{"id":32368,"date":"2014-08-15T14:23:02","date_gmt":"2014-08-15T14:23:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/youll-never-walk-alone\/"},"modified":"2014-08-15T14:23:02","modified_gmt":"2014-08-15T14:23:02","slug":"youll-never-walk-alone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/youll-never-walk-alone\/","title":{"rendered":"You’ll Never Walk Alone"},"content":{"rendered":"

reblogged for @_stunned, whose artistic practice includes walking.<\/p>\n

thenewinquiry<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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\"image\"<\/p>\n

If walking is the most philosophical way of getting around, solitary strolls in nature won\u2019t cut it. You have to choose who to march alongside.\u00a0<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Ways of getting around come with their own outlooks on the world. Cars, Americans are told again and again, mean freedom and comfort. Yet they can just as well be a burden, from the social costs of car-dependent communities to the way cars turn drivers into isolated individuals raging at the world outside their little metal box. Public transit can feel frustrating, involving lots of waiting and plodding routes. But there\u2019s a solidarity that emerges on the subway or bus, the feeling that we\u2019re all in it together, that makes it feel democratic. Whereas walking, trusting your own two feet, can mark one out as an interloper. It\u2019s the mode of the solitary thinker, the fl\u00e2neur, the backpacker. Yet it can be just as much a communal activity \u2013 from the solidarity of through-hikers on the Appalachian Trail to the crowd at a demonstration, people are on their own two feet together. The ambivalence of walking, which makes room for solo saunters and mass marches alike, has made it attractive to quite a few artists and thinkers.<\/p>\n

For Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Gros, a Parisian professor and Foucault specialist, walking is also the most philosophical way of getting around. In\u00a0A Philosophy of Walking\u00a0<\/em>(originally published as\u00a0Marcher: une philosophie\u00a0<\/em>in 2009), Gros expounds a view of the world in which walking is the cure for all modernity\u2019s indignities. Setting off on a walk is self-liberation, discarding drab duties or even rejecting a \u201crotten, polluted, alienating, shabby civilization\u201d for an ascetic freedom. Given his interest in Foucault, one might expect Gros to see the aimless, rambling walk as an evasive countermeasure against surveillance and discipline. But his emphasis is more on the philosophical, timeless value of wandering. He brings home the extent to which walking, practically the simplest activity there is, has been made almost peculiar in most societies. Yet his fundamentally Romantic sensibility leads him to an odd vision of the practice\u2014so caught up in the sublime and lofty that it misses what\u2019s at its own feet.<\/p>\n

Read More<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

reblogged for @_stunned, whose artistic practice includes walking. thenewinquiry: If walking is the most philosophical way of getting around, solitary strolls in nature won\u2019t cut it. You have to choose who to march alongside.\u00a0 Ways of getting around come with their own outlooks on the world. Cars, Americans are told again and again, mean freedom […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[],"tags":[1539],"class_list":["post-32368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-emergent-digital-practices"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-8q4","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32368"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32368\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}