-life-worlds, bringing the coor-
dinates of different artists, thinkers, Indigenous and diasporic
revolutionaries together into a formless formation.
Queer use then is always about a direct action that “depends on

other prior refusals: a refusal to empty oneself of a history, a refusal
to forget one’s language and family, a refusal to give up land or
an attachment to land, a refusal to exercise the terms that lead to
one’s own erasure or, to use Audra Simpson’s powerful words, ‘a
refusal to disappear.’”181 Let us not forget how Indigenous Action’s
own refusal to forget points to how their ancestors “understood
that the apocalyptic only exists in absolutes . . . dreamt against the
end of the world.”182 Dreaming against apocalypse, queer use, in
its collapse of absolutes, turns to disidentification and refusal as
strategies, in which the refusal to disappear is to also dismiss the
ingestion of “what would lead to your disappearance: the words,
the ways; the worlds.”183
Colonialism wipes out the extraordinary possibilities of other

doings, ways, and worlds, as Césaire attests, by enforcing proletar-
ianization, labor and commodification, property and propriety as
use instruction. If queer use is the refusal to ingest things, then it
is also always about how things are attended to, the ways in which
80
convivial research and study “linger on the material qualities of

that which you are supposed to pass over.”184 It is also as Ahmed
suggests: “to recover a potential from materials that have been left
behind, all the things you can do with paper if you do not follow
the instructions.”185 The formless formation, in its aesthetic cog-
nitive mappings and gappings, declines to ingest and follow the
use instructions of empire.
The alternative cartographies and direct actions enabled by algo-

rithmic hacktivisms and transnational conversations and alliances
– the misuses of the typewriter, trumpet, and trombone and the
queer use of the voice and language – all constitute an activist
archive that “might come into existence because of a gap between
what is and what is in use.”186 The refusal to use something properly,
to be impressed by the colonizer’s words and things, maps, genders,
and sexualities, is to also queer this gap “by finding in the paths
assumed to lead to cessation a chance of being in another way.”187
Indiana’s monster migrations and Armstrong’s gappings as queer
use, teach us that the aesthetics of cognitive maps are contingent
upon on the aesthetics of cognitive gaps.
Queer orchestrations are mobilized only when the gaps between

inseparable differences are sensed, put into play, and overlapped,
for without a reverence for gappings there would be no traversing
resonance, no unsettling of settlement, no open mesh of extraor-
dinary possibilities for the coexistence of particulars.
81
DIMENSION
“W 188
hat time is it on the clock of the world?” asks Grace Lee
Boggs. Taking a long view of the chronicles of humanity on our
rotating planet, Boggs traces the ever-changing faces of revolution-
ary historical time on a linear chronometer. She warns how, as the
clock ticks, social change urgently necessitates the eradication of
external and internal capitalist structures and values. “Visionary
organizing”189 moves away from mere protest to a radical social
re-organizing, a total re-imagining of world orders.
Yet the question “what time is it on the clock of the world?” sounds
like something other than historical progression. It seemingly invokes
the coexistence of multiple overlapping durations shooting off in
and across infinite dimensional tangents. Time and space collapse
because “the clock of the world” sounds more like planetary resonance.
Inseparable from discernable phenomena, imperceptible things
and their ephemera simultaneously exist in dimensions unknown.
Sensing multidimensional times and worlds requires the elimina-

tion of repetitive modes of linear and transparent representation.
Whether located within historiography, state logic, or quotidian life,
representation determines and demands reproducible structures.
Performing dimensionally, but evolving unilaterally, representa-
tion’s chilling inscrutability requires us to imagine what it would
mean to be understood outside of its determining systems.
Formless Formation
An acknowledgment of dimensional complexity is to recognize

the simultaneity of many times in many worlds where progressive
representation is not the defining outcome of revolutionary exis-
tence. Drawing from Gayatri Spivak, the authors of The Undercom-
mons remind us that the first right is the right to refuse what has
been refused to us.190 Such a refusal may aid us in withdrawing
from calcified annals, politics, temporal and spatial dimensional
objectives. Representation is often mediatized as a hollowed-out
signifier, a simulacrum that operates like a reproduced portrait,
a likeness in shape that recalls something but never the matter.
From some gallery walls to all police headquarters, most sketches
are circumstantial reductions that superficially aim to catch and
sell what eludes apprehension. This dimension of images, unfor-
tunately, is also in control of many repetitive forms of organizing.
Even resistance comes to understand itself via representation: we
are what they are not; and they are what they will never be. Power
purchases this almost-entity where the human=thingification.
Thus, representation can often be a murderous trap. For every

institution is ruled by the institution of representation, which is in
turn inseparable from the institutional reproduction of historical
anti-Blackness and anti-otherness.
Attacking and dismantling such Western overrepresentations, Syl-

via Wynter calls for the importance of “waking up our minds” via
an anticolonial reading practice.191 As she notes, colonial education
insists on attaching scientific classifications of human being to
conceptions of Western man; these categorical representations lead
to multiple catastrophes conditioned by the foreclosed acceptance
of categorical existence: “All our present struggles with respect to
race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, struggles over the
environment, global warming, severe climate change, the sharply
84
unequal distribution of the earth resources […] these are all dif-
fering facets of the central ethnoclass Man vs. Human struggle.”192
Shored up via the conveyance of scientific knowledge, ongoing
disasters are accelerated by Western constructed categorizations
of “human being” and their perennial institutional measurements
and reproductions.
Wynter’s countering anticolonial mode of intellectuality under-

stands and emphasizes “being human as praxis” and calls for the
necessary re-enchantment of this praxis, a re-enchantment made
possible through a new science and inscription of form itself.193
Drawing on Césaire, she reminds us that: “Human beings are
magical. Bios and Logos. Words made flesh, muscle and bone
animated by hope and desire, belief materialized in deeds, deeds
which crystallize our actualities […] And the maps of spring
always have to be redrawn again, in undared forms.”194 Undared
dimensions disregard colonial and capitalist forms, being human
as enchanted compositional praxis expresses the crystallizing
magic of inventive existence.
The anticolonial praxes of the constantly redrawn formless for-

mation are ones that recognize the figure of the human as co-re-
lationally bios and mythoi (biological and cultural) – a creative,
organic, fleshly, cognitive being that “authors the aesthetic script
of humanness.”195
Troubling the division between science and creativity, Wynter turns

to the cognitive leaps that connect Black creativity and differently
imagined scientific knowledges that offer open and incomplete
conceptions of being human. In her critique of scientific racism,
Wynter insists on moving away from the overrepresentation of
Man even as an oppositional category that determines resistance
85
Formless Formation
itself. In other words, what would it mean to attend to creative

works that are not invested either in an accepting adherence to,
or the simplistic oppositional refusal of, the overrepresentation
of Man?
In her study of the re-enchantment of “being human as praxis,”

Katherine McKittrick traces the ways composer, songwriter, and
guitarist Jimi Hendrix performs the creative work of a co-relational
bios and mythoi, a “science-ing of the biological contours of the
human.”196 Hendrix’s cosmic sounds unleash “a newly tilted axis,”
where the scientific axes of being human overlap with undared
sonic forms in the technological present, providing in their sono-
rous opening of closed compositional systems “a poetics-politics
of future love.”197 Listening to Hendrix’s axes in his 1967 studio
album Axis: Bold as Love, (also the title of her essay), McKittrick
understands Hendrix’s inventive manipulation of the guitar’s
sounds as one that allows for the “alterability of humanness.”198
The authoring of aesthetic scripts to re-write scientific delinea-
tions of being human is the creation of new dimensions removed
from binaristic existences. Hendrix’s resonating auralities are
creative acts of undared forms rebounding across multiverses of
metamorphosing (pr)axes, technes, and feelings.
The formless formation affirms the re-enchantment of life as

ongoing magical multidimensional invention and (anti)founda-
tional noise making.
In turn, the colonizing force of capital’s modes of overrepresenta-

tion determines “value” and seeks to consume all noisy obscurity;
it grows and profits by turning invention into profitable innova-
tion, forcing reproducible representation on all innate surplus.
As Marx shows, value is not a thing, but a set of social relations.
86
Manifested between the labor of different individuals working

under a generalized system of commodity production and exchange,
value “is nothing but the definite social relation between men
themselves which assumes here, for them, the fantastic form of a
relation between things.”199 Value as a fantastical relational form,
and its material representation in money, is a capitalist process
socially determined by the correlation between the purchase of
labor, power, and the means of production.
The production of calculable value in the universal form of numer-

ation must always reproduce itself in the name of reproduction:
“Capital is money, capital is commodities. By virtue of it being value,
it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself.”200 Money is
the material representation of value; if there is no market and no
purchasing power, there is no value. This looping contradiction is
in essence the capture of social relations and the disintegration of
all human and more-than-human ecologies outside its materialized
one-dimensional overrepresentation and dominance.
The internal contradictions of capital reveal the inherent mul-

tidimensionality to the one-dimensional spiraling of capitalist
accumulation.
Capital’s one-dimensional representational power is marked into

materiality. Re-enchanting anticolonial (pr)axes are necessarily
betrayed because an adherence to capitalism’s dimensional orders
is too often the only path for survival. Dollars, cents (sense), and
numbers represent our exhaustion. It is imperative, as Wynter
says, that “the buck stops with us.”201
If, as the clock ticks the buck must stop, then in their fantastic
formlessness non-capitalist organizations require philosophical
87
Formless Formation
conversations regarding the imagination’s role in configuring

and arranging the aesthetic scripts and revolutionary practices
necessary for addressing material needs and conditions. But they
would also necessarily entail philosophical questions regarding
the dimensional overrepresentations of historical time, matter,
and space altogether.
In other words, how are both established capitalist forms and

oppositional anticapitalist aspirational formations respectively
propelled, managed, and curtailed by temporal understandings
that are in themselves colonial? How are the past and the future
in the present clock of the world? How is the colonial a “project
of temporal looping” and “an active state in the here and now,
looping forward and back into itself as if time never started
or stopped ticking?”202 Or how is the material experience of
“ruination” lived as the processes through which imperial power
occupies the present?203 How are non-assimilating anticapitalist
contemporary worldviews that escape representation always-al-
ready active in our capitalist present? These questions trouble a
coherence only made possible by reproducibility. The conducive
force of representation is linked to human historicity and the
accelerations of accumulation.
The exhausting repetition of capitalism’s historical hegemony

demands a dismantling of its dimensional logics of space and
time cracked open by resonance. In all representative systems,
signs start and stop with us. Language is representational; all
alphabetic scripts are forms of communication. Representation
cannot disappear altogether. It is its prevalent rhyme and reason
that must dare to change so as to make space for all possibilities
in dimensions unknown.
88
As the title of one of Sun Ra’s albums suggests, the unknown is

witnessed in the Sunrise in Different Dimensions. Ra notes that
“nature never loses anything.”204 Convinced that the unknown
is outside of repetition, he states “history repeats itself over and
over, but a sunset does not repeat itself, a sunrise does not repeat
itself.”205 Planetary rotations repeat themselves in subtle or sudden
difference; omniversal resonances are part and parcel of multiver-
sal existences and their details remind us that yesterday is never
exactly today. Found in the changing depths of the horizon, the
light against the skyline, or the glinting color of the ocean, are
the shimmering ephemera of constant dimensional difference.
Ra’s philosophy of the unknown is one that requires knowing the

unknown. To put it another way, capitalist biopolitical and necro-
political representations of life and death are stuck in a looping
desired future that immobilizes subject transcendence for subject
transparency. Their obsession is actually a love of power in the
name of death with the face of life. The formless formation moves
to the future of the future, the past of the past: what happens after
you have imagined what will/will not happen, what did/didn’t
happen? This moment is called for by Ra in his poem “we must
not say no to ourselves” in the collection The Planet is Doomed.206
A call for the necessary synchronization and resonance with a
“greater deed,” an “art-wise dignity,” “across the thunder bridge
of time,” “we rush with lightning feet,” “to join hands with those,
the friends of seers who truly say and truly do.”207
In joining seers and doers, we land on the poetry of many, including

Youmna Chlala. In The Paper Camera, Chlala reorients our reading
practices by situating herself in multiple synchronous dimensions,
globally and locally, and boldly declaring: “I am writing to you from
the end of the world. You must realize this.”208 In a prophetic turn
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Formless Formation
of verse, Chlala’s untitled poems perform as formless formations

for friendship against the brutal doom of capitalist development,
global resource wars, refugeeism, and forced migration. For many,
as Chlala hints at, the end of the world has always-already been
available; the everyday is a combative and constant disruptive
situation209 amidst quotidian emergencies born from the deathly
maneuvers between clashing overrepresentations of Man.
Such crises inevitably lead to questions of form, imaging, repre-

sentation, and their rooted correlations. The relationship between
image and text and their ability to touch someone beyond the
shutter of the page is at stake, as the title of her poetry collection
suggests. Making friends with words and images, her “paper cam-
era” attempts to capture the moment always passed and still to
come. Chlala’s poems add layers of different temporal and spatial
dimensions and perspectives onto and into the surface of paper.
As her poem below expresses, a photo is both a friendship and its

documentation. Interplay and interchange occur between words
like “imagine” and “image,” where the thought leads you to matter
and then lands you on “form” as a structure for friendship across
different dimensions.210
To imagine
take an image tasawar:
conceptualization
(derived from soura)
form
photo
sadaqaa: affirmation of friendship, state of believing
90
Chlala writes in sparse lines amidst large negative space to indicate

openings for feelings, thoughts, and to form intimacies in the
gaps between line breaks. Moving between Arabic, French, and
English, her poems, like the one above, are motivated by syntac-
tical wordplay, deep utopic sentiment, deliberate translations and
definitions, and code-switching. Chlala’s book imagines different
forms across formless bonds of conversation, translation, and
intimacy that manifest across words, punctuation, line spacing,
and the distance between subjects.
All these different poetic, linguistic, formal, and affective dimen-

sions cut across each other so as to dodge, flee, hold, and also
let go of all demands of representation. Chlala’s poems perform
tectonic shifts and continental, regional tensions that in their
discrepant engagements and creative enchantments cultivate
undared forms across affirmative axes of friendship and faith.
She creates images and words in a ceaseless interval and break
against measure.211
In a constant state of intermission, the artist takes photos of

her body as if she knows it will soon go. I have disappeared,
present is as infinite, there is always construction going on
outside, earth digging and jack hammers, to undo presence,
myself as a timer–
The paper camera attempts to catch and present ephemeral life

where human being is another aesthetic script of temporality and
praxis. Chlala, in a constant state of intermission, takes pictures
of her temporary body as timer, as it disappears into infinity so
91
Formless Formation
as to counter the non-intermittent backdrop sounds of capitalist

growth. In so doing, she traces another kind of clock and world.
In a plea for the rigor found in transient feelings and impermanent

world makings, José Muñoz’s theory of the ephemeral finds the
enduring dimensions of the intermittent. Offering ephemera as
evidence in order to disrupt the fixities of representation, Muñoz
thinks through definition and genre; the hierarchies of academic
rigor and conventional knowledge; queer methodology. He notes,
“ephemera is always about specificity and resisting dominant
systems of aesthetic and institutional classification without
abstracting them outside of social experience and a larger notion
of sociality.”212 Muñoz prescribes a radical critique of institutional
systems, archives, and sanctions that expose how queer acts of
and as minoritarian knowledge production speak to new ways
of knowing, thinking, and doing. In rejecting dominant systems,
the tilted axes and dimensions of the ephemeral resist traditional
form, swaying across the formless in pursuit of all evanescence.
Muñoz cautions us to see that the formless is also in principle

ephemeral. Incapable of separating social life from politics, aes-
thetics, and this renewed project of epistemology, Muñoz alters
the entire landscape of reproducible and repeated representation.
He elaborates that “ephemera includes traces of lived experience
and performances of lived experience, maintaining experiential
politics and urgencies long after these structures of feelings have
been lived.”213 These ever-present traces, sensed in their socially
vital afterburns, demand a rereading and rewriting of the protocols
of critical reading and writing itself.
The nebulous and yet fully material dimensions of ephemera thus

provoke a necessary critical rereading and rewriting of value form
92
as well. If “value cannot exist without its representation” and a

regulatory norm can exist only when commodity exchange has
become a “normal social act,”214 then the recognition of ephem-
era as evidence, made apparent precisely because of queer social
exchanges, is inseparable from an overturning of value’s represen-
tation. Such a recognition allows for the force of creative sciencings
to sound out alternative spheres of exchange within the sciences
and technologies of capitalist accumulation. Hendrix’s opening of
closed systems and Chlala’s machinic paper camera, provide other
creative forms of value and social reproduction. Their aesthetics
script new sciences that perform the unceasing possibilities for
the alterabilities of humanness.
Words and sounds made flesh materialize “deeds which crys-

tallize our actualities,”215 actualities that noisily and poetically
disrupt the embedded regulatory norm of value across spheres
of exchange. This is why, as Wynter attests, the buck must stop
with us.216 The questions of value form and “creative forms” are
inseparable. Thus, the aesthetic scripts of humanness will always
escape their numerical measurement and representation because
they are ephemeral.
Spheres of exchange across different registers of value alter circu-

lation processes within capitalist conditions. Such anticolonial
and anticapitalist (pr)axes instill newly tilted axes, values, rep-
resentations, and dimensions. The creations of Wynter, Chlala,
Hendrix, and Ra attest to the importance of imaging and man-
ifesting new sciences, new aesthetic modes of inscription and
sound, undared forms.
Ephemera is not one-dimensional evidence: its lingering fleets

and feats glimmer across multiversal presences, even in the
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Formless Formation
para-presence of an insinuated absence rebounding in a shadowy

illumination. Lived experience in all its ephemeralities is not anti-
thetical to circulating information but an essential feature of how
one comes to envision study. And study can be found in anything,
from the vitality of a porous rock to the vibrancy of plants and
sentences, to all matter.217
Study as material ephemerality is also an intention for crossing

over, not just through time but within it, in all temporal-spatial
positions allegedly unavailable but cognitively and aesthetically
seized. With metaphysical thinking and in ethereal sentiment,
remembrance is like a foreshadowing, a motion forward in its past,
and a movement backwards in order to touch the horizon of the
otherwise materialized. To travel this way one doesn’t evolve by
walking through open doors, but by becoming a varying breed of
ether that allows the living to dissolve themselves through walls
of closed passageways. This evaporation is the recorded disap-
pearances and appearances of all existence, in which every ounce
of matter bespeaks the aesthetic scripts of unknown profundity.
The multidimensions of material liberation resound a score that

vibrates across planetary scapes and scopes, generating solidarity
out of compositions from the differentiated labor that causes
the world to revolve in frequency. A breaking of dialectical time,
overrepresentation, and captured value, this is the insurgent clock
of the world . . .
94
ADDITION
T he revolution is elemental, multitudinous, conjoined, and alive.
Everything small carries energy; everything seemingly tiny is an
extension, the “subtle beyond” of a larger magnetic force. In these
overlaps, dimensional worlds upon dimensional worlds escape
representational capture and meaning. Only resonance lingers in
the cuts of uprising, so listen for the touch, the splice, the addition,
for it is a virtual particle of the void and the void itself, in which
to touch the self is to touch the other through infinity, a “cutting
together-apart.”218 This materiality of touch is a formless formation
that in its constant process of addition flees from the demanding
structures of thought and representation.
The marriage between systems of representation and architectures

of knowledge makes it difficult to decipher their singular inten-
tions. There’s a connection between knowing and the elemental
paradigm of identification that representation upholds. Often, and
unfortunately, representation serves as epistemology itself, making
it unclear how the uses of knowledge are rationally defensible.
In submitting to the designs implicit to cultural forms, structuralist

thought accepts their logical presuppositions. Post-structuralist
thinking, on the other hand and in its most basic sense, contends
that all forms are socially, culturally, and politically conditioned,
and that the only way out of their organizing maze is to unfollow
Formless Formation
the labyrinth’s twists and exits.
For as principles of assembly teach,

the word form still lives in the term
reform.
Forms, and other structuring ventures, are not reliable conveyors

of information, rationality, truth, justification, and meaning since
systems are culturally determined. For study is a dimensional
continuum that one imagines, conjures, proliferates as much
as one feels across cultural interpretations, styles, rhythms.
In challenging instead of integrating pre-existing bodies of
knowledge, one embraces the materiality of touch through the
addition, both felt and sensed, by seeing its evolution as essential
to meaning-making.
In search of a materiality of touch that outpaces structuralist

tendencies, Roland Barthes appropriates systems of knowledge
to remake them. Of particular interest here is Barthes’s Camera
Lucida, a series of overlapping vignettes, published in the same
year he died and three years after his mother’s death. This two-
part text is an intervention in the philosophy of photography as
much as it is a reflection of love and despair, a eulogy in the shape
of a son’s grief, and the slivers of essence exceeding systems of
knowing, frames for seeing, and designs for feeling.
Barthes begins this book with a clear use of semiotics: terms upon
words reiterate structuralist systems meant to define the smallest
units of meaning; signifier upon referent, Barthes engages images
by enacting a new philosophical vernacular to read them. Working
from an assembly of signifiers, he underlines two properties of
98
the photograph: the studium and the punctum. 219 The former is
the cultural milieu, the mise-en-scene, the background we know
through education; while the punctum necessitates correspondence
between the image and the spectator. Not bound by education
or interest, Barthes’s defines the punctum as the detail within the
photograph that pricks the viewer, pre-existing and eclipsing
the image and its frame. The punctum is a kind of addition; or
what the spectator contributes to “the photograph and what is
nonetheless already there.”220
Propelled by the puncturing punctum, Barthes studies photogra-

phy as a wound that one wears on the body and also organizes as
a corpus/genus of knowledge. Bodies of both flesh and thought
become one as he searches for the ontology of photography found
in the very contusions of the viewer. In reckoning with this addition
as punctum, Barthes dubs it a “subtle beyond”221 and suggests that
what we can’t quite see with our eyes, we feel and know beyond
the bounds of touch. What does each image in its singular right,
Barthes wonders, represent if not the thing itself? Might the pho-
tograph be able to exist outside the boundaries of representation?
The punctum lives outside conventional notions of reproduction,

for if we collectively give life to an image that was always-already
alive, then the addition exposes our entangled shareability and
ongoing conspirations. In search of the punctum’s considerable
energy, Barthes adds that it is “as if the image launched desire
beyond what it permits us to see: not only toward ‘the rest’ of the
nakedness, not only toward the fantasy of the praxis, but toward
the absolute excellence of a being, body and soul together.”222
Unable to withstand the protocols of rigid forms, of reading images

through an objective lens removed from others, he unleashes form
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Formless Formation
from its own structuring principles and affectionately succumbs

to feeling. If the punctum exists in the “subtle beyond,” then
Barthes in part two of Camera Lucida, embraces the additional
beyond through the death of his own mother. The unbearable
loss of his mother leaves him forming and deforming emotions
and pragmatisms in search of the forever present-absent figure.
Regrettably, a remaining photograph of his mother as a child,
which he describes in detail but refuses to visually reproduce for
the reader, cannot accurately highlight her essence. In denying
us the “Winter Garden Photograph” and the opportunity to
signify meaning through signification and reference, he counters
structuralism, proving instead that dissent, formlessness, and loss
accompany one another.
One does not reform form, but formlessly apprehends formation,

even when one’s mourning carries the traced tenets of ephemeral
existences.
In confidence and grief, Barthes declares that the photograph of

his mother, “exists only for me. For you, it would be nothing but
an indifferent picture.”223 Sharing her photograph will not allow
one to know her as he does, or help him put her to rest, for the
punctum is everything inside and outside of death, every feeling the
addition shelters when the materiality of touch escapes the present.
If “photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or

even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks”224 and
punctures the spirit, then the photograph is a living image, maybe
even a wound, revived by the belief that in erupting all form one
reaches the edge of the edge. The subtle beyond, in all its formless
formation, is what one brings to the scene but is already there,
present, but outside the frame’s position of power and desire.
100
Outside representation. Outside structures of knowing. Outside

death. This is the addition.
Following this desire to land in the realm of “the absolute excel-

lence of a being, body and soul together,”225 the addition includes
everything outside the frame leading us into the internal traces
of touch, the volume of excess.
The subtle beyond happens outside the frame, inside the human,
in the reader, through the spectator; it is a transformative process
induced by details known and unknown and methods of desire
that activate engagement. Deciding when the writer has said some-
thing, the reader is the addition to the writer and the writer the
addition to the reader, in constant flux, gaining, as Barthes’s notes,
all the pleasures of the text that outweigh conventional meaning.
Found in the cuts, tensions, discrepant encounters of meaning,

the reader like the viewer is the deconstructor of the word and
the world in order to sculpt new ones.
Every detailed trace of the beyond is found in the harmonized

cracks left to be tremored, left to be invaginated.
Jacques Derrida’s poststructuralist deconstruction of the Euro-

centric human sciences tears down the institutions upheld by
their language, discourse, conventions. But as Spivak notes, “It’s
not just destruction,” but also a form of construction. “It’s critical
intimacy, not critical distance.”226 In learning to speak from the
inside, deconstruction as critical intimacy is the performativity
of addition in which the seed is modal and the expansion of
the supplement. Building on these observations, the addition
functions as an operation, one where to add is to be inside as
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Formless Formation
opposed to presuming an outside stance that purports to add

separate things together.
Invagination is the process of turning something inside out to make

another hold, another (w)hole, another fold out of resonance. In
other words, this folding in for Derrida is the process of identities
emerging out of difference, where difference itself has no stable
identity. His neologism différance writes out difference itself – the
difference and deferral of difference – by weaving together traces
that have no beginning or end.227 Like the punctum, exceeding and
surpassing the frame, the trace, too, denies the linear construction
and envelopment of existence and meaning.
Derrida notes that “différance is the systematic play of differences, of

the traces of differences, of the spacing by means of which elements
are related to each other.”228 This constant play of difference is where
things emerge, rather than existing prior to difference’s emergence.
Or as Derrida claims, “this spacing is the simultaneously active and
passive production of intervals, without which signifying terms
would not function.”229 That is to say that the trace of what things
are not is what gives them their identifiable presence.
This is nothing less than the question of being itself, for as Derrida
reminds us, building upon Heidegger’s corpus, the question of
being is the inaugural question of Western philosophy. Critical of
the idea that the present particle of being exists in a modality of
time that is sensed as the presentness of presence without trace,
Derrida considers what comes before the philosophical question:
“what is being?” For there must be an affirmation of traced being
in order for this question to be posed in the first place. He “rein-
scribes” and “displaces” the question of the presence of being
as positioned by Heidegger,230 by turning to the trace in writing.
102
In language, a weave of traces is the condition for the signified

and referent to communicate as their identifiability depends on
their relation to other signifieds and referents, and the intervals
between them. Always emerging from shared structural traces, the
performance of difference is in all things and all relations; it is a
“rapport” that refers to the traces internal and external to identities
indefinitely formed through and as variation.
Rapport is another word for additional resonance, where the trace

and the interval are evidence of both the presence and absence
of presentness.
Derrida emphasizes that the past and future are in the present,
and yet are not present in the present because the “trace is not a
presence but a simulacrum of a presence that dislocates, displaces
and refers beyond itself.”231 He goes on to add that the trace itself
is a non-place because “effacement belongs to the very structure of
the trace.”232 In putting into question the presence of the present,
the trace is an “anterior acquiescence,”233 an affirmation that in
everything there is a return and departure to something else, or
a future beyond, another subtle temporality through the rapport
with an other and all others.
If “being is trace-being,”234 and the trace is experienced differen-

tially and indirectly, then deconstruction is at once a subtracting
addition and addition subtracted. Identity has no being outside
of “trace-being,” which is always-already determined by a different
difference. This is the additional operation of the formless for-
mation as a web of traces. Its identifiable entities are felt present
through their innate traces, intervals, and shifts operating as
integral relational differences.
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Formless Formation
Such rapport with and as the addition includes not only what the
reader brings to the text but how the writer sees themselves as a
reader as well, how thought itself traces relational presences and
absences. Barthes’s “subtle beyond” and Derrida’s trace “beyond
itself” include not only the composer/writer but the reader, a
sensorial entanglement that surpasses its own indexicality.
If the subtle beyond is what one brings to any scene that is also
always-already present, then the extension of feeling one contrib-
utes activates this sensorial entanglement. One’s emotional history
is not an accessory to the mise-en-scene of reading or viewing, but
enriches the worlds produced by the composer/writer. Viewing
and reading, like writing, is a wound we afflict and suffer together.
If writing is a communal bruise, a relation, a

constructed deconstruction, then
the addition expands the idea that
being within/of the text is to also
be of the world.
Poet and novelist Ocean Vuong shares that writing is never

removed from one’s cultural flights. In a book about migration
and refugee subjectivity, Vuong parallels dispossession with the
saving grace that is writing. If countries carry symptoms and sen-
tences, he asks then “what is a country but a borderless sentence,
a life?”235 In personifying discourse, Voung entangles the webs of
life and narrative by writing out the details of both, even when
the structures of knowledge exclude him. Writing from a space
of forced migration into the material consequences of ideological
representation, Vuong answers the above question with another
question: “What is a country but a life sentence?”236 If belonging
104
to a nation-state also means to do time, then writing is a constant

influx and efflux237 of inseparable internal and external circum-
stances. A fluctuating scene that Voung negotiates into the script
of writing, and by consequence, world making into life sentences.
His aforementioned questions encapsulate a form of migration

that disappears the border through the metaphor of transient
sources and also identifies the temporal and spatial conditions of
writing. In his commitment to the sentence level, Vuong subverts
the absolutism of form through new autofictions, the epistolary
novel, citational practices, and a series of borderless vignettes that
author the aesthetic scripts of the human, of all life.
In challenging the linear temporality of existence, Vuong argues

that “if we are lucky the end of the sentence is where we might
begin.”238 In beginning at the full stop, with a commitment to the
trace, Vuong conditions our relationship to reading: everything not
written might also be the life of the sentence. He elaborates that
“if we are lucky, something is passed on, another alphabet written
in the blood, sinew, and neuron; ancestors charging their kin with
the silent propulsion to fly south, to turn toward the place in the
narrative no one was meant to outlast.”239 Writing to outpace
his own death, Vuong’s “writing sentence” is a love letter to all
who can read and those who never learned, all shapes of readers
are implicated in his account of doing time with discourse. This
expansive readership includes his illiterate mother, his belated
grandmother, all the men he loved and couldn’t carry, and his
younger self that he learns to befriend and outrun in order to sur-
vive the life given. Even if it is a version of an existence breathing
across fleeting paragraphs and multiple denouements, it is one
worth experiencing in full historical and ancestral resonance.
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Formless Formation
Vuong’s writing sentence, a play on serving time and surviving the

phrase, implicates more than just the readers named above, but
familiar writers, who in similar vein, understand that existence,
like writing, not only passes, but is passed on.
Throughout On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong passes down

his own subtle beyond as embedded in storytelling, in the bond
between mother and son. If “memory is a choice”240 and writing
exceeds the very sentence, then Vuong willfully uses citation as
the evidence of the materiality of tracing touch. Barthes’s writing
on the personal effects of mourning fills the pages of Vuong’s
novel; he’s a syntactical ghost that declines to die with the mother,
the text, the sentence. As Voung remembers Barthes, he records
his own loss and triumph and explains that the mother’s body
and writing with/for/into the mother are inseparable entities, all
writing is an opportunity to impair and also “change, embellish,
and preserve” the mother “all at once.”241 This is all to say that a
novel about migration and forced expulsion is also an ancestral
story about how one tells the story, none removed from the losses
experienced before the word hits the page.
Writing with formlessness rebuffs capture by way of the materiality

of process and the rapport (or resonance) with others and other
times and spaces. The constant construction and deconstruction of
difference, through modes of storytelling, emerges in the intervals
of social motleyness and in the cuts to other voices that in their
own loss cite a flock, reference a crew.
To abolish form you need a crew, mostly motley, and certainly

always ready to orchestrate into other worlds. For the rapport
with something/someone else is part of social organizing, or
what Laura Harris calls the kaleidoscopic category of the “mot-
106
ley crew.”242 For Harris, the resistant, improvised, and fugitive

ontological dimensions of the motley crew are bound up with
the “aesthetic sociality of blackness.”243 Directly responding to
the work of Marxist historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus
Rediker, who trace the emergence of “the Atlantic proletariat of
the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries”244
and mourn its demise, Harris traces how the connections that
form motley crews from disparately dispossessed peoples are
ongoing. Harris expresses that it is precisely the problem of
thought generated by categorical thinking (i.e. Linebaugh and
Rediker claim that the motley crew disappears with the emergence
of racial capitalism’s more institutionally structured categories
and separations), that blinds the historians from discerning
extant motley crew life and living.
Forming a distinct motley crew in her own book, Harris studies

the works of Trinidadian C.L.R. James and Brazilian Hélio Oiticica
to uncover how both James and Oiticica engage in the creative
sociality of Blackness formed by a motley politics and aesthetics.
In doing so, she brings our attention to forms and methods of the
motley crew’s insurgent study and experimentation. For example,
Harris places in conversation James’s study of cricket and Oitici-
ca’s collaborative works in samba to expose what Iyer calls in his
own terms “the athletics of black musical performance.”245 “The
aesthetic sociality of blackness,” in Harris’s naming, “is an impro-
vised political assemblage that resides in the heart of the polity
but operates under its ground and on its edge.”246 She adds that,
“it is not a re-membering of something that was broken, but an
ever-expanding invention.”247 The aesthetic sociality of Blackness
both includes and excludes the visual terms and engagements of
Blackness in its ever-expanding invention of addition in order to
survive its own conditions of racial capitalism. This in turn revives
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Formless Formation
and acknowledges extant motley crew lives, ones that never outrun
their own traces, “trace-beings.”
The motley crew is a mode of “intellectuality” that incorporates

the full breadth of our senses and resistances. Between the contact
as maneuvers of the motley and the priority of motleyness, Har-
ris arranges a new methodology to engage diverse experimental
encounters, challenge ideas of authorship, and attend to expansive
modes of belonging across nation, race, gender, class, and sexuality.
Harris’s “motleyness” is our formless formation and resonance
as methodology.
Resonance is that moment of illumination, or the liberation

one feels in the process of being discrepantly entangled with
another in all motley encounters.
Part of following this illumination requires recuperative and

revisionist histories that operate, without exception, in nonlinear
time and anticapitalist anticolonial tenor. This tenor is cut with
the impulse to deform form because even in the process of this
attempt, the organizing structure of all social life is form itself.
The indexicality of form is what mobilizes sites of divergence
against categories of difference as its organization for difference.
How can difference breathe against its own taxonomical confine-

ment? The answer is to be found within the crevices, cuts, excesses,
senses, traces, and additions of the formless, the cracking and blar-
ing of voices “where shriek, turns speech, turns song – remote from
the impossible comfort of origin – lies the trace of our descent.”248
This descent is also our ascent, our addition, our tracing of the
senses propelled by uprisings moved by motion.
108
Lines and breaks undone, all possibilities vibrantly fading into a

howling whisper. All additions are the incremental edge surfacing
within the motley crew.
Motley crews, however, must experience constant acts of internal

retracing and examination if they are to survive their own dif-
ference. The theory and practice of motleyness is not an organic
predicament, but a process that recuperates itself while in perpet-
ual review. Or as Vuong fiercely conveys “every history has more
than one thread, each thread a story of division.”249 That is to say
that in attending to these divisions one notices that the variant
silhouettes of the motley are best gleaned in the space of recurrent
historical assessment, where the interval cuts across and threads
new narratives and arcs.
The original Rainbow Coalition, for example, a multicultural

movement founded in Chicago in 1969, and formed by Fred
Hampton of the Black Panther Party, with the help of William
“Preacherman” Fesperman of the Young Patriots Organization,
and José “Cha Cha” Jiménez founder of the Young Lords, was a
motley crew that forcefully articulated the awareness that capital
relies on the separation of working people through the categories
of ethnicity, race, and religion. Calling for the destruction of such
categorizations, and solidarity between all working people across
the US and the planet, these soldiers of love often foreclosed their
own motleyness.
This is to specifically reiterate that the dissonance of gender,

sex, and sexuality within these movements was central to their
disintegration. The revolution wasn’t thoroughly actualized (or
televised) because patriarchy, machismo, heteronormativity, sexism,
transphobia, and misogyny played major roles in the collapse of
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Formless Formation
the worker movements of all centuries. Lamentably, these sys-

tems of oppression seep into the very spaces of counter-culture
and rebellion. For as Frantz Fanon proclaims, the conditions of
colonialism are not solely binaristic (colonizer versus colonized),
but a complicated landscape of relations in which the colonized,
at times, become the colonizer to those similarly subjugated.250
A primary resistance to this may be found in the political labor of

transgender activist Sylvia Rivera, a member of the Young Lords
Party and its Women’s Caucus, and a leading figure of the Stonewall
Riots of 1969, who established the political organization STAR
with Marsha P. Johnson, and was also the co-founder of the Gay
Liberation Front. In reimagining strategies of Black and Brown
revolution via a transgender analysis, Rivera built the first pride
rebellion, listening for the chimes of difference to free her and
comrades from the rattling sounds of sameness.
Rivera, like many others at the forefront of the movement, left

the Young Lords Party because of a monolithic understanding of
gender, sex, and sexuality. This departure was not one-directional
however; Rivera also felt alienated from the whiteness and of
transphobia embedded within the queer movement that equally
oppressed subjects across racial and sexual identities.251
Let us remember a less than 5 minute black and white video of

Rivera’s inflammatory speech “Y’all Better Quiet Down,” given in
New York City in 1973 at the Christopher Street Liberation Day
rally in Washington Square Park. From the stage, Rivera faces the
ensuing boos of the audience and courageously rages against the
crowd: “Y’all better quiet down.”252 But the riotous swarm persists
against her call for solidarity and mutual aid. Swaying back and
forth with microphone in hand, Rivera gathers herself against the
110
buzzing violence of the crowd: “I’ve been trying to get up here all
day for your gay brothers and your gay sisters.”253 The heckling
and hissing continue as she tightens her grip and screams even
louder into the mic to challenge the deadly and obsolete categories
of gender and sexuality.
In a move away from these dangerous categorical traps, Rivera

calls for a new formless formation called STAR (Street Transvestite
Action Revolutionaries), privileging a gender non-conforming
and transgender activist manera de ser. Unable to understand
the brilliant shimmer of her call, a wild bursting star in her own
right, the crowd responds, “shut up” and “get off the stage,”254
but Rivera refuses their admonishments as she shrieks against
the queer community’s silencing transphobia, toxic masculinity,
and racist heteropatriarchy.
As the video progresses and the camera zooms in on her desire for
more life and less loss, Rivera screams out an implicated duende that
shatters the perfunctory ideas of queer belonging. “You all tell me,
go and hide my tail between my legs. I will no longer put up with
this shit. I have been beaten. I have had my nose broken. I have
been thrown in jail. I have lost my job. I have lost my apartment.
For gay liberation, and you all treat me this way?”255 In this cry,
Rivera expresses the subtle beyond of loss that accompanies the
fallacy of representation for trans life. In demanding to be seen
and heard, Rivera necessarily withdraws from implied negation.
Spliced between screams, Rivera’s quivering sounds concede a type

of punctum, or the vocal slivers of essence that transcend systems
of knowing, scaffoldings for hearing, and designs for being and
feeling. Her breaking voice declares the immanent potential of
framing loss and losing the frame.
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Formless Formation
If the punctum is always the addition that is already there, Rivera

is always-already here. One must refuse to know her within the
totalizing frame of the image, and work to touch the cuts of her
sonorous progressions, the breaks within her activist vocal and
visual uprisings. For in demanding the right to exist in multiple,
Rivera disidentifies with dominant constructions of form, originat-
ing a formlessness that is resonance itself. With fist firmly up and
voice cracking into descent, Sylvia Rivera is the material memory
of a soldier of love pulsating ideological solidarity.
Identity politics, as Rivera calls out, often deny that presence relies
on the interwoven traces of difference, of multiple desires shared
across disparate anticolonial and anticapitalist projects. This is
to also suggest that the full potential of différance’s resonance
as innate addition, deferral, and subtle beyond is muted for the
sounds of capital in its circulation. Rivera’s shouting, then, is
more than rebellion. It is life sharing, leaving traces of descent
to both follow and unfollow.
Identity politics once meant “life sharing”256 as described by the

Combahee River Collective in 1977, a way to raise consciousness
and access liberation from within both singular and intersectional
struggles. Not surprisingly, identity politics has come to produce
the very exclusionary tactics they hope not to repeat in acts of
inclusion. This is to also say that a liberatory political force that
begins with one’s life coalesces with other lives always-already here.
Formless formations re-trace the addition that is “life sharing.” In

those fights against a “disembodied universalism” that attend to
“the coexistence of particularisms,” 257 the edge is never just and
edge, just as difference is never just an addition. Barthes’s “subtle
beyond,” Derrida’s “rapport,” Vuong’s “shared writing sentence,”
112
Harris’s “motley crew,” and Rivera’s “shriek, turns speech, turns

song,” are all a gathering made up of the effacing traces of ancillary
presences and absences.
113
MAGIC
A striking incantation, or a synergetic impulse between the
known and unknown, elemental magic is like a social democracy
gliding across enchantment, metaphysical sentiments of the earth.
Every possible universe exists in the multiverse, every potential
entity lives in a number of universes, all exchanges spanning
particles and emotions.
Magic’s thrilling intensity quells the quandary of everyday life,

where the liberating chorus of the formless unshackles suppres-
sive form.
The formless is more than a speckle of hope, dabbed and dusted

onto the earth, but a groove one walks, imprints left on the ground;
for in these traces, the fade conjures. This fade, its residual force,
is sustained by magic, remnants that remap the globe from the
depths of senses both felt and envisaged.
Sometimes magic is an atom in the wind

that brushes the heart on one’s sleeve;
a touch, that in its incommunicability, roars a
world into existence.
Formless Formation
Walter Benjamin writes that the shrilling bell derives its force from
the magic of the threshold.258 The magnitude is evinced in the exit
of entry and the end of the beginning, a looping sensation that
vitalizes transformation. Through euphonious reverberations, every
evolution is an ethereal interlude and extension, fading from and
into the multiverse. Magic is more than an inclination to sound out
an ephemeral spell, but a declaration to stand up with fists raised
against the open sky until the threshold complements its inten-
tion. Fading into life to life, these pulsating fists are the paradox
of the ephemeral being materialized, where to fade-in is to also
fade-with. Or to sharply fade into a movement amassed from the
threshold of a people garnered from the luminescence of magic.
Cultivating an immersive liberatory landscape from the bells of

magic, hip-hop feminist theorist Ruth Nicole Brown calls for
the “creative potential of Black Girlhood,” produced “critically
among and with Black girls.”259 More than a celebration of Black
girl visibility, Brown’s body of work shifts our understanding
of epistemology by exposing how Black girls, often erased from
archives, have always generated rigorous thought by surpassing
the boundaries of knowledge production. In 2006, Brown estab-
lished the concrete utopia that is SOLHOT (Saving Our Lives,
Hear Our Truths), a space of liberation and love that breeds new
meaning by traveling across discipline, genre, method, pedagogy,
and forms of creativity.
Honoring every kernel of thought rendered undeserving under

systemic racism, SOLHOT is an independent enterprise in its own
right. Moving across cultural sites like universities, elementary
and secondary public schools, churches, afterschool programs
and between creative work like theatre, poetry, ethnography,
performance, storytelling, and music, SOLHOT requires that
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we follow the inventive “trace of descent”260 that stimulates new

world mapping and making. Under Brown’s direction, SOLHOT
has produced albums, plays, novel forms of ethnography, while
simultaneously blurring the lines between pragmatic thought and
emotive creativity – neither one antithetical to the life of the other,
but rather ideologically embroiled.
Like Wynter, Brown calls us “to wake up our minds” by theorizing

creativity and accounting for its pedagogical and life-altering energy.
Encouraging the formation of magical soldiers of love, SOLHOT
is a call to arms via the aesthetic-life-world, all fists seen in the
details of narratives untold. These untold stories feature heavily
throughout Black Girl Genius Week (a yearly week-long SOLHOT
invention and celebration that travels across the states off and
online) where the creative labor cultivated and shared by and
with Black girls is center stage. In striking fashion, event topics
range from discussions of the politics of hair to Black feminist
poetry to letter writing as pedagogical praxis to Black and Brown
forms of aesthetic organizing to making live recorded music with
an on-deck SOLHOT DJ.
Leaving no thought by Black girls unturned, Brown is a visionary

of another time and place, a vision for and of the future who values
all creation, both rehearsed and improvised. In fact, it is the very
everyday improvised acts and sounds performed in the space of
SOLHOT sociality that assemble the possibility of hearing truth
in order to save one’s life. This truth is bound to what Brown
reveals about thinking itself: “research that is creative, public,
and grounded in collaboration with marginalized communities,
conducted by scholars of color, is always and already suspect.”261
Understanding that every form of knowledge produced by Black
girls is always-already outside standard epistemology, Brown
117
Formless Formation
devises new ontological breath for reading and listening with

them. In such liberatory spaces, Black Genius is a privileged form
of thinking that animates new constructions of Blackness, Black
girl study, and existence.
While formally established fifteen years ago, Brown comments

on the slippery nature of genealogy when work produced for and
by people of color is suspended from archives, documentation,
and funding. Part of this slipperiness, for her, is related to how
these systems of knowing deny curiosity and creativity in order
to uphold structure whilst still commercializing the moniker
“Black girl magic.” Brown’s work rejects this reductive neoliberal
representation for it overlooks the laboring genius embedded in
Blackness. SOLHOT began before it began as a formation for a
different kind of existence, one in which Black girls are fundamen-
tally listened to by one another, even if the institution refuses the
documentation of their voices.
In instituting against the institution, Brown knows that “what

we learn in and out of sacred time, practice, and relationship is
that we are certainly worth our own liberation.”262 “To be worth
your own liberation,” as Brown writes and shares with her stu-
dents, is an act of love in the domain of fugitive planning, or an
undercommons built upon the intellectual labor of Black girls,
where creativity is freedom itself and Black girl gathering is the
always-already necessary collective for a new social order. Brown
generates spaces to listen with creative memories in order to from
new knowledges toward the unknown, providing a path for how
to listen with creative memories in order to form new knowledge
toward the unknown. Not far removed from the political and
aesthetic stylings of Afrofuturistic thought, Brown promotes an
unknown where hip-hop feminist travels in space are the place.
118
Space is the place for misfit play, for imagining worlds otherwise
unseen, but cosmically known. As Sun Ra’s creative collectivity
reveals, mysticism is misfitism. Myth is both play and the motley
crew looking up to the stars and dreaming with glimmer. For as
Ra espouses “the myth can do more for humanity then anything
they can dream possible.”263 This is the adherence to a real myth
working in tandem with the worth of one’s liberation as Brown
avows. SOLHOT listens for the planetary connections across time,
space, and history like Ra vibrates an “Astro Black” mythology264
moving from ancient Egypt and back into outer space.
The visual and sonic pulse of Ra’s aesthetic-life-world works from

and within the Black Radical tradition, even if one is not from
planet Earth, and especially when the galactical soundwaves are
infinite. Like Ra notes, the impossible is possible.
From the depths of creative memory and curious methodology,

the impossible is possible.
The possible is an impossible possibility.
The impossible is always-already possible.
Expanding the boundaries of thinking History beyond chronol-

ogy, Ra is not the ostensible pathologization of some “galactic
gobbledegook,”265 but Black genius glimmering. His prophetic
observations of space and time tour through omniversal vibrations
that are now echoed in findings by contemporary astrophysicists,
theoretical and quantum physicists. How these vibrations are
sounded in the Sun Ra Arkestra’s collective practice begs one to
ask what these vibratory patterns say about history, time, plane-
tary, galactic, and improvised social compositions. What does Ra
119
Formless Formation
mean by mythocracy vs. democracy, or that “history repeats itself

in ways that the universe never repeats itself?”266 What is at stake
in trusting that the world is the way it is because of “the scheme
of words,” as he writes in the poem “man and planet earth”?267
Sun Ra’s and the Arkestra’s artistry embody musicianship as

spaceship, tapping into frequencies from sonically technological
“crossroads whence dimensions meet.”268 How can we listen deeply
to the ways that art is everywhere? "Every thing’s vibration is a
different degree of music,”269 as Ra writes in his poem “infinity is
the language.” How is listening a kind of shattering? “Somewhere
else on the other side of nowhere, there’s another place in space,
beyond what [we] know as time.”270
From stars to dust to inter-gravitational forces and dark matter,

there’s more magic beyond the dimensions we will ever see and
know.
There’s no adherence on the formless formation’s part to traditional

constructions of time and space, but rather to how resonance
replaces both as an organizing trope for the universe. As astro-
physicist Manos Danezis insists, outside our limited perceptions
the universe is formless,271 or to put it another way, the big bang
is the ever-moving extension and expansion of the big band!
Galaxies are always on the ground, flipped horizons hovering

under our starry feet.
To time travel with other space travelers is to misfitingly read272

and play with imagination’s magical ability to transport readers
and players to other worlds and constellations. Such articulations
120
of speculative futurity, as Alexis Lothian argues,273 are not singular

crossings, but traverse the boundaries of both science fiction and
queer thought. Queer imagining, outside traditional structures of
reproduction, always involves a futurity, while the “convergence of
queerness and science fiction requires that neither one be defined in
advance.”274 If futurity has already arrived, but hasn’t been “evenly
distributed,”275 then the imagined futures of those precluded from
futurity labor to dream queer possibilities speculatively.
One of many examples of such speculative and queer dreaming

is N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy. Drawing us into fantastical
worlds that are also eerily familiar, the first novel of the series, The
Fifth Season, begins with the words: “Let’s start with the end of
the world, why don’t we?”276 Through evocative renderings and
correlations, including those of imperialism, enforced labor, racial
policing, and environmental disaster, Jemisin’s story takes place on
a continent named The Stillness that constantly and dangerously
buckles and shifts in form.
The three key female protagonists of the novel are orogenes, known
derisively as “roggas” (the three become one), and are born with
the “the ability to manipulate thermal, kinetic, and related forms
of energy to address seismic events.”277 Infants and young children,
discovered to be orogenes, are captured by members of a type of
police academy. These “Guardians” deliver them to the capital to
be disciplined at the Fulcrum, an imperial facility for schooling
the “savages” into submission while simultaneously training them
to use their powers. For “any infant can move a mountain; that’s
instinct. Only a trained Fulcrum orogene can deliberately, specif-
ically, move a boulder.”278 Once trained, orogenes are mobilized
under surveillance to tap into and stabilize The Stillness’s seismic
tremors constantly threatening life.
121
Formless Formation
One day, reaching deep into the magma of the earth, an orogene
rebel breaks the planet, exploding the center to fade into the
edge of something otherwise. This insurgent act of destruction
seeks to abolish the governing system that capitalizes on the
orogenes’ power. The orogenes’ innate gift of being able to tap
into all elements, seams, and forces of the earth’s landscape is
one described as “magic.” This magic is the orogenes’ ability to
connect with and intricately manipulate all material life forms. As
there is no separation between their sinew and the world, theirs
is a quantum flesh.
Jemisin lends us the orogene’s quantum flesh as a reminder of the

formless inseparability of all connectivity. When the disobedient
orogene shatters the world, his fracturing is at once inseparable
from the earth and the desire for another social order. Apocalypse
marks both the end of the world as well as revelation.
Listen to the sounds of the big bang’s and the big band’s shat-
tering propulsions.
In deep resonance with Wynter, Brown, Jemisin, and Sun Ra,

Octavia Butler also blasts open humanity’s constitution through
radical revisions and revelations. Butler’s uncategorizable novels
and short stories imagine alternative embodiments, temporalities,
and cosmologies in order to grapple with histories of racism, sex-
ism, xenophobia, the ongoing threat of looming apocalypse, and
the very category of the human body itself. Her works are queer
speculative tales, changing the sciences of human structure in
which flesh itself is always scripted as an undared form.
In Butler’s first book of the Xenogenesis series, Dawn,279 Lilith Iyapo

wakes up in an alien spaceship after a nuclear war and the annihi-
122
lation of planet Earth. Eventually she communicates (cognitively,

communally, and sexually) with the alien species Oankali and
Ooloi that have saved her from her destroyed planet. Lilith’s story
reveals the ways in which the human body is biologically altered
through its contact with the aliens. This is what Butler means by
“xenogenesis,” the alteration and generation of a newly formed
human body through its physical and cognitive communion with
an alien other.
The Oankali tell Lilith that humanity’s defining contradiction is

that human beings put their intelligence to work in the service of
hierarchy. For Butler, this contradiction generates the constant
terror of institutional brutality and planetary doom. If "being
human as praxis," as Wynter notes, relies on the dismantling
of hierarchical overrepresentations and the creation of undared
forms, Butler’s genius is the authoring of aesthetic scripts for
unexpected reconstructions.
Butler provides the genesis of a socially formless formation in

which human relation to changing worlds is constantly rethought.
For as critic and artist Kodwo Eshun notes: “The question of
xenogenesis can be understood as a kind of diagramme for the
revision of the human.”280 Butler’s intervention is to share with
readers of Dawn and other novels such as the Parable series
and Fledgling, the vibratory auguries of inventive imagination.
For Butler, “all that you touch is Change. All that you Change
Changes you. The only lasting truth is Change.”281 Her prophetic
voice cracks open time and space, thundering across the peren-
nial challenges faced by the world today. Her stories teach us
about the ethical and physical claims of survival on the level of
flesh and feeling (stubbornness, fear, desire, pleasure) in our
apocalyptic present.
123
Formless Formation
In showing how “the human or humanity is a revisable project,”282

the magical powers of Butler’s interventions uncover how racial,
gendered, and corporeal classifications are reproducible fictions
and thus always modifiable. Butler’s cosmologies inform our current
questions about political imagining and organizing, operating as a
model for grassroots activism, and emergent strategy for change.283
In her fictional work, change is one that either looks to the stars, or
travels far back in time, undoing the linear project of temporality.
But change is not without painful ruptures sedimented into our

historical bedrock. Walter Benjamin writes that “[t]here is no doc-
ument of civilization which is not at the same time a document of
barbarism.”284 And crucially, “barbarism taints the manner in which
[documents are] transmitted from one owner to another.”285 Or as
Rammellzee, another vital maker of magical aesthetic-life-worlds
asks, “who put us in a race and for what purpose are we racing?”286
Butler’s novel Kindred287 provides a response to both Benjamin
and Rammellzee by telling the story of Dana, a struggling writer
living in California in 1976, who finds herself traveling back in
time and space to antebellum Maryland in the 1800s. When she
finds herself there, Dana must do everything to survive the con-
ditions of slavery. If she does not stay alive in the 1800s, she will
not exist in the 1970s, because she has traveled through her own
genealogical time to an ancestral past. Furthermore, she must fight
to ensure the procreation of her own ancestors who will lead to
her own birth a century later.
Trapped in limbo between her present and past, which determines

her present and future, Dana emerges in her own time at the end
of the novel alive, yet physically amputated. Kindred’s time travel
re-envisions the transmission of barbarism in official histories
and archives by subverting embodied forms of experiential time.
124
Butler’s novels disrupt the limitations of realist forms, genre,

and history by attending to the materiality of flesh, engendering
kindred resonances that are sustained by the magic found in the
formless formation.
An inventive “renascence of a new corpus of sensibility,”288 drives

Butler’s and Jemisin’s novels, Brown’s SOLHOT, and Ra’s Arkestra,
among countless others. These new awakenings are inseparable
from the insights gleaned “from a state of cramp” and the myriad
ways enclosures “articulate a new growth.”289 Harris emphasizes
how the barbarism of structural colonialism and enslavement
necessitates “a new kind of drama, novel and poem… a creative
phenomenon of the first importance in the imagination of a peo-
ple violated by economic fates.”290 Listen to the creative sounds
issuing forth from these ongoing fates.
Every day, everywhere, we hear the applied study and ema-

nation of new kinds of mediums in a circulation of endless
audio-inventories of style.
Just follow the sound.
Tracing the space/time and mind-bending trajectories of these sonic

worlds, the Black Audio Film Collective’s afro-futuristic film The
Last Angel of History suggests that these particular sounds, heard
in all forms of modern popular music, are inseparable from the
experience of the Atlantic slave trade and its aftermath.291 These
historical catastrophes, which the film argues can be understood
as ones of alien abduction and genetic mutation, are figured in
the Xenogenesis series, as well as in Kindred’s wrestling with the
sense of a “phantom limb.”292 The phantasmagorical sensation of
125
Formless Formation
a missing part still felt present through its resonating absence is

the limboing formlessness of imagination’s aesthetic form.
The enclosures of the wild wild west

are always outpaced by imagination’s contortions.
If the formlessness of form is both phantom limb and the act of

being in limbo, then magic might be the residual effects of the
fading presence of absence. This fading threshold, for instance,
imbues the workings of magical realism, the making of amalgama-
tion, an integration between the supernatural and the rational. In
the film Atlantique,293 the aesthetic-life-world of director Mati Diop
raises the dead so as to come back to life by entering the bodies
of the living in order to speak through them. The dead-alive are
the Vodun spirits of a group of drowned migrants off the coast
of Spain. They return to their West African shore to seek justice
and revenge against the local capitalist elite responsible for their
destitution and forced migration. Diop mobilizes magical realism
as a method to keep love alive and to remember and honor those
taken too soon from the realities of economic violation.
Collapsing the hyperreal and the practical, magical realism

disrupts the violence of representation.
Catastrophe always “seems to lead to a kind of magical realism”

where moments of utter disaster reveal glimpses of “a kind of
radiance on the other end of the maelstrom,” notes Kamau
Brathwaite.294 In his poem “Meridian,” the poetry collection Ances-
tors, and two-volume MR (Magical Realism), Brathwaite refers to
his archive of Caribbean radio broadcasts as “trance-missions.”295
These trance-missions are the intermingling waves between radio
126
transmissions, the poetic voice, and the sounds of trance-induc-

ing initiations of possession across Caribbean Afro-diasporic
religions. All of these trance-missions summon forth the poetic
neologism “ancestories.”296
Ancestories and trance-missions tremor across the radio

signals of disparate histories resonating across contemporary
Caribbean quotidian life.
Ancestories fall from the metaphysical techne of many who work

against brutal semantics and maiming discourses. In magical real-
ism’s power to transmit new breath, Brathwaite shapes the words:
“X pressions (indications) of literary cosmological disruption . . ..”297
And these X pressions of cosmological disruption vibrate across

Sun Ra’s mythocracy, Brown’s creative memory, Jemisin’s quantum
breaks, Butler’ xenogenesis and time travel, Diop’s dead/alive
love – all ancestories surpassing the edge of fade into the material
possibilities of magic.298
127
RESPIRE
T o respire is to turn the body over to aerating hapticality, a
revelatory incident in formless formation where the respirational
is atmospheric, mutational, symbiotic, all energy. Respiration is
both a process and an exercise in breath, cropping up and coming
to pass, taking shape, a communal befalling.
Calling forth an antiphonal arkestration open to love, not demo-

cratic care, respiration is a feeling that enlivens the collective the
moment political debris evolves into a promising exodus. Neces-
sarily breathed in unison, this respiration is an ideological imprint,
a social composition on the ground (across magic) that contains
the contours of all life, a shared exhalation for a movement piece
in parts – soldiers of militant love in the wild wild west, fists up,
airways open, listening to the sound.
The respirational recognize dispossession; they swarm the

spectrum, refusing their own dialectic. Choreographing the
flock, swarms move through their own suspension – a splitting
movement that harbors the strands, the residue, the matter and
meaning, all flight and fade.
Sentiments from the multiverse,

respirations carry the promise.
Formless Formation
Breathing with the dead and the future in our acts of surviving
the present, respiration is an ancestral pilgrimage, every droplet of
air a continuum of culture. In this time travel of breath, how does
breath breathe in its temporal segments? When breath is both the
offering of new life and the possible evacuation of another, does
breath resist its own refusal?
For when one last droplet of air can be stolen by a savage Other from
an(other) human, the properties of respiration are no longer an
involuntary muscle movement, but a practice of combat.299 Breath
is a discrepant engagement across passageways and afterlives,
for to respire is an opening for life and death and the exquisite
possibility of escape.
Studying the eternal quality of the middle passage, Sharpe stresses

how the “afterlives” of slavery still weather on.300 To be in this
unsettled weather is to be at a distance from those who easily
assume a determined subject’s place in the world. Moving across
literary, visual, cinematic, and quotidian expressions of Black life,
Sharpe methodologically produces what she names the “orthog-
raphy of the wake.”301 The “wake” and the other three terms that
make up the author’s orthography – the “ship,” the “hold,” the
“weather” – discharge multidimensional turbulences of elemental
forms, forces, states, and trajectories. In forming this grammar,
the orthography of the “wake” attends to the term at once meta-
phorical but always-already material.
The watery waves trailing behind a ship’s course, “the track left
on the water’s surface by a ship; the disturbance caused by a body
swimming or moved, in water;” or “the air currents behind a body
in flight; a region of disturbed flow”302 – this is Sharpe’s assembly
of one meaning of the word wake. But as she powerfully notes,
130
meaning carries multiple ascendancies, for the wake is also a prac-

tice of watching over the dead, or “grief, celebration, memory, and
those among the living who, through ritual mourn their passing
and celebrate their life.”303 All meanings of the single term wake
are what imbue the being of Blackness on the “wrong side of the
Atlantic,” but not only, for as she insists, one of the numerous
manifestations of the wake is today’s movement of people seeking
refuge on another side of the Mediterranean. Being in the wake
is at once a history and an ongoing presence of violence, death,
and dispossession.
It is not enough to assume consciousness, but to do wake work:

“a mode of inhabiting and rupturing this episteme with our own
known lived and un/imaginable lives.”304 This un/imaginability
in the name of labor is what Glissant calls “know[ing] ourselves
as part and as crowd,”305 a being-together that necessitates a frac-
turing of traditional modes of existence itself. In executing this
performative labor, Sharpe confesses to be searching for “the form”
of wake work.306 How does she locate the structural properties of
this un/imaginability? The form of wake work may be found in
her analysis of respiring acts across the everyday, art, and poetry
– in the very details of how she reads across aesthetic styles. In
defending both the dead and those living “as carriers of terror”307
through these forms of wake work, Sharpe opens up questions
about the excess of modernity’s determining “wake” within the
break, and how life, art, and thought flee from the total climate
of normative anti-Blackness.
Such breathing into writing as wake work is nothing less than

the imperative of responsibility in face of the unspeakable, or the
necessity of critical theoretical fictions as practice, as a “theoret-
ical politics,”308 as Nahum Dimitri Chandler insists. Chandler
131
Formless Formation
re-poses the question posed to W.E.B. Du Bois, “How does it feel

to be a problem?”309 by turning to how being a problem in the
wake, in collective breath, is to be a concerted problem for theory
and thought itself.
Building on Du Bois’s prescient 1903 statement that “the prob-

lem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,”310
Chandler offers the term “paraontology” so that this problem
evolves into a site of possibility “that might address our common
contemporary colonial and postcolonial nexus on a worldwide
ensemble of horizons.”311
Chandler considers how paraontological thinking enables a break

from ontological distinctions that determine human hierarchies
and orientations. Disrupting fixed categories, paraontology is con-
cerned less with what is given and more with what is yet to be given,
yet to come on a worldwide ensemble of horizons. The incessant
overturning of the patterns of sedimented historical thought open
up the chance for a future as an otherwise to the present.
For Chandler, Blackness is a paraontological status that escapes

the historical constancies of racial ontology, and in its fugitivity,
destroys fixed racial identities by affirming multiple existences.
Chandler reads paraontology in excess to oppositional framings
of identity/anti-identity, as a “vortex” built on “rhythmic turns.”312
The formless formation of paraontology as “the general possibil-
ity of the otherwise”313 escapes its own terminology to resist the
commodification of the term; in so doing, ongoing thought is cut
off from fixed shores.
Breath before and in the wake is a paraontological respiration. In

thinking back to Sharpe’s words and now Chandler’s invocation of
132
“the otherwise,” we aspire through Ashon Crawley’s philosophical

treatise on the politics and aesthetics of breath.314 For this author,
the minor breathes in the arenas and interstices of shouting,
whooping, glossolalia, noise-making, the deep inhalations of
Black Pentecostalism. Turning to how these vocal expressions
contribute to and reveal the necessary practices of thought-making,
Crawley shuffles the core of epistemology and ontology to yield a
new methodology for examining cultures under constant attack.
Through diverse forms of aesthetic sociality that exceed the confines
of modern thought, discourse, and the rules of communicability,
Crawley finds political and spiritual meaning in the smallest unit
of signification. And within all, there is a certain urgency to his
reassessment of Black existence in his call for “otherwise worlds
of possibility,”315 or modes of existence that rattle and discompose
the oppressive violence against minoritarian life.
From electrifying sounds to choral hums and screams, the sonically

paraontological invokes its wake into the gaps between context
and implication, for all these performative possibilities surface
and work against racial subjugation and social marginalization.
So what might it mean to be in the wake of breath, to break breath

in such waking work?
To break sonorous resonant breath is to delve into the realm of

the paralinguistic (the entanglements of sound, gesture, tone,
rhythm, texture, feeling) and how the study of paralanguage and
paraontology undoes normative readings that define the “para” as
solely auxiliary or derivative to a norm. Paralanguage’s inexorable
materiality, sensed as a swaying formless formation in its pre-con-
dition for language, interrupts standardized approximations of
discourse. To recognize paralanguage’s capacity of sonic breath,
133
Formless Formation
beat, and stroke is to disturb representational social patterns that

generate rational subjectification.
Respired sounds make words different from one another; sense

builds from nonsense. In “speaking in tongues,” paralanguage
fractures the structural powers that determine the sovereign by
affirming non-exclusionary improvisations of collective breath.
These expressive dissonances, like glossolalia for example, inter-
rupt the hegemonic forces objectifying marginal life through
the enterprise of communication. Paraontological paralanguage,
therefore, opens up a space for resonating radical dispossession
through the very refusal to re-state the state.
The denial of these accumulative norms is our formless forma-

tion in which language eclipses its own desire, verified in the
details of sound, speech, and the written word.
Writing respectively and deliberately is also, for us, a kind of

breathing within the wake, or a form of wake work embodying
new rhizomatic, assembletic, and galactical affiliations between
all entities. Breaking breath across these pages is an “otherwise
world of possibility”316 in which writing does not overdetermine
one sound or one score.
Syntax is euphonic, melodic, and always relational, every syllable

tempered by cadency, the flow of a breathing downbeat, the other.
In concert with the symphonic and its dissension, these vignettes
are a duo-ascendency, not a solo chirography. Despite structure,
the singular voice is subordinated for an orchestration that pul-
sates in simultaneity.
134
A respirit, our manuscript enunciates in the inhale and reiterates

through the exhale, an aspiration that listens for the loud gasp
given to the end of this world, an elongated sigh collectively shaped,
not in perfect unison but in consonance, not in closed harmony,
but throughout the strain. For instance, we write into each other’s
manuscription at the sentence level, an “influx-and-efflux” for
writing breath without sacrificing conviction.
The speech sound, the rhyme against the prose, and the song in
the break of the cry resound in our script. The result is a tune, a
discourse, a conversation, a number audible for the quorum, even
when the negation of our roaring silence is still our song.
Writing, for Jane Bennett, is a process of “influx-and-efflux,” a

respiration to and fro that invokes the “ubiquitous tendency for
outsides to come in, muddy the waters, and exit.”317 An expression
taken from Whitman’s “Song of Myself,”318 “influx and efflux”
concerns the quotidian movements that enable outside forces to
occupy bodies, animate and rattle their singular composition, to
then depart once such invigorating confusion is imposed. Every
entity, in this process, is intimately reconstructed and constituted
into something other.
Influx-and-efflux marks how writing’s movements oscillate

between porous extremities and radiating interiorities, both
shifts recalibrate the self, the reader, the properties and subjects
of citation, and the text’s dynamic impulses happening across
linguistic patterns. For Bennett, the conjoiner “and” is essential
as it stresses how change bridges and flickers in-between the
details of writing.
135
Formless Formation
This is to write that influx-and-efflux is the constant doing and

undoing of the addition, or the magical entrances and exits
swarming across writing.
Bennett’s evocation of influx-and-efflux attends to how writers

“ride the momentum of outside influences.”319 These momentums
charge through the written word as vibrant matter, for the vibrancy
of writing is inextricably linked to a plurality of resonances. Or,
influx-and-efflux marks the experience of being simultaneously
inside and outside the scene of writing, for the process of “writing
up” induces “a stutter, or lag, a delay before a vibratory encounter
becomes translated.”320 The influx and efflux of writing is “a sea
breathing itself in and out as waves.”321
Like an otherwise arranged by syntactical reinvention, or the

influx-and-efflux of words across sentences, waves, and worlds,
writing is a sonic entanglement. It is a call and response beckoned
by ideological impulse, political determination, and social sound
that travels across disparate life forces. In writing, the bridges,
underpasses, and waking lines and ephemeral traces of this life
world embolden the connections between aesthetic styles. Through
an improvisational practice within constraint,322 inspired by the
call to conspire (respire) together, writing is about who we read,
but also who we cite, engage, and refuse to summon.
Alice Coltrane claims that there are no coincidences, only inci-

dents.323 This must include the breaking breath of writing too,
for the occurrence of resonance is another way to understand
the alchemy of synchronicity within the everyday. For instance,
imagine a dream one experiences that comes alive, or the face one
thinks about after many years and then locates in the flesh, how
136
did one know? Or the word one thinks at the same time another
utters it? Is this not but the gift of magic, across breaking air that
thrives against the crestfallen?
Resonance, especially in writing, is about a preexisting feeling

already collectively felt before it was named.
Resonance is impossible to force, and yet the recognition of its

evanescent occurrences enables the collapse of confining temporal
and spatial accounts by way of reverberation’s portals. Resonance’s
deviations pervade formless formations that collectivize in the
nameless sound that’s always coming.
Thriving both before and after the precepts of existence, all forms
of life learn to flourish in the present known of an unknowable
presence. While terrifying and lonesome, the unknowing that
writing leaves open is a type of curious care, social love, a creative
experimentation for friends across words. Such a flow of interested
friendship is the encounter of relentless curiosity for one another.
For in altering how to write-with, we inevitably alter one’s interiority.
And in going in, we look out. In gazing forward,

we collect the past. In all external aims, we labor to listen
internally and eternally.
This is the praxis of writing, of friendship, a formless formation

culled from the crevices of deep feeling and deep listening. Fred
Moten understands the category of the unknowing as “the zone
of nonbeing [as] experimental” or “a kind of experiment, this
double edge of the experiment, this theater of like and unlike in
which friendship’s sociality overflows its political regulation.”324
137
Formless Formation
Friendship’s sociality is a formless formation that overflows from

within and without, a type of transformative living in fellowship.
If love at its essence is solidarity and “hope is as much a verb as it is

a virtue,”325 then the only way to survive and remake the earth is by
way of an anti capitalist fellowship mounted by care, vulnerability,
ethical compassion. From regions to cities and bodies to dust, new
and magical social orders choreograph formless formations. To
shout in an uprising is to “know ourselves as part and as crowd,”326
planted in the tension between the unspeakable and the imperative
to speak of fallen soldiers of love, to speak their names.
History’s resolute pleasure is to unsound the windpipes of singu-

lar and plural life. The legacies of existence and the aesthetics of
rebellions on occupied land, echo the unspeakable – every detail
in its every discrepant engagement thunders against unbroken
state suppression.
For liberation cannot be actualized by reforming social order

into “a new law or constituent social body”327 built from previous
structures, but must be “measured by our capacity to destitute the
governmental and economic mechanisms of labor, and of the cap-
ture of life more broadly.”328 More than an exercise in overthrowing
power and rebuilding it from failed and fractured strands, the
formless formation’s ultimate abolition is made possible from
the respiring spirit of fellowship and solidarity.
The affirmative negation of abolition includes the dissolution of

capitalist relations as well as the self formed through these rela-
tions. This “activated negativity”329 running through self-abolition
is necessary to formless formations and powerfully grounded in
material contexts and their overlapping differences. Formless
138
formations are not abstractions, for it is precisely the material-

ity of aesthetic-life-worlds that offer determinate formulas for
correspondences across singular and collective respirations. In
returning to Bataille, here, we recall that formlessness debases
form through an operation of abolition as a vehicle for creativity
on the ground.
Solidarity, therefore, is created by joining forms and then deform-

ing them, leaving all institutions (as we know them) for dust, for
these ashes are indicators of the evolution of wake work, of an
otherwise possibility, fleeting and permanent, where to grieve the
end of this word is to find the site and light of its new beginning.
Fists up. Wait for the sound.
Break breath in these pages,

for the open formless formation is
the grit of syllable upon syllable,
the influxes and effluxes of
sounding sentences read and
written together.
Listen for the cuts.
Remake the score.
139
Endnotes
1 On March 28, 2019 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amster-
dam, NL, and on behalf of the Studium Generale Riet-
veld Academie 4-day conference Take a Walk on the Wild
Side: Fabulating Alternative Imaginaries in Art & Life, which
included days curated by Kunstverein, Daniela K.Rosner,
and Tavia Nyong’o, we both took part in the conference
day “Excess Swarm (Wild in the Wild).” On this day,
Vourloumis invited scholars and artists to think alongside
the idea of resonance as both a theory and practice of
aesthetics and politics. Participants of the event included
Nwando Ebizie, Gayatri Gopinath, Malak Helmy & Janine
Armin, Rukeya (Monsur) Mansoor, Amber Musser, Jackie
Wang and Sandra Ruiz (event description here: https://
www.stedelijk.nl/en/events/hypatia-vourloumis).The
event’s opening remarks can be found here (https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=gQvcGVhJ334). We thank Jorinde
Seijdel for inviting us to participate and share our work
with each other. After this conference day, in the momen-
tum of a shared resonance, we joined energies and ideas,
and collaborated on co-authoring this book. Sophie
Muller dir., Soldier of Love, perf. Sade, RCA Records, New
York, NY, 2010.
2 Sade, “Soldier of Love,” Soldier of Love, RCA Records, 2010.
3 Sade, “Soldier of Love.”
4 Wu Tsang dir., Wildness, Class Productions, 2012.
5 “Michio Kaku: The Universe Is a Symphony of Vibrat-
ing Strings,” Big Think, May 31, 2011, https://youtu.be/
fW6JFKgbAF4
141
Formless Formation
6 “Michio Kaku: The Multiverse Has 11 Dimensions,” Big

Think, May 31, 2011, https://youtu.be/jI50HN0Kshg
7 Nathaniel Mackey, Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance,
Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993), 180.
8 Mackey, Discrepant Engagement, 3.
9 Mackey, Discrepant Engagement, 19.
10 Dawn Ades and Fiona Bradley, “Introduction,” in Under-
cover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and DOCUMENTS, eds.
Ades, Bradley, and Baker (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2006), 11.
11 Yve-Alain Bois, “The Use Value of the ‘Formless’,” in
Formless: A User’s Guide, eds. Bois and Kraus (New York,
NY: Zone Books, 1997), 18.
12 Georges Bataille, “Architecture,” Documents 1, no. 2 (1929):
117; Reprint in Oeuvres Completes Vol. 1, trans. Dominic
Faccini (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 172.
13 Bataille, Documents 1, no. 7 (1929): 382; Oeuvres Completes
Vol. 1, 80.
14 Bataille, “Formless,” Documents 1, (1929): 382; Reprint in
Vision of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, trans. Allan
Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt, and Donald M. Leslie Jr. (Minneap-
olis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 31.
15 Bataille, “Formless,” 382; Vision of Excess, 31.
16 “From Cooperation to Black Operation: A Conversation
with Stefano Harney and Fred Moten on The Undercom-
mons,” Transversal Texts, April 2016, https://transversal.at/
142
blog/From-cooperation-to-black-operation.
17 “From Cooperation to Black Operation.”
20 The Invisible Committee, Now, trans. Robert Hurley
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 70.
21 The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 12.
22 The Invisible Committee, Now, 42.
23 Denise Ferreira da Silva, “On Difference Without Separa-
bility,” 32nd Bienal De São Paulo Art Biennial: Incerteza viva,
2016, 57-65.
24 Ferreira da Silva, “On Difference Without Separability,”
64.
64.
65.
27 R.E.M., “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I
Feel Fine),” Document, I.R.S., 1987.
28 Cedric Robinson, The Terms of Order: Political Science and
the Myth of Leadership (Durham, NC: University of North
Carolina Press, 2016).
29 Thomas Sankara, “A United Front Against Debt,” View-
point, February 1, 2018, https://www.viewpointmag.
143
Formless Formation
com/2018/02/01/united-front-debt-1987/
30 The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, 12.
31 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and
Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014 [1976]).
32 bell hooks, “An Aesthetic of Blackness: Strange and Oppo-
sitional,” Lenox Avenue: A Journal of Interarts Inquiry, Vol. 1
(1995 [1990]), 65.
33 We want to thank Uri McMillan and Shane Vogel for their
theoretical framings and renderings of a minoritarian aes-
thetic, both in their individual work and as series editors
of Minoritarian Aesthetics at NYU Press.
34 The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, 12.
35 The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, 12-13.
36 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York, NY: Random
House, 1952), xxiii.
37 Stevphen Shukaitis, The Compositions of Movements
to Come: Aesthetics and Cultural Labor after the Avant-
Garde (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), ix.
38 Shukaitis, The Compositions of Movements to Come, ix.
39 Shukaitis, The Compositions of Movements to Come.
40 Randy Martin, The Politics of Preemption, Greg Elmer dir.,
Art & Education, October 2019, https://www.artandeduca-
tion.net/classroom/video/294555/randy-martin-the-poli-
tics-of-preemption
41 Kamau Brathwaite, ConVERSations with Nathaniel Mackey
(New York: We Press, 1999), 34.
144
42 Félix Guattari, “Machine et Structure,” in Psychanalyse

et transversalité: Essais d’analyse institutionelle (Paris: La
Découverte, 2003), 247.
43 Hypatia Vourloumis, “Ten Theses on Touch, or, Writing
Touch,” Women & Performance, February 2, 2015, https://
www.womenandperformance.org/ampersand/amper-
sand-articles/ten-theses-on-touch-or-writing-touch-
hypatia-vourloumis.html
44 Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategies (Chico, CA:
AK Press, 2017).
45 Jo Freeman, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” Struggle,
2000 (1970), http://struggle.ws/pdfs/tyranny.pdf
46 Referring to the Sun Ra Arkestra
47 Vijay Iyer, “Exploding the Narrative in Jazz Improvisation,”
in Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies, eds. Robert
G. O’Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine
Griffin (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2004).
393-403.
48 Iyer, “Exploding the Narrative,” 394.
53 Iyer “Exploding the Narrative,” 396.
145
Formless Formation

60 boychild, Josh Johnson, and Total Freedom, Untitled Duet
(the storm called progress), Gropius Bau, Berlin, February
1-2, 2020.
61 boychild, interviewed by the author, Hypatia Vourloumis,
May 4, 2020.
62 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,”
in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn
(New York, NY: Schocken Books, 1969), 13.
63 boychild, interviewed by the author, Hypatia Vourloumis,
May 4, 2020.
64 José Esteban Muñoz, “Vitalism’s After-Burn: The Sense of
Ana Mendieta,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Femi-
nist Theory 21:2 (July 2011), 191-198.
65 Muñoz, “Vitalism’s After-Burn,” 197.
68 Sandra Ruiz, Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Per-
formance (New York, NY: NYU Press, 2019), 136.
69 José Esteban Muñoz, “‘Chico, what does it feel like to
be a problem?’: The Transmission of Brownness,” in
146
A Companion to Latina/o Studies, eds. Juan Flores and

Renato Rosaldo (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing,
2007), 441-451.
70 Gayatri Gopinath, Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices
of Queer Diaspora, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2018).
71 Gopinath, Unruly Visions, 4.
72 Gopinath, Unruly Visions, 5.
73 Ronak K. Kapadia, Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the
Queer Life of the Forever War (Durham, NC: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 2019), 2.
74 Kapadia, Insurgent Aesthetics, 3.
77 Muñoz, “‘Chico, what does it feel like to be a problem?’”
441-451.
78 Alexandra T. Vazquez, Listening in Detail: Performances of
Cuban Music (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013),
20.
79 Vazquez, Listening in Detail, 8.
in Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies, eds. Robert
Griffin (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2004).
393-403.
81 Julia Steinmetz, “In Recognition of Their Desperation:
147
Formless Formation
Sonic Relationality and the Work of Deep Listening,”

Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 20:2 (2019), 119-120.
82 Steinmetz, “In Recognition of Their Desperation.”
83 Steinmetz, “In Recognition of Their Desperation,” 120.
84 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography,
trans. Richard Howard (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, and
Giroux, 1981).
87 “Pauline Oliveros: Still Listening!” Deep Listening Institute,
https://www.deeplistening.org
88 Steinmetz, “In Recognition of Their Desperation,” 119-132.
89 Erica Gressman, qtd. in S.G. Maldonado-Vélez, “Erica
Gressman,” La Estación Gallery Podcast, November 8, 2019,
https://soundcloud.com/user-605923905/erica-gressman
90 Erica Gressman, COVID-19, The Quarantine Concerts,
Experimental Sound Studio, Chicago, IL, April 1, 2020,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsyFD-xjeRo&t=5s
Gressman, interviewed by author, Sandra Ruiz, April 2,
2020.
91 Fiona Ngô, in conversation with Joshua Chambers-Let-
son and Sandra Ruiz, following Erica Gressman’s Limbs,
Krannert Art Museum, Champagne, IL, September 13,
2018. Curated by Sandra Ruiz with the help of Amy Powell,
KAM staff, and La Estación Gallery interns and Latina/
Latino Studies staff: https://kam.illinois.edu/event/eri-
ca-gressman-limbs
148
92 Erica Gressman, Wall of Skin, Channing Murray Founda-

tion, Urbana, IL, April 7, 2016.
93 Julia Steinmetz, “In Recognition of Their Desperation,”
119-132.
94 Ligia Lewis, Jonathan Gonzalez, Hector Thami Maneke-
hla, and Tiran Willemse, minor matter, HAU Hebbel am
Ufer, Berlin, November 24-27, 2016. Thank you to Joshua
Chambers-Letson for sharing his research materials and
for placing us in direct contact with Ligia Lewis.
95 Remi Raji, “Dreamtalk,” Gather My Blood Rivers of Song
(Ibadan: Diktaris, 2009).
96 Lewis, Gonzalez, Manekehla, and Willemse, minor matter.
97 Donna Summer, “I Feel Love,” I Remember Yesterday, Casa-
blanca, 1977.
100 Anh Vo “On Blackness – Ligia Lewis: Minor Matter
(2016),” Cult Plastic: Dance and Culture in the Plastic
Age, June 26, 2017, https://cultplastic.com/2017/06/26/
on-blackness-ligia-lewis-minor-matter-2016/
105 Hartmut Rosa, Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to
149
Formless Formation
the World, trans. J. Wagner (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2019

[2016]), 282.
106 Rosa, Resonance, 761.
107 Simon Susen, “The Resonance of Resonance: Critical
Theory as a Sociology of World-Relations?” International
Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 33 (2020): 309-344.
108 Susen, “The Resonance of Resonance,” 309-344.
109 For new work on Sun Ra and interstellar dust and mat-
ter see Jayna Brown’s forthcoming book Black Utopias:
Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds (Duke
University Press). Also see Jayna Brown’s talk A Fierce
Organicism: Ecologies of Enmeshment in Contemporary
Speculative Art here: https://youtu.be/u8MXDEOZL8E
110 Sun Ra, qtd. in Robert Mugge dir., Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise,
1980.
111 Sun Ra Arkestra, “Nuclear War,” Y Records, 1982.
112 Sun Ra, “We Hold This Myth To Be Potential (1980)” in
The Immeasurable Equation: The Collected Poetry and Prose,
eds. James L. Wolf and Hartmut Geerken (Wartaweil,
Germany: WAITAWHILE, 2005), 420.
113 Wilson Harris, “The Unfinished Genesis of the Imagina-
tion,” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 27:1 (March 1,
1992), 13-25.
114 Moved by the Motion, Sudden Rise, Whitney Museum of
American Art, New York, NY, April 26-27, 2019.
115 Wu Tsang and Fred Moten, “Sudden Rise at a Given Tune,”
South Atlantic Quarterly 117:3 (2018), 649-652.
150
116 W.E.B. Du Bois, “Sociology Hesitant,” boundary 2 27:3

(Fall 2000), 37-44.
117 Wu Tsang, dir., We hold where study, The Modern Women’s
Fund, MoMA, New York, NY, ongoing 2017.
118 Wu Tsang, dir., One emerging from a point of view, Sharjah
Art Foundation and Onassis Fast Forward Festival 6, Ath-
ens, Greece, May 5-19, 2019.
119 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing
(Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997).
120 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, xiii.
121 Wu Tsang, “There Is No Non-Violent Way to Look at
Somebody,” Gropius Bau, Berlin, September 4, 2019 - Jan-
uary 12, 2020.
122 Wu Tsang and Fred Moten, “Sudden Rise at a Given Tune,”
South Atlantic Quarterly 117, no. 3 (2018): 649-652. See
also W.E.B. Du Bois, “Sociology Hesitant,” boundary 2 27,
no. 3 (Fall 2000): 37-44.
123 Las Tesis, “Un Violador En Tu Camino,” performed on
International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against
Women in Santiago, Chile, November 25, 2019.
124 For more on this uprising see, https://suarapapua.
com/2020/06/12/the-voice-of-papua-news-letter-pap-
uan-lives-matter/
125 Glissant, Poetics of Relation.
126 Simeon Man, A. Naomi Paik, and Melina Pappademos,
“Violent Entanglements: Militarism and Capitalism,” Radi-
cal History Review 133 (January 2019), 1.
151
Formless Formation
127 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the

Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, NY: Knopf Dou-
bleday, 2012 [1975]), 135.
128 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 170.
129 José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and
the Performance of Politics, (Minneapolis, MN: University
of Minnesota Press, 1999), 182.
130 Patricia Nguyen, with Jim Ludes and G. Wayne Miller,
Story in the Public Square: Season 3, The Pell Center, New-
port, RI, October 21, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=QGpGb67mfto
131 Patricia Nguyen, “Building a Monumental Anti-Mon-
ument: The Chicago Torture Justice Memorial,” The
Funambulist, 2019, https://thefunambulist.net/articles/
building-a-monumental%E2%80%A8anti-monu-
ment-the-chicago-torture-justice-memorial-by-patri-
cia-nguyen
132 Patricia Nguyen, “Statement,” The Funambulist, 2019, 46.
133 Nguyen, “Building a Monumental Anti-Monument,” 51.
134 Nguyen, “Building a Monumental Anti-Monument,” 50.
135 Nguyen, with Jim Ludes and G. Wayne Miller, Story in the
Public Square: Season 3, The Pell Center, Newport, RI, Octo-
ber 21, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QG-
pGb67mfto
136 Patricia Nguyen, Untitled, in Groundlings, Museum of Con-
temporary Art, Chicago, IL, March 2019; Patricia Nguyen,
Echoes, in Upheavals, Defibrillator Gallery + Zhou B Art
152
Center, Chicago, IL, September 2019.

137 “Fred Moten with Jarrett Earnest,” The Brooklyn Rail: Crit-
ical Perspectives on Art, Politics, and Culture, November 2017,
https://brooklynrail.org/2017/11/art/FRED-MOTEN-
with-Jarrett-Earnest
138 “Fred Moten with Jarrett Earnest.”
141 Brent Hayes Edwards, Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary
Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2017), 47.
142 Edwards, Epistrophies, 47.
143 Aimé Césaire, Joan Pinkham, and Robin D.G. Kelley, Dis-
course on Colonialism (New York, NY: NYU Press, 2000),
42.
144 Césaire, Pinkham, and Kelley, Discourse on Colonialism, 43.
145 Robin D.G. Kelley, “A Poetics of Anticolonialism,” in
Césaire, Pinkham, and Kelley, Discourse on Colonialism
(New York, NY: NYU Press, 2000), 25.
146 Kelley, “A Poetics of Anticolonialism,” 25.
147 Kelley, “A Poetics of Anticolonialism,” 26.
148 Jeff Conant, “What the Zapatistas Can Teach Us About
the Climate Crisis,” Foreign Policy in Focus, August 3, 2010,
https://fpif.org/what_the_zapatistas_can_teach_
us_about_the_climate_crisis/
153
Formless Formation
149 Manuel Callahan, “In Defense of Conviviality and the

Collective Subject,” Polis Revista Latinoamericana 33 (2012),
https://journals.openedition.org/polis/8432
150 Conant, “What the Zapatistas Can Teach Us.”
153 Fred Moten, Black and Blur (Durham, NC: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 2017), vii; The Universal Machine (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2018), 112.
154 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a
Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society,
1, on. 1 (2012): 1.
155 Tuck and Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” 4.
156 “Rethinking the Apocalypse: An Indigenous Anti-Fu-
turist Manifesto,” Indigenous Action, March 19, 2020,
http://www.indigenousaction.org/rethinking-the-apoca-
lypse-an-indigenous-anti-futurist-manifesto/
157 “Rethinking the Apocalypse: An Indigenous Anti-Futurist
Manifesto.”
158 Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across
the Borders of Settler States (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2014).
159 “Rethinking the Apocalypse: An Indigenous Anti-Futurist
Manifesto.”
160 Ned Rossiter and Soenke Zehle, “Acts of Translation:
Organizing Networks as Algorithmic Technologies of the
154
Common,” NedRossiter.org, April 27, 2013, https://nedros-

siter.org/?p=332
161 Frederick Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic
of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1991), 409.
162 Jameson, Postmodernism.
163 Rita Indiana qtd. in Wilda Escarfuller, “[i]AQ[/i] Inter-
view: Rita Indiana Captivates Merengue Fans in New
York City,” Americas Quarterly, July 10, 2011, https://www.
americasquarterly.org/article/iaq-i-interview-rita-indiana-
captivates-merengue-fans-in-new-york-city/
164 Rita Indiana qtd. in Escarfuller, “[i]AQ[/i] Interview: Rita
Indiana Captivates.”
165 Engel Leonardo, dir., Da Pa Lo Do, perf. Rita Indiana y
Los Misterios, Premium Latin Music, 2010, https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=Y72XAybPTnU
166 For more detailed work on Rita Indiana and theories of
Dominicanness please see “Da pa’ lo’ do’ “: Rita Indiana’s
Queer, Racialized Dominicanness” by Karen Jaime in
Small Axe 19(2), 2015: 85-93.
167 Noelia Quintero, dir., La Hora de Volve, perf. Rita Indiana y
Los Misterios, Premium Latin Music, 2010.
168 Rita Indiana y Los Misterios “La Hora de Volve,” El Juidero,
Premium Latin Music, 2010.
169 Rita Indiana y Los Misterios “La Hora de Volve.”
170 Rita Indiana y Los Misterios “La Hora de Volve.”
155
Formless Formation
171 Rita Indiana qtd. in Escarfuller, “[i]AQ[/i] Interview: Rita

Indiana Captivates.”
172 Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1993), 8.
173 Vaginal Davis, N-Prolenta, ¥€$Si PERSE, and Urami,
Cherish x Queer Is Not A Label, Route de Saint-George 51,
Geneva, Switzerland, March 13-14, 2020.
174 Brent Hayes Edwards, Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary
Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2017), 10.
175 Edwards, Epistrophies.
176 Sara Ahmed, What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2019).
177 Ahmed, What’s the Use? 203.
182 “Rethinking the Apocalypse: An Indigenous Anti-Fu-
turist Manifesto,” Indigenous Action, March 19, 2020,
http://www.indigenousaction.org/rethinking-the-apoca-
lypse-an-indigenous-anti-futurist-manifesto/
156

188 Nick Mirzoeff, “Boggs Standard Time – in Detroit and
Beyond,” Waging Nonviolence, January 27, 2014, https://
wagingnonviolence.org/2014/01/boggs-standard-time-
detroit-beyond/
189 Mirzoeff, “Boggs Standard Time – in Detroit and Beyond.”
190 Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugi-
tive Planning & Black Study (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2013).
191 Sylvia Wynter qtd. in David Scott, “The re-enchantment
of humanism: An interview with Sylvia Wynter,” Small
Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 4:2 (2000), 123.
192 Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/
Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man,
Its Overrepresentation – An Argument,” CR: The New
Centennial Review, 3:3 (fall 2003), 260-261.
193 Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, “Unparalleled
Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness
a Different Future: Conversations,” in Sylvia Wynter: On
Being Human as Praxis, ed. Katherine McKittrick (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 23.
194 Sylvia Wynter, “The Pope Must Have Been Drunk, the
King of Castile a Madmen: Culture as Actually and the
Caribbean Rethinking of Modernity,” in Reordering of
Culture: Latin America, the Caribbean and Canada in the
‘Hood, eds. A. Ruprecht and C. Taiana (Ottawa: Carleton
157
Formless Formation
195 Katherine McKittrick, “Axis, Bold as Love,” in Sylvia

Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke
196 McKittrick, “Axis, Bold as Love,” 160.
199 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Vol. 1,
ed. Frederick Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward
Aveling (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1887), 48.
200 Marx, Capital, 107.
201 Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality,” 331.
202 Sandra Ruiz, Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Per-
formance (New York, NY: NYU Press, 2019), 3.
203 Ann Laura Stoler, Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013).
1980.
1980.
206 Sun Ra, “we must not say no to ourselves,” in The Planet is
Doomed (New York, NY: Kicks Books, 2011), 47.
207 Ra, “we must not say no to ourselves,” 47.
208 Youmna Chlala, The Paper Camera (Brooklyn, NY: Litmus
Press, 2019), 5.
209 Ghassan Moussawi, Disruptive Situations: Fractal Oriental-
158
ism and Queer Strategies in Beirut (Philadelphia, PA: Temple

University Press, 2020).
210 Youmna Chlala, “[To imagine],” in The Paper Camera
(Brooklyn, NY: Litmus Press, 2019), 11.
211 Youmna Chlala, “[In a constant state],” in The Paper Cam-
era (Brooklyn, NY: Litmus Press, 2019), 77.
212 José Esteban Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence: Intro-
ductory Notes to Queer Acts,” Women & Performance: A
Journal of Feminist Theory 8:2 (1996), 5-16.
213 Muñoz, “Ephemera as Evidence,” 10-11.
214 David Harvey, “Marx’s Refusal of the Labour Theory of
Value,” Reading Marx’s Capital with David Harvey, March 14,
2018, http://davidharvey.org/2018/03/marxs-refusal-of-
the-labour-theory-of-value-by-david-harvey/
215 Wynter, “The Pope Must Have Been Drunk,” 35.
216 Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality,” 331.
217 Jane Bennett, Influx & Efflux: Writing Up with Walt Whit-
man (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020).
218 Karen Barad, “Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Togeth-
er-Apart,” Parallax 20:3 (2014), 168-187.
219 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography,
trans. Richard Howard (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, and
Giroux, 1981), 25-26.
220 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 55.
159
Formless Formation

226 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in Steve Paulson, “Critical
Intimacy: An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spi-
vak,” Los Angeles Review of Books, July 29, 2016, https://
lareviewo6ooks.org/article/critical-intimacy-inter-
view-gayatri-chakravorty-spivak/
227 Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy,
trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
1982), 3-27.
228 Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1981), 27.
229 Derrida, Positions, 27.
230 “Jacques Derrida – On Being,” in Derrida, dirs. Kirby Dick
and Amy Ziering, Jane Doe Films, 2002, https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=gjmp0ZAz5yk
231 Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, And Other Essays
on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evan-
ston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 156.
232 Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, 156.
233 “Jacques Derrida – On Being.”
234 Geoffrey Bennington, “Embarassing Ourselves,” Los Ange-
les Review of Books, March 20, 2016, https://lareviewof-
books.org/article/embarrassing-ourselves/
160
235 Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (New York,

NY: Penguin Press, 2019), 8.
236 Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, 9.
man (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020).
242 Laura Harris, Experiments in Exile: C. L. R. James, Hélio
Oiticica, and the Aesthetic Sociality of Blackness (New York,
NY: Fordham University Press, 2018), p.10-11.
243 Harris, Experiments in Exile, 2-8.
244 Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed
Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History
of the Revolutionary Atlantic (New York, NY: Verso Books,
2012), 332.
Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies, eds. Robert
Griffin (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2004),
395.
246 Laura Harris, “What Happened to the Motley Crew:
C.L.R. James, Hélio Oiticica, and the Aesthetic Sociality
of Blackness?” in Experiments in Exile: C. L. R. James, Hélio
Oiticica, and the Aesthetic Sociality of Blackness (New York,
161
Formless Formation
NY: Fordham University Press, 2018), 33.

247 Harris, “What Happened to the Motley Crew,” in Experi-
ments in Exile, 33.
248 Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical
Tradition (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 2003), 22.
250 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard
Philcox (New York, NY: Grove Atlantic, 2007 [1961]).
251 Sylvia Rivera, “Y’all Better Quiet Down,” Christopher
Street Liberation Day rally, Washington Square Park, New
York, NY 1973.
252 Rivera, “Y’all Better Quiet Down.”
256 Combahee River Collective Statement, April 1977, http://
circuitous.org/scraps/combahee.html
257 Césaire, Pinkham, and Kelley, Discourse on Colonialism, 137.
258 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, third edition, trans.
Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2002 [1982]).
259 Ruth Nicole Brown, Hear Our Truths: The Creative Potential
of Black Girlhood (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois
Press, 2013), 1.
162
260 Moten, In the Break, 22.

261 Brown, Hear Our Truths, 31.
262 Brown, Hear Our Truths, 2.
263 Sun Ra, qtd. in Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise, dir. Robert Mugge,
1980.
264 Graham Lock, Blutopia: Visions of the Future and Revisions of
the Past in the Work of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony
Braxton (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).
265 Lock, Blutopia, 14.
266 Ra, qtd. in Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise.
267 Sun Ra, “man and planet earth,” in The Planet Is Doomed
(New York, NY: Kicks Books, 2011), 95.
268 Lock, Blutopia, 74.
269 Sun Ra, “infinity is the language,” in The Planet Is Doomed
(New York, NY: Kicks Books, 2011), 73.
270 Ra, qtd. in Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise.
271 “Manos Danezis with George Sachinis,” Antithe-
sis, CreteTV, May 13, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=yzvFTPM21bs&t=196s
272 Alexis Lothian, Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer
Possibility (New York, NY: NYU Press, 2018).
273 Lothian, Old Futures.
274 Lothian, Old Futures, 17.
275 William Gibson, “Books of the Year,” The Economist,
163
Formless Formation
December 4, 2003.
276 N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season (London: Orbit, 2015).
277 Jemisin, Appendix 2, Glossary: “Orogeny,” in The Fifth
Season, 462.
278 Jemisin, The Fifth Season, 166.
279 Octavia E. Butler, Dawn (New York, NY: Grand Central
Publishing, 1997).
280 Kodwo Eshun, “Feminism: Possibilities for Knowing,
Doing, and Existing. A Conversation Between the Otolith
Group and Annie Fletcher,” L’Internationale Online, June
24, 2018, https://www.internationaleonline.org/research/
politics_of_life_and_death/107_feminism_pos-
sibilities_for_knowing_doing_and_existing_a_
conversation_between_the_otolith_group_and_
annie_fletcher/
281 Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower (New York, NY:
Grand Central Publishing, 1993), 195.
282 Eshun, “Feminism: Possibilities for Knowing.”
283 Adrienne Maree Brown, Emergent Strategies (Chico, CA:
AK Press, 2017).
284 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,”
in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn
(New York, NY: Schocken Books, 1969), 256.
285 Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 256.
286 Rammellzee, qtd. in Mark Bould, “The ships landed long
ago: Afrofuturism and Black Science Fiction,” Science
164
Fiction Studies, 34:2 (2007), 177-186.

287 Octavia E. Butler, Kindred (Boston, MA: Beacon Press,
2004).
288 Wilson Harris, “History, Fable, and Myth in the Carib-
bean and Guianas,” in Selected Essays of Wilson Harris: The
Unfinished Genesis of the Imagination, ed. A.J.M. Bundy
(London: Routledge, 1999), 158.
289 Harris, “History, Fable, and Myth,” 159.
290 Harris, “History, Fable, and Myth,” 158-159.
291 John Akomfrah, dir., The Last Angel of History, Black Audio
Film Collective, 1996.
292 Harris, “History, Fable, and Myth,” 157.
293 Mati Diop, dir., Atlantique, Ad Vitam (France)/Netflix
(worldwide), 2019.
294 Kamau Brathwaite, “Poetics, Revelations, and Catastro-
phes: An Interview with Kamau Brathwaite by Joyelle
McSweeny,” 2005, https://www.raintaxi.com/poetics-rev-
elations-and-catastrophes-an-interview-with-kam-
au-brathwaite/
295 Loretta Collins, “From the ‘Crossroads of Space’ to the
(dis)Koumforts of Home: Radio and the Poet as Trans-
muter of the Word in Kamau Brathwaite’s ‘Meridian’ and
Ancestors,” Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, 1: 1
(2003), 12.
296 Kamau Brathwaite. MR (Magical Realism), Volume 2 (New
York, NY: Savacou North, 2002), 509.
165
Formless Formation
297 Brathwaite, MR (Magical Realism) Vol. 1, 267.

298 For her poetic cosmological disruption please also see
Alexis Pauline Gumbs on cataclysm, ancestors, specula-
tion and magic in the M Archive: After the End of the World
299 Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Cheva-
lier (New York, NY: Grove Press, 1965).
300 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
301 Sharpe, In the Wake, 20-21.
302 Sharpe, In the Wake, 3.
305 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing
(Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 9.
306 Sharpe, In the Wake.
308 “Public Lecture by Nahum Dimitri Chandler,” Depart-
ment of Social and Cultural Analysis, New York Univer-
sity, New York, NY, October 17, 2017, https://as.nyu.edu/
departments/sca/events/spring-2017/public-lecture-by-na-
hum-dimitri-chandler.html
309 “Public Lecture by Nahum Dimitri Chandler.”
310 W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Forethought,” in The Souls of Black
Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago, IL: A.G. McClurg, 1903).
166
311 “Public Lecture by Nahum Dimitri Chandler.”

312 Nahum Dimitri Chandler, “Of Exorbitance: The Problem
of the Negro as a Problem for Thought,” Criticism 50:3
(Summer 2008), 347.
313 Chandler, “Of Exorbitance,” 351.
314 Ashon T. Crawley, BlackPentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of
Possibility (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2016).
315 Crawley, BlackPentecostal Breath.
316 Crawley, BlackPentecostal Breath.
man (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), x.
318 Walt Whitman, Robert Hass, and Paul Ebankamp, Song
of Myself, and Other Poems (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint,
2010).
319 Bennett, Influx & Efflux, xxii.
320 Bennett, Influx & Efflux, x.
321 Bennett, Influx & Efflux, x.
322 Danielle Goldman, I Want to Be Ready: Improvised Dance as
a Practice of Freedom Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michi-
gan Press, 2010).
323 Sita Michelle Coltrane (“Alice Coltrane Turiyasangi-
tananda”), “In the early 80s, my mother Alice Coltrane
Turiyasangitananda, purchased land in the Santa Mon-
ica mountains on which she built an ashram with
the lord’s direction. She created a space for spiritual
practice . . .” Facebook, November 17, 2018, https://www.
167
Formless Formation
facebook.com/AliceColtraneOfficial/posts/in-the-ear-
ly-80s-my-mother-alice-coltrane-turiyasangitanan-
da-purchased-land-in-t/932128446970508/
324 Fred Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in
the Flesh),” The South Atlantic Quarterly 112(4), 2013, 768.
325 Sigal Samuel, “Why Cornel West Is Hopeful (But Not
Optimistic),” Future Perfect, Vox, July 29, 2020, https://
www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/7/29/21340730/cor-
nel-west-coronavirus-racism-way-through-podcast
326 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 9.
327 K. Aarons, “No Selves to Abolish: Afropessimism,
Anti-Politics, and the End of the World.” Mute Magazine.
February 29, 2016. https://www.metamute.org/editorial/
articles/no-selves-to-abolish-afropessimism-anti-politics-
and-end-world
328 Aarons, “No Selves to Abolish.”
329 “Activated Negativity: An Interview with Marina Vish-
midt,” with Mira Mattar and Julia Calver, Makhzin Issue 2:
Feminisms, April 1, 2016, http://www.makhzin.org/issues/
feminisms/activated-negativity
168
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Sandra Ruiz & Hypatia Vourloumis

Cover image by Yiannis Hadjiaslanis

All images in this book by Yiannis Hadjiaslanis (www.hadjiaslanis.

Released by Minor Compositions 2021

Minor Compositions is a series of interventions & provocations

Minor Compositions is an imprint of Autonomedia

In a scene from another space and time, Flawless Sabrina stands

As we write this, the abolitionist anti-fascist and anti-racist US

In rehearsing these scenes, the aesthetic-life-world (the inherent

Minor aesthetic performances stage chance convergences and

What if our modern capitalist world system experienced its own

Making form just a thing we do, not a thing we must follow.

Our Formless Formation, a thing we must follow, is composed of a

Only possible by way of gaps and encounter, resonance is found

Resonance is the decibel frequency of (dis)harmonious amplitude.

Amplitudes of resonance are described by theoretical physicists

as the fluctuations of multidimensional vibration. Working in

Our vignettes are multiverses, hanging about even when we cannot

Multiversal resonance relays in tandem, and the reverb causes a

Such discrepant engagements also provide the avenue to the

Formlessness, here, becomes a series of certain operations removed

The formless is a performative project, or as Bataille notes, “form-

Composed of multiversal resonating performances that constantly

In a move away from cooperation to operation, because as they

As forever students, our vignettes resist the canons and separations

Thus, formal limitlessness has to do with questions of method, of

make a place for them and accompany their metamorphosis.”20

If life, as noted above, is a constant metamorphosis of forms, how

It is in these “interactions of forms,” that we see the accessibility

Modelling her own beats and rhythms of interacting forms

our imaging of the universe, diﬀerence is not a manifestation of

To be formless, then, is to be in solidarity. It is to be open to options,

Although formless formations find ways to exist outside of the given

underlining of the dispositifs of the world as we know it. For natural

At the center of these vignettes sits the essential proposition

the nation-state’s containing and expelling borders, the formless

Thus, these vignettes are a compositional folding into immeasurable

But what exactly is this aesthetic-life-world, and how do we find

Advancing past the intellectual domain of the cultural elite, aes-

informed by minoritarian life.33 The aesthetic travels with and from

The aesthetic harbors both singular details and the interactions

by capital and modes of governmentality. Endeavoring to modify

This preemption is manifold and negotiates the ways in which

Such a tidalectical preemption also always keeps an eye on the

If the word fascism etymologically stems from an aesthetic symbol

sheaf, is the formless formation. In a counter strike, the resignifying

Unruliness doesn’t abandon full structure; from the space of

Take, for instance, the generative contradiction of the murmura-

As the murmuring starlings express, formless formation is a

listening to where the rhizomatic, the assemblages, aﬀective and

In conversation with an uncountable number of dynamic voices,

Formless Formation is an insurgent walking and flying side by side

Sensed as both keenly acute and suﬀusedly formless, these agglom-

The formless formation resonating across discrepant aesthet-

Wait for the sound.

It is a sensual discrepancy, a creak, a split, a speculative history,