A Manifesto of Site-Specificity by Phil Smith October 2001

(This rambling manifesto is really a thinking aloud, originally written for internal discussions within Wrights & Sites. The rejection of the term mythogeography was short-lived, while the lessening of the distance from the 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 are subjected to a study that seeks a single defining myth for each locality. Michael Kenny of Simon Fraser University defines the term as "shorthand for the way in which 'myth' ascribes meaning to landscape... projections onto ... sites from a future perspective that rationalised... history... into a coherent narrative - incorporating previously existing shrine-sites and the like into an evolving metahistory." This comes from an email promptly returning my enquiry about definitions, a connection prompted by Bess Lovejoy whose poem Dreaming of Houston contains the only use online of the word "mythogeography": "territories of my dreams, mythogeography I need to touch the black sheep of my country the 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 which the 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 and the US to reason and imagination in 18th century traditions of the sublime and the picturesque is rejected in favour of a potent notion of aboriginal folk culture. But there is a danger here. The potency of pseudo-origins has been catastrophic in the 20th century from Armenia to Rwanda. Blood and soil. Even with authentic aboriginal peoples things can get very complicated as

with the group of Native Americans who have used laws protecting Native American burial sites in order to prevent the study of a skull that seems predate 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 encoded in a site) to a mono-narrative of identity. There is an ambiguity in these associations, when locus becomes a where we feel we belong, which on the one hand seems to reduce identity to a belonging, a thing, an object of a monolithic consciousness, (memes* that increase their chances of survival when allied to attractive local identities), but on the other hand, in this feel suggests a far more complex and relativistic reading of identity, similar to that expressed by Umberto Eco: It is sometimes hard to grasp the difference between identifying with ones own roots, understanding people with other roots, and judging what is good or bad. (The The Guardian, Guardian 13.10.01) What Eco differentiates is easily, sometimes mischievously, muddied. The site of engraved local and national identity and consciousness is at odds with the heterotopian site, where (all) other sites are represented, and it is to this I think we should aspire. I would even prefer that we start with the sublime and picturesque, for all their imperialist and bourgeois baggage, as they are rooted in longing and move us closer to a contesting of ideological generalities, combining, in the words of Pearson and Shanks (Theatre/Archaeology Theatre/Archaeology), Theatre/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 its endogenous tendency to change. J. S. Wilkins Whats Whats In A Meme? Meme? quoted by Susan Blackmore in Imitation and the definition of a meme at www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit/1998/vol2/blackmore_s.html Memes are replicators in a process of variation and selection the medium of which is the human skill of generalised imitation which means that humans can invent new behaviours of almost unlimited kinds and pass them on to each other by a kind of copying. Memes work similarly to genes in natural selection: they exhibit heredity (the form and details of the behaviour are copied), variation (they are copied with errors, embellishments or other variations), and selection (only some behaviours are successfully copied). This is a true evolutionary process. (Susan Blackmore, Whats Whats In A Meme?) 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 is reported (perhaps inaccurately (!) by Andrew Hussey in The Game Of War) War

as the effect of the individual subject on his or her environment. In the International Situationiste #1 of 1958 Guy Debord defines it as: The study of the specific effects of the geographical environment (whether consciously organised or not) on the emotions and behaviour of individuals. In each formulation the subjective is split from the historical. And again in Debords Introduction Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography (Les Les Levres Nues #6, #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 first case prioritising the subjective, in the latter the objective, but in each case splitting them dualistically. On the one hand the environment is afforded agency over individuals, on the other hand an active individual transforms the environment. Individuals are divided between passive consumers of the spectacle 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. While their lifestyle might sensitise the situationists to the secret places in the city, there was also a tendency to over-excited self-importance. The world seemed their 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 were an inspirational, but not decisive, force. Had they fallen for what T. J. Clark in The Painting of Modern Life calls the essential myth of modern life: that the city has become a free field of signs and exhibits? Influenced by J. Huziengas ideas (in his Homo Ludens) Ludens they fielded spontaneity, festival and play as alternatives to, and the lost true modes for, society. Their literary communism is often utopian the drive replicates a fictional 19th century explorer in a Conan Doyle adventure exploring to explore, now in the jungle of the city. Such Utopianism is a nostalgia-fication and infantilising of the future (see William Morriss News From Nowhere with its romanticised medieval future or the cold, cleansed Nazi futureworld imagined as a return to the uncomplicated antediluvian island of Ultima Thule). Utopianism makes the future innocent, child-like and consequence-less, and so complements the Situationists oppositional game-playing in its resistance to adulthood. 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 to utopianise the space, and, if personal associations are invoked these are, equally, open to being made nostalgic. Utopias and nostalgia are not to be avoided, but to be contested.

The drives also have a youthful and nostalgic aspect I remember my own adolescent drives, drifting on bikes between the council estates and big houses of suburban Coventry, switching gnomes from garden to garden, breaking in to ornamental gardens and garden sheds, hiding in ditches as torch beams played above our heads, treating the night time suburbs as our own movie set. My more extreme friends conducted their own tours of burglary and sexual experiment in strangers homes. These are the adolescent wanderings of pre-adults whose homes are not under their control. Which is why our geography is not only public, but also private. We are as concerned with the shells of Bacherlard as with the empty spaces of de Chirico. Against drift/drive, we might suggest disruptive cartography and mis-guided walks, research and engagement with the existing aesthetics of site (maps, routes, cards, etc.). Projects and games which disrupt the spectacle of consumption and production (De Certeau in The Practise of Everyday Life: Life a society in which the disappearance of subjects is everywhere compensated for and camouflaged by the multiplication of tasks) without contempt for its participants, which restore a subject and subjectivity undefined by the illusion of business, stress and purchase, not deluded by false claims for effectiveness. Such projects result from an engagement with problems in the situationist project, but they would not be alien to it. We can also give back the drift to adults, the framework of pseudo-mapping and mis-guidance prizing them from their responsibilities and security. Perhaps, by deploying empiricism (while avoiding that danger that Anthony Easthorpe articulates in Englishness and National Culture as the traditional English assumption that reality itself exhorts from us a moral attitude), it will be possible to lift many of the situationist techniques without recourse to their ageist and dualistic philosophy. This is no more than taking advantage of the situationists own ambiguity; on the one hand attempting to disrupt things from their functions, at the same time divorcing themselves from the experiences and places of the adult majority (the workplace, for example, does not seem to figure in the situationists city).

Despite their dualism, the disparity between their revolutionary aims and bohemian resources, their sectarian and cultish behaviour, arbitrary expulsions, hectoring pamphlets and an authority within the group established by social and sexual relations with a charismatic leader, the situationists psychogeography, rooted in the tradition of the intoxicated wanderings of Thomas de Quincey, when subjected to an empirical gaze yields a number of techniques: the drive or drift as a resistance to the imperatives of working or purchasing - a resistant wandering ignoring the products of capitalism and religion, a seeking out of forgotten and ruined places, enjoying the exposed innards of ruins (disrupted landscape I loved to watch the passage of ruined trackside land on the trains approach to London,

explore the gutted cathedral and the bomb craters in 1960s/70s Coventry, the limbo and sterility of the rebuilt chapel in Exeter Cathedral now), the making of concretely and deliberately constructed situations moments of pure subjectivity - 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-policed places or milieus for the purposes of experiments in behaviour, including the deployment of previously existing and often ironically degraded art (they called this unitary urbanism); games that are not revolutionary acts but tactics for participation in the html of ideology (comparable, perhaps, to J. D. Dewsburys grid(s) of interpretation under/over/within motion, in a geometrical vision similar at times to Edwin A. Abbotts Flatland), Flatland and detournement, the re-routing, even hijacking, of conventional journeys, spontaneous turns of direction in disregard of the useful connections that ordinarily govern this conduct (Asgar Jorn quoted by David Kennedy in Cornell: A Circuition Around His Circumambulation). Circumambulation Detournement also referred to a re-contextualisation of familiar objects and images, placing them in unfamiliar contexts. Debord was influenced by Ivan Chtcheglov/Gilles Ivains symbolic urbanism, an idea of a city determined by the subjective visions of its inhabitants. These visions would be awakened by experience of the uncanny/unknown according to Andrew Hussey in The Game Of War. War A waking up to the city of the dead, of the grazing zombies, where the past has been subordinated to the present (in heritage, in the artifical brightness of retail); memory-less, thought reduced to an appetite for commodities. Ivan Chtcheglov/Gilles Ivain imagined a city divided into districts that could correspond to the whole spectrum of diverse feelings that one encounters by chance in everyday life. (Formulary Formulary For A New Urbanism, Urbanism 1953) They were to include Bizarre, Happy, Noble and Tragic, Useful and Sinister Quarters. Geographers of our persuasion will seriously and imaginatively research and map the fragments of these future areas that already exist or can be easily brought into being this is Reverse Archaeology. Mis-guides will take people to see the fragments, to point out their edges, encourage them to explore and materialise. Situationism makes site equivalent to city, makes drifting equivalent to performance, 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 of negotiation, a game accessible to an elite of players, a space unable to be itself, rendered multiply incapable of general meaning, it makes drifting/walking a heroic failure in subjectively making (re-siting) a city the walker can never

resolve the multiple and conflicting spaces of the city into the place itself. The walker is thus always in the process of acting out, of performing the contingences of a particular spatial practise, which, although subject to the place, can never wholly realise or be resolved into (its) underlying order. (Nick Kaye, Site-Specific Art.) Art De Certeau, like the situationists, articulates this failure positively: city an immense social experience of lacking a place compensated for by the relationships and intersections of the exoduses that intertwine and create an urban fabric... (The Practise Of Everyday Life). Life) Devon-based reverse-archaeologists can see the hills from the caf in Debenhams. The carcases brought in from the countryside. The monthly Farmers market on Fore Street. Models for a performance of intersecting and intertwining exoduses, urban and rural, quite different to drifts/drives, are present in Simon Persighettis Short Day/Long Line and Nicholas Cranes walk for Two Degrees West. West Our location in the city of Exeter, in the county of Devon, makes central to our work the extended organism of city/countryside, the ecological footprint of the city toed into sea and across fields and woodland, the trade of recreation and holiday that is neither re-creative nor holy, but an unspoken trauma of loss (past destruction), an ambiguous public riff on away from private. We are familiar with the theatricalisation and fictionalisation of landscape the High Moorland Visitors Centre on Dartmoor with its greeting 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 the vastness and immediately impact-ful Moor is deemed inadequate or too vast without its fictional authentication as dramatic scenery. Devon-based reverse-archaeologists take on the situationists on their strongest ground their analysis of the society of the spectacle. This is a society saturated in imagery. Pace Raymond Williams, it is the most dramatised society ever. So what? Rather than drawing the inevitably bleak conclusion 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 deceptive content of ideological obfuscation, but makers of our own autobiographies from 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 most intense and made metaphorical as the spectacle, is one in which memes (units of transferable idea) stand a better chance of reproduction and survival if they are carried by attractive media. Rather than the Hegelian pure negation of the situationists our reverse-geography should be disruptive, synthetic like the

Symbolist practise of weaving free-floating non-metaphorical associations from disparate sources (creating variations that are partly accidental, partly planned and each at risk in a crowded universe of orbiting memes), and aesthetic, not in the pursuit of beauty, but in making a sublime art of anxiety and uncanniness attractive to the senses (making blue plaques to celebrate intimate events, for example on the Exeter home where Tim Etchells recorded 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 and Charybdis of postmodernisms death of Self (author, etc.) and psychogeographys pure subject. The self is a meme mediating memes, an already socialised set of possible selves in a human culture of imitation.

Memetic-symbolist-disruptive-geography (or one of its potentially endless variations, including mythodgeography, deturnerment, smithogeography and, of course, the familiar perspicaciouslyghettingthere) re-materialises the human subject, rescuing it from both purity and obliteration, restoring sociality to psycho-geographic manoeuvres in meme-engrained, silted and layered sites. With what justification, if any, can we say: myths are as present or stored up in 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 force field stretching through the cosmos and interacting with, and enfolded by, the force fields of every other particle, every quantum event rippling through the universe. 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 of classical physics. Few places in the world have a soil composition unaffected by historical economic structure. J. Scott Turner makes an argument in The Extended Organism: The Physiology of Animal Built Structures for us to consider the borders of the body to include those structures that we make, however insubstantial, that effect the flow of energy to and from the body, whatever: adaptively modifies flows of matter through the environment and more particularly between the extended organism and the environment, rejecting the conventional model of an organisms border as a thing and better regarding it as a process,

conferring upon the organism a persistence that endures as long as its boundary can adaptively modify the flows of energy and matter through it. This suggests that we should be far more wary of drawing a line between body and site. The liminal nature of life is crucial to disruptive geography: living creatures are not material entities separated by their surroundings but rather regulatory interfaces of interactions occurring between their internal and external environments. Life is an emergent condition whenever and wherever certain complex internal and external tensions meet one another and find some dynamic balance. Life is a boundary conditions phenomenon. To maintain continuity under constantly changing circumstances , life must endlessly 1/ monitor the boundary conditions and 2/ act towards responding at once to internal and external demands. The resulting motor-sensory activity generates a certain experiential field, life space, or ambience that an organism is aware of. Awareness is thus a motor-sensory function presenting a synthetic report of boundary conditions. (Between Between Reality & Virtuality: Toward A New Consciousness? Julio Bermudez in Reframing Consciousness, Consciousness ed. Roy Ascott, Intellect, 2000.)

The site is always infected, never discrete, never a thing in itself, always a site in relation to others and Other. Complacent about its past, blatant about is obvious appearance, it bathes in a visual culture in which scepticism and paranoia 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 is mostly invisible, at a quantum level its particles are predictable but unlocatable, perhaps interacting with multiple universes at variance with each other. It is penetrated by microwaves, that express, in miniscule variations of temperature, tiny fluctuations in the cosmos immediately after the Big Bang, that are now galaxies. In the future it may be flooded with smart dust - nanomachines able to put it under surveillance and report large and nanomovements (New New Scientist, Ecologist July/August, 2001.) Scientist 14th July 2001. The Ecologist, 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 belonging and national, religious, and sexual identity.

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

it with an ideal; a cultural process equivalent to commodity fetishism in capitalist economy. A specificity which is only that is not itself at all. the dialectical method consists in doing justice each time to the concrete historical situation of its object. But that is not enough. For it is just as much a matter of doing justice to the concrete historical situation of the interest taken in the object. And this situation is always so constituted that the interest is itself performed in that object and, above all, feels this object concretized in itself (The The Arcades Project, Project Walter Benjamin, p.391) Disruptive geographers and mis-guides can learn empirically, draw upon and employ in bricolage elements of previous disruptive practise. But there is danger in leaving it there. Peter Woodcock in his book The Enchanted Isle has attempted to champion the local over the global and of the particular thing in itself over the conceptual generalities of the post-modern (David Sutton, Fortean Times, Times November 2001) in the work of artists who have all taken a particular interest in site and its anomalous degradations: including William Blake, Arthur Machen, Paul Nash, Michael Powell and Emric Pressburger, Iain Sinclair and Derek Jarman. Disruptive geography, then, can afford no sentimentality towards its traditions, it can neither grant it nor draw from it any authority to act, but is painfully aware of the power of interest that is concrete in its objects.

When making a map a disruptive geographer will recruit the myth that professional cartographers include errors in their maps in order to spot any breach of their copyright, but the disruptive mapmaker includes associational errors places assigned emotional rather than commercial value - in order to disrupt the rights of property over the space that he or she maps. The disrupted map traces the routes and locations of the fanciful - the long since melted Devils footprints in the snow, the battlefield where the Paignton Army marching under the banner of Beer and Beef confronted the Salvation Army across, through, and, where applicable, overlaying official cartography. Disruptive geography is partly a kind of watching-watched-walking. A www. It is inspired by the Hindu practise of darshan which translates literally as seeing, (it) can be defined as the act of exchanging gazes with a divinity. The power given and received occurs on an individual basis and it occurs through the gaze. Further darshan is also imagined as a way of touching, of making actual contact solely through the gaze. And finally, by absorbing in this manner, some of the superior powers of the deity, darshan is a way of knowing, of arriving at a superior state of consciousness. This concept is interesting because it is based on a theory of the eye as an active transmitter rather than a passive receptor. (Margot Lovejoy and Preminda Jacob,

Negotiating New Systems of Perception: Darshan, Diegesis and Beyond in Reframing Consciousness, Consciousness ed. Roy Ascott). As disruptive geographers we are aware of the eyes active power as an organ. The male and female geographer will meet quite different gazes as they drift. And consequently gaze 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 passive and inert. We can draw, like Lovejoy and Jacob, from recent scholarship on Lacan wherein discussion about the gaze shifts to a more complex, triangulated interaction of subject, other and community. Scholars trace this shift in Lacans interest in Merleau-Pontys phenomenological theories about the invisible realm that pervades the visible world as a constant, watchful presence. However, Lacan interprets the invisible presence not as a fixed, essential gaze but as a mutating, unstable gaze of culture and community the moment of gazing changes from a hegemonic, voyeuristic, guilt-ridden moment to a moment of and now Lovejoy and Jacob seem to miss the point by characterising the changed looking as one of self-realisation. By looking out at others, one looks back at/into oneself in the way that one is seen by others. Instead what the disruptive geographer takes from this is an opportunity to use the eye as an active organ for participating in and changing the community of memes that gaze back at him or her through the eyes of an other.

The work of Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks in bringing theatre and archaeology together has been considerable and highly suggestive for this document about our practise this would include their description of archaeology as a cultural production working with material traces in creating something a meaning, a narrative, an image which stands for the past in the present (Theatre/Archaeology Theatre/Archaeology, Theatre/Archaeology 2001, p.11) and their analogising of artefacts and memory (p.10). But there are dangers in a subsuming of performance in the language and practise of archaeology. This is crystalised around their use of the concept of recontextualisation, which appears on page 11 of their book in a relatively benign form, but by page 23 has assumed the sense that all that is of a site or brought to a site is inseparable from their sites, 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 of making and understanding site-specific performance is in the way that elements of a performance and a site float free of their geography, become detached from it, and to recontextualise them in terms only of their original site, while perhaps legitimate to archaeology in fixing site permanently in the past (in radical opposition to heritage which subjugates the past to the present), 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

its actual site? Similarly, our physical home spreads out from itself, in Bachelards words: our house our first universe, a real cosmos (The The Poetics Of Space, Space 1958) Despite the specificity of its traces, in its documentation, in its meme-complexes, in its attractiveness, a site is always moving beyond itself, across a multiverse of spaces, ideas, associations and narratives in motion about each other, each universe just as limited, material and measurable as our own (while similarly appearing not to be). Rather than recontextualisation to an original site, a process closer to disruptive geography would be one that disrupts authentic sites of monolithic national and local origins and identity, interrogates off the beaten track as itself a tourist destination, spreads material traces and creates new counter-sites or heterotopia where all the other real sites that can be found within the culture are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted. (Michel Foucault, Of Other Places in Diacritics, Diacritics 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 by adopting the language of archaeology we might think we pay memory a compliment by conceptualising it materially as a trace. But this hides memorys much greater longevity and materiality than site in memetic circulation and selection. To pose one process against another: first, in Simon Popes London Walking (Ellipsis, 2000) what a first seems to be an engagement with images and ideas as a material archaeological process in the last sentence is swallowed by a solipsist model: Westminster and London are twin cities of memory. While their everyday concerns are for systems, flows and 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 the most common form of dialogue is seldom made public however, a bitter hate campaign conducted as soliloquy in the privacy of each human brain. Simply because it is not spoken, does not mean it is not material. The second process is in A Carnal Tour a theatricalised, guided walk for delegates at the Standing Conference of University Drama Departments (2001) around the Cathedral Square in Exeter, in which I am attempting to dissolve the apparent solidity and fixedness of the place. To send these appearances, this fixed and apparently monolithic cathedral into the same maelstrom of gravitational pulls as the memes of thought about it rather than the blatancy of the conventional tours, I deny appearances to the group in order to reveal their motion. (Phil Smith, As You See Everything Here Is Very Old, Old Total Theatre, Summer 2001) This is almost an anti-archaeological process, setting in motion what in archaeology needs to be fixed to be useful. For just as using the metaphor of the scene of crime from criminal detection, the metaphor of archaeology contains a pressure for closure, except where it is explicitly resisted by the likes of Michael Shanks. There is a pressure from the metaphor for closure in the past. A better metaphor is not the decay and ruin of a building, but the evolution of a galaxy, or a cosmology in which energy

remains constant but redistributed: The decay and death of memory, a red shift to nostalgia or forgetfulness, a repositioning in space. (Roselle Angwin and Rupert Loydell, A Hawk Into Everywhere). Everywhere As I write these words waves of energy pass through me, the sounds of Poes Haunted, Haunted including her dialogue with recordings of her dead father, referencing her brother Mark Z. Danielewskis book of loss, The House Of Leaves, Leaves and, through its elastic hallways, I picture the fictional/real starving child, but the child is in Afghanistan now. Myth is present in economic process and product articulating their inevitability (the poor are always with us) - just as technological process is moulded in the myth (strip farming and Gregorian chant, Beethoven and the steam engine). Forestry is guided by myths of origins and of the sublime not as material expressions of non-material, private, unique, supernatural or subconscious thought, but as part of a continuum of material activity; a physical landscape in which the play of electrical brain activity and the natural growth of planted trees are in direct physical relationship a relationship described by J. D. Dewsbury in his paper at the Performance Of Place Conference in Birmingham as imperatives in the spaces we encounter that enact us. More explicit is that swastika of yellow-leafed trees planted in the 1940s in a coniferous forest in Germany that has now reached the height of the surrounding 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 Demonic (Duckworth, 1996):a theory of evil, considering it for the first time as a specific form of physical and mental behaviour rather than as a religious and ethical problem only. A crucial part of Oppenheimers theory is its description of the way that evil is a making of victims of a landscape and environment for existence that appears exotically torn, wrenched, shredded, in which time seems not only out of joint but absent a senseless desert One realises that one has entered a personified, stiff atmosphere and geography busy avenues, factories, skyscrapers, and department stores suddenly looming with a terrible mischief, that leave one somehow dumb a dreadful boundlessnessThe landscape repeats itself towards 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 disruptive geographer maps the material presence of memories and associations in the landscape.

It is sometimes a temptation to think of such associations as akin to gentle reminiscences of the Cotswolds, rather than, say late 1990s Rwanda. In August 1939 Adolf Hitler asked: Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians? Site-specific practise has often concerned itself with memory, but rarely with denial. In Stanley Cohens study, States Of Denial, Denial it figures materially and geographically: as an elusive presence that evaporates, an ecstatic force that can produce negative hallucinations, pseudo stupidity, knowing and notknowing, a continuum between innocent and malevolent forms, you imagine that you see nothing, as a susceptibility to top-down, conceptuallydriven ways of processing experience in cognitive framing, maps, schemata and assumptive worlds. Performer/spectators are subject to any or all of these: we are all cognitive misers, trying to save energy by picking out 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 the erasure of texts and images, or gaps, silences, lacunae, the absence of memorial. The temptation is always be cognitively miserly and discard the fanciful, the personally associative, the contradictory. Somewhere at the extreme of the site-specific continuum is the exhumation of bones to give families something to (re)bury. The exhumation of narrative and the burial of denials is no less valid. This may seem absurd in the practise of a British or English site-specific theatre company in 2001, but we must not theorise 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 of reconciliation, not only a form of accounting for events and denials, but one that also shapes a future, acknowledging the worthiness of anyone who has suffered to be given attention, placing the willingness of perpetrators and deniers to refuse to not-see, to publicly own (valid even, according to Cohen, when privately they do no such thing) and renounce their behaviour, above punishment or revenge. The report of the recent South African Truth and Reconciliation 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 negative reconstruction, the destruction of the public discourse of collusion, silence and indifference. An active disruptive geography would embrace the possibility of both an opening, peeling away of the indifference of a site, but also the negative reconstruction of changing the roles and functions of a physical landscape in the public discourse. But there should be no absolute conservatism about the preservation of physical structures. One of the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is the unwelcome compulsion

to replay bad memories. The same in a site. In some cases it may be important to memorialise in theatre and symbol, rather than preserve an archaeological remnant that fixes the future in the past and denies hope of change, but rather the replaying of dreadful associations. Stanley Cohen recounts the intervention of a helicopter-borne officer arriving during the My Lai massacre who recalled that at first he couldnt understand what he was seeing in this case a pseudo-stupidity, a refusal to place an atrocity within the boundaries of possibility, led to the opposite of his being dumb and to his speaking in intervention, saving a number of Vietnamese lives. This can be a model for the disruptive performer who rejects the sophistication of negotiating with given ideological memes in favour of the pseudo-stupidity (which should be distinguished from clowning) of bringing meme and appearance into explicit contradiction. In the city, where darkness and obscurity are banished by artificial lighting and dawn is disappearing. The urban population think they have escaped cosmic reality... (Formulary Formulary For A New Urbanism, Urbanism Ivan Chtcheglov/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 on the city. By the same pseudo-stupidity the reverse-archaeologist will re-introduce signs of private life into the public domain, inappropriately, and unaggressively personal. Walter Benjamin identified the forces with which the reversearchaeologist will engage as the phantasmagorias of the market, where people appear only as types. (The The Arcades Project, Project p.22) Such types are resilient. 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 eccentric peculiarities. Corresponding to these phantasmagorias of the market are the phantasmagorias of the interior, which are constituted by mans imperious need to leave the imprint of his private individual existence on the rooms he inhabits. (The The Arcades Project) Project Disruptive geographers, dialecticians of inside/outside, drawing on the practises of the anti-spectacular, are just as interested in the shell of Bachelard, who followed the molding - thanks to the house many of memories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate, if it 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 in day 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 as we are in them (Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics Of Space, Space 1958.) Even Bachelard who falls back on a Bergsonian elan vital to power up his poetic leaps - admits the presence of a material force in his cosy shells (wolves in shells are crueller than stray ones). Benjamin describes this force more socially as the suppression through the arrangement of personal

surroundings of business interests and social function: From this derive the phantasmagorias of the interior which for the private individual, represents the universe. In the interior, he brings together remote locales and memories 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 the globalisation of the interior. Just as it is a clich to say one is haunted by a memory, so it is to regard memories as spectral and insubstantial. How then do we find photographer Don 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 Leaves as an architectural force, tunnelling a 5 Minute Hallway into a home and burrowing staircases miles deep into. Still the temptation persists to imagine this is spectral as Poe, sings on her album Haunted: Haunted one look at the ghost before Im going to make it leave. But we fail to understand that in ghost we are not talking about the human, but the human already become an inanimate, concrete locus that we cannot demolish intellectually. But we can architecturally and geographically hence we should memorialise. Not only is a site marked by conscious human activities, simple and complex meanings encoded, engraved, trodden, excreted, illustrated, etc. on the site. Another activity materially present is electrical brain activity, and where it is shared 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 they have never been there before. Even if strange and alien, its strangeness and alien-like quality will be familiar. Because the spectators/visitors bring a set of partially shared memes which are triggered by signs, symbols, simulacra and generalised 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 moment equivalent 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 memories and associations. These two realities are not in the relation of a dead past to a free present, but both are simultaneously trigger and association operating on a plane that cuts at an angle through temporality. J. D. Dewsbury describes razor tears, planes of incision peeling open, slicing through and presenting

to us what is almost not there: virtual particles of association that are then only sustained if they can borrow energy from a spectator. This is expressed politically by Adorno and Horkheimer in The Dialectic Of Enlightenment : 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 of geometry, of shape, of archaeology, the negation of the directly lived by representation. As David Kennedy writes of (and writes us off) Joseph Cornells boxes of found objects garnered on his walks through New York: his art makes a complex response to the city that is longer possible because the city as Cornell knew it no longer exists. This is the city as an enormous material memory, a laying down of layer upon layer of stuff, a multi-layered sediment of dreams and passions and obsessions. Just as there is no empty space so there is no un-happened place. As historical beings we have always been before to a place. Our encounters with any site are, to once more quote J. D. Dewsbury, a kind of spacing. In every place we re-enact, we re-cite, we re-site. Dewsburys geometrical language of space (and indeed the archaeological language of site used by Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks traces, layers, marks) should be accompanied by a softer, less respectable argot of possessed and haunted sites, and the adoption of some of the techniques of the charlatan. 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 visit them and walk about until I get some kind of slightly mediumistic contact with the story And then all kinds of clues and documents start to arrive really its like, with the very first sentence, youve entered into some kind of Faustian contract and a voice, or a series of voices, is telling the story, and you go with that. It is a form of mild possession. (my emphases, Fortean Times, 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, the spectre/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 eye view, somewhere between factory and Narnia, Exmouth and fantasy.

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

that terrible, victorious invasion of green woods and peaceful lawns that even these vile red stones may be transmuted into living, philosophical stones Although Machen, given his esoteric and reactionary leanings, attempts to collapse all into relativism no absolute existence his whole approach can be posed the other way round, rather than all being unreal, what if all is equally real? For though Machen uses the language of alchemy, it could as well be archaeology: from the stones you can conjecture the sighs of the victim The sublime is synthesised with the vernacular strangeness, which is the essence of beauty is latent in the commonest, ordinary, most everyday circumstances. If an esotericist such as Machen, a member of Crowleys Order, can move so close to materialism it is somewhat of a disappointment to find Gaston Bachelard, the bard of domestic, vernacular space, 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 the image at the moment it appears total adherence to an isolated image to the very ecstasy of the newness of the image (Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space) Space is then sunk in anti-science: For here the cultural past does not count. Why can the image not float free from a material past that remains as valid as Machens red stones?

Gothic and neo-gothic - in which a concern for sublime site is such a fundamental part from the heaven-bound gothic cathedrals to their reinvention as haunted spaces by the likes of Victor Hugo - is a valid force for disruptive geography. Reminiscent of Ivan Chtcheglovs plan for a dimly lit Sinister Quarter in his imagined new city, Bess Lovejoy, an essayist and practitioner of Goth, critiques the wide-scale denial of the darker aspects of life within Western industrial culture Happiness sells as though sickness, death and pain have all been whisked away from popular culture (a) current I like to call artificial brightness certainly contestable best viewed as a current rather than a unifying whole. (Artificial Brightness at http://www.peak.sfu.ca/the-peak/98-3/issue4/brightness.html) This artificial brightness functions as an attractive vehicle of imitation for the purveyance of global capitalisms memes, and people give up their superior local cuisine for McDonalds sugared burger-sized aspiration. Disruptive geographers and reverse archaeological should consider setting up shop (a shop) in the High Street in the labyrinth of the bright shop, at the back 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 goods or starves, but a mirror now, remove the mirror. Night time or day-for-night game-playing along the marks and lines of past designs still remaining in the landscape (in Ivan Chtcheglov/Gilles Ivains

words: the baroque stage of urbanism considered as a means of knowledge) played with manuals, kit bags, tools, costumes could serve to tear through the artificial brightness like the Devils Footprints of 1855 cut through contesting theologies, melting snow and natural history. But gameplaying 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 a necrophile rejoicing in the reduction of living beings to inanimate and rotting thingness unlike the commodity fetishism of capitalism they are blatant about it - and a politics of artificial darkness practiced by human dust celebrating servitude and self-abnegation, that can spill over into a racist selfpity there is a progressive Gothic that resists escapism and looks to the sublime, 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 the absolutism of Futurists who would have used Rembrandts paintings for ironing 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 good and the bad not for nothing was Debord an avid mis-reader of Norman Cohns The Pursuit of the Millennium posing as radicalism it is a militant conservatism. I would prefer to work on the basis of a profound ambiguity in the physical construct of the modern (thirty to fifty thousand year old) human mind, 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 synthesising modern mind that has among its many capacities the facility of metaphor and the equating of other human beings to the status of objects (Steven Mithen, The Prehistory Of Mind). 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 the modern human mind, rather than the Hegelian pure negation of the situationists 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 antecedents of certain organs of the human body and declaring that every form retains life, 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 extravagant figures 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 he categorises as dialectical: the part that comes out (of its shell) contradicts the part that remains inside... Bachelard does not restrict himself to an

inside/outside dialectic, but continues on with half dead, half alive and, in extreme cases, half stone, half man. While Bachelards method is cluttered by his idealism and his formalism, his syntheses of intimate spaces and human/animal/object hybrids may help us utilise some basic physical properties 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 idealist synthesising (molluscs, human heads and stones) of Bachelard and the esoteric materialism (red stones/philosophers stone) of ur-psychogeographic walker Arthur Machen, that a tendency in disruptive geography can contest the thingness, the idealism of site. Deploying a neo-symbolist process based on an understanding of the modern human mind as physically evolved to synthesise its specialist thinkings about human, animal and inanimate behaviours 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 that express the invisible orbiting of ideas about the site. Making the inside outside. 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. Making material the floating free of associations about a site, in the site, in physical figures, 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 the circulation of memes about (geographically and mentally) the place. For the theory of memes to be self-consistent, the Self figures not as a controlling arbiter of memes, but as itself a meme, or complex of memes; perhaps one of the most successful. By placing the Self as one more meme complex in a process akin to the natural selection of genes, memetics strikes a blow to idealism. 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 reverse archaeological practise not manifestos.) Given the place of the Self in this tendency within disruptive geography, there is a continuum of role, in which participants move among and through spectator, visitor, passerby, performer, traveller, map-maker, map-reader, explorer, etc. The actor in disruptive geography is a signpost (Simon Persighetti).

The disruptive geographer will establish a death road defined by Danny Sullivan in his rather hazy book Ley Lines (Piatkus, 1999) as: special roads or paths dedicated to the transport of corpses for burial- and specify it in their will. Peter Ackroyd in London: A Biography describes the effect of the Blitz on the citizens: The wall between the living and the living became less solid as the wall between the living and the dead thinned. While we have a culture of physical negation, for example in action movies, there is very little culture of memory or memorial. Exeters Cathedral Green, the place of decomposition for tens of thousands of bodies is a place for picnics of ignoring shoppers taking a break from grazing on dead labour. In a distant past picnics were eaten on walkways above the ex-carnating dead. The path of our geography is for a closer walk with the dead. A memorialising of graves, murderers, army generals 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 in the rot, the decomposition of our extended organism and in memorial: an unsentimental public celebration of the sombre and ambiguous nature of individual death, unique and universal respecting and memorialising the bodies of a dead we never knew when living. As we learn to respect the bodies of the dead we will come to respect the bodies of the living incrementally.

The disruptive geographer will devise/discover/walk/establish the vast forms of 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 or utilitarian incentive. Just as the vast shapes on the Nazca plains are related to the skills of the Pre-Columbians in complicated weaving, supported by visual memory and without the aid of writing, so this complicated shape-making, cutting against the commercial imperatives of the city or countryside, is an indictment of a culture that has become supreme in its ability to externalise knowledge and produce artefacts that are no longer aids to memory but its substitute outside the mind of each person causing us to forget the need to remember. (Memory Memory Maps and the Nazca, Nazca Bruce Brown, in Reframing Consciousness, Consciousness ed. Roy Ascott, Element, 2000) Divorced from the commercial 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 and gateposts with warnings and encouragements, governed by their own experiences of the interior. The misguide and the geographer have responsibilities complementary to their obligations to disrupt geography. They are aware of the links between

suicide and a broad view of landscape, of the Pan-ic that can come suddenly in the woods, of the vertiginous conception of history, a heady un-analysed helter-skelter down Progress, affirming the new technological phantasmagoria 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 the cultural Pans and Long John Silvers of god/devil/nature and create walks and routes that cut across the commercial current and the guided history walk to be guided by volcanic lava in the walls, or similarly disruptive criteria.

Film is the memory art. Given its materiality that of over videotape and the particularity 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 Hitchcocks erotic skylines in Vertigo 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 I first viewed on TV, which in different ways have been overlayed on my familiar spaces: 1/ Daleks, Invasion Earth - one of a number of post-2WW British made sci fi films that define themselves by Trashing London (British British Science Fiction Cinema ed. I. Q. Hunter). Inspired by memories of the Blitz these movies opened up the buildings of the capital, exposed the fragility of seemingly permanent landmarks, intimacies, privacies and authorities, made everything political because changeable. And over this peeled and skeletal London 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 Midnight Jack Benny as an angel stranded on Earth was perhaps enough to suggest the transcendent in the banal, but far more important was watching this on a winter Sunday afternoon at the home of working class relations, my nose up against the miniscule screen which dripped with condensation from the boiling 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 Cry an Ealing comedy drama directed by Charles Crichton and featuring adventuress and chases through bomb damaged buildings in late 40s London. Somehow, aged 9 or 10, I interpreted 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 only historical 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 zombie trilogy - Dawn Of The Dead shows zombies, trapped in a shopping mall, grazing its anaesthetic walkways and escalators. These sequences have forever poisoned my feelings about shopping, even in quite intimate shops, let alone window shopping or long visits to arcades and shopping centres.

Consumerism for the situationists was simply repeating uselessly the same behaviour suitable for survival. Romeros film has made it for me a graveyard grazing 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 Turners picture frames in her section of Navigation, Navigation the pilot performances of The Quay Thing (1997) could be purloined as the frame of a camera lens. The masks worn by spectators in some Punchdrunk performances, restricting seeing 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 a geography of celebrity, both a material geography of clubs, big houses, first class compartments etc. to which admission is limited, and their aura the sense of associations and evocations that cluster around an object Aura is a sense of distance, no matter how close the object may be the transposition of the qualities of the animate to the conventionally inanimate world. (Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks Theatre/Archaeology) Theatre/Archaeology In Walter Benjamins words: To perceive the aura of an object is to invest it with the ability to look at us in return. (The The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction.) Reproduction And so the obsessive fan makes the mistake of trying to relate personally, as a living being, to the inanimate fame of a star. The star (and their site of celebrity, both its material places and its aura) stare back at the fan as 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 of the slumming to Whitechapel of the 19th century or to the Harlem kitchen parties of the 1920s, the respectable only visit by misadventure (the Director of Public Prosecutions to Kings Cross, the Government Minister lured from Clapham Common). Peter Ackroyd asks of London: do the rich and the poor 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 giant transparent-skinned human-Martian hybrids stealing around London in mono-human guise in Olaf Stapledons The Last Men In London. London Our ultrasensitivity is to the motion of a site, always moving beyond itself. Twice, sites have presented me with explosives, first in digging up an unexploded WW2 anti-aircraft shell on a building site, secondly sitting down opposite a terrorist bomb in the foyer of a theatre and slowly beginning to realise from the heightened behaviour of the Front of House staff that we should leave. When we returned the street was sealed off. When the play Pinters No Mans Land - finally began, the performance of personal violence had become geographical.

In opposition to celebrity the default mode of the disruptive geographer is anonymity not in the sense of the anonymity of a conspirator, but in the sense of that proud statue of Anonymous in Budapest, proudly enshrouded in his hood, his face not masked, but in shadow, not absent, but extravagantly present and relaxed, a true individual. Getting lost: Arthur Machen in The London Adventure or The Art Of Walking attests to the power of getting lost as a means to making the city strange (verfremdem): I got home in a somewhat confused and alarmed state of mind. And odd as it may seem, this perplexity has never wholly left me. A disruption of familiar routes that threatens to uncover the city by interrupting its processes, by which the walker/spectator is called upon to learn to be astonished at the circumstances within which he has his being. (What What Is Epic Theatre? in Understanding Brecht, 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 a ground for contesting with a social life that ceaselessly reproduces and accumulates copies of stories. Our society has become a recited society, in three senses: it is defined by stories (rcits, the fables constituted by our advertising and informational media), by citations of stories, and by the interminable recitation of stories. (De Certeau quoted in Getting A Life: Everyday Uses Of Autobiography ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson) The physical presence of remembering and associating performers, of participant/spectators in a heightened site can be a bodily space for the recontexualising of recited experience, denying to the recitation its false integrity and lost authenticity, and re-siting that physical presence in a space layered with the marks and signs of society. In the post-politics of New Britain/New Narnia, the September 11th 2001 attack on the World Trade Centre, initially cited as a scene from an action movie, is to the Baudrillard bureaucrats a good day to bury bad news. The intimate relationship between Stalinism and reformism created a crisis in 1989 that has only been resolved on the imaginary level in a wraith-like, evasive, conspiratorial, artful and anaesthetic nuptial of media and politics. This is a politics that cannot imagine a future, except in a repetition of its own present and very recent past, its own recent escape/survival. Autobiography is similarly nostalgic, making a utopia or dystopia of its very recent experience. An autobiographical sitespecific art set upon its feet can interrogate its own future-less nostalgia and its seamless siting in a future-less politics. Turned on its feet nostalgia becomes utopian as David Kennedy says of Cornells boxes: flickering somewhere between fascination and obsession, fandom and stalking, looking and voyeurism, they force us to ask questions about what nostalgia is, what history is. They force us to ask questions about the nature of desire. This is the re-eroticising of the future. A materialist and disruptive geography can draw its lines around the politics of the Baudrillard bureaucracy, making it a

Province, a Narnia made from lines drawn in the sand, no more than a professors 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 cartographies of excited and frightened minds. Less frequent are those marginal, but cataclysmically perilous conspiracies of concentrated anxiety, organisations of human dust in cells as small as one, capable of virus-like multiplication when enough people think that everyone else is sick. Disruptive geography is conspiracys opposite: a shallow affair, sliding like A. Square across Edwin A. Abbotts Flatland, Flatland its sharp angles tearing cross-sections into the miasma of memes, its own lines (as much as its trajectory) open and accessible to the three-dimensional spectator/participant, its etiquette one of humility, modesty, utopian ambition and transparency.

Transparency in site-specific performance is not an absenting of the performer

from the site, but a modest style, like the projection of holiday slide photography on the wall of a family home, the wrinkles in the paint or wallpaper, the uneven surface, visible through the images. (This transparency is sometimes manifest in the site itself, so a walker, viewer, spectator may see a previous or distant site on which the present site seems to be project: In the balance of its windows, flush with the walls, there was a certain symmetry and simplicity; and so about the doorway, its approach of steps, its pillars and pediment. True; the matter was London brick, but here you could see the survival of the antique classic tradition, worthily embodied (The The London Adventure or The Art Of Walking, Walking Arthur Machen) In heterotopias, sites which contain many (all) other sites, highly finished, baroque and picturesque sites, a performance closer to camouflage is more appropriate for the practise of disruptive geography. Like transparency the intention is not to be absent, or to disappear into the site (any close inspection of natural or artificial camouflage soon reveals its separateness from site and one should expect a heightened, binocular looking in performance), but an obvious 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 for synthesising and juxtaposing its understanding of objects, animals and humans, then the body is similarly open and synthesising. Disruptive geographies regard the body as much a site as our geological and

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 my Nans 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 and lights flashed in my eyes. There was much clunky discussion of my having been struck recently with a cricket bat, no credible psychology. I am left with the conviction that I performed this mild catatonia upon myself: just one of many acts of camouflage.