blips

Mol, Annemarie, & Law, John. (2004). Embodied action, enacted bodies: The example of Hypoglycaemia. Body & Society, 10(2-3), 43-62.

This article draws on the same study as Mol’s Logic of Care, but makes a somewhat more straightforward argument regarding the way our culture conceives of bodies. Instead of seeking objective knowledge (like what we know of cadavers) or subjective knowledge (how we feel inside), they argue we should seek to know how bodies “do.”

For example, they discuss people who play sports and have diabetes, and the increased level of complexity that gives their blood sugar management. One person interviewed said they had to give up a part of themselves since they couldn’t do sports as before.

What this suggests is that the assumption that we have a coherent body or are a whole hides a lot of work. This is work someone has to do. You do not have, you are not, a body-that-hangs-together, naturally, all by itself. Keeping yourself whole is one of the tasks of life. It is not given but must be achieved, both beneath the skin and beyond, in practice. (p. 57)

In other words, keeping yourself alive and healthy is an achievement, one accomplished through often invisible and un-reflective practices.  Mol & Law direct our focus squarely on these practices in discussing Mol’s study of diabetes.  This makes a good focus for my own upcoming presentation on typing injuries and pain.  Instead of focusing on the pain as something objective (what parts of the body are hurt) or subjective (how does it feel inside when typing), the focus needs to be on practicalities–the practices of typing itself, the design of keyboards, discourses of efficiency and work habits, design of office furniture, use of office furniture, laptop design and use, etc.

Toward the end of the article they connect their argument about studying bodies that “do” to the practice of medicine:

Sullivan suggested that medicine should add its patients’ self-awareness to the results of its own clinical (or, more specifically, pathological) gaze. Our suggestion is different. It is that instead of adding a further layer of knowledge, medicine should shift its self-understanding. Medicine should come to recognize that what it has to offer is not a knowledge of isolated bodies, but a range of diagnostic and therapeutic interventions into lived bodies, and thus into people’s daily lives.  . . . In articulating how it is doing, in considering the effects of its activities, medicine would be wise to confront its own tragic character: medical interventions hardly ever bring pure improvement, plus a few unfortunate ‘side-effects’; instead they introduce a shifting set of tensions. (pp. 57-8)

Aside from the obvious debt to Latour here (in the sense that almost all actions are translations that only approximate our imagined pure goals accomplished through direct means), I appreciate the recasting of medicine.  In other words, medicine should return to the sense of itself as a techne, as a cunning intervention, a set of imperfect practices and past solutions that may have relevance in existing situations.