Who Has the Privilege to Not Know?

I believe it is important to accept the various privileges one possesses – this acceptance gives us a better understanding and awareness of who we are, and allows us to create a more fair and transparent society. I, like many others, possess various privileges because of factors outside of my control. I am male, white, from a lower-middle class family in rural Ireland. I could talk about any number of these specific privileges and how they have shaped the reality of my life. However, I don’t think privilege is confined only to the human experience. I have been thinking a lot recently about the landscape where I grew up and how it has suffered greatly over the past 20 years as a result of the peat harvesting industry. The sustained extraction of peat over many years has caused irreversible damage to the biodiversity in this place. It has made me consider our human relationship to privilege through the lens of place. As humans, we possess an inherent privilege in that we can speak. We have a voice. If someone is being abused or hurt in some way, it is possible to communicate what is happening, and make it stop. Our landscapes don’t have this privilege, they remain silent and voiceless through, quite often, centuries of hardship. In this neutrality, our landscapes do not know the human concept of privilege in itself – they don’t have a gender, a class, a sexual orientation. They negate the very concept of privilege in a way, in their “not knowing”. I think privilege is one of the most important things we need to wake up to and discuss in our society. However, I also think there is a lot to be learned by returning to our physical landscapes to hear what they might have to say, or offer to the conversation.

I was spending time in various workshops with people from different fields, not just performing arts, and in a month I learned more about theatre than I ever had by being directly in it or studying it. Theatre is people. The matter is – and here comes an unpopular opinion – that it is getting more and more common to view directing or acting only as a profession, to have more and more (healthy) boundaries in theatre. We think that this is in order to escape abuse, but what if we only end up escaping ourselves?

This question and all possible answers to me are closely connected to the question “Who has a privilege not to know?”. My first anarchic instinct is to say, “Well who has not?”, in a few seconds I start to feel bad about it. I start thinking of my interview with a quote for its headline “I want to be able not to know”. This question is very personal to me and yet so universal during these trying times. Being able not to know is freedom to me. Not to know black or white and to throw yourself deeper into theatre, not creating rules around it. It is freedom when I think of creative process and the privilege of a director not to know. Finding actors to work with who allow you not to know is a beautiful, beautiful thing. I hope everyone could have a privilege not to know.

This is utopia. Our harsh contemporary reality does not and probably will not allow us not to know. But is not knowing the same as being willingly ignorant? We have Russia’s war against Ukraine, climate change, just to name a few. It is impossible to stay ignorant whether you are a person or an institution such as theatre.

When I am asked about my attitude to not knowing as privilege, I feel that this question is a trap door. With a wolfish smile, it invites the feminist dedicated to identity politics to explain concepts like privilege and knowledge for the 100th time. She will explain dominant culture, knowledge for domination, community. But the question highlighted by inverted commas is not the actual question – the actual question asks for my attitude towards it. This is where the trap door opens for the feminist. She has exhausted herself, regulated emotionally, dimmed down intellectually, denied her own artistic brilliance and taught a beginner’s course in anti-discrimination. She has no attitude left, she plummets to the depths.

The question before the question – the actual question, that is – is directed at those who can answer it. Those for whom it is of no consequence whether their attitude is this or that. Those who are not essentially involved. Those who don’t care whether they know or not.

The discourse evoked by this question is a revenant.

Ten years ago, for example, in 2012, the group Bühnenwatch was founded as a response to resistant racists at Berlin’s theatres. Black-facing, racist language, the refusal to hire Black artists etc. One of the prominent founding members was Sharon Dodua Otoo. The defensive howls of the racists were the same back then: On the one hand, we didn’t know that it’s racist to paint yourself Black, and on the other hand we had no choice because we don’t know any Black actors who could play Black people, etc. etc. It’s impossible to reproduce the whole debate here; in any case, it has been repeated umpteen times over the following years, although it was already older than the hills in 2012.

I mention this example to give a timeline of the discourse on privilege in the German-language theatre world. It’s a zombie. Dead from the outset, it still wanders among us. As a political artist, you are faced with the fact that the majority will fight you tooth and nail until it finally absorbs you.
The fact that this question is an application requirement for the International Forum Information 1 therefore brings me to the issue of visibility. Our debates have slipped from activist circles into high culture – did they bring us along? When I write “us”, I mean a variety of groups of people, social groups, whimsical marginals; what we have in common is that we are being systematically classified by the culture industry in a certain way.

Hypervisibility is something that Black artists of all genders and transgender artists of any positioning (white, Black, PoC, Jewish…) have in common. All eyes on you, but they can’t remember your name. All eyes on you, but you won’t be listed in the credits. All eyes on you, but when someone strikes a blow, nobody saw. What should I answer? I’d prefer to return the question. Why was it asked? By whom? Etc.

Of course, ignorance is the fertilizer for complicity to sprout. The mythology of “purity”, or some sort of a priori sensibility in which one does “not see race” and is somehow objective and ahistorical, is predicated by the ignorance about how cultural bias and intergenerational knowledge, oftentimes in the form of trauma, is interwoven into the fabric of both individuals and institutions. If one cannot, or chooses not to consider how these cultural and historical narratives shape biases in regards to race, gender, sexual orientation, accessibility, and socioeconomic status among many other factors, then it is more likely than not because they do not have to: a privileged position.

Yet, if there’s space for this possibility, we would be remiss to always group a concept of “not-knowing” to “privilege”. Missing archives, forgotten histories, displaced family members with no record: which episteme earns a privileged position in this archive?

My great-great-uncle Abraham Alter was born in 1909 in Sokolow Podlaski, Poland. After his father and sisters had emigrated to the United States in 1920 because increasingly anti-Jewish pogroms developed in the area where he lived, Abraham, his brother Jeremiah, and his mother Lena immigrated to the United States via Ellis Island in 1923. From what we could gather from our research into his immigration papers, Abraham had an intellectual disability, denoted as “mentally feeble” in a document indicating a medical hold. Abraham was not allowed into the United States and was deported back to Poland when he was 14 years old. Jeremiah fortunately accompanied him, but their mother remained in the USA. Jeremiah returned to the United States two years later, leaving Abraham to live with his uncle Meilech Alter. We found death records of Meilech Alter and the rest of his family that indicated that they passed 13 years later at the Chelmno concentration camp. Yet, we did not find and still have not found anything about Abraham’s death records, nor have we located any indication whether he left his uncle at some point over the thirteen year period. We are only left with one photo of him.

Every time I look upon this photo of Abraham, I feel as if I know less and less about him. I sympathize with Orpheus, who turns to Eurydice to make sure she is behind him while leaving the underworld, only to find her disintegrate before his eyes: turning to this photo of Abraham does the same for me. Is not knowing what happened to Abraham a privilege? Is it an intergenerational form of burden, even trauma? Perhaps these questions are meant to be rhetorical and open-ended.