Psychoanalysis and Performance Art: Go Figure!

In my academic, artistic, as well as curatorial practices, I have explored the question of how we produce and transmit knowledge across different, often unexpected, media. In this short essay, I will share my observations of similarities between psychoanalysis and artistic practices that move away for logocentric to performative knowledge, from truth as form to truth as event. I would suggest that psychoanalysis, like art, breaks from the hegemonic, hierarchical model of knowledge based on the patriarchal/masculine and moves toward more open, fluid, and networked forms of thinking, as well as producing and transmitting knowledge and meaning. We can position this model of thinking as feminine — in a wide understanding of femininity that goes beyond simple binary distinctions. Here, performativity is key: how certain concepts, feelings, and desires around identities are enacted and what effects these enactments produce in the world.

Namely, for centuries, we have been taught to decouple body from thought in what we can call a “masculine patriarchal model of thinking.” In modern times, colonialism connected the concepts of knowledge and science with the authority of power and race by establishing the hegemony of a Western (Eurocentric) model of knowledge as the only valid one. This hegemony has survived the historic colonialism and maintained till present day.

In the Western academic tradition, knowledge has been historically connected to literacy and the medium of the written word. Logocentric thought depends on technologies of books, chairs, and desks. Rodin's The Thinker offers a figure of the vita contemplativa, the life of contemplating abstract, frozen ideas. But what if the thinker were to stand up, walk, run, dance, and lounge around? And what if this figure were a female thinker?

For too long, positions of knowledge and power have been dominated by men. Despite improvements over the last century, women still struggle to take their pl