somewhere, for something, once launched we shift into just enjoying –
or ending – the walk or the ride. Our gaze that prises beyond things is
not situating on coordinates. It surveys across things, drawn to the distance
when it fuses into the tone and mists of space.... The perception of things,
the apprehension of their content and of their forms, is not an appropria-
tion of them, but an expropriation of our forces into them, and ends in
engagement.
(Lingis 1998: 7 0)Of course, none of this is to deny the cultural industry that has grown up around
the practice of walking – the vast literature of books and guides, the special clothing
and so on, all of which enhance or expand the range of affordances that inhere in
any setting – but it is to suggest that the power of the meanings circulated by this
industry is founded in the intensification of present experience coded in the body
practices set out above. The background has allowed this foreground of symbolic
delegates to develop.
The second development is, as the example of walking shows, the style of the
body’s location in space. What has developed has been both overall body stance
and the formation of certain sequences of bodily experiences which, in their
virtualized nature, produce an expectation, an anticipation, of a ‘natural’ experi-
ence: ‘it is the way in which the body sits in space that allows signification to be
grasped’ (Gil 1998: 109). For example, travel to a ‘natural’ place sets up the body
to fall into a ‘natural’ stance to the world. There is, if you like, a genetics of
movement which the body slips into through constant practice. There are ‘dance
floors of nature’ (Lingis 1998: 8 7 ).
The third development is similar but different. The body attends to configura-
tions of objects which are in line with its expectations and which produce particular
exfoliations/spaces and times. The body produces spaces and times through
the things of nature which, in turn, inhabit the body through that production.
Thus, for example, trees do not so much mean nature (Rival 1998) as they are
present as evidence of a natural configuration that embodiment itself has produced:
our bodies know themselves in such thinking. Thus trees become flesh by being
bound up in a practical field. And, in the intensified present time I have described,
that presence becomes its own justification. There is. Nature, in a sense, becomes
more natural.
In turn, of course, nature, understood as body practices like walking, expecta-
tions and configurations of objects, pushes back in confirmation. For example, our
experience of walking is validated by its effects on the body – from sweat to heart
rate to muscles stretching – which are a function of a resistance on certain planes
which confirms the existence of other planes. So nature speaks in us as ‘an
infralanguage’ (Gil 1998) of movement which, through the articulations and
micro-articulations of the body-in-encounter, fixes ‘symbolic’ thought as affect,
mood, emotions and feelings^10 (thus as self-evidently present and numinous).
Nature observes and writes us, bumping intensities into our thought^11 (understood
especially as unconscious thought), rather as Deleuze would have it:
68 Part I