Objecthood, Flat Form, Political Formalism: OOO and Ben Lerner’s Hatred of Poetry

Abstract

This is a largely theoretical essay that, in conversation with Graham Harman’s energetic view of objects and Ben Lerner’s idiosyncratic theory of poetry, articulates the basic tenets of a “flat aesthetics” and then moves on to tease out this aesthetics’ ramifications in terms of form, reading thereof, and politics. When the object’s ontological dignity is acknowledged, as flat ontology does, and further, when literature too is dealt with as an object whose “intransitive” objecthood is recognized, literary form, Moraru argues, no longer reflects an elsewhere, a beyond, or other transcendent place, meaning, or design. Instead, this form deflects clarifying light “prismatically,” illuminating other objects, the bigger ensembles into which they are arranged, as well as the potential for new arrangements and worlds. Drawing from Lerner’s Hatred of Poetry, the article’s closing segment explains how this potentiality is already embedded in form qua object and sprouts dialectically from the limits within which literary forms inherently coalesce.