Wochenklausur uncouples people from their professional identities.

Interviewee: Grant Kester

I’m thinking of Wochenklausurs’ boat talks. There was an aesthetic dimension at work in their decision to uncouple the participants in the boat talks in Zürich from their professional identities, and from the kind of media attention that would force them to retract into their public selves. Those identities impose very specific constraints on what these people could and couldn’t say. Once they entered the space in the boat, with no recording of any kind, there was a provisional bracketing of certain forms of power and obligation related to their official or representative status. And that, arguably, is what made it possible for them to think, and agree to, things that they couldn’t have otherwise. They were able to appear to each other at an ad hominum level, through what Bakhtin would call the “non-alibi of being,” without referring every word and though to an a priori set of values or mandates.