Activity and Repose:
Place, Memory, and Sociality in Chinese and Japanese Gardens
Dates
3-4 December 2004, California
Convener
Convener: Stephen H. West, (University of California, Berkeley)
A garden has no meaning unless it is used. It arranges natural
and constructed physical entities that remain external to the
perceiver until they pass through subjective experience and are
thus encoded with tactile, aesthetic, personal, and social meaning.
Through creativity and memory the garden reorganizes, within a
localized site, enduring meanings that accumulate over time as
a "garden experience," one that has sedimented within
it cultural, aesthetic, and social values. These values both produce
and are produced in the garden: the construction itself simply
concretizes in objective form the personal and social relationships
that the garden creates or authenticates. These relationships
are, at the base level, subjective, personal, and experiential,
but when they become socially cohesive and enduring in time, the
patterns they produce, both social and aesthetic, seem canonical
and obligatory.
This unending circle of creation, experience, and memory occurs
in place, a physical location, and in space, an abstract continuum
that incorporates within it the flow of experience and time. These
two elements are mutually dependent and, indeed, mutually created.
We propose to convene a symposium that will focus on how the garden
functions as a nexus of creative individual and social energy.
Three main topics will be involved: memory, place/space, and social
relations. These are not separate topics but are deeply interrelated.
Memory, for instance, can be seen as an aesthetic and ideological
force that lies behind the process of creating the garden. A garden
site is a combination of inherent natural features and the obligations
of culture, it is formed out of memory about how the body moves
through space and makes contact with natural features, about the
garden as a site of cultural production (poetry, painting, sexual
therapy, and hygiene, etc.), and about social relations within
its confines. Thus memory can move from that of tactile sensation
to highly defined and localized values of social process. Since
the garden can also be a site of intense human relations, it is
destined to provoke nostalgia. There seems to be a curious connection
between the sense of the garden as a physical object rendered
enduring only by battling the onslaught of nature and time and
of keeping the past alive as memory. Since memory is inherently
present and physical (through taste, touch, smell, etc.), the
garden becomes a memorial site to invoke the physicality of the
original moment against the forgetfulness of time and the generalizations
of history. Nostalgia is also present in the fact that so many
gardens in China and Japan are constructed on former garden sites,
incorporating within each new construction a memory of the older
as a structuring element.
Social relations, from the intimate to the commercial, are one
key to understanding both the physical layout of the Chinese or
Japanese garden and the habits of their use. From a small trio
of participants in erotic trysts to large social and ritual functions,
the garden offers a simultaneous plenitude that can have more
than one meaning at one time. Each group that uses the garden,
from the designers, to the grounds crew, to lovers, and the literati
aesthete, has a distinct sense of the garden, a distinct set of
habits, that belong to them and to them only. In this sense, the
garden is less a mosaic of activity than a kaleidoscope, an overlapping
and ever-changing configuration of meanings and desires. Use and
memory are, thus, inherently fragmentary and sociosyncratic.
This poses the question of boundaries: what is interchangeable,
mutually understandable, or significant to others? If social practices
are imported as part of a predetermined mindset or ideology related
to other activities of the constituent group, can boundaries be
drawn between the garden and outside cultural performances? What
is the meaning of physical boundaries? While there clearly may
be an awareness of being "inside" as opposed to "outside,"
how are these boundaries negotiated in terms of social practice
or of aesthetics? Beyond the actual physical properties of their
elements, for instance, how does a painting (particularly of the
garden) differ from the garden itself? How are plants chosen for
the garden? These and dozens of other questions could be asked
once we begin to conceive of the garden as a place that is productive
and active in the creation of subject and sociality. The garden
seems naturally transparent, a place to "enjoy nature."
But, the carefully placed lines of a Japanese rock garden, an
imposition of enlightened subjective state on the chaos of nature,
dispels the myth that the garden is an importation of the natural
world. Instead it asks us to consider, what is actually being
naturalized and where precisely the boundaries between subject
and garden lie-whether even the "place" of the garden
can be bounded.
Participants (so far):
Peter Bol, (Harvard University)
Mary Elizabeth Berry, (UC Berkeley)
Haun Saussy, (Stanford University)
Steven Carter, (Stanford University)
Susan Naquin, (Princeton University)
Xiaoshan Yang, (University of Notre Dame)
Stanislaus Fung, (University of New South Wales)
Robert Batchelor, (Georgia Southern University)
Enquiries:
Professor Stephen West
Email: olwest@socrates.berkeley.edu
or Tel: +1 (510) 642-2426