![]() ![]() The answer to the second question is perhaps easier to resolve. But is this true? Surely, it is therapeutic when our pet dog senses some unhappiness in us and rests its head on our knee? Ah yes, but does the dog intend to act therapeutically? Surely, for touch to be therapeutic, it must be intentional? However, is this also true? Don't many acts of therapy happen when we touch someone without us knowing or intending their effects? So if we cannot think of therapeutic touch as exclusively human or intentional, is there anything-beyond the obvious differences in kind-that differentiates a massage technique like petrissage from a leaf falling from a tree? In other words, are they different ontologically? And why does this matter? If a leaf falls from a tree in autumn and, by decaying, feeds the soil, can we say that this is an act of therapeutic touch? If not, why not? Because therapeutic touch only applies to humans, we might say. Let your imagination change what you know ( 1). How do you feel its rhythm, its time signature – a different baseline? How do you connect with something deemed a thing for eons, even as eons are alive in its very material? 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.Īn imagined place, a crease in the continuity of distance? In this paper I draw on Gilles Deleuze's machine ontology as a new way to think about touch. ![]() 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. 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. 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. 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. ![]() 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. How, and how much, physiotherapists should touch in practice is once again being debated by the profession. School of Clinical Sciences, Faculty of Health and Environmental Sciences, Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand.What are the advantages and disadvantages of each genre for exploring the strange, the unusual, and the improbable? I.e.How does each selection relate to this year’s theme?.
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