Anexact Form and Modernist Culture

Conducts the first genealogy of the philosophy of the anexact in twentieth century culture, introducing the concept as a means of understanding modernist avant-garde art and literature in the long mid-century (c. 1922 1972).

What happens to form in a time of random walks and Uncertainty Principles, self-organising plasma membranes and multivalent logics? And how might we better categorise the modernist avant-garde’s confrontation with such complex and contradictory formalisms? Anexact Form and Modernist Culture presents a soft taxonomy of the long mid-century avant-garde’s fuzzy, grey, and viscous forms while investigating the aesthetic and affective valences of that which is ''essentially and not accidentally inexact'', as Edmund Husserl writes in Ideas I (1913). Across five chapters – on doodles and inkblots; iridescent surfaces and the noise of becoming; the erratic cultural life of precision; the mesomorphic imagination of protoplasm; and the groovy aesthetics of industrial chemistry – Anexact Form and Modernist Culture offers a unique examination of avant-garde art and literature in a time of unprecedented err, smudge, ooze and wriggle.