Any political
revolution, as history has vividly proved so far, is bound to end in terror and
dictatorship. But social revolutions have the quality of being inevitable as
our life rapidly changes due to technological progress, resulting in social
change as well. But in this essay I do not intend to discuss either. Instead, I
want to highlight what I see as the way to disobey the kind of rule we all our
subjected to. And, in short, I see this last resort of resistance in doing meaningless
and naturally unbound things such as walking. I will try to show the importance
of activities that do not bring profit and do not have any practical use in the
way it is understood in our society in countering the dehumanizing nature of
our everyday life.
1. We all tend
to travel every day. We commute to school, to university/college, to work and
when our day is off, we go back. In doing so, people either choose to use their
own cars, either they use public transport. Either way, streets are full of
cars and busses, people have to wait, they get angry and try to relax, they
dream of other places, of a different world, where the person in question would
be able to drive at maximum speed seeing no obstacles. Travelling to work or to
school is seen as an inevitable if uncomfortable part of everyday city life.
What is the underlying concept behind it is that commuting is yet another way
of control. Here we see nothing new if we're acquainted with the theory of the
French philosopher Michel Foucault. First of all, if you have a car and use it,
you are subject to individualization (i.e. your individual and unique number
plate, your driving license with your personal information), then you are
subject to rules, which if you disobey, you are punished, and finally, by
controlling parking you are pretty much easy to track from home to work to
home. If, again, you use public transport, the system is a bit different,
however, you are once again fully subject to control – CCTV, e-tickets and
conductors make sure everything happens as it should. The level of
individualization is less obvious, however, it is still easy to find out who
you are and when were you in a given place or where were you in a given moment
in time. Control and surveillance – things that frighten us when we are
presented with the way they function, yet governments tend to picture it in
different terms – in terms of 'safety', 'obeying rules', 'you're better off
that way' etc. What, in short, is the way to disobey the rules which govern our
lives? Walking. Walking is a rather useless activity in a world where only
speed and efficiency is what matters. Traveling by foot distances you from the
crowd as it's an intrinsically solitary activity, even if you eventually meet
some people on the road you take – they have their own, individual routes and
for the bigger part you will follow your own individual path. It also loosens
the ties that hold you together with society- being together in a packed bus,
wasting your time in a traffic jam, having to take into account fellow drivers,
being visible and responsible – when you walk, you are alone, you are as free
as our society allows you to be, probably. And this kind of activity does not
have a price tag on it too – a dangerous thing for our capitalist society,
where everything depends on the price and is commoditised. Such consumer
capitalist 'alternatives' as Northern walking is merely a way to present an
intrinsically free thing in an oh-so-different way, that is labelled cooler and
requires, surprisingly enough, buying certain sticks that legitimate your
walking as something of a valuable experience. Otherwise, walking instead of
using public transport or any transport whatsoever is basically the kind of
resistance that is hard to supress. It is a way to disobey the monotonous rule
of society of control, a concept used by Gilles Deleuze.
2. Walking is a
unique way to stray away from beaten paths and find your specific way of seeing
your surroundings. Instead of a mediated mode of seeing, looking out of the window
of a car or a bus, when travelling on foot, you find a less mediated way of
perceiving your surroundings. Furthermore, you can regain control over the
tempo and rhythm of your movement in the city. When driving or going by bus you
are not free to choose your own rhythm, even traffic lights are controlled to
help you maintain a certain rhythm. Walking gives you a chance to claim the
indefinite. It is the opposite of fixed routes and roads, controlled by traffic
lights in the city. Marshal McLuhan argued, that media is what extends a given organ
or limb, or our power. However, the other part of it is that the power we
extend via media is also ‘amputated’ and ‘anaesthetised’. Thus we lose it, but
get a ‘better’ version of it. For instance, when you choose to drive, instead
of walking, your body and legs suffer in the long run – you are less and less
able to walk, in fact. Your body is weakening, because you got this remarkable
power to travel huge distances without putting in all your strength. And think about
planes then… One might think these changes are for the better, however, we are
plagues by obesity and various disorders related to fatigue these days
precisely because we can get away with less and less physical activity.
Ironically, we now pay for a chance
to legitimately exercise (in gyms), whilst also paying for our car or bus. We
got so much, but we lost a lot as well. So, walking enables you to break this
vicious cycle and reclaim your freedom to stay indefinite. And it is important
psychologically as it is physiologically. Mind you, I do not propose trekking
as a sport. It is an experience that escapes commodification. And a return to
being without the cheesy and completely fake ‘back to Nature’, proposed by
Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Friedrich Nietzsche, himself a huge fan of walking,
rightly scorned Rousseau’s idea. Trekking is a way of avoiding the Gaze of the
system and a way to reclaim your freedom to wander and find your own way of
seeing your environment without paying and without succumbing to the logic of
the market.
3. Here we come
to the strangest part of this essay. I have already mentioned ‘wandering’ as an
important term. When Friedrich Nietzsche, whom I have already mentioned above,
spoke of ‘eternally being childish’, he proposed a specific way of seeing the
world as a game, as play, without claiming any fixed identity and following
rules imposed on us from without, nevertheless, following some rules, as a game
by definition is linked to certain rules. He as well spoke of nomadic modes of
thinking. This idea was the picked up by the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze.
Even more interesting things were argued by the Situationists, especially their
leader Guy Debord. The Situationists talked not only of detour as a way to subvert the society of the spectacle that we all
live in, but also of unique ways of movement in the urban environment, that
should be taken to be a battlefield and thought of in terms of strategy and
tactics. I find it hard to accept the term ‘nomad’ as a suitable term, as well
as seeing a difference between the idea of prowling through the city along so-called
paths of least resistance and being a wanderer. A traveller, I propose, is an
individual, who travels without any objective, without any goal. A nomad, on
the other hand, as I understand, is a person, dependent on his or her
surroundings in one way or another (think, for instance, of a homeless person).
A traveller is someone who has no need to go anywhere, but no place to stay. He
is sort of mad – if allowed, he would go on and on, or turn around, if he wants
to. The world revolves around him in ways that are strange and unexpected to
him and escape conceptualisation. He can walk and walks as if there is a place where he goes, but there is no such place.
Nevertheless, the Situationist idea of a detour,
of walking where you please in an urban environment is very important to the
everyday revolution, a thing they spoke of as well. It is precisely that
walking is useless and inefficient, a horrible thing nowadays, and brings us
back to the indefinite, to places lost and found, where we have been so many
times, but never actually noticed anything; I remember walking along the road,
going home from school, and seeing a trolleybus packed full with people – I
might have been amongst them, because actually I should have taken it to the
place where I would catch a bus – and I felt relief, that I can walk on the
side of the road and do not have to be part of this mess all of them are into.
So, trekking is
a way to subvert your everyday routine and break the rules of efficiency and
the logic of the neoliberal world we all live in. Walking is a philosophical
activity, because it enables you to find your own way of seeing things and
reclaim your ability to walk, to look around, to wander. It is a way to get rid
of constraint we are forced to submit to. Losing ties with the society of the
spectacle and with herd morality, with pitiful feelings of powerlessness, that
you feel stuck in a crowded bus, is better than being efficient and a useful
part of the system, a cog in the mechanism. As Jean Baudrillard observes, even
fatigue is a way of resistance, as well as animals in farms, who break the rule
of profit by being inefficient and killing themselves – for they have nothing
else to do. We can do something and that is to resist in our everyday lives.
Walking is one particular way of doing it. It is antisocial, but a
philosophical way of life is not to be comfy.
