Abstract
In this artistic reflection, the artist and scholar Johanna Braun traces 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. To understand hysteria’s agency, the author propose, one needs to locate its specific (re-)emergence within the broader cultural context, furthermore drawing on the cross-disciplinary potential of performance studies. As a result of performance (studies) being a paradigm-driven field, Braun follows hysteria’s performance as object of inquiry and focuses on performance studies as a primary analytical concept, allowing her to imagine a “hysterical” expression of doing research.
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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, 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 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 arts-based 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 punctuation, 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).
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 ever-changing 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 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 continued 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 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 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, 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 under-analyzed 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 well-established 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 “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 horror 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.film-philosophy.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 (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 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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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).
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Braun, J. (2021). Notes on Hysteria in and as Arts-Based Research: a Case Study. In: Braun, J. (eds) Hysterical Methodologies in the Arts. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66360-5_15
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