Thinking through Violence

This conversation, between artist-scholars Fiona Davies and Joanne “Bob” Whalley, starts in corners and wanders through corridors to find small but significant examples of violent medicine. It explores the gap between clinical and patient practices, and rather than offering a series of “answers”, it hopes to outline an approach that allows space for multiplicity, fragmentation and, where appropriate, change. It asks: what if binary discourses of clinician-patient exchange were interrogated from within artistic fields? What might these hierarchy-resistant strategies look like? Drawing on their experience as patients, “being with” patients and artists, they are working from a widespread recognition that the patient is sometimes a forgotten yet fundamental element in clinical exchange, where this conversation foregrounds a concept position of “patienting”. This term draws upon John Fiske’s idea of “audiencing”, an approach used by cultural and performance studies scholars, which understands audience engagement as sensorial, self-determined and potentially resistant. For this conversation, the embodied responses of the patient are given equal value to the critical/analytical, affording space for the body to know and to speak. Patient practices might involve knowledges that range from procedural and implicit/tacit understandings, to declarative and explicit knowledges that place experience in a grounded context. Between these two is the “gap”, where the patient exists on a daily, moment-to-moment basis, negotiating between these dynamic processes. This conversation strives to appreciate the relationship between the micro- and the macrocosm, and between the human body and its environment. It is an intersection, a change of direction, a place to gather dust.