Agriculture Reference
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Phoebe : (about Diarmund Gavin) … some of the ideas he's come up with are really nice.
I like his way of thinking. To me he's a designer and it wouldn't matter what he was
designing … He has a vision of what is good design and he could be designing cars and
he'd still be a good designer. And it's that imagination that he's taken into the garden and
it's appreciated.
Anne : We appreciate that …
Phoebe : 'Cos he's asking people to make a leap of faith in essence.
What is important about these comments is that Anne and Phoebe were prepared
to use 'experts' as interpreters. According to Chaney (2001), as a new social form
lifestyles are fashioned out of two distinctive components: sites and strategies. Sites
are the physical spaces where people can appropriate their own agency; they are
places which become meaningful because they afford people a measure of control.
Strategies are the projects in which people invest; they become manifest as implanted
metaphors which articulate identity (Chaney 2001, 86). The 'leap of faith' Anne
describes was a recognition that lifestyle interpreters suggest lifestyle strategies for
audiences to appropriate and order in the context of their own garden sites. In what
follows, Phoebe and Anne discuss how they have selected interpreters' ideas which
they plan to go on to translate through their own creativity:
Phoebe : (about Diarmund Gavin) I like his ideas very much. I wouldn't steal them, but
some of the … like painting walls that marrakesh colour blue, that was lovely. That was a
nice idea but we wouldn't necessarily use it in paint. It might be in plants instead.
Lisa T : So you wouldn't, alright, so you'd actually be quite uncomfortable with just
nicking an idea?
Anne : Oh no!
Phoebe : Oh no!
Anne : You'd never … I mean our space is our space and therefore it's quite unique to us.
So no matter what idea you've chosen, it wouldn't be exactly the same because it would
have to fit.
Making it 'fit', using plants rather than paint showed their own aesthetic use of
lifestyle programming in order to adapt their own strategies into the physical
environment of the garden site. Yet even though, as these comments show, lifestyle
ideas were powerfully attractive to some respondents, I saw no evidence of practised
engagement with transformative gardening as action. Rather, I found that lifestyle
ideas captured the head rather than the hand or arm; the idea of transformation tended
to exist in the imagination and at the level of conversation rather than in practice.
Why, I wondered, was it the case that even those imaginatively fired up by the notion
of lifestyle gardening showed no evidence of putting those ideas in to action?
In his topic The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (1995),
Campbell argues that consumption must be understood in relation to the modern
self's unique ability to generate pleasurable thoughts through fantasy. Modern
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