Transmaterial Becoming

The Hour of the Analyst Dog is a collaborative performance project by the Medical University and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna that closed The Play on the Burden of Representation, a contemporary art exhibition commemorating the seventy-fifth anniversary of Freud’s death held at the Belvedere/21er Haus in Vienna. Our work melded resources conserving biological and cultural memory: a museum archive, a genetic lab and a biobank. We connected these resources’ practices – all relying on recalling the past in the present. Relevant to cloning, psychoanalysis and reenactment is their reanimation of historical DNA, transferring affects or gestures from the past to a context of the present. We began our undertaking by harvesting hairs from Sigmund Freud’s dog Jofie, woven into a rug by his daughter Anna. Using these hairs we sequenced one of the dog’s zeitgeber genes, and cloned it to become a synthetic timer in blood cells from a living psychoanalyst. The body heat emitted by the audience at the exhibition caused the resynchronization of – and consequently produced fluorescence in – the cells, signalling the end of the performance. Transgenetics became an arena for performative enquiry: How could a relic that brings a past/history back to life gain agency without turning an open future into the inevitable repetition of copies? How could this transgenetic being act without evoking archaic fears of a reversal in chronological order (Schneider 2001: 96)? What theories are relevant when we enable an audience to bring a dog-human hybrid back to life? We critically applied the findings of linguist Judith Roof – that geneticists falsely ascribe DNA an arbitrary relationship to matter (Roof 2007: 54–5) – in conjunction with Jacques Derrida’s concept of grafting as the power of reopening closed texts (Kakoliris 2015). Would such a transgenetic alliance enable us to reopen Freud’s retroactive constructivism and linear determinism of the past and future towards a more open-ended concept of drive, dreams and the unconscious? Here we adopted the concept of transmaterial becoming to account for the way time Transmaterial Becoming