Inquiry

In posing this question, philosopher Gilles Deleuze asserts that we still don’t know what a body can do. We often hear of new feats of cognition, transformation, endurance, athleticism, survival, recovery, or resistance. In spite of the many ways modernity alienates us from our bodies—through the mechanization of work, for example—the human body remains a confounding and elusive organism. Our bodies have wants and needs that make them irreducible to machines. Creative inquiry provides a means to riff and reframe Deleuze’s simple yet expansive question, spiraling it out into related ones: What are the bodily effects of mechanized labour? Whose work is valued? What can’t a body do? What can’t a machine do?