Inspiring Restraint – Not Just in Japanese. Cultural-Historical Connections to Bondage
– (not proofread) English version below –
The original version of this text was published in
Headlines – SM from the scene for the scene #171, Hamburg, July 2019
“[…] it matters what stories we tell in order to tell other stories;
it matters what knots tie knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what ties tie ties.”
– Donna Haraway[1]
Rope bondage aficionados who want to learn more about techniques, schools and origins of practices beyond improvised ties with a bathrobe belt can hardly avoid being confronted with the history of Japanese restriction arts Shibari or Kinbaku. The string track will lead you to medieval Samurai, who overpowered opponents with rope restraints called Hojojutsu. One learns that bondage practices developed somehow organically out of Japanese everyday culture, since kimonos are also tied, or gifts with a furoshiki. In his highly acclaimed book „The Beauty of Kinbaku“[2], Master „K“ never tires of emphasizing how closely Shibari/Kinbaku is linked to Japanese history, religion, and culture, distinguishing ornamental Japanese bondage from pure restriction measures to which he reduces Western bondage. He refers to Shintoism practiced in Japan, in which Shimenawa (ropes adorned with sacred paper) are used to mark sacred places, and binds the origins of rope aesthetics back to the ancient Japanese Jomon culture, whose pottery is characterized by the decorative use of string.
Early middle Jomon pottery, 5000-4000BC, with cord marks for decoration Tokyo National Museum Photo taken by Chris 73 in January 2005, freely available at //commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Middle_Jomon_Period_rope_pottery_5000-4000BC.jpg under the creative commons cc-by-sa 3.0 license
So when visiting the Museum for Pre- and Early History in Berlin, I flinch. I stand in front of a showcase with decorated vessels, which are presented to me as string ceramics: 2800 B.C., excavated in – Saxony-Anhalt, Germany! There the knot bursts and I intend to appear at the next Bondage-Jam not in an ‚authentic‘ Kimono, but already mentioned bathrobe.
As if bondage were a purely Japanese technique, there is a lack of cultural-historical embedding of bondage practices in Western contexts. At the same time, the repeatedly claimed uniqueness of the genesis of Japanese bondage arts obscures the view of the many other existing red threads that can make us understand that what we do at bondage events is not only something imported and appropriated from another culture, but has long since been complexly interwoven with manifold histories. If we pick up and follow these different threads, they lead us to a variety of surprising origins of the uses and aesthetics of rope practices.
Then we unravel a cable clutter of architectural and decorative cord ceramics from the cultures of Egypt and the Greco-Roman world, the twisted columns of Romanesque architecture, the rope-like twists of wickerwork, the use of arithmetic rope in the European Middle Ages, the depiction of ropes on heraldic banners – for our subject, particularly paradigmatic the so called lacs d’amour ❤ . Not to mention the cross-cultural use of rope as a tool in transport and construction, in seafaring, in sports and as an important component of machines.
Hortus Deliciarum – 12th century Allegory of arithmetic Artist: Herrad von Landsberg (about 1180), CC-PD-Art (PD-old-100)
Ropes as a material had an important impact on everyday life all over the world, not only Japan. Also the practice of rope bondage in the West tells its own transformation stories from violent to erotic pleasure practices beyond Japanese martial arts and Kabuki theater. A famous copperplate engraving from Marquis de Sade’s work Justine ou les Malheurs de la vertu from 1787, for example, depicts a person hanging upside down with a sling wrapped around her foot and pulled up over a pulley, who, delivered in suspension, is penetrated with dildos. As cultural historian Iris Därmann points out, this picture is a direct quote that explicitly refers to drawings of torture scenes from the West Indies of the time, published in John Gabriel Stedman’s Narratives of a Five Year’s Expedition against Revolted Negroes of Surinam, which records the sexualized punishments by slave owners. The similarity is astonishing, but „the figure of the stripped black girl was replaced by that of the white girl“ — a movement in which „slave emancipation […] at the same time introduces the emancipation of sadism as an ‚independent‘ sexual practice“[3].
Isaac Cruikshank „The Abolition of the Slave Trade, or the Inhumanity of Dealers in human Flesh exemplified in Captn. Kimber‘s Treatment of a Young Negro Girl of 15 for her Virje [!] Modesty“
Justine ou les Malheurs de la vertu, c. 1800 PD-old-100-expired
How can this change be explained, when once martial scourges find themselves translated into elaborate, consensual, lustful variations? The social anthropologist Edward B. Tylor found the term „survivals“ for this. As survivals he describes fragments of traditional customs and practices from a bygone era that are preserved through the historical development of a culture, but lose their original purpose and undergo a shift in meaning. Significantly, these elements are often found in children’s games, such as playing with a bow and arrow or dressing up as pirates. Rope bondage, which seems archaic in contrast to more modern restriction methods with handcuffs or straitjackets, is also found not only in BDSM fields, but also in (highly controversial!) initiation rites and punishment games in some Scout traditions such as german “Pflöckeln” (attaching the limbs to pillars staked in a square). In role-playing games such as „Robbers and Gendarme“ or playing Cowboys, ropes can be used as lassos and for staged imprisonment, and I leave it to the readers to remember their own childhood bondage games, which can take on countless imaginative forms.[4]
Ties have also gained fame in the performative use between entertainment, stunt and sport, such as so-called escapology, which appeared increasingly around the turn of the century and was popular first as illusionistic tricks in spiritualistic circles and then as show interludes by magicians, with Harry Houdini being considered the most famous figure among escapologists.[5] Especially with regard to the aforementioned slave emancipation, there is an interesting hinge in the figure of the magician Black Herman, who was probably the most prominent African-American escape artist in the 1920s – ’30s. He narratively combined his magic performances with political messages. It is said that he used to let himself be tied to a chair with ropes by audience members and explained that to liberate himself he used those ’secret‘ techniques, which enslaved Africans had already used in order to flee from their slaveholders.[6]
When talking about the art of bondage, the virtuosity and ornamentality of the practices are usually emphasized. However, bondage can also be found in areas that claim to be artistic in the narrower sense. Not only do many bondage scenes include public performances or photographs (the artistic value of which can be disputed in each case), but as a motif that carries meaning, bondage also goes beyond libertine arousal cultures. In Rope Piece by performance artists Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh, for example, bondage becomes a symbol of general entanglements and dependencies. For an entire year, from 1983 to 1984, they remained physically tied to each other only separated by an eight-foot rope, the ends of which they each had laced around their own waist. In an interview, the artists explain that for them the performance is a clear picture of how we are always already tied to other people to survive.:
,,Because we are all individual, we each have our own idea of something we want to do. But we’re together. So we become each other’s cage. We struggle because everybody wants to feel freedom. […] So this piece to me is a symbol of life and human struggle. […] there are cultural issues, men/women issues, ego issues. Sometimes we imagine this piece is like Russia with America. How complicated the play of power.”[7]
Cornelia Parker, The Distance (A Kiss With String Attached), 2003, CC-BY-SA-3.0 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Distance_(A_Kiss_With_Strings_Attached),_2003.jpg
Complexities also manifest themselves in rope bondage and Shibari/Kinbaku. When asked for the reasons of the claustrophilia of bondage enthusiasts, many will say something like this: „Only bound do I feel really free“. A conundrum in which opposites collide. Freedom through restriction, strength through vulnerability, capability through impotence. The world is turned upside down when bonds are generally understood as a metaphor for destructive constraints par excellence (e.g. “It is precisely those artists who are most inclined to think of their art as the manifestation of their personality who are in fact the most in bondage to public taste.“) and emancipatory appeals call for their breaking. We commonly value activity over passivity, freedom over restraint, ability over inability, autonomy over dependency. So why voluntarily submit to limitation and how can one even feel empowered by it? How does lacing lead to wings? Answers are not only to be found in geographically shaped historicizations.
„He still felt the evening wind between him and the wolf as the animal sprang at him. The man made sure he obeyed his ties. With the care he had long been practicing, he gripped the wolf by the neck. Affection for a being his equal rose in him, for the upstanding in the lowly. In a movement like the swoop of a huge bird – and now he knew for sure that flying was only made possible by very particular bonds – he threw himself at it and brought it to the ground. As if intoxicated, he sensed he had now lost the deadly supremacy of free limbs which let humans be beaten. His freedom in this fight was in harmonizing each twist of his limbs to the ties – the freedom of the panther, the wolves and the wild flowers swaying in the evening breeze.“
– Ilse Aichinger: „The Bound Man“
Looking at the thing itself, the promises of restrictions seem to be based on the insight that existential experiences of pathos – i.e. incidents, exposure, incapacity, vulnerability, sensitivity, devotion, submission and nonsovereignty – are inseparable from life and that every activity is deeply embedded into passivity. Bondage is part of the infamous ‚madness‘ of ascetic self-limitation like reclusion or fasting, by means of which the body consciously and directly exposes itself to forces that otherwise subliminally drive it about. These forces can be social structures like power hierarchies or they can be more existential aspects of the human condition between natality and mortality, pain and joy, being formed by what is not originally yours and dependent of others. Acts of self-limitation and exhaustion, such as bondage, can give form to these elusive forces in order to make them consciously experienceable and thus reflectable – without, of course, ever being able to master them. By no longer being able to do something (for example, to move), we not only make something impossible, but also open up a new space of possibilities that can only be experienced in non-doing and non-capability.
We don’t even need to go looking into deviant niches such as BDSM and Kink[8], we can just take itself at its word. We talk about being tied up in knots, are fit to be tied or cutting the ties with someone. To get accustomed to a task we do networking and someone shows us the ropes – but it is said that if you give one enough rope he will hang himself – since deliberately giving somebody enough freedom seems to lead them to make a mistake and get into trouble. What might help then is to follow a golden thread, promise that there are no strings attached or that one’s word is one’s bond, while in the financial system bonds refer to the ambivalent obligations resulting from loans, which express belonging, but also dependence.
Paradoxically, we allow ourselves to be ‚tied up‘ in order to expand our scope of action. Entanglements and enmeshments, for example, point on the one hand to a kind of captivity and thus passivation, on the other hand the involvement in certain circumstances can in turn provide new insights and possibilities. Media-theoretical discourses on the effects of the internet or world wide web – which take up the archaic-looking rope practices – describe how we hang passively on technological devices, but can also enter into new modes of relations and agency through them. The communicative aspect is reflected in bondage: the rope, wrapped around one’s own body, touching one, maintains contact with the person tieing one up, and figuratively stands for dialogue and connection, like the tightly taut threads of the cup phones from childhood. In order to be able to make contact at all, however, one needs the condition for the identity-creating and thus emancipating and activating experience of childbirth, which as the first rope experience among mammals is already embodied in the umbilical cord as a form of rope, the condition of which in turn is a kind of existential bondage – the mother-child relationship is not for nothing described by sentimental prenatal consultants with the developmental psychological concept of bonding.
© Foto H.-P.Haack. Note here how rope bondage is also used as a tool to support the birthing process.
Fateful entanglements can also be understood as a form of bondage, of something passively occurring. In mythological narratives this can be found in Plato’s famous cave parable, in which people are imagined bound in a way that they cannot turn their heads and always look straight ahead, holding shadow plays for real life; or in the rope of fate woven by the Norns of Norsmythology.[9] From a mythological point of view, we hang like puppets on these ropes that we have no control over. The belief in our autonomous power to act proves to be an illusionary misbelief. And yet we do not only hang passively, since we actively participate in shaping our experience, in an entanglement of determining and being determent.
Norns weaving destiny, by Arthur Rackham (1912), PD_US
The complicated nexus of liberation through bondage is beautifully illustrated in the figure of Odysseus, who prominently uses bondage as a means of opening up a possibility space by restricting himself, when he is bound to his ship’s mast with ropes in order to be able to listen to the seductive song of the sirens without being seduced by them and thus die.
Pragmatically, the hero of the Odyssey could also have stuffed wax into his ears and continued sailing. What he does here with the rope is similar to the kinky bondage practices, a technique that generates pleasure, also by playing with danger, risks and power relations.
Odysseus and the Sirens. Detail from an Attic red-figure stamnos, ca. 480–470 BC. From Vulci.
How ropes are woven into a history of power is evident in the domestication of animals by reins and leashes or in direct contexts of violence such as hanging by a noose or in areas such as torture and slavery.[10] It is striking that practices of criticism of power constellations that cause suffering do not, however, strip off motifs from the rope chains as insignia of power, but in turn appropriate them for their own purposes and reoccupy them imaginatively. For example, practices of passive resistance are known in which one is tied to trees, buildings, rails or other people. These protests responds to political domination with an exaggerated embodiment of one’s own lack of domination and use the power of becoming vulnerable. In addition, the ties create bonds of togetherness that make it difficult for opponents to reach the objects to which they are tied.[11] Strategically, the ruling schemata is not simply being withdrawn – the answer to constricting powers here is not a demonstration of unstrangling and freedom. On the contrary, the enemy is beaten with its own weapons. Instead of undoing the shackles, the resistance lies in trying to deal with the constraints differently while staying within the shackles. It’s a mode of reclaiming. Michel Foucault has described this in his famous definition of critique as not asking “how not to be governed at all,” but “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.”[12]. Starting from the premise of powerful social and cultural structures to which man is ‚tied‘ and from which he can never completely liberate himself from and enter a somehow powerless outside, he describes how, in the playing field of power, the subjects have room for manoeuvre: to play along and negotiate the rules of the game. The decisive question is therefore not how to break the shackles, but looking for innovative ways of agency within bondage and looking for the best possible ways of bonding: who and what do we really want to submiss to? In this way, rope bondage could be understood as a way of accepting and playing with being governed, but only if one considers its nature and reasons to be satisfactory. In this way, one can enter into the movement of de-subjugation through submission.
Ostra Studio, circa 1935, CC-PD-MarkPD-old-70
Bondage arts and practices could then become conceivable as possibilities for cultivating, one could say: vita passiva, with which the promises and necessities of an attitude interested in passivity, pathos and passion can be experienced bodily. Bondage does not only affect the body from the outside. The still and fixed positions bring hidden things to light, for example that corporeality is inexorably open, vulnerable, mortal, shameful and porous in its boundaries. In his phenomenological confrontations with sexual desire, Jean-Paul Sartre describes such processes as one’s wish to make the other person only flesh and thus revealing ourselves as just flesh. Sartre writes that the Other’s facticity is usually hidden and masked by clothes, make-up, beards and gestures, but that there will always come a time when the mask falls and the Other is exposed in the pure contingency of his presence, that is, in his flesh. A body is that object which is always more-than-a-body, because it is never given to me without its surroundings, it always points beyond itself in space and in time. The flesh of the body is what the body is reduced to, when there is no surrounding, no context, no relationships. Flesh is hidden above all by gestures and movements, that position human beings as beings in a position in a surrounding, a being who acts in situations in relation to the world and thus appears as body-in-situation. This is described by Sartre with the term grace: “Nothing is less ‘in the flesh’ than a dancer even though she is nude. Desire is an attempt to strip the body of its movements as of its clothing and to make it exist as pure flesh; it is an attempt to incarnate the Other’s body“.[13] Gracefulness for Sartre is the „moving image of necessity and freedom“, it is grounded in the active body. Practices such as bondage, which prevent the execution of movements, lead to the absence of these components and reveal the flesh of the person. The desire for making a body adopt obscene positions which expose it to all disguises and which reveal the inertia of its flesh is described by Sartre as sadistic. The sadist deprives the body of its situation, capturing and containing its freedom by looking for the fleshiness that lies hidden underneath all doing and making. The sadist wants his*her victim’s body as being “entirely flesh, panting and obscene, it keeps the position that the torturers have given to it, not that which it would have taken by itself, the cords which bind it sustain it as an inert thing and, by that, it has ceased to be the object which moves spontaneously“[14]. The French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas, in turn, strikingly describes the possible shame resulting from this by means of the figure of bondage: „What appears in shame is thus precisely being tied to oneself, the radical impossibility of escaping ourselves, of hiding from ourselves: the unforgivable self-presence of the ego. We are ashamed of our nakedness when it openly reveals our being, our intimacy“. And what if the confrontation with this state is now deliberately (masochistically) provoked? A fascination for such movements in BDSM practices is again expressed by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, since for him the „paradoxical character of shame is consciously made an object in them, in order to transform it into lust. […] For here a passive subject – the masochist – is so enthusiastic about his own, infinitely overwhelming passivity that he renounces his capacity as a subject […]. Hence the ceremonial armor of the snares and shackles, […] of all kinds of bondage, with the help of which the masochistic subject tries in vain to hold back and ironically fix that transferable passivity that it deliciously surpasses everywhere“.[15]
If such observations are elevated to a concept such as the art of not being governed in a specific a way (but nonetheless being governed and bound), this would be accompanied by an appreciation not only of what people create and accomplish, but also of what they endure and suffer. The freedom so often longed for would then not turn out to be a kind of stock that could be disposed of. Freedom emerges momentarily in the constantly new, wayward, even energy-sapping handling of afflictions, resistance, indeterminacy and in the recognition of complex entanglements.
Cat’s Cradle: Position 1, The Cradle Originally from Clarence Squareman (1916).
My Book of Indoor Games, Gutenberg.org. PD-US
For the feminist science theorist Donna Haraway such an abandonment of traditional narratives of autonomy and instead recognition of fundamental interdependencies is an unavoidable premise for living well together on this planet in the long term. To illustrate her thinking, she uses an image that is also taken from the world of strings and their potential for force-generating entanglements: String-Figures, which some readers might also know from their childhood as pattern-forming thread games. In these games, which have been and are played in a variety of cultures around the globe, the aim is to tie a closed cord around fingers and hands so that braided figures gradually form in the space in between. Their emergence can be accompanied by a narration that illustrates the pattern.
The back and forth winding of the string patterns in its playfulness points to larger things, such as „the fact that actors do not precede action, that relations take precedence“. Thread games also follow an intertwining of activity and passivity, which requires a thinking of the ‚in-between‘: „two pairs of hands are needed, and in each successive step, one is ‚passive‘, offering the result of its previous operation, a string entanglement, for the other to operate, only to become active again at the next step, when the other presents the new entanglement. But it can also be said that each time the ‚passive‘ pair is the one that holds, and is held by the entanglement, only to ‚let it go‘ when the other one takes the relay.“[16] Out of the entanglement of activity and passivity, Haraway develops a model in which relationships and interconnections are central: polymorphic networks that enable unexpected sides of one’s own sensuous embodiment. Above all, however, the fundamental mutual interconnectedness is accompanied by a concept of responsibility that the string and bondage games illustrate:
„In passion and action, detachment and attachment, this is what I call cultivating response-ability [sic!]; that is also collective knowing and doing, an ecology of practices. Whether we asked for it or not, the pattern is in our hands.“[17]
“Mme Hitchen with string bear” ~ (Anishinaabe) ~ Long Lake, Ontario 1916, F.W. Waugh, CMoH, CC-PD-old-70-expired
Which bondage patterns and stories are in our hands is in risk of being overlooked if we only exoticize the origins of rope bondage. This includes, as Haraway’s cord games show, also the stories that have yet to be realized as possible future stories. Rope bondage, as romanticizing as it may sound, thus brings with it an utopian moment in which it becomes tangible that the task of grasping one’s own possibilities and breaking out of a preordained destiny does not only consist in „loosening or breaking the many bonds during our lives“,[18] but also to create bonds, to get tied up, to get entangled and to search together for new states of being within the existing bonds. As an adaptation of Foucault’s formulation, bondage arts point out to deal with limitations, restrictions, ties and untying in an attentive and different way. The inherent vulnerability and ultimately mortality revealed by bondage not only makes the practice a breeding ground for intoxicating sensations that promise a delightful ‚kick‘, but also has the potential to generate ethical appeals for the perception of mutual connectedness, care and responsibility for one another. At least this is, what I have experienced and like to share.
[1]Donna J. Haraway:SF: Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation, String Figures, So Far, in: Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, Issue 3, November 2013, available at:https://adanewmedia.org/2013/11/issue3-haraway/(last accessed on March 20, 2019).
[2]Master “K”:The Beauty of Kinbaku (or everything you ever wanted to know about Japanese erotic bondage when you suddenly realized you didn’t speak Japanese),USA: King Cat Ink., 2008.
[3]Iris Därmann:Shame and the Violence of the Whip:Pornographic Investiture Scenes in the Anti-Slavery Movement and in the Works of the Marquis de Sade.In: Daniel Tyradellis (ed. for the German Hygiene Museum, Dresden):Shame. 10 Essays. Accompanying book to the exhibition:100 Reasons to Be Ashamed, Göttingen: Wallstein, 2017, p. 99.
[4]Edward B. Tylor:Primitive Culture: Researches Into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, andCustom,London: John Murray, 1871.
[5]In this initiation rite, which is also described as a form of ritual punishment, the child is stretched out and tied by the hands and feet to four stakes driven into the ground in a square formation. This practice of tying children to stakes has since been strongly criticized by Scout organizations and is viewed as a potential form of child abuse. See: Markuc C. Schulte von Drach: “No Harmless Game,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, Dec. 5, 2014, at:http://www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/pfadfinder-ritual-pflocken-kein-harmloses-spiel-1.2250396(last accessed June 10, 2018).
[6]See: Edwin A. Dawes, *The Great Illusionists*,New Jersey: Chartwell Books, 1979. And: T.I.E.S. – The International Escapologist Society, at:http://www.tiesociety.webs.com(last accessed on June 24, 2018).
[7]See: George Patton,*Black Jack: A Drama of Magic, Mystery, and Sleight of Hand*, Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2009.
[8]See: Frank Cullen and Florence Hackerman, *Vaudeville, Old and New: An Encyclopedia of Variety Performers in America* (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 114.
[9]Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh:“One Year Art/Life Performance: Interview with Alex and Allyson Grey” (1984), in: Kristine Stiles (ed.):*Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings*, Universityof California Press, 1996, pp. 907 ff.
[10]Sadie Plant draws attention to the origins of archaic media—textile processing involving strings and ropes—and their evolution into modern technologies:“Mediabecome interactive and hyperactive, the multifaceted components of an immersive zone that ‘does not begin with writing; it is directly related rather to the weaving of elaborate patterned silks.’” The yarn is neither metaphorical nor literal, but quite simply material, a gathering of threads that twist and turn through the history of computing, technology, the sciences, and the arts. In and out of the punched holes of automated looms, up and down through the ages of spinning and weaving, back and forth through the fabrication of fabrics, shuttles and looms, cotton and silk, canvas and paper, brushes and pens, typewriters, carriages, telephone wires, synthetic fibers, electrical filaments, silicon strands, fiber-optic cables, pixelated screens, telecom lines, the World Wide Web, the Net, and matrices to come.” Sadie Plant:Zeros + Ones. Digital Women and the New Technoculture, London: Fourth Estate, 1998, p. 12.
[11]Furthermore, one can point to the mythological significance of the many small ropes, woven threads, and cords, in connection with which media scholar Gunnar Schmidt highlights the “link between woman and thread” in the case of Arachne and many others: “Klotho, Neith, Penelope, Philomela, Holda, Zirze, Calypso, Helen, Pandora, Paivatar, Chih-Nii, Habetrot—when it comes to spinning and weaving, mythical storytelling presents itself across cultures as a cosmos of the feminine.” Gunnar Schmidt:Aesthetics of the Thread. On the Medialization of a Material in Avant-Garde Art, Bielefeld: transcript, 2007, p. 13. The practices of bondage and shibari/kinbaku certainly have their own gender-specific characteristics as well; for example, the greater number of male riggers and female “bunnies” is striking—a circumstance that can only be alluded to within this framework.
[12]“She allows me only to hear the song; but bind me fast, / so that I may not move a limb, / standing upright against the mast, with ropes tightly wound around me. / But if I beg you and command you to loosen the ropes; / then you hasten to bind me even tighter with more ropes.” Homer:The Odyssey, (Original title: ἡὈδύσσεια–hē Odýsseia) trans. by Johann Heinrich Voß, Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1990, p. 200.
[13]See, among others, Neville Twitchell,*ThePolitics of the Rope*, BurySt. Edmunds: Arena Books, 2012.
[14]See, among others, “Black Lives Matter activists go on trial over protest in Nottingham; man and three women accused of unlawful obstruction of highway as court hears they lay across tram lines while tied together,” in: The Guardian, UK News, Nov. 3, 2016, at:https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/nov/03/black-lives-matter-uk-activists-trial-protest-nottingham(last accessed on June 26, 2018); or:Protesters Tie Themselves to Trees in Bid to Save Them, in: L.A. Times, The Local Review, February 23, 1999, at:http://articles.latimes.com/1999/feb/23/local/me-10815(last accessed June 26, 2018).
[15]Michel Foucault:What Is Critique?(Original title: Qu’est-ce que la critique?), trans. by Walter Seitter, Berlin: Merve, 1992, p. 11.
[16]Ibid., p. 12.
[17]Jean-Paul Sartre, quoted without a specific source in Giorgio Agamben:*Nakedness*, trans. Andreas Hiepko, Berlin: Fischer, 2010, p. 125.
[18]Jean-Paul Sartre:Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology[orig.*L’Être et le Néant*, 1943], trans. by Justus Streller et al., Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1990, p. 699.
[19]Sadism would be understood here as “an instrumentalization that dissolves the intended reciprocal incarnation and reduces the Other to a thing among things,” in: Knut Berner:Medusa’s Epigenesis. Jean-Paul Sartre and the Development of the Evil Eye, in: ibid.:Abodes of Evil: Epigenesis; Thanatology; Aesthetics; Anthropology,Münster: Lit Verlag, 2013, p. 31.
[20]Sartre:Being and Nothingness:An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology(orig.*L’Être et le Néant*, 1943), trans. by Justus Streller et al., Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1990, p. 511.
[21]Ibid., p. 513.
[22]Quoted by Giorgio Agamben in:What Remains of Auschwitz: The Archive and the Witness,trans. by Stefan Monhardt, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003, p. 93 ff.
[23]Ibid.
[24]Donna Haraway:“Intertwined Notes: Gifts and Debts,” inDocumenta 13: 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts,Vol. 33, Berlin/Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 2012, p. 17.
[25]Donna Haraway:*Staying with the Trouble,Making Kin in the Chthulucene*. *Experimental Futures* (Experimental Futures: Technological Lives, Scientific Arts, Anthropological Voices), Durham & London, Duke University Press, 2016, p. 14.
[26]Ibid., p. 34.
[27]Nathalie Sarthou-Lajus:In Praise of Debt, trans. by Claudia Hamm, Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach 2013, p. 86.
– ENGLISH –
“[…] it matters what stories we tell in order to tell other stories;
it matters what knots tie knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what ties tie ties.”
– Donna Haraway[1]
Rope bondage enthusiasts who want to learn more about techniques, schools, and the origins of practices beyond improvised ties using a bathrobe belt cannot help but encounter the history of the Japanese art of restraint known as Shibari or Kinbaku. This journey will take you back to medieval samurai, who subdued their opponents using rope restraints known as Hojojutsu. One learns that bondage practices developed somewhat organically out of Japanese everyday culture, since kimonos are also tied, as are gifts wrapped in furoshiki. In his highly acclaimed book *The Beauty of Kinbaku*[2], Master “K” never tires of emphasizing how closely Shibari/Kinbaku is linked to Japanese history, religion, and culture, distinguishing ornamental Japanese bondage from purely restrictive measures—to which he reduces Western bondage. He refers to Shintoism as practiced in Japan, in which shimenawa (ropes adorned with sacred paper) are used to mark sacred places, and traces the origins of rope aesthetics back to the ancient Japanese Jomon culture, whose pottery is characterized by the decorative use of string.
Early Middle Jomon pottery, 5000–4000 BC, decorated with cord marks. Tokyo National Museum. Photo taken by Chris 73 in January 2005, freely available at //commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Middle_Jomon_Period_rope_pottery_5000-4000BC.jpg under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA 3.0 license
So when I visit the Museum of Prehistory and Early History in Berlin, I cringe. I stand in front of a display case containing decorated vessels, which are presented to me as corded ware: 2800 B.C., excavated in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany! That’s when the knot snaps, and I decide to show up at the next Bondage Jam not in an “authentic” kimono, but in the bathrobe I mentioned earlier.
As if bondage were a purely Japanese technique, there is a lack of cultural and historical context for bondage practices in Western settings. At the same time, the repeatedly asserted uniqueness of the origins of Japanese bondage arts obscures the many other existing connections that can help us understand that what we do at bondage events is not merely something imported and appropriated from another culture, but has long been intricately interwoven with diverse histories. If we pick up and follow these different threads, they lead us to a variety of surprising origins of the uses and aesthetics of rope practices. We then unravel a tangle of architectural and decorative cord ceramics from the cultures of Egypt and the Greco-Roman world, the twisted columns of Romanesque architecture, the rope-like twists of wickerwork, the use of arithmetic rope in the European Middle Ages, and the depiction of ropes on heraldic banners—particularly paradigmatic for our subject are the so-called lacs d’amour ❤. Not to mention the cross-cultural use of rope as a tool in transportation and construction, in seafaring, in sports, and as an important component of machines.
Hortus Deliciarum – 12th-century allegory of arithmetic Artist: Herrad von Landsberg (c. 1180), CC-PD-Art (PD-old-100)
Ropes as a material have had a significant impact on daily life around the world, not just in Japan. The practice of rope bondage in the West also tells its own stories of transformation—from violent acts to erotic pleasures—extending beyond Japanese martial arts and Kabuki theater. A famous copperplate engraving from the Marquis de Sade’s 1787 work *Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue*, for example, depicts a person hanging upside down with a sling wrapped around her foot and pulled up over a pulley, who, suspended in this position, is penetrated with dildos. As cultural historian Iris Därmann points out, this image is a direct reference explicitly drawing on drawings of torture scenes from the West Indies of the time, published in John Gabriel Stedman’s *Narratives of a Five Year’s Expedition against Revolted Negroes of Surinam*, which documents the sexualized punishments inflicted by slave owners. The similarity is astonishing, but “the figure of the stripped black girl was replaced by that of the white girl”—a shift in which “slave emancipation […] simultaneously introduces the emancipation of sadism as an ‘independent’ sexual practice”[3].
Isaac Cruikshank „The Abolition of the Slave Trade, or the Inhumanity of Dealers in human Flesh exemplified in Captn. Kimber‘s Treatment of a Young Negro Girl of 15 for her Virje [!] Modesty“
Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue, c. 1800 (Public Domain, 100 years expired)
How can this transformation be explained, when what were once instruments of martial punishment are now transformed into elaborate, consensual, and sensual variations? The social anthropologist Edward B. Tylor coined the term “survivals” to describe this phenomenon. By “survivals,” he refers to fragments of traditional customs and practices from a bygone era that are preserved throughout a culture’s historical development, yet lose their original purpose and undergo a shift in meaning. Significantly, these elements are often found in children’s games, such as playing with a bow and arrow or dressing up as pirates. Rope bondage, which seems archaic in contrast to more modern methods of restraint involving handcuffs or straitjackets, is also found not only in BDSM contexts, but also in (highly controversial!) initiation rites and punishment games in some Scout traditions, such as the German “Pflöckeln” (attaching the limbs to pillars staked in a square). In role-playing games such as “Robbers and Gendarmes” or playing cowboys, ropes can be used as lassos and for staged imprisonment, and I leave it to the readers to recall their own childhood bondage games, which can take on countless imaginative forms.[4]
Ties have also gained fame in their performative use at the intersection of entertainment, stunts, and sports, such as in so-called escapology, which emerged increasingly around the turn of the century and was first popular as illusionistic tricks in spiritualist circles and later as stage acts performed by magicians, with Harry Houdini considered the most famous figure among escapologists.[5] Especially with regard to the aforementioned emancipation of slaves, there is an interesting connection in the figure of the magician Black Herman, who was probably the most prominent African American escape artist in the 1920s and ’30s. He narratively combined his magic performances with political messages. It is said that he would allow himself to be tied to a chair with ropes by audience members and explained that to free himself, he used those “secret” techniques that enslaved Africans had already used to escape from their slaveholders.[6]
When discussing the art of bondage, the virtuosity and ornamentality of the practices are usually emphasized. However, bondage can also be found in areas that claim to be artistic in the narrower sense. Not only do many bondage scenes include public performances or photographs (the artistic value of which can be disputed in each case), but as a motif that carries meaning, bondage also extends beyond libertine arousal cultures. In *Rope Piece* by performance artists Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh, for example, bondage becomes a symbol of general entanglements and dependencies. For an entire year, from 1983 to 1984, they remained physically tied to each other, separated only by an eight-foot rope, the ends of which they had each tied around their own waist. In an interview, the artists explain that for them the performance is a clear illustration of how we are always already tied to other people in order to survive.:
“Because we are all individuals, we each have our own idea of what we want to do. But we’re together. So we become each other’s cage. We struggle because everyone wants to feel free. […] So to me, this piece is a symbol of life and human struggle. […] There are cultural issues, gender issues, ego issues. Sometimes we imagine this piece is like Russia and America. How complicated the interplay of power is.”[7]
Cornelia Parker, *The Distance (A Kiss With String Attached)*, 2003, CC-BY-SA-3.0 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Distance_(A_Kiss_With_Strings_Attached),_2003.jpg
Complexities also manifest themselves in rope bondage and Shibari/Kinbaku. When asked why bondage enthusiasts are drawn to the feeling of confinement, many will say something like this: “Only when I am bound do I feel truly free.” A conundrum in which opposites collide. Freedom through restriction, strength through vulnerability, capability through impotence. The world is turned upside down when bonds are generally understood as a metaphor for destructive constraints par excellence (e.g., “It is precisely those artists who are most inclined to think of their art as the manifestation of their personality who are in fact the most in bondage to public taste.”) and emancipatory appeals call for their breaking. We commonly value activity over passivity, freedom over restraint, ability over inability, autonomy over dependency. So why voluntarily submit to limitation, and how can one even feel empowered by it? How does binding lead to wings? Answers are not only to be found in geographically shaped historicizations.
“He could still feel the evening breeze between him and the wolf as the animal leaped at him. The man made sure he obeyed his bonds. With the care he had long been practicing, he gripped the wolf by the neck. Affection for a being his equal rose in him, for the noble in the lowly. In a movement like the swoop of a huge bird—and now he knew for sure that flying was only made possible by very particular bonds—he threw himself at it and brought it to the ground. As if intoxicated, he sensed he had now lost the deadly supremacy of free limbs that allows humans to be defeated. His freedom in this fight lay in harmonizing every twist of his limbs with the bonds—the freedom of the panther, the wolves, and the wildflowers swaying in the evening breeze.”
– Ilse Aichinger: “The Bound Man”
Looking at the matter itself, the promises of restrictions seem to be based on the insight that existential experiences of pathos—i.e., incidents, exposure, incapacity, vulnerability, sensitivity, devotion, submission, and non-sovereignty—are inseparable from life and that every activity is deeply embedded in passivity. Bondage is part of the infamous “madness” of ascetic self-limitation, such as reclusion or fasting, through which the body consciously and directly exposes itself to forces that otherwise subliminally drive it. These forces can be social structures like power hierarchies, or they can be more existential aspects of the human condition—between birth and death, pain and joy, being shaped by what is not originally one’s own, and being dependent on others. Acts of self-limitation and exhaustion, such as bondage, can give form to these elusive forces in order to make them consciously experienceable and thus reflectable—without, of course, ever being able to master them. By no longer being able to do something (for example, to move), we not only make something impossible, but also open up a new space of possibilities that can only be experienced in non-doing and non-capability.
We don’t even need to delve into niche interests like BDSM and kink[8]; we can just take it at face value. We talk about being tied up in knots, being fit to be tied, or cutting ties with someone. To get accustomed to a task, we network and someone shows us the ropes—but it is said that if you give someone enough rope, they will hang themselves—since deliberately giving someone enough freedom seems to lead them to make a mistake and get into trouble. What might help, then, is to follow a golden thread, promise that there are no strings attached, or that one’s word is one’s bond, while in the financial system, bonds refer to the ambivalent obligations resulting from loans, which express belonging but also dependence.
Paradoxically, we allow ourselves to be “tied up” in order to expand our scope of action. Entanglements and enmeshments, for example, point on the one hand to a kind of captivity and thus passivity, while on the other hand, becoming involved in certain circumstances can in turn provide new insights and possibilities. Media-theoretical discourses on the effects of the internet or the World Wide Web—which draw on archaic-looking rope practices—describe how we hang passively on technological devices, but can also enter into new modes of relations and agency through them. The communicative aspect is reflected in bondage: the rope, wrapped around one’s own body, touching one, maintains contact with the person tying one up, and figuratively stands for dialogue and connection, like the tightly taut threads of the cup phones from childhood. In order to be able to make contact at all, however, one needs the condition for the identity-creating and thus emancipating and activating experience of childbirth, which, as the first rope experience among mammals, is already embodied in the umbilical cord as a form of rope—the condition of which, in turn, is a kind of existential bondage. It is not for nothing that sentimental prenatal consultants describe the mother-child relationship using the developmental psychological concept of bonding.
© Photo by H.-P. Haack. Note here how rope bondage is also used as a tool to support the birthing process.
Fateful entanglements can also be understood as a form of bondage, of something that happens passively. In mythological narratives, this can be seen in Plato’s famous allegory of the cave, in which people are depicted as bound in such a way that they cannot turn their heads and must always look straight ahead, mistaking shadow plays for real life; or in the thread of fate spun by the Norns of Norse mythology.[9] From a mythological perspective, we hang like puppets on these ropes over which we have no control. The belief in our autonomous power to act proves to be an illusory misconception. And yet we do not merely hang passively, since we actively participate in shaping our experience, in an entanglement of determining and being determined.
Norns weaving destiny, by Arthur Rackham (1912), PD_US
The complex interplay of liberation through bondage is beautifully illustrated in the figure of Odysseus, who makes prominent use of bondage as a means of opening up a space of possibility by restricting himself—when he ties himself to the mast of his ship with ropes so that he can hear the sirens’ seductive song without being seduced by them and thus dying. Pragmatically, the hero of the Odyssey could also have stuffed wax into his ears and continued sailing. What he does here with the rope is similar to kinky bondage practices, a technique that generates pleasure, in part by playing with danger, risks, and power dynamics.
Odysseus and the Sirens. Detail from an Attic red-figure stamnos, ca. 480–470 BC. From Vulci.
The way ropes are woven into a history of power is evident in the domestication of animals through reins and leashes, in direct contexts of violence such as hanging by a noose, and in areas such as torture and slavery.[10] It is striking that practices of criticism directed at power structures that cause suffering do not, however, strip away motifs from rope chains as symbols of power, but instead appropriate them for their own purposes and reoccupy them imaginatively. For example, there are known practices of passive resistance in which people tie themselves to trees, buildings, rails, or other people. These protests respond to political domination with an exaggerated embodiment of one’s own lack of domination and harness the power of vulnerability. Furthermore, the ties create bonds of solidarity that make it difficult for opponents to reach the objects to which they are tied.[11] Strategically, the ruling schema is not simply being withdrawn—the answer to constricting powers here is not a demonstration of liberation and freedom. On the contrary, the enemy is defeated with its own weapons. Instead of undoing the shackles, the resistance lies in trying to deal with the constraints differently while remaining within the shackles. It is a mode of reclaiming. Michel Foucault has described this in his famous definition of critique as not asking “how not to be governed at all,” but “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.”[12]. Starting from the premise of powerful social and cultural structures to which man is “bound” and from which he can never completely liberate himself to enter a somehow powerless outside, he describes how, within the playing field of power, subjects have room for maneuver: to play along and negotiate the rules of the game. The decisive question is therefore not how to break the shackles, but to seek innovative forms of agency within bondage and to find the best possible ways of bonding: to whom and what do we truly wish to submit? In this way, rope bondage could be understood as a way of accepting and playing with being governed, but only if one finds its nature and reasons to be satisfactory. In this way, one can enter into the movement of de-subjugation through submission.
CC-PD-MarkPD-old-70, Ostra Studio, circa 1935, Source http://www.leslarmesderos.com/site/sscat2_en.php?page=0&ordre=id&sens=desc&id=15&themebase=2
Bondage arts and practices could then be conceived as opportunities for cultivating—one might say—vita passiva, through which the promises and necessities of an attitude focused on passivity, pathos, and passion can be experienced physically. Bondage does not merely affect the body from the outside. The still and fixed positions bring hidden things to light, for example that corporeality is inexorably open, vulnerable, mortal, shameful, and porous in its boundaries. In his phenomenological confrontations with sexual desire, Jean-Paul Sartre describes such processes as one’s wish to reduce the other person to mere flesh and thus reveal ourselves as mere flesh. Sartre writes that the Other’s facticity is usually hidden and masked by clothes, makeup, beards, and gestures, but that there will always come a time when the mask falls and the Other is exposed in the pure contingency of his presence, that is, in his flesh. A body is that object which is always more-than-a-body, because it is never given to me without its surroundings; it always points beyond itself in space and time. The flesh of the body is what the body is reduced to when there is no environment, no context, no relationships. Flesh is hidden above all by gestures and movements, which position human beings as beings situated within an environment—beings who act in situations in relation to the world and thus appear as bodies-in-situation. Sartre describes this with the term grace: “Nothing is less ‘in the flesh’ than a dancer, even though she is nude. Desire is an attempt to strip the body of its movements as well as its clothing and to make it exist as pure flesh; it is an attempt to incarnate the Other’s body.”[13] For Sartre, gracefulness is the “moving image of necessity and freedom”; it is grounded in the active body. Practices such as bondage, which prevent the execution of movements, lead to the absence of these components and reveal the person’s flesh. The desire to make a body adopt obscene positions that expose it to all disguises and reveal the inertia of its flesh is described by Sartre as sadistic. The sadist deprives the body of its situation, capturing and containing its freedom by seeking the fleshiness that lies hidden beneath all doing and making. The sadist wants his*her victim’s body to be “entirely flesh, panting and obscene; it maintains the position that the torturers have imposed upon it, not the one it would have assumed on its own; the cords that bind it sustain it as an inert thing, and, by that, it has ceased to be the object that moves spontaneously”[14].
The French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas, in turn, strikingly describes the possible shame resulting from this through the metaphor of bondage: “What appears in shame is thus precisely being bound to oneself, the radical impossibility of escaping ourselves, of hiding from ourselves: the unforgivable self-presence of the ego. We are ashamed of our nakedness when it openly reveals our being, our intimacy.” And what if the confrontation with this state is now deliberately (masochistically) provoked? A fascination for such movements in BDSM practices is again expressed by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, since for him the “paradoxical character of shame is consciously made an object in them, in order to transform it into lust. […] For here a passive subject—the masochist—is so enthusiastic about his own, infinitely overwhelming passivity that he renounces his capacity as a subject […]. Hence the ceremonial armor of snares and shackles, […] of all kinds of bondage, with the help of which the masochistic subject tries in vain to hold back and ironically fix that transferable passivity that it deliciously surpasses everywhere.”[15]
If such observations are elevated to a concept such as the art of not being governed in a specific way (but nonetheless being governed and bound), this would be accompanied by an appreciation not only of what people create and accomplish, but also of what they endure and suffer. The freedom so often longed for would then not turn out to be a kind of commodity that could be disposed of. Freedom emerges momentarily in the constantly new, wayward, even energy-sapping handling of afflictions, resistance, indeterminacy, and in the recognition of complex entanglements.
Cat’s Cradle: Position 1, The Cradle Originally from Clarence Squareman (1916).
My Book of Indoor Games, Gutenberg.org. PD-US
For the feminist science theorist Donna Haraway, such a departure from traditional narratives of autonomy—and instead a recognition of fundamental interdependencies—is an indispensable prerequisite for living well together on this planet in the long term. To illustrate her thinking, she uses an image drawn from the world of strings and their potential for force-generating entanglements: string figures, which some readers may also know from their childhood as thread games that form patterns. In these games, which have been and are played in a variety of cultures around the globe, the aim is to tie a closed cord around fingers and hands so that braided figures gradually form in the space in between. Their emergence can be accompanied by a narration that illustrates the pattern.
The playful back-and-forth winding of the string patterns points to larger themes, such as “the fact that actors do not precede action, that relations take precedence.” Thread games also follow an intertwining of activity and passivity, which requires a thinking of the ‘in-between’: “two pairs of hands are needed, and in each successive step, one is ‘passive,’ offering the result of its previous operation—a string entanglement—for the other to operate on, only to become active again at the next step, when the other presents the new entanglement. But it can also be said that each time the ‘passive’ pair is the one that holds, and is held by the entanglement, only to ‘let it go’ when the other takes the relay.”[16] From the entanglement of activity and passivity, Haraway develops a model in which relationships and interconnections are central: polymorphic networks that enable unexpected aspects of one’s own sensuous embodiment. Above all, however, this fundamental mutual interconnectedness is accompanied by a concept of responsibility that the string and bondage games illustrate:
“In passion and action, detachment and attachment, this is what I call cultivating response-ability [sic!]; that is also collective knowing and doing, an ecology of practices. Whether we asked for it or not, the pattern is in our hands.”[17]
“Mme Hitchen with string bear” ~ (Anishinaabe) ~ Long Lake, Ontario 1916, F.W. Waugh, CMoH, CC-PD-old-70-expired
The risk is that we will overlook which bondage patterns and stories are within our grasp if we merely exoticize the origins of rope bondage. As Haraway’s “cord games” demonstrate, this also includes stories that have yet to be realized as possible future narratives. Rope bondage, as romantic as it may sound, thus brings with it a utopian moment in which it becomes tangible that the task of grasping one’s own possibilities and breaking out of a preordained destiny does not only consist in “loosening or breaking the many bonds during our lives,”[18] but also in creating bonds, in getting tied up, in becoming entangled, and in searching together for new states of being within the existing bonds. Adapting Foucault’s formulation, bondage arts point to dealing with limitations, restrictions, ties, and untying in an attentive and different way. The inherent vulnerability and ultimate mortality revealed by bondage not only makes the practice a breeding ground for intoxicating sensations that promise a delightful “kick,” but also has the potential to generate ethical appeals for the perception of mutual connectedness, care, and responsibility for one another.
At least this is what I have experienced and would like to share.
[1] Donna J. Haraway: SF: Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation, String Figures, So Far, in: Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, Issue 3, November 2013, : https://adanewmedia.org/2013/11/issue3-haraway/ .
[2] Master “K”: The Beauty of Kinbaku (or everything you ever wanted to know about Japanese erotic bondage when you suddenly realized you didn’t speak Japanese), USA: King Cat Ink., 2008.
[3] Iris Därmann: Shame and the Violence of the Whip: Pornographic Investiture Scenes in the Anti-Slavery Movement and in the Works of the Marquis de Sade. In: Daniel Tyradellis (ed. for the German Hygiene Museum Dresden): Shame. 10 Essays. Companion book to the exhibition: 100 Reasons to Be Ashamed, Göttingen: Wallstein, 2017, p. 99.
[4] Edward B. Tylor: Primitive Culture: Researches Into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom, London: John Murray, 1871.
[5] See: Edwin A. Dawes, *The Great Illusionists*, New Jersey: Chartwell Books, 1979. And: T.I.E.S. – The International Escapologist Society, http://www.tiesociety.webs.com
[6] See: Frank Cullen and Florence Hackerman, *Vaudeville, Old and New: An Encyclopedia of Variety Performers in America* (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 114.
[7] Linda Montano and Tehching Hsieh: “One Year Art/Life Performance: Interview with Alex and Allyson Grey” (1984), in: Kristine Stiles (ed.): *Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings*, University of California Press, 1996, p. 907 ff.
[8] Etymologically, “kink” dates back to the 1670s, meaning “a knot-like contraction or short twist in a rope, thread, hair, etc.”; it was originally a nautical term, derived from the Dutch “kink” (“twist in a rope”) (also found in French and Swedish), which is probably related to Old Norse kikna “to bend backwards, sink at the knees” as if under a burden” (see kick (v.)). The figurative sense of “odd notion, mental twist, whim” was first recorded in American English in 1803, in the writings of Thomas Jefferson; specifically, “a sexual perversion, fetish, paraphilia” dates to 1973 (by 1965 as “sexually abnormal person”).
[9] Furthermore, the mythological significance of the many small ropes, woven threads, and cords can be highlighted; in this context, media theorist Gunnar Schmidt refers to the “link between woman and thread” in Arachne and many others: “Klotho, Neith, Penelope, Philomela, Holda, Zirze, Calypso, Helena, Pandora, Paivatar, Chih-Nii, Habetrot—when it comes to spinning and weaving, mythical storytelling presents itself across cultures as a cosmos of the female.” Gunnar Schmidt: Ästhetik des Fadens. Zur Medialisierung eines Materials in der Avantgardekunst, Bielefeld: transcript, 2007, p. 13.
The practices of rope bondage and shibari/kinbaku also have their own gender-specific characteristics; for example, the fact that there are significantly more male riggers than female bunnies is striking—a point that can only be touched upon briefly in this context.
[10] See, for example, Neville Twitchell, *The Politics of the Rope* (Bury St. Edmunds: Arena Books, 2012).
[11] See, for example, “Black Lives Matter activists go on trial over protest in Nottingham; man and three women accused of unlawful obstruction of highway as court hears they lay across tram lines while tied together,” in: The Guardian, UK News, November 3, 2016: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/nov/03/black-lives-matter-uk-activists-trial-protest-nottingham (last accessed June 26, 2018); or: Protesters Tie Themselves to Trees in Bid to Save Them, in: L.A. Times, The Local Review, February 23, 1999: http://articles.latimes.com/1999/feb/23/local/me-10815 .
[12] Michel Foucault, “What Is Critique?,” p. 37. See Judith Butler, “Critique, Dissent, Disciplinarity,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 35, no. 4 (2009), 791–792 and Daniele Lorenzini and Arnold I. Davidson, “Introduction,” in Foucault, Qu’est-ce que la critique? suivi de La culture de soi, p. 17.
[13] Jean-Paul Sartre: *Being and Nothingness*, trans. Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press, 1984 (orig. 1945), p. 389.
[14] Ibid., p. 474.
[15] Giorgio Agamben: What Remains of Auschwitz: The Archive and the Witness, trans. by Stefan Monhardt, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003, p. 93 ff.
[16] Donna Haraway: *Staying with the Trouble, Making Kin in the Chthulucene*. *Experimental Futures* (Experimental Futures: Technological Lives, Scientific Arts, Anthropological Voices), Durham & London, Duke University Press, 2016, p. 14.
[17] Ibid., p. 34.
[18] Nathalie Sarthou-Lajus: In Praise of Debt, trans. by Claudia Hamm, Berlin: Klaus Wagenbach 2013, p. 86.
