Assistive Technology & Organismic Life
THE ASSUMPTION: “organismic” language implies a body operating through its own biological processes alone.
THE RECONSTRUCTION: a wheelchair, ventilator, or device is part of this organism’s actual life, not separate from it.
Where the classical language falls short
Biodynamic theory’s “organism” language, inherited from Reich, tends to picture a self-contained biological system — vital, self-regulating, complete on its own terms. For a person whose actual, lived body includes a wheelchair, prosthetic, ventilator, or communication device, that language can implicitly exclude the very things that make their embodied life work.
The reconstruction
A disabled body with technology is not less organismic. It is differently organismic — a genuine, integrated body-world involving body, device, environment, relationship, and agency together. The organism this theory is trying to describe includes all of that, once the language stops assuming otherwise.
A question worth carrying
Does this theory’s picture of “the organism” actually include my whole lived body — equipment and all — or does it quietly stop at skin?
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