"What Can a Body Do"

Ramblings on Injury, Capacity, and Debility

I broke my collarbone last December, it's a rather unexciting injury, a right of passage I've been told. Instead of a life altering change in my physical and or mental capacity I'm left with a lasting memory in the form of a scar and some nifty hardware under my skin. The experience still felt monumental and overwhelming despite it being a sort of par for the course injury for a cyclist. I hadn’t been under the knife since I was a child and missed out on the chance to race in Belgium during the Kerstperiode, an opportunity that felt essential to my development as athlete. The entire process was an exercise in managing a level of disappointment and reliance on others that I hadn’t grappled with in a long time. 

I’m grateful that the wonders of modern medicine expedited my healing but surgery still remains a rather brutal process that we’ve softened the edges around. Of course the specifics are refined down to a mechanical process but it's surreal that we just suspend people in animation, open up their body, and screw metal bits into bone. The first thing I asked when I came-to was "What time is it?" so I could discreetly confirm nothing went awry. Unsurprisingly, I was out for almost the exact duration of the surgery. Roughly 70 minutes was all it took to cut open a body and meld a bone back together.

Before, During, After (I really like my scar)

Between hormone therapy and tending to injuries my relationship to being a patient has evolved over the years. We seek out medical professionals for answers and fixes but what we often see are the limits of bloodwork, x-rays, and medical expertise as they push against the reality that bodies are weird and variable things. Datasets and imaging only go so far to inform our recovery. In the same way that athletes have to refine their rate of perceived exertion, patients have to be intentional about seeking out care and hone a relationship with our bodies in tandem with a language to describe what’s going on with them. I was shocked when the final follow-up appointment for my collarbone ended with the doctor plainly stating that there’s not much to glean from an x-ray with all the hardware in the way but if I feel good I shouldn’t hesitate to return fully to training. It’s empowering and slightly daunting to realize that recovery and healing isn’t just about abstract timelines; it is personal and requires us to be mindful and in touch with our bodies.

It’s important to note that this experience with medical professionals is a luxury and specific to my situated position. In Belgium I was encouraged to immediately get surgery. When I arrived in the States I was dissuaded by one doctor and another leaned over at my consult and asked “so how professional are we talking with this cycling thing”. There are a lot of qualifiers that you have to tick before doctors are willing to take your understanding of your body's needs and sensations seriously. Being an able bodied, fit¹, white woman opens up doors for my access to healthcare that don’t exist for so many others. I am able to escape so much friction with doctors simply because of how I look and am read.

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When I wasn’t shuttling myself to physical therapy and doctors appointments being injured gave me time to start reading books again. Doing the discourse used to be a huge part of my life and I still miss talking text with my friends. I spent January bopping between Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. Their work is notoriously wide ranging but I kept coming back to their conception of machines and in turn the bigger question of how I understand my body. The D&G machine is an unending flow of connected machines moving along despite ruptures and breakdowns.  

Everywhere it is machines—real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts. The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth a machine coupled to it. The mouth of the anorexic wavers between several functions: its possessor is uncertain as to whether it is an eating-machine, an anal machine, a talking-machine, or a breathing machine (asthma attacks). That is how we are all tinkerers: each with his or her little machines. An organ-machine, for an energy-machine: all the time, flows and cuts.

(Deleuze & Guattari 1)

D&G were, as evidenced, notoriously crass at times. The quote above is how Anti-Oedipus opens and from the get it’s clear that the body as machine(s) is a very literal concept. What’s compelling is this capacity to fail and continue flowing/operating. Bodies are constantly failing in some capacity but most of the time those ruptures open the door for something new as opposed to stopping us in our tracks. I broke a small piece of my skeletal machine but things kept on moving giving way to a flood of new flows. 

Every injury is a reminder that bodies are as resilient as they are fragile. Changes in capacity throw us into ourselves and challenge our position in a world adapted for able bodies. The world doesn’t stop and neither does the imperative for us to continue moving through it. Being reminded of our precarity should foster not just empathy but a desire for a more liveable and accessible world. When a part of our body stops working we see that the able body is the one our world is oriented around. Amanda Cachia took up D&G’s interrogation of capacity and centered it on disability in her exhibit “What Can a Body Do”. Below is an excerpt from the introduction to the exhibit: 

In “What Can a Body Do?” Deleuze draws from two statements by seventeenth century Dutch philosopher Baruch de Spinoza: “We do not even know what a body is capable of…” and “We do not even know of what affections we are capable, nor the extent of our power.” In other words, we haven’t even begun to understand the potential of our own bodies! Most of us know even less about the disabled body. It is important to think about what disability does rather than simply what it is. Such reframing breaks binary constructs as it is focused on a type of concretized being-in-the-world, on the truths of living inside a disabled body. As disability bioethicist Jackie Leach Scully argues, “understanding the experience of disability from this inside is essential to inform ethical judgments about impairment.” Asking what the disabled body can do helps us to understand what it means to think and be through the variant body. To use a term originally developed by Michel Foucault to describe ways of knowing that are left out, the disabled experience has been a subjugated knowledge. But what if disability could become … a way of knowing the world? 

(Cachia 4)

Breaking bones produces something very distinct from disability, temporary debility² or impairment, but it still opens up the door to interrogate the questions laid out above. Existing with an eye towards how our capacity affects our ability to move through life is an essential part of understanding what it means to share the world with others who differ from us. When our capacity is impacted, that chance to change our way of knowing the world rears its head. 

Injuries range from inconvenient to devastating but I think there is an almost universal phenomenon of being thrown into ourselves. One of the first things we experience is a challenge to our autonomy, little tasks that we thought nothing of require help. In these moments we are given a chance to shift away from seeing ourselves as radically independent to interdependent³. It’s important to be reminded that we rely on others in varying forms every single day. As social beings we exist thanks to others, our sense of self is reified by the people in our lives. Our ability to exist and thrive is thanks to the networks and systems (hospitals, transportation, shelter, laborers) that we all play a role in perpetuating. Our reliance on others will take different shapes as we age and continue with our lives. It ebbs and flows but fundamentally we will always require friends, loved ones, community members, coworkers, etc. to help us navigate the world. The human condition is marked by this beautiful form of interdependence and we all have opportunities to intervene in one another’s lives for the better.

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Thank you for reading my musings on injury and capacity. Before ending this I would just like to again reiterate that disability and debility are not at all the same experience and it’s not my intention to conflate the two or speak to an experience that isn’t my own.

The main thrust of this is to simply express that injuries have the capacity to be productive and change how we move through the world. There is a lot of radical potential in these experiences and we owe it to ourselves to channel the vulnerability inherent in these periods into opportunities to empathize and grow closer with the people we’re in community with. 

1. The notion of being “Fit” is a tenuous concept. I may be perceived as such because of metrics that are unfairly weighted by medical professionals such as BMI.

2. This distinction is one that has been discussed at length in disability studies circles. The important distinction for my interpretation is that debility is circumstantial and temporary whereas disability is a more permanent impairment and in turn identity category/lived experience.

3. My framing of the shift from independence to interdependence is gleaned from the the “Examined Life” segment featuring Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor. At the 13:00 minute mark Butler and Taylor develop this concept of “the body as a site for radical interdependency”

Citations:

1. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1983). Desiring-Production. In Capitalism and schizophrenia (p. 1). University of Minnesota Press.

2. Amanda Cachia, "What Can a Body Do?" in What Can a Body Do? curated by Amanda Cachia (Pennsylvania: Haverford College, 2012), 4.