In ‘Archaeology of personalities’* we established a theory of how the communication between the tying and the tied person can be described. The person tying is interviewing the person tied and the reactions of the latter are constituting a picture of who they are. That picture, i.e. the personality of one’s vis-á-vis is in my worldview the main interest in interacting with people in general and tying in particular.
The problem of the interview 1.0, if one wants to call it, lays in its formulation which seems to favor a certain directionality from the tied to the tying person. It can be read classically in terms of physics, i.e. the outcome of an experiment is independent of how the observer looks at it.
It was absolutely justified to build up the theory of the interview based on this directivity but now it has found some rest to sit, I must break up this directionality of the interview and give one main agency back to the tied person.
Taking a closer look of any interview it becomes immediately clear that the questions are subjective and are born in the context of some ideology. In historical sciences, this circumstance is well known and it became “good scientific practice” to reflect one’s own background and under no circumstances neglect this. Since it has been shown beautifully that objectivity itself has its own historicity**, a great many of researchers deviated from the desire to be objective and instead reflect what to do with their ideological. I am well aware that in common language the term ideology has its negative connotations. I use it here as a substitute for one’s normative worldview – an association which has no judgmental value on that level whatsoever.
The same is true in the interview metaphor when we see the tying person as an archaeologist. The questions asked by the tying person are not objective. They are not coming from nowhere and, this is crucial, they are answers themselves. What does that mean? It simply means that the interviewer creates not only an interview of the tied person but in the same way also an interview of the tying person. The questions they give uncover answers coming directly from the ideology of the interviewer.
I want to call this bi-directivity the “reciprocity” of the interview metaphor. Not only the tied person reveals something of their cultural storage or archive. Of course not. The interviewer themselves, by asking the questions shows a great deal of their archive as well and makes it open and accessible for the tied person.
In that sense, it became interesting in recent tying as well as teaching situations to make myself or students aware of possible interpretations of answers given by stating this or that question.
I want to bring an example:
The distance between the tying people. In the interview 1.0 the choice of a closer distance provokes an answer that either shows there is a desire of more closeness or the other way around, it shows that a larger distance is what the tied person wants. But what does it mean to ask the question of the distance? Do I as a tying person have the desire to de- or increase the distance? How do I react to the answer (whatever that answer might be)?
A reflection of this reciprocity and of the why of any question not only consciously invites the tied person into the archive and hence excavates the personality of the tying person, it gives the tying person the opportunity to develop a deeper understanding of the function of ropes as a medium of communication.
This is in other words the modern, or quantum mechanical formulation*** of the interview metaphor. The reciprocity of the interview explains that it is not only a process of taking from the tied person. In my interpretation, Kinbaku from the perspective of the tying person is giving everything in order to get to know the tied person. If one is not willing to answer everything about oneself there is not only no right to dig in the archive of another person’s personality, it will also never go as deep.
*’Archaeology of personalities’. G. Barkas.
**e.g. ‘Objectivity’. L Daston & P. Galison.
***See quantum mechanical measurement problem and the role of the observer in the Copenhagen interpretation.