Site, Performance, and Environmental Change

Many thanks to Dee for pointing out this link to a detailed and positive blog on our Glasgow symposium event in February.

“Precipitous”

Paula Kramer’s single word response to the “nature” of Cove Park resonated strongly with geographical, topological, political and climatic affordances that I for one, in such good and stimulating company, enjoyed there enormously.

Precipitous?

Yes because the land fell away from Cove with a steepness that left little between the perched accommodation Pods and Containers and the flat expanse of Loch Long, which sometimes in turn through the shifting light seemed tilted at an angle up towards us and next sloping away and downwards as if being sucked under the opposite shore and its rising mountains.

Precipitous?

Yes because the sky was one moment tumbling with clouds and sheets of light and holes through both and more, and next as still as a landscape of carefully painted brush strokes, and then slowly pulsing as one’s eye was caught by the wake of a bobbing boat then the flashing flight of a bird or a fell-side suddenly lit upright by a break in the cloud from below.

Precipitous?

Yes because just over the ridge behind was the perfect spot for harbouring safely the mega-death potential of projectiles which once armed could unleash a billion or more instants of suffering beyond all measure and just round the gently curving headland to the North was the armoury of plutonium tips that could upend the world itself if all launched off together.

Precipitous?

Yes because when the rain fell heavily the tracks, paths, culverts, channels, gullies, combes and ravines gushed with suckling strings and gurgling ropes and tumbling chains and spewed out thrashing boulders of irresistible waterways as the tilted land became a soft sponge of moraine squelching underfoot and slipping away across the downhill granite in a gathering rush to be engulfed in Loch Forevermore.

Precipitate presentations?

In retrospect the diversity of the network members’ presentations for me was a singular rich response to Cove Park’s fabulous environmental energies and wayward signifying dynamics, even in the fact that there was no group presenting but all was done by individuals finding their own ways into engaging its powers, whether Sally Mackey’s touchingly cool remediation of the wasteful path light gradually coming into its own at dusk, or Phil Smith’s carnival verbal storyboard of a wildly travelling performance party driven haywire by little white figures from an architect’s model of a centre, or Alison Parfitt’s deepening personal meditation on the dimensions of death and hope that even as she stuck her paper submarine to the window glass could have been lurking under the sheen of the loch’s surface, or Tim Nunn’s backdoor outdoor audio concert of out-of-place sounds as if birds and crickets and dripping waters were escaping from the kitchen into windy wet air being the actual source of the blown-about and amplified plip plop resonance all around us, or Helen Nicholson’s anxiously driven effortful find a grip on or escape from the rampant big wild in the widow beyond her via computer screen and mobile phone and left-behind boxes of cereals that she gobbled down so substituting passion for the landscape of excess outside, or Dee Heddon’s to and fro ritual splashing along the flooded path of a living Pod huddling her trusty owl but scared that all and everything could so easily fall apart and best to gather and present some tiny fragments of things around and under threat to raise our hopes which she did she did, or Paula Kramer’s upside-down embrace of the deep green massive low-lying horizontal tree bough with back legs feet ankles toes and an ever-so-slow slow moving refraction of its ageless pulse as if life could be and for sure became drawn from it to sustain a deep joy for just being what it was going to be forever, or Steve Bottom’s widow-framed arts-as-landscape Ship Container reading as white-box gallery critique thankfully left behind for rain-swept bridge over over-gushing streams which like a delicate downhill heron he picked his way below us across becoming witty survivalist despite bullshit art-worlds and pathetic DiY garden nature-facsimiles, or David Harradine also riffing on Container-gallery ironies of in-yer-face separation framing of big outdoors scenes but trumping that back on itself appearing kitted out in sparse undies on the horizon’s lip gesticulating and speaking we can’t hear what till he struggles through freezing pond to our side where the pane filters speech ‘I need you to feel what I …’.

This panorama of presentations did not directly reflect the rackety beauty of the rapid climate shifts that made the Cove Park scenery seem wilder than it was, having been raked by human history over and over in so many ways. None of them took up a position of sustained and deliberate – quasi-scientific? – distancing of that immediate environment, though each and every one shifted and sifted it through various presentational perspectives, from miniaturisation to abstraction, from contemplation to immersion, from commentary to storytelling of various kinds and mix-and-matches in between … but all directly embodied and embedded it in various ways. This made sure that all together they refracted the environment, as they were taking it in (embodying it) and turning it over and around (angling it) and measuring it by varied degrees (embedding its qualities).

Baz wrote the above more-or-less high-speed stream-of-consciousness style – or at least fast-writing style – to see what that might reveal (if anything!) of patterns or networks or lights flickering in the dark like stars, and of any shared refractive angles on Cove Park’s actual movement of environment change enduring from our visit’s brief duration. But particularly for what one might make of this notion of shared refractions though Steve’s keywords on a thematic carry-over from Fountains Abbey, of SCALE AND SUBJECTIVITY, and his more immediate perception of an emphasis on TEMPORAL LAYERING for Cove Park. Might such a reflective retro-refraction give access to what might become from “reflecting on environmental change through site-based performance” that cannot be arrived at in any other way?

4.00AM 24 March 2011

All the presentations had performers and spectators, but relationally very differently positioned by each of them. All renovated their placing on/in the “site”, “landscape”, “environment” – of course it was no one thing – by responding with creativity to its fabulously diverse affordances.

Steve turned bridge into grandstand for a traverse of dangerous territory accomplished delicately well. Dee transformed a path that was a shallow pond into a pensive figuring of past and future survivals. Alison switched a glass window into murky loch to expose the flimsiness of its deadly cargo of looming threats. Paula massaged a low-lying tree into becoming a mossy alcove of knowing tentative tenderness. Sally transformed a wasteful daylight lamp into a beacon for saving the oncoming dusk. Phil took a model in a glass cage to wittingly scatter it across the slopes as seed for coming enjoys. Helen ransacked a room of leftovers and pulsing digital channels to reveal auguries of munchy hope. Tim turned a backdoor into a sounding board for elsewhere echoes of past lives still to come. David transfixed a picture-frame into a screen that filtered through whispers of un-ignorable needs. Baz turned a bombsite into a runway for…

Nothing was destroyed for good, one guesses. Deep respect was offered to temporally, temporarily borrowed niches. Even through their darkest angles, and however cautiously or recklessly, the performed events seemed to refract hard-won, un-pathological hopes.

These site-based “reflections” on the climate changes that had shaped Cove Park through past performances carefully introduced multiple SUBJECTIVITIES into a wondrous range of environmental SCALES, from microscopic miniature (moss strand on a tree-trunk) to magnifying gargantuan (nuclear warheads round the headland). Perhaps exposing new angles on potential niches for future sustainable lives, human and otherwise. Hence TEMPORAL LAYERING was integral to them all, not just in the archaeological sense of unearthing what’s past or in the geological sense of laying down materials to come but also in the (forgive the testy triplet neologism) “performalogical” sense of time travelling to-and-fro in evolved and evolving temporality. Was this a shuttling kind of refraction across and between climate change histories that cannot be achieved in any other way except by means of performances designed as such?

In the angle of critical engagement

Then – just as much embodied and embedded in Cove Park as the presenters described and discussed above – there was Wallace Heim and Tony Jackson and JD Dewsbury coming from yet other perspectives of reflection and refraction on climate change and site-based performance. Wallace asks: ‘Can sites learn?’; Tony asks: “How might children learn from sites?”; JD asks: “…how this space rewires thought and thinking [and] impacts on people’s practices?”.

A few further brief re-refracted reflections will have to serve as one‘s groats-worth attempt at reflexivity in regarding these profound queries.

Wallace’s question, as the young people my children would say, is a wicked one. It needs first to be dodged for emergent answers to have any hope of survival. So; are you sitting comfortably?

Learning by (human) definition depends on repetition or recycling; that is to say, on some form of memory, i.e. on “perceptible” responses to what has manifestly happened in the past. Water seems to have shown signs of this quality at both Fountains Abbey and Cove Park. When the Abbey river flooded (if one’s memory serves the story right) it tried to return to the course it ran before the monks – or their minions – dug its current route. And it seemed the Abbey’s minders were at least a little surprised by that. Nothing quite so striking a difference (but perhaps because one’s perspective of perception was somehow unprepared to serve it right) appeared on the loch-side slopes when the rain poured down heavily for three or more hours, as the water generally seemed to follow its former courses. But on the recently (re-?) surfaced paths leading down to the bridge it cut steep sided runnels that soon dried out but could possibly eventually become new streams if left unattended. Perhaps this was water “taking account ” of the “site’s” affordances; the “site” responding with – what? – “flexibility” to its flows? From these perspectives, the feedback between water and earth regarding old and new courses may be said to produce a quality possibly akin to memory, so it might start to become plausible to say that: “sites learn”. Somewhat dampish philosophical images, of course, but for one this reflection primarily relates to Wallace’s “differences that makes a difference” and Gregory Bateson’s impressively dry discussions of “deutero-learning” and his guiding idea of an “ecology of mind”, an idea of Earth as a becoming-refractive – “thoughtful”? – thing.

Is there any way in which this kind of relational analysis and theory could lead to a halfway plausible case for the “site” of Cove Park “learning” anything at all from our set of small performative responses? Another dodge to “save” time: a brief thought experiment. Consider that the World War Two concrete foundations for bomb/armaments stores at Cove Park are the positive to its waters’ negative; that is to say, energy relatively fixed rather than fluid in time. Still there were signs, if one “paid” attention, that their surfaces had been weathered a little by rain and wind and gritty dusts during several decades – maybe as much as half-a-century? – of frequent repetitions. Of course it’s ridiculous to compare that process to our performed presentations, which at most went through one-and-a-half or maximum three rounds perhaps! But in the speculative account above through a textual description of them being seen repeated just once, emerging half-automatically through an experimental/improvisational sequence of writing practices, potentially there seems to have been more repetitions of a different kind to the simply numerical; which – just possibly – together eventually could in principle create a difference that makes a larger difference (analogous, maybe, to the Fountain’s flood or Cove Parks converging streams gradually making a river!). For example: All of them made a material difference, however infinitesimal, to the “site” of a kind akin to the rain and the streams; a negative, a relatively very light-touch change to its TEMPORAL LAYERING. Then if one considerers their immaterially negative imprint, in comparison to the materially positive aspects of the “site”, to be in the network of SUBJECTIVITIES more or less shared between repeated different performances, perhaps their “impact” (to use the current jargon) in relation to the various SCALES of matters of concern (thanks Wallace) circulating at Cove Park could take on a different order of significance. However – yet more ridiculousness – that would entail treating human SUBJECTIVITY (and possibly by extension the sentience of all organisms, at least) as potentially having a durability, and sustainability, similar to the order – but decidedly not the qualities – of concrete. And how PRECIPITATE is that?

Set alongside this reflection, Wallace’s implication that the (precipitate?) learning in systems can be “toxic” is profound. Could this be the case even as such learning operates through “invention and improvisation”? Does this suggest the possibility of a toxic creativity that is beneficial? Did the presentations at Cove Park achieve something as paradoxical as that?

And what further implications might this have for the learning of young people that wonderfully preoccupies Tony, who echoes Paula’s “precipitous” by noting that “Perched as we were, everything seemed to point to the loch, even when it was out of view.”? An insight that could just as well be referring to the grand narrative of global warming and its unknown effects; another angle which, to make a little mental leap in these post-postmodern times, might partly explain the network’s emergent focus on the particular, personal, elemental-detailed responses to “site” as method for grappling with, among other matters of concern, the more extreme general frighteners of environmental change. Tony links well established approaches of educational theatre to “site-specific” projects and the innovative TIE programme “Whose land is it anyway?” His account of its focus on human cultures’ claims on nature notes a primarily discursive response (Brechtian debate, indeed), which made me wonder what cognate question would stimulate a complementary affective engagement at Cove Park: perhaps, what land is it anyway?

A peninsular with a history of intra- and inter-cultural colonisation, a rough 200 meter-high granite claw angled toward Glasgow by submarine-infested Loch Long, a steep-sided and precipitous place where flora and fauna cling like limpets on a submerged, but still-slippery, children’s slide. Add a geologist, a climatologist and an ecologist to the network’s environmentalist, archaeologist, engineer, geographers, historians, educators, artists, performance-as-researchers, etc., plus, say 150 young people and their tutors in campsite residence for three or four days and we’d be in business for a seriously funny affective/creative – i.e. inventive and improvisatory – investigation of how particular, personal, elemental encounters with the Cove’s slopes could be source for sustainable survival in the future. Expensive, yes; but possibly only around 0.00082% the price of a Trident class submarine. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/sep/23/gordon-brown-disarmament-push)

But in what sense could such a project become “toxic”?

As I hauled myself up to the Nissan hut workshop from the Pods in the Saturday afternoon downpour to make my flimsy wooden cut out submarine I was amazed at how much the water everywhere seemed determined to slide the clinging-on plants, top soils, stony tracks and the rest down into the loch. And, in response, by their fabulous tenacity in trying to stay put. JD’s pointing out that the peninsula is a granite outcrop with a thin layer of other stuff on top reminded me that the Avon Gorge in Bristol reveals a similar structure, but its core material is Carboniferous limestone with Dolomitic conglomerates, often used as a concrete aggregate.

The Downs that border the Gorge were the imaginary “site” for the post-global-warming survivalist biome of Green Shade, a durational pre-construction performance installation created in the Wickham Theatre at Bristol University in 2004.

The event included a reiterated “Toxic Drizzle Dance”, a comical falling-down-dead ritual meant to cheer up the “survivors” – and their visitor-spectators – when the pressure to keep going got especially tough. Its environment was intended as a creative antidote to doomsday scenarios, using the toxin of calamity-for-humanity ecological determinism against its potential affects/effects.

That project’s methods overall would likely not be appropriate for a youth-oriented workshop at Cove Park, except perhaps in the attention they paid to the particular, personal and elemental qualities of an imaginary human-made biome based on the “real” ones in Cornwall and the Arizona Desert.

Green Shade – Filtration Survivors full swing air cleansing (Photo: Mark Simmons)

But it was, one hopes, creatively toxic – in the sense that an antidote is toxic – to the current general prospect of global warming as probably the worst and possibly the most insistent aspect of climate change: a newish grand narrative of our times that’s still in need of elemental deconstruction, perhaps?

In any event, to “reflect on environmental change though site-based performance” via toxic creativity in light of the Cove Park network experience implies one must probably return repeatedly to first principles (however defined) of some sort or another. Which for this current writer is what JD’s query brightly and hopefully pitched the network towards: “…how this space rewires thought and thinking [and] impacts on people’s practices?” And why? Because one crucial creative problem decidedly not solved by the event of Green Shade was how to plausibly include spoken human languages in its practised thought experiment. This was not just an effect closely related to Alison’s witty injunction: “…climate change is too hard. Let’s talk about something else.” It is also, perhaps, that discourse as language, a.k.a. reflective thought, treated as a first principle of human identity is a foundational aspect of both modernist and, in some of its forms, poststructuralist subjectivities. From this perspective, Steve’s reading of Bonta and Protevi on Deleuze and Guattari was – this one who is writing/written dares to think – both timely and salutary for the network’s next move. The two theorists who refused to be only two, possibly as a result of that “…do not deny that human subjects can initiate novel and creative action in the world. However, they refuse to mystify this creativity as something essentially human and therefore non-natural. For them, the creativity of consistencies is not only natural, but also extends far beyond the human realm.” (Bonta/Protevi)  So then, if creative toxicity is provisionally taken as a first principle emerging from the Fountains Abbey~Cove Park sequence, where might that take network members from there? From this further perspective, as a “global city” – culturally, politically, economically, environmentally and so forth – London could well provide the network, as current media fashion has it (pace Sabastian Junger), with its perfect storm.

Post-script

Mindful of the several calls on the blog post-Cove Park to focus on the detail of an environment before (if ever?) trying to draw out more generalising observations in response to it I wondered how something of this might be put into practice through writing: about the “site” called Cove Park and its “performances”, about the overt performances that the weekend network group played out in it, whether through localized presentations, descriptions of imaginary located events, or ideas/concepts that reflect more general and/or abstract qualities of where those performances, presentations, descriptions and reflections took place and/or what they pointed towards. So the contribution above worked to use different styles of writing practice to explore various perspectives on what may have happened in that sequence to further the emergent focus of the network’s work, i.e.

• quickly drafted one sentence paragraphs of six lines then subjected to one minutes  worth of editing
• quasi-stream-of-consciousness writing from memories of the presentations in an order evolved as they came to mind
• carefully crafted one sentence commentaries on what the presentations might signify relationally done at moderate speed but then largely un-amended
• more measured-pace ruminative writings on critical perspectives suggested by three  network members who did not make scenario-based presentations, towards the end increasingly edited and rewritten up to two or three times for clarity
• and so on …

but always aiming to let the results of the initial section inform the next, and that the next and so on till the end. The methods and their order were not planned in advance, but emerged through the doing of the writing practices exercise as a whole. The aim was to work from the particulars of the “site” and the group’s responses to it, through increasing attempts toward generalisation: evolving from the “local” to the (potentially) “global”, perhaps. Of course I make no claims in any way to privilege what the result might signify; it’s just one of myriad possible, always fallible, versions of the events of the weekend. But I hope that as a semi-structured method of consciously using varied but linked writing practices to reflect on the creative practical and analytical theoretical practices at Cove Park it might be of passing interest in light of the earlier comments on that network event.

[Posted on Wallace’s behalf. And with a big thanks to her for making this available. SB]

Steve very kindly asked if I would put up the notes from my talk on Friday 11th February at the Glasgow Symposium. They seem dated now by the experiences of the Saturday and Sunday at Cove Park, but I’m happy to have them here, as long as they are taken as informal; notes for speaking; as only somewhat philosophical; as an over-simplified and ridiculously vast sweep of ideas which have been consolidated from many – unnamed, unacknowledged – sources. They were meant in the spirit of offering ideas or problems from philosophy that might be taken on a week-end visit to a site, by an interdisciplinary group looking at environmentalism, learning, environmental change and developing site-based work.

So here goes, a mix of sentences and not-sentences, with the bits I cut out as I went along. With thanks, too to Steve, for the connection to Deleuze and Geophilosophy.

(And apropos of nothing, here’s a photo from the Fountains Abbey weekend that I rather like, as Mike touches Alan’s light…)

Background – rough guide to two facets of ecological philosophy:

Western philosophy has considered nature, in relation to the human, to god and to science, to politics, to ideas about reality since the Greeks. In the last hundred years or so, those ontological strands can be found in the process philosophy and relational theories – of, for example, Whitehead, Bergson through Naess, Deleuze, Guattari, Latour, Massumi, Elizabeth Grosz, and many others. These are familiar strands, and are at work across many disciplines.

There’s also been, in the last 30 years, a move to re-examine the conventional categories of philosophy and to consider how ‘nature’ and how environmental change forces them to reconsider how they are done and the concepts they engage with, the arguments they make. This is happening in aesthetics, ethics, politics, philosophy of science, phenomenology. Like we discussed last time  – with the questions of what aesthetic appreciation of a landscape means – what do you include and how do you make a judgment about it. This is also changing, for some, where philosophy is done; as applied philosophy – for example – people working directly in situations of environmental conflict, as ‘philosophers in the field’.

I’m offering some ideas broadly based within relational and process philosophies, and calling on some of the detail of environmental ethics and aesthetics.

When thinking about what to take along when visiting a site:

Some things already work very well –

Phenomenology and performance have already adapted to each other in devising the practices for approaching a place or site, by sensing it, moving in it, responding to it, by spending time with it, inhabiting it, perceiving the flows between the human subject and the other-than-human world.

From other directions – approaches from human historical or mythic or celebratory aspects – has been very productive. Adding scientific information or environmentalist perspectives or actions – are other ways that have been tried. A desire to make possible an ethical experience of place, or animal or element are others.

Too, artists work directly with the land, in remediation projects, and in social organisation in areas where issues of environmental justice are critical.

But I think what is missing, often, when putting together ecology and performance or ecology and art  – is ‘nature’, or a  more direct investigation or grappling with the difficulties of nature – human relations. And I’m not going to define ‘nature’ – but leave it in all its possibilities. There are exceptions of course – like works that involve the animal and human. But I think there are regions of nature-human relations that are not often explored in performance.

There is a bifurcation between theatre practices and nature – one is what humans do, and the other is something else. And yes – one can add knowledge about and experience of nature to performance practices. The frictions of environmental change can be presented and chewed over – while still being in the habit of separating nature and the human. What I’m trying to get to are patterns of thought and experience that do not replicate the bifurcation; or at least are attempts at not doing so. Whether these are overtly expressed in performance, or are influences, or are embedded in new forms of practice.

Or are just ideas to take along and see what happens.

This is in the spirit of Alfred North Whitehead, for whom abstractions were like lures – one develops them in response to a problem, and they lure one’s attention towards something that matters – they give a vector, a direction to experience.

And the four things are:

– the composition of nature-human relations;

– whether the other-than-human and the material have agency;

– the representation of matters of concern;

– and the question of whether ‘sites’ or places can learn.

starting with  –  nature-human relations

Of course, nature and the human are relational, or are part of a network of actors or actants, or are mutually co-dependent, tightly coupled in co-evolution, or are internally coherent, or are together collectives or societies, or are configured as part of a self-organising system, or are part of a complex of emergent properties – the languages of relationality are familiar.

Reality can be thought of as the mediating, assembling, gathering of diverse matters and complex and entangled entities being made and unmade.

But the juicy questions are what kinds of relations are these, how are they composed or configured, how are they experienced in collectives, and as individual entities. In the network analogy, where are the knots, conflicts, sags and over what kinds of timescales.

At the meso-level, of living beings, entities and elements, one can diagram relations like an extended food chain of dependence and influence. It is relational in the sharing of spaces, nutrients, and wastes.

And it is all relational with concepts, histories, institutions, power, the whole apparatus of human society.

At this level, one can somehow assemble elements within some boundary or scale, and analyse, even negotiate or change, the assemblage of relations.

But there’s also relationality expressed more intimately in terms of human perceptions. That is, that there is not a world out there, measurable by science but devoid of qualities to which the human subject adds sense perceptions –  the redness of a tomato, the scent of jasmine, the heat of a stone in the sun. Instead, what is there is the relation between the sensing human and world – the redness of a tomato, the scent of jasmine, the heat of a stone in the sun. And from this, the habits of considering the human as a single, autonomous, separate entity, even at the level of consciousness, break down. That separation that allows one to draw or mark the connections is a device. The accustomed considerations are temporary manifestations.

There are many ways to refer to relationality. Getting in there, into relational thinking – is very difficult to sustain and express. For example –  a problematic example –  to see oneself always in respect of another. Or to not see one’s hand as identifiable segments, but as the relations between the parts. Another familiar example is whether one sees the tree as an entity or as the patterns of 200 years of wind, soil and rain, given shape through the tendencies and the tact of the oak.

I’m starting with this large subject as a way of offering basic questions to ask when visiting a site: what relates me to this? what is the composition of the relations that can be perceived? where, at what scale?

whether the other-than human and the material have agency

The next questions are to do with whether the other-than-human and the material have agency – the ability to act, to move, to alter a surrounding world.

There’s a long tradition – in philosophy – of vitalists and organicists finding that something of life inheres in all things. Currently, questions about whether the material – the non-human, the not-animal or other life form  –  has agency or is in some way animate, are generating ideas and polemics. I want to think here – very briefly – only about agency.

One way to consider this is whether entities other than the human could be sources of action. Can they be things that do things, things that alter the course of events? They might act as quasi-agents or forces with trajectories or propensities seemingly of their own. This may or may not mean that they are animate or alive, but even if they are not, does that mean they are merely instruments awaiting human or animal intervention?

Things like – elements, metals, weather patterns, waste matter, waves, electricity, instruments, fabricated artefacts and commodities, granite and slate.

Another way to look at it is not that the things in themselves have these capacities – they don’t have agency in the way it is conceived of for humans, but that within the network of associations or the assemblage, there is the capacity for things to act or do things. There is a relational field, within which, matter influences the actions of other entities, and affects the course of human actions.

I’m presenting this – not to argue whether it is correct or not – but because these are enticing questions.

There’s interesting critical work in theatre and performance studies on materialities – developing from theatre’s special associations with the inanimate. What’s interesting here is the intersection of performance-making and ‘natural’ environments and the material.

The agency of matter is wonderfully descriptive, and evocative for experimenting with – and not to be explained away. How does one see – for example – nuclear material not as a resource or commodity or weapon – but as having agency, even in its state of reserved potential.

More philosophically, what forms of action and commitment are implied by this? What are the nodes of conflict, where are the vortices of power or the aggregates of care? To what or where do humans then ascribe ethical significance?

Again to refer to Whitehead – he saw human agency and material agency as entwined, and asked the question of how to capture that entwining, and how to intervene in what he called  –  the dance of agency.

representation of matters of concern

I want to switch to a different use of the word matter.

Whitehead recognised what he called matters of concern – in the flux and process of reality, there are matters that have more effect, that are somehow ‘close’. Human experience has variations in it – it isn’t smooth, and those variations matter. Again in Whitehead’s words – ‘Have a care – here is something that matters.’

Bruno Latour also uses the phrase ‘matters of concern’ in a different way – but to indicate similarly that some things are differentiated out of the flatness of a network; the ‘network’ doesn’t account for all of human experience.  Some things matter, they deserve care and protection. Matters of concern evoke emotions, and may call upon us to act, to do something.

Environmentalism has been one of the ways in which matters of concern about environmental conditions and change have been recognised, and represented. [It’s one of the themes of the week-end – why it’s included here.]

I want to talk here no so much from philosophy, but from experience watching 15 years of environmentalism and performance, and from some experience with activist – artists.

We’ve had 50 or 100 years of environmentalism, depending on where you start – and its history is varied and diverse, as are the contexts in which it happens, the forms which it takes, and the critiques of it.

I’m taking environmentalism to mean groups or individuals who in some way act in the interest of ‘nature’ –  generally other-than-human living beings and the ecological niches, corridors, territories, habitats which are necessary for the continuance of life. Those actions may be specific to a geographic place, or within human social organisation. Actions have a purpose – to protect, conserve, value the environment or nature, to speak for it or in defence of it, in ways informed by social and political conditions, science, intuition, and activist ideologies.

It has been motivating and has had an educative force, across many publics – and been uncomfortable, successful for some, ineffective for others; it’s been a source of meaning, and of highly imaginative and intuitive performative strategies.

As rich as it is, I want to argue gently – not strongly –  against starting with environmentalism as the – or as a main source for indicating of matters of concern, or as a guide as to how those concerns could be represented.

Firstly – rather like with the presentation of results from science, there is a tacit black box to environmentalist actions –  the public is shown the results. The actions follow already chewed over thinking and analysis, and packs up a lot of undisclosed assumptions and purposes, I think even when those actions are long term and based on discourse or negotiation.  Viewing an action or intervention  as ‘the expression of an issue’ – can leave deeper questions of understanding and knowledge behind.

The second area is to do with privilege. For many environmental organisations, the development of issues and methods proceeds in different ways and with very different motivations to that of academia or of performance-making. For some, this is the chosen way of operating. But for some, it is because they do not have access to the knowledge that academia or institutional science provides – or do so only on an ad hoc, advisory basis. Some global corporate environmental organisations have access to this. But many don’t.

We – this group – is based in academia, in the humanities – although not composed entirely of academics. And I would argue that the epistemological privilege of academia be used better – there are to hand more sources of information, knowledge, methodologies, and funding for looking into matters of concern than many environmentalist groups could ever dream of. It is a privilege that could be exploited.

The third area is a warning against falling into a deficit model of communication. This is when the ‘information’ is data or facts – but can also be when the subject matter is about feelings and the motivations for actions. The assumption here is that if one can just make the public feel what they should feel, value what they should value, the desired changes will follow. It doesn’t work, or it doesn’t work predictably, and what does or often can happen is that the range of emotions and motivations becomes shrill and narrow. Environmentalism in the arts seems to bring this tendency out – the current example is the excruciatingly bad Greenland at the National.

Having said all that, environmentalist issues may point the way to matters of concern – but so may many other directions of enquiry, and so may experience of a place or site. And these matters of concern involve representation – in ways not defined only by environmentalism. How can nature-human relations be represented aesthetically and politically. The dilemmas of representation are not going away.

can, how sites learn

The last of these sets of questions is the most speculative – and it’s about learning.

If you go along with the ideas that reality is relational, that agency is not only within single individuals, but is, in some way, dispersed through the field of relations, and that there are matters of concern, motivational nodes within those fields – then one might start to ask questions about change, about how change comes about – in the relational field of human and other-than-human, in environments.

There are many ways into this.

Process philosophies look at change as being continual. There are theories of events as modes of change. Change is explained, too, by theories of evolution, of improvised or random variations occurring over time, and adaptation. And then, too, ideas about human interventions, politically, scientifically, in and with environments, which go some way to explaining both the problematic conditions that have been caused by those interventions and actions taken to remedy them. Change – for the human – can happen through trial-and-error, experimentation, haptic experience, revelation.

But what I’m curious about is learning.

This is not just about how human education could alter perceptions, change values, affect behavioural and political change – as important as these things are. Or how an artistic intervention can make a change in the environmental dynamics of a site. Or about the encompassing arc of evolution.

It’s also about whether, if agency is dispersed, then why not learning? Is it possible that learning is not only within human and animate capabilities, or even in a tightly coupled co-evolution of organism and environment?

Can a site, or a place, learn? Or do something that approximates what we think of as learning – not just a back-and-forth response and adaptation – but invention and improvisation at the level of the relational field?

Which I suppose means – can there be surprises in the nature-human relation?

If it is possible, then it’s probably happening, but has been invisible to – or not widely articulated by – human theory.

And what has been being learned, is toxic.

So I have a normative, optimistic, idealistic subtext here. There is an impetus to learning that feels like agency – it’s not merely variation and response. There are differences that make a difference.

There is a lure to this idea which is not just trying to change perspective or perception, but to find a juncture, a point to intervene in what seems like closed or self-replicating systems of toxicity. To learn in another way.

If it’s possible, what difference would it make, to one’s perceptions of nature, and of oneself? to how one intervenes in an environment? to how one might know or inhabit a place? to the urgency of environmental change?

[Posted on Tony’s behalf as he disappears off to Egypt to get revolutionised. SB]

At last, a few moments to jot down some rather rushed reflections on the Cove Park event. I won’t try to compete with the impressively articulate, often poetic, musings of previous bloggers, but simply want to pick up on a few things that struck me that haven’t yet had much airing. Apart from some of the talks on Friday in Glasgow, we didn’t really get round to talking much about learning and young people (in the plenary sessions at least). And nor was that the primary emphasis in the presentations we saw. I don’t have a problem with that – there was plenty else at the site and in the range of presentations that provided us with some remarkable and powerful intellectual and emotional stimuli; and indirectly many of those presentations were of course learning experiences in the widest sense. But I’m glad both Steve and Helen have brought ‘learning’ explicitly back into the frame in their recent blogs. At Cove, I kept finding my own thoughts turning to the challenge of trying to interpret the site a) with a potential audience of ‘young learners’ in mind, and b) in some way building on some of the information we were given about the history of the area by Richard on Saturday morning. Just to clear the decks quickly about what I mean by ‘learning’: I’m not confining myself to curriculum-driven learning, even less to the traditional positivist (or behaviourist) models of learning that prioritise the one-way transmission of a thing called ‘knowledge’. Interestingly, it has often been cultural organisations outside the formal education sector (museums, heritage sites, and perhaps theatres above all) that have been able to pioneer ways of putting the learner at the centre of the experience, engaging with and contributing to informal and lifelong learning and ensuring that learners (and visitors) are not just ‘targeted’ but considered participants in the process. They’ve drawn especially on constructivist and social learning theories (as discussed on Friday in Glasgow), emphasising the ways in which we all learn by making connections and building on pre-existing ‘knowledges’ – theories strongly influenced by Freire, Kolb, Dewey, Vygotsky, Gardner et al. If learners do indeed construct knowledge in an individual and personalised fashion, then the design of any kind of educational programme needs to keep in play all the cognitive, emotional and social dimensions, and to recognise that personal engagement is crucial. The use of drama as a means of engaging potential learners has not surprisingly therefore been embraced by many (but by no means all) ‘learning officers’ in museums, heritage sites, etc – it can be an invaluable tool in providing varied and stimulating ‘ways in’ to the subject matter being addressed.

So, where am I going with this? To take just one example from the Cove weekend, Sally’s fascinating experiment with autobiography, time-lapse photography and intertwined moments of ‘being there’ and ‘being elsewhere’ was clearly a rich experience not only for her but (in necessarily different ways) for the rest of us who stumbled across it and later shared the presentation. It was memorable, distinctive and gently provocative – and, in constructivist terms, as much a learning experience as any of the more formal offerings on Friday and Saturday morning. Maybe the extent of very personal, autobiographical themes in Sunday’s presentations was a useful reminder to us to widen the ways in which we think about learning – to value the particular and the personal as a way of reaching and grappling with the broader themes of environmental change – or, as Helen and Steve are suggesting, to pay attention to the detail before we can hope to move on to the general. How then might all that feed into the devising of programmes that use drama to promote thinking about environmental change in specific locations?

At the risk of stating the blindingly obvious, Cove was such a different site from Fountains! Fountains was awesome in its towering, crumbling edifices and the sheer scale and audacity with which the architecture was imposed upon, and yet later became part of, the landscape. It was powerfully evocative of one particular notion of civilisation developed to a crescendo of form – and yet… subject to constant revision as the small but significant architectural alterations in the stonework reminded us and in constant flux as ‘nature’ (in the shape of the river) refused to be totally thrown off course, returning with a vengeance in the recent floods. Cove Park makes no grand pretensions to being a ‘heritage site’, other than offering us extraordinary vistas of the surrounding landscape from our perch half way up the hillside. The architecture is decidedly subservient to the landscape, everything about the buildings conveying (to me at least) a sense of impermanence and provisionality – even the might of 20^th century concrete. (Fountains is not of course completely permanent, though its makers may well have hoped it would be…) The buildings aren’t trying to make an impressive mark on the landscape, they had to fit in and around the geology as best they could.

Perched as we were, everything seemed to point to the loch, even when it was out of view. The walk down to the shoreline was for me a compelling experience. Not only was there the gravitational pull and a curiosity to see close up what lay beneath us, but an added curiosity triggered by Richard’s presentation on Saturday morning – which I found both illuminating and usefully frustrating.

I was intrigued by the historical overview, and especially the incredible social shifts and swerves over the past few centuries as the Loch became exploited for such different purposes. But we saw the changes mostly through the lens of the history of the Dukes of Argyll. The obvious next step is to wonder what that history looked and felt like from the points of view of the ‘others’ – the farmers, the people who built the houses, hotels and the jetties, the navigators ancient and modern. So I was drawn to the shore line and to wondering about the ways the relationship between loch and land had changed over time. A number of potential projects spring to mind – all of which would require massive local research to flesh out the bones and to investigate local relevance and interest. (Which is why in the time available I copped out of doing a presentation on the Sunday.) One would be (unsurprisingly) some kind of participatory theatre-in-education event, on site at Cove and/or close to the shore. The purpose would be to use drama to explore the social impact of just one of those historical shifts – focusing in on, eg, the moment when tourists started to come for their days out from Glasgow; or indeed when the tourism began to die and jobs and life styles died with it. Of course such shifts are never concentrated into one neatly dramatizable moment and no doubt some ‘poetic licence’ might be necessary, justifiable if participants are provided with facts and resources to investigate the events further. Above all, the idea would be to find dramatic ways of engaging students with aspects of their own local history, offering alternative insights and viewpoints (and alternative voices) on that history, dipping in to the kinds of debates and anxieties and celebrations that must have taken place at times of great change, and provoking questions and reflections on the use(s) human beings have made of the land/loch at one specific point in time – and its potential relevance to the present. Just who were the people who worked for Argyll? What were their attitudes to him, to the land he owned and on which they toiled, and how did they cope with – or try to resist or indeed try to exploit – the changes thrust upon them? Depending on age group and much else, the level of role play might range from full-scale ‘immersion’ through to forum theatre.

Alternatively, one might devise a much more site-specific programme wholly based in the Cove Park territory, such as a much adapted version of a piece created some years ago for the National Trust in the Peak District, ‘Whose land is it anyway?’. In this interactive programme school students in small groups took on roles as investigative journalists invited to attend a meeting to decide the future of a piece of countryside being sold ostensibly for the benefit of the rural community; of course all was not quite as it seemed and as the day progressed and as the students encountered different stake-holders at different parts of the site, the complexity and clash of interests became increasingly apparent. Things culminate in a Caucasian Chalk Circle-like debate about who should own the land and a decision is taken – which may or may not coincide with the students’ own views. When originally devised, it successfully got kids thinking not merely about land ownership and how come who owned what, but more importantly about usage of the land, exploitation vs sustainability, and the possibility of thinking creatively about its future use: how best to respect what has been inherited, understand the rich diversity of its ecology and the changes it’s suffered/sustained, and plan for future change… How do you make claims for the best, most productive or most sustainable let alone fairest use of the land, and whose interests are being served at every juncture when decisions are made or avoided? One can easily imagine, I think, how this could be adapted to Cove Park, and how questions about past, present and future ownership have impacted, and will impact, upon the land in the future. One of the challenges would then be to couple the issue-driven and history-driven scenarios with that attention to detail discussed earlier – to those details of how life was/is/could be lived in particular circumstances which can offer rich, provocative connections with our own lives and at the same time pose the troubling questions. We still have much to learn from Brecht I think.