Читать книгу The Unsettling Outdoors - Russell Hitchings - Страница 17

For me, theories of social practice suggested a useful way of studying how easily outdoor experiences infiltrate everyday lives. And whilst there are many ways of accommodating the nuts and bolts of nature within theories of social practice, my starting point was to see these components as potentially destabilising threats to certain everyday practices that are both common and often increasingly widespread. Turning again to the ‘entanglement’ metaphor, this encouraged me to see outdoor greenspaces as environments that people might feasibly get caught up in in ways that might snap them out of their preoccupations.

Though their authors would be unlikely to express it as such, some of the above greenspace studies that I started with also hinted at a certain kind of entanglement. One of the suggestions that they examined, after all, was about how greenspace experience could be beneficial because it allows us to transcend our immediate concerns and put aside what was troubling us beforehand. In effect, people can become ‘mentally entangled’ in a way that leads to valuable forms of human respite and restoration. My point is that, whilst this now sounds like an enjoyable experience, it may also, for many people, feel like a risk if it proves hard to return to everyday life afterwards. The assumption that runs through some of this work is that it should be relatively easy to go back refreshed (after a beneficial burst of greenspace restoration) to what was happening beforehand. But the truth of the matter might be another thing and, if we run with the argument about starting with the practices, it is also possible that our practices might not always be so willing to let us escape their grip.

This finally takes me to the ‘subjectivities’, or personal feelings, associated with carrying out practices. Understandably, these features have not often been at the forefront of analysis for those working with these theories. The point, after all, was partly about putting the practices, rather than the people, centre stage in our understandings of how patterns of everyday life become established and evolve. If that is the aim, too full a focus on the experiences of taking part in relevant practices risks analysis drifting back towards a more ‘people-centred’ account when part of the point was to position them as not always so in control. One of the most popular ways of describing how it is to carry out a practice, however, is with reference to Schatzki’s (1996) idea of a ‘teleoaffective structure’. This idea draws our attention to how, in the course of carrying out relatively familiar activities, the practice effectively carries us along towards its usual end point (or until we have to stop). In effect, we are swept along by the practice. This is the idea that I want to take forward here. Schatzki is drawing our attention to the feeling of purposeful flow that we may experience when we carry out a practice, when we are getting on with things, getting things done, just as we usually do. There is tension here between purpose and restoration. It hints at the challenge of greenspace experiences infiltrating certain ways of meeting the demands of everyday life that might be becoming more widespread and which encourage those involved to act and think in certain ways. For many, the whole idea of ‘connecting to nature’ is motivated by the desire to ‘disconnect’ from the presumed pressures and stresses of modern urban living (Kaplan and Kaplan 1989). But the extent to which it is easy, in the moment, to achieve such ‘disconnections’ is, I would argue, a matter for investigation.