Today’s classic example of how to grip the outside with a rhetoric that deftly turns it into an extension of the inside. But the outside is already there; it is not a “free gym”. The concept of an outside is the last of the commons; a bit more of it is enclosed every time someone writes an article like this. I can’t say how unpleasant it feels to be encouraged to exploit the outside as an inside–to be given permission to exploit it that way–by someone called Lucy; or by someone who sells me back the commons as my membership of their Green Gym. (Or at present, of course, White Gym: expect valuable lifestyle insights on that from a Lucy or two if the current media end of the world, Big Freeze Britain 2010, lasts for another whole week.)
Fascinated by: the responses to Barbara Ehrenreich’s Smile or Die, which indicate that people all over are waking up to the wankfest they have enjoyed for the last 30 years. Listening to: The Books, courtesy Deb & Tim. Eagerly anticipating: the arrival of The Stone Tape from LoveFilm (I want to watch it again, but not at £50 for a secondhand DVD). Trying to avoid finishing: Notes from Walnut Tree Farm. Deakin has joined the list of authors good enough to ration. I’ve got sufficient unread Nemirovsky to last a couple of years. A powerful list to make would be of writers you wish you’d measured out across your life instead of binge-reading their entire oeuvre in three weeks when you were twenty seven. If I’d been a bit more abstemious with HE Bates he would easily have seen me through.
What a scumbag. I’m sure she’s lovely. They had another article up recently – maybe yesterday – that wound me up in a similar way, something about how you can be free of the office, make the whole world your office, work on the go, yada yada, everyone’s so well connected. I’d rather have a factory job I can clock the fuck out off at 5 o’clock, you know? Or in my case, a shop job. But whatever. It’s bad enough with the rest of the world being, you know, a human world – designed, built, structured according to intensely ideological schemes – but at least, until the other day, it wasn’t an *office.* What sort of lunatic thinks that’s a good thing???? Oh gawd, I thought. It really is the enclosures tightening. Fence builders. Badiou says we’ve been living through another Restoration. He’s not wrong, is he?
Lovely Lucy’s ideas seem pretty ahistorical. Weren’t gyms mostly an attempt to bring the outside inside? Why exercise in the woods with the mosquitos and rattle snakes and precipices when you can run in place in the safe air conditioning, I imaging the idea went. After all, fitness must commoditized. Now that all that’s failed so obviously and everybody is obese, outside is a nice place to be again.
Whatever. I snowshoed up a mountain yesterday and I didn’t see anyone enclosing the commons. (In fact, I saw a bunch of poorly dressed people scurrying off the mountain to head inside.) You might be able to enclose the concept of outside, but not mountains themselves. Mountains are Lucy-proof.
I don’t know though. I may be missing the point. I tried reading the linked article, but my eyes kept going crossed. Must be some sort of defense mechanism.
Hi fred & dave
>>Must be some some sort of defense mechanism.
I seem to lack it. I smell commodification in the wind. Also something slightly less palpable, in which the money side of the transaction is second or third order, or not even present. Depending on who you are–lifestyle journalist, funding body, activist, safety officer, whatever–it’s a slice of some other pie. A chance to monetize your hobby, status, a mission statement above your name. Don’t ask me to explain, I can’t get closer than this idea that people are being resold something they already have, because that creates the conditions for an industry, & an industry isn’t just money. The lifestyle journo gets a little slice of the new conceptual space she helps create.
Nobody’s going to sell you a membership of the Green Gym, Dave, because you’re already fully in possession of it as what it is. You have agency in that space.
Dave, I was born after gyms were invented, in 1986, when Thatcherism was already doing rather well and, well, isn’t the gym a Thatcherite invention? So that ‘ahistorical’ remark amused me – maybe I’d have thought of it first of all, if I hadn’t been born at a time when the Restoration was already well underway…
All of this makes me want to read Mark Fisher, AKA K-Punk,’s book even more. Is this not capitalist realist in some essential way? It’s horrible, regardless.
But your day out on the mountain sounds lovely, Dave. So some things are still okay. Pessimism is an infantile disorder, and all dat.
FH/s
I agree about the epidemic of positive thinking – you’ll find it’s not just Americans that are experts at this though – my own experience tells me that this type of irrationality pervades the daily thinking of a lot of Asia. On the other hand, the criticism coming the other way pins its hopes on what is perceived as a very lazy scepticism, all talk and no walk, which is seen as very pronounced in the European sphere. The outside starts where the skin leaves off, and even our own bone and sinew is lost in the trackless world of the projected intellect.
And there’s a fine line between denouncing media hype and not taking things actually very seriously, proffering instead a compelling flippancy. The big freeze is largely just the outside barging its way in, into homes, farms, onto motorways, into the workplace, journos or no. The outside has not even registered for most people for years, and I for one welcome its jolting effect. Try sitting in the garden and absorbing prana in this lot. It’s a Canute moment, and I am glad it’s here.
“Marched to the gym”? Oh dear. Compulsory games with a nice pashmina. I thought we’d consumed enough mascohist commodities under Thatcher.
That Forest School team all have AbbaZombie ™ grins, and you sense Lucy (her name means “light”: there’s just no bleedin’ end to the irony, guvnor) got an erotic but tasteful shiver just typing the word “outdoors.” All a bit Wandervogel, isn’t it?
As someone once said, if there’s an original thought out there, I could use one right now.
Hi MikeM, exellent point–
But the Big Freeze isn’t one, is it ? It’s not frozen enough & it hasn’t lasted long enough. It’s this week’s passing fiction that suits both media & media audience (for whom it’s a form of flattery–look how hard your lives are, the media croon, & always send us your pictures so we can show them to you). The outside has only been able to barge in so effectively because over the last 40 years we’ve begun to see it as a convenient extension of the inside–our expectation is that all environment is built environment, & that, as such, it owes us something, that it’s responsible for us in some way. Or that, at the very least, the various social organisations responsible for the environment are responsible for us. Thus the insane anger over the local councils’ “failure” to grit roads.
Part of my point is that concepts like the Green Gym are pivotal in the process of internalising the outside–making it safe & biddable, requiring it to be as predictable & utile as an inside. That’s why Dave is Lucy-proof: he has a powerful familiarity with the mountain, he’s able to work with its demands rather than expecting it to be made safe for him; his expectations of it are realistic. We need more Canute moments, just so we can understand how unreasonable our behaviour & expectations have become. (Lara is better at being pissed off about this than me, see her 06.01 rant at Unreal.)
http://www.breathing.com/
Hi Paul. Brilliant. I think I’ve wet myself.
And in other commodification of desire:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/6963383/Foxy-Roxxxy-worlds-first-sex-robot-can-talk-about-football.html
Sadly, he looks exactly the kind of man who’d realise that object – and who’d limit his Other to such a boring topic of talk.
>>That’s why Dave is Lucy-proof: he has a powerful familiarity with the mountain, he’s able to work with its demands rather than expecting it to be made safe for him; his expectations of it are realistic.
No, no, no. No powerful familiarity here. You wouldn’t think so either if you’d seen it when my map blew away on the wind. Just blew right out of my numb fingers as I was trying to figure out if I wanted to bag another peak. My mouth was just agape with surprise for a second – then I thought “screw it, I’m not in the mood for a headlamp finish anyway” and followed my tracks back out.
Apparently the outside even barges into the navigation of itself.
Still, inept as I may be, I like mountains because they’re so demanding. Rolling hills…you can pave those and put up shopping malls and condos. You can even chop down a rainforest. What kind of outside allows itself to be treated like that anyway? It may be that, for rolling hills to register, you have to have more nuanced instrumentation than me. I just like being clobbered by big mountains.
>>Apparently the outside even barges into the navigation of itself.
Wouldn’t have it any other way, Dave.
uzwi – thanks for that. I think fredhale hits the nail on the head: “a human world – designed, built, structured according to intensely ideological schemes”. Yes, ‘intensely ideological schemes’ – the ghost of commodification may be banished and evaporate even from the humanly crafted world if you start from the position of an alarming and feisty observationalism (if that word exists beyond its formal meaning in philosophy), with any action following on from watching, rather than from considering.
I actually walked to work this morning, and was thinking about this blog so much I nearly missed a perfect circle of green gingerly biding its time under a fir-tree. I don’t care if someone calls this the Big Thaw. Let the shaman shake his rattle and mumble. I saw it first, and that sudden flooding of the retina is beyond the power of words or ideas to stem.
There’s a pub I go to every now and then in Brighton. It’s called The Office.
I mean, for fuck’s sake.
MikeM: I think seeing is considering. uzwi: I think you’re a little hard on poor Lucy (and why shouldn’t she be called that?) She and the Guardian have to find something to hang the ads off of. It’s not just about the outdoors, the non-human: their standby approach is to commodify, to reify everything. Witness the “get fit by walking” supplement that came with last Saturday’s paper, which introduces its recommendations of £80-a-pair footwear with the revelation that “There are many shoes specifically designed for walking.”
“There are many shoes specifically designed for walking.”
I suppose it’s because you can’t bottle air and thereby enforce some kind of artificial scarcity on something naturally abundant. So you flog *kit*, instead.
julianr – I think I added you, a while ago, on wastebook – which manages to commodify *connections* between things rather than anything itself, reifying the connections themselves into a substance: pomo capitalism par excellance – out of a slightly desperate desire to “network” with photographers. Hope you don’t mind.
Uzwi – how’s Pearlant coming along? My NY’s Resolution is to write another, a lot shorter and a lot better than the last. I have a chapter so far, and some notes. But today I am going to try and write a short story.
That breathing.com website is horrible. Just saw it, after writing my comments about commodifying air. Never underestimate capitalism. It’s a kind of necrotic innovation, a deadhanded creativity in the art of staking fences. My gawwwwd.
Hi julianr
Sure. But for me the concept of conceptual enclosure lights it into clarity. Also I guess I’ve thought longer & harder about the outdoors (my concern with which is perfectly human thanks very much).
I also think there’s something else there–though I only seem to be able to get on the edge of saying it–which requires the inside/outside idea, & the idea of a kind of meta-commons. If you collide those concepts & sort through the debris, there’s this clue. I’m not sure it’s to do with commodification per se. It exists prior to that, it’s something people have always done & can’t stop doing, & commodification is only an example of it. “Big Freeze Britain” steals your experience & sells it back to you as the news; but for me it’s not precisely the selling back that’s the issue. There is some sort of violation of your common right to experience. Even if they simply gave the Big Freeze back, there’s still something degrading about having it stamped with their imprimatur. Here’s what to think about snow.
I nearly used that “learn how to walk” supplement for the basis of today’s rant. Then I thought (a) I’m not getting anywhere with this, time to forget it for a while & let yr unconscious do some work, maybe it’ll come out as fiction; & (b) Paul’s breathtaking example–above–renders most others obsolete.
I apologise for sneering at Lucy’s name, but not for sneering at her ideas.
Hi fred
Yes. But you also flog “safety” & “training”, for instance, both of which issue from a deliberate reconceptualisation of the activity & its surrounding circumstances. The paradigm is cycling or rock-climbing in the 80s. You sell an identity. You sell a meme. That act of reconceptualisation–and its non-economic payback to the reconceptualiser, its non-economic theft from the punter–interests me more than the obvious commodification.
Pearlant is jumping off in all directions, a bit like a busy jaunte-stage in The Stars My Destination.
uzwi – “There is some sort of violation of your common right to experience.” Absolutely – for me I also see this in the way people have been helping each other out, approaching neighbours they don’t normally speak to, assisting total strangers; there’s an act, or part of an act, something unscripted and unprompted by nothing more than the equivalent in relationship terms of being physically hungry or thirsty. And then the car is pushed off, or the inundated path cleared, and people stand about, uncertain of themselves again, and their right to be together as they test what happened against what someone else has imagined or had replicated (“is this the ‘Dunkirk spirit’?”, “Are we ‘pulling together’, now?”, “is this my ‘community’?”). They lack the language to describe and offer that moment to themselves, since they suddenly no longer feel sufficient.
julianr – well, I mean just: start with a rock, any individual rock, rather than the idea of rocks, or a picture or photograph of rocks, or musing on rocks – stub your toe against one walking about the place rather than wield the stub of a pencil to depict one, or read poetry about rocks (and I will now admit that unc’s post about the observed quality of light a few weeks ago makes *much* more sense to me at this minute, and I withdraw my own argument about it standing for something else possibly in the reader’s mind that the author might never have intended to proclaim or convey, but would still effectively communicate ‘light’).
MikeM: rock, shale, clay, soil, sand, ice, crystal, clump, mud, coal, metal – which is it? You know, immediately, because you’ve learned to identify these things when you see them; or rather, you only see them at all because you can identify them – if you couldn’t you’d see something else, or nothing. I’m not saying this should alter your experience of the perfect circle of green. That’s what makes life worth living.
uzwi: I know it’s not just about the outdoors, or commodification, taken strictly: you’ve blogged about ‘mid-life crises’, among other concepts, on similar lines, no? Perhaps, as I say above, it comes down to the primal act of naming. Was that when it all went wrong? But the, could we think in any way that we would recognise without it?
Don’t apologise to Lucy. She’s a fucking adult. Would you apologise if she was a bloke. For Christ’s sake. If she wants to make her name writing absolute shit, let her. But she must accept the consequences.
Sorry. I was suddenly hit by a surge of rage.
Meanwhile, Paul, I think I’ve just wet myself too. Thank you for assaulting my rage. Of course: I should have been breathing. Must remember that next time I take to the Walthamstow Marshes Lifestyle Space Place… they’ve got a really good deal on at the moment. Run twice round the marshes four times a week, and you learn to breath and defecate properly.
Bloody Lucy. Wasn’t the skull of the first human called Lucy too? Poor First Lucy. She’d be turning in her grave.
P.S. Bit unfair though to be slagging off ads about expensive shoes given that Uzwi (respek and all) regularly wets himself (don’t you Mike?) over all sorts of shoes and gadgety things that probably cost quite a lot of cash!
P.P.S. Why don’t any women ever write anything here? Are they all too busy with their lifestyles? I wish I’d been born a bloke.
Hi Lara, I think you’ll find there are High Levels of Irony & Self Pisstake when I do it…
& I’m certainly not trying to reconceptualise anything for anyone. My beloved Innov8s aren’t all that expensive, just very, very good. So light, you know ? But always there for you when you need support. Fantastic up hill. Strengthen your feet. & really, I don’t think they wear too quickly considering the weight of the materials. Did I show you my 315 gram pair ? I love to feel the lacing system just tighten over the bridge of my foot &
Sorry, where was I ? It’s not the cost of the gear I’m ranting about, it’s the attempt to market walking as an activity requiring a coach & a technical shoe.
>>P.P.S. Why don’t any women ever write anything here?
Maybe the shoe porn puts them off.
As a fellow Inov8 enthusiasist, I feel obliged to point out that, when Inov8 advertises that “Next time, the mountain kneels before you”, they mean it. There’s nothing to deconstruct there. Nothing subliminal. No subtext. Just some kick ass shoes.
I’m so thankful for that. I resent having to figure out what my gear is really trying to say to me, much less what it’s really trying to be.
You see, when I put on my Prana pants I’m still not any closer to understanding what “Born from the experience” means. Did I not exist before I put those pants on? And North Face’s “Never Stop Exploring” ad should be appended with “unless the low grade crap you bought from us has already fallen apart and let you down in which case…whatever…have a doughnut or something you loser”.
Hi Dave. I agree. While “Born from the experience” is clearly bollocks, “Next time, the mountain kneels before you” is one of those rare self-evident truths that shines out from the general muck of human experience. I always puzzled over the original bollocks slogan, from Chouinard in–was it?–the late 70s: Think Pink. We never could figure out what all that was about, but they made ok ironwork.
I like a North Face tarpaulin bag & so far one hasn’t fallen to bits on me. Mind you, it’s fair to say I haven’t done much exploring lately.
& remember: “Once it gets into your blood, off road running is a powerful narcotic. Technical off road running shoes from Inov-8 are your only hope of coping with this painful addiction.”