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