Hysteria, or what the body knows

You can read about the progress of my new practice-led research work on the depraved epistemology of hysteria here. I will be presenting a performative paper at the Sensuous Object conference on the 29th September 2011at Medical Museion, Copenhagen. Here is the abstract:

THE MATERIAL SENSUOUSNESS OF A HYSTERIC’S PERFORMANCE

Hysteria is an outdated diagnosis for a neurotic condition where the patient manifests psychic traumas in the body. In the nineteenth century, Dr Jean-Martin Charcot established the Salpetrière, a hospital in Paris dedicated to the treatment of hysterics – then mainly women. This is also where Sigmund Freud trained and discovered a passion for neurology, leading him to develop psychoanalysis. Charcot left a legacy of medical practices involving photographs and drawings to support his clinicaoanatomic method, and the objects he produced demonstrate the performativity involved in hysteria, and its research. As with any performance, objects, and their sensuousness, are important props.

The first accounts of hysteria relate a ‘wandering womb’, and fits, swooning and violent convulsions are some of the common symptoms reported. Restraining belts were often used in hospitals to keep patients safe. But how much was the contact of the leather – and sometimes the chains – a stimulant for the contractions in the body? How much did this limp object, only coming alive when in touch with the patient’s body enable the hysteric to ask her question – known as Che Vuoi?, what do you want from me?

Hysteria and seduction are inextricably linked. The hysteric is a performer, displaying some of the scopophilic characteristics of the pervert in their pleasure derived from being looked at. The alienist Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault worked with kleptomaniac women, interns in psychiatric units because of the sensuous reactions they had to fabrics such as velvet, silk or velour. The materiality of the object, as with the leather belt, was the conduit to the manifestation of their symptoms. What happens when the belt is not used is evident in a scene of Andrzej Zulawski’s 1981 film ‘Possession’ which I will show and discuss. Through it, I will also explore the positions of the hysteric and the pervert in relation to objects, seduction and being seen.

Make me yours: The psychodynamics of seduction through works of art

You can see the photographic submission of my PhD here. Below, is the abstract of my thesis.

In Fatal Strategies, Jean Baudrillard argues that music and literature are seductive in themselves. Given his later interest in photography and the work of Sophie Calle, it could be argued that seduction is also an attribute of the visual arts. But what makes a work of art seductive? My research is concerned with the relational and psychodynamic aspects of the encounter between the work of the art and the viewer; one that, when seduction operates, is characterised by interplay, flow and conflict.

The first step towards disentangling this problem is to define seduction, a concept that is contingent, ridden with confusion, contradictions and connotative interpretations, even in the gallery space (as recent exhibitions on seduction demonstrate). Any attempt at pinning down the term, however, shows that it is pervasive and as a ruling principle, it operates everywhere – especially where efforts to study it are made. The problem, then, becomes a methodological one: how might one study seduction as it operates in the encounter with works of art? I put forward a subjective, practice-led approach, comprised of three strands: artistic – in particular photography – psychoanalytic and writing practices. All three enact the self-reflexive methodology that is at the core of the contribution my project aims to make and which is constituted of three steps: recognition, capture and reflection.

The context for the research is multiform, interdisciplinary and is located in converging fields concerned with textual and visual material: eighteenth-century libertine novels, in particular Les Liaisons Dangereuses and the writings of the Marquis de Sade; Giacomo Casanova’s memoirs; Frank Sinatra’s peculiar arrest in 1938; Sigmund Freud’s abandonment of the seduction theory; Søren Kierkegaard’s games between Johannes and Cordelia; Karl Marx’s commodity fetishism; Naia del Castillo’s works, which are linked to Surrealist concerns, and Jacques Lacan’s mysterious objet petit a, the object cause of desire. All these play a part in delineating seduction.

My own (nearly missed) encounter with a work of art, Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés, and a bold shoe in a New York shop window are used as support for the writing, together with the occasional appearances of a detective – who will provide the forensic gaze required of PhD studies – and other minor characters.