Aaron – thanks so much for these provocative thoughts. And no need for any apology: I don’t feel you’re contradicting anything I wrote (though that would be fine), simply nuancing and developing it further. Although I agree that my choice of the word “indirection” was unfortunate (in fact I’m not sure why I wrote it, because I’m not even sure I know what it means!). What I was trying to articulate in that implied choice between didacticism and circumspection was precisely what you have said much better here — that it’s a false choice, because there needs to be a programmatic urgency about embracing complexity. And I wonder if this is precisely what site-based work has to offer: you can’t look sensitively at a site such as Fountains (or equally, I think, very many other sites) without reading in it layer upon layer of information pertinent to our current situation. The question then becomes how best to impart/interpret that reading (and its complexity) through performance or other interventions. To acknowledge the urgency of the questions, without permitting reduction to soundbites and shrinkwrappage. (And as for “guilt and responsibility,” there’s my Sunday School upbringing for you… )

So much material, and I agree the dissensus/ambivalence dimension should be more front and centre perhaps. Not to smear it out into compromise, but because it feels to me that that is where the work gets done best.

There is an overarching imprint I get from reading and rereading the notes, to do with guilt and responsibility and perhaps even wrestling with the “stain” of culture and discourse. Two of your notes especially point this way for me:

– “reflection and expression of human subjectivity and/or divine dominion [which arguably amounts to the same thing]

– and under the ‘dissensus/ambivalence/ruins’ heading, the issue of an attraction to doomsday scenarios vs. trying to better “express a sense of ecological relationships through circumspection, indirection, an embrace of complexity (or ‘mental biodiversity’?)”

To the first point, I suggest that we shouldn’t be afraid of framing human subjectivity as central. If I just break down the term “Anthropocentrism”, the problem I feel lies with redefining, re-worlding the “anthro”- what it is to be human- rather than attacking the “centricism” per se. I don’t think we should equate a possibly innate (uh oh…), or at least incredibly pervasive and necessary concern with selves in our narrations of the world, of our cosmology, with the need to dominate or possess.

To the second point: “doomsday” creeps in rather than lands on our heads in a moment? Our attention to complexity still needs to be alive to the very real and material threat that centuries of homo extracticus is burdening us with. Today I read that after years of multi-national corporation and US gov’t lobbying, the UK will now permit imports of livestock feed containing GM crop material. The implications are enormous. There is now a rising chorus of gov’t advisers and corporate lobbyists claiming that industrial-scale GM farming is the only responsible way to ‘feed the world’, given rising populations (population growth is in fact levelling out), climate change (increased fossil fuel dependency in agriculture will of course drive climate change), and inadequate rural infrastructure in many parts of the Global South (infrastructure neglected at the demand of World Bank/IMF in favour of rapidly increasing cash crop exports for foreign exchange to service loans…).

In this instance I would argue that civil society needs to keep up a pluralist complexity against the “There is no other option” unilinear corporatist narrative. The challenge in living a normatively positive (for people and the world) complexity is in somehow (how? Help me here…) having our “mental biodiversity” inseparable from the genetic-physical-organic (dare I say real) biodiversity. Without looking for green fascism, subsistence-based romanticism, originary narratives of wholeness. Inseparable in complex ways that aren’t based on demanding a homologous relationship between mind-nature, but are also equally predicated on the totality of the relationship? Elizabeth Grosz writes very interestingly about this in “Chaos, Territory, Art”.

I guess I’m afraid that ‘indirection’ is but one way of embracing complexity, and that it might lead to potential shrink-wrappage…When I think of the semiosis of materials and organic-register life, everything may be utterly contingent and indeterminate, but processes themselves are never actually indirect. There is always an impact with effects. What Charles Sanders Pierce would call “the clashing together”. Accidents are fine and actually the norm, but are in fact the result of things meeting with direction. I want to be present for the accidents and attentive to the directions behind the meetings too.

About the abbey: I was in the “forget the Abbey” camp! Or maybe I didn’t think I needed to ask too much of the abbey.

I am sorry I won’t be at Cove Park (only Glasgow on Friday). No doubt the place will inspire very different reactions. It’s too bad we couldn’t spend some time in Glasgow off-campus. Living here and seeing the annihilated guts of industrial space, veined through with the greenest urban ‘scapes I’ve ever seen has been a constant provocation.

Apologies if any of this seems rebuke-ish. Maybe I’ve teased out an element or two from the notes and made a straw man from them, sorry. Looking forward to seeing people again on Friday, even briefly.

Aaron