3.4.1: Academic Parasitism

What good are the arts, and arts-based research methods, if they do not afford some meaningful epistemic improvements, within the various fields which artists might embed themsleves? Should a chapter on method be focused on improving our methods, thus improving the final arguments produced with those approaches?

In my past framing of arts-based research I saw it in the context of Michel de Certeau’s tactics—which describes political action that does not produce meaningful, structural change (3.2.3).¹ By couching these methods in this term, I was negotiating a view which saw the labor of the arts in ways that were ultimately inconsequential, but not necessarily futile. The arts, and the creative, aesthetic, and iterative processes which generally accompany artistic practices, provide these circuitous, difficult to define possibilities for intervention, which can be folded into various disciplinary conversations. In turning Terminal Imaginaries into “Dermographic Opacities”, I was given an opportunity to parse through the nagging problems which surrounded my approach to reproducing medical images (3.3.3; 3.3.4). The art project helped make a specific intervention in the history of medicine, and this dissertation is another permutation, transformation, and examination of those same problems. The notion of tactics enables me to be more honest with the output: that Terminal Imaginaries, Tuberculous Imaginaries, and “Dermographic Opacities” were more useful as reflective exercises than they were in instilling any meaningful political change.

But this engagement across disciplines and methods is more than tactical, it is parasitic. I do not use this word in a negative sense,² but instead in the model described by Michel Serres. The parasite, for Serres, comes as part of a tripartite ontology,³ which stresses relation over opposition. Serres argues that supposedly oppositional relationships are established through the perspective of one actor. What Serres sees are chains of dependence, consumption, and friction. Relationality⁴ from this frame establishes actors, not as concrete units but as constructed ideas based on whom and what they depend: “The Devil or the Good Lord? Exclusion, inclusion? Thesis or antithesis? The answer is a spectrum, a band, a continuum.”.⁵ A farmer, a city mouse, a country mouse,⁶ are all viewable as parasitic actors, based on their relation to one another: Serres writes, “I no longer really know how to say it: the parasite parasites the parasites.”⁷

Rather than apply arts-based research as a method, I instead want to think of it as a tactical heuristic. ‘Heuristic’ refers to a flexible set of rules which guide decision making. It helps me see my own arts-based research as being guided not by a stringent method, but an overarching set of goals and frameworks.⁸ In this context, Michel de Certeau’s notion of tactics delineates the contingent, sporadically effective ways the arts can make political interventions, knowing full well that these critiques will most likely be ignored by the discourse at large. Covert and canny, arts-based research is much more about the forms of critical subterfuge made possible with the absence of strict methodological guidelines, disciplinary requirements, and expected outcomes (3.2.3; 3.4.2.).

What is arts-based research, then? Most simply, it is an open heuristic to apply aesthetic modes of working to more traditionally aligned disciplines or discursive conversations (3.1.3). This dissertation, for example, is built on a skepticism toward the primary evidence in the history of medicine: not a skepticism toward its provenance or reality, but toward its various epistemic purposes. Arts-based research enabled me to think through my research objects, to destroy and recreate them in ways that reframed and reimagined them.⁹ It was an exploratory method guided by a mistrust in the authority of their original author—the medical scientist—which was sharpened once I better understood who embodied the experiments (0.1.5; 2.1.4; 2.2.4).

Finally, if there is any value to this method it is in the same critical thread espoused by Tara McPherson regarding the digital humanities:

In extending our critical methodologies, we must have at least a passing familiarity with code languages, operating systems, algorithmic thinking, and systems design. We need database literacies, algorithmic literacies, computational literacies, interface literacies. We need new hybrid practitioners: artist-theorists, programming humanists, activist-scholars; theoretical activists, critical race coders. . . . We have to shake ourselves out of our small, field-based boxes so that we might take seriously the possibility that our own knowledge practices are normalized, modular, and black boxed in much the same way as the code we study in our work.¹⁰

Arts-based research inverts McPherson’s polemical argument: the disciplinary structures that build the academy’s discursive boxes actively discourage the kinds of scholarship for which McPherson clamors. Interdisciplinarity, while used as a buzzword for progressivist notions of scholarship, is regularly at odds with academia’s institutional structures (5.1.5). The arts, with its methodological and epistemic capricousness, can work in the reverse of McPherson’s logic: what the academy needs is less department formations and more researchers willing to follow threads and imagine methods through whatever discipline within which they find themselves.