ASKING WHAT IF?
AND WHAT ELSE?
WITH CONNECTIVE TISSUES
#SOURCE
:// Doerte Weig, Tensional Responsiveness. Ecosomatic Aliveness and Sensitivity with Human and More
“Fascia is our bodily connective tissue, which extends from the outer epidermis through all skin layers into the depths of our bodies. Fascia tissues envelope muscles, organs, bones, and nerves, thereby forming ‘a continuous tensional network throughout the human body’. This extensive interconnectedness results in a fascinating three-dimensional network, a living matrix, which forms a bodily support structure, an internal ‘soft skeleton’. At the same time, it transmits information inside the body as a communicative continuum. (…) Together with the nervous system, fascias form a body-wide mechanosensitive integrating signalling system. Most importantly, the fascia tissue-system is an amazing viscoelastic continuum with both/and qualities. Viscoelasticity means fascia is both viscous, so resistant to deformation, and elastic, so able to adapt and resume its shapes after stretched or compressed. Both/and means fascia combines qualities commonly perceived as opposites, as it is, for example, both liquid and solid, made of fibre and fluid.
Fascias are intelligent-adaptive and respond to the way a person lives and moves by becoming more or less permeable or solid. (…) In specialist terminology, fascias are relevant to interoception, the sensorial relationship people have with their own body, and proprioception, meaning how a person senses where their body is in space.”
“The term technogenesis describes the understanding that humans evolved with their technologies. Said another way, our original technologies, techme in Greek, are our senses, our sensorial capacities. Types and practices of sensory perception are socio-culturally distinct and cannot be understood or defined universally. For example, the five senses model (touch, taste, smell, sound, sight) dominant in Europe, Northern America and other parts of the world, is not universal. Most cultures have more than five senses, and cultures can have up to 29 senses, including for example the above-mentioned proprioception and interoception, or a distinct sixth ‘sense of balance’.
It has been suggested to theorize fascia as a social network metaphor, but the viscoelastic qualities of bodily connective tissues, which are always moving-adapting and never the same, precisely deny being turned into a model or metaphor. As I suggest, both with regard to scientific research methodologies and fluid ontologies, and with regard to lived life, the fascial qualities of shifting-sliding and tensional responsiveness can become a deep, quotidian, processual inspiration, especially when asking what if and what else.”