Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts: Rising in Revolt 3030663590, 9783030663599

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Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts Rising in Revolt Edited by Johanna Braun

Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts

Johanna Braun Editor

Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts Rising in Revolt

This publication stems out of the Erwin Schrödinger research project “The Hysteric as Conceptual Operator”: [ J 4164 -G24], funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF); conducted at Stanford University, University of California, Los Angeles, University of Vienna, Austria.

Editor Johanna Braun University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA, USA Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

ISBN 978-3-030-66359-9    ISBN 978-3-030-66360-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66360-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Andrea Lehsiak / Source: Dancing mania on a pilgrimage to the church at Sint-Jans-Molenbeek, a 1642 engraving by Hendrick Hondius after a 1564 drawing by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To the hysterical muses Lilli Braun z”l v’ Levi

Acknowledgments

Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts: Rising in Revolt is part of the postdoctoral research project “The Hysteric as Conceptual Operator” (FWF): [J 4164-G24], which was conducted at the Center of European and Russian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, at the Department of Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna from 2018 to 2020. This entire project, and the many connections that were facilitated through it, such as this volume, would not have been possible without the support of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), which not only has provided the necessary financial and institutional resources to conduct such an ambitious project but has also shown how relevant it is to endorse such in-depth study of this currently inflamed “hysterical discourse”, thereby attesting its mission to support the ongoing development of (Austrian) science and basic research at a high international level. An enthusiastic and dramatic shout out goes to my ever-supportive advisor Arno Böhler, habilitated lecturer at the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Vienna, and his always enthusiastic and encouraging partner in crime Susanne Valerie Granzer, professor emeritus at the Max Reinhardt Seminar at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, whose always enthralling spirits have been supporting me since the early conception of this project. They both took the long journey to California upon themselves to make sure that my hard labor for this project was not

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just manifested under a palm tree in Mae West’s magical garden cabana. I will always remember fondly our joined performance at the Los Angeles theater on Halloween eve—together with Elke Krasny, professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, whom I want to thank for the many hour-­ long conversations on the phone while simultaneously walking and thinking through the urban jungles, and my very own partner in crime Michael Niemetz—which marks the enchanting secret premiere of the event series #masshysteria. Hysteria, Politics, and Performance Strategies. Several of the essays collected here are the result of the many long and engaging discussions during this event series, which took place at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in November 2018, for which I want to thank the co-hosting departments: the UCLA Department of French and Francophone Studies and UCLA Department of Germanic Languages, and the Department Chair Prof. Dominic Thomas; the UCLA Department of English, especially the Department Chair Prof. Lowell Gallagher; the UCLA Department of Theater, and its Chair Prof. Brian Kite; the UCLA Center for Performance Studies, and its Director Prof. Suk-Young Kim; the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, and its Director Prof. Rachel C. Lee; the UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies, and its Ludwig Kahn Director, Prof. Sarah Abrevaya Stein; the UCLA LGBTQ Studies Program, and its Chair, Prof. Alicia Gaspar de Alba; and the UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, and its Department Chair Prof. Dan Froot. Most importantly I want to thank particularly my advisor on campus, Prof. Laure Murat, and director of the UCLA Center for European and Russian Studies (CERS), for her continuous support during my productive and inspiring time at UCLA, as well as CERS’ Liana Grancea and Sanja Lacan who were crucial to the accomplishment of these events. I also want to thank Sean Metzger, professor in the UCLA Department of Theater and president of Performance Studies international, who was an encouraging and supportive force throughout this project and the successful implementation of #masshysteria on campus. It is hard to put a simple “thank you” to having the honor to work with some of the leading Hystorians and inspiring creative thinkers of our times, who have directly and indirectly shaped the outcomes of this project. In defiance to not fall victim to aphasia, I want to wholeheartedly thank Elisabeth Bronfen, Anna Furse, Hélène Cixous, Sander L. Gilman and Elaine Showalter, for their very generous openness to participate in

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this project. It seems like a distant dream that I had the privilege to meet Elaine Showalter and Sander L.  Gilman on separate occasions for this event series on the UCLA campus and had the luxury of uninterrupted hysterical discussions. I’m melancholy that as a result of the globally raging pandemic, the event series at the University in Vienna, which was planned for the summer semester in 2020, had to be canceled or at least postponed for the time being. What a privileged sorrow to think about something so subordinate in our current time. I want to thank Elisabeth Bronfen, Hélène Cixous and Anna Furse, nevertheless, who have contributed to this project in unique and generous ways, as can be witnessed in this volume, remotely from the safety of their homes. I also want to thank Jennifer DeVere Brody, professor at Stanford’s Department of Theater and Performance Studies, director of Stanford’s Center for the Comparative Study in Race and Ethnicity and my advisor on campus, who was tremendously helpful in reworking the original book proposal and gave me the confidence to follow the hysteric’s flight beyond the often covered borders of imagination within the arts. Thank you to Alexandra Cox, from Coquelicot Translation, who has continuously shaped my at times hysterically scattered thoughts in a constructive while sensitive manner. This publication would not have seen the light of day without the untiring work and support of Palgrave Macmillan’s editorial team, whom I want to thank for their continuous patience and support for the at times pathological sleepiness of the editorial process on my part. I want to dedicate my hysterical labor to the three most supportive forces of this project: my ever loving and patient partner in crime Michael Niemetz, without whom I wouldn’t be able to work so carelessly away into the days and nights; our madly loved Levi Braun, who is performing and training his unique hysterical talents tirelessly daily; and my beloved Lilli zt”l Braun, who has shaped the form of this publication in many ways and whom I miss dearly every day. And of course, last but not least, the most significant and sincere acknowledgments go to all the wonderful authors, with whom it was just so delightful to work on this volume and beyond. Thank you: Tanya Augsburg, Thomas Ballhausen, Elisabeth Bronfen, Hélène Cixous, Arno Böhler and Susanne Valerie Granzer, Leora Farber, Anna Furse, Laura González, Elke Krasny, Mette Kjærgaard Præst, Shana Lutker, Jonathan W.  Marshall, Cindy Rehm, Elisabeth Schäfer, Anne Scheffer, Ingrid E. Stevens, Amanda du Preez, and Nathan J.  Timpano, and the many

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inspiring artists whose hysterical works are the subject of this humble undertaking. Without your hard labor and dedication Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts: Rising in Revolt would have only resulted in hysterical pseudocyesis on my end. In the name of everyone implicated in the publication of this book, I want to send a grateful thank you to everyone involved in the production, international shipment and delivery of this book to our hopeful readers. Which leads me to the final addressees of these acknowledgments: I’m sending heartfelt thanks from the past to all the engaged readers of Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts: Rising in Revolt in the future, who will hopefully be inspired by the many thoughtful contributions in this volume, continue the ever contagiously growing hysteric dialogue and enrich the field even further.

Contents

 Introduction: Searching for Methods in this Madness  1 Johanna Braun L’arc de cercle, or the Movement of Modernism (1620–2020) 21 Nathan J. Timpano Hysterias in Pictures 73 Anna Furse  From “Private Theatres Onstage” to Anti-­Hysterical Performances: Reclaiming the Feminist Interest in Hysterical Performances Since the 1990s105 Tanya Augsburg  State of Anxiety: Hysterical Studies for Reproduction Struggles127 Elke Krasny Hysteria: Turning a Diagnosis into a Call149 Mette Kjærgaard Præst

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To Arc, and Other Studies on Hysterical Gesturing171 Cindy Rehm and Johanna Braun  The Other Self of the Imagination: Cindy Sherman’s Hysterical Performance179 Elisabeth Bronfen  Hysterical Representation in the Art of Mary Sibande203 Anne Scheffer, Amanda du Preez, and Ingrid E. Stevens  Storm in a Teacup, and Other Minor Melodramas: A Narratives of Containment and Excess in Cultured Colonies/ Colonial Cultures233 Leora Farber Making Ghosts Heard257 Laura González  Hysterical Aesthetics in Contemporary Performance: Theater, Dance, Voice271 Jonathan W. Marshall H. Y. S. T. et al., on Archiving Hysteria’s Past in the Present297 Shana Lutker and Johanna Braun  Male Hysteria and the Archive: An Auto-­Ethnographic Reflection305 Thomas Ballhausen Notes on Hysteria in and as Arts-Based Research: a Case Study319 Johanna Braun

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 ora with Medusa: Is Hysterical Writing a Subversive D Revolution?339 Elisabeth Schäfer  ecture Performance: On Truth and its Relation to the Cellar L Regions of the Body357 Arno Böhler and Susanne Valerie Granzer  ia Telefaune, a Phone Call with Hélène Cixous369 V Hélène Cixous and Elisabeth Schäfer Index375

Notes on Contributors

Tanya  Augsburg  is Professor of Humanities and Creative Arts at San Francisco State University. She is an interdisciplinary feminist performance scholar, arts writer and curator who can be occasionally persuaded to perform. She is the author of Becoming Interdisciplinary: An Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies, 2016, and co-editor of The Politics of Interdisciplinary Studies, 2009, and her essays have appeared in The Drama Review; Text and Performance Quarterly; Issues in Interdisciplinary Studies; n.paradoxa: International Feminist Art Journal; World Futures; The Colorado Critical Review; and Critical Matrix: The Princeton Journal of Women, Gender, and Culture. Thomas Ballhausen  is a senior artist at Mozarteum University Salzburg and the head of special collections at Literaturhaus Wien/Documentation Centre for Contemporary Austrian Literature, Vienna. His research focuses on media history, textuality and literature and/as artistic research. He is the author of several scholarly and literary books, as well as co-­ author of the monographs Fauna: Language Arts and the New Order of Imaginary Animals, 2018, and Flora: Language Arts in the Age of Information, 2020. Arno Böhler  is an associate professor at the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Vienna. Together with Susanne Valerie Granzer, he is founder of the philosophy performance festival, Philosophy on Stage, and head of the residency program baseCollective for arts-based philosophy and artistic research in South India. They have developed new cross-­ disciplinary strategies between philosophy and the arts to provide xv

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­ hilosophy again with its materiality, corporeality, sensibility and vulnerap bility. From 2014 to 2018, he was the Principle Investigator of the PEEK-­ Project “Artist Philosophers. Philosophy as Arts-Based Research” [AR 275-G21], sponsored by the Austrian Science Funds (FWF) and situated at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Johanna  Braun  the editor of this volume, is an artist, scholar, curator and Principle Investigator of the postdoctoral research project “The Hysteric as Conceptual Operator” [J 4164-G24], sponsored by the Austrian Science Funds (FWF) and situated at the University of California, Los Angeles, Stanford University and the University of Vienna (2018–2020). Her academic and artistic research focuses on (new) hysteria, disability and performance studies. She has published the monograph All-American-Gothic Girl: The Justice Seeking Girl in US Narratives, 2017, and edited the artistic-philosophical volume Beschwörungsrituale, 2016, and most recently the volume Performing Hysteria: Image and Imaginations, 2020, in conjunction to numerous contributions to anthologies, art catalogues and journals. Elisabeth Bronfen  is Professor of English and American Studies at the English Department at the University of Zürich and Global Distinguished Professor at New  York University. A specialist in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, she has also written articles and books in the area of gender studies, psychoanalysis, film, cultural theory and visual culture. She is the author of The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and Its Discontent, 1998; Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic, 1992; Crossmappings: On Visual Culture, 2018; and, most recently, Angesteckt: Zeitgemässes über Pandemie und Kultur, 2020. Hélène  Cixous  is a Professor Emerita at the Université de Paris 8 and Founder and former Director of the Centres de Recherches en Études Féminines at Paris VIII University. She has published over fifty full-length books of fiction, ten plays and many essays, including the influential and much-anthologized essay “Le rire de la Méduse” (“The Laugh of the Medusa”) from 1975. Leora  Farber  is an Associate Professor and the Director of the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre, Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture, University of Johannesburg. She works as an artist, academic, editor, curator and postgraduate supervisor. She has ­published

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articles in numerous academic journals including Critical Arts, Image & Text, Textile—Journal of Cloth and Culture and Visual Anthropology Review. Farber has guest-edited three special editions of Critical Arts and Image & Text respectively and has edited four scholarly volumes. Her artwork has been shown on numerous international and South African platforms. Anna  Furse  is Professor of Theater and Performance at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she is Co-director of the Centre of the Body and Director of the MA in Performance Making. A veteran award-winning theater artist, she writes and produces her own works internationally, through commissions and co-productions. She is a published author of plays and theoretical writing and an Artistic Director of her own production company, Athletes of the Heart. She has published most notably her monograph Augustine (BIG HYSTERIA), 1997/2013, and most recently Performing Nerves: Four Plays, Four Essays, 2020. Laura  González  is an artist, writer, yoga teacher and an Athenaeum Research Fellow at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and teacher of postgraduate students at Transart Institute. Her work inhabits the space between medical humanities, psychoanalysis, performance and Eastern thought, investigating knowledge production and the body of the hysteric through practice. She has published a monograph Make Me Yours: How Art Seduces, 2016; the co-edited volume Madness, Women and the Power of Art, 2013; and the essay “Hosting Hysteria” in Translating Across Sensory and Linguistic Borders: Intersemiotic Journeys Between Media, Macmillan, 2019, and is writing a monograph on hysteria. Susanne  Valerie  Granzer is a professional actress and Professor for Performing Arts at the renowned Max Reinhardt Seminar of the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna. She is the Co-director of the residency program for arts-based philosophy and artistic research in South India, Co-founder of the Viennese art factory baseCollective (former GRENZ_film), and Co-director of the international festival series Philosophy on Stage. She is the co-editor of Kunst_Wissenschaft: Don’t Mind the Gap!, 2014, and Philosophy on Stage: Philosophie als künstlerische Forschung, 2018, and her book Schauspieler außer sich: Exponiertheit und performative Kunst, 2011, was published in 2016 under the title Actors and the Art of Performance: Under Exposure.

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Mette Kjærgaard Præst  is an independent curator and producer working within contemporary art, scientific research and community engagement. She co-curated FotoNoviembre biennale in Tenerife titled Myths of the Near Future (2019–2020). Other recent projects include ON EDGE— Living in an Age of Anxiety for Science Gallery London, King’s College London (2019–2020) and PS/Y’s Hysteria (2017–2018). Kjærgaard Præst holds an MA in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art. Elke Krasny  is Professor for Art and Education at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is the curator, author and editor of numerous exhibitions, books and essays. Edited volumes include Critical Care: Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet, with Angelika Fitz, 2019, and In Reserve! The Household, with Regina Bittner, 2016; 2020 essays include “The Unfinished Feminist Revolution. Performing the Crisis of Reproduction”, FWK Journal, and “Care Feminism for Living with an Infected Planet”, Akbild Online. Shana  Lutker  is a Los Angeles-based artist and Executive Director of Project X Foundation for Art & Criticism, a nonprofit art organization that publishes the contemporary art quarterly X-TRA, the website x-­traonline.org, and presents public programs. Her work was shown in many US and international venues, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects; the 2014 Whitney Biennial; Performa 13; the SculptureCenter; Hauser & Wirth; and Moscow Museum of Modern Art; and has been covered in Art in America, Artforum, Artillery, Frieze, Hyperallergic, Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, among others. Jonathan W. Marshall  is a senior lecturer and the postgraduate research coordinator at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Edith Cowan University. He has published extensively on Charcot and performance and is the author of the monograph Performing Neurology: The Dramaturgy of Dr Jean-Martin Charcot, 2016. Recent publications include “Traumatic Dances of ‘The Non-Self’: Bodily Incoherence and the Hysterical Archive”, in Performing Hysteria, 2020, and “Disciplined Subjects and Social Performance: Entertainments at the Fremantle Lunatic Asylum, 1873–1906”, in Australasian Drama Studies, 2020.

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Amanda du Preez  is a professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Pretoria, and co-editor of two South African journals, namely De Arte and Image & Text. She is the author of Gendered Bodies and New Technologies: Rethinking Embodiment in a Cyber-era, 2009, and has published essays, such as “For Real: Hysteria, Transsexuality and Femininity as Masquerade”, in her edited volume Taking a Hard Look: Gender and Visual Culture, 2009, and “Putting on Appearances: Mimetic Representations of Hysteria”, in De Arte 2004, among many others. She is also a member of the Governing Board of the International Association for Visual Culture. Cindy  Rehm  is a Los Angeles-based artist and an educator. She is the Co-founder and Director of “Craftswoman House Temporary Residence”, a project dedicated to presenting feminist-centered works in Southern California. She is a member of the Association of Hysteric Curators and former Director of the Baltimore installation space spare room. She is the recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship in Media from the Tennessee State Arts Commission, a Learning to Love You More Grant, and a Faculty Development Grant from Middle Tennessee State University and her work has been shown at national and international institutions. Elisabeth  Schäfer is a philosopher at the Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna, Austria. Her areas of research and teaching include deconstruction, queer feminist philosophy, Écriture feminine, writing as artistic research, performance philosophy. She is the co-editor of the first German translation of Hélène Cixous’ Le Rire de la Méduse, 2013, as well as author of several book chapters and essays in journals, for example, “Writing as Artistic Research”, in Teaching Artistic Research. Conversations Across Cultures, 2020, and “Open Text—Open Performance: Hélène Cixous and Ariane Mnouchkine”, together with Esther Hutfless and Gertrude Postl, in The Routledge Companion to Performance Philosophy, 2020. Anne Scheffer  is a senior lecturer at the Department of Fine and Studio Arts at Tshwane University of Technology, Pretoria. She is interested in the intersection of postcolonialism and feminism and particularly in the theme of hysteria within this context. Her field of interest is the exploration of subjectivity in contemporary South African art. She has held solo exhibitions at Tina Skukan Gallery and the National Museum of Cultural History.

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Ingrid  E.  Stevens (1952–2019) was an associate professor in the Department of Fine and Applied Arts at Tshwane University of Technology, Pretoria. She holds a D Tech (Fine Arts) degree from that institution, which focused on sustainability in South African craft projects, while her master’s degree investigated theoretical aspects of contemporary art criticism. She has published extensively, both in the popular press and in scholarly journals, on contemporary art, South African crafts and the discipline of art criticism. Her most recent publication is “Travelling Through Time: The Aesthetic Experience and Rogier van der Weyden’s ‘The Descent from the Cross’”, SAJAH, 2018. Nathan J. Timpano  is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Miami. His research focuses on modern art and visual culture in Europe and the Americas, with a specialty in German and Austrian Symbolism and Expressionism. He is the author of  Constructing the Viennese Modern Body: Art, Hysteria, and the Puppet,  2017, as well as several exhibition catalogues, book chapters and essays in journals such as  Art History,  Oxford Art Journal,  Journal of Art Historiography and  caa. reviews. Before joining the faculty in Miami, he held curatorial positions at Harvard University’s Busch-Reisinger Museum and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

List of Figures

L’arc de cercle, or the Movement of Modernism (1620–2020) Fig. 1

Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4

Fig. 5

Adrien Delahaye and Emile Lecrosnier, 2nd Period—Period of Clownism; Fig. 1: Phase of Grand Movements; Fig. 2: Phase of Contortions (Circular Arc), after original drawings by Paul Richer, 1885, metal engravings. Reproduced in Paul Richer’s Études Cliniques sur la Grande Hystérie ou Hystéro-Épilepsie (1885), Plate 3. Cornell University Library, Ithaca. Artwork in the public domain. (Photo: Courtesy of the author) 23 Albert Londe, Hysterical Attack in a Male Patient, 1885, twelve chrono-­photographs, various sizes. Artwork in the public domain. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons) 24 Pierre Aristide André Brouillet, A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière, 1887, oil on canvas. Paris Descartes University, Paris. (Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY) 25 Artemisia Gentileschi, Esther Before Ahasuerus, ca. 1625–1635, oil on canvas, 208.3 × 273.7 cm. Gift of Elinor Dorrance Ingersoll, 1969. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Artwork in the public domain. (Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art) 28 Gian Lorenzo Bernini, The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (detail), 1652, marble. Cornaro Chapel, Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome. Artwork in the public domain. (Photo: Courtesy of the author)30

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Fig. 6

Fig. 7

Fig. 8

Fig. 9

Fig. 10

Fig. 11 Fig. 12

Fig. 13 Fig. 14

Fig. 15

Henry Fuseli, Phaedra Reveals Her Passion for Hippolytus to the Troezenian Women in Her Delirium; her Nurse at the Right, 1815, graphite on paper, 19.7 × 30.5 cm. Gift of Gloria Middeldorf in Memory of Ulrich Middeldorf. Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University, Bloomington. (Photo: Eskenazi Museum of Art/Shanti Knight) 34 Sir Charles Bell, Convulsion, illustration on page 101 of Bell’s Essays on the Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression, 1824. Princeton University Library, Princeton. Artwork in the public domain. (Photo: Courtesy of the author) 36 Henry Fuseli, Dante Swoons Before the Soaring Souls of Paolo and Francesca, Virgil at His Side, ca. 1818, etching and aquatint on ivory wove paper, 500 × 332 cm. Gift of Dorothy Braude Edinburg to the Harry B. and Bessie K. Braude Memorial Collection. Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. Artwork in the public domain. (Photo: Art Institute of Chicago) 37 Napoleon Sarony, Sarah Bernhardt in The Lady of the Camellias, 1880, photograph. New York Public Library, New York. Artwork in the public domain. (Photo: New York Public Library Digital Collections) 40 Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Jane Avril, 1899, five-color lithograph on thin wove paper, 56 × 38 cm. Gift of Lessing J. Rosenwald. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Artwork in the public domain. (Photo: National Gallery of Art) 42 Paul Sescau, Jane Avril, ca. 1899, photograph. Artwork in the public domain. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons) 43 Auguste Rodin, Kneeling Man, before 1889, bronze, cast in 1960 at Fonderie Rudier, 10.4 × 12.1 × 32.5 cm. Museo Soumaya, Mexico City. (Photo: Museo Soumaya/Wikimedia Commons)44 Gustav Klimt, Medicine, 1900–1907, oil on canvas, dimensions unknown. Destroyed by fire in 1945 at Schloss Immendorf. Artwork in the public domain. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons) 46 David Allen & Sons, Ltd., Maud Allan as “Salome,” 1908, chromotype photograph, 15.1 × 10 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Given by the American Friends of the V&A through the generosity of Leslie and Judith Schreyer and Gabrielle Shrem Schreyer. © Victoria and Albert Museum. (Photo: Victoria and Albert Museum) 49 Egon Schiele, Lying Female Nude, 1918, collotype print, 29 × 44 cm. Posthumously printed in Egon Schiele: Handzeichnungen (1920), edition of 510 artist portfolios. Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies, Los Angeles

  List of Figures 

Fig. 16

Fig. 17

Fig. 18

Fig. 19

Fig. 20

County Museum of Art, Los Angeles. Artwork in the public domain. (Photo: Courtesy of the author) Hans Bellmer, Doll: Variations on a Montage of an Articulated Minor, 1934, eighteen gelatin silver photographic prints, each print approx. 11.7 × 7.6 cm. First published on pages 30 and 31 in Minotaure (Winter 1934–1935). Special Collections, University of Miami Libraries, Coral Gables. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. (Photo: Courtesy of the author) Salvador Dalí, The Hysterical Arch, 1937, ink on paper, 55.9 × 76.2 cm. Collection of the Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL (USA) 2020. © 2020 Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society. (Photo: The Dalí Museum) Anonymous, Untitled (Interior view of the 1938 Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme; Hélène Vanel), Paris, Galerie Beaux-Arts, January 17–February 22, 1938, vintage gelatin silver print, 15.2 × 20 cm. Ubu Gallery, New York. (Photo: Ubu Gallery, New York) Louise Bourgeois, Arch of Hysteria, 1993, bronze with silver patina, 84 × 101.5 × 58.5 cm. Galeria Soledad Lorenzo, Madrid. © 2020 The Easton Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. (Photo: Album / Art Resource, NY) Kara Walker, Fons Americanus, 2019–2020, site-specific installation, mixed media, 12.8 m high. Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London. (Photo: Courtesy of the author)

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Hysterias in Pictures Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4 Fig. 5 Fig. 6

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, La Loge (Theatre box), 1874. (Photo: The Courtauld Gallery, London) Jean Béraud, La Proposition, 1885–90. (Photo: Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris) Jean Béraud, Les Coulisses de L’Opéra de Paris, 1889. (Photo: Musée Carnavalet—Histoire de Paris) Sir John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1851–52. (Photo: Tate Britain, London) Anna Pavlova as Giselle (the Mad Scene), 1903. Imperial Russian Ballet. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons) Pierre Aristide André Brouillet, Une Leçon Clinique à la Salpêtrière, 1887. (Photo: Wellcome Institute Library, London)

75 76 77 78 79 80

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Fig. 7

Fig. 8

Fig. 9

Fig. 10

Fig. 11 Fig. 12

Fig. 13 Fig. 14 Fig. 15 Fig. 16 Fig. 17 Fig. 18 Fig. 19

Albert Londe, Attitudes Passionnelles: Extase (Augustine) (Photograph).  1878. Désiré-Magloire Bourneville and Paul L. Regnard, L’Iconographie Photographique de La Salpêtrière, Charcot Library, Salpêtrière, Paris. (Photo: Wellcome Institute Library, London) 82 Albert Londe, Catalepsy (Augustine) (Photograph). 1878. Désiré-Magloire Bourneville and Paul L. Regnard, L’Iconographie Photographique de La Salpêtrière, Charcot Library, Salpêtrière, Paris. (Photo: Wellcome Institute Library, London)83 Albert Londe, Lethargy (Augustine) (Photograph), 1878. Désiré-­Magloire Bourneville and Paul L. Regnard, L’Iconographie Photographique de La Salpêtrière, Charcot Library, Salpêtrière, Paris. (Photo: Wellcome Institute Library, London)85 Albert Londe, Attitudes Passionnelles: Menace (Augustine) (Photograph), 1878. Désiré-Magloire Bourneville and Paul L. Regnard, L’Iconographie Photographique de La Salpêtrière, Charcot Library, Salpêtrière, Paris. (Photo: Wellcome Institute Library, London) 87 Wilhelm Röntgen, X-Ray of Anna Bertha Röntgen’s Hand, 1895. (Photo: Wellcome Institute Library, London) 89 Shona Morris as Augustine in Augustine (Big Hysteria), by Furse 1991. (Photo: Sheila Burnett. These gestures are replicas of the original Augustine photographs, performed during the production)91 “Hypnosis.” Shona Morris as Augustine, Wolfe Morris as Charcot and James Dreyfus as Freud in Augustine (Big Hysteria), Furse 1991. (Photo: Sheila Burnett) 92 Mathew Wernham and Diogo André in Shocks, by Anna Furse, Craiglockhart, Edinburgh. (Photo: Nina Klaff, 2018) 94 Diogo André and Chorus in Shocks, by Anna Furse, Craiglockhart, Edinburgh. (Photo: Nina Klaff, 2018) 96 Diogo André and Chorus in Shocks, by Anna Furse, Craiglockhart, Edinburgh. (Photo: Nina Klaff, 2018) 97 Diogo André in Shocks, by Anna Furse, Craiglockhart, Edinburgh. (Photo: Nina Klaff, 2018) 98 (Above) Mathew Wernham and Diogo Andre in Shocks, by Anna Furse, Craiglockhart, Edinburgh. (Photo: Nina Klaff, 2018) 100 (Below) Mathew Wernham in Shocks, by Anna Furse, Craiglockhart, Edinburgh. (Photo: Nina Klaff, 2018) 101

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Hysteria: Turning a Diagnosis into a Call Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Fig. 3 Fig. 4

Florence Peake and Eve Stainton, Slug Horizons, 2018, CoolTan Arts, commissioned by PS/Y for Hysteria. (Photo by Anne Tetzlaff) 155 Zadie Xa, Fishscales and Poisonous Darts, 2016. In The Conch, Sea Urchin and Brass Bell, 2017. Pump House Gallery. Part of PS/Y’s Hysteria program. (Photo by Eoin Carey) 158 Larry Achiampong, Relic 1, 2017, King’s College London, commissioned by PS/Y for Hysteria. (Photo by Sue Parkhill) 160 Marie Kølbæk Iversen, Autumn Equinox Celebration, 2017, LUX, commissioned by PS/Y for Hysteria. (Photo by Christa Holka)163

To Arc, and Other Studies on Hysterical Gesturing Fig. 1

Cindy Rehm, Witch in the Chamber 6, 2020. (Photo: Courtesy of the artist)

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Hysterical Representation in the Art of Mary Sibande Fig. 1

Fig. 2 Fig. 3

Mary Sibande, A Reversed Retrogress, Scene 1, The Purple Shall Govern series (2013). Mixed media installation, 1800 × 1200 × 1200 cm. (Photograph by A Pokroy. Image courtesy of the artist and Gallery MoMo) Mary Sibande, A Terrible Beauty, The Purple Shall Govern series (2013). Digital archival print, 111 × 113 cm. (Image courtesy of the artist and Gallery MoMo) Mary Sibande, A Terrible Beauty Is Born, The Purple Shall Govern series (2013). Digital archival print, 110 × 320 cm. (Photograph by J Potgieter. Image courtesy of the artist Mary Sibande and Gallery MoMo)

213 215

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 Storm in a Teacup, and Other Minor Melodramas: A Narratives of Containment and Excess in Cultured Colonies/ Colonial Cultures Fig. 1

Leora Farber, cultured colonies/colonial cultures, 2020. (Photo: Courtesy of the artist. Photography: Bo Wong)

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 ysterical Aesthetics in Contemporary Performance: Theater, H Dance, Voice Fig. 1 Fig. 2

Fig. 3 Fig. 4 Fig. 5 Fig. 6

Fig. 7

The self-divided subject: contortions executed during the “demoniacal variety” of hysterical seizures (Charcot and Richer 1887, p. 103). (Courtesy of Harvard Medical Library) 274 Albert Londe using flash and stop-motion photography on a hysteric, La Nature (1883). Quoted by Max Ernst in his collage book The Hundred Headless Woman (1929). (Image courtesy of Conservatoire Numérique des Arts et Métiers) 276 Albert Londe’s stop-motion photographs of male hysteric, Leon Brodsky. Richer’s sketches of these photographs appeared in Charcot’s published lessons. (Wiki Commons) 277 Narelle Benjamin in Cordelia’s Beresford’s I Dream of Augustine (2005). (Image courtesy of Beresford) 278 Knowledge & Melancholy: An Autobiographical Fiction (1997) by Margaret Cameron. (Photograph by Ponch Hawkes. Courtesy of Hawkes) 285 The Proscenium, written and directed by Margaret Cameron; Bachelor of Performing Arts graduate production, Roundhouse Theatre, Edith Cowan University, Perth, 2008. (Image courtesy of Julie Robson and Edith Cowan University) 286 Sage Pbbbt (Harlow) in performance, Postgraduate Research Showcase, Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, 2018. (Photograph by Stephen Heath. Image courtesy of WAAPA@ECU) 287

H. Y. S. T. et al., on Archiving Hysteria’s Past in the Present Fig. 1

Shana Lutker, H., 2010, leather, wood, steel, 22 x 38 x 36 inches. Installatin of H. Y. S. T. et al. at Vielmetter Los Angeles. (Photo: Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles)

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Introduction: Searching for Methods in this Madness Johanna Braun

So if they want to call you crazy? Fine. Show them what crazy can do. —Serena Williams, “Dream Crazier,” 2019 (Nike Commercial ft. Serena Williams)

It is not without irony that a globally operating sportswear cooperation, namely Nike, aired a commercial during the Academy Awards broadcast in 2019 that, according to its website, “shines a spotlight on female athletes who have broken barriers, brought people together through their performance and inspired generations of athletes to chase after their dreams,” during a time when the term “hysteria” was trending on social media and in public debates. Opening the short film, Williams reflects, “If we get angry, we’re hysterical, irrational, or just plain crazy.” The commercial, in

J. Braun (*) University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Braun (ed.), Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66360-5_1

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many aspects, plays off a series of public discussions that labeled publicly visible women who take agency, or protest social injustice, as hysterical. The commercial plays off the sentiment at the time that the term hysteria was “reclaimed,” which led to a write-up in the New York Times on the success of the ad and how it is “Taking Back ‘Hysterical’” (Salam 2019). The ad itself, and the chosen wording on Nike’s webpage, also brings to mind the athletic performances of hysteria in nineteenth-century European medical and artistic amphitheaters, and it reinforces stereotypes of true virtue and talent as taking the burden of “working with” madness. But this current phenomenon is not only limited to the experiences of women. The ad is a continuation of the 2018 “Dream Crazy” campaign that celebrated the 30th anniversary of the brand’s iconic “Just Do It” messaging and attests as well that this “methodological madness” afflicts men just as extensively. The first film, which won an Emmy, was narrated by Colin Kaepernick—and touches on the controversy of NFL players protesting racial inequality, police brutality, and other issues by kneeling during the national anthem—and closes with Kaepernick’s remark, “Don’t ask if your dreams are crazy. Ask if they are crazy enough.” It is relevant to point out that although “Dream Crazier” is meant to primarily promote sportswear attire, its placement and promotion wording very much locate the campaign in the performing arts and therefore reveal the close and productive relationship between madness and the (performing) arts that dates back centuries. This campaign, just one example out of many in recent years, reveals the multi-layered interest in imaginings of madness in general and hysteria in particular, and its culturally and politically charged meaning in our present time. “Reclaiming” to “perform” madness and hysteria and the political, cultural, and artistic implications of doing so seem very much to be keeping up with our hysterical times. But this does not arise out of a historical vacuum. Already, we have been able to follow a build-up of vivid engagement with the term hysteria for quite some time, and especially, the second decade of the twenty-first century has displayed an ever-increasing interest in the term. A quick Google search opens the gates to sheer endless swathes of discussions on hysteria, covering almost every aspect of public discourses. The arts—as it is often in such cases—seem conspicuously involved in and engaged with this hysterical discourse. Countless exhibitions were curated on the topic, (art) journals established, performances and conferences held, festivals organized, articles and essays written. These artistic efforts were also not bound to a specific area and instead spread globally from Australia, China, Canada, India, South Africa, Europe, or the United

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States, among many others. Hysteria in these current narratives references conspicuously established representations of the hysteric as (public) performer and “Kunstfigur” that extend well beyond the often-referenced European medical studies of the nineteenth century—both into the past and present. Surprisingly, while the strong academic interest in hysteria throughout the twentieth century and most prominently at the turn of the century is well known and much discussed, the study of how these discourses have continued well into twenty-first-century art practices and of how those current practices very much continue a century-spanning cross-­ fertilization between hysteria and the arts, is largely pressing on a blind spot. It is the main objective of Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts: Rising in Revolt to illustrate how the arts seem to bundle the diverse present interests in hysteria in a multitude of ways, while at the same time bringing to the forefront the century-spanning fruitful relationship between hysteria and the (performing) arts. It is much covered that the hysteric was a well-studied object in arts and sciences in Europe, especially in Vienna and Paris, in around 1900. Our attention is demanded by the question of how this interest was already evidently informed by previous artistic, religious, and medical sources and how hysteria’s “currency” has prevailed since then. It is interesting that while, in the late twentieth century, the medical term hysteria was struck from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, its symptom catalogue concurrently emerged under the diagnosis label of histrionic personality disorder. The Latin noun histrio already points us in the right direction, unveiling the hysteric as actor/actress or player. This terminological move reveals the century-long understanding of the hysteric as what we would call today a performer and pointedly illustrates how hysteria moves and plays beyond the limits of medical discourse. It is the aim of this volume to show how this terminological decision was not made out of context and that hysteria was already well established within the arts alongside and at times even separately from the much-covered medical “hystory.” The title Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts: Rising in Revolt reveals the central questionings of this volume: How are (current) artistic practices surrounding hysteria informed by historical concepts and ideas on hysteria, how do they utilize hysteria as a methodological approach within their artistic practices, how do they contextualize their work in regard to previous ideas of hysteria as a form of pathological unruliness, madness, or insurgence, and how do they, in turn, create new ways of thinking with

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and thinking through hysteria? Furthermore, can an artistic engagement with hysteria be uncovered that moves next to, alongside, and, at times, separately from the often-covered entanglement of the arts with European medical studies on hysteria in around 1900? The nod in the title to the idiom “there is (a) method in (one’s) madness” is chosen to playfully discuss how engagement with a concept such as hysteria—which is often understood in the realms of madness and includes imaginings of mental and physical afflictions—can be chosen for “good reason,” productively for a specific, rational purpose within artistic practice, even though it may seem “crazy,” “mad,” or absurd at first sight. Deriving from Shakespeare’s often-quoted lines in Hamlet, “Though this be madness, yet there is method in ’t,” this phrase seems specifically fitting for this undertaking as Hamlet has, since its conception more than four centuries ago, inspired many critical engagements: not only in “performing madness” but also within the field of hysteria studies. As it is the objective of this volume to analyze hysteria clearly within a cultural and artistic framework, the term “madness” offers a productive tool to move hysteria from it predominantly medical conception—and such oppressive terms such as “mental illness” that imply an agreed upon understanding between “health” and “illness”—into the realms of what Anna Harpin has called the “accommodating language” of madness that is “in part owing to its literary and historical associations, including insight, inspiration, and creativity” (Harpin 2018, p. 3). The title therefore points to the history of madness in general and hysteria in particular within the arts and how artists and artistic practitioners have been labeled as mad or hysterical or have deliberately used such labels to elevate or authenticate the virtue of their artistic practice. Thus, this volume shows that such stigmatizing imaginations of the artist as mad, or of the mad as the artistically gifted, are not left in the past but echo evidently well into the present, especially when it is concerned around representations and concepts of hysteria, following the path of recent studies, such as Anna Harpin’s Madness, Art, and Society: Beyond Illness (2018), Ken Gale’s Madness as Methodology: Bringing Concepts to Life in Contemporary Theorising and Inquiry (2018), Therí A. Pickens’ Black Madness:: Mad Blackness (2019), or La Marr Jurelle Bruce’s How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity (2021), to just name a few—who are also clearly discussing madness in its creative and insurgent potential. Notwithstanding this, it is important to note that the aim of this book is not to continue what Didi-Huberman has described as

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the “pathologization of art” (2003), but to show how the arts have utilized hysteria in ways that test, critique, and go beyond such stigmatizing imaginations. To understand hysteria’s influence on artistic practices, I propose, one needs to locate them within their broader cultural context, furthermore drawing on the cross-disciplinary potential of performance studies. As a result of performance (studies) being a paradigm-driven field, this volume will follow hysteria’s performance as an object of inquiry, which will enable us to put the current phenomenon in its (historical) context and will focus on performance studies as a primary analytical concept, allowing me to imagine a “hysterical” expression of doing research.1 Both terms, hysteria and performance, are central to a variety of academic fields and their definitions are ambiguous and remain contested. The term “hysteria” is here chosen deliberately because it includes artistic, religious, medical, and political concepts through its extensive histories (in fact and fiction), and the imaginings of its representation, so the argument, have been conceived in terms of performance art. The hysteric is not just mad: they reference a range of representations that are historically specific to hysteria and were understood in the realms of performance. The performance of hysteria within the arts in this context includes representations of “hysteria’s performance repertoire” while also opening the door to hysteria as a methodological device. Thus, the current artistic engagements disclose how hysteria is not only tied to a performer, a hysterical body, but that hysteria can perform within a self-reflexive creative research praxis. Therefore, this volume not only demonstrates how hysteria’s corporeality is still haunting many artistic projects, but that a diverse group of artists and cultural producers understand their artistic and creative practice as hysterical. Here again, we will learn throughout this volume that this is not an invention of the present but that this phenomenon can be followed closely throughout the centuries of artistic involvements with hysteria. More prominently, Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts imagines hysteria as mediator between historical practices that were aware of their own performativity with the current artistic productions that are performing this historical awareness and self-reflection (Braun 2020). 1  This essay stems out of the Erwin Schrödinger research project “The Hysteric as Conceptual Operator”: [ J 4164 -G24], funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF); conducted at the University, of California, Los Angeles, Stanford University and the University of Vienna (2018–2020).

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This volume examines specific forms of artistic expression with regard to artistic, performative, philosophical, and cultural discourses. Due to its multiand cross-medial representation, it would not be sufficient to analyze hysteria’s performance through the perspective of one single medium. In order to thoroughly do so, this book brings together a diverse group of authors who follow hysteria’s performance within the arts as an object of inquiry and investigate the multi-layered and complex discussions that surround and foster this resurgent interest in hysteria—crossing wide areas of hysteric inquiry covering ground from photography, sculpture, installation, video, dance, performance, and protest art, to philosophy, creative writing, artistic and arts-based research, and archival and laboratory work. Unfortunately, creative practices are still too often marginalized as the “soft distraction from hard science” (Harpin, p. 4); it is the aim of the multidisciplinary approach of this volume to illustrate how those often as contradicting sides of inquiry can not only inform each other but constitute a fruitful dialogue. The chapters here make a light-footed foray into disciplines from art history, (performing) philosophy, political science, (visual) media, disability, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, and mad studies—never losing sight of hysteria’s affinity to performance studies—and they look into the emergence of hysteria in well-covered locales such as Europe and the United States, as well as in under-represented areas not only in within the latter two but also in Australia, China, Canada, India, or South Africa, among others. The contributors to this volume also very much attest the dynamic and ever-changing reasons for utilizing hysteria within artistic practices: While hysteria in historical and previous artistic sources is often associated with the corporeality of a European Caucasian (young) woman, the current representations testify to the inherent potential of hysteria to question, critique, and bend those presumed boundaries of race, ethnicity, sex, and gender. It is also the objective of this volume to show that hysteria is used in much more complex ways to question concepts of race and gender than often assumed and that are so easily and naively re-produced. The often-neglected parameters already in place in the problematic work of the two probably most discussed Hysterians Jean-­ Martin Charcot and Sigmund Freud present a productive vehicle for several chapters throughout this volume in order to discuss the prevailing sexist and racist “attachments” to hysteria in our contemporary present. To this day, there has been much said and published about how medical studies, in general, and influential figures such as Charcot and Freud, in particular, were influenced by the arts in their studies on hysteria. It is not the objective of this volume to add to this canon—while obviously still at times entangled with it—but to add a new perspective that is firmly equipped with a cultural

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studies lens that explores the arts and not a medical, psychiatric, or psychoanalytic one. Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts: Rising in Revolt is conceptualized as the missing complement to these studies and shows that hysteria is very productive up until the present in articulating and addressing cultural discussion that moves beyond medical discourse. The authors in this volume ask pressing questions such as the following: How does hysteria manifest in contemporary art? What are the historical legacies that are re-produced and into which they re-inscribe? What historical, cultural, and political circumstances might have triggered this current rise of “hysterical revival” in the arts and the public discussions surrounding it? How has the representation of hysteria evolved over the centuries and how is it visualized and performed in the present? What can be the reasons and motivations for hysteria to capture the interest of such diverse and globally spanning audiences? Each chapter will address these and related questions as we focus on hysteria from a variety of critical artistic perspectives, contextualizing artistic practices in the cultures that produce them. It is not the aim of this collection of essays to pretend to be the first to investigate this century-long entanglement of hysteria and the arts. The authors in this volume build very evidently and openly on a series of influential studies that examine the artistic relevance of representations and concepts of hysteria within the arts, and uniquely, some of those influential thinkers have even contributed to this volume directly. The contributions very much carry forward the work of Mark S. Micale, who (albeit as a medical historian) provided the first comprehensive overview of the research landscape in Approaching Hysteria (1995) and coined the field New Hysteria Studies, and continue the new developments in this area of expertise that Cecily Devereux (2014) playfully termed New New Hysteria Studies. Elaine Showalter coined in response to Micale’s endeavors the term New Hysterians (Showalter 1997, p. 7) and has named these cultural narratives, which we can still witness in the present, Hystories (p. 5). As it becomes visible in these ventures, the playfulness, irony, and at times “hysterical” laughter shines through between the lines of these otherwise very content academic writings. In addition to these efforts to define the field, this project pays tribute to previous scholarship that investigated the historical entanglement of hysteria with performance and the visual arts, such as Lisa Blackman and Valerie Walkerdine (2001), or Asti Hustvedt (2011), most notably, Georges Didi-Huberman’s often-cited Invention de l’Hysterie: Charcot et l’Iconographie Photographique (1982), and its English translation Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière (2003). Its analysis of the phenomenon of hysteria and its

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connection to visual images and artistic representations has shaped the discussions ever since. Further, there is Elisabeth Bronfen’s influential The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and Its Discontents (1998), who has re-visited historical medical and psychoanalytic texts in order to analyze a resurgence of critical interest in hysteria in cultural productions, covering artistic expressions in literature, cinema, opera, and contemporary (feminist) art; or Sander L. Gilman (e.g., 1982, 1985, 1988, 1993, 2020) whose extensive work on the visual history of madness, in general, and hysteria, in particular, and how those representations are tightly intertwined with the cultures that (re)produce them, informs many participants in this volume. While evidently stemming from also an interest in the medical and psychoanalytic dimensions, these academic endeavors laid already ground for the cultural implications of hysteria and appeared simultaneously at the moment of the aforementioned terminological transformations of the medical diagnosis of hysteria into histrionic personality disorder. To appropriately address this acknowledgment of hysteria as cultural player, or performer, several iconic historical studies about hysteria as a cultural phenomenon appeared (e.g., Veith 1965; Trillat 1986; Micale 1995; Shorter 1997; Showalter 1997; and Skull 2009, among many others). There exists a rich academic landscape that analyzes the many ways the arts and artists have influenced the medical studies on hysteria in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although the authors in this volume very much draw on those discussions, we do not need to cover this part of history in detail as it is already well documented in such landmark studies that deal with the visualizations of hysteria and “madness,” in visual media at large and the performing arts in particular. Informed by the medical and historical discussions of these early New Hystorians, there have been several publications recently that continue this hysterical academic engagement into the present, especially in relation to representations of hysteria in the arts, such as Nathan J. Timpano’s Constructing the Viennese Modern Body: Art, Hysteria, and the Puppet (2017), Jonathan W. Marshall’s Performing Neurology: The Dramaturgy of Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot (2016), Anna Harpin and Juliet Foster’s edited collection Performance, Madness and Psychiatry: Isolated Acts (2014), Ankhi Mukherjee’s Aesthetic Hysteria: The Great Neurosis in Victorian Melodrama and Contemporary Fiction (2007), Christina Wald’s Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia: Performative Maladies in Contemporary Anglophone Drama (2007), Nicola Shaughnessy and Philip Barnard’s edited collection Performing Psychologies: Imagination, Creativity and

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Dramas of the Mind (2019), or more removed Anouchka Grose’s edited volume Hysteria Today (2018). Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts: Rising in Revolt itself was conceptualized as a complement, a dialogue partner, for my recently edited volume Performing Hysteria: Images and Imaginations (2020). Many of the aforementioned publications in recent years are still very much involved with the European studies at the fin de siècle, but also attest to how hysteria has long ranged beyond those lines of discipline. Therefore, it is not the aim of this book to illustrate how artists have (re) used and re-produced the image archive established by European medical studies, but to localize hysterical methods within the arts as their very own tradition that predates those often-referenced medical studies and that continue their legacy until the very present to discuss pressing issues of our times. In doing so, this volume follows previous scholarship that has unveiled the many ways hysteria was visualized and imagined apart from the often-cited medical studies. In their jointly edited volume Hysteria Beyond Freud (1993), Sander L. Gilman, Helen King, Roy Porter, G. S. Rousseau, and Elaine Showalter already made their case that Freud’s influential studies on hysteria were neither the beginning nor the end of the field; their work uncovers the social and cultural implications of the representation of hysteria and made a significant contribution to this aforementioned new generation of hysteria studies. (Please refer to their extensive literary review on discussions about the representation of hysteria and its medical histories.) More recently, Nathan J. Timpano focuses in Constructing the Viennese Modern Body: Art, Hysteria, and the Puppet (2017) on fin de siècle Vienna and added new historical evidence that demonstrates how Freud did not import hysteria to Vienna after his studies under Charcot in Paris, but rather that it seems hysteria was alive and kicking within Viennese arts communities well before Freud even left for Paris, suggesting not only that there is a simultaneous and separate (albeit intertwined) legacy of hysteria in artistic practices during Freud’s time in Vienna, but that maybe this artistic interest was already established before and maybe even moved him to attend to “hysteria’s call” to Paris. But it is also important to note that it is not the aim of this book to rewrite previous studies on the history of psychiatry, psychoanalysis, or medicine under contemporary circumstances. It is the objective of this volume to be the first book-length study of the twenty-first century to systematically, theoretically, and historically analyze hysteria’s impact on various (contemporary) art practices. Therefore, as we can witness in the

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diverse chapters in this volume, concepts of hysteria are very productive in the present in communicating a wide range of discussions and topics that may include but also extend beyond the medical and psychoanalytical imagination of hysteria. Furthermore, while I acknowledge the importance of hysteria and psychoanalytic theory, this book follows the same historical objective as its predecessor, in Hysteria Beyond Freud, with the editorial decision not to include professional psychoanalysts or medical practitioners among the authors, as well as approaches fundamentally psychoanalytical in their motivation. Although the medical diagnosis of hysteria is still referenced in many of the contributions, it is evident that hysteria operates in our contemporary context far beyond the clinical and psychoanalytical limits of debate. We will see throughout this volume that Charcot’s and Freud’s often-problematic conceptualization of hysteria still echoes heavily in contemporary art practices, and they are often utilized as a springboard to discuss how themes thought long overcome, such as anti-­ Semitism, colonialism, sexism, homo- and transphobia, and so on, have been haunting the hysterical project into the present. These developments in the field can be seen as an immediate reflection of the terminological transference of the term hysteria within a medical diagnostic and pathological framework of the late twentieth century, while acknowledging the prevailing potency of hysteria for a contemporary audience, in the arts and beyond. Interestingly, and surprisingly I have to add, academic coverage of this phenomenon within the arts has been consistently marginal. Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts very much builds on the rich hystories from within the arts. All the contributors are writing from a position of “involvement” with hysteria and therefore locate their hysterical engagements within the field of doing research. In doing so they continue the influential (feminist) work from the late twentieth century, most notably Augustine (Big Hysteria): Writing the Body (1997) by Anna Furse, who just published Performing Nerves: Four Plays, Four Essays, On Hysteria (2020), and further, Dianne Hunter’s The Makings of Dr. Charcot’s Hysteria Shows: Research Through Performance (1998), or the hysterical performance writing practice of such influential thinkers as Hélène Cixous (e.g., 1976, 2004), Catherine Clément (e.g., with Cixous 1986), or Luce Irigaray (e.g., 1974 and 1985). While those publications attest the ongoing artistic and academic interest in hysteria and have contributed significantly in continuing the discussion on hysteria, Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts ranges even further and investigates by means of a range of contemporary case studies how

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pressing artistic discussions are negotiated through concepts of hysteria. Therefore, Hysterical Methodologies is not a “complete” record of the fruitful engagement of hysteria with the arts, but it wants to shed light on the wealth of existing examples of hysteria’s impact within artistic practices in their manifold manifestations. It will become clear throughout the course of this book that contemporary artists utilize hysteria in many forms and shapes that evolved alongside and at times separately from the often-quoted medical and psychoanalytical studies of the fin de siècle. We will learn how hysteria is utilized in productive ways to engage in a variety of critical and pressing discussions of our time that range from queer feminist protest, imperialism, (post-)colonialism, consumerism, and climate change to global epidemics, discussing pressing topics such as disability, healthcare, reproduction and labor rights and the blurring of transnational borders and conceptions of sexuality, gender, race, and ethnicity of hysteria. Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts “does” what a comprehensive analysis of hysteria in artistic practices demands: It moves light-footedly through the pages, to be able to join historically and locally scattered dots, to bend over backward to unveil histories often neglected; it is compelled to move freely and at times jump abruptly in order to tie in the fragmented parts and pieces of hysteria’s artistic practices. Given the nature of this topic and the title of the book, the book’s aim is to provide insights into the current elaborate, complex artistic engagement with hysteria rather than to impose any rigid structure of analysis or fixed theoretical framework. This is also manifested in the lengths and forms of the at times unconventional contributions, which run the gamut from traditional academic to visual essays, performative texts, interviews, and artistic statements. The contributions stem out of an event series at the University of California, Los Angeles—that was concerned with ways hysteria was performing in a contemporary art context and its political implications—and a planned event series at the University of Vienna, which unfortunately due to the current global situation is still awaiting its debut at the time of writing—that is concerned with the artistic and philosophical implications of doing research on hysteria’s performance practices. The chapters are often conceptualized as shadowy twins, as doubles, that share certain interests, but that shine light in different directions on hysteria’s multifaceted and ever-changing inspirational potential within the arts. We start the exploration of this volume with a chapter by Nathan J. Timpano, who bends over backward to review the visual manifestation

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of the arc de cercle—a specific movement in hysterical attacks coined by Jean-Martin Charcot in the 1870s and constituting the grand finale of “Grande Hystérie”—in order to better comprehend how and why hysteria was not the invention of nineteenth-century French medicine, but rather, a theatrically expressive “attitude” identifiable throughout the visual and performing arts from the Baroque era to the contemporary scene. Timpano demonstrates that the codification of the arc de cercle by “modern” medicine in the late nineteenth century was a rather late attempt to explain a long-standing tradition of hysterical expressions that had already found power and meaning in the realm of the arts. Anna Furse, who is considered one of the leading thinkers in hysteria within an artistic research and performance practice, follows immediately afterward, tracing her “theatrical thinking” and cultural research and productions on hysteria(s) as an annotated visual journey through some of the key ideas that influence her praxis. In focusing on two of her productions that span over three decades—Augustine (Big Hysteria) (1991) and SHOCKS (2018)—Furse takes us through some key social and historical moments of hysteria that are reflected and expressed within the arts from the late nineteenth century onward. Tanya Augsburg then shows how the scholarly and artistic feminist interest in hysteria as performance from the 1990s, of which Anna Furse is considered a central player, wandered productively into the second decade of the twenty-first century. Writing from the point of “critical involvement” and tracing her own academic and curatorial practice on hysteria over the past decades, Augsburg illustrates on a selection of what she terms “anti-hysterical performances” in artistic and political frameworks that she firmly sets as part of hysteria’s performances legacy. Elke Krasny builds on this personal, curatorial involvement with hysteria and examines its current political potential; specifically, in the ideological use of the term hysteria in the Trump era painting left politics and race, climate, and women*’s struggles unreasonable and out of control. She proposes that even though hysteria is used as an insult by conservative media pundits and populist politicians, the concept actually fits our historical conjuncture quite well. Krasny then bends to build a bridge between hysteria’s terminological relationship to the womb and issues of reproduction to argue that today’s hysterical anxiety a symptomatology of the global present. In linking class, race, gender, and nature, Krasny’s feminist curatorial suggestion is to insist on what she terms “hysterical studies”— connecting the reproduction crises to the radical legacies of hysteria.

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Picking up right there, the curator Mette Kjærgaard Præst then reflects on her curatorial project PS/Y’s Hysteria, an interdisciplinary arts program that was presented in venues across London from August 2017 to July 2018. The chapter draws upon Kjærgaard Præst’s experience of working “with” hysteria and its many associations. In highlighting a selection of artists’ projects, including exhibitions, performances, talks, and moving image works, Kjærgaard Præst considers how contemporary art practices can open new approaches to hysteria through the academic lenses of queer feminism, disability, and post-colonialism. This is followed by an interview with Cindy Rehm, a contemporary Los Angeles-based artist, performer, curator, educator, organizer of various politically engaged projects, and co-founder of the Association of Hysteric Curators. Rehm talks freely about her multi- and transmedial engagement with hysteria. This interview was conducted while the research project “The Hysteric as Conceptual Operator,” of which this publication stems out of, was conducted at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and gives insight into a broader artistic legacy of hysteria in California and ways hysteria can employ its political potential in our specific moment of time. Elisabeth Bronfen, another icon in the expanding orbit of the scholarship on hysteria’s extensive performance repertoire and who has dedicated considerable attention over the years to this topic, elaborates on Cindy Sherman’s hysterical performance as a contemporary case study. Cindy Sherman’s influential body of work continues to hold a young generation of artists under its spell and illustrates how hysteria moves artistic expression without making explicit references to the often-discussed medical European photographic studies. Bronfen furthermore links the acts of mimicry, imitation, and disguise to a “hysterical strategy of self-­expression” as a form of feminist protest, an argument on which several chapters in this volume build on. Anne Scheffer, Ingrid E. Stevens, and Amanda du Preez draw this line, of the hysteric as a figure of protest, further, and discuss the contemporary case study of the hysterical representation in the art of South African artist Mary Sibande. Scheffer, Stevens, and du Preez’s chapter analyzes the artwork of Sibande and how her work makes explicit and implicit references to hysteria in the South African context—more so contextualizing Sibande’s body of work on/with hysteria in a contemporary and post-­ apartheid milieu. Their interpretation of hysteria derives from a feminist understanding and not a form of pathology, building therefore on the

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previous chapters, while showing unique ways hysteria, a mode of representation, allows to articulate repressed traumatic knowledge, from within the confines of oppressive systems. South African artist and researcher Leora Farber then continues this train of thought with her assemblage of artist’s reflections on her recent body of work, titled cultured colonies/colonial cultures. Writing this chapter during the confinement to her home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Farber traces parallel narratives of containment and excess, drawing an analogy between the potentially uncontainable growth patterns of micro-­ organisms that comprise her work; English and Dutch styles of china and patterning that reference a legacy of settler colonialism that serve as inspiration for her work; discussions on nineteenth-century female hysterics’ theatrical performances of “disobedient” behaviors and emotional excesses; and what Priscilla Wald (2008) has identified as “the outbreak narrative.” Farber uses hysteria, as manifest in the properties of microbial growth, as methodology, and as an integral part of her working process in order to realize a form of what she calls “hysterical representation.” Laura González then follows with her self-reflective chapter on hysteria’s haunting potential and the at times distressing dimensions of working “with” hysteria. González outlines a performance devising method, which she calls “gHosting,” and intersemiotic translation as embodied methods for the creation of performance works about historical hysteric patients. Through studying classic clinical struggles around hysteria, González disentangles in this artistic reflection how the mimetic quality of hysteria—its ability to take on culturally permissible expressions of distress—is key to the fascination and the threat of the condition. Jonathan W.  Marshall picks up right there and elaborates hysteria’s “aesthetic strategy,” which he traces back to the Surrealists and others who encountered hysterical patients at the Pitié-Salpêtrière. He asserts that artists today do not necessarily draw directly on these precedents, but that this “hysterical aesthetic” is still very much alive and well in the present. Equipped with Joanna Townsend’s concept of “hysterical performance text,” Marshall analyzes the prominent hysterical performance strategy in contemporary performance pieces of dialectical corporeal surrogation— building on what Laura González terms “hosting”—whereby bodies and voices echo or inhabit one another, while the host-performer maintains a degree of distance from the possessing agent. This is then followed by an interview with Los Angeles-based contemporary artist Shana Lutker, which was also conducted during the research

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phase of this project at UCLA, and that traces how Lutker’s archival work at the Salpêtrière and research on the Surrealist movement has led to a growing body of work that investigates the at times violent and threatening artistic and medical legacies on hysteria from Charcot, Freud, and Breton into the present. Building on these discussions of hysteria’s archive, Thomas Ballhausen offers in his chapter a hysterical reading of archival theory and practices that is heavily relying on concepts of fictocritical writing, reflecting on literature and/as artistic research. Building on the writings of Hélène Cixous and Georges Didi-Huberman, Ballhausen retells the history of archives as a story of wandering images, care, neglect, and conflict. He uses the mode of auto-ethnographic reflection to excogitate on his position as “hysterical” archivist and poet to intertwine theoretical, historical, and literary aspects of the archive and its archived sources—making a case for male hysteria, that is to a greater part still buried in archival holdings, furthermore a male hysteria that he proclaims to need to recognize as his own. Right next slumbers my own reflection on a self-reflective research practice. I keep it short and simple and reflect briefly on my creative research practices that combine hysteria, performance, and artistic research in a multitude of ways, and out of which the humble undertaking of this volume is born. Elisabeth Schäfer then elaborates in more detail on a hysterical writing practice and—while looking closer to the creative potential of the iconic case study of “Dora”—offers a perspective on the attention feminist theorists devoted to the phenomenon of hysteria starting from the question, whether gestures of “écriture feminine” can themselves be read as hysterical writing, or open up another reading and understanding, which in turn could also lead to a new perspective on the writing of case studies in psychoanalysis. Dedicated to Écriture feminine/Trans*Writing, Schäfer’s chapter commits to a “trans*forming” arts-based writing practice. Through Schäfer’s text, a plurality of theories emerges in the Dora-­ Fragment, which suggests from which art can reveal inspiring information. What follows then is a transcript of a lecture performance that Arno Böhler and Susanne Valerie Granzer have presented at the conference of this project at UCLA, which can be firmly set within the framework of performing philosophy and philosophy as arts-based research. Böhler starts with a philosophical analysis of how one could contextualize Nietzsche as the first to interpret rationality as a hysteric reaction of men, before the actress and philosopher Susanne Valerie Granzer then

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introduces the character of Arthur Schnitzler’s “Fräulein Else.” Granzer reads Else as a literary example of hysteria, a young woman performing a kind of theatrical self-staging in the form of an inner monologue. Böhler and Granzer touch in their lecture performance on pressing questions of desire and consent, and this piece must be accurately read against the backdrop of the #MeToo movement that was gaining international momentum during the time it was performed in early fall 2018. This transcript that gives glimpse into a specific moment in time that reflects on how historical figures and concepts of hysteria can infiltrate the present, then culminates in the transcript of an intimate phone call between Elisabeth Schäfer and Hélène Cixous, hysterical icon, who is haunting this project in many ways. As a result of closed borders and limited international movement during the time of writing, Schäfer whispers questions to Cixous and asks what the potential of hysterical intervention might be. Cixous performs what one could call a “think piece” that discusses how the subversive potential of hysteria, that is already the core of her influential work on hysteria, is very much expressed in current discourses around such pressing topics as the #MeToo and more recently the Black Lives Matter movement. This moving conversation unveils playfully and fleet-­ footedly how hysteria is very much sound and well in the present and is continuously moving and captivating artists and thinkers to reflect on our present times. These short summaries only reveal briefly the many ways hysteria seems to productively inspire artists and cultural producers to “think with” and “do” hysteria. Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts: Rising in Revolt examines the current phenomenon of hysteria in the arts and sheds light on its historical entanglements and its complex developments and transformations in the present. While hysteria has attracted considerable scholarly attention over the decades, current critical academic engagements with recent multifaceted developments in artistic and creative research practices have been surprisingly slim. It is the humble aim of this publication to inspire focused standalone studies that explore the highly complex representations of hysteria within the arts, including but not limited to diverse artistic expressions, spanning from classical media, such as painting, drawing, photography, and dance to literature, creative writing, and performing philosophy as artistic research, and further, to curating, queer feminist protest art, and many other forms and shapes in the present. I am very much looking forward to following how this exploration unravels, entangles, and unfolds. With the resurgence of hysteria in public discourse, the

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time seems ripe to re-examine the multi-layered hystories in contemporary art practices and their potential meaning for the arts’ perennially loyal audience. The contributors to this volume faithfully follow Serena Williams’ Medusa call to “Show them what crazy can do.” Fine, but beware, that way hysteria lies. ☛

References Blackman, Lisa and Valerie Walkerdine. 2001. Mass Hysteria: Critical Psychology and Media Studies. London and New York: Palgrave. Braun, Johanna, editor. 2020. Performing Hysteria: Images and Imagination. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Bronfen, Elisabeth. 1998. The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and Its Discontents. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bruce, La Marr Jurelle. 2021. How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity. Durham: Duke University Press. (forthcoming) Cixous, Hélène. 1976. “Laugh of the Medusa,” translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs 1, no. 4: 875–893. ———. 2004. “Portrait of Dora,” translated by Ann Liddle. Selected Plays of Hélène Cixous, edited by Eric Prenowitz, 35–59. New  York and London: Routledge. Cixous, Hélène and Catherine Clément. 1975/1986. The Newly Born Woman, translated by Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Devereux, Cecily. 2014. “Hysteria, Feminism, and Gender Revisited: The Case of the Second Wave.” English Studies in Canada 40, no. 1 (March): 19–45. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 1982/2003. Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, translated by Alisa Hartz. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Furse, Anna. 1997. Augustine (Big Hysteria): Writing the Body. Amsterdam: Harwood Academics Publisher. ———. 2020. Performing Nerves: Four Plays, Four Essays, On Hysteria. New York and London: Routledge. Gale, Ken. 2018. Madness as Methodology: Bringing Concepts to Life in Contemporary Theorising and Inquiry. New York and London: Routledge. Gilman, Sander L. 1982. Seeing the Insane. New York: John Wiley & Sons. ———. 1985. Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 1988. Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to Aids. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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———. 1993. “The Image of the Hysteric.” Hysteria Beyond Freud, edited by Sander L.  Gilman, Helen King, Roy Porter, G.  S. Rousseau, and Elaine Showalter, 345–452. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2020. “Wandering Imaginations of Race and Hysteria: The Origins of the Hysterical Body in Psychoanalysis.” Performing Hysteria, edited by Johanna Braun, 41–60. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Gilman, Sander L., Helen King, Roy Porter, G.S. Rousseau, and Elaine Showalter. 1993. Hysteria Beyond Freud. University of California Press. Grose, Anouchka, editor. 2018. Hysteria Today. New York and London: Routledge. Harpin, Anna. 2018. Madness, Art, and Society: Beyond Illness. New  York and London: Routledge. Harpin, Anna and Juliet Foster, eds. 2014. Performance, Madness and Psychiatry: Isolated Acts. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hunter, Dianne, editor. 1998. The Makings of Dr Charcot’s Hysteria Shows: Research Through Performance. Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press. Hustvedt, Asti. 2011. Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-century Paris. W.W. Norton. Irigaray, Luce. 1985. This Sex Which Is Not One, translated by Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 1974/1985. Speculum of the Other Woman, translated by Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Marshall, Jonathan W. 2016. Performing Neurology: The Dramaturgy of Dr Jean-­ Martin Charcot. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Micale, Mark S. 1995. Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Mukherjee, Ankhi. 2007. Aesthetic Hysteria: The Great Neurosis in Victorian Melodrama and Contemporary Fiction. New York and London: Routledge. Pickens, Therí Alyce. 2019. Black Madness:: Mad Blackness. Durham: Duke University Press. Salam, Maya. 2019. “Taking Back ‘Hysterical’,” New York Times (February 26, 2019). https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/26/sports/serena-­williams-­ nike-­ad.html Accessed on July 30, 2020. Shaughnessy, Nicola and Philip Barnard, eds. 2019. Performing Psychologies: Imagination, Creativity and Dramas of the Mind. London and New  York: Bloomsbury. Shorter, Edward. 1997. A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac. New York: John Wiley and Sons. Showalter, Elaine. 1997. Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Skull, Andrew. 2009. Hysteria: The Disturbing History. New  York: Oxford University Press.

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Timpano, Nathan J. 2017. Constructing the Viennese Modern Body: Art, Hysteria, and the Puppet. New York and London: Routledge. Trillat, Etienne. 1986. Histoire de l’hystérie. Paris: Editions Seghers. Veith, Ilza. 1965. Hysteria: The History of a Disease. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wald, Christina. 2007. Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia: Performative Maladies in Contemporary Anglophone Drama. London and New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wald, Priscilla. 2008. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

L’arc de cercle, or the Movement of Modernism (1620–2020) Nathan J. Timpano

After all hysteria is the oldest, best-known and most striking of the neuroses under consideration. —Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria, 1895.

When the famed Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) penned the words to this epigraph, which first appeared in the pages of Studies on Hysteria (Studien über Hysterie) by Joseph Breuer (1842–1925) and Freud, he surprisingly states that hysteria—said to be “invented” by the French neuropathologist Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893) in the 1870s—was already an “old” neurosis (p. 258). Freud had studied under Charcot in the mid-1880s at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, so it is unlikely that he intended to age himself, given that he was not yet forty when Studies on Hysteria was printed, nor does he seem to suggest that the two decades between the publication of Charcot’s medical texts and his own constitutes an eternity in the realm of neurological medicine. Instead,

N. J. Timpano (*) University of Miami, Miami, FL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Braun (ed.), Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66360-5_2

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Freud likely recognized by the time he left Paris in 1886—or, even earlier, when Breuer was treating his most famous patient, Bertha Pappenheim (known as “Anna O.”) in Vienna in 1882—that the attitudes (or expressions) of the disorder called hystérie had been a part of European visual culture for centuries, as witnessed in (and here we can only assume what Freud was referencing) ancient treatises on “convulsive” women, or the plethora of examples available to him in the visual and performing arts (Timpano 2017). The long-standing image of the hysteric, it would seem, had therefore only been codified in the late nineteenth century in the name of modern, medical truth, which, as we now know, has become antiquated in its own right. As a result, the secondary literature on the historiography of hysteria and its visual manifestations is long and robust. Janet Beizer (1994), Gemma Blackshaw and Leslie Topp (2009), Harold Blum (2001), Johanna Braun (2020), Georges Didi-Huberman (2004), Sander Gilman (1985, 1993), Christopher Goetz (1995), Rae Beth Gordon (2001), Cristina Mazzoni (1996), Mark Micale (1990, 2004, 2008), and Sigrid Schade (1995) are but a few of the recent scholars who have surveyed the vast terrain that constitutes the writing of hysteria at the fin de siècle, as well as its legacies in the arts and humanities of today. Given this profundity of research, it is not my intent to rehash the many thoughtful and nuanced arguments offered by these, and other, individuals in the pages of the current chapter. Rather, the present study reviews the visual manifestation of one very specific movement of the hysterical attack—the l’arc de cercle (see Figs. 1, 2, and 3)—in order to better comprehend how and why hysteria was not, in fact, the invention of nineteenth-century French medicine, but rather, a theatrically expressive “attitude” that appears throughout the visual and performing arts from the Early Modern era to our contemporary moment. Known in medical terminology as opisthotonos, the spastic muscle contractions that constituted the arc de cercle, or “circular arc,” were described by Charcot as the second major phase of the hysterical attack or what he called the period of “grand movements” or “clownism” (1889, pp. 240–43, 251). In order to classify these expressions, images of female hysterical patients enacting the arc de cercle were consequently “documented” by Paul Régnard and D.  M. Bourneville, two photographers who worked closely with Charcot between 1876 and 1880 to produce three expansive volumes that became known as the Photographic Iconography at the Salpêtrière (Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière,

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Fig. 1  Adrien Delahaye and Emile Lecrosnier, 2nd Period—Period of Clownism; Fig. 1: Phase of Grand Movements; Fig. 2: Phase of Contortions (Circular Arc), after original drawings by Paul Richer, 1885, metal engravings. Reproduced in Paul Richer’s Études Cliniques sur la Grande Hystérie ou Hystéro-Épilepsie (1885), Plate 3. Cornell University Library, Ithaca. Artwork in the public domain. (Photo: Courtesy of the author)

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Fig. 2  Albert Londe, Hysterical Attack in a Male Patient, 1885, twelve chrono-­ photographs, various sizes. Artwork in the public domain. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

or IPS) (Charcot et al.). Medical illustrations depicting clownism and the arc de cercle by the French anatomist and sculptor Paul Richer (1849–1933) subsequently appeared in Richer’s 1885 book Clinical Studies on the Grand Hysteria or Hystero-Epilepsy (Études Cliniques sur la Grande Hystérie ou Hystéro-Épilepsie) (Fig. 1), and the French chrono-photographer Albert Londe (1858–1917) similarly catalogued the various attitudes of the hysterical attack—including the arc de cercle—on the body of male patients at the Salpêtrière (Fig. 2). Although Londe’s chrono-photographs may seem groundbreaking today for their subject matter, it is important to remember that hysteria was initially believed to afflict both sexes in the 1870s and 1880s, in spite of the fact that the disorder ultimately emerged as a wholly gendered “disease” of inescapable “femininity” (Mitchell 2000, p. 160).

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Fig. 3  Pierre Aristide André Brouillet, A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière, 1887, oil on canvas. Paris Descartes University, Paris. (Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY)

Despite Charcot’s, Richer’s, and Londe’s collective efforts to produce images of hysterical contortions that could be utilized by other physicians to diagnose and treat hysteria, the aesthetics of the convulsive “madwoman” nevertheless became a minor trope in painting at the fin de siècle (Dijkstra 1986, p.  101). We need look no further than the well-known painting A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière (1887, Fig.  3) by Pierre Aristide André Brouillet (1857–1914) to verify this claim. In the Charcot can be seen pontificating on the merits of hypnotism at his infamous Tuesday Lectures, while his patient—Marie “Blanche” Wittmann (1859–1913; known as the “Queen of Hysterics”)—enacts the arc de cercle for an attentive male audience. The fluid, organic curve of her arabesque form not only conveys the connection between pathology and pleasure, but additionally helps direct the viewer’s eye through the picture plane to create a visually exciting and dynamic composition. As such, the iconography of Wittmann’s body highlights just how effective the arc motif was in communicating visual splendor to the viewer—both as a

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subject in a work of art and as a subject in real-life “performances” for her spectators. The movement of this specific hysterical expression through the history of art and theater might nowadays be thought of as the iconography of swooning, or the act of fainting, though the visual and literary output produced in Europe from circa 1620 to 2020 that I review in the present chapter demonstrates that a strong distinction between “dramatic swooning” and “theatrically hysterical arcs” was likely an arbitrary division for artists and theater directors working throughout this timeframe. Instead, these concepts appear to have been conflated in the late nineteenth century to explain a long-standing tradition of “spastic” women who did not easily conform to “genteel” society, but who may or may not have actually suffered from opisthotonos during their lifetimes. This now-outmoded belief was perhaps best summarized by the American physician Wharton Sinkler (1845–1910), who, in 1898, noted that Charcot’s arc de cercle could be traced back to “the epidemics of hysteria which occurred in the Middle Ages” (p. 692). It is with Sinkler’s problematic, yet temporally insightful, proclamation in mind that I want to turn to prenineteenth-­century examples of the arc de cercle that materialize in the Early Modern era, especially in Italian Baroque sculpture and painting, and in English Romantic drawing and theatrical performances. Following this review of Early Modern arcs, my study charts the vogue for the arc de cercle in the visual and performing arts of the “high” modernist period of the long nineteenth century, and concludes with an abbreviated examination of the hysterical arch as an allegorical motif in postmodern, feminist art.

Prologue: Early Modern Hysterics, 1620–1815 It could be said that the hysterical woman was conceived in the ancient world, born in late nineteenth-century Paris, and came to maturity in early twentieth-century Vienna. The earliest medical texts to describe uterine prolapse and symptoms similar to those that would eventually be termed “hysteria” originate, to our current knowledge, in the Egyptian Middle Kingdom with the publication of the Kahun Gynecological Papyrus (ca. 1900–1800 BCE) and the Ebers Papyrus (ca. 1600–1550 BCE) (Griffith

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1898; Ebers 1875).1 By contrast, the imaginative concept of hysteria as a disorder of female “lunacy” first appears in ancient Greece and can be specifically traced to the myth of Melampus, an Argonaut seer and physician, who “cured” King Proetus’ virginal, homicidal daughters (as well as the hysterical women of Argos) of their “madness” by having them copulate with “strong young men” (March 2014, p. 306).2 In this wholly sexist formulation of hysteria, the solution was thus conceived in simplistic terms: sexual intercourse with a virile man would calm the nerves (and sexual organs) of the afflicted woman. The fifth-century BCE Greek physician Hippocrates, known today as the father of medicine, argued that in most cases of hysterical convulsions, or “uterine suffocation,” the woman’s health “is not to blame, but the fault lies in the position of the womb” (1849, pp.  112, 114, 265).3 Hippocrates’ contemporary, the great Athenian philosopher Plato (ca. 428–347 BCE), later postulated in the Timaeus (ca. 360 BCE) that a barren uterus may become distressed and thus “wander” throughout the body (1949, p. 74). Even though Hippocrates’ and Plato’s treatises were arguably the birth of the gendered discourse surrounding the “wandering womb” theory, Hippocrates’ texts were nevertheless regarded as serious medical theories—a point that likely explains why his pseudo-scientific understanding of hysteria was adopted, with few elaborations, throughout the Roman Empire and into the late medieval era in Europe. Not even the rise of humanism in the Early Modern era (ca. 1450–1815) could dispel traces of the Hippocratic-Galenic tradition. The tendency for Catholic, theological doctrine to take precedence over scientific writing during the Counter-Reformation additionally meant that (Christian) physicians in the Baroque era were, for the most part, still associating hysteria with mental illness and female pathology in the 1600s (Davis and Farge 1992, pp. 361–62).4 One of the earliest appearances of the pre-1885 arc de cercle in the visual arts can be identified during this period in the work Esther Before Ahasuerus (Ester e Assuero, Fig. 4) by the Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1656). Created sometime in the 1620s to early 1630s  Unless otherwise noted, translations are the author’s. For a discussion of these Papyri in the secondary literature, see Merskey and Potter (1989, pp. 751–53), O’Dowd and Philipp (2000, p. 43), and Tasca et al. (2012, p. 110). 2  See also Morford and Lenardon (1999, p. 484) and Tasca et al. (2012, p. 110). 3  See also Gilman et al. (1993, pp. 3–65). 4  See also Gilman et al. (1993, pp. 91–186) and Tasca et al. (2012, p. 113). 1

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Fig. 4  Artemisia Gentileschi, Esther Before Ahasuerus, ca. 1625–1635, oil on canvas, 208.3  ×  273.7  cm. Gift of Elinor Dorrance Ingersoll, 1969. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Artwork in the public domain. (Photo: The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

in Gentileschi’s characteristic Caravaggesque style, the large-scale religious painting depicts Esther, an Old Testament Jewish heroine and eventual Queen of Persia, “swooning” before the Persian king (her future husband) Ahasuerus, in an attempt to woo the monarch and spare the Jewish people from annihilation.5 Known for her strong female characters during a time when history painting was dominated by male heroes and saints, Gentileschi tellingly demonstrates that a wise heroine can use her wits, rather than brute force, to accomplish her goals—in this instance, “to manipulate the foppish king before her” (McBee 2009, n.p.).6 Unlike  For the Historical Book of Esther, see “Esther” (2010, pp. 707–19, 1411–26).  For additional sources that read Esther as a “strong” heroine in Gentileschi’s canvas, see Bissell (1968, pp. 162–63), Garrard (1989, pp. 70, 72–79, 91–92, 105–06, 274), Garrard 5 6

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earlier Renaissance paintings of the same subject and title, including Jacopo Tintoretto’s Esther Before Ahasuerus (ca. 1547, Kensington Palace) or Paolo Veronese’s various canvases from the 1570s, in which Esther either faints and crumples to the ground (as in Tintoretto’s painting), or stands rigidly while her maids support her (as in Veronese’s Esther Before Ahasuerus in the Louvre), Gentileschi’s protagonist only feigns adulation and fear, and in so doing, enacts the hypnotic arc de cercle (note the similarities with Wittmann’s body in Fig. 3). What is more, Gentileschi seems to have been the first painter to portray Esther’s swoon in this manner, given that this iconography is noticeably absent in earlier work but conspicuously present in later paintings, such as Nicolas Poussin’s French Baroque version of Esther Before Ahasuerus (1655), presently in the State Hermitage Museum. In line with revisionist art history and feminist theory, it is likely that Gentileschi’s version of Esther Before Ahasuerus employed the “arc” motif as a means of theatrically staging the moment when Esther deliberately uses her body to gain control over her opponent—both biblically speaking and in Gentileschi’s composition. Here, then, in the hands of a woman artist, the arc de cercle becomes an embodiment of Esther’s power, not her inherent “femininity.”7 While the figure of Esther has largely escaped the extant literature on possible representations of hysteria in Baroque art, Saint Teresa of Àvila has not. It is clear, moreover, that when Cardinal Federico Cornaro (1579–1653) commissioned the Italian Baroque artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) to decorate the family’s private chapel in the Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome in 1645 with a life-sized sculpture of the recently canonized Teresa (The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, or L’Estasi di Santa Teresa, 1652, Fig. 5), the Catholic patriarch could not have anticipated that Bernini’s marble would eventually be diagnosed as “the patron saint of hysteria” by Joseph Breuer in the late 1800s (Breuer and Freud 1895, p. 204).8 According to Cristina Mazzoni, nineteenth-­century “cult” of Teresa was attributed to the manner in which the saint’s descriptions of her “ecstatic” episodes mapped seamlessly onto the medical language and (2001, pp. 27, 132), Landi (2002, p. 113), and Mann et al. (2001, pp. 315, 342, 373–77, 398, 404). 7  Akin to my reading of the painting, Elsa Honig Fine argues that while Esther clearly commits a heroic act, Gentileschi nevertheless chose to depict her in an unheroic pose. Fine does not, however, discuss hysteria or the arc de cercle in her book. See (1978, pp. 15–17). 8  For a good English translation of Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud’s Studies on Hysteria (1895), see Breuer and Freud (2000, p. 232).

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Fig. 5  Gian Lorenzo Bernini, The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (detail), 1652, marble. Cornaro Chapel, Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome. Artwork in the public domain. (Photo: Courtesy of the author)

choreography of hysteria that popularized the disorder in fin-de-siècle Europe. Mazzoni writes, Among Christian mystics, Saint Teresa of Avila (1515–1582), because of her prolonged illness and the sensuality permeating her writings, has tradition-

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ally been the “privileged” target of the hysteria-mysticism interpretive tug-­ of-­war. She is the quintessential mystical (and thus, for some, erotically predisposed) woman, mentioned time and again by turn-of-the-century writers. (1996, p. 37)9

Here, Mazzoni draws allusions to writers like Charcot, Breuer, Freud, the Italian criminologist and physician Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909), the French medical doctor Antoine Imbert-Gourbeyre de la Touche (1818–1912), a Jesuit priest named Father G. Hahn (dates unknown), the French novelist and art critic Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907), the German art historian Wilhelm Lübke (1826–1893), and the Austro-­ German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902), to name only a few. Building upon these turn-of-century observations, the well-­ known Bernini scholar Rudolf Wittkower (1901–1971) argued, in 1955, that The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa “represented the most important—the canonical—vision of the Carmelite Saint corresponding exactly with her own account of it” (1981, p. 27). So then, what was this account that supposedly inspired a group of nineteenth-century medical men to envision the female saint as a hysterical patient? Writing between 1563 and 1565, Teresa of Ávila chronicled her life’s events, including the exact moment that Bernini later immortalized in stone: “He [the angel] appeared to me to be thrusting it [a spear] at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; … the pain was so great that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain that I could not wish to be rid of it” (1916, pp. 266–67). But nowhere in Saint Teresa’s account does she expressly state that her back arched, her eyes closed, and her limbs tightened when the angel pricked her body. Instead, it appears that it was Bernini—as a sort of artist-cum-diagnostician—who first provided clinicians with Teresa’s “medical” taxonomies. Mazzoni concludes rather convincingly that the literature on Teresa’s supposed hysteria was not, in fact, grounded in the saint’s religious writings, but rather, based largely (if not solely) on Bernini’s sculpture, which, Mazzoni argues, “many sets of clinical eyes have gazed with retrospective medicalizing (or sexually titillating) intent” (1996, p.  38). To this very point, Lübke wrote in 1878 that Bernini’s Saint Teresa can be seen to experience a “hysterical swoon” in which “religious ecstasy is here transformed into sensual delight” (p. 418), whereas Hahn concluded in 1883 9

 See also Bache (1985, pp. 300–15).

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that the saint “suffered from an organic hysteria, [yet] she had not attained intellectual hysteria” (p. 178). Charcot, who had lectured on Saint Teresa in the 1870s and 1880s at the Salpêtrière, wrote later in 1892 that she, along with Saint Francis of Assisi, were “undeniable hysterics” (1897, p. 10). Echoing French colleagues, as well as Lübke, Krafft-Ebing argued in 1886 that Teresa’s “hysterical faint” could be associated with “the wellestablished relations between religion, lust, and cruelty” (1894, p. 10) and as previously stated, Breuer similarly named her “the patron saint of hysteria” in Studies on Hysteria (p. 204). What is more, during a lecture in 1901 at the University of Edinburgh, the “father of American psychology,” William James, explained rather humorously (though equally patronizingly): “Saint Teresa might have had the nervous system of the placidest cow, … [but] if her theology can stand these other tests [philosophical reasonableness and moral helpfulness], it will make no difference how hysterical or nervously off her balance Saint Teresa may have been when she was with us here below” (1902, p. 19). For James, whether or not the historical Teresa was actually hysterical seems irrelevant alongside her saintliness, although he does not outright dismiss hysteria as a possible diagnosis either. Given that Bernini’s sculpture was therefore the most popular interpretation of Teresa of Ávila’s ecstasy, as filtered through his own artistic (male) imagination, marble Teresa, which Charcot and others had observed and deemed “hysterical,” was essentially a case of repeated arm-­ chair diagnosing at the fin de siècle. But firstly, it was an example of Baroque splendor capable of harnessing the visual power of the arc de cercle to communicate drama and elation to Catholic parishioners. If, then, Bernini’s sculpture of the chaste Teresa was the impetus and only visual source for the saint’s erroneous diagnosis, then this historical predicament begs the following question: was hysteria, from the start, always an artistic and theatrical (i.e., artificial) conception of the Ancients’ gendered theory of the sexually inactive female body? The current scholarship on hysteria, including my previous research on the relationship between hysteria, theater, and modern art in fin-de-siècle Europe, tends to uniformly adopt the affirmative stance here (Timpano 2017).10 Jesse Locker has argued, moreover, that the staging of figures in Gentileschi’s Esther Before Ahasuerus 10  For my review of this literature, as well as an in-depth examination of what I call “hysteron-theatrical gestures” in fin-de-siècle European art and theater, see chapter 3 in Timpano (2017, pp. 66–86).

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also derived from contemporary theater practices and tropes that the artist would have been familiar with in seventeenth-century Italy, such as stock movements popularized by La Commedia dell’arte (2015, pp.  73–83). The French psychiatrist Jules Falret (1824–1902), who was one of Charcot’s interlocutors, similarly observed in 1866 that the “madness” of hysteria was inherently (and perhaps wholly) a theatrical display, noting that the “deceptive” female hysterics at the Salpêtrière were “veritable comedians” (p. 31). The iconography of these French “actresses” and their dramatic postures were eventually transferred to Parisian theater productions at the fin de siècle—a point I will return to shortly—but they were also present much earlier in the century on the London stage, as recorded in theatrical drawings by the Swiss-born, Romantic artist Henry Fuseli (1741–1825), who, during his lifetime, was a theater enthusiast professor of painting (1799–1825) and Keeper (1803–1825) at the British Royal Academy. Andrei Pop (2012) has persuasively demonstrated that the stylized iconographies that manifest in Fuseli’s early nineteenth-century illustrations of scenes from classical theater were, in fact, derived from the expressive gestures enacted (and thus witnessed by Fuseli) in contemporary English theater. In terms of eighteenth-century theatrical productions, this principally included the revival of ancient Greek tragedies and Shakespearean plays by the English director and actor David Garrick (1717–1779), who revitalized London’s Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, under his leadership.11 One such image, a little-studied drawing titled Phaedra Reveals Her Passion for Hippolytus to the Troezenian Women in Her Delirium (1815, Fig. 6), reveals an exaggerated, theatrical arc de cercle, as readable through Phaedra’s body and arms, as well as the work’s title, which informs us that Fuseli’s heroine has been overtaken by both passion and delirium. This “hysterical” muse derives from Euripides’ Hippolytus, which was originally performed in 428 BCE as part of the City Dionysia festival in Athens (Mitchell-Boyask 2007, p. xxviii), though it is equally conceivable that Fuseli conflated the character of Phaedra in the original Greek tragedy with the heroine in the French Baroque play Phaedra and Hippolytus (Phèdre et Hippolyte) by Jean Racine (1639–1699). The latter was first performed in Paris in 1677 and at London’s Theatre Royal in 1773 (Burnim 1961, p.  8). In both tragedies, Phaedra—the wife of Theseus, King of Athens, and stepmother to Hippolytus (the chaste son of Theseus  Pop does not, however, discuss Fuseli’s Phaedra drawing in his study.

11

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Fig. 6  Henry Fuseli, Phaedra Reveals Her Passion for Hippolytus to the Troezenian Women in Her Delirium; her Nurse at the Right, 1815, graphite on paper, 19.7  ×  30.5  cm. Gift of Gloria Middeldorf in Memory of Ulrich Middeldorf. Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University, Bloomington. (Photo: Eskenazi Museum of Art/Shanti Knight)

and Antiope)—falls in love with Hippolytus due, in part, to Theseus’ long absence, a trick played on the virginal Hippolytus by the goddess Aphrodite. When Phaedra’s love (or lust) is finally revealed to her stepson in both Euripides’ Hippolytus and Racine’s Phaedra and Hippolytus (later retitled Phèdre), Hippolytus becomes furious (perhaps even hysterical) and Phaedra, realizing that her stepson will never share her immoral infatuation, kills herself. Fuseli’s image captures the moment that Phaedra, who has become delirious from a lack of food and sleep, reveals to her nurse and the Troezenian women that she desires the prince—not the king—of Athens. Lying on her bed, with her back arched and arms spread in a pseudo-­ Crucifix manner, Phaedra’s body anachronistically mirrors the hysterical attitudes recorded in Londe’s 1885 photographs of the various stages of the arc de cercle, especially chrono-prints 2 and 4 in Fig. 2. Even though the Chorus of women in both plays explain that Phaedra’s passion can be

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blamed on malnutrition and insomnia, it is interesting to ponder whether or not Fuseli (or even Garrick) was thinking of Hippocrates’ or Plato’s ideas on ancient hysteria when envisioning Phaedra’s grand gestures. If we recall that Falret later concluded in 1866 that hysterical women were nothing more than “deceptive” comedians, then perhaps Fuseli’s observations on London theater in the early 1800s, his simultaneous “documentation” of actual actresses’ bodies on paper, suggests that life (as epitomized by late nineteenth-century hysterics at the Salpêtrière) was, in fact, imitating art (as represented by the earlier movements of late eighteenth-­century theater). This very notion must have been present in early nineteenth-century humanist and medical circles, for in 1824 the Scottish physician Sir Charles Bell (1774–1842), who was then a surgeon at London’s Middlesex Hospital and professor of anatomy at the College of Surgeons in London, wrote extensively on the connection between art and science in the second edition of his Essays on the Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression. In a section on muscular spasms, he states that it was his intent to remind the painter that in [the state of] convulsion … there is no such thing in nature. It is a disease he is representing, which has definable symptoms, and it will ever present itself with the same characters. In vain will the study of history, of mythology, or of a purer religion enrich his imagination, and present him with subjects for his art, if science and philosophy do not join, to enable him to give a representation true to nature. (1824, pp. 101–02)12

Bell was not specifically speaking of Fuseli when he defended the medical sciences against art, but he might as well have, for it is clear that the anatomist believed that when it came to accurately representing diseases in illustrative form, the painter must imitate nature (i.e., medical biology). What is more, the “convulsion” that Bell mentions in his study was, in fact, the arc de cercle (see Fig. 7). Created approximately sixty years prior to Richer’s etchings (Fig. 1) or Londe’s photographs (Fig. 2), Bell’s engraving may therefore subsist as the earliest medical rendering of the arc prior to Charcot’s codification of this hysterical attitude—a point that leads us back to the realization that French incarnations of this medical gesture in the 1870s and 1880s were not the earliest examples of the arc de cercle in European visual culture.  Sander Gilman has previously examined Bell’s image in Gilman et al. (1993, pp. 362–68).

12

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Fig. 7  Sir Charles Bell, Convulsion, illustration on page 101 of Bell’s Essays on the Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression, 1824. Princeton University Library, Princeton. Artwork in the public domain. (Photo: Courtesy of the author)

It is worth noting that the first edition of Bell’s book, which was printed under the title Essays on the Anatomy of Expression in Painting (1806, p. 179), but which does not contain the Convulsion illustration, mentions Fuseli’s third “Lecture on Painting” (1801)—a historical footnote which reveals that Bell had either attended Fuseli’s lecture at the Royal Academy in March 1801 or read the printed version by 1806.13 This connection between the two men’s work is especially significant when considered alongside another “theatrical” image of the arc de cercle by Fuseli—Dante Swoons Before the Soaring Souls of Paolo and Francesca, Virgil at His Side (ca. 1818, Fig. 8)—which the artist based on Dante Alighieri’s epic poem The Divine Comedy (ca. 1300).14 Similar to Phaedra Reveals Her Passion (Fig.  6), Fuseli’s Dante Swoons pre-dates Bell’s second edition with the convulsion image and therefore suggests that the latter was perhaps aware of Fuseli’s specific drawings, or at least knowledgeable of the artist’s 13  Fuseli’s third Lecture was titled “Invention” and discusses, among other things, the painter’s relationship to nature. 14  Despite the ubiquity of illustrations for Dante’s Divine Comedy in the history of art, Fuseli’s image has received little attention in the extant literature, and to my knowledge, no scholar has suggested that the female figure “performs” the arc de cercle.

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Fig. 8  Henry Fuseli, Dante Swoons Before the Soaring Souls of Paolo and Francesca, Virgil at His Side, ca. 1818, etching and aquatint on ivory wove paper, 500  ×  332  cm. Gift of Dorothy Braude Edinburg to the Harry B. and Bessie K. Braude Memorial Collection. Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. Artwork in the public domain. (Photo: Art Institute of Chicago)

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penchant for sketching theatrically convulsive women. If this were the case, then this may explain why Bell was interested in Fuseli’s third Lecture, which discussed the nature of artistic imitation. Irrespective of any potentially tangible relationship between Fuseli’s images and Bell’s illustration, it is clear that both Dante and Francesca in Fuseli’s etching enact a version of the arc de cercle that later appears in both Richer’s Études Cliniques sur la Grande Hystérie ou Hystéro-Épilepsie and Londe’s photographs from 1885 (see Fig. 1 and chrono-prints 2 and 5 in Fig. 2). Within the Italian medieval poem, Dante is guided through the nine circles of Hell by the spirit of Virgil, the first-century BCE Roman poet who composed the Aeneid (29–19 BCE). During their journey through the Second Circle, the men encounter the damned souls of those overcome by lust, who are eternally tossed about in a violent wind storm that symbolizes the force, and folly, of their lustful passions (Alighieri 2003, Canto V). Dante and Virgil encounter a number of doomed lovers in Canto V, including Paolo Malatesta and his mistress, Francesca da Rimini, who was also his sister-in-law. According to historical documents, as well as the text of The Divine Comedy, the couple are punished for their sinful acts by Paolo’s brother and Francesca’s husband, Giovanni Malatesta, who mortally stabs them in Francesca’s bedchamber. In Fuseli’s print, Virgil looks away (perhaps in judgment or disgust) as Paolo and Francesca are whisked away by Hell’s tempest. Overcome by the drama of the scene, Dante (who is interestingly depicted in the nude) faints and, in so doing, performs an arc de cercle that conspicuously mimics Francesca’s gestures or vice versa. Fuseli thus implies that Francesca, like Phaedra before her, has become “hysterical” as a result of female passions, while Dante falls prey to the arc de cercle after witnessing the overwhelming theatrics of the underworld. Fuseli’s artistic exploration of the double arc motif reveals, therefore, that his Romantic notion of theatrical hysteria was not relegated to the female body alone. Instead, Dante’s strong emotional state at this juncture in the tale renders him hysterical. It is telling, moreover, that Fuseli chose to depict this character as a headless form—a decision, I think, that was meant to symbolically represent a man who has succumbed to lunacy, and has literally “lost his mind” to madness. In this regard, the assumed intent behind Fuseli’s Romantic images seems, in fact, to map nicely onto the choreography of the arc de cercle that eventually found its way into Richer’s text, and Londe’s photographs, throughout the modernist era.

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Modern Movements: Envisioning the arc de cercle in Parisian and Viennese Art and Theater, 1880–1938 This study has thus far examined the movement of the arc de cercle through the Early Modern era, with particular attention paid to Italian Baroque and English Romantic artworks created prior to Charcot’s “invention of hysteria” in late nineteenth-century France (Didi-Huberman 2004). I want to now examine the appearance of the arc motif in the Modern Era (ca. 1815–1945), especially as it transpired in Parisian and Viennese art and theatrical performances, respectively. As I have previously argued, the literature overwhelmingly suggests that fin-de-siècle French artists, like Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901), and Austrian painters, like Gustav Klimt (1862–1918) and Egon Schiele (1890–1918), were attracted to the “hystero-theatrical gestures” that were being enacted by actresses on the Parisian stage in both theater and cabaret performance (Timpano 2017). This revisionist theory of French and Austrian modern art subsequently posits that these visual artists were responding to gestures in the theatrical arts, rather than directly referencing the iconographies of “madness” that were being printed in late nineteenth-century medical journals (e.g., see Figs.  1 and 2).15 What is more, the literature surrounding Gentileschi’s Esther Before Ahasuerus and Fuseli’s respective drawings collectively suggests that the realm of the performing arts—not the visual arts or medicine—was perhaps the true “inventor” of hysterical theatricalities. So, who were the major players embodying hystero-theatrical gestures in fin-de-siècle Paris? It is clear that if Maria “Blanche” Wittmann was positioned as the “Queen of Hysterics” in Charcot’s Tuesday Lectures, then the renowned French actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923) had become the “Empress of Hysteria” on the French stage by the close of the century. Interestingly, Freud attended Bernhardt’s performances during his tenure at the Salpêtrière in 1885 and as his writings reveal, he was smitten with the “bewitching” actress and her talent (Freud 1960, p. 181). The previous year, Bernhardt had, in fact, personally visited the cells of the Salpêtrière in order to study the gesticulations and movements of female hysterical patients under Charcot’s care. In a subsequent interview published in The Medical Chronicle (La Chronique médicale), she explained 15  Rae Beth Gordon has previously noted that “as early as the 1870s, a number of caféconcert and cabaret artists borrowed gestures and movements from asylum inmates” in Gordon (2001, p. 517).

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that her visit to the hospital in 1884 was prompted by her desire to perfect the authenticity of a nervous attack for the theater (Veyrac 1897). Her interviewer, S. Veyrac, additionally commented that Bernhardt’s time at the clinic had taught her to convey “frightful agony” (p. 616) for her role as Marguerite Gautier in the stage adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ The Lady of the Camellias (Dumas’ novel La Dame aux Camélias was written in 1848 and then adapted to the stage by 1852). A carte de visite from 1880 (Fig. 9) shows Bernhardt as the “hysterical,” swooning Marguerite slumped over a fainting couch, as she enacts the arc de cercle in a manner not unlike Esther in Gentileschi’s Baroque painting (Fig. 4), or the figure of Wittmann in Brouillet’s later canvas (Fig. 3).16 Given that The Lady of the Camellias had premiered in Paris in the spring of 1880, before moving to New York that autumn, it stands to reason that Bernhardt could have

Fig. 9  Napoleon Sarony, Sarah Bernhardt in The Lady of the Camellias, 1880, photograph. New York Public Library, New York. Artwork in the public domain. (Photo: New York Public Library Digital Collections)

16  Victoria Duckett has recently examined Bernhardt’s modern movements, especially those enacted in The Lady of the Camellias, in Duckett (2019).

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also studied images in Charcot’s IPS prior to her visit to the Salpêtrière’s wards (Skinner 1967, pp. 146–47). Alternatively, given that Veyrac suggests that Marguerite was based on actual hysterical patients, it may be that Bernhardt misremembered the date of her initial outing to the hospital and actually visited prior to 1884. This is all to say, in end effect, that Bernhardt herself attested to the drama of the “hysterical” body to move her viewers to tears. Like Bernhardt, the Parisian cabaret performer Jane Avril (1868–1943) likewise spent two years at the Salpêtrière, but not as an actress studying method-acting for a theatrical role. Instead, Avril was an actual patient of Charcot’s between 1882 and 1884. She had reportedly suffered from Sydenham’s chorea (colloquially called Saint Vitus Dance), which may explain why the soon-to-be dancing phenome was reportedly afflicted with rapid, seemingly unchoreographed movements in her hands and feet. In reality, Avril was likely taken to the Salpêtrière not because of any overt pathology, but because she was a poor and homeless teenager living on the streets of Paris, and as such, she would have joined other street urchins, orphans, sex workers, epileptics, and “madwomen” who were sent to the hospital, almost de facto, from the late 1600s to the late 1800s (Giménez-­Roldán 2013, p. 53).17 Here, the irony is quite apparent, for Avril was “treated” for a disorder that she may or may not have actually possessed and then praised for the novelty of her modern gesticulations when she began dancing in Parisian clubs and cabarets. These wild movements and modern dances caught the attention of Toulouse-­Lautrec, a French Post-impressionist painter and illustrator, who tellingly based his well-known 1899 poster for one of Avril’s performances (Fig. 10) on a contemporaneous photograph of the dancer (Fig. 11). While it is clear that Toulouse-Lautrec took artistic license altering Avril’s arm gestures and giving her an expression of surprise, the poster is nearly a verbatim replica of the dancer’s body and costume in Paul Sescau’s photograph.18 In both images, Avril conspicuously enacts the arc de cercle and, in so 17  For a detailed history of the Salpêtrière prior to Charcot’s tenure, see also Goetz et al. (1995). 18  As a brief aside, it is worth noting that Avril’s costume, which contains a large embroidered snake, was likely read by fin-de-siècle viewers as a reference to Eve, and thus an embodiment of the “sinful” woman. This, in turn, may have deliberately positioned Avril as a “coquette”—that is, a flirtatious young woman—who was not unlike the hysterical female patients who were choreographed and then photographed by Charcot and his colleagues at the Salpêtrière (Charcot et al. 1876–1880, pp. 125–28).

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Fig. 10  Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Jane Avril, 1899, five-color lithograph on thin wove paper, 56 × 38 cm. Gift of Lessing J. Rosenwald. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.  Artwork in the public domain. (Photo: National Gallery of Art)

doing, literally becomes a “poster child” for the hysterical attitude in Toulouse-Lautrec’s lithograph. Toulouse-Lautrec was not the only French Post-impressionist to become captivated by the artistic merit of the arc de cercle, nor was he the

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Fig. 11  Paul Sescau, Jane Avril, ca. 1899, photograph. Artwork in the public domain. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

sole artist to utilize period photographs of hysterical movements as aids for his respective artworks. Rather, one can identify an earlier work by the modern sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840–1917), oddly titled Kneeling Man (Homme à genoux, before 1889, Fig. 12), which was seemingly based on

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Fig. 12  Auguste Rodin, Kneeling Man, before 1889, bronze, cast in 1960 at Fonderie Rudier, 10.4 × 12.1 × 32.5 cm. Museo Soumaya, Mexico City. (Photo: Museo Soumaya/Wikimedia Commons)

Londe’s photographs from 1885 (see print 6 in Fig. 2).19 Kneeling Man was originally conceived by the artist for his monumental work The Gates of Hell (La Porte de l’Enfer, 1880–1917, Musée Rodin) and thus included in the upper, right-hand panel of the final version of the large bronze sculpture (Lampert 1986, p. 208).20 Rodin’s Kneeling Man is significant for a number of reasons, first and foremost for its inclusion in The Gates of Hell, which, according to Natasha Ruiz-Gómez (2013), was a work designed to showcase the artist’s ability to “sculpt hysteria” through the many twisting, expressive bodies that portray physical anguish, torment, or sexual ecstasy (p. 1002). The work is important as it reminds us that 19  Natasha Ruiz-Gómez, who provides an in-depth analysis of Kneeling Man alongside Charcot’s arc de cercle, discusses Rodin’s sculpture alongside an anonymous photograph of a male hysteric, perhaps one taken by Londe in the 1880s. See Ruiz-Gómez (2013, pp. 1002–03). 20  Unlike the Musée Rodin catalogue entry for Kneeling Man, Catherine Lampert suggests that the work was made before 1884 and is plaster, not terra cotta.

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the male hysteric, which had been a focus of Charcot’s and Londe’s early studies on hysteria, was ultimately replaced by the more “tantalizing” female hysteric in turn-of-the-century art, theater, and medicine (Micale 1990, 2004, 2008). Rodin’s work seems to suggest that the artist was perhaps “gender blind” to the sex of the arc de cercle and interested in the general expressiveness of any hysterical body to convey modernity to his viewers. In terms of the relationship between Parisian and Viennese art and theater, it appears that both Bernhardt and Rodin played respective roles in the story of how the arc de cercle may have been transferred from the French to the Austrian capital. Of course, Freud’s translations of Charcot’s texts, and his subsequent reverence for Bernhardt’s grand movements, should not be forgotten here, at least as an auxiliary (albeit secondary) point. This notwithstanding, it was Bernhardt who personally transported her hystero-theatrical gestures to the Viennese stage in a series of plays performed between 1882 and 1908 at the Theater an der Wien (Yates 1996, p. 178; Timpano 2017, p. 72). Like Bernhardt, Rodin also traveled to Vienna during his lifetime, though only once, in 1902, to attend the now-celebrated fourteenth exhibition of the Vienna Secession, commonly referred to as the “Beethoven Exhibition” (Zuckerkandl 2007; Husslein-­ Arco and Koja 2010). Despite his relative physical absence in Vienna at the fin de siècle, Rodin had, nevertheless, been a corresponding member of the Vienna Secession since its inception in 1897 and had exhibited works in countless exhibitions of the Austrian organization, including sculptural works in the Secession’s inaugural show in 1898 and again in 1901.21 During this period, the Viennese art and theater critic Ludwig Hevesi (1843–1910) observed Rodin’s works at the 1898 Secession exhibition and subsequently deemed him the “Parisian Michelangelo” (1906, p. 17). The well-known Austrian Symbolist Gustav Klimt likewise paid tribute to Rodin (another point I will return to shortly) in his painting Medicine (Medezin, 1900–1907, Fig. 13). Medicine, which was destroyed by fire in 1945, was the second of Klimt’s infamous Faculty Paintings (Fakultätsbilder), which were commissioned in 1894 by the Austrian government to adorn the ceiling of the Aula at the University of Vienna. The three Faculty Paintings were intended to represent the academic faculties of philosophy, medicine, and law, but sparked immediate controversy in 21  For a review of Rodin’s works exhibited in the historic exhibitions of the Vienna Secession, see catalogues.

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Fig. 13  Gustav Klimt, Medicine, 1900–1907, oil on canvas, dimensions unknown. Destroyed by fire in 1945 at Schloss Immendorf. Artwork in the public domain. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

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the Viennese art world when conservative critics and faculty members lambasted the paintings for being too “ugly,” “heinous,” and overtly “risqué” for the grand hall of the main University building.22 Following a lengthy and heated anti-Klimt campaign in the local press, which began in the spring of 1900 and culminated in 1905, Klimt withdrew from the project altogether and never accepted another public commission thereafter (Zuckerkandl 2007). In Medicine, one immediately notices the asymmetrical divide between the singular figure at the left of the painting and the mass of floating bodies that fill the center-to-right portion of the composition. These bodies, in turn, are punctuated in the lower register of the canvas by the figure of Hygeia, the ancient Greek goddess of health and hygiene, who holds her customary Bowl of Hygeia (a symbol of pharmacy, with its snake and chalice) in her left hand. Moreover, the lone, female nude that hovers in the upper-left quadrant visually materializes as an important binary to Hygeia, given that the unclothed woman “performs” the arc de cercle in a painting intended to represent modern medicine. Ancient health—in her clothed, stoic dignity—is thus defied by the unabashedly naked “truth” of contemporary disease. To this very point, and as a visual nod to Rodin’s modernism, Klimt also included a “hairy” version of the Frenchman’s canonical sculpture The Thinker (Le Penseur, ca. 1881/1904, Musée Rodin), which can be seen to the immediate right of Hygeia. And while The Thinker does not exhibit the arc de cercle, as witnessed in Kneeling Man, it is nevertheless important to note that both Rodin and Klimt had created hysterical bodies as symbols of artistic vanguardism at the turn of the century. Around the time that Klimt was working on the final version of the Faculty Paintings, which, in 1905, were collectively withdrawn from the University and acquired by friends and private patrons,23 the Canadian avant-garde dancer Maud Allan (1873–1956) was touring Europe, 22  The events surrounding the Faculty Paintings, or the “Klimt Affair,” as it became known in the critical press, have been widely discussed in the extant literature. For primary sources, see Bahr (1903) and Hevesi (1906). For secondary literature on Klimt’s Faculty Paintings, see Bailey (2001), Bisanz-Prakken (1999), Koja (2006), Nebehay (1969), Schorske (1980, pp. 225–54), Timpano (2017, pp. 9, 26–31), and Vergo (1975, pp. 49–62, 80–83). 23  Unfortunately, all three Faculty Paintings were confiscated by the Nazis in the 1940s and subsequently burned by retreating SS troops at Schloss Immendorf, in Switzerland, at the close of the Second World War. As such, the canvases are only known to us today through period black-and-white photographs and one extant oil study (in color) of the figure Hygeia from Medicine.

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including Vienna. Allan began her artistic career at Berlin’s Hochschule für Musik (now the University of the Arts), where she studied classical piano in the late 1890s, before turning to expressive dance. In 1906 she famously unveiled—in Vienna, not Berlin—her most famous theatrical production, The Vision of Salomé, which was loosely based on Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé (1891) and which included a risqué, pseudo-burlesque version of the Dance of the Seven Veils. Historically speaking, the biblical figure of Salome was the (unfortunate) daughter of Queen Herodias and the step-­daughter of King Herod II of Judea, both of whom were said to have plotted the demise of Saint John the Baptist, as recorded in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark. Allan’s sensual portrayal of the Jewish princess meant that shows were routinely banned from “reputable” European theaters, forcing her to perform in private clubs to avoid the censors. Despite these setbacks, her reputation nevertheless earned her the title “the Salomé Dancer” throughout Europe (Allan 1908). One promotional image from the London tour of The Vision of Salomé (1908, Fig. 14) reveals that Allan, like Bernhardt and Avril before her, was distinctly drawn to the theatrics of the arc de cercle, undoubtedly to render her seductive Salome as an equally expressive hysteric. It is not known if Allan ever studied Richer’s illustrations (Fig. 1) or Londe’s photographs (Fig. 2) when developing her character, though this point may be irrelevant, as it is clear that hystero-­theatrical gestures had become part of modernist theater in Berlin and Vienna by the early 1900s, and as such, Allan would have likely been exposed to the vogue for the sensual “madwoman” on the Berlin stage during her studies at the Hochschule, or later during her tenure in Vienna (Timpano 2017, pp. 72–81, 108–10). As a theatrical character, Salome was one of the principal “madwomen” that Germanic audiences repeatedly encountered on the fin-de-siècle stage, and not just in Allan’s play. The German debut of Wilde’s one-act play Salomé had premiered at Munich in May 1901, but when it moved to Berlin, it was restaged as a modern, visual spectacle by the celebrated Austrian director Max Reinhardt (1873–1943), who transformed the titular character into a sensual “child-woman,” or femme-fatale (Timpano 2017, p.  74). Likewise, when the opera Salome by Richard Strauss (1864–1949) premiered at the Dresden Opera in December 1905, the theater critic and conductor Friedrich Brandes (1864–1940) noted that “hysteria is now the fashionable disease” after viewing the lead soprano’s portrayal of clinical madness on stage (1905, n.p.). Here, Salome’s “Jewishness” seems to have also played a significant role in the character’s

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Fig. 14  David Allen & Sons, Ltd., Maud Allan as “Salome,” 1908, chromotype photograph, 15.1 × 10 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Given by the American Friends of the V&A through the generosity of Leslie and Judith Schreyer and Gabrielle Shrem Schreyer. © Victoria and Albert Museum. (Photo: Victoria and Albert Museum)

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pathological diagnosis (Gilman 1993; Kramer 1990). Building on Charcot’s findings that hysteria was linked to a degeneration of the nervous system (Charcot 1889, p. 85)—a condition that Charcot’s colleague, the French psychologist Pierre Janet (1859–1947) linked to hereditary degeneracy (1893, p.  27)—Harold Blum (2001) has shown that being Jewish was also considered a “degenerate” condition in Austria and Germany at the fin de siècle (p. 162), while Sander Gilman has concluded that the concept of the “avant-garde” was linked to being “Jewish” (1988, p. 37).24 Anne Seshadri has explained further that Strauss’ Salome would have been regarded as a “Jewish opera” by contemporary viewers like Brandes, who, in turn, would have understood the Jewish princess to be an inherently “diseased” woman who transcended her degeneracy—that is, both her Jewishness and her hysteria—by the end of the piece (2006, pp.  24–25). The collective literature thus suggests that when Allan was performing The Vision of Salomé in 1906, German-speaking audiences would have already assumed that her avant-garde character was a “pathological Jewish hysteric.” Given that Bernhardt was a Jewish actress and Esther a Jewish woman before her, one additionally wonders if Gentileschi’s heroine, or the plethora of Bernhardt’s “hysterical” characters at the fin de siècle were, in fact, capable of escaping their “diseases” in the eyes of or inherently prejudiced viewers (Gilman 1993)? In other words, was transcendence truly ever possible for the hysterical woman if she was also Jewish? The Viennese Expressionist artist Egon Schiele likewise explored the arc de cercle as a marker of the hysterical woman in the early decades of the twentieth century and, as previously shown, may be linked to the gesticulations of the expressive hysteric (Jewish or otherwise) in Charcot’s medical theater, as well as the theatrical stage (Timpano 2017, pp. 59–60). Schiele’s Lying Female Nude (Liegender weiblicher Akt, 1918, Fig. 15), which shares strong affinities with his earlier work Two Girls, Lying in an Entwined Position (Zwei Mädchen, in verschränkter Stellung liegend, 1915, Albertina Museum), is principally a nude study a living model, though the position of the body in Schiele’s print additionally recalls the iconography of the “hysterical” woman in Klimt’s Medicine (Fig. 13).25  For an in-depth study of degeneracy, race, and pathology—particularly as these constructs were discussed in relation to negative stereotypes of Jews—see Gilman (1985). 25  I provide an in-depth analysis of Schiele’s Two Girls, Lying in an Entwined Position in Timpano (2017, pp. 180–83). 24

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Fig. 15  Egon Schiele, Lying Female Nude, 1918, collotype print, 29 × 44 cm. Posthumously printed in Egon Schiele: Handzeichnungen (1920), edition of 510 artist portfolios. Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles. Artwork in the public domain. (Photo: Courtesy of the author)

Schiele had, by 1910, begun to distance himself from Klimt, though the younger artist nevertheless relied on Klimt’s network of wealthy patrons to support his burgeoning career. As such, one is left to wonder if Klimt’s more famous Medicine—which, by then, was owned by a mutual friend and acquaintance, the Jugendstil artist and designer Koloman Moser (1868–1918)—was on Schiele’s mind when he incorporated the arc de cercle into his collotype. The woman’s pose is clearly sensual, even erotic, in its stark nudity and frontal presentation to the male gaze—a spectacle that had previously found “power” in Charcot’s Tuesday Lectures, in Bernhardt’s emotionally driven plays, and in Allan’s seductive dancing. This is not to say that Schiele envisioned Lying Female Nude to serve as a further fin-de-siècle Salome, though he could have deliberately positioned his model in this manner to recall the modern theatrics of expressive, hysterical bodies. If this were the case, then the aesthetics of the work

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suggests that the arc motif was still at the fore of Viennese modernism by the close of the First World War. Following the Great War, the German Surrealist artist Hans Bellmer (1902–1975) was arguably the next individual to explore sexualized femininity as a “site” of hysteria, of pathological “degeneration,” and of fetishistic desire—in this instance, through the body of the doll. Often referred to by their singular French name—la poupée—Bellmer’s dolls (die Puppen in German) routinely materialize in the artist’s photographs as a series of broken, dismembered, and reassembled mannequin-like body parts. During his lifetime, Bellmer made two dolls: the first was created in Berlin in 1933, photographed between 1933 and 1934, and of these prints, eighteen were selected for the centerfold of the December 1934 edition of Minotaure, a popular Parisian Surrealist journal (Fig.  16). The second

Fig. 16  Hans Bellmer, Doll: Variations on a Montage of an Articulated Minor, 1934, eighteen gelatin silver photographic prints, each print approx. 11.7 × 7.6 cm. First published on pages 30 and 31  in Minotaure (Winter 1934–1935). Special Collections, University of Miami Libraries, Coral Gables. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. (Photo: Courtesy of the author)

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doll, which he constructed in 1935, was similarly photographed in suggestive poses, and prints were then sent to André Breton (1896–1966), Paul Éluard (1895–1952), and other French Surrealists in late 1935/early 1936 to be reproduced in a subsequent issue of Minotaure (Lichtenstein 2001, p. 98). In keeping with this “French connection,” Bellmer later had his self-published German book Die Puppe (1934) translated into French (La Poupée, 1936), which documented the stages of the first doll’s construction via word and image. But unlike the living, breathing female hysterical patients that occupied the cells at the Salpêtrière, Bellmer’s work only constituted inanimate dolls—objects that would seemingly be divorced from the historiography of the arc de cercle. To remedy this conundrum, Therese Lichtenstein has recently argued that Bellmer’s fascination with hysteria was shared by other Surrealists and may have also been influenced by them. The Surrealists looked back to nineteenth-­century precedents for connections between madness and aesthetics—to Charcot’s photographs of hysterics, to literary Symbolists, as well as to burgeoning psychoanalytic theories. The hysterical poses that Charcot cataloged (which were based on previous aesthetic models) were turned into icons. However, these visual examples were not universal truths but constructed models codified for various ideological purposes. (2001, p. 116)

When Lichtenstein speaks of the Surrealists, it is important to note that she is referring to the Bretonian “camp” of Surrealism, which, according to Breton’s first Surrealist Manifesto (Le Manifeste du Surréalisme, 1924), espoused a new philosophical movement in art and literature that wed Freudian psychoanalysis to Marxist theory—especially Freud’s understanding of desire and sexual repression with Marx’s ideas on materialism (Breton 1969). It should also be remembered that Breton and fellow Surrealist poet Louis Aragon (1897–1982) had commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of Charcot’s “invention” of hysteria, arguing that the performance of female hysterics, and not the problematical medical “dramaturgy of the professionals,” should be celebrated in the new century (LaCoss 2005, p. 38). It therefore comes as no surprise that Bellmer, who had befriended Breton and Éluard in 1935 and subsequently joined their circle when he fled Nazi Germany for Paris in 1938, would be familiar with Charcotian and Freudian psychiatry, particularly the varying

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discourses surrounding the multiple expressions of hysterical attacks, including the arc de cercle. Lichtenstein’s analysis equally reinforces the belief that Charcot did not so much “invent” the aesthetics of hysteria, but rather, merely reinforced stereotypes of the theatrically hysterical “madwoman” that were already present in art and theater from centuries past. In the case of Bellmer, theater also played a defining role in the central subject of his oeuvre: now conceived of as the “hysterical” doll. This connection is verified by an anecdote that reappears in much of the literature on Bellmer, which discusses Max Reinhardt’s 1931/1932 modernist staging of Jacques Offenbach’s opera Tales of Hoffmann (Les contes d’Hoffmann, 1881) Bellmer attended in Berlin in 1932 and greatly praised.26 The French libretto had been based, in part, on E. T. A. Hoffmann’s German short story “The Sandman” (“Der Sandmann,” 1816), which tells the tale of a young man named Nathaniel who falls in love with a life-sized automaton named Olympia (variously called Coppélia), who he falsely believes to be a real woman, thus causing him to descend into madness (Hoffmann 1967, pp. 183–214). Around this time, Bellmer had also read the personal letters of the Viennese Expressionist artist and playwright Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980), the latter of whom had had a life-sized (sex) doll—which he tellingly called “The Fetish”—made in the “likeness” of his ex-lover, Alma Mahler, in 1919 (Kokoschka 1983, pp.  67–79; Taylor 2000, p.  58; Timpano 2017, p. 153). While the Alma doll would not have been known to Bellmer—given that the doll was lost (or likely destroyed by the artist) in the 1920s—the singing, dancing, doll-like actress/ballerina who played Olympia in Reinhardt’s production, as well as the “mad” Nathaniel, were likely the more immediate visual incarnations of modern, “pathological” characters known to the Surrealist (Senelick 2017, pp.  179–97). It is equally likely that Bellmer knew of, or had even read, Freud’s essay “The Uncanny” (“Das Unheimliche,” 1919), which discusses the automaton in Hoffmann’s “The Sandman.” However, rather than focusing on the lifeless doll, Freud instead linked Nathaniel’s mental anguish and self-afflicted blindness to the fear of castration, and thus the Oedipus complex (Freud 1953–1974, pp. 219–56). Returning now to the two-page spread of Bellmer’s photographs in Minotaure (Fig. 16), the viewer will note that the doll has been positioned 26  For literature on Bellmer’s relationship to Offenbach’s opera, see Krauss (1985, p. 62), Lichtenstein (2001, pp. 19–21), and Taylor (2000, pp. 61–66). For additional sources on Bellmer’s dolls, see Bellmer (1936), Bellmer (1990), and Foster (1991).

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in the arc de cercle in several images and most conspicuously in the lower three prints that span the binding above and below the byline and subtitle Hans Bellmer: Variations on a Montage of an Articulated Minor (Hans Bellmer: Variations sur le Montage d’une Mineure articulée). Unlike earlier examples of the arc motif explored in this essay, Bellmer’s dolls are presented here as fragmented and incomplete bodies: in some instances, disembodied limbs and torsos are piled next to one another, as if they were sections of a cadaver being catalogued and photographed in the morgue of a medical examiner. In line with this assertion, I posit that the very arrangement of the photographs in the centerfold of Minotaure—which, of course, was a curatorial decision made by the editors of the journal, and not Bellmer per se—metaphorically recalls the plethora of female hysterical patients at the Salpêtrière who were systematically “arranged” into their cells, unable to break free from Charcot’s ward, or Bellmer’s scopophilic (perhaps even pedophilic) gaze. This reading, in turn, recalls my earlier research on metaphorical puppets and dolls in turn-of-the-century marionette theater and modernist literature, and their ability to serve as allegories for pathological (female) bodies that were then manipulated by medical physicians, playwrights, and visual artists for ideological gain and aesthetic pleasure (Timpano 2017). Bellmer’s Surrealist preoccupation with the pathological doll transports this discourse beyond the fin de siècle and into the decadence of Berlin culture that defined the Weimar Republic (1918–1933). According to Hal Foster (1991) and others, Bellmer’s process of deconstructing the doll in 1933 and 1934—at the precise moment that Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist Party had seized power in Germany—can consequently be read as a politically motivated maneuver designed to disavow the dismembering of the “feminine,” or “weak,” body in fascism (pp.  95–96). This theoretical reading supposes that the German artist, who historically loathed his fascist father, sought to physically break the doll’s body in order to visibly illustrate the toll of Nazi violence and destruction during the Third Reich. And while scholars may perpetually struggle to rectify the doll’s potential to be read as an object of anti-fascist protest against its inherent sado-masochism, most art historians agree that the discourse surrounding corporeal degeneration was key to Bellmer’s artistic agenda, myself included. Bellmer was not the only Surrealist interested in the arc de cercle in the 1930s. The celebrated Spanish artist and cinematographer Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) similarly explored this motif in Paris prior to the Second

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World War, and most tellingly in a drawing titled The Hysterical Arch (L’arc hystérique, 1937, Fig.  17), which has surprisingly received scant attention by Dalí scholars.27 In terms of Dalí’s biography, the Spaniard had left Barcelona for the French capital in 1929, the same year he officially joined Breton’s and Éluard’s Surrealist circle; he subsequently made waves in the Parisian art scene with the unveiling of his experimental film The Andalusian Dog (Un Chien andalou), which he made with his friend, the Spanish-Mexican filmmaker Luis Buñuel (Fanés 2007, p.  113). The Hysterical Arch, which was created one year before Dalí traveled to London to meet with Freud (who was then eighty-two years old and

Fig. 17  Salvador Dalí, The Hysterical Arch, 1937, ink on paper, 55.9 × 76.2 cm. Collection of the Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL (USA) 2020. © 2020 Salvador Dalí, Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Artists Rights Society. (Photo: The Dalí Museum) 27  To my knowledge, the catalogue of works in the permanent collection of the Salvador Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg, as well as the museum’s website, are the only sources to address the iconography and symbolism on The Hysterical Arch. See Wach (1996, p. 23).

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exiled from Nazi-occupied Vienna), openly demonstrates that the psychiatrist’s theories had occupied the artist’s oeuvre prior to their historical encounter—a connection that was also visible in the use of Freudian symbolism throughout The Andalusian Dog. In fact, much of Dalí’s oeuvre can be said to deal with psychoanalytic themes, including the visualization of dreams, memory, and unconscious desires. This is undeniably why he wrote in one of his personal memoirs that he was “in fact living in a kind of perpetual hysteria” during his time in Paris (Dalí 1976, p. 88). The Hysterical Arch presents the viewer with an exceedingly complex tableau: a monumental female figure, who performs the arc de cercle, dominates the majority of the picture plane. Her upper abdomen has been replaced with an open desk drawer, from which beans or larvae spill forth. An upside-down book rests on her chest in place of human breasts. Her mouth is open, as are her eyes, which roll back into her head. Large larvae, or worms, writhe on the ground where her hands ought to be, and these, in turn, are surrounded by a plethora of disembodied phalluses. A larger-­ than-­life cigar, or cocoon, teeters on the woman’s lower abdomen, beneath which a miniscule figure can be seen in the middle ground carrying a lance—perhaps an early incarnation of Dalí’s well-known portrayal of Don Quixote. Other figures, shapes, and formations inhabit the far background of the drawing, though these tiny details become dwarfed by the female arabesque, who, in a figurative sense, subsists as the actual “hysterical arch” of the work’s title. In this regard, Dalí implies that the woman in The Hysterical Arch has also literally morphed into her disease, or, in other terms, he offers that her pathology has consumed her identity to the point where “she” is only recognizable through the physiological markers of her supposed neuro-psycho-sexual disorder. This same expressive iconography was analogously explored by Hélène Vanel (1897–1989) in her performance of The Incomplete Act (L’Acte manqué, sometimes translated as The Unconsummated Act, 1938, Fig. 18), which premiered on the opening night of the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme at the Galerie Beaux-Arts in Paris (Breton and Éluard 1938). Vanel was reportedly the only dancer to perform at the event, and by all accounts, hers was the only performance piece staged during the evening (Robinson 1997, pp. 76–77). Dalí recalls the preparations for the exposition: The big event of the evening was Hélène Vanel’s spectral appearance dancing dressed as a doll or a witch out of Macbeth. I had personally arranged

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Fig. 18 Anonymous, Untitled (Interior view of the 1938 Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme; Hélène Vanel), Paris, Galerie Beaux-Arts, January 17–February 22, 1938, vintage gelatin silver print, 15.2 × 20 cm. Ubu Gallery, New York. (Photo: Ubu Gallery, New York) her entrance and the Surrealist choreography. As Breton understood nothing about music or the dance, it had taken some doing to get him to agree to the scene. … She stirred them [the audience] up violently with her abrupt entrance. … She herself began screaming in hysterical mimodrama, rolling and disporting herself on the bed. (1976, p. 192)

Dalí’s dualistic reading of Vanel’s costume is interesting for two reasons. First, it suggests that perhaps Dalí was not as involved in Vanel’s performance as alluded to in his recollection of the exhibition, and secondly, it offers that Vanel may have therefore exercised a good deal of autonomy when executing her performance, in spite of Dalí’s grand proclamation. Importantly, Dalí recalls that her costume was meant to recall a doll’s, or a witch’s, dress, both of which, by 1938, had been associated with the “madwoman” and the hysteric. The dress can be seen in the

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photograph of Vanel’s performance (Fig. 18), in which the dancer grabs her breasts and enacts the arc de cercle while kneeling on a bed surrounded by Surrealist artworks. Even today, the grand movements of Vanel’s body unquestionably communicate to her viewers that the “incomplete act” was the “unconsummated act” of sexual intercourse—a failed act that had left her body in the throes of a hysterical attack, at least metaphorically. In reviewing the contemporary critical literature surrounding her dance, Don LaCoss (2005) has shown that many in attendance that evening left in disgust, accusing the Surrealists of being “dirty bastards,” yet they nevertheless understood Vanel’s act to be that of a “sorceress” performing hysteria (p. 44). While not as exaggerated as the arc gesture in Dalí’s The Hysterical Arch, Vanel’s presentation nevertheless recalls the choreography of bodies that inhabit medical photographs taken at the Salpêtrière in the 1870s and 1880s. As such, and to echo Lichtenstein’s earlier assessment of Charcot’s imagery, Vanel had, in a word, transformed herself into a secular icon—but not just any devotional image that of the modern goddess (perhaps the new patron saint) of hysteria.

Epilogue: The Contemporary Scene, 1990–2020 In this chapter, I have explored various incarnations of the arc de cercle in the visual and performing arts that span the early Baroque era to Surrealism. As a conclusion to my investigation into the aesthetics of this hysterical expression, I want to turn to two works from the postmodern era: one from the very end of the twentieth century, and one from this precise moment in the twenty-first. The first work, Arch of Hysteria (1993, Fig. 19) by the French-American artist Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010), is perhaps the best contemporary example of the arc motif realized in threedimensional form. As its title implies, Bourgeois’ gleaming bronze sculpture materializes as a literal, albeit exaggerated, version of the arc de cercle akin to Dalí’s The Hysterical Arch (Fig. 17) or Richer’s 1885 illustration (Fig.  1). Unlike Bourgeois’ later, though similarly titled Arched Figure (1999)—which illustrates the arc de cercle through a hanging female body constructed out of crudely stitched pink flannel patches—Arch of Hysteria references a male body, as evidenced by its clearly delineated male genitalia. In this regard, Arch of Hysteria dramatically recalls Londe’s photographs of male hysterics (see print 6 in Fig. 2), Bell’s Convulsion (Fig. 7), and especially Rodin’s Kneeling Man (Fig. 12). Bourgeois, who explored the arc theme with both male and female bodies throughout the 1990s,

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Fig. 19  Louise Bourgeois, Arch of Hysteria, 1993, bronze with silver patina, 84  ×  101.5  ×  58.5  cm. Galeria Soledad Lorenzo, Madrid. © 2020 The Easton Foundation/Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY. (Photo: Album / Art Resource, NY)

created, in total, a series of drawings for Arched Figure and Arch of Hysteria between 1992 and 1993, a print cycle titled Triptych for the Red Room (1994–2000), and additional sculptural pieces, including a male version of Arched Figure from 1993 that first appeared in a 1992–1993 installation titled Cell (Arch of Hysteria). In various versions of Cell (Arch of Hysteria), a headless male body either rests on a brown mattress or conversely reclines on white bedsheets embellished with the repeating phrase: “Je t’aime” (“I love you” in French) sewn in red thread.

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Given this preoccupation with the iconography of hysteria, and particularly the arc de cercle, one must question why Bourgeois, as a feminist art, chose to almost obsessively recycle this anti-feminist trope? In other words, why utilize a form that, for all intents and purposes, was created through Charcotian-Freudian patriarchal language, by male-centric notions of the sexualized female body, and for the male gaze? To address this seeming paradox, it is initially helpful to examine Bourgeois’ own words, for she had, in fact, identified herself as a “hysteric” during her lifetime, in large part due to her engagement with Freudian psychoanalytic therapy for more than thirty years (Turner 2012). Bourgeois’ longtime assistant Jerry Gorovoy, whose body Bourgeois used to cast the male form in Arch of Hysteria and Cell (Arch of Hysteria), recalls, moreover, that the artist was astutely aware that hysteria had historically affected both men and women, but that psychoanalysts had preferred to gaze upon “the women” (Gorovoy 2020). Bourgeois claims, therefore, that she used the arc motif as a redemptive gesture, imagining that it would serve as “a bridge, a contract between grief and happiness, between a negative experience and a sensation of pleasure” (De Pascale 2009, p. 257). This notwithstanding, I wonder if Arch of Hysteria was also intended to offer a cautionary tale: a warning that if we succumb to the visual “pleasure” of the arc (with its overwhelming history of female objectification), we might bend too far— just as Bourgeois’ figure attempts, in vain, to touch his feet while enacting his untethered, perpetually suspended, and destabilized somersault. In other words, when visualizing the arc de cercle in contemporary art, do we risk getting caught in a circular loop (the ouroboros always biting its own tail), in which the denouncement of hysteria’s misogynism can only be explored visually by simultaneously representing, even perpetuating, hysteria’s gendered stereotypes in two- or three-dimensional form?28 The contemporary American artist Kara Walker (b. 1969) ostensibly answers this query, without ambivalence, with her large-scale installation work titled Fons Americanus (American Fountain, 2019–2020, Fig. 20). 28  Although some of the following scholars do not specifically discuss any of Bourgeois’ “hysterical” pieces in their analyses, they do, nevertheless, examine her work through the lens of feminism, psychoanalysis, or both. See Bal (2001), Bernadac (2006), Lippard (1975), Nixon (2005), Pollock (1999), and Santamaría Blasco and Zanón Cuenca (2015). Interestingly, Mieke Bal relates Bourgeois’ work to Bernini’s sculptures, including Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, arguing that “Bourgeois beckons Bernini” (p. 126), but Bal makes these comparisons with Bourgeois’ Spider (1994–1997) and Femme maison (1983), not Arch of Hysteria per se.

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Fig. 20  Kara Walker, Fons Americanus, 2019–2020, site-specific installation, mixed media, 12.8 m high. Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London. (Photo: Courtesy of the author)

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Commissioned by the Hyundai Corporation for the Turbine Hall in London’s Tate Modern, the colossal fountain, which measures forty-two feet in height, was designed to recall the scale and form of the Victoria Memorial (1911), currently outside Buckingham Palace (Kim 2019). As a departure from her usual engagement with slave imagery and imagined narratives from the antebellum American South, Walker here turns her critical gaze upon English colonialism and the British Empire’s involvement in the sale and trafficking of African peoples prior to their abolition and emancipation between 1834 and 1838 (Capet 2007, p. 129). As with her now-canonical work from the 1990s, which materialize as large-scale, black paper-cut silhouettes depicting violent, sexual encounters between (Black) slaves and (white) slave masters affixed to white gallery walls, Walker’s Fons Americanus confronts Britain’s uncomfortable history with slavery and the commodification of Black bodies by literally “white washing” the African figures that populate the fountain.29 For example, at the fountain’s apex, the figure of Lady Victoria (which appears in gold on the Victoria Memorial) has been replaced with a monochromatic version of the Black Venus, whose mouth and nipples squirt water into the basins below. Based on an early nineteenth-century engraving titled The Voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to the West Indies (1801, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich) by the British illustrator Thomas Stothard (1775–1834), Walker’s Black Venus deliberately merges the classical image of Venus, a goddess depicted in white marble, with the image of an African woman (the “Sable Venus”) in Stothard’s print, to incriminate the transatlantic slave trade (Kim 2019, p. 75). More interesting is the fact that Walker’s Black Venus dramatically enacts the arc de cercle in a work that otherwise seems divorced from the history of hysteria. In the exhibition catalogue that accompanied the unveiling of Fons Americanus at the Tate Modern (Kim 2019), Kim and Walker write ambiguously about the figure’s arched back, and in this space of open-ended meaning, I want to suggest that the reference to hysteria becomes a deliberate gesture, especially for an artist whose oeuvre relies heavily on the “readability” of racial or gendered stereotypes in sculptural form. Unlike other artists discussed in this chapter—all of whom are, or were, Caucasian—race does not become a factor in analyzing their artistic or scientific output. Rather, only their sex an issue for contemplation and 29  For literature on Walker’s early paper-cut silhouettes and their indictment of racial histories, see Berry et al. (2003), Dixon et al. (2002), Shaw (2004), and Vergne et al. (2007).

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dissention. For Walker, race and sex (she is an African-American woman) have constantly occupied her work, as well as the scholarship surrounding her art. This is doubtlessly due to the fact that a white artist could not justifiably execute Walker’s racially charged pieces without rightly being accused of trying to Black narratives and histories through a position of white privilege. In this regard, Walker’s use of the arc de cercle echoes the uneasiness of racial discourses by suggesting that the Black female artist can not only write an imagined history of Black power in the years of British colonialism, but can also attempt to reclaim the female hysterical body from that same place of white privilege. Not all of Walker’s critics, however, see the power in her repeated use of “false” narratives, memories, and histories. In addressing the iconography and symbolism of Fons Americanus, Morgan Quaintance has questioned whether this “single-sightedness” is beneficial to the ongoing debate surrounding contemporary art and culture in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement. Quaintance begins with an inquiry of his own: What renders Walker’s brand of “critique” so attractive and so appealing to institutions keen to virtue signal? The historical distance. For hers is work that miraculously “speaks to the present” by ignoring it entirely, training its monomaniacal vision on the past. The new Turbine Hall commission at Tate Modern is no exception. (2019, p. 13)

Here, the critic suggests that Walker’s art may fail to function as a critique on Britain’s (or for that matter, the United States’) present engagement with race by only focusing on their antebellum pasts. If this argument holds true, then is the Black Venus in Fons Americanus equally guilty of perpetuating stereotypes of the hysterical female body without properly contextualizing it within its own storied and complicated past? I, for one, have always appreciated the fact that Walker’s art beseeches these difficult, uncomfortable questions without necessarily offering any clear-cut answers. It may be, then, that Walker is offering that the history of the arc de cercle, or hysteria in general, is as murky and unclear as our current inability to directly and honestly discuss issues of race and gender in today’s public sphere, especially in current U.S. cultural politics. The questions that contemporary works by Walker and Bourgeois raise about the legacy and future of hysteria’s engagement with the arts are complex, important, and undecided. Walker’s Fons Americanus, which absolutely confronts sex and race, inadvertently recalls the xenophobic

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rhetoric surrounding the “diseased” Jewish body in avant-garde plays and paintings at the fin de siècle. Bourgeois’ Arch of Hysteria and Arched Figure likewise recycle Charcotian-Freudian stereotypes in order to challenge gendered constructs by literally suspending male and female bodies in an unstable manner. Returning to the epigraph of this chapter, one must recall that it was Freud who declared hysteria to be “the oldest, bestknown and most striking” neurosis—a nineteenth-century description that followed him into the subsequent era and beyond. Now that we are in the twenty-first century, I am compelled to return to my previous query in this summation: can hysteria still function as a relevant topic for academic discussion or visual exploration in our present age? If we look no further than Bourgeois’ Arch of Hysteria or Walker’s Fons Americanus for guidance, then the reply comes to us as a resounding “yes.”

References Alighieri, Dante. 2003. The Divine Comedy: The Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Paradiso. Translated by John Ciardi. The Authoritative Translations ed. New York: Penguin. Allan, Maud. 1908. My Life and Dancing. London: Everett & Co. Ávila, Teresa of. (1565) 1916. The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus, of the Order of Our Lady of Carmel, Written by Herself. Translated by David Lewis. Fifth ed. Circa 1565. New York: Benziger Brothers. Bache, Christopher M. 1985. “A Reappraisal of Teresa of Avila’s Supposed Hysteria.” Journal of Religion and Health 24, no. 4 (Winter): 300–15. Bahr, Hermann, ed. 1903. Gegen Klimt: Historisches, Philosophie, Medizin, Goldfische, Fries. Wien: Eisenstein & Co. Bailey, Colin B., ed. 2001. Gustav Klimt: Modernism in the Making. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Bal, Mieke. 2001. Louise Bourgeois’ Spider: The Architecture of Art-Writing. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Beizer, Janet. 1994. Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of Hysteria in Nineteenth-­ Century France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Bell, Charles. 1806. Essays on the Anatomy of Expression in Painting. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, Paternoster-Row. ———. 1824. Essays on the Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression. Second ed. London: John Murray. Bellmer, Hans. 1936. La Poupée. Translated by Robert Valançay. Paris: GLM. ———. (1934) 1990. “Memories of the Doll Theme.” Translated by Peter Chametzky, Susan Felleman, and Jochen Schindler. Sulfur 26 (Spring): 29–33.

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Bernadac, Marie-Laure. 2006. Louise Bourgeois. Translated by Deke Dusinberre. Paris: Flammarion. Berry, Ian, et  al. 2003. Kara Walker: Narratives of a Negress. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bisanz-Prakken, Marian. 1999. Heiliger Frühling: Gustav Klimt und die Anfänge der Wiener Secession 1895−1905. München: Christian Brandstatter. Bissell, R. Ward. 1968. “Artemisia Gentileschi—A New Documented Chronology.” The Art Bulletin 50, no. 2 (June): 153–68. Blackshaw, Gemma, and Leslie Topp, eds. 2009. Madness and Modernity: Mental Illness and the Visual Arts in Vienna 1900. Farnham: Lund Humphries. Blum, Harold. 2001. “Setting Freud and Hysteria in Cultural Context.” The Psychoanalytic Century: Freud’s Legacy for the Future. Edited by David E. Scharff. New York: Other Press. Brandes, Friedrich. 1905. “Dresdener Uraufführung der Salome von Wilde-­ Strauss.” Deutsche Tageszeitung, 11 December, n.p. Braun, Johanna, ed. 2020. Performing Hysteria: Contemporary Images and Imaginations of Hysteria. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Breton, André. 1969. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Breton, André, and Paul Éluard. 1938. Exposition internationale du Surréalisme, Janvier-Février 1938. Paris: Galerie Beaux-Arts. Breuer, Joseph, and Sigmund Freud. 1895. Studien über Hysterie. Leipzig und Wien: Franz Deuticke. ———. (1895) 2000. Studies on Hysteria. Translated and edited by James Strachey and Anna Freud. New York: Basic Books. Burnim, Kalman A. 1961. David Garrick, Director. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Capet, Antoine. 2007. “Brougham, Henry Peter (1778–1868).” Encyclopedia of Antislavery and Abolition. Edited by Hinks, Peter, and John McKivigan. Vol. 1, 127–29. Westport and London: Greenwood Press. Charcot, Jean-Martin. 1889. Clinical Lectures on Diseases of the Nervous System, Delivered at the Infirmary of La Salpêtrière. Vol. 3. Translated by Thomas Savill. London: The New Sydenham Society. ———. (1892) 1897. La foi qui guérit. Paris: Progrès Médical. Charcot, Jean-Martin, D.  M. Bourneville, and Paul Régnard. 1876–1880. Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière. Vol 2. Paris: Progrès médical/ Adrien Delahaye. Dalí, Salvador. 1976. The Unspeakable Confessions of Salvador Dalí. Translated by André Parinaud. New York: Morrow. Davis, Natalie Zemon, and Arlette Farge. 1992. History of Women in the West. Vol. 3. Renaissance and the Enlightenment Paradoxes. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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De Pascale, Enrico. 2009. Death and Resurrection in Art. Translated by Anthony Shugaar. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum. Didi-Huberman, Georges. (1982) 2004. Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière. Translated by Alisa Hartz. Cambridge: MIT Press. (I am aware that the original translation was published in hardback in 2003, but I am using the 2004 paperback edition, hence the altered date.) Dijkstra, Bram. 1986. Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dixon, Annette et al. 2002. Kara Walker: Pictures from Another Time. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Museum of Art. Duckett, Victoria. 2019. “Performing Art Nouveau: Sarah Bernhardt and the Development of Industrial Modernism.” Modernity/modernism Print Plus 4, no. 3 (October) https://doi.org/10.26597/mod.0129. Ebers, Georg. 1875. Papyros Ebers: Das Hermetische Buch über die Arzneimittel der alten Ägypter in hieratischer Schrift. Zweite Band. Leipzig: Verlag von Wilhelm Engelmann. “Esther”. 2010. The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version with the Apocrypha. Fully revised fourth ed., 707–19, 1411–26. New  York: Oxford University Press. Falret, Jules. 1866. De la folie raisonnante ou folie morale. Programme des questions à etudier. Extrait des Annales Médico-Psychologiques. Vol. 1. Et tiré-à-part. Paris: Imprimerie de E. Martinet. Fanés, Fèlix. 2007. Salvador Dalí: The Construction of the Image, 1925–1930. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Fine, Elsa Honig. 1978. Women & Art: A History of Women Painters and Sculptors from the Renaissance to the 20th Century. Montclair: Allanheld & Schram. Foster, Hal. 1991. “Amour Fou.” October 56, High/Low: Art and Mass Culture (Spring): 64–97. Freud, Sigmund. 1960. Letters of Sigmund Freud. Edited by Ernst L.  Freud. Translated by Tania and James Stern. New York: Basic Books. ———. 1953–1974. “The Uncanny.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Translated and edited by James Strachey. Vol. 17. London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute for Psycho-Analysis. Fuseli, Henry. 1801. Lectures on Painting, Delivered at the Royal Academy, March 1801. London: J. Johnson. Garrard, Mary D. 1989. Artemisia Gentileschi: The Image of the Female Hero in Italian Baroque Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2001. Artemisia Gentileschi around 1622: The Shaping and Reshaping of an Artistic Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gilman, Sander L. 1985. Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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———. 1988. “Strauss, the Pervert, and Avant Garde Opera of the Fin de Siècle.” New German Critique, no. 43, Special Issue on Austria (Winter): 35–68. ———. 1993. “Salome, Syphilis, Sarah Bernhardt and the ‘Modern Jewess’.” The German Quarterly 66, no. 2 (Spring): 195–211. Gilman, Sander L. et al. 1993. Hysteria Beyond Freud. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Giménez-Roldán, S. 2013. “La Salpêtrière Hospital before Charcot: a visit described by Pedro González Velasco.” Neurología (English Edition) 28, no. 1 (January-February): 52–56. Goetz, Christopher G. et  al. 1995. Charcot: Constructing Neurology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gordon, Rae Beth. 2001. “From Charcot to Charlot: Unconscious Imitation and Spectatorship in French Cabaret and Early Cinema.” Critical Inquiry 27, no. 3 (Spring): 515–49. Gorovoy, Jerry. 2020. “Louise Bourgeois, Arch of Hysteria, 1993.” Museum of Modern Art, 2020, https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/42/681. Accessed on July 30, 2020. Griffith, Francis Llewellyn (F. Ll.), ed. 1898. The Petrie Papyri: Hieratic Papyri from Kahun and Gurob (Principally of the Middle Kingdom). London: Bernard Quaritch. Hahn, G. 1883. Les Phénomènes Hystériques et les Révélations de Sainte Thérèse. Extrait de la Revue des Questions scientifiques. Bruxelles: Alfred Vromant. Hevesi, Ludwig. 1906. Acht Jahre Sezession: (März 1897–Juni 1905) Kritik, Polemik, Chronik. Wien: C. Konegen. Hippocrates. (ca. 400 BCE) 1849. The Genuine Works of Hippocrates. Translated by Francis Adams. Vol. 1. London: The Sydenham Society. Hoffmann, E.  T. A. 1967. The Best Tales of Hoffmann. Edited by E.  F. Bleiler. New York: Dover Publications, Inc. Husslein-Arco, Agnes, and Stephan Koja, eds. 2010. Rodin and Vienna. London: Galerie Belvedere and Hirmer. James, William. 1902. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in 1901–1902. New York: The Modern Library. Janet, Pierre. 1893. “Quelques definitions récentes de l’hysterie.” Archives de neurologie 26: 1–29. Kim, Clara, ed. 2019. Kara Walker: Fons Americanus, Hyundai Commission. London: Tate Modern. Koja, Stephan, ed. 2006. Gustav Klimt: The Beethoven Frieze and the Controversy over the Freedom of Art. Munich: Prestel. Kokoschka, Oskar. 1983. “Der Fetisch.” Oskar Kokoschka: Die frühen Jahre. Aquarelle und Zeichnungen (1906–1924). Hannover: Kestner-Gesellschaft.

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Krafft-Ebing, Richard von. (1886) 1894. Psychopathia Sexualis, with Especial Reference to Contrary Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Legal Study. Translated by Charles Gilbert Chaddock. Seventh enlarged and revised ed. Philadelphia & London: F. A. Davis Company & F. J. Rebman. Kramer, Lawrence. 1990. “Culture and Musical Hermeneutics: The Salome Complex.” Cambridge Opera Journal 2, no. 3 (November): 269–94. Krauss, Rosalind. 1985. “Corpus Delicti.” October 33 (Summer): 31–72. LaCoss, Don. 2005. “Hysterical Freedom: Surrealist Dance & Hélène Vanel’s Faulty Functions.” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 15, no. 2: 37–61. Lampert, Catherine. 1986. Rodin: Sculpture & Drawings. London: The Arts Council of Great Britain and Yale University Press. Landi, Ann. 2002. “Who Was the Real Artemisia?” Artnews 101, no. 2 (February): 110–13. Lichtenstein, Therese. 2001. Behind Closed Doors: The Art of Hans Bellmer. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Lippard, Lucy. 1975. “Louise Bourgeois: From the Inside Out.” Artforum 13, no. 7 (March): 26–33. Locker, Jesse M. 2015. Artemisia Gentileschi: The Language of Painting. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Lübke, Wilhelm. 1878. History of Sculpture from the Earliest Ages to the Present Time. Translated by F.  E. Bunnètt. Vol. 2. Second edition. London: Smith, Elder, & Co. Mann, Judith W., et al. 2001. Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi. Edited by Keith Christiansen and Judith W. Mann. New York and Rome: Museo del Palazzo di Venezia. March, Jennifer R. 2014. Dictionary of Classical Mythology. Barnsley: Oxbow Books. Mazzoni, Cristina. 1996. Saint Hysteria: Neurosis, Mysticism, and Gender in European Culture. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press. McBee, Richard. 2009. “Esther in Venice—In Search of Images of Esther.” Jewish Press (11 March): n.p. Merskey, Harold, and Paul Potter. 1989. “The Womb Lay Still in Ancient Egypt.” The British Journal of Psychiatry 154, no. 6 (June): 751–53. Micale, Mark S. 1990. “Charcot and the Idea of Hysteria in the Male: Gender, Mental Science, and Medical Diagnosis in Late Nineteenth-Century France.” Medical History 34, no. 4 (October): 363–411. ———. 2004. “Discourses of Hysteria in Fin-De-Siècle France.” In The Mind of Modernism: Medicine, Psychology, and the Cultural Arts in Europe and America, 1880–1940. Edited by Mark S.  Micale, pp.  71–92. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2008. Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Hysterias in Pictures Anna Furse

Hysterias in the plural. Because this malady has morphed its way across time and place, discharging like a boiling geyser from the rocks of social behavioural norms. Hysterias are the consequence of pressures that have reached the critical limits of their containment. They are a somatically inscribed language of revolt. Hysterical behaviours in Medieval Europe were associated with religious fervour, asceticism or ecstasy; in the nineteenth century they exploded into the burlesque spectacular of Parisian Grande Hystérie and subsequently passed into bourgeois society; erupted as the shellshock epidemic of WW1; took on a special mien as a range of Eating Disorders1 in the late twentieth century, growing exponentially in the twenty-first century, fuelled by the effect of social media. Elaine Showalter argues that hyste+ria still manifests in contemporary society, physical symptoms including those suffered by Gulf War veterans. She calls these “Hystories”. (Showalter 1997) 1  Eating Disorders (EDs) are arguably a contemporary manifestation of the disease, although the bodily impacts of extreme dieting/bingeing/purging are active choices the sufferer makes rather than the unconscious explosion of hysterical symptom on the body. I argue for the hysteria tag for EDs because the sufferer is “writing on their body” as Hélène Cixous has expressed the hysteric/oppressed condition.

A. Furse (*) Goldsmiths, University of London, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Braun (ed.), Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66360-5_3

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Hysterias’ symptoms are many and varied. The Index to Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer’s (1988) Studies on Hysteria (first published in 1895) lists seventy-two of these. They range from sense impairments to paralyses, contortions to hallucinations. They include swoons, ticks, coughs, convulsions and fits. Hysteria’s expressive forms reflect class. Environment and education apparently play their part: proletarian manifestations appear more boisterous than their bourgeois counterparts. More extreme cases of the former include the St Vitus dance mania in the Middle Ages (this is now thought to have been caused by rheumatic fever; Waller 2009); the Tarantata of Southern Italy (Daboo 2010); the nineteenth century “Grande Hystérique” at the Salpêtrière Hospital; and the WW1 shellshocked private soldier. In the latter, we find aspects of the choreomania of the “Grande Hystérique”. Neurasthenia, a condition associated with lassitude, weakness, headaches and hallucination, is another form, from which the officer class of WW1 trenches tended to suffer. Class is here manifest as affecting hysteric expression and form, neurasthenia resembling the more sedate and tremulous symptoms of Freud’s bourgeois hysteric patients in nineteenth century Vienna. The broad gamut of hysterias has preoccupied me for many years of theatre making. I am consistently interested on the effect of mind on body, and of society on mental health. Hysteric illnesses are not congenital madness, healed by psychotropic drugs or pharmacopeia. They are complex psychophysical responses to the unendurable. That is why it is vital to contextualize hysterias within their sociocultural history. Here, I present some images that might illuminate a narrative, leading to two of my “family” of hysteric texts written and produced for theatre: Augustine (Big Hysteria) (1991) and my more recent Shocks (2018). Both works, by no means coincidentally, used live string instruments in the musical score: a solo violinist in Graeme Miller’s composition for Augustine (Big Hysteria), and a string quartet and soprano for Ken Dempster’s composition for Shocks. The string instrument is a metaphor for the “highly strung” person. Hysteria in war and peace. I suggest then that the shellshocked soldier is the not-so-distant cousin of the Salpêtrière hysteric, the neurasthenic officer akin to Freud’s Viennese patients. In my two theatre works included here, referenced in this chapter, characters are each suffering from the burdens of intolerable sexual and military violence, experiencing social conditions where normal complaint is impossible to utter. Ensuing mental breakdown then becomes performative, a range of somatised symptoms erupting in the body. Expressing hysteria at least offered these individuals the possibility of being withdrawn from the site of trauma, be it the domestic context of sexual abuse or battlefield. Hysteria is an act of protest.

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La Belle Époque

Fig. 1  Pierre-Auguste Renoir, La Loge (Theatre box), 1874. (Photo: The Courtauld Gallery, London)

Nineteenth-Century Paris The nineteenth century is a time of social upheaval, population surge, scientific invention and artistic creativity. Paris is a city with an expanding bourgeoisie and a culture to satisfy its appetites. This is an era of “visual frenzy” (Williams 1999), of the obsessively visual: tricks-of-the-eye, illusion, magic, X-Ray and the invention of still and movie camera. The burgeoning pleasures of the gaze seemed endless. In this Belle Époque, from the Folies Bergères to the Opéra, women were performing feats for this gaze, kicking their legs in can-can or arabesque to offer a glimpse of frilled pudenda, a promise of the carnal that bourgeois sensibility repressively kept in check. The magnifying lens of the opera glass brought the spectator’s gaze closer than its real proxemic relationship to the performer on stage. Like binoculars for hunting, the opera glass is a prosthetic for the predatory.

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Underworld

Fig. 2  Jean Béraud, La Proposition, 1885–90. (Photo: Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris)

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Fig. 3  Jean Béraud, Les Coulisses de L’Opéra de Paris, 1889. (Photo: Musée Carnavalet—Histoire de Paris)

Prostitution was endemic. In the sexual underworld, venereal disease, particularly syphilis, that caused insanity and death, was a scourge affecting working girls and the bourgeois male population who frequented Paris’ many brothels. (McCarren) Anxiety about death, disease and madness was reflected in the arts. Painters had access to instances of sexual intimacy. One, Jean Béraud, depicted scenes from the worlds of both prostitution and performance. He perhaps understood very profoundly the word “prostitution” that means “to set forth.” His ubiquitous top-hatted male signifies the one with purchasing power, selecting and buying the female flesh set forth before him, whether on street or stage. The Paris Opéra was pimping its dancers. Syphilis was rampant there. (McCarren 1998)

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High Art

Fig. 4  Sir John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1851–52. (Photo: Tate Britain, London)

The ballet Giselle (premiered in Paris in 1840) was very popular. It reflected social anxiety. It evoked the retribution in store for the privileged class who consorted sexually with the working-class girl: in this narrative, the young peasant Giselle, becoming instantly deranged on discovering that she has been duped by her lover Albrecht, who turns out to be a Prince-­in-­disguise, performs there and then her mad rage and dies of a broken heart. In Act Two she has transmuted to a Wili—that ethereal alterego figure of German folklore who resurrects from her grave at midnight to take revenge on her feckless lover and dances him to death. Giselle, however, offers redemption: she keeps Albrecht dancing till dawn, at which time her powers cease. He survives through her selfless salvation. This, we are to assume, is “true love.”

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Fig. 5  Anna Pavlova as Giselle (the Mad Scene), 1903. Imperial Russian Ballet. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

In her “mad scene,” Giselle lets her hair down, a nineteenth-century signifier for women’s insanity. Another iconic mad female character is of course Shakespeare’s Ophelia.2

2  The model for the painter Millais’ Ophelia, Elizabeth Siddal, contracted pneumonia while posing for the painter for long stretches of time in winter in a bath of water. He did pay for her medical treatment. An artist’s model, and an artist herself, she died young at the age of thirty-two.

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A Theater for Forgotten Scenes3

Fig. 6  Pierre Aristide André Brouillet, Une Leçon Clinique à la Salpêtrière, 1887. (Photo: Wellcome Institute Library, London)

Across the Seine from the Folies Bergères and the Paris Opéra, madness was being played out before a public of both medics and laypeople: the famous neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot’s Leçons on hysteria at the Salpêtrière Hospital. Note at Charcot’s right, the Salpêtrière’s artist-inresidence, Paul Richer,4 drawing the swooning hysteric. Her bodice is open, hair loose. We must ask why? 3  This is a citation from Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément. The Newly Born Woman (La Jeune Née), translated by B. Wing, B. Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. 4  Paul Richer produced a complete frame-by-frame The Synoptic Tableau of the “complete full and regular attack of hysteria” with both typical and variant positions in 1881.

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On the back wall, a Richer hystérique is performing the “arc-en-cercle” that Charcot identified as also recurring in depictions of demonic possession in religious art across the ages (Charcot and Richer 1984). A shaft of sunlight falls right on the patient’s breast. She is radiating her condition, a specimen in vivo. In post-Revolutionary France public institutions of medical care were founded: the modern clinic was born (Foucault 2009). Philippe Pinel (1745–1826) famously unshackled the insane. Charcot, a Republican and a Positivist, in turn sought to unshackle the concept of hysteria from the ideology of the Catholic church.

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A Star Is Born: Augustine (Louise, a, X)

Fig. 7  Albert Londe, Attitudes Passionnelles: Extase (Augustine) (Photograph). 1878. Désiré-Magloire Bourneville and Paul L. Regnard, L’Iconographie Photographique de La Salpêtrière, Charcot Library, Salpêtrière, Paris. (Photo: Wellcome Institute Library, London)

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Fig. 8  Albert Londe, Catalepsy (Augustine) (Photograph). 1878. DésiréMagloire Bourneville and Paul L. Regnard, L’Iconographie Photographique de La Salpêtrière, Charcot Library, Salpêtrière, Paris. (Photo: Wellcome Institute Library, London)

Charcot, a charismatic and flamboyant showman, was obsessed with hysteria’s taxonomy and proud of his nosological endeavor. He presented hysteria as a classical form. He produced atlases/catalogues: bound volumes of case histories with photographic and line drawing illustration, the

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Iconographie Photographique de La Salpêtrière (IPS) (Bourneville and Regnard 1876–1880). Charcot wanted to prove hysteria a disease, not of the “wandering womb,” but of hereditary pathology, passed down through the female line. He failed. Instead, he built up a hysteric industry, creating an environment ripe for this disease to proliferate: an arena in which its burlesque symptoms—convulsions, contractions, paralyses, sensory impairments, hallucinations and excessive fits—were avidly recorded by his “sci-art” team of photographers, sculptors and visual artists. Augustine, Charcot’s masterpiece star, repeatedly performed her narrative of childhood sexual abuse and convent torture for being “possessed.” Nobody listened. So she continued to let her body speak her mind. Augustine was exceptionally photogenic. The camera “takes,” “captures” and “shoots.” These are words of violence. The Salpêtrière hysteric was caught in its frame, learning to perform the required rubric to satisfy the medical gaze generated by Charcot’s optic machine. His asylum not only collected and curated but “invented” its hysterias (Didi-Huberman 1982).

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“Me and My Magical Body”5

Fig. 9  Albert Londe, Lethargy (Augustine) (Photograph), 1878. Désiré-­ Magloire Bourneville and Paul L. Regnard, L’Iconographie Photographique de La Salpêtrière, Charcot Library, Salpêtrière, Paris. (Photo: Wellcome Institute Library, London)

Augustine’s mysteriously mutable body was capable, under hypnosis, to produce miraculous symptoms of impossible exploits, such as lying rigid across two chairs or arching her back like a contortionist. Her hospital records state that “it is possible to put a 40 kilogramme weight on her stomach without making the body bend” (Bourneville and Regnard 1876, p. 192). At her worst, Augustine was suffering up to fifty hours of repeated attacks per week. Among writers, intellectuals and artists, the distinguished  Furse, Anna, Augustine (Big Hysteria). The full text is published in Performing Nerves, Routledge, 2020. 5

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actress Sarah Bernhardt attended Charcot’s Leçons, researching her role of Hamlet (though Ophelia would have been a more apt subject for comparison). She was disturbed and repulsed by what she saw (Brandon 1991). Charcot’s observation—or was this dramaturgical guidance?—of attacks divided them into a symphonic structure: four phases of acting-out that he named: Epileptoid Clownism Attitudes Passionnelles Delirium after which the hysteric would have exhausted herself, until she picked up and started over—sometimes mere minutes later.

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Clues, Signs

Fig. 10  Albert Londe, Attitudes Passionnelles: Menace (Augustine) (Photograph), 1878. Désiré-Magloire Bourneville and Paul L. Regnard, L’Iconographie Photographique de La Salpêtrière, Charcot Library, Salpêtrière, Paris. (Photo: Wellcome Institute Library, London)

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It was during the Attitudes Passionnelles, as recorded in the IPS, that hysteric utterance revealed its root causes: sexual abuse and other brutalities. The hysteric in the throes of Attitudes Passionnelles seemed to be taking cues from popular imagery and performance styles. As Augustine performed these grand gestes, she babbled her disjointed narratives of trauma and rape. Hospital scribes, presumably writing furiously, captured this, in fragments, in the IPS. Augustine was a consummate performer. Charcot himself used tropes of dissembling to describe his patients, while hysteria before and since has been described as mimicry, acting, showing, clowning, manipulation, performing, chicanery, lying, displaying, cheating, feigning and pantomime. But why is the hysteric acting? In the case of Augustine, aside from any cathartic release of tension while incarcerated at the Salpêtrière, this could lead to special status and promotion. She was promoted to nurse and laundry maid while intermittently being straitjacketed and locked in a padded cell.

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Insight and Interiority

Fig. 11  Wilhelm Röntgen, X-Ray of Anna  Bertha Röntgen’s  Hand, 1895. (Photo: Wellcome Institute Library, London)

The young Sigmund Freud studied at the Salpêtrière in 1885. Deeply impressed with Charcot (“no other human being has ever affected me in the same way” Sulloway 1979), he tried to interest the Professor in a case of hysteria that his colleague Joseph Breuer was working on back in Vienna: Anna O, real name Bertha Pappenheim. Charcot was underwhelmed. The persistent and ambitious Freud cunningly gained his attention by offering to translate his works into German. This earned him ingress to the “Charcoterie” and a signed print of the Brouillet painting, that hangs today over his iconic couch at the Freud Museum in London.

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Where Charcot looked, Freud listened. 1895: a year of ground-breaking insights. The Lumiere brothers unveiled the Cinématographe, Freud and Breuer published Studies in Hysteria, and Wilhelm Röntgen discovered the X-Ray. The first X-Ray was of Röntgen’s wife Anna Bertha’s hand. Note the wedding ring. The coincidence of two Berthas, contemporaries: each a significant presence in the unfolding understanding of human interiority—anatomical and psychological—at precisely the same time as cinema was born, with its techniques for generating what Laura Mulvey (1989) calls its voyeuristic “scopophiliac” gaze.

Tout Un Cinema6: Augustine (Big Hysteria) a Play by Anna Furse

Fig. 12  Shona Morris as Augustine in Augustine (Big Hysteria), by Furse 1991. (Photo: Sheila Burnett. These gestures are replicas of the original Augustine photographs, performed during the production)  Literally means “a whole movie,” meaning “making a song and dance (of/about).”

6

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Fig. 13  “Hypnosis.” Shona Morris as Augustine, Wolfe Morris as Charcot and James Dreyfus as Freud in Augustine (Big Hysteria), Furse 1991. (Photo: Sheila Burnett)

I took poetic license in imagining a convergence of Charcot, Freud and Augustine at the Salpêtrière, where Freud actually missed her by a decade. I was captivated by Elaine Showalter’s account (1987) of Augustine losing her sense of color after being repeatedly photographed in Charcot’s panopticon. She had appropriated the tool of her oppression by

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mimicking the camera’s gaze. Perceiving in black and white, was she declaring that she too could “see” what was going on, just as Charcot’s image-­makers were attempting to do in their restless capturing of hysteric moments? Another riveting trope was Augustine’s shifting identity across the IPS, and finally her own coup de théâtre: escaping the Salpêtrière dressed as a man. I was interested in creating a triangle between the father-figure of Charcot to Freud’s “son,” fighting for control over Augustine’s condition and its meaning. My play, premiered at Plymouth Theatre Royal in 1991,7 is about a patriarchal struggle for power over a woman’s body and psyche.

7

 Paines Plough, for which Anna Furse was Artistic Director, 1990–95.

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Shellshock: Shocks Anna Furse (2018)

Fig. 14  Mathew Wernham and Diogo André in Shocks, by Anna Furse, Craiglockhart, Edinburgh. (Photo: Nina Klaff, 2018) War was return of earth to ugly earth, War was foundering of sublimities, Extinction of each happy art and faith By which the world has still kept head in air, Protesting logic or protesting love, Until the unendurable moment struck— The inward scream, the duty to run mad. (Stallworthy 2008, p. 196)

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The poet Robert Graves suggests that running mad from the effects of the horrors of World War I (WWI) was, paradoxically, the only possible sane response. The many thousands of men collapsing with shellshock were shuddering, convulsing, weeping proof that Victorian masculinity was losing emotional self-control. Stiff upper lips were quivering (Reid 2012). The inculcation of male stoicism in the public school officer class frequently faltered, while the under-trained, underprepared, working-class private struggled with the intolerable physical and emotional conditions of No Man’s Land and the trenches (Downing 2017). My production Shocks  (2018) explored WWI shellshock through the voices of a private soldier, the innovative mind doctor William H. R. Rivers (1920)—a Freudian—and the poet Wilfred Owen. Owen, suffering shellshock, was sent to the Craiglockhart asylum in Edinburgh, where Rivers and others were experimenting with the Talking Cure. Owen wrote some of his finest war poems at Craiglockhart, only to volunteer to return to the Front where he died just days before Armistice.

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Male Hysteria

Fig. 15  Diogo André and Chorus in Shocks, by Anna Furse, Craiglockhart, Edinburgh. (Photo: Nina Klaff, 2018)

The massive numbers of soldiers returning from the Front suffering from shellshock—defined medically at the time as a form of hysteria—caused the British authorities serious consternation. It was both a political and strategic challenge. How should they distinguish the shellshocked from the “malingerer”? What indeed was shellshock, given its varied symptoms? How to understand the officer class’s tendency toward neurasthenia in contrast to the more expressive forms of psychophysical breakdown among the working-­ class soldiers? Were these men mad? The 1922 post-war Parliamentary Report8 tried hard to prove hereditary and congenital causes for the condition of shellshock, since it threatened not only the ideology of masculinity but also the economy itself. 8  Southborough (Chair) Report of the War Office Committee, or Enquiry into “Shell-Shock.” His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1922.

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Fig. 16  Diogo André and Chorus in Shocks, by Anna Furse, Craiglockhart, Edinburgh. (Photo: Nina Klaff, 2018)

As a nation, how should Britain provide pensions for the mentally wounded? The asylum was perhaps not a fit place in which to heal them. Besides, how should they be healed? WWI was a massive killing machine, the army a hungry maw needing a constant supply of troops. There was vested interest in fixing this mental illness, and fast. Some traditionalist doctors, such as Lewis Ralph Yealland, practiced barbaric forms of torture as “cure,” using lit cigarettes in the mouth to induce speech in the mute and techniques such as Faradization (electric shock) to literally shock the shellshocked into obedience. Craiglockhart, offering more gentle and slower rehabilitation, was a pioneering institution in promoting understanding shellshock. Rivers himself distinguished shellshock “suppression” from Freudian “repression,” arguing that it was the battlefield conditions—that is, recent memory rather than childhood trauma—that provoked breakdown. Accessing the distressing memory and finding context for this could help these men recover.

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War Takes a Man and Births a Broken Warrior

Fig. 17  Diogo André in Shocks, by Anna Furse, Craiglockhart, Edinburgh. (Photo: Nina Klaff, 2018)

The Netley War Neurosis films,9 silent black and white captioned documentaries made in two British military hospitals in 1917, demonstrate some symptomatology of shellshock. They vaunt how long it took to complete the “cure,” which in one case was in merely two and a half hours. 9

 Confer: https://archive.org/details/WarNeurosesNetleyHospital1917-wellcome.

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Hysteric features included hysterical gaits, paralyses, contractures, facial tics, spasms, loss of knee and ankle-jerk reflexes, and paraplegia. One brief film shows a shellshocked sufferer totally “recovered,” walking “normally” toward the camera at the end. We also see “cured” men making baskets (basket cases?10) and doing farm-work as part of their rehabilitation. These films were British propaganda, made to show that the authorities knew how to treat hysteria and render the men fit to return to the battlefield. According to Tiffany Watt Smith (2014), the Netley films might even have been reconstructions, staged performances for camera. Shocks  used these films as a physical score performed alongside the male voices. The piece involved two male performers, one speaking, one silently moving, a chorus, a string quartet and soprano (music composed by Ken Dempster). I wished to honor the shellshocked of WWI and all warriors who suffer today from Post-Traumatic-Stress-disorder (PTSD).11 The performance was created for Craiglockhart Chapel, performed during Armistice commemorations, 2018.12

10  Basket cases is thought to refer to post-WW1 amputees in the USA carried around in baskets, though the origin of the term is unclear. 11  The term PTSD was coined in 1980 to join “combat stress,” “war neurosis” and “battle fatigue” when a delegation of Vietnam Vets and psychiatrists lobbied the American Psychiatric Association to create a new diagnosis that could include the range of symptoms from which Vets were suffering. 12  Confer: www.athletesoftheheart.org. The full text is published in Performing Nerves by Anna Furse, Routledge, 2020.

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The Old Lie

Fig. 18  (Above) Mathew Wernham and Diogo Andre in Shocks, by Anna Furse, Craiglockhart, Edinburgh. (Photo: Nina Klaff, 2018)

Shocks explores male vulnerability, gender and sexuality (Owen was homosexual, Rivers also perhaps), power, violence, the ideological construct of militarism at the time and the atrocious conditions of the “war to end all wars.” The two male performers, one silent, one loquacious, slowly begin to identify with each other, in a final tableau of tenderness between them before the Wilfred Owen poem ends the piece as the Owen character, “cured” is dressed in uniform and drops dead. Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind. Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! —An ecstasy of fumbling,

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Fig. 19  (Below) Mathew Wernham in Shocks, by Anna Furse, Craiglockhart, Edinburgh. (Photo: Nina Klaff, 2018) Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; But someone still was yelling out and stumbling, And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime … Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est Pro Patria Mori” Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est,” 1992

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Hysteria and Theater Hysteria and the theater have been linked since the age of Greek tragedy, and metaphors of the histrionic have long influenced clinical discussion of patients, especially women, who were seen by male doctors as actresses seeking attention through imaginary physical symptoms. In the 19th century, Paris became the capital of hysterical theater with Professor Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot as the producer and director of a grand clinical theater at his hospital La Salpêtrière. There, young female patients were brought to perform every Friday for an audience of fashionable Parisians, including writers, actresses, cabaret performers, and dancers, to demonstrate their symptoms of grande hystérie, and to respond on cue to the doctor’s commands. In Vienna, Freud’s office became the set for ‘the talking cure,’ an intimate dialogue between doctor and patient, a theatrical two-hander. By 1977, in their book Hysterical Personality, psychiatrists Kay H.  Lacher and Joe P. Tupin suggested that acting would be the ideal career choice for the hysterical woman, who might find a life in the theater a way to satisfy ‘her exhibitionistic needs’. While the notion of an ‘acting cure’ reflects hostility towards hysterics, women, and actresses, the history and representation of hysteria have been the subjects of numerous plays and performances in the theater, cinema, television and dance. (Elaine Showalter, Foreword to Performing Nerves by Anna Furse 2020)

The ideas in this chapter are elaborated in my monograph Performing Nerves:  Four Plays, Four Essays, On Hysteria, which was published with Routledge in 2020. This book includes four chapters that contextualize four of my hysteria texts: Augustine (Big Hysteria), SeaWoman, Shocks and Gorgeous. These playtexts, which have been produced in the UK and internationally, are also annotated, while the book is illustrated with historical, archive and production images. My argument throughout is that the mental illnesses that have erupted across historical time and place are diseases of the mind, not the brain. They are conditions that arise in response to environment. A highly gendered society can prove oppressive to the point of mental illness for some, given a specific set of circumstances. Many individuals experience some kind of psycho-somatic illness at some point in their lives, even as mild as, for example, stress-related headaches, nausea or mild panic attacks. The body is an expressive organic entity. While hysteria is a protean condition that itself has shapeshifted across human history, what is common to all my texts, and my abiding interest in the topic, is how the body articulates mental anguish, and how extreme pressure on an individual can produce rebellion and resistance in the form of somatic symptom: the hysteric body, in short, as riot.

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References Brandon, Ruth. 1991. Being Divine: A Biography of Sarah Bernhardt. London: Secker and Warburg. Bourneville and Regnard, Paul. 1876–1880. Iconographie Photographique de La Salpêtrière: Service de M.  Charcot. Edinburgh: Royal College of Physicians. Confer: https://archive.org/details/iconographiepho00regngoog/page/ n322. Accessed on July 30, 2020. Charcot, Jean-Martin and Paul Richer. 1984. Les Démoniaques Dans l’Art. Paris: Macula. Cixous, Hélène and Clément, Catherine. 1986. The Newly Born Woman (La Jeune Née), translated by B. Wing. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Daboo, Jerry. 2010. Ritual, Rapture and Remorse: A Study of Tarantism and Pizzica in Salento. Bern: Peter Lang. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 1982. Invention de L’Hystèrie: Charcot et l’Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière. Paris: Macula. Downing, Taylor. 2017. Breakdown: The Crisis of Shell Shock on the Somme, 1916. London: Abacus. Foucault, Michel. 2009. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception [1973]. London and New York: Routledge. Freud, Sigmund and Breuer, Joseph. 1988. Studies on Hysteria [1895]. London: Penguin Books. Furse, Anna. 2020. Performing Nerves: Four Plays, Four Essays, On Hysteria. London and New York: Routledge. McCarren, Felicia. 1998. Dance Pathologies: Performance, Poetics and Medicine. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Mulvey, Laura. 1989. Visual and Other Pleasures. Houndmills: Macmillan Press. Owen, Wilfred. 1992. The Poems of Wilfred Owen, edited by John Stallworthy. London: Chatto and Windus. Reid, Fiona. 2012. Broken Men: Shell Shock, Treatment and Recovery in Britain 1914–30. London: Continuum. Rivers, William H.  R. 1920. Instinct and the Unconscious: A Contribution to a Biological Theory of the Psycho-Neuroses. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Showalter, Elaine. 1987. The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980. London: Virago Press. Showalter, Elaine. 1997. Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture. London: Picador. Sulloway, Frank J. 1979. Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend. London: Burnett Books. Stallworthy, Jon, ed. 2008. The Oxford Book of War Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Waller, John. 2009. The Dancing Plague: The Strange True Story of an Extraordinary Illness. Naperville: Source Books. Watt Smith, Tiffany. 2014. On Flinching: Theatricality and Scientific Looking from Darwin to Shell Shock. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, Linda. 1999. Hard Core, Power, Pleasure and the “Frenzy of the Visible”. Berkeley: University of California Press.

From “Private Theatres Onstage” to Anti-­Hysterical Performances: Reclaiming the Feminist Interest in Hysterical Performances Since the 1990s Tanya Augsburg

In describing the reactions to the stark differences between the U.S. Congressional testimonies of Judge Brett Kavanaugh and his accuser Dr. Christine Blasey Ford on September 27, 2018, The New York Times’ “Gender Letter” editor Jessica Bennett wrote: “It was like years of academic research on display in real time, in which women who express anger will be dismissed as hysterical but men who express anger are perceived as ‘passionate’ about the job.” Ford presented herself as credible, rational, and in control of her emotions. As a researcher and psychologist, she undoubtedly was well aware of the long associations between women, hysteria, and extreme emotions such as anger, and she did her best by avoiding these associations by performing as a professional despite the lingering effects of the trauma of the sexual assault that she bravely disclosed, such as her seeking psychological help for her fears. As Bennett

T. Augsburg (*) San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Braun (ed.), Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66360-5_4

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pointed out, Ford “teared up in her testimony—her voice cracking—but she did not openly cry or break down” (Bennett 2018). Numerous thoughts came to mind upon reading Bennett’s words. While it was significant that the existing academic research on performances of hysteria was acknowledged in the newspaper of record, proper attribution of those who wrote the scholarship was missing. Although I understood perfectly well that space limitations and journalist conventions could account for the brevity and incompleteness of the reference, I could not help but wonder which specific scholarly works Bennett had in mind. Admittedly, as a feminist interdisciplinary performance scholar and curator I had personal reasons for such musings. At the time, I was in midst of working as the lead curator for the 2019 intersectional feminist art exhibition F213, which was short for Fahrenheit 213—one degree above the boiling point of blood. The exhibition, which was sponsored by the Northern California Women’s Caucus for Art, would take place from April 13 to May 11, 2019, at Arc Gallery in San Francisco. F213 examined the ways feminist artists and writers were expressing their outrage about issues that concerned not only themselves but also the communities with which they identified. The exhibition and its accompanying catalog featured artworks and short textual responses about the artwork from over eighty artists and writers (Gutfreund and Otani 2019). Bennett’s article jolted me with the realization that with few exceptions the artwork in the show did not depict excessively or out-of-control angry reactions that could be simultaneously conflated with hysteria. As for questions of previously existing scholarship, I was reminded of my own. I had completed in 1996 a doctoral dissertation on performances of female hysteria entitled “Private Theatres Onstage: Hysteria and the Female Medical Subject from Baroque Theatricality to Contemporary Feminist Performance” (Augsburg 1996).1 The title is a nod to Anna O., Case 1 of the five case studies in Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer’s Studies on Hysteria (1893–1895), in which Breuer recounts Anna O.’s description of hysteria as a “private theatre” (Freud and Breuer [1894] 2004, p. 22). One of its chapters, which considered the artist ORLAN’s performance strategies to overcome critics’ accusations that she is hysterical, was revised and subsequently published in 1998 as “ORLAN’s Performative Transformations of Subjectivity” in The End(s) of Performance, a 1  Jonathan Erlen (2020) “rediscovered” the dissertation abstract, publishing it in History of Psychiatry without my knowledge.

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collection of essays edited by Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane, and has been reprinted since (Augsburg 1998). While the dissertation as a whole made clear my interest in constructing a performance genealogy of female hysteria, the ORLAN chapter revealed possibilities for what I am calling two decades later “anti-hysterical performances”—performances of seriousness and rationality intended to counter or refute any possible allegation of hysteria against the performer usually made in attempt to discredit her. The vagueness of Bennett’s allusions to the academic research not only raised questions regarding the specifics of the existing literature but also cracked open the door for lesser-known contributions to the study of female hysteria as performance to be recovered or reclaimed in order for them to be incorporated in current and future histories before they are entirely forgotten. To understand the current rekindling interest in hysteria, especially in contemporary “fourth wave” feminist performance art, I find it important to return to the end of the twentieth century to revisit how by then hysteria was utilized in feminist theater, performance, and art as expressions of protest and critique to the political frameworks at that moment in time and which seems closely related to what we can witness in the present. As “New Hysterians” (Showalter 1997, p. 7) such as Elaine Showalter and Mark Micale have pointed out, by the mid-1990s a new type of hysteria studies emerged that was categorically different from the medical and psychological studies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In his historiography Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations, Micale (1995) separated new hysteria studies “into five main categories: intellectual histories of hysteria, Freud and the history of hysteria, feminist historical criticism, Charcot and the history of hysteria, and non-feminist social and political accounts” (p. 13). Micale further noted that “since the late 1980s, American feminist drama historians and literary critics have been actively restaging the nineteenth-century theatrical tradition of hysteria, which they believe captures vividly the combination of science, sexuality, and feminine pathology inherent in the history of hysteria and in patriarchal cultures generally” (p. 199). In a footnote Micale cited what was at the time the latest scholarly feminist writing on plays and performances such as Diane Hunter’s 1988 performance Dr. Charcot’s Hysteria Show (Hunter 1998), Anna Furse’s 1991 play Augustine (The Big Hysteria) (Furse 1997), and Coral Houtman’s 1989 unpublished television play Augustine, which later was made into a film in 1993 (Houtman 1993) (Micale 1995, p. 199 fn 83).

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While Micale was correct in his conclusion that in 1995 “once again hysteria is in the news” (Micale 1995, p.  294), he nevertheless did not seem to realize fully the extent what was indeed happening. Additional plays that theatricalized actual and fictional historical accounts of hysteria from the era include Dora: A Case of Hysteria, Kim Morrissey’s 1987 play about Freud’s famous patient (Morrissey 1994)2; Hysteria: Fragments of an Analysis of an Obsessional Neurosis, Terry Johnson’s 1993 surrealist farce about an imagined encounter between Freud, the daughter of one of his previous patients, and Salvador Dali (Johnson 2013); and The Waiting Room, Lisa Loomer’s 1994 comedy that features a nineteenth-century English woman whose husband obliges her to seek medical attention for her hysterical fits (Loomer 1998). It was not just that “since the late 1980s American feminist drama historians and literary critics have been creatively restaging the nineteenth-century theatrical tradition of hysteria”—they and additional playwrights from outside the U.S. were investigating hysteria as performance and from feminist perspectives. For example, Dr. Charcot’s Hysteria Show, Augustine (The Big Hysteria), and Augustine all examined how hysteria was theatricalized by famed neurologist Jean-­ Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris from the point of view of his most well-known patient, Louise Augustine Gleizes, also known as Augustine. By the 1990s feminist video artists also sought to expand historical studies of hysteria by linking them with the contemporary. Mindy Faber’s award-winning video Delirium (1993) contrasted the female hysterical bodies of Charcot’s patients as performance, with candid interviews with her mother about her mother’s mental illness, as well as parodic skits regarding domesticity and motherhood performed by her mother and herself. Faber considered the ways her mother’s madness revolved around her resistance of social and familial responsibilities. Artist Sam Taylor-­ Johnson’s short video Hysteria (1997) foregrounded the indeterminability of extreme expression as the performer oscillates between laughter and grief. In an online biography about the artist, writer Dea K. notes that “Hysteria was inspired by nightly conversations between Sam Taylor-­ Johnson and a friend who had lost her sister to cancer and, in her emotional confusion, alternately laughed and cried” (Dea K. 2014). 2  Christina Wald (2007) notes that Morrissey’s play premiered in London in 1993, but Kate Morrissey’s (2000) biography on the University of Toronto Library’s website that is copyrighted to the author notes that it was first staged in Canada in 1987, as does Döring (1996) in a footnote (p. 44n7).

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Moreover, the feminist interest in hysteria as performance led to innovative scholarship during the 1990s. Mady Schutzman’s 1994 performance studies dissertation examined how nineteenth-century performative photographs formed visual currency for twentieth-century advertising. Schutzman interspersed the history of hysterical performances, psychoanalytic theory, and original analyses of images of femininity within contemporary advertising. Schutzman’s dissertation was subsequently published in 1999 as The Real Thing: Performance, Hysteria, and Advertising (Schutzman 1999). Schutzman was interested not only in hysterical performances but also in their deployment: “To utilize hysteria as a strategy of resistance or healing is possible only by becoming conscious of our hysterical performances” (p.  4). Schutzman considered possibilities of performing hysteria as means of feminist resistance by examining multiple “tropes of duplicity”—masquerade, ventriloquism, narrative, ritual, and magic (p. 190). And while she did not entertain the possibility of choosing not to perform hysterical as a hysterical performance strategy, she did state that feminist “‘opposition’ today must be one that knows hysteria well and that launches its performative attacks from slippery and borderless ground” (p. 184). Nonetheless, as Schutzman asserted, “the potential problems of inaugurating a project of ‘performing hysteria’ for resistant purposes are many” (p. 186). Completed in 1996, “Private Theatres Onstage” drew from existing research on hysteria at the time, incorporating what I had observed in media and culture about the contemporary feminist interest in hysteria, and my own ambivalences toward it. “Private Theatres” reexamined early historical representations of hysterical performances beginning with Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s sculpture the Ecstasy of Saint Theresa in the Cornaro Chapel that was completed in 1652, reappraised Charcot and his school’s theatrical representations of hysteria in late nineteenth-century Paris, and probed Sigmund Freud’s avoidances of theatrical metaphors in his early writings on hysteria. It then shifted from historical reconsiderations to readings of specific feminist theater and performance texts created before the advent of the new hysteria studies such as Marguerite Duras’s 1959 screenplay Hiroshima Mon Amour (Duras 1961), Adrienne Kennedy’s 1964 play Funnyhouse of a Negro (Kennedy 1988), Hélène Cixous’s 1976 play Portrait of Dora (Cixous 1983), Marsha Norman’s 1977 play Getting Out (Norman 1978), and  Joan Schenkar’s 1979 play Signs of Life (1979).

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These two studies written by junior scholars were eclipsed by two subsequent major works published in the late 1990s that also extended the study of hysteria in order to encompass its more contemporary manifestations. Elaine Showalter’s study Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media (1997) reviewed the history of hysteria before considering contemporary examples of mass hysteria. Elisabeth Bronfen’s The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and Its Discontents (1998) intertwined the history of hysteria within contemporary readings of hysteria as cultural performance. As these examples illustrate, the burgeoning feminist interest in hysteria as a performance in history and its legacies in contemporary culture during the 1990s contradicted Micale’s 1995 reservations regarding the historical importance of hysteria’s theatricality. In Approaching Hysteria Micale called for a de-emphasis on the attention on certain historical documents that foreground hysteria’s “most spectacular” aspects, that is, the performative photographs of female hysterical patients at the Salpêtrière, which  were published in Volumes I,  II and III of Désiré-Magloire Bourneville and Paul Régnard’s Iconographie de la Salpêtrière (Bourneville and Régnard 1876–1877, 1877, 1878): Hysteria in its everyday meaning denotes excessive or uncontrollable emotionality. By its nature, it is a highly corporealized pathology in which psychological anxieties are played out on the stage of the human body. Self-dramatization is an inherent part of it, and the words of Régnard, Bourneville, Brouillet, and Richer capture this element of theater powerfully. … Nevertheless, I believe that this has become a limiting and misleading feature of the new hysteria studies, and again I would like to propose a small corrective. … Regarding hysteria, I believe that in recent years a false centrality has been imposed on the documents named above, while a mass of other relevant primary source materials has been ignored. The result has been an excessive emphasis on the most spectacular aspects of hysteria’s history that trivializes the subject and distorts historical understanding. (Micale 1995, p. 150)

Focused on studies on nineteenth-century hysteria from the perspective of the history of medicine, Micale’s purview, while comprehensive, did not seem to concern itself with some of the more recent intellectual developments of the 1990s. Emergent fields such as cultural studies and visual studies with their similar interests in analyzing cultural representations became more widespread. With Judith Butler’s study Gender Trouble (1990), there was growing interest in theories of “performativity” in

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general and the performativity of gender in particular. While Butler’s work has been widely recognized as foundational for advancing what would eventually become gender studies, its impact on the “new feminist hysteria studies” has yet to be fully acknowledged even as Schutzman, Bronfen, and I all cited Butler—as would subsequent scholars such as Christina Wald (2007) and Jonathan W.  Marshall (2016). In other words, Butler helped pave the way for hysteria to be increasingly regarded as a specific gender performance that was in resistance to prescribed social heteronormative gender roles. Finally, a new “third wave” of feminism emerged during the 1990s, one that was more inclusive, diverse, and ironic in expression. Along with postmodernism and poststructuralism, these new theories, schools of thought, and emergent fields challenged longstanding binaries and embraced paradox, heterodoxy, contradiction, and ambivalence. It is within this milieu that we can better understand both the ongoing interest in and ambivalence toward female hysterical performance that was already evident in the 1990s, which progressed steadily during the early years of the twenty-first century. Among the most notable include Henrik Borgstrom’s article, “Strike a Pose: Charcot’s Women and the Performance of Hysteria at La Salpêtrière” (2000), which examined Charcot’s “theater of madness,” and Wendy S.  Hesford’s article, “Visual Auto/biography, Hysteria, and the Pedagogical Performance of the ‘Real’” (2000), which considered both Charcot’s hysteria patients and Faber’s film Delirium. In an important article, “Expressing the Unspoken: Hysterical Performance as Radical Theatre” (2003), Joanna Townsend-Robinson theorized how reclaiming performances of hysteria could create a new radical feminist theater. Filmmakers Jean-Claude Monod and Jean-Christophe Valtat directed a short black and white film about Charcot’s “star” patient, Augustine (2003), as would choreographer Cordelia Beresford as part of a two-channel installation, I Dream of Augustine (2005). In her study, Hysteria, Trauma, and Melancholy: Performative Maladies in Contemporary Anglophone Drama (2007), Christina Wald considered in depth the previously mentioned plays by Furse, Morrissey, and Johnson, calling them “the drama of hysteria,” borrowing from Tobias Döring’s paper, “The Real Inspector Freud: Kim Morrissey, Terry Johnson, and the Drama of Hysteria” (1996). As Cecily Devereux pointed out in her pivotal article, “Hysteria, Feminism, and Gender Revisited: The Case of the Second Wave” (2014), with the new decade feminist perspectives on hysteria went mainstream in film (p.  41). Tina Wexler directed the British comedy

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Hysteria (2011), which fictionalized the historical links that Rachel P. Maines revealed between medical treatments of hysteria and the invention of the vibrator in her influential study, The Technology of Orgasm: “Hysteria,” the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction (1999). David Cronenberg directed A Dangerous Method (2011), a historical drama about Freud, Carl Jung, and one of Jung’s hysterical patients, Sabina Spielrein, who eventually recovered and became one of the first female psychoanalysts. Alice Winocour directed Augustine (2012), a French film that addressed speculations about the relationship between Charcot and his star patient. These are just a few examples of the many cultural forms the feminist interest in hysteria and its performative manifestations have taken in the early twenty-first century. Despite the steady continuation of the initial feminist interest in hysterical performances of the 1990s, it would take until around 2014 for what Devereux proclaimed as the “new new hysteria studies” with its undeniable feminist interest in hysteria as performance to be acknowledged (Devereux 2014, p. 41). But this revival of interest did not come without ambivalence about, and refusals of, performances of hysteria. Indubitably, on account of my own personal experiences and reservations, “Private Theatres” foregrounded instances how performances of hysteria were constructed, de-­ emphasized, dismissed, refused, and even disavowed. I was not the first to pay critical attention to the resistances to hysterical performance as performance. By quoting Désiré-Magloire Bourneville, art historian Georges Didi-Huberman in his groundbreaking work The Invention of Hysteria ([1982] 2003)3 called attention to the spectacular nature of Geneviève’s refusals to perform: “Geneviève would pour out—would scream out her refusal: I’m not going to the Salpêtrière anymore. … I don’t want to go to the amphitheater any more,” which prompted Bourneville to stop the ovarian compression treatment he was applying (quoted in Didi-Huberman 2003, p. 255). Regarding this last point, Didi-Huberman again quoted Bourneville: “We stop the ovarian compression. Immediately, as in a coup de théâtre, her speech ceases; her facial features become immobile; the patient seems to have suffered a shock; her face bears to the left and the 3  Invention of Hysteria, Didi-Huberman’s ([1982] 2003) study of the photographs of the Iconographie with its reproduction of many of the photographs, was extremely important for those of us considering hysteria as performance during the 1990s as the Three Volumes of the Iconographie were not readily accessible to view before the advent of the Internet. DidiHuberman’s study was not translated into English until 2003.

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muscles convulse; her whole body is overcome with an extreme rigidity” (quoted in Didi-Huberman 2003, p. 255). After Bourneville stated that Geneviève’s resistance, which seemed to be also resistance to the physical force, was terminated by the cessation of the procedure, he then described her physical responses in theatrical terms only to pathologize them. As Didi-Huberman commented about Bourneville’s account, “any attack, convulsion, or tetanism is better than a word of refusal” and noted that subsequently Geneviève “was driven to the most extreme refusal” (p. 255). Her attempts at resistance did not succeed, unlike Augustine’s, who eventually performed the ultimate refusal by escaping from the Salpêtrière. Assuming male authority performing in male drag, that is, disguising herself in men’s clothing, Augustine walked out the hospital never to be heard of (at least by the doctors) again (Didi-Huberman 2003, p. 276; Hustvedt 2011, pp. 208–9). As Elaine Showalter would comment through a feminist lens in her essay, “Hysteria, Feminism, and Gender,” “One cannot help rejoicing at Augustine’s escape, and her male disguise seems like a coded statement about hysteria and gender; despite Charcot’s insistence on the equality of male and female hysteria, men had an easier time getting out of the Salpêtrière” (Showalter 1993, p. 312). In contrast to Showalter, Didi-Huberman considered these resistances and refusals primarily within the doctor-patient encounter—that is, in terms of transference and counter-transference. Nonetheless, it is clear from Didi-Huberman’s selections of quotations from Bourneville’s case studies in the Iconographie that Charcot’s patients were women who lacked agency as well as their own voices. As I already indicated, Schutzman seriously questioned the efficacy of feminists deploying hysterical performances for feminist resistance, although she ultimately concluded, “Hysterical symptoms are all we’ve got” (Schutzman 1999, p.  192). Like Schutzman’s The Real Thing, “Private Theatres” was imbued with awareness of ambivalence and even hostility toward performances of hysteria. It commenced with a consideration of Karen Finley’s performance strategies exhibited in her performance piece A Certain Level of Denial (1994). The audience’s silence and quick exit from her October 30, 1994 performance in Atlanta led me to realize that audiences can misinterpret performances of hyperbolic hysteria by misreading performance as actual hysteria. To paraphrase Elin Diamond’s important article on realist drama, “Realism and Hysteria: Towards a Feminist Mimesis” (1990–1991), the audience incorrectly

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projected hysteria onto the performer rather than perceive Finley’s performance as mimesis.4 How so? While performing A Certain Level of Denial, Finley knowingly and intentionally foregrounded with her body in performance the “traditional” repertoire of semiotic signs, that is, gestures such as extreme emotionality and facial gestures, which we have come to regard as female hysteria. Finley recycled many of these conventional expressions of female hysteria and added a few of her own, such as her distinctive wardrobe of thrift store clothing (when she wore clothes during the show) that ranged from outrageous camp to serious frump. By aligning herself with the drabness and “ordinariness” of the stereotypical troubled and harried white American working-class housewife in terms of both speech and appearance, Finley succeeded in alienating if not enraging her Atlanta audience. When I observed a panicky rush en masse to the exit as soon as the performance was over, I was left with a strong impression that the spectators wanted to forget both Finley’s presence in the space as well as their own, and furthermore, they wanted to forget as soon as possible. The audience’s hasty departure seemed to be in itself a hysterical reaction to what was not recognized or misunderstood. It exemplified the claims of scholars such as Sander L. Gilman (1976, 1982) that the “iconography”—or rather, what performance studies theorist Diana Taylor in her important book, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003), would refer to as the “performance repertoire”—of hysteria needed to be previously known before they could be recognized as such.5 As mentioned previously, the second half of “Private Theatres” was devoted to readings of specific feminist theater and performance texts and to a consideration of how these texts could be identified as a subgenre of the theatricalist tradition in Western drama. I examined the significance of hysterical performances in Marguerite Duras’s 1959 screenplay Hiroshima Mon Amour and Adrienne Kennedy’s 1964 play Funnyhouse of a Negro. Although the word “hysteria” is never mentioned in either text, both give expression to the subjective experiences of female hysteria at a time with the term “hysteria” fell into disrepute and was no longer considered as an 4  See also Elin Diamond’s subsequent book-length study, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater (1997). 5  I drew from, and at the time believed, that I somewhat extended Sander L.  Gilman’s (1976, 1982) work on visual stereotypes of “seeing the insane.”

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official diagnostic category. Moreover, both texts engage in powerful albeit indirect critiques of psychoanalytic theory and medical authority. Duras’s critique of psychoanalysis is to be located within the ambiguities surrounding the “therapeutic” possibilities of transference dynamics between the hysterical French actress and her Japanese lover. Kennedy’s play enacts the failures of psychoanalysis to provide a theory for the complex intrapersonal dynamics of racial identity. As can be witnessed in hysterical performances that have appeared in feminist theater and performance art from the 1970s to the early 1990s, I contend that the feminist interest in publicly staging the hysterical patient’s private struggle against rigid gender roles reflects the continuing political struggle for women, in general, to enter the public sphere. In other words, the public stagings by feminist dramatists and performance artists of performances of female hysteria were opportunities for audiences to reflect on the ongoing challenges women experience to have their words taken seriously in public realms. One year after I completed “Private Theatres,” Elaine Showalter would write in Hystories, “hysteria concerns feminists because the label has always been used to discredit women’s political protest” (1997, p. 10). Rachel Fensham described in her article “On Not Performing Madness” (1998) how she approached her production of the performance script she co-­ wrote, The Worst Woman in the World, “as a feminist investigation … an opportunity to interrogate theory with practice, and theatre with real life, making the history and performance of women’s lives significant to the students and their audience. To do so it was critical that we were ‘not performing’ madwomen” (Fensham 1998, p. 167). Fast forward a decade and the rise of “fourth wave” feminism coincided with the blossoming of the new new hysteria studies that Devereux noted. Around 2013 younger generations of feminists began to rethink the links between hysteria, political protest, and art in ways that that, contrary to what Showalter (1997) and Fensham (1998) had earlier asserted, were empowering rather than discrediting. Their approaches were global in scope, diverse, inclusive, intersectional, and expansive as they sought to combat not only the patriarchal constraints but also misogyny, rape culture, racism, homophobia, transphobia, discrimination against the disabled, and additional forms of oppression. Indeed, it is interesting to note how feminist activist art collectives across the globe reclaimed the term hysteria to stage feminist protest. For example, the Eye Art Collective, a feminist student activist group that sprung in Kolkata in 2013 after the

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horrific Delhi rape case, organized a historic conference against rape culture in 2015 titled Hysteria FemCon (“the first of its kind” in India, claimed Manisha Ganguly [2018], founder and editor of the feminist counterculture webzine Eyezine, which disbanded in 2018). Alternatively, in January 2016, the fraternity Hysteria posted its first Facebook post and has since staged protests in Vienna and Munich that satirize acts of “mass hysteria” within male fraternities and men’s right-wing groups. As journalist Verena Bogner has described the collective, “the fraternity Hysteria is somewhere between satire, an art project and radical, political activism and does one thing above all: through this exacerbation, it shows the weaknesses of the ideas of male fraternity fraternities in the clearest, most brutal way” (Bogner 2016). The term has been additionally reclaimed to envision emergent forms of feminisms within artistic practices. In 2013, a group of university students at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London started the School of Oriental and African Studies Feminist Society that has published numerous volumes of an interdisciplinary journal they titled HYSTERIA, which, according to collective member Jago Rackham, was intended to be “a platform for feminisms rather than a singular hegemonic feminisms” (quoted in Lamming 2015). HYSTERIA has published writings in various forms, genres, and languages. It has featured artwork from artists across the world that was unabashedly sex positive, queer, nonheteronormative, nonbinary, multiracial, intersectional, antiracist, and anti-­ imperialist. While recounting HYSTERIA’s origins during an interview, co-founder Ama Josephine Budge emphasized that “most cultures reference the hysteric in one guise or another. We reject the idea that HYSTERIA only references a white, European history or feminism” (quoted in Lamming 2015). For example, HYSTERIA Issue #7: Confusion featured several photographs from Heather Agyepong’s 2015 Too Many Blackamoors series (see Agyepong 2016) in which she styled herself after a carte-de-visite of Queen Victoria’s adopted goddaughter, Lady Sarah Forbes Bonetta, in the manner of Rosy Martin and Jo Spence’s pioneering “re-enactment photography” (Martin 2001), while exploring her “own internal conflicts” by means of performance (Agyepong 2016, p. 97). The series title references Queen Elizabeth I’s exact words in a 1596 letter requesting that “those kind of people should be expelled from the land” (quoted in Agyepong 2016, p.  97). In addition to exposing outdated Eurocentric, racist, white supremacist, and heteronormative views to encompass more inclusive, global, intersectional, queer, genderqueer, and

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transfeminist approaches, HYSTERIA has reframed “hysterical feminisms” as feminist activism. In Volume 4, titled Antagonism, photographer Agata Cardoso wrote an essay in 2014 on “The Hysterical Body” that envisions the twenty-first-century hysteric as an empowered protester: The Hysteric is empowered by a hysterical language of resistance. Her hysterical body, then represents a language of rebellion, and the grandiosity and severity of her movements create and extremely powerful dialogue between hysteric and viewer. She is deviant. Her contorted body displays her truth, her turmoil, and ultimately her right to protest. She stands defiant and refuses to give into a role of submissiveness or to conform; acting to shock and provoke. She causes fear and anxiety because the viewer cannot understand and is therefore powerless; the hysteric’s language forces us to confront our inner nightmares. The hysteric is ultimately empowered: she is daring, she is standing her ground, refusing to participate, she will no longer deny her own experiences and makes this known. She is fearless, brave; shameless; the hysterical body is no ‘neurosis’ but provides us with a powerful archetype of female resistance and resilience. (Cardoso 2014, p. 30)

Such decidedly non-neurotic or non-hysterical bodily assuredness was illustrated with Emma Sulkowicz’s noteworthy 2014 nine-month endurance artwork, Mattress Performance (Carry that Weight), which Sulkowicz performed during their senior year at Columbia University.6 Sulkowicz, whose parents are both psychiatrists, carried a fifty-pound mattress, an exact duplicate of a material artifact of their rape as well as its physical location, around campus in protest of Columbia’s failure to respond adequately to Sulkowicz’s report of their attack as well as several other alleged instances of sexual misconduct by the same individual, another Columbia student (Grigoriadis 2014; Smith 2014). During many media interviews Sulkowicz remained calm and not hysterical. They labored silently while carrying the mattress, allowing all volunteers who offered to assist them. Rather than “act out” their trauma, Sulkowicz metaphorically visualized the inner, psychological burden of trauma by implementing an undeniable stand-in for the very scene of the rape, a mattress, as an integral part of the performance. Observers could not witness Sulkowicz’s physical struggle to haul the lumbersome object without being reminded that the original mattress would have been regarded as actual evidence of the sex crime for which Sulkowicz had unsuccessfully sought institutional redress and 6

 Sulkowicz has subsequently identified as queer and gender non-conforming (Small 2018).

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justice. Sulkowicz’s laboring body made visible the heavy weight of their invisible psychological trauma without them having to resort to performing hysterical gestures or emoting excessively. The performance concluded on their graduation day on May 19, 2015. Literally bringing their private theaters onstage, Sulkowicz walked across the stage in her cap, gown, and mattress with the help of friends. The performance culminated in a revealing display of male institutional authority and power when Columbia President Lee Bollinger turned away his gaze to avoid shaking hands with Sulkowicz, let alone acknowledge them, their performance, and the icon of their sexual assault and trauma (Taylor 2015). Arguably, Sulkowicz’s mattress can be regarded as an overdetermined image with its parallels to other iconic beds in feminist art such as the soiled, unmade bed in Tracey Emin’s notorious 1998 installation My Bed, but also the beds in Régnard’s haunting photographs of Charcot’s hysterical patients, some of whom, like Geneviève and Augustine, pantomimed their sexual assaults. Shortly after they graduated, Sulkowicz (2015b) released their 2015 online participatory artwork, Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol, which featured a consensually made sex performance that—as Sulkowicz wrote in the written preface—“may resemble” (Sulkowicz 2015a) rather uncannily their 2012 rape in an eight-minute video with the help of a hired cismale actor, in which the artist visualized in no uncertain terms how initially consensual sex can suddenly turn into traumatic, non-­ consensual date rape. It is interesting to note that the video concludes with Sulkowicz sighing in a rather unemotional (or shellshocked) manner while making their bed before lying in it as they fall asleep, illustrating that victims of sexual violence do not always immediately register completely what had been done to them, let alone “act out” emotionally in response. Subsequent  discussions on how hysteria, feminist protest, and anger came to the forefront as a result of a string of recent public and political discussions in the U.S., but also beyond, had a direct effect on my own academic and curatorial work. In June 2016, members of the Northern California Women’s Caucus for Art (NCWCA) Exhibition Collective held a brainstorming session in Oakland about the theme of their next exhibition. The collective members shared their concerns about how then-­ candidate Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign was normalizing increased incivility in the public sphere. In response, the NCWCA exhibition collective spent the summer organizing the feminist art exhibition, F*ck U! In the Most Loving Way. The show opened at the Arc Gallery in San Francisco slightly more than one month after the U.S. presidential

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election on December 13, 2016, and closed on January 21, 2017, the day of the historic Women’s March (Gutfreund 2017). As featured artist curator and programming chair, I also wrote the exhibition prospectus, concluding with the following: F*ck U! In the Most Loving Way celebrates utopian and revolutionary visions about women’s voices, focusing on women’s self-expression, self-respect, and self-care. The provocative artworks in this historic feminist exhibition foster dialogue, whether shocking, confrontational, polite, healing, or well-­ reasoned. Ultimately, the exhibition promotes further investigation of positive and productive ways to overcome what is often dismissed as women’s hysterical overreactions, bitchy rants, unjustifiable anger, or passive aggressive resentment. (Augsburg 2017a, p. 15)

The above words reveal the extent to which the exhibition collective was concerned with its participants being dismissed as hysterical and angry. Turns out that our concerns were unfounded, especially by October 2016, when Trump’s “grab them by the pussy” statement was publicly disclosed. Whereas women, particularly Black women and intersectional feminists, were previously accused of being “angry” as a way to discredit them, the fact that the Women’s March, which took place the day after the inauguration of President Trump, was the largest one-day protest in American history to date demonstrated that many believed, as Audre Lorde had written decades earlier, that there was nothing wrong with all women expressing their anger, indignation, and outrage (Lorde 1981). Months later in October 2017 revelations of sexual assault and abuse by powerful men such as Harvey Weinstein prompted actress Alyssa Milano to promote the #MeToo hashtag on Twitter, apparently unaware of activist Tarana Burke’s Me Too movement. Milano’s #MeToo social media campaign quickly became a global phenomenon in which sexual assault survivors acknowledged what had happened to them (Garcia 2017). Perhaps because of sexual trauma’s long association with hysteria, would-be detractors such as fugitive director (and admitted child rapist) Roman Polanski tried to discredit #MeToo as “collective hysteria of the kind that sometimes happens in society” (quoted in Scislowska 2018). What Polanski failed to realize is that societal views about sexual assault have evolved—at least in the U.S. And while the testimony of one woman such as Dr. Blasey Ford may still be challenged, what the #MeToo movement has accomplished is that the collective angry voices of many women

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are now being heard and taken seriously. Women are no longer being immediately and generally dismissed or pathologized as hysterical for calling out abuse. Nor are they immediately silenced for expressing anger in response to social injustice. Indeed, a trio of books that appeared in 2018—Brittney Cooper’s Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower (2018), Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger (2018), and Rebecca Traister’s Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger (2018)—all examined the positive implications of women’s anger, which indicate that women’s emotions and resistance are being reframed in ways that go beyond immediate pathologization, marginalization, and dismissal. While the stigma around female anger appears to be subsiding, the court of popular opinion seems to be still out with regard to female hysterical performances. Consequently, my interest in female hysterical performance after all these years remains ambivalent, especially after the Congressional testimonies of Dr. Ford and subsequently sworn-in Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh. In retrospect, it is not surprising that much of my scholarship and curation since being engaged in the discourses of hysteria during the 1990s focused on topics inextricably associated with hysteria, such as feminist erotic art and performance (Augsburg 2005, 2011a, 2011b, 2015, 2018, 2019a, 2020b) and more recently, feminist protest art (2017a, 2017b, 2019b, 2020a). Nonetheless, I would submit that it is more important than ever to know the history of female hysterical performances in order to recognize their contemporary manifestations. Recent significant examples of such much-needed historical scholarship include Jonathan W. Marshall’s study, Performing Neurology: The Dramaturgy of Dr Jean-Martin Charcot (2016), and Nathan J. Timpano’s Constructing the Viennese Modern Body: Art, Hysteria, and the Puppet (2017). Contemporary feminist scholar artists and artists such as Johanna Braun, Laura González, Johanna Hedva, Kandis Williams, and Sharon Young, who have each reinterpreted the history of hysteria in order to deconstruct it, remind us that we still have much to learn and gain from contemplating hysteria. Numerous notable contemplations occurred in November 2018 when Johanna Braun brought together New Hysterians such as Elaine Showalter, New New Hysterians such as Cecily Devereux, and numerous additional scholars, scholar artists, and curators to the UCLA campus in Los Angeles when she organized the #masshysteria conference and several additional lectures that addressed hysteria and hysteria as performance. However, I would

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still caution against the risks and limitations of performing hysterical as several aforementioned examples illustrate. Serious risks remain for women who perform hysterically in public—and also for women who do not. As a performance scholar I have been interested since the early 1990s in examining the feminist performance strategies that have enabled women to challenge, resist, and triumph over the negative associations with female hysteria. I think it would be helpful to identify further and precisely the various extreme emotions and mental states associated with hysteria such as anger, delirium, and shellshock in order to consider each of them separately. Which ones are in response to trauma—and are they ever in response to social injustice and thus associated with indignation, such as what was put forward as an explanation of Kavanaugh’s hysterical behavior during his testimony? I conclude by asserting that the questions regarding all the legacies of female hysterical performances, ranging from the “obviously” hysterical to the intentionally “anti-hysterical,” remain open to debate and would benefit immensely from further consideration.

References Agyepong, Heather. 2016. “Too Many Blackamoors.” HYSTERIA #7: Confusion: 97–100. Augsburg, Tanya. 1996. “Private Theatres Onstage: Hysteria and the Female Medical Subject from Baroque Theatricality to Contemporary Feminist Performance.” PhD diss., Emory University. Ann Arbor: UMI. ———. 1998. “ORLAN’s Performative Transformations of Subjectivity.” In The End(s) of Performance, edited by Peggy Phelan and Jill Lane, 285–314. New York: NYU Press. Reprinted in European Theatre Performance Practice, 1900 to the Present, edited by Nadine Holdsworth and Goeff Willocks, 475–485. Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2014. Reprinted in 2016 by Routledge. ———. 2005. “‘The Siren Is Also a Mystic’: An Introduction.” In Joanna Frueh: A Retrospective, edited by Tanya Augsburg, 7–11. Reno, NV: Nevada Museum of Art, 2005. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title, organized by the Sheppard Fine Arts Gallery, University of Nevada, Reno, March 7–April 8, 2005 and the performance Ambrosia authored and performed by Joanna Frueh at the Nevada Museum of Art on March 24, 2005. ———. 2011a. “The Concupiscent Performer: Joanna Frueh’s ‘Art of Seduction.’” TDR—The Drama Review T210: 86–103. ———. 2011b. “Introduction: Some Starting Points, Theories, and Themes.” In  Man as Object: Reversing the Gaze, edited by Tanya Augsburg, 13–31. New  York: Women’s Caucus for the Arts. Published in conjunction with an

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Ganguly, Manisha. 2018. “So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.” Eyezine (archived). Accessed July 12, 2020. https://medium.com/eyezine/so-­long-­ and-­thanks-­for-­all-­the-­fish-­5c0826ec0a09. Accessed on July 30, 2020. Garcia, Sandra E. 2017. “The Woman Who Created #MeToo Long Before Hashtags.” New York Times, October 20, 2017. https://www.nytimes. com/2017/10/20/us/me-­too-­movement-­tarana-­burke.html. Accessed on July 30, 2020. Gilman, Sander L. ed. 1976. The Face of Madness: Hugh W.  Diamond and the Origins of Psychiatric Photography. New York: Brattleboro, VT: Echo Point. ———. 1982. Seeing the Insane: A Visual and Cultural History of Our Attitudes Toward the Mentally Ill. New York: John Wiley and Sons. Gilman, Sander L., Helen King, Roy Porter, George Rousseau, and Elaine Showalter. 1993. Hysteria Beyond Freud. Berkeley: University of California Press. Grigoriadis, Vanessa. 2014. “A Revolution Against Campus Sexual Assault: Meet the College Women Who Are Leading the Charge.” New York Magazine, September 21, 2014. https://www.thecut.com/2014/09/emma-­sulkowicz-­ campus-­sexual-­assault-­activism.html. Accessed on July 30, 2020. Gutfreund, Karen, ed. 2017. F*ck U! In the Most Loving Way. San Francisco: Northern California Women’s Caucus for Art. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title, organized by the Northern California Women’s Caucus for Art and presented at Arc Gallery, San Francisco, December 17, 2016–January 21, 2017. Gutfreund, Karen and Priscilla Otani, eds. 2019. F213. San Francisco: Northern California Women’s Caucus for Art. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title, organized by the Northern California Women’s Caucus for Art and presented at Art Gallery, San Francisco, April 13, 2019–May 11, 2019. https://www.ncwca.org/f213-­exhibition.html. Accessed on July 30, 2020. Hesford, Wendy S. 2000. “Visual Auto/biography, Hysteria, and the Pedagogical Performance of the ‘Real.’” JAC: Quarterly Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Rhetoric, Culture, Literacy, and Politics 20, no. 2 (Spring): 333–369. Houtman, Coral. Writer and Director. 1993. Augustine. Graduation Film, National Film and Television School. Hunter, Dianne, ed. 1998. The Makings of Dr. Charcot’s Hysteria Shows: Research Through Performance. Lewiston, Queenston, and Lampeter: Edwin Mellen Press. Hustvedt, Asti. 2011. Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris. New York and London: W.W. Norton. Johnson, Terry. 2013. Hysteria: A Case of Obsessional Neurosis. London and New York: Bloomsbury.

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K., Dea. 2014. “Sam Taylor-Johnson/Samantha Taylor-Wood.” Widewalls, December 5, 2014. https://www.widewalls.ch/artists/sam-­taylor-­johnson. Accessed on July 30, 2020. Kennedy, Adrienne.1988. Funny House of a Negro. Adrienne Kennedy in One Act. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lamming, Becky. 2015. “An Interview with Feminist Journal Hysteria.” VICE, August 27, 2015. https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/avykxe/interview-­ with-­two-­members-­of-­the-­feminist-­collective-­hysteria. Accessed on July 30, 2020. Loomer, Lisa. 1998. The Waiting Room. New York: Dramatist Play Service. Lorde, Audre. 1981. “Uses of Anger.” Women Studies Quarterly 9, no. 3 (Fall): 7–10. Maines, Rachel P. 1999. The Technology of Orgasm: “Hysteria,” the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press. Marshall, Jonathan W. 2016. Performing Neurology: The Dramaturgy of Dr Jean-­ Martin Charcot. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi. org/10.1057/978-­1-­137-­51762-­3. Martin, Rosy. 2001. “The Performative Body: Phototherapy and Re-Enactment.” Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism 29, no. 3 (November–December): 17–20. Micale, Mark S. 1995. Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Monod, Jean-Claude and Jean-Christophe Valtat, dirs. 2003. Augustine. France: Les Films du Possible, Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC), Conseil Régional d’Auvergne. Morrissey, Kim [Janice Dales]. 1994. Dora: A Case of Hysteria. London: Nick Hern Books. ———. 2000. “Kim Morrissey: Biography.” Canadian Poetry Online. University of Toronto Libraries. https://canpoetry.library.utoronto.ca/morrissey/index. htm. Accessed on July 30, 2020. Norman, Marsha. 1978. Getting Out. New York: Dramatists Play Service. Schenkar, Joan. 1979. Signs of Life. New York: Samuel French. Schutzman, Mady. 1999. The Real Thing: Performance, Hysteria, and Advertising. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Scislowska, Monika. 2018. “Director Polanski Calls #MeToo ‘Collective Hysteria.’” AP News, May 9, 2018. https://apnews.com/93e4ddfcaa214f0fb 7f93543df0aaa6a. Accessed on July 30, 2020. Showalter, Elaine. 1993. “Hysteria, Feminism, and Gender.” In Gilman et  al., Hysteria before Freud, 286–344. ———. 1997. Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media. New  York: Columbia University Press.

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Small, Zachary. 2018. “Queer Identity in the MeToo Movement: A Conversation with Emma Sulkowicz.” Hyperallergic, August 31, 2018. https://hyperallergic.com/458257/conversation-­with-­emma-­sulkowicz/. Accessed on July 30, 2020. Smith, Roberta. 2014. “In a Mattress, a Fulcrum for Art and Political Protest.” New York Times (New York Edition), September 22, 2014. Published online with the headline: “In a Mattress, a Lever for Art and Political Protest.” https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/22/arts/design/in-­a -­m attress-­a -­ fulcrum-­of-­art-­and-­political-­protest.html. Accessed on July 30, 2020. Sulkowicz, Emma. 2015a. “A____’s S____t.” Preface. Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol. Online Participatory Art and Video with Preface, June 2015. http://cecinestpasunviol.video/. Accessed on July 30, 2020. ———. 2015b. Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol. Online Participatory art performed by author and video with Preface, June 2015. http://cecinestpasunviol.video/. Accessed on July 30, 2020. Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Taylor, Kate. 2015. “Columbia Act of Protest Extends into Graduation.” New York Times  (New York Edition), May 20, 2015. Published online with the headline: “Mattress Protest at Columbia University Continues into Graduation Event.” https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/20/nyregion/mattress-­ protest-­a t-­c olumbia-­u niversity-­c ontinues-­i nto-­g raduation-­e vent.html. Accessed on July 30, 2020. Timpano, Nathan J. 2017. Constructing the Viennese Modern Body: Art, Hysteria and the Puppet. New York: Routledge. Townsend-Robinson, Joanna. 2003. “Expressing the Unspoken: Hysterical Performance as Radical Theatre.” Women’s Studies 32: 533-557. Traister, Rebecca. 2018. Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger. New York: Simon and Schuster. Wald, Christina. 2007. Hysteria, Trauma and Melancholia: Performative Maladies in Contemporary Anglophone Drama. London and New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wexler, Tina. Dir. 2011. Hysteria. Sony Pictures Classics. Winocour, Alice. Dir. 2012 Augustine. France: Dharamsala, France 3 Cinéma, ARP Sélection.

State of Anxiety: Hysterical Studies for Reproduction Struggles Elke Krasny

Without fear and anxiety, humans would surely have disappeared long ago. After all, creatures that cannot recognize danger and respond accordingly are well suited only to being someone else’s prey. —Daniel Freeman and Jason Freeman, 2012 Thus, in her own way, she (the hysteric) interrogates the structure at the point of its own failure, and takes on herself, incarnating sometimes even to the sacrifice of herself, to unveil this secret truth at any price. She wants to put truth at the place of knowledge. This is the value of hysteria for culture. She has a vocation to resist the dominant discourse and to make herself the symptom of a social malaise that she incarnates. (…) She is a whistleblower for society. —Claude-Noële Pickman, 2012 Hysteria (…) was never just a disease. —Laura Briggs, 2000

As I wake up and sit down to have my first cup of coffee in the morning, I can hear of another incident of hysteria on the news on the radio. As I

E. Krasny (*) Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Vienna, Austria © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Braun (ed.), Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66360-5_5

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am about to settle down after another long day of working more hours than any one should want to work, hysteria appears again, this time in the late evening news. Anchormen* and anchorwomen* diligently deliver their reports on new cases of hysteria so the public is kept informed. The same holds true for the newspapers I read. Hysteria has started to be a frequent term used in the headlines. When I go online, hysteria is trending and new hashtags using hysteria routinely appear. Even when using public transport, when I find myself aboard a train or on a plane, I do not have a chance to escape the omnipresence of the term hysteria. In the fragments of conversations which I have to overhear, without wanting to listen in on other people, without wanting to have to become an ear-witness, hysteria is frequently used. Has there actually been a spectacular and massive return of the historical disease of hysteria, even though in 1952 “the diagnosis was eliminated from the official American psychiatric nomenclature” (Gherovici 2014, p. 47)? This question is, of course, rhetorical. There has not been a return of hysteria as it was known to and defined by the American Psychiatric Association up to the mid-twentieth century, nor had hysteria disappeared. This question merely serves as an opening gambit which is used here to draw attention to the fact that even though hysteria may no longer be considered a valid psychiatric diagnosis and is no longer studied as a current mental disorder by psychiatrists, hysteria has taken on a new social, political, and cultural life outside of the context of psychiatry. Yet, the fact that hysteria was a disease, and a particularly puzzling disease for that matter, continues to inform today’s understanding of the term. The usage of the term hysteria today is, of course, not a medical diagnosis. Much rather, the usage of the term hysteria, which is the subject of this chapter, serves to deliver a politic-ideological diagnosis that draws on historical legacies of the commonly held understanding of hysteria as a state of anxiety, emotionalism, and uncontrollable excessive behavior. Hysteria has become the standard mechanism to call facts into question, to render statements unbelievable, to denigrate emancipatory political movements, to disparage social justice movements, and to malign critical activism. In common day-to-day language, in social media language, and in media reporting, hysteria is considered the embodiment of unreason. Hysteria is a discursive and ideological weapon used to call out the inability to think and to act properly. Those who suffer from hysteria are not in control of what they are thinking, saying, and doing. Those who are described as suffering from hysteria are therefore, reversely, considered to have to be better and more efficiently controlled. Hysteria is of course neither an a-historical condition nor an a-historical idea. Ways of thinking

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and defining hysteria are always historical. Following the work of the New Hysterians such as Elaine Showalter, hysteria is understood as a “cultural symptom of anxiety” (Showalter 1997, p. 9). The interest here is on how conservative, populist, right-wing, and far-right ideological rhetoric in politics and public media strategically connects anxiety to earlier diagnoses of hysteria as “feminine deceitfulness and irresponsibility” (Showalter 1997, p. 9). There are, of course, historical permutations concerning the diagnoses of hysteria in the disciplinary contexts of medicine, psychoanalysis, and psychiatry, but there is also a history of its changing meanings in the general everyday understanding of any historical period and geographical context. This chapter focuses on the political and ideological use of hysteria in the global present in the era after the election of Donald Trump, whom Ta-Nehisi Coates has described as the “first white president” (Ta-Nehisi Coates 2017). Cultural theorists concerned with public meaning making and ethical dimensions of the global present are challenged by hysteria with hysteria requiring to constantly sharpen and develop further methods of transhistorical and transcultural diagnosis and analysis. Critical recent scholarship focusing on the historical change in medical diagnoses and general understandings of hysteria has particularly foregrounded the entanglements of gender, class, and race in the construction of hysteria in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The challenge hysteria poses goes much further than these entanglements. With hysteria the birth scene of psychoanalysis connected to the famous invention of the cathartic talking cure, hysteria centrally poses the question of the (im)possibility of cure.1 The primary source material used for this chapter are public opinion pieces by media pundits, in particular conservative and right-wing writers, and their use of hysteria to speak about present-day social and political movements and left politics in general. But the selection also includes commentary and opinion pieces by journalists and commentators, who critically expose the prevailing use of hysteria as misogynist and racist. There are connections to be made to the extensive hysteria scholarship in the context of medicine, obstetrics, psychoanalysis, and psychiatry, which was particularly advanced in women studies, gender studies, and race 1  In particular, Alys Eve Weinbaum’s recent rereading of the birth of psychoanalysis in her chapter “Sexual Selection and the Birth of Psychoanalysis: Darwin, Freund, and the Universalization of Wayward Reproduction” through the lens of reproduction and race illuminates that even though cure from hysteria was being claimed, in fact, this was not the case.

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studies since the 1970s and then, again, the 1990s, yet the research focus here is much less historical than contemporary. The motivation is to contribute to the emancipatory and transformative project of political scholarship through critical cultural analysis focusing on reproduction crises and reproduction struggles in twenty-first-century studies. I will get to the centrality of the entanglement of hysteria and reproduction by working through the symptomatic use of hysteria for public badmouthing and slander of present-day race-justice and climate-justice movements. What is the use of hysteria a symptom for? How will a symptomatology of this use of hysteria be useful to understanding our current global predicament of violent injustice and the curses of so-called normality? The interest here is firstly on the strategic deployment of the hysteria terminology as an ideological tool. Hysteria is part of ideological warfare aimed against the left and destabilizing a left emancipatory and transformative project. Secondly, the interest is on understanding hysteria, as many theorists and scholars have done before me, as symptom. Hysteria always raises the question of the cure. And by extension, hysteria also always raises the question of the impossibility of the cure and of the implicatedness of the cure in the existing systems of exploitative and extractivist racist and sexist heteropatriarchy which the existence of the phenomena called hysteria, in some ways, has driven to become even more analytically explicit. The hysteria-analysis-­ cure nexus interests me. What if hysteria always wrongs the analysis? What if the cure always fails hysteria? What if the cure is part of the problem that caused hysteria in the first place? Turning to the recent phenomenon of hysteria making headlines today, this chapter is dedicated to searching for hysteria outside of the context of psychoanalysis and psychiatry. Hysteria is understood as being used, or more precisely being abused, for political and ideological purposes in order to cast doubt on those diagnosed to suffer from hysteria. Even though the focus is on the here and now, on twenty-first-century hysteria, the memory of hysteria’s historical wanderings is not forgotten. The bodily, material, and conceptual hysterical legacies matter to today’s understanding of hysteria. Even though one might claim that all scenes of hysteria are always problematic, the interest here is to focus on the fact that so far, all scenes of cure have been problematic. Even though calls for curing today’s hysteria are not explicitly being made in the headlines and articles I present here as primary source material, the unstated call for a cure is its political horizon. In real-world political terms, this is ominous and a very real threat that the cure to the current crises is understood to be more of the same that has caused the symptom of

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hysteria to arise in the first place. Before turning to thinking about the reproduction struggles connected to the symptomatology of hysteria as well as calling into question the cure imperative connected to the abysmal violence of the production of so-called normality, I will provide some evidence for the ideological use of hysteria. Thinking with one’s time is challenging and painful. Sharing the anxiety characteristic to experiencing the global present which has its deep-seated roots in centuries of human exceptionalism, environmental destruction, plunder, and oppression, informs this writing siding with those who are accused of hysteria. As a feminist curator, cultural theorist, and researcher, my motivation is to move one’s research as close as possible to the specificities characteristic to historical conjunctures and to feel the anxieties and troubles connected to the emergence of new political and ideological keywords in order to lay the ground from which curatorial intellectual work can find its ethical and political orientations outside of the highly normative, normalizing, and narrow confines of many academic and artistic contexts driven by systems of violent and internalized epistemic power and discipline-specific, and genre-specific conventions.

Hysterical Contagions: Black Lives Matter Hysteria, Climate Hysteria, Feminist Hysteria The public political culture in the twenty-first century is fully gripped by a politics of insult, fear-mongering, hate speech, and denial. Hysteria has been discovered by conservative pundits and by politicians as a term useful to ideological warfare. Hysteria is key to degrade political and social movements counteracting the extreme and potentially deadly social, economic, political, and environmental crises of our time. New words have been coined to cast doubt on those who criticize alt-right, far-right, and extreme right politics with its emergent populisms of neo-authoritarian cultures and lifestyles. One example for this is “Trump Hysteria” (Love 2017). Described as a “new mental illness,” Trump hysteria is “the fear of what’s going to happen to this country when the carpet gets pulled out from under the sick, weak, disabled, old, the poor, minority hatred running rampant” (Love 2017). This is underlined by headlines such as “Trump Isn’t a Threat to Our Democracy. Hysteria Is” that such hysteria presents a threat to democracy and politics at large (Moyn and Priestland 2017). Commentary and opinion pieces are at the forefront of an ideological war

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against public political movements concerned with system change and life-­ making practices. All these movements are called out as infected with hysteria. The politics of insult, fear, and denial drive this hyper-ideologized use of hysteria. Large-scale and global movements such as Black Lives Matter and Fridays for Future are described as uncontrollable outbursts of hysteria. The fear being expressed is that this kind of hysteria is highly contagious and spreading wildly infecting the masses globally. Let me give a few very recent examples of this use of hysteria as an ideological weapon to render political agents and emancipatory and transformative political movements untrustworthy in the twenty-first century. In May 2020, African-American George Floyd was killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The murder made global headlines. It happened at a time when the world was already in a state of utmost uncertainty and significant anxiety because of the outbreak of the novel COVID-19 virus earlier that year. Swift and most dramatic measures had been taken by governments around the world in order to protect their populations from the spread of the deadly virus and to keep human lives safe. These measures led to what was called the Great Lockdown with strict social distancing measures in place. People were instructed to wear masks when leaving their homes to go to work, with only those in the essential services allowed to work, or to get essential supplies. Otherwise, people had to not leave their homes and to shelter-in-place. After the murder of George Floyd, people took to the public space to demonstrate against the systemic police violence. This time, the Black Lives Matter movement, which dates back to 2013, went truly global, as Berlin-based Haitian-American scholar and writer Edna Bonhomme observed (Bonhomme 2020). Despite the still prevailing pandemic conditions and despite social distancing rules still in place in most countries, millions of people gathered on the streets and in the squares and marched to show their protest against the brutal murder with another black life taken. Immediately after Black Lives Matter demonstrations started in American cities, the marches connected to the large-scale movement were described as hysteria. On June 9, 2020, Frank Furedi published the following piece on Spiked: “Why did the protests over George Floyd turn into mass hysteria? A new culture of groupthink is emerging and it is causing mass psychosis”2 (Furedi 2020). The author argues that the public 2  The World Socialist Website offers a good overview of the political orientations, opinions, and values of Frank Furedi and of the magazine Spiked tracing Furedi’s proclamations to be

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culture of shame is “an epidemic of hysteria” which he links to the COVID-19 pandemic as he argues that the large-scale reactions to the murder of George Floyd have to do with “pent-up energies” because of pandemic measures. By shifting the reason of the way in which people respond from the actual cause to the pandemic, Furedi obscures the systemic violence of racism. At the same time, he argues that other examples of such mass hysteria have shown hysteria to be temporary and fleeting, while this time hysteria, much like the global pandemic caused by the coronavirus, is endemic and will therefore stay for a very long time. With people having learned in pandemic times that they have to fight the pandemic, the article, in a brutal twist of reasoning, seems to suggest that the endemic of hysteria has to be thought, not the brutal system that caused it. On June 26, 2020, Patrick West, regular columnist and commentator at Spiked, titled as follows “The summer we all went mad. The Black Lives Matter hysteria is this generation’s Diana moment” (West 2020). His article featured an image of a Black Lives Matter protester who, standing on top of a care, held a megaphone in a raised hand. The commentator suggests that the coronavirus pandemic is connected to or may even the reason for what he calls the “mania” of “anti-racism” (West 2020). A close reading of his article reveals that the use of terms such as “mad,” “mania,” “convulsions,” “conspicuously compassionate,” and, of course, “hysteria” all serve to create vivid images of unfounded and uncontrollable states of bodily, emotional, or mental anxiety. Thus, the political relevance and the political agenda of Black Lives Matter are completely discredited. The commentator does not elaborate on why he links the political movement a libertarian Marxist, his embrace of Thatcherism and corporatism. Furedi’s books such as How Fear Works: Culture of Fear in the Twenty-First Century in which he argues that fear results from the unraveling of moral authority can be linked to the right-wing and far-right politics’ use of hysteria as a group-insult. The following describes the involvement of Spiked in promoting far-right ideas: “Spiked’s opposition to identity politics is from the right, insofar as the latter employs the language of ‘anti-imperialism’ and selectively points to some of the historic crimes committed against the colonial peoples. Theirs is an attempt to rehabilitate the ideas of the far right, to promote the supposedly civilising mission of imperialism and thereby to turn universities into centres of corporate and state interests” https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2016/05/31/spikm31.html. A 2018 article in the Guardian reported that “Spiked magazine’s US funding arm received $300,000 from the Charles Koch Foundation.” Charles and David Koch are behind “the citizen’s group Americans for Prosperity,” who has been crucial to pulling “the Republican party to the far right on economic, tax, and regulatory issues.”

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of Black Lives Matter to the pandemic conditions. Here, the otherwise fairly straightforward text remains elusive. There are just some hints being made to “general frustration” and “powerlessness” and that these feelings find an outlet in the public demonstrations. This vagueness serves to delink the demonstrations from the murder as the actual reason that led to organizing in solidarity around the globe. It also serves to obscure the facts that black and brown people in the United States, and also in the United Kingdom, suffered disproportionately from the pandemic and died in much higher numbers. After reading the article over and over again, the title remains its most striking, most puzzling, and most toxic element. Under pandemic conditions, people had learned to think of themselves as being at risk to be infected. Hashtags such as #weareallinthistogether were indication of this. The title indicated that all are at risk to be infected with the madness spread by Black Lives Matter hysteria. The comparison to Diana captures the attention. It is puzzling. What does Black Lives Matter have to do with Princess Diana? What are we to make of this comparison? How does the killing of an African-American man by a police officer compare to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in a car accident with foul play being suspected? After Diana’s death, the response of the British public was described as “mob grief,” as loud and emotional “mass hysteria” (O’Grady 2017). This week in 1997 was diagnosed as Diana mass hysteria and madness. Does it serve here to refer to how fast death, even the death of a globally known princess, can be forgotten, as just a bit over twenty years later the tragedy of Diana’s death in a car accident has become a fading memory? Does it serve to refer to the All Lives Matter response to Black Lives Matter which denies the systemic discrimination and bias? Does it serve as an attack on the notion of white privilege? Even though all of these dimensions might matter, hysteria remains central. Linking Black Lives Matter hysteria to Diana hysteria definitely serves to delegitimize and depoliticize the movement. Diana’s death was surrounded by unproven conspiracy theories. Linking her death caused by a car accident to the murder by police violence casts a shadow of doubt over the latter. And, which is maybe most important here, the culture of Diana mourning was at the time described by “the right-wing think tank the Social Affairs Unit” as sentimentalism, “emotionalism, moral relativism and a victim culture blamed on identity politics” (Davies). Public mass grief was presented in a highly ideological mode rooted in classed, gendered, and racist bias. “Anthony O’Hear attacked the Diana events as ‘the elevation of feeling, image and spontaneity over reason, reality and

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restraint,’” pitting “feminized affectivity” against “masculine reason” (Davies 2001, p. 184). Linking Black Lives Matter, potentially “the largest protest movement in U.S. history,” to hysteria and through hysteria to the global cultural memory of past mass sentimentalism and emotionalism and the fear induced by the global current COVID-19 pandemic is an ideological move that discredits and undermines mass political agency centering on race justice and on the implicatedness in the historical system of colonial capitalism and “racist patriarchy” (Robertson 2020; Lorde 2017). In everyday usage, hysteria stands for emotionalism, excessive behavior, hyper-affectivity, uncontrollable anxiety, and unreason. Linking hysteria to the pandemic serves the dual purpose of firstly obscuring the real reason behind the public expressions of Black Lives Matter actions, the endemic police violence, and the structural legacies of coloniality, and of secondly presenting Black Lives Matter as contagious with people needing to protect themselves from this contagion. This, of course, serves the strategic purpose of discrediting the political dimension of Black Lives Matter. The formulations “Black Lives Matter hysteria” and “an epidemic of hysteria” make the global political movement appear as a viral disease which is spreading dangerously and possibly infecting everyone unless it can be stopped. With global fear of the novel coronavirus and in particular acute awareness of the lack of treatment and vaccination, this parallel the two commentators in Spiked magazine are making between Black Lives Matter hysteria and the COVID-19 pandemic is “haunted” by the memories of fascist biopolitical control and by current-day developments of neoliberal surveillance medicine (Gordon 2008). Controlling the spread of a pandemic is compared to controlling the spread of a transformative racial justice movement. Both are presented as a threat, but are presented in need of cure. This false parallel is as ideologically dangerous as it is factually wrong. The toxicity of these arguments runs deep. By turning public political expressions promoting race justice and, of course, in order to achieve that, system change, into the contagious disease of hysteria, those who act in support of Black Live Matter are no longer seen as political agents, but as infected bodies spreading further a dangerous and harmful infection. The climate struggles and climate strikes of the global climate-justice movement including Fridays for Future or Extinction Rebellion have also widely been described as hysteria. On September 25, 2019, the Los Angeles Daily News ran an opinion piece titled “Climate hysteria drives the extinction of common sense” (Shelley 2019). The article opens with an image

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of climate struggle icon Greta Thunberg speaking at the United Nations Climate Change Summit in New York on September 23, 2019. The term extinction is, of course, a reference to the sixth mass extinction also called Anthropocene extinction. The concept of mass extinction has been widely popularized, and therefore, the reference to research connected to anthropogenic environmental threat and destruction is easily identified in this headline. The ideological use of hysteria serves to call into question science just as much as common sense. It presents a form of climate change denial that promotes the idea of common sense knowing better than scientific consensus, but also denounces climate activism as unfounded and emotional. In particular, Greta Thunberg has been described as hysterical. One of the Long Reads focusing on Women published by the Independent in October 2019 traces the hysteria accusations—the piece “Why are powerful men so scared of Greta Thunberg?” (Nelson and Vertigan 2019). The nineteenth- and early twentieth-century figure of the hysteric posing a threat to men and reason is the historical horizon of delegitimizing the arguments made by Greta Thunberg, her political activism and consequently the whole Fridays for Future movement. Critics questioned Greta Thunberg’s soundness of mind by denouncing her as “unstable, hysterical, and mentally ill” (Nelson and Vertigan 2019). The article summarizes a number of misogynist and toxic comments about Thunberg: in Australia, Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt has called Thunberg “freakishly influential … with many mental disorders.” Sky News commentator Chris Kenny described her as a “hysterical teenager.” Her activism has even been likened to “medieval witchcraft” (Nelson and Vertigan 2019). While the ideological mode of attack uses both Black Lives Matter hysteria and climate hysteria, there are significant differences to be made out between the different attacks. Black Lives Matter originally started in 2013 on social media, with Alicia Garza, who is an organizer with the National Domestic Workers Alliance, coining the expression Black Lives Matter on her Facebook page. She used these words in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, who had killed seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin. Patrisse Cullors, an organizer heading an advocacy organization for incarcerated people, took up Black Lives Matter and turned it into a hashtag. Together with Opal Tometi, director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, they turned the hashtag into an online and offline civil rights movement (see: Politico 50 2016). Fridays for Future was started in August 2018, when Greta Thunberg, at the time fifteen years old, started a school strike and decided to go on striking every Friday until

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the Swedish government would adopt measures to reach the goal of the Paris climate agreement. Black Lives Matter hysteria and climate hysteria denounces the race-justice movement and the climate-justice movement in general. The three initiators of Black Lives Matter have not been called out as hysterical on a personal level; Greta Thunberg has been described as hysteric. Historically, as is well known, hysteria has been linked to women since ancient times, yet during the nineteenth century hysteria was specifically connected to white women of a certain class in the context of settler colonialism in the United States. The legacies and reverberations of these classed and racist distinctions through hysteria still loom large today. The Fridays for Future movement is also being discredited by the ageist bias of rendering young people as easily swayed, unnecessarily anxious, and therefore highly susceptible to manipulation. On September 24, 2019, an article published in the National Review titled “If You Can’t Sell Your Hysteria to Adults, Try Kids” argued that because adults not responsive to threats posed by climate change and not willing to work for system change, the left has conspired to manipulate young people. Interestingly enough, even though hysteria is commonly held to exceed control and to present the epitome of being out of control, hysteria also appears here as deliberate political indoctrination and therefore as something that can first be controlled as indoctrination in order to then spin out of control as uncontained hysteria. This supposed indoctrination and manipulation is claimed to provoke and deepen “existential eco-anxiety” (Prager 2019). The author then goes on to speak about multiple and different hysterias. In the author’s views, hysterias are the twenty-first-century form of left politics. “It is critical to remember that hysterias—such as Russian collusion with the Trump campaign, ‘endemic and systemic racism in America,’ the heterosexual AIDS ‘crisis’ in America and the ‘rape culture’ on American college campuses—are to the Left what oxygen is to biological life. No oxygen, no life; no hysteria, no Left” (Prager 2019). We can also find this general condemnation of the left by association with hysteria in writing about Black Lives Matter. On June 10, 2020, one commentator in the Catholic Weekly titled as follows “The destructive blindness of #BlackLives Matter” (Donnelly 2020). He speaks of “mob hysteria, virtue signalling and cultural-left group think” and sees this as result of education, in particular university-level education focusing on critical theories that expose Eurocentrism, white supremacy, exploitation, and oppression (see Donnelly 2020). This had already surfaced immediately after the election of Donald Trump with the left and, in particular, women being

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described as suffering from hysteria. Already in 2017, a diagnosis of the political vocabulary used in the Trump era to speak contemptuously of the left identified the central turn to hysteria. An article published in Vogue on March 10, 2017, titled “What It Really Means When You Call a Woman ‘Hysterical’” pointed out the following: “Trump supporters—all the way from the administration on down to the legions of right-wing bloggers— cannot seem to stop themselves from diagnosing the left with various forms of mental illness, particularly ‘hysteria’” (Espach 2017). After the 2017 Women’s March, women those who joined the march were described as “rabid feminists” and “crazies” who flew into “hysterics and tantrums” (Espach 2017). If the left, and if all emancipatory and life-making struggles and movements are being described as a disease, as hysteria, what then are the prospects for cure? And, what might the deeper-running symptom revealed by the use of the term hysteria be?

Gender, Race, Class, and Nature: Struggles for Reproduction Post-truth, alternative news, fake news, junk news, digital racism, online misogyny, algorithmic violence, surveillance capitalism, large-scale digital manipulation, profit-driven media, and the influencer industry have been made possible through the technologies of the digitally supported and enabled infrastructure that has had tremendous influence on the ways in which patterns of public political behavior are being formed.3 Hysteria has been a number one political keyword in the twenty-first century and in particular after the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States in 2016. Hysteria has tremendous influence upon how that which is being described through this term is being understood. Hysteria has never been a neutral term. Linked to women’s bodies, hysteria intersects class, gender, and race bias connected to historical bias on femaleness and femininity. We have seen that conservative media pundits use hysteria in order to speak about left politics, social movements, in particular those movements connected to race struggles, climate struggles, and women*’s 3  Important literature on digital racism and misogyny include, amongst other titles: Ruha Benjamin’s Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, Safiya Noble’s Algorithm’s of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, Emma A. Jane’s Misogyny Online, and Tania G. Levey’s Sexual Harassment Online: Shaming and Silencing Women in the Digital Age.

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struggles. With the global Black Lives Matter movement during pandemic times the most recent rendering of this systematic use of hysteria to denounce social movements and political activism, my examples have focused on this movement, but I have also provided some evidence for climate struggles and the new feminist movement that has emerged in the twenty-first century being slandered by the ideological use of hysteria. In the twenty-first century, nobody seems to be safe from being infected with hysteria. This massive spread is assumed to be linked to people easily being swayed by the wrong political ideas and emotions in the eyes of their opponents. The left politics people identify with their belief system connected to political parties, social movements, political struggles, or mass mobilizations is called out as hysteria by their political enemies and by all those who want to discredit their views. At a time when trust in politicians is at an all-time low globally and fake news very hard to discern from real news, hysteria is being used to further destabilize trustworthiness and credibility. Interestingly enough, these politics of public commentary rarely question hysteria or its use. Much rather, hysteria, historically considered the embodiment of wandering, instability, and unpredictability, is quite predictably employed by those who claim that they are occupying reason simply through the fact that they call their political enemies hysterical. We may want to call this the hysteria method of contemporary public political discourse. Hysteria is held to be contagious, spreading virally, and infecting societies. Interestingly enough, the metaphors and the terminology used to speak about hysteria closely resemble those used to speak about the COVID-19 pandemic. Societies are being made out as infected. Can everyone be infected by hysteria? Or are there some who are immune to hysteria? Who is held to be most at risk to become infected? Can those who spread the infection be held responsible? Can those infected be held responsible for their political actions since they have caught hysteria through contagion? And, how is the spread being contained? What are the measures taken to stop hysteria from spreading? How does one catch hysteria? How does one protect societies from the spread of hysteria? The disease vocabulary is of interest as it foregrounds bodily, corporeal, material, and spatial dimensions. Bodies matter. Bodily matters matter. As hysteria is being presented as mass disease, as mass delusionality, people are led to believe that this disease has to be stopped. This medical approach is telling. In particular, the notions of spread and contagion are of interest. The medical vocabulary speaks to evidence-based, rational diagnosis and plans for treatment and cure. The hysteria terminology calls for measures

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to be taken in order to stop the transmission of the disease. Risk, responsibility, and containment loom large when thinking of contagion, infection, and spread. This is what is to be feared most: that right-wing politics and populism conjure hysteria in order to oppress those accused of suffering from hysteria even more. Those who present unreason need to be governed. Those who are out of control need to be controlled and disciplined. This is the politics of cure implicit in the opinion pieces of the conservative and right-wing media pundits. This is the politics of cure that presents the utmost threat to livability. This is the cure that is the continuation of what is considered normal with this normality a continuous catastrophe for the 99% and for all those who, as they resist the disastrous conditions of life and reproduction for the 99%, are now being described as suffering from hysteria. Today’s disdainful, cruel, and spiteful political language presents an attack on gender, race, class, and nature. Interested in processes of public meaning making as they are part of ethical questions of the global present configurations, the question is what is the symptom behind the turn to hysteria? On the surface, it seems quite clear. The answers seem to be racism, misogyny, and classism. The vocabulary speaks to this: Black Lives Matter hysteria, feminists throwing hysterical tantrums, or mob hysteria. Yet, I want to suggest that there is a more profound reason, one that might even escape those who have weaponized hysteria and make ideological use of the term. I read the use of hysteria as a symptom for the struggle for reproduction. Reproduction is most widely understood here and includes biological reproduction, social reproduction, and resource reproduction. With lives and resources in peril because of precarity, austerity, exploitation, and extractivism based on a system of classism, racism, and sexism, there is some truth to be found in hysteria. Historically, the idea of the womb, hystéra, wandering in the body was behind the notion of hysteria. Using the womb, the place inside women’s bodies where the embryo develops and grows into a fetus, in metonymical terms, specifically as pars pro toto to speak about reproduction as a whole. The feminist movement of the twenty-first century, which is also largely organizing around femicides, the climate-justice movement, and the race-justice movement organizing against murderous systemic racist violence, is presented to suffer from hysteria in order to insult the movement and in order to render it untrustworthy and unstable; it might be interesting to understand that this insult is actually on to something and might point a way to what needs cure and treatment.

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Hysterical Studies: Rooted in Anxieties, Moving Cures In concluding I want to speculatively think about a field of hysterical studies that connects together twenty-first-century crises studies, reproduction studies, public meaning making, and ethical dimensions of the global present. The current historical conjuncture of climate catastrophe and pandemic catastrophe results in the continuation and deepening of historically interlinked affective, ecological, economic, epistemic, material, social, and political crises presses down on, de-presses, bodies, minds, and nature. The global social and political movements against these brutally violent and ruinous conditions caused by an irresponsible political class paired with neoliberal economic feudalism is rendered as mere hysteria, with the legacy of hysteria as simulated disorder looming large and the accusation that such hysteria produces a state of anxiety. When proposing hysterical studies, I am thinking of here is the following field of hysterical studies. In a 1994 edited volume on Political Ideologies, Michael Kenny in his chapter on “Ecologism” presented publications such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, or Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William B. Behrens III’s study Limits to Growth “as hysterical studies” that he saw as the “transformation of disparate anxiety” into scholarly debate (Kenny 1994, p. 229). Precisely because of the fact that hysterical studies are used in a quite negative way in Kenny’s arguments, in particular because of their alignments with real-world anxieties, I find this idea of hysterical studies extremely inspiring and see it as an invitation to generatively suggest, as a feminist curator and theorist interested in the ethical dimensions of the global present in the twenty-first century, the insistence on the existence of such hysterical studies that take seriously current anxieties, that is, anxieties characteristic to the specific historical conjuncture, study these anxieties through developing their symptomatology, and thinking with these anxieties to understand cause, symptom, and, potentially, cures. Such hysterical studies, as I envision them in curatorial and scholarly terms, connect research and art making to social and political activism, traditions of militant research, as well as scholarship focusing on hysteria as it has been established in women’s, feminist, gender, and queer studies. Hysteria studies will therefore turn to the scholarship on hysteria as a “traveling concept” which has been most fruitful and most productive, particularly in women’s, gender, feminist, and queer studies. Joining

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together the study of contemporary anxieties, and taking seriously the wanderings of hysteria, opens up a way of imagining hysteria as teacher for the real world (Bal 2002). Hysterical studies as imagined here will, of course, have a lot more work to do on what earlier scholarship in women’s, feminist, and gender studies has overlooked: the hysterical dimensions of class and race under imperialism and today’s neo-authoritarian neo-imperialism. In the nineteenth century, with the establishment of colonial capitalism and racist heteropatriarchy, hysteria was instrumental in establishing specific gender roles. What has been remained underexamined and overlooked is that hysteria was entangled in processes of producing not only gender effects but also class race effects in the context of Europe and North America. In 2000, historian of reproductive politics and US imperialism Laura Briggs published an important article in which she started to trace the “race of hysteria” in the context of the United States. Following her, “the dimensions of class and race have been overlooked” in the scholarship on hysteria (Briggs 2000, p.  252). Briggs understands hysteria as “an ideology that forcibly differentiated women’s experiences from each other” (Briggs 2000, p.  252). Hysteria did not unite all women as it affected all women, an understanding widely held and even celebrated in second-wave feminist philosophical and theoretical fascination with hysteria. Much rather, as Briggs points out, hysteria separated women from each other. Briggs examines historical sources on obstetrics and drawing on critical race and whiteness studies teases out that hysteria was the disease of “white women of the middle and upper classes” (Briggs 2000, p. 254). In the context of the United States, Anglo-­ American white women diagnosed with hysteria were portrayed as suffering from “overcivilization” (Briggs 2000, p.  249). Fully tied to reproduction troubles, hysteria is used to express the fear of “race suicide” linked to the ideology of white supremacy. While white women experience trouble giving birth, or even cause trouble to actually have children, as they control or withhold their sexuality, all other women are described as giving birth easily and naturally. “‘Overcivilized’ women avoided sex and were unwilling or incapable of bearing many (or any) children, ‘savage’ women gave birth easily and often, and were hypersexual.” The way in which hysteria was described and defined in nineteenth-century obstetrical literature divided women systematically into two classes: “one white, nervous, and plagued by weakness; the other racialized, colonized, and hardy” (Briggs 2000, p. 250). Echoes of these distinctions still loom large today

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and permeate all questions of care and cure with regard to the violently ignored specificity of the gender and race of bodies in need of care.4 Hysterical studies as envisioned here will first and foremost join together scholarship on reproduction struggles and hysteria, thus moving forward the notion of the im/possibility of the cure. While cure is definitely the goal, cure has to be questioned in the parameters through which cure can, could, and will be produced. To think more speculatively about cure I turn to Alys Eve Weinbaum’s observation that “at the precise moment that Breuer declared Anna O. cured, Freud (…) inserted the footnote into the case that introduced Anna O.’s pregnancy and thus unequivocally declared that she was still quite hysterical” (Weinbaum 2004, p.  181). That she was not cured by the birth scene of psychoanalysis she helped birth, but much rather through her much later work as an activist in Frankfurt working against poverty, establishing an orphanage, fighting for women’s rights and forced trafficking and prostitution in particular of poor Jewish women from Galicia. Through activist practice, cures against the societal ills are achieved. Cure is not found in patriarchal options, cure is not found in cathartic talking, but cure is produced through activist practice. Suffering from the unjust system today, those who struggle against these conditions are rendered hysteric. Those in power fear those who revolt because of anxiety. Those on the right want people to believe that worldwide activism converging in questions of life and survival is hysterical. Hysteria is being used, or to be more precise here abused, as a strategic weapon in this violent language of political warfare. The rhetorical use of hysteria spawns warmongering turning public belief into targeting and attacking those who are made out to be unstable and to therefore cause the destabilization of the ruling system. Hysteria is useful to neo-­ imperialistic ambitions with its war against all sexualized and racialized others as those who are revolting the state of anxiety caused by a system that puts the planet with its humans and non-humans in peril are under attack.

4  In light of the death statistics of the current COVID-19 pandemic, racism as a public health crisis has been publicly recognized and widely discussed in the context of the United States and Great Britain. Racism intersecting gender and poverty also impact largely on the death toll of the COVID-19 pandemic in settler colonial contexts of Brazil, Peru, Chile, and many other countries in South America.

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The hysterical studies I am imagining choose to side with hysteria aligned and allied with those who feel, think, and live in a state of anxiety. Therefore, hysterical studies are partial to anxiety, hysterical knowledge production, reproduction struggles, and a politics of life and survival. While those who fight for different conditions of life, and the right to dignity and sovereignty in the reproduction of these conditions of life, may, of course, not agree with being linked to hysteria, hysteria offers a productive strategy to think about the deep-seated crisis of reproduction that links together all current struggles for life, survival, and futurity. In our catastrophic times defined by mass precarity and mass devastation, ecological destruction and global pandemic, populism and neo-­ authoritarianism, hysteria read through its connectedness to reproduction might, quite unexpectedly, open ways to move forward in a different way. Bertha Pappenheim, the exemplary hysteric, who gave birth to the talking cure, presents a most convincing example of moving from cathartic speech to activist practice connected in more than one way to issues of reproduction presents a way toward transformative change. Today, she would, most likely, again be accused of hysteria. She might be spotted organizing the teachers who also want to contribute to the Fridays for Future demonstration, she might be among those who translate and circulate women’s writings on global trafficking and femicide, and she might be joining the Black Lives Matter march in Frankfurt (Loentz 2007). Hysterical studies, which see themselves as part of and useful to curating and art making, could, will, and can create such hysterical alignments and alliances over time and space in the future.

Afterthought This text is written in anxiety. Siding with those who are insulted as hysterical, this text is partial. Objectivity is and is not its goal. Objectivity in terms of progress- and evaluation-centric scholarship is not its goal. Objectivity in terms of a deeper understanding of the symptoms of our time and in contributing to a symptomatology by not losing one’s anxiety is. There is an afterthought on social movements, political movements, and the movements of hysteria and the womb which I want to share. This thought is owed to hysteria as possible connecting us with a different concept of moving and a different notion of temporality in moving toward the future. The ancient Greek root of hysteria is hustera, the womb. Interestingly enough, the verb connected to the womb, husterein, means

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to be behind, to come late, to lag behind. Aprogress-centric master narrative of modernity that was invented alongside the notions of modern hysteria has little left to offer in terms of moving toward the future. Therefore, reversing the thought about moving toward the future through thinking that coming late and lagging behind clearly resists the acceleration-centric and fastness-dominated notion of progress and growth can be helpful. Speculatively and generatively, I suggest that husterein, coming late, might be a way of slowing down the accelerated frenzy of disaster that leaves us no future at all. The cure to current ailments, urgencies, and crises cannot be found through the recipes for disaster already in place. The cure can only be found through moving differently, maybe by moving conventionally called lagging behind.

References Bal, Mieke. 2002. Travelling Concepts in the Humanities. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Benjamin, Ruha. n.d. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Cambridge and Medford: Polity Press. Bonhomme, Edna. 2020. “George Floyd, a Survivor’s Guilt and a Global Black Lives Matter.” Aljazeera, June 21, 2020. https://www.aljazeera.com/ indepth/opinion/george-­f loyd-­s ur vivor-­g uilt-­g lobal-­b lack-­l ives-­ matter-­200620181544441.html. Accessed on July 30, 2020. Briggs, Laura. 2000. “The Race of Hysteria: ‘Overcivilization’ and the ‘Savage’ Woman in Late Nineteenth-Century Obstetrics and Gynecology.” American Quarterly 52.2: 246–273. Coates, Ta-Nehisi. 2017. “The First White President. The Foundation of Donald Trump’s Presidency is the Negation of Barack Obama’s Legacy.” The Atlantic, October 2017. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/ the-­first-­white-­president-­ta-­nehisi-­coates/537909/. Accessed on July 30, 2020. Davies, Jude. 2001. Diana, A Cultural History. Gender, Race, Nation and the People’s Princess. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave. Donnelly, Kevin. 2020. “The Destructive Blindness of #BlackLives Matter.” Catholic Weekly, June 10, 2020. https://www.catholicweekly.com.au/the-­ destructive-­blindness-­of-­blacklivesmatter/. Accessed on July 30, 2020. Espach, Alison. 2017. “What It Really Means When You Call a Woman ‘Hysterical’.” Vogue, March 10, 2017. https://www.vogue.com/article/ trump-­women-­hysteria-­and-­history. Accessed on July 30, 2020. Furedi, Frank. 2018. How Fear Works: Culture of Fear in the Twenty-First Century. London: Bloomsbury.

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Furedi, Frank. 2020. “Why did the Protests over George Floyd Turn into Mass Hysteria? A New Culture of Groupthink is Emerging and it is Causing Mass Psychosis.” Spiked-Online, June 9, 2020. https://www.spiked-­online. com/2020/06/09/why-­did-­the-­protests-­over-­george-­floyd-­turn-­into-­mass-­ hysteria/. Accessed on July 30, 2020. Gherovici, Patricia. 2014. “Where Have the Hysterics Gone? Lacan’s Reinvention of Hysteria.” English Studies in Canada 40, no. 1 (March): 47–70. Gordon, Avery. 2008. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Jane, Emma A. 2016. Misogyny Online. London and Los Angeles: Sage Publications. Kenny, Michael. 1994. “Ecologism.” In Political Ideologies: An Introduction, edited by Robert Eccleshall, Vincent Geoghegan, Richard Jay, Michael Kenny, Iain McKenzie, and Rick Wilford, 218–251. London and New York: Routledge. Levey, Tania G. 2018. Sexual Harassment Online: Shaming and Silencing Women in the Digital Age. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Loentz, Elizabeth. 2007. Let me Continue to Speak the Truth. Bertha Pappenheim as Author and Activist. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press. Lorde, Audre. 2017 [1978]. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” In Your Silence Will Not Protect You. London: Silver Press. Love, Angel E. 2017. “Trump Hysteria.” Urban Dictionary, March 10, 2017. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Trump%20Hysteria. Accessed on July 30, 2020. Monbiot, George. 2018. “How US Billionaires are Fuelling the Hard-Right Cause in Britain.” The Guardian, December 7, 2018. https://www.theguardian. com/commentisfree/2018/dec/07/us-­billionaires-­hard-­right-­britain-­spiked-­ magazine-­charles-­david-­koch-­foundation. Accessed on July 30, 2020. Moyn, Samuel and David Priestland. 2017. “Trump Isn’t a Threat to Our Democracy. Hysteria Is.” The New  York Times, August 11, 2017. https:// www.nytimes.com/2017/08/11/opinion/sunday/tr ump-­h ysteria-­ democracy-­tyranny.html. Accessed on July 30, 2020. Nelson, Camilla and Meg Vertigan. 2019. “Why are Powerful Men So Scared of Greta Thunberg?” Independent, October 7, 2019. https://www.independent. co.uk/news/long_reads/women/greta-­t hunberg-­c limate-­c hange-­c risis-­ strike-­austism-­misogyny-­protest-­speech-­a9127971.html. Accessed on July 30, 2020. Noble, Safiya. 2018. Algorithm’s of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: New York University Press. O’Grady, Sean. 2017. “Princess Diana: Looking Back at the Monarchy’s Worst Week in Living Memory.” Independent, August 30, 2017. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-­news/princess-­diana-­death-­royals-­reaction-­ blair-­p rince-­w illiam-­h arry-­c harles-­m onarch-­f uneral-­m ourning-­a 7918396. html. Accessed on July 30, 2020.

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Hysteria: Turning a Diagnosis into a Call Mette Kjærgaard Præst

I have an alternative. Lets make it a maxim. Don’t get over it, if you are not over it. When we are not willing to adjust, we become maladjusted. Perhaps we can turn the diagnosis into a call: do not adjust to an unjust world! —Sara Ahmed. “Feminist Killjoys (And Other Willful Subjects),” 2015

PS/Y’s Hysteria was an interdisciplinary arts program that drew upon the varied connotations of its titular term to open a conversation about perceptions of health and illness. Presented in venues across London from August 2017 to July 2018, the public program was the culmination of a number of years of collaborative research with artists, scientists, medical practitioners, service users, theorists, and activists, all of whom contributed toward a rich body of hybrid thinking that manifested in various forms, including exhibitions, performances, talks, workshops, and publications.

M. Kjærgaard Præst (*) London, UK Copenhagen, Denmark © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Braun (ed.), Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66360-5_6

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As the curator of the Hysteria program for PS/Y, this chapter is going to draw upon my experience of working with, and sometimes against, “hysteria” and its many associations, to consider the value of investigating the subject from an art context and in a public setting. In particular, I will be using this case study as a means to reflect upon the successes, failures, and futures of a curatorial approach with the potentially contradictory aims of presenting a coherent and widely accessible program whilst also manifesting the structures and methodologies associated with the conceptualization of hysteria itself. The quotation from Sara Ahmed’s “A Killjoy Manifesto” that opens this chapter demands that the challenges of this approach be considered. To use her language, what are the benefits of presenting an arts program that emerges from the position of “not getting over it,” but getting into it? Is there value in being “maladjusted”? As a curator, how might it be possible to “turn the diagnosis into a call,” and how might this call be activated or experienced by an audience? Finally, what does this call require in response? Before reflecting on the curatorial strategy adopted within the Hysteria program, it is useful to first consider the significance of making hysteria—a term with largely negative, archaic, and unstably defined connotations— the central focus of a London-based contemporary arts program during the second decade of the twenty-first century. Ahmed’s discussion of the “feminist killjoy” stems from her book The Promise of Happiness (2010b), and an earlier version of a killjoy manifesto can also be found in her essay “Feminist Killjoys (And Other Willful Subjects)” (2010a); however, the quotation I have drawn from above is taken from Bad Feelings (2015), a collection of short texts compiled by the UK-based activist group Arts Against Cuts and published by contemporary arts publishers Book Works. The publication provides a useful recent example of the convergence of “bad feelings,” and their potential value, in both scholarship and art. In her introduction, Nina Power outlines the necessity to take up the study of these “negative states”: “It is my feeling that we need to understand negative states, […] all the better to make them militant where we can, and at least share them where we can’t. It is not negative to dwell in the negative. And besides we have no choice” (Power 2015). Examples of issues shared in the publication that directly effects artists and cultural workers and might lead to the formation of “negative states” include cuts to national arts and education budgets carried out by the Conservative and Liberal Democrat Coalition UK Government (2010–2015), the

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hidden agendas behind the “rise of private [art] funding in London,” “a planned strategy to suppress effective protest [as] part of the total policing agenda,” racism, the dominance of the narrative that “unemployment is the fault of unemployed people and they need to change themselves,” and the perceived requirement for publicly funded arts institutions to prioritise Establishment patronage over accessibility toward their local communities, as exemplified in a 2011 exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery “guest curated by the following: Lord Boateng, a former government minister and British High Commissioner to South Africa; the Prime Minister’s wife Samantha Cameron; Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg; Lord Moscow; Sir John Sawers, Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service; and the Culture Minister Ed Vaizey” (Arts Against Cuts 2015). Together, these factors, alongside many other interrelated issues, have contributed toward increasingly precarious conditions for artists and cultural workers, in which social, political, and economic pressures directly impact upon people’s individual and collective status, stability, and security. This discussion of “bad feelings” and “negative states” is making more than just an implicit semantic connection to mental health. In her chapter “Scattered Speculations on Anger,” Priyamvada Gopal considers the diagnostic categories made available through the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and how these might apply to “our own sense of disempowerment, our own depression, our illnesses, and our pain” (Gopal 2015). In other words, the social, political, and economic concerns of scholarship and art, such as those outlined in Bad Feelings, are also concerns that are explicitly understood in terms of their specific impacts upon mental health. However, as previously mentioned, this dwelling on negativity does not aim to further the cause of negativity. In her contribution to Bad Feelings, Lauren Berlant, whose book Cruel Optimism (2011) provides another key point of reference in this context, writes that “the issue politically, though, is not just managing this convergence of negativities but converting our own non-sovereignty or out-of-controllness into an awkwardness that is affirmatively energizing for the work of transforming sociality itself” (Berlant 2015). Here, negative conditions are more than a set of challenges to be avoided or “managed,” but instead a call to action toward positive change. This position touches upon the long history of thought that sees a relationship between mental health issues, the arts, and the desire to create positive change. In the context of increasing demands and limited resources in the UK National Health Service, key institutional research bodies such as the All Party Parliamentary Group on

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Arts, Health and Wellbeing (APPGAHW) continue to advocate this connection. In 2017, APPGAHW published the report of a two-year inquiry entitled “Creative Health: The Arts for Health and Wellbeing” that calls “for an informed and open-minded willingness to accept that the arts can make a significant contribution to addressing a number of the pressing issues faced by our health and social care systems” and argues that “arts-­ based approaches can help people to stay well, recover faster, manage long-term conditions and experience a better quality of life” (APPGAHW 2017). Therefore, the research and development of PS/Y’s Hysteria, which began in 2015, took place in a reciprocal critical context in which issues effecting mental health were being explored in contemporary art, and the value of art was simultaneously being advocated within the mental health sector. With this context established, it is useful to turn again to Ahmed’s call: “Do not adjust to an unjust world.” In 2016, two major political events took place in which the requirement to adjust to a new status quo prompted public discussions of collective mental health: in the UK, the “Brexit” vote to leave the European Union, and in the United States, the presidential election of Donald Trump. Both votes were won by a relatively narrow margin, and significantly, in both cases the negative reactions of supporters of the opposing sides were specifically and repeatedly labelled as hysteria by high-profile public figures. For example, in his column for The Telegraph newspaper, then Conservative leadership candidate Boris Johnson wrote: “There is, among a section of the population, a kind of hysteria, a contagious mourning of the kind that I remember in 1997 after the death of the Princess of Wales,” whilst in the United States, senior Texas Senator and previous presidential candidate Ted Cruz blamed “hysteria and mistruths being pushed by the liberal media” for public criticism of Trump’s temporary ban on visas from seven Muslim-majority countries (Johnson 2016; Leslie 2017). Indeed, the prevalence of the expression “anti-Trump hysteria” even prompted an article in fashion magazine Vogue, noting that “Trump supporters—all the way from the administration on down to the legions of right-wing bloggers—cannot seem to stop themselves from diagnosing the left with various forms of mental illness, particularly ‘hysteria’” (Espach 2017). These arguments, therefore, bring us to the question: is the refusal to adjust a symptom of a mental health issue, such as hysteria, is it a position from which to create positive change, or indeed is it both?

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In her book Hystories, Elaine Showalter explains that hysteria is “plural rather than singular, cyclical rather than linear” (Showalter 1998, p. 15). Hysteria’s meaning has varied from century to century, decade to decade, situation to situation, person to person—its slippery plurality and historically shifting definition makes it a powerful and persistent image. The way in which the diagnosable symptoms of hysteria have continuously shifted in order to reflect its social, political, or biomedical context leaves the term open to endless interpretation; however, one recurrent idea is that it is identified as a psychosomatic or conversion disorder, in which physical symptoms are a manifestation of psychological distress. Perhaps because of the ways in which hysteria has been understood in connection to physical symptoms, it has often been understood through and alongside the aesthetic developments of its time. The most famous example of this interdependent relationship is probably Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot who studied and taught hysteria at the Salpêtrière in Paris from 1825 to 1893, where the use of photography—itself still a developing art form—aestheticized the image of the hysteric women. So if ideas about hysteria as a mental health issue have been furthered through the performative presence of aesthetic experimentation, an exploration of hysteria through contemporary art can further unfold, nuance, and question the kaleidoscopic nature of the term itself, in addition to how it reflects the issues of its time. In framing PS/Y’s Hysteria, it was therefore important not to attempt to communicate a singular definition of the term, but instead mimic its plurality and include as many perspectives as possible. To ensure the plural and complex conversation, we invited different and distinct voices to contribute, including artists, scientists, medical practitioners, service users, theorists, and activists. Throughout an open research period running from 2015 to 2017, and the public program running from 2017 to 2018, that approach manifested in a cacophony of voices, and a turmoil of knowledge and experiences. In partnership with art institutions and mental health charities across London, Hysteria consisted of more than 25 events presenting projects led by artists including Larry Achiampong, Pia Arke, Evan Ifekoya, Marie Kølbæk Iversen, Fiona James and Jessica Wiesner, Laleen Jayamanne, Jamila Johnson-Small/Last Yearz Interesting Negro, Lana Lin, Florence Peake and Eve Stainton, Imran Perretta and Paul Purgas, Federico Vladimir Strate Pezdirc and Pablo Esbert Lilienfeld, Jocelyn Pook, Farah Saleh, Victoria Sin and Shy One featuring Whiskey Chow, Cally Spooner, Cara Tolmie and Paul Abbott, Tran, T.  Kim-Trang, Visionist and Pedro Maia, and Zadie Xa. The program included works

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across a range of art forms, which together explored multiple aspects of hysteria’s plurality, including representations of gender, race, and cultural identity; hysteria as a political tool; collective mental health; contemporary approaches to mental healthcare; ritual and shamanistic practices; and the physical effects of psychological experiences. For the purposes of this chapter, I will discuss a small selection of the artists’ projects that represent different approaches to research and collaboration, in order to explore the ways in which theories, histories, and experiences of hysteria can be interpreted and manifested in new ways through artistic practices.

Florence Peake and Eve Stainton, Slug Horizons, 2018 Throughout the history of Western medicine, the study of hysteria has typically been defined by men and associated with women: the male gaze of society observing and analyzing female bodies and behaviors. Charcot’s aestheticized photographs of the contorted and hysterical female body are key examples of this, alongside his apprentice Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer who further conceptualized hysteria through the famous case studies of Anna O. and Emmy von N. Through a residency at CoolTan Arts—an arts charity for adults with mental health problems who believe that “mental wellbeing is enhanced by the power of creativity” (CoolTan Arts n.d.), based in a former library— Florence Peake and Eve Stainton examined this century-old tendency to associate hysteria with women (Fig.  1). Their collaborative project Slug Horizons explored the expressive potentialities of women’s bodies, through intimacy, touch, and collective reclaiming. During the residency, Peake and Stainton invited CoolTan Arts’ Women Make Art group to participate in a series of workshops exploring synergic movement, sound-vibrations, and non-verbal communication through drawing, working with clay, and touch. While each workshop was specifically tailored to the women’s group, some of the workshops were also open to the public. The residency culminated in a performance, in which Peake and Stainton utilized the collective experiences from the workshops. The performance took place in the old library, on a round stage constructed of foam, with the audience seated around it in a circle. Two women naked from the waist down entered the stage and began to explore their own and each other’s bodies through drawing, painting, touch, movements, and sounds. During the

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Fig. 1  Florence Peake and Eve Stainton, Slug Horizons, 2018, CoolTan Arts, commissioned by PS/Y for Hysteria. (Photo by Anne Tetzlaff)

performance the two bodies connected in various ways, some moments were intimate, some sensual, some restful, some humorous, and some were highly energetic and playful. While Peake and Stainton’s work responded directly to hysteria’s association with women, its non-verbal communicative aspects also referenced the medical relationship between hysteria and the loss of voice, and the historical socio-political history of hysteria having been used as tool to silence women. For example, Showalter explains, Both traditional medical accounts of hysteria and Freud’s case histories stressed such symptoms of blocked speech and communication as the Globus Hystericus, or sense of choking; the tussis nervosa, or chronic nervous cough; aphasia, or inability to use words, and aphonia, or loss of voice. Mutism frequently turned up as a symptom of nineteenth-century hysteria. Anna O. could not speak her native German and instead spoke either Yiddish, which she called “the woman’s German” or a jumble of English, Italian, and French. (Showalter 1998, p. 87)

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To exemplify how hysteria has in turn been utilized as a silencing tool, Showalter uses an example of how feminists were perceived as hysterics in the time of the Suffragette movement: “Conservatives saw feminism as the woman’s form of degeneration; doctors viewed hysterical women as closet feminists who had to be reprogrammed into traditional roles, and politicians attacked feminist activists as closet hysterics who needed treatment rather than rights.” She continues, “Women who spoke out in public for women’s rights were caricatured as ‘the shrieking sisterhood’” (Showalter 1998, p. 49). In her essay, “The Gender of Sound,” from her book Glass, Irony and God (1995), Anne Carson writes about the urge to silence women: It is an axiom of ancient Greek and Roman medical theory and anatomical discussion that a woman has two mouths. The orifice through which vocal activity takes place and the orifice through which sexual activity takes place are both denoted by the word stoma in Greek (os in Latin) with the addition of adverbs ano and kato to differentiate upper mouth from lower mouth. Both the vocal and the genital mouth are connected to the body by the neck (auchen in Greek, cervix in Latin). Both mouths provide access to a hollow cavity which is guarded by lips that are best kept closed. (Carson 1995, p. 131)

Carson further explains the attitude of the ancient Greek and Romans toward different types of sound: High vocal pitch goes together with talkativeness to characterize a person who is deviant from or deficient in the masculine ideal of self-control. Women, catamites, eunuchs and androgynes fall into this category. Their sounds are bad to hear and make men uncomfortable. (Carson 1995, p. 119)

The irony is, of course, that the idea that women’s mouths should be kept closed and that their voices are irritating, was not just an idea of the ancient Greek and Roman society, but is an idea that has continued through history up to the present day. Carson describes how Margaret Thatcher trained for years to make her voice deeper and still earned the nickname Attila the Hen (Carson 1995, p. 120). Carson continues, “Putting a door on the female mouth has been an important project of patriarchal culture from antiquity to the present day” (Carson 1995, p. 126). By reclaiming the “voice” of the female body and reintroducing female intimacy, independent of the male gaze, Peake and Stainton’s work sought to produce new knowledge of intimacy, empathy, and solidarity amongst

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women, and for women. If Slug Horizons did not attempt to rewrite history, it aimed at adding a new reading of it. The old library that became the stage for the performance was already emptied of books, and no longer held the position of distributing knowledge, but by being the setting of Slug Horizons, the library once again became a space for sharing knowledge.

Zadie Xa, The Conch, Sea Urchin and Brass Bell, 2017 Influenced by the invention and popularization of photography, a general understanding that “truth” was observable on the surface of the human body spread in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Differences in appearance held symbolic value, and the Western gaze typically considered anyone who looked other than white, male, and European to be less intelligent, less healthy, less worthy, and so on. Therefore, race, as well as gender, became a signifier of hysteria. For example—as Sander Gilman writes in his essay “The Image of the Hysteric” (1993)—during the 1930s, hysteria was understood as a particular predisposition affecting the Eastern Jewish male, an assumption that later included other non-­ European cultures (Gilman 1993). In his 1961 book The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon provides a psychiatric and psychological analysis of the dehumanizing effects of colonization upon the individual and the nation. He notes that the tendency to associate hysteria with non-­European cultures, the Other, had manifested in colonial thought: Those hordes of vital statistics, those hysterical masses, those faces bereft of all humanity, those distended bodies, which are like nothing on earth, that mob without beginning or end, those children who seem to belong to nobody, that laziness stretched out in the sun, that vegetative rhythm of life—all this forms part of the colonial vocabulary. (Fanon 1982 [1963], p. 33)

Hysteria opened with the exhibition The Conch, Sea Urchin and Brass Bell by Zadie Xa at Pump House Gallery (Fig. 2). For this, her first solo exhibition, Xa explored hysteria and its relation to gender, race, and cultural identity, through the lens of colonial heritage and Asian diaspora drawing on her own history of being Canadian with South Korean heritage. Across the three floors of Pump House Gallery, the exhibition narrated a displaced body’s return to a “homeland.” Each level of the gallery marked a

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Fig. 2  Zadie Xa, Fishscales and Poisonous Darts, 2016. In The Conch, Sea Urchin and Brass Bell, 2017. Pump House Gallery. Part of PS/Y’s Hysteria program. (Photo by Eoin Carey)

different stage of the journey, in which the protagonist searches for an understanding of belonging, but instead finds a concoction of excitement, rejection, and bewilderment. In the entrance to the gallery hung a red twin costume from The Sea Child, Octopus and Brass Bell (2017) marking the entering into the exhibition. On the left hand side of the ground floor space was a mask by Korean artist Jung Sung Am that represents Bibi (Spirit of the Sea or Sea Dragon). Underneath the mask were four shells and a driftwood stick. The conch shells were collected from Jeju Island, where they are harvested by Haenyeo women and sold to tourists and residents. The driftwood was collected from Vancouver where Xa grew up. These objects, alongside the fabric work Fishscales and Poisonous Darts (2016), a red pair of shoes by Benito Mayor Vallejo and the video trilogy Deep Space Mathematics//The Transfer of Knowledge (2016), functioned as an introduction and a pre-liminal stage to the journey ahead. At the entrance to the staircase, a total installation, including soundscapes, light installations, masks, and textiles, began. An oceanic science fiction

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atmosphere was unveiled, and within this, the figure of the female Korean shaman introduced. The titular moving image work—The Conch, Sea Urchin and Brass Bell—appeared on the top floor. The work compiled footage from a recent journey the artist had undertaken to South Korea, interlaced with footage of imagined and learned Korean folklore and aspects of the shamanist culture that remains, despite being repressed during Japanese rule, as well as with footage of octopuses as they change color and shapeshift to mimic their surroundings as a survival strategy. The Conch, Sea Urchin and Brass Bell was in a sense a manifestation of a search of a reflexive space in which diasporic knowledge can be transformed into new realities. Using the shapeshifting qualities of the octopus as a metaphor, Xa’s exhibition juxtaposed the slippery nature of hysteria with diasporic experiences of being displaced and needing to adjust, while attempting to maintain a sense of belonging. By making this connection, Xa attempted to embody the idea of the Other and to reclaim it as a position of power.

Larry Achiampong Relic 1, 2017 The exploration of hysteria as a diasporic term continued with Larry Achiampong’s commission Relic 1, which premiered at the Chapel at King’s College London (Fig. 3). Through research with Sander Gilman and Sashi Sashidharan, Achiampong addressed colonial legacies in contemporary society—including scientific, institutional, and political racism—in his moving image work. In a lecture held as part of the open research for Hysteria, Sashi Sashidharan points to the fact that hysteria as a diagnosis is a European cultural notion that through colonialism was imposed on other cultures: As the boundaries of Europe expanded during the imperial or colonial era, non-European people living under European rule implicitly came under the European gaze. […] One of the things that happened during the encounters in clinics, in hospitals, and more widely across the colonised countries, between the coloniser and the colonised, between the professionals and the patients, [and] behind that, between the idea of what is normal and what is exotic, was an appropriation of local knowledge and experience. The varied manifestations of mental distress or psychosocial disruptions in diverse communities and cultures were subsumed into a single overarching paradigm of mental illness and wellness, specifically rooted in European culture and his-

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Fig. 3  Larry Achiampong, Relic 1, 2017, King’s College London, commissioned by PS/Y for Hysteria. (Photo by Sue Parkhill) tory. In other words, the European model was applied uncritically to the varied and diverse experiences of the colonised people and became part of that overarching narrative of what constituted normal and what constituted abnormal. (Sashidharan 2017)

But as Sashidharan points out, specific European medical concepts, such as hysteria, are based on a European distinction, the dualism between

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mind and body, and their implied hierarchical order wherein expressions of distress through the mind (psychological) are somehow superior to expressions of distress through the body (somatic). Sashidharan explains that still today a significant number of clinical studies show that people of non-European origin, people with a colonial past, report psychological symptoms less often than somatic or physical symptoms when faced with a life adversity, which is in contrast to the experience of dealing with distress in European people. (Sashidharan 2017)

This also meant that through the European gaze on non-European reactions to distress, symptoms expressed through the body became the topic of interest and contributed to the development or realignment of hysteria with what is now called the somatic symptom disorder (or its variations) which refers to conditions where people develop physical symptoms which are assumed to be psychological in origin. In a European perspective, this differentiation implied that non-Europeans lack something, that is, higher faculties and more subtle emotional experiences, and has had profound influence on both medical history and colonial history. Sashidharan continues, Psychiatrists for example argued that non-Europeans were like infants ruled by our desires, highly susceptible to our emotions, lacking rational thinking and with an underdeveloped sense of social responsibility. There was something inferior, something abnormal about the normal native mind. This reflected not only on the capacity of the body, but also the natives’ capacity for self-governance. How can we be trusted to have our own government? (Sashidharan 2017)

Achiampong’s Relic 1 responds directly to colonial history in a fictional work that seeks to revert the colonial hierarchy. It is part of Achiampong’s Relic Traveller project, which “builds upon a postcolonial perspective informed by technology, agency and the body, and narratives of migration” (Achiampong 2017). Relic Traveller was partly inspired by efforts of cooperation within the Pan African Movement, at a time where the European Union was in a serious crisis, due to a growing nationalism amongst European countries. Relic 1 is set in a seemingly desolate UK, where a child-like protagonist apparates across the landscape. The traveller journeys across iconic empty landscapes, uncovering fragments of data

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that bear testimony to a forgotten Empire. The film invites its audience on a journey consisting of moments that are simultaneously claustrophobic, traumatic, poetic, and sublime. Using science fiction and computer game terminology, these constructed and yet familiar feelings of otherness and displacement embody situations of colonial hysteria, while reversing the roles of the colonizer and the colonized. The work was premiered in the Chapel at King’s College London, a church built inside the university’s main building, where the stained glass windows and other elements of church iconography contain depictions of scientific discoveries such as the atom, DNA, genes, and chromosomes. In this setting, Achiampong’s science fictional revision of colonial histories was further set in juxtaposition to the “relics” of Christian faith and Western science. With this work— which he dedicated to those who were killed and those who were made homeless and displaced by the Grenfell fire in 2017—Achiampong directed the conversation around hysteria toward a highly contemporary political problem.

Marie Kølbæk Iversen, Autumn Equinox Celebration, 2017 and Star Messenger, 2017 With the interest of exploring physical manifestations of psychological trauma, Marie Kølbæk Iversen was invited to make work expanding on her research into shamanist approaches to fright, trauma, and healing. Kølbæk Iversen had already been making work around the processes of loss and trauma as the basis of new becomings, and had recently connected this to the transformative qualities of the female voice within Sejd, a shamanist culture in Southern Scandinavia during the Viking-era.1 Kølbæk Iversen had recently “inherited” a collection of magical Sejd related songs from her great-great-great-great-grandparents. The songs had been collected and conserved in 1873 by the folklore collector Evald Tang Kristensen and were largely (and in places explicitly) feminist, apocalyptic, anti-­ Christian, anti-nationalist, and anti-Danish. This project was commissioned in collaboration with LUX, and as part of the development 1  The word “shamanism” originally refers to the particular practices of Siberian shamans and was only later appropriated as a general term to denote spiritual practices involving ecstatic trance and spirit journeying. Kølbæk Iversen use the term “shaman-ist” rather than “shamanic” to indicate that in Viking-era Scandinavia there existed something shamanismlike, and this culture was called Sejd.

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Fig. 4  Marie Kølbæk Iversen, Autumn Equinox Celebration, 2017, LUX, commissioned by PS/Y for Hysteria. (Photo by Christa Holka)

of the project, Kølbæk Iversen worked in collaboration with the volunteer organization Friends of Waterlow Park to plant a medicinal herb garden. The Autumn Equinox Celebration was an outdoor celebration that took place during sunset (Fig.  4). Accompanied by sound artist Diana Policarpo on percussion and lit by only a small fire, Kølbæk Iversen performed the magic songs while light turned to darkness. Kølbæk Iversen’s performance celebrated the agency of the female voice and connected this historic agency with the significance of autumn equinox in the Northern hemisphere, where that night marks the threshold into winter darkness— and symbolically into the dreams of an extended night. It celebrates the power of dreaming to unsettle the fabric of reality by rendering weird— Wyrd—and contingent, the waking life of our troubled modernity. The second part of Kølbæk Iversen’s project Star Messenger took place at winter solstice and expanded the artist’s research exploring the transformative potentialities of fright encountered through traumatic and shamanist processes, proposing a softening of the historical Western divide between the rational and the irrational, the material and the magical. The

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moving image work Star Messenger is a silent animation of a vision the artist had during a traumatic experience of natural labor as she was giving birth to her son. The silent screening was again accompanied by Policarpo on percussion and included a work by Gaia Fugazza, Other Ways—a series of 90 unique porcelain sculptures of octopus beaks, which were displayed in the mouths of visitors for the duration of the screening. In her understanding of fright and how it can lead to transformation, Kølbæk Iversen followed the writings of ethno-psychiatrists Catherine Grandsard and Tobie Nathan, who, in exploring the etiology of fright and trauma, refer to the Amazonian Huni Kuin tribe and their ritual work with the psychotropic plant brew ayawaska. In a public talk as part of the Star Messenger event, Kølbæk Iversen explains that according to Grandsard and Nathan, ayawaska is a means of encountering and approximating fright, and to the Huni Kuin “the ability to cope with being frightened is equal to the ability to perceive of worlds based on unknown logical principles.” Following this, the path to the New, whatever it might be, necessarily runs through states of fright. Shying away from fright means blocking the road to transformation. (Kølbæk Iversen 2018)

The way in which Kølbæk Iversen understands shamanic fright is therefore that beside its initial shock it is also an invitation to pass through, and through this moment of intense fear a part of you dies. At the same time, through this ritualized death, you become New and you become Other, and this makes it a future- and transformation-­ oriented practice rather than one of restoration and maintenance of the status quo. (Kølbæk Iversen 2018)

As Kølbæk Iversen revisits her own fright in Star Messenger, she therefore also invites her audience to join her in her search of the New that comes after. The experience of having the porcelain sculpture in the mouth is a very unusual feeling, which functions as an attempt to digress a border or a sense of being in control, of normality, while giving the audience a “taste,” a bodily experience of containing the Other, the transformation. Through the two parts the celebration of the darkness, dreams, and their transformative potentials, alongside the acknowledgement of fright as a potential for new becomings, Kølbæk Iversen brings into the conversation key aspects of hysteria, as strategy for resistance and its transformative force.

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Cally Spooner, Soundtrack for a Troubled Time and Notes on Humiliation, 2017 and Several Lectures on Display (Managed Tears, Unscripted Skin, Riots), 2018 Cally Spooner’s commission—which took form of the solo exhibition Soundtrack for a troubled time and notes on humiliation at Whitechapel Gallery, and several lectures on Display (managed tears, unscripted skin, riots), a daylong collection of lectures and performances at the Anatomy Lecture Theatre at King’s College London—approached hysteria as an exploration of the contemporary iterations of the medical term, looking for parallels in contemporary society and politics. For the exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery Spooner created a poster series titled Notes on Humiliation that transcribed extracts from her conversations with psychiatrist and clinical lecturer Isabel Valli. Spooner and Valli’s conversation journeys through notions of HPA (the hypothalamic-­ pituitary-­adrenal axis is the main system that controls the production of the hormones mediating the stress response), Hippocampus (a major component of the brains of humans and other vertebrates that plays important roles in the consolidation of information from short-term memory to long-term memory), Humiliation, and Riots. When discussing “HPA” the conversation between Spooner and Valli follows theorist and media activist Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s notion that an infosphere, such as London, “appropriates and absorbs our nervous systems, creating an ‘epidemic of panic and depression,’” that is, “spreading through the circuits of the social brain and the global economy,” akin to a societal “nervous breakdown” (Spooner 2017) and continues to discuss how stress affect our parasympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for processes that build and repair the body and therefore stimulates the body to rest and digest, feed and breed. Discussing the “Hippocampus,” the conversation examines how attention fragmented by external stimuli, through sensory overload, can have a negative impact on memory formation, which in turn can be linked to feelings of humiliation and depression. Valli uses protest culture in the UK as an example: When I came here from Italy I was surprised about how many people said: “protest never changes anything, we did it during the Iraq war, and nothing happened.” In this case, the social and societal memory of this protest is that nothing was achieved, therefore no action will ever lead to anything. Yet,

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something did happen. A million people marched together. However, because this did not fulfil its project brief—to stop the war—the response generated a depressive narrative of failure, that lead to registering the memory with a depressive twist. To me, that sounds as though the collective understanding of political action, in this case, is depressed. (Spooner 2017)

“Humiliation” questions the use of hysteria in political language and addresses how “in calling the anti-Trump protestors hysterical, Fox News (who at the time were supporters of the Trump Administration) is dismissing the symbolic as irrational, labeling the protests as manifestations of the collective body that have no rationale” (Spooner 2017). And using the 2011 uprising in London, instigated by the death of Mark Duggan, who was shot dead by the police, as an example, “Riots” discusses hysteria or conversion disorder on a public and collective scale or as “bodily displays of pre-verbal communication at a societal level” (Spooner 2017). The posters are overlaid with drawings of human organs that produce the stress hormone cortisol. In order to understand hysteria at a societal level, Spooner and Valli probed ideas of pre-verbal communication, trauma, apocalypse, and protest, asking how these conditions can be captured and made visible, either as fact, fiction, or the symbolic. In several lectures on Display (managed tears, unscripted skin, riots), Spooner brought together Valli, professor of French and German studies Naomi Segal, the philosopher Federico Campagna, and the OFFSHORE company of dancers and performers, to explore physical conditions that are psychosocial in origin and which display themselves in response to psychological stressors or conflicts. Beginning with human skin and then expanding the scale to humiliation and nervous breakdowns at a societal level, the day explored how the historical and embodied character of experience arrives “hysterically” in contemporary life.

Mental Fight Club’s Dragon Café and RE:CREATE Psychiatry, Hysteria: Contested, Popularised, Diagnosed, 2018 Over a period of four weeks, four discussion events were programed by and for Mental Fight Club’s Dragon Café and RE:CREATE Psychiatry participants. Dragon Café is a weekly arts and health pop-up in the Crypt of St George the Martyr Church in Borough, South London. Every

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Monday Dragon Café opens its doors to people with experience of mental illness or distress, service-users, healthcare workers, or anyone interested in experiencing a safe non-judgmental creative space. RE:CREATE Psychiatry is an exploratory platform, which works to facilitate open and equal forms of dialogue between those who use mental health services and those who provide them. The aim of the series of discussions was to examine hysteria through conversation with those with lived experience of mental health problems and medical professionals. The conversations examined how the social constructs of hysteria have influenced perceptions of people with mental health experiences in services and beyond and in turn what mental health services can learn from the complex history of the hysterical. The discussion topics highlighted elements of the Hysteria program, including an exploration of colonial hysteria and postcolonial experiences, an examination of the politics of language and gender performativity, whether “fake news” is a form of modern hysteria, and delved into the shared experiences of the “Heterotopias of Mental Health Care.” By piecing together the collective, multi-perspectival yet genuinely shared understandings elicited through its unique dialogic model, these discussion events allowed clinicians and service-users to address—together—the challenges of working in and through the mental healthcare system. The selection of artists’ projects represents some of the many ways in which Hysteria brought together multiple voices and perspectives to create a new body of on-going research around this complex and contested term. Crucially, as an arts program, this research took place in a public setting and in forms that required the active contributions of a wide range of audiences and participants.2 One of the key benefits of investigating hysteria in this way was that by combining the knowledge and experience, not only from arts and health science theory but also from artists, service users, healthcare professionals, and people with experience of the mechanisms of hysteria, the Hysteria program was able to reach people who otherwise would not engage with the arts or discussions around health and illness. Significantly, 69% of audience members who responded to PS/Y’s questionnaire said that they have had “experience of mental health problems”—53% of whom had had “direct personal experience.” Apart from the fact that these kind of statistics point toward the sheer prevalence 2  Hysteria had a total live/primary audience of 82,564 and an online/secondary audience of 1,666,183.

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of mental health problems in the UK, this also evidences that Hysteria was both developed by and spoke to people with different perspectives on the issues explored, including those with lived experience. In addition to quantitative information, we also received anonymous written audience feedback that supported this view, such as “this event managed to respectfully and dynamically engage with meaningful issues in a creative way, including a range of perspectives” or that the audience were the “most diverse crowd seen at an art event.” Using a diagnosis (even an expired one) as a topic for an arts program is not without complexities and requires significant ethical considerations; how can curators, and artists, work with a contested term, whether that term relates to mental health, physical health, feminism, witchery, racism, diaspora, climate, and so on, without inadvertently repeating the stereotypes attached to it and without misappropriating it? When I began researching hysteria and its associations, my approach to the term was that of great suspicion and carefulness. Hysteria is a term that has been used to stigmatize and silence many minorities and has played a part in defending colonial thought. As a curator, I was concerned that I could accidentally reiterate or reinforce the understandings that lay behind these misuses of the term. For example, I questioned what it would mean that the program included mostly women, BIPOC artists, artists with experience of mental health problems, mental health charities, and many artists whose work positions itself or is positioned in the margins of what is generally perceived as the norm. Would the fact that the program did not represent the dominant voice of heteronormative white middle-class men further strengthen the historic perception that hysteria is a diagnosis of the Other? As I continued the research in collaboration with artists, healthcare professionals, and service users, and as I grew more familiar with the terminology and its ability to mutate and shift, I realized that within the historic and current manifestations of hysteria lie its inherent ability to reject and oppose its contemporaneous oppressive conceptions of normality. The key for me became to let hysteria lead the way and play along with hysteria: “not getting over it,” but getting into it. Together with the collaborators and the audiences, I followed where hysteria wanted to take me and aimed to build a program that embodied its multitude, and acknowledged its pasts, its presents, and its futures. Here I would argue that Hysteria was able to manifest Showalter’s description of the term itself as “plural rather than singular, cyclical rather than linear.” The plurality of

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perspectives became a cacophony of sound that shared Ahmed’s demand to “turn the diagnosis into a call”—not as a singular, unified voice with a coherent worldview, but perhaps, as Berlant proposes, a kind of “awkwardness that is affirmatively energizing” for the work that is to come.

References Achiampong, Larry. 2017. “Relic Traveller: Phase 1.” Artists’ website. https:// www.larryachiampong.co.uk/projects/relic-­traveller-­phase-­1. Accessed on June 30, 2020. Ahmed, Sara. 2010a. “Feminist Killjoys (And Other Willful Subjects).” The Scholar and Feminist Online, 8.3 (Summer). http://sfonline.barnard.edu/polyphonic/print_ahmed.htm. Accessed on June 30, 2020. Ahmed, Sara. 2010b. The Promise of Happiness. Durham and London: Duke University Press. All Party Parliamentary Group on Arts, Health and Wellbeing. 2017. Creative Health: The Arts for Health and Wellbeing—Second Edition. Last modified October 9, 2017. https://www.culturehealthandwellbeing.org.uk/appg-­ inquiry/. Accessed on June 30, 2020. Arts Against Cuts, eds. 2015. Bad Feelings. London: Book Works. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Carson, Anne. 1995. Glass, Irony and God. New York: New Directions Books. CoolTan Arts. n.d. “CoolTan Arts.” Local Offer: The London Borough of Southwark—Mental and Emotional Health Services. https://localoffer.southwark.gov.uk/wellbeing/mental-­and-­emotional-­health-­services/cooltan-­arts/. Accessed on June 30, 2020. Espach, Alison. 2017. “What It Really Means When You Call A Woman “Hysterical”.” Vogue, March 10, 2017. https://www.vogue.com/article/ trump-­women-­hysteria-­and-­history/. Accessed on June 30, 2020. Fanon, Frantz. 1982 [1963]. The Wretched of the Earth. Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd. Gilman, Sander L. 1993. “The Image of the Hysteric.” In Hysteria Beyond Freud, by Sander L.  Gilman, Helen King, Roy Porter, G.  S. Rousseau, and Elaine Showalter. Berkley: University of California Press. Johnson, Boris. 2016. “Tory Candidates Need a Plan for Brexit—Here’s Mine in 5 Points.” The Telegraph, July 3, 2016. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ news/2016/07/03/tory-­candidates-­need-­a-­plan-­for-­brexit%2D%2D-­heres-­ mine-­in-­5-­points/. Accessed on June 30, 2020.

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Kølbæk Iversen, Marie. 2018. Star Messenger. Interview with Mette Kjærgaard Præst. LUX, December 17, 2017. http://annualreportt.com/img/annual_ reportt_marie_koelbaek_iversen_starmessenger.pdf. Accessed on June 30, 2020. Leslie, Katie. 2017. “Ted Cruz Strongly Backs Trump Travel Ban, While John Cornyn More Cautious.” The Dallas Morning News, January 30, 2017. https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2017/01/31/ted-­c ruz-­ strongly-­backs-­trump-­travel-­ban-­while-­john-­cornyn-­more-­cautious/. Accessed on June 30, 2020. Sashidharan, Sashi. 2017. Symposium Presentation for Hysteria and Art: Traumatic Coincidences. Toynbee Studios, January 14, 2017. https://vimeo. com/208119054/. Accessed on June 30, 2020. Showalter, Elaine. 1998. Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture. London and Basingstoke: Picador. Spooner, Cally. 2017. Notes on Humiliation. Interview with Isabel Valli.

To Arc, and Other Studies on Hysterical Gesturing Cindy Rehm and Johanna Braun

Cindy Rehm is a multi- and transmedial artist, she is a performer, curator, educator, and organizer of various politically engaged projects. There seems no limit to her creative output. One red thread can be traced through most of her artistic endeavors: a critical engagement with hysteria.

Johanna Braun (JB): You are an artist with a far-reaching, multi- and cross-disciplinary output of creative practice, that is creating a vast network of projects, collaborations, and exchanges. An artistic practice that is in constant “hysterical” movement: spreading, stretching, bending, and

C. Rehm (*) Los Angeles, CA, USA J. Braun University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Braun (ed.), Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66360-5_7

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reaching different creative and contentual manifestations. I’m very much intrigued by your specific references to Charcot’s images archive of the hysteric in several of your video pieces, the references to feminist “hysterical” scholarship, as in your Cixous Reading Group, and your activist engagements through the Association of Hysteric Curators, that you cofounded in 2014, and the many exhibitions and public events that you organize and curate in institutions as well as more alternative exhibition spaces. Where originated your fascination with hysteria from and what are the primary multi-medial approaches you take in your investigations? Cindy Rehm (CR): For a very long time my practice has moved between drawing, performance, and video. In 2002, I made the video To Arc: A Study in Hysterical Gesturing, which made direct reference to hysteric postures. I was thinking about the frame of the camera and my body having to adjust to those edges, much in the way that women throughout history have been forced to adjust to the boundaries set by patriarchy. I continue to be drawn to hysteria as a kind of language which is reliant on the body—as a series of ruptures that create an opening for the transmission of intimate female narratives, from the inside of the body to the surface, to the exterior, to the skin. The first drawing series I made specifically about hysteria was Odd Women (2005), a series of very small collage and pen drawings using illustrations of women performing calisthenics from a 1970s beauty manual. It struck me that the various exercise poses resembled illustrations of the sequence of a hysterical attack. My odd women were performing paper dolls, who contorted, cried, and leaked bodily fluids, like vomit and tears (see Fig. 1). JB: There are many interesting multilayered and overlapping themes emerging of the corporeality of hysteria and especially performing and staging hysteria; as well as the political and medial implications of doing so. Especially with the connection of the hysteric’s many interesting histories with “new media,” specifically since the reproduction and distribution of images of hysteria with the help of new printing technologies since the fifteenth century, and more concretely through the development of photography, and the subsequent emergence of moving images—that your work clearly draws on. But also the Internet and more recently social media platforms, have contributed immensely on spreading images of hysteria and the hysteric as a “figure of speech” almost without limits. How do you use this historical material in your work practice and how do you contextualize this reflection in the present? CR: In many ways, my work considers the traces of hysteria throughout time: from Medieval saints to Salem witches, to turn-of-the-century mediums and improper women housed in asylums. There are present-day

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Fig. 1  Cindy Rehm, Witch in the Chamber 6, 2020. (Photo: Courtesy of the artist)

echoes of hysteria everywhere in fashion photography, which is a rich resource for my work in collage and video. I am a collector of images and started archiving pictures on Tumblr. I began to notice the movement between bodies within the grid, which lead to my interest in working in a serial fashion, to use fragments to create repetition and movement across a collection of works. The arrangement of Tumblr images has also led to a more recent project where I am creating visual scores from a selection of found digital fashion images that will serve as a movement scores to be performed for the camera.

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JB: This theorization of movement and hysteria is quite interesting. The “hysterical” movements of images, of concepts, of discourses. Considering the intertwined history of the emergence of “moving” images and psychoanalysis in general and hysteria in detail, and especially Freud’s amusing rejection of cinema on one side and the influence he and his theories had on film theory on the other: where do you see your work mediating between hysteria and the medium of film? CR: While I have a great love of film and film theory, I really think of my video works in the realm of performance for camera. I started using video as a way to focus in on small gestures and details that might be lost in a live performance. I fell in love with editing process and use cutting, repetition, and shifts in perspective to speak of female interiority. The structure in my video works often reflects a kind of hysterical form as images fragment and repeat. There is a relation, too, to the documentation of hysterical patients at Salpêtrière, who we know through their performances for camera. JB: This is an interesting point of reference to the many different performance practices of the hysteric throughout history. As you mentioned before such manifestations of hysteric performances at the so-called Salem witches trails during the late seventeenth century, the institutionalization and staging of hysteric’s in medical amphitheaters during the nineteenth century, and the politically charged séances at the fin de siècle are all significant historical moments that inform your work. Where do you see specifically the potential—and maybe even the trappings—of the intersection of performance and hysteria in your work and the re-imagining of those histories in contemporary performance art in general? And as your creative practice is often in collaboration and in dialogue with other artists, what tendencies and general interests do you witness on this intersection for a wider contemporary art community? CR: My work connects to historical evidence of hysteria through both content and form. In hysteria and during séances, the female body becomes a conduit, a channel to release interior experiences to the external world. This also relates to ideas of the leaky body, that women are porous, that they expel blood, milk, and other bodily fluids. The porosity works the other way too, where women have always been seen as more vulnerable to possession by evil forces. While these notions of women’s unstable boundaries have often been evoked to demonize or constrain women, I like to think about the awesome power of a body that is not fixed. I evoke a body that assumes power through her ability to flow endlessly, to transform and

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regenerate. I’m remembering a favorite passage from Cixous’ Laugh of the Medusa, “Our glances, our smiles, are spent; laughs exude from all our mouths, our blood flows and we extend ourselves without ever reaching an end; we never hold back our thoughts, our signs, our writing; and we are not afraid of lacking.” I love the phrase “from all of our mouths” because it speaks to a multi-mouthed female monster, and to the idea of a collective body. I do think in younger feminist artists have embraced the hysteric and the witch as generative models of rebellion. In contemporary work, I often see uses of fragmentation, the unstable narrative, and tactility to speak from a subjective female position. It’s as if women are taking the negative charges that have been leveled against them and turning them into a power. JB: It is evident in your many artistic endeavors and the public programs that you continuously organize, that your work is very much involved in and in response to current political discussion. This is especially interesting as you have worked with the term hysteria for quite some time, but it is especially in the past couple of years that we can witness the term hysteria “trending” in public debates, especially on social media platforms, covering wide-ranging topics in the economy, environment, society, and politics. Also being located in Los Angeles seems to be an important factor to consider, as it was here that countless men in Hollywood warned of hysteria by the so-called #MeToo movement, and therefore bringing the term hysteria to the forefront of discussion around sexual abuse and violence. The film directors Michael Haneke and Roman Polanski made it even more specific and warned of the epidemic and contagious nature of “mass hysteria” in the movement. How do you stand to this current phenomenon? CR: The term “hysterical” is almost always reserved for a woman who is speaking her mind. American politician, Kamala Harris was called hysterical by a senate colleague during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings and she pointed out that the term is often aimed at women “who own their power” (Millstein, Seth. 2018. “Kamala Harris Is Not OK with This GOP Senator Calling Women Protesters ‘Hysterical’.” The Bustle. (Sep. 5) https:// www.bustle.com/p/kamala-­h arris-­r esponds-­t o-­b en-­s asses-­h ysteria-­ comment-­with-­a-­pointed-­rebuke-­11764905). Haneke, Polanski, and others who warn of the dangerous hysteria of the #MeToo movement tread on similar territory and aim to silence women who have finally given voice to the rampant sexual harassment and abuse taking place in all corners of

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our culture. Hysteria, as a term to describe a mass movement, is almost always overstated and used to diminish serious concerns. JB: I see an interesting tension in your work. On one hand, you continuously fuse images of hysteria and violence, and therefore, critically comment on the brutal environments that often produced the historical material we know today (e.g. Salpêtrière). On the other hand, your work is very much informed by the feminist discourses on hysteria from the late twentieth century that critiqued those practices while also “reclaiming” the term hysteria. Where do you see the productive intersection for your own creative practice? CR: There is so much imbedded violence in the history of women’s lives. There is the presence of physical and emotional abuse, but also the strain of erasure and invisibility. As I research, hidden women are constantly creeping out of texts, much like the ladies coming off the walls in Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s short story The Yellow Wallpaper (1892). These women haunt my work and keep leading me back to witches, hysterics, and all matter of odd women. I often speak to female interiority and think of the hysteric fit as a rupture that creates a passageway for female narratives to seep into the world. That was certainly true of twentieth-­ century mediums in trance states, where they were liberated from proper culture and could express wild, sensual, and visceral narratives. Western culture continues to have problems with women’s bodies, with fear of bodies out of control, with excess and flow. JB: This dedication of making the invisible visible and presenting marginalized, underrepresented, and often-ignored voices is also something that you relentlessly do through your curatorial and organizational work. Let’s look a little closer at a selection of your many interesting projects on the intersection of queer feminist knowledge production and distribution, curatorial practice and hysteria that is moving like a guiding thread to your work. You were one of the founding members of the Association of Hysteric Curators. Could you talk more about the genesis of the group and the decision on the name? CR: The Association of Hysteric Curators was formed when artist Mary Anna Pomonis called a meeting of female colleagues to discuss a troubling situation. She had been invited to propose work for a politically themed show, but was rejected for not being political enough. Her project considered the dynamics of power and trust within an intimate relationship. The male curator had a limited view of what constitutes political

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work and seemed completely unaware of the notion of “the personal is political” which has been a core value of feminist art and activism since the 1970s. In reaction against this dismissal, we centered ourselves as a team of female-identified artists who would stage feminist focused exhibitions and events. I suggested the name and liked the irony of a professional organization composed of hysterical women. In recent years, I have stepped away from the group to focus on other projects, but it’s been interesting to see how the group continues to grow and change. The group has maintained an open and unfixed approach, which, while often unwieldy, allows for constant reinvention and is itself a hysterical model. JB: Very interesting to frame this as a “hysterical model” of collaboration and support. The facilitation of such other forms and sites of knowledge transfer is also integral part of the Cixous Reading Group that you co-founded and have been organizing monthly since 2013. Could you talk more about the critical engagement and your engagement in education and forming alternative knowledge production sites through your work and your decision to again tie this in with “hysterical” scholarship? CR: I co-facilitate the Cixous Reading Group with Robert Nashak and the group is open to all genders, though we do only read texts by women. The reading group began as part of Alexandra Grant’s Interior Forest project at 18th Street Art Center in Santa Monica and I’m happy to say we have been meeting regularly for the past six years. Hélène Cixous’ Laugh of the Medusa (1976) was one of the first texts we read, and of course that work is so much about unleashing the hysteric and freeing the female voice. I don’t perceive my work organizing the group as part of my art practice, but our reading together and discussion of texts has been so generative and has contributed greatly to what is happening in my studio. JB: It is also through those discussions that inform your own artistic practice that you organize and curate exhibitions on a regular basis. Curating and Hysteria seem to have a productive relationship, considering themes of caring, curing, and framing performance and art practices. Could you give a glimpse into your—let’s call it—“hysterical curatorial practice” that brings together a diverse group of artists and topics, while always building up, circling around, and expanding themes of hysteria— and the historical moments of the hysteric’s performance that we talked about before—as a recurring topic of those exhibitions? In what way do you think hysteria and curatorial practice are intertwined? In what ways is this curatorial practice informed by diverse

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group(s) of feminist theorist that contextualizes and historicizes curating in feminist thought? CR: All of my curatorial endeavors focus on female-identified artists and I am committed to showing work with feminist content. Often times themes around female autonomy, women’s narratives, and body-centered practices have a natural overlap with the history of hysteria. In the fall of 2016, I curated a group show at Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles that considered the subversive female voice. This Wicked Tongue opened a week before the 2016 presidential election, where Hillary Clinton had faced blatant misogyny throughout her campaign. Clinton was often portrayed as cold-hearted, untrustworthy, and in most extreme cases, as the wicked witch of the west. This mistrust of women persists through time and can be seen in the persecution of witches, the invention of hysteria, and in contemporary distaste for women’s ambition, especially in the arena of politics. I’m currently curating the exhibit These Creatures that will open at Wignall Museum in fall 2019. The show is in dialogue with Nancy Buchanan’s 1979 video These Creatures, a fifty-eight-second anti-­ advertisement that features a male voiceover ironically marveling at the daily machinations of women. The authoritative male voice portrays women as “the other,” mysterious beings, who should always be approached with suspicion. Forty years after Buchanan made These Creatures, women are still struggling with issues around autonomy, representation, and equity. Themes in the show will address the performance and subversion of femininity, the monstrous feminine, exchanges between women, and the female body as a site for ritual and narrative production. In preparing this show I’ve been reading various texts including Kate Manne’s Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (2017), the collection of Andrea Dworkin writing, Last Days at Hot Slit (2019), and essays on female monstrosity including Anne Carson’s Putting Her in Her Place: Women, Dirt, and Desire (1991). The show features a diverse group of female artists who address the performance and subversion of femininity, the monstrous feminine, exchanges between women, and the female body as a site for ritual and narrative production. This show will engage a feminist structure that has been important to my work, derived from the notion of “hysterical” multiplicity, of many voices contributing to a fluid dialogue and exchange.

The Other Self of the Imagination: Cindy Sherman’s Hysterical Performance Elisabeth Bronfen

“I don’t do self-portraits,” Cindy Sherman explained to Andreas Kallfelz in an interview for the journal Wolkenkratzer. “I always try to get as far away from myself as possible in the photographs. It could be, though, that it’s precisely by doing so that I create a self-portrait, doing these totally crazy things with these characters” (Kallfelz 1984, p. 49). Sherman, one of the most widely discussed contemporary American artists, thus poses a serious challenge to art and cultural critics, because if it is not the artist herself, then who is the woman depicted in her photos? If she does not want to create portraits of herself, then why does Sherman use her own body—distorted by costumes, make-up, and props—as her main model? If it is not a question of self-representation, then what is the relationship between the depiction and the female body being represented? We must consider further, at least in relation to the work she produced up to 1991, that Sherman always staged her portraits of women as a scenario that quite self-consciously employs multiple references to American film and TV

E. Bronfen (*) University of Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Braun (ed.), Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66360-5_8

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culture since the 1950s, to costume gothics and romances, science fiction and horror thrillers, film noir, melodrama, advertising and, in the “History Portraits,” classical paintings she studied in college. In view of this, we could certainly bring into play the distinction between self-portrait and self-performance, but we would immediately have to ask, who is staging herself here and why? Cindy Sherman has also explained that she uses her photographs to reveal the latent psychological material that we do not normally see on the surface, in a subject’s face or gestures, namely the material that contains the subject’s imagination. At the same time, however, this other self of the imagination can only be articulated through surface appearances, through the knotting together of different self-representations. The way Sherman tells the story of how she became a photographer characteristically revolves around this contradiction. Using as its point of departure the image of the solitary young woman we are so familiar with from Western narratives and paintings, to be more precise, the young woman who withdraws from the world, finds refuge in her own room and there occupies herself with her own fantasies behind closed doors, Sherman describes how she first felt alienated within her own family, how she later felt threatened existentially by the urban violence of New York City, and how, to reduce this threat, she learned to transform herself into other people, initially in her own room, then later in her studio. She started to study her own face continually from different angles until it began to look like a stranger’s face. She began to disguise herself by dressing up in different costumes, until she could no longer recognize the figure in the mirror. Her portraits were produced precisely in such moments of complete alienation, emerging from her discontent with the gender roles prescribed to her by her family and later by the conditions of her existence as a woman in a major urban center. As such, these portraits always also articulate Sherman’s sense of dissatisfaction with the expectations of femininity that prevailing culture has. In a television interview with Mark Stokes, Cindy Sherman describes how, as a child, she borrowed her mother’s clothes to disguise herself, but actually transformed herself into an ugly old woman. Imbued with exactly the same gesture, her photographs are brilliant and at the same time painful parodies of the imperative imposed by media images on every American girl, namely that she should perfect her clothes, her make-up, and her posture so as to imitate an apparently desirable but simultaneously unattainable model of immaculate feminine beauty. Crucially, Sherman chose

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never to represent herself as an idealized figure. Perfection, Roland Barthes poignantly argues, exalts in so far as it wipes out the distance between code and performance, between origin and result, between model and copy. Since this distance, however, is part of the human condition, Barthes concludes: [P]erfection, which annuls it, lies outside of anthropological limits, in supernature, where it joins the other, inferior, transgression: more and less can be generically placed in the same class, that of excess, what is beyond no longer differs from what is short of a limit; the essence of the code (perfection) has in the end the same status as what is outside the code (the monster). (Barthes 1974, p. 71)

This is precisely the dialectic that Sherman performs in her photographs. The perfectly beautiful body and the monstrous body are shown to be mutually dependent on each other. There is yet a further distinction that Cindy Sherman’s self-portraits that are not self-portraits undermine, namely the difference between “performance” in aesthetic practice and “performance” in linguistic speech-act theory. The latter refers to a verbal utterance that simultaneously performs the action it also describes. Sherman presents us with a dual gesture. She stages herself in scenarios by virtue of distorting her appearance, putting on costumes, performing a masquerade. But in so doing, she additionally points to the fact that as a woman who grew up in a specific cultural context, she has also been performatively constructed by the discourse specific to her environment. By presenting herself other than what she is, by refashioning the media images and narratives that have influenced her self-­ image, Sherman insists that the act of self-representation, as a means of expression, simultaneously always also performs the act it designates. Her explanation “I don’t do self-portraits” can thus also be understood as referring to the notion that the portraits she makes of herself function as an aesthetic “performance” of the following utterance. The subject of the portrait has been created performatively; in fact, it can only be articulated as a performance. The represented subject can, therefore, be understood as a knot, binding together the various languages that have shaped it and through which it is able to express, in a displaced and dislocated manner, its traumas, its memories, its desires, and its fantasies. In addition, this represented subject performatively embodies the laws and imperatives imposed upon it by the family and by society, as well as any culturally

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acquired image repertoire. In the course of every self-representation, the depicted subject is always also a cipher for collective wish fulfillments and anxieties; in Sherman’s case, it is above all so manifestly a cipher for the way in which perfection and monstrosity are enmeshed. If we recall that the Latin etymology of the word “monster” links this concept with that of the omen and the miracle, given that miraculous phenomena were seen as warnings of an inevitable and threatening future event, we can begin to grasp how Sherman’s disturbances of the self-portrait incorporate the notion of mutability as one of their central themes. These self-­ representations are proleptic; they point toward something that has not yet become visible, even as they articulate the fact that although it may be invisible, the event of the subject’s demise is, nevertheless, also inescapable. Adept in postmodern theories, Cindy Sherman thus quite consciously uses her photographs to transform herself into a representation, thereby rendering problematic the relationship between the image, the depicted body, and any citation, serving as cultural model for the representation. She stages her memories of media images and personal fantasy images, and at the same time seeks to trigger memories and fantasies in her viewers by performing her very specific understanding of this culturally given image repertoire. In so doing, she draws on a rich archive of images from childhood reading, television, film, and high-gloss magazines, as well as from the entire catalogue of high art. Significantly, she says of herself that she belongs to the first generation of American artists who have grown up with television. If postmodernist theory works on the assumption that the socialized body is always already inscribed by the image repertoire within which it finds itself emplaced, then Cindy Sherman, we could say, in turn inscribes these culturally transmitted images with the “performances” recorded in her photographs. In the process, she unsettles the relationship between authentic body and its pictorial representation, between original image and body masquerade. In her non-self-portraits, composite images emerge, assembled from body parts and prostheses; bodies that dissolve gender boundaries, that trouble the distinction between human and animal, between living body and corpse or prosthesis. At the same time, Sherman also produces hybrid bodies, given the enmeshment of model image and body performance, between memory and self-fashioning, between latent psychic material and manifest expression. “I see myself as a composite of all the things I’ve done,” she explains (Kellein 1991, p. 9). Sherman’s self-representations can thus be seen, on the one hand, as the serial fashioning of a plethora of potential identities. On the other

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hand, they raise the question whether this highly intricate role-playing stages the represented subject as a false self, a mimicry; whether the illusion of authenticity is preserved even though such a gesture is intended to deceive; or whether beneath the surface, beneath the media composite, an autonomous self nevertheless does exist. Are we irrevocably caught up in the free play of simulacra, or can an authentic articulation of the self emerge in the midst of postmodern simulations? Can we as spectators discern an intact subject behind the performance and in addition, can we recognize in these non-self-portraits a woman who is radically other than ourselves? Or are we, as Sherman at least suggests, primarily expecting to find our own self-image mirrored in the representation of this other? “People are going to look under the make-up and wigs for that common denominator, the recognizable. I’m trying to make other people recognize something of themselves rather than me” (Schulz-Hoffmann 1991, p.  30). Sherman thus not only addresses the hermeneutic problem that spectators will first and foremost find themselves as well as their memories and fantasies reflected in the image. Rather, she also points to the fact that in order to become meaningful, each image requires an interpretive story, regardless whether in the process the series of stills is supplemented by a narrative or whether it is reshaped into our own fantasy scene. By calling upon us to exercise our own memory and imagination, but doing so precisely by staging stereotypic figures—from the image repertoire of femininity, of fairy tales, or of horror films—Sherman succinctly raises the question whether the fantasies thus aroused are really authentic or perhaps nothing more than clichés. Concomitantly, she forces us to consider whether we, the spectators of the images, might not be like the represented hybrid bodies, namely the composites of a play of simulacra, as she equally asks us to consider whether in the process of spectatorship, we are able to reach that realm of the imagination that is specifically unique to each of us. In addition, by turning herself into the image and at the same time constructing this image herself, Sherman not only knots together what are otherwise separate entities—the cited media image, the model, the representation, and the effect of viewing. She also stages herself as a hybrid being, oscillating between empowered subject and disempowered object of the gaze. She critically refashions the relationship of the artist to the traditional image repertoire of femininity out of which, but also against which, she designs herself. She does this by installing and as it were parodying the traditional analogy between femininity and the image, even as she performs the extent to which the femininity being represented

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is in fact a viewing effect, given that each still implicitly elicits an interpretive narrative to accompany it. Craig Owens argues: Sherman’s photographs themselves function as mirror-masks that reflect back at the viewer his own desire (and the spectator posited by this work is invariably male)—specifically, the masculine desire to fix the woman in a stable and stabilizing identity … but while Sherman may pose as a pin up, she still cannot be pinned down. (Owens 1992, p. 183)

No matter, therefore, how much we are tempted to see Sherman’s photographs as a way of processing the media image repertoire that she quite explicitly sees as her artistic material, it must not be forgotten that the reason these photographs are not self-portraits in the conventional sense may be because they articulate that other, unconscious self that can only emerge in the process of staging the imagination, that is, by virtue of a displaced representation. For although in the interview with Kallfelz, Sherman insists that she does not do self-portraits, she is quick to concede that her photographs do have a real psychic point of reference, “and that’s the other aspect. It could be that I really do let out some crazy person inside me in this way.” Ultimately, Cindy Sherman’s hybrid and composite technique aims at making manifest the way in which vulnerability and masquerade, perfection and monstrosity are enmeshed. The performance of her masked, disfigured, or displaced body is meant to serve as an apotropaic gesture against and as a reference to the body’s vulnerability, to the fallibility of identity, and to anxieties about destruction and death, regardless of whether these fears have their origin in an actual experience of threatening events or merely in childhood nightmares. While Sherman seeks to evoke memory and fantasy images in her spectators in order, on the one hand, to demythologize traditional stereotypes—especially regarding femininity— and to deconstruct the primacy of the idealized body, she aims, on the other hand, to induce those images of horror that are usually repressed anxieties about fragmentation, dissolution, or the substitution of the human body with artificial body parts and prostheses. Staging a masquerade of the self serves a critical, even if displaced project. If the postmodern subject is conventionally conceived as a “network of quotations, a complete blurring of image and identity,” Sherman, on the one hand, shows what the logical conclusion of the idealized image of the intact body as well as the reference-free simulacrum is, that is, the female body petrified

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into a mask, a prosthesis, and a doll (Bryson 1991, p. 98). On the other hand, she points to the realm that is foreclosed by both of these representational gestures, but nevertheless remains a part of the visualization—the formless body mass, the abject, decay, and the process of decomposition. Cindy Sherman’s multifaceted performance of the female body thus serves to deconstruct various codes, namely traditional images of femininity, aesthetic idealization, and the concept of an intact body of plenitude. Against these codes, she sets the multiplicity of female identity, a collapsing of the distinction between designing an image and becoming an image, as well as images of the transience of the body. Her photographic performance exposes what lies beneath the cosmetic surface (Disaster Pictures 1980 and Fairy Tales 1980) or reduces everything to a simulacrum (Film Stills 1977–80, Centerfolds 1981, and Fashion 1983), to anatomical body parts and prostheses (Specimens 1991 and Sex Pictures 1992). What is staged is the following question: “Where is the subject located, given its performative constitution through trauma, sexuality, and media images?” This performance, in turn, points to what has been foreclosed, to the traumatic material that inhabits each of us, just as it also points to the fact that our subjectivity is the result of the discursive field which has inscribed us. In lieu of self-portraits, Sherman offers the knotting together of a given cultural image repertoire, with memory traces, creations of fantasy, and figures of the traumatic. In contrast to her earlier work, Cindy Sherman no longer appears as the model in her photographic transformation of the Grimm fairy tale “Fitcher’s Bird” (Brothers Grimm [1819] 1999). Her body is replaced by dolls and artificial body parts. Nevertheless, this series is perhaps the artist’s most manifest self-portrait to date. Here, too, she draws on a familiar archive of culture, the image repertoire of fairy tales, and chooses from it the story of a clever and sly girl who, after initial passivity, begins to revolt against the imperative of female obedience. She uses her curiosity as a form of self-protection so as to act in ways that transcend gender roles. After all, she not only ignores the magician’s prohibition to enter the room with the smallest lock and disobeys his command always to carry the magic egg with her. In this story of violence, dismemberment, and resuscitation, she also carries out the act of creating artificially—an activity normally relegated to the masculine realm. Without a trace of sentimentality, the sly girl, having shed a few tears, puts back together the body parts of her dead sisters that she finds in the forbidden room. At the same time, she claims the magician’s deadly power for herself. He exercised power over

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other people’s lives by hewing intact bodies—above all those of beautiful women—into pieces and then demonstratively putting them in a cauldron that, deliberately placed in the center of the forbidden chamber, resembles an exhibition display. In her photographic transformation of the fairy tale, Cindy Sherman stages this cauldron as the focus of a horrific display, illuminating it with a golden ray of light and placing it in front of a curtain with a skull, an iron chain, and barely recognizable instruments of murder. What is then seminal to the required happy ending of the story is the fact that the girl ultimately destroys the wicked magician, this artist of dismemberment, but that apparently she can only do so by creating new body objects herself, and doing so precisely on the border between life and death. Firstly, the dead body parts of the demonic artist’s victims, with which Cindy Sherman recalls her own use of dolls, artificial body parts, and prostheses as substitutes for her own body in her previous work, are put together again by the sly girl so as to form new bodies. The sisters are thereby resuscitated. In the photos, however, it is still only fragments of hands, hair, nose, and mouths that are visible, as if, in contrast to the fairy tale’s plot, Sherman uses her photographic language to insist on an analogy between the fragmentation of female bodies by the wicked magician and the fragmentation of the represented body as an object in any aesthetic image (#267). Secondly, the girl transforms herself into a fantasy figure, a feathered hybrid between animal and human being. In this image, too, Sherman only represents a section of the body from waist to knee, illuminated from behind. The two hands are held in front of the stomach, the left one hovering slightly above the navel while the right one almost rests on the hipbone. Some fingernails are visible through the feathers (#277). Thanks to this mimicry, the sly sister is able not only to leave the magician’s house with impunity but also to entice the evil bridegroom to his death. Significantly, she does this by creating one last time on the threshold between life and death. She decorates a skull with flowers and jewels, and placed on a small pedestal, she exhibits it from her window. This composite body also resembles an art display (#272). The decorated skull becomes a dual representation. It functions as a stand-in for the sly bride, but it is also an inverted rendition of the magician’s conceptual coupling of bride and corpse, given that it corresponds to the dismembered body parts of the other beautiful women he courted. In both acts of creation—the magician’s murderous performance of dismembering and displaying his brides and the girl’s self-protecting act of exchanging a substitute body, the decorated skull, for her own bodily

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presence—the concept bride is linked to dead body parts and to aesthetic display. If in Sherman’s photographs of these brides, the feminine body appears to be inanimate—the artificial body parts of the two dismembered sisters decoratively arranged in a pattern, the feathered body of the third, in which a human form is barely recognizable, the substitute bride, the decorated skull, by contrast, gives the impression of being animate. Both bride substitutes, however—the bird-woman and the skull bride—render the boundary between what is animate and what is inanimate fluid. Upon approaching his home, the wicked bridegroom asks the bird-woman where his bride is and she tells him that she is sitting at the window waiting for him to return. “The bridegroom looked up, saw the decorated skull, thought it was his bride, and nodded to her, greeting her kindly.” With this statement, the sly daughter, working with, but also against death, introduces a death performance of her own. Her correlate site to the magician’s forbidden chamber-of-death scenarios where she found herself confronted with the traumatic spectacle of her dismembered sisters is the magician’s entire house. Set on fire by her father and her kinsmen, it has become the site of death for the magician himself. By emphasizing the nipple of the dead artist, Sherman offers one last blurring of gender boundaries the magician, too, is a hybrid, bearded and female (#274). These fairy-tale photographs thus also serve to illustrate the revenge that art can take. Sherman presents us with images of violence meant as an apotropaic gesture against a fatal art project, but also as a statement about the cost of artistic creativity. Art needs dead bodies, and art creates dead bodies. In the images of the beautiful but dead female faces, the sisters’ chopped-off heads as well as in the decorated skull, the perfection of aesthetic idealization meets its opposite—monstrosity. The former represent the traumatic spectacle of what the sly girl found in the cauldron. As such, they stand for death as the prerequisite for the masculine artists’ creative act. They function as the representation of a destructive fragmentation externally imposed by an artist on his medium. The latter image, by contrast, offers an aestheticized rendition of what the sly sister sets up against this spectacle of horror—a representation of death that stands for herself and that constitutes her self-representation. With “Fitcher’s Bird” in mind, we can, then, isolate three aspects of the performative in Cindy Sherman’s artistic practice, each thematizing how the survival of the self is coterminous with the destruction of the intact body as well as its transformation into a new body. First, the image of the sisters’ dead body parts points to the concrete materials Sherman uses in

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her performed scenes—not only to the inanimate set pieces, dolls, and props, but also to the iconographic bits and pieces she borrows from a collective image repertoire. On two scores, the production of her photographs can, therefore, be seen as an act that consciously employs the process of assembling body parts and image fragments. Second, the image representing Fitcher’s bird is a radical reference to Sherman’s multifarious masquerades, to her playing with disguise, mimicry, as a screening of the self, as though she wanted to demonstrate how it is only with the help of such a strategy of displacement that she can offer herself to the view of the photographic lens. Finally, Sherman stages the image of the dead and deadly substitute bride as though it were a self-portrait. The face is reproduced frontally, looking, with almost impudent candor, directly at the spectator; her other self of the imagination represented by the image of a decorated skull. But the decorated skull allows a further association to emerge, namely the report of one of Sigmund Freud’s hysteric patients, Emmy von N., who told him of the horrible dreams she had had the night before. She had to lay out and decorate a number of dead people and put them in coffins, but would not put the lids on. The role that this hysteric ascribes to herself in the dream fantasy is that of a woman who refashions dead bodies, dresses, and adorns them, indeed we could say embellishes the dead, even as she also commemorates the presence of the dead amongst the living by virtue of the fact that she is compelled to leave the coffins open. If in what follows, I speak of Cindy Sherman’s self-representations, which are not self-portraits, as manifestations of a hysteric language of the body, I am interested in this analogy from the point of view of aesthetic strategy. Hysteria, one of the most resilient psychosomatic disturbances in the history of medicine, continues to be a compelling issue today because it so poignantly stages the problematic interface between identity, gender, and representation. One of the definitions of hysteria that is still currently used in medical discourse, according to Stavros Mentzos, describes this psychosomatic disturbance in the following manner: Those affected by hysteria move internally (in accordance with their experience) and externally (in accordance with public appearance) into a state in which they experience themselves as quasi-other, and in the eyes of those around them appear as other than they are. They place themself into a psychic state in which their own body functions and/or psychological functions and/or character traits are experienced and appear in such a way

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that an (apparently) other, a quasi-altered self-representation results. (Mentzos 1980, p. 75)

Symptoms of the hysterical tendency to experience oneself and to present oneself as other than one is are histrionic behavior, emotional instability, over-excitability, and seductive gestures, although Mentzos is careful to qualify his definition. Expressive behavior and heightened excitability can only be termed hysterical when the self-presentation involved “is not the spontaneous expression of a momentary experience, but rather where the inverse is true. Excitability and histrionic behaviour are chosen, and a particular scene is staged and played through as though such an experience and such a dramatic situation had in fact occurred” (Mentzos 1980, p. 92). The term “hysteria” is taken from the Greek word for the womb (hystera), because in antiquity medical discourse was of the opinion that when the uterus became dry, it wandered all over the body in search of moisture; one day it would settle in the throat, the next in the appendix, later it would make its appearance in the breast or in the leg. This somatic cause was then retrospectively invoked when a capricious, fickle, or extremely theatrical woman showed symptoms that could not be attributed to any organic disturbance. Such a diagnosis of hysteria of course corresponds to the traditional image of femininity Western culture has preserved over the centuries—it is a cultural commonplace to view the female body as an enigmatic, untamed, uncontrollable nervous system, as it is equally common to stereotype the feminine character as having a proclivity toward inauthenticity, imitation, deception, and mimicry, as well as toward an unrestrained and unpredictable fantasizing. Hysteria, however, was always also considered to be the language of feminine discontent with culture—the code of dissatisfaction and boredom, melancholy, world-weariness, effusive day-dreaming and narcissistic selfpreoccupation, as well as the self-destructive anger with which many talented young women reacted to the constraining gender role offered to them by the bourgeois family. Even before Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer published their pioneering Studies on Hysteria in Vienna in 1895 (Breuer and Freud [1895] 1955), physicians saw this psychosomatic condition as being a disorder that staged the problematic relationship between self-identity and self-­presentation. Not only is it impossible to identify any organic lesions as the cause of hysterical symptoms. Each historic period also seems to show its own specific form of hysteria. Thus already in the late seventeenth

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century, the British physician Thomas Sydenham suggested that hysteria should be seen as a disease of imitation, given that it merely imitates other diseases without itself taking on any fixed characteristics and without abiding by the rules of anatomy. The hysterical strategy of self-expression, Mentzos concludes, is like a chameleon, making use of the most widely differing shades of somatic disturbances and adapting itself to the style, the modes of expression, and the contents of various cultures and epochs. Since hysteria is a consequence of tensions, crises of meaning and beliefs as well as conflicts within the culture surrounding the woman or man affected by this psychosomatic disturbance, the symptoms marking the condition of hysteria in fact merely reflect the culture from which this disturbance emerges. Psychoanalysis, in turn, shifted the medical discourse radically by insisting that hysteria, above all, involves the suffering from memory traces of a psychic trauma whose origin is either unknown to the person affected or which he or she has suppressed. While the French psychiatrist Pierre Janet calls hysteria a malady of representation (maladie par representation), caused on the one hand by the cultural images that it imitates and on the other hand producing condensed and displaced repetitions of an original psychic disturbance, Freud also introduces the notion of memory traces and ideas that have become pathogenic owing to repression (Janet 1931). His claim is that for the hysteric certain memories retain their original quantity of affect and thus lead to the formation of symptoms precisely when there is no satisfactory abreaction of a psychic trauma. The hysteric, he repeatedly notes, is haunted by impressions that have not become free of affects and whose memory has, therefore, remained vivid. The hysteric suffers from incompletely abreacted psychic traumas, from reminiscences, and because she cannot free herself from the past, she neglects her immediate reality. However, Freud also believes to have discovered that the language of hysteria is nothing other than the articulation of unconscious imaginations that, in the course of conversion, return from their banishment into the conscious. What the hysteric symptomizes is the transformation of psychic energy into a somatic mode of expression. Freud understands the conversion undertaken by the hysteric as a symbolic transformation of psychic material into a somatic language, as the displaced staging of unconscious fantasy scenes at the material site of the body. What is common to all these definitions is the fact that hysteria performatively stages precisely the same problematic that characterizes Cindy Sherman’s displaced self-representations. The hysteric uses her

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body to repeat by representation an earlier trauma, and in the course of this mimetic self-representation, she oscillates between memory and figuration, between masculine and feminine self-definition, between resuscitating what is dead, inanimate, artificial, and killing off what is animate and material. With the help of her body performance, the theatrical display of intimate fantasy scenes, the simulation of various roles toward each of which she affects a belle indifférence, the hysteric decorates the past and draws new life from the dead. Hesitating between consciousness and trance, the hysteric uses her performances to render the concealed visible. She allows the other self of the imagination to speak. She stages the body in relation to a past trauma, to retained memory traces, whose vanishing point is death. As Georges Didi-Huberman (1982) has shown, while the hysteric articulates her discontent with the performance of gender her culture expects of her, she does so, however, by having recourse to precisely the same representations of femininity which this culture dictates to her. She imitates, represents, and parodies with her own body the feminine roles celebrated in Western art—the woman possessed by demons, the day-dreamer, the seductress. Because she experiences herself and appears to others as being other than what she is, her self-representation stages the incongruity between any so-called genuine feminine being and any visualization or staging of femininity. Viewed as precisely such a strategy, the language of hysteria can, I suggest, be useful to any discussion about the way the self is constructed by representations. Because, as something goes awry in the process of imitating given cultural codes of gender identity and perpetuating the simulacrum of inscribed media images, the self that emerges proves ultimately to result as a knot formed in the context of and the conflict between traumatic psychic material and its representations. In other words, it is precisely at this interface that both the hysterical and the postmodern subjects emerge. To read Cindy Sherman’s photographic work as a postmodern performance of hysteria involves, on the one hand, an interpretation of the content of her images, given that the themes of her portraits of women are often the somatization of a wandering desire, a bodily imitation of culture, and an expression of discontent with it, a malady caused by fantasy, representation, and reminiscences. Repeatedly, her portraits represent the vagabonding, the boredom, the day-dreaming of the feminine subject. On the other hand, the undecidable question posed by art criticism—“Are Sherman’s portraits of woman only meant as surface phenomenon, a free play of signifiers without any specific non-semiotic point of reference, or

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can a feminine essence, an authentic woman be discerned beneath the surface of the image?”—in fact mirrors the question posed by any hysterical self-representation. Because, owing to her somatic disorder that has no contingent organic disturbance, even as this disorder nevertheless reflects an authentic trauma, the hysteric oscillates between the critical exposure of her discontent with the identities that her culture either offers or prescribes to her, on the one hand, and the imitation of precisely this image repertoire, on the other hand. In hysteria, whose symptoms are so different in every epoch, what is performatively articulated, however, is not only the discontent with society’s prescription of specific gender roles. Rather, at stake is also the knowledge of all the trauma that serves as the ground and vanishing point of any representational gesture. After all, the hysteric suffers as much from memory traces whose origins she cannot determine as she does from her need to commemorate the dead, whose graves she is compelled to leave open. The series of photographs Cindy Sherman has been working on for almost twenty years now—all under the auspicious label “Untitled”—offer us various modalities of the language of hysteria. My speculative suggestion is that they do so by enmeshing, in the gesture of a negated self-­ representation, the performance of her body, and later of the artificial body parts that take its place, with performance as a discursive constitution of the self. After all, Sherman stages herself primarily not only as an image but also and perhaps above all as a knot of traumatic material which finds articulation owing to ideational representations in a substitute manner, namely in representations of the materiality of the body caught in the act of decomposition or having become completely mechanical, nothing but matter, abjected flesh, plastic, wood. Possessed by memory traces, suffering from representations, her other self of the imagination oscillates between the play of simulacra, the essence of the aesthetic code of perfection, and a traumatic mass, the monstrous. Apodictically put, Sherman repeatedly stages traumatic disturbances connected to the body as it is turned into a series of representations that themselves hysterically perform the disturbance in the image and of the image, notably a language of the body that veers ever more urgently toward the crisis of representation itself. I would like to speak of Sherman’s self-representations as a hysteric language of the body because she performs—albeit self-consciously in the way the early patients of Freud did not—the disjunction between feminine identities traditionally offered by Western culture and what feminine subjectivity “actually” is. As Laura Mulvey (1991) argues, “because Sherman

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uses cosmetics literally as a mask she makes visible the feminine as masquerade” (p. 142). In her first photographs, the Untitled Film Stills, Cindy Sherman presents reconstructions of film scenes of the 1950s and 1960s—film noir, melo, nouvelle vague—in which she quite consciously poses as the stereotypical heroine of post-war Hollywood films and indeed literally turns her body into a representation, into the prototypical signifier “woman.” If we, furthermore, take into account that she was born in 1954, then we realize that the media images she cites include those representations of femininity with which her mother tried to identify as she was conceiving and giving birth to her daughter. These photographs stand as the legacy of the maternal image repertoire. Reconstructing these imaginary film scenes allows her, on the one hand, to identify with her mother’s attempt to try out the feminine roles her post-war culture offered her. But on the other hand, the scenes also represent fantasy scenes about her own origins and as such revolve around three central questions coupling fantasies of origin and the origin of fantasy: Where do I come from? What is my gender? What do I desire? Significantly, Sherman performs these questions in relation to the way they find their source in the fantasmatic register of her own mother (Laplanche and Pontalis 1988). Because Cindy Sherman pays scrupulous attention to the details in her strategy of citation, the photographs appear entirely familiar to the spectator. In an uncanny manner, they thus evoke memories of films, but of films that never existed, because Sherman’s photographs are quite consciously designed as pure simulacra, as authentic copies without an original. The represented subject and the representing image are identical. The disjunction between empirical woman and woman as representation is here endowed with a very special variation, given that the actual model of these photographs could potentially be other cinematic photographs, but that these are all purely invented film stills. If the classic hysteric suffers from non-abreacted reminiscences, finds herself subject to belated memory traces whose origins are unknown to her, Sherman provokes both in herself and in her viewers the analogous effect of being confronted with freely floating and overdetermined memory traces. She represents one moment from a film, captures a whole film in a single image. With every image she suggests that something is about to happen, but leaves open which event it is that is about to occur. These women, self-preoccupied, pausing in mid-sentence, hesitating in mid-action, recall the hysteric whose unsatisfied desire produces a permanent state of feverish expectations and fragile anxieties. But we, too, are drawn into the spell of momentary hesitation,

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of uncertainty. Arrested at the interface between memory and expectation, we too begin to dream or to anticipate hysterically. Above all, however, in so doing, Cindy Sherman presents the other self of the imagination and of representation as a knot of given cultural representations precisely because the constructed subject is neither in reference to any earlier representation nor in reference to herself as model, but rather the function of the act of self-representation which, once we see the Film Stills as a series, stages her represented body as the nodal point of multiple identities. The subject appears to be wandering—to return once more to the resilient metaphor for hysteria, the uterus that has gotten unhooked and gives body to roaming feminine desire, to inconstant feminine fantasy. This heroine does not appear to be a firmly established character but the integrating knot of curious non-integrated details, “the sum of curious particularities” (Kellein, p. 10). That is to say, Sherman deconstructs the tradition of Western iconography, which equates Woman with the image. She discloses the performance of femininity as a fake in the gesture of the hysteric’s so-called dissimulation the hysteric woman who in her self-representations pretends to be another person, without ever fully identifying with this assumed other role. What Carla Schulz-Hoffmann writes about the heroine of the Film Stills—namely that we are presented with a woman pretending to be someone else, but never quite getting fully into the role, so as never fully to expose either herself or the other—is equally applicable to the strategy of hysteria (Schulz-Hoffmann, p. 31): not only owing to the analogy that can be drawn between the hysteric’s and Sherman’s heroines’ dissimulation and the reduction of self-expression to pure surface phenomena, but rather, because the hysterical subject can only be represented as one oscillating between various positions; hesitating between expression and imagination; appearing even as it vanishes and at the very end withholding a final residue from any self-expression, even as the trace of a residue constitutively influences the self-representation. By virtue of this hysterical gesture, Sherman self-consciously demonstrates to what extent the reality of femininity is produced by the representational medium, how the represented subject exists as a knotting of signifiers of femininity, as the integration of arbitrarily assembled details from our cultural image repertoire without any material non-semiotic referent. As Rosalind Krauss (1993, p. 32) argues, the portrayed feminine subject is imagined and embodied by virtue of the function of the signifiers, and as such her identity is purely a function of the mise-en-scène, of lighting, distance, and camera angle.

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Thus, when Sherman repeatedly insists that it is futile to seek her true identity behind the woman performed in and by the image, that there is no depth to these photographs, that beneath the surface of the photographic image no intact, authentic self can be found, she is in fact emphasizing that her identity emerges only obliquely, as the conglomerate performance of her many masquerades and displacements of the self. Here, too, we can locate an analogy with the hysterical mode of self-­ reproduction. For like the hysteric, Sherman articulates herself by adopting other bodies and figures, by resorting to the histrionics of different self-fashioning and a belle indifference toward any one of these. After all, her works all remain untitled. Indeed when she speaks about her mode of working, the scenario of artistic creation she offers resonates with the language of Freud’s hysterics. “The level of energy brought to the otherwise faked emotions, as well as the staging of my photographs, leaves me drained,” she explains. “The only way I can keep objective towards the characters I’m portraying is to physically distance myself from the activity … I don’t see that I’m ever completely myself except when I’m alone. I see my life as a training ground because I’m acting all the time; acting certain ways to certain people, to get things done, what I want, to have people act towards me the way I want them to” (Stockebrand 1985, p. 11). While Laura Mulvey argues that in the Film Stills, “each of the women is Sherman herself, simultaneously artist and model, transformed chameleon-­like into a glossary of pose, gesture, and facial expressions” (p.  137), Judith Williamson opposes such an essentialist interpretation. She suggests instead that—because Sherman offers a lexicon of represented feminine identities—each image calls upon the viewer to construct the inextricability of femininity and the image, the enmeshment of femininity as a phantasy projection onto any single image and the depiction of a woman concretely given figure to by any single image. Sherman’s work is neither exclusively a witty parody of media images of femininity, a deconstruction of the supremacy of the simulacrum, nor merely a series of self-portraits in a search for identity; “the two are completely mixed up, as are the imagery and experience of femininity for all of us … femininity is trapped in the image—but the viewer is snared too” (Williamson 1983, p. 106). Where the classic hysteric—rather more disempowered by than in control of her strategy—performs femininity as a symptom without any clear lesion, Sherman self-consciously and self-controlled elicits the false search for a real, coherent, homogeneous identity. She performs a maladie

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par representation, rather than becoming its victim, as is the case of the hysteric, even as she also has recourse to the undecidable interchange between surface and essence. As Williamson puts it, Sherman’s photographs are to be understood as a “surface which suggests nothing but itself, and yet insofar as it suggests there is something behind it, prevents us from considering it as a surface” (p.  102). By virtue of the fact that her photographs turn the viewer into an accomplice, in an act that constructs the represented woman as an image, the ideology inherent in this aesthetic act is disclosed. Clearly we should question any univocal allegorical reading of Sherman’s work, such as that offered by Arthur Danto, who reads the Film Stills as a representation of the essential Woman, eternally the same in the midst of all her guises: The Girl is an allegory for something deeper and darker, in the mythic unconscious of everyone, regardless of sex. For the Girl is the contemporary realization of the Fair Princess in the Far Tower, the red-clad child in the wolf-haunted woods, the witch-sought Innocent lost in trackless forest, Dorothy and Snow-White and The Littlest Revel in a universe of scary things. Each of the stills is about the Girl in Trouble, but in the aggregate they touch the myth we each carry out of childhood, of danger, love, and security that defines the human condition where the wild things are. (Danto 1990, p. 14)

By thus interpreting the represented woman as a cipher for universal characteristics of the masculine psyche, Danto has been taken in by Sherman’s hysterical performance because he thereby enacts precisely what she is trying to demythify. Above all, however, such an interpretation deflects the disturbance that emerges from Sherman’s deconstructive staging of stereotypes of femininity, by transforming this unsettling gesture into a stabilizing tropic reading. Such an allegorizing interpretation is blind to precisely the critical moment in Sherman’s work, namely the way in which she performs the disjunction between ideational notions of the self, self-­ representation, and identity. Instead, I would argue that works from the series Film Stills, Rear-Screen Projections, Centerfolds, and Fashion produce an effect of uncanny and irritating recognition that elicits a gesture of counter-direction. They seem to call for an interpretative oscillation between the desire to integrate the free-floating signifiers into a narrative that would once again mitigate the sense of disturbance evoked by the images precisely by having recourse to metaphors of danger, desire, or

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fantasizing. At the same time, however, they force upon the viewer recognition that the engendered composite is inhabited by an internal dissolution, by the traumatic psychic material as well as the real body as the ground and vanishing point of any representation and its interpretation. These photographs perform the fact that to be subject to representation means neither an image-produced falsification of the represented self (signifier without signified) nor an identity between image and self (transparency between signifier and signified) but rather the production of a knotted subject that in one and the same gesture is conscious of the fact that it is represented as it is aware of the dissolution inherent in any image representing it—a hysterical, postmodern subject which articulates itself precisely in the interface between monstrous, formless materiality beneath the surface of the image and an outward appearance of perfection, the coherence of any aesthetic object. This counter-directional gesture, this oscillation between integration and dissolution, sublimation and desublimation of aesthetic coherence, is no longer merely the privileged subject, but rather transforms into the privileged strategy itself in the later photographs, the Disasters, Fairy Tales, and Sex Pictures. While the protagonists in the Film Stills, Rear-Screen Projections, Centerfolds, and Fashions depict, in a variety of ways, the hysterical body performing a maladie par representation, this hysterical body nevertheless remained intact within the frame of the representation. The displacement and dissolution of the subject here took place, as Rosalind Krauss argues, primarily by virtue of the photographic medium—the lighting, the depth of field, the grain, and the cadrage. In the later works, by contrast, the subject fades almost completely from the field of vision, disfigured into monstrous body shapes or cut up into body fragments. It is reduced to a gaze without any reference point (#167 and #175) or appears only by virtue of the objects that metonymically refer to the absent subject (#168 and #170). In these representations, the hysterical body appears wounded, fractured, dissolving. It is often absent, replaced by or supplemented with prostheses. In Mulvey’s words, we are shown “a monstrous otherness behind the cosmetic façade” (p. 144). At the same time, these photographs make manifest what had been implicit in Sherman’s earlier demythification of cultural images of femininity—the conflation between the depiction of the disintegrating feminine body and a disintegration of the cohesive formal organization of the photographic image. These photographs self-reflexively stage phantasy scenes of bodily fragmentation as an aesthetic principle, and as such, they form

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the horrific inversion of the earlier scenes, in which, analogous to the hysterical self-performance, an illness by representation was staged. For what is now being performed is the malady aroused by a traumatic knowledge of one’s own mutability, transformation, and decay. The represented monstrosity inundates the aesthetic coherence of the image and turns idealized perfection inside out. Both the represented body and the strategy of representation seem to be caught up in a movement of desublimation, of dissolving, and of disseminating. In so doing, these photographs elicit a different kind of hysterization in the viewer, now no longer in relation to assimilated memory traces without origins, but rather in relation to the viewer’s own anxieties about fragmentation and dying. Thus, two modalities of a language of hysteria emerge in Cindy Sherman’s work. On the one hand, her photographs stage the hysteric’s proclivity to extravagant fantasy, day-dreaming, self-preoccupation, as the thematic subject of the Film Stills and Centerfolds. Here we, as viewers, are placed outside the scene, permitted to watch the self-contained, seductive, dreaming, psychically and physically vagabonding heroine, as she appears to be tormented by anxiety, engrossed in her desires, and consumed by her anticipations (#2, #6, #52, #48, #85, #93). We gaze at her from outside, as she is caught in the act of fantasizing something, the content of which, however, in the fashion of the true narcissist, she keeps to herself. What is staged here is the gesture of dreaming, while we are forced to use our interpretation to come up with the content of these fantasies. In the Disasters, Fairy Tales, and Sex Pictures, this relationship is reversed. Owing to the fact that the subject of the image with whom we have been identifying has begun to fade, we ourselves partake of the scene of fantasy and are no longer excluded from its content. We do not see the dreamer; rather, we have entered into the realm of her fantasy space. We are now presented with the intimate drama at which we were only able to guess in the earlier photographs. We are directly drawn into the intimate spectacle, the other self of the imagination. We could say that we are now asked to look into the evil magician’s cauldron, and much like the sly sister in “Fitcher’s Bird,” we are not spared the horrific sight it contains the dismemberment of the body, the monstrous dissolution of the self, and the fantastic composites that create hybrid creatures. Sherman repeatedly displays the hysteric’s oscillation between fixed identity positions. According to psychoanalytic theory, the hysteric defines herself in relation to a figure of paternal authority by constantly renegotiating her relationship to this other. In dialogue with the representative of paternal alterity, she constantly re-poses the question “what am I—in

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relation to my gender and in relation to the contingency of my existence?” Sherman’s work performs a similar strategy of self-interrogation as a means of self-fashioning, though here it is quite specifically the spectator, who serves as representative of the patriarchal code. For the photographs are constructed in such a way as to implicitly draw the viewer into the exchange; indeed, this implied viewer serves as the other to whom the staged interrogation of identity is addressed. In the Centerfolds and the Color Tests, we find the classic hysteric indecision “am I feminine or masculine?” (#103 and #112); in the Film Stills, the Rear-Screen Projections and Fashions, the question “do I exist or am I the mere repetition of an image?” (#56); in the Disasters and Fairy Tales, the questions “am I human or animal, human or fantasy creature?” (#140 and #146), “do I exist as an animate body or do I negate my existence through inanimation?” (#91 and #173), “am I human or model, doll, prosthesis?” (#264). Norman Bryson has poignantly described the transition within Cindy Sherman’s work as that from the conventional postmodern notion that “all is representation” to a reformulation that privileges “the body as horror”—from a notion that the simulacrum is the only reality we have to the breakdown of the simulacrum into a body of disaster (p. 217). It is in the counter-directional gesture so typical of the language of hysteria, namely the gesture of hesitating between two diametrically opposed registers— that of pure representation and that of horror—that I want to locate the common denominator of all Cindy Sherman’s work. In her early series, the heroine composed of citations from invented film stills, advertising, and pornographic images functions as a serial display of stereotypes of femininity perpetrated by the image repertoire of Western culture. Sherman here not only stages a vulnerable, precarious, hesitant, vagabonding, and seductive feminine protagonist. Rather, the performance itself aims at highlighting the exclusively semiotic quality of this photographic subject. In her later work, Sherman turns surface beauty inside out to reveal human mutability, the decomposed, vulnerable body, and the monstrosity that is inherent to any aesthetically coherent image, its ground and vanishing point, meant to remain occluded by the perfection of sublimation. Now, her performance aims precisely at making manifest what is excluded from and foreclosed by the representation, the alterity that crosses cultural constructions of femininity with the real. I want to call this aesthetic strategy the language of hysteria because it doubles the dissolution of the represented subject by offering a threat to the coherence of representation itself. However, what is privileged is neither the sublimation performed by representation (perfection as the

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essence of the code) nor a desublimating disturbance of the image (the monstrous situated outside the code). Rather, we have an oscillation between the two. Cindy Sherman traces two modalities of feminine self-­ representation within the discursive formulations of Western cultural practices, thereby transforming representation into performance. On the one hand, there is the simulacrum heroine who functions as a knot of traditional images of femininity; Woman as a fetish, as a seemingly integrated body symptom, uncannily screening the truth of human vulnerability and contingency. On the other hand, there is the feminine body as representative for denavelling and mutability, for those moments of bodily castration that are irrevocably inscribed into all human existence beyond gender. The disgusting fragments of the body and the abject body fluids stand in for that real which can never be entirely captured within the frame of aesthetic coherence. As the logical conclusion of her trajectory into the interiority of the body and into scenes of the body’s woundings, Sherman in Specimens and Sex Pictures takes leave of the human body completely, only to replace it with dolls and anatomical figures. In so doing, she once more seems to deconstruct certain tacit presuppositions about gender and the body that continue to be so dear to our culture. For are not dolls the artificial bodies given to girls so that, by playing with them, they might learn the power of feminine masquerade? And are not anatomical figures the plastic reconstructions, given to the medical students so that, by probing into them, they might explore the secrets of the human body that lie beneath the skin? Cindy Sherman’s photographs, all labeled “Untitled,” urge us to endow them with a title, to bind them into narratives. But like the case histories of the hysterics, so disconcerting and at the same time so heuristically stimulating to the analyst Freud, to whom they were addressed, precisely because he was incapable of finding any solution to them, this series, too, is interminable. Of the Film Stills, Sherman says, “What I was trying to do was to make people make up stories about the character so they could imagine a whole film, perhaps based around that character.” By forcing us, however, to invent narratives for her images, she hystericizes us. Like her, we are haunted by representations that remind us of familiar images, even as they always miss their mark. Like her, we are possessed by memory traces that have no clear origin. Her performance of femininity, of the monstrous, and ultimately of the mechanical body compels us to see this staging as a performance. In one and the same gesture, she urges us to focus both on the process of figuration and on the traumatic material that is screened out by any aesthetic figuration or, if it cannot be contained, that emerges from it in its excessive, monstrous shape. If the starting point

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of her self-displacements was her sense of dislocation and alienation in her home, its end point is the fact that her photographs have the same effect on us. We, too, begin to feel uncannily dislocated in our own image repertoire, in the fantasy scenes transmitted to us by the media, and the protective fantasies we use to give coherent meaning to our contingent existence. If in her self-portraits, which are not self-portraits, Sherman articulates her discontent with culture, her performance of this dissatisfaction consists precisely in making this discomfort disturbingly our own. In the television interview with Mark Stokes, Cindy Sherman describes how she at first dismissed the suggestion—made to her by a doctoral student—that her entire work was one long confrontation with death, but upon reflection recognized that her interest in horror films, in artificial body parts as well as in fairy tales could indeed be understood in this way since these representations allow her to prepare herself for the potential incursion of violence and death. “I don’t know why, I think of death perhaps every day, but maybe it’s living in Manhattan, and reading the paper, and thinking how it can happen at any moment … there are so many variables,” she explains. I think what’s fascinating is that you are never prepared for it. And I’m not exactly afraid to die, once you’re dead, what is there to be afraid of? It’s just the unknown, and I think that is what’s triggered in the films that I like, and somehow, I guess, I try to come to terms with it in my work, somehow.

All of Cindy Sherman’s work, we could say, revolves around staging this hesitation, this “somehow.” It performatively transforms her sense of being haunted by nightmares, memory traces, and inherited representations into renditions of a coherent photographic subject. Yet at every turn, she makes sure that one never loses sight of the underlying trauma. Acknowledgments  This chapter appeared in Bronfen, Elisabeth. 2018. Crossmappings: New Encounters. London and New York: Bloomsbury.

References Barthes, Roland. 1974. S/ Z, trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang. Breuer, Joseph and Sigmund Freud. 1955. “Studies on Hysteria” [1895], translated by James Strachey, in A Case of Hysteria: Three Essays on Sexuality and Other Works, Standard Edition, vol. 2, edited by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press.

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Bryson, Norman. 1991. “The Ideal and the Abject: Cindy Sherman’s Historical Portraits.” Parkett 29: 91–93. Danto, Arthur C. 1990. “Photography and Performance, Cindy Sherman’s Stills.” Cindy Sherman: Untitled Film Stills, 5–14. New York: Rizzoli. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 1982. Invention de l’hystérie: Charcot et l’Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière. Paris: Macula, 1982. Grimm, Brothers. 1999. Kinder- und Hausmärchen [1819], 19th edn. Munich: Winkler. Janet, Pierre. 1931. L’Etat Mental des Hystériques: Etudes Sur Divers Symptômes Hystériques, 3rd edn. Paris: Alcan. Kallfelz, Andreas. 1984. “Cindy Sherman: ‘Ich mache keine Selbstportraits’.” Wolkenkratzer 4: 44 – 49. Kellein, Thomas. 1991. “Wie schwierig sind Portraits? Wie schwierig sind die Menschen!” Cindy Sherman. Basle: Cantz. Krauss, Rosalind. 1993. Cindy Sherman: Arbeiten von 1975 bis 1993. Munich: Schirmer/Mosel. Laplanche, J. and J.-B. Pontalis. 1988. The Language of Psychoanalysis. London: Karnac Books. Owens, Craig. 1992. Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mentzos, Stavros. 1980. Hysterie: Zur Psychodynamik Unbewusster Inszenierungen. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Mulvey, Laura. 1991. “A Phantasmagoria of the Female Body: The Work of Cindy Sherman.” New Left Review 188: 137–150. Schulz-Hoffmann, Carla. 1991. “Cindy Sherman: Kommentare zur hehren Kunst und zum banalen Leben.” Cindy Sherman, edited by Thomas Kellein. Basle: Cantz. Stockebrand, Marianne. 1985. Cindy Sherman: Photographien. Münster: Westfälischer Kunstverein. Williamson, Judith. 1983. “Images of ‘Woman’: The Photographs of Cindy Sherman.” Screen 24, no. 6: 102–106.

Hysterical Representation in the Art of Mary Sibande Anne Scheffer, Amanda du Preez, and Ingrid E. Stevens

The South African artist Mary Sibande’s portrayal of Sophie, who escapes the drudgery of life as a domestic worker by means of fantasy, is intriguing. Sophie appears in a number of digital prints and installations by Sibande, ranging from her Long Live the Dead Queen (2009) to the series The Purple Shall Govern (2013, 2014). The fiber-glass body of Sophie has been molded on that of Sibande and she can be identified as the artist’s alter-­ ego (Bidouzo-Coudray 2014). Sophie is a “quasi-fictional character” (Corrigall 2015, p. 146) who was developed in reference to previous generations of women in Sibande’s family who had worked as domestic workers (Bidouzo-Coudray 2014). Sophie is portrayed as being deeply immersed in fantasy, and it is because she is engaged in fantasy that her

A. Scheffer (*) • I. E. Stevens Department of Fine and Studio Arts, Tshwane University of Technology, Pretoria, South Africa A. du Preez Visual Culture Studies, School of the Arts, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Braun (ed.), Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66360-5_9

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domestic uniform seems to be transforming into the costume of a Victorian lady (Corrigall 2015, p. 147). By hybridizing the clothing of a domestic worker with that of a Victorian lady, Sibande evokes the role of the mistress of the house, colonial authority, and the historical context from which domestic servitude emerges in South Africa (Corrigall 2015, pp. 151 and 152; Dodd 2010, pp. 470–471). In this chapter, we argue that Sibande engages with the traumatic impact of racial and patriarchal oppression on the individual and, more specifically, that in her exploration of these issues, the artist employs a strategy of hysterical representation. Although the condition has a long history, the most extensive and acute eruption of hysteria occurs during the second half of the nineteenth century.1 The hysterical inmates of the Salpêtrière hospital (in Paris), as well as the treatments of the leading resident physician, the neuropathologist Jean-Martin Charcot, feature prominently in historical accounts of the condition (De Marneffe 1991, pp.  72–78). In an attempt to develop a systematic method for the diagnosis of thereof, Charcot compiled a history of case studies of hysteria, entitled Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière (1875–1880; De Marneffe 1991, pp.  72–78). Charcot’s Iconography comprises an array of photographs and drawings representing the mostly female hysterics in the various theatrical, enigmatic, and often subtly erotic postures which are characteristic of the hysterical attack. Although Charcot does point out that the malady can occasionally also afflict male patients, hysteria would continue to be regarded as generally being a female reproductive disease or be otherwise ascribed to feminine over-sensitivity in general, throughout the nineteenth century (Showalter 1997, pp. 9 and 33; Foucault 1965, p. 149). Sigmund Freud’s treatment of hysteria, commencing at the turn of the twentieth century, serves as a major reference influencing the manner in which the condition is envisioned today. Hysteria presents a legion of diverse and mutable symptoms, ranging from convulsions to the paralysis or contraction of limbs, and Freud notes that the only constant is the fact that all symptoms manifest through the body (2015, pp. 39, 55, 61, 72, 87). Freud ascribes the variable nature of the hysterical symptomatology 1  The term hysteria originates in ancient Greece, where the disease was considered to be an exclusively female condition, as may be inferred from the etymology of the word: hysteria is derived from the Greek word hyster (uterus; Peters 2005, p. 124). Physicians ascribed the presence of the malady to the existence of a migrating womb, a sign of the female sufferer’s violation of sexual and reproductive prescriptions, including that of procreation (Yarom 2005).

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to the fact that symptoms do not refer to any organic cause, but have a psychical and phantasmatic basis (2015, p. 818). Symptoms are encrypted representations of repressed traumatic knowledge (Freud 1910, p.  198, 207, 1963, p. 258). The hysteric cannot properly verbalize her complaint, so that repressed psychical material may be articulated in a negotiated manner, by means of symptoms manifesting at the site of the body (Freud 2015, p. 584). The hysteric is remarkably sensitive and routinely translates “psychical excitation … into the somatic field …” (Freud 1966, p. 195); as Mark Micale observes, hysteria is the paradigmatic psychosomatic condition (1993, p. 449). Feminist scholars of the 1980s revisit Freud and reclaim hysteria as a form of feminist representation (Showalter 1997, p.  9).2 As Cecily Devereux explains: “Historically linked with femininity for hundreds of years, hysteria’s involuntary, uncontrollable, somatic symptoms were coming to be understood in the emerging critical feminist discourse not as a medical condition but a cultural one, an embodied index of forms of oppression” (2014, p. 20). Feminists conceive of hysteria as a peculiarly feminine form of representation, an alternative to proper verbalization, where the body is the main vehicle for articulating that which cannot be properly articulated otherwise (Devereux 2014, p. 21). Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane (1985, p. 5), as well as Rhona Justice-Malloy (1993, p. 133), interpret hysteria as comprising a reaction to patriarchy, where it has failed to fully acknowledge or sanction the desires of women. Dianne Hunter similarly indicates that hysteria is a compromised means of communication, a “form of feminist discourse in which the body signifies what social conditions make it impossible to state linguistically” (1983, pp. 484–486). According to Hunter, hysteria comprises a subtly oppositional means of expression which emerges in reaction to regulatory social 2  Feminists particularly engage with hysteria via Freud, where his encounters with the hysterical patient known by the pseudonym of Dora, are especially influential. In The Newly Born Woman (1975) Hélène Cixous, viewing hysteria as a form of silent resistance, describes Dora as a feminist martyr (Cixous and Clément 1987, p. 154). Dora is also the subject of Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane’s compilation of feminist writings entitled In Dora’s Case. Freud—Hysteria—Feminism (1985). Dora is the pseudonym of Ida Bauer, the patient who Freud (2015, pp. 572–617) refers to in Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905). Dora suffered from a range of hysterical symptoms, including aphonia (an inability to speak) and a nervous cough. She was traumatized when, while she is still an adolescent, a close friend of her father’s known as Herr K made sexual advances to her. Freud argued that Dora suffered from repressed sexual desire for Herr K, as well as repressed homosexual feelings for his wife, Frau K.

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conditions; Hunter correlates the prevalence of hysteria during the late nineteenth century with patriarchal repression and attributes its pervasiveness during that era to the severity of patriarchal attitudes (1983, pp. 485–486). Hysteria is considered to be a compromised form of expression insofar as symptoms conform to the acceptable boundaries delimiting feminine behavior. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg (1986) exemplifies this by referring to the behavior of nineteenth-century female hysterics who used illness as an escape, as a socially sanctioned, oblique method of rebellion, where symptoms such as fainting were reconcilable with the prescribed norms for femininity (such as frailty and passivity). In this chapter, our definition of hysteria is derived from the feminist interpretation thereof inasmuch as we do not interpret hysteria as a pathological condition. As is consistent with the feminist interpretation thereof, we understand hysteria as a mode of representation that allows the subject to articulate repressed traumatic knowledge and repressed desire from within the confines of an oppressive system. Our interpretation of hysteria diverges from the conventional feminist interpretation thereof, however, insofar as hysteria is not merely understood as comprising a reaction to patriarchy, but as potentially also comprising a negotiated reaction to other regulatory social conditions, as well. Our interpretation of hysteria is derived from Elisabeth Bronfen, where she describes hysteria as a particular mode of representation for the articulation of repressed trauma, where trauma is understood as relating not merely to patriarchal oppression, but as also encompassing other aspects (1998, p. 40). In the context of hysteria Bronfen employs the term “trauma” widely, and in a non-­ gendered manner, to refer to the subject’s perception of his or her own physical vulnerability and mortality, or his or her oppression on either a socio-political or personal level (1998, pp.  20, 34, 35). In this chapter, hysteria is characterized as a particular mode of representation which entails the articulation of repressed traumatic knowledge and repressed desire by means of fantasy and through the register of the body. In our interpretation of Sibande’s artworks through the lens of hysteria, the trauma referred to is that of patriarchal and racial marginalization. An interpretation of Sibande’s artworks in relation to hysteria is not wholly unprecedented. Penny Siopis has previously explored the themes of patriarchal and racial discrimination in relation to hysteria, and in the South African context, in her artwork, Dora and the Other Woman (1988). The artwork refers to Freud’s hysterical patient, Ida Bauer (1882–1945), known by the pseudonym of Dora, whose desires, according to Siopis

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(quoted in Coombes 1997, p. 121) were represented by Freud as a pathology. The artwork relates Dora’s history to that of Sara Baartman (1788–1816), the Khoisan woman whose body was scrutinized by both the European public and anatomists alike, according to Carole Boyce-­ Davies, in order to form judgments regarding the sexuality of black women (2008, p. 137). As is consistent with the contemporary feminist interpretation of the condition, Siopis locates hysteria as a response to patriarchal objectification (1999, p. 248). The painting, Dora and the Other Woman, implies that the two women share a similar experience to the extent that their sexuality has historically been represented in a demeaning manner.3 Siopis’s reference to hysteria in the South African context serves as precedent for our own analysis of Sibande’s artworks. While Siopis’s application of hysteria is emblematic of the late twentieth-century feminist stance as well as of resistance art, we examine hysteria in the contemporary and post-apartheid milieu.4

Sophie and Hysteria The “quasi-fictional character” (Corrigall 2015, p. 146), Sophie, has been pervasive in Sibande’s oeuvre, ranging from Long Live the Dead Queen (2009) to The Purple Shall Govern (2013, 2014). On the basis of the homogeneous quality of these series, these can be interpreted as forming part of a single thematic exploration and a single narrative. We aim to correlate Sibande’s portrayal of Sophie throughout these series with hysterical representation, below.

Fantasy The first characteristic of hysteria which we aim to identify as being prevalent in Sibande’s portrayal of Sophie is an indulgence in fantasy. Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis define fantasy as a “term used to denote the (…) the imaginary world and its contents” (1968, p.  1). 3  Siopis (in Willis 2010, p.  134) notes that, like Bauer, “Saartjie could be seen in some sense to represent, for all African women, a body bearing out desire”; for Siopis (in Coombes 1997, p. 120), Baartman symbolizes the manner in which black women’s sexuality has historically been interpreted in both a sexist and racist manner. 4  The term, resistance art, refers to art which was critical of the “racial, cultural and or political polices” of the apartheid state (Towards a people’s culture, Art and Resistance under apartheid 2016).

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According to Laplanche and Pontalis, fantasies can be understood as comprising “scripts (scénarios) of organised scenes which are capable of dramatization––usually in a visual form”; fantasy is “a sequence in which the subject has his own part to play” (1973, p. 317). According to Freud, the hysteric frequently escapes reality by immersing herself in fantasy; this may occur to the extent that reality and unreality interpenetrate and become indistinguishable in her mind (1963, p. 374, 2015, p. 1639). The hysteric enjoys weaving fantastical narratives and fantasy serves as a means by which she may express repressed desire, albeit in a compromised manner (Freud 2015, p. 817). The hysteric routinely makes visible her fantasies through performances. Freud refers to these performances as the hysterical attack, where he states that “these attacks are nothing else but phantasies translated into the motor sphere, projected on to motility and portrayed in pantomime” (2015, p. 837).5 During the hysterical attack or pantomime the hysteric physically performs her fantasies, so that fantasy is therefore superimposed onto reality as an “external stage” (Bronfen 1998, p. 155). Fantasy it is overtly present in Sibande’s artworks: Joyce Bidouzo-­ Coudray (2014), Thembinkosi Goniwe (2011, p.  247), Kerry Bystrom (2016), as well as Mary Corrigall (2015, p. 146) all state that Sophie is perpetually immersed in fantasies of empowerment.6 Goniwe, for example, asserts that Sophie “embodies a set of fantasies and imagined tales that on the one hand unsettles her state of being a maid or domestic worker while on the other presents the possibility of change, of becoming something other than a subordinate servant” (2011, p. 247). It is significant that these theorists interpret Sibande’s artworks in terms of fantasy, as we aim to develop the notion further and locate these fantasies specifically as being characteristic of hysterical representation. As is consistent with hysterical representation, Sophie’s fantasies are made visible as actual performances. Sibande portrays Sophie as being physically engaged in the performance of several phantasmatic roles, 5  As Laplanche and Pontalis (1973, p.  317) note, the different spellings, “fantasy” and “phantasy”, which are to be found in translations of Freud as well as in the secondary literature, hold no significance and can be attributed to the different translations of Freud’s German word “Phantasie”. 6  While her analysis cannot be explored within the limitations of this chapter, Corrigall provides a particularly intriguing examination of Sibande’s artworks in her article, “Sartorial Excess in Mary Sibande’s ‘Sophie’” (2015), by analyzing the artist’s phantasmatic outfit in relation to dandyism, where luxurious clothing “visualises a desire for social mobility” (p. 146).

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including those of “a lady, a housewife, a religious devotee, a queen, an artist, a horse rider, a soldier and a shopper” (Maurice and Dodd 2014, p. 1). The Wait Seems to Go on Forever (2009), for example, portrays Sophie where she is engaged in fantasy while waiting at a bus stop.7 The artwork evokes the cumbersome commute which is part of the normal daily routine of domestic workers (who normally reside in townships far from their place of employment). Rather than being mindful of her actual situation, Sophie is portrayed as being immersed in a fantasy of luxury, as signified by the chandelier suspended overhead.

Trauma Corrigall suggests that Sophie’s fantasies have a traumatic basis, where she states of Sophie: Her eyes are always shut, setting her imagination free to dream up ensembles that could liberate her from domestic toil. Without the constraints of reality she settles on the antithesis of who she is: a royal figure from the colonial era who embodies the power and opulence absent from her everyday existence. Her garments become the site upon which she reinvents herself and maps out her evolution from domestic worker to mistress, from oppressed to oppressor. (Corrigall 2015, pp. 146–147)8

If Sibande’s fantasies have a traumatic basis, this correlates with hysteria. The etiology of hysteria is of an exclusively psychological nature; it is precipitated by a traumatic experience or impression (Freud 2015, p. 187). Freud (2015, p. 174) particularly attributes the onset of hysteria to the sufferer’s experience of a shock of a sexual nature, such as a “premature sexual experience”, where it may also arise out of repressed desire (1910, p.  206). According to Freud, hysterical fantasies originate in traumatic memories and are intended to mediate their traumatic content (1955, p. 34). Bronfen describes fantasies as “psychical facades constructed to bar  Image available at: http://umma.umich.edu/archive/view/exhibitions/2013-Sibande.php.  As Corrigall notes, Sophie’s guise as domestic worker is apt and enables Sibande to explore the politics of race: “OVEREXPLOITED and positioned within the heart of white South Africa, domestic workers have been the ultimate victims of a skewed social and political system thus their occupation embodies the vexed racial dynamics in this country” (Corrigall 2009, capitalization in original). 7 8

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memories” (1998, p. 37). Since she suffers “from incompletely abreacted psychical trauma” (Freud 1955, p. 34), the hysteric’s fantasies do not only involve pleasurable reminiscing, but also have a traumatic undercurrent. Traces of traumatic memories pervade the hysteric’s fantasies, but she is nevertheless preoccupied with the past (Freud 1955, p.  34, p.  290). Fantasy may allow the hysteric access to repressed traumatic knowledge, from which she may derive a form of traumatic enjoyment (Bronfen 1998, p. 149). She compulsively attempts to access repressed traumatic knowledge, through fantasy (Breuer and Freud 1955, p.  290; Freud 1966, p. 223). Sophie’s fantasies have a traumatic quality, Corrigall (2015, pp. 146–147) implies. However, it is necessary to elaborate on the traumatic aspect thereof below, in order to clearly correlate Sophie’s fantasies with the traumatic nature of hysterical fantasy.9 As we demonstrate, Sibande’s artworks subtly refer to the traumatic impact of patriarchy, apartheid, and colonialism, where these systems are often signified particularly through Sophie’s attire. Especially in her manifestations prior to The Purple Shall Govern series (2013, 2014), Sophie is shown wearing a blue dress which hybridizes the contemporary uniform of a domestic worker with Victorian costume (Corrigall 2015, p. 147). As we have stated, the Victorian dress signifies both the role of the mistress of the house and calls to mind colonial authority (Corrigall 2015, pp.  151–152) so that Sophie’s hybridized clothing, therefore, serves to evoke the historical context from which domestic servitude emerges in South Africa (Brown 2011, p. 77). Sophie’s dress serves to evoke the racial hierarchies which originated during the colonial period and persisted into the apartheid era (Dodd 2010, pp. 470–471); these hierarchies are examined in a critical manner, Carol Brown adds: “She [(Sibande)] inverts the social power indexed by Victorian costume by reconfiguring it as a domestic worker’s ‘uniform’; problematizing the colonial relationship between ‘slave’ and ‘master’ in a postapartheid context” (Brown 2011, p. 77).

9  While it remains an integral part of her work in our reading, we do not wish to imply that Sibande’s artworks function solely in the register of trauma. As Bystrom (2016) indicates, Sibande’s artworks also move beyond this and cannot be categorized as being purely posttraumatic. Sarah Nuttall (2013:429) similarly states that Sibande succeeds in moving “away from the language of wounds” toward a form of resistance.

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Sibande also refers to racial concerns by employing color in a symbolic manner (Maurice and Dodd 2014, p.  5). The repetitive and restricted color palette which she employs suggests that the hues are symbolic in nature: Sophie is clothed in blue, with details in white, or she wears purple. Color symbolism is particularly evident in the title of the series The Purple Shall Govern, which is an overt reference to the trauma of apartheid, as it is based on an anti-apartheid slogan. As Emile Maurice and Rebecca Dodd explain, the series title refers to the “graffiti that appeared on walls around the city of Cape Town in 1989, after police sprayed protestors participating in an anti-apartheid march with purple dye. It is a play on a clause in the Freedom Charter that says ‘The people shall govern’” (2014, p. 5). Sibande (in Mabandu 2013) adds that purple, in the context of protest, is “a colour of privilege”, stating that she is “attempting to use this privilege afforded to me by those who have fought for it”. The artist also states that purple connotes royalty: “The clergy and the royalty of England wear, or wore, purple if they were meeting an important person. Purple dye was expensive so only the rich were able to wear it” (Sibande in Krouse 2013). Sibande (in Mabandu 2013) notes that she employs the color in an ambiguous manner, stating that purple may, on the one hand, suggest governance, but that those marked by this hue are also, on the other hand, “marked to be arrested”. White connotes servitude; it is almost exclusively reserved for Sophie’s apron and headdress, items of clothing which are associated with domestic labor (Corrigall 2015, p. 150). The blue color of her dress similarly signifies domestic labor, as this particular hue is typically used for the mass-produced uniforms worn by domestic workers or other South African laborers (Corrigall 2015, p.  150); on the other hand, the ultramarine hue also recalls the Virgin Mary, as the use of expensive pigment was mostly reserved for the painting of Madonna’s robes, during the Renaissance (Gage 1993, p.  130). Whereas the role of the domestic worker has often been denigrated, Sibande’s ambiguous use of the color blue complicates such traditional associations. Apart from addressing race, Sibande’s artworks also comprise a feminist examination of the regulatory and inhibiting impact of those expectations for femininity which have been created for women in a socio-culturally stratified and patriarchal society (Brown 2011, p. 77). Sibande investigates the manner in which “privileged ideals of beauty and femininity aspired to by black women discipline their body through rituals of imitation and reproduction” (Brown 2011, p. 77). The series engage with the “Western

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ideal of beauty” (Bidouzo-Coudray 2014); this is particularly overt in artworks such as Conversations with Madam CJ Walker (2008) and I Put a Spell on Me (2008).10 In the former artwork, which refers to the eponymous entrepreneur who marketed hair products to the African market during the Victorian era, Sophie is shown holding strands of synthetic hair.11 In the latter artwork, the staff that is part of the liturgical accoutrements of the Zion Christian Church is wrapped in fabric with a Louis Vuitton design; it is suggested that the staff has inspired awe in Sophie, so that the notion of religious worship is collapsed into a consumerist myth of beauty. Apart from involving fantasy and possessing a traumatic basis, another feature of hysterical representation which we identify in Sibande’s artworks is an engagement specifically with primal fantasy. This traumatic form of fantasy is highly prevalent in hysteria (Freud 2015, pp. 575, 670, 671, 1205, 1477). According to Freud, primal fantasy, which includes the primal scene, castration, and intrauterine fantasies, is a specific form of fantasy which is universal (2015, pp. 364, 1278).12 The intrauterine fantasy is a form of primal fantasy that manifests as a memory of “existence in the womb” or may entail a fantasy relating to “the act of birth” (Freud 2015, p. 364). A second primal fantasy is the primal scene, which comprises a traumatic fantasy of the “observation of parental intercourse” (Freud 2015, pp.  1471, 1472, 1481), which the subject remembers as having witnessed and interrupted, as a very young child. The castration fantasy relates to a fear of castration and is often represented in dreams or 10  Conversations with Madam CJ Walker can be viewed at: http://www.artcritical. com/2010/06/29/dispatches-capetown/. The latter image is available at: http://www. anotherafrica.net/art-culture/mary-sibande-triumph-over-prejudice. 11  As is characteristic of Sibande’s artworks, Conversations with Madam CJ Walker is ambiguous and does not purely have negative connotations. As Bystrom (2016) notes, Madam CJ Walker was an iconic figure—a slave who later managed to become a millionaire—and Sibande’s reference to her therefore also serves to signify emancipation. Bystrom (2016) supports this interpretation by referring to the fact that Sibande’s own mother’s work in a hair salon similarly enabled her to escape a life of domestic servitude. 12  Freud (2015) argues that primal fantasy is derived from inherited memories, stating that primal fantasy does not only have its basis in the subject’s own experiences, but may also relate to “things that were innately present in him at his birth, elements with a phylogenetic origin––an archaic heritage”. Laplanche and Pontalis reject Freud’s account of primal fantasy and provide a contemporary analysis thereof, by stating: “Like collective myths, they claim to provide a representation of and a “solution” to whatever constitutes a major enigma for the child” (1973, p. 331).

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myths through images of “baldness, hair-cutting, falling out of teeth and decapitation” (Freud 2015, p. 347). Freud suggests that castration fantasies are mostly suffered by boys, but that these may also to some extent affect girls (2015, p. 642). The subject who engages in primal fantasy may feel as though he or she is occupying several contradictory positions at the same time; this mobile subject may for example feel as though he or she is simultaneously both the viewer of the scene and the one viewed (Laplanche and Pontalis 1968, p. 13). A primal fantasy “is characterized by the absence of subjectivization, and the subject is present in the scene”, Laplanche and Pontalis (1968, p. 13, italics in original) state. Such a fluid subject position is often created in Sibande’s artworks, through the use of doubling. First, Sophie serves as a phantasmatic self for the artist (Corrigall 2009) and can be identified as the artist’s alter-ego (Bidouzo-Coudray 2014). Second, Sophie is herself also conspicuously doubled in several artworks by Sibande, notably in A Reversed Retrogress, Scene 1 (2013; see Fig.  1), where one version of Sophie is shown

Fig. 1  Mary Sibande, A Reversed Retrogress, Scene 1, The Purple Shall Govern series (2013). Mixed media installation, 1800 × 1200 × 1200 cm. (Photograph by A Pokroy. Image courtesy of the artist and Gallery MoMo)

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interacting with her double. Sibande (in Mabandu 2013) states that in this artwork, “the ideas of violence are insinuated and yet the violated and the violator are connected. The figures’ gestures are ambiguous in being neither violent nor defensive”; because of this ambiguity, the perpetrator and the victim are indistinguishable, and Sibande can identify with either or both of these Sophies. Both Sophies can serve as place-holder or avatar for Sibande, so that her subject position is fluid. The diversity of subject positions created in A Reversed Retrogress, Scene 1 is consistent with the experience of the subject immersed in primal fantasy, who often feels as though he or she is both viewer and participant, as well as both protagonist and victim in the scene (Laplanche and Pontalis 1968, p. 13). An interpretation of A Reversed Retrogress, Scene 1 as exemplifying primal fantasy is justified by the artwork A Reversed Retrogress, Scene 2 (2013), which, as the title suggests, represents the event which follows and can be interpreted as portraying an intrauterine primal fantasy. This installation can be identified as a representation of the intrauterine primal fantasy insofar as it, first, represents a fantasy of parturition and, second, portrays a mobile subject position. A massive umbilical cord dominates the scene and seems to have both originated from Sophie’s own womb, and, disturbingly, from the wall behind her; Sophie seems to be both giving birth and being born. As is the case with A Reversed Retrogress, Scene 1, a fluid subject position is therefore created in this second scene, as well. The convoluted nature of the umbilical cord suggests that the figure may even have given birth to herself. Metaphorically, the concept of self-birth suggests that Sophie has produced her own identity. If understood in the context of hysteria, it must be noted that such an exploration of identity is typical of hysterical fantasy, which often expresses the hysteric’s desire know to who she is and from where her identity originated (Lacan 1977, p. 168). Although the artwork is highly ambiguous and it is impossible to tell whether the figure’s hands have been cast into the air in a gesture of ecstasy or despair, the artwork also evokes physical mutilation: Sibande (in Mabandu 2013) states that the figure’s body has been turned inside-out. Our interpretation of the artwork as representing primal fantasy is further supported by this traumatic aspect and the oppressive atmosphere of the artwork, which is typical of primal fantasy. Apart from portraying an intrauterine fantasy, Sibande also evokes another primal fantasy: that of castration. This is primarily signified by means of the elongated shapes which float in the air around Sophie in The Purple Shall Govern series, called “[n]on-winged ceiling beings” (Maurice and

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Dodd 2014, pp. 5, 6). These shapes are highly ambiguous. In A Terrible Beauty (2013; see Fig. 2) and A Terrible Beauty Is Born (2013; see Fig. 3) they signify Sophie’s liberation, because they strip her “of the white apron and bonnet that symbolise her domestic servitude” and “appear to be looking up in admiration, vying for her attention and rejoicing at her emancipation” (Maurice and Dodd 2014, pp. 3, 6). To this extent, because of their symbolic association with emancipation, the creatures seem to represent

Fig. 2  Mary Sibande, A Terrible Beauty, The Purple Shall Govern series (2013). Digital archival print, 111  ×  113  cm. (Image courtesy of the artist and Gallery MoMo)

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Fig. 3  Mary Sibande, A Terrible Beauty Is Born, The Purple Shall Govern series (2013). Digital archival print, 110 × 320 cm. (Photograph by J Potgieter. Image courtesy of the artist Mary Sibande and Gallery MoMo)

Sophie’s desire. Their shapes simultaneously also seem to refer to fetuses or intestines and seem phallic. What is more, these elongated shapes seem to have tumbled from Sophie’s loins and appear to have been severed from her body. According to Bronfen (1998, p. 163), in hysteria, the castration fantasy underlies scenes where the subject imagines him- or herself as being physically mutilated. Bronfen (1998, p. 163) states that the hysterical castration fantasy may center on mortality or on the origin of sexual difference and is often posed in order to answer the question: “Am I masculine or feminine, and how does gender relate to my body’s vulnerability?” Sibande’s portrayal of Sophie can be aligned with the castration fantasy in this respect: It comprises an exploration of gender relations, and in The Purple Shall Govern series, elements alluding to birth (representing the female body) are prevalent, where these are overtly juxtaposed with phallic (male) imagery.13

13  Helene Strauss provides an interesting analysis of the work of Zanele Muholi, the South African artist who, like Sibande, explores the themes of race and gender by using her own body (2014, p. 474). Strauss refers to Muholi’s installation What Don’t You See When You Look at Me (2008) wherein a tire and a sausage feature as prominent motifs (pp. 474–476). The artist employs these motifs ambiguously: the tire evokes both the safety of the womb and “South Africa’s history of resistance”, and the phallic sausage refers to both the patriarchal violence, which is rife in South Africa, and intestines. In Muholi’s art, ambiguity is seminal and masculine and feminine signifiers are interwoven, in order to complicate conventional gender ideas (Strauss 2014, pp. 486–487). Her work, therefore, bears various similarities to that of Sibande and a comparison of Muholi’s work with that of Sibande in this regard may prove to be productive.

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Corporeal Representation Thus far, Sibande’s portrayal of Sophie has been aligned with hysterical representation in terms of the prevalence of fantasy therein, its association with trauma, and in terms of its engagement specifically with primal fantasy. Sibande’s artworks can be further associated with hysterical representation on the basis that these evoke traumatic content in an indirect manner, through the body. It is a defining characteristic of hysteria that repressed psychical content is articulated through the register of the body; as Amanda du Preez (2009, p. 237, p. 241) asserts, hysteria “materializes in and through the body’s anatomy”. Hysterical symptoms which are of psychogenic origin (articulating repressed traumatic knowledge or repressed desire) and manifest in a cryptic manner, through the body, are called conversion symptoms (Micale 1993, p. 449; Freud 1966, p. 195). An array of conversion symptoms exists and symptoms are eminently protean, often varying greatly from one patient to another. Freud provides several examples thereof, including “vomiting as a substitute for moral and physical disgust”; and the “conversion of psychical excitation into physical pain” (2015, p. 55, p. 61). The conversion symptom is produced through fantasy, as Lacan explains (1981, pp. 164–165). Insofar as fantasy is pervasive in hysteria, the hysteric produces a fantastical map of her own body; this phantasmatic map carries a great deal of weight, so that it radically skews the hysteric’s perception of her own body and may wholly overwrite the functional body (Lacan 1981, p. 165). The hysteric develops compelling fantasies regarding the shape and functioning of her own body, and it is such fantasies which manifest as the conversion symptom (Grosz 1994, p. 40; Verhaeghe 1999, p. 42). The “popular visual representation of the body and its parts” (Verhaeghe 1999, p. 42) influences the hysteric’s fantastical perception of her own body in an excessive manner, so that the symptom develops according to popular ideas regarding the functioning of the body. A typical hysterical fantasy of the body as being fragmented underlies the hysterical symptom of partial paralysis, for example, where the hysteric imagines that a part of a limb is paralyzed. Elizabeth Grosz explains how the hysteric’s phantasmatic anatomy may produce this latter symptom: Hysterical paralyses show a “logic” that relates more to the body’s visible form than its biological makeup. An arm that is hysterically paralysed will, in all likelihood, be paralysed from a joint––shoulder, elbow, or wrist––rather

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than from muscular groupings as would occur in the case of physical injury. (Grosz 1990, p. 45)

The conversion symptom is highly enigmatic, insofar as it represents repressed psychical material in a cryptic manner. Apart from the fact that such a symptom encrypts perturbing psychical material somatically, it also articulates repressed thoughts in an inherently distorted manner (Freud 1910, pp.  184, 202, 2015, pp.  202–209, p.  837). Lacan describes the process by which disturbing thoughts and memories are converted into something unrecognizable during symptom-formation as being largely metaphorical, where the hysterical conversion symptom is conceived of as an embodied metaphor: Between the enigmatic signifier of the sexual trauma and the term that is substituted for it in an actual signifying chain there passes the spark that fixes in a symptom the signification inaccessible to the conscious subject in which that symptom may be resolved––a symptom being a metaphor in which flesh or function is taken as a signifying element. (Lacan 1977, p. 166)

Elaine Showalter illustrates the metaphorical aspect of the conversion symptom, by stating: Nineteenth-century hysterical women suffered from the lack of a public voice to articulate their economic and sexual oppression, and their symptoms––mutism, paralysis, self-starvation, spasmodic seizures––seemed like bodily metaphors for the silence, immobility, denial of appetite, and hyperfemininity imposed on them by their societies. (Showalter 1997, pp. 54–55)

In Sibande’s artworks, metaphor is often employed in order to subtly evoke trauma. The elongated shapes which frequently emerge from Sophie’s dress are notable in this regard. These seem phallic, and sometimes the coils unfurling from her body recall intestines; as these shapes have been severed from her body, these evoke bodily trauma in the form of castration or evisceration, respectively. The evisceration and castration of Sophie do not seem to represent real events and can be interpreted as being metaphors of trauma. In the context of Sibande’s examination of the traumatic impact of patriarchy, colonialism, and apartheid, it can be assumed that these two tropes (evisceration and castration) refer to the traumatic impact of these systems on the individual. Brown highlights that

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the physical representation of trauma is pervasive in Sibande’s series, stating that the artist uses Sophie’s body “as a site where history is contested” (2011, p. 77). Insofar as the metaphors which Sibande employs in order to represent traumatic impact are represented at the site of Sophie’s body, these are analogous to the hysterical conversion symptom. The conversion symptom is produced precisely by such a transformation of traumatic psychical impressions into physical form (Breuer and Freud 2015, p.  37), where Lacan defines the symptom as a corporeal metaphor where flesh “is taken as a signifying element” (Lacan 1977, p. 166).

Mimicry Apart from an indulgence in fantasy, primal fantasy and the corporeal and cryptic representation of repressed traumatic knowledge, a further characteristic of hysterical representation which we identify in Sibande’s artworks is the subject’s mimetic engagement with the very system which has traumatized her. The hysteric is highly impressionable and symptoms such as pantomime are often mimetic in nature, so that her performances frequently conform to those images and roles which are prescribed for her by others. This is exemplified by the nineteenth-century hysterical inmates of the Salpêtrière, who would comply extravagantly and on demand with their physicians’ commands for the demonstration of symptoms. Resident physicians would regularly provoke hysterical attacks and demonstrations from patients by employing hypnosis, to be performed for the benefit not only of interested members of the medical community, but also for members of the public (Showalter 1985, pp.  35, 149). These performances were generally spectacular in nature and drew crowds of spectators. However, the hysterics’ compliance was excessive and, as Elaine Showalter points out, the postures which the women adopted were uncannily similar to those represented in the images hanging from the walls of the hospital’s demonstration hall, which depicted hysterical attacks (1985, p. 149).14 As Showalter further explains, hysterics’ symptoms are often developed to conform to an existing iconography of hysteria. The fantasies which the 14  One such artwork is a lithograph of Pierre Aristide André Brouillet’s painting, A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière (1887), where Charcot is portrayed holding a woman who has succumbed to a hysterical attack. Two other artworks also lined the walls: Dr. Philippe Pinel at the Salpêtrière (1795), by Tony Robert-Fleury, which depicted the physician amongst the women housed in the asylum; and Paul Richer’s Arc de cercle (1887), a graphic image depicting a particular phase in a hysterical episode (Showalter 1985, p. 149).

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hysteric performs frequently seem to mimic the fantasies of those around her; the hysteric seems to fulfill those expectations and mime those representations which have been provided for her. Moreover, because the hysteric’s fantasies develop in response to her milieu, her symptoms vary and are assimilated to the existing socio-historical context (Veith 1965, p. 209). The hysteric’s mimetic performances are further characterized by theatricality, where the hysteric has an unparalleled ability to perform various roles and assume various identities in quick succession; Showalter refers to the trope of “the hysterical woman as actress” (1997, p. 102).15 Vicki Kirby refers to the hysteric’s “chameleon display’”, adding: “It is as if the hysteric is a mirror of her surroundings” (Kirby 1997, p. 57). The famous Salpêtrière hysteric known as Augustine, for example, simulated postures borrowed from a whole range of cultural narratives. Many of her fantasies seemed to be derived from the media, as Bronfen points out: “Her simulation is compiled like a patchwork of an array of narratives taken from romance plots––gestures mimicking the iconography of visual representations of possession with modes of theatrical acting popular at the time” (Bronfen 1998, p. 196). Mimicry can be identified in Sibande’s artworks, where she engages mimetically with patriarchal and apartheid representations of black femininity. While several of her artworks, including Conversations with Madam CJ Walker, engage with Western and patriarchal ideals for feminine beauty, Sibande does not examine these in a manner which is overtly critical. Rather, Sophie generally seems to comply with patriarchal ideals: first, Sophie is represented as a mannequin (Corrigall 2015, p.  147), which inherently presents an ideal physical form for women to aspire to (an ideal provided for women in the patriarchal paradigm); secondly, the anachronistic Victorian dress, with its corsetry, cumbersome undergarments and prodigious size (which Sibande further lengthens and exaggerates) radically restricts movement, and connotes the contemporaneous patriarchal expectation that women will be passive and modest, as Sibande suggests (in Balboa-Pöysti 2011); furthermore, Sophie is portrayed as being quietly engaged with some of the select few occupations which were deemed feminine in the patriarchal Victorian context, and in a manner which

15  While Freud asserts that the hysterical pantomime is not a conscious production but rather refers to it as being “involuntary” (2015, p. 817), Showalter’s analysis thereof suggests that a conscious element may also have been involved (1985, p. 149).

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suggests contentment.16 In They Don’t Make Them Like They Used To (2008), Sophie is shown knitting, and she is portrayed as being immersed in tapestry or embroidery in Wish You Were Here (2010); Conversations with Madam CJ Walker portrays Sophie as being serenely occupied with the grooming of hair. Sibande’s mimetic performances accord with the patriarchal representation of femininity, a feature which is eminently typical of hysteria. Insofar as hysteria has been deemed a woman’s disease and has been strongly associated with femininity, the hysteric’s mimetic fantasies often correspond to patriarchal cultural representations and expectations regarding femininity (Showalter 1997, pp. 9, 64; Foucault 1965, p. 149). Symptoms are frequently adjusted to correspond to culturally acceptable expressions of feminine distress, according to “the prevailing concept of the feminine ideal” (Veith 1965, p.  209). The mimetic nature of Sibande’s fantasies should, however, not be understood as signifying a wholesale compliance with patriarchal ideals. In the late twentieth century, the French feminist Luce Irigaray recuperates the mimetic quality of hysteria as a potentially empowering feminist strategy. Irigaray argues that the cultural realm has been dominated by patriarchy and that hysterical mimicry comprises the sole means of expression available to women, who have been excluded from participation in culture (Irigaray 1985, p. 142). The only recourse available to women who wish to represent themselves is to mimetically appropriate those representations which have been provided for them within the existing (patriarchal) system of representation. Those representations which have been constructed for women in the existing patriarchal paradigm are appropriated and repeated; this makes it possible for women to engage with and question these very roles. Irigaray clarifies: To play with mimesis is thus, for a woman, to try to recover the place of her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to simply be reduced to it. It means to resubmit herself […] to “ideas,” in particular ideas about herself, that are elaborated in/by masculine logic, but so as to make “visible,” by an effect of playful repetition, what was supposed to remain i­ nvisible: 16  Sibande’s work is layered with meaning. Nuttall provides an interesting interpretation of Sibande’s use of the mannequin, where she argues that the plastic skin of the mannequin is employed figuratively. Whereas the wounded black female body has routinely been used in feminist culture to serve as reminder of trauma of racial oppression, the polished plastic skin of Sophie-as-mannequin seems impervious, and, as such, suggests a resistance to suffering (Nuttall 2013, pp. 428–429).

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the cover-up of a possible operation of the feminine in language. It also means to ‘unveil’ the fact that, if women are such good mimics, it is because they are not simply reabsorbed into this function. (Irigaray 1985, p. 76)

Sophie does not only seem to be mimicking patriarchal representations of ideal femininity; Sibande’s portrayal of race is comparable, insofar as Sophie seems to mimic the type of role which was often prescribed for black women during the apartheid era: that of domestic worker. While Sibande explores several phantasmatic identities which are potentially empowering insofar as these promise release from “domestic toil” (Corrigall 2015, pp. 146–147), including the roles of “a lady […] a queen, an artist, a horse rider, a soldier […]” it is significant that Sophie also performs the role of domestic worker. Sophie herself must be understood as being a fantasy on the part of the artist and, as Corrigall notes, “in dressing as a domestic worker, Sibande herself is living out a ‘fantasy’ of sorts” (Corrigall 2009). If Sophie is to be understood as performing a fantasy on the part of the artist, this assumption of the guise of domestic servant does not immediately make sense, Corrigall points out: “Given its undesirability and the low status it signifies in our society, the domestic worker seems an unlikely figure to aspire to be” and explains Sibande’s apparently paradoxical assumption of the guise of domestic worker by stating that this fantasy is a vehicle which allows her to freely explore a complex and emotionally laden subject, namely, the “politics of Self and Other”. According to Corrigall (2009) (where she refers to the various appearances of Sophie as domestic worker): “Their theatrical quality confidently roots them in the realm of fantasy, thus obviating those predictable knee-jerk emotional responses which ultimately have a didactic goal and underscore the domestic workers’ role as victim”. Corrigall further adds in relation to Sibande’s “domestic fantasy”: the domestic worker is a mask, like any other she can slip on and off at will. The ease with which she is able to do this implies that no one is defined by their appearance. In assuming the guise of this highly politicised character, Sibande is able to explore, ridicule and subvert the structures that victimised the domestic worker. (Corrigall 2009)

Corrigall’s correlation of Sophie’s portrayal of a domestic worker with the donning of a mask is significant. When considering this guise, it should

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be remembered that it is a phantasmatic performance and Sibande does not engage with the role in an authentic manner. Rather, Sibande’s artworks are highly theatrical in nature and underscore pretence. Artifice is intimated by the highly theatrical quality of the series, as Brown notes in relation to Sibande’s digital prints: “The background of all her photographs is a neutral pale shade, denoting a photographic studio setting–– the ideal environment where identities can be remolded with the aid of lighting, costume, and make-up” (2011, p.  77). Maurice and Dodd explicitly compare Sophie to an actor in a play and state that she always assumes a “dramatic pose” (2014, p. 1). While she may consistently don the habit of a domestic worker, Sophie also does not merely assume one identity; the roles she plays are diverse, which further implies artifice. Sophie’s guise as domestic worker, Corrigall (2009) suggests, comprises a mimetic performance, which allows the artist to “explore, ridicule and subvert” this role. Sophie’s theatricality as well as her phantasmatic performance of the interpellating system’s fantasies for her––where she apparently complies with the desires of the traumatizing patriarchal and apartheid systems––is consistent with the mimetic behavior of the hysteric.17 The hysteric’s phantasmatic performances, like those of Sibande, often mirror the desires and representations provided for her by the particular oppressive system and it is often the desires of those who have traumatized her, which she represents in fantasy. However, it is important to note that the highly artificial nature of Sibande’s mimetic performances allows the artist to evoke a gap between herself and her self-representations; this too, is an eminently hysterical strategy. As Bronfen explains, when a mimetic performance is excessive, it allows the hysteric to suggest that those representations of her identity which have marginalized her, are inadequate, so that her mimetic self-representation “demarcates the blind spot [… pointing to] that which lies outside any categorization” (1998, p. 418).

17  We employ the term interpellation in an Althusserian sense. The term is coined by the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser in order to describe the manner in which ideology addresses the individual (1971, p. 11).

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Omphalic Representation We aim to correlate Sophie’s performances with hysteria in a further respect: in terms of their omphalic nature. Bronfen identifies omphalic representation as a defining characteristic of hysteria. She emphasizes that the hysteric’s mimetic performances are fraught with disturbing ambiguity and it is this ambiguity which she characterizes as omphalic: the hysteric produces a versatile and seemingly infinite array of self-­ presentations, alternating between sustaining and interrogating paternal desire … the inconsistent number of masks she dons actually displays the inconsistency of the symbolic system ruled by the paternal […]. Moving seamlessly from seductive obedience to calculated derision and insolence, [she is] manipulating the masks […]. (Bronfen 1998, p. 39)

Bronfen employs the term omphalic representation to refer to this dual quality of the mimetic hysterical fantasy, where it vacillates between “sustaining and interrogating paternal desire”. The term omphalic is derived from the Greek word, omphalos, which means navel. Bronfen (1998, p. 37) employs the navel as a trope representing the cryptic structure of the hysterical symptom: “Like the navel, the symptom articulates an incision without allowing penetration of the wound lying beneath the knotted scar they construct”. The symptom is analogous to the navel, insofar as it simultaneously points to and conceals trauma. The defining feature of omphalic signification, according to Bronfen (1998, pp. 20, 59), is this “counterdirectional” quality: it both veils and evokes underlying trauma. The omphalic structure of hysterical fantasy can be illustrated by referring to the hysteric’s relation to patriarchy; as stated previously, hysteria often comprises a reaction to the traumatic impact of patriarchy, although other traumatizing systems may also be relevant (Bronfen 1998, p. 40). On the one hand, the hysteric’s pantomimed fantasies mime and seem to comply with those roles which the traumatizing and interpellating patriarchal system has prescribed for her (Bronfen 1998, pp.  20, 39–44, 160–162). On the other hand, it is characteristic of omphalic representation that such mimetic fantasies are always attended by an oppositional aspect, which disrupts the illusion of compliance. Bronfen refers to the former quality, where the hysteric mimes those roles which have been prescribed for her by patriarchy, as sublimatory; by contrast, that aspect of hysterical fantasy which disrupts it is referred to as being desublimatory

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(1998, pp. xiv, 20, 84–86).18 The sublimatory fantasy represses and protects the hysteric from having to confront traumatic knowledge; the hysteric attempts “to support the desire of his interpellating Other precisely because he hopes to exchange memory traces of vulnerability for a protective fiction of plenitude” (Bronfen 1998, p.  44). The sublimatory and mimetic fantasy also contains an oppositional element, however, as the hysteric compulsively returns to and attempts to evoke repressed knowledge (Bronfen 1998, pp. 20, 39). Desublimation erupts as a result of the fact that the hysteric does not manage to perfectly repress her own desires or traumatic knowledge. Contemporary artworks which employ hysterical representation often engage mimetically with the image repertoire for femininity provided by the interpellating patriarchal system; such a mimicry of ideal femininity exemplifies the sublimatory aspect of omphalic representation. However, the omphalic nature of a hysterical representation implies that it possesses a dual nature, and will involve both the “bodily imitation of culture and an expression of discontent with it” (Bronfen 1998, pp. 413, 423, italics added). An omphalic (hysterical) representation will therefore simultaneously sustain and disturb the patriarchal code for femininity. It is a typical omphalic strategy to articulate “traumatic knowledge of somatic and symbolic vulnerability” by utilizing “the body to repeat by representation an earlier traumatic impression [… employing] mimetic self-representation” (Bronfen 1998, pp. 422–427). Traumatic knowledge is often articulated in the desublimatory hysterical fantasy in the form of scenes of horror. Specifically, as hysteria centers on the body, it is particularly the mutilated hysterical body which functions to stage the “encroachment of trauma” (Bronfen 1998, pp.  162, 169). A desublimatory “horror” fantasy may therefore entail the portrayal of the idealized (sublimatory) female body as having been disfigured or fragmented (Bronfen 1998, p. 417). Contemporary hysterics employ the motif of the fragmented or horrific body in order to evoke psychic disturbance (Bronfen 1998, pp.  34, 382). The castration fantasy is a typical desublimatory fantasy (Bronfen 1998, pp. 162, 169). The desublimation 18  Freud defines sublimation as the process whereby the libido is deflected toward more socially desirable purposes (2015, p. 588). Bronfen’s definition of sublimation is an adaptation of its conventional meaning; in her framework, sublimation refers to a process whereby traumatic knowledge and traumatic enjoyment is repressed (1998, pp. 20, 84–86). Her association of sublimation with repression therefore resonates with Freud’s definition of sublimation insofar as both interpretations involve the moderation of the libido.

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which attends the hysteric’s mimetic performances occurs when such an artist “reveals the vulnerable body and monstrous inherent in any aesthetically coherent image, occluded by sublimation” (Bronfen 1998, p. 429). It is, therefore, typical of omphalic representation that the perfect and intact body should be intermeshed with the monstrous; the body is often represented as being “both healthy, and integrated, as well as diseased, and disintegrating” (Bronfen 1998, p. 382, italics in original). As is typical of hysterical representation, the dual quality of omphalic representation allows the artist to articulate a “discrepancy between the way someone presents him- or herself to others and how he or she really is” (Bronfen 1998, p. 382). Sibande’s representations of Sophie can be aligned with omphalic representation, we argue; her artworks possess a counterdirectional quality, insofar as these serve to both veil and evoke trauma. This counterdirectional quality can be identified as being inherent in the manner in which Sophie appears to transform over the course of the series. There is marked difference between Sophie’s early manifestation as a domestic worker, where she is clothed in blue (in Long Live the Dead Queen, for instance), and her later appearance in The Purple Shall Govern, where she is clad in purple and her outfit is barely identifiable as that of a domestic worker. The transformation of Sophie is overtly visible in A Reversed Retrogress, Scene 1, where the two manifestations of Sophie are juxtaposed. Sophie’s transformation is so marked that Maurice and Dodd (2014, p. 2) refer to an “old” and a “new” Sophie and Tim Leibbrandt (2014) distinguishes between the new and “terrible” or “[e]vil Sophie” and the old, “Good Sophie”.19 Sophie’s change from “old” to “new” is made visible through her body-dress.20 The waist of the early “good” Sophie is cinched, and is presumably girdled by the obligatory corset, connoting her subscription to the patriarchal Victorian ideal of feminine beauty; Sophie is also neatly clothed in a headscarf and apron, insignia of her servitude, so that she conforms to the apartheid representation of black femininity. However, her dress and the ribbons of her apron start to take on ridiculous lengths 19  Leibbrandt (2014) describes Sophie as “terrible” on the basis of the title of one of the works in The Purple Shall Govern series, namely, A Terrible Beauty. 20  In The Purple Shall Govern the dress-like tendrils of flesh unfurl from Sophie’s body in such a manner that flesh and fabric become indistinguishable. Flesh and fabric interpenetrate to the extent that these can be referred to as comprising a body-dress.

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in some artworks, for example in Silent Symphony (2010), where Sophie, who is still clad in the blue fabric of the domestic worker, indulges in the fantasy that she is conducting an orchestra. The lengths of redundant fabric become excessive in the dress of the “evil” and emancipated purple Sophie who appears in The Purple Shall Govern. In this series her waist is no longer constricted, the contents of her stomach no longer constrained, and her dress becomes monstrous; the contents of her loins tumble out and her body-dress transforms into the looming non-winged ceiling beings (A Terrible Beauty Is Born, 2013) (see Fig. 3). The transformation of Sophie’s body-dress into something horrible culminates in The Allegory of Growth (2014), where her body is infested by teeming tentacles which seem to have both inflicted a mortal wound and suffocated her. Sophie’s transformation from old to new, as signified by her body-dress, correlates directly with her transformation into an emancipated figure. The Sophie who complies with repressive ideals is clothed in a blue dress of a relatively modest length; by contrast, the dress of the Sophie who contravenes these ideals by being emancipated is purple, loosened and excessively lengthened, eventually becoming horrific. The dissent of the “terrible” Sophie who defies the restrictive patriarchal and apartheid systems is, therefore, represented through the portrayal of physical release, where this release involves an actual release from confining garments (signifiers of oppression), a process continued by the motif of her unfurling and widening dress and her body’s ultimate dehiscence and division into the non-winged ceiling beings which represent her desire. The fantasies of early Sophie, insofar as these seem to represent a desire to fulfill those roles which the interpellating patriarchal and apartheid systems have prescribed for her, are emblematic of the sublimatory form of hysterical fantasy. However, as is consistent with the counterdirectional (omphalic) nature of hysterical fantasy, Sibande also portrays the inverse, a desublimatory fantasy, where this is articulated by means of a mutilated body. Sophie’s body-dress is suggestive of bodily mutilation, so that emancipation is signified by means of an aesthetic of physical horror. This quality––of “corporeality gone awry” (Bronfen 1998, p.  38)––is a feature which is closely associated with hysteria, and the representation of the body as horror is typical particularly of the contemporary hysteric. Hysteria “hooks to the body its message of the return of [the] repressed” Bronfen states (1998, pp.  41, 382). Such fantasies of the subject’s own physical mutilation are highly emblematic of the desublimatory form of fantasy which performs the eruption of repressed traumatic knowledge.

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In this omphalic context, understood as a sublimatory fantasy, it seems that “good” Sophie must represent repression; that is, repression of the traumatic knowledge of her own unrepresentable desire. By contrast, “terrible” Sophie confronts and stages this traumatic knowledge. The eruption of the desire of the “new” Sophie is signified by the presence of the non-winged ceiling beings, and it is this aspect, along with the horrible aspect of her mutilated body, which serves to evoke the repressed.

Conclusion To conclude, we have identified the following features of Sibande’s artworks as significant: her portrayal of Sophie as being engaged in fantasy, including the traumatic primal fantasies of intrauterine existence and castration; the articulation of psychic trauma at the register of the body; the manner in which Sibande engages with traumatizing apartheid and patriarchal representations of black femininity by means of mimicry; and her omphalic engagement with these roles, where she seems to simultaneously comply with and subvert these representations, notably through the depiction of bodily horror. These are all features which are highly characteristic of hysteria, and therefore serve to establish that Sibande’s artworks are emblematic of hysterical representation. It has been demonstrated that Sibande leverages a strategy of hysterical mimicry in order to evoke a gap between herself and the various roles which have been prescribed for her in the apartheid-colonial and patriarchal systems. As Hunter has asserted, hysteria serves as a negotiated means of communication, which functions from within the limitations of an oppressive system, to allow the subject to evoke repressed desire as well as repressed traumatic knowledge. Sibande’s use of a hysterical strategy is therefore significant, as it enables the artist to engage directly with marginalizing patriarchal and apartheid-colonial representations, only to disturb or disrupt these. Omphalic hysterical representation enables Sibande to not only evoke the trauma of racial and patriarchal oppression, but also allows her––simultaneously––to articulate her dissent. Acknowledgments  The financial assistance of the National Research Foundation toward the completion of this research is hereby gratefully acknowledged. This chapter has previously been published as: Anne Scheffer, Ingrid E. Stevens and Amanda du Preez. 2017. “Hysterical Representation in the Art of Mary Sibande”, de arte 52. no. 2–3, pp.  4–28. DOI: https://doi.org/10.108 0/00043389.2017.1332503 Images courtesy of the artist and Gallery MOMO.

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Leibbrandt, Tim. 2014. “The Purple Shall Govern Mary Sibande at Iziko South African National Gallery.” Artthrob Contemporary Art in South Africa (27 November–15 January). http://www.artthrob.co.za/Reviews/Tim_ Leibbrandt_reviews_The_Purple_Shall_Govern_by_Mary_Sibande_at_Iziko_ South_African_National_Gallery.aspx. Accessed on February 29, 2016. Mabandu, Percy. 2013. “The Interview—Mary Sibande: Purple Shall Govern.” City Press 7 (July). http://www.news24.com/Archives/City-­Press/ The-­Interview-­Mary-­Sibande-­Purple-­shall-­govern-­20150430. Accessed on August 9, 2014. Maurice, Emile and Dodd, Rebecca. 2014. A Learner Resource on the Art of Mary Sibande. Standard Bank Gallery Learner Series 3. http://www.standardbankarts.co.za/media/3567902/172505_m_sibande_ed_sup-­spreads.pdf. Accessed on March 15, 2015. Micale, Mark S. 1993. “On the ‘Disappearance’ of Hysteria: a Study in the Clinical Deconstruction of a Diagnosis.” Isis 84, no. 3 (September): 496–526. Nuttall, Sarah. 2013. “Wound, Surface, Skin.” Cultural Studies 27, no. 3: 418–437. Peters, Fiona. 2005. “Desire—less—ness.” Genealogies of Identity: Interdisciplinary Readings on Sex and Sexuality, edited by Margaret Breen and Fiona Peters, 123–137. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Showalter, Elaine. 1985. The Female Malady. Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980. New York: Pantheon. ———. 1997. Hystories, Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture. London: Picador. Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. 1986. Disorderly Conduct: Visions Of Gender in Victorian America. New York: Oxford University. Strauss, Helene. 2014. “Spectacles of Promise and Disappointment: Political Emotion and Quotidian Aesthetics in Video Installations by Berni Searle and Zanele Muholi.” Safundi. 15, no. 4: 471–495. Towards a People’s Culture, Art and Resistance Under Apartheid. 2016. South African history online. http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/towards-­peoples-­ culture-­art-­and-­resistance-­under-­apartheid. Accessed on December 18, 2016. Veith, Ilza. 1965. Hysteria. The history of a Disease. Chicago: University of Chicago. Verhaeghe, Paul. 1999. Does the Woman Exist? From Freud’s Hysteric to Lacan’s Feminine. Trans. Marc du Ry. 2nd ed. New York: Other Press. Willis, Debora, ed. 2010. Black Venus 2010: They Called her “Hottentot”. Philadelphia: Temple University. Yarom, Nitza. 2005. The Matrix of Hysteria. Psychoanalysis of the Struggle Between the Sexes as Enacted in the Body. New York: Routledge.

A Storm in a Teacup, and Other Minor Melodramas: Narratives of Containment and Excess in Cultured Colonies/Colonial Cultures Leora Farber

The Outbreak Narrative In this chapter, I offer an assemblage of artist’s reflections on what could be seen as a set of unrelated theoretical concerns, artistic practices and processes. In these reflections, I suggest possible readings of my ongoing body of photographic and sculptural work, entitled cultured colonies/colonial cultures (2019–2020; hereafter colonial cultures) through the lens of nineteenth-century female hysteria. The work was made using specific strains of bacteria and fungi as artmaking media in a level two Physical

L. Farber (*) University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Braun (ed.), Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66360-5_10

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Containment (PC2) microbiology laboratory,1 following strict scientific protocols and practices. These protocols center around issues of containment—the control over pathological microbes which threaten to become dangerously uncontrollable; excessive; that have the potential to override borders and boundaries, spill over into “chaos”, “take over” and “contaminate” the historically gendered masculine world of rationality, reason and order. I draw a loose analogy between the potentially uncontainable growth patterns of micro-organisms and the nineteenth-century female hysterics’ theatrical performances of “disobedient” behaviors and emotional excesses that were considered to transgress Victorian ideals of femininity. I consider the growth patterns of microbes and the Victorian hysterics’ behaviors as manifestations of agency. In these works, I use “hysteria”, as manifest in the properties of microbial growth, as methodology, and as an integral part of my working process in order to realize a form of “hysterical representation”. In reading the works on cultured colonies through the lens of hysteria, I draw on Victorian conceptualizations of the (female) hysteric, basing my discussion around the views of feminist scholars of the 1980s and 1990s. These feminists revisit French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot’s work conducted between 1862 and 1893, and Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer’s writings (1893), through which to reclaim hysteria as a form of feminist representation (Showalter 1997, p. 9). I draw specifically on manifestations of hysteria from the Victorian era because, in the work, I make direct references to the style and patterning found on objects found in domestic interiors of this time. These, in turn, are closely related to the status of the woman as “ornamental” in the late nineteenth century, and her oppression under the Victorian codes of femininity through which she was relegated to the domestic domain. At the time of writing, I find myself, like millions of others worldwide, in domestic confinement due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Being restricted to my home for over three months under lockdown in South Africa has heightened my awareness of the boundaries and borders between interior and exterior; between the safety of the known and the 1  The laboratory was run by Dr. Kate Hammer, Senior Lecturer and Deputy Director Graduate Programs in Infectious Diseases, School of Biomedical Sciences, University of Western Australia. The works were made during a residency at the SymbioticA Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts, University of Western Australia (September 2019– January 2020).

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“threatening”, “dangerous” unknown invader that lurks outdoors.2 Priscilla Wald’s (2008) identification of “the outbreak narrative”3 seems to have unexpected parallels with conceptualizations of nineteenth-century female hysteria as a means of “breaking out” from the systemic suppression of women under patriarchy. It is these parallels that, I suggest, have relevance to our current condition in which a similar kind of containment-­ excess narrative plays out in extreme ways. In suggesting the analogy between the potentially “unruly” growth patterns of microbes and the hysterics’ theatrical performances and emotional excesses, I draw on Marietta Radomska’s (2016) concept of “uncontainable life”, which she applies to certain bioartistic4 practices, arguing that these “explore and enact life as processual and uncontainable, thus surpassing preconceived material and conceptual boundaries” (Radomska 2016, p.  14). Karen Barad’s (2003) term “intra-action” in which different elements and entities, subjects and objects merge and 2  Similar dichotomies between interior and exterior formed the bedrock of colonial discourse. The white, upper-middle-class Victorian woman living in the British colonies was compelled to live her life according to, and within the parameters of, these dichotomies: inside her mansion and within the known safety of domestic space, as opposed to the “wilderness” outside, with its connotations of darkness and threats of imminent danger. As Laura Ann Stoler (1989, p. 651) observes, “the exclusionary politics of colonialism demarcated not just external boundaries but interior frontiers, specifying internal conformity and order among Europeans themselves”. 3  Wald (2008) uses the term “outbreak narrative” to identify the formulaic sequence of events that make up a pandemic/epidemic, characteristically found in journalism, fiction, film, popular science and government policy. According to Wald (2008, p. 2), the formulaic plot begins with

the identification of an emerging infection includes discussion of the global networks throughout which it travels, and chronicles the epidemiological work that ends with its containment. As epidemiologists trace the routes of the microbes, they catalog the spaces of global modernity. Microbes, spaces, and interactions blend together as they animate the landscape and motivate the plot of the outbreak narrative: a contradictory but compelling story of the perils of human interdependence and the triumph of human connection and cooperation, scientific authority and the evolutionary advantages of the microbe, ecological balance, and impending disaster.

4  Bioart can be described as a current in contemporary art that involves the use of biological materials (living elements: cells, tissues, organisms) along with scientific procedures, protocols and tools. It may, therefore, be considered as a form of hybrid artistico-scientific practice (Radomska 2016, p. 13).

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emerge, is used to describe my sense of bodily entanglement with the microbes; as she suggests: “It is through specific intra-actions that a differential sense of being is enacted in the ongoing ebb and flow of agency” (Barad 2003, p. 817). Such issues around containment and interspecies “intra-actions” take on particular resonance in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, as the virus continues to spread rampantly across borders and boundaries.

Commodity Fetishism and the Ornamental Woman Precarious and frangible yet strangely resilient, the “impressions” of domestic objects that make up my ongoing body of photographic and sculptural work, titled cultured colonies/colonial cultures, (hereafter cultured colonies) hover in a liminal space of constant becoming. The photographic images are of casts of domestic objects made from a solidified mixture of agar and bacterial nutrient, onto which live, naturally pigmented, mildly pathogenic bacteria5 and fungi6 have been painted. Inscribed into, imprinted onto, or infused with the translucent jelly-like substrate, the microbes grow unpredictably, and often uncontrollably, in response to the patterns or surface applications that I attempt to map out for them. Rather than being the product of my creative efforts alone, the work is made through a process of organic collaboration between the micro-organisms and myself; they happen “with” the agencies of the microbes in a dynamic process of intra-action. The kinds of objects cast range in design, period and surface patterning. They include items taken from Chinese porcelain and English bone china—such as dinner, cake and side plates, teacups and saucers, bowls and glassware—and reference traditional English styling and patterning as found in Royal Doulton, Royal Albert, Royal Crown Derby and Royal Worcester ranges. Some of the casts feature blue and white patterns of Chinese origin, such as the willow pattern, which the British copied in their production of blue and white eighteenth-century bone china, and the Dutch reproduced in their Delftware ceramics. The typically English and Dutch styles of china and patterning that they reference speak to a 5   Strains of bacteria used include Chromobacterium violaceum, Serratia marcescens, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Elizabethkingia, E. coli, Klebsiella and Citrobacter. 6  Specific types of fungi used were Candida albicans, Rhodotorula, Saccharomyces and E. faecium.

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legacy of settler colonialism which is rooted in South African history and a rich, yet deeply troubled, history of West-East cross-cultural and economic exchange.7 These casts carry hauntological resonances of British and Dutch Imperialism and colonialism—the very mechanisms that drove the enculturation of capital, set against a historical backdrop of slavery, genocide, dispossession, apartheid, exploitation, displacement and precarity. In tracing the stages of capitalism in South Africa from its mercantile phases with the establishment of the Cape of Good Hope, through Dutch and British settler colonialism and apartheid, the “casts-as-cultivated-­ cultures”8 may be seen as uncanny specters of disquietude that, even in their states of demise, continue to inhabit the future-present. Reproductions of the original designs of the cast objects, and the originals themselves that are still being produced, have become domestic “classics” in many global post-colonies; in their reference to English tastes and values, they have also become signifiers of settler middle-class 7  During the eighteenth century, Britain rose to a dominant position among European trading Empires. Although her commercial market was with North America and the West Indies, she also embarked on trade with Asia, specifically China and India, through the activities of the East India Company. In the work, these references to colonial Dutch and English trade are extended in the function of the objects themselves—porcelain teacups and sugar bowls are used to hold tea and sugar—commodities which are resonant with the British Empire and Imperialism and carry long histories of exploitation in its colonies. From the 1600s to 1800s, the East India Company was instrumental in spreading tea from China to India; with their plantations in India, British interests controlled tea production in the subcontinent. Tea, which was initially an upper-class drink—a sign of high society and social class—became the infusion of every social class in Great Britain throughout the eighteenth century and has remained so, to the extent that tea drinking is often associated with British culture. Sugar, used to sweeten the tea, was cultivated using slave labor in Britain’s West Indian colonies. 8  Following Lorenzo Veracini’s (2014), analogy between the relationships between growth patterns and characteristics of viruses and bacteria and the functioning of colonialism and settler colonial systems an analogy might be set up between the bacterial colonies that grow on the casts and settler colonies. Veracini (2014, pp. 615–616) notes that while both viruses and bacteria are exogenous elements that usually dominate their destination locales, a crucial difference is that viruses need living cells to operate, while bacteria attach to surfaces and may or may not rely on the organisms they encounter. As Veracini points out, viruses first attach to a host cell and then penetrate it in a way that is similar to how the colonial system depends on the presence and subjugation of those deemed as exploitable “Others”. Alternatively, while settler colonies might depend on the subjugation and exploitation of indigenous peoples, they have more in common with bacterial colonies in that settler collectives attach to the land but generally do not necessarily need indigenous “Others” to reproduce and function (Veracini 2014, pp. 615–616).

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consumption and status, and often act as markers of gentility or respectability. As such, in both the original and contemporary reproduced form, the objects and their casts resonate as spectral traces of colonial legacies that haunt domestic interiors and broader individual and collective imaginations in post-colonial contexts. The casts create a semblance of presence, of immediacy, of touch, yet their delineation of absence ironically defines what they are. Ethereal and ephemeral, they appear to be in varying states of atrophy, and as such, may act as affective carriers of memory, and evoke associations with trauma, absence, complicity and loss. Verne Harris’s description of the archive resonates here: “For the fragments in their custody comprise matter out of place. And the whispers of dislocation can be heard. Ghostly voices of other places, of lineages, of origins” (2015, p. 20). Harris’s reference to “other places, lineages and origins” can be traced back to the heavily decorated interiors associated with the Victorian British upper-class, bringing to mind parlors and dining rooms filled with dark mahogany furniture, draped velvet curtains, fine bone china, damask table linen, Georgian silver, flocked wallpaper, fine Belgium crystal, and large mirrors in heavy and ornate frames. Here, wallpapered walls are laden with closely hung framed prints and paintings; carpeted floors are strewn with intricately patterned Persian rugs; surfaces are covered with textiles, embroidered mats and lace doilies, upon which a multitude of cherished ornaments, family portraits and sentimental keepsakes are placed (Lemmer 2007, p. 96, p. 99). In the Victorian era, bone china was considered to be the epitome of style, grace and elegance. The china pieces in the Victorian household were prized possessions that were considered as beautiful ornaments for onlookers to gaze at, and acted as signifiers of wealth and class. Similarly, the parlor of the middle-class home became the domestic space for the display of what Anne McClintock (1995) calls “commodity fetishism”—it served to display the family’s “‘best’ household commodities: use value was converted into exhibition value” (McClintock 1995, p.  162). “Ornament appeased the anxious appetite of the new rich and the prosperous middle classes for visible evidence of their status” (Gloag 1962, p. 136); in the lower-middle-class Victorian home, commodities such as the “‘good’ silver, ‘good’ china and ‘clean furniture’” were “anxiously” displayed, as the housewife demonstrated her upwardly mobile aspirations (McClintock 1995, p. 162).

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It was against this backdrop that, by the end of the eighteenth century, women were considered as only fitted for an ornamental place in society (McClintock 1995, p. 160). The upper-class Victorian woman’s status as a “lady of leisure” was considered a mark of gentility and respectability, signifying her husband’s economic prosperity and class. Robbed of her productive labor and any means of self-expression, the traditional historical image of Victorian woman is either as a modest, unassuming, unaffected and docile being, bound by codes of respectability and with a sense of duty to her husband, family and home, or as a passive, leisurely, frivolous, dependent, prudish wife (Lemmer 2007, p.  32). As McClintock puts it: There, drooping prettily in the faded perfume of watercolours and light embroidery, she lived only to adorn the worldly ambition of her husband […]. Ensconced after marriage in a bower of ease, she simply exchanged temporary for permanent uselessness. Closeted in her ‘cold sepulchre of shame’, the virgin in the drawing room blushed at table legs and shrank from pleasures of the body. Her dreamy torpor was ruffled only by hysterical aliments, swooning spells and a plague of obstructive servants. Frigid, neurasthenic and ornamental; wilting in the airless hothouse of Victorian domesticity; fretfully preoccupied by trifles; given to irrationality and hysteria; languishing in ennui; incapable of constancy, decision or stature, the middle-­ class woman[‘s] […] life […] was dismissed as a ‘mass of trifles’. (McClintock 1995, p. 160)

Infantilized, bereft of agency, silenced and spoken for by the paterfamilias, the nineteenth-century woman had few means of intellectual, emotional, sexual, creative and logistical self-expression. Her confinement—in the home and bourgeois family—and within the prescriptive gender roles these entailed brought the nervous body and its protean complaints into being—a state that was exemplified in the female propensity for the disorder of hysteria (Showalter 1985, p. 142).

Breaking the Silence Given the relationship between the styles and patterning of the casts, the role of the object in the Victorian household as status symbol, and the status of the Victorian woman herself as “ornamental”, I locate my discussion of hysteria within the context of feminist writers of the 1980s and 1990s. These writers revisit the work of French neurologist Jean-Martin

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Charcot conducted between 1862 and 1893 at the Salpêtrière asylum in Paris when the disorder hysteria was at its height, as well as Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer’s (1893) psychoanalytic approach. While Charcot ascertained that hysteria had psychological, rather than pathological, origins, according to Freud and Breuer (1955), the hysteric’s symptoms are encrypted representations of traumatic repressed sexual experiences that usually occurred in childhood and resurfaced in adulthood (Freud 1910, p. 198, p. 207; 1963, p. 258). Because the hysteric cannot properly verbalize her condition, repressed psychical material is articulated by means of somatic symptoms (Freud 2015, p.  584); she translates “psychical excitation … into the somatic field” (1966, p. 195). Although feminist re-readings of psychoanalytic theories of nineteenth-­ century hysteria are differently nuanced and even contradictory, feminist scholars such as Elaine Showalter (1985, 1997), Martha Noël Evans (1991), Noël McAfee (2004), Amelia Jones (2012), Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane (1990, p.  5), Rhona Justice-Malloy (1993), Dianne Hunter (1983), and Amanda Du Preez (2004, 2009) concur that the political and social repression of speech and its channeling into psychosomatic symptoms were instances of a systemic suppression of women under patriarchy. In this feminist discourse, the hysteric’s involuntary, uncontrollable, somatic symtoms are understood as an “embodied index of forms of oppression” (Devereux 2014, p. 20). From this perspective, hysteria reads as a form of feminine representation—a non-verbal form of communication, using the body as an alternative to linguistic verbalization (Devereux 2014, p.  21). As Showalter notes, since nineteenth-century hysterical women “suffered from the lack of a public voice to articulate their economic and sexual oppression”, “their symptoms […] mutism, paralysis, self-starvation, spasmodic seizures—seemed like bodily metaphors for the silence, immobility, denial of appetite, and hyperfemininity imposed on them by their societies” (1997, p. 55). These feminists conceive of hysteria as a compromised means of communication, a “form of feminist discourse in which the body signifies what social conditions make it impossible to state linguistically” (Hunter 1983, pp. 484–486; see also Devereux 2014, p. 21). From this perspective, hysteria reads as a form of desperate communication by the powerless: “an expression, a body language for people who otherwise might not be able to speak or even to admit what they feel” (Showalter 1997, p. 7). French psychoanalytic feminists such as Luce Irigaray (1985a, b [1997]) and Hélène Cixous (1976, 1981) associate hysteria with female protest,

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resistance and revolution (Showalter 1985, p. 5). They claim that not only was the hysteric psychologically “silenced” by her deference to patriarchal authorities, she was also assigned to “a zone of silence” in western philosophical discourses structured around the male as the paradigmatic sex. For Irigaray, “the silence of women results, then, not only from the denial of their authority to speak, but also from the lack of a symbolic system reflecting their experience” (cited in Evans 1991, p. 213). These feminists connect “the hysteric’s silences, symptoms and distorted speech to female symbolism, semiotic or infantile wordless verbalisation” (Showalter 1997, p. 5). By using a form of communication that lies predominantly beyond phallocentric language, Cixous and Irigaray argue, the hysteric can establish an(other) point of view from which phallogocentric concepts and controls can be deconstructed. Studies of female hysterics in the nineteenth-century differentiated “orderly” bodies from those perceived as “disorderly”. “Orderly” forms of behavior, where the hysteric’s symptoms were reconcilable with the prescribed norms for feminine behavior (such as frailty and passivity) were more likely to be seen as “compromised forms of expression” (Smith-­ Rosenberg 1986). Disorderly hysterical bodies were considered as those that transgressed gender roles and prescribed feminine behaviors through the release of “excess” (emotions such as desire and rage; drives such as sexuality and creativity), performativity and theatricality.9 It is these transgressive, excessive, theatrical and performative characteristics of hysteria that, I suggest, can be seen as analogous to the dynamic processes of replication, procreation and propagation of microbes that take place in cultured colonies. The works, which may be considered as metaphors for the hysterical body, are underpinned by an uncontainable sense of excess that, if not contained, threatens to erupt into an uncontrollable mass. It is this tension between the strict maintenance of boundaries in order to contain and control, and the agency of matter as processual and uncontainable, that I explore in the next section (see Fig. 1).

9  Performativity and theatricality were characteristics of the attitudes passionnelles (passionate gestures) which were identified as the third stage of a hysterical attack (Du Preez 2004, p. 57). While some hysterics suffered from aphasia (loss of speech), those that spoke of their own accord, often did so assertively and audaciously, with a lack of modesty, mimicking masculine speech. Though their use of “foul” language, and audacity to taking on the role of the speaking subject, was considered to be shocking in that they were inverting and transgressing gender roles (Du Preez 2004, p. 49).

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Fig. 1  Leora Farber, cultured colonies/colonial cultures, 2020. (Photo: Courtesy of the artist. Photography: Bo Wong)

(Un)containable Life As an artist accustomed to studio-practice in which I give myself license to work in a spontaneous, organic manner involving a fair degree of messiness and imprecision, working in a PC2 microbiology lab opened up a new world for me—a world governed by strictly defined practices, protocols and procedures that needed to be vigilantly adhered to so as to ensure absolute distinctions between sterility and contamination. Donning my lab coat and closed shoes at the door, I cross an imaginary boundary between the “clean” entrance area and the “dirty” working space of the lab, leaving all personal items used outside the lab in the clean area. Thereafter, I follow a set of almost obsessive rituals: measure out precise amounts of powdered bacterial nutrient and agar (remember to clean up any powder that might fall onto the highly calibrated scale or the workbench; never leave materials used for measuring the agar on the workbench or unwashed); place the powdered mixture in sterilized bottles with the exact amount of distilled water, microwave their contents to boiling point (watch carefully—do not let them overheat because the liquid will spill over

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and the lid of the bottle will pop off ). Check that the china and glass objects to be used to cast from, and Pyrex dishes in which the casts will be placed are wrapped in brown paper, taped down and labeled before taking them to be autoclaved10 (reminder to self: always wash your hands with soap and water, and remove your lab coat as you leave the lab). Make sure that all of the above takes place in time for the next autoclave run (watch the clock. You can miss the deadline by only a few minutes). Clean work surfaces and instruments with ethanol; allow the autoclaved agar mixture to cool; remove brown paper from the autoclaved objects and dishes (but without touching their surfaces with your hands). Layout all containing dishes and objects to be cast in orderly rows. Using a transfer pipette to ensure precise amounts to the micromilligram, add the anti-biotic vancomycin hydrochloride to the agar mixture to prevent the growth of unwanted bacilli. Pour the cast and let the agar set. Clean all bottles so that the agar does not coagulate in them (make very sure not to leave any bits of agar in the bottles, their lids, or in the sink). Place the contaminated bottles in the designated area for sterilization (note to self: do not leave the wet dishtowel on the sink; never spill any water on the floor). Clean the workbench and tools thoroughly with ethanol. Armed with ethanol to sterilize paintbrushes and a Bunsen burner to heat steel instruments (they must be heated until red-hot), I draw and paint the colored microbes onto the cast. (Take extreme care never to touch the culture plates or let the bacteria come into contact with your skin; do not let anything fall to onto the floor. While working, do not, under any circumstances, touch the Pyrex bowl or the cast with your hands or an instrument as this will contaminate it.) Place the dish in an incubator heated to 37 degrees centigrade. Clean everything with ethanol, dispose of waste in a biosafety bin. Swab new sub-cultures to grow in petri dishes and incubate them. After 24 hours, check microbial growth and remove the cast from the incubator (be careful not to leave the door of the incubator open for more than a few seconds or the temperature will drop rapidly). Prepare physically and mentally for the most precarious part of the process: removing the agar cast from the object it is attached to, and later, transferring the agar cast into another sterile Pyrex dish or a Tupperware container. Dip a stainless steel cake lifter, spatula or barbeque tool in ethanol, and burn the 10  An autoclave is a machine used to sterilize equipment, using high-pressure saturated steam at 121 degrees centigrade. All bacteria, viruses, fungi and spores are inactivated during the process.

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liquid off under the flame. (Breathe in deeply.) Slide the lifting tool underneath the jelly-like cast, without causing it to crack or break. Carry the shaky cast over to the new container and slide it in while removing the lifting tools. Breathe out a sigh of relief (if the cast was successfully transferred) or despair (if it broke during the transfer process). Seal the Tupperware, and store it in a cold room. Pack the contaminated Pyrex dishes and objects into a large, sealed stainless steel pot, and take them to be autoclaved. Bring the decontaminated glassware and china upstairs and wash them thoroughly with a chemical solution. (Scrub hard with a metal brush to make sure that all bits of agar that might be caked on their surfaces are removed.) Dry them and return them to the lab. Seal the swan bin and take its contents to be autoclaved and incinerated. Replace the bags in the swan bin with fresh ones. Repeat the process again, and again for each set of casts. Throughout this process, I am hyper-aware of being in the regulated environment of the lab, the levels of (self)control required for every action; and the need for self-discipline, self-regulation and self-­containment at each stage of the working process. At the same time, I am struck as to how, in this regimented context, designed for restraint and restriction, the microbes that I cultivate and work with usually replicate with frenzied, almost hysterical virulence. After 24  hours of incubation (and anxious anticipation on my part), my responses to the work vary along a sliding scale of delight, amazement fascination, repulsion, horror and disgust. In most instances, the microbes have loosely adhered to the patterns that I have delineated for them, but also extended beyond these constructed borders. In certain cases, their movement—which could be described as “haptic performativity” (Bates 2019, p.  36)—has been so dramatic that I cannot recognize the pattern that I had rendered. They refuse to be disciplined: relentlessly animated, the microbes calcitrantly spread across the agar cast to acquire nutrients, attaching to and gliding over its surfaces, swimming, seething and teaming as they migrate toward and away from each other to form dense multicellular aggregations called biofilms, and “floccing” together to create minutely raised surfaces. As different strains of bacteria and fungi merge, their pigments bleed into each other to create new hues. Lines that I have inscribed into the agar expand to resemble veins and capillaries, or a network of nerve cells and fibers in the human body. They form a matrix of fluid, seeping, formless matter. They are at once invasive and evasive; imminently threatening and fascinating, evoking associations with the swarm; the blob; the monstrous;

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the grotesque; the abject. The cast becomes an interspecies contact zone, in which the different strains of microbial bodies, nutrient and agar (polysaccharides extracted from algae) proliferate and co-evolve in fecund communion. When the microbial growth has reached a certain point, I attempt to halt their growth by spraying the casts with acetone, and refrigerating them at 3 degrees centigrade. Yet, although the bacteria’s growth has been chemically curtailed and thus “contained”, their agar surfaces remain susceptible to contamination from eukaryotic micro-organisms such as yeasts and mold. They also, often, continue growing, despite my efforts to suppress them. During the making process, I am intensely aware of my embodied relationship with the organisms that I am working with. Despite the rigid scientific protocols that I must adhere to, which are designed to set the organisms at a safe distance from the body, and despite my knowledge that they are pathogenic and could cause illness, my interaction with them comprises unsettling yet pleasurable sensual intimacies and corporeal entanglements.11 Here I am co-author; a participant in an organic, unscripted, sometimes asymmetric collaboration which necessitates that I relinquish artistic autonomy and control. The matter12 with which I am working has agency; it responds and reciprocates; it is alive. I experience a sense of enmeshment with the microbes through sight, smell and tactile experience. This reciprocal relationship between the microbes and I, and the sense of entanglement I experience with them, can be related to Barad’s (2003) notions of “intra-action” and “intra-activity”. Barad problematizes common-­sense assumptions imbedded in the word “interactions”. While the term “interactions” makes dichotomous distinctions between subjects 11  Sarah Nuttall (2009, p. 1) explains the term “entanglement” as “a condition of being twisted together or entwined, involved with: it speaks of an intimacy gained, even if it was resisted, or ignored, or uninvited. It is a term which may gesture towards a relationship or set of social relationships that is complicated, ensnaring, in a tangle, but which implies a human foldedness.” Barad also uses the concept of “entanglement” to describe a situation in which the qualities of certain entities are not fixed or determined before these entities enter into relations with one another: they materialize only through intra-actions and relationalities (Radomska 2016, p. 41). 12  “Matter” (including the materiality of the body) and its capacity for agency have been foregrounded by feminist, cultural studies and science studies theorists since the early 2000s. These scholars theorize matter as “being, not inert and moulded by language and meaning, but instead as capable of engendering affects and effectuating events” (Radomska 2016, p. 58).

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and objects, Barad’s term “intra-actions” gives a presence to the “constructed boundary between the ‘object’ and the ‘agencies of observation’”. Barad transforms the term “agency” into “agentiality”, which she argues is a “doing” and “intra-acting”: an unfixed and non-anthropocentric process, and an enactment (Radomska 2016, p. 41). As she suggests: “It is through specific intra-actions that a differential sense of being is enacted in the ongoing ebb and flow of agency” (Barad 2003, p. 817). Intra-­action thus underscores the agency of matter, which is distributed among human and non-human actants and exerts itself at the level of matter as such. Matter is not a fixed essence but a “substance in its intra-active becoming—not a thing but a doing, a congealing of agency […] a stabilizing and destabilizing process of intra-activity” (Barad 2007, p. 151). In this way, matter is understood as a “discursive production”, which means that the materialization of bodies and the production of meaning are interdependent. Such enmeshment contributes to a decentering of the human in postanthropocentric, posthumanist and post-dualist theory, as it calls into question clear-cut binary oppositions between human and “non-­ human”; “self” and “other”; mind and matter; subjectivity and objectivity; rationality and emotion. In liquid form, the agar is warm, viscous, molten; it pours and drips freely; once set, it is cool and smooth. I slice cleanly into it with a knife cutting away thin slithers to create sharp edges or patterns that resemble cut-glass, whittle into it with carving tools, and caress it with soft paintbrushes to clean away particles that resemble shards of transparent glass. The casts read as if they have been made of layers of exposed subcutaneous tissue. Devoid of the protective epidermis, they are materially corporeal yet eerie and spectral. They too, constantly change shape-shift over time. Once refrigerated, they lose moisture and shrink; their outer surface may develop a dry, slightly hardened external “skin”; some become more glutinous, others crack and break into fragments. In their shiny viscosity, the bacteria themselves are seductively beautiful, yet simultaneously repellent. I feel a sense of bodily and emotional attachment to them; my actions are sensual and sensuous—I pick them up from the culture plate with an instrument, swab or paintbrush, stroke them onto the smooth agar surface as if gently caressing exposed flesh; I inhale their strange odors which, although unpleasant, I come to enjoy. The process of painting or drawing with them is laborious, painstaking, detailed, but also meditative and pleasurable. I care for them by monitoring their growth and checking for contamination on a daily basis. I think

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about them when I am not in the lab, wondering if they are growing; are they alright? I find pleasure in working intimately with living organisms to create an artwork that is constantly dynamic, evolving and in a continual state of flux. As such, work might, therefore, be considered as a manifestation of Radomska’s (2016) concept of “uncontainable life”. Basing her argument on Deleuzian feminist philosophers such as Rosi Braidotti (2002, 2006, 2013), Claire Colebrook (2014) and Elizabeth Grosz (2008, 2011), and posthumanist/science studies scholars, such as Barad (2003, 2007, 2012) and Donna Haraway (2003, 2008, 2010), she uses it to refer to “an understanding of life as a material, dynamic, and excessive force of transformation that traverses the divide between the living and non-living, organic and inorganic, human and nonhuman, growth and decay, and, ultimately, life and death, as they are currently conceived” (Radomska 2016, 32). The casts that make up the cultured colonies series similarly hover in a liminal space of emergence and becoming: slipping between life and death; visibility and invisibility; materiality and immateriality; human and non-human; presence and absence; being and non-being; form and formlessness, they oscillate, restlessly, in a state of in-betweenness. Radomska’s words, written with reference to other bioartists’ work are applicable here: Bioartworks help us to uncover these porosities and blurred boundaries: they expose life as becoming … as non-teleological processes of change, and as intensities that do not compose an external force enlivening inert matter but, instead, are constitutive of matter as such. Uncontainable life is not modelled after the life of the human or any other organism and thus, it is not limited like the life of discrete entities. Rather, uncontainable life dwells in the sphere of the in-between: it is processual, dynamic, and multiplicitous. (Radomska 2016, p. 32)

The Domestic Laboratory At first glance, it might seem that the modern scientific lab and the middle-­ class Victorian home could not be more different—the one being a sparse, clinical work environment, and the other, a profusely decorated, “feminized” domestic space. Yet, in reflecting on my experience of working in the lab, which imposed a set of practices that were predicated on regulation and control, I am struck by how, as McClintock points out, Victorian

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middle-class homes were characterized by an intense preoccupation with rigid boundaries and its inhabitants displayed a “paranoia around boundary disorders”. As she notes, “[d]omestic space was mapped as a hierarchy of specialized and distinct boundaries that needed constant and scrupulous policing” (McClintock 1995, p.  168). These boundaries—which upheld the “politics of containment’”—were manifest in numerous ways, some of which are detailed below. Domestic space was structured around segregation and specialization, differentiated according to a specific “socio-sexual” code that denoted masculine from feminine, and upheld boundaries between class (Lemmer 2007, p. 71). Dominant middle-class beliefs about appropriate social relationships, gender roles and separate spheres were coded and built into the home. Because the home represented a site where class and race difference potentially came into direct contact, distinctions between servants and family were demarcated through its spatial organization and the social rituals that kept employer and employee at a distance from each other (Giles 2004, p. 67). It was the duty of the mistress of the household to impose middle-class notions of order and discipline not only on herself and her children but also on her staff. Furthermore, as McClintock describes, daily life was subject to multiple forms of ordering and classification: […] in the labelling of bottles, the careful marking of sheets and clothes, the scrupulous keeping of visitor’s books, the regular accounting of stocks, the meticulous measuring of food, the strict keeping of account books. […] This fetish for rational measurement led to an increase in the use of weights and measures. Food was served according to strict timetables […] [following] strict sequential rules with one course following another with the proper decorum of rational linear progress. Domestic space was increasingly disciplined by the obsessive tidying and ordering of ornaments and furniture. Time was rationalised: servant’s and children’s daily schedules followed strict routines […]. Cleaning schedules were divided into increasingly rationalised and rigid calendars […] the domestic day was measured into mechanical units marked by the chiming of clocks and meticulous ringing of bells. (McClintock 1995, p. 168)

Housework itself became a “semiotics of boundary maintenance” (McClintock 1995, p.  170). Acts of cleaning demarcated boundaries between clean and dirty, separating the unsanitary from the hygienic, order from disorder, logic from confusion. These binaries were

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determined by moral or social criteria rather than scientific standards of hygiene (Davidoff and Hall 2002, p. 382; Muthesius 1982, p. 43), with cleanliness being associated with the virtues of morality and sobriety. This middle-­class preoccupation with the clear demarcation of limits and anxiety about boundary confusion gave rise to a fetish for cleaning—particularly liminal, or boundary objects that demarcated distinctions between the private and the public (McClintock 1995, p. 170). Clean steps, doors and window ledges, shining brass knockers and starched white curtains dramatically demonstrated the gap between private decency and public squalor (Davidoff and Hall 2002, p.  382). Furthermore, as Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall (2002, p. 383) and Stefan Muthesius (1982, p. 46) attest, ideas about cleanliness and order directly affected the layout of middle-­class housing. Separating the mess and smell of food preparation from the social ritual of eating became an important feature of respectability and meant that the kitchen was ideally located as far as possible from the living rooms (Lemmer 2007, p. 59). Victorian conventions dictated that the upper- to middle-class Victorian woman live her life according to, and within these parameters classification, measurement, order and boundary control.13 Her identity was constructed around a constant striving to maintain attitudes, behaviors and values that were aligned with Victorian codes of morality and decorum. Respectability was organized around a complex set of practices and representations which covered every aspect of a woman’s life; it defined appropriate and acceptable modes of behavior, language and appearance. These social rules and moral codes worked to regulate both gender and class identities (Davidoff and Hall 2002, p. 398; Nead 1988, p. 28). This was coupled with the intellectual, creative, sexual and psychological constraints of the gender constructs that determined her life under patriarchy. 13  Following John Snow’s connection between cholera and contaminated drinking water as the cause of the cholera epidemics in London from 1854 to 1855 and Louis Pasteur’s and Robert Koch’s linking of bacteria and disease, animosity toward pathogenic microbes grew in Europe in the second half of the 1800s. Given the devastation of repeated plagues and appalling sanitation caused by urban intensification, Europe and particularly Victorian England, became preoccupied with hygiene (Shail 2007; Smith 2007 cited in Bates 2019, p. 38). “Appropriate human behaviours vis-à-vis microorganisms” were prescribed, including transmission, vaccination and consumption (Paxson 2008 cited in Bates 2019, p. 38). Once under control, “pure” social relations could proceed—“relations that would not be derailed by microbial interruption, that could be predicted and thus rationally ordered” (Paxton 2008, p. 17 cited in Bates 2019, p. 38).

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Although the home was deemed as the “woman’s domain”—the “natural” place through which her identity, status and being was determined (Dickerson 1995, pp. xxviii–xiv), within it, woman’s scope for self-­ assertion was limited. As Laura Fasick (1995, p.  78) notes: “Although Victorian gender ideology assigned women to the private rather than the public sphere, it did not authorise women to assert themselves openly even in the home.” Arguably, it could be said that the tasks of decorating and beautifying the home were a form of creative outlet for her but her creativity would have been limited by the didactic Victorian imperatives that the home and its contents operate as markers of social status and moral standing. The proliferation of decorative objects and furnishings that characterized the Victorian home could be seen as an almost desperate need to fulfill these imperatives; as Patricia Branca (1975, p. 6) states, “in the middle class life-style […] the drive for social esteem became an obsession”. John Tosh (1999, p. 17) and Branca (1975, p. 6) concur that a non-­ working wife, a contingency of servants and an elegantly furnished home was a more convincing symbol of a man’s status than his business or profession. In addition to being a place of “comfort” and a haven for withdrawal from the external world, the house was also the stage for social ritual and outward manifestation of status in the community (Dickerson 1995, p. xviii). Comfort, signified by an excessive proliferation of ornament, was inextricably linked to good taste, financial status and moral awareness. Furthermore, Thad Logan (1995, p. 217) argues that behavioral psychology suggests a similarity between decorating and marking behaviors: rather than being a form of creative expression, decoration can be seen as an attempt to assert authority and control on the part of subjects whose autonomy was constantly being undermined by legal, medical and religious discourse. Thus excessive decoration, from a feminist perspective, is read not only a question of surplus but of lack: women filled their parlors with objects not only because they had plenty of time, money and consumer goods, but also because they lacked social power. Speaking in relation to sewing and needlework that women did to produce soft furnishings for the home, Logan (1995, p.  213) proposes a causal link between oppression and the production, suggesting that the sheer number of useless decorative objects produced by women were an indication of anxiety, boredom and depression rather than a fulfilling engagement with art, or a form of creativity. This was compounded by the association with sewing

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and embroidering with femininity, which meant that it was not accorded much artistic or creative value (Parker 1984, p.  5). The excessive ornamentation, restless conflict of patterns and motifs, and overwhelming clutter of nearly every room in the Victorian home made even the spacious rooms of large houses seem overcrowded, and the effect in small rooms must have been overwhelming (Gloag 1962, p. 137). Already stifled by her systematic oppression in a patriarchal context, the middle- to upperclass woman was trapped within a stifling domestic environment, with little outlet for any assertion of agency.

Agential Enactments If read in relation to the suffocating physical and psychological constraints imposed on women in the nineteenth century, the casts of dishes, tea-sets, plates, platters and bowls that feature in cultured colonies might be seen as metaphors for the Victorian woman’s body. By extension, the proliferation of the microbes in the casts-as-body could, imaginatively, be read as analogous to the hysteric’s internally suppressed desires being expressed and articulated through the body. With their microbial patterning, the agar casts bear more than a passing resemblance to mass of cells and tissue that make up the epidermis which is filled with blood vessels, capillaries and nerve fibers. Fragile, translucent and vulnerable, the casts recall the delicacy, frailty, infirmity and non-­ corporeal etherealness that were considered ideal traits of Victorian femininity. Objects such as bone china cups and saucers are delicate and easily breakable. The objects from which the casts are made could be utilitarian, but in the Victorian home, were, like the woman of the house herself, primarily decorative, ornamental and signifiers of status and class. The gelatinous forms quiver when moved, in ways that recall the hysteric’s nervous trembling and shaking fits during an attack, and, like the Victorian woman and hysteric that were prone to fainting fits, the casts are unstable, continually susceptible to collapse. Continuing in this imaginative vein, both the patterns of microbial growth and the Victorian woman’s hysterical performances can be considered as somatic enactments of excess: a form of expression that, in its performativity and theatricality, is potentially uncontainable; both transgress the historically gendered boundaries of order, rationality and reason. Un-suppressible and un-repressible, the bacterial growth threatens to escape the already porous boundaries of the casts, not unlike the way in

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which the hysteric tried to free herself from, or rebel against, her confinement in the bourgeois home and its patriarchal gendered constraints. The microbes loosely adhere to, but also break free of “feminized” floral patterns that I attempt to create for them, in a manner not unlike the way in which the disobedient hysteric transgresses the pattern of idealized femininity set out for her. No longer constrained within the confines of the decorative or ornamental, the microbes and the hysteric’s behaviors can be considered as “agential” enactments and in the hysteric’s case, as a means of articulating repressed psychic material through the register of the body. As such, the hysteric’s performance of excess emotion may be construed as a form of agency; speculatively representing an attempt to “speak” from within the physical and psychological constraints imposed on her by patriarchal society. Here, the microbial growth does not merely mirror emotion; “it is emotion expressed, made sensually manifest” (Bates 2018, p. 54). My intra-actions with the microbes could be read as “transformative encounters”—corporeal entanglements that disrupted conceptions of myself as an autonomous, contained and unified subject. While experiencing a sense of bodily and emotional enmeshment while working with the microbes, and consequently, a dissolution of ego boundaries of self and other, I became acutely aware that this was an intraspecies form of practice that, for me, generated new modes of coexistence. The repeated “eruption” of the microbes into vibrantly colored communities offered an opportunity to reflect on my entanglements with the invisible multitude of ecologies that shape the world in ongoing process of intra-activity (Barad 2003, p. 823) and on Radomska’s (2016, p. 32) concept of uncontainability as that which “exposes the excessive character of life: its potential for surplus and transformation that cause life to exceed both the material boundaries of entities and the conceptual frames and established meanings”.

Post-script: Containment/Contagion and COVID-19 While I was making the colonial cultures series in January 2020, I remember hearing reports of six cases of COVID-19 infections in Wuhan, China. At the time of writing this paper in early July 2020, the number of cases worldwide stands at 11.8 million. We are living at a time when Radomska’s (2016, p. 32) concept of “uncontainable life”, as that which is excessive, which exceeds physical, psychological and intellectual boundaries, and Barad’s notions of “intra-action” are manifest in formidable ways. The

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containment-excess narrative that I have touched on in this chapter plays out in almost every facet of everyday life. Containment and prevention of contagion takes the form of self-isolation, quarantine, hygienic practices; sanitizing surfaces, wearing a face mask, practicing social distancing. Disinfect, sterilize, decontaminate. Home is both a place of safety and imminent threat, as seemingly innocuous objects, such as door handles and light switches, become potential sites of danger. Touch could mean disease or death. The COVID-19 virus is described in excessive, performative and dramatic terms—it emerges, spreads, rampages, invades, infects, contaminates and mutates. The media tells us that we are in the midst of a crisis; an outbreak; a catastrophe; a disaster. We are at war with an invisible enemy; a foreign invader, an unwelcome stranger. While the virus’s performativity can be called “hysterical”, it also induces forms of mass hysteria. This takes the form of collective anxiety and fear, manifest in instances of panic buying, catastrophizing, underplaying and outright denial (Maric 2020). Our anxieties and fears are fueled by the media machine, fake news and conspiracy theories, the ever-rising daily death count, and perpetual uncertainty around our futures. Perhaps it is time to accept our decentered place in the universe, or even imagine the possibility of our own extinction (Wald 2008, p. 40).

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Making Ghosts Heard Laura González

“Ida” On 8 April 2016, I performed “Ida” as part of Buzzcut, an artist-led performance festival in Glasgow, Scotland. “Ida” is a one-to-one durational performance: I perform to one member of the audience in turn, and time itself is a material of the work (Skjoldager-Nielsen 2009). The piece adopts the simple format of psychoanalytic space, where the patient lays down on the couch and the analyst sits on a chair at the head of the couch. “Ida” was performed uninterruptedly between 18:30 and 22:30. Audience members were able to sign up for a slot, roughly at 15-minute intervals. “Ida” tells the story of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s most famous patient, Ida Bauer, for whom he used the pseudonym Dora in his case history “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” (Freud 2001). Ida is a young girl of 18 who, at the request of her father, sees Freud for around three months before she breaks off her therapy. Her symptom is, initially, a hysterical cough and her reason for being asked to enter into an analysis with Freud is a confession that Herr K., a friend of her father who is married to Frau K., made sexual advances on her.

L. González (*) Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Braun (ed.), Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66360-5_11

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Ida speaks through me and she tells each audience member the story she told Freud, in the first person. Her account hinges on two dreams and her conviction that her father was offering her to Herr K. in exchange of him being able to continue his affair with Frau K. The audience were free to analyze her words, as Freud did, or simply listen. I did not offer an analysis or hinted at Freud’s view of the case. Only Ida’s words (although of course those recorded by Freud) were uttered. Between the audience member and Ida, in the clinical room, no rules are specified. In “Ida,” the constraints of the durational are supported by those of work that is performed one-to-one. While time is a key part of the work, this is intimate time, behind closed doors, in what psychoanalyst Chris Oakley named a privileged enclosure when writing about both the consulting room and the art gallery (Oakley 2000, p. 149). For psychoanalysis, as a therapy, is also performative, durational, and intimate—and therefore, somewhat privileged. Peggy Phelan relates psychoanalysis to choreography: “if we think of psychoanalysis as a mode of psychic choreography, we can see the symptom as the body’s psychic movement. Psychoanalysis and choreography are two different modes of performing the body’s movement. Each seeks to give the body a system of time” (Phelan 1996, p. 94). I argue that the same could be written about performance art. In psychoanalysis, the boundaries of who does the work and what kind of work they do are not easy to find. The patient is asked to say everything that comes into her head—free association. The analyst, on the other hand, has to listen without memory or desire, not imposing meaning into what they hear. This is evenly-hovering-attention, a kind of listening that places equal emphasis on all elements of communication. The two injunctions are impossible to fulfill, as is meeting the demands of the work of art (Benvenuto 2000, p. 59). gHosting1

“Ida” is currently the second in a series of performances. Both “Ida” and “Don’t Say Anything” are translations of Freud’s case histories of hysterical patients, Dora and Emmy von N., respectively. In order to translate the

1  gHosting, written thus, is different from  the  popular term denoting ending a  personal relationship by suddenly withdrawing all communication, or ghosting.

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work from text into performance, I created a method I call gHosting, in which I host the ghost of the patient in my own body. First, I read Freud’s writing with attention, carefully. On my second re-read, I re-write by hand the words I hear from the patient in the first person, erasing the voice of the doctor. I then record a reading of this new case history in my own voice and, instead of rehearsing the performance, I play it back to myself repeatedly, over several weeks. When I perform, I remember, rather than recite, what I hear, in the way Ida might have remembered occurrences or incidents when she told them to Freud. Thus, every one-to-one performance is different, an encounter created with the specific audience member in the room with Ida. The work is responsive to the context, as some audience members answer her words with their own assertions, questions, or, at times, physically, through contact or by leaving. While the purpose of the work is not to create these reactions, at times, I have to acknowledge them and let these analyses carry some of the work. Yet, no new material is added to Ida’s story. gHosting is a method of intersemiotic translation, between semiotic, both verbal and non-verbal sign systems. In This Little Art, Kate Briggs compares the act of translation to Robinson Crusoe making a table in his island. He is not inventing the concept of table, but has to make one, himself, for the first time, from trees. “When it comes to translation (…) there’s never a question of what to write (…) because the work has already been written. What matters is how to write it again” (Briggs 2017, p. 252). In my translation from case history to performance, this how involves staging, creating the one-to-one durational setting, omitting the doctor’s voice, and switching Ida’s words from third to first person—a really powerful act which I hope to reflect on in future writing. In any act of translation questions of fidelity (equivalence) and failure keep returning in relation to the source. Needless to say, in reading Freud, I am also aware of reading James Strachey’s translation from German to English. Yet, when my translation is presented to an audience, it facilitates something, as a book translation facilitates a reading experience when the original language is not accessible to the reader. Once Robinson’s table is built, it provokes questions around the conversations it will bring about, who will sit on it, how it will change the island (Briggs 2017, p. 249). The method of gHosting involves both ghosts and the rules of hospitality. In the creative development of the work, I am a host and Ida, although she might eventually become a friend, starts the process as a stranger-­ guest, one that has been invited but is not known. According to Jacques

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Derrida, the stranger (or foreigner) is odd or eccentric, and operates as if they held the keys; the host becomes hostage. In inviting strangers to one’s home, there is always a risk they will misbehave, be ungrateful, spoil the party. Yet, we must also respond, and be responsible, to the stranger, as “the stranger reminds one of the other at the heart of one’s own being” (Corris, et al. 2010, p. 9). Kevin D. Gorman traces the root of all modern words associated with hospitality (host, guest, stranger, hostage) to the “same hypothetical Proto-Indo-European root *ghos-ti” (O’Gorman 2007, p. 17). The fact that all come from the same potential word shows the reciprocity and relationality associated with the process. They are bound together by such a strong set of rules they are called a law, law of hospitality. Furthermore, “Implicit in this Proto-Indo-European root *ghos-ti, is the word ‘ghost,’ a semantic intersection that, as Derrida has commented, casts the host and the guest into the realm of the spectral” (Manzanas Calvo and Benito 2017, pp.  2–3). The two elements of my method—hosting and ghosts—are here brought together. Working with visiting ghosts and hosting them is not easy. During the performance of “Ida” I had a dissociation, a loss of some consciousness (perhaps a hysterical Coup de Théatre), a blackout. I don’t remember performing for over an hour, sometime after an encounter with an audience member who left, and left me feeling abandoned. At the end of the evening, I was brought round by the usher, as I was beginning to tell her Ida’s words, continuing to perform, unable to stop. The work is more than just words; it is a possession of my body by Ida. In all the risk assessments I completed, I could not have predicted what happened, how I transformed from Ida’s host to her hostage. Why then do it? Why gHost? For Derrida, working with ghosts is a way of learning to live politically, intergenerationally and with memory (Derrida 1994, p. xviii). Hospitality is transformative of relationships, in my case, from ghost to friend. This transformative quality is evident in a psychoanalytic relation too, which is mediated by ghosts of some kind, even if the ghost is transferred from another situation and not from another realm, that of the dead. It is common for an analyst to remain out of the line of vision and silent for most of the duration of the session, perhaps introjecting only once, usually to reflect back to the patient either something she has said but escaped her, an emerging pattern, or something pertaining to transference, the specific relation between doctor and patient. Transference is

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the phenomenon whereby we unconsciously transfer feelings and attitudes from a person or situation in the past onto a person or situation in the present. The process is at least partly inappropriate to the present. (…) It is the transferring of a relationship, not a person. Only an aspect of a relationship, not the entire relationship, is transferred. (Hughes and Kerr 2000, pp. 58–59)

Transference is crucial in treatment and in one-to-one performance. It is also important in Ida’s case because Freud believed that his failure to analyze her was due to him not paying enough attention to transference, which he theoretically conceptualized for the first time in this case history. gHosting Ida, I offer my body to her as a home. In performing her, I open my home to an audience. This extends hospitality: “Civic and business hospitality developed from private hospitality but retained the key foundation: treat others as to make them feel at home even though they are not at home” (O’Gorman 2008, p. 138). In a way, this is similar to the psychoanalytic setting I reproduce. I translate Ida and deepen my relation to her and to the text. By placing her in the context of a one-to-one durational performance, I re-create an aspect of her relation with Freud. Transferences, if analyzed correctly, can have the therapeutic effect of a recovered memory.

La grande hystérie In order to create performances, I read the case histories I work with, attentively. I also read images, photographs, and drawings. The synoptic table of hysterical symptoms is an index of tiny drawn shapes set out in columns, which was developed under Dr. Charcot at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris in the nineteenth century. These drawings categorize the four stages, or périodes of “La grande hystérie” in female patients (Didi-­ Huberman 2003, pp. 118–119). These four stages were, first, the epileptoid phase, where hysterics mimicked epilepsy, a condition near them in their ward and which in the nineteenth century was taken very seriously, which hysterics were not. Second, clownisme, or illogical and acrobatic movement. This was then followed by the attitudes passionnelles, or passionate attitudes showing devotion and eroticism to arrive, finally, at the phase of delirium, “the painful phase during which hysterics ‘start talking,’ during which one tries to stop the attack, by every possible means” (Didi-­ Huberman 2003, p. 115). Years later, Freud, Charcot’s pupil, popularized

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the writing format of the clinical case history, revealing not only conditions and treatments, but the profound relation between patient and analyst. Charcot’s inscriptions and Freud’s narrations, though, speak in the doctor’s voice. The talking voice doctors at the Salpêtrière were trying to suppress was principally Augustine’s, their star patient. In her seminal book Hystories, Elaine Showalter recognizes that “all medical practice depends on narrative—the ‘doctor’s story,’ which both shapes the formal case study and determines practical treatment” (Showalter 1997, p. 82). Patients are the ones who usually have to modify their stories, re-write them, and fully assimilate them into their lives. And yet the hysteric is miming something beyond what the medical images and words of Freud, Charcot, and other doctors capture, using body, movement, and voice. It is not by chance that my translations are of hysterical patients, or that hysteria has found its way into numerous stages. It has a mimetic quality, taking on “culturally permissible expressions of distress” (Showalter 1997, p. 15). Hysteria is a physical response to emotional conflict, a way for the self—mainly through the body—to rebel against what is perceived to be unreasonable demands. Peggy Phelan states, “Hysteria (…) involves the use of the patient’s body as a stage for the body of the other” (Phelan 1996, p.  97). Psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas writes about how “it is common to portray an hysteric as theatrical without giving it much further thought” (Bollas 2000, p. 117). Furthermore, Bollas’ hysterical theater is “always something of a séance, as ghosts of the past are brought into some strange light and the hysteric feels himself or herself to be something of a medium for the transition of the absents into a type of materialisation” (Bollas 2000, p. 118). This, in the past, gained them accusations of making symptoms up, of wanting attention and resources. For it was the doctor’s voice that was heard, not the hysteric’s. Didi-Huberman explains this relation between doctor and hysteric, one mediated by the act of seeing: (…) something was constructed at the Salpêtrière, something resembling a great optical machine to decipher the invisible lineaments of a crystal: the great, territorial, experimental, magical machine of hysteria. And in order to decipher the crystal, one had to break it, be fascinated by its fall, then break it again and invent machines permitting an even more visible, regimented fall, and then break it once again—just to see. (Didi-Huberman 2003, pp. 9–10)

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Didi-Huberman makes a case for hysterics and doctors at the Salpêtrière to be linked in a performance of “psychiatric theatricality,” starting with a “Coup de Théâtre” (Didi-Huberman 2003, p. 111), a sudden loss of consciousness. These performances involved public attacks and poses which were categorized into the classic four phases by Charcot. They were recorded in the archive known as the Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière, overseen by Paul Richer, “a professor of artistic anatomy at École National Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris” (Didi-Huberman 2003, p. 115). Charcot himself claimed that “in this I am nothing more than a photographer; I inscribe what I see” (quoted in Didi-Huberman 2003, p.  29). The doctors, at best, could only hope for a mechanical reproduction of symptoms. Another argument supporting performance’s interest in hysteria is the tight connection between hysteria and protest. Ida, Freud’s patient, refused to participate, showing a resistance to the dominant narrative of family relations. Hysteria was a way of making herself heard, of producing knowledge rather than submitting to the patriarchal knowledge production on hysteria represented by the doctor’s voice. Hysteria, as a condition, has a destructive quality, as well as the mimetic one I mentioned above: it critiques, including the validity of the cure itself. It scrambles the codes to its own decipherment, and it is by scrambling its own structure that hysteria is critical. Hysterics also represent tropes, rhetorical figures. Ida is the one who got away, a textual ruin, a fragment of an analysis (which Freud could only but acknowledge), a synecdoche for hysteria. A failure to read Ida the patient (or Dora’s case) is a failure to read hysteria. In any situation in which hysteria shows up, it means there is something that is not understood, something that is illegible, unreadable, something escaping meaning. Why is hysteria, over any other condition, not only favored but also particularly apt for performance research? It was through his work with Charcot and his treatment of hysteric patients with Joseph Breuer that Freud conceptualized the technique, practice, and body of theory known as psychoanalysis, which then was a new way of understanding the mind. It all started with hysterics and their speech. It is bound with psychoanalysis’ origin story. Furthermore, Moustapha Safouan singles out this condition over any other in relation to knowledge, which places it in a privileged position:

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We can do our work, and well, without knowing what the transference is; and we can obtain appreciable modifications in the cure of an obsessional neurosis without being able to say exactly how we have obtained them; but it is out of the question to introduce significant modifications in a case of hysteria without knowing. (Safouan 1980, p. 55)

He relates knowledge to the doctor, but, as we will see, knowledge production in hysteria is mainly on the side of the patient. Lacanian analyst Gérard Wajcman, in his paper “The Hysteric’s Discourse,” explains how the history and condition of hysteria ushers talking about it. The history of hysteria, Wajcman writes, “would demonstrate the failure of knowledge to unveil the mystery, as can be seen from certain historicist interpretations. Still, this history describes the conditions under which a mystery triggers the production of knowledge” (Wajcman 2003). The title of his essay references Jacques Lacan’s theory of the Four Discourses, comprising those of the master, the university, the analyst, and the hysteric (Wajcman 2003). Lacan’s Four Discourses, which he discussed in Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, are quasi-­ equations, where four elements are rotated into four positions, two on the side of the agent and two on the side of the other. While I explore the Four Discourses in relation to artistic practice in the book chapter “Work of Art as Analyst as Work of Art” (González 2018), here I want to concentrate on the relation between the hysteric and the production of knowledge. It is the hysteric’s discourse that, for Lacan, produces knowledge, and not the university (which produces split subjects), the master-slave relation (which produces objects that cause desire) or even the analyst’s discourse (which produces the symptom). In the diagnostic manuals hysteria marks women’s bodies as pathologies: the wandering womb and the arching bodies. It is an exaggeration of woman, woman as dis-ease. Yet, the diagnosis itself is marked by a denial of the visceral and a failure to know. While hysteria and knowledge are linked, looking at hysteria is not, for Lacan, how knowledge is produced: “the desire to know is not what leads to knowledge” (Lacan 2007, p.  23). This is, perhaps, why medical discourse and the doctor’s voice have failed in relation to hysteria, now that it has disappeared from diagnostic manuals and been replaced by other conditions (from post-traumatic stress disorder to conversion disorders). Such a history, privileging the doctor’s voice, demonstrates the failure of knowledge to unveil the mystery of hysteria (and thus of the mind-body

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connection). Hysteria itself, as a condition, has not disappeared; only medical interest in it has (Stone, et al. 2008). In order to produce knowledge, one has to do it, according to Lacan, though “the hysterization of discourse. In other words, it is the structural introduction, under artificial conditions, of the hysteric’s discourse” (Lacan 2007, p. 33). Hysteria as a Freudian clinical concept is different from Lacan’s Hysteric’s Discourse, which designates a specific social bond. One does not need to be a hysteric, in the clinical sense, to enter the Hysteric’s Discourse, but, of course, the hysteric is in this Discourse. In my performances, I am reclaiming hysteria as a way to rebel and resist. Analysis, diagnosis, symptomatology are all signs of patriarchal hegemony. The hysteric fails to produce knowledge (at least a kind of knowledge that is expected, scientific) and this is then portrayed as feminine failure, but it is mis-known, misunderstood. This is what one-to-one durational performance (and according to Lacan a sustained psychoanalysis), with its intimate and time conditions, with its relation to the impossible—which gives it risk and courage—with ghosts, hospitality and transference, can do: coming to understand hysteria. Lacan moved away from symptomatology and understood hysteria as a structure, one that asks a question concerning a position with respect to an other’s desire: Che Vuoi? What do you want from me? And even when silenced, the hysteric does ask this question, through her body: “when the hysteric presents her riddled body to the physician, even though mute, she poses her question” (Wajcman 2003). In hysteria and in the Hysteric’s Discourse, the body is the site of knowledge production, a kind of knowledge that is not only distinct from intellectual processes but enables the experience of understanding the mind-body, the connection between two realms we tend to perceive as separate, but are not. This is the crystal Didi-­ Huberman was referring to above. Lacan offers us a further and useful distinction in terms of knowledge production. When he refers to the knowledge produced by the hysteric, he does not mean the French connaissance, imaginary knowledge, or even self-knowledge. Instead, he relates it to savoir, a symbolic, intersubjective, supposed knowledge that is related to jouissance, enjoyment beyond the pleasure principle. It is a knowledge gained in relation to an other. This quest for savoir is also what animates psychoanalytic practice and performance research. I mean performance research, though, in its purest form, not its institutionalized setting. The university as a concept (more than a place), has maintained alive the idea of a totalizing discourse, one that

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does not easily enable dismantling its foundation. This makes savoir difficult to obtain. As Lacan warned us in the quote above, a desire to know is not enough. The problem with the hysterization of discourse and the knowledge produced is its dissemination. Performance allows one to enter the Hysteric’s Discourse and unveil knowledge, bringing it to light, experiencing it. Performance research can allow for its capture and its dissemination but the problem here is that language per se does not release the hysteric. It is not language per se that rescues the hysteric, but a language attached to a more affectual or embodied imaginary, where “she” can own not just one, but many desires. A focus on language and representation misses the fundamental meaning of the hysteric’s mimesis which is a staged performance for the other, but it is a peculiar narration in the sense that it is one-sided. (…) She is like a soap opera star forced to play the same role, over and over again. (Campbell 2005, p. 346)

This might be because, in a way, hysteria itself is a language rather than a disease and we need to pay attention to the hysteric utterance, to what it is telling us, rather than ask her to convert her insight into something readily understandable. It is us who must do the work. In order to share the knowledge of the hysteric, hysterical language has to be used. This is the potential in performance research, a field of enquiry privileged in its position to hystericize in body and language. But for that, we must erase the doctor’s voice; we must try not to ventriloquize the way language is used in other disciplines which we might associate with knowledge but which might only be reproducing the University Discourse and producing split subjects.

Possessed/Dispossessed gHosting starts with reading and gHosting is also a method for reading, in the broader sense, from case histories to films and political events, and, through this (hystericized) reading, knowledge (savoir) can be produced. This reading, though embodied and engaged, performative and lived—it is so because it asks of the text the Hysteric’s question, Que Vuoi?, What do you want from me?—comes with certain downsides. In “Ida” and my other Freud pieces, I let ghosts possess and dispossess my body, as “ghosts haunt places that exist without them; they return to where they have been

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excluded from” (Derrida 1994, p. 152). As Mark Fisher writes: “The one who is possessed is also dispossessed—of their own identity and voice. But this kind of dispossession is of course a precondition for the most potent writing and performance. Writers have to tune into other voices; performers must be capable of being taken over by outside forces” (Fisher 2014, p. 52). In this process of possession and dispossession of my body, I gain knowledge, which is found “in a gap between the limits of two ontological categories. [Knowledge] escapes any positivist or constructivist logic by emerging between, and yet not as part of, two negations: neither, nor” (Wolfreys 2013, p. 70). I do this through intersemiotic translation, understanding the term as broadly and inclusively as possible, hopping across media, from text, to writing, reading, speaking, moving, hosting, transferring, staging, performing. This is gHosting. As Kate Briggs ascertains, “translating a book is never simply translating the words in a book, as if a book were this discrete, bounded object. It is an occasion for writing, for reading, for talking to other people, for researching, for living. For learning, basically” (LaRue 2017). One of the things that occurred to me in this process, though, is that I was not only possessed by Ida, I was possessed by Freud’s text. Artist Sharon Kivland also became obsessed with Dora, Freud’s pseudonym for Ida. Her work, the artist’s book A Case of Hysteria, helped her to gain knowledge of her symptom: “If no longer a chronic condition, reading Dora is still the sickness. The cure A Case of Hysteria records and effects is not one of the subject or the text but of the reader (who is only in the first instance the writer). Clinically, the book’s aim is not to cure ‘Dora’ or Dora but to cure itself of Dora” (Kivland 1999, p. x). Hysterics hold knowledge because of the mind-body split that occurs in the condition; thus, they enable hysterical discourse. The savoir-­knowledge is acquired through gHosting. Knowledge is then transmitted, to a very small audience, through duration and intimacy. The body as a research process, especially the body in performance, when put in relation to other bodies (the symbolic and intersubjective Lacan discussed with savoir) presents a kind of knowledge distinct from just intellectual processes. The tools for the unveiling of this knowledge are observing (the self), feeling, sensing, reading, translating, and hosting, among others. But it is with language that we come unstuck.

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One Final Note Performance, in its body-full expression but also in its writing, is in a key position to investigate hysterical savoir and many artists have already explored its potential. But this work is often not interdisciplinary, not exploring knowledge that is seen as the domain of another field of enquiry. It can also be seen as too practical, too unrigorous, or too theoretical, difficult to apply. Yet, performative writing—a practice not without its problems of course—is “a space where others might see themselves (…) allowing others to not only see what the writer might see but also to feel what the writer might feel” (Pelias 2014, pp.  13–14). It is embodied, evocative, partial or incomplete (and therefore representative of the body’s experience, and of hysteria) and has material force—“it is both a material substance that locates its presence and an action in the world that articulates the unsaid, unnoticed, and unquestioned” (Pelias 2016, p.  283). These are precisely the qualities needed to articulate knowledge appearing on the site of the body, mirroring its qualities and our experience. One of the reasons I am not performing the writing of this paper (although of course I am) is because I want to ensure that knowledge is recognized as such. We are used to discourses (especially those of the university) operating in a certain way and we think knowledge comes in a particular form, especially in the way it looks and feels. If I hystericized my discourse—which I have done before, to curious results—it would have been mistaken for the speech of a hysteric and thus knowledge might be missed, because it did not come in the way one thought it might. Peggy Phelan, a model of knowledge which is embodied in writing, articulates how “suturing consciousness into bodily ‘truth,’” the domain of performance, might not be recognized as knowledge: The body does not experience the world the same way consciousness does: the gap between these two ways of “processing” experiences punctuates the formation of the unconscious. The function of the analysis then is to repair this join, to find a way to suture the body into time’s order. The equally logical task of suturing consciousness into bodily “truth” remains outside the official domains of mainstream science and thrives in new-age philosophy and alternative medicine. (Phelan 1996, pp. 90–91)

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References Benvenuto, Bice. 2000. “The Impossible.” Journal of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research 12, (Special Issue: In the Place of an Object): 45–59. Bollas, Christopher. 2000. Hysteria. New York and London: Routledge. Briggs, Kate. 2017. This Little Art. Fitzcarraldo Editions. Campbell, Jan. 2005. “Hysteria, Mimesis and the Phenomenological Imaginary.” Textual Practice 19, no. 3: 331–351. Corris, Michael, Jaspar Joseph-Lester and Sharon Kivland. 2010. Transmission Annual: Hospitality. London: Artwords Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York and London: Routledge. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2003. Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière. Translated by Alisa Hartz. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Fisher, Mark. 2014. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Alresford: Zero Books. Freud, Sigmund. 2001 [1905]. “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria”. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume VII (1901–1905): A Case of Hysteria, Three Essays on Sexuality and Other Works. Translated under the general editorship of James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, 1–122. London: Vintage. González, Laura. 2018. “Work of Art as Analyst as Work of Art.” Transpositions: Aesthetico-Epistemic Operators in Artistic Research, edited by Michael Schwab, 75–95. Leuven: Orpheus Institute Series, Leuven University Press. Hughes, Patricia and Ian Kerr. 2000. “Transference and Countertransference in Communication between Doctor and Patient.” Advances in Psychiatric Treatment 6, no. 1: 57–64. Kivland, Sharon. 1999. A Case of Hysteria. London: Book Works. Lacan, Jacques. 2007. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Russell Grigg. New York: W. W. Norton. LaRue, Madeleine. 2017. Waiting Translations: A Conversation With Kate Briggs. musicandliterature.org/features/2017/11/20/a-­conversation-­with-­kate-­ briggs. Accessed on April 25, 2018. Manzanas Calvo, Ana Maria M., and Jesús Benito. 2017. Hospitality in American Literature and Culture: Spaces, Bodies, Borders. New  York and London: Routledge.

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Oakley, Chris. 2000. “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis—A Response.” Journal of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research 12, Special Issue: 141–160. O’Gorman, Kevin D. 2007. “Dimensions of Hospitality: Exploring Ancient Origins.” Hospitality: A Social Lens, Oxford: Elsevier: 17–32. ———. 2008. “The Essence of Hospitality from the Texts of Classical Antiquity: The Development of a Hermeneutical Helix to Identify the Origins and Philosophy of the Phenomenon of Hospitality.” PhD diss., University of Strathclyde. Pelias, Ronald J. 2014. Performance: An Alphabet of Performative Writing. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press. ———. 2016. “Performative Writing: The Ethics of Representation in Form and Body.” Qualitative Inquiry: Past, present and Future. A Critical Reader, edited by Norman K.  Denzin and Michael D.  Giardina, 272–287. New  York and London: Routledge. Phelan, Peggy. 1996. “Dance and the History of Hysteria.” Corporealities Dancing Knowledge, Culture and Power, edited by Susan Leigh Foster, 90–105. New York and London: Routledge. Safouan, Moustapha. 1980. “In Praise of Hysteria.” Returning to Freud: Clinical Psychoanalysis in the School of Lacan, edited and translated by Stuart Schneiderman, 55–60. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Showalter, Elaine. 1997. Hystories. Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture. London: Picador. Skjoldager-Nielsen, Kim. 2009. “Challenging Smooth Consumption: Durational Performance as Cultural Misfit.” Panel abstract for PSi#15 (June 24–28): MISPERFORMANCE: misfiring, misfitting, misreading, Zagreb. Stone, Jon, Russell Hewett, Alan Carson, Charles Warlow, and Michael Sharpe. 2008. “The ‘Disappearance’ of Hysteria: Historical Mystery or Illusion?” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 101, no. 1: 12–18. Wajcman, Gérard. 2003. “The Hysteric’s Discourse.” The Symptom 4 (Spring). https://www.lacan.com/hystericdiscf.htm. Accessed on April 18, 2018. Wolfreys, Julian. 2013. “Preface: On Textual Haunting”. The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory, edited by María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren, 69–74. New York: Bloomsbury.

Hysterical Aesthetics in Contemporary Performance: Theater, Dance, Voice Jonathan W. Marshall

“Fifine has had an attack!” We run. The poor child has fallen onto the cold paving stones, foaming, contorted, her arms in a cross, her back arched, [the muscles] contracted, tensed almost into the air. “Quickly, nurses! take her, lie her there…” … this parcel of mad nerves, screaming, moving, the head thrown back, a possessed subject at an exorcism, like I had seen in the old painting of the holy saint which I saw in Charcot’s office. —Alphonse Daudet. “Le Figaro,” 1894

Joanna Townsend argues that the historic medical condition known as “hysteria” cannot only serve as a topic to be explored within drama and performance. It can also act as a structural metaphor or set of performative strategies, which support the construction of a “hysterical performance text,” serving to emphasize the “splits and contradictions” within and between characters, their voices and their bodies (2000, pp.  127–131). This aesthetic strategy was pioneered by the Surrealists and others who J. W. Marshall (*) Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Edith Cowan University, Mount Lawley, WA, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Braun (ed.), Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66360-5_12

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encountered hysterical patients at the Pitié-Salpêtrière complex and elsewhere. Artists today do not draw directly on these precedents, but what I am calling the hysterical aesthetic is still with us. Hysterical aesthetics may take many forms, but the most prominent strategy is that of dialectical corporeal surrogation—or hosting, in the words of Laura González (2019, pp. 171–182)—whereby bodies and voices echo or inhabit one another, while the host-performer retains a degree of critical distance from the possessing agent.1 In the phrasing of vocalist Sage Harlow, this constitutes a dangerous but necessary aesthetics of love, wherein that which arises from within or without the host body to deform and reconfigure it must be accepted with compassion, even as this challenges one’s own sense of subjectivity. The modern hysterical diagnosis emerged out of what Michel Foucault (1978) named biopolitics: attempts by states, agents, institutions and groups to determine how to manage, support and control the mental and physical potential of the individual for social harmony, industry and power. The hysteric arose as a social and medical typology for those subjects whose bodies and minds represented a challenge to this evolving set of practices. Hysteria revealed a latent disposition for illness, seizure and psycho-­corporeal collapse within the subject. Yet hysteria’s nature was not well understood, while its muscular tremors, mutism, vomiting, paralyses and other corporeal signs made it clear that hysteria was of the body, even if its physical causation remained obscure. Based at the Salpêtrière women’s hospice in Paris, the founder of French neurology Jean-Martin Charcot described hysteria as one of a series of all but unknowable neuropathological “Sphinxes” (1888–1894, vol. 4, p.  179), while his former student Sigmund Freud claimed that to solve hysteria was akin to solving the riddle which the hero Oedipus faced in rescuing Thebes from the Sphinx. For both Freud and Charcot, hysteria’s ultimate origins lay with the individual’s parentage, with one’s hereditary, be this childhood experiences (relations with parents, traumatic psycho-physical states, injuries and infections) or genetic dispositions. Although Oedipus initially resisted acknowledging his true lineage, Freud considered the mythic character who appeared at the close of Sophocles’ play Oedipus Tyrannus, stripped 1  I am partly inspired here by Patrice Pavis’ claim that the body of the Butoh dancer— another quintessentially hysterical figure from the history of performing arts—constitutes a “hollow body,” an empty space or vacuum waiting to be filled by chthonic forces which are not necessarily proper to it; see Marshall (2013, 2020).

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of his delusions, as a model for the healthy subject (Freud 1973, vols 4–5). Shakespeare’s Hamlet by contrast represented the neurotic, unable to reconcile his ambiguous attachments to his uncle, father or mother. Hamlet died refusing to accept his status as the scion of a parricidal combination of incestuous desires and traumas. Freud and Charcot both insisted that hysteria was not confined to women, but found in men, whose masculine strength and composure typically crumbled under its influence (Micale 1995, pp. 161–8, 239–60). For both authors, hysteria was linked to early modern demonological delusions. Charcot and Freud agreed that accounts of possession, fugue and religious experiences had their origins in the perceptual and sensory deformations brought on by hysteria and related conditions (Freud 1973, vols 8 and 19; Charcot and Richer 1887). In what follows, I build on Townsend and González to argue that hysterical symptoms and the historiographic discourse that surrounds them might serve as a heuristic for the classification of contemporary strategies in performance. The hysteriform aesthetic serves to challenge the monadal self which arose out of modern biopolitics, presenting an influential prototype for the post-human subject of our own time. The conceptualization of identity as a fundamentally unified or bounded concept, even if it encompasses a degree of processual division through its component parts, remains a necessary fiction for political, cultural and economic activity. Hysteria and the various neuro-psychological disorders affiliated with it (including dissociated hallucinatory states such as fugue, catalepsy, lethargy, somnambulism and seizure) did not conform to this unitary model. The hysteric, therefore, served as an experimental subject and on-stage demonstrator for how the subject functioned, and of what remained unresolved within this conceptualization. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries hysterics were tested, prodded and put on stage by doctors, mystics, artists and entrepreneurs. The hysteriform aesthetic challenges, problematizes, unseats or stages alternatives to dominant models of subjectivity and embodiment, presenting a fragmentary, self-­ divided subject in performance (see Fig. 1), closely allied to spiritual science and ways of rethinking experiences that exceed normal human potentialities. The first sustained investigations of hysteria’s unsettling potential for aesthetic critique were authored by those who had direct experience of the disease, particularly those who had studied with Charcot’s peers or had been interred within the wards. The Salpêtrière neurologists Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne, Paul Richer and Henry Meige taught both

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VAR I É T É D É M O N IAQ U E D E LA G RAN D E AT TAQ U E H Y S T É R I Q U E

Contorsions.

Fig. 1  The self-divided subject: contortions executed during the “demoniacal variety” of hysterical seizures (Charcot and Richer 1887, p.  103). (Courtesy of Harvard Medical Library)

healthy and pathological anatomy at the Paris School of Arts, where Marcel Duchamp and others studied (Marshall 2008b, 2009). Several “trance dancers,” claiming to have been patients of Charcot and his peers toured Europe (Marshall 2011, pp. 268–72). Magdeleine Guipert was the most famous of these “Traumtänzerin,” for whom the vibrations emitted by the playing of a piano transformed her into a fleshy, reflexive automaton. Her doctor Émile Magnin claimed that while in a hysterical trance “her normal consciousness [was] more or less annihilated” and so she became physically “possessed” by the “pitch, volume, sound, color, intervals, and rhythms” of the sonic waves generated by the music (Magnin 1903, p. 410). Several key members of the Surrealist movement studied with members of Charcot’s service, and it was the Surrealists who quoted photographs and writings from Charcot’s circle—notably those from Salpêtrière

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neurologist Joseph Babinski and neuro-psychologist Pierre Janet. The Surrealists and their peers thereby laid the groundwork for the hysterical aesthetic of today. Citing Babinski, Louis Aragon and André Breton (1928) described hysteria as “the greatest poetic discovery” of the age. Their study of hysteria and metapsychology led them to adopt fugue states and automatic writing as means to produce art, to attempt to trace jagged, electric-like impulses across minds and bodies (Marshall 2009, 2020; Lomas 2004), as well as to metaphorically reorganize bodies as discontinuous collages of movement, image, and form—be this in dance (Hélène Vanel’s “hysterical mimodrama” The Missing Act, 1938), theater (Guillaume Apollinaire’s The Breasts of Tiresias, 1917, classified by Peter Nicholls (1991) as an “anti-Oedipal drama”), photomedia (Max Ernst, Hannah Höch, Claude Cahun, Pierre Molinier, Hans Bellmer, or that “well-known hysteric,” the Dadaist John Heartfield; [Doherty 1997, p. 129]), literature and music (Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonata, 1932, Raoul Hausmann’s Fmsbw, 1918, and other concrete poetry) or painting (Salvador Dali’s “paranoiac-critical” methodology). The Surrealists sought to explode conventional perception, encouraging new, hallucinatory affinities between objects and bodies—as where Apollinaire’s sex-changing dramatic character Tiresias/Thérèse (named after the blind seer in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus) let fly his/her breasts in the form of balloons. Such sensorial and corporeal derangements made the subject sensitive to the newly found beauty of “the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table,” as the Comte de Lautréamont had it—this corporeal image itself being an assemblage of non-identical subjective fragments come together as a new and violently challenging organic whole. This aesthetic has lost none of its potency, although the links between the hysterical aesthetic of the last forty years and the work of Charcot, Freud and their peers, is now found in parallels and affinities between hysterical pathology and aesthetic form, rather than via direct lines of influence. The most common strategy employed within contemporary hysteriform performance is that of corporeal mimicry and habitation, whereby historical images are enacted within and across the artist’s body. The historiography of hysteria has bequeathed to us an extensive archive illustrating poses adopted by women, and in some cases men, whose bodies shook, shuddered, twisted, enacted complex erotic or ecstatic dramas, mimicked demonological possession, or exhibited other symptoms. Documentation includes the three volumes of the Iconographie Photographique de la

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Fig. 2  Albert Londe using flash and stop-motion photography on a hysteric, La Nature (1883). Quoted by Max Ernst in his collage book The Hundred Headless Woman (1929). (Image courtesy of Conservatoire Numérique des Arts et Métiers)

Salpêtrière (1877–1880) by neuro-psychiatrist Désiré Bourneville and photographer Paul Régnard, as well as nineteen volumes of the Nouvelle Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière (1888–1918) assembled by Richer, physiologist and photographer Albert Londe, Charcot’s senior student Georges Gilles de la Tourette, the neurologist art-historian Henry Meige, and others. Fragments of speech and descriptions of sounds ventured by the patients were also included. These publications present physical stances adopted by the patients during para-epileptic seizures, in addition to the extraordinary fugue states and hallucinatory hypnotic scenarios which the physicians saw as a diagnostic feature of hysteria. Photographs document poses which endured across the extended exposure period of early photography, while Richer supplemented these with sketches of more fugitive positions (Marshall 2008b; Richer 1885). Londe also pioneered stop-motion photography (see Fig.  2), recording rapidly changing seizures exhibited by both men and women (Bernard and Gunthert 1993, Figs.  10 and 11). Widely published in journals and

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Fig. 3  Albert Londe’s stop-motion photographs of male hysteric, Leon Brodsky. Richer’s sketches of these photographs appeared in Charcot’s published lessons. (Wiki Commons)

newspapers during Charcot’s lifetime, it was principally Richer’s illustrations together with photographs taken by Régnard, Londe and their close associate physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey, which the Surrealists republished and reworked (see Fig.  3; Braun 1994; Lomas 2004; Marshall 2009). This has led to such images becoming an all but ubiquitous feature of hysterical iconography.2 Anne Ferran’s dramatic photographic series I Am the Rehearsal Master (1989) uses the stop-motion photographic approach employed by Londe, 2  The focus of Aragon and Breton on photographs of the young, charismatic subject Augustine Louise Gleizes has led many artists and critics to distort the historical record by viewing Augustine as typical of Charcot’s patients, which she was not. The majority of the patients at the Salpêtrière were mature working-class women few of whose seizures exhibited the erotic charge which Augustine presented. Marshall (2016, pp. 136–145).

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Fig. 4  Narelle Benjamin in Cordelia’s Beresford’s I Dream of Augustine (2005). (Image courtesy of Beresford)

Richer and Marey to produce a series of diffuse black and white freeze-­ frames showing a woman in a white hospital gown re-enacting positions from the Salpêtrière archive. The multiplicity of images produces a sense of visual and corporeal vacillation, or as curator Claire Monneraye puts it, the performer’s body is “fiercely present” but “tragically absent,” its totality scattered across the discontinuous frames (Various 2017). Despite this, in those stills which show the face clearly framed, “a powerful elegance shone through”—unlike in the more fraught, pained images typical of the Salpêtrière. A similar strategy is used by cinéaste Cordelia Beresford in her film with dancer Narelle Benjamin (see Fig.  4), entitled I Dream of Augustine (2005). Beresford employs a range of filmic distortions, slowing the body’s trajectory, rewinding it, and setting it against short selections of text taken from the case histories. Performed in a physical and acoustic space at once expansively echoing yet claustrophobically self-­ enclosed, we hear the thud of the body as it returns to the ground during seizure, the labored pant of breath, and the scratch of the needle as Marey’s sphygmomanometer traces the frequency of the patient’s movement. The needle marks out jerky waveform lines below the increasingly frenzied corporeal form. Hysteria emerges here as an intensely mediated but powerful, rebellious and fractured type of embodiment which resists any

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attempts to master it, even as Beresford shows Benjamin’s body posed— and even drawn upon—by the hands of an off-stage doctor. Charcot’s lectures on hysteria and other conditions exhibited a similar degree of vacillation and anatomical fragmentation in how Charcot presented materials. Moses Allen Starr relates that, “Dismissing the patient,” Charcot would “describe the lesion,” or visible corporeal defect within postmortem tissue. Following this: on the screen on the opposite side of the stage the magic lantern would flash out the picture he wished to show, either in the form of a sketch made from nature, or an actual slide of a section of the spinal cord, or part of the brain magnified by the microscope, or a photograph of some unusual clinical type. (Starr et al. 1926, p. 12)

Charcot employed preserved specimens, slide projections of historical paintings featuring demonological subjects, sphygmomanometer tracings, and his own bodily mimicry. The aim was to achieve a kind of medical transubstantiation wherein the bodies of the on-stage patients—generally more than one, so as to represent hysteria in its totality—together with mediated fragments of other bodies, were transfigured into a synthetic virtual whole through Charcot’s diagnostic multimedia display (Marshall 2016, pp. 77–85). The hysterical subject and its body was dissected and reified, even as it was sewn back together as a diagnostic archetype. Theater-maker Dianne Hunter also used images from the Salpêtrière as the starting point for her play Dr Charcot’s Hysteria Shows (1989).3 Her actors adopted positions from the photographs and sketches, and analyzed the “subjective impressions” of inhabiting these poses. Recognizing a distance between the actors and the historical subjects they played, Hunter nevertheless argued that using corporeal identification to evoke the patients’ experience served as an “enabling fiction” for new performances which challenged contemporary biopolitics (Hunter 1993, p. 94). Joseph Roach asserts much the same thing when he argues that the uncanny 3  Hunter’s play was not the first to dramatize life at the Salpêtrière. Charcot’s collaborator and close associate, the psycho-physiologist Alfred Binet, worked with playwright André de Latour de Lorde to produce the Grand Guignol comedy A Lesson at the Salpêtrière (De Lorde, André de Latour, with Alfred Binet 1909) in which a hysteric throws acid onto the face of a doctor who tormented her, while the character based on Charcot continues his lesson in a dissociated state, informing his audience of how to neutralize the acid; see Marshall (2016, pp. 213–240).

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return of the presence of the dead “may speak freely through the bodies of the living” and through material likenesses such as effigies held aloft in popular rituals, which he calls a process of “surrogation” (Roach 1996, p. xiii). Hunter’s claim is given additional credence by the fact that hysterical symptoms often replicated conventional social and medical poses, be these those of gender (woman as weak; the nun in ecstasy; the defective woman as animalistic body; the defective man as flaccid muscle) or of other diseases (organic bilaterally asymmetrical paralyses, the disordered tremors of chorea and Tourette’s syndrome). Like Hunter, Anna Furse strives to make sense of hysteria so as to craft a theatrical narrative. Furse’s Augustine (Big Hysteria) (1991) emphasized the fragmenting anatomical logic of hysterical diagnosis.4 The protagonist Augustine eventually rebels against her doctors, proclaiming that Charcot and Freud would “see my body fly away into a thousand sparks,” as in Charcot’s slide shows. Her “crisis” or seizure would “shatter” the body and self into “millions of crystal splinters … I will disappear. Dis-­ membered” before coming “together again in a form you won’t recognize” (Furse 1997, p. 49).5 This almost ecstatic explosion outward of the body and its incandescent representations acted as a climax in which glowing images from the Salpêtrière archives were projected with what is described in the stage directions as an ever increasing (one might say hysterical) “speed and frenzy, a montage of photographs” which “flash around the stage so that the effect is almost stroboscopic. The audience’s eye is giddied” (49). As in Londe’s stop-motion images and Beresford’s episodic freezing of the dancer, Furse renders the hysterical body as an almost uncontainable array of shifting images and embodiments which move across the different media of text, film, speech and flesh. Rendered abstract through these depictions, Augustine exits through “a window of light, as though performing a conjuring trick” (49). Furse positions sexual abuse as the unacknowledged cause of historical hysteria, a claim partly borne out by the archive. The Salpêtrière’s case histories routinely included accounts of rape and sexual assault. Furse’s reading is moreover in line with the reinterpretation of Freud’s seduction 4  I omit from discussion Cixous’ own Portrait of Dora (1976) which has been analyzed by Townsend, Diamond and others. An especially loquacious, bourgeois patient, Dora’s case history and theatrical representation of it do not reflect patients at the Salpêtrière. 5  Furse has literally transposed the French term “la crise” as “crisis,” though in the case histories Charcot used the word to refer to a physical fit or seizure.

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theory by contemporary psychotherapists, who reject Freud’s conclusion that majority of childhood sexual encounters involving adults represent repressed infantile fantasies, rather than being incidents which patients actually suffered. Townsend objects to this narrativizing of hysteria, invoking the more open-ended reading of hysterical historiography by 1970s feminist literary critics such as Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément (1975). Townsend argues that reproduction and surrogation as practiced by Furse and Hunter is insufficient to produce a hysterical performance per se. Townsend distinguishes between those representations which remain hysterical in the telling, versus those which decode hysteria as a sign of something else— what one might call by an interpretive psychological approach akin to which Freud and Charcot employed with Hamlet, Oedipus Tyrannus and historical accounts of demonological possession. Although the Surrealists drew on the work of Charcot, Janet and Freud, they did not seek to cure themselves of hysterical tendencies. The Surrealists strove to actively cultivate and extend expressions of hysteria as a creative assault on modern biopower. Like González, they sought to produce “enigmas that do not have solutions” (González 2019, p. 168). Whether a performance is hysterical or not, therefore, depends on how hysteria itself is read: be this as a sign of sexual abuse (Furse), of a more generalized apparatus of scopic and institutional repression (Hunter), or as an unreadable symptom of subjective, corporeal and communicative aporia which may or may not also include sexual abuse or scopic oppression (Townsend, Beresford, Ferran). Inasmuch as we can trust the patient records, hysteria would seem to have been “over-determined,” as Freud put it, arising out of a multiplicity of inciting causes. The Iconographie includes accounts of animal attacks, industrial accidents, impoverished upbringings, childhood encounters with corpses, experiences of military conflict, violence, sexual assaults at the hands of employers and others, further presaged by morbid hereditary conditions scattered throughout the sufferer’s family. Reducing hysteria to a single origin—sexual or otherwise—is therefore difficult. The Salpêtrière cases offer something closer to a morphing, Janus-like visage, corporeally imbricated across multiple inciting factors and functional disorders which were dispersed throughout body and self (Marshall 2020, 2008a). González provides a useful set of tasks which the artist might adopt so as to present to the audience with such a vacillating sense of subjective and corporeal self-strangeness. González takes the third-person narratives of disease authored by Freud and Charcot and transcribes them by hand

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(González 2019, p. 171). In doing so, González adopts first-person narration to produce a semi-fictional diary. The artist then makes an audio recording of herself reciting this text. She then listens back to her recorded voice, allowing this acoustically performed subject to guide the actor in learning the new aural text. She becomes in effect a fleshy sphygmomanometer, akin to Guipert, or Benjamin in I Dream of Augustine. This method therefore produces a series of distinct psycho-corporeal strata in the performer which, although placed over each other, do not necessarily fuse. Words are embodied through discrete recitations and corporeal acts: the hand and arm writing; the lips, jaws and tongue speaking; the ears and body listening; and the total body bringing these materials together through an act of re-embodiment akin to that which Furse’s character alludes to. González reflects: There is a curious feeling when hearing one’s voice in the course of reading aloud, a strangeness in experiencing oneself outside, as if one had an encounter with an it in the I, an encounter permeated with Lacanian extimacy, intimacy outside. (González 2019, p. 172)

Steven Connor argues that this hysterical experience of acoustic self-­ strangeness is in fact normative to modern subjectivity. Citing the development of devices such as Edison’s gramophone, or the wheezing, ventriloquizing automaton christened “Euphonia” presented to London audiences in 1846, Connor (2000) argues that listening to the human voice echoed back to oneself is to perceive “the mark both of the self’s presence to, and its estrangement from, itself” in which the vocal body “enacts the strangeness of the self’s [own] self-presence.” There is a perceptive, psychological and affective paradox in observing something which is of one’s identity, but which may travel through space as an independent corpus of materially present sound waves, moving beyond the subject who produced it. Hysterical voices recorded in the archives present to the reader an almost demonic compendium of howls, transcribed lines of movement, gnashings of teeth, ululations, coprolalia, scraps of texts and songs, cries of joy, and screams of pain, which exceeded the unity of the subject from whom they emanated, taking on a life of their own as they moved across the records. The work of theater-maker Margaret Cameron is underpinned by a sequence of psycho-corporeal divisions and acts of reflexive listening akin

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to the model which González adopts. Cameron’s approach may be identified as hysterical by the way she characterizes her practice as spasmodic, akin to what emerges within tremulous athetose paralyses or glottal spasms such as those which produce hysterical mutism. Cameron identifies the “shudder” as the moment when the body moves away from itself in a moment of subjective paroxysm. The body tenses in order to explosively bounce back. To “shudder” then is to “re-present the Subject” to itself so that it may “resound” (like Benjamin’s body as it strikes the floor) in a second embodied act which is painfully but lovingly joined to the first (Cameron 2016, p. 102). Flesh here is rendered dialectic. Speech too is a profoundly dialectic physical phenomenon, which both takes something away from the subject (the voice, sent out to be appropriated by the doctor, the audience, or the lover) and which then returns to be reclaimed by the subject as a second self. Cameron argues that the scripted solo performance functions “in many ways is like a shell” or doubled body, which resonates with that which is placed within it. There is an “acoustic and somatic materiality of language” as “an inscription of … life … it occurs … on each occasion of audience” (Cameron 2016, p. 24). As with González, the practical blueprint which Cameron offers for achieving this is for the actor to accept her status as the one who is looked at and whom is listened to. Cameron observes that she learned how to make theater by being a life model for art classes similar to those which Richer, Meige, Duchenne and their peers staged in their own artistic anatomy classes. “I choose to be literal and to enact the feminine in an obsessional drama, seeking validation from a masculine ‘other,’” she reflects: “It is a serious joke” (Cameron 2016, pp.  33, 50). Postmodern dancer Deborah Hay—whose workshops Cameron attended—claims that: To ‘invite being seen’ is … made up of three verbs … to invite, to be, to see. Inviting being seen spontaneously creates relationship between the player/ performer and audience who may otherwise go unrealized. (Hay 1989, p. 72)

There is always a chance that this invitation to be seen could generate a repressive aesthetic akin to that of the patient caught within the masculine clinical gaze. Charcot’s subjects were rarely free agents, being interned at the hospice after coming to the attention of medico-legal authorities. But the hysterical aesthetic is always a fraught one, rich with joys and dangers. Cameron recommends that artists follow her own lead and work to “See yourself seeing; hear yourself hearing; feel yourself feeling … multiply

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possibilities” (Cameron 2016, p. 16). By resting in the unfolding moment of reflection and psycho-corporeal flux, Cameron claims to “un-know and unname myself … unhanding the body’s knowledge releases its libido for knowledge, an appetite that re-constitutes joy” (16). Cameron’s creative mastery over the corporeal surrogation which she cultivates arises quite precisely out of this self-reflexive and divided process of vocalization and listening; an act of pained self-love. On stage, Cameron used audio playback together with her own breathy, richly resonant vocal inflection, which alternated with moments of self-­ mockery and the often awkward, pained speaking positions which she adopted on stage (see Fig. 5; Marshall 2000). Even in solo performance, Cameron’s work had a polyvocal character. Perhaps the most eloquent embodiment of Cameron’s hysterical aesthetic was in The Proscenium (2005), a play which she staged both as a self-performed monologue and as a choral piece for twenty-two young female and male performers who she directed. The Proscenium featured Cameron or her doubles dressed in a drenched overcoat, water dripping onto their bare feet, as she/they balanced atop of a large stone which at other points they curled around on the floor as if clutching a lover, or which she held to her breast (see Fig. 6; Marshall 2007a). The Proscenium portrayed a subject who stands apart from the world—literally—as on a rocky island, telling of a vision she had of her father being hosed down through the window of her childhood home, claiming to have herself “swallowed a house,” thereby taking this fractured image inside her own body (Cameron 2016, pp. 13, 129). In these acts, the poetic image inhabits the flesh of the performer, which echoes and reverberates in response; the voice of the possessing agent emanating from out of her as something which is both of her, and yet it is not her, exceeding the hysteriform subject so generated. This kind of willed self-fracture in performance is not without risks. Sage Harlow is an avant-garde vocalist who performs and records under the name Sage Pbbbt. Harlow is inspired by queer and trans theory. She employs meditation and possession rituals in order to produce abstract, typically non-verbal performances—or what Michael Edgerton christened the “extra-normal voice” (see Fig. 7; Harlow 2019b, p. 4). Charcot and his peers saw hysteria as at the root of most ecstatic religious ritual practices, including the Evangelical dancing of the “jumpers” found at American “camp-fire meetings,” as well as Sufi whirling dervishes, and others (Marshall 2007b). More recently, Natalia Theodoridou has argued that Charcot’s model of hysteria constitutes an expression of the

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Fig. 5  Knowledge & Melancholy: An Autobiographical Fiction (1997) by Margaret Cameron. (Photograph by Ponch Hawkes. Courtesy of Hawkes)

“fractured self” which “shares not just the same physiological signs as trance” but also “its spectacular manifestations, its processual/narrative nature, and its … engagement with an audience” or invitation to be seen (Theodoridou 2009, p. 202). Indeed, critic Mady Schutzman found the conclusion to Hunter’s own theatrical production reminiscent of “footage I’d seen of tribal healing rites from several places around the world”

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Fig. 6  The Proscenium, written and directed by Margaret Cameron; Bachelor of Performing Arts graduate production, Roundhouse Theatre, Edith Cowan University, Perth, 2008. (Image courtesy of Julie Robson and Edith Cowan University)

(Schutzman 1990, p.  189).6 Schutzman does not specify, but parallels might be made with the anti-colonial African possession rituals documented in Jean Rouch’s Surrealistic films such as The Mad Masters (1955), or Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1954) by US film-maker Maya Deren and modern dancer Katherine Dunham (see DeBouzek 1989; Burt 2016). Harlow’s own practice draws on the postmodern chaos magick models which have evolved out of the work of Aleister Crowley and the nineteenth-century Spiritists and Satanists with whom the Surrealists were acquainted. These traditions draw extensively on non-Western esoteric ritual, Harlow being particularly influenced by Buddhist and Tibetan practices (vipassanā, Chöd ritual), as well as Tuvan and Mongolian shamanism 6  German photomontagist John Heartfield too was said by Elias Canetti to be possessed of “reactions … so spontaneous that they got the better of him … if an idea struck him, he would leap into the air.” Doherty (1997, p. 128).

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Fig. 7  Sage Pbbbt (Harlow) in performance, Postgraduate Research Showcase, Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, 2018. (Photograph by Stephen Heath. Image courtesy of WAAPA@ECU)

and throat singing (khoomei). Harlow explains that her “improvised possession rituals seek to give voice to aspects of the extra-normal self”—be these doubles of the self, or outside agents, or more diffuse patterns of psyche and body which coalesce within the ritual (Harlow 2019b, p. i). In Charcot’s terms, Harlow’s work constitutes a form of willed hysteria. Like Diamanda Galás in her own performance of The Litanies of Satan (1998), Pbbbt is a contemporary Traumsänger or trance-singer for our time. Harlow employs a “meditative,” trance-like awareness so as to allow music to “‘speak through me’ in a ‘flow state’” giving voice to: whatever arises … I … begin with an intent to explore … I invite an experience with an archetypal form … and allow it to resonate through my voice and in my physical and emotional states. Inviting a deeper experience of ‘anger,’ for example, might manifest with physical sensations of heat and

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heightened energy, and manifest aggressive screams and growls. (Harlow 2019a, p. 28)7

In her experimental Residence Workings performed as part of her doctoral research, Harlow successfully hosted a “Serpent spirit,” as well as the “spirit of Plastic” (this entity being an especially postmodern, improvised figure) and even an “Unknown Entity.” When invoking the spirit of Choronzon however—a creature which Crowley and others cite as a “personification” of the “illusory nature of personhood” itself—Harlow felt “profoundly alone at the conclusion of this ritual” and was “overcome by sadness, [I] sat and cried for a while” (Harlow 2019b, pp. 90–105). González records a similar moment of distress arising within her own performances. Entering into an almost dissociated state she recalls an audience member informing her that her work “meant nothing to him and [he] left” (González 2019, p. 172). The usher was forced to approach González while the actor was still reciting her text and to repeatedly inform her that the session had finished. At this point, González broke down. Harlow for her part does not reject such experiences. Her practice requires both a sense of calm and a sense of dis-ease, what Judith Halberstam describes as a radical form of critical “unbecoming” akin to collage or even self-dissection (Harlow 2019b, pp.  60–72). Despite the violence or self-harm which this form of subjective scission could entail, Harlow relates that over the course of her research she observed a “subtle shift” had occurred within her practice, from simply “accepting whatever arises” to: having compassion and love for myself in the present moment. This comes from observing sensations arising and passing away and developing the understanding over many years that we have no control over these experiences. From this comes compassion for oneself, and compassion for that which arises, as one realizes that other responses have no logical basis. This understanding has infused my possession (or channeling) work. (Harlow 2019a, p. 32)

Harlow’s realization has both an ethical quality, as well as serving to protect and nurture herself as a performer. Compassion for one’s own internal divisions enables—indeed, is equivalent to—love for other beings, human 7  Recordings such as Pbbbt (2017) and other material can be accessed: https://sagepbbbt. com/ and https://tonelist.bandcamp.com/album/invocations-of-unknown-entities.

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or otherwise. As González puts it, the performer must become the “host of ghost in order to learn how to live” in this “exchange of being possessed and disposed” (González 2019, p. 181). Citing Elin Diamond, Townsend claims that the analytic, narrativizing tendencies of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Naturalism are inconsistent with the hysterical aesthetic. Diamond however argues that Naturalist theater-makers guaranteed the “legitimacy” and verisimilitude of their work by “endowing” their characters “with the symptoms and etiology of the hysteric,” offering to decipher for the audience the “hysteric’s enigma” (Diamond 1997, p.  60). Naturalists achieved this, as in Freudian or Charcotian analysis, by inviting the audience to diagnose characters according to what Townsend correctly identifies as a dissonance between bodily ticks and the true, often repressed, emotions of the character portrayed. As Townsend explains, the hysteric “may ‘say’ one thing while her body ‘means’ quite another,” expressing that which “cannot be said” and which has been “repressed” (Townsend 2003, p. 545). Diamond concludes therefore that Naturalism is “itself a form of hysteria” because it strives to unlock the aporetic presence of repressed hysterical subjectivity (Diamond 1997, p. 4). Far from deciphering or even fully narrativizing hysterical subjectivity, Naturalism set in train an impossible desire on the part of the audience. Henrik Ibsen’s play of Hedda Gabler, for example, climaxes with Hedda leaving the on-stage space for the first time over the course of the performance. She has however not left altogether, but has rather withdrawn into what Diamond characterizes as “the vanishing point” of the stage—specifically an alcove curtained off from the rest of the set. This is a space which is present but unheeded, just as the Unconscious is present but hidden within the hysterical psyche: From this latter unseen ‘space,’ Hedda projects not words but sound, ‘a wild dance melody’ on her childhood piano, which earns a rebuke … Then … she pops her head out … to make one last insolent remark. With Head-da in fragments, Ibsen comes close to translating the ‘impossible.’ The old puppet trick shivers [and shatters] the wholeness … of the mimetic body. (Diamond 1997, p. 28)8

8  This “wild dance” is the tarantella, which Ibsen’s character Nora also performs at a climactic point in A Doll’s House, and which was closely associated with hysteria, “tarantism” being a lay term for choretic and hysterical seizure. Marshall (2007b).

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The audience then hears a gunshot, and the curtains are drawn back to reveal Hedda’s lifeless body. Unable to comprehend, Brack “closes the play with the famous line, ‘But good God! People don’t do such things!’” The audience is invited to conclude the same. Carlo Ginzburg (1980) has observed that the modern detective novel’s journey of attempting to decipher obscure codes, symbols and signs shares a common logic with nineteenth- and twentieth-century art criticism, psychoanalysis, genetics, criminology and Modernist aesthetics as in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1927). As with the protagonists of Dashiell Hammett’s novels, there is a promise of narrative closure, but any final resolution is deferred and uncertain, lost in the hypnogogic noir of modern experience (see Sargent 2010; Eisner 1969). Naturalism and the acting methods developed to sustain it such as Konstantin Stanislavsky’s psycho-corporeal system—itself influenced by Charcot’s collaborator Théodule Ribot, as well as by Western appropriations of yogic meditation—were specifically designed to seduce the audience with the possibility of attaining a complete knowledge of the human subjects depicted on stage, no matter how contradictory their actions and bodies seemed. Stanislavski indeed conducted his own form of subjective doubling and fragmentation in his teaching manual, An Actor Prepares (1936), which takes the form of a fictional narrative. Arkadi Tortsov, standing in for Stanislavski, instructs the protagonist in his chosen profession, arguing that the “prime task” of the actor was to “not only to portray the life of a role externally, but above all to create the inner life of the character” through an act of “genuine, subconscious creation” in which the distinction between the host actor, and the character embedded within the world of the play, became difficult to separate (Stanislavski 1968, pp. 18–19). Stanislavski argued that trained actors could send out “prana,” or “vital energy, a force that gives life to all of our body” (White 2006, p.  80). Disruptions in the flow of prana’s nervous energy disordered the body. Tortsov concluded that in addition to “the verbal, conscious argument” which dialogue contains, there was “another process” central to dramatic action, namely an “invisible communication, the emitting and receiving that, like an underwater stream, flows continuously under our words, in silences, and forms the invisible link between objects which creates an inner connection” (Stanislavski 2008, p. 248). Stanislavski’s para-scientific understanding of psycho-corporeal health presented the actor with an abstract, near hysterical dialectic model in which trance-like habitual

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actions were to be dynamically balanced by semi-conscious monitoring.9 In a vein not dissimilar to Harlow and González, Stanislavski saw acting as a form of compassionate, divided “self-analysis” or the “preparation in an actor’s soul for the conception of creative emotions—both conscious and especially unconscious feelings” (Stanislavski 1968, pp. 8–9). Those who are unable to maintain this crucial homeostasis between hysterical hosting and calm self-reflection would become ill or over-wrought, a common ailment for performers which Mark Seton has since dubbed “‘post-dramatic’ stress.” The hysterical aesthetic is therefore central to the dialectics of performance as a whole, linking Charcot’s patients to dramatic figures as diverse as Sage Pbbbt, Sophocles and Stanislavski. In addition to the rich vein of interpretative and structural gambits which hysteria continues to offer, Seton contends that artists and their peers need to develop a range of “interpersonal resources to incorporate the experience of their performance in a resilient manner” (Seton 2008, p. 4). Key to this I would argue is to accept the non-monadal construction of the body and subjectivity which the Surrealists celebrated. Harlow contends that, as shifting composites and collections of impulses and resistances, human subjects “can never manifest our will in any pure or absolute sense,” nor can we “free ourselves” entirely from the “impulse to do so … We cannot give up our ego, [n]or will [we]. I admit to still feeling confused by this” (Harlow 2019b, p. 92). Only by attending to the doubles and fractures of the hysterical self, to its confusing echoes through bodies and times, can we begin to unravel this most vital of tasks and so move beyond conventional models of biopolitics into a more psycho-corporeally diverse realm, seething with both vital force and joyous contradictions.

References Aragon, Louis, & André Breton. 1928. “Le cinquantenaire de l’hystèrie.” Révolution surréaliste 11: 20–22. Beresford, Cordelia, direction/conception. 2005. I Dream of Augustine. Short film. Choreographed & performed by Narelle Benjamin. Sydney: Joanne

9  Stanislavski insisted however that nervous excitation without a more totalizing psychocorporeal realization of the character’s world would produce an empty form of actorly “hysteria,” distinct from good performance; Stanislavski (2008, pp. 31, 56, 547).

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Weatherstone productions, reproduced on https://vimeo.com/12981596 Accessed on July 30, 2020. Bernard, Denis, & André Gunthert. 1993. L’instant rêvé: Albert Londe. Paris: Chambon. Bourneville, Désiré, & Paul Régnard. 1877–1880. Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière. Paris: Progrès médical, 3 vols. Braun, Marta. 1994. Picturing time. Chicago: Chicago UP. Burt, Ramsay. 2016. “Katherine Dunham & Maya Deren on Ritual, Modernity, & the African Diaspora.” Art Research Journal 3, no. 2: 44–51. Cameron, Margaret. 2016. I shudder to think. Brisbane: Ladyfinger. Charcot, Jean-Martin. 1888–1894. Œuvres Complètes. Paris: Progrès médical, 13 vols. Charcot, Jean-Martin, & Paul Richer. 1887. Les démoniaques dans l’art. Paris: Delahaye et Lecroisnier. Cixous, Hélène, & Catherine Clément. 1975. The Newly Born Woman. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP. Connor, Steven. 2000. Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. Cambridge: Online archive, http://www.stevenconnor.com/dumbstruck/. Accessed on July 30, 2020. Daudet, Alphonse. 1894. “À la Salpêtrière.” Le Figaro (4 janvier): 1. DeBouzek, Jeanette. 1989. “The ‘Ethnographic Surrealism’ of Jean Rouch.” Visual Anthropology 2: 301–315. Diamond, Elin. 1997. Unmaking Mimesis. London: Routledge. Doherty, Brigid. 1997. “See: ‘We Are All Neurasthenics’!” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 1: 82–132 Eisner, Lotte. 1969. The Haunted Screen. LA: California UP. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality. Volume I.  An Introduction. Translated by Michael Hurley. NY: Pantheon. Freud, Sigmund. 1973. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. edited and translated by James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 24 vols. Furse, Anna. 1997. Augustine (Big Hysteria). Amsterdam: Harwood. Galás, Diamanda. 1998. The Litanies of Satan, audio recording; text by Charles Baudelaire. Europe: EMI. Ginzburg, Carlo. 1980. “Morelli, Freud & Sherlock Holmes.” History Workshop 9: 5–36. González, Laura. 2019. “Hosting hysteria.” Translating Across Sensory & Linguistic Borders, edited by Madeleine Campbell and Ricarda Vidal, 167–184. London: Palgrave. Harlow, Sage. 2019a. “Exploring the Extra-Normal Self With the Extra-Normal Voice: Improvised Ritual Possession.” Context 44: 25–35, reproduced on http://contextjournal.music.unimelb.edu.au/context/ files/2019/08/44.04-­Context.Harlow.pdf. Accessed on July 30, 2020.

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———. 2019b. Giving Voice to the Extra-Normal Self With the Extra-Normal Voice: Improvised Exploration Through the Realms of Shamanic Chaos Magick, Insight Meditation & Gender Performance. PhD dissertation, Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, Edith Cowan University, reproduced on https://ro.ecu.edu.au/theses/2210/ . Accessed on July 30, 2020. Hay, Deborah. 1989. “Playing Awake.” TDR: The Drama Review, 33, no. 4: 70–76. Hunter, Dianne. 1993. “Representing mad contradictoriness in Dr Charcot’s Hysteria Shows.” Themes in Drama, edited by James Redmond, 15: 93–118. Lomas, David. 2004. “‘Modest recording instruments’: Science, Surrealism & Visuality.” Art History 27, no. 4: 627–650. Londe, Albert. 1883. “La photographie en médicine.” La Nature 11e année, 2e semestre, pp. 215–218. De Lorde, André de Latour, with Alfred Binet et al. 1909. Théâtre d’Épouvante. Paris: Charpentier et Fasquelle. Magnin, Émile. 1903. “Catalepsie et extase musicale.” Revue spirite (juliet): 409–19. Marshall, Jonathan W. 2000. “An Object Lesson: Margaret Cameron’s BANG!” RealTime Australia 40 (Dec 2000–Jan 2001): 23, reproduced on https:// www.realtime.org.au/wp-­content/uploads/2018/06/RT_40_Edited.pdf . Accessed on July 30, 2020. ———. 2007a. “A Revealing Partnering: Margaret Cameron & Dawn Albinger at PICA.” RealTime Australia 88 (Dec 2007–Jan 2008): 33, reproduced on http://www.realtimearts.net/article/88/9241. Accessed on July 30, 2020. ———. 2007b. “The Priestesses of Apollo & the Heirs of Aesculapius: Medical Art-Historical Approaches to Ancient Choreography After Charcot.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 43, no. 4: 410–426. ———. 2008a. “Beyond the Theatre of Desire: Hysterical Performativity & Perverse Choreography in the Writings of the Salpêtrière School, 1862–1893.” In Fin de siècle Sexuality: The Making of a Central Problem, edited by Peter Cryle & Christopher Forth, 42–60. Delaware UP. ———. 2008b. “The Theatre of the Athletic Nude: The Teaching & Study of Anatomy at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, 1873–1940.” Being There: After— Proceedings of the 2006 Conference of the Australasian Association for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies, 1–20, reproduced on http://ses.library.usyd. edu.au/bitstream/2123/2511/1/ADSA2006_Marshall.pdf. Accessed on July 30, 2020. ———. 2009. “The Archaeology of the Abstract Body: Parascientific Discourse & the Legacy of Dr J.-M. Charcot, 1876–1969.” French History & Civilization: Papers from the George Rudé Seminar 3: 92–111, reproduced on http:// www.h-­france.net/rude/rudevolumeiii/MarshallVol3.pdf. Accessed on July 30, 2020. ———. 2011. “Kleist’s Übermarionetten & Schrenck-Notzing’s Traumtänzerin: Nervous Mechanics & Hypnotic Performance Under Modernism.” In Heinrich

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von Kleist & Modernity, edited by Bernd Fischer & Tim Mehigan, 261–81. Rochester: Camden, reproduced on https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7722/j. ctt1x725q.20. Accessed on July 30, 2020. ———. 2013. “‘The world of the neurological pavilion’: Hauntology & European Modernism ‘mal tourné.’” TDR: The Drama Review 57, issue 4: 60–85. ———. 2016. Performing Neurology: The Dramaturgy of Dr Jean-Martin Charcot. London: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2020. “Traumatic Dances of ‘the non-self’: Bodily Incoherence & the Hysterical Archive.” She is Hysterical. Hysteria, Politics, & PerformanceStrategies, edited by Johanna Braun. Leuven: Leuven UP, pp. 61–83. Micale, Mark. 1995. Approaching Hysteria. Princeton: Princeton UP. Nicholls, Peter. 1991. “Anti-Oedipus? Dada & Surrealist Theatre.” New Theatre Quarterly 7, issue 28: 331–347. Pbbbt, Sage. 2017. Invocations of Unknown Entities, audio recording. Perth: Tone List, https://tonelist.bandcamp.com/album/invocations-­of-­unknown-­ entities. Accessed on July 30, 2020. Richer, Paul. 1885. Études cliniques sur la grande hystérie ou l’hystéro-épilepsie. Paris: Delahaye et Lecroisnier. Richer, Paul, & Albert Londe, Georges Gilles de la Tourette, Henry Meige, et al., eds. 1888–1918. Nouvelle Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière. Paris: Progrès médical, 19 vols. Roach, Joseph. 1996. Cities of the Dead. NY: Columbia UP. Sargent, Neil. 2010. “Mys-Reading the Past in Detective Fiction & Law.” Law & Literature 22, no. 2: 288–306. Schutzman, Mady. 1990. “Dr Charcot’s Hysteria Shows.” Women & Performance 5, no. 1: 183–189. Stanislavski, Konstantin. 1968. Creating a Role. Translated by Elizabeth Hapgood. NY: Theatre Arts. ———. 2008. An Actor’s Work. Translated by Jean Benedetti. London: Routledge. Seton, Mark. 2008. “‘Post-Dramatic’ Stress.” Being There: After—Proceedings of the 2006 Conference of the Australasian Association for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies, 1–5, reproduced on https://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/bitstream/handle/2123/2518/ADSA2006_Seton.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y. Accessed on July 30, 2020. Starr, Moses Allen, et  al. 1926. “Minutes of Boston Medical History Club Centenary Meeting”. 23 Nov. 1925. Boston Medical & Surgical Association no. 194: 11–12. Theodoridou, Natalia. 2009. “Hysteria & Trance: Performative Synergies.” Contemporary Theatre Review 19, no. 2: 195–203. Townsend, Joanna. 2000. “Re-membering the Performing Body.” Performance Research 5, no. 2: 125–132.

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———. 2003. “Expressing the Unspoken: Hysterical Performance as Radical Theatre.” Women’s Studies 32, no. 5: 533–557. Various. 2017. “A Work A Day.” Sydney: Stills Gallery website, http://www.stillsgallery.com.au/exhibitions/2017/farewell/index.php?obj_id=a-­work-­a-­day. Accessed on July 30, 2020. White, R.  Andrew. 2006. “Stanislavsky & Ramacharaka.” Theatre Survey 47, no. 1: 73–92.

H. Y. S. T. et al., on Archiving Hysteria’s Past in the Present Shana Lutker and Johanna Braun

Shana Lutker is a multi-disciplinary Los Angeles-based artist; her artistic research practice combines a wide range of media, from drawing and sculpture to writing, installation and performance and other forms of knowledge production. The critical engagement with hystories, especially historical medical French sources and their relevance in a contemporary art context, is a recurring theme in her work.

Johanna Braun (JB): Your approaches and techniques are manifold, they remind me of forms of calling, invoking, conjuring—of guidelines, of discourses, hinting at so many different intersecting and overlapping histories that still haunt our present. Next to your objects and installations, you also give lectures, write essays, publish books and perform. Intense research S. Lutker (*) Los Angeles, CA, USA J. Braun University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Braun (ed.), Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66360-5_13

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seems at the basis of it all, and not only as preliminary work, but as instrumental part of the work itself. Especially, your intense research on hysteria seems to be “lurking” behind many of your projects. Even more so the triangle of men, Charcot, Freud and Breton—who were fascinated by the hysterics of their time, and in turn were so influential on how we read images and discourses around hysteria and art today—are continuous sources in your work. How did this fascination with hysteria come to be, what motivated this interest? Shana Lutker (SL): Yes, I very much feel the “lurking” and haunting of the present by these specters of hysteria and psychoanalysis, and this is manifested in my work. In their unique ways, Charcot, Freud and Breton each strove to define and translate the unconscious, an impossible task, doomed to fail. Their attempts at interpretation are full of gaps and holes, blurry and unarticulated. The men were stymied by these failures, their claims to objectivity were their weakness. I wonder, what would be different if they embraced the gaps and holes, and were more at peace with the blurriness? I came to research Charcot’s patients and his work at the Salpêtrière through Freud. After moving to Los Angeles in 2002, I spent a number of years reading through Freud’s major works, the output being a body of work archiving my dreams and then making the art that I dreamt that I made. (To this day, I continue to think of my works as dream objects.) Finishing up that body of work, I held in my mind a quote from one of Freud’s letters, written, I believe, soon after he returned to Vienna from Paris and his studies with Charcot in 1886. Still in shock at the violence of Charcot’s techniques, Freud wrote in distress, reflecting on the techniques he had witnessed at the Salpêtrière, that there must be a “talking cure” for hysteria—there must be another way. I was taken by this idea that what he saw at the Salpêtrière felt not-right and that psychoanalysis was born in response to that. A rejection of the so-called medical treatment of the hysteric comes through language, talking it out. Georges Didi-Huberman concludes his preface to The Invention of Hysteria with an invocation of this time after Freud left Paris, making a connection to the concurrent invention of the photographic image, and suggesting that perhaps it was the proliferation of the photograph that shocked Freud as much as the needles and various treatments Charcot doled out: “Freud was the disoriented witness of the immensity of hysteria in camera and the manufacturing of images. His disorientation was not without bearing on the beginnings of psychoanalysis” (Georges Didi-Huberman, Argument, MIT Press, p. xii). I fell into hysteria as subject, backwards, from Freud: the seeds that led to psychoanalysis. Didi-Huberman’s discussion of the

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historical concurrence of technological advancements in photography and Charcot’s attempt to define and treat the symptoms of hysteria was fascinating to me. A historical coincidence of great significance. Like Freud, I was shocked at what I saw in the photographic archive of Charcot (the Iconographie), spurring me to investigate and develop this series of work. I was guided by two quotes. From Didi-Huberman, “Representation, in the Freudian economy notably, does not ‘reproduce’ an object (an object of desire): it produces its absence, and animates its loss” (Georges Didi-­ Huberman, The Invention of Hysteria, p.  151). And from patient Augustine, “When I’m bored, all I have to do is make a red knot and look at it.” And later, it was from Charcot and Augustine that I was led to the Surrealists and Breton, via another archival find: In 1928, André Breton and Louis Aragon published a fiftieth Anniversary celebration of the hysteria, Charcot and his “delicious” pinup Augustine. They cite Charcot’s invention of hysteria as the “greatest poetic discovery” of the late nineteenth century. This attempt to translate the unconscious is akin to making art. An idea takes an articulated form that must be interpreted by another. Art is always full of failure, the gap between the idea and the realized object. There is a reflexiveness here that I quite enjoy, that will always implicate my subjectivity in the making or producing of these bodies of works. And this is a self-reflexiveness that Charcot, Freud and Breton often seemed to lack—or repress—in order to carry on their work with a near-theatrical sense of certitude (see Fig. 1). JB: Those questions of translation and transference within and surrounding discourses of hysteria is also very much relevant for its contemporary manifestations. Currently, we can witness the term hysteria “trending” in public debates, especially on social media platforms. Debates range from pressing topics such as the so-called Trump, or Anti-Trump hysteria, Democratic or liberal hysteria, Black Lives Matter hysteria, Climate Change hysteria, Russia or Collusion hysteria, Xenophobic hysteria, trans bathroom hysteria, COVID-19 hysteria,  (anti-) vaccine hysteria,  and so on. Countless men in politics and Hollywood warned of hysteria by the so-called #MeToo movement and Michael Haneke and Roman Polanski make it more specific and warn of the epidemic and contagious nature of “mass hysteria” in the movement and reveal an interesting and quite troubling connection to the men that were controlling the discussion around hysteria at the fin de siècle. As your work obviously connects historical as well as contemporary discussions around hysteria, how do you stand to this current phenomenon?

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Fig. 1  Shana Lutker, H., 2010, leather, wood, steel, 22 x 38 x 36 inches. Installatin of H. Y. S. T. et al. at Vielmetter Los Angeles. (Photo: Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles)

SL: As you indicate, public debate has become, on many fronts, quite “hysterical.” In reference to the sphere of social media, I suppose “hysteria” is that which has become unhinged from some ethical, moral or factual moorings. These issues solicit emotional reflexive responses and the tone of these debates rises in pitch. Why? We must question the ethical, moral or “objective” foundations of these debates themselves. And in some cases, the “hysterics” of these movements have made significant progress in shifting the center of their specific debate in their direction. Who decides which is a grounded argument and which is hysterical? How do we draw a hard line between an “appropriate” response and a “hysterical” one? How does that change over time? JB: Those very sensitive and time-spanning expeditions through which you unfold the complex relationships that are imbedded in those hysterical histories is so intriguing. Also how the specters of the women who were

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instrumental in those “scientific discoveries” are still haunting those current discourses, such as Louise Augustine Gleizes’ influence on Charcot, as the famous hysterical performer Augustine, or Bertha Pappenheim, as the infamous patient Anna O. in Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud’s Studies on Hysteria, who coined the term “talking cure.” Research is at the basis of most of your work—or should I even dare to say all. Charcot and Freud were often criticized as not being scientific enough, of being too close to an art practice, instead of a medical one. Your work evokes a similar approach: Facts are a guide for creative thoughts that can lead sometimes astray or to unexpected places. But while Charcot and Freud came from the fields of science, you have the artistic freedoms as an artistresearcher. Research as an experience, as a mode of storytelling. How would you describe your approach to research in your work, and the “emerging” fields of artistic research and art-based research? And where, if at all, do you see a connection to a hysterical research practice? SL: Yes, research itself is the foundation of most of my work, if not all. I need to be grounded somewhere, in something, and my work is more akin to analyzing and interpreting rather than creating. But there are more layers to the research—the experience of research also shapes my work. Doing research is part of my creative process: the seeking, the finding, the piecing together of clues into a narrative. Research leads me to new places and inscribes sites with new meaning. And further, the material of research feeds my work: the sites, the libraries and archives, the books. For example, as I was reading Freud’s catalogue of writing, I made a work about the covers of the books themselves. And, as you suggest, the artist-researcher can take certain liberties. I allow for dérives, for intuition and free association. I don’t always end up where I expect. As an artist, I am not required to format my research conclusively, and I don’t need to strive to create new scholarship. I find great pleasure in inhabiting a subject matter, slipping sideways and going down the rabbit hole. JB: This playfulness in investigating complex matters definitely translates to the viewer. As does the notion of wandering, or what art historian Simon Ofield-Kerr has theorized as “cruising” as a mode of research (2005: 357). Maybe one can go so far to ask if hysterical research wanders, such as the historical and medical concepts of the hysterical wandering womb. The archive and the collection play a recurring role in your practice. In the context of your exhibition you often use tables (or structures

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that resemble them) as display. For me, they very much evoke of exhibition settings in archives, libraries, clinics or museums that invite to “wander” through the collection. The interesting relationship between hysteria and collections can be found with Jean-Martin Charcot, Sigmund Freud, Andre Breton’s collection of art, cultural relicts and artifacts. They were also all displaying their vast private collections in their homes, and this collecting was also very informing their work practice. How would you see the productive tension of hysteria and collection/archive? SL: Yes, I think of arranging objects on a plane to be read by the viewer, like words of a sentence. I use display tables like library tables, reading happens there. And there are other forces and influences at work: display techniques of archaeological museums and flea markets. I am very interested in the vernacular and display mechanisms at work in these two arenas. I think often of the specific collections of art and antiquities of these three men and how their collections have been documented and preserved. One can visit Freud’s house museums and Bretons’ living room at the Pompidou, the objects carefully arranged to appear as they do in their photographs. Collecting is the act of finding (and buying, possessing) something that makes you stop looking for other things, if even for a moment. There is a very problematic colonialist aspect in those collections too, of course. But I am interested in this pause and what causes it. (This is where Augustine’s knotted red string comes into play. The thing that catches one’s attention staves off boredom.) In my own collecting, I try to follow that pause. These days, I try to satisfy that collecting urge by taking photographs of the things that catch me. I don’t want any more things. I hope maybe the photos can suffice. I’ve been documenting the flea markets for years. Each time I return to Zurich or Paris or Mexico City, I return to the markets and take pictures of the displays and display surfaces. JB: This also ties to your research practice at the actual “scene of the crime,” the Hôpital Universitaire Pitié Salpêtrière, that inspired you to numerous bodies of work, such as the use of the yellow window shades, that are similar to those at the Salpêtrière (in your exhibition A. G. L. & X.), the bronze sculptures, that are based on the air ducts at the Salpêtrière (Augustine, Geneviève, and Louise, 2011); or the medical tools that were used (H.  Y. S.  T. et  al., 2010). The resulting artworks of your archival research are not re-creations or re-makes, but the object’s origins are the

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space and experience of research. Can you tell us more about your archival research, your field research practice? SL: The act of research results in an archive, of images and texts and experiences. I then take a pause, return to the studio, and make the sculptural works, with that distance from the “originals”—the forms are more from memories of archives. I also like to think of the objects as witnesses that were affected by their environments, by what they “saw.” I suppose you could call them hysterical objects. JB: This is an interesting train of thought from the hysterical object and its materiality to the hysteric’s performed and staged corporeality. Interesting is also, that while contemporary depictions and the reuse of those images of the “famous hysterics” often fall into the trap to reenact the sexualization and eroticization of those pathologized bodies, that your work leaves mostly the hysteric body out of sight. The hysterics are referenced through their names, as you suggested in your title A.  G. L. & X. (Augustine was also alternately referred to as Geneviève, Louise, and X. in various medical records), or naming your air duct replicas after Louise Augustine Gleizes’ alternative names. Furthermore, you often refer to your work as “bodies of work,” or as one body of work, therefore underlining the corporality of it. How do you see the connection/influence of the invisible body, the haunting body of the hysteric in your practice? SL: Leaving out the body also allows the viewer to inhabit that subjective space. Absence can make for a stronger presence. And it is the life of objects, these silent witnesses, that interests me. JB: This historically informed performance of showing and not showing points also to a rich a history of queer feminist traditions. While many contemporary artists “reclaim” a hystory, that is especially influenced by feminist discourses of the late twentieth century, those references seem not to be relevant in your body of work. It is very obvious that you “do your research” thoroughly, and know about the discourses around it. It is certain that this “leaving out” is a conscious decision. Could you elaborate how you stand to those discussions of hysteria from a feminist perspective, and how you contextualize your own practice in this regard?

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SL: As a woman (and one who is, as you guess, steeped in critical theory and feminist critique), I hope that the way that I made my work—the tone, the aura, the humor—is deeply informed by feminist discourse and feminist art. Revisiting the “births” of hysteria, psychoanalysis, and surrealism and their “fathers” as subject—in the wake of the feminist work and criticism of the 70s, the 90s, through today—allows me to take a more nuanced position in relationship to all of these “hystories.” Allowing for different interpretations. I don’t think sculptural objects can or should be didactic or pedantic. Sculpture can’t do that. But when the authority of the object is undermined, and when an object uncannily waivers between known and unknown, familiar and unfamiliar, it can be destabilizing. It can cause the viewer to question their understanding of objecthood, and objectivity. I aim to present objects that are simultaneously familiar and anew, that make viewers question what they see. In my writing and performance, revisionist histories and feminist slants come into sharper focus. In these mediums, I work more pointedly to question and undermine the authority of the objective narrator of history, considering historical events from multiple concurrent viewpoints. JB: The recurring theme of violence in your work ties to those discourses, and you subtly critically comment on the brutal environments that often produced the historical material and the “tools” that were used to “perform cures.” Could you talk more especially on your series of sculptures in H. Y. S. T. et al.? SL: Yes, there is violence infused in the objects, it is imaginary and possibly, therefore more threatening. The sculptures of H. Y. S. T. et al. grew out of my research and are references to the tools and devices used to “cure” hysteria found in the archive. Each object was affected by some sort of hysteria: a version of Freud’s office chair, doubling, as if frozen in a mitopic state; a tuning fork used to hypnotize that grew to the size of a girl; a “conversation” chair found in a Victorian sitting room designed to physically separate a dating couple; a wooden “T” that reminds one of a pole that might be used in a public hanging; a series of sharpened steel needles that appeared in the Iconographie, here displayed on a rack like one for guns… When making this body of work I was thinking about how these objects might be psychically affected by their work. And also, thinking about them as dream objects—the patients’ and my own. I also imagined that there was a collapse of roles and of identifications: As a woman artist, I was both “hysteric” and “doctor.”

Male Hysteria and the Archive: An Auto-­Ethnographic Reflection Thomas Ballhausen

Not even nothing can be free of ghosts —Karen Barad (2012)

Disclaimer In this chapter, I offer a hysterical reading of archival theory and practices that is heavily relying on concepts of fictocritical writing, that is, literature and/as artistic research (Dawson 2005; Haas 2017; Caduff and Wälchli 2019). Proactive thinking with the arts—and not just about them—defines my approach of interlacing theoretical and literary elements. Transgressing traditional methodologies, I intentionally turn toward writing about the hysterical other that translates into writing as the hysterical other. Taking Elaine Showalter’s and Mark S. Micale’s (Showalter 1997; Micale 2008) ideas of hysteria as a more universal category into account I connect it to the topics of memory, media and the arts without limiting its impact to femality, that is without renewing its questionable characterization as a

T. Ballhausen (*) Mozarteum University Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Braun (ed.), Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66360-5_14

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(solely) female disorder. Ideas of normativity, power and order are embedded into the history and development of archives, inscribed in their practices as well as in the preserved sources and documents (Head 2019). Being an archivist and a poet, I use this radical mode of auto-ethnographic reflection to intertwine theoretical, historical as well as literary aspects of the archive and the archived sources themselves. Building on the writings of Hélène Cixous (1992, 1998) and Georges Didi-Huberman (2003, 2018), both crucial in linking concepts of collecting and hysteria, I retell the history of archives and their theorization as a story of wandering images and motifs, as thirteen vignettes about care, conflict and neglect. My breathless, condensed writing is both expression and examination of a male hysteria, that is to a greater part still buried in archival holdings, furthermore a male hysteria I need to recognize as my own. 1. Following an—in the best sense ongoing—examination of the archive and the practices and challenges linked with it, I would like to present my initial thoughts aiming at an archival policy of care, including earlier considerations, repetitions, and advanced approaches (Ballhausen 2005, 2015). In order to unfurl these preliminaries, which have to be read and understood with an eye to their tentativeness, the larger theoretical contexts will be addressed, the central aspects extensively explored, and finally the etymological background of the presented conceptual movement’s stage spread out. The practiced entanglement of archive, policy and care hinted at takes place with the productive philosophical dynamic of—in brief—the Central European history of concepts and French–Anglo-American discourse analysis. The undertaken discursive interlacing (like a shoelace borrowed from Leibniz) should query and explore with the means of philosophy and literature. However, as far as I am able to, I do not want to make or propagate the mistake of interpreting the functionalities and effects of the arts in a limiting manner from the knoll of a platonic plateau. At least these preliminary notations, for that is the character of the text on hand in all its admitted incompleteness and perhaps defectiveness, rely on a true neighborhood between these fields. The trail into and through these fields, which does not entirely want to make do without fronde, will unfold stone by stone, as it were, in the shape of images, of eponymous vignettes of different lengths. Hopefully, these images will show what I would like to borrow

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from Kafka: on the one hand, not so much narration than the literarily motivated explanation of reading and approaches to its interpretation, and on the other hand, proof that inadequate, even childish means, too, may serve salvation (Kafka 2008). 2. The archive as well as the present are to be seen as dynamic. For me, the literary text and its reacting to the texture of memory is influenced by an understanding of the present or presence that defines them as discontinuous. In the sense of Peter Osborne’s operative fiction (Osborne 2013), the relation of past and present is negotiated within the disputed now. So, the presentation’s line of attack, by applying fictocritical practices, attempts to depict and make tangible the terms archive, policy, and care in their mobile formation around a permanently negotiated now: the path taken thus also understands literature as a practice of critique which in writing realizes fictocriticism as a method. The understanding of matters necessitates rendering them understandable—that is, letting philosophy and literature become effective as an actual connection for genuine artistic research while keeping in mind much-stressed vocables such as artistic research and cultural heritage entrepreneurship. With archive, policy, and care I would like to make clear that terms and their history have to be conceived in their topicality or actualization, and that, exactly because they are inconclusive (i.e., unfinished and not to be settled), they are valid for current practices of work in and on the archive. Making matters understandable with the concessions of the literary leads to a second trace, laid out for investigation, namely that of literature as an undeniable part of our cultural heritage. The pronounceableness of literature (but also: of chosen silence) in its entirety clearly reveals that with literature, nothing less but everything is at stake. The significance of the arts cannot simply be expressed in numbers. Literature as criticism and cultural heritage shows one of its many valences as its relation to history and historiography: regarding the past, its effect is that of creating memory, regarding the present, it is reflective, and in relation to the future, formulating and developing. I would like to start addressing our entanglements, which the power of fiction calls our attention to—for instance, in its substituting quality with regard to written records—with the textual images mentioned. Realization and knowledge conjoin in the images; with them, in allusion to William Kentridge (Kentridge

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2014), the archive can be conceived as a laboratory and perhaps as a studio, too. The epistemology of de-linearization to be gathered therefrom is at least partly reflected in the text offered here, and its structure. 3. I feel as if I were dreaming of a room, leached out of a lost space very familiar to me. A single corridor has remained of all its vastness, standing trembling in time, shortly before it will collapse upon itself as planned. The walls and the ceiling are almost completely covered with artifacts, references and pictures, a proliferating, stratified collection prompting me to keep a rashly given promise of renarration. In this installed book I am like abandoned, carefully taking my footsteps, letting my gaze glide over papers and objects like a castaway. Additionally laid-out stuff clings to the low walls, sometimes making it difficult to keep my balance. An archaeology of a continuously elapsing present, this incessantly moving wave crest in the chronology of things gains something like a strange and threatening shape of its own in this arrangement. The purported items of flotsam correlated with each other indicate two different kinds of future; on the one hand, the predictable which can be calculated, and on the other hand, the unexpected which will occur despite all calculation results to the contrary. I feel observed while I am cautiously grazing over wrinkly memories and futile convolutions, palpating the little embedded in the big. Retracing and preserving the connections—intended and invented ones alike—is to be my secret service to this collection. I feel as if I were dreaming of looking at a home I will not have, of opened pages and legs, of a charm bracelet’s pendants. 4. The archive stands for an ordered collection as well as its place of storage. It was (newly) positioned and established as a concept which over the last decades, apart from its implementation strongly focusing on the areas specific to economy and administration, has more and more frequently been thought and conceived in constructive connection with the areas of museum and library. Besides the practicability of the conjunction, the revaluation of the archival assets used by art and culture, and a public more sensitively and discerningly socialized with regard to the media, this is probably to a good part due to the fact that these kinds of institution mostly cultivated internal archives, too, in order to be able to process and manage heterogeneous sub-stock adequately. Apart from classical

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collection contents, such as the medium book (for the library) or the more or less singular object (for the museum), there also were, for example, estates and unpublished material that found their way into these institutions. The intricacies of data gathering, conservation and appropriate processing required—and still does—an archival approach within the collection-specific structures mentioned. 5. From an etymological perspective, the archive, next to the building it is and that accommodates it, is connected with the árchontes, the keepers and (often: first) interpreters of the (official) documents: they are the guarantors of conservation, of memory and actualization. It is up to them to keep the archival records intelligible and up to date, to stay humble in the face of the never-ending task of the archive and retain a reflected self-consciousness of their own work in, and on it. In the organization of internal systems that also has to take into consideration a connection, and the extensive understanding of the heterogeneous records, one should also allow for the respective records’ not, or not immediately, revealing their respective qualities. In my estimation, the currently undertaken philosophical debates between—to put it simply—radical ontological materialists and subject-centered epistemologists have a rather indirect influence on the methods of archivation and indexing, but prove to be the more effective if we enquire about the handling of the archived assets. The practices of archiving which have to include physical properties without abiding there, also create an object’s documentary status while entering and recording it, and thus endow the now archived object with a potential, second vitality. Beyond an exclusion or overcoming of humanness, which to me appears questionable and also politically irresponsible—also with regard to the archivists in relation to their archive—, the establishment and moderation of relations between the archive and the outside apostrophized by Jacques Derrida (Derrida 1996) as dual responsibility: responsibility for the collections, but also for a changed, discerning public. The archive, which over the major part of its historical tradition and sometimes even nowadays is not interested in giving insight to this, with regard to the media differently socialized public, has begun to change, which we should not forget, in parallel with exactly this public in the nineteenth century. So it is not only widely different types of assets and areas, but also

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spheres of interest that need to be moderated. Thus it is, although organized in its directionality, unconcluded, incessant and synchronous. However, the archive that unconditionally has to be, never can and will be unconditional. 6. That which comes to lie next to each other of the acreage of desire and longing, and appears to change again and again, can be described as an atlas. The encounters in this game are preceded by misses one has to accept, exactly because whenever gods and men get in contact with each other, the latter are always the worse for it. There is an armor which actually must not be taken off, or injuries would become visible. The un-healed, ever breaking up afresh, emerges: Clothing is your first line of defense. The blemishes and effects have a counterpart in the collection of objects lying around. You find the unexplored scattered, stacked, stretching to the next, not yet entered room. Friendly insights hurry ahead, the work becomes body ajar, a crack in the darkness. You ask about the advantages of preciseness, the qualities of a goddess of fate who commands fortune and misfortune, but also ability and the chances arising. Fortuna is that which eludes control and predictability, acting vociferously at first, then taciturnly. You cannot simply lie on your side, the changing landscapes lend the atlas its temporary shape. Stretched on this dark underlayer, the evidence stays in motion, becomes arranged. Ever new, initially unthinkable constellations from the depots afford insights, are registered, wear away, and are re-set. 7. Conservation of its assets can easily be seen as the archive’s most exigent task. This scientifically backed-up process of reclaiming the forgotten, the past and the suppressed, too, can only be thought and lived in the sense of a balance between conserving the records and making them accessible, as far as their constitution permits. In this way, the archive—which is a system of order and actual collection in equal measure, connected by a difference-creating hinge element of administrative, submedial processes—can be conceived as a place of intellectual value creation which is pre-informed by its heterogeneous assets. In this, various kinds of assets are not only an important attribute, but also a positively effective basic condition for handling the respective materials, and specification of certain baselines for discursive works and approaches. Thus, apart from the erroneous insinuation of being an end in itself, continuous

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reassessment may not only lead to a more extensive, better understanding of one’s own discipline and recent developments, but also provide instruments for the critical analysis of larger social processes. The consequent investigation of the extant collection assets—for example, what may still qualify as an exhibit, or already has to be considered part of a discipline-historical examination— simply cannot take place in the narrow understanding of a hermeneutics misconceived to be yielding final and everlasting results. Rather, a serious investigation of memory and archive requires a— in the post-structuralist sense—chain of interlinked interpretations which also fertilize and propagate the history of their own field of work. Although the orientation of this interpretative procedural method occasionally has to be viewed with a critical eye, it still is best suited to indicate changes in the recorded material’s significance with regard to a historiography (of the discipline) organized in narrative forms, and considering current issues. 8. Here, the discipline’s internal attribution of meaning in the framework of a twofold movement has to be taken into consideration: the first of these two movements processes the respective artifact out of an entropy-related phase of disorder, of chaos, perhaps even of garbage, into a state of reassessment. The second, in general probably subsequent movement is that of a—mnemotechnically relevant—circulation of semantization in the framework of dealing with collection assets and single objects, a discourse in the sense of an oscillation between two points of tension. This intellectual logistic effort includes shifts in meaning and (re)valuations. Moreover, considering the (metaphorical) blind spots resulting from being integrated in a system—that is, in the broadest sense, a referentiality in the sense of position, observation, and work to be executed—recognizing that position can, quite in the sense of an advanced connection between rationality and collection, lead to a cognizance of participation in historical or historicizing processes. Herein it is indeed desirable not to lose sight of the presence of this mnemotechnical archiving work, that is, to participate in current discourses and to comply with the archives’ foremost wish: to escape a delirious state and head for an order capable of critically questioning itself and offering its own discipline expedient ­possibilities of support and (self-)reflection in the sense of a metaphorical registry. This also holds true extensively for the persons

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working in the institutions, who owing to their occupation are also always affected and inscribed in the archive discourse. Thus, in the area of intersection presented by the archive (for instance, between the ethical, the technical, the juridical, etc.) they are the responsible ones, who with their efforts have to contribute to keeping up the aforementioned balance of responsibility for the assets as well as toward the public. 9. What are quietude and disquiet, what is the book to me next to the sought-after, the thing I actually was searching for without knowing it in advance? The I so lightheartedly written and seeing itself written here wants to be light and has to be allowed to be light. However, one must beware of lightheadedness, just like an archive should not be a private collector on his/her own behalf. In the risk, in the askance glance there is recognition, an option of new insights which does not transcend the already given. The new is created by the connection, the sketch. Rather than simply exchanging the works, it should be their handling. That is, what gets archived, what perhaps was not even intended to, what sees itself fit in the formations of the material. As I am standing here in front of the shelves, imagining the double ground of history under me, the archive becomes tangible to me as a cluster of procedures which make the knowledge of literature come forward. Under my gaze it gains shape and reality. What catches my eye, focusing in the lens of a foreign language, is nothing less but a rencontre in its multitude of readings. When looking up and flipping open anew, I encounter time together with the text in space. Therefore, with regard to the unavoidable loss we have to ask when, not whether it will come to pass. This image wants to be remembered, and in secret probably desired, too. I will be able to observe the following story, but no longer to participate in it. Should I close my eyes and enjoy it, as the literary sources recommend in such cases, should I knowingly decide: there’s always a siren, singing you to shipwreck. How many creases are there to an owl, how does the paper (more exactly: the paper’s memory) remember? Something is created in the traces of creasing, here the moments of turning and transformation become tangible. So I have to find out what I missed. What I am consulting is not only stored here, as if we could thoughtlessly forget—here, something could originate. It is an exercise in

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absence which helps me to affirm that the sayable is preceded by the readable, by what can be read out. The source, if skillfully asked, reveals itself, the trembling page in my hands is two-valued, script and tremor in one. The cut in my palm makes me remember everything I unknowingly miss. The collection encourages entry into one’s own writing: the gathering of objects in the archive, my flickering dropout, the microsleep of the machines all around. 10. Policy (of the archive) as prudent, regulating behavior necessarily goes beyond the possibilities and modes of action of one discipline. As already mentioned earlier, mindful of the power and responsibility of the archival tasks, humility and decision-making authority have to be thought together to guarantee the proportion of conservation and accessibility, and continue to do so. The change of status of the respective object, which through the practices of archiving becomes a document, as already hinted at, is an example of alignment with the law, a set obligation. The broad field of meanings of the law ranges from the sacred to the secular (from nómos to lex); it includes a function of order and orderliness. The rightful commandment, which is the epitome of prescriptions and the respective scripture (lettre) itself, too, sets itself apart positively from the so-called natural, unwritten law, the ágraphos nómos: other than these conventions or customs, the law (of the archive) can also be enforced and asserted according to an orderly given procedure derived from itself. The transformation of such a law, which always is positioned in relation to the entirety of what is valid at a time, can only be executed according to prefigured conditions, in line with its expedience and meaningful application. In the sense of obligation and specific telos, that is, voluntary compliance, the law (of the archive) needs rules of reason, of rightness (also: justice) and actuality in order to achieve meaningful applicability and viability which is positive, but not positivistic. Coherent, reflected perception of our courses of action in order to—in a Hegelian sense—realize our work in and on the archive is clearly in favor of not taking it easy. This mostly invisible work frequently becomes visible only when it is missing. 11. Now, to get literal in this respect, too, and following Martin Heidegger (Heidegger 2006), this care is the considerate active

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contact linked to it, which makes use of all the necessary instruments—which likewise mostly are noticed only when they fail. Thought positively, also in the sense of Osborne’s already mentioned approach regarding present and presence, a caring, concentrated sensibility directed at the freedom of its options, which is also conscious of its actual chronology, can (and should) be at work in the archive. The not least temporal structure of care advances understanding for the right moments of the time slots opening in the now. Regarding the protective form of care, provision is also laid out in the sense of the archive, that is, actions directed at the future and prospective issues, which in all its discretion strives not to d/evaluate anticipatorily, and conceives history in its synchronicity. In the sense of the archive’s dual responsibility, the conservation and opening up of its records, care focuses our responsibilities of searching, conserving, opening—and, whenever necessary, guarding. 12. A new mental matrix is required for this, a renewed understanding of history and historiography. Herein, the (re-)politicization of the archive is as unavoidable as it is desirable. The step that has to be taken, that of establishing the archive as an in this respect effective and functional thinking model can only be realized when one simultaneously calls on the ambiguously readable critique—for instance, as ability or worthiness of taking criticism. The mode of the setting is accompanied by the gestus of that critique. The repeated (or perhaps: new) setting of the archive as a thinking model opens our gaze for the objects history breaks down into, and which not least are material (such as texts, pictures, etc.). Deliberately once again, this means: the archive on the one hand should be established as a triad of institution, collection, and practice, and on the other hand, with reference to David L.  Martin (Martin 2011), with regard to its sources as a discursive troika of collection, body (also in the sense of the respective sources’ physical quality) and a medial cartography, which enables productive criticism of progression-linear historiography. The assortative archive here serves as a register of historiography, as an option for reflecting about the way and what kind of sense we lend to basically meaningless history. However, this moment of endowment should not be thought as a hermeneutic practice applied once and there-

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after unquestionable, but rather as the necessity of time and again (and ever anew) subjecting the sources competently—and thus skeptically, too—to rereading and contextualization. This, too, is part of the incessant, cyclical work on the archive to be mediated— work on the archive’s records. The gaze, thus, enhanced and lifting the respective evidence out of the collection’s aggregate is aware of historicity as well as of the present moment. The prospect of the future following thereupon, of which care has to be taken, here continuously re-manifests as a challenge regarding the ethical position of a commitment to responsibility for the collection and the public. The logistic-intellectual efforts of the archive (or the archivist) in the sense of choreographic linkage and sensitive updating not only enables enquiry of the sources, but also defining resistances, perhaps even yielding fault lines leading to that which has to be grasped in all its ambiguity—in the sense of the ability thus addressed, but also its worthiness—and as such, to be indicated for society as a whole, or even, if possible, to be lived: a critique of archives. 13. The pressure in the back, gentle for now, then becoming stronger, can be felt clearly. Your right palm is sitting between my shoulder blades, I cannot see it, I merely imagine how it is putting me in motion more and more clearly in this pictorial moment. You are pushing me onward, while I am unable to conceive of my own sleep, cannot remember the disquiet which I have perhaps introduced to someone else’s bed. In the morning, there still was a voluminous heroic biography with appropriately colorful cover design lying on the windowsill. My fleeting glance was another than the one with which I had skimmed the titles on the bookshelves the night before. Perhaps it will not be important which of them could have irritated me, or which ones actually amazed me. In the now there is no stopover, and your pushing, somewhere between the rudiments of a rehearsed dance step, that is, a predetermined sequence one follows without thinking at all, and a downright mechanical lever movement from an exotic martial art, supports that circumstance. My flippantly discarded watch, once more almost forgotten, now shows the right hour to me again, your severe calculation of times does not just have to do with day-

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light saving and a predilection for semiotics. I’m going easy on you by going easy on myself, submitting to the pressure and the movement, letting myself fall into them. The rustling of clothes disappears behind the comfort of a door that closes lastingly. In re-enacted exactitude, listening at the mercy of the watch’s hands, the present divulges what is to come. That is the best of all possible worlds.

References Ballhausen, Thomas. 2005. Kontext und Prozess. Eine Einführung in die medienübergreifende Quellenkunde. Ansätze—Beispiele—Literatur. Wien: Löcker Verlag. Ballhausen, Thomas. 2015. Signaturen der Erinnerung. Über die Arbeit am Archiv. Wien: Edition Atelier. Barad, Karen. 2012. What is the Measure of Nothingness? Infinity, Virtuality, Justice. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz. Caduff, Corina, and Wälchli, Tan, eds. 2019. Artistic Research and Literature. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink. Cixous, Hélène. 1992. “Coming to Writing” and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cixous, Hélène. 1998. Stigmata. Escaping Texts. New York: Routledge. Dawson, Paul. 2005. Creative Writing and the New Humanities. London: Routledge. Derrida, Jacques. 1996. Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2003. Invention of Hysteria. Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2018. Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Haas, Gerrit. 2017. Ficto/critical Strategies. Subverting Textual Practices of Meaning, Other, and Self-Formation. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. Head, Randolph C. 2019. Making Archives in Early Modern Europe. Proof, Information, and Political Record-Keeping, 1400–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 2006. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. Kafka, Franz. 2008. Die Erzählungen. Drucke zu Lebzeiten aus dem Nachlass. Düsseldorf: Artemis & Winkler Verlag. Kentridge, William. 2014. Six Drawing Lessons. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Martin, David L. 2011. Curious Visions of Modernity. Enchantment, Magic, and the Sacred. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Micale, Mark S. 2008. Hysterical Men. The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Osborne, Peter. 2013. Anywhere Or Not At All. Philosophy of Contemporary Art. London: Verso. Showalter, Elaine. 1997. Hystories. Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media. New York: Columbia University Press.

Notes on Hysteria in and as Arts-Based Research: a Case Study Johanna Braun

In my arts-based research, I’m concerned with how images and imaginations of hysteria have been re-produced in the present and how the hysteric has been imagined as a mediator between historical practices that were aware of their own performativity and current manifestations of hysteria that are performing this historical awareness and self-reflection.1 The academic and artistic research culminates in a Warburgian Bilderatlas, which enables a performative display and performative research methodologies.2 The source material of the Atlas is drawn from visual culture at large and (US) horror film in particular.3 As a result of performance (studies) being a paradigm-driven field, I follow hysteria’s performance as an object of inquiry, which enables me to put the current phenomenon in its (historical) context and focus on performance studies as a primary analytical concept, allowing me to imagine a “hysterical” expression of doing research.4

J. Braun (*) University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Braun (ed.), Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66360-5_15

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Acknowledgment  This essay stems out of the Erwin Schrödinger research project “The Hysteric as Conceptual Operator”: [J 4164 -G24], funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF); conducted at the University, of California, Los Angeles, Stanford University and the University of Vienna (2018–2020).

Notes 1. For more on arts-based research, please confer: footnote 2. For more scholarship on hysteria and performance, please confer: “Introduction: Searching for Methods in This Madness”, the introductory part of this volume, and the webpage www.performing-hysteria.com. But while I have you here, may I tell you something? It is a not so well-kept secret that while, in the late twentieth century, the medical term hysteria was struck from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the notorious characteristics of hysteria, as a mimetic disorder, cryptically emerged under the diagnosis of Histrionic Personality Disorder—and the Latin noun histrio already points us in the right direction, unveiling the hysteric as actor/actress or player. This terminological shift reveals the century-long understanding of hysteria as what we would call today a performer and pointedly illustrates how hysteria moves, plays and performs beyond the limits of medical discourse. Let me disclose this bit of personal information: I use the terms hysteria and performance consciously and simultaneously cautiously, as they are central to a variety of academic and artistic fields and their definitions are ambiguous and remain contested. The term “hysteria” is here chosen deliberately, because it includes artistic, medical, religious and political concepts throughout its extensive histories (in fact and fiction), and its representations, so the argument, have been conceived in terms of performance. The hysterics is not just “mad”: they reference a range of representations that are historically specific to hysteria and were understood in the realms of performance. Jean-Martin Charcot revealingly used the term “neuromimesis” to describe how the hysterical body could mimetically perform other distinct conditions and the very terms used to describe the hysterical body and its seizures—epileptoid, choretic, clownism, acrobatic—reflect this sentiment. Following this idea of hysteria as a playful agent provocateur, whose performative symptoms point to something pressing to be articulated “under the surface” or “between the lines”, I explore in this (buried) essay the potentiality of a hysterical text body as a symptom of a hysterical interdisciplinary performance (writing) practice. Steven Conner muses: “It does appear as though the idea of the marking of the skin has a strangely indeterminate status in discussions of hysteria. Perhaps we might risk the suggestion that it is a disease, not of the womb, as so many have thought, nor of the imagination, as Freud declared, but a disease of marking” (2004, p.  124). In this context the footnote’s superscript figure,

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which leaves marks on the main text corpus that point to important information lurking buried at the margins, and proclaims that there is something “lurking in the shadows” of the textual body, seems to be the fitting place to start this arts-based reflection on hysteria’s various performance practices. Here I propose to contextualize the footnote’s superscript figure as a mark on the page’s skin, a textural gesture, in hysteria’s performance repertoire. The superscript figure, as a pointing finger, is mostly situated at the end of a dot, a “full stop”, and exclaims: wait, there is more to the story than might appear! The superscript figure that is tied to the footnote (or sometimes also disguised as endnote) is imagined as a visual marker, a symptom, a moving gesture, in the main text corpus that points to what is hidden beneath the often drawn line on the page that dissociates the main text corpus from the thoughts and voices in the margin. Just as symptoms on and of the hysteric’s performing body invite exploration of their hidden or underlying “meaning”, the superscript figure serves as a significant visual and contextual marker, in this regard, a performative player—that mimics hysteria’s corporeal performance; even mimicking hysteria’s often proclaimed virtues of dissociation and conversion in moving messages from the surface to the verge of the main (text) corpus. These little marks and their attached notes invite a performative reading, a reading in motion. The superscript figure in the main text moves us, the readers, to its superscript shadow figure “below the surface” and the ensuing note in the fringes of the text, either at the end of the page or the end of the main text corpus, and then, in turn, the awaiting note directs to further readings and sources that move us beyond the limits of the actual text. These different parts and “symptomatic attachments”, which are often simply conflated under the term “the footnote”, are already inviting a fairly performative engagement with the text. The topically applied superscript figure of the footnote is interruptive, providing little insights, marks and, at times, wounds to the page, which pretends to speak under its breath of things only mentioned in passing, or points casually to the notorious tip of the iceberg, which presents “hooks” that invite further, more detailed explorations. The footnote summons whispers, rumors and personal reflections that are often otherwise excluded from academic writings and can even be added posthumously and turn the direction of previous writings on their head. It is also via such a footnote that the origins of Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud’s Studies on Hysteria (1895) are re-written. A rumor, a legendary tale of a hysterical birth scene that still haunts the psychoanalytical project, was inserted in the form of a sneaky footnote, to transform Anna O.’s case study in Freud’s favor and incorporate it into his wider oeuvre. This ominous footnote was added thirteen years after Anna O.’s presumed treatment by Joseph Breuer had ended, and additionally half a century after the first publication of Studies on Hysteria, and was pointedly inserted—by James Strachey, Freud’s

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editor and translator of a reprint of the original text, and presumably on behalf of Freud—right before Breuer’s closing sentence, where the supposed cure was declared. For more on this “power move” on Freud’s part and the consequences it brought about, confer: Weinbaum (2004). This legendary inserted footnote, and the twist it entails to the historization of one of the most prominent and influential case studies on hysteria, precisely illustrates how powerful the often underestimated superscript figure is, how political it can act, especially in the performative history of hysteria, the history of writings on hysteria. Amid this context, this essay (that is lurking in the shadows) is meant as an exploration of relations between writing and hysteria’s performance repertoire. In this endeavor, and simultaneously acknowledging the personal involvement with the topic at hand, this essay is evidently informed by and draws from forms of writing on and around contemporary art and performance, that are drawn together under the ambiguous term “performative writing”—following the Medusa call from inspiring thinkers, such as Peggy Phelan (eg. 1993), Jodi Kanter  (2007), Della Pollock  (eg. 1998), Ronald Pelias  (eg. 2019), Avital Ronell (eg. 1989), Jennifer DeVere Brody (2008), Amelia Jones and Andrew Stephenson (1999)  or Hélène Cixous  (eg. 1976). In following Andrea Lunsford’s (2015) declaration “writing is performative”, I use performative writing to both write and think about hysteria’s performance in relation to my work in general and reflect on how hysteria’s performance is “infiltrating” my arts-based practice in a multitude of ways in particular. As Jodi Kanter has poignantly summarized: “Performative writing does not just describe an event or experience—it mirrors, behaves like, does its subject” (Kanter 2007, p. 12); this sentiment very much brings to mind the very notion of how hysteria’s performance is described as mimicking, mirroring and behaving in “pretend” or at times deceptive play. Therefore, performative writing mimics the performance it writes about and thus provides a very productive bridge to a hysterical self-reflective performance praxis, in theory and practice. Here, writing about hysteria’s performance is more than just a replication, the act of writing forms hysteria in and of itself. Performative writing provides tools to explore how writing interacts with other art forms and practices, in this case performance art, visual art and artsbased research. By considering textual marks, such as in this case the superscript figure and its “attached” footnote, through the lens of cultural studies, visual studies and performance theory, I follow what Jennifer DeVere Brody has described in Punctuation: Art, Politics, Play. Durham (2008) as the “performative aspects” and “visual (re)marks” of punctuation marks. Brody advocates for an expansion of punctuation and its performances beyond “the stage of the page” (p. 26); freeing the topic from its long-standing confinement to linguistics and offering a bridge or, more appositely, an arc-en-cercle to the performing arts. For other book-length works of cultural studies on punctua-

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tion, please confer: Garber (2003), Scheible (2015), Mitchell (2020). I quite literally follow Brody’s “point” in looking at the performative aspects of what at times follows the punctuation mark: the superscript figure of the footnote, sometimes also disguised as endnote. The term footnote, here, already invites the probably platitudinous musing of “following the text’s footsteps” or hysteria’s light-footed movements in a multitude of performative manifestations. In following Brody’s proclaimed “structure” of “[d]iscontinuity and disjuncture” (p. 27), or Ronald Pelias’ statement that performative writing “cherishes the fragmentary, the uncertain” (Pelias 2014, p. 13), the superscript figure provides a form of artistic reflection that can look at different aspects of one’s practice on their own: each footnote is related to the main “body of work”, but still stands on its own in the shadows of the main text. In close resemblance to hysteria, “the footnote” invites a wandering reflection and exploration, that does not follow a straight path but moves freely, wanders, bends, sometimes jumps abruptly and at times even gets lost, between subjects, periods, disciplines or hysterical methodologies. The superscript figure in and on the main text facilitates a “jumping-off point” to explore some translucent layers; in the case of this essay, on how different scopes of hysteria and performance inform my body of work. Although I have chosen to use the form of an Artist Statement “up front”, the main text body mostly refrains from inviting the often shunned personal “me” and “I” in academic scholarship, while the margins of the main text corpus invite a playground for personal reflection. Therefore, the footnote seems fitting to explore the self-reflexive potential of thinking with hysteria. Performative writing, even on a submerged level playing field of the footnotes, opens up the possibilities of what Trinh Minh-ha (1991) calls a “plural I”, an “I” that has the potential to stand in for many “I’s”. The footnote is this regard is a place to gather, where one can listen to summoned whispers. Pelias has discussed this in relation to scholarship on performative writing that is not “just about the self, although the self can never be left behind”; scholarship on performative writing, precisely as visualized in the footnote, “even when based upon the self, points outward” (Pelias 2014, p. 14). Or, as Therí Alyce Pickens’ “expects” footnotes and epigraphs to “do a substantive amount of work in pushing the conversation beyond the four walls” of the text (2019, p. xi), in this regard the footnote is an inviting conversation starter. The aim of this whispering essay is to provide a glimpse into the multitude of sources and practices that I am in conversation with that combine hysteria, performance and artistic research. I invite you to move with me further in this shadowy exploration. 2. According to the Oxford Research Encyclopedias, “The term arts-based research is an umbrella term that covers an eclectic array of methodological and epistemological approaches. The key elements that unify this diverse body of work are: it is research; and one or more art forms or processes are involved in the doing of the research” (Greenwood 2019).

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In following this premise, the arts provide unique tools and methodologies to create, interpret, analyze, reflect on and present my research on hysteria. These various research activities come together in multimedia installations that stem from one combining “body of research” that can be described as a Warburgian Bilderatlas, inspired by Aby Warburg’s extensive Mnemosyne Atlas project that I understand very much in the field of arts-based research; for this argument, please also confer: Bäcklund (2004); and clearly within a performative research practice. The medium and methodologies of the Bilderatlas not only provide me with a suited form to present my research findings as art, but by “doing” something that resembles the hauntings of a Warburgian Bilderatlas, the acts of collecting, archiving, interpreting and analyzing that go into making multimedia installations that encompass photography, various forms of visual print media, videos, painting, literature and writings, and performance art can come together and frame those activities from a “mad” or in my case “hysterical” research practice. Although Warburg’s sprawling body of work is often described as “never completed”, “unfinished” or “unaccomplished”, those descriptions neglect the core artistic quality of his project. Just as Warburg kept his private library project in motion, wandering by constantly rearranging and moving it, the intrinsic set up of the Bilderatlas already suggests: there is no final form, the entire project is built on being in motion, in constant augmentation, continuously changing shape and form, and tirelessly performing, and playing by its very own rules. For more on the political and racial implications of wandering and hysteria, please confer: Weinbaum (2004), Gilman (2020). Each piece stands only for a brief moment in time, the arranged plates are mere snapshots, Momentaufnahmen, that disintegrate freely and playfully when the time comes for reconfiguration. Like symptoms traveling on the hysterical body, each collected piece within the atlas only shows the tip of the iceberg, pointing nonchalantly to what might lie beneath the surface. Each time the pieces resurface in new constellations, keeping good company just for as long as necessary, they travel lightly, before they (maybe) return again with a different meaning depending on the context amid which they emerge. The Bilderatlas enables me to “work with” or more accurately “think or collaborate with” images that mimic or disguise in everchanging forms, that are hard to pin down (at times quite literally), resist a set definition, operating discontinuously and non-linearly in time. The Bilderatlas functions like a performative display that rejects the often-assumed virtue of history’s narrative as an ordered sequence of successive events: it invites rumors, secrets and ghostly whisperings; marginalized and disenfranchised voices too often rendered invisible. This kind of Momentaufnahmen can be documented and recorded, but the atlas itself “moves on”. I don’t think I have to elaborate in detail how this very virtue of the Bilderatlas presents itself quite uniquely and fittingly for a multifaceted hysterical arts-based performance research practice—it is already revealing enough for this argument that

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images from Charcot’s archive on hysterical gestures wandered prominently around Warburg’s plates. The methodologies introduced by the Bilderatlas are not only genuinely interdisciplinary, but have the potential to act “indisciplinary” (Rancière and Birell 2008; Kolesch and Klein 2009). In following Warburg’s declaration “I was less interested in neat solutions than in formulating a new problem” (Warburg 1988), I’m moved by what hysterical images (Bilder) can reveal about our culture(s), what they are whispering, speaking or at times shouting about, and what echoes from the past are still traceable in the present and might project into the future. As a result of this unruly temperament, Warburg’s approach to research is at times referred to as “anti-method”; Giorgio Agamben has famously and more favorably referred to Warburg’s Bilderatlas project as the “nameless science” (Agamben 1999). By doing a Bilderatlas, the research opens up reflective spaces that invite wanderings, explorations on how artistic research and the production of knowledge can intersect. Du Preez contemplates “we are reminded that an atlas of images, as in the case of the Bilderatlas, never merely illustrates knowledge; it constructs knowledge and even, sometimes, manages to deconstruct it” (2020, p. 379). In doing this, this hysterical performative research practice is very much moving in the two directions that Florian Dombois (2009) has discussed as the diametrical movements of artistic research as “Research about/for/through Art | Art about/for through Research”; but by eliding the partition and adding a bridge, I’m advocating for the Bilderatlas as “Research about/for/through Art and Art about/for through Research”. Furthermore, Warburg’s project builds a bridge to the self-reflexive and creative field of Mad studies; for more on Mad Studies, please confer: footnote 4 of this exploration. Although not often discussed, Warburg was a psychiatric survivor himself and was institutionalized until 1924—the same year he started working on his Mnemosyne project (Binswanger and Warburg 2007). Even after his presumed “cure” at Klinik Bellevue was declared, Warburg recurrently summons “the notion of a clinic and its inmates” when talking or writing about his library and its personnel (Forster 1999). Lucia Ruprecht concludes that these descriptions “might have been intended jocularly; yet it also reveals the scholar’s [Warburg] projection of his personal experience onto his institution [Warburg Library of Cultural Studies] and onto the research that he was pursuing together with his staff” (Ruprecht 2019, p.  126). The “madness” that expresses itself through the tirelessly moving and changing Bilderatlas brings Georges Didi-Huberman—who needs no introduction in the ways he has shaped research on hysteria and its visual representation and cultural implications, and who traced the origin of the Mnemosyne Atlas in the trauma of the First World War and Warburg’s subsequent psychiatric institutionalization (Didi-Huberman 2012)—to declare “the intrinsic madness” of Warburg’s project (Didi-Huberman 2010, p. 20). Didi-Huberman then readily contin-

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ued this “mad”, or more accurately hysteric, research into the twenty-first century by curating a series of exhibitions that take Warburg’s atlas as their point of departure. Here we can see how this kind of “mad research” is contagious and moves light-footedly across periods and “performers of knowledge”. And this only shows a fraction of how Warburg’s project cultivated a quite “busy afterlife” in present times, which in turn also “infects” my own creative research practice. I’m also very moved by Griselda Pollock’s work that adds an international-, postcolonial-, queer-feminist perspective to Warburgian “mad” research on images and their cultural and political implications (Pollock 2013a, b, 2017, 2018) and Amanda Du Preez’s invitation to reflect on how a Warburgian approach of “Thinking Through Images” can be conceptualized in the digital age (Du Preez 2020). In building a bridge, a hysterische Brücke, between the introductory part of this volume that already unveils many of my interests, musings and (re)search for hysteria’s performance, Warburg offers us a friendly gesture, a note that illustrates the survival or “afterlife” of gestures and motifs from antiquity to commercial art of the 1920s. Warburg noted in a diary in 1929—the same year his project came to an end because of a fatal heart attack, a year he proclaimed already during his lifetime would end his tireless work: “The travel maid in the flyer is a bedraggled nymph, as the sailor is a Nike” (Forster 1999, p. 40). In this spirit, my very own Bilderatlas project on the continuing involvement of hysteria and its performative, cultural and political dimensions operates as not so much a declaration as an invitation to think and explore further. Just like a footnote, the Bilderatlas is an invitation to explore or even get lost on the Wanderstrassen that lead beyond the “period”, the hastily set dot. 3. For the documentation of a selection of projects involving the Bilderatlas, please confer: www.johannabraun.com. In my academic and artistic research, which often culminates in such a Bilderatlas, I trace hysteria’s performance repertoire in contemporary popular culture and political discourse, and look closer at the underlining meanings of re-producing images and gestures evidently stemming from hysteria’s performance histories. One specific recurring image is the hysteric girl, a historically well-studied object in arts and sciences and whose hysterical “episodes” are clearly defined and understood in the realms of performance (see footnote 1; “Introduction: Searching for Methods in This Madness”, the introductory part of this volume; and Braun 2020a)—that emerged at the turn of the century as a complex pop-cultural icon, especially through its portrayal in the iconic horror film The Exorcist (Warner Bros., 1973). Some of the most successful US horror films of the early twenty-first century, and of which generally The Exorcist (Warner Bros., 1973) is seen as the originator, and which are summarized under the umbrella term Possession Film (Clover, 1992), were eager to put the hysteric girl center stage—for example, An American Haunting (Lionsgate, 2005), The Exorcism of Emily Rose (Sony, 2005), the Paranormal Activity series (Paramount, 2007–), The

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Last Exorcism I and II (Lionsgate, 2011/2013), The Devil Inside (Paramount, 2012), The Possession (Lionsgate, 2012), The Conjuring universe (Warner Bros., 2013–), Deliver Us from Evil (Sony, 2014), The Quiet Ones (Lionsgate, 2014), Jessabelle (Lionsgate, 2014), Insidious: Chapter 3 (Sony, 2015), Ouija I and II: Origin of Evil (Universal, 2014/2016) and The Possession of Hannah Grace (Sony, 2018), among many others.These productions use this figure as a critical commentator on current pressing political discussions, especially touching on public health care debates, while also promoting stereotypical and stigmatizing images of mental and physical disabilities. The images these films re-produce and widely distribute form an essential part of my primary research material (Braun 2020b). The representation of hysteria in these films reproduces obviously the representations of Jean-Martin Charcot’s nineteenth-century medical studies on the “hysterical attack”—with stereotypical hysterical symptoms, such as what Charcot termed clownism (contortions and acrobatic postures), and choretic spasms (involuntary spasmodic twitching or jerking), and employs classic hysterical fits of “attitudes passionnelles”, such as erratic behavior, uncontrollable laughing and dancing, twisting limbs behind and across the body, and disturbance of vision, hearing and language. These selected films often even feature the iconic hysterical pose of “Grande Hystérie”, the excessive movement of the arc-en-cercle—and many of them even feature the hysteric in this iconic pose on their promotional posters. Angela M. Smith already notes that Charcot’s photo archive “resonates with typical scenes from classical horror films”, considering Augustine a template or blueprint of “horror-film visions of vulnerable, beautiful young women sleeping or fainting on their beds” (2011, pp. 167–68). At the same time, these representations move beyond mere reproduction of the European medical material and utilize hysteria in order to bundle current public discussions on, and also provide interesting insights into, current public discourses of migration, women’s rights, healthcare politics—especially in regard to physical and mental disabilities—and racial politics. While the hysteric’s visual repertoire points to the fact that something of pressing urgency is communicated, it is especially the hysteric’s ambivalent performance that is relevant in its contemporary context. The hysteric challenges, blurs and transgresses boundaries of class, gender, sexuality, race, religious belief and time periods with ease and these current representations point to the fact that hysteria’s relationship to those parameters is much more complex than often “retold”. What became evident during my arts-based research is the current shift from the horror film icon of the hysteric girl to more recent representations of hysteria as mass phenomenon—that differs in its representation of “the masses” as hysterical from other horror genres, such as the zombie or alien invasion film. This shift becomes more evident in a group of highly successful and widely marketed recent films that build on the tropes and the representations of the

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hysteric body on screen, but shift the attention from the individual to a collective hysterical body—implying a connection between hysteria and the political body or, more widely, the body politic at large. These highly successful US (horror) films of recent years feature large groups of people as mass hysterical, as unruly and out of control, referencing in obvious ways the depiction of mass hysteria from historical, medical, artistic and religious sources, as can be witnessed in the popular The Purge series (Universal, 2013–), Bird Box (Netflix, 2018), Us (Universal, 2019), Joker (Warner Bros., 2019), the recent remake of Suspiria (Amazon Studios/Videa, 2018) or surprise box-office hits such as the indie-production Assassination Nation (Bron Studios, 2018). It is interesting to witness how these current films draw much inspiration from and continue the legacy of The Exorcist, whose release and reception was surrounded by themes of mass hysteria, as original newsprint reviews and articles attest, and allegedly triggered in the audience intense bodily reactions to the film, which included fainting, vomiting, heart attacks, miscarriages and spectators claiming they were themselves possessed as a result of the cinematic experience (Bozzuto 1975; Hamilton 1978). The Exorcist was one of the first to deploy what was later coined “viral marketing strategies” (Tim Draper) and has since then become a major tool in the distribution and marketing of those current films. These films illustrate how hysterical symptoms “contagiously” transfer from the onscreen body to the spectorial body, and thus imply and reproduce long-standing discussions of a mediating contagious film-body. In doing so, they point to the cineastic legacy that Francesco Casetti calls the often forgotten “Cinephobia in early film culture” (2018) and connects with Lee Grieveson’s (2018) idea of a mimetic contagion from film to spectators. The mimetic transference between the onscreen body, the film-body and the spectorial body carries historically charged concepts of hysteria into the present and reveals the entrenched relationship of hysteria and cinema from its conception. The medium film has already played from its very beginning a crucial role in documenting and representing the hysterical body, as is also evident in Charcot’s early motion studies on hysteria’s performance repertoire (in the form of serial photography produced by Désiré Magloire and Paul Regnard, confer: Didi-Huberman 2003; Cartwright 1995; Marshall 2016), and this “image archive” of hysteria is very much used and re-produced in these contemporary horror films. Although American horror film scholarship is highly aware of Freud’s influence on the genre, the connection between Freud’s internationally well-recognized studies on hysteria and its close link to cinema falls surprisingly on a blind spot. Their immediate proximity can be traced to their parallel emergence: Simultaneously as the Lumière brothers were presenting their cinematograph in Paris in 1895, Freud and Breuer published their influential Studies on Hysteria in Vienna. Furthermore, Freud’s Dream Analysis,

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which is important to film studies, actually debuts in Studies on Hysteria; on the simultaneous emergence of Edison’s Kinetoscope in 1893 and Freud and Fliess’ breakthrough in the diagnostic etiology of hysteria, confer: Dumas (2014, p.  22). Especially, the myth surrounding the first public screening of the Lumière’s L’arrivée du train à La Ciotat in 1896 allegedly led to mass hysteria among the audience, who thought that the train onscreen was actually driving into the screening room, producing what was later termed the “train effect” (Metz 1982; Gunning 1999; Bottomore 1999) and constituting the underanalyzed legacy of “Cinephobia in early film culture” (Casetti 2018). This fruitful connection of film-viewing and mass hysteria is illustrated by the historically prevailing notion that the film medium itself is possessed/possessing. Building on such historically established assumptions that the film-body can have possessing abilities, the perception of film spectators as being hysterical, “mad” or possessed can be traced throughout the history of film and can be contributed to the fact of the parallel development of cinematic technologies, psychoanalytic theory and modern clinical psychiatry; confer: Hamilton (1978), Ballon and Leszcz (2007), Levack (2013), among others. Brian Levack already investigated the intersection between cinema and “possession”, and located its origin in the “theater of possession”, which well predates the development of the medium film and attests that this wellestablished connection is still influencing contemporary horror films (Levack 2013). It was especially by the film The Exorcist, and the large number of spectators that were claiming to suffer from demonic possession through watching the movie, that medical professionals were led to coin the term “cinematic possession neurosis”—the latter were also influenced by Sigmund Freud’s paper “A Seventeenth-Century Demonological Neurosis” (Bozzuto 1975; Hamilton 1978) and Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of Ego (1921), which was especially influential on media theories concerning anxieties about the mimetic effects of cinema in twentieth-century film studies, philosophy and social sciences. The current phenomenon that is the focus of my case studies evidently draws on such historically and cinematically well-established notions of the mass hysterical spectorial body, especially in relation to representations of “madness” and disability. The current films reveal how the film material itself is contagious; as is illustrated in films such as The Evil Dead (1991), Videodrome (1984) or Demons (1985), or later productions such as Rec. (2007, Spanish) and its US remake Quarantine (2008). Demons presents a Grand Guignolesque epidemic of demonic possession, among the audience of an avant-garde grindhouse theater (a plot that was later imitated by The Video Dead, 1987) and echoes evidently the “madness” of the mass hysterical spectorial bodies at the screening of L’arrivée du train. While also building on recent film history scholarship, such as Francesco Casetti on Cinephobia in early film culture (2018) and Lee Grieveson on a

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“mimetic contagion” of the cinematic experience on spectators (2018), the aim of my arts-based research is to shed light on this highly interesting and still under-recognized historical and cultural connection between hysteria studies, performance studies, (American horror) film, and disability studies and to trace how these concepts of embodied spectatorship from the late nineteenth century, especially as they link cinematic technologies to concepts of possession and madness, are still effective in the present. Furthermore, in reflecting on this hysterical spectorial body, my research has extended its scope to theories of embodied spectatorship, which have become an analytical focus in recent decades and draw on phenomenological frameworks as well as personal film-viewing experiences (Sobchack 1992, 2004; Marks 2000; Barker 2009). The theories tie in the new field of Mad studies (LeFrançois et al. 2013; Spandler et al. 2015) to bring to the fore corporeality and tactility in notions of film spectatorship—in theory and as analytical concepts. In building on (feminist) horror film scholarship of embodied spectatorship, which is embedded in broader discussions of a “corporeal turn” (Sheets-Johnstone 2009) in the humanities, the methodologies of existential film-phenomenology and “Mad studies” (Ingram 2016) provide critical tools to analyze mass hysteria and film, while opening the door to the emerging field of performed phenomenology as a mode of (hysterical) embodied research. 4. For more on Arts-based research and hysteria, especially a “hysterical” performative writing practice, please confer footnote 1; for “doing” “hysterical/ mad” research as Bilderatlas, please confer footnote 2 and visual documentation at www.johannabraun.com. For more scholarship on hysteria and performance, please confer “Introduction: Searching for Methods in This Madness”, the introductory part of this volume, and a continuously updated bibliography at www.performing-hysteria.com. Within my research practice that understands itself in many ways as “hysterical”, and that is also tracing hysteria’s movements through the medium film, the film-viewing experience and reflection on the latter itself becomes performative and invites reflection on the artistic and philosophical implications of my doing this research. This research on performance studies emerges as a primary analytical concept and the emerging field of Thinking as Performance provides the necessary philosophical tools for such analysis; confer: Rokem (2010), Böhler et al. (2013 and 2014), Cull Ó Maoilearca and Alice Lagaay (2020). In the following, in relation to the philosophical questioning of my research object of hysteria, the pressing questions of “Speaking-of” and “Speaking-Through” reflect my own authorship position in this discourse. Along the way, I draw on Linda Williams’ concept of horror as “body genre” because of the strong physical response elicited by it (1991); on Rhona Berenstein’s concept on gender performativity to “offer a theory of classic horror spectatorship as a form of performance” (1996, p.  30; “spectatorship-as-drag”, drawing on Clover 1993, p.  159 and Butler 1990); and, most importantly, on Matt Hills’ notion of “thinking about theories of hor-

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ror as performative” (Hills 2004, p. 205; drawing on Austin’s speech act theories). In a wider sense my arts-based research engages with the work of political philosopher Giorgio Agamben, a key theorist in the emerging field of Film Philosophy as a distinct research field within cinema studies, as he adopts a philosophically driven Foucauldian archeological approach to the study of moving images and contributes significantly to film studies and visual culture studies. The hysteric in the films I “experience”, that I think about, reveals the invisible and speaks the unspeakable. Here it is important to note that the hysteric is both saying and doing and sometimes the message from one action contradicts the other. This ambivalent performance makes it highly relevant to analyze the hysteric’s actions in both dimensions. Agamben enables a multidisciplinary approach to the study of moving images; therefore, his concept of “gestural cinema” (1999, pp. 133–140) offers a productive tool for studying the ambivalent performance of hysteria in the language and gesture used, the words and image (re)produced. In tying these approaches together, I add a performative diversification of my own research practice and establish a link between (new) hysteria studies, performance studies, (horror) film studies, and the emerging field of film-philosophy and the emerging international network of scientists, philosophers and artists who have been investigating the entangled relation between philosophy and performance, which addresses the philosophy of performance as well as performance-as-philosophy and philosophy-as-performance. For further readings, please confer: the festivals Philosophy on Stage (2005–), and [soundcheck philosophie] (2011–), the research network Performance Philosophy (2012–) and the accompanying peer-reviewed, open-access journal, Performance Philosophy and the Performance Philosophy book series published by Palgrave Macmillan. For philosophy, performance and film, please confer: the Open-Access journal Film-Philosophy (www.filmphilosophy.com; 1997–), The Cinematic Thinking Network organization (2011–); and book titles, such as Read and Goodenough (2005), Wartenberg  and Smith (2006), Wartenberg (2007), Livingston (2009), Livingston and Plantinga (2011), Sinnerbrink (2011), Vaughan (2013), Thomson-Jones (2016), Herzogenrath (2017), Rawls (2019), Carroll et al. (2019), .Furthermore, as hysteria is clearly embedded in medical discussions throughout the centuries—especially on mental health and physical impairment—it is meaningful to tie the field of disability studies into this discussion. Disability studies have emerged as an interdisciplinary endeavor of the social sciences, humanities and medicine, alongside performance studies. Both disability and performance studies, overlapping in their interdisciplinary approach and their originating disciplines, have also increasingly embraced their shared research interests. These merging developments of the fields, therefore, influence my “body of work”; for more on how performance studies and disability studies intersect, please confer: Kuppers

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(2003 and 2005), Sandahl and Auslander (2005), Henderson and Ostrander (2010 and 2013). Furthermore, in following feminist philosopher Shelley Tremain’s notion that “impairment is performative” (2017, p.  93) my research aims for repositioning disability as a rich critical site of inquiry within performance studies and philosophy. Furthermore, although mostly overlooked, the Possession film is evidently embedded in discussions surrounding disabilities and (horror) film. Interestingly, the scholarship on disability and horror film studies is still surprisingly slim, although stereotypes of physical and mental disabilities are the core tropes of the most influential horror movies and can be traced back to such influential examples as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), The Hands of Orlac (1924), The Phantom of the Opera (1925), the “Mad Dr.” and his disabled patient/assistant/creation in Frankenstein (1931), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), Freaks (1932), Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) or the physically and mentally impaired serial killer in the Slasher film, to name only a few. The Exorcist in particular, and the Possession film in general, is very much informed by those discussions and was instrumental in creating and promoting stereotypical images of mental health, “madness”, and disability. Thus my academic and artistic research is informed by and builds on the notable work of disability and film scholars, who investigate the cultural implications that frame such representations of disability on screen; please confer: Bogdan et al. (1982), Longmore (1985), Fleming and Manvell (1985), Norden (1994), Chivers and Markotić (2010), Smith (2011), Sutton (2014), Mitchell et al. (2019). My arts-based research, which is subsequently illustrated by the image atlases, and my personal “involvement” in the topic at hand, follows the metaphorical dimensions of disability and the political, social and legal implementations embedded in the representation of disability within the hysteric’s performance in visual media in general and contemporary horror film in particular; and follows the premise of what Richard Ingram has coined doing “Mad studies” (2007)—as an emerging, interdisciplinary field within disability studies, that provides a radical new perspective to discuss representations of madness—in theory and a self-reflexive research practice. In the context of Mad studies and mad politics, I confer a certain agency to performing hysteria and performing research on hysteria as an active constituent of political sense-making. Brenda LaFrancois, Robert Menzies and Geoff Reaume already proclaim on the first page “Mad matters, and so does the study of madness and psychiatrization, and so too does Mad Studies.” (2013, p. 1) and outline the premise of the field as a “project of inquiry, knowledge production and political action” (2013, p. 13). In following Mad studies’ incentive of challenging the conventional biological paradigm of “mental illness” and looking at the symbolic and systematic dimensions of the cultural and political implications that lie at the core

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of such stereotypical representations and imaginations, my self-reflexive research practice looks at how images and discussions around hysteria feed into this wider discourse; for a more detailed discussion on Mad studies, please refer to Ingram (2016), the international Mad Studies Network (https://madstudies2014.wordpress.com; 2014–), the Disability Studies Quarterly’s special issue on “Disability and Madness” (2013), and LeFrançois et al.’s world’s first reader in Mad studies 2013, and book titles, such as: Ben-Moshe et  al. (2014), Burstow et  al. (2014),  Spandler et  al. (2015), Garrisi and Johanssen (2020). Thus although my arts-based research is not primarily investigating the personal experiences of people who were clinically diagnosed with hysteria, I’m predominantly concerned with the representations of hysteria in pop cultural and political discourse, and I look at the historical frameworks that often lead to such forms of representation; such as the portrayal of people who protest social injustice as (mass) hysterical. As it is the objective of the Mad studies community to collectively cultivate thinking, analysis and reflection on the field in relationship to mental health system(s), research and politics, the self-reflective writing practice on hysteria is very much involved in and performs on the scene of Mad studies, exploring the manifold expressions of an interdisciplinary hysterical performance research practice. Mad studies can provide some handy search tools to look for creative method(s) in one’s madness. —Oh, I’ve got to get going. Thank you for taking out your precious time for me, I really appreciate your gesture. I can only imagine how busy you must get moving across pages. Looking forward to seeing you again, maybe then I’ll be able to listen to your secret and at times scattered thoughts. Until then, take care and remember Serena Williams’ call: “Show them what crazy can do”.

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Binswanger, Ludwig and Aby Warburg. 2007. Die Unendliche Heilung: Aby Warburgs Krankengeschichte, edited by Chantal Marazia and Davide Stimilli. Zürich: Diaphanes. Birell, Ross. 2008. “Jacques Rancière and The (Re)Distribution of the Sensible: Five Lessons in Artistic Research.” Art & Research 2, no. 1: 1–11.) Bogdan, Robert; Douglas Biklen, Arthur Shapiro, and David Spelkoman. 1982. “The Disabled: Media’s Monster.” Social Policy 13, no. 2 (Fall): 32–35. Bottomore, Stephen. 1999. “The Panicking Audience?: Early Cinema and the ‘Train Effect.’” Historical Journal of Radio, Film, and Television 19, no.2: 177–216. Bozzuto, J.C. 1975. “Cinematic Neurosis following The Exorcist: Report of 4 Cases.” Journal of Nervous Mental Disorder 161, no.1: 43–58. Braun, Johanna, ed. 2020a. Performing Hysteria. Images and Imaginations. Leuven: Leuven University Press. ———. 2020b. “Hysterical Cure: Performing Disability in the Possession Film.” Performing Hysteria: Images and Imaginations, edited by Johanna Braun, 204–233. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Brody, Jennifer DeVere. 2008. Punctuation: Art, Politics, Play. Durham: Duke University Press. Burstow, Bonnie; Brenda A.  LeFrançois, and Shaindl Diamond, ed. 2014. Psychiatry Disrupted: Theorizing Resistance and Crafting the (R)Evolution. Montréal, London, Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Bäcklund, Jan. 2004. “Aby Warburg: Art Research Between Art Theory and Artistic Practice.” Denmark: The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Accessed on 19 Jul. 2020: http://lnu.diva-­portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2% 3A1412022&dswid=6262 Böhler, Arno, Christian Herzog, and Alice Pechriggl, eds. Korporale Performanz. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2013. Böhler, Arno, Krassimira Kruschkova, and Susanne Valerie Granzer, eds. Wissen Wir, Was Ein Körper Vermag? Bielefeld: Transcript, 2014. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York, London: Routledge. Carroll, Noël; Laura T.  Di Summa and Shawn Loht, eds. 2019. The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Cartwright, Lisa. 1995. Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Casetti, Francesco. 2018. “Why Fears Matter: Cinephobia in Early Film Culture.” Screen 59, no. 2: 145–157. Cixous, Hélène. 1976. “The Laugh of the Medusa,” transl. by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs 1, no.4 (Summer): 875–893. Chivers, Sally and Nicole Markotić, eds. 2010. The Problem Body: Projecting Disability on Film. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

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Clover, Carol. 1993. Men, Women & Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Conner, Steven. 2004. The Book of Skin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Cull Ó Maoilearca, Laura and Alice Lagaay. 2020. The Routledge Companion to Performance Philosophy. London and New York: Routledge. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 1982/2003. Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, translated by Alisa Hartz. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2010. Atlas: How to Carry the World on One’s Back? Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía. ———. 2012. “Warburg’s Haunted House.” Common Knowledge 18, no.1: 50–78. Dombois, Florian. 2009. “0-1-1-2-3-5-8-. Zur Forschung an der Hochschule der Künste Bern.” Forschung. Jahrbuch Nr. 4. Bern: Hochschule der Künste Bern. Dumas, Chris. 2014. “Horror and Psychoanalysis: An Introductory Primer.” A Companion to the Horror Film, edited by Harry M. Benshoff, 21–37. Oxford and Malden: Wiley-Blackwell. Du Preez, Amanda. 2020. “Approaching Aby Warburg and Digital Art History: Thinking Through Images.” The Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities and Art History, edited by Kathryn Brown, 374–385. New York and London: Routledge. Fleming, Michael and Roger Manvell. 1985. Images of Madness: The Portrayal of Insanity in the Feature Film. London: Associated University Presses. Forster, Kurt W. 1999. “Introduction.” The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, by Aby Warburg. Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities. Garber, Marjorie. 2003. Quotation Marks. London and New York: Routledge. Garrisi, Diana and Jacob Johanssen, eds. 2020. Disability, Media, and Representations: Other Bodies. London and New York: Routledge. Gilman, Sander. 2020. “Wandering Imaginations of Race and Hysteria: The Origins of the Hysterical Body in Psychoanalysis.” Performing Hysteria: Images and Imaginations, edited by Johanna Braun, 41–60. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Grieveson, Lee. 2018. Cinema and the Wealth of Nations: Media, Capital, and the Liberal World System. Berkeley: University of California Press. Greenwood, Janinka. 2019. “Arts-Based Research.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Accessed on 19 Jul. 2020: https://oxfordre. com/education/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264093.001.0001/acref ore-9780190264093-­e-­29. Gunning, Tom. 1999. “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In) credulous Spectator.” Film Theory and Criticism, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, 818–32. New York: Oxford University Press. (originally published in 1989 in Art and Text 34)

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Dora with Medusa: Is Hysterical Writing a Subversive Revolution? Elisabeth Schäfer

“[Clément]: Listen, you love Dora, but to me she never seemed a revolutionary character. [Cixous]: I don’t give a damn about Dora; I don’t fetishize her. She is the name of a certain force, which makes the little circus not work anymore.” —Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément. The Newly Born Women, 2008.

We may know that when we begin to speak, that we sometimes begin the speech with a kind of clearing or coughing, that moves in front of the words that want to be spoken. In Greek husteros means “later”. Coughing only then start, which means in a certain way, to start later, after the beginning. But how to cough—in writing? Which means also how to begin with writing? How to begin later—after the beginning—with writing? And in our particular context: How to begin once again to write on hysteria? So

E. Schäfer (*) University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Braun (ed.), Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66360-5_16

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much has been written on hysteria. And there has been coughing, too. Nevertheless, within the connection between hysteria and art—may that be performance, literature, writing and so on—a hysterical and performative practice is often forgotten, as well as the fact that language and writing can function productively together both historically and currently. There has been coughing and/in writing. Or, is it rather the case that writing always already relieves us of this coughing before the beginning, because writing always comes afterward, because the writing has always been in the mode of Nachträglichkeit/belatedness? But this would mean that writing itself would be a movement that could never completely escapes the cough. A gap in time and space, then, is what brings forth writing, which is not difference, but will have made difference through its shifting. Assuming, then, that writing is that beginning which never quite escapes the cough, because it would itself be this beginning as belatedness, is writing then mysteriously related to that action, or can bear traits of such a kinship, which we are used to call hysterical? Or do gestures of writing even draw strength from this “kinship” or subsequent “appropriation”? Husteros—we can almost hear “hysteria” in this word. And this might remind us of Dora’s, Ida Bauer’s, coughing, which in the course of the case study “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” (1905) has increased to an aphonia. If after coughing the voice is absent, then coughing is no longer a beginning. Or it remains the beginning of itself alone. But it is no longer the beginning of a changing, transforming movement, a process and so on. Hysteria has produced a long history of writing on hysteria. It has set in motion a long history of writing, whereby at first it remains open how exactly the relationship between writing and hysteria can be explored. My article wants to clearly inscribe itself in an Écriture feminine/Trans*Writing tradition and commit to a writing practice as “trans*forming” arts-based research. The use of the term trans* in relation to hysterics, which have already been understood as queer subjects by the most famous hysterics researchers such as Jean-Martin Charcot and Sigmund Freud, is deliberately kept open in this text. It is about letting the hysterical bodies build a theoretical bridge to trans*formation, trans*ference, trans*gression. For Sigmund Freud, author of the “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria”, the case of Dora became a reason for writing. The development of psychoanalysis altogether goes hand in hand with writing of case studies. Freud was surprised, stating that “it still strikes me myself as strange that the case histories I write should read like short stories” (Freud

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1893, p.  160). So, what he says is that his case studies partly read like novels. Thus, they come close to literature, and beyond a decidedly psychoanalytical, clinical interest can also be read as literature. In her text “Die Falldarstellung als Mutmaßung” (“The case study as speculation”, transl. by E.S.), Susann Heenen-Wolff examines the question of the tasks and challenges that writing of psychoanalytic case vignettes in the different psychoanalytic schools face. Heenen-Wolff notes from the perspective of the psychoanalyst: “At first we may write simply so that we do not forget, but then above all to document and record something special. We write down unusual dreams, surprising events of transference, striking moments of counter-transference. We write in order to process, to theorize, sometimes simply to bear what the patient asks of us. Or we write a comprehensive case report. […] While writing, we are inevitably confronted with the uncertainty of what the essence of the analytical approach is and what should therefore make up the case report. What form of presentation is appropriate for the specific case?” (Heenen-Wolff 2018, pp. 60/61, transl. by E.S.). Freud stresses that working on a “case” inevitably involves “construction” (Freud 1937, p. 258). This construction can have many facets: the address, if the case is to be presented and discussed with colleagues in the field; if it serves the own notes; or if the case history is to convince a supervisor of the own abilities to analyze it and so on. A text, as we can also say with Jacques Derrida, always has at least one address. But—above all—texts usually have addresses that evade the intention of the author. Derrida calls this tendency of every text, sign and word dissemination. The concept of dissemination goes beyond polysemy in the context of Derrida’s thinking. While polysemy refers to ambiguity in a relatively well-defined conceptual framework, dissemination refers to a more radical “centrifugal force”. Thus, in “disseminating” signs are able to find themselves in contexts that lie beyond previously conceivable contexts of meaning: “… dissemination exceeds polysemy” (Derrida 2000, p.  26). In Susann Heenen-Wolff’s analysis of the practice of writing after and in the psychoanalytical process we find a similar thought when she writes: “Language is infinitely ambiguous” (Heenen-Wolff 2018, p. 63, transl. by E.S.). In the context of Derrida’s philosophy, this idea refers to the radical openness of linguistic signs and to the fundamental undecidability that Derrida locates as the structure of language. Heenen-Wolff sees a connection between this Derridean figure of undecidability in the psychoanalytic process when she writes: “The patient in analysis speaks of something and in this way gives it a more or less definite meaning. The psychoanalyst is then, however,

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attentive to other possible meanings and contexts that are still hidden, that is, to the surplus of meaning. It is precisely this that opens the way to differentiated thinking and the analytical process. Dealing with ambiguity, polysemy, with the half said, implied is what makes psychoanalysis so unique and constitutes its epistemological status” (Heenen-Wolff 2018, p. 63, transl. by E.S.). Strictly speaking, however, this also has implications for an understanding of the notation and reading of psychoanalytic case studies. It implies the necessity to think about polysemy, dissemination and ambiguity—also in the process of writing and reading case studies. It would mean that in every written psychoanalytic case study there would be a constitutively inherent dissemination; not only as an unavoidable possibility, but as a fundamental factor that constitutes the text in the first place. This idea corresponds in a striking way with Jacques Derrida’s understanding of the text, who briefly stated: “What would a mark be that could not be cited? Or one whose origins would not get lost along the way?” (Derrida 1988, p. 12). It is precisely this potentiality of losing the origin of meaning as a constitutive moment, which in the context of psychoanalytical writing techniques raises the question: “Does writing about psychic processes make the analyst a writer?” (Heenen-Wolff 2018, p. 66, transl. by E.S.). Jean-Bertrand Pontalis has an answer to this—but also Freud. Pontalis says: “In our own way, we are constructing a novel” (Pontalis 1977, p.  14; transl. by E.S.). And Freud also speaks of the moment of “construction” (Freud 1937, p. 258), which he distinguishes from interpretation: “The analyst finishes a piece of construction and communicates it to the subject of the analysis so that it may work upon him; he then constructs a further piece out of the fresh material pouring in upon him, deals with it in the same way and proceeds in this alternating fashion until the end. If, in accounts of analytic technique, so little is said about ‘constructions’, that is because ‘interpretations’ and their effects are spoken of instead. But I think that ‘construction’ is by far the more appropriate description. ‘Interpretation’ applies to something that one does to some single element of the material, such as an association or a parapraxis. But it is a ‘construction’ when one lays before the subject of the analysis a piece of his early history […]” (Freud 1937, p. 260). He emphasizes, “We do not pretend that an individual construction is anything more than a conjecture which awaits examination, confirmation or rejection. We claim no authority for it, […]” (Freud 1937, p.  265), and takes borrowings from literature: “In short, we conduct ourselves on the model of a familiar figure in one of Nestroy’s farces—the manservant who has a single answer

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on his lips to every question or objection: ‘It will all become clear in the course of future developments’” (Freud 1937, p. 265). In the context of what Nestroy calls “become clear”, which addresses the fundamental possibility to understand something (which must not always succeed, should be added)—“in the course of” refers to a process, in which something becomes clear and not only at the end or even at the beginning. In the course of the writing—a case study as well—something becomes clear. Jacques Derrida emphasizes in “Freud and the Scene of Writing”: “We should not be surprised then if Freud, in order to suggest the strangeness of the logico-temporal relations in dreams, constantly adduces writing, and the spatial synopses of pictograms, rebuses, hieroglyphics, and non-­ phonetic writing in general. Synopsis and not stasis: stage and not tableau” (Derrida 1972, p. 100). Derrida interprets this procedure as a scene in the broadest sense, namely that Freud is concerned with the scene and that Freud makes us a scene: “Thus Freud performs for us the scene of writing. Like all those who write. And like all who know how to write, he let the scene duplicate, repeat, and betray itself within the scene” (Derrida 1972, p. 116). So, when Freud, as Derrida writes, makes us the scene of writing, this means: Freud’s techniques, with the help of which he drives the development of psychoanalysis both practically and theoretically, prepare a scene for writing within the setting of psychoanalysis. A scene, in other words, as a place where something happens. As Susan Heenen-Wolff points out: “Writing confronts the analyst with his limits and inhibitions” (Heenen-­ Wolff 2018, p.  62, transl. by E.S.). So, in the scene of the written case study, the patient is never alone. In this scene, there is space for transference and counter-transference, defense, for precisely those limits and inhibitions—but also for productive and surprising revisions. Freud prepared this scene for psychoanalysis, where all this can take place. And since, as Derrida says, a sign is only a sign if it can be repeated, the writing scene must also be repeatable, that is, quotable. That is why the case study as text can be read in other contexts—and why it can be read differently. The scene can be doubled, multiplied, repeated and exposed. Maybe that’s exactly what happened with the “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria”. As it is always “construction”, as Freud already noted, and as the scene of writing a case study, as Derrida emphasizes, can “let the scene duplicate, repeat, and betray itself within the scene”. So, do we have to read it differently? More scenic, diverse, polyphonic, exposing, exposed? That is what this article aims for.

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Making the Writing Scene: Reading Differently In his essay “Théories de la Littérature” (“On the Theories of Literature”, transl. by E.S.), the French sociologist Didier Eribon says that there is not so much a theory about literature as theories that literature produces through itself. It is Eribon’s thesis that the way literature produces theories is interesting because it is not a single, unified, coherent theory produced in and by literature, but a collection of ambivalent and contradictory theories that are related to each other. It is not the aim of literature to create consistency, unity, purity or univocality. Eribon outlines this by discussing the theme of homosexuality in the work of Marcel Proust. He shows that the author Proust—himself homosexual—creates a heterosexual protagonist who, in the fictional text, thinks of his friend, who is homosexual. Thus, within Proust’s fiction there is no consistent theory of homosexuality or gender, but rather a conflict of theories, a prism of different theories. Eribon emphasizes: “One should therefore avoid talking about the ‘Proust’ theory as if there were only one” (Eribon 2019, p.  21, transl. by E.S.). Similar to Eribon’s reflections on the genesis of ambivalent gender theories in and through literature, Hélène Cixous’ work on what has long been called “écriture feminine” appears to be the most important. We might also call “écriture feminine” a “queer écriture” as Cixous herself does in her foreword to the second French edition of her famous essay “The Laugh of Medusa”, one of the most influential texts of écriture feminine, when she calls Medusa “la queen des queers” (Cixous 2010, p. 32). The aim of queer écriture is not only to point out the lack of queer and “female” inscriptions, the lack of queer and “female” voices in a patriarchally informed symbolic order, but also to actively invent strategies and subversive modes, to rewrite these discourses and to stage new ways of writing at their edges, which performatively makes the excluded, the non-­ normative, the subaltern, etc. visible. Not in order to invent a new regulative idea of “femininity” or “queerness”, but to permanently keep awake the necessity to make the hidden visible, to hear the unheard. Moreover, the need for a queer écriture can and will change over time, and it will always be different in different places and contexts in the world. Cixous uses the figure of an invitation or even a call when she writes: “Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it” (Cixous 1976, p. 876). And it is not only my body or one single body that “must be heard”, but every body that has not yet been heard and written.

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This also includes all future bodies; bodies to come call for words to come. The surprising turn of words within text-productions of queer écriture/ écriture féminine want to free a new and different circulation of desire in language, to set in motion a different logic to a logic of the one, “[w]hich implies that there are not really two sexes, but only one” (Irigaray 1985b, p.  86). Therefore—as Anna Babka suggests—“écriture fémine/ queer écriture” can also be called “allo-écriture” (Babka 2014, pp.  15–50), “other-writing” or “writing as othering”. Hysteria has given rise to a long history of writing about hysteria, and time and again “écriture feminine” is confronted with the question of whether it is not precisely hysteria to which the project of the “écriture feminine” owes its verve, motivation or even its origin. Or more precisely: Is what “écriture feminine” tries to make visible in writing hysterical writing? So, is “écriture feminine/queer écriture”, which intends to shift the hegemonic, patriarchal symbolic order, something like hysterical writing in itself? Can hysteria work in writing, or can it bring about a writing, that undermines, bypasses and intervenes in the symbolic, hegemonic discourse? Does it consist in this constant presence of what Julia Kristeva calls the “semiotic chora”? In her book The Revolution of Poetic Language (Kristeva 1984), Kristeva distinguishes between the symbolic and the semiotic function for her project to rethink the process of the constitution of meaning. For Kristeva, the semiotic is not the same as the symbolic—as the etymology of the term might suggest—but it rather describes that in which the very first signs are created. Within the semiotic there are no clear and distinct signs and no fixed meanings. Already articulated signs belong to the symbolic order. Every sign system is always both: semiotic and symbolic. While the symbolic function institutes and governs a unity, the semiotic function, on the other hand, demonstrates the heterogeneity of meaning. It represents that which precedes and repeatedly escapes the genesis of the subject and meaning. The semiotic function is a dynamic reservoir of language. However, it is thus immanent to the sign, syntax, denotation and meaning and moves through them. This means that in the history of the subject and within the process of the constitution of meaning, the semiotic is first and foremost that which is supposed to describe the development of early and primarily bodily experiences toward language. The semiotic thus first leads to the symbolic, but it is not replaced by the symbolic. It insists and continues to exist. Kristeva (1977) emphasizes the permeability of the border between the symbolic and the semiotic. She calls this border Thesis. The semiotic function is closely linked to

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the symbolic function that it passes through. They transpose each other at the edge of the thesis. “Transposition would be the turning of the impulse into the symbolic, the transition of the semiotic, which is not yet sign, into the symbolic” (Kristeva 1977, p.  232; transl. by E.S.). Transposition is fundamental within the process of the constitution of meaning and it takes place at the edge of body and language, it represents a mediating, transmitting, translating and intermediate instance. Kristeva also calls the semiotic “semiotic chora” and thus brings the Greek word “chora” for “space” into play. On the one hand, this provides a reference to Plato’s use of this term within the cosmology of “Timaeus”. For Plato, chora is the intermediary area between the eternal and the finite. Also, with Kristeva, the “semiotic chora” has the function of a mediator, although in a different sense than with Plato. Plato also calls chora “the nurse—of all becoming” (Plato, Timaeus, pp.  48e–49a). Kristeva’s semiotic chora is the place of becoming of signs, of genesis of language. Derrida also refers back to Plato’s conception of chora (Derrida 1997) and initially wants to leave the term chora “sheltered from any translation” (Derrida 1997, p. 16). Traces of attempts at translation can be found, such as “[…] (‘place,’ ‘location,’ ‘site,’ ‘region,’ ‘country’) […] (‘mother,’ ‘nurse,’ ‘receptacle,’ ‘imprint-­ bearer’) […]” (Derrida 1997, p.  16). Chora is “neither ‘sensual’ nor ‘intelligent’” (Derrida 1997, p. 15), it belongs to a “‘third genus’, a ‘third gender’ (triton genos, pp. 48e, 52a)” (Derrida 1997, p. 15), that is, neither of the two recognized genera of being. It is “neither this nor that or that it is both this and that” (Derrida 1997, 15). Derrida’s reflections culminate in the insight “that the thought of the chora exceeds the polarity, […]” (Derrida 1997, p. 16). “Chora marks a place apart, the spacing which keeps a dissymmetrical relation with all that which, ‘in herself,’ beside or in addition to herself, seems to make a couple with her” (Derrida 1997, p. 29). Here, the term “in-between” does not function as a translation of chora, but refers to what chora denotes: an in-between place, an intermediate instance, that which in Kristeva’s case is the semiotic chora and its function of transposition. Bettina Schmitz emphasizes: “Transposition, however, means the creation of a text and a new meaning” (Schmitz 1997, p. 81 f., transl. by E.S.). Thus, if transposition is at work in every linguistic articulation, the dynamic reservoir of language becomes effective. With Kristeva there are textual practices that work especially on the creation of new meanings and support and reinforce this process, which is always at work. A first transposition refers to mechanisms that enable the process of the constitution of meaning as oscillating between

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the semiotic and the symbolic. Articulations become possible; the semiotic permanently pushes at the thesis as a boundary, crosses it and keeps the process of the constitution of meaning going. The transposition does not stop there, but rather constantly produces new types of text and new meanings. Kristeva favors avant-garde poetry and literature as meaning-­ generating text practices. And the genesis of such a “new text” is also at stake in the “écriture feminine/ queer écriture”—to what extent is it based in, inspired by or even related to hysteria?

Hysteria—As a Feminist Mode of Resistance? The hysteric was and is sometimes considered a more or less secret protagonist in feminist rebellion. Rachel Bowlby characterizes the hysteric as the one who opposes psychoanalysis, “which was doing no more than reconfirming the prevailing sexual norms” (Bowlby 1989, p.  45). Luce Irigaray reads hysteria as a bodily, symptomatic form of expression for women, to speak where patriarchy has silenced them. Thus, in Irigaray’s perspective, the hysteric becomes the one who preserves “female sexuality” from “total repression and destruction” (Irigaray 1985b, p.  72). For Cixous, hysteria stands for “woman in all her force”, it is an “element that disturbs” (Cixous and Clément 2008, p.  254). And with reference to Freud’s “Dora” Cixous writes: “Dora seemed to me to be the one who resisted the system, the one who cannot stand that the family and society are founded on the body of women, on bodies despised, rejected, bodies that are humiliating once they have been used” (Cixous and Clément 2008, p. 154). In this sense, it was an essential feminist approach, especially in the 1970s, to bring the excluded “feminine”, the rejected, female sexuality, the “dark”, the unconscious and all those “others” to the hegemonic symbolic order into the discourse—even if both the psychoanalytic discourse and the symbolic order today seem to be still partially resistant to these strategies. Within psychoanalysis as well as within the symbolic order there are still tendencies of pathologizing the female as hysterical or of classifying female homosexuality as perversion. In the feminist discourses of the 1970s, the hysteric was a burlesque figure. It was she who was able to radically question the status of the “woman” as an object. But how? What does the hysteric do—and how does she do it? The hysteric takes up the discourse about her and challenges it by starting to perform it as “her illness”, so to speak. She executes, as Christina von Braun puts it, fantasies about femininity, she acts them out. In this way,

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she can be understood early on as a kind of performative figure and thus finds her way into performative feminist formats. Hélène Cixous dedicated her very first theater play to Dora. And it may not come as a surprise that Cixous chose the stage as the place for Dora becoming symbolic. It will be necessary to examine what exactly performs on stage: hysteria itself/herself, hysteria in the context of psychoanalysis, hysteria as something that belongs to a female subject or hysteria that has a much larger context? Does the stage in Cixous’ “Portrait de Dora” become a place where hysteria can be performed, where hysteria becomes the performer of what it is? Performer of cultural fantasies to femininity, so? A play is a text that needs bodies to be able to stage itself. The reinsertion of the body in the scene can be read here as a repetition of what the hysteric “is staging” in and through her own body, but—because the hysteric is not alone on stage but in a network of voices, other bodies and figures as well as objects—the stage play “Portrait de Dora” also becomes an enabling space to read Dora differently. Just as Eribon does not discover a theory of homosexuality in Proust, we can hardly see a theory of hysteria in Cixous’ “Portrait de Dora”. Rather, we find an agonal setting of voices, theories, postures, which does not take sides, or only one identifiable artistic, feminist and so on positioning toward hysteria. The passage from The Newly Born Women by Cixous and Clément, which precedes this text as a motto, corresponds with this when they write: “Listen, you love Dora, but to me she never seemed a revolutionary character […] I don’t give a damn about Dora; I don’t fetishize her. She is the name of a certain force, which makes the little circus not work anymore” (Cixous and Clément 2008, p. 157). The project of the “écriture feminine” continues to go far beyond the goal of preventing the “little circus” of gender from running smoothly. It is rather about a fundamental change of this “circus”. It is rather a transcription, a transposition that aims for a genesis of a new scenery for the sexes, for new meanings in the field of gender. To enable and generate a new discourse, to work on a language beyond the phallocentric order, which first and foremost enables women, queers and so on to be subjects and to speak and write each other, that is what the queer-feminist project of Cixous’ is about. It is based on the assumption that this revolution of language through language (Boyman 1989, p.  185) will automatically have an impact on patriarchal, repressive structures and will ultimately also be able to revolutionize them (Dane 1994, p. 242). “Écriture ­feminine/

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queer écriture” is intended to free women and queers from the silence to which they have always been forced by the phallocentric symbolic order. For Irigaray and Cixous, “the woman” is the one who does not yet exist—in the symbolic order. “Woman” is at the very most in the process of coming, and whenever and wherever her coming is shown or announced historically, the patriarchal, hegemonic gender order begins to shift in such a way that it will no longer be possible—not quite so easily1—to make woman an object, to talk about her, to write about her, to devalue her within the dichotomous conceptual architecture of Western thought.

Porte-Trait of/to Dora In “Portrait de Dora” Cixous takes a critical and a de-constructive feminist look at Freud’s famous case study of Dora. The material Cixous can work with is the written case study. Cixous, by writing a play, reads this scene, where she finds Dora not alone. And especially it is not Ida Bauer, who Dora was in real life, but that “construction” that Ida Bauer has already become as Dora. And Dora has already been with others in the written scene, the case study, for example with Freud, the psychoanalyst. A few years later, in her essay “The Laugh of Medusa”, Cixous addresses the suppressed, silenced position of women in the symbolic order. Thus, this essay about a writing that leads beyond the discourse determined by the phallocentric system. A political extension of the canon is not the first priority. We can consider this procedure in the sense of a post-structuralist, decentering view of the subject, according to which this subject is never completely transparent and consequently cannot “speak of itself uninterruptedly and cannot completely return to itself” (Schäfer 2017, p.  84, transl. by E.S.). It (dis)stands always in difference, which runs in us and between us. Cixous also speaks of a “non-closed mix of self/s and others” (Sellers 1994, p. xvii). That we cannot be sure of ourselves also has consequences in terms of what we can know: “I is the open set of the trances of an I by definition changing, mobile, because living-speaking-thinking-dreaming. This truth should moreover make us prudent and modest in our judgements and our definitions” (Sellers 1994, p. xvii).

1  Hélène Cixous calls this “passisimplicité”—“non-simplicity”, cf: Cixous, Hélène. 2004. “Der Gebundene Bock.” Lettre International 67: 82–85, here: p. 83.

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A reflexivity of writing, shattered by bodies, desire and the unconscious, leads into unclosed circles that never arrive at a substantial self. “The Laugh of Medusa” initially demands nothing more than to allow this and invent this anew and anew. Freud’s “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” from 1905 is not only the first of Freud’s five major case studies, it is also the only one of the “major case studies” in which Freud deals with a female patient. This major case study has been widely commented on and has not only met with clinical interest. Thus, from the 1970s and 1980s, a whole series of new readings and critiques of this text can be found from literary, philosophical and above all feminist perspectives. In these re-readings, special attention was often paid to the ideological implications of the case study and in particular to those effects that examine power relations that have an effect in language and sexuality and that will ultimately have produced a certain imprint on Freud’s perception of his patient Dora. Dora—whose fictional name was borrowed from Freud’s maid—was brought to Freud by her father when she was eighteen years old. At that time Dora had already been suffering from numerous hysterical symptoms such as migraine attacks, nervous coughing and finally aphonia for about 10 years. In the course of the treatment a whole web of entanglements of desire becomes apparent, including a family of friends, the K.s, whose children Dora looks after from time to time. Dora’s father was Mrs. K.’s lover, a detail that Dora initially wanted to hide from Freud. Added to this is the special attraction that emanates from Mrs. K. for Dora, which Freud “hears” and which in a certain way also remains unheard of. Freud interprets this attraction as the effect of Dora’s search for what it could mean to be a woman. So in Freud’s “ears” it is a matter of identification (Freud 1905, p. 59), not so much of desire, when he states: “For behind Dora’s supervalent train of thought which was concerned with her father’s relations with Frau K. there lay concealed a feeling of jealousy which had that lady as its object—a feeling, that is, which could only be based upon an affection on Dora’s part for one of her own sex. It has long been known and often been pointed out that at the age of puberty boys and girls show clear signs, even in normal cases, of the existence of an affection for people of their own sex. A romantic and sentimental friendship with one of her school-friends, accompanied by vows, kisses, promises of eternal correspondence, and all the sensibility of jealousy, is the common precursor of a girl’s first serious passion for a man” (Freud 1905, p. 59). Freud registers Dora’s homosexual desire as something that is “usually” replaced. Female

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homosexuality is almost like the coughing we read about at the beginning, which sometimes occurs when we want to raise our voices and say something, then it moves to the beginning and can perhaps finally be forgotten when the word follows. The cough is not yet symbolic, but the word that follows it—if it follows—is. The analogy to homosexuality and the devaluation of homosexuality contained therein is what Freud was and is criticized for by feminists at this point. Some feminist re-readings of Dora also see hysteria as a special form of resistance—not only against patriarchal social structures: “[i]f feminism is calling into question of constraining sexual identities, then hysteria may be a protofeminist” (Gallop 1993, p. 288) or: “[w]e might answer that the despised hysterics of yesteryear have been replaced by the feminist radicals of today, by contemporary women artists and poets, and by gay activists” (Showalter 1993, p. 334)— but also against psychoanalysis itself, when the assumption of the Oedipus complex is radically questioned, for example, under the condition that desire and identification are not distinct but entwined. Sexual identity consists of identifying with the person you desire and desiring the person with whom you identify. At the same time, however, it was precisely hysteria that paved the way for the development of the psychoanalytic cure as talking cure. And Dora’s psychoanalysis is not regarded—either by us or by Freud himself—as the ideal of a successful analysis. Freud had published The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) before the treatment of Dora began and he did not get the attention he had hoped for with this publication. At the same time, he is still on the trail of dreams during Dora’s treatment. It is some of Dora’s dream narratives that essentially determine the treatment and the course of the analysis. The “translation”, as it is called in the “Fragment”, of the dream language, which according to Freud is a “language of images”, into “language of thought” is conceived as a path to be covered: It is “one of the détours by which repression can be evaded” (Freud 1905, p.  15). This detour to avoid repression would have taken time. After three months of analysis, however, Dora leaves the treatment. Cut. In “Portrait de Dora” Cixous takes up Dora’s dream landscape and the objects that inhabit it, which also come to life in Freud’s case study. The burning house, the jewel box, the lake, the train station and cemetery and so on. The protagonists of Cixous’ play move in this scenery. In the course of the piece there is a continuous transfer from images to word-images and back. What remains is a portrait of Dora not as a portrait but as a porte-­ trait, which means: not as a whole image, in all its recognizability and

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similarity, but as a fragment, as a trace, with cracks and openings. Porte-­ trait means something that cannot be understood as an image, but that is already detached from Dora and is therefore no longer similar to her. Here, at first glance, Cixous is not far from Freud himself, who reveals that the analysis with Dora remained and must have to be remained as a fragment. In Freud’s fragmentary text the translation of the dream imagery of his patients into imaginary language takes place as a process of condensation into a concept, and in this way psychoanalytic concept formation gradually takes place in the writing of the case study. Cixous’ staging strategy with “Portrait de Dora”, her version of the fragment of a portrait of the hysterical patient Dora takes a completely different direction. It is not about condensing something into a concept. Not about depictability and not about representational relationships. Cixous rather questions all this. This skepticism of the play about concept formation, representation and the search for what really happened is expressed right in the beginning by a figure on stage, who, interestingly enough, is only a voice without a body. An inverted Dora, in other words. Not aphonic body, but phoné without body. This figure is consequently called “Voix de la pièce” and functions as a kind of alter ego of the Freud figure also appearing in the play. The “Voix de la pièce” is, so to speak, reversed to the patient. As a voice without a body, it is also what the patient usually perceives in the psychoanalytic setting. A voice that can be heard. A voice that must belong to a body, but which is usually not seen during an analysis due to the specific psychoanalytic setting, since the psychoanalyst sits behind the patient lying on the couch. “Voix de la pièce” is in addition to this particular psychoanalytical context also the voice of the theatrical genre, and it begins by saying: “[…] These events are announced in dreams like a shadow [une ombre], they often become so clear that one thinks one can grasp and understand them, but they remain unclear, and if we proceed without particular skill and caution, we cannot even decide whether such a scene has really taken place […]” (Cixous 1986, p. 9; transl. by E.S.). Instead of the portrait as an image, it is traits, such as “une ombre”, that do not aim at truth or the claim of truth, not at interpretation, not even at reality. Where the portrait traditionally has the function of generating similarity and recognizability, the traits in Cixous’ play are vague, they are shadows from dreams and are treated as such. Here nothing can be ascertained—what happens to Dora’s body cannot be grasped through a physical access. Dora’s body eludes an empirically ascertainable foundation in the scenes that Cixous makes us. The role of “Voix de la pièce” also

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multiplies the position of the psychoanalyst Freud. He splits up into an authorial narrator of the case study, the narrator who knows, and into a voice that is ghostly, physically incomprehensible, whose appearances also leave it unclear “whether such a scene really took place”. Freud is thus endowed with an unconscious by Cixous’ play. And this position cannot be mastered, interpreted with sovereignty; it cannot be interpreted and translated into science. It is exposed to the scene. Thus, the possibility of psychoanalytic knowledge is once again raised and questioned with regard to its registers. The real event cannot be completely, unambiguously determined, it must be doubted—“on ne peut arriver à décider si une pareillescène aréellementeu lieu”/“We cannot decide whether such a scene actually takes place”. Cixous places this specific psychoanalytical problem of how to know and how not to know on the stage, a space that seems almost predestined for it. The stage is also the space of constitutive uncertainty par excellence. What happens on a stage is real but not necessarily true and the staged scene is not the only possibility of how this particular event can be realized. The stage always opens up the fundamental possibility of re-staging, of repetition, of iteration and reiteration, thus of changing repetition. That everything can be staged a little bit or clearly differently, is what staging provides. With this, an essential characteristic of theatricality is named: the simultaneity of presence and absence, singularity and repetition, the double perception of the stage action, which is real but not true. And with it a fundamental openness that is inscribed in every performance: the openness to a changed repetition of the performance. As we know from psychoanalysis—especially from the “Case Histories from Studies on Hysteria” (Freud 1893)—every symptom that at first seemed monolithic is overdetermined. The question remains whether an analogy to the fundamental openness and grafting of linguistic signs à la Derrida carries very far. After all, hysterical symptoms are overdetermined. And they are sufferings that—in Dora’s case—make a subject, a body, a woman temporarily voiceless. Dora can hardly contribute to the productive transformation of the inner and outer psychic situation. It is a theater play, for example, that is able to re-contextualize the voiceless Dora on stage with a disembodied voice of the psychoanalyst, with the psychoanalyst’s unconscious and with his other representation in the play, the concept-creating scientist. Freud’s “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” delivers as a fragment, as Freud himself titled this text, and as a construction, which every case study is always also, as Freud recorded, and as literature, in which—as Pontalis said—writing psychoanalytic texts always move as well,

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already that accumulation of ambivalent and contradictory elements that have always been related to each other in literature, as Eribon explains. In this way, a plurality of theories emerges in the psychoanalytical case study, from which art can also provide information. Thus, with “Portrait de Dora”—the play with which she approaches the case of Dora from an artistic point of view—Cixous puts the psychoanalytic setting of the talking cure on stage. It is not just Dora—for example as a role model or “proto-feminist”—who becomes the protagonist in Cixous’ play. It is not only the acting out of hysteria that describes the place, the space in between—we remember chora—of the stage. The choreography of Cixous’ play is different. It brings the history of the development of psychoanalysis as a talking cure to the stage. And the stage thus becomes chora, the setting and interspace of voices, bodies, signs—from whose dynamics toward and against each other a space of transference develops. It is the space of art that does not make hysteria the protagonist here, but the space of art is able to show that which detaches itself from hysteria, that is what ex-­ scribes itself from it, creates plural, moving effects.

References Babka, Anna. 2014. “Frauen.Schreiben—Jelinek. Lesen. Aspekte einer allo-­ écriture (féminine) in Texten Elfriede Jelineks (nach Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray und Julia Kristeva).” Frauen.Schreiben. Österreichische Literatur in China 2, edited by Liu Wie and Julian Müller, 15–50. Vienna: Präsens. Bowlby, Rachel. 1989. “Still Crazy After All These Years.” Between Feminism and Psychoanalysis, edited by Teresa Brennan, 30–51. New York: Routledge. Boyman, Anne. 1989. “Dora or the Case of L’Écriture Féminine.” Qui Parle, Literature, Philosophy, Visual Arts, History 3, no. 1: 180–188. Cixous, Hélène. 1976. “The Laugh of the Medusa,” transl. by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen. Signs 1, no. 4 (Summer): 875–893. ———. 1986. “Portrait de Dora.” idem: Théâtre (= joint edition of “Portrait de Dora” and “La prise de l’école de Madhubaï”). Paris: Éditions de femmes. ———. 2010. Le Rire de la Méduse. Et Autre Ironies. Paris: Gallilée. ———, and Clément, Catherine. 2008. The Newly Born Women. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dane, Gabrielle. 1994. “Hysteria as Feminist Protest: Dora, Cixous, Acker.” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 23, no. 3: 231–255. Derrida, Jacques. 1972. “Freud and the Scene of Writing.” Yale French Studies, no. 48 (French Freud: Structural Studies in Psychoanalysis): 74–117.

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———. 1988. “Signature Event Context.” Derrida: Limited Inc. 1–25. Illinois: Northwestern University Press Evanston. ———. 1997. “Chora”. Chora | Works: Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman, edited by Jeffrey Kipnis and Thomas Leeser, 15–32. New  York: The Monacelli Press. ———. 2000. As If I Were Dead / Als Ob Ich Tot Wäre. Wien: Turia+Kant. Eribon, Didier. 2019. Theorien der Literatur. Geschlechtersystem und Geschlechtsurteile. Vienna: Passagen. Freud, Sigmund. 1893. “Case Histories from Studies on Hysteria.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume II (1893–1895): Studies on Hysteria, 135–181. London: Hogarth. ———. 1937. “Constructions in Analysis.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XXIII (1937–1939): Moses and Monotheism, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis and Other Works, 255–270. London: Hogarth. ———. 1905. “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905 [1901])”. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume VII (1901–1905): A Case of Hysteria, Three Essays on Sexuality and Other Works, 1–122. London: Hogarth. Gallop, Jane. 1993. “Hysteria, Feminism and Gender.” Hysteria Beyond Freud, edited by Elaine Showalter et  al., 288–334. Berkeley: University of California Press. Heenen-Wolff, Susan. 2018. “Die Falldarstellung als Mutmaßung.” idem: Gegen die Normativität in der Psychoanalyse. Gießen: Psychosozial: 59–83. Irigaray, Luce. 1985a. Speculum of the Other Women. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 1985b. This Sex Which is Not One. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kristeva, Julia. 1977. La Révolution du Language Poétique. Paris: Edition du Seuil. ———. 1984. The Revolution in Poetic Language. New  York: Columbia University Press. Pontalis, J.-B. 1977. “Écrire, Psychoanalyser, Écrire. Échange de vues.” Nouvelle Revue des Psychoanalyse 16: 5–26. Schäfer, Elisabeth. 2017. “Hélène Cixous’ Life Writings–Writing a Life. Oder: Das Auto- /Biographische ist nicht privat.” Internationales Jahrbuch für Medienphilosophie 3: 81–98. Schmitz, Bettina. 1997. Arbeit an den Grenzen der Sprache. Königstein im Taunus: Ulrike Helmer Verlag. Sellers, Susan.1994. The Hélène Cixous Reader. London: Routledge. Showalter, Elaine, et al. 1993. Hysteria Beyond Freud. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Lecture Performance: On Truth and its Relation to the Cellar Regions of the Body Arno Böhler and Susanne Valerie Granzer

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil. Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future: “Suppose that truth is a woman—and why not? Aren’t there reasons for suspecting that all philosophers, to the extent that they have been dogmatists, have not really understood women? That the grotesque seriousness of their approach towards the truth and the clumsy advances they have made so far are unsuitable ways of pressing their suit with a woman?” (Nietzsche 2002, p. 3).

The Woman: Fräulein Else A heavenly evening. How splendid the hotel looks. One feels that all the people there are well-off and have no worries. I, for example. Ha, ha! It’s bad luck. I was born for a care-free life. It’s bad luck … I’d

A. Böhler (*) Institute of Philosophy, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] S. V. Granzer University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna, Austria

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Braun (ed.), Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66360-5_17

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rather like to be married in America, but not to an American. An Italian might be dangerous to me. It’s a pity the dark man with the Roman head left so soon. He looked a scamp. I’ve nothing against scamps. Quite the opposite … Or I’ll marry an American and will live in Europe. A villa on the Riviera, with marble steps going down into the sea. I’d lie on the marble steps with nothing on … I am not in love. Not with anybody. … I don’t think I’m capable of falling in love, that’s really curious, for I’m certainly sensual. … I ought to have gone on stage. And I’ll have a hundred lovers, a thousand; why not? At four o’clock, when I went out to play tennis, the express letter which Mother telegraphed to say she was sending still hadn’t come. … An express letter! … Can I be afraid of Mother’s letter? (assemblage by Susanne Valerie Granzer on the basis of Schnitzler 1998)

Friedrich Nietzsche: “I have kept a close eye on the philosophers and read between their lines for long enough to say to myself: the greatest part of conscious thought must still be attributed to instinctive activity, and this is even the case for philosophical thought. Just as the act of birth makes no difference to the overall course of heredity, neither is ‘consciousness’ opposed to instinct in any decisive sense–even most of a philosopher’s conscious thought is secretly directed and forced into determinate channels by the instincts” (Nietzsche 2002, pp. 6–7).

The Man: Herr von Dorsday “Good evening, Fräulein Else.” “Good evening, Herr von Dorsday.” “Been playing tennis, Else?” Why doesn’t he say Fräulein Else? “I used to be a very teen tennis-player.” “And aren’t you now?” “No, I’m too old now.” “Old? There was a Swede who was sixty-five, and he played every evening from six till eight.” “Well, I’m not sixty-five yet, thank Heaven, but, unfortunately, I’m not a Swede either.” Why unfortunately? I suppose he thinks that’s funny. The best thing to do is to smile politely and go … I don’t like him. “Küss’ die Hand, gnädiges Fräulein.” “Good-bye Herr von Dorsday.”

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Arno: In order to become an artist-philosopher one has to learn to accept that thinking is born out of the womb of desires. Artistic thinking is rather a matter of our hearts, than our brains. One thinks in line with one’s conatus, who is the very essence of a body, according to Spinoza, and not separate from one’s striving. Hyste(e)ría, the womb of desires, is a productive force. It haunts our hearts to imagine something, something virtual, a future to come.

The Letter If there had been an express letter for me the porter would have brought it to me at once. … And if it doesn’t come I shall have a bad night. I slept so wretchedly last night, too. I’ll take some Veronal to-night.

Arno: Barbital was firstly marketed in 1904 by the German company Bayer as “Veronal”. It was considered to be a great improvement over the existing hypnotics. In Literature, Film and Music of the twentieth century an overdose of Veronal was often used by fictional characters to commit suicide. If somebody’s appetite to persevere in being is blocked, an uncanny will to nothingness pops up which starts to overtake and rule the assemblage of desires operative in the cellar regions of a body. In such a constellation somebody starts to hate the fact to be alive at all. One longs for all kind of hypnotics. “A letter for you, Fräulein.” Yes, it is from Mother—an express letter. … It needn’t have anything to do with Father. “My dear child, you can understand how sorry I am to burst into your pleasant holiday time.” … Mother does write a fearful style … “But father’s situation has become acute. I don’t know what to think or do. The sum in question is a comparatively trivial one, thirty thousand gulden, last time it was a question of 120,000.” … Trivial? … “The money must be here on the 5th, at noon. Unfortunately, trust money is concerned.” … Well, go on, go on, what’s she driving at? … “Think of it—a lawyer, a famous lawyer” … Well, what, what, WHAT do you want me to do? … “And now your letter has come, my dear child, in which you mention Dorsday, he helped father before. Thirty is nothing to Dorsday. So I wondered whether you could not do us a kindness and speak to Dorsday” … What? … “He has always been particular fond of you. … So speak to Dorsday at once, I beseech

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you. I assure you there is no harm in it.” … So I’m to borrow from Herr von Dorsday. … “It would surely be an irony of Fate if a catastrophe happened …” … She doesn’t seriously mean that Father would commit … Madness! … It’s awful, simply awful! And even if we get the thirty thousand we shouldn’t be out of the woods. It’s always been the same story for the last seven years—

Friedrich Nietzsche: “I will not stop emphasizing a tiny little fact [namely]: that a thought comes when ‘it’ wants, and not when ‘I’ want, [like a post card or letter, which one receives]. It is, therefore, a falsification of the facts to say that the subject ‘I’ is the condition of the predicate ‘think.’ It thinks: but to say the ‘it’ is just that famous old ‘I’—well that is just an assumption or opinion, to put it mildly, and by no means an ‘immediate certainty’” (Nietzsche 2002, p. 17). Arno: A thought is a message that hits us, which calls us to think.

Else Thinking of Dorsday The letter is crazy. I speak to Dorsday? I’d die of shame … Why should I be ashamed? It’s not my fault … Father is to be locked up. No! Never, never! I’ll save him! Yes, Father, I’ll save you! It’s quite simple. A few nonchalant words: Herr von Dorsday, might I trouble you for a moment? I’ve just had a letter from Mother. … If only I didn’t dislike him so much—and the way he looks at me. Odious creature. I hate him. I hate everybody. Must it be Dorsday? Is Dorsday really the only person in the world who has thirty thousand gulden?

Arno: The little “id”, it, the little girl, is exposed to “id”’s thoughts in a fatal manner. Everything starts with a sending, an envoi, a letter, a mail, an email, a transference, a transposition, a post card, says Derrida in THE POST CARD, from Socrates to Freud and Beyond. The little girl is forced to think. How can “id” affirm such a fate? How could “id” say amor fati to the fabric of desires, circulating in the cellar regions of such a shocking and evident turbulent constellation.

Selling Oneself It’s nearly dark now. Night. The dead of night. I wish I was dead … It simply isn’t true. … O how horrible! … The noble daughter sells herself for her beloved father’s sake, … No, you can’t get me even for

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thirty thousand. Nobody can. … But for a million? … Or for a palace? For a pearl necklace? … How would you like it, Father if I sold myself by auction this evening? To save you from prison? It would make a sensation!

Friedrich Nietzsche: Till today dogmatic philosophers “act as if they had discovered and arrived at their genuine convictions through the self-­ development of a cold, pure, divinely unhampered dialectic (in contrast to the mystics of every rank, who are more honest than the philosophers and also sillier—they talk about ‘inspiration’—): while what basically happens is that they take a pre-existing tenet, a sudden idea, an ‘inspiration’ or, more typically, a rarefied and abstract version of their heart’s desire—and they defend it with rationalizations after the fact” (Nietzsche 2002, p. 8. Translation adopted by A.B.). Arno: Rationalization, should it just be a defend mechanism after the fact, after one has received a message hard to digest? A kind of rumination? A hysteric reaction, searching to get rid of a painful affection which hits us bodily, corporeally, sensually?

Stalemate Why are you doing this to me. Father? To gamble the money away on the Bourse. And the thirty thousand won’t help you either. For three months perhaps. … I shall talk to Father seriously—if it isn’t too late. Why have I never done it before? Everything at home is settled with jokes, and no one feels like joking. Everyone is afraid of the others, and everyone is alone. … The porter will think me mad—sitting on this sofa staring into space. I’ll light a cigarette. Where’s my cigarette case? Upstairs. But where? I put the Veronal in with my linen, but where did I put the cigarette case?

Arno: “Repose in all cellar regions” (Nietzsche 1989, p. 108)—“Ruhe in allen Souterrains” (Nietzsche 1988, p. 352), this is what the bodies of dogmatic philosophers were basically longing for. They wanted to hypnotize themselves. This basic desire has even defined their concept of thinking: They experienced thinking to be a releasing life-practice that liberated themselves from the noise of that part of their lived-bodies which unconsciously functions in the basement of their body. Feeling comfortable while thinking detached from their earthly, bodily existence, they finally wanted thinking to be a realm that should operate entirely independently

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of their desiring machines in a pure mental, disembodied, an ideal space. Plato’s image of thought? Was it not a hysteric reaction concerning the womb of his desires, in Greek terms, a maieutic way of governing hyste(e)ría?

Else Meeting Dorsday: the Deal I’ve got to speak to Dorsday. There he is. He’s bored, I can see it. I’m not looking his way, but I know he’s looking at me. I can feel Dorsday’s look on the back of my neck. “Good evening, Fräulein Else,” “Oh, Herr von Dorsday.” Idiotic! Why do I look at him so coquettishly? He’s smiling already, in the usual way. How stupid men are! “Think, Herr von Dorsday, I got a letter from my mother only today. A very sad letter and you were mentioned in that letter, Herr von Dorsday.” That wasn’t very clever. He looks rather puzzled. … Forward, forward! “To cut it short, Herr von Dorsday, things have come to a crisis again…” How he looks at me. … Father, how could you ask this of me? … Quickly then and get it over. After all, what can happen to me? … He oughtn’t look at me like that. … Why does he press his knee against mine? And I allow it. “There are particular difficulties for Father. And the sum which is owing must be sent on the fifth, the day after tomorrow, at twelve noon…otherwise…” “… otherwise an arrest would be inevitable? And the sum in question, Fräulein Else?” Why does he smile? “The total amount is thirty thousand gulden, Herr von Dorsday. Thirty thousand. Really an absurdly small sum.” Why did I say that? How silly! He stares at me. But he’s smiling. “Not so absurdly small, my dear child.”—Why does he say ‘my dear child’? … What a strange tone there is in his voice. … How he looks at me! … The situation is impossible. I sit here as a sinner. … But I am smiling at him. Why I am smiling? … I’ll get up now. “Don’t go, Fräulein Else. … The thirty thousand gulden shall be sent the day after tomorrow at twelve noon … on one condition.” What does he want? … There’s that tone in his voice again. “Else, I’m only a man after all, and it isn’t my fault that you are so beautiful, … Else … je vous desire.”

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I still stand here. Why? Oughtn’t I simply to have slapped his face? “Else, Else! forgive me. … I want nothing more, Else, than—to see you.” Is he mad? He does see me. … Oh, that’s what he means! You want to see me with nothing on? I am pretty with nothing on. … Why don’t I smack his face? Why don’t I simply go? We glare at each other like deadly enemies. “Else, I am not a blackmailer. I’m only a man who has learnt, that everything in this world has its price, and that anyone who gives away his money when he might get something in return for it is a consummate fool. I ask of you nothing than to be allowed to stand for a quarter of an hour in reverent contemplation of your beauty.” He speaks as if he would speak to a female slave. I’d like to spit in his face. “Think it over, Else. Please notify me your decision after dinner. Au revoir then, Else.” He raises my hand to his lips. Hot lips. Ugh! My hand is cold. He looks deeply into my eyes. Impudent beast,—dirty beast! Never, never! Father you have to kill yourself … No, I won’t sell myself. I’ll be a hussy, but not a prostitute. … No, you speculated too certainly on my childish affection, Father.

Arno: Our appetite to persevere in being is never dis-embodied, it is rather the concrete assemblage of drives unconsciously operative in a body in relation to the world, it is surrounded by. Hyste(e)ría, the womb of desires, shows hysterical traits whenever somebody’s wish-machine is forced to mask and disguise itself. That is to say, if the womb of desires is unable to utter itself freely. Under such circumstances hyste(e)ría, the productivity of somebody’s wish-machine, is blocked. One is possessed by a hidden desire, unknown to oneself. Id, the disguised desire, is there, but as if it would not be there. Id haunts us, forces us to imagine things, for the sake of our appetite, to persevere in being. Not only to persevere myself, but to persevere my being-in-the-world. Being-in-the-world with others, fathers, mothers, uncles, friends et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Else Out of Focus Thirty thousand, thirty thousand … I haven’t got them yet. I must earn them first. … Herr von Dorsday is waiting for my decision. … If I were a magician, I’d be in quite another part of the world. … I‘d live in a villa by the sea and lie naked on the marble steps that run down into the water … and wait. … And at last a man would come or several

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men, and I’d choose one, and the others have to be patient and wait till next day. Oh, what a delicious life it would be!

Friedrich Nietzsche: “Consequently, I do not believe that a ‘drive for knowledge’ is the father of philosophy, but rather that another drive, here as elsewhere, used knowledge (and mis-knowledge!) merely as a tool. People’s basic drives are playing their little game as inspiring geniuses (or daemons or sprites—) … They all practiced philosophy at some point,—… because every drive craves mastery, and this leads it to try philosophizing.—” (Nietzsche 2002, pp. 8–9).

Death Fantasies The moon hasn’t risen yet. It’ll rise just in time for the great performance, when Herr von Dorsday makes his female slave dance naked. … Now, Mademoiselle Else, what are you making such a fuss about which Herr von Dorsday asks of you? You were ready to go off and be the mistress of strange men, one after the other. … And your Father’s life isn’t worth as much as that? … But I can’t go to Herr von Dorsday’s room. … How his eyes will stab and drill their way into me. … If only I could spoil his pleasure somehow! Suppose someone else was there! Why not? He didn’t say that he must be alone with me. … If I liked I could invite the whole hotel, and you’d still be bound to send the thirty thousand gulden. … I don’t care a straw about discretion. … I’ve known for a long time that I’d end up like this. … Yes, I’m a depraved creature. I wasn’t made for a bourgeois existence. … When I’m dead, will you be kind enough to send the few thousand gulden to Father. … I’ll leave a letter with a testamentary disposition. Herr von Dorsday shall have the right to see my body, my beautiful, naked maiden body. So you can’t complain, Herr von Dorsday, that I have deceived you. You’re getting something for your money. … How many powders does one have to take? Six, I think. But ten are safer. I think there are ten left. Yes, that’ll be enough.

Spinoza, Ethics, part 4, proposition 20, scholium: “No one, therefore, unless he is defeated by causes external, and contrary, to his nature, neglects to seek his own advantage, or to preserve his being. No one, I say, avoids food or kills himself from the necessity of his own nature. Those who do such things are compelled by external causes, which can happen in many ways.”

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A Telegram, Hysteric Climax A telegram? In Heaven’s name, what can be in it? “Implore you again speak Dorsday. Sum not thirty but fifty. Otherwise everything unavailing.” … but fifty. Trala, trala! Fifty. But surely fifty or thirty makes no difference. … ‘Excuse me, Herr von Dorsday, a little mistake. Not thirty, but fifty, otherwise everything unavailing.’ … The Veronal is under my linen. … ‘But for fifty I should have to ask correspondingly more, Fräulein.’ ‘Pray command me, Herr von Dorsday.’… And then comes the Veronal. … No—why? Why die? … Life’s only beginning now. … I’ll become such a hussy as the world has never seen. … You shall have your fifty thousand gulden, Father. Although it’s all for nothing. In six, no, in one month we shall be where we are today again! Thank God I’ve got the powders. One, two, three, four, five, six. … I only want to look at you, my dear powders. It commits me to nothing. And pouring them into the glass commits me to nothing. One, two, three, four, five … you go to sleep slowly and never wake up again; no trouble, no pain. You lie in bed, dream and it’s all over. But I won’t kill myself. … And I won’t get to Herrn von Dorsdays room. … To stand naked in front of an old rake … If one sees me, others shall see me. … Splendid idea! Everyone shall see me. They shall all see me, all! … I make fools of them all … especially that swine Dorsday. … off with the dress. … off with the stockings. Naked, quite naked. … Oh, I am not at all mad. You must only think me shameless. Canaille. … I’ll start a collection. I’ll go around with the plate. Why should only Herr von Dorsday pay? That would be unfair. Everyone according to his means. … I need not go down at all. But I will. I am glad to do it. Haven’t I wanted something like this all my life?

Spinoza, Ethics, part 4, proposition 20, scholium: “Someone may kill himself because he is compelled by another [who] forces him to direct the sword against his heart; or because he is forced by the command of a tyrant (as Seneca was) to open his veins, that is, he desires to avoid a greater evil by [submitting to] a lesser; … But that a man [or woman] should, from the necessity of his/her·own nature, strive not to exist, is as impossible as that something should come from nothing. Anyone who gives this a little thought will see it” (Spinoza 2018, p. 174).

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Downstairs in the Lounge: Else Is Looking for Dorsday Where is Dorsday? He isn’t here. Dorsday, where are you? … Trala, trala, I walk through the lounge, and nobody suspect that there is nothing under the coat but me, just me. … I can’t go back. And I won’t go back. … Who’s that playing so nicely? Chopin? No, Schumann. … Well, Herr von Dorsday, where are you hiding? … I don’t care whether he sends the money or not. I’m not the least bit sorry for Father. I’m not sorry for anyone. Not even for myself. My heart is dead. I believe it stopped beating. Perhaps I’ve drunk the Veronal already.

Theatrum Philosophicum: Wanderings in the Forbidden Michel Foucault: Deleuze Prelude to a philosophy of the future “is philosophy not as thought but as theater—a theater of mime with multiple, fugitive, and instantaneous scenes in which blind gestures signal to each other. This is the theater where the laughter of the Sophist bursts out from under the mask of Socrates; where Spinoza’s modes conduct a wild dance in a decentered circle while substance revolves about it like a mad planet; … In the sentry box of the Luxembourg Gardens, Duns Scotus places his head through the circular window; he is sporting an impressive mustache; it belongs to Nietzsche, disguised as Klossowski” (Foucault 2016, p. 57).

Else Staging Naked in Front of All There he is standing at the window. … I am eating my heart out … I’m going mad. … I am dead. … he does not see me, he is listening to the piano. … Fifty thousand. Yes, I’ve gone up in price, Herr von Dorsday. It isn’t so much. Fifty thousand. … Ah, he is looking up. … He fixes his eyes on my face. … Herr von Dorsday, you look at me as though I were your slave. His eyes say to me: I want to see you naked. … You don’t suspect that I have nothing on under the coat. … I’m ready. Does our agreement still hold good, Herr von Dorsday? Here I am. I’m smiling.——————Well, you swine, I am naked. … Delicious thrills run over my skin. How wonderful it is to be naked. … Here I stand naked! ———————–Dorsday opens his eyes wide. At last he believes. … The piano stopped playing. … Father is saved. Fifty thousand. … Why can’t I stop laughing?

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Arno: Schopenhauer’s interpretation of beauty—as a temporary form of silencing all our desires—is only the most telling example of what it meant for a classical metaphysician like him to realize his optimum. Schopenhauer wanted to get rid of his desiring machine and instead enter exactly that particular state of being in which his cogito is no more disturbed, probably even tortured by the noise of desires, operative primarily in the cellar regions of his lived-body.

Finale I’m lying in my virginal bed. Am I dead? Am I pretending to be dead? … I stood there naked before everybody. … Where’s the Veronal? Quick before they come into the room again. Quick. Quick. I mustn’t spill a drop. It tastes nice. How nice death tastes! (Klirr, klirr). The empty glass is lying on the floor. I’ve taken the Veronal. … It’s running over my legs, right and left, like ants. … It was only for Father’s sake. Dorsday insisted on my doing it. … Why do you all let me run through the desert alone? I’m frightened all alone. I’d rather fly. I knew I could fly. I’m dreaming and flying … asleep and dreaming … and flying … don’t wake me up … I’m flying … I’m dreaming … I’m fly …

Acknowledgment  This lecture performance by Arno Böhler and Susanne Valerie Granzer was held on November 1, 2018, at the conference #masshysteria. Hysteria, Politics, and Performance Strategies at Royce Hall at the University of California, Los Angeles.

References Foucault, Michel. 2016. “Theatrum Philosophicum.” Between Deleuze and Foucault, edited by Nicolae Morar, Thomas Nail and Daniel W.  Smith, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1988. “Zur Genealogie der Moral.” Kritische Studienausgabe, Vol. 5, edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Munich: DeGreuyter. ———. 1989. “On the Genealogy of Morals.” edited and translated by Walther Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 2002. “Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, Preface.” Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, edited by Rolf Dieter Horstmann and Judith Norman, translated by Judith Norman. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Schnitzler, Arthur. 1998. “Fräulein Else.” translated by F.H.  Lyon, London: Pushkin Press. Spinoza, Baruch de. 2018. “Ethics: Proved in Geometrical Order.” Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, edited by Matthew J.  Kisner, translated by Michael Silverthorne, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Via Telefaune, a Phone Call with Hélène Cixous Hélène Cixous and Elisabeth Schäfer

Ring… ring… ring… #00:03:21-8# Hèlène Cixous (HC): Oui, bonjour! #00:03:35-4# Elisabeth Schäfer (ES): Bonjour, Hélène! It’s Elisabeth from Vienna. This is extraordinary. Thank you so much for the time, you do not have. So, we all know what a gift this is, to give what one has not. Thank you so much. #00:03:51-6# Hélène Cixous: It is not. It is really, because I […].

The interview was conducted by Elisabeth Schäfer on July 19, 2020, partly in English and partly in French, audio recorded and transcribed. All French passages were translated into English by Elisabeth Schäfer. H. Cixous Université de Paris 8, Paris, France E. Schäfer (*) University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Braun (ed.), Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66360-5_18

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#00:04:07-1# [Both are laughing] ES: How are you, Hélène? #00:04:26-3# HC: “As everybody”, as I say … And you? #00:04:26-3# #00:04:24-7# ES: Thank you, Hélène. At the moment, I am really fine. Hélène, I told you that Johanna Braun, the editor of the volume There Is a Method to This Madness, an anthology on hysteria—she is a colleague and friend of mine—invited the two of us to talk on the phone about the question of the subversive potential of hysteria and how you would understand hysterical interventions. The hysterics became important for feminist movements, but it is also always a crucial question how close it comes to a performative subversive transforming force, or if it is this not yet. And what needs to be added: and how?! #00:06:02-8# HC: I think that this is of course a very contemporary issue. We are still inside of the monstrum of his story. History is hysterical, anyway. For me, of course, hysteria is subversive. The problem is that the subversion is a stage toward a complete transformation or revolution. It is the first stage in a long way to real, complete change, which hasn’t happened yet. I think, hysteria is more and more present. And it’s more and more global and exasperated. And it will go on like that. If we do not recognize hysteria, that it exists, it is really because we are referring all the time to the forms that were observed and described by Charcot and Freud et cetera. But, the same process of exclusion happens now with different aspects in different forms. Because the causes (corsets) are always there. It’s not only women, of course. And hysteria anyway has never been only a feminine feature, no. Men, too, are hysterical. It is because the causes are the same. That is, the person that resorts to hysteria as a mean of expression is who is deprived of language and of attention. Babies can become hysterical, if you do not listen to their needs or try to understand what they ask for—it is the same thing. Of course, the roots, as Freud pointed, are sexual. But, of course, it is sexual! It relates to remain alive. So, the problem has always been a problem of language and choking and repressing the vital needs. And of course, in the two last centuries it was mainly illustrated by the condition of women. Now, it is—as we know—the condition of black lives. Because the Black Lives Matter movements respond to the same. The problem is of course that the Black Lives Matter as well as the #MeToo

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movement—they think they have separated causes. No, the thing is, they have the same causes. The question is always, how to escape. The needs of escaping are most important, because this of course will change something. The predicament is always: doors closed. And you want to open them. So, you have to find how to unlock, which is impossible. And, of course, if hysteria took the form of convulsion et cetera. it is because it has to invent a new language, which is a body language. But, you know, the tragedy is exactly that, it is choking, its wing-chained, saying clearly: “you are killing me, and you not being hurt or hold responsible for that”. This is exactly what the hysteric says. #00:11:43-8# ES: Oh, yes. I think it is really very interesting that you are linking the #MeToo debate and the Black Lives Matter movement to the question of hysteria … #00:11:48-6# HC: No. I make a difference. Because #MeToo is very complicated. I think it is a necessary stage but it’s only a first stage. It’s necessary. Exactly like feminism in its first figuring out was necessary—but not enough. Not sufficient. Does one also say “me too” in German? #00:12:12-2# ES: Yes. It’s it has moved from English into the use of German language … #00:12:24-0# HC: That’s already a problem—referring to the stage and to the American discourse. Then, it has the character of a slogan. And also, it is very feeble, very weak. It is not poetical. It has no linguistic quality. It’s only a shout. But I think, you can’t escape the shout stage. You have to go through it. But to realize that you have millions of millions of millions of very, very simple sounds or phones in order to make not even a word. Now, we are expecting something more. As far as we see, it’s riot—which is deserved and necessary—but we need to develop a language. I think that Black Lives Matter is ahead. Because it has this huge past of thinking over and over the repression of black people. But of course, it is the same thing. It is always the exclusion, the eruption of energies, of indignation of all kinds of states of soul and body, which are nice itself. Of course, we have that for a long time. In France, we now have a new example. It seems to be an anecdote, but it is not. In the new government in France, Macron has appointed a Minister of the Interior, who is responsible for the police. And the police is the enemy, of course. They are repressive, they are violent

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in France, they killed an incredible number of people last year. It’s unbelievable. And to appoint a man who is pure ambitioned and has absolutely no ethical quality, and furthermore this man is now accused of having raped a woman. The situation is unclear because he denies the fact. It is not being solved for the moment. So, the Hypocrites say, that this man benefits from a “beautiful law”, which is the principle of the assumption of innocence. But this is of course a way of perverting the law and not listening to or showing respect for women at large. All women in France—and also women on the right—are offended by the appointment of this minister. And that makes people hysterical, of course. No one refers to hysteria currently, but it is exactly that. The form of such an offensive appointment is what causes hysteria. But hysteria is not at all a sickness. It is the contrary! It is pure health! #00:18:16-5# ES: Oh, that is very interesting. Thank you for this! And read as a healthy force, for sure, it moves and transforms itself into the next steps and may come closer to revolutionary forces and/or poetical language, which we are in need of, as you said. #00:18:56-8# HC: Of course! It is this stage of the shout. #00:19:13-5# ES: Yes, one has to shout. But one has not to stop with the shout … HC: … one should go beyond—and transform a shout into poetry. You have to work very hard for that. #00:19:30-7# ES: Yes. That’s true. Would you consider your own writing as this kind of work, transforming a shout into poetry? #00:19:40-8# HC: I think so, yes. Of course, it wouldn’t be enough—to understand of what I do. But, yes. I think that I reached the point of shout very early, when I was three or four years old. And in the given time, I went further. But of course, the moment of shouting is very important. I now and then still achieve it—for example, in dreams. In dreaming, I am shouting enormously. Then I transform it into a new kind of language—which goes through language. #00:20:38-0# ES: That is a beautiful thought. I really love this. And for me this is a very enriching understanding of hysteria. Because it is always very difficult to think of hysteria as a suffering and an illness only. As an embodied

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“No”, which has for sure it’s right. But life with all its changes is also in great need of a “yes”, an affirmation that one can go on and transform and become what one desires. #00:21:34-0# HC: Hm. Yes. – – – And how is Kristal (dog called Miss Crystal)?! #00:21:45-3# ES: Oh, she is very fine. She is sleeping and dreaming very close to my writing desk right now. I think she is hearing your voice … And tell me about your cats—Haya and Isha?! #00:22:17-4# HC: For the moment, they are extraordinary, really …

Index1

NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS #MeToo, 16, 119, 175, 370, 371 See also under Hashtag A Achiampong, Larry, 153, 159–162 Ahmed, Sara, 150, 152, 169 Alighieri, Dante, 36, 36n14, 38 Allan, Maude, 47, 48, 50, 51 Anti-hysterical, 12, 105–121 Anti-Semitism, 10 See also under Race Anxiety, 12, 77, 78, 110, 117, 127–145, 182, 184, 193, 198, 249, 250, 253, 329n3 Apartheid, 207n4, 210, 211, 218, 220, 222, 223, 226–228, 237 Arc de cercle, 12, 21–65, 219n14 Archive, 9, 15, 172, 182, 185, 238, 263, 275, 278, 280, 282, 299, 301–316, 325n2, 327n3

Arch of Hysteria, 59–61, 61n28, 65 Artistic research/arts-based research, 6, 12, 15, 16, 301, 307, 319–320, 320n1, 322–323n1, 323–325n2, 326–327n3, 330n3, 330–333n4, 340 Arts Against Cuts, UK-based activist group, 150, 151 Asian diaspora, 157 Association of Hysteric Curators, The, 13, 172, 176 Attack, 12, 22, 24, 40, 54, 59, 85, 86, 102, 109, 113, 117, 134, 136, 140, 143, 172, 204, 208, 219, 219n14, 241n9, 251, 261, 263, 281, 307, 326n2, 328n3, 350 Attitudes Passionnelles, 87, 88, 241n9, 261, 327n3 Augustine, 82–85, 88, 91–93, 108, 113, 118, 220, 262, 277n2, 280, 282, 299, 301–303, 327n3

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Braun (ed.), Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66360-5

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INDEX

Augustine (Big Hysteria), 10, 12, 74, 91–93, 102, 107, 108, 280 See also under Furse, Anna Auto-ethnographic writing, 15, 305–316 Avant-garde art, 47, 50, 65, 284, 329n3, 347 Avril, Jane, 41, 41n18, 48 B Baartman, Sara, 207, 207n3 Bacteria, 233, 236, 236n5, 237n8, 243–246, 243n10, 249n13 Barad, Karen, 235, 236, 245–247, 245n11, 252 Baroque, 12, 26, 27, 29, 32, 33, 39, 40, 59 See also under Bernini, Gian Lorenzo Bell, Sir Charles, 35, 35n12, 36, 38, 59 Belle Époque, 75 Bellmer, Hans, 52–55, 54n26, 275 Beresford, Cordelia, 111, 278–281 Berlant, Lauren, 151, 169 Bernhardt, Sarah, 39–41, 40n16, 45, 48, 50, 51, 86 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 29–32, 109 Black Lives Matter movement, 16, 64, 131–140, 144, 299, 370, 371 Bourgeois, Louise, 59–61, 61n28, 64, 65 Bourneville, Désiré-Magloire, 22, 82–85, 87, 110, 112, 113, 276 Braun, Johanna, 5, 22, 120, 171, 297, 326–327n3, 370 Breton, André, 15, 53, 56–58, 275, 277n2, 298, 299, 302 Breuer, Joseph, 21, 22, 29, 29n8, 31, 32, 74, 89, 90, 106, 143, 154, 189, 210, 219, 234, 239, 240, 263, 301, 321–322n1, 328n3 See also under Studies on Hysteria

Briggs, Laura, 142 Brody, Jennifer DeVere, 322n1, 323n1 Bronfen, Elisabeth, 8, 13, 110, 111, 206, 208–210, 216, 220, 223–227, 225n18 Brouillet, Pierre Aristide André, 25, 40, 80, 89, 110, 219n14 C Cameron, Margaret, 282–286 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 6, 9, 10, 12, 15, 21, 22, 24–26, 31–33, 35, 39, 41, 41n17, 41n18, 45, 50, 51, 53–55, 59, 80, 81, 83, 84, 86, 88–90, 92, 93, 102, 107–109, 111–113, 118, 153, 154, 172, 204, 219n14, 234, 239, 240, 261–263, 272–277, 277n2, 279–281, 279n3, 280n5, 283, 284, 287, 290, 291, 298, 299, 301, 302, 320n1, 325n2, 327–328n3, 340, 370 Chorea, choretic dancing, 41, 280, 289n8, 320n1, 327n3 Cinema, 8, 90, 102, 174, 328–329n3, 331n4 See also Film Cixous, Hélène, 10, 15, 16, 73n1, 109, 175, 177, 205n2, 241, 280n4, 281, 306, 322n1, 344, 347–349, 349n1, 351–354 Clément, Catherine, 10, 281, 347, 348 A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière, 25, 219n14 See also under Brouillet, Pierre Aristide André Clownism, 22, 24, 320n1, 327n3 Colonialism, 10, 14, 63, 64, 137, 159, 210, 218, 235n2, 236, 237, 237n8

 INDEX 

Contagious, 132, 135, 139, 152, 175, 299, 326n2, 328–329n3 CoolTan Arts’ Women Make Art group, 154, 155 COVID-19 virus, 14, 132, 133, 135, 139, 143n4, 234, 236, 252–253 Curator, 13, 106, 119, 120, 131, 141, 150, 168, 176, 278 Curatorial, 12, 13, 55, 118, 131, 141, 150, 176–178 Cure, 97, 98, 102, 129–131, 129n1, 135, 138–145, 263, 264, 267, 281, 298, 301, 304, 322n1, 325n2, 351, 354 D Dalí, Salvador, 55–59, 108, 275 Dance, 6, 16, 41, 48, 58, 59, 74, 78, 102, 271–291, 315, 364, 366 Derrida, Jacques, 260, 267, 309, 341–343, 346, 353, 360 Devereux, Cecily, 7, 111, 112, 115, 120, 205, 240 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), 3, 151, 320n1 Diamond, Elin, 113, 280n4, 289 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 4, 7, 15, 22, 39, 84, 112, 113, 191, 261–263, 265, 298, 299, 306, 325n2, 328n3 Disability studies, 330n3, 331–332n4 Doll, 52–55, 54n26, 57, 58, 172, 185, 186, 188, 199, 200 Dora, 15, 205n2, 206, 207, 257, 258, 263, 267, 280n4, 339–354 See also under Studies on Hysteria Du Preez, Amanda, 13, 217, 240, 241n9, 325–326n2 Duras, Marguerite, 109, 114, 115

377

E Early Modern era, 22, 26, 27, 39 École National Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 263 Écriture feminine, 15, 340, 344, 345, 347, 348 Epidemic, 11, 26, 73, 135, 165, 175, 249n13, 299, 329n3 Existential eco-anxiety, 137 Extinction Rebellion movement, 135 F Ferran, Anne, 277, 281 Film, 1, 2, 56, 98, 99, 107, 111, 112, 162, 174, 175, 179, 180, 182, 183, 193, 200, 201, 235n3, 266, 278, 280, 286, 319, 326–330n3, 330–332n4, 359 See also Cinema Finley, Karen, 113, 114 Freud, Sigmund, 6, 9, 10, 15, 21, 22, 29, 29n8, 31, 39, 45, 53, 54, 56, 65, 74, 89, 90, 92, 93, 102, 106–109, 111, 112, 143, 154, 155, 174, 188–190, 192, 195, 200, 204–210, 205n2, 208n5, 212, 212n12, 213, 217–219, 220n15, 225n18, 234, 239, 240, 257–259, 261–263, 266, 267, 272, 273, 275, 280, 281, 298, 299, 301, 302, 304, 320–322n1, 328–329n3, 340–343, 347, 349–353, 370 Fridays for Future movement, 132, 135–137, 144 Furse, Anna, 10, 12, 91–93, 96–98, 99n12, 100–102, 107, 111, 280, 280n5, 281 Fuseli, Henry, 33–39, 33n11, 36n13

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INDEX

G Geneviève, 112, 113, 118, 302, 303 Gentileschi, Artemisia, 27–29, 28n6, 29n7, 32, 39, 40 Gilman, Sander, 8, 9, 22, 35n12, 50, 114, 114n5, 157, 159, 324n2 Giselle, ballet, 78 Gleize, Augustine Louise, 108, 277n2, 301, 303 See also Augustine González, Laura, 14, 120, 264, 272, 273, 281–283, 288, 289, 291 Great Lockdown, 132 H Hamlet, 4, 86, 273, 281 Harlow, Sage (Pbbbt.), 272, 284, 286–288, 291 Hashtag, 128, 134, 136 See also under #MeToo; Black Lives Matter movement Hippocrates, 27, 35 Horror, 95, 180, 183, 184, 187, 199, 201, 225, 227, 228, 244, 319, 326–330n3, 330–332n4 Hustera, 144 See also under Womb Husterein, 144, 145 Husteros, 339, 340 Hygeia, 47 HYSTERIA (journal), 116, 117 Hysteria Beyond Freud, 9, 10 Hysteria FemCon, 116 Hysterical studies, 127–145 Hysteries, 21–24, 38, 73, 102, 261–266 See also under Showalter, Elaine

I Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière, 22, 84, 85, 87, 204, 263, 276 Ida, 257–261, 263, 266, 267, 340, 349 See also under Studies on Hysteria Impressionist painting, 41 Irigaray, Luce, 221, 222, 240, 241, 345, 347, 349 J Janet, Pierre, 50, 190, 275 Jewishness and hysteria, 48 See also under Race K Kennedy, Adrienne, 109, 114, 115 Klimt, Gustav, 39, 45, 47, 47n22, 50, 51 Kølbæk Iversen, Marie, 153, 162–164, 162n1 L Londe, Albert, 24, 25, 34, 35, 38, 44, 44n19, 45, 48, 59, 82, 83, 85, 87, 276, 277, 280 Lumiere, brothers, 90, 328–329n3 M Mad studies, 6, 325n2, 330n3, 332–333n4 Male hysteria, 15, 96–97, 305–316 Mazzoni, Cristina, 22, 29–31 Mental Fight Club’s Dragon Café, 166–169

 INDEX 

Micale, Mark, 7, 8, 22, 45, 107, 108, 110, 205, 217, 273, 305 Mimesis, 113, 114, 221, 266 Mimicry, 13, 88, 183, 186, 188, 189, 219–223, 225, 228, 275, 279 Modern Era, 39 Monster, 175, 181, 182 Mulvey, Laura, 90, 192, 195, 197 N N., Emmy von, 154, 188, 258 See also under Studies on Hysteria New Hysterians, 107, 120, 129 New hysteria studies, 7, 107, 109, 110, 112, 115, 331n4 New New Hysteria Studies, 115 See also under Devereux, Cecily Norman, Marsha, 109 Nouvelle iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière, 276 O O., Anna, 22, 89, 106, 143, 154, 155, 301, 321n1 Omphalic representation, 224–228 ORLAN, 106, 107 Outbreak narrative, 14, 233–236, 235n3 Owen, Wilfred, 95, 100, 184 P Pandemie, 14, 132–135, 139, 141, 143n4, 144, 234, 236 Pantomime, 88, 208, 219, 220n15 Pappenheim, Bertha, 22, 89, 144, 301 Pelias, Roland, 268, 323n1 Performative writing, 268, 322–323n1, 330n4 Performing madness, 4, 115

379

Pickens, Therí Alyce, 4, 323n1 Pinel, Philippe, 81 Possession, 81, 174, 220, 238, 260, 267, 273, 275, 281, 284, 286–288, 329–330n3 Possession film, 326n3, 332n4 Prostitution, 77, 143 Protest, 2, 6, 11, 13, 16, 55, 74, 107, 115–120, 132, 133, 135, 151, 165, 166, 211, 240, 263, 333n4 R Race, 6, 11, 12, 63, 64, 129, 129n1, 130, 135, 138–140, 142, 143, 154, 157, 209n8, 211, 216n13, 222, 248, 327n3 Rape, 88, 115–118, 137, 280 RE: CREATE Psychiatry, 166–169 Régnard, Paul, 22, 82–84, 87, 110, 118, 276, 277, 328n3 Reproduction, 11, 12, 127–145, 172, 211, 237, 263, 281 Richer, Paul, 23–25, 35, 38, 48, 59, 80, 80n4, 81, 110, 219n14, 263, 273, 274, 276–278, 283 Riot, 102, 165–166, 371 Rodin, Auguste, 43–45, 44n19, 45n21, 47, 59 S Salpêtrière, Hospice de la, 15, 21, 24, 32, 33, 35, 39, 41, 41n17, 53, 55, 59, 74, 80, 82–85, 87, 89, 92, 93, 102, 108, 110–113, 153, 174, 176, 204, 219, 220, 239, 261–263, 272–274, 276, 277n2, 278–281, 279n3, 280n4, 298, 302 Sashidharan, Sashi, 159–161 Schiele, Egon, 39, 50, 51

380 

INDEX

School of Oriental and African Studies Feminist Society, The, 116 Schutzman, Mady, 109, 111, 113, 285, 286 Shapeshift, 102, 159 Shellshock, 94–98, 121 Sherman, Cindy, 13, 179–201 Showalter, Elaine, 7–9, 73, 92, 102, 107, 110, 113, 115, 120, 129, 153, 155, 156, 168, 204, 205, 218–221, 219n14, 220n15, 234, 239–241, 262, 305, 351 Sibande, Mary, 13, 203–228 Sinkler, Wharton, 26 Siopis, Penny, 206, 207, 207n3 Studies on Hysteria, 6, 8, 9, 21, 32, 45, 74, 106, 189, 301, 321–322n1, 328n3, 353 See also under Breuer, Joseph; Dora; Freud, Sigmund; Ida, N., Emmy von, O., Anna Suffragette movement, 156 Sulkowicz, Emma, 117, 117n6, 118 Surrealism, 53, 57–59, 304 See also under Avant-garde art Swooning, 26, 28, 40, 80, 239 T Taylor-Johnson, Sam, 108 Theatre, 33, 74, 80–81, 93, 102, 105–121, 165, 262, 271–291, 348, 353 Thunberg, Greta, 136, 137 Timpano, Nathan J., 8, 9, 11, 12, 22, 32, 32n10, 39, 45, 48, 50, 54, 55, 120 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de, 39, 41, 42 Townsend-Robinson, Joanna, 111

Trans*Writing, 15, 340 Trauma, 74, 88, 97, 105, 117–119, 121, 162, 164, 166, 181, 185, 190–192, 201, 206, 209–219, 221n16, 224–226, 228, 238, 273, 325n2 V Vanel, Hélène, 57–59, 275 Victorian era, 212, 234, 238 Violence, 55, 74, 84, 100, 118, 131–135, 138, 140, 175, 176, 180, 185, 187, 201, 214, 216n13, 281, 288, 298, 304 W Wald, Christina, 8, 108n2, 111, 235, 235n3 Walker, Kara, 61–65, 63n29 Wandering Jew, 323n1, 324–325n2 See also under Race Wandering womb, 27, 84, 301 Warburg, Aby, 324–326n2 Weinbaum, Alys Eve, 129n1, 143, 322n1, 324n2 Wexler, Tina, 111 Wittman, “Blanche” Marie, 25, 29, 39, 40 Womb, 12, 27, 140, 144, 189, 204n1, 212, 214, 216n13, 264, 320n1, 359, 362, 363 Women’s March, 119, 138 X Xa, Zadie, 153, 157–159 X-ray photography, 75, 90