Walking into the Void

A Historical Sociology and Political Anthropology of Walking

Arpad Szakolczai, Agnes Horvath

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138214484
• eBook ISBN: 9781315445908
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The book starts by discussing the significance of walking for the experience of being human, including a comparative study of the language and cultures of walking. It then reviews in detail, relying on archaeology, two turning points of human history: the emergence of cave art sanctuaries and a new cultural practice of long-distance 'pilgrimages', implying a descent into such caves, thus literally the 'void'; and the abandonment of walking culture through settlement at the end of the Ice Age, around the time when the visiting of cave sanctuaries also stopped. The rise of philosophy and Christianity is then presented as two returns to walking. The book closes by looking at the ambivalent relationship of contemporary modernity to walking, where its radical abandonment is combined with attempts at returns.

The book ventures an unprecedented genealogy of walking culture, bringing together archaeological studies distant in both time and place, and having a special focus on the significance of the rise of representative art for human history. Our genealogy helped to identify settlement not as the glorious origin of civilisation, but rather as a source of an extremely problematic development. The findings of the book should be relevant for social scientists, as well as those interested in walking and its cultural and civilisational significance, or in the direction and meaning of human history.

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PART I

Walking into sense

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1

THE EXPERIENCE OF WALKING

The earth, that is sufficient,
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are,
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, ‘Song of the Open Road’ (1990: 121)

While our interest, over the past three decades and even beyond, was always centred on the modern world, its modality certainly had a decisive change, which can be indicated by a shift from the ‘question’ of modernity to the problem of modernity. Growing up beyond the Iron Curtain, in the grim world of ‘existing socialism’, trying – always or eventually – to ignore it, escape it, consider it as if it did not even exist, one needed some kind of stable reference point; and Western, liberal-democratic modernity, with its presumed or evident freedom and well-being, seemed to offer such a standard. However, the values of such an ‘existing modernity’ increasingly proved to be mirages as well, and not merely because of the original, certainly exaggerated expectations.

We started to walk not as part of a research project, but rather as a deliberate effort to get respite from daily life. This is why we did the Camino de Santiago in 2011, completing it in – by the hour – 30 days exactly, and repeating the experience in three long-term pilgrimages in the three following summers. The idea worked perfectly, but we found much more than we were hoping for: we realised that such walking trips, when done properly, do not simply offer a possibly unparalleled mode of good feeling. Walking is to return to be guided by our own heart (Szakolczai 2017b), the most physical and metaphorical essence of our being, so we have to do nothing else but start walking, and continue it, for quite some time. It is indeed so simple; and those of us humans who cannot walk can also be helped by those who returned to walking.

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The significance of walking is increasingly realised by a number of people. Two of them have a special importance for this book, and will be used as our main guides: Frédéric Gros, a French philosopher and an editor of Michel Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France, who recently wrote an international bestseller on the ‘philosophy of walking’, offering ‘a dense reflection about the transformative experiences of walking and the peripatetic sources of being’ (Roman 2014: 59); and Tim Ingold, an anthropologist with an interest in archaeology, who similarly pioneered a sociology and anthropology of walking.

Walking, understood as a mode of moving by foot, in our world is primarily considered as an obsolete, archaic mode of travelling. This is borne out by the most appropriate and strongest form of ‘empirical’ evidence: changes in the use of language. The most basic term used for ‘walking’, or using our feet to advance, in English, this most modern of languages – both in the sense of being, together with Russian, the most recent of languages, but also being the language of the flagship countries of advancing modernisation, England and the United States – is ‘to go’. However, by our time, the basic meaning of this term became identified with travel, in the sense of ‘changing place’, and as most of us ‘moderns’ do not travel by foot, the term capturing such an activity became ‘walking’.

Yet, strange as it might sound, there are considerable forces in modernity that promote a shift of attention to walking as an activity. Two examples will be evoked right here, at the beginning. The first is a relatively sudden and certainly unanticipated and unexpected reappraisal of walking that happened in England, just about 1775 or at the moment identified as the Sattelzeit or threshold instant of modernity both by Michel Foucault (1970) and Reinhart Koselleck (1988), which can be furthermore associated with the first self-conscious modern movement, the Romantics.¹ The second takes place in our very time, with an again relatively quite abrupt, surprising and steadily increasing popularity of long-distance walking pilgrimages, in particular – but not limited to – the Camino de Santiago. Thus, while walking is the non-modern form of travel par excellence, there seems to be a paradoxical return to walking with the onset of modernity, and exactly by some of the protagonists of high modernity, in contrast to ‘early modernity’ or Foucault’s ‘classical age’.

The situation is quite similar concerning the link between archaeology and modernity.² Given that modernity is usually identified with the contemporary and the ‘new’ (see German Neuzeit), any reference to archaeological evidence, especially the Old Stone Age, seems profoundly out of place in any effort to come to terms with the modern world. Yet again, the very possibility of a serious study of archaeological evidence was only rendered possible in modernity; and in such sensitivity and interest there is even something profoundly modern – though it can be traced to the Renaissance. Thus, in an interest in archaeology, just as in walking, there is something modern beyond modernity – not in the sense of the post-modern running further ahead, which is only a version of hyper-modernity, but in the sense of going ‘ahead’ by going back, to history and traditions, and thus seriously overcoming the excessive obsession of modernity with the ‘absolutely new’ – a kind of ‘anti-modern modernity’.

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Finally, while any concern with religion, spirituality or the divine is certainly the radical opposite of secular modernity, there is something profoundly, even disturbingly modern about ‘religion’ as well – at least, certainly concerning Christianity. This concern is again not new, but particularly ‘modern’, and in the best sense of ‘anti-modern modernity’, going against the early modern/classical age/Enlightenment age concerns, to be connected to the ideas of Max Weber, the single most important classical founding father of sociology. According to Weber, the source of modern capitalism, and modern culture in general, is not merely a (presumably, supposedly) secular Renaissance, but rather a religious revival promoted by Protestantism. The point can be made even stronger by rendering explicit the evident and arguing that modernity, even modern secularism, is a peculiar consequence of Christianity, a point that was made in the strongest possible sense by Nietzsche. Modernity indeed is not multiple, though of course it has several modalities, but rather singular: it is a ‘post-Christian’ modernity, paradoxically produced by a Christian ‘renewal’, Protestantism – thus, the possibility of another religious renewal, from within the same sources, can never be ruled out. Indeed, the most ‘modern’ of countries, the US, is at the same time one of the most religious of countries, and even the source of a ‘fundamentalist’ renewal, again for better or worse. The idea of ‘multiple modernities’ is an ideological point, attempting to minimise the importance of Europe, just as the ‘axial age’ concern, in spite of all its importance, had a similarly evident and similarly untenable attempt to question the epochal significance of Christianity.

The significance, and exact modality, of this issue will be discussed throughout the book. While this cannot be anticipated here, and while of course no final solution can be envisioned concerning such ultimate matters, a fundamental point of clarification can be offered here. The issue is not to assert, positively, the foundational significance of Christian faith, at any level – though neither will this be questioned or ‘bracketed’; rather, it is to positively problematise – and emphasise the significance of – the rejection of the Christian sources of the world in which we live, and thus of our own identity. We became what we are, for better or worse, through our own Christian culture. Denying this amounts to a paradoxical self-negation and self-hatred. It is our responsibility and task to draw the consequences of this fact – but this, as a start, assumes that we cannot ignore the profound responsibility of ‘Christianity’ for modernity, nor the higher existence.

The modern scientific vision of the world, and methodological perspective, however, is problematic not simply because it cannot capture a concrete event and experience in its singularity, but also because science can only deal with whatever really exists in this world, what is part of some empirical concreteness, while the higher existence indeed cannot be empirically perceived – at least, it is generally believed. It therefore has close affinities with non-existence, or the void – which, however, brings in some unexpected affinities between science and religion, as the void is also the starting point and background of Newtonian science.

This issue is quite central for this book, for understanding the practice of walking and representation as its counter-activity also requires entering the most difficult and tricky question of unreality; the issue where, fortunately, Plato in the Sophist offers some guidance. The point is that in a way the question concerning the existence of the divine has a similar character to the existence of the void. In one sense, the void most obviously does not exist in an absolute form, but it exists as a conglomeratum of the most fluxional existence of corporality; as an enormous emotional charge.

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It is exactly here, where the foundations of the scientific vision of the world are laid down, hoping to exorcise forever any concern with the divine and the transcendent, that the possibility of posing again the ‘existence’ of the divine reappears. This is because such existence, in a way, can be approached exactly like the existence of the void – even in the sense that the divine can be all but identified with the void (at least as an analogy). This implies, first, a recognition that something like god, or the divine, or supernatural beings indeed do not and cannot exist in the usual sense of bodily objects. Yet, as electricity and radiation are material existences, and just as – and here we enter the point of the Sophist – the imagination itself, or any word, impulse or emotion, while not ‘real’ in the evident sense can become real, and even alter reality the moment we formulate or design them in representations, our being continuously communicates and operates by using these electric or radiating charges.

However, the divine – let’s use now this term in a somewhat technical sense, to capture what cannot be captured – has a further characteristic, more closely associating it with the void, and it is that it is not simply of our own making, but somehow is ‘out’ there, outside us, without ‘really’ existing, in the sense of being part of our world. Such affinity between the void and the divine is indicated by the fact that appearances of the divine – epiphanies, hierophanies or theophanies (Eliade 1989; Giesen 2006) – often take place in a void, through a void or due to the void. The most frequent places for epiphanies are mountain tops, deserts or – indeed – caves; weaknesses, illnesses or deaths, depression or other liminal places and moments; occasions where stabilities are dissolved and thus replaced by the emptiness of the void.

And yet, it is exactly here that the radical difference of the void and the divine appears. In the void our senses might perceive the divine; or, such presence assumes our ability of perception. But for this to appear, it seems that there is another condition that must be met: the man who enters the void, metaphorically or literally, cannot be completely empty or void, cannot dissolve himself or herself in the liminal void, but must preserve humanness; the loyalty to one’s character must remain substantial, or even ‘full’: fully present. It is only if these two presences, the human and the divine, meet in the absence of the void that walking as a significant experience can take place.

The relevance of cave art

Indeed, a central methodological concern, guiding our efforts at understanding and this book, was the recognition of the full force of the fact that the people who painted and used these caves were exactly like us. Of course, it is impossible for us to ‘know’ why these caves were painted in the late Palaeolithic, or what our distant ancestors felt while they visited them, but we can assume, and indeed we must, that they in a way were just like us. Any other claim or assumption is unacceptable, inspired by one or other ideology; we have the same feet and hands, the same faces, the same eyes and ears. ‘In a way’ only because they did not have many of our specific modern ‘sensitivities’ as a baggage, but this does not mean that they were less; rather that they were more, in the sense of not having been ‘spoiled’ by those ways in which our perception has been altered due to various technological and commercial developments.

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The strong personal experiential encounter with these works made us, as no doubt so many other people, deeply aware of such a constitutional identity between ‘us’ and ‘them’. It made us realise that the impact must have been very similar, if only even stronger, on them as well, and so they were capable for a similar appreciation of beauty and grace as us. It also made it clear for us that our identity, and thus our genuine and ‘indestructible’ essence as humans, lies somewhere here, and not in some kind of ‘rational thinking’ or self-consciousness, as it is assumed by various modern ideologies. It lies in the capacity of complex experiences, and their adjudication, which we cannot define here, at the start of this book, but which hopefully will become gradually clear as the work progresses.

Given that one of the central aims of this book is to overcome the limitations of being ‘modern’, it is important to formulate here, at the start, the exact problem of this ‘moderno-centrism’ at this level and in this sense. Such moderno-centrism means to assume that everybody is fundamentally the same as ‘we’ are supposed to be – ‘rational’ maximisers of ‘utility’ – except that they were not yet able to ‘develop’ their ‘potentials’, as we are. While this might seem a straw man perspective, only shared by the most extreme believers of neoclassical economics and rational choice theory, it is quite widely shared by many archaeologists who focus on the ‘rational’ strategies our ancestors supposedly followed to make ends meet. In fact, the taken-for-granted current academic ‘modernist’ position is even more problematic, as – while accepting the perspective of such materialist ‘rationalism’ as ‘scientifically’ given – the current consensus also proposes that we should not be ‘judgemental’ about our ancestors, but rather accept their seemingly striking, even bizarre, repulsive practices as just as legitimate and normal, from their perspective, as ours. Thus, we should simply accept that certain cultures buried their dead under the floors of their houses, decorated and used for display the skulls of their ancestors, or even mingled the excrements of small rodents with human remains.

There is something deeply problematic, or even hypocritical, in this combination of assuming universal ‘rationality’ at the level of purely cognitive abilities while pretendi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Praise
• Walking into the Void
• Contemporary Liminality
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART I Walking into Sense
• PART II The Flourishing and Demise of Walking Culture
• PART III Returns to Walking
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Glossary
• Name Index
• Subject Index