New forms of subjectivity: critical intermedia and socially engaged poetics, 1971–2021

This dissertation argues that intersections between poetry and other art forms are sites of struggle over aesthetic critique during the socioeconomic era of late capitalism. As the postwar economic boom gave way to the deindustrialization of North America and Europe after 1970, the aesthetic critique of capital was confronted with a mode of production that proved capable of commodifying immaterial forms of both labour and art. Examining intersections between poetry and performance, sound, and digital media, respectively—three art forms that are often considered “immaterial” or “ephemeral”—this dissertation tracks the attempts for poets to realize alternatives to capitalist relations in and through their poetic works. Diverging from theories of resistance promulgated by the Euro-American avant-garde that insist on non-commodification and autonomy, I develop the terms critical intermedia and socially engaged poetics to describe poetic practices that foreground mediation and sociality to influence the material and discursive relationships between author, art, and audience. Critical intermedia and socially engaged poetics posit that collectivity, not autonomy, is the condition of possibility for new forms of subjectivity to proliferate in tandem with social and political transformations. Ultimately, this dissertation shows that poetic texts are sites of social interactivity, helping to form new relationships among artists and their multiple publics. The scope of this project is from 1971 to 2021 and focusses on poets from Canada, the US, and one from the UK. This half century and relatively broad geographical purview permit a theorization of the wide-ranging effects of late capitalism on literature, labour, and culture, including the proliferation of immaterial production, multiculturalism as a strategy of neoliberal state containment, and the integration of digital technologies into work and in everyday life. I analyze American poet Bernadette Mayer in conversation with feminist performance art of the seventies, the aural poetics of Canadian poets ahdri zhina mandiela and Dionne Brand in relation to dub poetry and Black feminist activisms in Toronto in the eighties and nineties, and the similarities in form, style, and theme across the digitally mediated poetics of American poet Ariana Reines, English poet Sean Bonney, and Nisga’a poet Jordan Abel in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Contributing to literary sociology, performance studies, cultural studies, and the critical digital humanities, this dissertation affirms the potential for poetry to enact social critique, presenting a timely and necessary counter-narrative to critical discourses that foreclose this possibility

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