Disability and Illness in Arts-Informed Research: Moving Toward ...

apart from the world. Relationality or intersubjectivity is absent, with two notable and broadly conceived exceptions, the phenomenologys and the feminisms. Bias, objectivity, and neutrality are brought into question, and it is suggested that we can deepen our understanding of our humanity by examining direct experience. According to Cixous (1991), a phenomenological practice is “at once a vocation and a technique”, “a practice of the greatest possibility”, which is actually “an active way—of getting to know things by letting ourselves be known by them” (p. 30).

I still experience confusion in discussion with people who have reified theory to the point where all of their knowing is mediated through a canon established by others. They haven't gone out into the world naked yet. It's not that theory is useless. It can reassure, it provides a way of perceiving the world, it provides interpretive principles through which we gain understanding. However, if I perceive theory as a medium, that which stands between, I begin to see differently. I see how it shapes what I perceive, I begin to see that a different media would give me a different perception, would make a different shape. I have learned to practise seeing both through and around the frame of theory. I am increasingly aware that any theory throws certain patterns into relief and others into shadow. Perhaps it is not important to ask whether our interpretation is correct, but rather, is it useful? When is it useful?¹⁶ Wittgenstein wrote, “[T]he constraints imposed by any theoretical orientation may serve to impair our actual view, such that our understanding of the world is rather a misunderstanding” (as cited in Brill, 1995, p. 11).

The principles of intersubjectivity, humility, compassion, confusion, and uncertainty infuse my world of scholarship. These notions contest the master narratives of Euro-Western thinking, based in the rational, in certainty, and in the ideas of progress and objectivity. The scholarship conterminous to the dominant tradition has no interest in a hierarchy. It does not exist to obscure and asks that it be perceived as a useful and serious way in which to engender a greater empathic relationship to the world and to all of life. I do not wish to fix my perception and limit my