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lsinstitution as sublimation and institution as alienation. This 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 find 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 codified in just the same way. Its the same with traditional mythologies: a society which has a certain stability always finds 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 modifications and reassessments. This 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 specific 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

This 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.

Thanks 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 first 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 finally 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 official normalcy. A person 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 signifiers 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. The 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? The 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. The patient-subject who finds us: perhaps she is there, body and soul, before you, but perhaps shes still the prisoner of a file in the supervisors briefcase at the factory, or maybe well find 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. The 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 movementcould 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. The 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. This is the precondition for any possibility of writing a real institutional study.

If we do not begin with the definition 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 filtered 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, floating 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.