Contemporary cyborg theory tends to approach the integration of human bodies and technology innovations as if the cyborg were a unified whole. And, because of the potential of the cyborg body to help ameliorate disability, the cyborg has been suggested as a way to restore function to individuals living with disabilities. We investigate the deployment of the cyborg integrated dance company using theoretical concepts provided by Gilles Deleuze. Rather than observing a smoothly integrated whole, our ethnographic research reveals tensions within the cyborg body. Our analysis revealed three types of creative/reactive forces. Each of these forces comes from the effects/functions of the three striations of the cyborg body: (1) the effects/functions from the machine stria; (2) those from the human stria; and (3) those from the animal stria. Although together these striae constitute the assemblage of the cyborg, as each one takes on greater intensity such that the others are of decreased intensity, the hybridized whole of the cyborg becomes less functional as one is becoming-machine, becoming-human, or becoming-animal.

DW seeks to smooth out the distinction of those who rely on mechanic assemblages and those who do not. To explore this attempt to smooth out or integrate difference, to make a whole out of these parts, the first author spent 18 months with DW and engaged in in-depth interviews, participant observations, and document analyses (see Quinlan & Harter, 2010, for a full review of the methodology). One of the many themes that emerged from the first author's experiences with DW was their focus on the smooth integration of human and technology and the new opportunities that emerge for dance, as well as reminding us of the benefits and difficulties of incorporating the human, mechanical and animal. At DW, a space is created in which dancers can make this cyborg move.

The Dancing Wheels (DW) Company & School, located in Cleveland, OH, is a professional modern dance company for people with and without disabilities. DW was founded in 1980 by Mary Verdi-Fletcher. Verdi-Fletcher was born with spina bifida and spends her life in a wheelchair even though she dreamed of being a professional dancer. She wanted to make space for dancers with disabilities in the professional dance world. In their fully accessible studio, DW provides community dance classes, summer dance workshops, theater arts camps, and teacher training workshops. Through these innovative programs, which integrate arts and recreational activities with career opportunities and training, DW is committed to the inclusion of persons with disabilities in the arts and broader communities. Through dance, the studio challenges cultural norms about the body and institutional patterns and practices that fail to acknowledge different bodies (Quinlan & Bates, 2008; 2009; 2010; 2012; Quinlan & Harter, 2010). There is, in the choreography, an attempt to efface or erase the difference between able-bodied and disabled-bodied dancers. Integration and difference are central to DWs' organizing practices; indeed, DW characterizes itself as smoothing out differences between these two kinds of dancers.

Cyborg, Technology and the Body

The focus of the integration of the mechanical and the human in DW's work calls to mind the works of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze, alone and in his collaborations with the psychotherapist Felix Guattari, discussed the integration of machines and biological bodies in an attempt to eliminate the distinction between the real and the immaterial. Building on the work of Foucault, Deleuze (1995) was interested in the reorganization of society to subvert systems of power and control. Deleuze's (1995) concept of the "disciplinary society" and "control society" unveil the multiple forces of discipline, control, liberation, and resistance operating in the realms of human behavior (pp. 177-178).

As such, Deleuze follows Foucault in their shared understanding of institutions (e.g., the family, prisons, armies, schools, hospitals) as technologies to control the biological body. Although Foucault himself never talked about information technology or the transformation of human beings by communication technology, Deleuze (1988) speculated on the new relations between humans and the "third generation of machines, cybernetics and information technology" (p. 131). Because of this interest in "third-generation" machines, and Deleuze's (1987) concepts of "machinic assemblages" (p. 71) and "desiring machines" (Deleuze & Guattari, 2003, p. 36), some scholars have chosen to see Deleuze as an early cyborg theorist.

The trends that inspired Deleuze have since accelerated. We now experience a post-industrial, high-tech culture that pushes us to challenge the interminglings (which are made to appear seamless) of body and technology. There is no longer clear distinction between who makes and who is made in connections among the animal (organic), human (emotive/intellectual) and technological (machinic). In light of these trends, Haraway (1991), through the metaphor of the cyborg, challenged us to think beyond the dualisms of organic and inorganic, of machine and flesh (see also Currier, 2003). In doing so, she encourages us to think beyond the existence of a whole or complete body. Haraway (1991) asks:

Why should our bodies end at the skin?… For us in imagination, and in other practices, machines can be prosthetic devices, intimate components, friendly selves. We don't need organic holism to give impermeable whole-ness, the total woman and her feminist variants (mutants?) (p. 178)

After asking this question, Haraway (1991) provisionally defines a cyborg as a "cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction" (p. 181). For Haraway, we have all become cyborgs blurring the boundary of human and machine. In contrast, or perhaps better in distinction, Deleuze and Guattari (DG) (1987) believed the human and nonhuman world were not machine + organism but, rather, both machine and organism and their combined effects. Following Deleuze, for purposes of this analysis, we define a cyborg as an assemblage of animal, human, and mechanical components that form an assembled body with equal intensities.

Drawing on DG, Haraway's student Hayles (1999) noted that cybernetics shares affinities with post-structural philosophy insofar as both challenge the centrality of the liberal notions of human agency. Once there is a cyborg, there is no longer a self that "is free from the will of others" or technology (Hayles, 1999, pp. 3-4). However, unlike Haraway, Deleuze did not consider our evolution as heading towards becoming cyborg. Rather, we already are and already have been cybogs. Deleuze considers the world to be composed of "machinic" assemblages. He uses the term 'machinic' as distinct from machine in order to highlight the fact that a machinic assemblage may also include human and nonhuman components. Moreover, the concept of machinic is not only subject to multiple interpretations, depending upon where you are in relation to the assemblage, it also serves to transform the way that the assemblage functions in the world. In other words, an assemblage has agency and is consequently political.

From a communication standpoint, DG called the human body—and all of its effects — an "assemblage." They (1987) characterized it as a "constellation of singularities and traits deducted from the flow—selected, organized, stratified—in such a way as to converge (consistency) artificially and naturally" (p. 406). DG offers a different way of understanding the body in its connection with other bodies. As connected systems, organs/biological processes relate to material objects in ways that exceed the humans acting upon these objects or objects influencing human action; Deleuze calls upon us to remove our focus from putative wholes and to focus on movements and linkage and connection among components of the assemblage (Currier, 2003; Grosz, 1994). In thinking of bodies as assemblages, Deleuze moves past the idea that the body is a unity; for him the flesh is a multiplicity through which organic materials, processes, energies, and capacities are ordered and constrained (see Currier, 2003). Deleuze wanted us to go beyond the idea of a unified body to a body without organs in which multiplicities intersect with other multiplicities. Technology does not meet a body—instead matters, flows, forces and intensities of the corporeal link and its connections with technology and machine and nature can no longer be seen. Instead, as Grosz (1994) says, "assemblages are the provisional linkages of elements, fragments, flows, of disparate status and substance: ideas, things-human, animate, inanimate" (p. 164).

Under this conception of the wheelchair dancer as cyborg, the dancers at DW are not simply human bodies that happen to sit in wheelchairs. Rather than seeing a wheelchair/machine and a dancer/human, we should see the wheelchair dancer as an assemblage of machinic, human, and animal parts. To consider the same design in Deleuzian terms opens up infinite possibilities, possibilities that transform something (the wheelchair and the human) into something different (the wheelchair dancer), which, in turn can be transformed into something different yet again and again as the linkages and connections ebb and flow. There is no optimum finite solution because there are no problems to be solved: there are only multiple possibilities resulting in the potential for multiple transformations. Rather than asking what this wheelchair dancer is, it is better to ask "what a body is capable of…and what forces belong to [and extend from] it" (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 292).

This focus on the effects of the body (be the effects organic, mechanical, or some other kind) should be of great interest to scholars of disability. Rather than asking what limits the body, or how communication/social construction dominates the body in ways that prevent it from doing that which is done by able-bodied individuals, Deleuze asks us not to ask what the body is, but what the body can do. Deleuze (1992) asks, "Of what is the body capable? Of what affections, passive as well as active? How far does its power extend?" (p. 256). He does not reject the power of thought or of communication but instead suggests that if we do not yet know the power of the body, we also do not yet know the power of thought or communication, but are beyond consciousness (Frohmann, 2007).

In this focus, Deleuze encourages us to look at the body (be it able-bodied or disabled) as an active, creative force rather than a reactive force. Deleuze distinguishes between active creative forces, which can act of their own accord, and reactive forces, which operate only by limiting and resisting the creative potential of other forces (Deleuze, 2006). He attributes value to active forces that permit transformations and creativity, and, thereby, the development of new values and new ways of living. According to Deleuze (1988),

If you define bodies and thoughts as capacities for affecting and being affected, many things change. You will define an animal, or a human being, not by its form, its organs, and its functions, and not as a subject either; you will define it by the affects of which it is capable. (p. 124)

Most disability studies research examines the individual living with disabilities as either mere body (what devices does it need; what piece is missing, malformed, or mutilated) or as simple subject (what is the political or intellectual motivation of the disabled person who is speaking) (Barnes, Mercer, & Shakespeare, 1999; Corbett, 1997; Corker & French, 1999; Gill, 1997; Hedlund, 2000; Linton, 1998; Paterson & Hughes, 1997; Stacey, 1992). To fix the individual living with disability either as body or as subject locks us into the consideration of an unchanging form. But, as Deleuze established, society also is not defined by unchanging forms; our social structures are assembled into different segments (e.g., class, race, gender, etc.), including the myriad of institutions and cultural formations that organize, regulate and give meaning to social existence (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). And to investigate the bodies, the segments, and the institutional and cultural formations of social existence, it is necessary for us to examine how the different components of the human assemblage become more and less intensified as the animal, the human, and the machine emerge in the practice of life.