Walking

RELATED TERMS: Actantiality; Derive; Enaction Paradigm – Cognitive Science

“Only thoughts which come from walking have any value.”

(Nietzsche, 1998: 9)

Nietzsche, in the above epithet, is arguing against the over-valuation of a sedentary life, as does, in another context, Arendt argue against the valuing of the contemplative life over and above the active life. While thoughts which come through sedentary contemplation are not dismissed as having no value, nevertheless, the emphasis here is on the moving body as the generator of thinking and meaning. The body, moving through and interacting with an environment thick with material signs of many valences, is the focus of attention. There is no simple body-mind duality here. The body is in the midst of a mutable, multi-dimensional cognitive enactment involving several orders of intelligence, from the bio-semiotic to the digital semiotic through the semiosis of language and culture.

Rebecca Solnit (2001) comments that, “thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard to do. It’s best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking.”

She continues, walking “strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. It is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals”.

Walking and Speaking

Michel de Certeau (1988: 97-99) argues that the act of walking has the same relationship to the urban system as the speech act has to language or to the statement uttered. Walking has, de Certeau contends, a threefold ‘enunciative’ function. 

Firstly, it is an act of appropriation of the topographical system by the pedestrian. It articulates or carves a ‘my space’ from the midst of the common, communal or shared space. In that sense, it stakes a temporary claim for an ‘inappropriable’, in Agamben’s terms. Agamben (2016) suggests that the body, language and landscape (place) are inappropriable in as far as they do and do not belong to me.

Secondly, walking is a spatial acting-out of the place, a realisation or actualisation of it as place. 

Thirdly, walking implies relations among differentiated positions. Movements serve as a mode of addressing other pedestrians, initiating a dialogic ‘contract’ with them to which their movements respond.

The pedestrian act of walking, considered as analogous to the speech act, has, according to de Certeau, three characteristics that distinguish it from the spatial system: the present; the discrete; and the phatic. 

Firstly, while a spatial order organises an ensemble of possibilities or affordances, that is, directions in which one can move, and interdictions, that is, obstacles which prevent movement in particular directions, the walker actualises some of these possibilities. The walker makes such possibilities exist and emerge. However, the walker also may move these possibilities around and invent others, transforming or abandoning certain spatial elements. The walker makes a selection, actualising only a few of the possibilities offered by the constructed spatial order but also increasing the number of possibilities and prohibitions, by, for example, creating shortcuts and detours or by forbidding themselves to take certain paths.

Secondly, in acting thus, the walker creates discreteness by making choices among the signifiers of the spatial ‘language’ or by displacing them through the use made of them. The walker condemns certain places to inertia or disappearance while composing others with spatial choices that are unusual, rare, accidental or illegitimate.

Thirdly, in this framework of enunciation, the walker constitutes, in relation to their position, a near and a far, a here and a there, as well as, it might be added, a now and a then. This location, a here-now in relation to a there-then, implied by walking and indicative of a temporary appropriation of space by an ‘I’, also introduces an other (‘you’ or ‘they’) in relation to this ‘I’. Thereby, a conjunctive and disjunctive articulation of places is established. Such places are sustained by movements considered as phatic communication, a series of ‘hellos’, ‘well wells’ and ‘uh huhs’ that initiate, maintain or interrupt contact. 

Walking and Pedagogy

For a discussion of the relationship between walking, embodiment and pedagogic practice, see Jarow (2002: 23), who notes that, “the scholastic traditions inherited from Descartes, and from humanistic disciplines trying to prove their worth by imitating the natural sciences, do not favor embodiment. Mind is to be developed and sharpened; a reasonably healthy body is needed to carry the mind on its way, but the two shall rarely if ever … meet.”

Jarow describes how he used his ‘peripatetic experiments’ walking through the Vassar College campus to bring to attention the ways in which an engagement with the terrain and the environment can deepen our understanding and experience, in this case, of Buddhist traditions. He comments, “The teacher and the text pale before the panorama of nature. There is no need to sit, study, and memorize concepts here; for they are being coded into the body.”

The relevance for design, particularly of environmental design, is clear. Designs work with graphic, linguistic, embodied and environmental codes as part of the processes of hypomnesis, as both memory and cognition.

References

Agamben, G. (2016) The Inappropriable, in Kotsko, A. (tran.) The Use of bodies. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp. 80–94.

De Certeau, M. (1988) Walking in the city, in Rendell, S. (tran.) The Practice of everyday life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 91–110.

Jarow, E. H. R. (2002) ‘The peripatetic class: Buddhist traditions and myths of pedagogy’, Religion & Education, 29 (1), pp. 23–30. doi: 10.1080/15507394.2002.10012290

Nietzsche, F. W. (1998) Twilight of the idols, or How to philosophize with a hammer. Translated by D. Large. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Solnit, R. (2001) Wanderlust: a history of walking. London, UK: Penguin Books.

Additional Reading

O’Mara, S. (2019) In praise of walking: The New science of how we walk and why it’s good for us. London, UK: Bodley Head.