Blog Archives
IS SOCIALITY PROMOTED BY THE SPECTACLE?
I am releasing my new fiction novel: Turkeys Not Bees. It explores a near future of capitalism and totalitarianism controlling human evolution.
The story tells how two young people take on the establishment when their sport and then their health are threatened by emerging totalitarian control.
Chance wants to apply his physics training in his job and resists being coerced to run in the hamster wheel of meaningless work and futile consumption. Analogous to Nietzsche’s camel, lion and child, he wants autonomy. Returning to university he meets a champion athlete also doing a PhD, in psychology. He encourages her to coach herself and with Heidegger’s phenomenology she investigates her lived experience of pole vaulting. She improves using Mihaly’s ‘flow’, a psychological condition of optimal achievement.
The Athletics Association, pursuing a policy of levelling outcomes for profit, ban her from using flow. The couple resist.
At the Olympic Games they both catch Covid. The subsequent restrictions on them are oppressive and they join with others in a campaign of non-violent civil disobedience.
Reviewed by
David P Jones – Philosophy Student
August 12th 2022
My blog: martinknox.com
OPTIMAL ACHIEVEMENT IN FLOW
Flow is optimal achievement. According to Mihaly it requires the performer to fully engage with an achievable goal using her performance skills. She focusses on the next part of her decomposed goal. Suspending disbelief and throwing yourself totally into a performance takes courage. Such total commitment may seem reckless to others and can bring jeers in the dressing room before a performance, but seldom after a personal best has been achieved. Flow is absolutely competitive and exposes the weaknesses of others who are less committed and less practiced at achieving their goals. My novel Time is Gold has a runner in Extreme Flow break a world record. htpps://martinknox.com
