The fix is in – But let’s skip it

In the following narrative, I want to capture a sense of the complex pressures and pleasures that arise in scenes oriented to remediation. Reflecting on this narrative, I hope to reveal a bit of what it means to perceive people as in need of remediation and how the fix is in.

***

I was done. Treadmill, elliptical, weights albeit a little lighter today as I was protecting my sore shoulder. My last stop was stretching in the small room, next to the gravity machines. Usually crowded, there was only one other person in the room, an older woman lying on a mat. Plenty of room to stretch in my rather robust way – happy and eyes closed, I began stretching.

Shuffling sounds near the doorway; I look up to see a group coming into the room. Young adults or teenagers, maybe five or six moving together, sort of lanky they shuffle in and mill about at the far end of the small room. They don’t seem to be a class… but, maybe; they also don’t seem to say much to one another… One woman, older than the others, says, “Sumner, no need to be pacing; come over here to the mat. You can sit or stretch.”

That seemed to act like a permission slip for the older woman on the mat to question the group. She turns on the mat, faces the, and says, “What is this, some sort of class or something?”

“No, not a class,” says the middle-aged woman. The others don’t even acknowledge the questioner.

“What then?” says the woman on the mat.

“Well, we just come here…, to use the gym,” says the other woman.

The questioning tone from the woman on the mat is now replaced by a declaration: “Well, they don’t do anything.”

Woosh – like the air, I too wish to leave the room.

A group of people said to be “doing nothing” — to their faces. It seems that the group is an affront to her sense of who ought to lie on mat, or pace, or who ought to sit, or stretch, or hang-out.

I stop my stretching, pick up my mat, and return it to the stack. The woman within the group says softly, “There are different ways to do things at the gym.”

She is not merely stating the obvious; her words come across as a justification for this groups’ presence.

I feel my anger begin its boil.

In just a few words, a group has been told that they do not belong but not because they are doing something abusive or wrong. Many people pace, sit, stretch, and stand while at the gym. I don’t remember seeing the woman on the mat move, except to turn her look toward the group to say, “But they are not doing anything.” What sense lies in her saying this? The group is doing things done in a gym but not in a way that the woman on the mat considers to be doing things in a gym. Their presence seems to be her question.

Moving from the stack of mats and toward the way out, I stop near the women lying on the mat, look down and say: “How do you know what they are doing?”

“I have seen them before,” she retorts.

“They are doing lots here,” I say, my arms flailing suggesting the space of their doings. In agitation, I bark, “They are often here.”

She, who has seen them before; I, who recalls their presence; we thus establish ourselves as regular gym members with valid opinions on them; both of us are seeking solutions; both of us have things we are grappling with but not the same things.

“I was just asking a question,” says the woman still lying on her mat.

“No, you weren’t just asking a question,” I respond. “You were making a statement. You were making people feel unwelcome.” I turn toward the group and say, “I am glad you are here.”

Muffled replies, shuffling, pacing. It’s all very awkward.

Exiting, I throw a few more words at the woman lying on her mat, “I feel really sorry for you and your attitude. This is a community center. They can do what they want.”

Days later back at the gym, I still find myself mulling over her insolence. I stop at the water fountain, turn around and there she is, standing right behind me, much shorter than I had imagined.

She says, “I got them doing things. They thanked me.” Then she says, “See! I brought them this” and thrusts a skipping rope toward me.

“What?” I say. I’m startled. I stare at the skipping rope, then look at her as a strange sensation rises, “I thought you didn’t want them here.”

She responds, “I used to be a gym teacher. Their worker thanked me. I got them doing things and I brought them a skipping rope. If they are here…” and she begins to look around.

“Oh,” I hesitate. “Well, ok. Umm, sorry – I guess, I misread you completely. I’m…” she has moved off.

Maybe I read everything wrong. Still, I feel flabbergasted — skip rope! Says, who?

***

The woman on the mat seems to fixate on the group as insufficient, as outsiders. Between the utterance “Well, they don’t do anything” and the other woman’s rejoinder “There are different ways to be at the gym,” my fix is in on the entire scene – a woman is telling a group of young people that they don’t belong. I try to fix her. Our next encounter by the water fountain, however, suggests that maybe something else is going on since bringing people a skipping rope hardly seems an exclusionary practice. Still, what emboldens one gym member to suggest to others to skip?

The gifting of the skipping rope unsettles my clear sense of what is going on but, likely, any reflection on this story would blur the supposedly clear lines between protagonist and antagonist. As Thomas King (2003) reminds us “The truth about stories is that that is all we are.” In this story, the “we” that we are appears against a backdrop of a well defined “they” – a group, moving together, and moving differently than a class — shuffling, pacing, standing. The group is seen as different by everyone in the story who speaks about them; they, however, do not speak.

To consider what has been made “see-able through being made say-able,” suggests a need to re-read this story through terms more nuanced than right or wrong (Titchkosky, 2011: 73). Sarah Ahmed (2006:12, 27) is helpful here:

If we think of [read] space through orientation…then our work will in turn acquire a new direction, which opens up how spatial perceptions come to matter and be directed as matter…Perception is a way of facing something… which means I have already taken an orientation toward it.

In the gym with its routine forms of spatial perception, I notice the group entering the room as those who do not fit neatly within my perceptual lines of engagement; thus, “They don’t seem like a class… but, maybe.” The gym allows some lines of perception to be understood as normal and expected. Sumner, who is invited to stop pacing seems anxious or uncomfortable to me, yet regardless of his experience, we are directed to read him as not following an expected line since he is told to do otherwise, “sit or stretch.” This utterance orients the spatial perception that comes to matter, namely, an invitation to read Sumner’s pacing as an out-of-place activity.

Sumner and the group are perceived as the unexpected; the woman on the mat, not only recognizes this but aims to fix it. She has “seen them before,” and perceives them as not doing anything. By the stories end, it is not clear whether this statement is meant to dismiss, degrade, or do something else; what is clear, is that she wants something more from the group. Just as we cannot know Sumner’s intention, we cannot know hers; but we do know that she is not at one with the group – they are a they and she is not accepting of their actions. Remarked upon by her, the fix is in — the group is unexpected.

And, once this interpretation of the group is established, the various voices in the story pursue their own fix — “They don’t do anything,” “There are different ways…” “They can do what they want.” Through the utterance, “I got them to do something,” the woman suggests that she is moving them toward what she expects. Her retired-gym teacher sense of what people should do at the gym is imposed and she moves toward them in order to get them to move closer to her expectations. I try to move her away from them and toward her imposition upon them – or so my imposition on her seems to me. I said, “They can do what they want.” My expectations move me away from both her and the group — saying “I’m glad you’re here” also serves as my exiting words. One orientation suggests let them be, another suggests be more of what I expect, both stave off the influence of the unexpected.

The everyday asserts its expectations through the space, through the way perception is already organized and already directs how people come to matter. I aim to fix the woman by reasserting an abstract version of inclusion that means simply do what you want; the woman aimed to fix the group in a strict version of inclusion that meant do what is expected in a gym. Either way the compulsion to fix is the duress under which versions of the human unfold in this story and in its telling. Participants in the story enter with a fixed version of the human. We can move right past what we have already thought about all the people involved, even pass over how we made sense of people, especially the group of youth, and thus take pleasure in asserting an orientation which already fits the scene it seeks to fix.

***
Through this exploration of remediation, I have sought to actualize a politics of wonder toward human expectations (Titchkosky, 2011). Such a politics seeks to unpack the sense behind what is already said and already done, in order to wonder about our current dominant forms of engagement. A politics of wonder nurtures awareness of the forms of perception generating duress in everyday life and might generation other ways of how we matter to one another.

References

Ahmed, Sara. (2006). Queer phenomenology: Orientations, objects, others. Durham: Duke University Press.

King, Thomas. (2003). The truth about stories: A native narrative. Toronto: Dead Dog Café Inc. and CBC.

Titchkosky, Tanya. (2011). “Chapter 6: Toward a Politics of Wonder in Disability Studies,” The Question of Access. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 129-150.

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