My walk in London was purposeful, although until I encountered the installation of beach huts, it was somewhat less playful than a Situationists’ derive. I was walking to learn how (or if) I remembered two performative walks I had undertaken as part of the AHRC network that had challenged me to reflect on environmental change through site-based performance. As the third in a trilogy of weekend events, London weekend was the accumulative effect of our time together and meant that network members had grown familiar with each other’s rhythms and patterns of thought, lending this weekend a particularly comfortable texture. Over the course of this weekend, we were led through the City of London and across the Thames to Tate Modern by Mel Evans and James Marriott, two membes of PLATFORM. Phil Smith, network member and a core member of Wrights and Sites, (mis)guided us around the area surrounding The Strand. As this blog has testifed, the two walks held contrasts of scale and rhythm: Mel and James took us to commercial sites associated with BP and in each setting they pieced together the narrative of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico with cool detachment, often refusing eye contact as they read the chilling details from a script. Phil, by contrast, engaged his audience intimately and conversationally, weaving together the history layered on the streets with more personal memories, artefacts and images. The PLATFORM walk maintained the detached anonymity of the City, and Mel and James’ refusal to domesticate its spaces amplified my sense of alienation to the spatial order of the architecture.

The images on the blog show the security Guards were largely impassive, scarcely registering our presence as we stared through windows that would easily encase most homes. The empty foyer of the University Superannuation Scheme building perhaps presented the most challenging moment in the walk, where we were reminded that we were implicated the environmental catastrophe of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill as we sat on sofas to hear how our pension plans depend on investment in BP. This global ecological crisis feels contagious, conceded in the toxic space of my own body, my embodied practices and written on my pay cheque. Theron Schmitt, writing about another PLATFORM walk, describes this feeling of complicity as ‘a profoundly doubled moment, overlapping representation and relation’ (Schmitt 2010: 292). My ecological consciousness was similarly raised by PLATFORM’s walk, and my reading of the cityscape in the refuge of the beach hut was haunted by its memory and, perhaps, tainted by my environmental double-standards.

But when the walk was over, I felt that I had left no trace, no mark or imprint on the City. I had ingested it, but this space of urban capitalism remained abstract, in Lefebvre’s terms, and it had resisted me (1991: 53).
Phil’s walk invited us to embody the city’s stories, to theatricalise its dead spaces and re-imagine the stories of the dead. When I retraced my steps three months later, I was not surprised that my body remembered the walk around the Strand. Standing in the garden in which Phil had told us Dickens had set the melodramatic demise of the fictional Lady Dedlock, I was haunted not only by the imaginary of ghosts of the ‘real’ dead people beneath my feet, but also the live people I missed from the first walk – and the comingling of both hauntings, to borrow Steve Pile’s words, allowed me to attend to the relational space we had produced by disrupting ‘notions of linear time and space’ (1996: 164).

When I returned, in the City I got lost. I could remember few details. Perhaps it was part of the political effectiveness of PLATFORM’s walk that I still felt shrunken by the vast scale of the buildings, and confused by their impassive indifference.  Or perhaps I have a poor memory for facts. I found the USS building eventually with the aid of a map, and I looked through the window at the sofas, catching my reflection. The glimpse was fleeting, and in a moment I knew I would disappear again without leaving an impression. Precipitously, as this was just before the London riots, I understood why demonstrators and rioters sometimes want to smash windows. It’s one way to produce space.

I am interested in the idea of attentiveness as a way of suggesting the kind of affective engagement with things – human, non-human, imagined, material – that disrupts the orderliness of the world and invites learning to become intimate. In reflecting on learning and environmental change, I am interested in how to bridge the gap between what we do now, domestically and in the everyday, and how we might imagine (re-imagine?) the future. For me, this is not about constructing or absorbing dystopic narratives – what Alan Reid described as an education of terror – in which we might position ourselves (or children) as either anti-heroes or saviours, but in the quiet moments of attentiveness in which we make one choice rather than another. It is this attention to the intimacy of domestic details and the opportunity to work creatively in the vernacular spaces of everyday life that has the potential for what Lefebvre calls the ‘politics of small achievements’. Perhaps this is what Bachelard in means in The Poetics of Space when he talks of attending to the ‘dynamic virtues of miniature thinking’ which he sees both as ‘beyond logic’ and as a stimulus for ‘profound values’ (1994, pp. 150-151).

Dee's red mug

I am reminded of the images we saw from Fevered Sleep’s Weather Factory – the moss in the bathroom, the mist hovering inside the house and the excess of pendant lights – each of which held a fragmented world in domestic miniature. Steve mentioned smallness in his blog, and it was interesting that Sally’s light, Dee’s miniature installation and Paula’s kinaesthetic connection with the movement of trees, in different ways, condensed complex thought into theatrical image. Theatre, performance, the relational aesthetic of the arts can insist on this kind of attentiveness, and I think it is the affect of attentiveness that has the potential to re-order thought and change environments. When Jane Bennett refers to the ‘self-criticism of conceptualization, a sensory attentiveness to the qualitative singularity of the object, the exercise of an unrealistic imagination, and the courage of a clown’ (2010, p. 15) she is actually talking about the pedagogy of Adorno’s negative dialectics, but there is something in that sensory attentiveness that seems to me to link art, subjectivity and learning in ways that might just create the conditions for thinking through environmental change.

Layers of rock on a wall

What I am plugging away at is finding a way to bridge the pedagogical gap between the apocalyptic imagery of disaster movies and just carrying on as we are. I am suggesting that this is about the affect of scale. It is also about time, and I am drawn to Alan Reid’s idea of a slow pedagogy in which the cumulative layering of one miniature moment on top of another reshapes the everyday and inspires new practices. What is the role of the arts all this? I am not sure that Giroux’s model of critical pedagogy (the one that was at the bottom of Alan’s grid) quite does it. Sure, it focuses on practices, activity, critical engagement, dialogue and all those other progressive education virtues, but in the process it assumes an Ideal Speech Situation that is not always as ‘empowering’ as its rhetoric claims. Elizabeth Ellsworth was heavily criticised in the 1980s for saying exactly that, and her response is instructive for debates about the pedagogy of climate change. She advocates a pedagogy of place that is constructed spatially and dynamically, through ‘a complex moving web of inter-relationalities’ (2005, p. 24). It is attentive to the movement of bodies, to memory, forgetting, sound, smell, taste – it  marks the limits of me and you (or self and other) and offers encounters with an outside in ways that prompt thinking about the ‘unthought’. Ellsworth uses Winnicott’s idea of transitional space to theorise this approach to learning – and although I am not sure that her emphasis on Winnicott’s anxious projections quite does it for me, it offers one way to start questioning the relational aesthetics of artistic engagement and its contribution to learning and knowing. I am searching for a vocabulary to witness moments of witnessing – attending to the aesthetic doubleness in which affect becomes visible and understood, at least temporarily.

Cove Park reminded me to be attentive to the aesthetic vulnerability of learning, its intimacy and messiness. It was interesting that many people chose to work alone but also beside people (in Eve Sedgwick’s sense) – my own interest in layering as Steve rightly picked up was amplified by conversations with JD on Saturday and the imagery of cereal boxes was inspired by Fevered Sleep’s dramatisation of accumulation in On Ageing. I am sure that other people’s work was were similarly non-linear, associative and layered. This form of learning may have something to do with what Nigel Thrift calls ‘third order knowledge’ – it involves both attention and inattention, when past selves and future selves are not conceived as binaries but layered, embodied, responsive, in relation and in dynamic unity.

Layers of Fluff on sea