Places of Water and of Trees: Affective Embodiment, Identity and Materiality

Title: Places of Water and of Trees: Affective Embodiment, Identity and Materiality

Owain Jones

Reader in cultural geography: landscape, place and environment

CCRI

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Abstract. Drawing upon recent research into water issues and community, and previous work on trees and places, this paper suggests that new affect based understandings of everyday life and practice can be of use in understandings of how individuals and communities engage with materiality in imaginative and in embodied (practical) terms, and also in how the complex composition of watery and treed spaces (as cultural, ecological, political, economic, and living entities) can be appreciated. Peoples’ engagement with (differing) places and their vibrant materiality is articulated through a range of affective bodily practices such as dwelling (home making, eating), communing, walking, sitting, climbing, doing (hobbies, gardening, diy) and a range of non-cognitive affective processes – haptic, sensing (touch, sight, sound, smell) - emotional (feelings, moods) which are not necessarily articulated or articulable in thought and/or language. Thus these approaches can be seen as post-phenomenological as set out in Ingold’s ‘meshwork’ and Thrift’s ‘ecologies of place’. Places/landscapes are considered to be as much temporal as they are spatial, as complex interviewing of the topographic and the topologic, and as incoherent assemblages of both presences and absences, which never fully settle into stable, (fully) knowable ground. The essential fabric of the production of place is process which is articulated through bodies, martials, which come together in events and which form patterns into which social, cultural, and symbolic meaning entwine. Places are pattern outcomes. This is why things like trees and water – and anything else really - need to be taken seriously because the force of process is channelled through their specific materialities habits. In thinking about how to live sustainably in such an envisioned world key premises is that notions of community need to be extended beyond the social, and that the affective dimensions of life need to be foregrounded. We need an ecologicalisation of philosophy, politics and ethics if we are to make any sense going forward in terms of understanding of society and reimagining of how it can flourish. This can draw upon a whole range of thinking from Latour, deep ecology, ecofeminism, pragmatism, non-representational theory and affect centred politics.

“Making matter matter: The new materialism and the environmental humanities”

Matter has always mattered. Many always known that (but not the Moderns)

Bit of an overview of where I been, at, and trying to go

Trees research – about the agency of trees – types of trees – specific trees in places over time. Putting trees as agents as the centre of place narrative. Very much about “making matter matter”.

Water research – a number of projects about flood, tides and what we are calling ‘hydrocitizenship’. This again seeks to treat water as a specific, local in a different way, agent. Making the matter of water matter.

Tides research – tides are particular (and amazing) processual forces that flows - in terms of physics (gravitational pull) – through water. And all the implications that has for culture, economy, ecology, landscape.

So matter is of interest in terms of how it is on the move through space-time in flexing relations with other matter and other forces. What is the energy (flowing through) matter?

“Pushing the Envelop”. AHRC project “In Conversation with…Participatory Research with Non-humans” with Michelle Bastian (Edinburgh University) and various other academics, artists and practitioners. How might participatory, co-designed research be conducted with non-humans (matter): in ascending order of trickiness (from sentience), dogs, bees, trees, water. Highly experimental but seeking to give ‘matter’ voice in knowledge creation.

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I embarked on the tree research in approx. 1997 in terms of writing the research proposals. This was driven but a number of things:

Tree protests in UK where local trees – vibrant matter – were under threat from development.

Ecological sensibilities and concern; deep ecology, ecofemism, ecocentrism – all seeking to reconnect the human to the ecological matrix of life.

Various generally materialist post-structural takes on the world, particularly Latour, Actor Network Theory. The ecologicalisation of politics – the “parliament of things”.

Various approaches to the specificities of place, (art movements like Common Ground), some humanistic geography, which also sought to take the specific material performance of place seriously.

Very involved in the UK Connected Communities programme (large multi agency programme). What ‘we’ (a large grant application on hydrocitizenship) are pushing in that programme is that:

“We got little chance of understanding communities, or making them sustainable or resilient, unless notions of ‘community’ expand beyond the social to the material and ecological basis of the production of life.

Leopold (1947) "The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land...[A] land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such."

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A move from spatial/object philosophy to process philosophy.

This might seem odd if we are talking about matter. But as already hinted at this is because we recognise that the processes of worldly becoming are channelled through specific material forms and the agencies of things in combination. Process as a “creative advance into novelty” (Whitehead 1978).

Whitehead pointed out that “all things flow” is one of the most ancient philosophical observations, and he ‘updates that to “the flux of things”. This has be supressed by the “subordination of fluency” (as in Descartes) in philosophies which ‘spatialised the universe’ (as Bergson put it).

Places/landscapes – which are assemblages of matter in particular arrangements - are processes as much as the are spaces. The change over time in multiple temporal patterns Lefebvre's rhythms – (arrhythmia, polyrhythmia, eurhythmia, isorhythmia) and varying tempos, durations and cycles. (temporal ecology)

Trees – their growth and death cycle, there colonisation cycle, seasonal cycle, integration with economy cycle (coppicing, pollarding), their ecological relations

Water – the rhythms of the hydrosphere – catchments and engineered systems conjoined. The 1:1 scale of water landscape interaction

We get materially Patterned Ground – (Harrison et al) but also patterned time. Rhythm is to time what pattern is to space – as they are always together – so we get ‘rhythmpatterns’ – such as that of a tidal estuary (Jones 2010)

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Affective engagement with these fluxes of matter is the next step to consider.

(Whitehead discusses ‘feelings’ as a basic element of his process philosophy. These are not ‘feelings’ as we commonly understand them but forces of emergence (I I need to work on this bit)

Affect is a complex and contested term but it comprises a) the systems of the body which enable us to function as meaningful beings and to engage with the world and each other, most of which are pre/beyond consciousness and reflexive thought/language; b) the ‘channels’ that these engagements occurs through; and c) the traffic on those channels.

Emotions are vital elements of affective processes (but the two are not synonymous).

Springs from an alternative philosophical / scientific pedigree (Spinoza, Darwin, Deleuze) to that of modernism/rationalism, which never bought into the whole Descartes derived notion of the self as pure, separate, rational mind.

Seeing human (selves) as complex embodied animals not as virtual minds, and humans as ‘dividuals’ rather than ‘individuals’ (the ecological self.

Affect is the ‘push of the world’, and is ‘autonomous to the degree to which it escapes confinement in the particular body whose vitality, or potential for interaction, it is.’ (Massumi)

The half second delay is a well established (scientific) fact. That the sub-conscious mind works in front of the conscious mind. This is where much affective business occurs.

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“The feeling of what happens” The primary forces/systems in our brains /minds are emotional. These enable, enframe and exceed rational thought/language .

“feelings of pain or pleasure or some quality in between are the bed-rock of our mind. We often fail to notice this simple reality [ ] But there they are, feelings of myriad emotions and related states, the continuous musical line of our minds.” Damasio (2003: 4)

Draws upon Charles Darwin’s other great work The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) (Thrift)

For Amin and Thrift political judgements “are not made in rational or deliberative ways; they follow key lines of emotion” - it follows that “[m]any political impulses are contagious and require only momentary thought”. Politics is affect first.

This draws upon (and demands) a very different set of intellectual (philosophical) backgrounds and an adapted suite of methods,

Ethology, visual ethnography, narrative, witnessing, site and case specific micro ethnographies (deep hanging about), performance, fieldwork (transepts)

So we have active matter in flux and then – in the first instance at least – people’s affective responses to, and extension of that ‘energy’.

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Affect takes matter, and practice, place (the site) seriously “Advocates of affect offer it up as a way of deepening our vision of the terrain we are studying, of allowing for and prioritizing its ‘texture’, in Eve Sedgwick’s words (2003, p. 17). This texture refers to our qualitative experience of the social world, [and] to embodied experience that has the capacity to transform as well as exceed social subjection.” (Hemmings, 2005)

“The idea is to get embroiled in the site and allow ourselves to be infected by the effort, investment, and craze of the particular practice or experience being investigated. Some might call this participation, but it is a mode of participation that is more artistic and, as with most artistic practices, it comes with the side-effect of making us more vulnerable and self-reflexive. It is not however an argument for losing ourselves in the activity and deterritorializing ourselves completely from our academic remit, but nor does it mean sitting on the sidelines and judging. Rather the move, in immersing ourselves in the space, is to gather a portfolio of ethnographic ‘exposures’ that can act as lightening rods for thought. It is then in those key ‘times out’ as we set upon generating inventive ways of addressing and intervening in that which is happening, and has happened, as an academic, that such a method produces its data: a series of testimonies to practice. This is of course the flipping over of ‘participant observation’ to ‘observant participation’ that Thrift made (2000) to emphasise the serious empirical involvement involved in non-representational theory’s engagement with practices, embodiment and materiality.” (p. 326-327) Dewsbury, J-D. (2009)

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An open becoming (that is why Thrift and co (J.D. Dewsbury) think that this has political, ethical and epistemological force. This is how Stewart (2007) describes the affective/performative view of the social as articulated in everyday life

To attend to ordinary affects is to trace how the potency of forces lies in their imminence to things that are both flighty and hardwired, shifty and unsteady but palpable too. At once abstract and concrete, ordinary affects are more directly compelling than ideologies, as well as more fractious, multiplicitous, and unpredictable than symbolic meanings. They are not the kind of analytic object that can be laid out on the single, static plane of analysis, and they don't lend themselves to a perfect, three-tiered parallelism between analytic subject, concept, and world. They are instead, a problem or question of emergence in disparate scenes and implement strict forms and registers; a tangle of potential connections (p.4)

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Trees – a few examples

Take 6 small flower pots, fill them full of earth from the garden or somewhere (the earth is more or less the same) and then plant 6 different tree seeds, one each pot. Let’s say, oak, ash, elm, beech, Scot’s pine, and yew. If all sprout and grow, in the end what they produce from the same earth -the same mix of soil nutrients, trace elements etc., are remarkably different organisms. They will take different form, they will have differing temporal qualities, produce different seeds, fruits and flowers, have differing relationships in terms of biodiversity. Their timbers will have differing capacities; differing colour, patterning, hardness, strength. They will have differing reactions to water (important if you are building a boat). Some will bend more easily than others (important if you are building furniture) . They will ‘work’ (cut, plane, chisel) differently.

These differing woods have traditionally well defined differing uses which still persist today. Human agency cannot create these materials or get anywhere near creating them. (Of course plant breeding and now genetic modification can alter them). Thus the agency of the trees is in one sense embedded in the precise qualities of its material becoming. They are particular organisations of minerals, chemicals etc. Humans have known and engaged with these capacities for centuries. This is a question of process of becoming being extruded through differing forms of matter.

Craft (Heidegger, Sennett) is based on skill and feel (affect) the carpenter and the wood (s)he is working.

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Trees materiality and time

There is an extension between their material becoming and our affective reception of or exchange with that material becoming

Tree locate us in time and place. (Sinden, 1989 cited by Rival, 1998b: 19)

Harrison's (1991) Talking about the old trees in his local landscape says, ‘To stand beneath one of these maimed colossi is to be overwhelmed by its powerful, resonant presence’ (135). These oak trees are ‘the living tissue of time’ (135) and therefore (as do other trees, to differing extents) they meet a need, which, Harrison says, he ‘believe[s] to be indispensable, for parochial monuments, landmarks, milestones and other points of reference by which each person can take his or her own bearings in time and place’.

The oak tree in the churchyard which he describes is part of the material and cultural nexus through which ‘the continuities of time and place are made visible, immediate and above all, tangible’ (139).

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Sensory richness

Sound, movement, colour, light

Thomas Hardy. The novel Under the Greenwood Tree opens thus;

To dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has it voice as well as its features. At the passing of the breeze the fir-trees sob and moan no less distinctly than they rock; the holly whistles as it battles with itself; the ash hisses amid its quiverings; the beech rustles while its flat boughs rise and fall. And winter, which modifies the note of such trees as shed their leaves, does not destroy their individuality (1978: 39).

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Water – like trees - is extraordinary matter. It’s agencies are profound and fundamental.

It has specific in relations to its specific places.

and is also pregnant with affective force (sites of pilgrimage and hermitage)

Linton –’What is Water’

“We will be considering water primarily as a process rather than a thing. The “water process” is that out of which every specific instance of water gets abstracted, including scientific representations such as H2O. On this view, things such as H2O do not constitute the fundamental reality of water but, rather, are fixations that occur at the nexus of the water process and the social process of producing and representing scientific knowledge. The stability of such representations of water, moreover, is contingent on these social processes. Every instance of water that we can think of occurs as a product of the water process and various kinds of social processes and practices.”

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Tides

Created by the relational movement of earth, sun and moon, the semi-diurnal tides (rising and falling roughly twice every 24 hours) have complex daily, monthly and seasonal rhythms. At the very highest tides (perigee spring tides) which occur at the equinoxes, the sea level can rise and fall by as much as 14.5 metres in the space of 12 hours. That is the sea level rising 3 times the height of a double-decker bus in 6 hours then receding again. The estuary is dominated by this profound natural process which shapes its physical features, ecology and cultural heritage. The high tides wash up the estuary to create the famous Severn Bore, a tidal wave that runs over 7 miles up the Severn River above Gloucester (making it “the river that sometimes flows backwards”), which attracts tourists, surfers and artists to the river.

The times of high and low water slowly migrate across the 24 hour grid, bringing a very different pattern of temporal life and sense of time to the landscape in natural, cultural and economic terms. There are unique, and always varying patterns and rhythms of space/time and related practices of landscape, such as intertidal commercial fishing, livestock farming on salt marshes, work related to ports and coastal trading, and a range of recreational activities (e.g. walking, fishing and bird watching). The tidal processes speak to the aliveness of (the) landscape and the never-ending gravitational pas de trois of earth, sun and moon , and create huge, ever inter-changing vistas of shore, intertidal area, sea, sky, space and light. These are enjoyed by many people, including those who work in relation to the estuary, live or work overlooking the estuary, visit it/use it recreationally, and those who see it in their travels along its shores and over its bridges. 14

Conclusions

So where I am at really is … having spent a number of years thinking working on the issues of non-human agency as lively specific matter flowing through places/landscapes – making places and landscapes, I am beginning to consider how that flow is first and foremost expressed or extended out into the social ‘world’ though affective registers. To turn to Ingold - the business of life is a business of ‘going on’ in what he calls the ‘meshwork’ – all the paths/journeys we make as we go on. This is a world rich in materiality – only in materiality – and of course you are part of others’ meshworks, and the fundamental way of being in the meshwork is affective. The material and affective ‘turns’ are still young – they make an attractive couple.

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