Mapping the Unconscious, Trapping into Taboos, Snapping Out Of It – Depth-hermeneutical Research In/About/With Groups
The following essayistic analysis shows significant sketches of a transnational artistic research project, working with a combined methodological mix of group-analytical and depth-hermeneutical approaches, finally questioning the idea of a ‘transcultural unconscious’. With the newly developed ‘scenic-performative writing format’ as its heart it seeks to establish a translational paradigm-shift, using tools of hetero-, border-, transmatrixial dialogue combined with presentational, polyvocal language-games in order to break tabooed speech-acts.
Prologue
Mapping the Unseen (2019 – 2021) was an artistic research project, investigating unseen, undiscussed, tabooed topics absent from public discourse. Based in Austria, it was realised with three countries, Croatia, Bangladesh and Iran. With the support of linking people (a person who had migrated from one of these countries to Carinthia) ‘culture-country-specific topics’ were identified: For Croatia, the chosen topic was ‘LGTBIQ’, for Bangladesh, it was ‘devoid of subjecthood, fleeing and displacement’ and for Iran it was ‘discrimination and censorship’. Each topic was mapped through an analogue and virtual exploration and representation by artistic means. Beneath the public presentation and transcultural discussion of interdisciplinary artistic works, research was carried out by biographical workshops and audience interviews. These intervention phases of ‘analogue mapping’ were accompanied by reflection cycles. The depth-hermeneutical research in/with/about groups were part of the latter. The final step of the whole project was the creation of a web-based space, ‘virtual mapping’, an open-to-visit archive of all artistic and research productions (https://www.mappingtheunseen.com/en/welcome).[1]
So far, the interesting, manifest and conscious facts about this ambitious project. In the following I kindly invite to go with me on stage, exploring also hidden, latent, mostly unconscious layers of meaning, beneath the surface of an easily decipherable discourse. For me it was a risky excursion of one set forth to unlearn what fear is, to learn how to see the invisible, to hear the mute, to feel the untouchable, to express the culturally repressed – while leaving my familiar ordinary world, transgressing thresholds to not-yet known regions. Before that I didn’t know how deep taboos cut. More than once I was about to abandon everything and settle for the dominant discourse, but something wouldn’t let me rest. Why was I struggling and how did I manage to survive the journey?
The curtain opens – searching the not-yet found
In the project I got the chance to carry out the depth-hermeneutical research based on biographical workshops hold in each country about the respective topic with a median group of interested artists/activists. Over decades as a scientist in academic affairs, experienced in depth-hermeneuts and additionally since a few years trained in group analysis, I decided to combine both. We installed a constant research group of seven participants, working in two steps: First, with the transcriptions of the biographical workshops; second, with the respective transcriptions of our group discussions. The aim of a two-step process is to open a supervisory space of a co-reflexive intersubjective interpretation.
In the light of depth-hermeneutics ‘mapping the unseen’ means ‘mapping the unconscious’, a mostly hidden, marginalised, veiled and often tabooed reservoir of thoughts, feelings, experiences, values and codes. It contains content that is individually and/or collectively unacceptable, repressed, excommunicated from speech, and eliminated into the ‘dark continent’ (Freud). Thus, the unconscious represents a utopian ‘not-yet’, “an overturning of all circumstances in which (humanity) is a degraded, a subjugated, a forsaken, a contemptible being” (Bloch 1986, 1355). And with it the hope, what once could be.
Act 1: Facing the power matrix – laced up, entangled, ashamed
Follow me directly into the creative work of the Croatian partner on the chosen theme LGTBIQ which seeks to deconstruct the politically conditioned marginalisation of sexual minorities in current right-wing extremist discourses that frame the growing re-traditionalisation of Croatian society. LGTBIQ is used as umbrella term for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexul, Transgender, Intersex, Queer. The list of significant terms to be included is long as many minorities should find space here, figured out by the ‘all-inclusive chain’ LGBTIQAPK + (…Asexual, Polygamous, Kink +).
Inspired by the vividness of the biographical workshops – the participants left discursive paths, confronted the ambiguity of their chosen identity models, performed their own narratives while struggling with the ghosts they called – our research group started in a corresponding way. Enthusiastically we rejoiced in the incipient productivity, but quickly our co-creativity faltered, and we found teased up in the emergent ‘heteromatrixial strips’.
According to Judith Butler, the term ‘heterosexual matrix’ describes a social order in which the male-female binary and respective heterosexual desire is underlined by the claim that these two (and only two) role-models are facts of nature. Tracing back the etymology of the upcoming term ‘strip’ we find ourselves in a mélange reaching from ‘narrow piece of cloth’ over ‘to strip of, to ramble’ to ‘striptease’. It is undeniable that every single letter of the strung LGTBIQ-strip can be traced back to the activist idea of a ‘third gender’ going beyond the heterosexual matrix. The aspiration for gender fluidity is promising the formation of a ‘reverse discourse’ (Foucault) enabling the heterosexual other to speak on its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy, normality or naturality be acknowledged. In this perspective LGTBIQ serves as ‘lifeline’, from which one may try to escape the ‘subjugation’ on one’s search for (a) stable identity. Subjugation, literally ‘bringing under the yoke’, is a key term of Michel Foucault, defined in his genealogical description of power, a concept not easily to transcode in an easily understandable idea. Simply put power is everywhere, an ultimately all-determining, metaphysical principle, waiting at every corner – a superstructure, governing us and all. Thus, we are entangled in an inescapable web of discursive power-strips woven matrix-like around us, disciplining, disposing and fixing our being, subjugating us under discursive control.
Make your free, self-determined choice, we are asked, but immediately we are falling into the trap, spanning between two binary poles: male/female. In this sense, the blossoming of fluid gender identities and assumed non-binary sexual practices are locked into pre-formed, established heterosexual matrix strips that shape, limit and divide our ontological horizon in two. The resulting deeply hierarchical attributions are putting somebody very fast in different boxes: L, G, T, B, I or Q or … x. Thus leaves the concepts of alternative identity within heteronormativity, which is desired to overcome. Moreover, each time one tries to be represented and recognized accurately, one must reveal sexualities, lust and other intimacies. And this in a society where the colour blue is closely associated with the term tampon. Or would you invite anyone into the inner sanctum that is your bedroom? Self-determination requires a ‘strip-tease’, eliciting feelings of shame and guilt.
If ‘stripping’ means to undress, ‘teasing’ etymologically derives from the matriarchal of heckling flax, ultimately from the female vulva – open display of which being one of the biggest taboos. Yay, we finally got it/id on the hook, aren’t we! However, rejoiced too soon. On contrary, I was far away from above-mentioned insights, because precisely at this point a certain way of speaking prevailed which went hand in hand with the division into good and evil. Good was the unqualified endorsement of queerness, bad was its critical questioning. Two parties faced each other like hostile adversaries: the do-gooders who supported the struggle for recognition of the former outcasts, and the morally reprehensible who prevented any potential for emancipation. A kind of ‘cancel culture’ established itself, built on the yet unspoken rule to follow ‘political correctness’. The splitting solidified, subgroups formed, two female protagonists of our group coupled, the research process stagnated. I got into a writer’s block.
Act 2: Staring into screens – virtual, fictional, postcolonial
The stagnation escalated in the second part of the research project, when we, chained to the thrown out ‘politically-correct-identity-policy-lifeline’ of LGTBIQ passed the threshold to Bangladesh – but only virtually. In March 2020 we were already sitting on our suitcases, plane- tickets in hand. Then the world clocks changed to Covid time, the superficialities of human interaction changed fundamentally, ‘zoomed up, in, out’. Digital, virtual, distant acts superseded lively, physical, close contacts. Mapping the unseen after Covid meant mapping the unconscious which arises, enlarges, multiplies itself in manifold, digital channels. Safely sitting in our home boxes, we were condemned to trust that we might catch a ‘true’ glimpse of the taboos hidden behind the digitised transcultural curtain. Like the lonely covid patient in intensive care hangs onto the lung-machine, we isolated quarantined were hanging onto the internet-machine. Like him, we were more than ever dependent on expert knowledge and had to trust. But whom and what?
In our search to map the ‘devoid of subjecthood’, materialized in the migration drama of Rohingya people, a persecuted minority interned in Bangladesh, the lack of clarity plays a crucial role. Which historical sources can we trust, what is based on fictitious stories and legends? Who is who? Where do they come from? Where do they belong to? Where are they going to? Which documents and artistic contributions are real, which are faked? The boundary between documentation/fiction, reality/illusion, information/interpretation, true/false identity blurs.
Again, identity was at stake, again ‘identitary-admission-tickets’ were demanded. Now it was no longer about ‘Intimite-self-LGTBIQ-labels’, as before in the heteromatrixial strip, but about world-orders between global south/north, black/white, subaltern/superior. The group’s strategy for overcoming the increasing paralysis was to flirt with politically correct identity policy, fraternised with postcolonial reparation-desires and thus, step by step, to stretch a new triple-sewn ‘border-matrixial net’ over untouchable taboo zones.
The transcripts of the biographical workshops changed. In line with data protection the participants were anonymised – named P1 to P9. Short biographical notes were missing. Questions like “who comes from where, what sex?” were answered with the counter question: “is this relevant?” Then our names in the research groups-protocols were also replaced by P1 – P7. Discussing them, we were unable to allocate our original contribution. Total identity diffusion. But what is the point of a biographical workshop if you sever the connection to everything what is biographic? The question for origin becomes a strongly tabooed no-go, mirroring the current taboo to inquire about a stranger’s heritage. It is frowned upon if not as racist, then at least ‘politically incorrect’ if the one spoken to is a shade darker.
Identity policy together with political correctness seem currently the ‘golden way’ to foster postcolonial global equity and equality. But what is the point of identity policy, when every question of identity becomes a moral offence? What if the sudden popularity of the notion of identity, expressed in all prominent identity discourses, merely reflects the specific interests of the Western world – with its neoliberal discourse emphasising private ownership, saying that one must ‘own’ an identity and is forced into a coherent Western narrative of ‘self-identity’ through ‘social penalties’? Doesn’t this bring with it the great danger that ‘well-intentioned identity policy’ completely miss its target audience whose identity it desperately seeks to define? Or do we need the other to define our identity? Does Western-tinged identity policy itself colonise the speech of the ‘subaltern other’ once again?
Act 3: Trapping into taboos – shut down, muted, emptied
I was left alone with my questions sitting with my shoulders down in the research group-sessions as if a big elephant was perched on top of them, as one participant put it, wanting to defuse the situation. I felt muted and emptied.
At the same time, the guiding term ‘taboo’ was erased from the project-programme, replaced by the term ‘marginalised topics’, with the argument that taboos are not ‘speakable’. Tracing back the etymology of taboo, we found ourselves at sea with the sailor James Cook, who brought from his third voyage to the Polynesian Tonga islands. Spread in many other languages, it remained phonetically nearly unchanged. Overall taboo means an irrevocable, sociocultural norm which is to be respected. Despite (or because) of that, taboos are considered as foundations of culture(s), marking boundaries between outsiders/insiders, normal/deviant, allowed/forbidden. Taboos function as meaningful social codes, incorporated assumptions and non-codified rules, serving as protectors of deeply layered cultural values and common beliefs. Taboo violations are not only prosecuted by concrete punishments but are primarily regulated by affect economies with arising feelings of guilt, shame and embarrassment. Seeming quasi-natural they are taken for granted, and therefore are rarely discussed, questioned, looked at or even touched. Taboos are seismographs for any sociocultural progress, development, and innovation up to dissolution, disintegration and decay, as well as for rigidity, solidification up to fundamentalism, anachronism and ‘societal production of unconsciousness’ (Erdheim). Taboo-breaking activities are ‘openers’ that mostly find their articulation in artistic performance, in new movements or in reflexive research practices.
Have I thus found an answer to Foucault’s concern, “how not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of those principles, with such and such an objective in mind and by means of such procedures, not like that, not for that, not by them and at that cost?”. According to Butler, confronting this question, the only chance is to find the “tear in the fabric of our epistemological web”, which I decoded as the traditional Cartesian way of dividing the world into body/mind, ratio/emotion, male/female, white/black, normality/deviation, north/south pole.
It is mapped in an asymmetrical either/or-topology always implying the superiority of the rational-mind-male-north-white side: A ‘Cartesian matrix of power’, in our project almost impenetrable because triple-stitched by political correctness, postcolonial reparation, identity policy.
How to begin “an experiential, interrogative relationship with the field of categorisation itself”, which Butler calls the reflexive stance that lies beyond a well-intentioned but backfiring do-gooder mentality – she designed as a “virtue of a critical being”, a particular “art of existence”?
Act 4 Snapping out of it – reflexive, intersubjective, decartesian
These reflective insights eventually allowed me to recall the profoundly “de-Cartesian” principles of depth-hermeneutics and group analysis. Both the founder of depth-hermeneutics, Alfred Lorenzer, and the founder of group analysis, Sigmund H. Foulkes, were strongly associated with the Frankfurt School’s critical theory project. Both de- and reconstruct Freudian concepts, leave their monadic structures, and formulate a profoundly intersubjective-relational redefinition of the underlying relationship of individual/society. In doing so, both transgress asymmetrical, hierarchical Cartesian demarcations that delineate interconnected and mutually determining entities. Moreover, both transgress those supposedly intersubjective-relational constructions that initially think the individual separate from society, but then, in a further step refer back to each other through weighty montages such as social factors, social unconscious, social influence, social dialogue, etc. – In a vague disguise of an ‘as if’ (Klein 2022).
Only then I understand a) the splitting into the seemingly insoluble opposites of an ‘either-or’, b) the dictated univocalisation through corresponding language regulations and c) the inability to find words for it outside of the entangling Cartesian power matrix, as the dominant counter-transference figure.
Depth hermeneutics, in its goal to translate the potential of not-yet conscious into utopian ways of living and articulation, gets its central data through a consequently reflexive perception of researcher’s subjectivity. It is veiled and revealed in constant transference/countertransference-interactions which are evident at every point in the research process: how each person reads, talks, asks, listens, acts; what each person sees, hears, feels, says and more importantly: what they don’t. Thus, the main research questions are: what does the whole research affair doing with me/us? Including Foulkes’ perspective, significant key scenes condense into a scenic pattern that emerges as matrixial transference/countertransference-gestalt, a figure that exactly mirrors hidden unconscious circumstances.
In a painful reflection process, the fog of letters cleared, I gained a glimpse out of the entangling cartesian power matrix. The hitherto ‘tear in the fabric’ opened and exposed an intermediary potential space: free to play ‘culture-located creativity’ (Winnicott), free to play ‘language games’ (Wittgenstein), free to think out of t ‘pre-set symbolic forms of interaction’ (Lorenzer) and free to ‘translate unconscious matrixial figures into conscious ones’ (Foulkes).
What happened next, how the fragmentary building blocks came together to form a colourful jigsaw puzzle during the encounter with the Iranian artists’ group and the associated groundbreaking insights into discrimination and censorship, I can only touch on in passing for reasons of space – probably the “elephant in the room” occupies the same.
Act 5: Writing down – playful, dialogical, co-creatively
But how to manage one of the most difficult part of the symbolisation process, to find ‘expressions’ for all ‘impressions’ pelting me; to linguistically symbolise the desymbolised, destructed, excommunicated ‘not-yet’ articulated utopian ideas into shared culturally goods and to bring the resulting (inner) chaos into a reader-comprehensible order – simply put: to translate and write it down?
Firstly, I decided to leave academic textual formats and ‘created’ the essayistic format of ‘scenic-performative writing’. An essay provides an intermittent, floating form of the in-between, with which it is possible to elude categorising schemes of order and, in performative aesthetics, to subvert moments of domination out of determining language: “The essay does not allow itself to be dictated to. Instead of achieving something scientifically (…) its effort still reflects the muse of the childlike, who without scruple inflames himself with what others have already done (….). He says what strikes him about it, breaks off where he himself feels at the end and not where there would be no rest left”. (Adorno 1988, 10, own translation).
Sitting on the shoulder of this prominent philosopher I automatically felt free to excuse its fragmentary weave in which many loose threads are left hanging – waiting to be knotted together by you, as interested reader.
With the interposed reader-activating scenic-performative writing impulses I tried to realise the envisaged dialogical act of co-creation. Scenic-performative writing is an invitation to join a collaborative language-game as co-productive team-mate.
‘Language-game’ is a central concept in Lorenzer’s depth-hermeneutics, illustrating that a word isn´t just a word, whose meaning can simply be looked up in a dictionary. Words are interwoven with connected individual experiences, forms of life and cultural habits. Each word/text/discursive symbol has its more or less large, vivid ‘yards of meaning’, that could be a royal yard, a farmyard, an industry yard, or a shipyard, a graveyard, a slaughter yard. In the case of ‘language destruction’, a traumatic act of ‘desymbolisation’, when any kind of suppression by powerful censorship forces banishes unwanted meanings to dark continents, the ‘yards of meaning’ appear to be burnt down, littered, smashed, devastated, destroyed, arid, withered, steep, impassable, swampy, muddy or tabooed. In that case, the words we use remain empty phrases, just hollow clichés, crudely drawn or empty signifiers, separated from their vivid content (experience, sensation, desire, expectation) shaped by lifeforms and culture. But regardless of their appearance, each desymbolised word, each empty signifier, each flattered yard of meaning can be revitalized, if we overcome our resistances and defence strategies. ‘Yards of meanings’ are deeply territorialized, linked to spaces we are roaming with our feet, our hands touch, in which we pause and stay, where we settle or walk further.
Secondly, I choose the narrative of hero’s journey, an important archetypical mythology, in which someone leaves the ordinary world due to a crisis scenario to change things, goes on an adventure, overcomes thresholds and returns changed. ‘Myths’ express fundamental aspects of human condition, beliefs, values and taboos; they are open oral stories about deeply ethical dilemma thereby derive applicable models for future modes. According to Lorenzer’s symbol-theory myths belong to the sensual-symbolic forms of interaction, building the bridging-link between discourse/rational/conscious and body/emotion/unconscious. Referring to Susanne Langer, language has a linear, successive order. Discursive symbols are strung one after another like beads on a rosary, like a clothesline, in which each piece is placed side by side, hanging like a series of flagships. (Remember the LGTBQ-lifeline). In contrast presentational symbols allow for superimpositions and ambiguities – like garments thrown into the laundry bag. Thus, presentational symbols as artistic figures (dance, music, pictures, metaphors) or performative practises (myth, rituals, dreams) operate independently of discursive elements with their fixed, stringent meanings. Myths form a ‘collective transitional space’ (Green) precisely having the function of a transitional object. In them, the unspeakable, the strictest taboos, the deepest ethical dilemmas can be put into words and up for public discussion – polyvocally. As sensual-symbolic forms of interaction they preconsciously pave the ‘royal path’ from unconscious to conscious and precede linguistic symbolization.
Thirdly, knowing that ‘translation’ is the main concern of both, deph-hermeneutics and group analysis, I consequently explored the etymological roots of significant terms. As I found, they spread like subterranean rhizomes, linking cultures, histories, ethnicities and identities across time and space, detailing their spread from one language to another and their evolving changes in form and meaning. The etymological interludes provide the ground, in Foulkes’ words, the foundation matrix for a shared understanding of the underlying ‘yards of meaning’ – beyond English as shared super-power-uniform-language.
The German ‘übersetzen’, derives from ‘pflanzen’ (to plant), meaning to put a botanical element into soil and wait for the seeds to sprout and new ‘cultures” to develop. Similar to English, it exhibit a physical movement as a driving force, overcoming the old, simultaneously creating the new, transported from one place to the other.
Hopefully these ‘sensual-symbolic’ decisions provide answers to the multilayered translation-challenges in the project:
- To translate excommunicated unconscious to negotiable conscious
- To translate colonized (and therefore lost) ‘yards of meaning’ of the subaltern-other beyond non-western-tinted-post-colonial-super-power-languages
- To translate non-translatable taboos to … we will see …
Because all – the unconscious, the subaltern, the ghost … -speak all the time: We are simply unable to hear them (Spivak). Can we play ‘translation-games’ to rip apart from our Western way of Cartesian-binary-representations? Could the desired ‘virtue’ be a ‘translatability-virtue’?
Fourthly, I put together a group, invited them to walk the hero’s journey with me. Some acted as travel compagnions, others as treshold guardians: the ‘hungry ghosts’, called by the biography workshop group in Zagreb, who threatened to fall under the table but stayed always invisibly present anyway. The ‘elephant in the room’ that appeared at the Bangladesh-research groups, carrying the weight of an uncomfortable truth; the ‘mole’ that dug deep holes during the transition to the last act, the Iranian intervention, and finally the ‘Eastern Whipbird’ that whistled the farewell-song.
In addition, not-yet-known selfs were created. Therefore I distinguished between ‘Me’ and ‘I’ (Mead). ‘Me’ represents the seeing eye, monitoring the ‘I’, which symbolise the individual’s impulse, reacting in response to the ‘Me’, but also initiating creative-spontaneous action. The ‘I’, called L’eye’, represents a liminal position, always in having to balance inner/outer requirements, not hesitating to get to the bottom of things, even if the ‘yards of meaning’ we roamed, were closed by iron curtains, blocked by border fences, obstructed by flashing warning or uncanny. ‘Me’, named M’eye, to emphasize its nature of surveillance, anxiously observing all the norms/standards society comes with. He always acted professionally, seriously committed to doing the right. To leave the resisting unconscious some space, to express it/id-self, I also invited a troublemaker: D’eus, who used to speak in different tongues, switching in mid-sentence between German, English, vernacular and fantasy speech.
In difficult passages, emotionally charged situations and when we came to a threshold, then they were on spot.
The most difficult threshold of the Hero’s Journey was the transition through the needle of hope, after the third playground, occupied by Iranian artists, was left – encompassed by a ‘shipwreck with spectators’, referring to a ground-breaking metaphor. According to Blumenberg (1997) the ocean voyage encapsulates a paradigmatic moment of human blasphemy, codified in the attempt to transgress those natural conditions that bind human existence to ‘terra-firma’, and to venture out into an immeasurable element that embodies the forces of incalculability, lawlessness, disorientation. During a shipwreck, viewers on the safe shore watch the other’s distress at sea. From their secure position they peer at the waves of world affairs. Do the castaways find a plank or not? Do they fail or founder? The onlookers at the beach collect the flotsam. From the blanks, they construct new houses to settle in or pile up a stake. Who knows? In any way a co-creative cultural formation.
Act 6: Performing art of existence – polyvocal, trans-linking, utopian
The travel group saved themselves onto the washed-up ship planks, gliding on a sea of ‘floating signifiers’. To pass the time they arranged a panel/plank discussion about ‘Arts of Existence’. The storm subsided; scraps of words reach us through the wind.
L‘eye’: Torn between right/wrong, we/them, good/bad, speech/silence, revealing/concealing, I was paralyzed with fear, nearly not enduring the tension: What can, may, should I do? How far can censorship be overstepped – into the intimate bedroom, in dark cellars, under the coloured skin? These questions keep me up at night. To be honest taboo-breaking freaks me the hell. (…) My lifeline was the empowering ‘Virtue as Art-of-Existence’ and its pillars: reflexivity and translationability.
The Elephant: shakes his trunk from one side to the other in a nice transitional movement: I think I find myself in ‘trans’ so well, because I myself am a ‘transitional subject’. Hailing from India, after the blind men touched me, I think of myself as having been the last colonial, fated to a continuing process of ‘dis’-identification shaping my life. The core of my translinking set-ups therefore is transition – an uncanny decentered, unstable, precarious and temporary foothold, waiting for us at Gheluc.
D’eus, talking ‘vernacular’, involves a group in his new game, then goes off with the ‘hungry ghosts’ to dance in the graveyard.
Meanwhile the Mole distributes his newly created ‘identitary-admission-tickets’, called ‘green yards’ which are not, as he secured, occidentally checked. He fetches spores and pieces of roots out of the laundry bag, to be planted at their destination: It is time to leave the spectator’s chair, to remove our western ‘Cartesian split-glasses’ and to ‘lay our whole life on the edge of the border’, heading for Gheluc. In line with the trans-linking Elephant, I raise the often called ‘individual or social or cultural unconscious’ to ‘transcultural unconscious’. Paraphrasing Wittgenstein, there is ‘no such thing as a word as an isolated thing’, separated from the way people live. I deduce that there is no such thing as individual conscience (or a social or cultural one), it is firmly rooted in its transcultural matrix, filled with floating signifiers from everywhere and everytime (…). The wind blows away his latter scraps of words and some ‘green yards’.
Aha, Gheluc seems to be a co-created neologism out of ‘Lücke’/luck and *ghieh/gap, I heard. M’eye, who has just taken over the chairmanship of the Post-colonial-corrective-service in the swampland, I don’t like to listen. His entrepreneural binary neo-speak-reglement is coming out of my ears. One hears it so often these days. Obviously it fulfils a basic need for order and orientation. Mut zur Lücke, I think and close my …
…screen.
The Curtain falls – shadow fight with taboo(s)
At Gheluc- back stage: Dark forest in half moonlight, a tree on the right casts its shadows, something moves in the web of branches. A bird! Very small one, olive green with a black head and breast – an Eastern Whipbird.
It emits a long melodic note, abruptly ended by the unmistakable whip-call Then he raises his voice: “You want to know more about taboos?”.” He jerks and jolts: “But also strange, amazing, downright odd that you should ask, I have waited so long, been sitting on this branch for centuries. Ever since the great, white, old man, navigator Sir James Cook, stole me from the Polynesians and placed me in Victorian Britannia as a precious colonial treasure. Since then, I have eked out a sad, lonely shadowy existence as an imported taboo guardian in this strange dystopia. No one dares to approach me, to really look at me, to listen to my whip-song, to touch me. Yet taboos by nature – are neither transplantable nor translatable.” Again he emits a long melodic string of notes, abruptly ended by a whipcrack: “Here I am perpetually secluded, surrounded by an invisible mile of ban. A taboo is a commandment of avoidance, connoted with contagion, impurity and moral decay, the transgression of which is punished by exclusion from the community. Hence this little warning song at the beginning, because be sure, it will not be an innocuous instruction that will leave you untouched. No, it will bring your ego, your being, your world structure into total disorder. Nothing will be the same as it was before. Your mental edifice will be torn off its hinges, you yourself will lose the solid ground under your feet, drifting away on a slowly melting ice floe – directionless and disoriented, navigation systems are suspended. The threat of exclusion touches on existential fears of death. Even Sir James Cook had to die because he carelessly crossed a taboo line.” He sings his two-phase song again, the cracking whipcall after each sound fugue growing more dramatic: “One cannot be silent about a taboo without speaking of the taboo – a strange hermaphroditism is inherent in it – especially the reigning, regimenting linguistic taboos of postcolonial political correctness. Listen”. Whipbird falters, cowering fearfully. For suddenly the PCPC-Thought-Patrol (for those, not-yet in the know: Postcolonial-political corrective) has stepped onto the stage, a gender-neutral troupe of 6 humans, dressed in camouflage suits with a white waistcoat and the emblem CC (for those not-yet in the know: Cancel-Culture) emblazoned in red. The leader is distinguished by a glittering IP badge (for those not-yet in the know: Identity-Police, acquired through certified trainings in one of the few selected PCPC reserves that function as cultural heritage memorials).
References
Adorno, Theodor, W. (1988): Der Essay als Form. In: Noten zur Literatur I. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/ M.: 9–33.
Blumenberg, Hans (1997): Schiffbruch mit Zuschauer. Paradigma einer Daseinsmetapher. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt/M.
Butler, Judith 2001: What is critique? https://transversal.at/transversal/0806/butler/en
Klein, Regina (2022): Gruppenszenen – essayistische Verknüpfung tiefenhermeneutischer und gruppenanalytischer Denk- und Handlungsfiguren. In: Dörr; Schmid-Noerr; Würker (Eds): Zwang und Utopie – das Potenzial des Unbewussten. Weinheim: Juventa. 137-153
[1] Recently the project was prized as Austrian contribution to the annual digital exhibition organized by the council of Europe featuring works of art to promote the importance of freedom of artistic expressions. https://freetocreate.art
Regina Klein, PhD in education, sociology and cultural studies, group- + family-psychotherapist, author, writing coach and depth-hermeneutic-artistic researcher in Klagenfurt/Austria. Working on the threshold between science-art-culture, her focus is on recognising the transitional, intermediate, border and fault space between-betwixt-beyond the inner/outer world, individual/society, body/culture, unconscious/conscious to figure its utopian potentials framing our existence. And that even though no visible-material (yet invisible-immaterial) borders, such as exits, entrances, walls, rooms, staircases, chambers, cellars can be discerned.