Episode 43 - Walking

Transcript

David: 0:06

Hi, I'm David Pena- Guzman,

Ellie: 0:08

and I'm Ellie Anderson. Welcome to Overthink,

David: 0:11

the podcast where two friends,

Ellie: 0:13

who are also professors,

David: 0:15

put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.

Ellie: 0:18

Because big ideas are within everyone's reach. This may go without saying, but David and I recommend listening to this episode while walking. That said, no need to save it for a walk. You can always just think about it the next time you're on a walk if you happen to be driving or on the subway or somewhere else. Um, but I will say that a lot of our listeners have actually said they like to listen to Overthink while walking. It seems to be particularly popular among folks walking their dogs.

David: 0:52

Or walking to work, which is how I listen to podcasts. And, you know, Nietzsche does say that only thoughts that come from walking have any value. Uh, for him, there is a deep connection between, uh, philosophical ideas and the practice of walking itself. It's just that nowadays we do that through podcasting of course.

Ellie: 1:13

Yeah, where we're just like sort of a spewing into listener's ears, what they should be thinking about rather than letting them think for themselves. I know. I actually do wonder about the way that when so many of us are only taking walks while listening to podcasts, it might get in the way of some creative thinking. So maybe actually listen this episode and then go take a walk without having headphones in your ears, but in terms of this Nietzsche quote: okay, so, so you said David, only thoughts that come from walking have any value. That is a very bold statement and it actually reminds me of this one time when I was with my friend, Allie, on the Nietzsche walk in Eze, which is a small town in the south of France. And we were like, oh, this is so great. We're going to do the Nietzsche walk together. It's from the beach to this cute little town. And she and I had studied Nietzsche together too. Cause she's also a philosopher and it turned out it was a hardcore hike that we - David: Uh. Middle of July. This was not a walk David, this was a hike. We showed up to this cute little town drenched in sweat, absolute trolls. And I mean, I'm not really into hiking as a form of exercise. And so it was just a very stressful.

David: 2:22

Well that checks out and I'm kind of surprised that you didn't expect it to be a hike because Nietzsche loved the mountains and uses a lot of mountain imagery in his writing. So for example, I think that when Nietzsche says that only thoughts that come from walking have any value, that claim really has to be clarified.

Ellie: 2:40

Limited to strenuous hikes.

David: 2:42

It- I think he means something like hiking. What we today would call hiking, going up a raucous- rock. Is that the term? Raucous, uh, path or-

Ellie: 2:51

That's not the, that's not what you mean, rocky?

David: 2:54

Yes. A rocky path where there's an element of danger and that's where you stumble upon ideas that have any merit, according to Nietzsche.

Ellie: 3:03

Yeah. I mean, that's just not, that's not my vibe for walking. I definitely prefer a city walk and I love walking around cities. For instance, when I lived in New York, oh my God, you could just, you just send me walk in for the day. I have nothing better to do. And I would just find little places to pop into. If I'm with a friend, we'd have great conversations while walking, you stop in and park for a second, just walking as a way of exploring cities is totally delightful to me. And in fact, it's really important for me as somebody who lives in LA, not-

David: 3:34

Uh, yeah.

Ellie: 3:36

That I-

David: 3:38

You basically have to go on urban hikes in LA, like-

Ellie: 3:42

No, no, no, I, well, yeah, I mean, there are a lot of hills here, but where I'm going with this is that it's very important for me to live in neighborhoods in LA that are walkable.

David: 3:50

See. Yeah, no. So on the other end of the spectrum, I see city walking largely as instrumental, rather than as an aesthetic experience, where you get to take in urban life. In the city, I can never get in the right meditative mental space, uh, maybe Nietzsche would want me to get into. For that, I really do need to go out on that Nietzsche walk that you're talking about in France. I need to go out into the mountains. I need to go out, a long walk that is somewhat strenuous. That's where I get that meditative experience. So I really would've loved to do that Nietzsche walk or hike that costs you so much pain and trouble.

Ellie: 4:31

I think I just don't like it when walking is the focus, it sort of produces anxiety for me. I need to be distracted from my own walking by say, looking at cool houses or looking at, you know, the cityscape surrounding me, which is different. I mean, I have done formal walking meditation where you kind of just move back and forth usually with just 10 to 20 steps. But even, even there, it's not about the walking, it's about the meditation that walking provides. Maybe that's what you were saying.

David: 5:00

Yeah, maybe. Um, although I will have to say that in recent years, I've actually changed my tune a little bit about urban walking ever since I moved to San Francisco because San Francisco, unlike LA, is such a walkable city, right? One of the things that a lot of Europeans say about the US is that it really only has one real city, which is San Francisco. And by that they mean- well, no, by that they mean a walkable city where you can get from neighborhood to neighborhood in 15 minutes. So most other cities are either too gigantic for that be viable or too small to count as a city. And so I have learned to enjoy and appreciate the beauty of urban walking much more recently, but I'm definitely on the hiking side of the spectrum.

Ellie: 5:49

You take your hikes. I'll take my walks in Greenwich village.

David: 5:53

Uh.

Ellie: 6:02

Today, we are talking about walking.

David: 6:05

Does a recent book argue that walking led to the most distinctive achievements of human creativity?

Ellie: 6:11

How can the figure of the wandering flaneur help us understand the freedom of walking in cities?

David: 6:16

How does panic over gender expression make certain forms of walking dangerous for people from marginalized groups?

Ellie: 6:27

Just earlier this year, the paleoanthropologists James DeSilva

published a book called First Steps: 6:30

How Upright Walking Made Us Human. And David, I thought this book was really interesting because it suggests that walking is responsible for many of the achievements that we associate with human societies. You know, we're, we're the only bipedal mammal and walking, DeSilva argues, is the gateway for much of what makes us human as a species. And this includes our technological abilities, our thirst for exploration, our use of language. And even, this was most surprising to me, compassion and altruism.

David: 7:01

And by now this is a relatively mainstream argument in evolutionary theory, which is that our ancestors' transition from essentially being on all fours to an upright bipedal position, had the effect of effectively liberating the hands that then could be used for manipulating objects, for creating tools, especially with our very fancy opposable thumb. And that the birth of human technology, which on many evolutionary readings is what separates us from other species, begins from that standing up at some point in our evolutionary past.

Ellie: 7:41

Even more than standing up, it's actually walking upright because there are a lot of other mammals who stand upright temporarily. They'll stand on their hind legs to survey the landscape or perhaps to appear bigger than they are for a predator. But it's humans who undertake this weird task of falling forward as mammals, you know, where we are actually walking for prolonged periods of time. And DeSilva says that we don't know for certain how and why walking originated, but we can make a lot of claims about what followed from walking, what walking made possible for us. And there's a lot to the story here, but one thing that really struck me was his account of how walking up right by allowing us to move out of the trees where we had been living in order to avoid predators. Yes, exactly. And onto the ground, required a totally different social organization, especially around parenting young babies than humans had previously had. So he talks about how chimpanzee mothers usually have their baby chimps on their backs for the first six months of life and will barely let any other chimps even touch the young baby, but that's not the case for humans. And it couldn't have been the case for humans when we started to walk upright because human babies just can't cling on the way that Chimp babies can cling on. Also, this is partly because we don't have hair-

David: 9:04

Hair to-

Ellie: 9:05

We, we lost that. Yeah. We lost the body hair over the course of our evolutionary heritage. And so he hypothesizes that human mothers had to develop trust in their companions by saying, for instance, Hey, I need to go on the ground and hunt. Can you take care of my baby up in the tree while I do that?" So he says that this is the origin of trust, cooperation, our sense of reciprocation, even.

David: 9:33

One thing that I really like about his analysis of the history of walking is that he draws our attention to the ways in which walking actually made us quite vulnerable as a species. If you're a four legged animal that runs with all four legs and you cut one paw on the ground, you know, on a rock or on a shard of glass, which definitely existed in our evolutionary past.

Ellie: 9:58

On a rusty iron nail.

David: 9:59

Yes.

Ellie: 10:00

In the Savannah.

David: 10:02

Um, you know, you could get away with the other three still relatively easily, but once you have that transition to upright bipedalism, you cut one leg, it really changes your relationship to the world. So you are way more vulnerable. And he talks about how the literal movement of the body, the reorganization of our posture, led to a reorganization of our very organs and limbs, which is why a number of things that used to be easy, suddenly become very hard. For example, childbirth is very difficult for our species compared to the rest of the apes. And that's also why we're the only ape that experiences lower chronic pain because we carry all of our weight from our upper body on our lower back on account of being the walking mammal. So-

Ellie: 10:53

Does it also make it harder for us to poop? Is that why we have to use Squatty Potties.

David: 10:57

I, you know, I was just thinking about the Squatty Potty, and I think there's probably something to that, um, because you do have to exert a lot of force, um, you know, like, um, but, I mean, I don't know. I don't recall if he talks about the potty.

Ellie: 11:12

Of our evolutionary heritage of walking upright is hemerrhoids.

David: 11:15

Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Um, but you mentioned Ellie that DeSilva attributes philosophical tendencies to walking. So like thinking and, maybe like concept creation. I don't know if that-

Ellie: 11:30

Yeah. I abstract thinking, creativity, desire for exploration.

David: 11:35

Yeah. And I mean, this is suggested by many philosophers throughout history who found the pace and the rhythm of walking helped spark their philosophical thinking. And I think the best example of this is Aristotle's Peripatetic school of philosophy, which is named after the cloister where Aristotle would walk and talk with his students in the Lyceum. So he would have these discussions with students who would come to study with him. And he would walk around the cloister, which is called the Peripatos, and there was this inseparable connection between philosophical thought and the act of walking itself.

Ellie: 12:20

Yeah. And I wonder if we might connect this to the pace that walking provides. There's something about moving around while thinking that perhaps enables a synchronization of cognition and embodied movement, that I don't know. I mean, I shouldn't say this as an extremely sedentary person, so I don't know if I should say this, given that I actually do most of my thinking while sitting down, but it seems likely that perhaps we should be moving a bit while, while thinking. I mean, certainly Nietzsche also thought so, as we said earlier, and he's far from the only one, aside from Aristotle and his school who loved to walk, a lot of famous philosophers and thinkers emphasize the importance of walking for the development of their ideas. So Darwin developed his theory of natural selection while walking near his house and Rousseau thought almost exclusively while walking, he seemed to have had a fear of the desk.

David: 13:16

Oh, well, I mean, he was also in exile and worried that everybody was after him. So I would imagine that he was not just walking, but actually on the run. No, but you're right. I mean, Immanuel Kant, the famous 18th century moralist, would go on these daily walks at the same time and Kant scholars talk about the extent to which his walks were built into his practice of being a philosopher, right? So there were not these externalities that maybe could or could not happen. It was essential for his thinking that he walked.

Ellie: 13:50

And I also like thinking about the difference between Kant's and Rousseau's walks as analogous with the differences between their philosophies, because Kant had this extremely regimented walk, right. It was at the same time every day. And Rousseau's just out there kind of ambling about.

David: 14:05

Yeah. And I mean, Nietzsche also, all over the place, just like hiking.

Ellie: 14:10

So we have the difference between the systematic regimented walker and thinker and the more romantic out in nature, taking things as they come, kind of walkers and thinkers.

David: 14:20

I'm definitely the cool version of that. I'm the naturalist walker as opposed to the mechanical walker. Um, but we can see that in that the act of walking is essential for a lot of philosophers and maybe a catalyst for human thinking itself. At least if we're speaking in evolutionary terms. And so one question that we might ask here is what about walking gives that this power?

Ellie: 14:48

And I liked that you clarify David there, that it's about walking from an evolutionary perspective, that it provides this ability for the creativity and generative abstractions of thought, because Silva points out that his account is not saying that people who don't walk or who can't walk, don't also think abstractly and creatively. Of course. Um, I do, but I just want to make that explicit because of course, you know, from a disability perspective, we want to be careful about making it seem like walking is necessary in order for philosophical thinking to happen. And I think we can maybe address that in two different ways. The first way to address it is by saying that on the species level, it is the upright walking position that paved the way for our technological innovations. And so DeSilva says, clearly we can have technologies like the wheelchair because the human species developed this high level of technological innovation ultimately, thanks to bipedal orientation. And the other point is that what I'm about to say, I think a lot of what we're going to say in the rest of the episode, doesn't necessarily depend on walking on two feet, right? We're now going to be moving more towards thinking about moving through space and perhaps walking, even as a metaphor for that. So for instance, the philosopher, Frederic Gros, wrote a book about walking. And he said that one of the great things about walking is that it provides for a suspense of freedom. Walking frees us from our everyday cares and from the burden of our identities. And I don't think that that requires actually walking on two feet, right? Like this could also be a wheelchair user moving through space, right, in a country path or in a city street, although unfortunately, a lot of country paths are not accessible for wheelchair users. And so that obviously needs to be remedied in our society. But I think this idea sort of more generally that through walking, we can escape the very idea of our identity would still hold because Gros's point is that walking actually frees us from the burden of our identities. So what's really cool about walking from Gros's perspective, and I think we could use this as a metaphor for various other kinds of movement through space as well, is that it provides a sort of punctuating point away from the daily cares of life. Obviously Gros has in mind here walking for pleasure, rather than walking in order to get from point A to point B. He says that through suspending our everyday worries and cares, we get to have this kind of free play of imagination as we take walks.

David: 17:15

Yeah. And I wonder whether we can even take that metaphor of walking a little further, where walking is not just a stand- in for movement through space, but for any activity that, as you said Ellie, introduces a kind of pacing, a kind of repetitive pacing, and a rhythmicity into the thought process. So that it's even a little bit more broadly applicable than just either walking on two legs or using a wheelchair to move around. Pretty much everybody has access to this expanded notion of walking.

Ellie: 17:48

And at the same time, one thing that Gros says in relation to this, which I'm not sure I totally buy, is that the walking body has no history. It is just an eddy in the stream of immemorial life. And I want to just note that we'll come back to this later, David, this idea that when we're walking, we're able to let go of the shackles of our identity, because I don't really think that that's true, at least for a lot of people. But I do like the general point that we can get this suspense of freedom through walking. It, it provides a break in the day.

David: 18:20

Yeah. And I mean, I think the easiest refutation of that claim that the walking body has no history comes just literally from DeSilva his book on the evolutionary history of walking, right. That we didn't always walk as a species. So there is a natural history there, and according to the DeSilva, that evolutionary history is essential for understanding the cognitive, mental, intellectual, philosophical value of walking even nowadays. He cites research indicating that walking does impact creativity. For instance, he cites the research of Marily Oppezzo , who is a researcher at Stanford who conducted a study of creative thinking after walking, by having a bunch of students list as many creative uses for common objects as possible. So-

Ellie: 19:10

What? Like give me an example and I'll list a few creative uses.

David: 19:13

Okay. So let me give you a hammer.

Ellie: 19:15

Uh, can I, can I use the regular one to putting a nail in a wall? Is-

David: 19:20

That's not creative. That's the normal one.

Ellie: 19:22

Okay. Okay. Okay. Fine. Um, wall decor. Oh my God. I'm so bad at this. I need to take more walks.

David: 19:30

Yes, it's because you're sitting down right now in your closet, recording a podcast, you're in a sedentary mental state.

Ellie: 19:36

And I haven't moved all day. So we need to pause this recording and come back after I've taken a walk. Just kidding. We don't have time for that. We gotta be able to come up with more. Come on.

David: 19:45

Like.

Ellie: 19:46

On. Oh, you could use it instead of a hoe. Oh, break. Oh, you're good at this. You can use it instead of a hoe. You can use it to dig.

David: 19:53

Yeah, you can use it to dig. You can use it to stir soup. You can use it to crack an egg. These are all possible uses of a hammer.

Ellie: 20:02

David. I am ashamed.

David: 20:03

Oh.

Ellie: 20:03

Meanwhile, I plan hikes every day for the next, you know, year.

David: 20:07

maybe you would have underperformed in Oppezzo's study, but Oppezzo also asked a bunch of students to do precisely that exercise. So she would give them an object and ask them to list creative uses for that object. So for example, a Frisbee can be definitely used as a toy for dogs, but it can also be a hat. It can be a plate for dinner, it can be a bird bath, or a little shovel for a making a sand castle at the beach and Oppezzo found that creativity scores improved by as much as 60% after a walk. So-

Ellie: 20:44

Knew it was going somewhere.

David: 20:45

Yes, and I, think it's because walking does activate that speculative side of the human mind that allows you to make new connections in connection to the everyday. And that's just one study that DeSilva mentions in his book. Another one, which we don't need to go into great detail about. He talks about research in cognitive psychology, showing the impact that walking has on memory.

Ellie: 21:11

You and I both need help with that one.

David: 21:15

And there, there was a study that was conducted by Jennifer McDuff at BU, showing that walking, constant walking, regular walks, might stave off the cognitive declined, found in early stages of different kinds of dementia. So there is a clear connection here between walking and what we remember and how well we remember it.

Ellie: 21:41

Interesting. I'd be curious to know what kind of memories she's talking about and also what kind of walk she's talking about, but it does strike me that a lot of times I can remember things better if I can orient them to a particular image. So I can remember oh yeah. That idea was associated with when I was in this particular place, whether it was walking or driving or whatever it might be. And so having that, that image that's linked to the cognitive thought could be a potential hinge point.

David: 22:15

Enjoying this episode? Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Ellie: 22:22

You can also connect with us and other listeners through our Facebook page or group as well as on Instagram and Twitter at @overthink_pod.

David: 22:38

By far the most famous figure of the walker in recent philosophy is the flaneur, uh, who is a creation of 19th century author Charles Baudelaire. The flaneur is someone who wanders the city soaking in the life of the crowd.

Ellie: 22:57

Yeah, the flaneur is such a popular figure among academics, I think, because the flaneur. We're all so sedentary, but we like this idea of the person who's wandering around the city, very romantic figure. And I do resonate with the idea of the as someone who loves walking in the city. And one of the things that Baudelaire says in the essay where he discusses the flaneur, which is called "The Painter of Modern Life," is it the flaneur thrives on the fugitive pleasure of circumstance. So they pass by an interesting scene spontaneously. You might stumble upon a musician who's playing really beautiful music while busking, you might overhear the snippet of a conversation. You might see, oh, I, this one, this one I really resonate with. And it does come up in Baudelaire's essay too, which is seeing people's cool outfits as you're walking on the street. I love, I-

David: 23:48

That. Yes. Um, so there's a way in which the flaneur marvels at the life of the city. So there is this aesthetic, uh, component to their existence and more over they stand by as a kind of witness to what is happening in urban space. And so here, let me read a quote from "The Painter of Modern Life," where Baudelaire talks about the flaneur, which is here conceived as a male figure, uh, unfortunately. So 19th century figure.

Baudelaire says: 24:20

"Out he goes and watches the river of life flow past him in all its splendor and majesty. He marvels at the eternal beauty and the amazing harmony of life in the capital cities, a harmony so providentially maintained amid the turmoil of human freedom. He gazes upon the landscapes of the great city, landscapes of stone caressed by the mist or buffeted by the sun. He delights in fine carriages and proud horses, the dazzling smartness of the grooms, the expertness of the footmen, the sinuous gait of the women, the beauty of the children, happy to be alive and nicely dressed. In a word, he delights in universal life."

Ellie: 25:09

He's having so much fun and he loves fashion. And just the unabashed and flamboyance of this scene, even as it's such a, bougie scene.

David: 25:20

It is a very bougie scene. I- like, the proud horses that carriage is, although my favorite is the sinuous gait of the women.

Ellie: 25:29

But yeah, universal life here is definitely the life of the well-to-do Parisian. But I like this fact that he's just taking in what's around him and enjoying whatever happens to come across his view.

David: 25:42

Well, and I think this is where we can speak about the fundamental passivity in many ways of the flaneur, which is that the flaneur is almost like a palimpsest on which the life of the city makes an imprint. He takes things in, and appreciates the beauty of that, which passes through him. Um, so there is a passivity but also an aestheticism, although it is an aestheticism that I actually find quite dangerous. Um, I don't romanticize the figure of the flaneur. I don't identify with it. Maybe it's a class thing because it's such a bougie scene. Maybe it's a racial dimension because you know, it's a white, French figure, but the notion of somebody who just walks through the city and enjoys the beauty of universal life, almost as a disembodied, all seeing eye just rubs me the wrong way.

Ellie: 26:39

It's funny you say this David, because I came across an article in researching this episode called "Death to the Flaneur," which was published in The New Republic.

David: 26:46

Did I write this?

Ellie: 26:51

No, it's written by Jo Livingstone and Lovia Gyarkye, but in case. This article from The New Republic argues that the flaneur is not a promising political figure. And one of the things that they focus on here is that part of the bourgeois identity of the flaneur is an appreciation from a far of difference without actually engaging in difference. So you might think back to Gros's point, this idea that you lose yourself while walking. I think we see that very much with the flaneur as well. The flaneur is so immersed in the life of the city that they lose themselves, but by losing themselves, they actually not only remain passive, as you said, but they also don't really reflectively consider their own relation, their own positionality in the city itself. By losing themselves, they aren't able to stage an encounter with difference.

David: 27:45

Well, and I think that's where we see the apolitical nature of the concept of the stroll, right? Because I think people who like the figure of the flaneur potentially as a model for political action would argue that maybe being a flaneur develops your sensibilities, it brings you into encounter, say with difference and other neighborhoods. It allows you to appreciate what's what's there.

Ellie: 28:11

Generates gratitude.

David: 28:12

It allows you to throw yourself in the fray, right? Like you jump into the busy-ness of city life. But I actually think that's exactly wrong because the flaneur never actually jumps in the fray. But appreciates it from, from a distance at one remove, right. So I just imagine a flaneur who is literally walking by something like a political protest. And instead of joining the protest and marching, just continues to stroll around the protest, appreciating the beauty of the chanting or the movement of bodies. So there is definitely a distancing and auto distancing that is built into the figure.

Ellie: 28:53

And I think what we're saying here is actually two different points, but they're not necessarily incompatible ones. One is that the flaneur is unable to move into the fray because they have lost their own identity, which suggests that they're just exclusively focused on what's around them in the same way that when I'm looking, I'm not thinking about my own operation of looking, I'm not reflective. So there's an unreflective quality to the flaneur. And then the other is that the flaneur is at a distance, right. They're removed from the fray at which would suggest not necessarily that they've lost themselves, but rather that they are just separate from the scene.

David: 29:31

Well, and we might want to add even another point, which is that the figure of the flaneur doesn't recognize that not everybody can be a flaneur, right? That's another apolitical aspect of this figure. And we might even say that Baudelaire's description of the painter of modern life doesn't take into account the fact that the city space is not accessible to all subjects equally, on the one hand, because not every human subject is a walker. So here we might connect it back to, the very good red flag that you raised earlier about disability and ableism, but also that not all walkers can become visible as walkers in all spaces. So I'm thinking here, for example, about the fact that a lot of people find city spaces alienating, uh, women and people of color. I feel kind of queasy sometimes when I find myself in a space that I know is primarily white or white dominated, where I don't feel as if I can take in the beauty of universal life, because I know I am under a certain gaze, right. It's almost as if this space is watching me rather than I'm watching the space.

Ellie: 30:49

Yeah, I think the flaneur is, is a very interesting figure. I'm not ready to just throw it away, but I think a lot of the fawning affirmations of the flaneur really do overlook a lot of the limits and problems with this figure. And there was a book that came out recently by Lauren Elkin called Flaneuse, and it's about women walkers, right? Like the, women, women flaneurs um, okay. The-

David: 31:17

Walkers.

Ellie: 31:19

Flaneuse. And this book received mixed reviews because it was just as far as I can tell sort of suggesting like women, we too are walkers in the city. And one thing that comes to mind is just the way that as a, as a woman walker, I, I'm often, when I'm walking in a place like New York, which I said-

David: 31:40

You love. You love just to channel your inner flaneuse, Ellie.

Ellie: 31:46

Yeah. But the times when I least like walking in New York City is when I'm getting catcalled and it just totally takes me out of the meditative moment, right? There's no abstract thinking or creativity going on when I'm instantly being objectified by somebody else. And a lot of feminist accounts of catcalling focused precisely on this, the fact that women are jolted out of their own internal thought processes, which are often thought processes of exploration, trying on new ideas, reflecting, by catcalling. And so it's the sense that like, you can't have your own train of thought. You have to be focused on me and the kind of focus that the cat color demands is so different from the focus that the flaneur is able to have on the city street that they're looking at, right? It's an, it's not a kind of aesthetic enjoyment of what's going on around them. It's this usurping of attention and being like, yep, you, you gotta, you gotta come over here, lady.

David: 32:43

Well, because the meant-

Ellie: 32:44

Miss, you're beautiful. To put it very much, the mildest version of the cat call.

David: 32:49

Yeah. It's important to recognize that in order for the flaneur to be a flaneur or a flaneuse, they have to be left alone. That's why I mentioned earlier that the flaneur is almost like a transparent eyeball through whom the city moves, but whom the city does not disrupt. And so it seems that in this case for women, women are subjected to what the French Marxist Louis Althusser would call acts of interpellation, where somebody just like seizes you in the moment, puts a category on you, and demands attention from you. You know, like, Hey, you, woman, address me, man, in the terms that I am setting for the two of us. And so it's this forceful taking you out of that mental space of enjoyment, or aestheticization even, or witnessing, which is a term that we used before, that is not the same for everybody, because it only happens to certain subjects and not to others and not always in the same way as you point out.

Ellie: 33:54

Precisely. And in their article "Death to the Flaneur," the authors argue that we should move away from thinking about the flaneur as this model for what it's like to be an urban dweller in the 21st century and move on to thinking about the cosmopolitan instead.

David: 34:10

What exactly do they mean by that? Because when I think about the flaneur I have a very concrete image of what that figure does. They walk, they go on a stroll. In French, it's a verb, uh, flaner, the flaneur flans, we could say in English, even though that's not really a word, so what does the cosmopolitan do differently?

Ellie: 34:33

The cosmopolitan travels, that would really be the difference. So the cosmopolitan is somebody who's at home anywhere, whereas the flaneur, and this is now my extrapolating based on the article, is somebody who's at home in their city. Uh, even though I did say before that, I do think about the flaneur or a little bit in terms of tourism and travel, but maybe it maybe what I'm really talking about as the cosmopolitan, I don't know, but what what's interesting about their distinction between the flaneur and the cosmopolitan, and it's just quite a short article, but nonetheless, I think they get to a really interesting point, which is that the cosmopolitan doesn't erase themselves. They don't lose themselves in the crowd or in the city, the way that the flaneur does. The cosmopolitan grapples with their identity in their encounters with difference. So they recognize, Hey, I'm in a foreign place right now. I'm positioned within that. And so are other people. And how do I relate to that? So there's a more genuine encounter with difference. I don't, first of all, I'm not sure if I buy this. I think it's interesting, but I haven't fully thought it through yet. But second off for better or for worse, the person I have in mind in reading their kind of cosmopolitanism is Anthony Bordain.

David: 35:39

Oh, I mean, he does travel.

Ellie: 35:41

Well did, rip.

David: 35:43

Course, um, and did you know, I think as far as he was concerned, he was also deeply changed by his encounters with others.

Ellie: 35:53

And tried to approach new places with a sense of humility.

David: 35:56

Of humility and openness to what the interaction might look like. So we might even draw a distinction here between the approach to difference that we find in somebody like Baudelaire, where the self is unaffected by its own encounters with others in public. And Bordain approach, which is you jump into these encounters maybe in order to be changed, right. Not only would the possibility of change, but for the sake of-

Ellie: 36:25

Yeah.

David: 36:26

Changing who you are.

Ellie: 36:27

Yeah. Rather than being a passive witness, which paradoxically, it can be a stance of control. There's an active engagement in it. Acknowledgement of the reciprocity between the cosmopolitan and the place they're inhabiting. We want to provide a content warning for the final segment of this episode. We discuss transphobic and homophobic violence. When I think about my own personal feeling of freedom, I'm hard pressed to find a situation in which I feel more free than walking around anonymously in a city. But as we've said, David, this might be dependent on axes of privilege, and it also might lead to an illusion that the kind of freedom that I feel while walking is the same thing as actually joining the fray in a genuine political sense that is catalyzing revolutionary action. What do you think about this feeling of freedom? Is there difference between the feeling of freedom that I get to have while walking and the kind of freedom that's politically worth fighting for?

David: 37:51

Yeah, I think this is a difficult question because walking is typically such an individual activity, and so it would seem as if whatever freedom we might get from a lonely walk or a stroll through the city is that purely private freedom, right? My freedom to have some time to think about ideas and not really a political form of freedom, but-

Ellie: 38:15

Yeah. Or even if we're walking with a friend too, that would still be a very individualized.

David: 38:19

Yeah. Largely constrained to me and my personal relationships, right. Something that doesn't escape the realm off of the personal.

Ellie: 38:26

Yeah.

David: 38:27

Now the French philosopher, Michel de Certeau has a very interesting perspective here about the kind of freedom that we get when we walk through urban spaces in particular. He argues that you can find that unique form of political freedom in the act of walking, because walking allows you to carve your own path through rigid urban spaces that have been designed for the purposes of social control. So we live in hyper regimented, largely controlled societies where even the most minute aspect of our day to day existence seems to be subject to governmental regulations, legal limits, social expectations, and according to de Certeau, we can open, wiggle our way into freedom by finding cracks in the structures of social control. So we can put our own flavor, for example, on the city landscape by finding shortcuts, by jaywalking, by taking little detours from point A to point B that personalize what is otherwise a purely impersonal expanse.

Ellie: 39:48

My worry about that view is that, although it's super interesting to think about small things that we can do in our everyday lives, that help carve out freedom for us, such as jaywalking, the jaywalker doesn't have power over the way that the street is constructed, right. Or whether there's a crosswalk in place. And so there are still structural constraints and structural productions of power that are completely outside of the walker's control,

David: 40:17

right. And I think that's de Certeau's point is that if our understanding of freedom is not being subject to those transpersonal forces, that we have no control over, then we will never have freedom, right. Because we don't individually construct the layout of the cities that we inhabit. And so freedom for him, it means freedom within these structures. One possible way to think about this is de Certeau's analogy between walking and language. He has some really beautiful passages in one of his essays on walking where he tackles this precise problem, right, that we don't create the paths. We don't have control over the direction of traffic on the streets, much in the same way that I don't have control over the meaning of the words that we use, right? So we inherit language from the past and the meanings of the words that we use are settled and fixed by the time we come into language, And de Certeau says, nonetheless, even though language is also its own rigid, fixed structure, I, as a subject, can find some kind of freedom in language by concatenating different words into different sequences and creating my own thoughts, my own ideas, right? So I can create a poem out of words that other people have used, but in a particular way, in which nobody has ever used them before. And so I can wiggle my way into a kind of linguistic freedom by manipulating the rigid structures that are before me. And he says, we can do the same thing when walking, because when we walk, we are creating a physical poetry, where you create meaning and beauty, not with words like nouns and verbs, but with steps and turns and redirections. So in walking you poetize space.

Ellie: 42:23

I love the idea of walking as poetry, but I have to say I'm not convinced by that analogy because the reason that walking seems fundamentally different to me than the kinds of plays that we can do with language, is in part that walking involves engaging with material structures, such as buildings, concrete, sidewalks, and streets, whereas language, by virtue of its immateriality, it's also intersubjective and shared and has, you know, it's sedimented within our culture. So I, so I do get the analogy to some extent, but nonetheless language, I think, strikes me as more malleable and having more leeway for, for creative development than like, you know, jaywalking, I can jaywalk, but I can't walk through a building. I can fundamentally break down a certain word and, and create a neologism, of course it can't change the fundamental structure of grammar, but I still think there's a difference in kind between them. But I think there's a difference between the materiality of the city and the immateriality of language.

David: 43:25

But what's the difference? Is it just literally the physicality of one and the immateriality of the other? Because one could argue that it's the other way around, that the immateriality of language makes it even more unchangeable, right? I think it would be easier for me to take down a wall or a door than for me to redefine what the word table means in a way that actually registers in the larger linguistic community. I feel more powerless in the face of language than in the face of space.

Ellie: 43:57

Oh, huh? I don't at all. I mean, I think it among my friends, we've gotten neologisms, we've got jokes. We've got nicknames. Youth cultures are all about creating new words all the time and re signifying words in different ways. So I think the ability to re signify words is not only more accessible to a wider number of people, especially those who have less power than others, but it also has fundamentally more leeway for freedom than walking through the city does. sorry to hate on de Certeau. Cause it is an interesting point.

David: 44:30

Yeah, but-

Ellie: 44:31

Not convinced by the analogy.

David: 44:32

But again, I think that the examples that you use make me think of analogs in the realm of space. So for example, think about the book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities by the sociologist, Jane Jacobs, who points to ways in which space itself is resignified all the time, right. She gives the example of stoops, in the Northeast, which were not originally designed, uh, for socializing. And yet all kinds of communities would create a social life by inhabiting stoops in a way that they were not meant to be inhabited or think about the ways in which skateboarders re signify public physical spaces without necessarily changing their physicality. Or the way in which a marching crowd can stop traffic and redirect the sense in which other bodies move in space by reclaiming something that seems unreclaimable.

Ellie: 45:30

Yeah. And I think those examples are helpful. And at the same time, they also reiterate to me what I'm seeing as this fundamental difference, because all three examples that you gave David, the stoops, the skateboarding and the marching crowds, are examples of people in groups that are often persecuted, policed, literally, by using public space in these ways. And, and in particular, if we think about stoops, the culture of socializing on stoops is associated in the Northeast, traditionally with Black and brown communities. And it's very common, especially once gentrification begins in a given community, that police will start fining residents for loitering, and that's a way of getting people off of the streets. And so I guess I'm just, I'm thinking about how the public spaces, can be a place, not just for escaping power through walking, but also for enforcing highly oppressive forms of power.

David: 46:22

But so his language, it's not as if language is free of policing, it's just that the language police is not wearing blue uniforms, right. If anything, you and I, the language police when we grade grammar and we demand syntactical order in the things that our-

Ellie: 46:39

That is- that- there is no comparison-

David: 46:41

of course not.

Ellie: 46:42

hundreds of dollars or arrested.

David: 46:44

Of course, but there, there is policing in both cases.

Ellie: 46:48

No. Policing is a metaphor in the language case and it's literal in the city.

David: 46:53

Well, yes. I mean, maybe we don't want to use the word policing, but people's use of language is often. Regulated in very concrete material ways, right? Think about like the ways in which students are told to speak or not speak in certain, public spaces, you know, like dialects accents, grammar, so on and so forth. And so I'm just trying to resist the notion that language, because of its immateriality, is a site of more easily achievable freedom and personal individual agency, as opposed to space, simply on account of its physical weight.

Ellie: 47:29

And I do want to hold on to that distinction, although I think the analogy gets us somewhere because I like the idea of walking as poetry and physical space. I think that's cool. I just, I don't think you can take the analogy very far.

David: 47:42

Meanwhile, I want to turn it around and think about language itself as a massive grid that orders people and to only allow certain kinds of movement. But yes. So I- here, we just agreed to disagree on how far the, the analogy goes.

Ellie: 47:57

Yeah. I mean, I read an article recently by the philosopher Quill Kukla about how policing the pace of people's walking can really be an exercise in power and privilege. This was really interesting for me because they start off their piece by talking about how they used to pride themselves on walking really quickly in a place like New York, you know, New York is I think the prime example of this. There's a moral judgment that's cast upon slow walkers in New York city space. And the faster you walk, the cooler you are, the better you are. I can always tell when somebody has recently moved from New York to LA based on how fast they walk and Kukla argues that this is a super ableist idea. This equation of the fast pace of a walk say in New York city with moral goodness or with at least adhering to social norms, because it overlooks people with mobile difficulties, it's very normative in terms of age, right. It excludes often elderly people and children, and in general it just reinforces ableism and ageism in all kinds of ways.

David: 49:01

Yeah, and I take it that Kukla's point is that there are many aspects of walking that lend themselves to appropriation by various power structures. So the fact that what seems like a perfectly neutral thing, like walking fast through a city space, can in fact have these repercussions. Another place where we see walking as a site for the application of power, rather than maybe a conduit to freedom in the way that de Certeau believes is in connection to homophobia and transphobia and the fear over what I'll call the sissy walk. Um, you know, that kind of walking that registers as too effeminat e, and one extremely tragic example of this, of the politics of walking, was that 2008 murderer of Latisha King.

Ellie: 49:56

Yeah.

David: 49:57

Latisha King was an eighth grader in Oxnard, California. And was the student who presented as a girl, wore heels, often wore a women's clothing and she was murdered by one of her classmates, in a brutal way. And the philosopher, Gayle Salaman wrote a book about this case, looking at the ways in which walking was at the center of the murder, because initially the story was reported as a case of a romance gone badly. So it was presented as a case of gay panic, you know, that gay panic defense, where you realize that somebody is making advances on you, you panic and you murder them. And Salaman says, this is actually mistaken because it's not as if Latisha King made advances toward the person who ultimately murdered her, but rather that the murderer panicked over Latisha's very own gender expression, her own way of inhabiting space and yeah, her gender expression in short. Latisha was killed, not for her sexual orientation, but because of the way she walked, because she had that sissy walk, that effeminate way of moving the hips and wearing heels and so on and so forth. And in her book, Salaman analyze s what happened in the courtroom after the murder. And one of the really intense things is that the defense lawyers actually made the argument that Latisha's way of walking was so obviously intentionally provocative that she was sexually harassing the boys in her grade merely by the way she walked. So there were a lot of arguments made by the lawyers about the details of her walk, just how aggressively she would sway her hips, just the sound of the heels clacking on the tiles in the hallway. And so they, painted this picture of the sissy walk as a form of harassment. of the cis-gender boys in her classroom.

Ellie: 52:17

We have so much going on here. I mean, this is a whirlwind of victim-blaming misogyny, misogynoir, transphobia, and I just think the way that the defense was leveraging, as you said, David, the sheer fact of walking as a form of harassment, the idea that rather than being the victim of harassment and violence, she was the harasser. Yeah. Yeah. She was the harasser because of the way she walked, I think just, there's no clearer expression of the strongly socially coded norms we have around walking. And who gets to walk like what, when and how, and walking in gender in general is so intertwined, right?

David: 53:03

Yeah. But I mean, it went so far as the lawyers literally pantomiming her walk in the courtroom, like literally calling up the ghost of Latisha King and embodying the way she walked as a way of making the jurors presumably by tapping into their own conscious or unconscious transphobia, come to the conclusion that this is in fact an act of aggression, because what else could it be when somebody that in their eyes registers as male, expresses a gender that does not seem to match their expectations of what that is. I think it's yet another reminder of how problematic it would be to follow Gros in thinking that the walking body has no history because there are these-

Ellie: 53:53

Absolutely.

David: 53:54

racism and transphobia and so on and so forth.

Ellie: 53:57

Yeah, Latisha King's death gives the lie to the myth of the flaneur.

David: 54:01

Oh yeah, definitely. And even if in this particular case, sexual orientation was not at the center, as Gayle Salaman points out, there is also a connection between sexual orientation, violence and walking. A while ago, Judith Butler, a famous queer theorist was interviewed for a documentary about gender performativity, about which we have done an episode in the past. And I want to play a clip from that documentary that is specifically about the gender politics of walking in connection to sexual orientation.

Judith Butler: 54:36

There's a story that came out around, I don't know, eight years ago of a young man who lived in Maine and he walked down the street of his small town where he had lived his entire life and he walks so with what we call swish, uh, kind of, uh, his hips move back and forth in a feminine way. And he started to be harassed by the boys in the town. And soon two or three boys stopped his walk and they fought with him and they ended up throwing him over a bridge and they killed him. So then we have to ask, why would someone be killed for the way they walk? Why would that walk be so upsetting to those other boys that they would feel that they must negate this person, they must expunge the trace of this person, they must stop that walk no matter what. They must, uh, eradicate the possibility of that person ever walking again.

Ellie: 55:36

I was struck by her suggestion that there's something about this case whereby not only do the perpetrators want to stop the boy from walking, but they want to stop him from walking ever again. There is something that's so violating to their sense of propriety in social space that they need to stop this boy from any future walking. And the way I'm inclined to think about this is in terms of the necessary reproduction of gender norms into the future. This idea that the ideology of masculinity depends on a commitment to continuing masculine norms into the future.

David: 56:19

Into infinity.

Ellie: 56:20

Yeah. And that the only way to stop this from changing is to kill the boy who's rebelling against it. Like the fundamentally most violent form of gender conservatism.

David: 56:32

And I mean, we could say that these boys were not just trying to kill the walker, they were trying to kill the walk itself, which in this case is a stand-in for a femininity, right. It's femininity or effeminateness or queerness that becomes also the target of this murderous attack.

Ellie: 56:51

But femininity as performed by someone they don't think should be.

David: 56:55

Correct. Not femininity period, but femininity by certain bodies. And Butler goes on to talk about how cases like these, where walking is police to the highest degree, uh, which is the border between life and death, ought to make us question really what it means to comply with gender norms, because a lot of us do comply with gender norms and the meaning of that compliance in a world in which a violation of social norms around gender can mean this kind of backlash. So are we really complying versus are we being coerced into complying.

Ellie: 57:37

Absolutely. Well, and I think that that very distinction, the idea of coercion versus compliance is blurred in the policing of social space. It's blurred in a lot of cases, I think, right. What we feel to be compliance is coerced compliance. But you know, I think what, what I'm getting from, from our discussion is that walking is very much a sight of potential freedom, and also very much a site of potential coercion and enforced compliance. It has this capability for liberating us from the shackles of our everyday lives, but it also has the ability to destroy the people who are really trying to liberate themselves from those shackles when their attempts at liberation are not recognized as legitimate by the people around them.

David: 58:27

Yeah. And we might connect this to DeSilva's evolutionary narrative about the origins of walking, because for him, it is walking that brings us into communal life into new forms of social interactions that differ from say our evolutionary ancestors and in doing that, it brings us face to face with the possibility of those relations being normed and police and subjected to all kinds of power maneuvers. We hope you enjoyed today's episode, please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Okay.

Ellie: 59:09

You can find us overthinkpodcast.com where you can email us with questions, feedback, or even request for life advice.

David: 59:15

You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter at @overthink_pod.

Ellie: 59:20

Thanks to Samuel PK Smith for the original music, and Trevor Ames for our logo.

And to our listeners: 59:24

thanks so much for overthinking with us!