thre
ewal
lsinstitution as sublimation and institution as alienation. This
misunderstanding of the function of the subject (regardless of the
modernist intentions of the project) will produce perverse effects
in the articulation of the system and a paralysis of all its
statements. Invariably we will find ourselves, perhaps in a
slightly more supple vein, in the same roles: the doctor, the
nurse, the patient. All the internal hierarchies and other
phantasmatic systems will have been reinstituted and codified in
just the same way. Its the same with traditional mythologies: a
society which has a certain stability always finds some
representatives of the Church to reinterpret the religion and adapt
its structures to new situations.
On the other hand, from the moment when one is able to shift, to
splinter, the character of the institution (public or private) as a
totality, instead of turning back on itself as a structure, it can
acquire a subjective consistency and institute all kinds of
modifications and reassessments. This is what I have aimed for in
emphasizing (perhaps too much) the difference between groups that
are constituted passively (subjected groups) and those that intend
to interpret their own position (subject groups). Groups, that is,
including religious, political, or, who knows, even institutional
groups that might be psychiatric, analytical, and political all at
the same time. But lets avoid all confusion with a psychiatric or
boy scout concept: a group cannot, by itself, have analytic powers!
Setting aside times when revolutionary winds are blowing, there is
in fact a whole specific praxis, a chemistry of the group and the
institution, required to produce analytical effects. Shall we
repeat: such a praxis can only be the effect of a collective agent
the group itself in its project to be a subject not only for
itself, but also for history!
Rebecca Zorach teaches and writes on medieval and Renaissance
art, contemporary activist art, and art of the 1960s and 70s
(particularly African American artists in Chicago). Recent articles
have addressed AfriCOBRAs gender and family politics; Claes
Oldenburgs lawsuit challenging the copyright of the Chicago
Picasso; and the experimental art center Art & Soul, founded on
the west side of Chicago in 1968 by the Museum of Contemporary Art
and the Conservative Vice Lords, a street gang. She has been a
member of Feel Tank Chicago since 2003.
PANEL could not have been realized without the thoughtful labor
of the following:
Performers: Darrell Moore, Mikal Shapiro, Matthias Regan, and
Mark Jeffery Directors of Photography: Yoni Goldstein and Meredith
Zielke Sound Engineer: Mathew Paul Jinks Assistant Camera: Alex
Brown Producer and Compositor: Joseph Carr Director and Editor:
Mary Patten
This project is partially supported by a grant from the Illinois
Arts Council, a state agency, and a Faculty Enrichment grant from
the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Thanks to Sylvre Lotringer, the performers and crew, Joey Carr,
Rebecca Zorach, Melika Bass, Ilan Gutin, the Department of Film,
Video, New Media, and Animation at SAIC, and all the beautiful
folks at threewalls.
Special thanks to Judith Clark, to whom this piece is
dedicated.
threewalls 119 N. Peoria #2c, Chicago, IL 60607 312.432.3972
[email protected] three-walls.org open tuesday to saturday,
11am5pm
threewalls is a 501(c)3 organization partially supported by a
grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency; by a CityArts
Program I grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural
Affairs; The Chicago Community Trust; The Cliff Dwellers Foundation
for the Arts; ArtsWork Fund for Organizational Development; The
Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation; The Alphawood Foundation;
The MacArthur Fund for Arts & Culture at the Richard H.
Driehaus Foundation; 3Arts Chicago; and major support is provided
by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
And if the world had devolved into a terrifying madness, and
only the mad could speak reason?
Mary Pattens Panel restages a portion of the Schizo-culture
conference sponsored by Semiotext(e) at Columbia University in
1975.
Here I restage an excerpt of Flix Guattaris untranslated 1972
Psychanalyse et transversalit, a portion entitled The institution.
The institution is the psychiatric hospital (itself at issue in the
conference text). Here too it is the institution of the academy,
the institution of professionalism, the institution of the
panel.
Panel, in old French, from a Latin diminutive of pannus, cloth,
was a saddle pad, a cloth placed under the saddle to cushion the
horses back, and thence a piece of parchment (skin) listing jurors
in a court case. The panel discussion, then, doesnt refer in the
first instance to the array of bodies at a table, but to their
names as they appear on a list.
(I changed the pronouns in Guattaris text. For him, he covered
she. Not for me. A minor edit.)
What is a patient? First a citizen, then an individual, and
finally one may ask what relationship this can have with the fact
of being a speaking subject.
Citizenship is important: its the starting point for the
determination of official normalcy. A person with an illness can
follow, or not, a certain number of avenues to rational meaning. We
might move beyond this level, but not automatically. From this
perspective it is interesting to have heard (in a presentation by
Jacques Schotte) the word transference in the sense of
transportthat is, the seventeenth-century sense of transport, the
notion of amorous transports. Whats either transferred as meaning,
or blocked, is a certain number of signifiers in a given society,
such that, within a set of historical conditions and a given
context, an individual is only able to articulate herself through
her encounter with an institution which might be, for example, the
doctor. The problem for this individual may be to know how to
become a subject under these conditions. What good is it to her to
continue to be a speaking subject and to speak effectively? The
subject is not necessarily the individual, or even an individual.
We have to excavate her at the heart of her alienation, reopen a
potentiality of her history in the opacity of her situation. The
patient-subject who finds us: perhaps she is there, body and soul,
before you, but perhaps shes still the prisoner of a file in the
supervisors briefcase at the factory, or maybe well find her
waiting at the local bar where other patients will give her better
hospitality than we doctors ever could.
What will the unconscious subject reveal in that moment? Its a
matter of a word, its the manifestation, even the most minimal, of
an event that will make her take hold of herself. Under these
conditions, anything at alla meeting, meds, shock therapy,
newspapers, the Chinese Revolution, a nursery rhymecan produce
meaning that could intervene
in a decisive way as a form of interpretation (broadly
understood) in a psychotherapeutic institution. The psychic
energies of a medium-sized mass excitedly watching a soccer game or
thrilling to a trashy operetta if they were liberated from their
chains and guided toward the rational ends of the workers
movementcould no longer be kept down. Its from this perspective
that we must analyze the sexual economy. (Wilhelm Reich) While the
psychoanalyst contents herself with a laughable assortment of
interpretations, the institution has the potential to be, itself,
an analyzing subjectone that does not coincide with an individual.
It doesnt become this automatically; most often, it remains a blind
structure, fundamentally operating in the register of alienation,
with the subject referred back to herself and the individual left
in the impasse of the status quo.
Why institutional psychotherapy? It means that we wish to close
the books on the doctor as individual, colleague, citizen, who
claims to be the one who speaks for or who is the spokesperson for
the institution
as subjectnot necessarily consciously. Is she not herself the
unconscious prisoner as much as the agent of this process, with her
family life, her culture, her opinions, and so on. The question is
to see whether she can become an element that articulates itself,
in an authentic relationship, to the hospital staff and all those
who encounter what is spoken of there. Its only then that we can
hope to restructure the proceedings and different levels of a
psychoanalytic treatment, or the treatment of a psychoanalytic
institution. This is the precondition for any possibility of
writing a real institutional study.
If we do not begin with the definition of the subject as
unconscious subject, or better yet as collective agent of
enunciation, we run the risk of reifying the institutionand
moreover society as a wholeas structure. In so doing we may wind up
in a false dichotomy between
Institution/Panel by Rebecca Zorach
The raucous noise of the event is filtered out, but the clenched
tension is there, the lapses and the disconnects, the missing tape
(there had to be some number of minutes of missing tape) are duly
evoked by the spaces between the screens: gaps over which a shadow
might be cast or a mic might be grabbed. The falling, floating
fugues of color.
In the history of art a panel can also be a wooden support on
which a painting is made. Pattens Panel is a quadriptych, not a
typical format in late medieval religious art but not unheard of
either, one that might fold in upon itself or open up, but in any
case lacks an obvious center.
What reason can there be in madness? Diagnostic, ecstatic,
corrosive, digressive? What reason is in torture?
Is the institution any more or less a subject of analysis now
than it was in 1975?
(And what brings a former editor of Semiotext(e) to direct Zero
Dark Thirty?)
The collective subject, the panel, the space between
individuals, the space between individual and institution. The
answer may not be found there, but the question is.