No Relation

A new relation among fragments would arrive as a sentence of obscene incommensurability.

—Lisa Robertson, Riverwork

In this seminar we seek to understand how and why aesthetic forms can insist on the nonrelation between their parts. What happens when a single artwork contains elements for which there is no compelling logic of selection? How can critical response meaningfully address such nonrelation without positing an (implicit or explicit) relation—say, of comparison? What might lie behind artists’ and theorists’ insistence on nonrelation? If rhetorical analysis has classically described forms of relation between figures and between things, can there be a rhetoric of nonrelation? Or must all nonrelation become relation, if only through language itself? 

Our motivation is twofold. We are interested in the histories of specific artistic movements that have pursued dissonance and jaggedness as ends in themselves (for example, postwar collage, postdramatic theater, constructivist film, postmodern urbanism). We are also curious about the “nonrelational” as a canonically problematic term in psychoanalytic queer theory, which in this millennium became associated with “the entitled subject who can afford the simple negation” (Jennifer Doyle), that is, became marked out as a theoretical position enabled by social privileges of autonomy and abstraction. Might a return to this term still illuminate various poetics of contemporary alienation? What are the possible logics of wilfully fragmentary figuration, and how might they correspond to particular ethical, sexual, or political fantasies and practices? On what grounds might positing nonrelation become useful or even necessary? Topics might include but are by no means limited to:

• Parataxis;
• Theories of assemblage;
• Aesthetic negation and negativity;
• Articulations of nonrelation in Black studies;
• Nonrelational affects;
• Postdramatic theater;
• Gender without relation;
• Montage and editing;
• Colonial and neocolonial superimposition and syncretism;
• Lacanian poetics;
• Disidentification;
• “Unbelonging” (Iván Ramos) and other aesthetic alternatives of/to collectivity

Co-organized by Shonni Enelow, Julia Jarcho, and Martin Harries