I.
In hermeneutic research we like to talk about the “address of the topic” based on Gadamer’s idea that understanding begins when something addresses us – when we notice something in the world and start to think about it. (This is more than a subliminal noticing in everyday life, for example I notice that I have reached a busy road on my walk to walk, and now I understand I have to work out how the crossing signals work, what they mean, and judge the environment well enough so I can carry on walking without getting run over). My “address” began before I became a nurse – as a teenager I chose to take history and languages at school, including studying works of French and German literature. I picked up the idea that we know who we are and orient ourselves in terms of cultural creations, so that it is worth spending time with literature, art, music etc. As a nurse, however, I often felt this current of my life ran parallel to my working life.
I was drawn to mental health because it involves people experiencing breakdowns in knowing who they are and where they belong in relation to others, breakdowns in sustained and sustaining systems of meaning. (This is one way of looking at it, if not the predominant one in modern biochemically oriented psychiatry. A contemporary philosopher called Sanneke de Haan has worked out a framework for psychiatry based on theories of embodied cognition that puts a lot of emphasis on the idea of an existential break in the flow of sense-making.).
In the UK I worked at a therapeutic community that was a late 20th century outpost of an earlier phase of psychiatric history, where psychoanalysis was central – and that tradition is far more permeable with cultural reference points. It was when I came to Canada and worked in conventional psychiatric settings, I really felt the split between commitments. The address of the topic for me was bound up with wanting to resolve this split and connect nursing with arts and humanities (though it was a lot later, when I had completed my PhD that I started to see it in those terms).
For me the “address” was a drawn-out process – I can identify points along the way that with hindsight were leading towards this topic, but no one revelatory moment.
II.
Michel Serres in Hominescence plays with “address” in different ways. The Gadamerian usage means a call, something in the world says to us, “Hey, look over here! Something’s up!” It also means a form of address, is it “Hey, you!” or is it “Excuse me, sorry to interrupt, but…” But address also means a location, a location pinned down within a system, a code. That’s how the package ordered online arrives in the right place and we can meet our friends at an agreed spot. Serres argues that address in this sense is on the way out. We call it an email address, but it belongs to us, not to a place, and we can access it wherever we have a connection.
Serres’ ideas about addresses give some new ideas for hermeneutic researchers, who routinely present incidents from their past as prompts towards the topic they have chosen for research. Often it was a “bad” communication where someone was abused or ignored or misunderstood by a healthcare provider, or maybe when someone said something out of the ordinary, that suddenly raised a question about a taken-for-granted slice of the daily routine. Serres’ reminder that verbal address can mean mode of address, that reveals assumptions about power and status, is a useful addition. Desire and valuation inflect all communication, and a good hermeneutic study must find ways to get at them. Gadamer set up an ideal “genuine conversation” and that has confounded researchers ever since, lured by the dream of complete equality in carrying out research interviews. There is, however, something self-regarding about this, that we think we can shuck off all the associations we take one with titles like “researcher,” or “doctoral student,” or even “nurse.”
Address also means a place in the world, defined within a system of codes, of street names and building numbers, cities and postcodes. What “addresses” the researcher happens somewhere. If it did not occupy space and involve actual people, it would hardly matter for nursing research. The researcher needs to pay attention to the detail, of who said what to whom – but in what kind of room, in what kind of institution, with what kinds of rules and routines, etc. Serres’ observation about the placelessness of electronic communication does not work so well here. Much of healthcare still necessarily requires buildings in which real things are done to real, present bodies. Even in remote care, there are bodies and places, even though provider and patient can be far apart from each other.
Up to now, the address of the topic as a call to attention invites the question, “what happened?” Serres’ reminder of other meanings of address invites further questions, “who was involved, and who are they to each other?”, and “where did this happen?” The where can be taken one step further. If an address needs a system of coding to work, what is the background network of codes that makes this moment of address a possibility? What kind of world needs to exist for such thing to happen at all?
Nursing and Humanities 