lne Gevers	curator  \  writer  \  activist

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Coming Out 'Coming out' is a term used by people with autism who, after years of silence, suddenly are able to communicate and tell others about their experiences, their way of thinking, their world. I thank the platform HOTEL NEW YORK at P.S.1 to have given me the opportunity to 'come out' in a new disguise as well: as an artist/activist doing projects which enable neurologically divers cultures to place themselves on the map. As a cultural producer I have been actively engaged with issues of representation for the last 15 years. Either in the form of exhibitions or interventions, or in theoretical reflections such as lectures and articles. Subject-matters circled around the limits of curating, of language and institutions, often linked to notions such as identity and diversity. The book Beyond Ethics and Esthetics (SUN 1997, ed. Ine Gevers, Jeanne van Heeswijk) was meant to combine these and other initiatives and projects of artists and activists with whom we felt related. This set the tone for a practice that was to become even more openly engaged. A practice which in fact balances on the interface between art and activism. Art to me has always been an important tool to do the unexpected within a culture ruled by pre-fabricated norms and values. Of course there are the restrictions of the institution of Art, giving interventionist art practice only partly the chance to really flourish. The institution of Art as used here does not stand for the museum or the Kunsthaus only, but indicates the internalised scheme of anyone who is part of this system and whose perception and production of meaning is thus determined beforehand. In an environment where the framework within which a work is to be interpreted is already set, engaged art will never fully obtain its effect. An interesting parallel can be made with language and the order of symbolic representation. This symbolic order, the framework we use to make sense of reality and communicate about it, is pervasively present on all levels of our existence. It almost completely controls everything we do and say. Indeed it was often the case that avant-garde artists, by challenging institutions, metaphorically questioned language and the symbolic order as well.  Art can be an important factor in undermining the symbolic order -here interpreted as one dominant, language-based system(1)- from the inside out. This is where my personal and professional stories have begun to merge. Slowly my critical attitude towards the practice of curating started to form one continuum with a growing interest in the limits of language as a means of communication and representation. I started analysing aspects of normative culture and its many mechanisms of exclusion, becoming more and more personally involved with the ultimate 'Other' doomed to fall out of place within such decisive frames. Titles like Curating the Mad of the Other en Whose Madness? clearly marked a fascination, not only for the mad and insane as the first to be expelled from the order of language, but also for the reverse. The idiocy that characterizes normative society. The French philosopher Michel Foucault actually states that with the future elimination of the very face of madness (by pharmacological control, genetic engineering and other methods of neutralization) something extremely valuable will get lost to mankind forever. In that near future, madness - almost 'naturally' transgressing the limits of language and therefore equated with forbidden language- might prove to have been the only unlocked door through which culture could have gotten to know the truth about itself (2). Although I am interested in Foucault's and Deleuze's celebration of the mad and the schizophrenic, I find this romanticising attitude highly problematic. Similarly inspired and wary of anti-psychiatric politics I have been discovering new routes to uncover the threads of fear and anguish that often lead to extreme xenophobic attitudes regarding the most 'inner' Others we come across. Parallel to the activist movement set up by people with disabilities all over the world I became interested in regarding people with autism, schizophrenia and/or related developmental disorders as different cultures (I am aware of the dangers of mentioning these different disorders in one breath, which is done for strategic reasons. Only as a community they can make a stance, suggesting an united opposition against normative culture). Autism is a diagnostic term used in reference to a heterogeneous community of people who are differently brained such that their language, (self)organisation skills and/or social behaviour deviate from what is accepted as normal. Confronted with a mental condition that is different, many people with autism cannot automatically subject themselves to the order of language and symbolic interpretation following a strict set of rules. The way their brains function is simply not compatible with the dominant order. Even if some among them can 'adapt', after years of practice and hard work, many obstacles remain. For instance the many stimuli which cannot be filtered or the simultaneity of most daily life processes. The detour they have to make in order to play along the game set by normative culture leads to an unbridgeable gap between subjective experiences and symbolic representation. Result is a lifelong disability. People with schizophrenia experience a life in which they occasionally drop out of this symbolic order. As a result of a psychosis people can, for just a few moments or for longer periods of time, loose the capability of perceiving the world around them symbolically. Jacques Lacan explains the implication of this kind of losing control by arguing that the symbolic order is not only a screen translating reality for us, but that it functions as a kind of shield as well. It protects us against the 'gaze of the object' , as he calls it. It garantees a certain distance from the Real. In normal circumstances we even cannot experience reality other then traumatically (3). During a psychosis the loss of such 'normal' perception seems to coincide with a temporary incapability of filtering and ordering visual, auditive and other sensorial stimuli. The schizophrenic theatre-maker and writer Antonin Artaud has compared the effect of such a disintegration with cruelly becoming devoured by objects, events, even words (4). When I came to P.S.1 in may 1999, I had just started making my first steps into this unknown territory. Determined to find ways to extend the current discourse on Otherness with the inclusion of people whose brains are differently organised, I had my first public debate in HOTEL NEW YORK. Actually, there was no better place to do such an experiment. The most important activist movements have started in New York. Many issues, among which homelessness, war-politics or Aids, were on the agenda of the leftist artistic scene. Congruently, the audience was engaged and challenging. People asked me to be straightforward and personal even at moments I hesitated. It made me aware of how big the gap was that I was about to cross, but also of the urgency to place this topic on the cultural map. Almost one year later, I have founded the DeCenter. Centre for neurologically Divers Cultures (before known as Centre forNon-SymbolicCultures) ‹www.inegevers.net/nonsymbolic› The DeCentre is currently managed by seven experts of whom two have autism and a third one a psychiatric background. It attempts to de-marginalize the position of autistics and their cousins, to support their self-advocacy and to contextualize the representation of autism as culture. As such we try to create some distinctive turbulence within the narrowly defined symbolic order and the system of language. Our goal is to spread awareness of alternative modes of consciousness and different sets of operating tools with which to meaningfully interact with the world. In fact we try to put into practice   Michel de Certeau's notions of the resisting tactics of the disadvantaged. In Practices of Everyday Life he examined carefully how the less advantaged in our society attain power through the subtle tactics of manipulation and play (5). Contrary to the strategies of those in power and who postulate a place that can be delimited as their own, serving as a base from which to manage and dominate, the disadvantaged are condemned to calculate action determined by the absence of such a place. The tactic of the Other is subversive by definition. Without openly attacking the dominant order or breaking its rules in any obvious way, they develop their own, independent production (of art, of meaning, of language) in a space controlled by others. The French term De Certeau uses in reference to this practice is 'la perruque' (doing your own thing in the time of your boss). In the seminar Encountering the Culture of the Norm (De Geuzen, Amsterdam, 1999) we invited only people who were differently brained to reflect upon these kinds of tactics of survival in a culture which excludes them in almost every possible way. Other projects, which are in different developing stages at the moment, are more practically oriented. As the group of people on the autistic spectrum is heterogeneous, different projects are meant to serve different target groups. Martijn Dekker (activist/ creator of his own website on autism and host of a world-wide e-mail support group for adults on the autistic spectrum), will start a research project / workshop aimed at designing an internet-interface that is better equipped for use by people with autism. The workshop and public debate will give extra attention to the positive effect such an adjusted architecture for autistics could have. Already at this time the Internet is an important instrument for autistics, enabling them to take part of the dominant as well as their own meaning-producing order. Closely linked to the work of the artist Juul Sadee and philosopher Ruud Hendriks, both members of the DeCenter, two other projects are now in progress. In different settings and distinctive workshops artists will be guiding the communication between autistics and non-autistics. The theory of Hendriks, based on the notion of 'extra-mental levels of imagination', plays an important role here. In his dissertation he argues how things do not necessarily need to be interpreted as obstacles preventing communication to happen between for instance autistics and their parents. This has been the traditional interpretation of autistic behavior for many years (autistics preferring things to people, finding themselves completely absorbed in spinning, moving, flickering objects such that they cannot be reached). Objects, things, lights, structures, trajectories, sounds have proven to play a major role as 'extra-mental' supports - as 'mental' circuits which are not 'inner scripts' but which are situated outside of the person in question- , providing the person with autism a larger inner freedom and imaginary playfield. Gunilla Gerlands' account of how touching, holding or striking curved forms saved her from being stuck in her own rigid and straightforward way of reasoning is just one out of many examples (6). In these projects art plays a crucial role, both as a method to do the unexpected and as provider of concrete objects, words, contexts. Art fulfills a primal role in finding the 'place' which resides between symbolic and material extremes. Art cannot place itself outside the symbolic order, but works of art can trigger experiences which cannot be translated into words. It is this quality which seems crucial   to us in our search for communication which is not restricted to language or any other form of symbolic representation. In guiding the communication between autistics and non-autistics, the work of art will   function as a necessary 'extra-mental' tool for the persons with autism. At the same time, though, these works undermine the single-minded urge for immediate symbolic interpretation typical for those we consider 'normal'. So not only autistics are invited to emphasize and theorize about the contents of the Others' mind, which is something many are trying with amazing efforts, but non-autistics as well. It is through and within the creative process, the absorption in things, sounds, structures, words, music, happenings, that people whose brains are differently organized might find each other on yet unknown territories. By taking a critical stance towards the normative order the DeCenter contributes to a relatively new discourse: one that investigates the concept of 'physical and/or mental disability as a social construct'. This discourse focuses on why the exclusion of disabled people has seldom been questioned whereas disability has always existed, in any culture at any historical moment. Partially this is due to the biological/medical view that still dominates the discourse on people who are 'physically and/or mentally disabled'. People who have been diagnosed as having a developmental disorder, a psychiatric decease or other physical/mental disabilities can either be cured and become like us, or they just have to settle for a life at the periphery of society. This dualistic worldview on which the medical model is based has in fact played a major role in the segregation of people with disabilities and in the labeling of them as aberrant, deviant, abnormal. As such the medical model has discouraged full citizenship for people with disabilities for centuries. A new, humanities-oriented approach of disability has been founded to present alternative perspectives. Run by and for people with disabilities, disability studies links in with and borrows from many fields and movements, including cultural studies, area studies, feminism, race-and-ethnic studies, and gay-and-lesbian studies. New-style disability researchers consider disability as an ordinary human variation, like gender, race or ethnicity, and approach the topic accordingly. Informed by post-structuralist literary and cultural criticism they pull apart concepts about disability to see what cultural attitudes, antagonisms and insecurities went into shaping them. Last but not least a major discussion in both academic and semi-intellectual circles around the generally accepted interpretation of the symbolic order, might be of help. The position of Jacques Lacan, celebrated as the Father of the Symbolic Order, being severly questioned. One of his defenders is Gilles Deleuze who credits Lacan of being the first radical re-interpretors of Freud. In his opinion Lacan opened the doors for the many flows of 'schizoid deterritorialisation' which can liberate the neurotic from being trapped within a pre-conditioned and oedipalized society. He discovered the fertile domain of the unconscious, consisting of many 'signifying chains'. Because of their multiplicity they are so complex that it is inopportune to speak of one chain, one code, or even one order. Deleuze mourns the fact that the nuts and bolts are tightened again "where Lacan had just loosened them", as well as the tendency to "oedipalize the schizo where on the contrary Lacan had just schizophrenized even neurosis" (7). Despite these efforts to free Lacan from his burden, the symbolic order has become the dominant order of language and symbolic representation. It is understood as one chain of signifiers, one code of desire. Another strong voice, questioning the 'confusion' of the symbolic order with one dominant and normative order comes from the semiotic discourse. Here there is a tendency to interpret the symbolic order not as one confined system of power, but rather to think of it as consisting of a multiple and interactive interfaces through which to look at the world around us. Much of the critique is focused at Lacan's premises that the forming of subjectivity would coincide with acquiring language (and as such entering the symbolic order). Arguments are being developed that there might be other strategies at play -or perhaps better: tactics- through which meaning can be formed. These tactics include signifying processes through taste, smell, touch and body, and through the performative act. The different cultures I have tried to introduce here might indeed have their own symbolic orders. Instead of holding on to our dualistic perception we had better make the shift for a more pluralistic stance right now. Instead of 'normal' and 'abnormal' functioning of the brains we will soon witness the welcoming of a whole range of different mental states through which to know and experience the world. And perhaps one day we will be happy that, at this particular moment in history, differences were allowed. Ine Gevers 1 The French psycho-analist Jacques Lacan is generally recognized as the one who introduced the symbolic order as language-based. There is however some dispute about the closures within Lacan's vision versus the interpretation of both his followers and critics. See Gilles Deleuze/Felix Guattari on Lacan in Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minesota, 1983, p. 83 2 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilisation: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, New York, 1971. See also Foucault, Madness, the Absence of Work, in Critical Inquiry, 21, 1995, p. 292-5 3 Jacques Lacan, Of the Gaze as Object Petit a, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, New York, 1978 4 Antonin Artaud, Van Gogh, the man suicided by Society, in Artaud Anthology, San Francisco, 1968 5 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, London 1984 6 Gunilla Gerland, A real Person, Life on the Outside, London 1996 7 Op.cit (1) Lecture at PS 1 in Hotel New York, New York, on invitation by Jeanne van Heeswijk, mai 2000, published in I am Looking for Space and Fortune, Amsterdam [top]