Terms: alienation, all to all, care virus, intoxication, left melancholy, pharmachoreography, practices of ourselves, psychodata, sanatorium, weak disease
First essay: Calculating Mental Disorder.
Demand transition to a new construction of psychiatric normativity! Accelerate production of disorders, diagnoses and therapies. Multiply and aestheticize them!
Union of Convalescents tried out a newly proposed unconventional diagnostic routine. Based on certain clinical tests that blend aesthetics and bureaucracy such as the test of an invented animal and MMPI, a 558-question-long quiz, we aim to reappropriate and detourn the conventions and assembly lines of souls.
Being more narrow non-specialists than psychiatrists or psychologists, we claim to see psychic life differently. We shall produce by displacing diagnoses, poetically, appealing to nonknowledges of alternative or para- psychologies. These studies are directed not only to the psyche, but also include faith beyond any principles.
The dialogic performance produced diagnoses and prescriptions.
Second Essay: Egor Sofronov “Towards a Ruthless Critique of Everything Existing, Version 2018.” A report in abeyance of disillusionment.
Why did Charles Baudelaire ask us to conceive as properly modern “an artist perpetually in the spiritual condition of the convalescent,” always in attempt to supplement the edge of insanity that haunted him? This artist experiences urban modernity and the modernist culture inhabiting it as psychically traumatic in affects irreducibly negative, while trying to capture these affects in “things, even the most trivial in appearance.”
The report is about writing in art, or practicing criticism. Why does the word “critique” mean negative affects and destructive operations? If in its systematic origin in Kant critique was understood as a juridical architecture for discernment and reason, then in later decades and until now critique has become a medium of specifically modern affect of negativity.
