Who can ignore the birth pangs of the new tying? Who has slept through the attacks on the new fangled ancien régime? Who has not been touched by the spreading irritation? 

Japanese rope bondage has changed in its transport. Stripped of context, it has mutated. Inserted into Anglo-American sexual politics, it has served as ferment. Bottoming education and structured curricula are the first small motions of effervescence. Something unforeseen grows amidst the decomposition. 

How can we best revel, drunk on conditions and possibility of its arrival? What slurred words are sufficient to announce what has not yet been contained? Let us strive to speak of the new tying and not enfold it entirely into our common tongue. Let us fashion new language from borrowed words and tattered slogans. Let us clear space for the tying that is to come. 

In revelation, unveiling is twinned with accounting. As the new tying emerges, we must ask, “where do we stand?” Amidst a field of violations and volatile and productive contradictions. 

• We suffer under the tyranny of sex and all its associated discourse. All the potential of tying is all too easily reinscribed into the sphere of the sexual. We must look for a tying that does not require or reduce to sex. 
• We chafe at the limits imposed by kink and its context and ideologies. We subscribe to models of the subject and will that are not just untenable, but utterly stifling and depoliticizing. 
• We are flattened by the language of role. We must displace and pervert those terms, and after that, ever-undermine such fictions. We are all and always have been multiple. We must not let the molar category of role foreclose our molecular becomings. 
• We have cornered ourselves in the personal. We have relegated ourselves to only the most well-worn forms of intimacy. We must learn to revel in the surface. We must find a place for the opaque, not just in the other, but in ourselves. Let us strive for the inhuman and the unknown, for ecstatic extimacies and impersonal intimacies. 
• We have been seduced by the fantasy of authenticity. We look for truth in touch. We suffer under the fiction of the “natural surprise,” of “involuntary response.”  Our forensic desire undermines our pedagogy, denigrates our expression, and relegates those who are tied to passivity. Let us take rope bondage’s roots in performance seriously. Let us revel in art and artifice. To learn to speak for ourselves we must have the tools to be otherwise. It is through character and choreography that we begin to understand and control our impact. 
• We are too attached to the medium of rope itself. The material of rope is not fiber. It is culture. Let us move from objects to affects, from patterns to habit. Let us learn to rehearse and reconfigure the codes of vulnerability, gender, and touch. Let us make our material the very stuff of ourselves. 
• We have taken the body and what it can do for granted. We must look at it with new eyes. We must eschew the blinders of a cheap scientism or cognitivism. We must be ready to reshape ourselves utterly. 
• We have overvalued consensus. We understand homogeneity as democracy. We have abstracted the self into meaninglessness. Every new person tied demands a new poetics of tying. The impossibility of such a task does not diminish its necessity. Let us turn our eye towards difference, towards the local. Let us not assimilate our observations into the same old narratives, napkin-back psychoanalysis. 

Our way forward is not to ignore the where we stand. Instead, we must pay an acute attention to the territory. We must acknowledge the violence and oppression that were the condition of possibility of the development of Japanese rope bondage as we know it. Let us not forget this past and unintentionally perpetuate the same harm. We must always keep in mind this history and its contingency. 

Our way forward is not singular. Let us not try and synthesize our myriad versions of tying into something anodyne and compatible. We must crack doxa against other doxa. We must scan the tumult and place ourselves in spaces newly opened. Only there can we find rope that is not hopelessly compromised. 

Let tying burst forth from the dungeon. Let it escape the confines of sex. We must prize open new ways of relating. There is nothing revolutionary in tying as an art form. But there is potential in the rupture. Let us be poised and ready to gain what we can, if not a way out, then a way to bring things in. Let us use this moment of instability and invention to fashion openings in ourselves, to become more responsive, more attuned, more able to affect and be affected. We will revel before tying’s inevitable capture. We will suck the marrow of it. We will find its tools and its weapons and make them our own. For the end of tying is more than bondage.