23127322 Phil s Manifesto of Site Specificity

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A Manifesto of Site-SpecificityA Manifesto of Site-SpecificityA Manifesto of Site-SpecificityA Manifesto of Site-Specificityby Phil Smithby Phil Smithby Phil Smithby Phil SmithOctober 2001October 2001October 2001October 2001

(This rambling manifesto is really a thinking aloud, originally written forinternal discussions within Wrights & Sites. The rejection of the term

mythogeography was short-lived, while the lessening of the distance fromthe situationists was a much longer (possibly a continuing) process. P.S.2009)

In what traditions might I work?

Not mythogeography - this is too monolithic a practise in which sites aresubjected to a study that seeks a single defining myth for each locality.Michael Kenny of Simon Fraser University defines the term as "shorthand forthe way in which 'myth' ascribes meaning to landscape... projections onto ...sites from a future perspective that rationalised... history... into a coherentnarrative - incorporating previously existing shrine-sites and the like into anevolving metahistory." This comes from an email promptly returning myenquiry about definitions, a connection prompted by Bess Lovejoy whosepoem Dreaming of HoustonDreaming of HoustonDreaming of HoustonDreaming of Houston contains the only use online of the word

"mythogeography":

"territories of my dreams, mythogeographyI need to touchthe black sheep of my countrythe great closed door, the great embarrassment..."

Michael Kenny goes on to describe how mythogeography has been used"partly in service of unsettled land-claims... documented by the way in whichthe adjoining landscape was filled by meaning in what we like to call 'myth'."

Monolithic mythogeography reappears in site-specificity as the land itself(and as belonging) in which the bourgeois subjection of land in England andthe US to reason and imagination in 18th century traditions of the sublimeand the picturesque is rejected in favour of a potent notion of aboriginal folkculture. But there is a danger here. The potency of pseudo-origins has beencatastrophic in the 20th century from Armenia to Rwanda. Blood and soil.Even with authentic aboriginal peoples things can get very complicated as


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with the group of Native Americans who have used laws protecting NativeAmerican burial sites in order to prevent the study of a skull that seems pre-date the presence of Native Americans.

If stories of local identity are thought to lie in the land itself then this is to

subordinate a core idea of site-specificity (of narratives engraved and encodedin a site) to a mono-narrative of identity. There is an ambiguity in theseassociations, when locus becomes a where we feel we belong, which on theone hand seems to reduce identity to a belonging, a thing, an object of amonolithic consciousness, (memes* that increase their chances of survival

when allied to attractive local identities), but on the other hand, in this feelsuggests a far more complex and relativistic reading of identity, similar to thatexpressed by Umberto Eco: It is sometimes hard to grasp the differencebetween identifying with ones own roots, understanding people with otherroots, and judging what is good or bad. (The GuardianThe GuardianThe GuardianThe Guardian, 13.10.01) What Ecodifferentiates is easily, sometimes mischievously, muddied.

The site of engraved local and national identity and consciousness is at oddswith the heterotopian site, where (all) other sites are represented, and it is tothis I think we should aspire. I would even prefer that we start with thesublime and picturesque, for all their imperialist and bourgeois baggage, asthey are rooted in longing and move us closer to a contesting of ideologicalgeneralities, combining, in the words of Pearson and Shanks(Theatre/ArchaeologyTheatre/ArchaeologyTheatre/ArchaeologyTheatre/Archaeology), terror/anxiety and curiosity in the viewer.

* Meme: the least unit of sociocultural information relative to a selection

process that has favourable or unfavourable selection bias that exceeds itsendogenous tendency to change. J. S. Wilkins Whats In A Meme?Whats In A Meme?Whats In A Meme?Whats In A Meme? quotedby Susan Blackmore in Imitation and the definition of aImitation and the definition of aImitation and the definition of aImitation and the definition of a memememememememe atwww.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/1998/vol2/blackmore_s.htmlwww.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/1998/vol2/blackmore_s.htmlwww.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/1998/vol2/blackmore_s.htmlwww.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/1998/vol2/blackmore_s.html Memes arereplicators in a process of variation and selection the medium of which is thehuman skill of generalised imitation which means that humans can invent newbehaviours of almost unlimited kinds and pass them on to each other by akind of copying. Memes work similarly to genes in natural selection: theyexhibit heredity (the form and details of the behaviour are copied), variation(they are copied with errors, embellishments or other variations), andselection (only some behaviours are successfully copied). This is a true

evolutionary process. (Susan Blackmore, Whats In A Meme?Whats In A Meme?Whats In A Meme?Whats In A Meme?)

Is there another tradition I can follow?

Not psychogeography - this is too dualistic and self-aggrandizing a practise.Its meaning for the International Letterisme group of the early 1950s isreported (perhaps inaccurately (!) by Andrew Hussey in The Game Of WarThe Game Of WarThe Game Of WarThe Game Of War)


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as the effect of the individual subject on his or her environment. In theInternationalInternationalInternationalInternational Situationiste #1Situationiste #1Situationiste #1Situationiste #1 of 1958 Guy Debord defines it as: The studyof the specific effects of the geographical environment (whether consciouslyorganised or not) on the emotions and behaviour of individuals. In eachformulation the subjective is split from the historical. And again in Debords

Introduction to a Critique of Urban GeographyIntroduction to a Critique of Urban GeographyIntroduction to a Critique of Urban GeographyIntroduction to a Critique of Urban Geography (LesLesLesLes LevresLevresLevresLevres Nues #6Nues #6Nues #6Nues #6,1955): he writes of the conditioning of life and thought by objective nature.

This is dualism, a removal of the subjective from material nature, in the firstcase prioritising the subjective, in the latter the objective, but in each casesplitting them dualistically. On the one hand the environment is affordedagency over individuals, on the other hand an active individual transformsthe environment. Individuals are divided between passive consumers of thespectacle and the Letteristes and then situationists who are, Debords claims,

Cathars, pure ones.

Guy Debords stance was essentially aristocratic, fetishising youth and

genius, existing on family handouts he was free to wander and drink,enjoying the city through an alcoholic, or drug induced mediation. Whiletheir lifestyle might sensitise the situationists to the secret places in the city,there was also a tendency to over-excited self-importance. The world seemedtheir oyster. They felt themselves different, superior to the passive majority,ecstatically empowered to change the city through their own subjectivity

when, for a brief few days in May 1968, they had that opportunity, they werean inspirational, but not decisive, force. Had they fallen for what T. J. Clark inThe Painting of Modern LifeThe Painting of Modern LifeThe Painting of Modern LifeThe Painting of Modern Life calls the essential myth of modern life: that thecity has become a free field of signs and exhibits? Influenced by J. Huziengas

ideas (in his HomoHomoHomoHomo LudensLudensLudensLudens) they fielded spontaneity, festival and play asalternatives to, and the lost true modes for, society. Their literarycommunism is often utopian the drive replicates a fictional 19th centuryexplorer in a Conan Doyle adventure exploring to explore, now in the jungleof the city. Such Utopianism is a nostalgia-fication and infantilising of thefuture (see William Morriss News From NowhereNews From NowhereNews From NowhereNews From Nowhere with its romanticisedmedieval future or the cold, cleansed Nazi futureworld imagined as a returnto the uncomplicated antediluvian island of Ultima Thule). Utopianismmakes the future innocent, child-like and consequence-less, and socomplements the Situationists oppositional game-playing in its resistance toadulthood. Michele Monot said of herself and Debord: We were like

children, incapable of thinking of ourselves as adults.

Because site in performance is heightened there is always a temptation toutopianise the space, and, if personal associations are invoked these are,equally, open to being made nostalgic. Utopias and nostalgia are not to beavoided, but to be contested.


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The drives also have a youthful and nostalgic aspect I remember my ownadolescent drives, drifting on bikes between the council estates and bighouses of suburban Coventry, switching gnomes from garden to garden,breaking in to ornamental gardens and garden sheds, hiding in ditches astorch beams played above our heads, treating the night time suburbs as our

own movie set. My more extreme friends conducted their own tours ofburglary and sexual experiment in strangers homes. These are the adolescent

wanderings of pre-adults whose homes are not under their control. Which iswhy our geography is not only public, but also private. We are as concernedwith the shells of Bacherlard as with the empty spaces of de Chirico.

Against drift/drive, we might suggest disruptive cartography and mis-guidedwalks, research and engagement with the existing aesthetics of site (maps,routes, cards, etc.). Projects and games which disrupt the spectacle ofconsumption and production (De Certeau in The Practise of Everyday LifeThe Practise of Everyday LifeThe Practise of Everyday LifeThe Practise of Everyday Life:

a society in which the disappearance of subjects is everywhere compensated

for and camouflaged by the multiplication of tasks) without contempt forits participants, which restore a subject and subjectivity undefined by theillusion of business, stress and purchase, not deluded by false claims foreffectiveness. Such projects result from an engagement with problems in thesituationist project, but they would not be alien to it. We can also give backthe drift to adults, the framework of pseudo-mapping and mis-guidanceprizing them from their responsibilities and security. Perhaps, by deployingempiricism (while avoiding that danger that Anthony Easthorpe articulates inEnglishness and National CultureEnglishness and National CultureEnglishness and National CultureEnglishness and National Culture as the traditional English assumptionthat reality itself exhorts from us a moral attitude), it will be possible to lift

many of the situationist techniques without recourse to their ageist anddualistic philosophy. This is no more than taking advantage of thesituationists own ambiguity; on the one hand attempting to disrupt thingsfrom their functions, at the same time divorcing themselves from theexperiences and places of the adult majority (the workplace, for example, doesnot seem to figure in the situationists city).

Despite their dualism, the disparity between their revolutionary aims andbohemian resources, their sectarian and cultish behaviour, arbitraryexpulsions, hectoring pamphlets and an authority within the group

established by social and sexual relations with a charismatic leader, thesituationists psychogeography, rooted in the tradition of the intoxicated

wanderings of Thomas de Quincey, when subjected to an empirical gazeyields a number of techniques: the drive or drift as a resistance to theimperatives of working or purchasing - a resistant wandering ignoring theproducts of capitalism and religion, a seeking out of forgotten and ruinedplaces, enjoying the exposed innards of ruins (disrupted landscape I loved to

watch the passage of ruined trackside land on the trains approach to London,


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explore the gutted cathedral and the bomb craters in 1960s/70s Coventry, thelimbo and sterility of the rebuilt chapel in Exeter Cathedral now), the makingof concretely and deliberately constructed situations moments of puresubjectivity - to disrupt and transform the mediocre nature of everyday life,subverting the spectacle of capitalism in which all (but they!) have become

spectators of their own lives, the seeking out of secret, private, un-policedplaces or milieus for the purposes of experiments in behaviour, including thedeployment of previously existing and often ironically degraded art (theycalled this unitary urbanism); games that are not revolutionary acts buttactics for participation in the html of ideology (comparable, perhaps, to J. D.Dewsburys grid(s) of interpretation under/over/within motion, in ageometrical vision similar at times to Edwin A. Abbotts FlatlandFlatlandFlatlandFlatland), anddetournement, the re-routing, even hijacking, of conventional journeys,

spontaneous turns of direction in disregard of the useful connections thatordinarily govern this conduct (Asgar Jorn quoted by David Kennedy inCornell: ACornell: ACornell: ACornell: A Circuition Around His CircumambulationCircuition Around His CircumambulationCircuition Around His CircumambulationCircuition Around His Circumambulation). Detournement also

referred to a re-contextualisation of familiar objects and images, placing themin unfamiliar contexts.

Debord was influenced by Ivan Chtcheglov/Gilles Ivains symbolicurbanism, an idea of a city determined by the subjective visions of itsinhabitants. These visions would be awakened by experience of theuncanny/unknown according to Andrew Hussey in The Game Of WarThe Game Of WarThe Game Of WarThe Game Of War. A

waking up to the city of the dead, of the grazing zombies, where the past hasbeen subordinated to the present (in heritage, in the artifical brightness ofretail); memory-less, thought reduced to an appetite for commodities.

Ivan Chtcheglov/Gilles Ivain imagined a city divided into districts that couldcorrespond to the whole spectrum of diverse feelings that one encounters bychance in everyday life. (Formulary For A New UrbanismFormulary For A New UrbanismFormulary For A New UrbanismFormulary For A New Urbanism, 1953) They wereto include Bizarre, Happy, Noble and Tragic, Useful and Sinister Quarters.

Geographers of our persuasion will seriously and imaginatively research andmap the fragments of these future areas that already exist or can be easilybrought into being this is Reverse Archaeology. Mis-guides will take peopleto see the fragments, to point out their edges, encourage them to explore andmaterialise.

Situationism makes site equivalent to city, makes drifting equivalent toperformance, makes psychogeography particular to large capitalist cities,participation specific to a coterie of walkers distinct from the drivers,shoppers and urban workers. It makes the city space a postmodern fantasy ofnegotiation, a game accessible to an elite of players, a space unable to be itself,rendered multiply incapable of general meaning, it makes drifting/walking aheroic failure in subjectively making (re-siting) a city the walker can never


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resolve the multiple and conflicting spaces of the city into the place itself. Thewalker is thus always in the process of acting out, of performing thecontingences of a particular spatial practise, which, although subject to theplace, can never wholly realise or be resolved into (its) underlying order.(Nick Kaye, Site-Specific ArtSite-Specific ArtSite-Specific ArtSite-Specific Art.) De Certeau, like the situationists, articulates

this failure positively: city an immense social experience of lacking aplace compensated for by the relationships and intersections of the exodusesthat intertwine and create an urban fabric... (The Practise Of Everyday(The Practise Of Everyday(The Practise Of Everyday(The Practise Of EverydayLife)Life)Life)Life).

Devon-based reverse-archaeologists can see the hills from the caf inDebenhams. The carcases brought in from the countryside. The monthlyFarmers market on Fore Street.

Models for a performance of intersecting and intertwining exoduses, urbanand rural, quite different to drifts/drives, are present in Simon Persighettis

Short Day/Long LineShort Day/Long LineShort Day/Long LineShort Day/Long Line and Nicholas Cranes walk for Two Degrees WestTwo Degrees WestTwo Degrees WestTwo Degrees West.

Our location in the city of Exeter, in the county of Devon, makes central toour work the extended organism of city/countryside, the ecological footprintof the city toed into sea and across fields and woodland, the trade ofrecreation and holiday that is neither re-creative nor holy, but an unspokentrauma of loss (past destruction), an ambiguous public riff on away fromprivate. We are familiar with the theatricalisation and fictionalisation oflandscape the High Moorland Visitors Centre on Dartmoor with itsgreeting to visitors: a shop window mannequin dressed as Sherlock Holmes,

a character from a novel sourced in East Anglia and given a Dartmoor patina,flanked by wall-sized photographs of theatrical performances. Even thevastness and immediately impact-ful Moor is deemed inadequate or too vastwithout its fictional authentication as dramatic scenery.

Devon-based reverse-archaeologists take on the situationists on theirstrongest ground their analysis of the society of the spectacle. This isisisis asociety saturated in imagery. PaceRaymond Williams, it is the most

dramatised society ever. So what? Rather than drawing the inevitably bleakconclusion that this makes all citizens passive spectators of their own lives,

why not take the other part of the contradiction it makes us all potential

image-manipulators, participants not only in practical life with its deceptivecontent of ideological obfuscation, but makers of our own autobiographiesfrom the detritus of the spectacle. The situationists themselves were keen to

use art but not to make it. The human culture of imitation, now at its mostintense and made metaphorical as the spectacle, is one in which memes (unitsof transferable idea) stand a better chance of reproduction and survival if theyare carried by attractive media. Rather than the Hegelian pure negation ofthe situationists our reverse-geography should be disruptive, synthetic like the


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Symbolist practise of weaving free-floating non-metaphorical associationsfrom disparate sources (creating variations that are partly accidental, partlyplanned and each at risk in a crowded universe of orbiting memes), andaesthetic, not in the pursuit of beauty, but in making a sublime art of anxietyand uncanniness attractive to the senses (making blue plaques to celebrate

intimate events, for example on the Exeter home where Tim Etchellsrecorded his heart almost stopping and its re-starting as a result of a dream.)

The practise of disruptive geography should be open and accessible,identifiable, dark and bright, suggestive rather than provocative.

Memetic-symbolist-disruptive-geography steers between the Scylla andCharybdis of postmodernisms death of Self (author, etc.) andpsychogeographys pure subject. The self is a meme mediating memes, analready socialised set of possible selves in a human culture of imitation.

Memetic-symbolist-disruptive-geography (or one of its potentially endlessvariations, including mythodgeography, deturnerment, smithogeographyand, of course, the familiar perspicaciouslyghettingthere) re-materialises thehuman subject, rescuing it from both purity and obliteration, restoringsociality to psycho-geographic manoeuvres in meme-engrained, silted andlayered sites.

With what justification, if any, can we say: myths are as present or stored upin the landscape as in the individuals minds? Let alone give credence to the

presence in the landscape of memories, associations or memes?

At the quantum level materiality is profound; each particle has its own forcefield stretching through the cosmos and interacting with, and enfolded by, theforce fields of every other particle, every quantum event rippling through theuniverse. Even in the classical physical world there is action at a distance:gravity, for example.

The effects of social and intellectual structures are present in the landscape ofclassical physics. Few places in the world have a soil composition unaffectedby historical economic structure.

J. Scott Turner makes an argument in The Extended Organism: TheThe Extended Organism: TheThe Extended Organism: TheThe Extended Organism: ThePhysiology of Animal Built StructuresPhysiology of Animal Built StructuresPhysiology of Animal Built StructuresPhysiology of Animal Built Structures for us to consider the borders of thebody to include those structures that we make, however insubstantial, thateffect the flow of energy to and from the body, whatever: adaptively modifiesflows of matter through the environment and more particularly between theextended organism and the environment, rejecting the conventional model ofan organisms border as a thing and better regarding it as a process,


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conferring upon the organism a persistence that endures as long as itsboundary can adaptively modify the flows of energy and matter through it.

This suggests that we should be far more wary of drawing a line betweenbody and site.

The liminal nature of life is crucial to disruptive geography: living creaturesare not material entities separated by their surroundings but rather regulatoryinterfaces of interactions occurring between their internal and externalenvironments. Life is an emergent condition whenever and wherever certaincomplex internal and external tensions meet one another and find somedynamic balance. Life is a boundary conditions phenomenon. To maintaincontinuity under constantly changing circumstances , life must endlessly 1/monitor the boundary conditions and 2/ act towards responding at once tointernal and external demands. The resulting motor-sensory activity generatesa certain experiential field, life space, or ambience that an organism is awareof. Awareness is thus a motor-sensory function presenting a synthetic report

of boundary conditions. (Between Reality &Between Reality &Between Reality &Between Reality & Virtuality: Toward A NewVirtuality: Toward A NewVirtuality: Toward A NewVirtuality: Toward A NewConsciousness?Consciousness?Consciousness?Consciousness? Julio Bermudez in Reframing ConsciousnessReframing ConsciousnessReframing ConsciousnessReframing Consciousness, ed. Roy

Ascott, Intellect, 2000.)

The site is always infected, never discrete, never a thing in itself, always a sitein relation to others and Other. Complacent about its past, blatant about isobvious appearance, it bathes in a visual culture in which scepticism andparanoia are marginalized, it is layered with secret signs and spaces, engraved

with associations and scenarios, ordered by urban, agricultural and forestry

practise and the ideology of landscape. A battery driving memories, it ismostly invisible, at a quantum level its particles are predictable butunlocatable, perhaps interacting with multiple universes at variance with eachother. It is penetrated by microwaves, that express, in miniscule variations oftemperature, tiny fluctuations in the cosmos immediately after the Big Bang,that are now galaxies. In the future it may be flooded with smart dust - nano-machines able to put it under surveillance and report large and nano-movements (New ScientistNew ScientistNew ScientistNew Scientist, 14th July 2001. The EcologistThe EcologistThe EcologistThe Ecologist, July/August, 2001.)It is property, it exists elsewhere in maps, memories, advertising, settings for

TV dramas. Some sites are no go areas, some are used to define belongingand national, religious, and sexual identity.

Crucial to specificity is an understanding of the thing in itself. While thismay at first appear to be the essential component of any empirical scientificattitude initial to a developing critique of site, it is sometimes posed as thebeginning and end of the process. This is not empiricism but a form ofidealism privileging the thingness of the thing over its specificity, investing


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it with an ideal; a cultural process equivalent to commodity fetishism incapitalist economy. A specificity which is only that is not itself at all. thedialectical method consists in doing justice each time to the concretehistorical situation of its object. But that is not enough. For it is just as much amatter of doing justice to the concrete historical situation of the interesttaken

in the object. And thissituation is always so constituted that the interest isitself performed in that object and, above all, feels this object concretized initself (The Arcades ProjectThe Arcades ProjectThe Arcades ProjectThe Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin, p.391)

Disruptive geographers and mis-guides can learn empirically, draw upon andemploy in bricolage elements of previous disruptive practise. But there isdanger in leaving it there. Peter Woodcock in his book The Enchanted IsleThe Enchanted IsleThe Enchanted IsleThe Enchanted Islehas attempted to champion the local over the global and of the particular

thing in itself over the conceptual generalities of the post-modern (DavidSutton, Fortean TimesFortean TimesFortean TimesFortean Times, November 2001) in the work of artists who have alltaken a particular interest in site and its anomalous degradations: including

William Blake, Arthur Machen, Paul Nash, Michael Powell and EmricPressburger, Iain Sinclair and Derek Jarman. Disruptive geography, then,can afford no sentimentality towards its traditions, it can neither grant it nordraw from it any authority to act, but is painfully aware of the power ofinterestthat is concrete in its objects.

When making a map a disruptive geographer will recruit the myth thatprofessional cartographers include errors in their maps in order to spot anybreach of their copyright, but the disruptive mapmaker includes associational

errors places assigned emotional rather than commercial value - in order todisrupt the rights of property over the space that he or she maps.

The disrupted map traces the routes and locations of the fanciful - the longsince melted Devils footprints in the snow, the battlefield where the Paignton

Army marching under the banner of Beer and Beef confronted theSalvation Army across, through, and, where applicable, overlaying officialcartography.

Disruptive geography is partly a kind of watching-watched-walking. A www.It is inspired by the Hindu practise ofdarshanwhich translates literally as

seeing, (it) can be defined as the act of exchanging gazes with a divinity. Thepower given and received occurs on an individual basis and it occurs throughthe gaze. Furtherdarshanis also imagined as a way of touching, of makingactual contact solely through the gaze. And finally, by absorbing in thismanner, some of the superior powers of the deity, darshanis a way ofknowing, of arriving at a superior state of consciousness. This concept isinteresting because it is based on a theory of the eye as an active transmitterrather than a passive receptor. (Margot Lovejoy and Preminda Jacob,


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Negotiating New Systems of Perception:Negotiating New Systems of Perception:Negotiating New Systems of Perception:Negotiating New Systems of Perception: Darshan,Darshan,Darshan,Darshan, Diegesis and BeyondDiegesis and BeyondDiegesis and BeyondDiegesis and Beyond inReframing ConsciousnessReframing ConsciousnessReframing ConsciousnessReframing Consciousness, ed. Roy Ascott). As disruptive geographers weare aware of the eyes active power as an organ. The male and femalegeographer will meet quite different gazes as they drift. And consequentlygaze quite differently. These are material forces. Until recently they have been

described perjoratively by critical theorists as hegemonic and objectifying,characterising the viewer as an oppressive spectator and the viewed as passiveand inert. We can draw, like Lovejoy and Jacob, from recent scholarship onLacan wherein discussion about the gaze shifts to a more complex,triangulated interaction of subject, other and community. Scholars trace thisshift in Lacans interest in Merleau-Pontys phenomenological theories aboutthe invisible realm that pervades the visible world as a constant, watchfulpresence. However, Lacan interprets the invisible presence not as a fixed,essential gaze but as a mutating, unstable gaze of culture and communitythe moment of gazing changes from a hegemonic, voyeuristic, guilt-riddenmoment to a moment of and now Lovejoy and Jacob seem to miss the

point by characterising the changed looking as one of self-realisation. Bylooking out at others, one looks back at/into oneself in the way that one is seenby others. Instead what the disruptive geographer takes from this is anopportunity to use the eye as an active organ for participating in and changingthe community of memes that gaze back at him or her through the eyes of another.

The work of Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks in bringing theatre and

archaeology together has been considerable and highly suggestive for thisdocument about our practise this would include their description ofarchaeology as a cultural production working with material traces increating something a meaning, a narrative, an image which stands for thepast in the present (Theatre/ArchaeologyTheatre/ArchaeologyTheatre/ArchaeologyTheatre/Archaeology, 2001, p.11) and their analogising ofartefacts and memory (p.10). But there are dangers in a subsuming ofperformance in the language and practise of archaeology. This is crystalisedaround their use of the concept of recontextualisation, which appears onpage 11 of their book in a relatively benign form, but by page 23 has assumedthe sense that all that is of a site or brought to a site is inseparable from theirsites, the only contexts within which they are intelligible. This seems to me to

make a fetish of site, as the only possible context. Part of the process ofmaking and understanding site-specific performance is in the way thatelements of a performance and a site float free of their geography, becomedetached from it, and to recontextualise them in terms only of their originalsite, while perhaps legitimate to archaeology in fixing site permanently in thepast (in radical opposition to heritage which subjugates the past to thepresent), is to miss most of their meaning for performance and its reception.Surely the performativity of, say, a holy site, is as much present elsewhere as at


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its actual site? Similarly, our physical home spreads out from itself, inBachelards words: our house our first universe, a real cosmos (TheTheTheThePoetics Of SpacePoetics Of SpacePoetics Of SpacePoetics Of Space, 1958) Despite the specificity of its traces, in itsdocumentation, in its meme-complexes, in its attractiveness, a site is alwaysmoving beyond itself, across a multiverse of spaces, ideas, associations and

narratives in motion about each other, each universe just as limited, materialand measurable as our own (while similarly appearing not to be). Rather thanrecontextualisation to an original site, a process closer to disruptivegeography would be one that disrupts authentic sites of monolithic nationaland local origins and identity, interrogates off the beaten track as itself atourist destination, spreads material traces and creates new counter-sites orheterotopia where all the other real sites that can be found within the cultureare simultaneously represented, contested and inverted. (Michel Foucault,Of Other PlacesOf Other PlacesOf Other PlacesOf Other Places in DiacriticsDiacriticsDiacriticsDiacritics, 1986)

A further problem in archaeology/theatre is the analogy made between the

study of ruins and memorys decay and death there is a danger that byadopting the language of archaeology we might think we pay memory acompliment by conceptualising it materially as a trace. But this hidesmemorys much greater longevity and materiality than site in memeticcirculation and selection. To pose one process against another: first, in SimonPopes London WalkingLondon WalkingLondon WalkingLondon Walking (Ellipsis, 2000) what a first seems to be anengagement with images and ideas as a material archaeological process in thelast sentence is swallowed by a solipsist model: Westminster and London aretwin cities of memory. While their everyday concerns are for systems, flowsand a clean passage-to-exit, they have a need to store traces of human activity

traces of such things as conversation, reflection, conflict and attrition themost common form of dialogue is seldom made public however, a bitter hatecampaign conducted as soliloquy in the privacy of each human brain. Simplybecause it is not spoken, does not mean it is not material. The second processis in A Carnal TourA Carnal TourA Carnal TourA Carnal Tour a theatricalised, guided walk for delegates at theStanding Conference of University Drama Departments (2001) around theCathedral Square in Exeter, in which I am attempting to dissolve theapparent solidity and fixedness of the place. To send these appearances, thisfixed and apparently monolithic cathedral into the same maelstrom ofgravitational pulls as the memes of thought about it rather than the blatancyof the conventional tours, I deny appearances to the group in order to reveal

their motion. (Phil Smith, As You See Everything Here Is Very OldAs You See Everything Here Is Very OldAs You See Everything Here Is Very OldAs You See Everything Here Is Very Old, TotalTheatre, Summer 2001) This is almost an anti-archaeological process, settingin motion what in archaeology needs to be fixed to be useful. For just as usingthe metaphor of the scene of crime from criminal detection, the metaphor ofarchaeology contains a pressure for closure, except where it is explicitlyresisted by the likes of Michael Shanks. There is a pressure from themetaphor for closure in the past. A better metaphor is not the decay and ruinof a building, but the evolution of a galaxy, or a cosmology in which energy


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remains constant but redistributed: The decay and death of memory, a redshift to nostalgia or forgetfulness, a repositioning in space. (Roselle Angwinand Rupert Loydell, A HawkA HawkA HawkA Hawk Into EverywhereInto EverywhereInto EverywhereInto Everywhere). As I write these words

waves of energy pass through me, the sounds of Poes HauntedHauntedHauntedHaunted, including herdialogue with recordings of her dead father, referencing her brother Mark Z.

Danielewskis book of loss, The House Of LeavesThe House Of LeavesThe House Of LeavesThe House Of Leaves, and, through its elastichallways, I picture the fictional/real starving child, but the child is in

Afghanistan now.

Myth is present in economic process and product articulating theirinevitability (the poor are always with us) - just as technological process ismoulded in the myth (strip farming and Gregorian chant, Beethoven and thesteam engine). Forestry is guided by myths of origins and of the sublime notas material expressions of non-material, private, unique, supernatural orsubconscious thought, but as part of a continuum of material activity; aphysical landscape in which the play of electrical brain activity and the natural

growth of planted trees are in direct physical relationship a relationshipdescribed by J. D. Dewsbury in his paper at the Performance Of PlacePerformance Of PlacePerformance Of PlacePerformance Of PlaceConferenceConferenceConferenceConference in Birmingham as imperatives in the spaces we encounter thatenact us.

More explicit is that swastika of yellow-leafed trees planted in the 1940s in aconiferous forest in Germany that has now reached the height of thesurrounding trees and advertises its ideology to the skies.

Disruptive geography usefully draws on the theory of evil proposed by Paul

Oppenheimer in his Evil and the DemonicEvil and the DemonicEvil and the DemonicEvil and the Demonic (Duckworth, 1996):a theory ofevil, considering it for the first time as a specific form of physical and mentalbehaviour rather than as a religious and ethical problem only. A crucial partof Oppenheimers theory is its description of the way that evil is a making of

victims of a landscape and environment for existence that appears exoticallytorn, wrenched, shredded, in which time seems not only out of joint butabsent a senseless desert One realises that one has entered a personified,stiff atmosphere and geography busy avenues, factories, skyscrapers, anddepartment stores suddenly looming with a terrible mischief, that leave onesomehow dumb a dreadful boundlessnessThe landscape repeats itselftowards a new, frightening imperialism of greed toward an overwhelming

disaster. Past the disaster lies not a horror but a blank

In the face of these sites that leave one somehow dumb the disruptivegeographer maps the material presence of memories and associations in thelandscape.


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It is sometimes a temptation to think of such associations as akin to gentlereminiscences of the Cotswolds, rather than, say late 1990s Rwanda.

In August 1939 Adolf Hitler asked: Who, after all, speaks today of theannihilation of the Armenians?

Site-specific practise has often concerned itself with memory, but rarely withdenial. In Stanley Cohens study, States Of DenialStates Of DenialStates Of DenialStates Of Denial, it figures materially andgeographically: as an elusive presence that evaporates, an ecstatic force thatcan produce negative hallucinations, pseudo stupidity, knowing and not-knowing, a continuum between innocent and malevolent forms, youimagine that you see nothing, as a susceptibility to top-down, conceptually-driven ways of processing experience in cognitive framing, maps,

schemata and assumptive worlds. Performer/spectators are subject to anyor all of these: we are all cognitive misers, trying to save energy by pickingout only the stimuli we need. The site is no different: engraved in the site will

be marks of denial, the fragments of former structures, the marks of theerasure of texts and images, or gaps, silences, lacunae, the absence ofmemorial. The temptation is always be cognitively miserly and discard thefanciful, the personally associative, the contradictory.

Somewhere at the extreme of the site-specific continuum is the exhumation ofbones to give families something to (re)bury. The exhumation of narrative andthe burial of denials is no less valid. This may seem absurd in the practise of aBritish or English site-specific theatre company in 2001, but we must nottheorise our practise purely and opportunistically for our own interests. We

seek heterotopia that contain all possible sites.

To contest with denial, at least one of many possible truths is that ofreconciliation, not only a form of accounting for events and denials, but onethat also shapes a future, acknowledging the worthiness of anyone who hassuffered to be given attention, placing the willingness of perpetrators anddeniers to refuse to not-see, to publicly own (valid even, according to Cohen,

when privately they do no such thing) and renounce their behaviour, abovepunishment or revenge. The report of the recent South African Truth andReconciliation Commission is full of the language of scars and wounds.

According to the report re-opening them and waiting for a natural healing

process to do its work is not enough there must be a collective negativereconstruction, the destruction of the public discourse of collusion, silenceand indifference. An active disruptive geography would embrace thepossibility of both an opening, peeling away of the indifference of a site, butalso the negative reconstruction of changing the roles and functions of aphysical landscape in the public discourse. But there should be no absoluteconservatism about the preservation of physical structures. One of thesymptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is the unwelcome compulsion


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to replay bad memories. The same in a site. In some cases it may be importantto memorialise in theatre and symbol, rather than preserve an archaeologicalremnant that fixes the future in the past and denies hope of change, but ratherthe replaying of dreadful associations. Stanley Cohen recounts theintervention of a helicopter-borne officer arriving during the My Lai massacre

who recalled that at first he couldnt understand what he was seeing in thiscase a pseudo-stupidity, a refusal to place an atrocity within the boundaries ofpossibility, led to the opposite of his being dumb and to his speaking inintervention, saving a number of Vietnamese lives. This can be a model for thedisruptive performer who rejects the sophistication of negotiating with givenideological memes in favour of the pseudo-stupidity (which should bedistinguished from clowning) of bringing meme and appearance into explicitcontradiction. In the city, where darkness and obscurity are banished byartificial lighting and dawn is disappearing. The urban population thinkthey have escaped cosmic reality... (Formulary For A New UrbanismFormulary For A New UrbanismFormulary For A New UrbanismFormulary For A New Urbanism, IvanChtcheglov/Gilles Ivain) the disruptive geographer will re-introduce the

passage of time, the oncoming of darkness and the turning of the earth,announcing in pseudo-stupidity their re-arrival as so many asteroids falling onthe city.

By the same pseudo-stupidity the reverse-archaeologist will re-introduce signsof private life into the public domain, inappropriately, and unaggressivelypersonal. Walter Benjamin identified the forces with which the reverse-archaeologist will engage as the phantasmagorias of the market, wherepeople appear only as types. (The Arcades ProjectThe Arcades ProjectThe Arcades ProjectThe Arcades Project, p.22) Such types areresilient. Benjamin describes the anguish of the city dweller who is unable to

break the magic circle of the type even though he cultivates the most eccentricpeculiarities.

Corresponding to these phantasmagorias of the market are thephantasmagorias of the interior, which are constituted by mans imperiousneed to leave the imprint of his private individual existence on the rooms heinhabits. (The Arcades ProjectThe Arcades ProjectThe Arcades ProjectThe Arcades Project) Disruptive geographers, dialecticians ofinside/outside, drawing on the practises of the anti-spectacular, are just asinterested in the shell of Bachelard, who followed the molding - thanks tothe house many of memories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate, ifit has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges

that are all the more clearly delineated. All our lives we come back to them inday dreams Not only our memories, but the things we have forgotten are

housed the house images move in both directions: they are in us as much aswe are in them (Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics Of SpaceThe Poetics Of SpaceThe Poetics Of SpaceThe Poetics Of Space, 1958.) EvenBachelard who falls back on a Bergsonian elan vital to power up his poeticleaps - admits the presence of a material force in his cosy shells (wolves inshells are crueller than stray ones). Benjamin describes this force moresocially as the suppression through the arrangement of personal


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surroundings of business interests and social function: From this derivethe phantasmagorias of the interior which for the private individual,represents the universe. In the interior, he brings together remote locales andmemories of the past. His living room is a box in the theatre of the world.Disruptive geography and reverse archaeology encourage the self-activity of

residents, and invasive and intimate mis-guides, in taking advantage of theglobalisation of the interior.

Just as it is a clich to say one is haunted by a memory, so it is to regardmemories as spectral and insubstantial. How then do we find photographerDon McCullin unable to demolish the memory of a skeletal albino child

delicately licking a barley sugar sweet as if it might disappear too quickly?This child reappears in Mark Z. Danielewskis The House Of LeavesThe House Of LeavesThe House Of LeavesThe House Of Leaves as anarchitectural force, tunnelling a 5 Minute Hallway into a home andburrowing staircases miles deep into. Still the temptation persists toimagine this is spectral as Poe, sings on her album HauntedHauntedHauntedHaunted: one look at

the ghost before Im going to make it leave. But we fail to understand that inghost we are not talking about the human, but the human already becomean inanimate, concrete locus that we cannot demolish intellectually. But wecan architecturally and geographically hence we should memorialise.

Not only is a site marked by conscious human activities, simple and complexmeanings encoded, engraved, trodden, excreted, illustrated, etc. on the site.

Another activity materially present is electrical brain activity, and where it isshared by others in the site it is memetic. Although each performer/spectator

will have their own subjective response to the site they will bring to that their

own selection from an independently existing set of memes for the site.

When a spectator arrives at a site he or she will remember it even if theyhave never been there before. Even if strange and alien, its strangeness andalien-like quality will be familiar. Because the spectators/visitors bring a set ofpartially shared memes which are triggered by signs, symbols, simulacra andgeneralised patterns at the site - setting off both a general memetic process (a

univocality in which spectators will identify with a process, say of search,even when there is no generally understood starting point), a momentequivalent to the total act of Grotowski in performance or to Deleuzes

impersonal and yet singular life free from accidents of inner and outer life,

and also subjective acts of memory and association.

The marked site is the stimulant of predictable and unpredictable memoriesand associations. These two realities are not in the relation of a dead past to afree present, but both are simultaneously trigger and association operating ona plane that cuts at an angle through temporality. J. D. Dewsbury describes

razor tears, planes of incision peeling open, slicing through and presenting


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to us what is almost not there: virtual particles of association that are thenonly sustained if they can borrow energy from a spectator.

This is expressed politically by Adorno and Horkheimer in The Dialectic OfThe Dialectic OfThe Dialectic OfThe Dialectic OfEnlightenmentEnlightenmentEnlightenmentEnlightenment : What is needed is not a preservation of the past, but the

redemption of past hopes.

The negation of this sentiment is in postmodern pessimism, the loss ofgeometry, of shape, of archaeology, the negation of the directly lived by

representation. As David Kennedy writes of (and writes us off) JosephCornells boxes of found objects garnered on his walks through New York:

his art makes a complex response to the city that is longer possible becausethe city as Cornell knew it no longer exists. This is the city as an enormousmaterial memory, a laying down of layer upon layer ofstuff, a multi-layeredsediment of dreams and passions and obsessions.

Just as there is no empty space so there is no un-happened place. Ashistorical beings we have always been before to a place. Our encounters withany site are, to once more quote J. D. Dewsbury, a kind of spacing. In everyplace we re-enact, we re-cite, we re-site.

Dewsburys geometrical language of space (and indeed the archaeologicallanguage of site used by Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks traces, layers,marks) should be accompanied by a softer, less respectable argot of possessedand haunted sites, and the adoption of some of the techniques of thecharlatan. Iain Sinclair: The way I work, its largely coming from place, my

system has always been to meditate on certain areas or structures, then to visitthem and walk about until I get some kind of slightlyslightlyslightlyslightly mediumistic contactwith the story And then all kinds of clues and documents start to arrivereally its like, with the very first sentence, youve entered into some kind ofFaustian contract and a voice, or a series of voices, is telling the story, and yougo with that. It is a form of mildmildmildmild possession. (my emphases, Fortean TimesFortean TimesFortean TimesFortean Times,147)

Performance is a particular force in a site, because it heightens the space,making it complex, raising, in the way of (e)ra(i)sing ghosts, thespectre/spectator. In its in-betweeness (say, between text and flesh) it parts,

slices through layers and maps, cross-sectional, a razor tear in the birds eyeview, somewhere between factory and Narnia, Exmouth and fantasy.

In 1924 Arthur Machen, wrote in A London Adventure or The Art ofA London Adventure or The Art ofA London Adventure or The Art ofA London Adventure or The Art ofWalking:Walking:Walking:Walking: there is no absolute existence in things seen; and, against my ownfeelings, that even the rawest, reddest modern suburb, with those shops thatare the same everywhere, with those villas that are the same everywhere, with


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that terrible, victorious invasion of green woods and peaceful lawns thateven these vile red stones may be transmuted into living, philosophicalstones Although Machen, given his esoteric and reactionary leanings,attempts to collapse all into relativism no absolute existence his wholeapproach can be posed the other way round, rather than all being unreal,

what if allallallall is equally real? For though Machen uses the language of alchemy, itcould as well be archaeology: from the stones you can conjecture the sighs ofthe victim The sublime is synthesised with the vernacular strangeness,

which is the essence of beauty is latent in the commonest, ordinary, mosteveryday circumstances. If an esotericist such as Machen, a member ofCrowleys Order, can move so close to materialism it is somewhat of adisappointment to find Gaston Bachelard, the bard of domestic, vernacularspace, striking up such a dualism between scientific idea and poetic aesthetic,in which a heartening description of poetic image floating free from its roots,in the tradition of the Symbolists: One must be receptive, receptive to theimage at the moment it appears total adherence to an isolated image to

the very ecstasy of the newness of the image (Gaston Bachelard, TheTheTheThePoetics of SpacePoetics of SpacePoetics of SpacePoetics of Space) is then sunk in anti-science: For here the cultural past doesnot count. Why can the image not float free from a material past that remainsas valid as Machens red stones?

Gothic and neo-gothic - in which a concern for sublime site is such afundamental part from the heaven-bound gothic cathedrals to theirreinvention as haunted spaces by the likes of Victor Hugo - is a valid force fordisruptive geography. Reminiscent of Ivan Chtcheglovs plan for a dimly lit

Sinister Quarter in his imagined new city, Bess Lovejoy, an essayist andpractitioner of Goth, critiques the wide-scale denial of the darker aspects oflife within Western industrial culture Happiness sells as though sickness,death and pain have all been whisked away from popular culture (a) currentI like to call artificial brightness certainly contestable best viewed as acurrent rather than a unifying whole. (Artificial Brightness athttp://www.peak.sfu.ca/the-peak/98-3/issue4/brightness.html) This artificialbrightness functions as an attractive vehicle of imitation for the purveyance ofglobal capitalisms memes, and people give up their superior local cuisine forMcDonalds sugared burger-sized aspiration.

Disruptive geographers and reverse archaeological should consider settingup shop (a shop) in the High Street in the labyrinth of the bright shop, at theback of that area into which customers are allowed is a curtained cubicle filled

with light, and inside the cubicle, not the child-labourer who makes the goodsor starves, but a mirror now, remove the mirror.

Night time or day-for-night game-playing along the marks and lines of pastdesigns still remaining in the landscape (in Ivan Chtcheglov/Gilles Ivains


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words: the baroque stage of urbanism considered as a means ofknowledge) played with manuals, kit bags, tools, costumes could serve totear through the artificial brightness like the Devils Footprints of 1855 cutthrough contesting theologies, melting snow and natural history. But game-playing has its limitations and its ideology, ignored but inadvertently bared by

Chtcheglov when he chooses Las Vegas as a model for his city of games.

While Gothic contains its own contradictory tendencies including anecrophile rejoicing in the reduction of living beings to inanimate and rotting

thingness unlike the commodity fetishism of capitalism they are blatantabout it - and a politics of artificial darkness practiced by human dustcelebrating servitude and self-abnegation, that can spill over into a racist self-pity there is a progressive Gothic that resists escapism and looks to thesublime, the uncanny and the elegant in its resistance to the artificially bright.

As the necrophilia of some strands of Gothic is a dead end, so is theabsolutism of Futurists who would have used Rembrandts paintings forironing boards, or the situationist definition of all art as part of the spectacle.

This leads to a Manichaean politics that divides the world in two, the goodand the bad not for nothing was Debord an avid mis-reader of NormanCohns The Pursuit of the MillenniumThe Pursuit of the MillenniumThe Pursuit of the MillenniumThe Pursuit of the Millennium posing as radicalism it is a militantconservatism. I would prefer to work on the basis of a profound ambiguity inthe physical construct of the modern (thirty to fifty thousand year old) humanmind, in which specialised areas of the mind have collapsed into a single,cathedral-like structure in which previously specialised areas (thinking about

and memories of animal behaviour, sexual desire, shaping of inanimate tools,etc.) interact directly with each other, creating the fluid and synthesisingmodern mind that has among its many capacities the facility of metaphor andthe equating of other human beings to the status of objects (Steven Mithen,The Prehistory Of MindThe Prehistory Of MindThe Prehistory Of MindThe Prehistory Of Mind). This is far more than an ideological contradiction,but a physical one, which places art and genocide in the same human

vocabulary, while predetermining us to neither. Given this ambiguity in themodern human mind, rather than the Hegelian pure negation of thesituationists we should be seizing on the opportunities of contradiction.

Bachelard, despite, or perhaps because of his idealism (quoting approvingly

an 18th century author describing various fossilised animals as the antecedentsof certain organs of the human body and declaring that every form retainslife, and a fossil is not merely a being that once lived, but one that is still alive,asleep in its form), writes of animal/human hybrids: these extravagantfigures come alive in the dialectics of what is hidden and what is manifest.He writes of human heads...attached directly to molluscs, an animal type hecategorises as dialectical: the part that comes out (of its shell) contradicts thepart that remains inside... Bachelard does not restrict himself to an


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inside/outside dialectic, but continues on with half dead, half alive and, inextreme cases, half stone, half man. While Bachelards method is cluttered byhis idealism and his formalism, his syntheses of intimate spaces andhuman/animal/object hybrids may help us utilise some basic physicalproperties of the modern human mind while engaging with the inside/outside

of particular sites.

It is here in bringing together in a single intellectual territory the idealistsynthesising (molluscs, human heads and stones) of Bachelard and theesoteric materialism (red stones/philosophers stone) of ur-psychogeographic

walker Arthur Machen, that a tendency in disruptive geography can contestthe thingness, the idealism of site. Deploying a neo-symbolist process based on an understanding of the modern human mind as physically evolvedto synthesise its specialist thinkings about human, animal and inanimatebehaviours and qualities in one overarching cathedral-like structure - in which

associations are floated free of the site in physical figures of movement,dissident routes, and disruptive maps and then juxtaposed in ways thatexpress the invisible orbiting of ideas about the site. Making the insideoutside. This can escape psychological performance when the map-makers,performers or mis-guides associations are kept to themselves, making inside

what is explicit in naturalistic performance.

Crucial to the materialism of the above is the theory of memetics. Makingmaterial the floating free of associations about a site, in the site, in physicalfigures, maps, etc. is not to add to the thingness in itself of the site, to add

further artefacts to idealism, but rather to animate and intervene in thecirculation of memes about (geographically and mentally) the place. For thetheory of memes to be self-consistent, the Self figures not as a controllingarbiter of memes, but as itself a meme, or complex of memes; perhaps one ofthe most successful. By placing the Self as one more meme complex in aprocess akin to the natural selection of genes, memetics strikes a blow toidealism. There is no break between the things of the site and the thing of self,nor the things of other selves. Disruptive geography can express their motion,disrupt it and (the rest is for disruptive geographical and reversearchaeological practise not manifestos.)

Given the place of the Self in this tendency within disruptive geography, thereis a continuum of role, in which participants move among and throughspectator, visitor, passerby, performer, traveller, map-maker, map-reader,explorer, etc.

The actoractoractoractor in disruptive geography is a signpost (Simon Persighetti).


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The disruptive geographer will establish a death road defined by DannySullivan in his rather hazy book Ley LinesLey LinesLey LinesLey Lines (Piatkus, 1999) as: special roads orpaths dedicated to the transport of corpses for burial- and specify it in their

will.

Peter Ackroyd in London: A BiographyLondon: A BiographyLondon: A BiographyLondon: A Biography describes the effect of the Blitz onthe citizens: The wall between the living and the living became less solid asthe wall between the living and the dead thinned. While we have a culture ofphysical negation, for example in action movies, there is very little culture ofmemory or memorial. Exeters Cathedral Green, the place of decompositionfor tens of thousands of bodies is a place for picnics of ignoring shopperstaking a break from grazing on dead labour. In a distant past picnics wereeaten on walkways above the ex-carnating dead. The path of our geography isfor a closer walk with the dead. A memorialising of graves, murderers, armygenerals and their victims, the child mortalities of the 19th and early 20th

century West Quarter of Exeter. A secular society needs to find that which

survives us not in the sentimentality of souls, or tourist trade ghosts, but inthe rot, the decomposition of our extended organism and in memorial: anunsentimental public celebration of the sombre and ambiguous nature ofindividual death, unique and universal respecting and memorialising thebodies of a dead we never knew when living. As we learn to respect the bodiesof the dead we will come to respect the bodies of the living incrementally.

The disruptive geographer will devise/discover/walk/establish the vast formsof animals long absented from the city or countryside in the shapes of streets

and alleys, or hills and streams. These routes will obey no commercial orutilitarian incentive. Just as the vast shapes on the Nazca plains are related tothe skills of the Pre-Columbians in complicated weaving, supported by visualmemory and without the aid of writing, so this complicated shape-making,cutting against the commercial imperatives of the city or countryside, is anindictment of a culture that has become supreme in its ability to externaliseknowledge and produce artefacts that are no longer aids to memory but itssubstitute outside the mind of each person causing us to forget the need toremember. (Memory Maps and theMemory Maps and theMemory Maps and theMemory Maps and the NazcaNazcaNazcaNazca, Bruce Brown, in ReframingReframingReframingReframingConsciousnessConsciousnessConsciousnessConsciousness, ed. Roy Ascott, Element, 2000) Divorced from thecommercial imperative of any other logic of navigation, the regular walking of

these shapes provoke the walker to remember the need to remember.

In chalk, the disruptive geographer and the mis-guide, mark doorways andgateposts with warnings and encouragements, governed by their ownexperiences of the interior.

The misguide and the geographer have responsibilities complementary totheir obligations to disrupt geography. They are aware of the links between


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suicide and a broad view of landscape, of the Pan-ic that can come suddenly inthe woods, of the vertiginous conception of history, a heady un-analysedhelter-skelter down Progress, affirming the new technologicalphantasmagoria that is the crowded High Street. As public health unofficials,Misguide and disruptive geographer re-contextualise landscapes in frames

(pace Cathy Turner), are ready for ambiguous confrontations with thecultural Pans and Long John Silvers of god/devil/nature and create walks androutes that cut across the commercial current and the guided history walk tobe guided by volcanic lava in the walls, or similarly disruptive criteria.

Film is the memory art. Given its materiality that of over videotape and theparticularity of light and space on film, the use of real places as film sets, as

well as the aesthetic of space central to the art of the auteur Hitchcockserotic skylines in VertigoVertigoVertigoVertigo to name one of many thousands of examples memories of movies become overlayed on familiar spaces and landscapes (not

necessarily those used for the films). To give three examples, all films which Ifirst viewed on TV, which in different ways have been overlayed on myfamiliar spaces: 1/ Daleks, Invasion EarthDaleks, Invasion EarthDaleks, Invasion EarthDaleks, Invasion Earth - one of a number of post-2WWBritish made sci fi films that define themselves by Trashing London (BritishBritishBritishBritishScience Fiction CinemaScience Fiction CinemaScience Fiction CinemaScience Fiction Cinema ed. I. Q. Hunter). Inspired by memories of the Blitzthese movies opened up the buildings of the capital, exposed the fragility ofseemingly permanent landmarks, intimacies, privacies and authorities, madeeverything political because changeable. And over this peeled and skeletalLondon hovered a Dalek craft that despite its similarity to a Kenwood Chef,still seemed to me capable of investing any urban landscape (or even holiday

coastline) with sublime dread. 2/ The Horn Blows At MidnightThe Horn Blows At MidnightThe Horn Blows At MidnightThe Horn Blows At Midnight JackBenny as an angel stranded on Earth was perhaps enough to suggest thetranscendent in the banal, but far more important was watching this on a

winter Sunday afternoon at the home of working class relations, my nose upagainst the miniscule screen which dripped with condensation from theboiling cabbage, the room full with cigarette smoke and the smell of gravy.Suddenly the room was invested with a theological significance. My relations

were angels stranded on Earth. 3/ Hue and CryHue and CryHue and CryHue and Cry an Ealing comedy dramadirected by Charles Crichton and featuring adventuress and chases throughbomb damaged buildings in late 40s London. Somehow, aged 9 or 10, Iinterpreted the plot as one of a post-nuclear holocaust. From then on those

remaining bomb craters and ruined houses in Coventry for me were not onlyhistorical relics of the war, but iconic omens of a coming nuclear devastation.

A film I first saw in the cinema, the second of George Romeros zombietrilogy - Dawn Of The DeadDawn Of The DeadDawn Of The DeadDawn Of The Dead shows zombies, trapped in a shopping mall,grazing its anaesthetic walkways and escalators. These sequences haveforever poisoned my feelings about shopping, even in quite intimate shops, letalone window shopping or long visits to arcades and shopping centres.


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Consumerism for the situationists was simply repeating uselessly the samebehaviour suitable for survival. Romeros film has made it for me a graveyardgrazing in the dead/living alienation of dominant economics.

Given the potency of film and its technology overlaying and framing

material landscapes there are devices for fore-fronting this: Cathy Turnerspicture frames in her section of NavigationNavigationNavigationNavigation, the pilot performances of TheTheTheTheQuay ThingQuay ThingQuay ThingQuay Thing (1997) could be purloined as the frame of a camera lens. Themasks worn by spectators in some Punchdrunk performances, restrictingseeing to the frame of the eyeholes.

Disruptive geographers overlay movies on familiar places.

The modern city has its own secular heaven and hell: in the first case ageography of celebrity, both a material geography of clubs, big houses, firstclass compartments etc. to which admission is limited, and their aura the

sense of associations and evocations that cluster around an object Aura is asense of distance, no matter how close the object may be the transposition ofthe qualities of the animate to the conventionally inanimate world. (MikePearson and Michael Shanks Theatre/ArchaeologyTheatre/ArchaeologyTheatre/ArchaeologyTheatre/Archaeology) In Walter Benjamins

words: To perceive the aura of an object is to invest it with the ability to lookat us in return. (The Work Of ArtThe Work Of ArtThe Work Of ArtThe Work Of Art In The Age Of MechanicalIn The Age Of MechanicalIn The Age Of MechanicalIn The Age Of MechanicalReproductionReproductionReproductionReproduction.) And so the obsessive fan makes the mistake of trying to relatepersonally, as a living being, to the inanimate fame of a star. The star (andtheir site of celebrity, both its material places and its aura) stare back at the fanas if at an inanimate object that has suddenly, threateningly, spoken. In the

case of the site of hell - housing estates and inner cities that, in the absence ofthe slumming to Whitechapel of the 19th century or to the Harlem kitchenparties of the 1920s, the respectable only visit by misadventure (the Directorof Public Prosecutions to Kings Cross, the Government Minister lured fromClapham Common). Peter Ackroyd asks of London: do the rich and thepoor inhabit the same city? and then again: is a city so filled with difference,also, therefore filled with fear? The default mode of our geography is not fear,but paranoia, not distrust of the other, but the ultra-sensitivity of the gianttransparent-skinned human-Martian hybrids stealing around London inmono-human guise in Olaf Stapledons The Last MenThe Last MenThe Last MenThe Last Men In LondonIn LondonIn LondonIn London. Our ultra-sensitivity is to the motion of a site, always moving beyond itself. Twice, sites

have presented me with explosives, first in digging up an unexploded WW2anti-aircraft shell on a building site, secondly sitting down opposite a terroristbomb in the foyer of a theatre and slowly beginning to realise from theheightened behaviour of the Front of House staff that we should leave. When

we returned the street was sealed off. When the play Pinters No MansNo MansNo MansNo MansLandLandLandLand - finally began, the performance of personal violence had becomegeographical.


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In opposition to celebrity the default mode of the disruptive geographer isanonymity not in the sense of the anonymity of a conspirator, but in thesense of that proud statue of AnonymousAnonymousAnonymousAnonymous in Budapest, proudly enshrouded inhis hood, his face not masked, but in shadow, not absent, but extravagantlypresent and relaxed, a true individual.

Getting lost: Arthur Machen in The London Adventure or The Art OfThe London Adventure or The Art OfThe London Adventure or The Art OfThe London Adventure or The Art OfWalkingWalkingWalkingWalking attests to the power of getting lost as a means to making the citystrange (verfremdem): I got home in a somewhat confused and alarmedstate of mind. And odd as it may seem, this perplexity has never wholly leftme. A disruption of familiar routes that threatens to uncover the city byinterrupting its processes, by which the walker/spectator is called upon tolearn to be astonished at the circumstances within which he has his being.(What Is Epic Theatre?What Is Epic Theatre?What Is Epic Theatre?What Is Epic Theatre? in Understanding BrechtUnderstanding BrechtUnderstanding BrechtUnderstanding Brecht, Walter Benjamin.)

Autobiography is a powerful tool, not for its potential for self-expression,

(indeed its potency in practise lies in its modesty) but because it offers aground for contesting with a social life that ceaselessly reproduces andaccumulates copies of stories. Our society has become a recited society, inthree senses: it is defined by stories (rcits, the fables constituted by ouradvertising and informational media), by citations of stories, and by theinterminable recitation of stories. (De Certeau quoted in Getting A Life:Getting A Life:Getting A Life:Getting A Life:Everyday Uses Of AutobiographyEveryday Uses Of AutobiographyEveryday Uses Of AutobiographyEveryday Uses Of Autobiography ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson) Thephysical presence of remembering and associating performers, ofparticipant/spectators in a heightened site can be a bodily space for the re-contexualising of recited experience, denying to the recitation its false

integrity and lost authenticity, and re-siting that physical presence in a spacelayered with the marks and signs of society. In the post-politics of NewBritain/New Narnia, the September 11th 2001 attack on the World TradeCentre, initially cited as a scene from an action movie, is to the Baudrillardbureaucrats a good day to bury bad news. The intimate relationshipbetween Stalinism and reformism created a crisis in 1989 that has only beenresolved on the imaginary level in a wraith-like, evasive, conspiratorial, artfuland anaesthetic nuptial of media and politics. This is a politics that cannotimagine a future, except in a repetition of its own present and very recent past,its own recent escape/survival. Autobiography is similarly nostalgic, making autopia or dystopia of its very recent experience. An autobiographical site-

specific art set upon its feet can interrogate its own future-less nostalgia andits seamless siting in a future-less politics. Turned on its feet nostalgiabecomes utopian as David Kennedy says of Cornells boxes: flickeringsomewhere between fascination and obsession, fandom and stalking, lookingand voyeurism, they force us to ask questions about what nostalgia is, whathistory is. They force us to ask questions about the nature of desire. This isthe re-eroticising of the future. A materialist and disruptive geography candraw its lines around the politics of the Baudrillard bureaucracy, making it a


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Province, a Narnia made from lines drawn in the sand, no more than aprofessors wardrobe in a sensualised map of a future world.

Final Thoughts

The shadow of the spectacle is the conspiracy. Phantoms of conspiracies -conspiracy theories - move like acidic ghosts across the mental cartographiesof excited and frightened minds. Less frequent are those marginal, butcataclysmically perilous conspiracies of concentrated anxiety, organisations of

human dust in cells as small as one, capable of virus-like multiplication whenenough people think that everyone else is sick. Disruptive geography isconspiracys opposite: a shallow affair, sliding like A. Square across Edwin A.

Abbotts FlatlandFlatlandFlatlandFlatland, its sharp angles tearing cross-sections into the miasma ofmemes, its own lines (as much as its trajectory) open and accessible to thethree-dimensional spectator/participant, its etiquette one of humility,

modesty, utopian ambition and transparency.

Transparencyin site-specific performance is not an absenting of the performerfrom the site, but a modest style, like the projection of holiday slidephotography on the wall of a family home, the wrinkles in the paint or

wallpaper, the uneven surface, visible through the images. (This transparencyis sometimes manifest in the site itself, so a walker, viewer, spectator may see aprevious or distant site on which the present site seems to be project: In thebalance of its windows, flush with the walls, there was a certain symmetry andsimplicity; and so about the doorway, its approach of steps, its pillars and

pediment. True; the matter was London brick, but here you could see thesurvival of the antique classic tradition, worthily embodied (The LondonThe LondonThe LondonThe LondonAdventure or The Art Of WalkingAdventure or The Art Of WalkingAdventure or The Art Of WalkingAdventure or The Art Of Walking, Arthur Machen)

In heterotopias, sites which contain many (all) other sites, highly finished,baroque and picturesque sites, a performance closer to camouflage is moreappropriate for the practise of disruptive geography. Like transparencytheintention is not to be absent, or to disappear into the site (any close inspectionof natural or artificial camouflage soon reveals its separateness from site andone should expect a heightened, binocular looking in performance), but anobvious costuming in imitation of the site, a fore-fronted association of the

active performer with the memes in motion in the site.

The modern mind is porous to the influence of attractively advocated memes,to exterior ideas of a self lurking behind our eyes, and physically evolved forsynthesising and juxtaposing its understanding of objects, animals andhumans, then the body is similarly open and synthesising. Disruptivegeographies regard the body as much a site as our geological and


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architectural surroundings or conscious. A site we perform upon, on and in,ambiguously a costume, a shop, a stage, a terminus.

I remember being carried from a classroom to a teachers car, driven to myNans and from there carried to the settee, where I stayed for weeks, with a

brief interlude in Birmingham for electrodes to be placed on my scalp andlights flashed in my eyes. There was much clunky discussion of my havingbeen struck recently with a cricket bat, no credible psychology. I am left withthe conviction that I performed this mild catatonia upon myself: just one ofmany acts ofcamouflage.

Documents

23127322 Phil s Manifesto of Site Specificity