3.1.2: Guilt as Method

“The Modern Orpheus” shows the beginnings of a broader career using arts-based research as a means to make legible the ethical, conceptual, and theoretical problems of working with subjects objectified in the process of medical research (0.1.4; 3.1.2). “The Modern Orpheus” operated on a largely personal level, because it was a way for me to be more honest with my audience: I did not have answers then, and I still do not have them, but that does not mean that I will shy away from the concerns I see. When I began “The Modern Orpheus” my training had not equipped me with the tools to properly unpack, describe, reflect on, and process what I was seeing. I find myself thinking about how addressing images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as impossible. A decade after the first cut of the film, I am still unsure how best to address the material; I am unsure as to whether the decisions I made were the right, proper, or ethical ones. In writing this dissertation, designing the digital platform, and working on a series of art projects which I will describe in this chapter, the correct approach to a history of violence whose wounds are still so obviously open seems impossible to find.¹

The impossibility I evoke when describing “The Modern Orpheus” was one in which my methodological, theoretical, and conceptual toolkit—built as it was through a degree in literature and film studies—was so completely unprepared to address the brutal, violent, exploitative content onto which I had stumbled. Sylvia Wynter addresses this in regard to the limits of academic knowledge work. She asks,

how can we come to know our social reality, no longer in the terms of the abductive order-legitimating ‘knowledge of categories’ system of thought (Althusser’s Ideology) to which the code lawlikely [sic] gives rise, but heretically, in terms of ‘knowledge of the world as it is’?²

She asks, how can we view the ground of social reality, as it is made through operations of ideology? How can we view social reality which is inescapable and self-producing, outside the confines of the predetermined views already established? For the Black critical theorist, she defines a loose method: the autopoetic turn/overturn. This method is a reflexive possibility afforded by an inspection of the foundational myths of knowing—tied to biohistories and Darwinian ideologies of kin-relationship. The ways of knowing are thoroughly broken down into a reflective poiesis (autopoiesis), wherein the self is engaged in a praxis of revealing what may reside outside the total ideologies presumed by ontologies that define the human. It is knowledge as process, which is constantly engaged—the turn—and reengaged—the overturn. More simply, she encourages fraught participation with an overwhelming ideological reality through a conscious engagement with and desire to break the ideological and meta-epistemic dependencies upon which knowledge work relies.

The impossible is itself an opportunity to address the unspoken, implicit, and predetermining factors which frame knowledge’s possibilities. “The Modern Orpheus” and the arts-based work I will describe later in this chapter present how creative, arts-based methods (3.1.2) can be engaged in addressing broader problems within a discourse. I am framing arts-based research as exploratory, although the colonial metaphor is less than ideal. These methods are a means to test preconceptions about specific subject matter in a way that more standardized methodologies may be unable to conceptually grasp; they are also a means of imagining potential other methods, frameworks, and approaches.

Moreover, this notion of impossibility that I am discussing comes out a broader limitation of my education: that my epistemic and artistic training was unable to address guilt. The guilt that arose out of seeing the obvious violence which was enacted in the demarcation of America’s postwar empire, out of how it othered the Japanese subjects it caught on cinematographic emulsions, and how these documents seemed to revel in their pain.

Guilt is not as much a weight—an albatross around my neck—so much as a methodological choice. Guilt functions as a driving force, which arises as an unsettling between my privileged, white, cis male, abled view and responds to an obvious harm enacted on the bodies of othered, raced, disabled, research subjects, a harm that maintains my privilege, and enforces my acceptance of it. This guilt arises from a relation—that in doing research on something, on someone, on some community, or some field of knowledge, I am brought closer to it, and that knowledge is only possible because of this connection (0.1.5; 2.4.3).³ Relation necessitates action (4.2.3; 4.3.5), and it is tempered by an obligation—an obligation that is doubly entangled with the benefits of my own white, settler, cis male, middle class, and abled privilege⁴—to work in ways that tend to resist against and disallow an archive’s open wounds. Guilt does not allow “settler moves to innocence”—the “strategies or positionings that attempt to relieve the settler of feelings of guilt or responsibility without giving up land or power or privilege, without having to change much at all.”⁵

Guilt is incommensurable with our academic system, because it assumes that maybe our research should not be done in the first place (4.2.3). It forces us to ask whether we are reifying, perpetuating, and remaking systemic violences.⁶ Guilt is a moment of vulnerability, which the hazing activities of peer review, doctoral exams and dissertations, hiring processes and tenure review can point to as epistemic weakness. It is within an ethics of incommensurability, which as described by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, unsettles colonial settler epistemologies and ideologies in imperfect, contingent ways.⁷

Returning to my self-positioning as a hypocrite—one who argues against the use of nonconsensual images and research objects, but who has littered this dissertation with the very materials I rally against, and who has a history of feeling uneasy about reproducing these images while still using them in my arts-based interventions—I make this move to point to my own conflicts and desires. I feel that I need to show these harms to articulate my argument, but more importantly, I show these harms because without them I would be unable to pass a dissertation defense. I do not image my committee would be happy to review a document that has been entirely redacted. My guilt, for this dissertation especially, helps me be more honest about the difficulties of academic work, the complexity of the projects that I had undertaken, and the seeming impossibility of meaningful change (5.1.4).

In showing the iterative development of these projects, I detail how an arts-based attention to aesthetic concerns—both in as it manifests in the primary materials, and in the artworks I produced—helped me develop this dissertation’s ethical critiques.