Undisciplined squads of emotion:
Critical ID and TD Pedagogy
{
Dr Jonathan Heron
University of Warwick
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion.
T.S.Eliot Four Quartets (1943)
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
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‘a different kind of failure’: the performance claim
‘the thing one no longer has to say’: the critical claim
‘a raid on the inarticulate’: the radical claim
‘the general mess…of feeling’: the pedagogy claim
‘undisciplined squads of emotion’: in conclusion
Psychiatry, Performance and Play (2010-11); University of Warwick
Beckett and Brain Science (2012); Birkbeck, Reading & Warwick
(Arts and Humanities Research Council)
Beckett on the Wards (2013); Health Education Kent, Surrey, Sussex
(National Health Service)
Modernism, Medicine and the Embodied Mind (2015–16) Bristol,
Exeter & Warwick (AHRC)
Structure and projects
The medical humanities have been defined by the Wellcome Trust as ‘a
variety of disciplines that explore the social, historical and cultural
dimensions of scientific knowledge, clinical practice and healthcare policy.
They investigate and give meaning to the experiences, narratives and
representations of health and illness that are often ignored by the biomedical
sciences alone. By exploring experience, knowledge and practice in context,
the medical humanities can enrich our understanding of health, medicine
and disease’ (website accessed in 2015)
The phrase ‘medical humanities’ has a currency that is perhaps wider than
any agreement as to what it means. Even so, those engaged in the medical
humanities usually know what they are attempting… this in turn reminds us
that health, illness, well-being and suffering are first and foremost aspects of
experience. (Evans, Ahlzen, Heath and Macnaughton, 2008)
It is self-evident that whatever benefits the medical humanities may have for
the rest of medicine, they are equally relevant to psychiatry. All psychiatric
disorders, perforce, are disorders of persons. (Oyebode, 2009)
Medical Humanities
Like artists, experimenters are restricted by the limits of
their equipment and materials, they push these limits and
must wait and see what works… An artistic performance
begins with a performative play-space that is not infinite…
A performer allows such things to function as organic parts
of the performance as event… apparently inessential details
spelled the difference between success and failure.
(Crease, 1993: 110)
‘a different kind of failure’: the performance claim
The beginning of the nineteenth century witnessed a
disciplining of modern science, when it came to be
conceived as consisting of relatively discrete and specific
bodies of knowledge or ‘logies’. However, this development
was also accompanied by the recognition that the
knowledge embodied in each discipline bore on others, and
that understanding any particular slice of human life
involved a spectrum of fields. These two poles are illustrated
by Humphrey Davy’s famous introductory lecture on
chemistry at the Royal Institution in 1802, in which he
extolled the value of chemical knowledge for a multitude of
sciences and throughout human life and experience.
(Crease, 2010: 82)
‘a different kind of failure’: the performance claim
Theorizing about ID can involve considerable posturing and
self-congratulation. The physical sciences present clear
examples of the inheriting, adapting and transforming of
disciplines – which can transform not only our
understanding of science but also of all research.
(Crease, 2010: 99)
‘a different kind of failure’: the performance claim
Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
(Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho, 1983)
‘a different kind of failure’: the performance claim
How might the methodological and intellectual
legacies of the humanities intervene more
consequentially in the clinical research practices of
biomedicine?
... In this sense, the ‘critical’ marks an ambition to
see the humanities more fully embedded into
biomedical research, beyond the clinical
encounter per se…
(Whitehead & Woods, 2016: 25–6)
‘the thing one no longer has to say’: the critical claim
3 “Es”:
ethics
(medical ethics and bioethics);
education
(medical, but also increasingly health);
experience
(qualities of illness experience).
(Whitehead and Woods, 2016)
‘the thing one no longer has to say’: the critical claim
ethics
(medical ethics and bioethics);
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10912-0159376y?wt_mc=Internal.Event.1.SEM.ArticleAuthorAssig
nedToIssue
education
(medical, but also increasingly health);
http://mh.bmj.com/content/42/1/63.full
experience
(qualities of illness experience).
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/arts/research/modernismmedicine/
‘the thing one no longer has to say’: the critical claim
the scope of Beckett’s exploration of functions and
dysfunctions of the brain works as a way of asking
fundamental questions of the contours and limits of selfhood
and representation. By drawing together scholars,
practitioners and clinicians interested in investigating how
Beckett’s use of neurological and psychological discourses
shapes his work, while exploring how the aesthetic
experiences those texts produce might help us to understand
and contain the complexity of the subjective experience of
illness and disorder
(Barry, Maude and Salisbury, 2016: 134)
‘the thing one no longer has to say’: the critical claim
The difference between Instrumental ID and Critical ID is a
major faultline in the discourse of ID. In an analysis of forms of
interdisciplinary explanation, Mark Kann identified three
political positions. Conservative elites want to solve social and
economic problems, without concern for epistemological
questions. Liberal academics demand accommodation but
maintain a base in the existing structure. Radical dissidents
challenge the existing structure of knowledge, demanding that
ID respond to the needs and problems of oppressed and
marginalised groups.
(Julie Thompson Klein, 2010: 22–3)
‘the thing one no longer has to say’: the critical claim
ethics
(medical ethics and bioethics);
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10912-0159376y?wt_mc=Internal.Event.1.SEM.ArticleAuthorAssig
nedToIssue
education
(medical, but also increasingly health);
http://mh.bmj.com/content/42/1/63.full
experience
(qualities of illness experience).
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/arts/research/modernismmedicine/
‘the thing one no longer has to say’: the critical claim
Empathy
More than this, the critical medical humanities questions the
value accorded to empathy (itself a fourth and final ‘E’ that
might be added to our list) in first-wave medical humanities.
The positioning of narrative as ‘the cure-all for an increasingly
mechanical medicine’ through the production of ‘more
empathic’ practitioners has recently been critiqued by Jeffrey
Bishop, on the grounds that it ‘perpetuates a dualism of
humanity that would have humanism as the counterpoint to
the biopsychosociologisms of our day’.
(Whitehead and Woods, 2016)
‘the thing one no longer has to say’: the critical claim
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We have a particular interest in collaborating with the creative arts and the
arts and health community in exploring the radical potential of the arts within
a critical medical humanities.[Durham]
A Radical Politics of Health: bioethics, biopolitics, contested health and
activism, violence, trauma and slavery [Liverpool]
Across the CHASE Consortium institutions, radical and innovative research
within the burgeoning field of Medical Humanities is being undertaken.
[Birkbeck]
Highlighting the value of this debate within the social sciences for the future
development of the medical humanities, we call for scholars to take seriously
the challenges of critical and cultural theory, community-based arts and
health, and the counter-cultural creative practices and strategies of activist
movements in order to meet the new research challenges and fulfill the radical
potential of a critical medical humanities. J Med Humanit. 2015 Mar; 36(1):7181.
We especially encourage submissions from critical geographers, including
feminist, anti-racist, queer, differently-abled, Indigenous, and myriad other
scholars working at the radical edges of our discipline. [Call for Papers, 2016]
‘a raid on the inarticulate’: the radical claim
a provocative account of interdisciplinary research across the
neurosciences, social sciences and humanities. Setting itself against
standard accounts of interdisciplinary 'integration,' and rooting
itself in the authors' own experiences, [their] book establishes a
radical agenda for collaboration across these disciplines.
‘Rethinking Interdisciplinarity’ does not merely advocate
interdisciplinary research, but attends to the hitherto tacit
pragmatics, affects, power dynamics, and spatial logics in which
that research is enfolded. Understanding the complex relationships
between brains, minds, and environments requires a delicate,
playful and genuinely experimental interdisciplinarity, and this
book shows us how it can be done.
(Fitzgerald and Callard, 2015)
‘a raid on the inarticulate’: the radical claim
What would happen, for and to the medical humanities, if
we set aside our usual allegiances and identifications to think
more experimentally about the constitution and dynamics of
the medical humanistic domain? Tracing such trajectories of
entanglement is what we have tried to begin in this chapter.
(Whitehead and Woods, 2016)
‘a raid on the inarticulate’: the radical claim
4 TD ‘trendlines’:
1.
2.
3.
4.
the contemporary version of the historical quest for
systematic integration of knowledge from ancient Greek
philosophy to ‘unification theories’ in Physics;
TD is not just “transcendent” but “transgressive”… more
often as a label for knowledge formations imbued with a
critical imperative, fostering new theoretical paradigms [e.g.
cultural studies];
Overarching synthetic paradigms… that transcend the
narrow scope of disciplinary worldviews [e.g. sociobiology];
Trans-sector problem solving [in, for example] contexts of
environmental research.
(Julie Thompson Klein, 2010: 24–5)
‘a raid on the inarticulate’: the radical claim
Some examples in practice:
http://hubbubresearch.org
http://www.createdoutofmind.org
https://wellcomecollection.org/what-we-do/residents
‘a raid on the inarticulate’: the radical claim
The trans-space exists by virtue of a dialectical process between
various theses and antitheses that, in the moment of their
opposition, create an ‘open’ space in which new syntheses develop.
This is true, for example, of the teaching space that is neither
rehearsal room nor seminar room, the relationship between
participant and facilitator, between subject and object, between
learning styles, and between mind and body. Indeed on this last
point we argue… that OSL promotes a phenomenological
experience of learning that follows an anti-Cartesian pattern of
unity between mind and body, promoting a richer and fuller
understanding of the subject matter.
(Monk, 2011)
‘the general mess… of feeling’: the pedagogy claim
Radical inclusion
That public can neither become an alibi for the university
remaining as it is nor become a compensation to free the
university from its social bond… And it perhaps should not
be forgotten, students – or pupils as Walter Benjamin liked to
call them – are people and publics, too.
(Alan Read, 2015: 24)
‘the general mess… of feeling’: the pedagogy claim
the research programme is also expected to contribute new
knowledge for, among others, teaching practices for children
and adults, child welfare, the diagnosis and treatment of social
disruptions, the care of older people with memory problems
and the rehabilitation of people with mental or neurological
disorders. Mental illnesses and learning disabilities give rise to
significant social costs and human suffering, both of which
could be diminished. Research within the programme may
also respond to the challenges of life-long learning and help
people retain their working and learning abilities
throughout their lifetime.
(The Human Mind website, accessed 1 December 2016)
‘undisciplined squads of emotion’: in conclusion
And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion.
T.S.Eliot Four Quartets (1943)