UKC

Climbing videos, writing and other content typically fail to engage with the bodily experience of the activity, argues artist and philosophy PhD graduate Dr Andrew Whall.

What is the problem with how climbing is represented in its media? In my opinion, the problem is primarily that the output rarely portrays a holistic view of the climbing experience—one which connects both the internal and external (mind and body). 

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Yawn. (Sorry.)

OK, which aspects of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's theory do you take issue with?

Excellent article, thank you. I totally agree with your thesis.

How does Ed Drummond, with his unique style of writing, plus his performances (which included climbing) fit into the argument made here ?

Love it. Bolder and more sincere than my efforts in the past.

Your works makes attempts of mine of 'capturing the hills' look Kitsch in comparison.

Keep at it 👍👍👍👍👍

Interesting article, shame it ended with what just seemed like lazy stereotyping of young people.

Not convinced that there’s a strong argument that a lack of experimental art in climbing is the driving force behind the popularity of indoor climbing either. Of the representations of climbing used to illustrate the article, the only ones that make me want to get outside are the photos. Can’t say the more experimental efforts stir anything in me I’m afraid. 

Bravo UKC.

For me this is totally unreadable, I just have not got a clue what it is about, and much of it is what frustrates me about academic articles, a certain language is used, which is impenetrable to people who are not in the club. "phenomenological study of consciousness", seriously, I am pretty well read, and this is almost academic willy waving, but what's the point trying to present a message if very few understand what you are on about.

Possibly , the author could have got their message across by using, more accessible language.
However, UKC is not limited by page numbers, so why not put something like this out there, I assume there must be people who understand it.

Who give's a flying freckle that the author's idiolect differs from yours?

It is the meaning behind the diction that is critical.

It would be a dull old world if we all expressed ourselves the same, I mean what would be the point...

that was a fascinating read. and as someone who wrote his master’s thesis on husserl, i’m always in favour of bringing phenomenology into things.

anyways, sorry for the wall of text, but here are thoughts that came to mind:

very much yes to making a distinction between functional media – tools, effectively – like topos, beta videos, etc., and attempts at more holistic or even artful/artistic representations, and focusing the critique on the latter. on the former, it would be misplaced. (however, where guidebook prose moves closer to wine reviews, it has some real potential for trying to represent the bodily experiential nature of a line, and i’d argue that the way you draw a line on a picture of a rock expresses at least some abstraction of the bodily experience, not a mere plotting of climber’s centre of gravity.)

that said, i’m not sure i quite share your degree of pessimism about the state of media. yes, climbing is more than the object-centred view, and while we have to swim against the stream of zeitgeist to get there, it is valuable to explore more than just that. but we *are* doing that already. is it fully realised? absolutely not. but we do get, for example, videos that explore aspects of togetherness and camaraderie in various ways. we definitely get documentaries and their alike that explore the meaningfulness of a person’s climbing, often all but explicitly saying that considering just the physical feat is incomplete. climbing literature has been doing that since forever. and lately, i’ve seen increasingly many bouldering videos that are riffing off skateboarding videos. of course, one could call them less coherent edits with excessive music, but the point stands that these are attempts to capture a *more than* just getting a body up some rock. right now, they’re using a lot of the language developed by those documenting their engagement in a different sport, and it hasn’t yet developed into a thing of its own, but nevertheless, it is more than just the object-centred view, and all of these aspects are legitimate parts of climbing, the whole-mind-body-practise.

speaking of setting our eyes on a phenomenologically informed depiction of climbing: that is, of course, an immensely tall order. and i completely agree with you saying that it only gives a framework for thinking about the thing, not a tutorial for how to get there, or even an outline of what that would look like. but what is certain is that whatever medium it is going to be realised in will heavily inform the outcome. schopenhauer built his entire aesthetics on two tenets: 1) art conveys insight into the full truth of its subject, and 2) different media can express different aspects of this full truth. he, for example, explains that what is expressed in the medium of architecture is the truth of inanimate matter: gravity pulling down, material properties resisting it, and so on. visual media can depict living creatures doing their living business, but only insofar as their living business manifests as something visible. to depict the inner life of a sentient being (not just to insinuate that it is there, like in rodin’s thinker), we need literature. he goes on and on about this, but the important bits for us here are: if we are talking about, say, climbing videos, then we can only directly express visual things in motion and with sound. and we can use video’s moving visuals and sound over time to express some things beyond that, insofar as we manage to cram them into sound and visuals: narration to add a literary description, editing a quick sequence of twenty falls to indicate time spent on effort, intercutting climbing with the climber talking at the camera to try reconciling how simultaneous climbing’s visible external and expressed internal are.

what i’m trying to get at here, is: to express that phenomenological living-body-ness, subjective-object-ness, it’s not even straightforward what medium could convey such a thing. this combination of meaning (can be written down or narrated, at least a notion of it), movement (can be shown, at least its external aspect), sensation (many of which can hardly get conveyed as such at all, especially climbing-specific ones), and their inseparability. in the face of how big a task that is, and visual media leaning much easier to the objective pole of the phenomenon, i think you are a little too easily dismissive of the ways climbing media already stretches to encompass many aspects that go beyond the object-centred fact that a body went up some rock (plus attached number).

(we could do with a good bit more ‘artsy’ art in the spotlight, though. absolutely no argument on that front. i’d love a world with more drawings, paintings, sculpture, poems, and whatever else to accompany our reports of a meaningful bit of climbing.)

finally, i’m really not with you when it comes to climbing outdoors vs indoors. if outdoor bouldering’s creativity is in opening problems, then most outdoor bouldering isn’t creative. if, on the other hand, it is at least as much about finding a way to integrate the demands of a piece of rock with one’s own bodily mind in given environmental conditions, then it makes no difference whether that takes place on a chunk of granite or a composite of plywood and colour-coded resin.

likewise, we already have this sort of emancipation of indoor setting from the outdoors experience, with problems being set that lean into movement that pretty much doesn’t happen outdoors, and is chiefly influenced and driven by bodily experience of these movements in an indoor setting. and it didn’t make indoor climbing any more or less meaningful, or more or less rich, let alone start undoing it. what it did become was less of a simulacrum, less of a mere practise of setting for the purpose of training for rock, and more of its own, separate thing. and where, in all of this, do spray walls and boards fit, with their combination of (meta-)creativity of their designer, the creativity of everyone who set a problem on it, every climber who bodily experienced ways through that problem’s demands, and the pesky detail that all of this took place under a roof? i’m just not sure that part of your essay does your point about the form of medial representation any favours.

all these disagreements aside, i am 100% with your closing appeal! for practicioners of an activity where we (gleefully!) fall off more times than not, we are surprisingly reluctant to fall in our representations and descriptions. and that, i believe, would be the way to get to less conventional ways of expression: for every one that really hits home, there were a lot of them where we fell.

Well I assume the author would wish people to understand their message, and the more the better, otherwise what is the point in writing it. Of course I could be wrong,  obviously you think I am. 

Thank you, an interesting article. I agree that much media does not present a holistic view of climbing. However, there is also much that does.

   I've just returned from a fascinating and inspirational talk ( with photos and video clips ) by Hazel Findlay. It absolutely connected the internal and external mind and body experience. 

   When I flick through some of the 'climbing' books and magazines that adorn many shelves around my home there are wonderful poems, stories, cartoons, work by mountain artists, descriptions of landscapes, stories about training and much more. Games Climbers Play comes to mind, as does the writing of Rebuffat.

   Some artwork, for me, captures an internal and external experience that resonates such as by Shelley Hocknell and John Redhead.

   By coincidence I was chatting to some of the route setters at my local climbing wall last week. Mostly young and very competent and creative climbers and route setters. They not only love going to boulder such as at Hound Tor, Fontainbleu, Magic Woods, Joshua Tree etc. but actively encourage new staff ( as well as junior club members ) to get out bouldering. In my opinion they are actively helping to mould the creativity of the future route setters.

   For those who choose to cast their net wider there is plenty that engages with the body and mind experiences of climbing - but I agree there could always be more in what for many is the 'mainstream' media for climbing.

i get your frustration, but in the specific case you mentioned, there isn’t really a way around. ‘phenomenological study of consciousness’ is as concise and accurate as it gets, and outside of prefixing it with a couple (= a whole lot) of paragraphs on phenomenology, it’s hard to phrase this any different. phenomenology *is the name* of a school of thought in philosophy, there really isn’t a way around calling it by that, and there isn’t one to condense decades of very specific thought into something immediately accessible either.

you could say something like: we used to think the world was out there, and we have perceptions of it that mirror it exactly.

and then we came round to the fact that we really only have our first-person views on all things, and so we can only speak about how a thing looks, given what toolkit our first-person view is equipped with. but not about what things are like when not perceived by such a toolkit.

and then, we came round to realising that we can’t even talk about these first-person views as if they were independently existing, because we only have them when we’re first-person-viewing things. so we can only really talk about this weird combination of a view on a thing, that looks like a thing from one side, like a view from the other, but the view is only a view because there’s a thing to view and the thing is only a thing because it is viewn. that last bit is called phenomenology.

and even that gets obscure and inaccessible really quick, and is still painfully incomplete. philosophy, as a discipline, sadly isn’t conducive to immediately digestible terminology. both because it is about looking at matters from so up close that the entire approach becomes unintuitive, and about such specific differences to other such close-up views that it’s hard to grasp what the deal is without reading up on all of them.

it’s a real problem.

Being squished through an academic mangler is traumatising enough before being mobbed on a public forum for your efforts, especially 'cos your typical student is developing cognitively, I applaud the piece. The visuals more so than than the text - I'm more of a visual person.

That's the point! Academic articles are written to communicate efficiently with people working in that academic field. They are not written for any other audience - you go to the 'popular science' (or whatever) section for that.

There is an interesting point made in this article, but I think the author would have done better - given the audience - to have rewritten it in less academic terms. There is however the danger that having done that, you end up with... nothing. Here? I'm not so sure.

Thank you, an interesting reply. This is a great thing of the Internet, and something it used to be better at, publishing Niche stuff. Somebody with a niche interest would create a wonderful website, just for the passion of it, possibly about, phenomenology, and if only 7 people in the world looked at it, so what, but nowadays google search seems to swamp out the amateur passionate websites of old, so Bravo to UKC for publishing this.

Why do you not use capital letters, are you using a special device, it makes reading your post feel odd.

Yep, there have been articles on UKC that have for instance used relatively technical medical terminology. Lots of non medics will have some ideas what those terms mean, but not everyone will. And to a certain extent, that's ok. Beyond anything else, reading on a phone or a computer gives everyone the opportunity to highlight one word, right-click on it, and select web search and read up on a word they don't know or idea they don't understand. 

I have half a philosophy degree and can't say I understood everything in this article. I don't actually remember coming across phenomenology in philosophy, rather only in sociology where it is a related but slightly different concept as best I understand it. So I am conscious that I might be missing some of the argument being made here, but my immediate reaction, at least to the conclusion, was that even using phenomenology as a way to get there, the end result seems to be the romanticization of, in this case, outdoor bouldering, as we saw in the Victorian era of early mountaineering and alpinism.

I have in the past found and (as the author says) "opened" new boulders, nothing very hard but still I guess I can say I have partaken in that creative part of climbing. I have also climbed new routes, and helped develop cliffs where no routes existed before our visit. This is fun, satisfying, enjoyable, rewarding and so on. I'm not sure if personally I would claim it as any great expression of art though. But I also have enough reflexivity to be able to question my motives for engaging in such activities. I remember when I climbed my first new winter route as a young student in Scotland, I must have written off to the SMC journal the next day to inform them of our 'achievement'. When we have developed new boulders or cliffs, we have made topos and reported the new routes to the relevant website or magazine. If I was being kind to myself, I might say this was wanting to share the pleasure I've gained from climbing in these places with other people. But realistically, I also know many of us crave peer approval or to show ourselves to be successful in some way, even if in just such niche activities. Perhaps the art is being done by people out there, climbing amazing problems or new routes and not telling anybody about them. Kudos to those we never hear about. But for most of us socialized into competitive late capitalism, I think our desires are not nearly so noble.

But this isn't an academic audience, is it (barring a tiny minority of members)? It is more akin to that 'popular science' audience you mentioned.

One marker of a skilled academic practitioner is the ability to convey their specialist topic to non-specialists. 

you’re most welcome, and i agree about the internet having been better when everybody who wanted to hosted their own obscure little website. so many interesting little nuggets.

as for the capital letters: that’s one part me being lazy in my time off after a work day of having to be very precise about typing and glyphs, and one part having grown up in chat rooms and forums filled with talk so informal that capitalisation seemed unnecessary.

Why do you not use question marks? It makes reading your post feel odd. 

(Not to mention random capitals in the middle of sentences and the sentence with 7 commas.)

"What is the problem with how climbing is represented in its media? In my opinion, the problem is primarily that the output rarely portrays a holistic view of the climbing experience—one which connects both the internal and external (mind and body). "

V.

"I believe the problem lies in the dichotomy or tension between bouldering inside and bouldering outside."

I don't think there's anything intrinsic that stops the holistic portrayal of climbing experience indoors but allows such a holistic portrayal outdoors.

It's just that video or pictures are crap at it. Words spoken or written are the way forward, which isn't going to generate as many clicks and likes on Instagram 

from what i know, phenomenology is quite central in continental philosophy, but also somewhat easily overlooked in favour of more captivating schools like existentialism etc.. husserl himself was a mathematician, and his books certainly read that way. both of these i can imagine going some way to it not being a favourite topic in an anglo-american context.

as regards your conclusion about the author’s romanticisation, i am struggling with that part of the essay the most, and i can’t find much phenomenological substance in there. if radically abridged, phenomenology would want one to focus epistemological thought on pure description of the phenomena of the mind. he says that from kant on, we were overly focused on the primacy of the subject. the subjective mind has a category of spatiality, therefore objects appear spatial to us, it’s saying more about us than about the thing, and so on. husserl would say that it’s more accurate to say that objects only appear in subjective acts of cognition, but subjective acts of cognition also only happen when cognising(?) objects – it’s not one taking primacy over the other, they’re two poles of the same thing. and either pole is only what it is because of the other: an act of seeing is only such because it correlates with a seen object. a visible object is only such because it correlates to an act of seeing.

so the angle of bringing in phenomenology ties more into the essay’s aspect of wanting media to try and express the entire phenomenon of climbing – in the moment of moving your body, you can’t really make the distinction of saying ‘this is me, the mind subject, and that is the object, the body i manipulate.’ that’s only how you can tease it apart afterwards, but in the process, you’re taking apart the ‘whole.’

that part of the essay i believe has value, if for nothing else than providing an interesting framework to consider. the one that goes ‘but pulling on rock is worth more than parkour on plastic’ doesn’t do much for me. (i’d even say that to the phenomenological moment of inhabiting your moving body, it’s inconsequential whether you’re moving on rock or plastic. but that’s just me.)

There’s a problem with how climbing is portrayed in it’s media? News to me

Somewhere a group of climbers, engaging with a different way to read about climbing, than what tends to be provided by others who choose to make a living out of it, are giggling and teasing climbing media consumers for not getting it. 

"Currently, my media feeds are chock full of videos with music soundtracks, mostly quite frankly dull as dishwater and telling me nothing about the experience of the climbing body, the climber".

This is a bit like saying that climbing Little Chamonix does nothing to explain the plot of Game of Thrones, and holding that up as a flaw of the route.

Too much of this article assumes that there's a problem that needs fixing for the benefit of everyone, when the only person that thinks there's a problem is the author.  The rest of us, not so much.

T.

One of the best posts I've read here in a while.... thank you.

I'm sharing the image below as a representation of my lived experience of this article.

Oh, and Orwell's 6 rules nos 1-5.

Who funded that?

​​​​Certainly feels like this piece started with an axe to grind and then spent much time and effort wrapping it in a lot of flowery academic language. 

Had there been a editorial decision to start a campaign of opinion pieces attacking young people and indoor climbers? Seems not terribly smart from a business perspective. I'll happily stop bringing my business here if that's that case (and I'm neither young nor a primarily indoor climber). 

The second article in as many weeks that seeks to draw a dividing line through the climbing community....it smacks of culture war nonsense, and while it no doubts drives 'engagement'....I'll have no part of it, and cease contributing to Rockfax/UKCs coffers if they decide to go down that road. 

Pretentious? Moi?

Seems a lot of complicated words to express a simple opinion that could easily be said in a couple of sentences.

Interesting to see how challenging people have found this article, and how willing people are to get the daggers out when challenged! In all directions.

I thought it was a really interesting thing to read and a good contrast to other articles on here. I didn’t understand all of it, and I don’t totally agree with all of it either, but I’m glad it’s here. That goes for John’s article too.

The bits I did understand seemed self-evidently obvious or simplistic, which does make me question whether there was anything interesting buried behind the long words and so on in the bits I did not understand. It did come over a bit like some people who use long words and language in such a way as if to say "don't challenge me; you are not worthy".

Stepping aside from all of the difference of opinion above about the academic approach for a moment. I do find it kind of cool that you can essentially attain a Phd in bouldering. 

Trying to read the first paragraph then scanning the rest was enough to convince me that this utter bullshit has very little to do with climbing. 

This article seems to be to be barely penetrable, obtuse, and to dress up essentially an aesthetic distaste as an objective flaw in the way other people have fun.

They could just say "I don't like Instagram videos of young people doing indoor bouldering" and that'd basically cover it, instead its trying to present those videos as some kind of deep flaw in the soul of climbing. I don't know what it is about this one and the UKC article recently about grades but like, it just reeks of grumpy old man yells at cloud.

It seems odd to say that people's experiences of climbing aren't represented in the media, and then go on to say that the experiences people are having are insufficient in themselves. If someone is only interested in indoor bouldering as a fun activity and a way to exercise (as a large amount of casual climbers are), then consuming media that matches this 'shallow' depth of experience seems pretty appropriate.

Just because your specific experience of climbing isn't being represented in the mainstream doesn't mean that the current representation is in any way wrong. 

I also think that the claim is wrong anyway, there is plenty of content out there, for those who look, that delves into the holistic experience. Take any Dave Macleod or recent Robbie Phillips video for example. Talented climbers and filmmakers are putting out content which does convey a depth of experience.

I guess it isn't wrong to say that there is a level of commodification to climbing media, but to have that all hidden behind pointless philosophy jargon that serves to add nothing to a myopic rant about the youth and social media, seems like a thinly-veiled show of superiority. 

Yes.  And the idea that philosophy has to be written in impenetrable jargon like this is also nonsense - Bertrand Russell, for example, covered the entire history of Western Philosophy in an entirely readable and sometimes  humorous manner.  If you are genuinely trying to communicate something technical to a lay audience, in whatever field, you take the time to write in a way that will be understood.

I think this bit is the part for me that stands out

"Route setters, I would hazard a guess, have all climbed outside and have bouldered at places like Fontainebleau, Magic Wood, Rocklands, Bishop to name a few top class venues. The knowledge they gained from this experience they then bring inside into the climbing walls and gyms and into the creation of the problems/boulders. What will happen when these boulder setters retire, give up? Problems will then be set by a younger generation who have climbed extensively or predominantly inside.

Their knowledge of movement, their creative understanding of what a boulder can be and how their body fits with that boulder will be derived from an increasingly narrow field. Ultimately this will undo the sport, making it increasingly anodyne and boring, at least for those people that understand bouldering as art, or even the people who have a flickering remembrance of an experience that constituted more than a blob to blob hop, skip and jump."

This is just contempt and snobbery with the veneer of artistic appreciation as a defence. Outdoor bouldering is just as at times incredible and at times basic as indoors. There's nothing ecstatically artistic about a crimp ladder, there's definitely artistic merit to many indoor climbs. As for the sporting element; it is often a sport, it always has been, just as it often not a sport and always has been. Toby Roberts is a professional athlete. Katie Lamb is a professional athlete. That there is aesthetic merit in what they do doesn't diminish that. Dan Varian describes himself as a hobbyist with an aesthetic eye but the man has trained incredibly hard and is in incredible shape, he has applied athletic practises and ability to his bouldering, and that doesn't diminish anything either.

"I don't like comp style problems or the sport of bouldering, and I dont like trash instagram media of them" okay dude, but so what? Genuinely can't even begin to understand why UKC thought this was worthy of publication, I suggest the author spend their valuable time on something other than putting out absolute dross like this.

 Well put. I also think it seems odd to say that indoor problems have to mimic outdoor problems. Indoor climbing used to be simply a training replacement for outdoor climbing but is now an individual discipline in its own right. In some ways it is better that more unnatural movements are being explored and boundaries are being pushed on indoor setting separate from outdoors.

I am not a huge fan of competition style bouldering (to climb that is) but I appreciate its place and I also appreciate (which doesn't seem to be something the author of the article does) that other people do respond and enjoy indoor setting. 

Indoor climbing is also much more accessible and brings many more into the sport. I vastly prefer outdoor climbing but I started indoor, and likely wouldn't be climbing at all if I wasn't able to build confidence indoors.

A glossary of terms, and not using three words when would do, might make it more accessible to the average reader. I just ended up thinking: “Hmmm. Word salad”

this could be a nom de plume for Bob Pettigrew?

Hi, I wrote about Ed Drummond in the thesis... "Ed Drummond, a well-travelled English climber who arguably looked inwards to a consciousness influenced by Modernism and a US 60’s West Coast counter culture. Although not about bouldering specifically, his writing is startling in its departure from what went before. The following quote provides an example of writing that is an attempt to convey the climber’s subjective experience. Ed Drummond in Hard Rock (1974) has written: A five foot arm suspension bridging your life inyourhandatthreefootarmIdon’thavetofalloffSolestickonnice. Made it, snug as a nut, my doigt in the peg...now you’re big enough to fly, jugs come lovely, hands full of rock I go up like a slow balloon, pink knees bumping after me.  Drummond’s words roll out onto the page as if they are his thoughts occurring in the moment, during the climb. We can feel his pink knees as if they were our own".

"I agree that much media does not present a holistic view of climbing. However, there is also much that does.there are many instances:...

I agree there are many instances, I've worked with John Redhead as a curator (art projects) and included him as an example in my thesis. Other examples you mention are good too. 

Hi, thanks for your thoughtful response. I do address your point quoted below in the thesis. My mistake in this article was to ask questions and not give too many answers, I guess that has upset some people.

what i’m trying to get at here, is: to express that phenomenological living-body-ness, subjective-object-ness, it’s not even straightforward what medium could convey such a thing. this combination of meaning (can be written down or narrated, at least a notion of it), movement (can be shown, at least its external aspect), sensation (many of which can hardly get conveyed as such at all, especially climbing-specific ones), and their inseparability. in the face of how big a task that is, and visual media leaning much easier to the objective pole of the phenomenon, i think you are a little too easily dismissive of the ways climbing media already stretches to encompass many aspects that go beyond the object-centred fact that a body went up some rock (plus attached number).

Hi, thanks for your response. I'm a more visual person too. The article was an attempt to put some ideas that had languished in the 'academic' milieu, into a more public/populist space.

Interestingly I didn't think it was that academic, but I can see that language used has caused some problems.

surprised you didn't give a link to your thesis https://www.academia.edu/51411571/THE_PROBLEM_OF_REPRESENTING_THE_BOULDERIN...

I put my website link and the thesis link at the end of the text, but they didn't publish it. Its embedded in the text. It would have been helpful. Also the photographer Rowan Spear-Bulmer, who some people might know with his film work with Dan Turner. 

https://www.ukclimbing.com/videos/categories/bouldering/out_of_obsession-49... 

https://andywhall.com/

At least it sparked a varied and contrasting response from lots of people. Surely that’s a good thing.

Ranging from - ‘this is great’ to ‘how dare you UKC, if you ever post anything like this again I’m going to cancel my subscription and never speak to you again’.

Climbing has changed, as everything does and should. Some people miss the more anarchic, creative, subcultural perspectives that it brought. It’s ok to miss that, and say so.

I think the problem is that the article doesn't feel very tailored for the site of publishing. From looking over the abstract on the thesis it seems incredibly interesting and seems from the first few pages very well written.

For me it seems that sections of your thesis have been taken, and had sections of opinion tacked on in order to create an opinion piece. As someone who studied philosophy at university, I understand the need in academic settings to use specific language and terminology. This doesn't necessarily feel appropriate in a UKC opinion piece however.

It just feels like the message is confused in this article. 

A poorly argued article that substitutes waffle for coherent argumentation.

The understanding of phenomenology and its application to artistic and cultural representation is scant, as evidenced in claims such as "If we accept that climbing is indeed a bodily experience, then surely we should be striving to represent that, rather than settling for a partial representation." One dubious claim leads into another, ending in a false dichotomy: the partial representation, versus the... "true" representation? It's too embarrassing even for the author to be explicit.

After admitting a little too much by describing their research process as involving "a scan of current trends and media coverage on the Internet and social media platforms", this is then brought to bear on the dichotomy between indoor versus outdoor climbing, with no justification beyond the dubious assertion that one is creative and the other is not. This despite the author cautioning us early on to always deconstruct rather than "embrace a false dichotomy between inside and outside—internal and external worlds." Quelle surprise!

The ridiculousness of this position becomes apparent in the conclusion: "My call would be for less prescriptive, less conventional, less formulaic and for more experimental and genuinely challenging representations of the climbing and bouldering experience"... and yet, the author is being both prescriptive and incredibly predictable in privileging outdoor climbing over indoor climbing, by representing the former as "creative, challenging, original" and the latter as "derivative, consumerist, unimaginative". 

Q. Is this indicative of the author's inability to construct a coherent argument, or else of the paucity of contemporary appropriations of continental philosophy? Or does it point to a more generalised crisis within our so-called educational institutions? 

A. All of the above?

You are right, varied and contrasting response is indeed good.

Climbing has changed, I've climbed for about 45 years now, I've changed and sometimes I write to reflect on those changes. 

And so you should. It’s clearly divisive, and it’s a shame people couldn’t respond in a less persecutory and aggressive way. That’s their stuff not yours though.

I enjoyed it, even with all the big words

Interesting how much anger there is in this thread about the OP’s use of philosophical language.
Over the years I’ve enjoyed UKC threads about nuclear physics, chemistry, tax law, DIY plumbing and epidemiology, to name just a few. All of them used technical terms, necessarily, which were unfamiliar to me and I’d guess to many others. I don’t recall any complaints about that.

No one expects a nuclear physicist to explain their field in everyday language: why are the humanities held to a different standard?

The difference is that the use of technical language in articles about nuclear physics etc feels necessary in conveying the point that is intended.

I don't have an issue with all of the philosophical language in the article, it is just used to a point that does not help to convey the point trying to be put across, and instead muddles it. A physicist will use specific language but they won't suddenly delve into string theory terminology without properly explaining, or at least setting up the context. 

Most of what is said in this article can be conveyed in a way that would increase engagement and further convey the point being made.

Is this article about rock climbing? As in scrambling about on some rock for fun? If you're worried about climbing media and how they portray holistic internal and external climbing experiences perhaps you've lost your way a bit. 

All the stuff about art is interesting. I think the only time I have ever used the terms "work of art" or "masterpiece" in climbing is with regard to indoor route setting, which seems to me a truly creative thing. The process of climbing a bit of rock is many more things and can certainly be a totally absorbing holistic experience, but I don't think I would ever describe it as art. More an exercise in problem solving if it had to be encapsulated in few words.

Of course they do. For example New Scientist or many publications aimed at interested but lay audiences

Yes, I’ve had the same thoughts about indoor bouldering sometimes. But outdoor routes too: haven’t you ever thought the first ascensionist created a beautiful thing? And I can’t remember where but it’s a long time ago that I read the comparison of repeating a route to performing a piece of music from the score.

Fair point! But it doesn’t always happen on here…

I’m not complaining, by the way: I’ve learned a huge amount from threads on here discussing topics that stretched my vocabulary and understanding. But I still think there’s an asymmetry in expectations about the language used in the sciences and humanities. 

its becoming more of an expectation in academia to be able to explain one’s  research in everyday language to a generalist audience. it’s a requirement in grant funding applications, and increasingly written in to the audits of research activity. It would stop proceedings on a multidisciplinary panel or event if someone could only use the most opaque language 😂😂

I think Richard Feynman implied that if you couldn’t teach a generalist audience in straightforward terms, then you really didn’t understand the subject matter. For me, I’ve no problem with the article per se, but to choose such abstract language rather than reading the room and fitting to the audience is probably counter productive.

Discovered or created? I think I would go with discovered. It's a bit like mathematics. Interesting question though.

In short I fully agree although I don't believe the subject requires such a complex and long winded thesis as well considered as it is. 

Sadly, what we see now in climbing media is a largely elitist level of the sport. Although this provides opportunity to all of us to set lofty goals, something to aspire to, it also, for the vast majority, provides opportunity to compare ourselves to unachievable levels which in turn can potentially lead to negative feelings of 'not being good enough'. It's like the phenomenon of body identity issues caused by media. 

When I first discovered climbing I was 11 years old and was able to fully enjoy the pure personal experience of the sport. Later in my teens I fell foul if comparing myself to the elites of the time and it quickly escalated to negative feelings about my ability and it fully ruined my experience of climbing for a good decade until my late 20's when I rekindled my love of the sport and had grown wise enough to throw my ego to one side. It was only then, and continously now into my late 30's that I have been able to simply enjoy the sport for my own sake. Interestingly this has led me to climb at a higher level than I ever did in my younger years and my only competition is with myself. 

In summary I think it is a huge responsibility on the industry to produce more media that is inclusive to the majority of climbers and loss to highlight the simple joy of climbing rather than putting so much emphasis on the elites and the highest levels of the sport. The mental health benefits and catharsis of climbing alone are worthy of huge investment in terms of research and teaching. 

Well, the OP *is* discussing abstract ideas. Actually, I see only two terms that might be unfamiliar to a general reader: “Cartesian dualism”, which is explained in plain terms within the same sentence, and “phenomenological”, likewise immediately explained.  My main quibble might be with the word “holistic” because of how vague it has become!

Indeed. When setters ceased to feel indoor climbing was simply derivative and that their role was to "reflect the reality" of rock climbing, and instead began to explore the possibilities of their medium as an end in itself... that was a decisive rupture within indoor climbing/setting, which continues to be reflected in the debate about "competition style" problems. Indoor bouldering's "modernist turn", perhaps! 

Another intriguing aspect is Will Bosi's approach to climbing Burden of Dreams blurred the lines between indoor and out, with digitally scanned replica holds... which may in fact have themselves have constituted a slightly harder variation of the original problem. This whole process was then extensively documented and broadcast, so that viewers could join Bosi on his journey in real time - echoing the mediatised ascent of the Dawn Wall. Where does "representation" end and "reality" begin?

Interesting debates, potentially, but running completely counter to the reheated Romanticism of the OP article.

Thanks for your support. It was a UKC editorial decision to use the word 'holistic', it wasn't my term. Tbf though, the editor made that decision on the basis of accessibility.

"If we accept that climbing is indeed a bodily experience, then surely we should be striving to represent that"

If we accept that climbing is indeed a bodily experience, then it can only be represented by actually climbing. Not by words. Not by pictures. Not by videos. All of those will merely be approximations that fail to some degree, depending on the individual's preference/mentality. Some will 'get' words better, some pictures, some video. Some will not 'get' any of those.

Ha! So perhaps, in cases like this, “accessible” equals “vague”? 😀

Thanks for your piece, thought-provoking. 

This is my issue that the article is too reductive. Climbing can't be represented other than by itself. Which is pretty much true of everything but the visual arts and writing have been tackling much more complex experiential activities than climbing so to say it can't handle climbing seems to be promoting climbing as something utterly exceptional.

The thing about the climbing has changed, some people prefer the old anarchistic way etc, is that it is of itself a false dichotomy 

The modern world of climbing was built by the old "anarchistic" guard. Jerry was dossing in Stoney and everyone says "that's the way to do it, on the dole, outdoors all the time, none of this indoor or comp nonsense," well Jerry competed and founded a climbing wall! People say "back in the day, we did what we wanted, we didn't let anyone tell us what to do." And now people are doing what they want, and the response is "not like that! That's sanitised and fake!"

You can't have it both ways. This article and articles like it tie into the recent BMC discussions, into numerous and endless threads, about the division between people who want it to be like it was, when people did what they liked in an anarchist vein, and the people that they are criticising, who are doing what they want, right now! It's old men shouting at young people for wanting a different experience. And it gets dressed up as something more fundamental and philosophical and important time and time again, because even to themselves the people who write articles like this know that the honest truth is ridiculous when spoken aloud; I don't like how you're having fun.

Since when was climbing primarily about ‘having fun’? If it is now, then something fundamental has changed. 

Shorthand for "fun/satisfaction/excitement/what I personally want from X thing"

Some people do climb purely for fun, sure. Not me personally but many do. But that's not really the point, is it

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2501/

this is certainly fair criticism – not least as i myself used ‘explain it to my intellectually curious, but decidedly unacademic grandma’ as a gold standard test to see how well i grasped what i was studying.

but to be fair, i also believe dr whall is a little between a rock and a hard place (pun not inte— oh who am i kidding). on one hand, it would be possible to write an essay expressing the point that also explains the underlying philosophical thought in sufficient depth. on the other hand, that article would easily be three times as long and then the commentariat would be angry about that.

another such tension is between how terminologically accurate it is versus editorial practises at UKC. this one is put under even higher strain by dr whall not only coming from a background of philosophical expertise, but it being his thesis’ subject. that is not a position that lends itself to compromising specificity. and on UKC’s side of things, the article’s subject is different enough from the usual fare that their editorial practises can’t be expected to deal gracefully with the task (see ‘holistic’). neither of these is a shortcoming, but it makes the undertaking more difficult.

top it all off with how common it is in philosophy to use less common terms, just to escape the connotations a more established term has. when being highly specific is required, it can be a real problem when your treatise and another use the same term for very different approaches to a similar thing.

all in all, i can appreciate this was a difficult undertaking for all involved, and overall, i’m glad UKC and dr whall decided to tackle it (and risk not getting it to everybody’s satisfaction), rather than not have it at all.

When it comes to philosophies of climbing, I don't feel the tired phenomenology of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty offers us much of a way forward. Surely it's long overdue that climbing embraced the theories of that true titan of continental philosophy, Jacques Derrida. In fact, Derrida's ideas can prove surprisingly productive when applied to climbing. For instance, we can use the fundamental metaphysical binary opposition of presence/absence to deconstruct the conventional way of owning or possessing climbs - ie recording them in one's UKC logbook or ticking them in one's guide. This enables us to undo the logocentric privilege given only to climbs present in the log and recognise the equal importance of those climbs absent from the log. Put simplistically, the climbs that one drunkenly planned to do in the pub the night before only to bottle in the cold light of day, or the climbs that one idly dreamed of doing while ransacking YouTube for unacknowledged video beta count for just as much as the climbs one merely performed on rock. Since these are generally of a much harder nature, this approach has instant benefits for one's onsight grade, self-esteem and overall worth as a human being. Il n'y a pas de hors-escalade.

To me, your articles raises more questions than it answers. Why should the media 'portray a holistic view of the climbing experience'? In what other field do the media reach that level of reporting? Why should it be different in climbing?

The climbing media are read/seen by climbers, who therefore know what the top dogs go through: pain, joy, frustration, doubt, strategising and so on. If they do not, the problem is not to do with the reception of said news items, but of subject perception.

You seem to advocate a personal, some would say arty form of reporting and expression. And that's fine. Some do go down that route, just like some students end up studying phenomenology. But as in everything it's not all, not by a long margin, and there's no rationale why climbing should get more of that. No rationale or reason that you provide at any rate.

Your section on outdoor/indoor feels too quickly written, in my eyes, and maybe not phenomenologically enough. If creativity is so important, what about chipped holds? Fred Rouhling manufactured brilliant routes back in the 90s, expressing his inner self with a hammer and chisel. And with rock that is not manufactured, is it the human who's being creative, or nature?  

Then what did you do it for? Employment? Valour? Kudos? Pain? (or is that just a different type of fun?).

Surely, people do things voluntarily because they enjoy them. Fun = enjoyment.

I always look forward to articles telling me how to enjoy myself, and that I'm doing it a wrong and intellectually inferior way according to someone else's philosophical position.

That you may find is the reason for some of the strong reactions. I'll just get on with enjoying climbing videos and chasing grades thanks

I think I'm with Gordon on this one, my best climbing experiences are the ones that have provided the strongest emotional response, rarely are these experiences 'fun' in the truest sense of the word.

Of course I enjoy having fun climbing as well, but fun on its own certainly isn't enough for me.

I don't see abstract language: just name dropping and confused explanations, bungled together with a lot of everyday rambling. The eds could have asked for a bit more of an edit for focus, conciseness and clarity.

I might have missed something in the article or the thread above, but if you want the holistic experience of climbing, surely you just go climbing?

Of course, but nothing wrong with trying to convey something of that experience in writing or art.

People often do things for a more lasting and deeper satisfaction than mere fun. True very often of climbing.

Absolutely, and I've an ever-increasing collection of excellent literature and films that does exactly that, and that brings me great pleasure when I'm not out in the hills. I just don't think that the representation will ever be the thing itself, and doesn't need to be.

Of course. Has anyone been mad enough to claim otherwise?

Probably not! I'm not sure I fully understand what the author of the article was driving at so perhaps I've misinterpreted the thrust of his argument - I'm only a simple electrician and I spent most of my 20's and 30's smashing my brain to mush with strong booze and stronger drugs.

Interesting article, Andrew.

I agree with your comments re inside versus outside. As you say, this is not new stuff: see Jim Perrin’s seminal 1986 essay, “Better Out Than In”

There are so many aspects of climbing that are hard to convey: the sweet tang of wild strawberries on an alpine ledge, the acrid smell of sheep-piss topping out at Borrowdale, the sudden cold wind rounding an arete at The Wanneys or a trancelike visual focus on the pattern of dust and lichen on the next hold. Try fitting all that into a YouTube video on a 5" smartphone screen.

[I would also say the problem extends beyond climbing. Mountain biking videos typically choose a pumping rock backing track and show riders, wide-eyed on Taurine and distorted GoPro imagery, scattering pebbles with whoops and high-fiving each other at the bottom. By contrast, wild camping films often go for a self-consciously soporific vibe. Whether the full depth of the experience is conveyed is moot.]

One issue I have with climbing media is surety of outcome. If I tap on a video: “Ben Biceps sends Priapic Paradise 8c+” there’s no suspense how things will pan out. Even “whipper” videos are constrained by ethical norms so I feel confident the fall will be on overhanging rock and rope-arrested with barely a graze. “Free Solo” was a brilliant film, but we all knew it would never have been released had Honnold really fallen through Jimmy Chin’s viewfinder.

It’s not that I want to watch injury or death. It’s just that the actual climbing experience is intrinsically uncertain. Microscopic differences in friction will determine whether Ben Biceps is lionised in the climbing press or charitably pitied as he wheels towards the disabled toilets. Only Schrődinger’s cat is harder to insure.

A few years ago, I had a crack at conveying that dichotomy in verse. Dunno if I managed it but, by thunder, I tried. If nothing else, a poet showing up on this thread mighy help deflect people’s ire at the philosopher.

*************

Pebble

Fingers scrabble upward, Brailing for texture.

On the blank slate: no hyphen of a welcome ledge,

just this full-stop pebble - hard, conclusive,

a goitred eyeball staring, Odin-wise.

Now I see where necessity leads me:

to tug the world down like a Roman blind,

commit all that I am to this obstinate fragment,

stretch, trembling, into a hopeful sky.

I ponder how securely this nugget is bonded.

Two futures open; triumph, disaster:

neither impostors, the distinction concrete.

To pluck the jewel between surprised fingers,

catch the critical eye of cartoon gravity

and scatter my flesh among distant boulders

or

find it firmly-founded; reach and seize the windswept rim.

But spin the clock the other way, watch the birches recede,

see ice sheets pulsate across the land,

oceans spill over and continents cleave

to find this land, Sahara-scorched, Pangaean.

A storm-tossed pebble lies loose on a beach.

Emergent from the shimmer; three-horned beasts.

Will they swagger past, snorting stale breath on primitive bromeliads?

Or will one lumber near, impose its thunderous mass,

tamp the pebble down, cemented for a billion frosts?

Two pasts converge where two futures part

and here am I,

nailed to the crosshair of decision,

then, now and always.

While I don't agree with the comments about outside versus in, I did enjoy the poem. If we're chucking verse into the thread, here's my own attempt at conveying something of the same intrinsic uncertainty, describing an obscure Lundy slab route...

White Squall

Lundy

wired up wrong for risk –

armoured by old compulsions

and rosary rack –

mysteries arranged

cam by colour-coded cam,

the ritual counts

and magical thoughts –

climbing after days of rain:

dampness clings to air

and dark-streaked granite –

Lundy’s familiar spell

cast on cool grey cloud

reluctant to leave

one guardian seal attends

the echoing zawn

where forgetful tides

murmur green songs to themselves

and circling seabirds

cry for all the lost

and nothing feels wholly real –

the liquiform world

shivers in the wind

while envied sharp barnacles

scrape against my feet

reluctant to start

now the chosen route looks dry:

a seldom-climbed slab

of dimples and crimps

and impossible retreat –

fully committed

and far from the gear

my strength draining out to sea

with incoming fear

soft intakes of breath

pluck at my ragged focus

from somewhere beyond

and urgent feet sketch

bloody cartoons in dark eyes

watching from below

adhesion fading

and options all washed away

time for yet one more

all or nothing pop:

nobody makes their own luck

last a climbing life

Type 2 fun is the sort you remember longest.  That said, type 3 casts a long shadow too, but the recall usually isn't so positive.

T.

Okay. Maybe we're just arguing about our different interpretations of 'fun'. I lump all kinds of enjoyment/satisfaction into 'fun'.

Other than that, it's "for the greater good", "for the benefit of mankind", or "to earn a living".

ps. I guess, if you're lucky, all of the above...

Yeah; that's what I said:

https://www.ukclimbing.com/forums/ukc/todays_climbing_media_output_rarely_c...

INCREDIBLY KNOWLEDGEABLE EXPERT HAS ARRIVED!!!!!!!!!! As someone with a master's degree in philosophy and a dissertation on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology under my belt, I am in absolutely the most qualified position imaginable to respond to this article...

... and I can say with absolute confidence that your predicates are all messed up. "Today's Climbing Media Output Rarely Conveys Depth of Experience". Great. Can it? No. Should it? No. Does anyone expect it to? No. Does it need to? No. Can phenomenology be applied to almost anything? Yes. Does it need to be? No. 

Get outside and climb when you can. Read about it when you can't. Are these the same experience? No. But there's no tension there. So don't go looking for it when there isn't any. 

Philosophy is the proverbial hammer that leads many who use it to believe everything is a nail.

I thought that someone would have already made the point, I had thread fatigue and only skimmed some of the later posts. timparkin's reply to your post nicely captures what I felt but did not fully articulate.

Bingo.

I was just reiterating your comment...

Fine work, Andy - I could hear the smack and slosh of the Atlantic in that zawn. Curious that we both reached for cartoon imagery - I guess Wile E Coyote is the prototype for plummeting. 

You'd already said what I did, I missed it because the thread was pretty chunky and then I just posted the same thing, only not as well as you had!

Sorry, I feel like I've been having real trouble communicating clearly on recent threads. I worry that the rave years are starting to catch up with me.

I know lots of people who find that climbing is an important part of the relationship to their body and their mind, often from the perspective of mental health, chronic illness, disability (or all three).

Of course some of them will post a reel on Instagram of them sending a dyno filled comp style boulder that looks cool, but that doesn't mean they don't have any introspection into what climbing means to them in terms of community, head game, trust, confidence, nature, or anything else that might be considered "deeper" than a focus on athleticism.

I agree that ‘more art’ could be useful but there’s already some great climbing writing, photography and film out there which is very much art. To suggest otherwise is doing a disservice to the people who put a lot of hard work into these artistic creations.

On the other hand, the article could be much better written. I don’t think the author paused to consider their audience. It might be suitable for an academic convention though. 

There is no point writing or saying stuff if your audience doesn’t understand you.

Could Chat GPT write the article and/or comments….? The mischief maker in me kind of hope so.

Isn't this like saying the holds on Burden of Dreams should be chiseled so we can all climb it! 

Sometimes it's good to have to work for things a bit and that includes what we read. We all have instant access to explanations of words we might not have in our immediate vocabulary, so its not like this is a secret language.

The point of climbing Burden of Dreams is that it is an intense challenge to overcome.

If you think the purpose of a piece of writing is that it should be difficult to read, then you are simply a very poor writer.

Sorry, but that's rubbish! Chipping BoDs would be more like destroying all the works of Bertrand Russell (for example).

The purpose of language is to facilitate communication of ideas and for that you cannot ignore the capabilities/motivations of your audience. The quote from Feynman should borne in mind: If you can't explain something to a non-specialist audience then you probably don't really understand it yourself. Or by extension, perhaps there's actually nothing much there apart from fancy words.

I agree, but the difficult thing, the thing we have to work for or at, should be the concepts, not the quality of the writing.

Edit: there's actually a bit of a trade off here. Sometimes it's worth ploughing through poor writing if there's a sufficiently good nugget at the bottom of it. I didn't feel that was the case with this piece.

Ed Drummond has already been quite rightly quoted as a writer who seeks to convey the full intensity of the climbing experience by manipulating his language in unusual ways that often force one to reread, to pause and think, to puzzle out meanings which may not initially be obvious. This makes reading him far more of a challenge - far more "difficult " - than the ladybird book prose of Dan Brown, for example. It also makes him a far better writer. One of Drummond's great inspirations, James Joyce, is famously difficult to read, but few would  suggest that this makes him a very poor writer. If one is forced to abandon a reading of Ulysses one most simply accept one isn't up to it, rather than trying to make out it's the novel's fault for not being easier.

The complexity and challenge of the writing of Drummond and Joyce work because they convey meaning within themselves. The challenging nature of their pieces add to the meaning conveyed. 

Challenging reads can be very good, but not when the challenging nature gets in the way of what is being conveyed. This article is written in a way that does not help to convey meaning, if anything it clouds it. 

Joyce and Drummond also weren't writing opinion pieces on UKC. There are different audiences that need to be catered towards.

This isn't a piece of modernist literature. It's an opinion piece on a climbing website, one that as far as I can see is the result of someone to take their personal gripes with what they clearly view as inferior indoor climbing, and dress it up in a haze of deliberately obtuse language.

I rather like reading challenging literature at times, when the writing is of a quality that provides a return, and certainly not in an internet opinion piece so evidently lacking in substance and quality as this. 

​​

This is fair enough, but it was the generalisation of your initial statement that I wanted to take issue with. 

I didn't read the other comments yet so sorry if I'm repeating something someone else said. Anyway I figured I'd throw in some thoughts, intended entirely as a constructive response.

Whall's piece  – like any writing – will find its audience, and I don't think he (or UKC) has to be too precious about editing things so that they appeal to everyone. The same's true of climbing articles, films, books, or art or culture in general. It's neat that UKC doesn't pigeonhole its readership as only being interested in one way of thinking or talking about things. (It'd be neat if found a way to share its platform with a much wider, more diverse range of voices and experiences, but perhaps that's for another thread).

I agree that there's a very flat range of styles in the media surrounding climbing – a narrow range of instagram filters in use, the same establishing shots on 90% of films (a camera rises slowly out of wavy long grass etc, young people brush their teeth on portaledges). This piece seems to recognise that most of this media is really just content/filler for advertising products; I just watched a trio of youtube things by Petzl about Sardegna on the basis that I met a lovely climber from Sardegna and wanted to see some images of the places he was talking about, but instead saw lots of footage that lingered on bright orange quickdraws on someone's bright orange harness. So I found Whall's critique slightly misplaced; these films and things are not intended to capture something about what it's like to climb, they're created to promote a particular image of a particular lifestyle and highlight the accessories that you can own which can make you feel like you might be living inside that image.

Whall's specific claim that a phenomenological approach to philosophical / aesthetic questions bears a bit further scrutiny. As Whall points out, it's not entirely clear how an artwork (particularly a representational artwork, like many paintings, photographs, films) are supposed to achieve or capture, in their representations, the non-representational states of being (bodily movement, bodily awareness, self possession, skilful mastery, grasp of worldly affordances) which we encounter and perhaps set out to enjoy when we're climbing. And, given that some representational artworks do, in some sense, manage to achieve or capture these states, how exactly is it that they do it? It's a neat and knotty problem, the kind of thing that philosophers like thinking about.

But it's hard to see how that problem can be addressed by wondering whether too many of the people making 'climbing media' are spending too much time climbing indoors. (They might be spending too much time watching too much of this very similar climbing media, but that's a different diagnosis, and again, doesn't address the problem at stake; explaining why so much of the climbing media misses the mark isn't the same as explaining how its possible for any media to capture the phenomenology of climbing).

A couple of people who've been thinking and writing about some of these kinds of questions recently (and are no doubt familiar to Whall, but might be interesting for other people to encounter) are C. Thi Nguye, in his excellent and very readable book 'Games: Agency As Art', and Alva Noë, in various places, but particularly in a new book called 'The Entanglement: How Art and Philosophy Make Us What We Are'. Thi Nguye gives a nice summary of the position his book takes in this blog post for the Forum for Philosophy here. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/theforum/art-is-a-game/ – just as he thinks that art (and appreciating art) is a kind of interactive game, I think it's fair to say that some types of climbing, by involving certain kinds of interactive and imaginative striving, will amount to something like an art work. These are lines of affinity that I think Whall would appreciate. Similarly (although with a very different approach from Thi Nguye), Noë is interested in exploring the ways in which the mind and the world aren't neatly separated, but instead are multiply 'entangled' by our engagements and activities and interactions. No doubt Whall will be aware of Noë's contributions to the literature on enactivist theories of perception, so I'm mostly flagging this here because he's also been writing recently about the connections between enactivism and aesthetics. Both authors, in their own ways, argue that we can and should step away from thinking about art works as objects which capture and communicate representations of things, and in doing this rethinking about what art works are and how we're supposed to engage with them, the knotty problem of trying to make sense of how art works are able to 'capture' or express those complicated non-representational states of being seems like it might be a bit more fathomable.

I think there are two different things being discussed here. Drummond and Joyce are (arguably!) good, but difficult writers. This piece was just plain bad writing, which made it additionally difficult on top of the difficulty of the concepts.

Almost the whole point of climbing is that you are testing yourself. At its best there is always the question ‘can I get up this?’ - because it’s at or around one’s limit. So there’s a huge adrenalin factor, with an element of fear, on any adventure climb. It’s the tension between fear and excitement that is the essence of the sport, imho. Being scared and thrilled at the same time, while keeping calm and using all one’s amassed technique to accomplish it.

PS. Of course there are times when one repeats routes for sheer enjoyment, but I don’t think that’s the essence of the game. It wasn’t, for me, anyway.

IT’S OK KIDS I’M BACK TO SEPARATE THE PHILOSOPHICAL WHEAT FROM THE ONLINE FORUM CHAFF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Having utterly, thoroughly and conclusively demonstrated 100% the article itself is based on faulty assumptions (see my comment above) I have a real itch to address parts of the content within the article too. Naturally this will only really be of interest to anyone who actually gives a rat’s arse about the article, this comment section, and my half-baked drivel. The sheer level of downright naughtiness in the article makes me want to bend the author over my philosophical knee and give him a good intellectual spanking. (My earlier response was a hasty five-minute reply on the train home, but I’m now on the sofa with my laptop and a whisky, like a REAL ARMCHAIR PHILOSOPHER!!!)

“If we accept that climbing IS indeed a bodily experience, then surely we SHOULD be striving to represent that” (my caps, because I do what I want)

Ouch! We’re leading here with a philosophical fallacy. You can’t derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. In essence, there is no logical way to make this argument (stating what ought to be the case, based solely on statements about what is the case). This is first year philosophy stuff!

“we can imagine climbers (…) arriving home with their bodies throbbing and fizzing from all that lived experience. But we still have the problem of how we represent these experiences and we still avoid teasing out the subtleties of the experience in a clumsy and conventional series of images and texts”

Clumsy and conventional! Heavens to Murgatroyd! What a way to dump on folk who are writing climbing articles! I’m sure many don’t regard it as a problem that they can’t fully express the ‘subtleties’ of climbing through writing. So much phenomenology is about the very fact that language IS clumsy when it comes to trying to describe experience! But more on that later, we’re just getting warmed up.

“quite simply, climbing these days is in the thrall of media and money”

Is it?! Is it really? Absolutely SOME parts of climbing are, no doubt about it! But when I’m at the crag or the wall I just see people going about something they love largely without media or money on their minds. This statement is a gross and lazy exaggeration.

“I believe that an increasing effort to appeal to mass and mainstream audiences with (…) dumbed-down output to attract eyeballs has become a deterrent to experimentation”

Dumbed-down! Gadzooks, there we go again with the lazy (and elitist, and mildly offensive) generalisations!

“I believe the problem lies in the dichotomy or tension between bouldering inside and bouldering outside. (…) What concerns me is the rupture between what I see as a creative act, i.e. bouldering outdoors and a simulacrum that is practised indoors.”

Crikey, there’s a lot going on here. Tension? What tension? The one you’re projecting onto bouldering? So, bouldering outdoors is ‘a creative act’ and bouldering indoors is ‘a simulacrum’ (or imitation) of bouldering outdoors (which is somehow more ‘real’). Ecky thump! Are we really going to argue this?! All us folk who are pulling on plastic aren’t ‘really climbing’? What about the people who are from social or economic backgrounds that don’t permit them the means to get to Font or even Stanage to engage in this ‘art’? Are we going to tell them they’re not ‘really climbing’? WILD SUGGESTION TIME!!!!!!!!! What if we erred on the side of inclusion instead of exclusion? What if we replaced this nonsense gatekeeping of what climbing ‘is’ and ‘isn’t’ with acceptance and welcoming everyone into an activity that means many things to many people? We were all new to climbing once. Let’s not go dictating to others who are new, or who only want (heaven forbid!) to climb indoors, or don’t have the privilege of climbing outside.

“My call would be for less prescriptive (…) representations of the climbing and bouldering experience (…) More art, less sport.”

I hope the irony is not lost that this article is jam-packed with prescriptivism, not least that last sentence! ‘More art, less sport’ is being nakedly prescriptive! I also hope the irony is not lost on anyone (author included) that what is, in essence, quite a prescriptive philosophical argument, making some pretty strong claims about right and wrong, is being put forward as… an opinion piece. My homeboy, Freddy Nietzsche (the man! The myth! The moustache!), said that “It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy up till now has consisted of – namely, the confession of its originator, and a species of involuntary and unconscious autobiography” and I think this article (while quite far removed from ‘great philosophy’) really falls into this dank pit of being a confessional autobiography of personal opinions dressed up as a broad argument.

As a last point, much of Merleau-Ponty’s work outlines how writing about stuff ‘deforms’ the lived experience of that stuff. Lived experience goes beyond mere words. Words can’t completely express what it means to experience something. I think it’s noteworthy that a few replies in the comments have brought poetry into the mix. M-P talked about art and how it does a better job of representing what lived experience can be like. I think this captured best in his essay ‘Eye and Mind’ if I remember correctly (and if anyone really gives two farts to go and look this up). So if we’re truly concerned about representing climbing outside of the activity itself, let’s get the poetry out, let’s get the paintbrushes out, let’s get the musical instruments out.

But really? I’d rather just go and climb, indoors or out, knowing that climbing isn’t much outside the activity itself. Even then, so much of all of this is just toys and games. Controversial opinion: there are far more important things in life than climbing.

THANK YOU, THANK YOU VERY MUCH!!!!!!!! We can now wrap up this whole comment section and go home, everything has been addressed and answered, we’re all the better for it, and I’ll see you in the pub.

Loving your work, ever thought of writing an opinion pice for ukc?😉

If anyone is interested, I shall be doing a representation of climbing using the medium of dance next Friday. It will be a daring piece melding the internal struggle for "oneness" with timeless question of what ? and why ? The piece will be recorded using a super 8 camera and then the footage burned as a symbol to the fleeting nature of existence. 

This is part of my Phd Thesis of Climbing as Art. 

Hope you can all come. 

 'I think it's fair to say that some types of climbing, by involving certain kinds of interactive and imaginative striving, will amount to something like an art work.'

That I think is interesting - one thing I've learnt is that whilst there's a lot of art I do like, there's also plenty I don't , or that doesn't trigger a reaction for me personally.  While some of it is bad, a lot isn't bad per se but... - I think it wise to simply say 'that doesn't work for me' and move on. 

As Gordon says 'It wasn’t, for me, anyway.' But it might be for someone else, and who is to say that my personal opinion invalidates all others.  

Anyway enough with the metaphysics. Let's address the real issue here...

Is it dishwater or ditchwater ? 

I believe it was Tuco who said “When you gotta shoot, shoot, don’t talk”...

Without wanting to post a spoiler for anyone, I can think of one major recent mountaineering film that contradicts that hypothesis.

Like so many of these philosophical discussions/arguments it all seems to boil down to semantics. Whether any sort of climbing is or isn't art really just depends on your definition of the word 'art'. Pin down (and agree) the definitions of such - generally abstract - terms and most of the 'philosophising' just disappears.

just one interjection: y’all need to cool your jets with the brazen assumptions that an article is ‘bad writing’ when what you object to is the article using jargon you aren’t familiar with.

by that standard, every article on UKC would be ‘bad writing’ because a non-climbing reader doesn’t know cams, whippers, sending, crimps, slopers, portaledges, let alone these cryptic alphanumeric grade bits. no. an UKC article and a non-climbing reader are an audience mismatch. as is a perfectly adequate piece of academic writing and a readership without background in that discipline. nothing in the article’s writing is even slightly akin to modernist literary prose. it merely uses vernacular you’re not familiar with, and concerns itself with schools of thought you’re not familiar with.

it’s fine and dandy to quote feynman’s plea for science communication, but not without a consideration what the tradeoffs involved would be. whoever in camp ‘i don’t know this word, this is bad writing’ wouldn’t be instead be launching tirades about having to read a double-digit lengths of pages because every non-climbing concept is explained, or throw fits about perceived mistakes that weren’t in the author’s thought but in the boiling down to imprecise vocabulary, may throw the first stone.

wikipedia is right there, folks. if you don’t know a term, chances are an at least superficial understanding is right at your fingertips.

Art is something that evokes something from one’s past experiences ergo an opinion piece on art represents the writers past experience. Clouding that opinion piece in difficult language is a subconscious attempt by the writer to obfuscate his past experiences which he doesn’t actually wish to expose😀

Its not the the jargon that's the main problem for me, it's things like all the junk phrases, signposting, big clunky sentences and weird mix of active and passive voice.

This is incorrect because the target audience of UKC Articles is climbers who do know those terms. 

I hope the OP is enjoying the irony that he’s now been lambasted for being too philosophical, and for being not philosophical enough!

Artists using obscure language seems pretty standard to me from visiting galleries.

On a related point gekitsu made I'm physics trained and remember listening to Feynman and thinking how great a communicater he was, until I was asked to explain stuff he had said in my own words and got stuck.

Sometimes people are using rhetoric selling snake oil but that works best with simple language, where language is complex often the concepts are just very tricky.

Good grief no, no-one needs to listen to me, I'm a complete sausage who doesn't know much about anything. 

Or it’s just emperor’s clothes!

The trouble is that such language is almost always very pretentious, using far more complicated words than are needed - all to try and make it sound more important than it is. The art of good writing is surely to express oneself as simply as possible, in as few words as possible. Perhaps the most famous sentence in the whole of English literature uses nine very common single syllable words followed by one slightly less simple two-syllable word. 

Go on then, tell us.

I presume it's Hamlet's "To be or not to be..." but not all of the language in this famous soliloquy is quite so simple!

Yes, and good point. It’s the most wonderful mixture or jumble of words, really, isn’t it?

Utterly marvellous. I never tired of teaching Shakespeare.

good thing, then, that i adressed the entire issue of audience mismatch and how it differs from supposedly ‘bad writing’.

was the article’s diction mismatched with the UKC audience? yes. would i have chosen a different approach? slightly. do realistic choices exist that wouldn’t have drawn misplaced ire? i argue not. is the article ‘badly written’? no.

that can be, but to tell the difference, one needs more than minimum expertise in the subject. ‘this sounds more complicated than what i’m used to’ does not ‘this is emperor’s new clothes’ make.

Is that because it turned out he had not communicated the ideas as well as you thought, or because he had used up all the best words leaving you with no good ones of your own?

I hope you still found time to teach kids to use capital letters at the beginning of sentences.

I agree with all of that apart from the very last bit for the reasons I mentioned above. Things like junk phrases, signposting, big clunky sentences and the mix of active and passive voice are poor writing regardless of the intended audience.

Have you lost the ability to use capital letters in your text to aid communication and understanding?

It's because his subject was very difficult but his language made it sound less so. It wasn't the first time that happened to me, nor the last, but it gave an important life lesson: teaching someone else can be a real test of genuine understanding.

He knew the language of science is often complex by necessity but wrote an amazing public work on the space shuttle disaster that I'd recommend to anyone. It's the second half of this book:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Do_You_Care_What_Other_People_Think%3F

I found whacking them over the fingers with a no. 9 hex every time they made a mistake worked wonders.

I applaud your moderate approach, you could have turned it up to 11.

Descriptions are often written by curators, not the artist. I once saw an artist read the description, and say "that's not what I was trying to say at all".. 

i’d argue that they either aren’t necessarily (in fiction, mixing active and passive voice in your narration is bad form. mixing them in your dialogue isn’t necessarily if it makes sense for characters to utter words like that and literary naturalism is a goal. in nonfiction, it may even be required to express some concepts clearly. doubly so in academic nonfiction. in philosophical writing, i found it indispensable), or they aren’t excessively present in the text. (when accuracy is important, as it is in philosophical writing, what looks like a junk phrase may be absolutely load-bearing. what looks like an overly long sentence may be nigh impossible to avoid. but, here’s the kicker: without a firm grasp of the subject matter, this difference is hard to make.)

tl;dr: philosophical writing isn’t (entirely) difficult by choice. it’s mainly a demand of the subject. (lord knows, reading dr. whall’s text in my secondary language was way easier than reading husserl in my native tongue.)

when the subject is difficult and hinges on minute differences, there is only so much simplification the text can take.

and, as offwidth pointed out: even hearing (or reading) somebody’s genius turn of phrase that conveys something complex in an easier fashion without sacrificing accuracy doesn’t automatically mean you can in turn espress this newly gained understanding in as genial a fashion. that is a very difficult, and arguably separate skill from research writing. it would benefit us all if researchers had some capability in it, but then we’re back at ‘had any other approach inspired less ire in the comments? i argue no.’

a short addendum on the topic of genius turns of phrase and understanding vs explaining, something i just saw quoted at kottke.org from a kurzgesagt video:

this is undoubtedly very strong text. it communicates something from a very hard to grasp discipline that defies understanding. it makes us get the feeling that we understand a little more now, and we are in awe both at the way in which this makes our minds twist and that the words enabled us to grasp that fact.

but as effective as it is, we would be brazen to believe we now understand something about black holes on the level a theoretical physicist does. that level of accuracy went out of the window in service of merely illustrating, in a single paragraph, a degree of being flabbergasted by how much black holes defy our lay understanding.

Hmmm, it may be strong but I don't think it is actually true that "at the event horizon, space and time switch their roles". FWIW I have an astronomy degree and passed my special relativity and cosmology course. It's also questionable whether a singularity exists, we don't so far have a satisfactory theory for what happens with general relativity at very small scales. Predictions of a singularity may be a modern "here be dragons". Black holes, on the other hand, certainly exist.

Isn’t that the point that was being made? That sometimes simplicity comes at the expense of accuracy?

A good point

Whichever way you look at it I haven't seen an article spark such lively and entertaining debate on UKC in a very long time.

At the risk of getting philosophical, it depends on what you mean by 'true'. Physics doesn't deal with or claim 'truth', merely reasonably accurate prediction and it does that - particularly in the modern fields of QM, GM & cosmology - via mathematical models. For example the mathematics of black holes is not 'true' or 'false' (or even anywhere in between), it's just a reasonably accurate (as far we can tell) model of what happens under certain gravitational conditions. Then if you try translating those reasonably precise mathematical models into the very imprecise English language, you lose precision and accuracy - it all becomes very vague and not able to output predictions - but the concept of 'truth' really doesn't come into it.

Sorry if I'm teaching grandmother to suck eggs.

Quite seriously accurate prediction in some cases. If, say, a quantum mechanics prediction turns out to be accurate to 10 decimal places, I don't have a problem with saying it is true, at least in the situation for which the prediction was made. Not true like a mathematical or logical statement may be true but true for the purposes of any useful discussion of the physical world.

There are ways in which time and space coordinates can be treated as semi-interchangeable and ways in which they cannot. I'm comfortable asserting that latter to be true, because there is a mass of accurate observations demonstrating it to be so. 

However as far as the inside of a black hole goes, we obviously can't observe that interior, hence we cannot observe a singularity. General relativity says it is there but we cannot be said to know. It is known that quantum mechanics and general relativity are not mathematically compatible at small scales and a Nobel prize awaits the first to solve that conundrum. Plenty of people smarter than me are trying. This not-so-smart mathematician and astronomer reckons singularities of all kinds are the maths telling you that you've pushed it outside the situation in which it represents the physical world.

So I half agree with you. There are situations in which physics is known to produce highly accurate predictions and in those, it can be asserted to be true for all practical purposes. There are other situations - important ones like the very early life of the universe - in which physics remains incomplete. Is that not fun?

I intend to shut up now.

thank you, that is exactly the sort of context knowledge i, a lay reader when it comes to physics, do not have and thus can’t make such a judgement about the text. hence the risk of the entire thing: it’s very impressively written, it does a pretty good job of illustrating a degree of mindbogglage, and it even uses some technical terms with which to seduce a lay reader into believing they understood more than they did.

there’s a place for that sort of writing, but it comes with the danger of making people believe it conveys a deeper understanding than it does, and that every text not written like that can (and ought to) be rewritten because other texts made them ‘understand’ complex things in easy words.

that was the point i was trying to make, as it relates to the debate whether the original post was badly written, or could’ve easily made its point in an easier to read fashion, if only the author wasn’t so bad at writing and his ego forced him to hide behind needlessly exotic words and long sentences.

Do you think you would have said that about Newtonian gravitation in about 1900.

I confess that whenever I read any philosophy, I always come away with the impression that a lot of flowery, navel-gazing language has been used to discuss the blindingly obvious.

Having now read the article in full, i get that impression once again. 

It's a shame you've found this, because philosophy can be both useful and enlightening. But equally, you're right, and sometimes philosophy gets used for things where it detracts from the subject rather than adding to it, frequently due to the author getting a bit over excited with using philosophy (often understandably, due to its very real utility in many cases - but not all, importantly). It's all a case of what's appropriate.

I've got a spanner that's really useful for fixing up my bike. Would it be wrong to stir my pasta with it? Well, no, not really. But is it appropriate when I have a perfectly good fork? Philosophy is no different.

As far as I can see, the article did little more than say that he would like to see more writing reflecting the experience of climbing rather than the ticks and grades. 

But maybe I was missing something.

We are all talking about it, which probably means it's a success. A reaction, of whatever type, is often the aim.

Talking about the article, but not so much about what the article was about.

If people talked about my work in a similar manner, I'd be seriously worried... 

What philosophy have you read? If it's classic stuff written two or three hundred years ago or much earlier, I suspect it's only 'flowery' in the sense of the style of English being different. Even with the Greeks written millennia ago the point is rarely that obvious.

If it's 20th century analytic philosophy, then that prizes clarity in language, although of course can get dense and technical, but by that point it tends to be anything but "blindingly obvious" and difficult for those not trained in the subject. 

It's quite easy to dismiss 1000s of years of human thoughts like that, but seriously if you read, say, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and found it's message blindingly obvious you should publish and get yourself a chair at a good university and help all the reasonably bright kids doing their philosophy undergraduate degrees who wrestle with it and still find it really hard to understand without a good teachers guidance - that was me a long time ago!

Impressive. I've seen and heard of all sorts of striring done using philosophy but for pasta that's a first! 

Yes, I'm looking forward to these tips on the stuff that's blindingly obvious. I'm currently fighting my way through Sartre's Being and Nothingness and I have to go for a long lie down in a darkened room every few pages.

Kant’s COPR is about the most difficult book I’ve ever read. To make any sense of it at all one has to read a commentary like Kant’s Analytic by Jonathan Bennett. But most philosophers, as you say, strive for clarity, the late Wittgenstein being a good example. Even 400-year old Descartes’ Discourse on Method is remarkably clear and ‘modern’ to read.

Okay, maybe I'm just a philistine engineer, not a philosopher.

To support this take a look at 'Arty Bollocks' online and choose which level of pretension you wish to operate at

Renée Descartes was a drunken fart

Mumbo jumbo

I think what you mean is: he drank therefore he farted.

On the matter of Cartesian dualism, the inner vs outer worlds, I believe Renée said "better out than in"...

Because of the concepts, or the way they are presented/discussed?

I really don't think you could disentangle the one from the other. I don't really mind. I like stuff that's hard to think about. 

Raymond Queneau, another french author of the same era, highly praised Sartre's book

...

... because it weighted exactly 1kg, which could come in handy at the market

for potatoes

Leaving aside what I think about the content of the article, perhaps the Editor (if there is one) could be doing a bit more Editing before posting someone’s poorly constructed ramblings on UKC. This reads like a first draft, and surely the good supporters of UKC deserve better!

But if you find philosophy blindingly obvious, you may well have missed your calling. A second career could be waiting in the wings for you!😀

It holds no interest for me, so, no...

You might have noted a hint of scepticism in my tone of prose by now - that maybe it isn't quite as blindingly obvious as you first said. ;⁠-⁠) But you still haven't actually said which philosophers you have read.

Oh, I had. It was blindingly obvious...

In a way, my 'no interest' comment was an apology to the philosophers out there who do find it insightful and fascinating. I accept you do, but simply don't share the enthusiasm.

But who are the philosophers you've read who've given you such a poor impression of the subject?

I think a lot of this went over my head. But some things came to mind having read it all:

1. There is plenty of recent climbing media that absolutely conveys the experience of climbing, to me at least. That sweaty palms feeling watching honnold traversing around a roof in free solo and the bit in the alpinist where Marc Andre leclerc calmly hangs one handed from a tiny pick placement and hooks hit other axe, leash less, over his shoulder for instance.

Or a recent clip of sasha degulian on some out there sport route clearly boxed and fighting.

Hazel Findlays film of muy caliente where the music ramps up the tension in line with her progress along a frankly terrifying runout also springs to mind. 

2. That somehow indoor bouldering feels less aesthetic or lacks and artistic element... I'm not so sure... Outdoor bouldering might be about unlocking a sequence from the rock for the first ascensionist but less so for those who follow. And the idea of one person setting a route and others trying to complete it feels like a performance piece to me. Especially when those who follow find their own way and solve it differently to the intentions of the setter

3. Perhaps all sport IS  art?

​​​​​

I did philosophy as a graduate, as well a dissertation on Merleau-Ponty, and I think the idea of approaching climbing through phenomenology could be incredibly interesting.

As I'm sure you know already, in the final chapter on freedom in Phenomenology of Perception, M-P uses the analogy of climbing a rock face as our interface with the world and the medium through which we express our freedom.  So to me it doesn't sound like the author of the article above is trying to stir his soup with a spanner by applying his training in philosophy to try and talk about his experience of climbing.  After all, the philosopher used climbing to talk about his philosophy.

There could be a rich discussion about the qualitative and experiential differences of indoor and outdoor climbing.  Not in a judgmental way by pitting one against the other as the "true" act of climbing.  They're both, in essence, climbing.  And since climbing itself is a futile and absurd act, it would be pointless to talk about the "best" way to do it.  The "best" way boils down to opinion, experience, and in the longterm, tradition, which is subject to change.

So what is the experience of climbing an indoor route?  What is the experience of finding a new way up an unclimbed rock face?  Are they different?  Or does it reduce simply to the difficulty and sequence of moves?  

Climbing walls are made to be climbed.  Rocks are not.  The man-made intentionality of setting indoor routes challenges us in different ways mentally and physically than the indifferent shapes of nature.  Why is that?  Indoor climbs are by nature ephemeral (if the setters are doing their jobs), while some rocks have existed for hundreds of millions of years.  Does that make a difference to our experience?

Also, what is the experience of motion?  Why do we find moving up rocks pleasurable, addictive to the point of obsession, even when it's uncomfortable and painful?  How does this motion act on our consciousness and just what the hell are we doing out there?

I'm not suggesting anyone answer these questions, or even that there is an answer.  It's way more interesting that there are responses, and that those responses are never answers.

And it's clear from all the initial responses that not everyone (hardly anyone) is going to engage with this type of approach, and that's fine.  People only seek answers to questions they want to ask.  But to suggest that there's no approach to climbing through phenomenology to begin with, strikes me as somewhat disingenuous

Phenomenology, at it's most basic, is asking questions of our experience.  And climbing is one hell of an experience.  Why not have a look and see where that goes?

I fully agree. The article just did a terrible job of this. I think a major source of my ire was the fact that I see the real value philosophy can bring to so many subjects, and yet opinions dressed up in philosophy (i.e. the article) turn people off of and away from philosophy, which is a real shame. We all lose. The overlap of philosophy and climbing is something that interests me personally a great deal. Hearing how bouldering indoors is a 'simulacrum' does not interest me. 

You've summed up in two sentences exactly how I felt after reading the article. Thanks.

Again, I think there could be real value in this done well. I'll nominate you for the next climbing/philosophy article!

I give a flying freckle. You write for your audience (hopefully with accessibility in mind)  and that makes it a weird editorial decision. UKC is not a philosophical society.

It’s an interesting article, but also a shame they couldn’t communicate their ideas in a less verbose way. 

Haha, would that I were thick-skinned enough for that!  I'd say the audience is exactly the opposite of being "primed" for more of this kind of thing.