Tell Me Everything (2013-14, 50 minutes, HD video, 5.1 Digital Surround Sound)
Two theorists deliver divergent lectures on the human psyche and its social effects, forming a multi-faceted discussion of an observable, empirical psyche, rooted in the subjective process of becoming conscious, over time from infancy to adulthood, and the ways this psyche is folded back out into "culture"; our consciousness, our being, is inextricable from the social. The lectures are interrupted by a two-part session between a patient and her analyst adapted from DW Winnicott's Playing and Reality.
Music by Nick Hallett
With Robert Osborne, Kyle deCamp, Stephanie Roth Haberle, Therese Plaehn, Pat Palermo, nicHi douglas, and Joe Westmoreland
"A critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered not, certainly as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them." — Michel Foucault, What is Enlightenment
"My account of myself is partial, haunted by that for which I can devise no definitive story. I cannot explain exactly why I have emerged in this way, and my efforts at narrative reconstruction are always undergoing revision. There is that in me and of me for which I can give no account. But does this mean that I am not, in the moral sense, accountable for who I am and for what I do? If I find that, despite my best efforts, a certain opacity persists and I cannot make myself fully accountable to you, is this ethical failure? Or is it a failure that gives rise to another ethical disposition in the place of full and satisfying notion of narrative accountability? Is there in this affirmation of partial transparency a possibility for acknowledging a relationality that binds me more deeply to language and to you than I previously knew? And is the relationality that conditions the and blinds this 'self' not, precisely, an indispensable resource for ethics?" — Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself