Tag Archive for 'attention'

We are borrowing the title of the mythical conference Italo Svevo gave in Milan in 1927 about James Joyce, to name a new research and exhibition project developed by the students of the Haute école d’art et de design Genève, and myself, Dora García. Starting from the "clinical" analysis of the specific type of language developed by people said to suffer from the variety of symptoms associated with schizophrenia (to begin with Emil Kraepelin, Über Sprachstörungen im Traume), the lines defined along the specificity of this language (lack of purpose or goal, asyndetic thinking, metonymic distortion, interpenetration of themes, neologisms corresponding to new concepts, portemanteau words, multidirection, ignorance of social convention related to speech) are repeated "in prodigious parallelism" in the language of the avant garde literature, cinema, and art. Remarkable is as well the use of the two stylistic figures more frequent in dreams: condensation and displacement. Dream, disorder of thought, experimental language. ‘Joyce explained to me that the bread a child dreams of eating can’t be the same as the bread he eats when he’s awake; the child can’t transfer all the qualities of the bread to the dream. Therefore, the bread in the dream wouldn’t be made of everyday flour but rather of ‘flower’, a word that would take away certain qualities of the bread and give it others better suited to a dream.’ (Italo Svevo, Ulysse est né à Trieste. Bordeaux, Finitude, 2003, p. 78.) Ulysses had to be born in Trieste, a cosmopolitan city that was about to disappear as such with the raise of fascism after the First War, home to an astonishing number of nationalities, vibrating with the first notions of psychoanalysis arriving from Vienna, and speaking so many languages they could not really decide which one was their own. Later on, when not only Ulysses had been born, but also Finnegans Wake, Trieste was witness and participant of the Basaglian revolution, that ended with psychiatric hospitals and with the concept of social dangerousness. The relation between symptom and symbol, grammar and time, dream and delirium, metaphor and neologism, and the possibility of interpretation/ translation of the tissue of language as proposed in psychoanalysis, could form a new angle to look at the work of different artists and thinkers, as well as the production not only of new artworks, but also of new forms of presenting those works.