Poietic Resonance: Physis, Technē, and Wheelchair Mobility After Spinal Cord Injury

Assistive technologies are often framed by a compensatory sequence: natural function, physical injury, technical substitution. I argue that this sequence is operationally correct but ontologically insufficient because it leaves “nature” unexamined and silently identifies it with the able body. Through a close reconstruction of Aristotle’s physis, technē, and poiēsis, followed by Heidegger’s transformation of their relation in “The Question Concerning Technology,” I develop the flower as the decisive figure of natural self-emergence. I call poietic resonance the relation in which technical bringing-forth, while remaining causally distinct from physis, becomes incorporated into living praxis and contributes to the appearance of a bodily possibility. Spinal cord injury is treated as a real material transformation that reconfigures the conditions under which powers can be actualized without reducing the person to ontological deficit. The wheelchair then serves as the test case. It may compensate for lost locomotion, but through adjustment, embodied learning, and a supporting sociomaterial world it can also institute another kinetic grammar. Rolling is not walking performed badly; it is another way in which a body moves and discloses a world.