Form | Shapeless forms

To illustrate the crisis between the two terms announced in the title it is not easy to say that the first is a noun deliberately kept in the singular and the latter an adjective rendered in the plural. In terms apparently paradoxical we find that while in the notion of form we find a plurality of meanings and articulations in that of forms, this multiplicity of declinations is notably reduced even though there are positions therein have highlighted the propulsive potential as opposed to the usual limiting designation by denial. On the level of etymological ascent, the term “form” in reference to Greek or Latin origin offers significations not only distant and multiple but sometimes oppositional. The origin of the word ‘formless’ or “shapeless” is quite different, although on one side it is of more recent formation [first half of the sec. XIV] on the other hand has no other derivation than the Latin one of informis (der fōrma with negative prefix in-). Connecting this meaning to the term ‘amòrfo’ we get to the Greek ἄμορφος as ‘shapeless’ (comp. of  - priv. and μορφή) denoting what is “without a definite form: amorphous matter”. The formless is therefore what “has nothing distinct in its structure “which, not being ordered, would not yet have a definite, stable, recognizable shape and therefore available to transmutations. On the aesthetic and philosophical and theoretical level, the multiple values of the term ‘form’ take on the meaning of an “ordering principle that gives unity and coherence to a multiplicity of elements”. A relevant singularity is represented by the formal theory of Henri Focillon in which each work “is an attempt towards the unique; it affirms itself as a whole, as an absolute; and, at the same time, it is part of a system of complex relationships (...) it is matter and spirit, it is form and content” and arises from an active encounter between the formal vocation of man and the formal vocation of the subject. In recent years, a search for the stability of the form as a transgression of the form but also as a promise, as a possibility, is reflected in this search for stability of form. The arguments of George Battaile want to argue that the form “serves to downgrade” and to transgress the form, to de-sublimate it, managing to trigger new processes. Against the stability and clarity of the form of the classical tradition and of the modern one connected to the essential relationship with the construction, in these years of reductio ad imaginem, we assist to the disarticulation between image and form. The first responsible for the seductive aggression to the senses and the second relegated to a precarious hyper-formalism that has its counterparts in technological exhibition or in the obscene excess of forms in reference to a misunderstanding neo-naturalism.