The Patient A Conference on the Dual Citizenship of Illness

60% theory 30% lecture 10% art & politics

Illness proliferates within or invades from without. It is a condition of the other, of the misunderstood, a parallel world in life. And even if the world of the healthy and the world of the sick are fundamentally separate from each other, we are part of both.
Illness is suffered, ignored, administrated, illustrated and idealised. It serves as a sign and as a metaphor: tuberculosis, the disease of poets, that renders the body transparent, cancer, Aids and recently, dementia as a synonym for a generation’s repression of Nazi crimes. The question remains what illnesses are created by society itself, what illnesses it names, recognises, and what illnesses are suppressed into the realm of speechlessness. And what normalcy, what health (in times of hygiene fetishism) is called for when smoking, eating and drinking suddenly no longer fit in with the image of the human being?
Illness is a concept to describe a condition of abnormality; and what the norm is, is subject to fashions and necessities. So how is the concept of illness changing as we transition from a disciplinary society to a society of control? And how does the definition of illness relate to the definition of the stranger variously propagated by society?
Traditionally, art is responsible for revaluating illness, for giving positive attributes to decay, morbidity and deviation. But today, the artist is no longer a social outcast, as a neoliberal subject they have become integrated as a guiding model – and thus illness has lost its passionate advocate. The subversive potential of illness has vanished. Who are we as patients?

This conference during steirischer herbst 2011 brings together various theorists and practitioners dealing with illness, to look at the question of the role that illness plays today as an omnipresent second world in the midst of the first, as reality and as a metaphor.

Playing field research / Theory at steirischer herbst

Sat 01/10
Who are we as patient?
11 am Opening and table-talk with Barbara Duden, Gustav Mittelbach, Rainer Possert & Bernd Kräftner

Risky dependencies: Doctor and patient
11.30 am Barbara Duden: “Disparate worlds. The chasm between patient narratives and diagnosis”
12 noon Josef Smolle: “Expertise and fragmentation. The hospital between possibility and purpose”
12.30 pm Christian Fazekas: “The patient as partner. Conversation technique and participation in medical training”
1.15 pm Lunch break
3 pm Panel discussion with Barbara Duden, Christian Fazekas & Céline Kaiser

Cancelling the principle of exchange: Care and concern
3.45 pm Harald Haynert: “Ethics as a non-exclusive protected area. On care, recognition and neediness”
4.15 pm Panel discussion with Karl Harnoncourt, Harald Haynert, Gustav Mittelbach & Rainer Possert
5 pm Table-talk with Harald Haynert, Céline Kaiser & Eveline Kerecz Aya Ben Ron: “Shift” (film)
5.30 pm Hermes Phettberg in conversation with Claus Philipp: “Illness as an attitude”

Sun 02/10
Speculative knowledge: Artists and illness
11 am Marcus Coates: „The Trip“ (Film)
11.30 am Daniel Tyradellis: “Academese and pillow-talk. On the professionalisation of the patient”
12 noon Bernd Kräftner: “The syndrome as a ship. An artistic instrument of diagnosis”
12.30 pm Céline Kaiser: “Therapy scenes. Case studies from theatre therapy”
1 pm Florian Riegel: „Holding Still“ (film)
1.30 pm Final discussion