• This week was the last of the 4 workshops I organised for the MFA Art students at Goldsmiths - it has been intense but so enjoyable, and I've felt so privileged to have another 10 or so brains to think with, share experiences, shape practices.

• The topic (biosocial rehabilitation) is not of the most catchy on paper, and the path through the readings was a bit windy - so I appreciated these people sticking with me and putting the effort into understanding material that was sometimes foreign, and digesting it openly. Rehabilitation is such a creative, imaginative relational act - it is non-sensical that it has been relegated to the biomedical field.

• We started by analysing the entanglement (and use!) of the 'biological' and 'social' categories, exploring the values of different methods of generating knowledge; which then allowed for a definition of health that is less circumscribed: one of my favourite comments was that 'health is static, reaching an equilibrium' but that 'life is movement and transformation' - so somehow life is inherently sick🙂

• The comment was referencing the idea of 'chronically unstable bodies' that comes from looking at amerindian perspectives of the body, where metamorphosis (shifting from one form to another) is commonplace and is even used as a therapy.

• Metamorphosis - a great concept, one that symbolises the impossibility of a truly 'individual' individual, that reveals that identity is porous, transitional. That the borders between self and the environment (natural, social) are lax. And that the health of humans is inherently linked to health of animals, ecosystems, etc.
• In this light, rehabilitation is a process of negotiating one's own mutations and the surroundings - a kind of life practice that emerges more vigorously when the negotiations are harder.
• Another good point was that the 're' in rehabilitation stands for repetition rather than return: it is not an archaeology but a speculative exercise, a building of new practices that heal the relationship between the self and the environment. Doesn't this 2020 world need a bit of that?!

• Ultimately, these conversations provide context: they remind a medical professional that their work in the clinic is not finite, that policy-makers, artists.. basically everybody has a responsibility towards seeking health but that this should always  be mutual;  that our individual or shared practices and processes are always political; and that their sum will determine our shared health.

• I'm sharing some bits from the reading list for the workshop - it's a complete jumble of new and 'vintage' thinking, but I hope you find something  you like.

Biosocial world:

• Guattari, Félix. The Three Ecologies / Félix Guattari ; Translated by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton. London: Athlone, 2000. 
• Chuang Journal. 2020. Social Contagion: Microbiological Class War in China

Biosocial health:

• We Can Think Ourselves into a Plague and Influenza’s Historical Present in: Wallace, Rob. 2016. Big Farms Make Big Flu. New York: Monthly Review Press.
• Descola, Philippe. 2013. “Trompe l’Oeil Nature.” In Beyond Nature and Culture, 23–82. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
• http://karenkramer.eu/LIMULUS

Biosocial rehabilitation:

•  MacFahrquar, Larissa. 2018. The Mind-Expanding Ideas of Andy Clark. The New Yorker, April 2, 2018 Issue. 
• Vilaça, A. 2005. Chronically unstable bodies: Reflections on Amazonian corporalities. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11:445–464.
• Gray van Heerden, Chantelle. 2017. “The Slightest Gesture: Deligny, the Ritornello and Subjectivity in Socially Just Pedagogical Praxis.” Education as Change 21 (2): 6–24. https://doi.org/10.17159/1947-9417/2017/2009.

Responsibility:

• Braidotti, Rosi. 2019. “Affirmative Ethics and Generative Life.” Deleuze and Guattari Studies 13 (4): 463–81. https://doi.org/10.3366/dlgs.2019.0373.
• Commitment. In bell hooks, 2000. All about love. New York: Harper Collins.

Hoping you are all well, safe and happy.