Spinelessness

About

The fruit fly, a member of the family of the diminutive but pesky invertebrates, is one of the best studied organisms in the world. Research on this creature has helped to reveal the consequences of inbreeding, the existence of chromosomes, and other factors related to heredity. But the researchers in question—who focused on this manageable gene pool for practical reasons—were driven primarily by their own conflation of reproduction with success, and by their preconceptions about the natural behavior of male cells. With the assumption that these biological findings were mirrored in society, rather than considering how socially constructed their perspective of biology might be.

Though these deeply rooted ideas have met with resistance for some decades now, they have never been completely cast aside. In the late 1960s, for example, divorced from procreation or the desires and motivations of others, feminist groups focused on freeing one’s own ideas and desires from social constraints: “we’ve got to learn to sleep with people because we want them not because they want us,” wrote the New York Radical Women in their Notes from the First Year in 1968.

Nevertheless, in many contexts, the issue of clearly stating one’s own preferences remains a difficult one. Recently, for example, critical yoga teachers and mindfulness practitioners—perhaps in an effort to restore their image, tarnished by an association with antivaxxer and QAnon conspiracists—have spoken out to assure that they afford others the same autonomy that they claim for themselves. But as a guest recently remarked on the IndoctriNation podcast (dedicated to “protecting yourself from systems of control”), it is not always so easy to ensure that others are able to exercise their agency. If he asks participants of his retreats whether they are comfortable with the distance that exists during meditation between him as the teacher and them as the students, most would say yes, regardless of what the truth might be.

Psychoanalysis also makes a number of suggestions about what we really want, even though we don't know it (a penis, sex with your mother/father, etc.). The setting of a one-way conversation—essentially unchanged since its invention—serves to avoid confrontation and coercion, even if there are decisive factors to consider. The rhythm of the conversation is determined by the clock and the patient. As an artist, Daphne Ahlers considers the formal conditions of these (and other) conversations, their real-life settings and their governing elements: Two Ikea chairs, of the more exclusive variety, placed at an angle somewhere between 180 and 90 degrees. To this, another element is added, one that likewise comes from real life, albeit from a different realm. A button, which can be pressed and will then send a signal, beside which you wait. The kind of thing you might otherwise find at a traffic light has been cast and changed into an indicator for a conversation.

And another thing: on the bus in Vienna, the button that passengers can press is called Fahrgastwunsch (passenger wish), articulating the sole wish that a passenger can have—for the bus to stop, so that you can get off and cease to be a passenger.

- Anke Dyes