MedHum Open Forum: Embodiment and Critical Medical Humanities

EMBODIMENT AND CRITICAL MEDICAL HUMANITIES How can we consider “the body” and “bodies” in all their individuality ? How can the value of individual experiences, of affects and sensual structures, of embodiment in medical contexts be taken into account? How can the hidden strategies of normalization be addressed with the aim of achieving a more just perspective?

These are some of the central questions and concerns of this book.

It questions medical humanities as a truly interdisciplinary field in which the traditional oppositions of biomedicine’s explainable physical body and the humanities’ hermeneutic dimensions might be critically challenged : In a series of in-depth conversations with the editors of this volume, Angela Woods, Erin Manning, Monica Greco, Ana Gómez-Carrillo, and Siri Hustvedt discuss their completed, ongoing, and future interdisciplinary projects; their stillunwritten books-to-come ; their non-academic research designs and experimental research spaces; and their embodied thinking and teaching practices.

Sophie Witt is Professor at the Institute for Liberal Arts & Sciences at the University of Hamburg.

Céline Kaiser is Professor for Media cultural studies and Scenic research, University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Ottersberg.

Christina Schües is Professor of Philosophy at the Institute for History of Medicine and Science Studies.

Cornelius Borck is Director of the Institute for History of Medicine and Science Studies.

www.schwabe.ch

MedHum OF 1

Edited by Vincent Barras, Mariacarla Gadebusch Bondio, Martina King, and Susanne Michl

EMBODIMENT AND CRITICAL MEDICAL HUMANITIES

Medical Humanities – Open Forum

EMBODIMENT AND CRITICAL MEDICAL HUMANITIES Conversations with Angela Woods, Erin Manning, Monica Greco, Ana Gómez-Carrillo, and Siri Hustvedt Sophie Witt, Céline Kaiser, Christina Schües, Cornelius Borck (eds.)

Medical Humanities – Open Forum 1

Medical Humanities – Open Forum

Edited by Vincent Barras, Mariacarla Gadebusch Bondio, Martina King, Susanne Michl

Volume 1

Embodiment and Critical Medical Humanities Multiple Practices and Shifting Concepts Conversations with Angela Woods, Erin Manning, Monica Greco, Ana Gómez-Carrillo, and Siri Hustvedt Edited by Sophie Witt, Céline Kaiser, Christina Schües, and Cornelius Borck

Schwabe Verlag

Project and publication funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)

Open Access: Unless otherwise stated, this publication is licensed under the Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence.

Any commercial exploitation by others requires the prior consent of the publisher.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2024 by the authors; editorial matters and compilation © 2024 Sophie Witt, Céline Kaiser, Christina Schües, Cornelius Borck, published by Schwabe Verlag Basel, Schwabe Verlagsgruppe AG, Basel, Schweiz Cover illustration: Photo by FlyD on Unsplash Proofreading: Katherine Bird, Berlin Cover: icona basel gmbh, Basel Graphic design: icona basel gmbh, Basel Typesetting: 3w+p, Rimpar Print: Hubert & Co., Göttingen Printed in Germany ISBN Print 978-3-7965-5124-6 ISBN e-Book (PDF) 978-3-7965-5125-3 DOI 10.24894/978-3-7965-5125-3 The e-Book has identical page numbers to the print edition (first printing) and supports full-text search.

Furthermore, the table of contents is linked to the headings. rights@schwabe.ch www.schwabe.ch

Contents

Introduction: Embodiment & Critical Medical Humanities Sophie Witt, Céline Kaiser, Christina Schües, and Cornelius Borck . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

7

In Conversation with … … Angela Woods . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

15

… Erin Manning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

33

… Monica Greco . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

49

… Ana Gómez-Carrillo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

69

… Siri Hustvedt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

91

Critical Medical Humanities, Writing, Embodiment, and Artistic Practices: Round Table on Propositions, Failure, and Openings . . . 107 About the Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139

Introduction: Embodiment & Critical Medical Humanities Sophie Witt, Céline Kaiser, Christina Schües, and Cornelius Borck

Medical or health humanities is an umbrella term for a vibrant international and interdisciplinary field of studies. It entangles various perspectives and practices from the humanities and the social sciences with medicine and healthcare. Its starting point was the insight that illness and health, as both human experiences and socio-political concerns, transgress the narrow limits of their biomedical operationalization. Literary studies, philosophy, ethics, anthropology, history of medicine, social and cultural history, and the arts—among other fields—all address the experience of illness and health, the diversity of bodily and mental conditions, the variety of medical and psychiatric practices, the needs and shortcomings of patient care, educational questions and possibilities, and the politics of normalization and inclusion.

Within this broad understanding of the medical humanities, its aim and meaning differ widely depending on its concrete institutional context. In Germany—where the idea for this project and the publication of this book originated—medical humanities is often the label applied to training programs within medical faculties. In 2016, the journal Deutsches Ärzteblatt (German Medical Journal) reported that medical humanities have a much richer tradition in Switzerland and other countries compared to Germany where just a single endowed chair existed.1 New centers emerged and things have changed since then,2 but compared to other countries, the concept of medical humanities in Germany perhaps still tends to be conceived more narrowly in its educative focus of enabling medical students “to look beyond the horizon of science-based medicine” in order to “preserve sensitivity to human need and the help that is required.” In

Cf. “Wahlfach Medical Humanities verbindet Medizin, Kultur und Gesellschaft,” Deutsches Ärzteblatt, https://www.aerzteblatt.de/nachrichten/71980/Wahlfach-Medical-Human ities-verbindet-Medizin-Kultur-und-Gesellschaft, Dec 13, 2016.

2 Susanne Michl (2020), “Wissen in Bewegung. Medical Humanities – Potenziale und Fallstricke eines umbrella term,” in: Nach Feierabend. Zürcher Jahrbuch für Wissenschaftsgeschichte 15: pp. 189–205. Cf. for an overview of Medical Humanities in Switzerland Marc Keller, “Medizinische Geisteswissenschaften, Sciences humaines en médecine, Scienze umane mediche: Medical Humanities in Switzerland,” The Polyphony. Conversations across the medical humanities, https://thepolyphony.org/2023/10/17/medhums-in-switzerland/, 17 October 2023.

1

8

Sophie Witt, Céline Kaiser, Christina Schües, and Cornelius Borck

this vision, the humanities come into play because “good films and literature […] build a bridge to the interior of the human being.”3 Conceived in this way, the medical humanities are relegated to merely providing a service, and this has epistemological consequences. One of these is the resulting epistemic status of humanistic knowledge, which is subordinated to biomedicine’s objectifying gaze; another is the repetition and continuation of the dichotomy between subjective experience and objective biomedical knowledge.4 Last but not least, this dichotomy inappropriately narrows the multidimensional perspective that is necessary if bodies are to be acknowledged in their myriad biological, social, and cultural conditions.

Indeed, this book takes its starting point from its authors’ and editors’ discomforts with these narrowing effects. It sees itself as part of an enterprise in cultural studies and artistic research that aims to strengthen and expand the medical humanities in research and teaching, both within medical faculties and beyond.5 Hence we conceive of medical humanities as a truly interdisciplinary field in which the traditional oppositions of object and subject—of biomedicine’s explainable physical body and the humanities’ hermeneutic dimensions—might be critically challenged, and even perhaps overcome: How can we consider “the body” and “bodies” in all their individuality and plurality? How can the value of individual experiences, of affects and sensual structures, of embodiment in medical contexts be taken into account? How can the hidden strategies of normalization be addressed and rewritten with the aim of achieving a more just perspective? These are some of the central questions and concerns that led us to undertake this book project. Contrary to what the title “Embodiment & Critical Medical Humanities” might suggest, there is no single term or homogeneous conceptual framework to guide us. Therefore this book necessarily explores “Multiple Practices and Shifting Concepts.”

To speak of critical medical humanities is first of all to refer to discourses in the English-speaking world, as the well-known Edinburgh Companion demon-

“Wahlfach Medical Humanities verbindet Medizin, Kultur und Gesellschaft,” Deutsches Ärzteblatt, https://www.aerzteblatt.de/nachrichten/71980/Wahlfach-Medical-Humanities-verbin det-Medizin-Kultur-und-Gesellschaft, Dec 13, 2016.

4 Cf. Kristeva Julia, Moro Marie Rose, Ødemark John and Engebretsen Eivind (2018), “Cultural crossings of care: An appeal to the medical humanities,” Medical Humanities 44: pp. 55– 58.

5 See, for example, two newer German institutions: IMHAR Institute for Medical & Health Humanities and Artistic Research at HKS Ottersberg: https://www.imhar.net/; and the new specialization on interdisciplinary health studies as part of the BA studies program in Liberal Arts & Sciences at the University of Hamburg: https://www.philosophie.uni-hamburg.de/liberalarts/ studium.html.

3

Introduction: Embodiment & Critical Medical Humanities

strates.6 In the UK, the medical humanities are traditionally located in humanities or social sciences faculties and thus address a wide field of diverse knowledge and distinct actors, often in “critical” distance to strictly biomedical agendas. If we understand the experience of the body or of illness not as irreducibly subjective, but as embodied in a culturally, historically, and socially situated reality,7 then this opens up a range of polyphonic critical perspectives. William Viney, Felicity Callard, and Angela Woods had issues such as these in mind when they sought to sharpen the profile of the medical humanities about ten years ago, and thus to readjust the relationship between the medical humanities and biomedicine. In their manifesto for a critical turn and interdisciplinary entanglement in the medical humanities, they pleaded for “greater attention not simply to the context and experience of health and illness, but to their constitution at multiple levels,” as well as for a “closer engagement with critical theory, queer and disability studies, activist politics and other allied fields.”8 Not least, their call fell on the fertile ground of the so-called “cultural turn” in the humanities, and could also build on earlier work in medical anthropology, Science and Technology, gender studies, among others, on the lived body.9 In this book, our focus on embodiment—on the rich, diverse territory of discursive bodily practices—takes up this critical impetus and touches on ontological, epistemological, and institutional aspects. Precisely because biomedicine focuses so much on the body, our contributions also start here, rather than concentrating on an alleged other. They focus on embodiment and the bodily conditions of experience and offer a descriptive, diverse, rich arena of discursive bodily practices. (Critical) medical humanities can thus be traced as an enterprise that reaps the benefits of the disciplinary rigor applied in the humanities and the social sciences concerning ontological, epistemological, and institutional issues; and also as an effort to bring hidden practices to the fore, to articulate silent speech, and to explore the blind spots that screen certain habits.

In this sense, the medical humanities interconnect with other humanistic fields that attempt to traverse the spheres of nature and culture—and these constitute the implicit or explicit theoretical background for this book. These topics obviously resonate with gender and disability studies, but also—for example— with phenomenological perspectives, which point to the ontologically irreducible 6 See Anne Whitehead and Angela Woods (eds.) (2016), The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities, Edinburgh UP. 7 See, for example, Rob Boddice and Mark Smith (2020), Emotion, Sense, Experience, Cambridge UP. 8 William Viney, Felicity Callard and Angela Woods (2015), “Critical Medical Humanities: Embracing Entanglement, Taking Risks,” Medical Humanities 41(1): pp. 2–7.

9 See, for example, Annemarie Mol (2003), The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice, Duke UP; Havi Carel (2016), Phenomenology of Illness, Oxford UP.

9

10

Sophie Witt, Céline Kaiser, Christina Schües, and Cornelius Borck

“ambiguity of the body” based on the fact that the body, the soul, and the world are in a reciprocal, interactive relationship; thus the body can be understood as the “medium” through which one accesses the world.10 This also resonates with claims from the field of new materialism, which situates material bodies in their cultural and societal environments. As Karen Barad states, the body is something more than an inert, passive object on which ideology inscribes meaning; it is an agential reality with its own causal role in making meaning.11 Bodily realities inhere experiences that are founded on the ambiguity of the body’s entanglement between the embodied self and its particular worldly situation. The body itself is situated in-between the subjective and the objective, the self and the world; it is a “hinge” between different methodological and thematic approaches. The theoretical foundation of this book also includes body history (Körpergeschichte), a field in German-speaking countries which explores changing conceptualizations of the nature of the body.12 This history is located between the fields of discourse history, history of knowledge, and media theory, and it explicitly aims to acknowledge the fact that (medical) bodies remain deeply connected to materialism and to the sciences.13 It asks how we can remain sensitive to different cultures of knowledge; to the constraints of our always-partial perspectives, to borrow a term from Donna Haraway;14 and to the political and ethical implications that arise from these.

From this perspective different questions and new interdisciplinary opportunities in the field of teaching arise, both within and beyond medical faculties: Which of the understandings that biomedicine takes for granted should be scrutinized because they unleash unexpected consequences and often manifest in unjustified strategies of normalization? In what areas does medicine exert power beyond its expertise, and to which socio-political effects? What role can artistic forms and practices play in research and teaching? Critical medical humanities constitute an effort to question medicine on an equal footing, not by ignoring its enormous potential, but by acknowledging medicine’s multiple efficacies and coming to terms with them in beneficial ways, on the individual as well as the collective level.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (2012), Phenomenology of Perception, transl. by Donald Landes, Routledge.

11 See Karen Barad (2007), Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Duke UP. 12 Cf. Philipp Sarasin (1999), “Mapping the Body: Körpergeschichte zwischen Konstruktivismus, Politik und ‘Erfahrung’,” Historische Anthropologie 3: pp. 437–451; cf. Barbara Duden (1990), Body History – Körpergeschichte. A repertory – ein Repertorium, Tandem.

13 Cf. Albrecht Koschorke (1999), Körperströme und Schriftverkehr. Mediologie des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts, Fink.

14 See Donna Haraway (1988), “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14(3): pp. 575–599.

10

Introduction: Embodiment & Critical Medical Humanities

Along with these critical and interdisciplinary impulses, medical humanities aim at deconstructing and leaving behind a bifurcated ontology—namely, the assumption that nature consists of two separate realities: the objective reality of bodies as determined by the biomedical sciences and the subjective reality of lived experience, thinking and feeling. Our book tries to take this challenge very seriously and aims to include both material reality of bodily experiences and scientific knowledge. While the medical humanities commonly acknowledge language, culture, and the experiential world as part of the clinical encounter, we also turn the question back around: How can we bring the physical and material world into the humanities in a meaningful way? The ways in which we perceive ourselves and others as healthy or ill, and how we classify, evaluate, and act upon these concepts, is a deeply embodied practice. This “we” is interwoven in many ways with our environment and the ways in which it is possible for us to act in relation to it—in short, we are embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended (commonly referred to as “4E”).15 How can our senses of hearing, speaking, or touching be traced—senses that may be hidden, yet are so vividly experienced somehow? More generally, what are the bodily conditions that allow us to speak of a (homogeneous) “we”? Certainly the discussions on neurotypicality and neurodiversity—which have intensified since the 2010s, and which play a decisive role throughout this book—make clear that the idea of a universal human perception or cognition must be critically re-evaluated.

Bringing these different approaches to the table, however, goes against premature hopes for the holistic integration of different perspectives in interdisciplinary research settings. Contrary to this expectation, critical medical humanities require us, in Angela Woods’ words: “not to seek resolution or consensus, not to pretend that the power hierarchies […] don’t exist, but to try to find ways of working around them.”16 Following from this insight, artistic practice and research play a central role in our conceptualization of this book. Sensory experiences go beyond the body as an abstract or “authentic” entity. Combining critical and artistic methods in this way leads to new research avenues, especially opportunities to develop inclusive forms of research in which diversity is addressed in ways that seek to avoid the traditional hierarchy of language over body.

These different perspectives came together in the institutional cooperation that marked the beginning of this book project: cooperation between the University of Zurich, the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Ottersberg, and the Institute for History of Medicine and Science Studies (IMGWF) at the University of Lubeck. As a group, the four initiators of the project—Sophie Witt, Céline Kaiser, Cornelius Borck, and Christina Schües—initially invited colleagues and Joerg Fingerhut, Rebekka Hufendiek and Markus Wild (eds.) (2013), Philosophie der Verkörperung. Grundlagentexte zu einer aktuellen Debatte, Suhrkamp.

16 See Woods’ contribution to this book, p. 108.

15

11

12

Sophie Witt, Céline Kaiser, Christina Schües, and Cornelius Borck

experts working on these issues to a workshop at the IMGWF in Lubeck. What was originally planned as an international conference at which participants would be present in person had to be redesigned due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the fact that nobody could travel. Form and content are often closely related, and that is also the case with this book. Narrativity and questions of writing and poetry are important topics throughout its pages, but the book itself also has a story that must be told if the reader is to understand its form and content.

When an in-person conference was still not possible even more than a full year after the onset of COVID, most of us were tremendously tired of the online meeting formats we had been confined to in 2021. We had to recognize that we could not simply move three days of lectures and Q&A online. Instead, we designed an online format in which we asked our experts to guide us through their work in an informal manner and to share their reflections in an intimate online setting, “in conversation with” the other participants. We came together with five eminent guests: Angela Woods from Durham’s Institute for Medical Humanities, Erin Manning from Concordia University in Montreal, Monica Greco from Goldsmiths at the University of London, Ana Gómez-Carrillo from McGill University in Montreal, and Siri Hustvedt from Weill Cornell Medicine in New York.

We invited them to engage in a series of conversations about their completed, ongoing, and future interdisciplinary projects; about their still-unwritten booksto-come; about non-academic research designs and experimental research spaces; and about their embodied thinking and teaching practices.

We had the great pleasure of starting our conversations with Angela Woods, Professor of Medical Humanities in the Department of English Studies and then Deputy Director of the Durham Institute of Medical Humanities. As mentioned above, she and her colleagues, William Viney and Felicity Callard, and later Anne Whitehead, established the term critical medical humanities.17 On the same day we met with Erin Manning, who was in the middle—both mentally and physically—of her current project in Canada, and thus gained a very vivid impression of the workings of the SenseLab she founded, as well as her follow-up project, the 3Ecologies Institute. Erin holds the University Research Chair in Relational Arts and Philosophy in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University in Montreal, and she convinced us of the importance of various kinds of practices and of acknowledging neurodiversity. We started our second day with Monica Greco, Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University in London, talking about Monica’s particular area of interest: the implications of concepts in psychosomatic medicine for questions of ethics and politics, subjectivities, social ontology, embodiWilliam Viney, Felicity Callard and Angela Woods (2015), “Critical Medical Humanities: Embracing Entanglement, Taking Risks,” Medical Humanities 41(1): pp. 2–7; Anne Whitehead and Angela Woods (eds.) (2016), The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities, Edinburgh UP. 17

Introduction: Embodiment & Critical Medical Humanities

ment, and agency. We continued our conversation with Ana Gómez-Carrillo, postdoctoral fellow in the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry at McGill University. We talked with Ana about the role and importance of an ecosocial perspective in psychiatry, and how this model is influenced by concepts from 4E cognition—that is, cognition as enacted, embodied, embedded, and extended. Last but not least, we had an inspiring conversation with Siri Hustvedt, the eminent and well-known author of numerous works of fiction and essays, and a lecturer in psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York. Siri shared her fascinating long-term project on the placenta, which considers the placenta’s place literally between two people or bodies, and metaphorically between nature and culture. We talked about the scientific, political, and ethical importance of such in-between states, which open up a whole universe of critique.

After two days of individual conversations, on the third day we held an “Opening Up” panel as an invitation to reflect together on the broader questions that had emerged from our conversations. As we edited the transcribed version of this group panel, we identified—in addition to the overarching question of the role critical medical humanities could or should play—four significant strands which structure the discussion and consequentially the last chapter of this book: questions of 1) writing & narrativity, 2) embodiment & space, 3) art-based research & artistic practice, and 4) propositions, failures & openings. Thanks to the intellectual generosity of our conversation partners, this was an extremely inspiring and illuminating event, and it was immediately clear to us that we wanted to share these recorded conversations in a textual format.

Exploring the cultural side of medicine and health opens up stimulating new fields of research beyond the institutional distribution of labor and disciplinary specializations. Such an approach shapes research as collaboration, as polyphony, as a minor gesture, to take up Erin Manning’s formulation. Our shared aim was—and still is—to leave the comfort zones of the established orders of knowledge according to which our universities are designed, with their faculties of science on the one hand, and their faculties of the arts and humanities on the other.

Both the series of recorded conversations and this book itself are explicitly intended to operate far from classic academic formats. In what follows, we take the plunge and allow for wild, outrageous modes of thinking and practice.

What started as a kind of pandemic-induced experiment ended up being the best format we could have found. We had no choice but to experiment—but then, this is exactly what we think critical medical humanities needs: spaces of shared experimentation and exploration. We had amazing, lucid, thought-provoking, tremendously open, touching, and funny conversations, for which we are all extremely grateful.

13

In Conversation with Angela Woods

Sophie Witt: It is an honor and a pleasure for me to open our first conversation.

I will begin by introducing Angela Woods. From the beginning, it was clear that we very much wanted Angela to participate in this workshop. In fact, of all the guests and organizers, she is the only person whose professorship is explicitly identified as “medical humanities.” She teaches in the English Department at Durham University and is now Director of Durham’s Institute for Medical Humanities and co-director of the Hearing the Voice project. Her position in an English department is exciting for those of us in the German-speaking context, because normally in German-speaking countries a professor of medical humanities would be part of the department for medicine. Later, we will have the opportunity to look at these local entanglements and different local contexts, as well as the academic traditions in which the medical humanities come up, and also to raise questions about the separation of the sciences and the humanities, both in our universities and in our history of thought. Since Angela Woods—along with her colleagues William Viney, Felicity Callard, and later Anne Whitehead— turned the medical humanities into critical medical humanities—why don’t we start our conversation with this notion of the “critical”? Angela, maybe you could tell us something about the starting point, or primacy, that convinced you and your colleagues it was necessary to think of the medical humanities differently— namely critically.

Angela Woods: I think that is an important question to keep asking. As the 2015 article perhaps intimated, there are so many different iterations of what one can mean by “critical,” and sometimes different versions of those will come into focus at different times. For me, there was a really galvanizing moment when I came from Australia—that’s where I did my doctoral work on schizophrenia and representations of schizophrenia, completely independently of any interaction with clinical thinking, with people with lived experience, with practicing psychiatrists; it was purely a kind of literary–cultural studies endeavor. At the end of that project, I started to realize that there was this field of medical humanities, and for that reason—to cut a very long story short—I relocated to the UK in 2009, and I managed to do so with some very uncanny timing: at the moment when the King’s Centre for the Humanities and Health at King’s College London was launched, and at the same time as Durham University was advertising this posi-

16

In Conversation with …

tion in philosophy and medical humanities. This field seemed to speak to a desire I had in my work to move beyond strictly textual frames of reference and to start engaging experience, essentially. At the King’s Centre launch event, Howard Brody, who was then the doyen of the field, gave a talk outlining the roles he saw for the humanities in relationship to medicine.1 The third plank of his argument centered on the role of the supportive friend, and it was a vision of the humanities as very much—servile is too harsh, as there was very much a positive intent in the idea of supportive, but it was very clearly hierarchical, clearly a reinforcing endeavor that would restore to medicine its lost humanity, the sense of a lack in empathic practice or a kind of corrective to strictly biomedical concerns. Listening to this talk the night before I went to Durham for the job interview just made me really, really cross and really frustrated—to think that all the traditions of scholarship I had grown up in and all the critical potential I could see didn’t really seem to have an articulated place within this field, which I had literally moved across the world to join. I was always personally critical of what we have gone on to describe as the first wave of medical humanities, which is deeply embedded in medical education and located, as you have said, in medical schools, which sees itself in that provision of something, either restorative or corrective.

These frustrations I had were picked up on, amplified and further complicated by the connections and ongoing networks that emerged through what was then the Centre for Medical Humanities at Durham—and particularly through coming to know Felicity Callard and her work, and working with Will Viney and his work.

For example, one of the first workshops I attended at Durham was a revelation to me: that fat studies existed as a field, in terms of this configuration of fundamentally challenging fat as a pathology or fat as a problem, and very much bringing activism into the heart of scholarship and scholarly aims and endeavors. I think there was a very strong sense of the critical as opening out—certainly critical theory, but also a criticality that emerges from activism, that is actually instrumentally calculated, that is seeking change and is seeking to have, for want of a less egregious term, a real-world impact. Again, there is critical in the sense of an intensified form of reflexivity, holding a critical suspense or tension around one’s own assumptions. Critical in that iteration suggests an ongoing dynamism, potentially, or an ongoing sense of energy or movement, or that the stakes are not defined and necessarily figured in a continuous way in relation to each other but are shifting and need to be the focus of attention and reflection. Not to take one’s eye off the ball, in that sense. But critical also in terms of wanting some of that antagonism, wanting some of that sense of the great traditions in a whole lot of cognate areas—such as disability studies most obviously, queer theory, and feminism—really strong currents that have profoundly shaped thinking, particularly 1 Howard Brody (2011), “Defining the Medical Humanities: Three Conceptions and Three Narratives” [Book Review], Journal of Medical Humanities 32(1): pp. 1–7.

… Angela Woods

over the last century, and also activism over the last century, that again are seeking to shift or reorient or problematize the knowledges that are seen as sacrosanct in certain biomedical contexts. My sense of the “critical” in critical medical humanities is that it’s an imperfect term precisely in its multiple meanings to multiple audiences and on multiple occasions, but I think when we were talking about it and designing the 2013 workshop that then led to the special issue which the article you mentioned seeks to introduce, it also felt like the best version of what we could come up with, without it being a particularly original thing to say.

Cornelius Borck: I would like to focus a little more closely on the notion of critique. I explicitly engaged with critique when I joined the Critical Neuroscience Group, which also contributed to the same special issue. There is also a personal background to this: when I finished my training in medicine and philosophy, I had the opportunity to do a PhD in neurophysiology, in London. So I did “proper neuroscience,” so to speak, and with that background it was an obvious decision to continue working on neuroscience when switching back to the history and philosophy of science. When I published the book on the cultural history of electroencephalography, it coincided with the massive public interest around neuroimaging, so I was immediately confronted with invitations to comment on questions like, “What’s going on with functional imaging?” and “Can you believe what’s going on there?” So there was a felt sense of urgency to evaluate what was going on and also to respond to the public need to debate the overblown, alleged “triumphs” of these scientific breakthroughs. As someone who had just studied the history of neuroscience, I was well aware that this kind of triumphalism runs through society with every new technological visualization tool; I could easily align recent glamorous publications with similar news magazine articles from the 1930s or 1950s, or whenever—just name your “revolution.” This critique wasn’t so much spawned in relation or close connection to political movements, but it corresponded with my own historical epistemological work, questioning the epistemological foundations of this line of research: What conditions are necessary to make these research results possible? How many circumstances have to be geared into precisely these laboratory conditions to get to these results? I was blending Kantian epistemological critique with Foucauldian socio-political grounding. With this background I came to the Critical Neuroscience Group and met Martin Hartmann and Jan Slaby,2 for example, who were very much rooted in the Frankfurt School notion of critique. I just wanted to invite you, with this very long introduction of my own intellectual trajectory, to reflect a little further on how you would relate this more overtly political agenda of critique to another

See Suparna Choudhury and Jan Slaby (eds.) (2012), Critical Neuroscience: A Handbook of the Social and Cultural Contexts of Neuroscience, Blackwell.

2

17

18

In Conversation with …

agenda, which I think is also valid in critical medical humanities: questioning the soundness, the reliability, of medical scientific knowledge itself.

Angela Woods: One of the things that springs to mind is perhaps directly in response to your discussion of the neurosciences. I think it’s from 2010, the work of Felicity Callard and Constantina Papoulias; the article is called “Biology’s Gift.”3 I remember that, for me, was a real turning point in picking up on the whole flood of interest from the humanities, in particular the work of Antonio Damasio and this idea that there was somehow going to be, if not a rapprochement between the humanities and the neurosciences, then a kind of daring reimagination of what humanities scholarship could do with neuroscientific knowledge, with these understandings of the brain, and with some of the kinds of beliefs and convictions in the literature being borne out of neuroscientific evidence. One of the things I remember vividly from that article was the attention they paid to drawing out the additional commitments in taking some of these ideas around mirror neurons and empathy, for example, and running with them—as it were—in a humanities context; the idea that the wider commitments of a neuroscientific project were being downplayed, or the dependency on certain evolutionary theories that might not sit with people’s progressive politics was being downplayed. Before the term “critical medical humanities” existed, I think, Felicity defines her work in various different ways—rightly so, in various different contexts—and I’m not sure if she would fit this paper to that agenda. But it seems to me that in that move, in being able to attend to the wider context— intellectual, material, and cultural—in which ideas are crossing disciplinary boundaries, particularly en masse when these things become popular or become movements, that there is a critical perspective, in that sense of very focused attentiveness that is deeply historical, that is also deeply literate in terms of being able (as you did in your work, Cornelius) to look beyond the popularization of medical or scientific concepts into the underpinning research there.

Christina Schües: I would like to twist this question about the critical in yet another turn, from the perspective of a particular philosophical horizon. I did my dissertation on classical Husserlian phenomenology on the theme of changes of perception, and since then I have tried to link phenomenology with political and feminist theory. So some of my publications are dedicated to epistemic injustice, notions of vulnerability, and the phenomenon of negative social philosophy. I was wondering about the different dimensions of your term “critique.” It seems to me that with a Marxian-Adorno approach, when you critique, you remain immanent to the system; one cannot really leave the system. In that case, I would 3 C. Papoulias and F. Callard (2010), “Biology’s Gift: Interrogating the Turn to Affect,” Body & Society 16(1): pp. 29–56.

… Angela Woods

ask: Is it possible for you to find a standpoint external to the epistemic system that we might be in and might almost be imprisoned by? If we then turn to Judith Butler, it seems we can see Butler in two senses. One is more FoucauldianButler, where she asks about the limits of our mode of conditions, because we look at the world around the unspeakable—what has been excluded—and how can we include the unspeakable? Does the unspeakable have a particular space? I would think this is a rather epistemological question. The other Butler is more closely linked with Levinas, so this is about the dimension of social ontology.

There we ask about vulnerability and how differently vulnerability can be broken down. Who is actually vulnerable? We can describe how some lives are more vulnerable than other lives, and it seems to me this is a very different type of ontological critique. Then I come to the final dimension, which seems to me rather a social-institutional one, where we can place knowledge in the particular institution, in particular social spaces. Hence one would wonder whether a new sense of critique might also be institutional critique, and whether this notion of revolution you came up with in the already mentioned editorial of the “Critical medical humanities: embracing entanglement, taking risks” is then actually an institutional one—or what sort of revolution is it? Because a revolution is actually a resistance to the state, and the state doesn’t want this to occur. In this sense, I would like to ask you: In which dimension do you situate your critique? Epistemic, social, ontological, or institutional? Where do you see yourself in your approach, and in what sense are we actually really talking about a revolution?

Angela Woods: That is an excellent and very complex question. I think one of the challenges in answering that question is around the diversity of the field and the commitment to not wanting to be prescriptive—and I realize that is frustrating and somewhat evasive, not to nail one’s colors to the mast and to shy away from programmatic statements about what good scholarship in this field might look like, or what an agenda or a robust epistemic standpoint should be. I’m also mindful of the fact that the medical humanities or critical medical humanities is not the only set of voices in the room thinking about health and illness from the perspectives of the humanities and the social sciences. There are deep conversations happening in medical sociology and in sociologies of the body, and more broadly in medical anthropology, so it’s a question of what might give critical medical humanities a distinctiveness within that space. In terms of thinking about—to take it very narrowly—why I would describe our project on hearing voices4 as a critical medical humanities project, for example, I think it’s been a struggle, but with respect to the sense of finding an epistemic standpoint that is not necessarily, or doesn’t understand itself in terms of being entirely dictated by psychiatry or clinical practice, the project has moved in two directions. One is 4

For further information on the Hearing the Voice project, see: https://hearingthevoice.org.

19

20

In Conversation with …

very much going back to people’s experience, to lived experience, and I think that connects the medical humanities to loads of research happening in different places that is participatory, that is trying to wrestle with and work around precisely these institutional barriers concerning who gets to produce knowledge and where knowledge has come from. So for us and for the project, the imperative to constantly go and talk to people about their experiences, to listen to experience in ways that try to attend to some of what phenomenologists call bracketing—the endless suspension of one’s own assumptions, to the extent that is possible—trying to find and make space for standpoints that aren’t necessarily primarily theorized, or intellectual, or coming from the institution, that has been one way we have been able to generate more intellectual knowledge about this set of experiences. This also connects with the sense of the very complex pragmatic, ethical, and effective degrees to which these conversations become possible, or listening becomes possible, with people in very vulnerable situations, who have been users of mental health services for years, and other voice-hearers we have worked with who are members of the spiritualist church, who have very different relationships to their experience and who are perhaps vulnerable in slightly different ways. In addition, attentiveness to experience leads into multiple forms of collaboration that are endlessly pushing back and testing us in terms of the disciplines and the disciplinary institutionally-embedded knowledge we are bringing to the table— this sense that within our project, it’s the people working in very different historical periods and with very different thought worlds who have also provided a grounding and a vantage point from which to try to imagine otherwise. One of the project publications that has just come out is an edited collection called Voices and Visions,5 which is about voice-hearing (although it is very difficult to separate out something like hearing voices in the medieval and early modern period, because it’s so often a multisensory experience, or it’s fused with visions).

But one of the fantastic things about that volume is the exploration of experience through these different textual means by which the past can be accessed, which are taking place particularly in early medieval hagiographic accounts dating back to the 12th century; thought worlds where entirely different, different sensory experiences were possible, and entirely different views of the boundaries of mind and body and the presence of the supernatural were possible. To think with and alongside these kinds of differences is again a way of engendering a kind of critical space that is part of how, in the context of our project, people have been kept on their toes, as it were, and able to do things that would not be critical—a notcritical way of working. For us in this project, the answer to that question would have been to take at face value either the assumptions about hearing voices as H. Powell and C. Saunders (eds.) (2021), Visions and Voice-Hearing in Medieval and Early Modern Contexts. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.

5