Category: art

[…] join in, for us, to change misery.

Barely, related — The Calamity Form : On Poetry and Social Life, Anahid Nersessian.

Like the commodity form, the calamity form enables an “active and in-depth knowing of nothing.” Its “peculiar achievement” is not to explain the conditions responsible for the epistemic and experiential dilemmas and contradictions of its moment but rather to put us “on close terms with incomprehension.” Through its “anti-denotative and anti-representational” strategies, the poetry “repossess[es] the occult character of the commodity and sets it not against but beside the inscrutability of its historical moment” (p. 4, emphases Levinson).

In other words, the relationship of commodity form to calamity form is one of adjacency: a serial, similarity, reiterative relationship rather than a hierarchical, logical, and causal one. The calamity form is Nersessian’s category-term for Romanticism’s way of suspending, attenuating, downgrading, vaulting over, fracturing, blurring, deforming, and misdirecting the normative relationships between signifier and signified that characterize narrative, statement, argument, and reference. The calamity form, on her reading, neither critiques nor idealizes the commodity form; it “rehearses” it …

Marjorie Levinson on The Calamity Form via Critical Inquiry