What have I been thinking about this week?
Walking to the studio every day, one of the things that’s really struck me has been the changes going on in the neighborhood. There are apartment buildings being torn down, there are new houses being built in other areas. When doing the same walk every day, the shifts feel more significant and weighty. These shifts are a large part of what is giving the week its structure.
Alongside these human changes, the seasons are also noticeably moving. We are in the middle of winter, but there are several cherry trees starting to bud and some that have already bloomed. I don’t know that I’ve noticed changes in these plants over the past week necessarily, but I do feel that I’ve become more aware of them. Each day of repeated walking has made me more aware of the details along the way to the studio.
I’ve also thought a lot about my own physical pleasure doing this walk. When I was much younger, I remember thinking that one of the worst things about being an adult would be having to carry things in my pockets. I really enjoyed having empty pockets, either to have my hands in, or just to not feel clunky against my legs. At a certain point though, I accepted the need for a wallet, keys, and then a phone. But, whenever I’d perform concerts as a flutist, I thought, this might be stressful, but at least while I’m playing I get to have empty pockets! That’s the main way that that pleasure of empty pockets continued into adulthood until this week.
I’ve felt quite enjoyably alone in these days. My work is quite solitary and in a way I think I’m a bit giddy with the sense of freedom that solitude provides. So, one of the things I’ve done to experience that freedom is not having anything in my pockets during my walk to and from the studio. I put everything in my backpack and it makes an oddly large difference in my experience of the walk.
Historically, I also don’t really like shoes. I’m not sure how far I can or want to take this one, but on Friday I did try walking home barefoot and it was enjoyable. I’ve always felt like there is a mutedness to having shoes on. So much of the experience of walking without shoes is recognizing the different ground conditions under your feet. Sometimes this can be really painful, but if you’re on softer ground or your feet get used to it, pain is one minor element among a range of sensations. When you’re wearing shoes, you just don’t experience that whole range of sensation and awareness.
I do think there is a tradeoff in terms of the social visibility of not wearing shoes that I’m not sure I can handle. The things in your pockets thing, that’s quite invisible from the outside, but not wearing shoes is a a very observed behavior. I felt a little tension passing anyone on the street, like: they’re probably wondering why I don’t have shoes on.
I think at a certain point as a kid, I started to recognize that this was a response that a lot of people had to me not wearing shoes. And the interpersonal read on not wearing shoes became a part of the dynamic of being barefoot. I liked it because there was a non-conformist quality to it that went along with other aspects of my personality. But, as I became increasingly socially aware of barefootedness as a character trait or at least a minor marker of my identity, it lost its ability to be simply a choice based on sensorial preference. This is especially true in a very public social settings, where it feels like either the goal is to innocuously blend in, or to not blend in as a sort of statement and be willing to have your non-conformity read as politically meaningful because it is public.
I do remember that as a young child I associated barefootedness with hobbits from Lord of the Rings. In middle school, I was part of a large group email role playing game (very abstractly, maybe more-so hypothetical conversation) in which we were all preparing for a zombie apocalypse and talking about the different skills that we would have to offer the survival collective. In that game, I was often compared with a hobbit and there might have even been nicknames having to do with the hairiness of my toes. I remember being sort of proud of this. Not that my toes were hairy (I’m pretty sure the main person who was saying that never actually saw my toes), but that something that felt quite naturally me was unique and noteworthy. Like, it wasn’t anything to work at and have to present to others, it was just something about me that was going from being an undifferentiated aspect of myself to being a unique characteristic worth prizing. And also, that characteristic gave me a unique proximity to hobbits and therefor to an entire fantasy world to which I felt very attached.
On the streets of Atlanta, I don’t assume that people are going to associate my bare feet with hobbits or Lord of the Rings. I am more than six feet tall and not nearly as rotund as a hobbit ought to be. Instead, I worry about being perceived as somehow deviant. Why am I worried about being seen as deviant? I remember one football weekend in Tuscaloosa while in high school, in a bathrobe and flip-flops, walking through the crowds of people waiting to go into the stadium. I was going to the music school to practice flute. That deviance felt good. It felt like it cast doubt on the overall importance of football for someone to be walking through the very center of all that in an entirely incongruous outfit and to be doing it not as a direct protest (which would have made the football seem more important) but just because it was the path I needed to walk on to get where I wanted to go (and the bathrobe was just something I really liked wearing at that time).
But now, when I do walk through Tuscaloosa not in the appropriate colors on the day of a football game, I feel unease, not pride. A lot of that can be put down to a social pressure to conform and the responsibility that adults are assumed to have to act “adult.” There’s a civic responsibility you take on towards others in public space that a kid doesn’t have. Children aren’t the custodians of public safety, they are beneficiaries of it. If a parent walks by me with their kids and I’m barefoot, I feel that I’ve somehow failed to communicate to that parent that their kids are safe, to assure them that it doesn’t follow from this eccentricity that I pose a threat to their kids.
I know that sort of feeling is one side of the difficulty that anyone who strays from absolutely conformist self presentation has going out into public space. The other side, which I’m not so afraid of with being barefoot is a fear for my own safety: that my straying from conformity is going to feel so threatening to someone that they will actually want to be violent towards me. I’m much more worried about stepping on nails than getting beat up, but I do recognize that that is a big part of what a lot of people have to worry about in the overall politics of non-normative self presentation in public spaces.
There’s another aspect to this which is a bit more psychologically confusing to me and that has to do with the way I’ve come to see this behavior of mine interpreted by the world and then come to reflect on its meaning for myself.
This confusion has to do with the very dubious goal of looking for actions and ways of being that feel genuine. And I mean genuine as originating in personal taste, not in the way an activity is interpreted and appraised from the outside, by others. At one level, it feels very genuine to walk barefoot. I enjoy it for the sensorial reasons I mentioned earlier. And I recognize that I’m not hurting anyone by being barefoot and so I should’t really worry about how it is perceived from the outside. I don’t feel endangered and I’m not causing anyone else unnecessary discomfort. But then there all these other feelings caught up in it that are related to the different memories I’ve talked about. There’s the resurfacing of the adolescent pride in non-conformity. That then calls into question how genuine the pleasure in being barefoot is. And all the mature oppositions to being barefoot come to mind: the dirtiness of the streets, the ease and comfort of wearing shoes, the social awkwardness of not wearing them.
These factors feel, so far, very much held in the balance. I can’t come down on either side. Does the desire to be barefoot come from a somewhat desperate nostalgic attempt to cling to something that, from a relatively early age, has been called out as a unique marker of my character, or, does it go beyond that and also (because that is most definitely part of it) include a pleasure that is entirely about the sensorial joy of not wearing shoes? And does that sensorial joy outweigh the angst of social scrutiny that I perceive to come with walking barefoot across Atlanta?
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I’ve been reading through Baudrillard’s The Precession of Simulacra this week. Two really brief sketches from that paper: The first is the relationship between Disneyland and America. Disneyland is an extreme of images, facades, fantasy, under which there is no reality. And there does’t have to be. It’s an amusement park, we can acknowledge that it is phantasmagorical, plays of surface. Baudriallard says that we need Disneyland in order to save the reality principle of America in general. Amusement parks, spectacles, those far extremes of showmanship and fantasy, they create a contrast to everyday life and space. Because of the contrast, we can feel that we live in a real place. A real place is a place that precedes the images made of it. A real place is not prefabricated. A real place has no goals, a simulated place is striving to fulfill an image already made of itself. To be honest, a lot of our world does shape itself around images, around aspirations which are actually most clearly articulated in the fantasy space of an amusement park. Or, more recently, in the algorithmic churn of a social media feed. But Disney is such an obvious exaggeration of that logic that we don’t see it as operating like or even being the model for everyday life. We can call it fantastical, extreme, light amusement.
The second sketch is from another section of the piece dealing with the “discovery” of the Tasaday tribe in the Philippines. The way Baudrillard characterizes this is that this tribe was found, some ethnologists talked with them for a while, and then, the ethnologists pleaded that the Tasaday be returned to an isolated section of the jungle and no further attempts be made to be in contact with them. He thinks of the Tasaday as scape-goats for all of ethnology. As in, ethnology is validated by the presence of a pure, unstudied group out there in the wild. Why does this validate ethnology? Similar to Disneyland, the Tasaday become an extreme or hyperreal case, an artificial construct that can be held up as the model of what ethnology studies. That the ethnologists who study isolated tribes would want a group to be quarantined in the “glass coffin” of hermetic isolation becomes a model of scientific objectivity. There is a “pure” specimen out there in the jungle. This secures the objectivity of science because it creates the ultimate model of an untampered with specimen.
But now they aren’t people, a social unit, whatever, they are the unstudied subjects of ethnology. And none of this matters to them, but it matters to us, because it validates the ethnological gaze. It validates the museumification of social dynamics, looking at people as distanced subjects with the total isolation of this tribe in the forest as the extreme case. And then that gaze is given life and is free to roam around looking at all sorts of other social situations.
Thinking over this more, it’s not that Disney distracts us from the fact that all of America operates by Disneyish logic, or that the Tasaday act as an extreme case. It’s that they form an exemplary case. They become the aspirations of reality. The enclosure of the Tasaday is the exemplary model of the objective lens that science claims to apply to all human interactions. The princess narratives, the hyper-consumerism of Disney, these things become the models for everyday American life.
In a crazy twist that I haven’t researched nearly enough, the Tasaday tribe was actually entirely fabricated. Filipino politician Manuel Elizalde seems to have bribed local tribespeople, who were very much aware of the outside world and not living in anything like the stone-age conditions to pretend to live in caves, use stone tools make up a fake language and call themselves the Tasaday. This was done in order to secure international funding for a reserve for the Tasaday. The ethnologists plea for this tribe to be left in the splendid isolation of the jungle was actually orchestrated by Elizalde, who then appropriated the money and lived the rest of his life off it.
Baudrillard’s setting of the real against the simulacra is one of many ways that people talk about the distance we feel from a sense of authenticity in action and experience of the world. I talked about the loss of innocence/emotion is all cliché postmodernist take of Umberto Ecco in a previous blog, and this also made me think of Mark Fisher talking about the ways the capitalism has become the force which structures our desires.
In my post-adolescent attempts to explore the dynamics of authenticity and nostalgic aspiration involved in walking barefoot though Atlanta while also balancing my internalized sense of social surveillance on my non-normative behavior, I do kind of feel like I’ve found a bit of a thin patch in the simulacra, almost like a hole in the video game map. Not because I’m escaping or being liberated from any of these dynamics (I feel like this is the most auto-ethnographic blog I’ve written, I definitely feel subject to social dynamics that feel that they come from a simulation of normalcy). Maybe actually because all of this feels so present and the whole thing sort of also feels absurd: the walking barefoot part and the talking and thinking so much about walking barefoot part.
Hmmm. I don’t really like how that rhetorically tries to wrap things up. I feel like a lot is very unclear and ending with a sentence that starts “Maybe actually because” is a bit too cute faux-deep. But I’m also tired and a day late on this and want to get it done. It’s Monday night and I’ve been trying to finish these on Sundays. Just know, I’m only trying to feel out the edges of the simulacra of Atlanta (with my bare toes!), I don’t think I’ve actually found any real answers, just the slightest give of softness in the ground.