3.2.3: Tactical Modalities

Terminal Imaginaries’ biggest issues were in its lack of specificity. It tried to do too much—answering issues that arise over a century of medical research with a single installation. By collapsing parts of the history of medicine into the specific projectors the critique becomes visible, but it is too indebted to the secondary literature and for the audience to be familiar with these conversations (4.2.2). Anatomy, dermatology and grave robbing are interlinked but not dependent, in a kind of lenticularity which juxtaposition does little to square, address, or contradict. As defined by Tara McPherson, lenticularity refers to a way of thinking about ideologically linked, but visually disparate practices, which cannot be seen in the same field of vision. I address this term in more detail later in this chapter (3.4.2).¹

What interested me in this broad program was thinking about different kinds of images and seeing if I could find some linkage in their juxtaposition. The observations made by Terminal Imaginaries are far from perfect, but they address a beginning to the kinds of critiques found in chapters one and two: where conceptions of medical vision are too narrow to speak to a massive, dispersed enterprise (1.1.2; 2.1.2). Working broadly helped give me some visual context, but also led me through to more specific studies on dermatology (3.3.1) and, eventually, tuberculosis (3.2.4; 3.4.1).

I write about the issues with this first project, partly to point to how the project became the first iteration in a series of works interested in the history of medicine. Iteration echoes the approach to creative research described by Robin Nelson (3.1.2).² This kind of recursive thinking (0.2.1) is best enacted upon the completion of a project. This is partly because of funding and publishing requirements, but this reflection is only possible with space and time from the project altogether, which is impossible while still working through it (4.3.5). I am critical of Terminal Imaginaries because this self-reflexivity helps me sharpen future critiques. In the case of Terminal Imaginaries, the work spun out to Tuberculous Imaginaries (3.2.4), “Dermographic Opacities” (3.3.0), the Opaque Online Publishing Platform, and to the chapters on visual culture. Being honest about the project, its misfires and its successes means subsequent work can follow those ideas in different ways. My interest then is on process. As I wrote in a blog post for the Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities (IDAH):

I want to describe arts-based practice as I am trying to conceive it, and shelve for the moment the term “artist” for the term “practitioner”. Partly I want to sidestep the immense cultural baggage associated with the term ‘art’ in favor of thinking of reimagining aesthetic labor. Arts-based practice is a knowledge practice in and of itself.³

My aesthetic handwringing in this section is an admission of practical and conceptual issues which became clearer because I was interested in a too broad inquiry into medical history, but it also signals a kind of work that is interested more in attempted engagement than successful implementation. As I argued in the blog post, it was tactical (3.1.3; 3.5.1). Again, I wrote,

While seemingly unimportant, tactics creates the grounds for epistemic play: it is messy, chaotic, and its products cannot be delimited by hypothetical experimentation. Arts-based practice exists in a mutable discourse, and functions not as a static object, but as a process where aesthetics is but a single (albeit essential) interlocutor. Further, in opposition to other forms of knowledge which rely (explicitly or implicitly) on the technology of hypothesis, arts-based practice does not need to predict its outcomes, so much as examine its aftereffects.⁴

As a knowledge practice, arts-based research is less about completed projects than about the ways different methods and approaches enable different relationships between the researcher and their objects of study (0.1.5; 2.1.4). The success or failure of the individual creative project is less important than the ways it can help articulate further intervention, be it in future aesthetic work or more traditional knowledge work.

One of the limitations of the blog post I wrote in 2021, is that it still assumes knowledge can be articulated in a quasi-positivist way: humanists, artists, scientists, and other knowledge workers will come to conclusions from different avenues, methods and approaches. I used tactics—Michel de Certeau’s framework regarding the political affordances of inconsequential activity (3.4.1)⁵—as a way to handwave the inconsequential possibility afforded by a recursive approach, itself steeped in an attention toward the aesthetic. The term tactics borrows from de Certeau’s militaristic metaphor regarding political action. The French philosopher used a binary to define the term, pointing to the opposite term, ‘strategy’—actions that could produce tangible, spatial impacts on lived experience. “A Cartseian attitude,” de Certeau writes, strategy “is an effort to delimit one’s own place in a world bewitched by the invisible powers of the Other.”⁶ Strategy works on the real, countable, mappable, knowable spaces. In relation to Foucauldian, panoptic ideas of discursive power (2.2.3), strategic action operates in what discourses deem visible. Tactics, being the opposite of strategy’s colonialist spatial control, manifests resistance through non-spatial interventions: tactics are “‘ways of operating’: victories of the ‘weak’ over the strong. . . clever tricks, knowing how to get away with things, ‘hunter’s cunning,’ maneuvers, polymorphic simulations, joyful discoveries, poetic as well as warlike.”⁷ Everyday resistances

operate in isolated actions, blow by blow. It takes advantage of “opportunities” and depends on them, being without any base where it could stockpile its winnings, build up its own position, and plan raids. What it wins it cannot keep. This nowhere gives a tactic mobility, to be sure, but a mobility that must accept the chance offerings of the moment, and seize on the wing the possibilities that offer themselves at any given moment. It must vigilantly make use of the cracks that particular conjunctions open in the surveillance of the proprietary powers. It poaches in them. It creates surprises in them. It can be where it is least expected. It is a guileful ruse.⁸

The tactical affords a powerful position for critique. For my own work, the nomadic refers to an ability for arts-based work to intercede with and against discourses (3.4.2).

When writing in 2021 I imagined artists had a fluidity and capricousness that could forward productive, innovative, or insightful scholarship. Arts-based research could adopt, I imagined, a commitment to process that was born from successive iteration, experimentation, and play. I followed this approach for the next installation, Tuberculous Imaginaries.