What Can the Running Body Do? The Running Machine's Affective Possibilities and the Limits of Language

While others have suggested that action sports offer avenues of escape from neoliberal imperatives like maximizing health and self-regulation, we argue that even the most mainstream of sports—amateur road running—holds similar potential. Using data from 20 “running reflections,” we explore running's everyday affective intensities using Deleuzo-Guattarian theory. We conceptualize running as a machinic assemblage that shapes what the body can do in myriad ways. We argue that while the running machine produces neoliberal imperatives and the disciplined subjectivity of “runner,” those almost inarticulable affects that runners struggle to express reveal deterritorial possibilities that challenge the stratification of running as a practice shaped by health and fitness discourse. Additionally, we show that it is important to cultivate methodologies and analytic strategies that excavate beneath the surface of participants’ stratified language, because runners’ tendency to default to wellness language—order-words—for the sake of effective communication in a world where neoliberal logics are most easily articulated and understood may elide other affective and embodied analytic possibilities in the form of a-grammatical deterritorializations.