[-empyre-] INITIAL POSTING FROM SCOTT TAYLOR:

[Johannes Birringer]

thanks for joining us, Scott, and also thanks to all who posted today,  we invite
feedback and open discussion this weekend::

best wishes
Johannes

>>
From: Scott Taylor [fst44 at hotmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, October 22, 2011 6:08 PM


Hello:

SPEED UP LEADS TO SLOW DOWN AS IN GRID-LOCK:  HYPER [wave] LEADS TO HYPO [particle]:  THESE ARE NOT MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE BUT MUTUALLY INCLUSIVE ASPECTS OF TIME, SPACE, MASS AND WEIGHT [inertia]:

 A propos the late, great Marshall McLuhan, in the year of his centenary: with electronic computerized speed-up there is no social group, no age group, no private, no public, et cetera.  There is only a bathetic attempt to validate the last orgasm relative to the next orgasm.

As a result, there is currently a growing movement slated towards activism involving the deceleration of techno-culture.  The more complex the cognitive problem the longer it takes to solve it.  Some forms of reflection demand meditative states of psycho-physiological habitation.  When meditating at gamma brain wavelengths there is greater connectivity and entrainment of cognition toward transparent states involving cerebral “binding” or the seeming transparency of all phenomena.   All of the neurological and other communicational connectives in the human body move electrically at about the speed of sound, and are whacked out of human prospective by communications moving more rapidly.   Sonic boom is possibly what has led to electromagnetic bust when it comes to techno-culture.

Ours is an age which privileges instantaneous forms of communication and of accelerated discovery with the caveat that the far greater bulk of discoveries are not implemented or synthesized into any whole, process or pattern except in terms of political-economic and techno-cultural imperatives.  Some have suggested, like the late Barbara Tuchman and Jane Jacobs, this results, in essence, with a new time-less, space-less dark age.  It is a dark age in part because the holistic observation, intellection and implementation which are the result of longer forms of duration are ignored.

Take for example the findings of scientists at the Gran Sasso and Opera (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus) that there are neutrinos which have been detected as traveling sixty-billionths of a second faster than the speed of light.  That finding raises the possibility of sending information back in time, hence, destroying all notions of universal causality.  So what would it mean to destroy universal causality at speeds greater than light speed?  What possible advantage could that hold for a biome?

Also, there is no such thing as a personal identity or self which isn’t constructed apart from environmental interactions, properties of association and dissociation, as well as social, cultural and historical events.  The major purveyor of such interaction is human language.  Whatever distorts, displaces and/or transforms language phenomenology does the same with any sense of personal identity or self, as well as the status quo and all forms of myth and consensus.  Each new telecommunications medium distorts, displaces and/or transforms the communication of percepts, concepts, and social constructs and customs, including general human mores, in other words, conventions that embody the fundamental values of any group.

What is troubling is that there really isn’t any such thing as a culture when we are talking about speed-up and digitalization.  What happens is that the whole takes on the aspects of the universal but without any standards or scales of being with which to measure its qualities and quantities with any meaningful resonation.  There isn’t any Piaget available to monitor normal ontological and epistemological developments.  For example, Sherry Turkle’s attempt to plot new notions of psycho-physiological pathology involving electro-digital computational communication devices is pathetic.  Ours is an age of value judgments without any values.  Notions of ethics or morality are obsolete.  The Thought Police won’t be able to think with any kind of authenticity, authority or autonomy.  Autopoiesis?   Give me a break.

The internet is often referred to as the engineered digital superstructure for a supernatural tactility, when in fact it is post-sound or post-audile-tactility.  The illusion and delusion of the internet is that we are able to reach out and touch or experience what we would not be able to do so otherwise.  Of course, in terms of commonsense this is true, but in terms of the counter-intuitive, internet experience is nonsense and false because it is decontextual, or sans time and sans space.  What is skin when it is neither discovered in time nor explored in space?

With the introduction of telecommunications technologies, there is no longer any common causal measure for patterns of consensus relating to psychology, physiology, sociology, culture and scientific advance.  There is the illusion and delusion that problems occurring in one context can be solved by beings experiencing another context.

Also, there is a troubling new development regarding normal psycho-physiological co-ordination and orchestration involving the ability to bring the senses and the muscularity behind sensibility to an appropriate closure, as in “Stop, Look and Listen”, as in teaching the mind-brain-body to decelerate without causing injury or harm.  Find the following an illustration of this as – I hypothesize – instantaneous, non-stop, non-look, non-listen electronic digitalization desensitizes the body toward taking any contextual stand, whether grounded or not [emphasis added]:
Deceleration Mechanics: A Lost Art http://www.elitefts.com/documents/deceleration_mechanics.htm
By Jason Riddell, Head Strength & Conditioning Coach, American University
“No, I am not talking about the grease monkey at your local garage who just FUBAR’ed your brake job and now your car sounds like it’s grinding steel on steel as you approach a red light. I am writing this article because my experience of late has shown that the ability of my athletes to decelerate their body weight, then use that potential energy and translate it back into kinetic energy accelerating out of a jump or turn has been lost. This problem is something that I have had to address with the high prevalence of ACL injuries especially within my female population.
“First a little background, the sports with the highest occurrence of ACL injuries for female athletes are in order gymnastics, soccer, basketball, field hockey, volleyball, lacrosse, and then softball. For men, it is close between football and wrestling. According to the 1999 article by M.L. Ireland women are 2 to 8 times more likely to have an injury than men. You may be asking why? The answer is comprised of a multitude of intrinsic factors such as “hormonal influences, intercondylar notch width, joint laxity, limb alignment, muscle strength, neuromuscular activation, ligament size and extrinsic factors such as excessive shoe-surface interface friction, sports activity, training/conditioning level and equipment (4).” With all these variables the ones we as strength and conditioning coaches can control the best for our male and female athletes are lower limb alignment, muscle strength, neuromuscular activation and training/conditioning level. I will come back to this later but let’s just look at what typically happens when the ACL tears.
“Commonly, the athlete runs, suddenly stops, and then turns, thereby causing a deceleration of the lower limb, a forced hyperextension of the knee, or a forced tibial rotation, resulting in injury to the ACL (3).” What I see typically with my athletes is when jumping they land on the balls of their feet and end up with their knees out over their toes, then jump back up. This lends to the majority of the work concentrated on the quads and not letting their hamstrings, glutes and hips take the majority of the impact force. In simplest terms they don’t sit back when landing, and that leads to big problems down the road. “It is the synergistic relationship between the ACL and the hamstrings that activates to decrease the shear forces at the knee during pivoting and jumping motions (5).” “In contrast, the quadriceps acts antagonistically to the ACL, encouraging forward displacement of the tibia relative to the femur. The contraction force produced by the quadriceps can produce forces in excess of what the ligament can handle, predisposing a person to ligament tensile failure (1).” These facts elucidate the two most prevalent problems I see with my athletes when they enter the program. The first is posterior chain deficiencies in athletes are so common that I have come to just expect it and know that it will be a priority in their training program. And second is poor jumping/deceleration mechanics.”

For the moment I rest my case.

Thank you for your attention, 
best regards, 
F. Scott Taylor

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