M. John Harrison gets annoyed about what he calls the new enclosures — the way perfectly ordinary activities have been commodified by business and government into something you need to pay for or ask permission for.
My point is simply that everyone must have the freedom to swim in a river without the act being marketed to them as “wild swimming”. The label is a danger because it’s the first step towards commodification.
The councils, lobbies, sports-regulatory bodies and swimming-hat manufacturers can’t take “wild swimming” indoors to control it as a commodity & meter it out to the participants in paid-for units (although that was ably done to rock climbing, which thought of itself as a “wild”, fully exterior activity, across the 1990s); but they can construct the kind of linguistic & cultural enclosure around it that will allow them to take profit in other ways.
In this sense, & in lots of others, the UK outdoors has been moved relentlessly indoors over the last two and half decades.
I don’t see how this observation has anything to do with elitism. What I am trying to disentangle–from political, commercial & media constraints–is the individual human freedom to decide to go swimming, or walking, or riding a bike without that action being a privilege granted by someone else and/or a source of profit for someone else.
The difference is between the activity as an action & the activity as a captive resource which is then offered back under the terms of whatever group has captured it.
Patrick Nielsen Hayden
September 7, 2009 at 6:04 pmMaybe I’m just being dense, but I literally cannot tell from M. John Harrison’s post what actual bad thing somebody is supposed to have done.
I think I’m reasonably alert to the tendency of capitalism to attempt raids on the common weal, and yet all I can discern from what Harrison reports is that someone stuck a label onto something. Okay, admittedly, labels have power, but it’s a very different power from that wielded by (for instance) a Pinkerton.
Possibly this is just me being a literal-minded American. Alternately, perhaps it’s a failure of expository technique.
Martin Wisse
September 12, 2009 at 8:41 amCan’t you? It’s not just labeling an activity, it’s remaking something that’s a natural, uncontrolled activity into something you need permission for, either from the autorities or through a commercial entity, no matter how understated. Having areas were wild swimming is encouraged or allowed imply that it isn’t elsewhere. Instead of being able to decide for youself to swim here or there, you instead have to make use of the designated area.
A minor irritant perhaps, but one example of the increasing intrusiveness of the combination of state control & commercialism, feeding on each other.