On Falling III

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Notes

1 Drew Leder is alluding to Herbert Plugge's descriptions of cardiac patients' sense of space pursuant to a heart attack.

2 Mike Pearson is writing about the site-specific performances of Brith Gof.

3 The concept of disease is often used to denote pathologies and abnormalities whereas illness is used to refer to an individual's experience of disease or of poor health (for further discussion, see Young 1982). This is rather a medically driven distinction. In the essay,

4 Needless to say everybody has their own unique techniques and ‘tactics’ of performing daily tasks. In comparing performances of ‘healthy’ subjects with those of subjects with RA, I do not intend to suggest two groups of individuals performing in two distinct ways but to highlight how the experience of a disease may force people to go beyond the limits of the bodily notations inscribed in the design of objects.

5 Tim Ingold's phrase (Ingold 2007:11).

6 This is certainly not to claim that individuals, when experiencing pain-disease or any other form of illness, suddenly start creating things that they would not otherwise have. Needless to say, suffering does not necessarily generate the same responses in each person. Nor is it to claim that there is something uniquely subversive, emancipating or repressive in such states - as some disability studies' scholars have claimed contemporary theorists on the body have done so (see Siebers 2006: 177 and Wendell 1996: 169 for criticisms of Butler and Haraway). It goes without saying that pain is physically debilitating rather than anything else. That said, I shall also add that pain and illness experience cannot be explained away by this individualizing aspect of suffering, especially when the techniques of survival that disabled subjects invent on a day-to-day basis are taken into consideration.