one;
at Charcot’s “famous Tuesday lectures” the behaviours of his patients were induced, displayed, and commentated to an amphitheatre of medical professionals and students. one of the things that first interested me in his method was this idea of giving the hysteric an audience to play to: placing them on the literal stage for this expected, demanded, “performance of madness”. not only was the patient’s mania sanctioned by this attention, but indeed the doctor depended for his professional reputation upon a “good performance”. another interesting point for me was the use of camera technology to further catalogue their “passions”, the idea of catching, of containing, of capturing, this madness. the fragmentary nature of the photograph, the violence of it. still life, stilling life. but these images are vivid, they are full of movement, of expression. they are simultaneously staged and candid, at once contrived and genuine. particularly in Augustine. always in Augustine.
I’m wary to enter into a dissection of to what extent Charcot’s patients were “really mad” vs “playing to the camera”, partially because I find it frustratingly redundant in the same way I find discussions of whether Stoker’s characters “really” encountered a vampire frustratingly redundant, but also because I’m not sure that, when it comes to performance (or (traumatic?) experience), it’s really ever so binary as all that. one can’t act without in some sense becoming, and one can’t be without in some sense acting. we communicate our internal workings in order to understand them, and in doing so we must translate them to a less self-specific language. as an art teacher once told me, it’s not as simple, sometimes, as just drawing a thing as you see it. such literalism doesn’t always make sense on the page. sometimes we must skewer, resize, lighten, darken, in order to properly represent. we overemphasise ourselves. that doesn’t have to make us ingenuine. “the knife is real, the blood is real, and the emotions are real.”
apparently Mesmer wrote screeds and screeds of notes that are practically indecipherable without an extensive key because they’re mostly made up of symbols. “the idea behind it is that images are the basis for a true understanding while instead words can lead to many different and opposite meanings.” I’m reminded of Stoker’s characters, and their shorthand, and their phonographs, and their circulation of written accounts over verbal, their archiving of the moment in the present. their preoccupation with convening their experiences, knitting together a single cohesive chronological narrative of events. as for Charcot, why photograph? to circulate outward, outwith, to the foreign, to the future. the image as pure language without language. there’s something in here about signs and signals and pulling a funny face or exposing your breasts to represent “mania” or folding your palms under your cheek to represent “sleeping” because it’s the easiest shortcut to being universally understood. there’s something about performance as translation of the self, of the local, of the now. there’s something about fragmentary evidence versus whole narrative and the best way to tell the truth. how to validate the subjective in the world of the objective.
