How Do You Touch an Impossible Thing?

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aut.relation.journalFrontiers in Rehabilitation Sciencesen_NZ
aut.relation.volume3en_NZ
dark.contributor.authorNicholls, DAen_NZ
dc.date.accessioned2022-07-29T04:16:32Z
dc.date.available2022-07-29T04:16:32Z
dc.description.abstractHow, and how much, physiotherapists should touch in practice is once again being debated by the profession. COVID-19 and people's enforced social isolation, combined with the growth of virtual technologies, and the profession's own turn away from so-called “passive” therapies, has placed therapeutic touch once again in an uncertain position. The situation is more ambiguous and uncertain because, despite its historical importance to the profession, physiotherapists have never articulated a comprehensive philosophy of touch, taking-for-granted its seeming obviousness as either a bio-physical or inter-subjective phenomenon. But both of these approaches are limited, with one failing to account for the existential and socio-cultural significance of touch, and the other rejecting the reality of the physical body altogether. And both are narrowly humanistic. Since touch occurs between all entities throughout the cosmos, and human touch makes up only an infinitesimally small part of this, physiotherapy's approach to touch seems paradoxically to be at the same time both highly reductive and ontologically vague. Given physiotherapists' much vaunted claim to be experts in therapeutic touch, it would seem timely to theorize how touch operates and when touch becomes therapeutic. In this paper I draw on Gilles Deleuze's machine ontology as a new way to think about touch. Critiquing existing approaches, I argue that machine ontology provides a more robust and inclusive philosophy of touch, pointing to some radical new possibilities for the physical therapies.en_NZ
dc.identifier.citationFrontiers in Rehabilitation Sciences. 3:934698. doi: 10.3389/fresc.2022.934698
dc.identifier.doi10.3389/fresc.2022.934698en_NZ
dc.identifier.issn2673-6861en_NZ
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10292/15330
dc.publisherFrontiers Media SAen_NZ
dc.relation.urihttps://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fresc.2022.934698/full
dc.rights© 2022 Nicholls. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
dc.rights.accessrightsOpenAccessen_NZ
dc.subjectTouch; Deleuze; Machine ontology; Therapy; Labor; Work; Action
dc.titleHow Do You Touch an Impossible Thing?en_NZ
dc.typeJournal Article
pubs.elements-id460564
pubs.organisational-data/AUT
pubs.organisational-data/AUT/Faculty of Health & Environmental Science
pubs.organisational-data/AUT/Faculty of Health & Environmental Science/School of Clinical Sciences
pubs.organisational-data/AUT/PBRF
pubs.organisational-data/AUT/PBRF/PBRF Health and Environmental Sciences
pubs.organisational-data/AUT/PBRF/PBRF Health and Environmental Sciences/HY Public Health & Psychosocial Studies 2018 PBRF
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