August 28, 2009 · 10:25 am

acts of enclosure

Though not much of a swimmer, I was interested in this until I saw their caps, which reminded me of this. More Acts of Enclosure in the new style, in which an activity open to any human being–going for a swim, going for a paddle, moving for pleasure in a landscape–is repackaged & generously returned to the participant after being stamped with some organisation’s mission statement. Last week you could go to the beach & have a good time. This week you go through the shabby temporary portal they’ve erected on the foreshore to “the Blue Gym”, just one of the thousands of new outside interiors provided for your leisure in the UK, a facility owned & branded by a loose affiliation of interest groups, local authorities, health & safety lobbies, & equipment manufacturers. Welcome to your landscape. There’s just a few sensible rules on the noticeboard there. Play safe & have a great time.

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5 Comments

Filed under outright politics, the postmodernised landscape

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5 Responses to acts of enclosure

  1. MikeM
    August 28, 2009 at 12:26 pm

    I have been thinking about this, after our last exchange. I see what you mean (though I might add that we would also seem rather to want to see sometimes an untrammeled tiger than a fellow human even symbolically being helped back to the goodness of their cell, sinew, bone and muscle memory but on the whole I think it’s deffo 1-0 to you).

    But where to start? It’s hard for me to enter in on a cultural critique of the sorts of things you are pointing out without the general anxiety that I would be pandering to a breed of cultural pessimism, and entertaining the spectre of a brooding, mis-timed fin de siècle moroseness.

    I am not sure that we are over-privileged, maybe over-nourished – but still physically underfed, lacking stimulation in the broader non-cognitive sense. But then you might be adopting a language of rawness and toughness, so that you could start to tear away at the cosseting and the closeting – and that has its own dangers.

    I may be heading straight into enemy fire here but I wonder if it isn’t time for the spirit that lay behind Dan Beard and Thompson Seton to walk abroad again? Still, a friend of mine who works for the Woodcraft Folk recently told me merrily that her bunch didn’t really “do” camping, so that I suppose such groups these days hardly even entertain outward-bound activities.

    But I suppose we are still stuck with – when is a cultural contrivance not a cultural contrivance, and how long will we be able to stave off a certain elitism as we become more and more aghast at a dumbfounding mediocrity? Perhaps I should come clean and ask the way to the new Monte Verità, and stop wringing my hands at the fate of the masses? For once I am not being facetious. I just don’t know where to put myself.

  2. uzwi
    August 28, 2009 at 3:05 pm

    I think we’re at cross-purposes here, MikeM.

    Any group descended from Wandervogel thinking is performing as much of an act of enclosure–the turning of a common space, or commons, into a pseudo-inside space so that it can be measured out to others, either for overt profit, or ideological profit, or the kind of status-satisfaction individuals get from controlling the way a space is defined & used–as the new groups I’m trying to identify. There’s no difference between the Woodcraft Folk & the Blue Gym folk: they’re just selling a different ideological definition of the space.

    My point is simply that everyone must have the freedom to swim in a river without the act being marketed to them as “wild swimming”. The label is a danger because it’s the first step towards commodification.

    The councils, lobbies, sports-regulatory bodies and swimming-hat manufacturers can’t take “wild swimming” indoors to control it as a commodity & meter it out to the participants in paid-for units (although that was ably done to rock climbing, which thought of itself as a “wild”, fully exterior activity, across the 1990s); but they can construct the kind of linguistic & cultural enclosure around it that will allow them to take profit in other ways.

    In this sense, & in lots of others, the UK outdoors has been moved relentlessly indoors over the last two and half decades.

    I don’t see how this observation has anything to do with elitism. What I am trying to disentangle–from political, commercial & media constraints–is the individual human freedom to decide to go swimming, or walking, or riding a bike without that action being a privilege granted by someone else and/or a source of profit for someone else.

    The difference is between the activity as an action & the activity as a captive resource which is then offered back under the terms of whatever group has captured it.

    I’m going mad here, trying to find different ways to say this…

    Anyway, the tiger is much the same, although a much sadder example. Just as going for a swim in a lake has been turned into “wild swimming” and given a logo & a special kind of hat to buy, the tiger has been turned into an image of itself. Something that used to be powerful in its own right is turned into an image of human power, which is then, more often than not, used to sell things. The difference, for now, is that you can actually still go swimming in a stream; whereas soon there won’t be any tigers–not as agents able to define their own space by using it.

    People should be encouraged to live lives that automatically include defining exterior space by using it to swim in, run across, climb on, jump off, plant up, trip over, etc etc. Marketing isn’t an especially good way of doing that. Neither is setting up a regulatory body. If you want a Monte Veritas–& god forbid I should supply one–it lies somewhere in the idea of allowing kids to play outside from an early age. (It isn’t any good your replying “but…”. I know all the arguments against that, too. The weirdest thing about the deep ideology of all this is that the postmodern generation, despite its insistence that there’s no such thing as a hard fact, was the the same one that invented the safety culture… Don’t you see a certain conflict there ?)

    I think this is a potentially endless wrangle you & I can have; but I suspect it may be less interesting to others, so maybe we should take it into email ?

  3. MikeM
    August 28, 2009 at 3:24 pm

    uzwi
    I agree with you, and the point where the agreement convergence comes in for me rests on the notion of the cultural contrivance I mentioned. How to exhort without falling back on marketing-like mantras. Happy to take offline though.

  4. Aaron White
    August 28, 2009 at 3:53 pm

    I’m fascinated by this conversation, largely because I’m such a product of shopping-mall culture that I’ve long taken cultural and linguistic enclosures for granted.

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