Thing Power in Reverse
‘Show us not the aim without the way.
For end and means on earth are so entangled
That changing one, you change the other too;
Each different path brings other ends in view.’
Ferdinand Lassalle: Franz von Sickingen
quoted in Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler
A little while ago I was walking down Moonee Ponds Creek and peloton of people on bikes came past. These were the kind of people who take riding their bike very seriously. They had the lycra, they had the $15,000 bike, they had the reflective sunglasses that you could still somehow see a scowl through. These people weren’t just riding bikes, they were Cyclists.
One thing that none of these Cyclists had was a bell. Somehow courteous, mutually intelligible communication with others wasn’t a priority for them.
But they passed me coming up to a sharp bend and because their default posture as a group was to take up both sides of the path, they had to communicate among themselves to move over to their side so as to avoid zooming directly into me.
This was achieved through call and response shouts of ‘Walker!’, ‘Walker!’, Walker!’, Cyclist to Cyclist, all the way down their coasting conga-line.
Friends, up until that point, I’d been innocently thinking of myself as a Person - out for a walk.
But in that moment, I was recast in their visor-protected gaze; not just objectified but somehow vehiclified.
To these Cyclists I evidently was the means by which I moved about.
Dr. Alice Lewis writes compellingly about how easily the boundary between a person and their bike can become fuzzy. Discussing a bike as a ‘prosthetic’ she explains
‘The bicycle and the body amalgamate when cycling, as cleated shoes attach feet to pedals and knees move with cranks and wheels to all become pistons of the one machine.’
Friends, I fear my Cyclists had gone too deep. They’d become so uncritically enmeshed with their protheses that their capacity for some kind of a basic human empathy had been foundationally compromised.
‘I’m a little airplane, neow, noew!’
Jonathan Richman, ‘I’m a little airplane’, Sesame Street
I found my encounter with the Cyclists very funny, perplexing, and somehow mildly confronting to my sense of self. But last night I had an experience that helped me understand it better.
Last night I was the one on the bike. I was riding home, it was dark, and I passed a man jogging. This man, I noticed, was wearing a front and rear bike light on his head and upper arm respectively. The one on his head was white, steady, and facing forward; the one on his arm was red, flashing, and faced behind him. As I passed this jogging man he was turning a corner. There was no one crossing his path but as he turned, he lifted his arm, using it to indicate like you would on a bike.
Friends, this man was a ‘Jogger!’.
Jane Bennet writes that
‘so-called inanimate things have a life … deep within is an inexplicable vitality or energy’
May-be, but last night I was confronted with the truly terrible inverse of so-called thing-power, a weird and perverse impulse that expresses in some people - to cosplay at being things.
Means and ends are tricky, but it’s truly disorienting to be shown the apparent next, natural, fitting shape of thing-sympathy is some weird, equal parts silly & self-serious kind of thing imitation.
My cyclists, my Joggers, my Walkers – I hope you’ve retained enough of a sense of self to be offended when I describe you using a possessive determiner.