Can a Place Learn?

Abstract

Site-specific performance concerned with environmental change involves reciprocal, if uneven, influences between changes in human perception and experience and changes in the creative manifold that is called ‘place’ or ‘site’. Learning is a form of change associated with living beings. This essay poses the question of whether learning is a capability also found within the wider systems of relations between the living beings and non-living entities composing a place. The question requires keeping the subject who learns, but proposes another realm of capacity, the relational field. The steps to consider the question begin with Naess' theories of reality as a relational, experienced as a complex of internally related gestalts. Uexküll's ecological theory finds that there are no autonomous entities, only the entwining of co-evolving organisms and their milieu. This entwining is expanded on by Bateson in his theories of mind, systems and co-evolution. Three of Bateson's categories of learning apply to the question: that of zero-learning; learning to make varying choices in repeatable contexts; and of deutero-learning, the cross-species learning about the context of learning from which new patterns of interaction are generated. Learning is cognate with but different to creativity, adaptation and emergence. This learning within the relational field would pre-date the human and human normative intentions; what is being learned may be toxic. The question is offered as a provocation, as a heuristic for experimentation, asking whether and how performance can engage with the realm of deutero-learning in relation to place. It asks how performance can recognise and represent a phenomenon in which human capabilities are de-stabilised, and in which human experience is inherent, as in the constitution of a place, but off-centre. The question, too, is like a concept or abstraction. For Whitehead, abstractions are raised in response to a problem, and they lure one's attention to something that matters.