So what's the big idea?

The 3rd instalment in an occasional series on writing a new critical physio book

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

If you’ve subscribed to this new CPN newsletter, you’ll have noticed you’re now getting three different ‘streams’. There are blogs with news about CPN events (called the CPN Herald), there are the weekly CPN Digests which come each week with 15 curated critical physio-related links from the margins of the Internet, and there are these ‘Third book’ newsletters, which are about the long process of writing a new book to follow Physiotherapy Otherwise.

Having explained the basic idea of the project here, and talked about what you need to have in place if you’re going to write a book (here), today’s post is about the book’s big idea.

As I mentioned in the first post, my plan was always to write a three-book series, with this third book being philosophical.

Being an early qualitative health researcher I had to have a basic appreciation for philosophy. So since the 1990s, I’ve been trying to make sense of phenomenology, realism, constructivism, and a dozen other ‘isms’. Most of these did nothing for me, but I found my home in the early 2000s when I was introduced to postmodernism.

Postmodernism is skepticism towards grand narratives, and the belief that there is no objective reality underneath our language games, desires, and power struggles. The Crown Prince of postmodernists is probably Michel Foucault, whom I love dearly. I even look like him!

But I wouldn’t be a good postmodernist if I wasn’t also skeptical of postmodernism, and for years I’ve been concerned that it’s pushed me to reject the physical reality of the biological body in favour of a world made up only of discourse. This always troubled me, because even if I could reconcile myself to this idea, I didn’t think most of my physiotherapy colleagues could. So if I wanted to find a way to ‘diagnose’ physiotherapy better, I’d need to find a different way to think.

So I began to search for philosophies that could account for the full majesty of the world around us: philosophies that could account for bodies that are real and bodies that exists only in language; human experiences, as well as the billions of other non-human entities that make up the physical therapies; social forces like gender or colonisation and rectus femoris muscles that seem to be entirely anti-social.

Three or four years ago I came across a group of thinkers who were exploring a philosophy that didn’t just try to reconcile our conventional philosophies but created entirely new ways to think. They developed an approach variously called Speculative Realism or Object Oriented Ontology (OOO). I’ll explain more about this in a future post, but for now, suffice to say it’s an approach that might just provide the basis for a radical new way to approach the physical therapies.

So the book that I’m embarking on now is going to look at each of the fundamental physical therapies - touch, movement, exercise, heat and cold, light, water… - and try to understand them in a new way.

I’ve already tried to do this in an article that looked at respiratory physiotherapy (open access version here), and I’ll hopefully be doing more of this short-form writing over the next couple of years.

But for someone with a classical physiotherapy training, this is heavy stuff. And even my love of philosophy doesn’t mean that this is an easy process. I’m on sabbatical this year, so I’m going to spend a lot of my time in slow, deep reading of books that feel sometimes like they’re written in a foreign language. But this is how it has to be, I suppose. It probably wouldn’t be a radical idea if it made perfect sense or flowed like water.

And I’m already wondering how on earth I’m going to explain the strangeness of these ideas to physiotherapists who still think qualitative research is exotic. I don’t want to have to spend most of the book explaining a new set of theories and leave no room to say something actually about physical therapy. But that’s a problem for another day. For now, I’ve just got to get back to trying to understand the Body-without-Organs.