Clinic - A Pathology of Gesture
“The psyche is like an inexhaustible resource which demands to be managed. In modern societies this task is delegated either to the individual or, in cases where the balance has dipped too far into the red, to psychiatric and other institutions.” Armin Schäfer & Cornelius Brock, Psychographien
„I speak for people who are accustomed to seeing the most horrific movement even in immobility.“ In his ‘Pathologie de la vie social’ Balzac aimed to dissect the imagery of society under the microscope, thereby eliciting the general conditions that make up the individual and releasing from the images the movement brought to a standstill, the gesture. This pathological, microscopic view of social forms and surfaces first indicated what only later becomes obvious, through the parallels between psychiatry and cinema as well as in the form taken by bio-politics today: that gestures are about social positioning, mobility, and the movement of internalized images—about ‘inner movement’ and becoming a social being—and about having to learn how to be moved again, as „people who touch nothing and are touched by nothing learn to cry again in the cinema.“ (Walter Benjamin)
