Poetics of flow

23.09 - 24.09.2026 | GB 5/160

Anmeldung: linda.simonis@rub.de

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The ability to flow is a fundamental aspect of poetic and cultural production. What is in flow can be further developed, shaped and reshaped and thus bring forth change and transformation.

Since antiquity we encounter literary traditions and genres that give preference to the fluid (in contrast to the solid): We may evoke, for example, the rhythmic flow of language in Homer and Pindar and the oral communication of their poetry as an aesthetic correlate of this appreciation of flow. Accordingly ancient concepts of poetic inspiration also rely on fluid media such as honey and wine which were held to be susceptible of transmitting the creative impulse in a fluent motion.

In literature, ancient and modern, poetological reflection on flow often goes along with themes of water, rivers, sea or ocean, while it may also be linked with other fluid media such as sand, air, wind, clouds, snow and sound. Moreover, a poetics of flow is also at work in theories of the cosmos such as Heraclitus’ philosophy to which the famous formula πάντα ῥεῖ has been retrospectively attributed.

In modern and contemporary literature, the engagement with flow often serves to explore the potential of change and renewal enclosed in the physical state of liquidness, while at the same time it probes into the limits of fluidity as a poetic or cultural condition. As possible case studies of this tendency we might evoke Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Pericles, Hölderlin’s Archipelagus, Arthur Rimbaud’s Le bateau ivre, Paul Valéry’s Regards sur la mer and Le Cimitière marin, Virginia Woolf’s The Waves – to mention only a few conspicuous examples.

As a vehicle of artistic production, flow mostly implies a precarious maneuver on the ridge between fluidity and dissolution, the resistance to rigidity or closure and the dispersion into formlessness. Viewed in a more general cultural perspective, media of flow such as water or wind disclose a specific ambivalence: While often conveying a fascination of boundless space and unlimited movement (cf. for instance Freud’s account of the ‘oceanic feeling’: „ein Gefühl wie von etwas Unbegrenztem, Schrankenlosen“, “a feeling as of something unlimited and boundless”), they may also incite a need of containment, an urge to fence in and control the dynamic motion.

This observation also raises the question of the political or cultural-political dimension of flow: For although, as Gilles Deleuze und Félix Guattari have famously argued, flowing media, such as sea and sand, appear, in the first place, to resist permanent cutting and dividing and thus seem to elude territorialization, they nonetheless become subject to processes of measurement and cartography.

At the workshop we will engage in an interdisciplinary discussion with contributions from literature studies, cultural studies, media studies and philosophy. In a comparative perspective, we aim to envisage and set in relation the diverse and multifaceted phenomena of flow in their cultural and aesthetic adaptations. Against the background of historical traditions of flow, we will also investigate more recent phenomena of flow and the respective attempts at their conceptualization. Thus, contemporary phenomena such as circulation and ‘streams’ of data suggest themselves for an analysis in terms of flow. Moreover, we will also consider natural environments of flow and their reflections in eco-poetry.