Garden Interpreters: Garden Lifestyle Television and Media Culture - A Taste for Gardening: Classed and Gendered Practices - page 96

example, Anne McKevitt's makeover design is based on providing a series of rooms
for the garden which include modern features - a heated swimming pool, a grass
and bamboo garden and a lit patio area - as well as such 'updated' historical features
as a perspex version of the eighteenth century ha-ha and a brightly painted khaki,
aubergine and maroon representation of a walled garden. The result is a melange of
stylistic trends, or what some might even regard as a miscegenation of cultural and
historical codes.
This kind of playful eclecticism was also at work in the community makeover of
back gardens in Gardening Neighbours . In all, the eight back gardens of the Sheffield
terraced row are based on themes of choice - African, white city roof top, cricket,
child safe, classical formal, herb and seaside, so that the experience of strolling
past is almost akin to choosing lunch in a shopping mall restaurant from an array
of world cuisine. For Fredric Jameson postmodernism brings a new 'structure of
feeling' to contemporary culture. In Postmodernism; or, the Cultural Logic of Late-
Capitalism (1991), Jameson argues that the 'crisis of historicity' which characterises
post-modern culture is experienced subjectively and becomes manifest in a loss of
temporal meaning. The past becomes nothing more than a series of unrelated signs
which give no sense of the shape of material history. This leads to what Jameson
describes as a 'schizophrenic experience … of isolated, disconnected, discontinuous
material signifiers which fail to link up into a coherent sequence' (1990, 119).
Jameson claims that the schizophrenic experience is marked by a different kind
of emotional charge: it is, 'a far more intense experience of any given present of
the world' (ibid.). This feeling of heightened intensity, or what Hebdige calls 'acid
perspectivism' (Hebdige 1994), occurs as a result of being condemned to experience
time as a 'series of perpetual presents'. As Jameson argues, 'the world comes before
the schizophrenic with heightened intensity, bearing a mysterious and oppressive
charge of affect, glowing with hallucinatory energy' (Jameson 1990, 120). Jameson
is careful however to warn of his sense of deep pessimism, for him a loss of
history is experienced as an assault against subjectivity, 'what might for us seem a
desirable experience - an increase in our perceptions, a libidinal or hallucinogenic
intensification of our normal humdrum and familiar surroundings - is here felt as
loss, as “unreality”' (ibid.).
Not all critics have embraced Jameson's notion of a schizoid culture. Featherstone
for example, suggests that 'little evidence is presented as to how men and women
engaged in everyday practices actually come to formulate these experiences'
(Featherstone 1991, 42). While it is difficult to assert that my analysis reveals a
hallucinogenic post-makeover experience, I would argue that many makeover
subjects responded with shocked emotional intensity to their new gardens. In fact
the first experiential encounter with their makeover is often accompanied by tears,
laughter or over-whelmed emotional astonishment. Often subjects are rendered
speechless or they offer bewildered emotional statements about the garden which
often speak of it as unreal or otherworldly. For example in an episode of Homefront in
the Garden one woman, whose new communal garden included among other things
an outdoor cinema, offered this perplexed statement to the programme makers: 'It's
just amazing. It's really mad though, it's kind of hard for me to get used to it. I think
it's just not happening …It's out of this world, it's just completely out of this world.