Reference book: PERFORMING NEUROLOGY The Dramaturgy of Dr Jean-Martin Charcot, Jonathan W. Marshal
1. INTRODUCTION
- What was it? History.
After being the first gunpowder factory, the building was used for an institution for mad women in the
last few decades of the 19th century.
Considered a reference in the French
hospital system, it has made scientific contributions with worldwide
repercussions and figures such as Dominique Laplane, who studied
obsessive-compulsive changes.
XVII century – Luis XIV orders to
build hospitals for poor people, because the city is full of them. This building was converted into a
hospice for the poor woman: mentally ill woman, epileptic,
prostitutes, alcoholic, girls born on adultery, witches, orphans,
criminals, crazies, lesbians, girls with suicidal tendencies,
bohemians...
XVIII - During the September massacres
of 1792, the working-class district tried to release the woman:
134 prostitutes were released, 25 madwomen were murdered.
XIX – Alfred Vulpin, Jean- Martin
Charcot = father of modern neurology, he developed several studies on
hypnosis and hysteria. He creates a neurology school in La
Salpêtrière, where he starts teaching. Georges Gilles Tourette was
his disciple and studied what is now known as "Tourette's
disease". Freud was also a disciple – Charcot's said to be the
precursor of psychoanalysis.
XX - Gradually, the neurological
specialty of the institution is consolidated thanks to doctors such as Édouard Brissaud, Raymond Garcin and Pierre Marri.
Diana, princess of Wales, died here.
- Such a Wagner
monopolized hysteria. He astonished
men. He frightened women. He practiced in sum scientific
cabotinage. His success has been enormous. Oh the great allure of
hamming it up! It has profited Charcot, but science also. He
advanced science in the manner of Wagner, the great musical
cabotin.Charcot and Wagner seem to me to be of the same race.
It was horrible to say this for the doctor, as it was comparing him
to an artist rather than to a scientist. And he was such a
nationalist man.Wagner was famous for championing the total art
work, in which all of the senses were simultaneously assaulted by
different elements of performance: sound, music, voice, acting,
lighting, spectacle, and design. Charcot and his acolytes warned
against the potential ill effects of such intense neuro-affective
stimulation, claiming that it could bring on hysteria or other
diseases.
- Linguistics. Butler and performativity
Derrida explains this by reference to language itself. For any word
to make sense, it must have been said before, and the association of
this word with a particular object or concept have been recognized.
Every time this word is subsequently said, it becomes more clearly
associated with the object it names—the more one is called “man,”
the more this designation becomes, in Butler’s phrasing,
“sedimented” and “concretized” in social, physical, and
subjective terms. One “becomes” a man through such performances.
This raises, however, the possibility that the subject was not a man
at some time or other, and hence that it was always possible that
another designation could have been applied.
All language has some performative character. Charcot starts to name
things and actions, so he's creating the knowledge, but it could have been different.
“There is nothing outside the text”- Derrida. So, knowledge is
something human-made.
This is related to the concept of “mad women”, very present in
today's society. I had a teacher who told me when her daughter was kind of rebel she
was called “a bad girl”, while if it was her son who adopted
that attitude, he was seen as “a boy with a lot of personality”
and intelligence. The use of the language. “Stop being so hysterical!” - It is always said to women who just want to be heard. It was not only a big influence in arts, but in
society and in the meaning of the word “woman”.
Beyond linguistics
The choreography of hysterioepilepsy was so violently
chaotic as to be not just pathological, but to exist beyond the
logical structures of language itself. Hysteria’s status as a
pre- linguistic, somatic language has since become a truism of
feminist psychoanalysis. What is often overlooked, however, is that
the alinguistic character of nineteenth century hysteria meant that
the disease could only be fully represented through the force of
physical performance, and not through written or verbal
description, or even the static images of photography.
- Later influences
- LEÇONS DU MARDI: his students write
the notes and then he reviews them and creates a book out of them. His work was inseparable to the work of his acolytes. Aesthetic values in
his school: some pupils were professors of artistic anatomy.
His work was very influential in arts. Neuropatologhy as
entertainment.
- DANCE
a) End of the XIX –
beginning of the XX century: Loïe Fuller, “trance dancers”.
b) Inability of the language and logic
speech acts.
c) Marta Graham used muscle tension and relaxation as
motor energy.
- SURREALIST ESSAY by Louis Aragon and André Breton, “The Fiftieth Anniversary of Hysteria”, 1928
- ARCH OF HYSTERIA, Louise Bourguois
- Per Olov Enquist’s fictional book of Charcot’s patients BLANCHE AND MARIE, 2007
- UNITED COLORS OF BENETTON, Oliviero Toscani and Isabelle Caro
- AUGUSTINE Alice Winocour’s film, 2012
- 1893: Charcot's death. Following
years: significant literary and aesthetic works
-
REFLECTION OF THE AUTHOR:
Didi-Huberman
concludes that: Charcot rediscovered hysteria. I attempt to
retrace how he did so, amidst all the various clinical and
experimental procedures, through hypnosis and the spectacular
presentations of patients having hysterical attacks in the
amphitheater where he held his famous Tuesday Lectures. With Charcot
we discover the capacity of the hysterical body, which is, in fact,
prodigious. It is prodigious; it surpasses the imagination,
surpasses “all hopes,” as they say. Invention
of Hysteria (2003)
For
Didi-Huberman, the collection of photographs published within the
Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière
“contains everything: poses, attacks, cries, ‘passionate
attitudes,’ ‘crucifixions,’ ‘ecstasy,’ and all the
postures of delirium” or what might be called “theatricalized
bodies.” one of Didi-Huberman’s most significant observations:
hysterics became art objects. the diseased neurological body is
therefore a kind of fiction , very close to theatre.
2. CHARCOT Diagnosis of
hysteria
- Key words = ART & SCIENCE
Hysterioepilepsy and hypnosis = theatrical diseases
- Process of study
BODY MOVEMENT
He
was known to explore illnesses by focusing on the body
movement. He even
produced, together with other people, proto-cinematic stop-motion
analyses of the moving body, just when the cinema was about to
start. We worried more about the plastic manifestations of hysteria
than about his nature or causes, having as an important tool a
visual archive he impulsed: Iconographie Photographique
de la Salpêtrière. He was more focus on the body reactions and impulses than on psyche,
sexuality or psychology, this means, on the choreographic patterning of the body.In the film, the movements are very sexual-related, with Augustine touching her sexual organs and breast while convulsing. But Charcot always stated that the sexual wasn't part of the disease, it was just delirium, and the disease starts in the brain.
RAPPROCHEMENT (relationship) BETWEEN THEATRE AND MEDICINE
At the Théâtre
du Grand Guignol and in the work of Munthe and Daudet (french
dramaturgues), a Charcot-figure is depicted as a diseased performer
or histrionic actor. It helps in the medical practice.He made a distinction: Performance of medical knowledge in the lectures / pathological performativity of patients
Controversial.
Even though, criticism of Platel: faced with the problem of
differentiating between illness and the mere performance of illness;
between outward theatrical display and essence, which in turn
implicitly raised the question of whether illness was itself a kind
of performance.
Health vs. Disease: symmetry of classical male young bodies vs disorder, grotesque, carnival. The work of Richer, Meige, and Duval on the healthy moving body acted as an instructive complement to Charcot’s own focus on diseased movement.
Marcel Duchamp’s Futurist painting of Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) explicitly references the lectures on the body in movement of Richer.
Richer claimed that every age was characterized by a particular art form, in “modern times” however it was “music.” Marey and his collaborators, such as Londe, had indeed experimented with forms of musical and choreographic notation to record movement patterns, heartbeat, and other physiological phenomena, and Richer reproduced illustrations of Marey’s semi-musical “notation of movement” throughout his course-books. Scientists had moved from listening for the music of the spheres, to listening to and watching for the rhythms of anatomyological movement.
DRAWINGS AND PHOTOGRAPHY. CINEMA
Images.
Draws and pics. They let
the images speak for themselves: medicine and photography. As
photographic techniques improved, Salpêtrière physicians such as
Richer increasingly commended the camera for its superiority over
the physical eye, enabling one to capture the “most fugitive” or
subtle of bodily expressions for further investigation. The phrase
“made after nature” which Charcot evoked in his lecture above
was crucial here.
Charcot was a fair illustrator, and several of his schematic drawings adorned his published lectures. As Charcot’s secretary of 1889–1893, George Guinon, observed:
THE THEATRE OF
THE ATHLETIC NUDE
CHAPTER 5: The
Grotesque Body and the Living Nude
This concept led to some violent tendencies, such as Martin
McDonagh's and Sara Kane's“In-yer-face”.(Blasted)
French theatre at
the time very academic, following the Greek rules: Aristoteles'
model of the three unities: time, space, character, Rules of Classicism. Therefore, Charcot preferred Molière than Wagner or Aurélien Lugné-Poe. For the ancients, the admiration of beautiful forms was in some sense the dogma of
a religion, and the science of the nude became the catechism. Both
painters and physicians must know the nude.
Art and science.Health vs. Disease: symmetry of classical male young bodies vs disorder, grotesque, carnival. The work of Richer, Meige, and Duval on the healthy moving body acted as an instructive complement to Charcot’s own focus on diseased movement.
Marcel Duchamp’s Futurist painting of Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) explicitly references the lectures on the body in movement of Richer.
MUSIC
AND RHYTHM OF THE BODY
The
work of Richer, Meige, and Duval on the healthy moving body acted as
an instructive complement to Charcot’s own focus on diseased
movement. As Richer observed, it was above all the “music”
or “rhythm” of
the body, its uniquely sequential or choreographic action, which
defined the body as healthy or diseased.Richer claimed that every age was characterized by a particular art form, in “modern times” however it was “music.” Marey and his collaborators, such as Londe, had indeed experimented with forms of musical and choreographic notation to record movement patterns, heartbeat, and other physiological phenomena, and Richer reproduced illustrations of Marey’s semi-musical “notation of movement” throughout his course-books. Scientists had moved from listening for the music of the spheres, to listening to and watching for the rhythms of anatomyological movement.
DATA
Iconographie was full of statistical
data on the patients: the frequency and duration of their fits; the
volume and quality of their urinary and fecal excretions, as well
as notes on foaming at the mouth, saliva, menstruation, and other
“vaginal secretions”; skin and mucosal sensitivity; rectal,
vaginal, and skin temperatures before, after, and during fits, as
well as across the body; dynamometric measurements of muscular
force, the relative weakness and atrophy of limbs; measurements of
bodily proportions; transcriptions of patients’ delirious
ramblings; electrostimulation readings; ...
O. indeed claimed that during his seizures:
“There seem to be two persons in me … I am at once
the actor and the spectator; and the worst of it is, the exuberance
of the one [the pathological actor] is not to be thwarted by the
just recriminations of the other”. // others feel like the sky was
splitting in two parts, etc
Patients frequently raged and gnashed their teeth in
postures which Bourneville and Richer identified as being closely
akin to those which Catholics had formerly designated as being the
result of demonic possession.
These radically disordered movements could only be
described as “illogical attitudes,” a phrase also used to
describe Tourette’s syndrome. Such poses were “illogical”
because of “their non-correspondence to any [identifiable]
emotional states” or other narrative or contextual justification.
Charcot said that hypnosis was only possible with people with
hysteria (he was wrong), while whilst Bernheim argued others
attacked him saying this was not truth, and even that hypnosis could be a curative method for them.DRAWINGS AND PHOTOGRAPHY. CINEMA
Charcot was a fair illustrator, and several of his schematic drawings adorned his published lectures. As Charcot’s secretary of 1889–1893, George Guinon, observed:
He himself drew
like a true artist, and this talent often served him well in fixing
on paper a patient’s attitude, a deformation, which he immediately
[then] knew how to define with a characteristic word.
Charcot recognized
in Richer, however, a superior gift. As a young intern, Richer
stayed overnight in the wards so as to capture the transitory fits
and seizures of hysterics and other patients.
They both two major iconographic studies on illness in art,
Les démoniaques dans l’art (1886) and Les difformes et les malades dans l’art (1889), with their drawings.Art as realism.
The “love of truth,” of
nature, and of “ exact imitation,” formed the basis for all
true art, theatre and science. The ideal medical theatre was rather the
literally spartan aesthetic of the classical athletic stadium.
The reader
was encouraged to read across the images, and reconstruct patient
behaviour in all its chaotic totality. The Iconographie resembled
in this sense a flip-book of cinematic stills more than it did a
collection of self-contained, static images. The performances
represented in these texts were pathological because of how such
dramas transgressed the rules of classical theatre and Aristotelian
drama. Instead of being representations of real events, they acted
as corporeal manifestations of a compulsion to perform itself.
Hysterioepilepsy was a disease because, in the final analysis, it
depicted nothing other than itself; it was pure performance, or as
Charcot observed, “art for art’s sake.”
- Postmodernity. Taoism. VARIABILITY. TRANSFORMATION
Complexity of our
body, very postdramatic, always changing: As Richer observed: the
volume of the diverse parts of our body are not constantly the same,
it [the body] is, on the contrary, in a perpetual state of
instability. That is to say that it changes from moment to moment,
with our stances, with our actions, our feelings, our emotions, even
our thoughts. One of the features of life is the incessant changes
in the volume of the limbs and as a result in their form. From this
it follows that, in Nature, the form itself is variable, transitory
and ever-changing.
- Complexity in every field: postmodernism is not only a philosophical tendency, but it is expressed in several fields: architecture, literature, sociology... “Less is a bore”. Very baroque.
- I think he was kind of a visionary, as he didn't focus on searching for the causes of hysteria and the sense of it (as modernisms did, all of them were focused on the meaning of life), but on exploring and enjoying the performativity of the body in such a state. Postmodernity doesn't intend to raise new ideas, there is not a truth, but subjective impressions of it.
- Self-contradiction
Past: ancient Greeks. Body and soul were one, impossible to separate. With the mask,
body was very important. There was no concept of an independent mind
functioning outside the body. They didn't regard the naked body as
sinful or corrupt, but they celebrated in the gymnasium.
Postmodernism goes
back to the past, modernism wanted to differientate form the past.
Modernity:
industrialization, free market, rationalism, material life... Modern
society is mainly about destruction, about the change. Initiated by
nihilism.
Postdramatic
theatre totally breaks with the Aristotelian structure of the plot:
the theatre is defined by the staging. It doesn't destroy the
structure of the drama, but it overcomes it. There is an
absolutization of the body. This is way I'm studying physical
theatre, because I think it is the future and I somehow don't find
an inner meaning to other theatrical forms at the moment.
- Artistic way of description. Charcot and Bourneville
The Iconographie offered not only a transcription of
the dramaturgy which Charcot and his associates described, but also
an attempt to translate this living, performative material from the
stages of the Salpêtrière into a published, textual form.
Photography was enlisted to aid in this task of bodily
transcription. A tension existed between the alogical, pathological
body of hysterioepilepsy and its rational, medical description. This
conflict between medical diagnosis and its irrationally disordered
object was reflected in a similar opposition between performance and
its textual documentation.
It is significant in this context that Bourneville’s
project of somatic description was contemporary with not only the
work of Marey, Londe, and Richer in finding ways to record and
analyse movement, but also with attempts to carefully notate and
examine choreography by dance theorists such as Maurice Emmanuel of
the Paris Conservatoire, or the founder of Eurhythmics, Émile
Jaques- Dalcroze, both of whom drew on advances in
chronophotography.
Ways of linguistically describing and transcribing both
the poetic, and the poetically deranged, medical body were of
widespread concern in the arts and science throughout the 1880s
through the 1930s.
Choreographic patterns:
- “coprolalia” (vocal expletives)
- “echolalia” (repeating of phrases and nonsense)
- “illogical movements” such as “salutations” (swipes of the hand over the cranium)
- choretic movements: rhythmic movements, like continuous
movement of the feet. They counted the number of oscillations per
minute of the movement
- Charcot claimed that “It was there,” in these
rhythmic patterns, that one discovered “as is said in Hamlet ,
‘there is method , though this be madness.
- All happens in a non-speaking body, no words
are issued during the seizure
Film called Hysteria, 2011: Two doctors in Victorian England use manual stimulation in the female genitals to cure the diseases of their patients, causing the invention of the vibrator.