Walead Beshty on problems in Bourriaud's positivist formulation of "relational aesthetics":

Texte zur Kunst Nr. 59 - Walead Beshty NEO-AVANTGARDE AND SERVICE INDUSTRY: "the relationships that occur in relational aesthetics are invisible to the material understanding of the institution, or physical locus of power, by their very imbeddedness. This revision of the city map foregrounds the relations between pockets of the city, privileging usage over topography, networks over space, all in service of 'the primary engine of urbanization: the market.' Bourriaud’s 'interstices' in 'the social corpus' are just such invisible points of communion where the market transcriptions of personal relations are the boundaries between people, no longer the physical walls, and the complete irrelevance of private vs. public space is realized. The proposed libratory conflation of domestic space and gallery space, and the real world progression of the art institution into entertainment complex, creates both a disturbing endpoint where domestic space become indistinguishable from commercial space, (for Bourriaud only considers the transition going one way, not the other) and masks the understanding that this is already happening. The new digital behaviorist topography of the city completely dissolves the symbolic divisions between personal and public. The city itself becomes an expression of interrelations, consciousness of material conditions evaporate, creating systems of control invisible to those who are placed inside it. With the onset of the satellite, the panopticon has become as ubiquitous as the sky itself.
Nan Ellis argues that this dematerialization is the foundation of a distinctly postmodern anxiety of the city, '[w]here modernist fear and the positivistic climate in which it occurred led to efforts to detect causes and effects...postmodern fear amid the refining anti-technocratic climate has incited a series of closely related and overlapping responses including retribalization, nostalgia, escapism, and spiritual return.' Or in Bourriaud’s words, '...we are hoping for a return to traditional aura...' The understanding, or reflection, of these evolutions of subjectivity and space are important to consider in reexamining the subjectivity of the viewer, and how control can be disrupted, but relational aesthetics seems to go only so far as recreate these systems, literalize their movements, without providing any moments of resistance. Instead it is staged t as an inevitable outcome, by reinscribing these existing structures of control as 'a realm of possibilities,' of a 'possible future,' as 'microtopias.' This is exactly the system of domination that Gilles Deleuze and F�lix Guattari describe in 'Mille Plateaux', writing, 'Attention has recently been focused on the fact that modern power is not reducible to the classical alternative 'repression or ideology' but implies a process of normalization, modulation, modeling, and information that bear on language, perception, desire, movement etc,, and which proceed by way of micro assemblages.'"