3.4.3: You & Me & Futility

I hate music

What is it worth?

Can’t bring anyone

Back to this earth

The feeling of space

Between all of the notes

But I got nothing else

So I guess here we go

Superchunk, “You & Me & Jackie Mittoo”¹

In in light of the tactical, parasitic arts-based research described in the previous sections (3.4.1; 3.4.2), I want to make one final claim, which will tie this chapter together as best I can. None of this work, be it the artworks, published essays, or even this dissertation, signifies an end to a research project. These projects hardly count as ends of their own, so much as moments in which a product was made under a required deadline or ended because my own inability to continue forwarding a critique in a medium or platform. These projects revel in the process² of thinking at the nexus of discourse, medium, and critique (3.4.2).

All this chapter’s handwringing—about parasites and tactics (3.4.1), about the value, or lack-thereof, of arts-based research (3.4.2)—was trying to get my brain around what is a loose, messy, epistemically fluid way of operating. Moreover, I am hoping to be honest about the reality of this work, which I doubt anyone outside the five obligated committee members will read. While I hope these artworks will prove a useful model for aspiring scholars, for medical historians, for professionals working in medical libraries, museums and archives, to expect anyone to read it and engage with it, is likely an ego-driven folly.

As I mentioned in the previous section (3.4.2), Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar’s nonchalance regarding their research is a useful model for me,³ but I want to add in an additional wrinkle: these products can be more valuable as process, as practice (3.1.2). Beneath the digital corpus (X.1.1), the image dataset (xX.1.3), the arguments in previous chapters, and the digital dissertation platform, are these artworks. Successful or not, they fertilized the ground of these other interventions, and once grown and reaped, this dissertation will in turn be composted for the next phase of work, be it arts-based or more traditionally framed academic research.⁴ They were part of a process—a recursive practice of engagement, reflection, and critique.

I started this section with an epigraph, the first lines of a Superchunk song, “You & Me & Jackie Mittoo”. I have done this before,⁵ and I am drawn to this line not for its tongue in cheek irony, nor its way of recalling and recontextualizing the Replacement’s song “I Hate Music”, but instead for the way it imagines and reimagines creative activity. The album “You & Me & Jackie Mittoo” was released on was also called I Hate Music. It was the second in a string of records made after Superchunk’s almost ten-year hiatus in the aughts. A frenetic, poppy punk band, whose key members front the successful indie label Merge, Superchunk began in 2010 releasing a series of excellent, existentially fraught albums that reflected in part on middle age, the angst of watching one’s friends die, and the radical potential of punk’s revolutionary spirit.⁶

I bring the opening lines of “You & Me & Jakie Mittoo” because it most explicitly states the kind of relationship I have to the production of art. Mac McCaughan, the band’s frontperson, reflected on the song in interviews when promoting I Hate Music in 2013, describing how it was responding to a kind of frustration someone who is entrenched in the music scene can feel, and how the artform becomes less helpful as a release and space of reflection. In an interview with Vice, McCaughan said,

That song is kind of talking about how, as you get older, your life is more complicated and stressful to the point where that doesn’t work anymore. Obviously, I don’t hate music—it’s more of a passing feeling. But even if that’s just a passing feeling, if you’ve gone your whole life without ever having that feeling, it’s one that you should think about. Like, what do you when your favorite records, in some moments, don’t do what they used to do?”⁷

For me as a listener, reflecting on the exhaustion expressed by McCaughan and Superchunk, there is also a sense of momentum which maintains a kind of possibility: “But I’ve got nothing else / so I guess here we go”.⁸

This lengthy aside helps me articulate the weariness I feel when producing art, when writing for academic sources, when trying to explain to grant funders, job committees, and my own institution why I should still exist as an academic. I feel, as I write about my method, that what I am actually doing is turning out my pockets and admitting that there was no method. Instead of a method, I am just trying to iterate—to make, examine, and make again—to process—to do, to reflect, and do again—because it is the only thing I know how to do, and because it helps me make sense of otherwise unyielding primary materials. These practices change my relationship to the material, force me to read the material in different ways, and make me spend more time on specific research objects (4.3.4). They enable me to better reflect, in the moment and in written pieces like this chapter and this dissertation, on the broader problems which I hope to address.