UC Santa Cruz

Couple(t): A Poetics of Love extends the theoretical apparatus of coupling (Luhmann, Sloterdijk) to the form of the poetic couplet (original poems) in order to elucidate how mimesis happens in the social and in excess of symbol as a production of relational difference. By thinking love untethered from the absolute truth value assigned it as societal ideal or literary trope, I activate coupling to posit affect and affection as mutually constituted and spread through connection; this connection can be read as a network of bodies, or a social body. If love is a technology of communication practiced materially as well as semiotically, the dynamic couplings formed in love can illuminate our relationships with ulterior agencies, including language. Couple(t) centers a poetics of love uniquely concerned with both form and feeling to enter directly into the media ecology of a functionally differentiated artistic social system: the Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb, Croatia. My sensory ethnographic fieldwork in this vernacular museum reenters love as ekphrastic ratios of description by intervening upon visual taxonomies and submitting my own testimonial relic to the collection. In evidencing and amplifying couplings between personal artifacts and public encounters, I participate in love’s orientation against the grain of totalization by attaching to multiple vectors like lines of verse. Coupling with this critical framework, my artistic practice summons desire as a generative apparatus. My poetry manuscript, Money with You, wields couplets as platforms of relationality: two lines toggling across their border and between their modular unit and the remaining poem to defamiliarize the ordinary. This distinctive vibration, engineered through juxtaposition and enjambment, renders the couplet a contact zone of subjectification and knowledge production. Money with You is part sensory autoethnography, part epistle to former and speculative lovers, part municipal ecopoetics, and 100 percent queer heuristics orientating love via the couple(t). By embodying both conceptual and formal architectures, Money with You forges new pathways through perceived binaries including personal/political, humor/despair, nostalgia/futurity, digital/actual, vulgarity/constraint, and creative/critical. Together, the creative and critical axes of my dissertation project open outwardly like arms, like a book, to embrace a media poetics of love. By honoring allocentric modes of being and interpretation that hold otherness in tension, the dyadic structure of Couple(t) aims to renew signification via transversals faithful only to the location and vacillation of difference.