Democratic Ideals and the Politicization of Nature

The Roving Life of a Feral Citizen

N. Garside

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349435739, 9781137008657
• eBook ISBN: 9781137008664
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Democratic Ideals and the Politization of Nature introduces the feral citizen as a response to a perceived need to revitalize the disruptive, critical, and exploratory nature of democratic culture. By learning from the traditions of aimless walking and by embracing a consciously feral method of political engagement, radically-democratic citizens can prompt political moments that create conditions where the primacy of the political can be performed, realized and defended. Ultimately, this book seeks not to solve the problems and paradoxes of democracy but to assist in unleashing and celebrating them. Garside concludes that using the methodology of feral citizenship inspired by environmentalism and democratic articulation to reprioritize the political within the green public sphere, citizens can reclaim necessary (and welcome) tensions between representations of nature and political citizenship.

C H A P T E R 1

WHY WANDERING

In the next three chapters, my intention is to tap the metaphorical richness of the image conjured up by the idea of the wandering feral citizen. To assist in this task, I explain the inspiration behind the choice of the three particular terms central to the idea. My rationale is simple, wandering equals aimless movement, feral equals disturbance, and citizenship equals primacy of the political. Individually, each term carries particular inferences that help clarify and guide the characteristics and activities that inform feral citizenship and free feral citizens. Collectively, they represent a radically democratic approach to political agency that focuses first and foremost on the intrinsic value of democratic politics.

Wandering, for example, is a figurative—and at times, real—practice of feral citizenship inspired by wanderers who embodied, recognized, and defended the privilege of aimlessness and noninstrumental exploration. Wanderers have particular political relevance as they have often defended the pleasure that accompanies their existence, at least for a time, outside or in temporary ignorance of the ever-worsening conditions of their respective societies. While rarely intentionally political, I show that wanderers represent important figures with innumerable implications for radical democratic citizenship that become most apparent once politics, like wandering, is itself acknowledged as a terrain for pleasurable exploration and expression.

My particular focus in this chapter is on defending and clarifying the need for the distinctiveness of wandering in the face of the present-day entanglement of new social movements, which is making it particularly challenging for progressives to speak of freedom in times of clear and present need. I do this not by claiming the superiority of wandering over other socially necessary activities, but by defending aimless movement as a particularly important component of political agency needed for the realization of a healthy and critically engaged democratic culture.

To better situate the discussion of wandering in present-day pluralist conditions, I bookend the chapter by drawing parallels between the reduction of walking to treadmill training, and the reduction of democracy to procedural decision making. After discussing the joy of wandering I suggest that new social movements, as important and essential as they are to pluralist democracy, are often more akin to pilgrimages than they are to wandering and thus, threaten to replace politics with more instrumental excursions in which spontaneity and adventure are replaced by end-focused and (at least partially) self-interested actions. In each case, most of the activity occurs within the confines of what I, following Guy Debord (1988) in Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, refer to as a typical dynamic (state/economy/media) that excludes the amateur, inefficient, unpredictable, and pleasurable attributes of wandering and active politics.

AMATEURISM AND THE TREADMILL

It has often been said that ideas need legs—a prophetic statement if there ever were one—yet with no enticing places to walk, legs get weak and walking becomes more a burden than a pleasure. Ideas settle and representatives of those ideas become comfortable with their own interests and beliefs. In such a society, the political terrain may still be used but its presence is more assumed than celebrated. Gradually, creativity, joy, and imagination associated with political life are replaced with more immediate needs of particular and often parochial ideas, interests, or resistances.

In relation to walking, the most extreme example of present-day reduction has to be the treadmill.¹ This machine, once used as punishment for prisoners, is now threatening to replace the once joyful and socially interactive act of wandering with the safe, monotonous, individual, and rhythmically efficient burning of as many calories as possible in the shortest time period. The mere notion of treadmills alters the way walking as an activity is discussed, and exemplifies the prevalence and imposition of notions of efficiency and speed. A similar threat with equally detrimental outcomes can be said to face democracy and politics. The presence of “representatives” and voting booths, along with the broad reduction of politics to decision making and struggles with the state for rights, alters the way citizens think about political involvement and effectively reduce politics to a tool for extrapolitical desires. Treadmills replace potentially wonderful and risky aspects of walking with the “result” of better health—with safe, repetitious, uninterrupted, and quick burning of calories. Locating politics within procedural decision-making bodies and largely administrative spheres similarly represents the replacement of potentially joyful interactive engagement with more inclusive, measurable, and thus presumably more legitimate, decision making bodies.

Treadmills and procedural decision making correspondingly take one minor component of their respective activities and make it appear to represent the whole; once unintended outcomes become the stimulus, purpose, and sole reason for taking up the activity. In both cases, it is the least enjoyable, most disciplinary, and dutiful aspect of the activity that is emphasized. In politics, inefficiency, amateurism, and exploration are gradually squeezed out, replaced by trite duties that cannot help but deter participation and discourage broad involvement.

Such a reduction of politics to a means rather than an end in itself is a cautionary tale that celebrants of the proliferation of particular movements should not ignore. Resistance to this threat lies in the realization of a common enemy and the yet to be fully appreciated political promise of the abundance of social and occupy movements that draws attention to the common enemy at the same time as it creates the links between the previously isolated and typically issue focused movements. These links also help to create enticing new terrain that can encourage those with radically democratic and antiauthoritarian commitments and ideas to take a stroll. Furthermore, the vastness of the actions and the spontaneity of the performances mean most of the places have yet to be controlled and are not enticed by the spectacle. Audience becomes each other and those present in the moment, and common enemies begin to emerge not as any particular corporation or political party but as the foundation and norms that allow such parties and corporations to act as they do.

A second equally germane parallel between the treadmill and decision making appears when the story of the history of the treadmill comes to light. “The original treadmill,” explains Solnit (2000, 260), “was a large wheel with sprockets that serve[d] as steps that several prisoners trod for set periods . . . Their bodily exertion was something used to power grain mills or other machinery, but it was the exertion, not the production, that was the point of the treadmill.” Solnit, quoting James Hardie’s 1823 book on the treadmill, continues, “It is the monotonous steadiness and not its severity, which constitutes its terror, and frequently breaks down the obstinate spirit” (2000, 260, emphases added). It does not take an especially imaginative leap to see how the citizen as a passive voter faces the same spirit-draining monotony. Indeed, as numerous studies of “political participation” have shown, the tedium of voting along with the recognition that the political system like the treadmill never changes, never goes anywhere, and always does the same thing regardless of who is on it, has led to a not surprising decrease in participation in elections and authorized political activity. However, as all else appears to be lost there is a consistent mass outcry of injustice whenever examples of lost opportunities to vote or vote tampering are discovered. One always wants to choose, but remarkably most fail to see that the choices have been made for us long before we get to take on our legitimizing role of making the final decision. Don’t vote and the choice is theirs; vote and the choice is theirs. The argument will be further clarified later in the book but here we can state that decision making is to politics what the treadmill is to walking.

Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Walking” is perhaps the most explicit defense of the particularity and promise of the kind of wandering that could never be reduced to activities on a treadmill. In this lovely short piece, he clearly understands and celebrates the promise of aimless wandering:

We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return—prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics of our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again—if you have paid your debts, and made your will then you are ready for a walk. (1993, 108)

Thoreau found few “who understood the art of walking, that is, of taking walks—who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering.” For Thoreau, the particularity and privilege of walking without purpose or necessity is what allows for creativity. The act itself is an art, a pleasure lost once any need or other purpose intrudes on the wander. Similar to performance art, yet without the audience or sphere of appearance so important to making performance political, the activity itself, rather than the produced outcome, is the purpose. To saunter or roam relies on the capacity to free oneself from that which keeps one from leisurely pleasures, for when one can walk “there will be so much the more air and sunshine in our thoughts” (Thoreau 1993, 109), and so much the more opportunity to be guided by desire and spontaneous urge.

For Thoreau, “life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. All good things are wild and free [and] in Wildness is the preservation of the World.”² Therefore, unstructured and undisciplined activity, thought and being may not be needed to survive but it is needed if one is to live. Wildness is something beyond our knowledge, it can never be controlled or domesticated, it is where the previously unconsidered may emerge, and it is where spontaneity is most prevalent. Like Thoreau, I “rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken before they can be made the slaves of men, and that men themselves have some wild oats still left to sow before they become submissive members of society” (1993, 114). A wild and curious wandering citizen set free from the controlling and imposing norms and institutions of liberal democratic society seems to me to be precisely what democratic politics needs. It also resists the push to be broken.

A consistent wanderer initiates, discovers, and uncovers the new, but this newness occurs primarily (solely, if we agree with Arendt) when the movement is not instrumentally guided. Arendt, like Thoreau, knew that the ability to find pleasure in aimlessness was not something necessarily given to all. The opportunity needs to be available to everyone who wishes access to political space, but like the opportunity to wander, not everyone is required to participate. What feral citizens can do is create the conditions that will entice more and more people to venture along paths that have no obvious end. In addition, like Thoreau’s equation of wandering with art, Arendt (1958) sees politics as a sort of performative art practiced by those who are free from the realm of necessity where survival, not life, is the focus. Arendt’s celebratory and playful approach to politics will be discussed in much greater detail in chapter 5. Here, what is important to note is, first, her obvious support for wandering and the noninstrumental movement that accompanies the wanderer and, second, her recognition that not everyone will participate in politics in this manner. Wandering is one particular approach to traveling the democratic terrain; it remains politically significant only if there are places to wander to and others who are not wandering. A political wanderer’s activities involve physically and theoretically visiting and exploring sedentary communities along the political landscape; rather than enticing others to give up on their communities and join the walk, the intent is merely to engage these others as a political wanderer committed to democratic ethics and the expansion of the public sphere.

The equation of politics, art, wandering, and pleasure are particularly relevant to feral citizenship.

THE RAMBLERS

Attempts to limit spaces for pleasurable walks have been responsible for politicizing walkers for many years. This is nowhere more evident than with the populist Ramblers in Great Britain. According to the Ramblers’ Association’s official web site (http://www.ramblers.org.uk/), the roots of the organization go back to the nineteenth century, when a growing number of British residents turned to the countryside for rest and relaxation in the face of expanding industrialization. Quite unlike the North American approach to wilderness protection, British Ramblers, who were largely from the working class,³ focused on ensuring right to access and freedom to roam in the countryside including mountains, moors, heathland, downland, and registered common land under the Crown ward. While North America was protecting and incarcerating its wilderness (Birch 1995), British workers were demanding access to their countryside and rambling into areas that were beginning to be enclosed and designated private by wealthy landowners buying up the land. Unlike Thoreau’s solitary wanderer, Ramblers tend to travel in groups and when purposefully political, organized mass trespasses that intentionally drew attention to their illegal activities.

Ramblers were politicized because they and others who shared their passion for walking the countryside were being denied access to spaces to which they believed citizens had absolute rights.⁴ The simple act of rambling became illegal once fences were erected and private property signs were affixed where previously paths were traveled. Many ignored the signs and rambled on but others wanted to draw attention to the loss of public space and the enclosure of the commons. For those who wished to draw attention to the enclosures, the battles were and are less over a demand for increased rights than a demand to acknowledge the rights of the public as well as the right to access public land. Ramblers have always fought for the right to roam, and by holding “Forbidden Britain,” mass trespasses used acts of civil disobedience to (re)open the British countryside for those who wish to wander through public land. Without the actions of the Ramblers, previous crown land that was gradually being bought up by wealthy British landowners would have been off-limits to the public.

As recently as 1997, the Ramblers’ Association was successful in convincing the British Labour party to support and legislate the “right to roam,” a law that allows access to right-of-way paths and open countryside across Britain. The law came into effect September 19, 2004, and while consistently threatened nevertheless represents an inspiring assault on gated privilege. And “after a long mapping process the new right of access to mapped areas . . . was fully implemented on Monday 31st of October 2005” (http://www.ramblers.org.uk/freedom/righttoroam/history).

The achievement of the right to roam along with the famous rights-of-way battles at Kinder Scout⁵ and other places across the British countryside are ideal examples of politically relevant walking acts and stories.⁶ Wanderers who would not accept predetermined boundaries and borders politicized their walking by actively trespassing. The whole idea of not allowing public access to the countryside regardless of who owned it was made a political issue by Ramblers who were unwilling to adapt passively to the changing conditions.

Feral citizens can learn plenty from Ramblers as they tend to be guided by their own imperative, have traditionally ignored borders and boundaries erected on what they perceive to be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Democracy and the Feral Citizen
• 1   Why Wandering
• 2   Why Feral
• 3   Why Citizenship
• 4   Feral Citizenship as Method and Feral Citizen as Guide
• 5   Public Realm Theory, from State to State of Being/Becoming
• 6   A Tough Walk: Environmentalists on Democratic Terrain
• 7   The Obscured Promise of Green Citizenship
• Conclusion: A Feral Citizen’s Democratic Imperative
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index