This morning my wife Natalie Boulton and I performed a familiar Sunday morning ritual – we went down to the harbor in Bristol and had bacon and egg sandwiches at Brunel’s Buttery before walking together round the harbor. It’s a good way to have a change of scene, get some light, air, and exercise – it was freezing cold today – and, above all, to catch up with each other as we walk and talk without distraction.

Natalie is just back from the USA, where she was attending a conference at Stanford Medical School at which the short, thirty minute  version of her film Voices From The Shadows – http://voicesfromtheshadowsfilm.co.uk, which she made with our son Josh, was launched. (It’s intended to be part of an educational pack for training medical students). As she was telling me about the conversations she’d had and the contacts she’d made I remembered why I’d seen her work as so central to the position I tried to set out in my last talk for PLaCE before I retired.  It seems worthwhile revising some of what I said then as a way of auditing where that work finds itself almost a year later.

I said then that at the heart of my vision of PLaCE’s work had been the creation of a community of transverse action and made clear that ‘community’ here is not seen – to quote the artist Pauline O’Connell – as “a permanent entity; not … a noun, not a permanent construct describing a grouping, sharing, being in common, and so on. But, rather … a verb, a doing word, brought into action only on occasion, a deliberate act of union of ‘I’s’”. Among other things, then, I saw community here as an antidote to the dominant culture of possessive individualism. I took the term ‘transverse’ from Felix Guattari’s book The Three Ecologies. As I understand it this refers to a working or cutting across of existing social presuppositions, assumptions, and hierarchies and the disciplinary, professional, and other structures built upon and sustaining them. Which is exactly what Natalie – artist, housewife, mother, and career turned ME activist and filmmaker – has been doing in Stanford. That’s to say she was making unconventional and unexpected connections without suppressing differences – a practice we both associate with our enjoyment of collage as a creative approach. I think the ability to engage in this transverse activity is closely related to Geraldine Finn’s understanding that we are always “both more and less than the categories that name and divide us“. Lastly, action here is used in the sense proposed by the philosopher Hannah Arendt, as the vital act of keeping-open human horizons. For Arendt action manifests both: the capability to initiate – to begin something new, to undertake the unexpected and a commitment to plurality; that is to the presence and acknowledgment of others. These two qualities give action its social value and meaning. Action then is the enactment of the mycelial mesh of relationships between material environments, social relations, and the inter-subjectivities that animates the ecology of becoming. I am currently trying to think this through as a fourth ecology – particularly in terms of the work (verb) of art.

Now as then PLaCE International tries to serve as a portal into a community of transverse action that addresses both the overlapping institutional domains of culture and education and very specific social and ecological concerns. As a living entity this community flickers in and out of being, so it’s largely invisible to the hierarchies that dominate both academic and cultural life. That is both it’s strength and, in these difficult economic times, a possible but inevitable weakness. I’m no longer certain that the large networks I’ve been helping to co-ordinate are the best way to sustain a community of transverse action, but will keep an open mind on that until I’ve talked to people in Ireland and had a chance to think some of my current concerns through in more detail.

But to summarise: the particular community of transverse action that I have done all I can to help create and support is still drawn from multiple groups – of artist/researcher/teachers and their students; of ordinary, extraordinary, citizens who are able to live in a polyverse; and of activists addressing social abuse and injustice; and from various combinations of these. What matters above all is that communities of transverse action, like Mary McLeod, are ways of finding the skills and courage necessary to “sing across thresholds”. ( “She was first forbidden to sing her songs outdoors, and later they were forbidden indoors too. Consequently, Màiri was to be found singing while standing in doorways: in short, across thresholds”). Some of their work is equivalent to keening, some to praise singing, some to flyting – a sophisticated poetic form of insult traditionally used by bards. (It was probably her flytings that earned Mary her posthumous reputation for sexual impropriety and even witchcraft). As creative life changes in response to the normative pressure of institutions, we have to find new ways to work so as not to be trapped in the thickening carapace of ‘culture’. We have to allow ourselves to spend time ‘going feral’, inhabiting the liminal spaces-between that are, for that very reason, also the spaces of being-as-becoming. PLaCE’s work as an ‘academic’ research centre has in part been subversive, to unravel some of the presuppositions that dominate education in our increasingly exploited, fragmented, and embattled world. Unless people like myself do that work – people who have been privileged enough to have access to cultural skills and intellectual capital – those who most need the resources necessary to human wellbeing – material, educational, cultural and spiritual – will become less and less able to access those resources.

Using Guattari’s notion of three ecologies – of environment, society, and self – I am still thinking about a fourth ecology – a form of communicative, joined-up educational action that engages and ferments transformative mutations across and between the other three. As anyone who follows my thoughts on this web site will be aware, I’ve started to see this in terms of translation.

The text below is a response to my previous text from Margaret Ames, a lecturer in the Department of Theatre Film & Television Studies at Aberystwyth who knew Cliff McLucas and attended the event to which that post refers. Her research includes: Devising Theatre, particularly in a Welsh cultural context, and disability and performance. She is director/producer for Cyrff Ystwyth Dance Company, who participate in long term practice based research projects, and is co-Investigator with Central School of Speech and Drama University of London on an AHRC funded project. ‘Challenging ‘Liquid’ Place’.

I am putting her response up here – with her permission – because it seems to me to exemplify and clarify, in a highly specific instance, our collective need to keep in mind Paul Ricoeur’s insistence on the importance of what he calls “the model of translation”. This can be found in a short paper titled Reflections on a new ethos for Europe (in Richard Kearney (ed) Paul Ricoeur The Hermeneutics of Action (SAGE 1996). (I should perhaps add that I understand ‘translation’ in relation to different languages – that is literally – but also in the sense of mediating between mentalities and lifeworlds).

Margaret writes:

“First. Thank you. I do not feel let down in any way and I was left with a profound sense of gratitude for all the careful presentations and offerings throughout the day. What you said at the end hit the nail on the head and as everyone agreed – it was a kind of mission impossible in any case, to sum up after the panel. What you have written in your blog extends my thinking further and reminds me of the necessity to ‘let go’ and to develop more nuanced understandings of how others come to these debates/places. None of this is mine, all of it we share. I use the forward slash here as an awkward attempt to refer to the lived experience of contestation within location.”

“For me the entire event was moving as I understood the intellectual endeavour being engaged by all concerned. Future possibilities seemed to abound and I carry the energy of that right now as I write this.”

“I want though to pick up on a couple of points you make – partly from a personal view as ‘I was there’ in the 80s and partly because, although Rhys is a fantastic simultaneous translator, I don’t know how he really coped with the speed and  passion of the discussion!!”

“So….for me the panel discussion took me right back to my very early twenties for as Catrin said, in the house where we lived and the Barn centre, such arguments happened morning noon and night. This was my political context and was profoundly formational. Clifford was always contributing/central to the debates and he challenged me to step up, to be part of the solution and not part of the problem as he phrased it one evening. I was aware of the generation gap as well as the perceptual and experiential gaps, but I was excited to hear the debates again in public.”

“But the main thing I want to pick up is that I don’t think the marginality is rural alone, I think it is more specific and more wide ranging in terms of identity. I take Euros’ position here and understand his insistence on the word for ‘culture’ – diwylliant as absolutely key. Somewhere in the root of this word is the notion of de-wilding which is there in the English word too I think. But within the definition of the word there is an implicit set of practices. These are about inclusion, sharing, dependency and definitely not about exclusivity, an ‘us and them’ arrangement. And most importantly – it is not about cultural product, of theatre, art, anything at all except the practice of living together here. There are other words he could have used which explain this more clearly – such as the word that I think translates as ‘colleague’ – cydymaith means the one who travels with me. Rural or urban, for there is a Welsh urban context too, the prefix ‘Cym’ and ‘cyd’ signals togetherness – negotiated and contested but together.”

“However….if you travel all the time with people who resist your vocabularies, structures and descriptions as you go along – in order to stay in step with them, to keep up….you cease to speak…..for fear… of loss…how can you cope with this journey alone? You change your language because you know they never will.”

“So… the language is of critical importance and is a means of inclusion rather than exclusivity. It is this I think that many people cannot accommodate. I don’t see the panel expressing nostalgia – I do see them struggling to understand Euros’ radical proposal that the ‘culture’ is more important and that the culture is the people – us – all of us. I have never felt any parochialism in these debates about identity – more a kind of desperate terror of the silence of finding yourself alone. I will always remember Clifford and Catrin talking about the horror of being the last surviving speaker of your language – who would you tell that to in a way that could be felt/understood? Who would you tell your dreams to?”

“And this leads me back to a notion of utopia. Yes – I think that this notion of travelling together is a utopia – but this morning the shop 2 miles down from me opened again – its been closed for over a year. It was decorated with flags and daffodils. They had made cakes and welsh cakes and tea and coffee for anyone who wanted. Mary-Anne bought duck eggs for no reason other than they were there!! Welsh was the language this morning, some without it did the swim in the rhythms and the expletives and the cadences  – we gathered before going on our way for the day. A tiny moment of a utopia  – inclusions and beginnings”.

Yesterday I attended an event in Aberystwyth – see http://www.cliffordmclucas.info. This was organised by Rowan O’Neill and Anwen Jones, and entitled Revisiting The Memory of Cliff McLucas. I had signed up early on, pleased to have a chance to celebrate McLucas’ work on deep mapping and acknowledge my own debt to him. Also to see friends and support Rowan who, through her PhD, has done so much to ensure that informed debate around his work continues. A few days before the event she contacted me and asked if I would act as an informal respondent to the day. “I’m thinking it would be interesting to hear your thoughts … in relation to your own deep mapping work and the inspiration you’ve previously drawn from this aspect of Cliff’s work. … it might be a nice opportunity to bring worlds together”. I agreed, perhaps without sufficiently thinking through what I was signing myself up for.

What follows here is in a sense almost an apology. Although I did speak at the end of the day, I did not say what I wanted to say about what Rowan and others have been doing, about my own debt to McLucas’ work, or about how I see the value of that work now. Apology may be too strong a word, but I have an obscure feeling that I have somehow let Cliff McLucas down and, more significantly, have let down those who value his work for its humanity and for its almost prophetic qualities. I certainly don’t feel I made the most of an ‘opportunity to bring worlds together’, in part because I’m not entirely sure that that was what many of the people at the event really wanted.

Why I feel all this is difficult to articulate, but obviously I’ll try.

First, some context. Dr Cathy Turner started the day with a sensitive, well-researched, and often poetic meditation on the McLucas archive and its resonances – both with regard to the man and to questions thrown up for us today by his work. Among these was the notion of the possibly utopian aspect of his work, which Margaret Ames picked up at the end of the session. I had intended to return to this issue at the end of the day, positing the Irish philosopher’s Richard Kearney’s notion of the productive tension between testimonial, utopian, and empathetic imagination as possibly a more useful way of thinking about Cliff’s work than one derived from the usual suspects among continental philosophers. I didn’t because by the time I was due to speak, I was unclear as to how such an issue sat with the preoccupations that had surfaced during the afternoon.

Unclear, that is, as to whether I was attending what seemed to have turned into a reunion of a generation of Welsh language and cultural activists whose heyday was the 1980s (and that just happened to include Cliff McLucas), or to celebrate the achievements of a man whose work and critical solicitude extended well beyond the specific Welsh context in which it was forged and tempered? I had been told by several people that the McLucas archive was a hot ‘political’ issue within the institution and in Wales. I was now beginning to see why.

The introductions to the new McLucas web site, to the archive in the National Library of Wales, and to MabLab where each, in their different ways, informative and thought-provoking.  My own problems as respondent began with the panel in the afternoon. Let me be clear. Some of what was said by panelists was both pertinent and appropriate to a day dedicated, as I had understood it, to revisiting the memory of Cliff McLucas. But of course that phrase is itself somewhat deceptive. I had chosen to take it as emphasising the importance of McLucas’ work and how what he had achieved in the past might be carried forward. But for some others it seemed that what was most important was the act of revisiting a shared past, one in which he had played a sometimes more, sometimes (I sensed) less, important role. Much of the discussion between panel members revolved around issues of the Welsh language and relations to cultural authority – understandably given the cultural situation in Wales at that time. I’ve some familiarity with these debates – as any English person who has worked with Welsh artists and academics must be – and am by no means insensitive to the very real and longstanding problems involved or the continuing issues in a ‘post-colonial’ era. I am also deeply sympathetic to (and a little envious of) those whose language – unlike standard English – allows them to speak the land and their lived taskscape with precision and sensitivity, as Welsh clearly does.

But I have to admit that as the panel session – conducted in Welsh and simultaneously translated – went on I felt increasingly uncomfortable and, to a degree, irritated. In part this was because I could sense the growing inattention of the students in front of me as one of their elders repeated, for the third or fourth time, just how difficult the 1980s had been. But aren’t we here, I found myself thinking, precisely to enthuse those students’ generation with what had made McLucas such a valuable figure to us, rather than tell them what a tough time we had? (And, like Eddie Ladd, I think things are harder now than they were then, since the issues are more complex and far less black and white). The moment I realised I was in real trouble as a respondent came when one panel member told us he would demonstrate that McLucas was (in his words) “no saint”. It seems McLucas had told him at one point he might best solve his problems as as a Welsh-speaking English person living in Wales by simply getting out of “this fucked-up little country”. No saint indeed! I have no idea how that ‘revelation’ of McLucas’ lack of ‘saintliness’ was received by an overwhelmingly Welsh audience – there was certainly no audible sharp intake of collective breath –  but, because the complexities and frustrations that revelation articulated resonated with issues that Rowan had raised about those who are hybrids within the Welsh context, the issues of context and categorisation suddenly came to seem central. Central, but also highly contentious.

What is important to me personally about Cliff McLucas, as I tried to make clear when I did speak, is that he was a man who embodied Geraldine Finn’s insight that: “we are always both more and less than the categories that name and define us”. Including, of course, the categories of nationality and linguistic ability or (in my own case) lack of it. In the self-filmed footage of Cliff explaining his deep mapping work in California, what comes over is his openness (perfectly captured in his brief remarks about his music tastes); his desire to share and involve; his concern that his work should serve the needs of others. And it was very clear from at least two speakers that he was, as a result, an outstanding mentor.

Any of us with some professional awareness of his lifework already knew of his extraordinary breadth of vision and his practical ability, in many registers, to get that vision out into the world. So for me it was the insights into his more personal qualities, his ability to hold at one and the same time an imaginative sense of “the smell on a man’s breath” and the historical and conceptual “strangeness” of his ideas, that struck me – and, as part and parcel of that, his openness, his capability as a mentor. That, for me, was what was most valuable in the day.

So why didn’t I say all this as a respondent. One answer is that I could see no way of doing so adequately without giving offence. To put it bluntly, we all now live in “fucked-up” countries – their size is largely irrelevant – as a result of weight of global capitalism, impending ecological meltdown, and the internalisation of the culture of possessive individualism upon which capitalism depends psycho-socially. The nostalgia (as I see it) of many of the panel for a world in which the Welsh language could be taken as the central issue for their community seemed to me almost counter to everything I admire about Cliff McLucas. I am sure he had his failings, but nostalgia, parochialism, and the particular self-regard of artist/activists that so neatly models possessive individualism for the advertising industry were clearly not among them. Anyway, mindful of being a guest in Wales and at an institution in which its language is central – both facts reinforced by the bi-lingual nature of the event – I felt unable even to appear to question the terms on which that hospitality had been extended. However, and this is the crux of my own discomfort, I also think that there was something cowardly in my reducing all the above responses to the day to the brief generalisations that I ended up presenting.

A second answer is that I would liked to have said that we genuinely only re-member the dead by incorporating what was best in their lives into our own values, practices and understanding. That’s a big ask, because it means that we have to have the humility and generosity to make space within ourselves in order for them to have a place there. For me that’s what the transmission of culture in its best sense is about. That’s a hard thing to say to a room full of people (most of them strangers) at the best of times, particularly since I’m aware that it can all too easily be interpreted as some kind of personal rebuke.

So what do I think is Cliff McLucas’ value to the C21st? On yesterday’s showing I’m not sure I’m qualified to answer that question on behalf of any constituency other than myself. However, in my personal view he is a key figure in that – through his exploration of notions of deep mapping – he provides us with an orientation from which to rethink issues of connectivity. By this I mean the dynamic, complex, and unstable web of relationships between humans, non-humans, and the particular spaces and places they inhabit and engage with on a daily basis. Such inhabitation and engagement occurs in a multi-dimensional mesh of physical, psycho-social and non-human geographies that extend well beyond any particular cartographic site, region or even nation. They take, and make, place in a polyverse that is tensioned somewhere between Doreen Massey’s understanding of space as “a simultaneity of stories-so-far” and Tim Ingold’s notion of a ‘meshscape’. More particularly, and in terms of my own interests, he offers an alternative way of engaging with the ‘placing’ of marginal rural communities that’s capable of generating the the critical solicitude necessary to engage with the dynamic psycho-social tensions engendered by their marginality. This, as I see it, is informed by a version of Kenneth Frampton’s Critical Regionalism as re-calibrated through Felix Guattari’s ecosophy. Two tensions are central here. One is between the rural as ‘landscape’ – fundamentally an ‘aesthetic’ presupposition in which land is always seen at a distance and from an ‘edge’, looking inwards – and the other as a working ‘taskscape’ in Tim Ingold’s sense. One experienced from the position of a moving and unstable position within that taskscape. The other tension is between a pragmatic commitment to communitarianism and the dominant culture of ‘possessive individualism’.

Cliff McLucas remains central to my interest, and in my view a globally important figure, to the degree to which working through these tensions might help us re-frame more extensive socio-environmental issues.