The ‘subject’. “The sensory-motor break makes man a seer who finds himself struck by something intolerable in the world, and confronted by something unthinkable in thought” (Deleuze 1989: 169). The collapse of overarching sense-structures (be it religion, the state, or traditional humanist conceptions) following the ‘disenchantment of the world‘ has been part of the cultural discourse for a long time now, and it has reached its peak not only in the historical experiences of humanity’s cruelty during WWII, but also due to the monstrosities of colonialism. While certain social theories, as much as the efforts of the avant-garde, but also Existentialism, have tried to propose alternative structures of sense and meaning (even in light of the absurdity of life), it seems that they all, based on an unsustainable notion of authenticity, were bound to fail. It seems like the only alternative left for us is total indifference. For if we are mere visitors in this world, are we not to travel lightly? To give it all away as easily as Kierkegaard’s Abraham, but without expecting the world to be given back to us? But it is exactly this experience of something “intolerable in the world” that shakes up this nihilist equilibrium. This might recall the disruptive experience of the avant-garde sketched out above, as its ethos was also borne out of the experience of something that should not be. And yet, “believing is no longer believing in another world, or in a transformed world. It is only, it is simply believing in the body. It is giving discourse to the body, and, for this purpose, reaching the body before discourses, before words, before things are named” (ibid.: 172f.).

Is this once again the return to an authentic body, untouched by society’s grasp? We would miss the point if we drew the distinction once again between authenticity and alienation. It is not about an action that should be facilitated, but rather about finding a mode of existence to face the world — like timid people that feel that they ‘don’t belong in a room’ and assume a corresponding posture. It is not about the body’s relearning to perform, but its general stance towards the world, ways of ‘being in the world’ which, even in indifference, remains a stance as we face a world that we cannot grasp: “The categories of life are precisely the attitudes of the body, its postures.” (ibid.: 189) — “To think is to learn what a non-thinking body is capable of, its capacity, its postures” (ibid.).

Confronted with the problem of our stance towards the world, we are faced with a choice, as “choice no longer concerns a particular term, but the mode of existence of the one who chooses” (ibid.: 177). Choosing one’s mode of existence is not the same kind of choice as choosing one’s favorite flavor of ice cream. It is inherently problematic, as there is a “difficulty of being,” a “powerlessness in the heart of thought” (ibid.: 166), as there is no faculty in us (reason, imagination, instinct) that could point us to the right choice. This task will necessarily fail: “There is no such thing as any possible ‘end of history’ or ‘end of art’, because the game is being forever re-enacted, in relation to its function. A new game is announced as soon as the social setting radically changes, without the meaning of the game itself being challenged” (Bourriaud 2002: 18f.). But still, we are perpetually confronted with the choice of our mode of existence, and it is this, which perpetually hinders our turning away from the world. And it is in seeking for this “discourse of the body” that we learn that what is happening in this world does indeed concern us, just as Christian learns in the end that his actions have had very real consequences and that he has an obligation towards the ones affected by it — even though he realizes this too late.

The ‘relation’. When our relation to the world is tightened, our encounters also matter again, they create an ob-ligation, in contrast to duties. While duties are owed within singular, structured encounters and segments (I ‘owe’ the money for the things I buy in the supermarket), obligations affirm that our actions are committing and affect the world as much as the people around us. As the text of the film’s eponymous artwork, The Square, says: “The Square is a sanctuary of trust and caring. Within it, we all share equal rights and obligations.”

That an artificial frame, the artwork, is needed to establish this relation, is indicative that what is at stake here is not an authentic community, but, as we’ve seen above, something that originates from a choice, namely the choice for a mode of existence. Christian’s careless life of non-concern was just as much a matter of choice as another one, and it was neither ‘less authentic’ nor is his latter ethical realization ‘more truthful’. They are simply different modes that originate from different choices. Both are equally constructed. No outside criteria, be they instinctive, rational or imaginary, can ‘prove’ to Christian that he has lived wrongly, but it seems that as soon as he allows for the encounter between himself and the boy to happen, he also steps out of his bubble of indifference. Considering that the path to any authenticity is blocked, the only alternative remains with a certain constructivism (for which, of course, there are also very different interpretations).

The ‘object’. “[I]t is not in the name of a better or truer world that thought captures the intolerable in the world, but, on the contrary, it is because this world is intolerable that it can no longer think a world or think itself. The intolerable is no longer a serious injustice, but the permanent state of daily banality” (Deleuze 1989: 169f.). While the modernist confrontation with the world lead to impulses of escape, of finding an alternative, this conception remains purely immanent. This also means that the relation to the world must not occur with ‘another’ world (the world of the future, of an afterlife), but within the world we are already inhabiting. So, when Bourriaud asks: “is it still possible to generate relationships with the world?” (Bourriaud 2002: 9), then he, just like Deleuze, means this world.

Therefore, the change Bourriaud sees in Relational Art, in contrast to avant-garde conceptions, lies in its chance of “learning to inhabit the world in a better way, instead of trying to construct it based on a preconceived idea of historical evolution” (ibid.: 13), as it was sketched out not only in artistic manifestos, but also in social theories. This also means that “the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever the scale chosen by the artist” (ibid.).

The world as it is does not necessarily need to be negated, as it was in the modernist conceptions; if there is ‘no escape’, then maybe it is within the world as it is, that change needs to occur, which changes the status of utopia: “Social utopias and revolutionary hopes have given way to everyday micro-utopias and imitative strategies” (ibid.: 31), so that “[t]hese days, utopia is being lived on a subjective, everyday basis, in the real time of concrete and intentionally fragmentary experiments. It seems more pressing to invent possible relations with our neighbours in the present than to bet on happier tomorrows” (ibid.: 45). Such an art ultimately “tightens the space of relation” (ibid.: 15), instead of trying to find alternative spaces, like the commune of the ’60s and its many cults. It is no longer about negating the world as it is by means of confrontation and “conflict,” but about with help of “negotiations, bonds and co-existences” (ibid.: 45), giving way to “convivial situations,” which are “part of a ‘friendship’ culture’” (ibid.: 32). We are no longer to withdraw ourselves to an area of autonomy with a selected group of people, but to move freely within the societal territory — in some sort of nomadism.

There is one scene in The Square that offers a vision of such a conviviality: Christian is in the mall, sitting on a bench with his daughters’ many shopping bags, waiting for them. Suddenly, he gets a call, so that he urgently needs to get back to work. He asks different people for help to guard his shopping bags while he searches for his daughters, but nobody reacts. He then sees a beggar at the mall’s entrance and asks him to guard his things, which the latter, confused, obliges to. The one seeking help is now in the role of the helper and for a short moment, these two form a friendly micro-community. An example that Bourriaud cites seems to be going into a similar direction, namely Jens Haaning’s Turkish Jokes from 1994: The artist “broadcasts funny stories in Turkish through a loudspeaker in a Copenhagen square,” and thus “produces in that split second a micro-community, one made up of immigrants brought together by collective laughter which upsets their exile situation” (ibid.: 17).

What happens in these two examples? We could say, “the ‘deviation’ and random encounter between two hitherto parallel elements” (ibid.: 19), as the beggar, who is part of a society running parallel to the bourgeois one, and Christian meet (or the immigrant boy and Christian). In this context, Bourriaud speaks of “lasting encounters” created by art, which “turn out to be lasting from the moment when their components form a whole whose sense ‘holds good’ at the moment of their birth, stirring up new ‘possibilities of life’” (ibid.). The encounter between the beggar and Christian didn’t last, as it was only a gesture, not a stance, but it also shows us that in the end, art might not be happening where we are expecting it to happen — in galleries, auctions, workshops — but within daily life itself, which is full of such encounters, if we only allow them to happen, if only we allow for deviations in the straight lines of our habits. So we are not to counteract against segmentation by rediscovering a totality, but rather to find ways within these segments to open up potentials for new forms conviviality. For example, while it might be said that apps like Tinder segment the dating process, not only by channelling the communication through a specialized app, but also by dividing the process of getting acquainted (first visual attraction, then chatting, then meeting), they also offer the possibilities for people from different walks of life or day-to-day rhythms, which would normally ‘run parallel’ without meeting, to encounter each other (how often this really happens, is another question).

This might seem like an optimistic solution for a situation that started out so bleak. And while Bourriaud indeed seems to be a lot more optimistic than Deleuze, we must not forget that withstanding a condition without any access to authenticity or ‘Truth’, with the necessarily problematic structure pertaining to it, will always be the more difficult choice than falling back to ideologies that promise us everything that we wish for.