Poetic “being-with”: A Case for Relational Poetics

Abstract

Abstract This article repurposes the conceptual ingredients of participatory art, from 1960s Environment-Happenings to 1990s and contemporary relational aesthetics, to postulate an analogous poetics. While both epochs of interactive art exercise the same premise—that is, taking “the sphere of human relations as site for the artwork” to “induce models of sociability,” as Nicolas Bourriaud claims—the conditions of relationality entailed in each concern distinct modes of production, consumption, and governance. I trace this distinction in relation to the Foucauldian notion of “technologies of power,” arguing that, while Allan Kaprow's practice engages with the biopolitical, “disciplinary” power of liberalist regimes, the work of Félix González-Torres and Rirkrit Tiravanija engage with what Byung-Chul Han terms that “psychopolitics” of neoliberal debt relations. This examination serves as the ground from which I devise a new kind of relation poetics, a heteroglot and immersive literary bricolage that critically reflects neoliberal modes of atomised individualism. Juliana Spahr's Fuck-You-Aloha-I-Love-You serves as a means by which I distinguish poetry about relationality from relational poetry, which in turn gives rise to my own attempt at, and critical analysis of, a relational poem: a vexed interstice of what Jean-Luc Nancy calls “being-with.