3.3.4: The Centrality of Ethics

In articulating opacity and refusal at the end of the last section (3.3.3), I found myself split between how I engage with these terms now, and how I understood and used these terms when writing “Dermographic Opacities”. In some ways that project and the Opaque Online Publishing Platform (OOPP)—the platform which was developed to host this dissertation (4.1.1)—see opacity similarly: it is an analytical method, which proves useful for critical, necessary scholarship in the history of medicine. While this is true, this positions assumes that the reason why one might engage in opaque, refusal-based methodologies is because they can be used for the benefit of future knowledge work. While this may be true, and is certainly how I imagined “Dermographic Opacities” when I wrote it in 2022, it overshadows the more important ethical concern at the center of this dissertation.

The problem is that the ethical demands of the opaque—the respect for the research subject, their interiority, their exclusion from knowledge systems—are antithetical to a claim that announces the improvement of scholarly methods. My argument in “Dermographic Opacities” still produces scholarship that depends on the extraction of information, even if what I am collecting is reduced, reframed, and reimagined.¹

Where the opaque functioned as a method in the “Dermographic Opacities” essay, my relationship has continued to shift. My approach is defined by ethic of opacity, which is undergirded by a deep skepticism regarding the ultimate utility of the academic project (3.4.1; 3.4.3; 5.1.3). In reflecting on this essay, I see that I still imagined the images as specimens, ones which could be reassessed, but which ultimately were valuable to me and my professional research. In the years following its publication, I am trying to imagine a relationship which is not extractive, and the OOPP, which is ambivalent toward the outputs of opacity and which I will describe in the next chapter (4.1.1), feels like a helpful step.

I bring this tension forward to tease out an implicit ideology at play, and which my scholarship is most interested. Ethics do not guide method, so much as function as a check box to mark as scholars do their research, especially as they navigate the requirements of an institutional review board (IRB) (5.1.2). In this way ethics are secondary to knowledge work. In articulating an ethical standard as being generative, I maintain this secondary relationship. I am basically saying that only if ethics helps me make ‘novel’ work does it have a place in my research.

I tease this problem out, because it conveys an important difference between this project and the OOPP. It also helps me clarify how my understanding and relationship to opacity has shifted, and how the iterative approach to creative work has changed my theoretical understanding of knowledge work.

The problem of ethics in the context of research is the same problem I see for arts-based interventions: what are we to do with them if they are not epistemically superior?