Minor Perambulations,Political Horizons: Comment on Kathy Ferguson’s “Anarchist Women and the Politics of Walking”

Introduction

Among what seem, at first glance, quite disparate elements—anarchist women, walking, Whitehead’s process philosophy—Kathy Ferguson identifies rich and unexpected connections. Engagingly weaving in her own story of walking lost and—incrementally, collaboratively, incompletely—regained, she helps us pay careful attention to what the concept of process might mean for political thinking, and what the process of walking might mean for political life-practice. In attuning readers to key resonances between the miraculous physiological complexity of walking, the immersive sensory richness of walking as a kind of praxis, and the latter’s enactment in the anarchist feminist lives of Alexandra David-Neel and Lily Gair Wilkinson, Ferguson reorients our sense of both the actual and the possible. This triangulation showcases Ferguson’s keen sense, here and in her work more broadly, of the political valences of everyday practices. At the same time, it seems to me that the triangle fails to cohere entirely. Where the sections on Whitehead and physiological walking hum with the vibrant complexity of life in process, David-Neel and Gair Wilkinson’s walking praxes depend in some degree on the disavowal of complicating factors. Namely, white supremacist frames of reference undergird their respective conceptualizations of freedom. Moreover, Ferguson’s circumscription of the politics of walking to exclude situations of coercion and vulnerability to violence correspondingly raises the question of what and for whom the politics of walking is for. The first two sections of this comment detail this appreciation and this criticism in turn. In the third and final section, I suggest that a radical politics of walking must not only open its horizons to nonvoluntary, threatened, and resistive perambulatory modes and the histories that they carry, but avow these feminist anarchist ancestors’ disavowals along with their achievements as part of a living radical lineage.

Resonant Steps

Ferguson’s use of Whitehead to understand walking as a “resonant process of becoming” as an entanglement of different kinds of bodies and material-semiotic environments aligns her account with Erin Manning’s (2016) concept of “the minor gesture.” Manning also draws on Whitehead, along with her more obvious debt to Deleuze and Guattari (1986), to develop the concept of the minor gesture:

the force that makes the lines tremble that compose the everyday, the lines, both structural and fragmentary, that articulate how else experience can come to expression . . . it makes felt the unsayable in the said . . . leading the event elsewhere than toward the governant fixity of the major, be it the major in the name of normative political life, of able-bodied-ness, of gender-conformity.

For Manning, the register of the minor gesture is always political, in that it reorients the event “by a difference in register that awakens new modes of encounter and creates new modes of life-living . . . life with and beyond human life” (8). Perhaps most relevant to Ferguson’s theorization, minor gestures can manifest as generative breaks in hegemonic temporalities like the capitalist clock,

altering rhythms . . . mak[ing] time for modes of encounter otherwise elided . . . crafting techniques that create the conditions for . . . the opening of the everyday to degrees and shades of experience that resist formation long enough to allow us to see the potential of worlds in the making. (15)

Michel de Certeau, on whom Ferguson draws at a few points, might be thought of as the go-to theorist of walking in this sense of syncopation and encounter. In The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), the major for Certeau is the top-down organization of space to facilitate surveillance, control, and capitalist efficiency. Certeau uses street-level observations to shift the frame; the institutions and their homogeneity are vastly outscaled by the sea of differentiating practices from which they emerge, and upon which they, impossibly, try to impose their order: the “night-side of societies, a night longer than their day . . . transform[ing] what was represented as a matrix-force of history into a mobile infinity of tactics” (41). Primary among these differentiating practices is walking: “the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers” (115). Certeau’s walkers interpret and remake the city with their feet, wearing unanticipated paths and shortcuts. But Ferguson goes further: not only the capitalist clock and urban grid but the time and space of walking itself, conceived as a smooth and regular rhythm, a unified and intentional pattern of action, is the major here. She shows that the infinitesimal components of the action of walking are in fact an intricate collective, fragile and error prone and ingeniously responsive, each in its turn reorienting the event of perambulation away from a fall to the ground or down the stairs—and sometimes, as in Ferguson’s recent case, failing to do so.

She launches this explanation by way of a lively primer on walking physiology as well as an account of the process of physical therapy as a site of Whiteheadian concrescence. Not only do collaborative modes of walking emerge in the therapeutic dyad, confounding the apparent limits of the individual organism. We also see negotiations and antagonisms within the walking body itself during therapy; unilinear time is confounded as the current bodily configuration is forced to reckon with the tenacious presence of its previous form’s kinetic knowledge. While she does not mention it here, Ferguson’s work on dyslexia—both writing about it and tutoring people with it—strongly parallels her current ruminations about walking’s internal differentiations, introducing and appreciating differences between readers (Certeau also analogizes reading and walking). She analogizes the parsing of the components of walking for study and healing to Whitehead’s contingent nodes of clear awareness that arise from the dense sensory background, but it is also strongly reminiscent of the work that she does with dyslexic people—breaking up the language into phonemes, as entry points into linguistic flow. This analogy may also help to further specify the political in physical therapy by highlighting the ways that it creatively works to serve the individual normativity—as opposed to hegemonic normalization—of each body. In a 2008 essay on dyslexia, she writes about the tensions she feels between the empowerment of dyslexic readers through neural retraining that normalizes their approach to reading, and what those brain waves might have accomplished had [she] left them alone, given that dyslexia also often entails vividly imagistic creative thinking and problem solving. For Manning, enforced neurotypicality is at the root of much of the violence that has defined modernity. Although dyslexia and autism should in no way be conflated, Ferguson’s dream of a “becoming-dyslexic” educational system (2008, 245), in which each student’s strengths, values, and learning styles are given the collective support to flourish, anticipates Manning’s argument that what she calls autistic perception, an immersive attunement to the world in its becoming that is most highly developed in autistic people, can and should be cultivated in all of us. Likewise, while the aim of regaining a typical adult human gait orients Ferguson’s experience, her insight that nearly all walking involves prosthetic elements also puts the entire range of walking assemblages in potential play.

With regard to the anarchist women that capture Ferguson’s imagination, the majors include those usual suspects against which anarchism and feminism respectively define themselves—capital and the state, heteropatriarchy and gender norms—but the majors here are also anarchism and feminism themselves, as conventionally narrated and practiced. Ferguson aims

to bring women’s lively presence back into our historical accounts of the anarchist movement, to include their ideas and their activities, to invite them to surprise us with their insights and adventures, and to bring anarchism more fully into feminism, including anarchist feminists’ radical critiques of capital, religion, and the state and their insistence on living a transformative way of life.

This intervention is timely in an age of “lean in” corporate feminism, militarist feminism, and other varieties complicit with major structures of domination and violence, and as many forms of radical politics still take scant account of the gendered distribution of, inter alia, child care, housework, and sexual violence.

Lily Gair Wilkinson in particular seems attuned to the minor gesture—the feel of the reorientation of fixed ideas of household, family, mother and wife, through the extended-kin project of a peripatetic puppet show or chestnuts blithely left unboiled. As Ferguson quotes her, “I believe that if we begin with immediate personal things, greater and greater opportunities are likely to occur.” Ferguson contests in her focus on Lily’s life and writing the idea that real political change happens only on a grand scale, justifying an anticipatory holding pattern. Instead, with Lily, she attunes us to the fact that we are already, at every moment, in the event, whose concrescence, in Whiteheadian terms, is still to be determined—and that glimpses or moments of the world we want are already here to be gathered and amplified. Ferguson offers us the traces of Lily and Arthur’s side-by-side walking as what Whitehead calls an “adventure of better living,” an everyday praxis of joyful gender equity in the now.

Suppressed Presuppositions

But Whitehead also writes: “in every consideration of a single fact there is the suppressed presupposition of the environmental coordination requisite for its existence” (1938, 9, in Ferguson, this issue). In the case of life histories from which we draw lessons for transformative praxis, both the facts and the suppressions that they entail assume a political valence. Where Ferguson’s Whiteheadian description of physiological walking expansively unsuppresses these coordinations, her account of walking as anarchist feminist praxis glosses over some crucial complexities.

In the prodigious accomplishments of Alexandra David-Neel, we can appreciate the burning drive for a mode of existence that defied all prohibitions, from gender and family norms to the British colonial government to Tibetan sacred authorities, her anti-imperialist celebration of Chinese dissident poets and exiled Tibetan leaders as political exemplars, and her extraordinary dedication to her chosen religion of Tibetan Buddhism, immersion in its texts and physically mortifying trainings and pilgrimages. She writes in support of the Tashi Lama, who was hostile to the British, in her memoir, My Journey to Lhasa, that

a Westerner may have ideas about the necessity or usefulness of colonization, the subjection of a less civilized people, and be somewhat justified in his views. But the Asiatic who sees his country enslaved is still more justified in lacking friendly feelings toward the people who have robbed him of his possessions, whatever methods, diplomatic ruses or sheer violence, they may have used. (2005 [1927], xxvi)

Yet as we see in this passage and elsewhere, her defiant rejections of Euro-supremacy and its attendant norms were often accompanied by their qualified presupposition. She rejected expectations of conventional marriage and motherhood, leaving her husband, Philippe David-Neel, at home during her long sojourns in Asia, but his earnings and wealth as a colonial engineer in Tunis funded her travels. She writes at droll length of the brownface disguise of Tibetan peasant woman—cocoa powder, charcoal, ink, and yak hair—that she assumes to defy the Tibetan prohibition on foreigners in Lhasa (16-17). Her flip assertion that she entered the forbidden city because “the bureaucrats said not to” conflates her defiance of both the British Raj and the Tibetan authorities. While true to an anarchist rejection of all state authority, this sits uneasily with her acceptance, after her sojourn in Lhasa, of the protection of the British colonial officers to whom she reveals her true identity (288). Her exultant claim that she “wanted to show what the will of a woman could do” rings strangely in view of the fact that the journey was made, and made possible, alongside the young lama, Yongden, a constant companion whom she claimed as her adopted son. Given the vivid portrayal of this companionship and collaboration in the memoir, it is doubly disturbing that she refers to him as her unnamed “domestic” in the letter that Ferguson cites—though perhaps this was some kind of strategic concealment. And while her immersion in Buddhism was deep, lifelong, and full of personal sacrifice, the penetrative logic of colonial Europe is in evidence in her memoir’s closing comment that “The first white woman had entered forbidden Lhasa and shown the way” (288). This is movement, but is it freedom? Sara Ahmed (2006, 136) cautions that

The extension of white motility should not be confused with freedom. To move easily is not to move freely, and it is still a way of constraining what bodies do “do.” Bodies that are not restricted by racism . . . are bodies that do not have to come up against the limitations of this fantasy of motility.

This is not to invalidate David-Neel’s lived praxis of anarchism and feminism, but to situate it and apprehend its contours, its enabling fantasies, its potentials and limits alike. It is to foster, as Ferguson argues that we must, a “vigorous memory of past radicalisms in order to learn from them . . . to take responsibility for [them],” so that they, in their flawed and powerful fullness, can inform and accompany our own struggles.

Lily Gair Wilkinson offers an anarchist feminism of a vastly different flavor. Oriented toward the homely and the communal, she seems indeed to have established a life practice of creative non-domination, anti-consumerism, and gender equity—one which touched and perhaps transformed a number of other lives outside her circle of kin. Her scanty paper trail, moreover, includes unqualified militant anti-colonial sentiments. But I want to suggest that, along with appreciating her insights, part of taking responsibility for this radical ancestor is attending to the implicit anti-Blackness in her (and fellow anarchist feminists’) written formulation of “woman’s freedom.”

As Ferguson notes, Gair Wilkinson’s (1914) essay, published as the pamphlet Woman’s Freedom, is remarkable in its invitations to its reader: the invitation to walk with the narrator, to open to shades of experience and suffering, and, emphatically, to banish abstraction. The abstraction of Man as oppressor in more conventional feminist writings, she argues, obscures the shared subjection of working women and men to exploitation—even as women’s position is the more degraded. The “cold figure” of the miserable “average wage” abstracts from and obscures “unimaginable lives of struggle and suffering!” (5). She finely schematizes the distinct but interrelated ways that capitalism and sexism limit the full realization of personhood and love for women across the economic spectrum in London. She scorns votes and legislation as mere tyranny, as well as women’s “emancipation” through factory labor, military service, and more prestigious careers alike. Corresponding with Gair Wilkinson’s lived praxis, and in stark contrast with David-Neel, the essay’s narrator eschews the fantasy of individual motility, declaring that “There can be no freedom for single individuals—one here and one there cannot be free in a social sense; but men and women, being socially independent can only be free together—as a community.”

Yet her account of women’s contemporary unfreedom relies heavily on the metaphor of enslavement abstracted from its actual human history. Saidiya Hartman (1997, 21) argues that a constitutive component of modern global capitalism was the literal fungibility of Black people, the replaceability and interchangeability that render “the captive body an abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the projection of others’ feelings, ideas, desires, and values.” Hartman and other theorists of what she calls the “afterlife of slavery” (2007, 6) argue that the radical expulsion of Black people from the dominant notion of humanity—including conventionally recognized gender and kinship roles—has persisted past the legal end of the chattel slavery, manifesting as a seemingly endless tolerance (and even appetite) for Black suffering and death among Western whites (e.g., Marshall 2012; Spillers 2003; Wilderson 2010). Drawing on this literature, Sabine Broeck (2008) contends that Black fungibility has manifested in the ubiquitous use of the slave as metaphor in white European and North American feminist discourse in particular.

very signification of the slave . . . provided the metaphorical horizon of what woman—if she was to achieve fully human status—was not to be; the maintenance of this metaphorical fungibility has been serving generations of feminist articulations of gender.

Alongside critiques of private property, capitalist exploitation, liberal reformism, and patriarchy that remain fresh and relevant, Gair Wilkinson’s bid for freedom also evinces this metaphorical horizon.

The essay’s first section is titled “Women in Bondage,” and her opening premise is that “nearly all women are no better to slaves.” The seemingly free rich woman is “A slave and a bondswoman” who has “sold her woman’s body for costly accessories and a soft living” (3); with respect to the working woman, “the struggle to live is even more painful and terrible for women wage-slaves than for men wage-slaves” (5). The prostitute is a “White slave” (5), and though she invokes this term ironically, it nevertheless marks the naturalized equation of slavery and Blackness. Rich woman, poor woman, and prostitute alike “enter bondage by selling their bodies; selling them for man’s pleasure or selling them for the profit of an employer but always by selling that sacred thing, a woman’s body” (5). While the metaphor’s usage is most concentrated here, it also appears abundantly later in the essay. Exploited workers are “brothers and sisters is in bondage” (11); the reader, addressed as a working woman tempted to leave her job, must “turn back . . . and sell yourself once more into slavery before it is too late” (12).

In her magisterial book on Emma Goldman, Ferguson devotes a chapter to what she calls the “puzzling limit on [Goldman’]s imagination of [Black] political struggles”—especially given her attention to Mexican, Japanese, and Chinese insurgents. Ferguson (2011, 225) writes that Goldman used “wage slavery to describe these conditions and to spur workers to outrage; in the process, the distinction between metaphorical and literal slavery, between having little property and being property, was implicitly lost.” I would argue that the pervasive metaphor of the slave in Gair Wilkinson and Goldman alike is not simply a product of anarchist discourse, but part of a broader legacy in European and North American white left thought. This thought tradition has tended to erase the fact that “industrial capitalism” is racial capitalism all the way down to the core fact of the commodified Black human being and, following Spillers (2003) and Jennifer Morgan (2004), her commodified reproduction. Likewise, Gair Wilkinson’s pantheon of rebelling women, in “Women’s Freedom,” misses the specific history of female marronage and fugitivity as ambulatory practices of anti-hierarchy and the cultivation of communal freedom. Fifteen to 20 percent of maroons on Saint Domingue before the Haitian Revolution were women, in a population in which they were greatly outnumbered (Roberts 2015, 101). And as Hartman (2016) writes, enslaved mothering against all odds was itself fugitive work. Moreover—as Alexis Pauline Gumbs (2016) and others, following Spillers, have argued—enslaved peoples’ expulsion from Euro-humanity’s gender categories has meant a legacy of revolutionary minor praxes of gender and kinship (Jackson 2011; Moten 2003, 2013; Tinsley 2008; Weheliye 2014). While demystifying economic abstractions with vivid clarity and wit, Gair Wilkinson partakes in the abstraction of enslavement as a concept from racial slavery as a historical condition. Such abstraction obscures not only the institutionalized practices of gratuitous violence that fueled the capitalist machine against which Gair Wilkinson railed. It also obscures enslaved peoples’ own vast repertoires of resistance, refusal, relation, endurance, and other practices of freedom.

Political Horizons

The foregoing might register as an anachronistic critique of subjects who merely reflected their historical contexts. The limitations of these anarchist feminist exemplars’ political horizons, however, find at least a partial correspondence in Ferguson’s own framing of the politics of walking. She writes that she is

addressing situations in which we walk more or less voluntarily; not fleeing, as must refugees; not marching, as do armies; not pacing in confinement, as do prisoners; not negotiating hostile streets, as do walkers marked as vulnerable or dangerous by their gender, sexuality, color, or disability.

From one point of view, this keeps the scope of analysis modest, leaving room for complementary theorizations of other perambulatory practices. Yet if we circumscribe the politics of walking to exclude situations of coercion, vulnerability, or projected threat that arise from context-dependent interpellations of specific embodiments, this move effects a suppression in some ways analogous to those of David-Neel and Gair Wilkinson. Against the grain of Ferguson’s otherwise expansive apprehension of the deep-going interplay between people and their environments, it prescribes a kind of “ideal stride situation” that pre-empts the very political questions that enable it to arise. How does voluntary walking relate to modes of involuntary walking, elsewhere or here present but unseen? This also seems to depart from Ferguson’s dedication to the creative normativity of every body—presumably even in flight or danger—pre-empting consideration of ways that walking as praxis may function particularly powerfully in situations of state violence.

Part of this consideration might entail situating Ferguson’s archival excavations of these mostly white anarchist women, in their tantalizing incompleteness, in relation to what Hartman, Morgan, Marisa Fuentes (2016), and others describe as the deafening silences of the archive when it comes to the content of most enslaved women’s lives—the latter overwhelmingly appear in the written record only as quantities traded or lost, as runaway notices, and occasionally in court cases—and to what these thinkers do with these silences. Using one runaway slave notice, city plans, and whites’ journals, in Dispossessed Lives, Fuentes recreates fugitive Jane’s 1789 walk through Bridgetown, Barbados—the fetid Cage crammed with captured runaways, the custom house where Africans were daily sold, the opulent facades of wealthy whites and the piles of human and animal excrement along the humid streets. A radical politics of walking must interest itself in Jane’s walk in that milieu and its dangers—rewriting with her feet an urban plan designed for capture—no less than in David-Neel’s perilous Himalayan trek, and in the links, divisions, and stakes of these respective projects of recovery.

An anarchist feminist politics of walking that speaks directly to our contemporary predicaments, I suggest, must share a horizon with the flight of the refugee, the military march, and the pacing prisoner; and with the coffle as well as the fugitive in her many forms: Jane in Bridgetown; Frederick Douglass’ mother walking twelve miles each way in a night for the sake of a brief visit to her children. Harriet Tubman guiding a group sized for stealth, walking with someone else’s sleeping baby slung on her back. And those in the group who caught and watched over Tubman when her narcoleptic falls from overseer-dealt head trauma interrupted the walk toward relative legal freedom (Barrow et al. 2015). And, in complex and “incommensurable” relation to all of these (Tuck and Yang 2012), with the genocidal forced marches of Indigenous peoples; the innumerable walks and marches and stands that insist on Native endurance and sovereignty, of which Idle No More and at Standing Rock are only two of the most recent (Coulthard 2012; Woodard 2017); and the refusal of white settler barriers to mobility, as in the border refusals by Mohawk (Simpson 2014) and Tohono O’odham peoples (Rickert 2016; Schmidt 2016).

Does insistence on such an expanded horizon negate the value of David-Neel or Gair Wilkinson’s singular peripatetic praxes? On the contrary, I would argue that it offers a far richer archive of what walking as a politics has meant and could mean: of otherwise “modes of life living . . . with and beyond the human” that our predicaments at all scales urgently demand. I think that the key to Ferguson’s triangle resides in a relation to feminist anarchist ancestors not so much as “lives into which we could walk” but lives that we might ask to walk alongside us and many others, gaining and offering strength by turns: something like the collective walking process of physical therapy, but more fully mutual. Ferguson’s citation of Maria Tamboukou’s “narrative personae” “with whom one can be in dialogue” (Tamboukou 2016) in fact gestures toward such a relation, but the celebratory renderings of Gair Wilkinson and David-Neel do not quite follow this out. The side-by-side relation I have in mind entails “be[ing] inspired by them” precisely in their flawed wholeness. This something that those of us who move through the world as white tend to have a hard time doing. For those of us in the United States, our relationship to white ancestors tends to fall along two extremes: white nationalist hagiography, on one hand, or white progressive hatred and shame, on the other, for our ancestors who, in James Baldwin’s (1984) phrasing, paid the “price of the ticket” for becoming white, partaking in the “genocidal lie . . . opting for safety instead of life.” But critical love for forebears who opted for life instead of safety, loudly or quietly risking the security of convention even as they missed much from our point of view, offers a different path, one that can situate us in a crucial minor lineage staked to the prospect of a livable world.

For feminists who move through the world as white, attending to these ancestors’ suppressed presuppositions along with their words and deeds might not only clarify our own contemporary implications in national and planetary horrors; it might fuel our creative, anarchic powers toward leveraging our ill-gotten insulation. We might inherit David-Neel’s steely insouciance in the face of police power and geopolitical boundaries to support the Movement for Black Lives and other groups’ calls for community control over police (Adams and Rameau 2016), indigenous sovereignty claims, and the freedom of movement across imperialist borders. Likewise, we might not only draw strength from Gair Wilkinson’s unflinching economic and gender analysis. We can also leverage, against masculinist conceptions of radical politics, her anarchist feminist practices of everyday life—refusal of gender expectations, a decathected relation to housework, participation of children and youth in shared projects, an open home, creative play, and walking alongside rather than leading—while also acknowledging that many of these are longstanding principles of Black feminist and abolitionist praxis (e.g., Brown 1994; Gumbs 2016; Ransby 2005).

For all of us, whether or not we want to claim them as our dead, we might invite these radical and imperfect feminist anarchists to ask each of us, in our singular and dynamic nexus of histories and relationships, what a “transformative way of life” entails. Given the environmental coordination that makes possible the emergent event of our existence, how do we seize that something else already welling toward the world that we want?