Walking in Late Capitalism - Dialectic of Aestheticization and Commodification

Walking has become a trend in the USA. In recent years, the desire to walk has brought forth specific urban design for walkable places as well as art forms that focus on walking. Whence this trend? This dissertation studies the socio-economic and cultural context that brought forth the aestheticized forms of walking such as walking in designed walkable places and walking as art. The theoretical framework to study this genealogy is based in social anthropology, critical theory, theatre studies and the practice of audio-walks. A "dialectic of aestheticization and commodification" runs through modernity that generates aestheticized forms of walking today. While walking is initially a form of aesthetic struggle against the rational principles of modernity and the forces of capitalism, this struggle is co-opted by the logic of capital in a continuous interlacing of the processes of aestheticization and commodification. The social and spatial consequences of capitalism together with the process of aestheticization of society produce new spatial forms of capitalism, new commodified forms of social interaction, and new forms of walking. What became of the yearning for agency through walking? With "walkable urbanism", capital returns to the city center and creates new markets for a budding walkable life-style which is fed through conspicuous consumption and the commodified "walkable body". With walking as art, the struggle for more physical, intellectual and political agency through walking goes on. While fighting with the self-referential loop of postmodern performing art, art walking opens up doors to new paths for contemporary art that lead out of post-dramatic art, beyond the phenomenology of embodied experience, and out of the manipulating products of the culture industry in order to create art that offers room for imagination -- the source of social change.