The idea is something like thinking about a garden as if it was a space craft; first in that they can both be understood as in some way bounded, but also in terms of the way in which that boundedness relates to (queer/eco) forms of survival – so a kind of pioneering if the word pioneering is understood less in terms of it's colonial or futurist histories than as a gestural motion toward other places in time. Something like an ark, or 'something like' in that the idea is also to do with thinking the relationship between different bodies/ grounds/ ecologies - in terms of ideas like holding or containing (and the patterns (re)produced by or productive of those relationships)– but also in terms of thinking about an actual garden in working-class-north-east-england as a way of thinking (other) temporal relationships as de-centralized or horizontal, which at the same time means thinking about a garden as it relates to scale, or as a word – in other words taking into account that there's always going to be an uneven ground to start from built into the fact that it's called a 'garden' and all of the tangled ethics involved in the history of that as well as, more broadly, the history of naming things.


ONE

Partly, because a garden is also a shared ground both for ideas of naturalness and culture (cultivation), it's in other words a context that corresponds with the context of queerness and subjection, or like, an environment mediated by taxonomy. What that means is that a garden, or allotment, or the process of gardening (as relating to care, watering, nourishment) in a way condenses the politics of wider cultural reality as a politics of survival. This makes sense in that you know which plants are which and are meant to be growing where: in that it relies in some way on the strength of analogy - but also in terms of the mutual evolution of personal and cultural discourses relating to naturalness as well as to gender and sexuality in nature (eg. the masculinization of wildness, or the privileging in scientific research and education of plants which most readily conform to straight binary sex / reproduction). That is, in so far as nature and culture can be seen to reproduce and shape one another through time – this process is also productive of a selectivity in terms of which practices, behaviours etc. get to count as natural and which don't - a reciprocity between on one hand a given language, history, and psychology by which cultural reality is made (un)stable, and on the other a reductive understanding of nature which makes up the ground that queerness inhabits and survives - by which the point isn't to defend queerness as a cohesive subjectivity, but to point out that in it's subjection, other ways of being in or thinking about the world are left out.

ONE: More directly – a garden (or a queer body) can be thought to relate to survival in its political register in so far as those histories in some way run parallel to (a) history of consumption and reproduction: in so far as they're terms describing the relationship of nature to time (to ongoingness), and consequently in terms of the subjection of nature and time to economic value. In one way, this can be thought as it relates to the objectification of time observed in the marxist understanding of value - the accumulation of time in things or goods, time less to do with labour than its solidification as matter.

(partly in terms of the mediation of food as relating to the abstraction of labour in post-industrial culture rather than like, actual experience of farming as something to do with religiosity and the affective relation between a good year and a good harvest. But also the way that this abstraction of material subsistence correlates with a spiritually meagre or top down world view as a kind of wider pattern – specifically one which privileges the name, idea or image over the actual thing in its material configuration. )

But also in relation to the immaterialization of the economy inherent to SEMIO capitalism, or like, in terms of the classification of food into systems of value such as luxury/basic as well as like GM farming, local/free range etc.; the tanging up of ethics with subjectivity not only as the commodification of nature as matter, but a means of reproducing lifestyles and identities (as ends): a process which could be described not only as the naturalization of the economy as a given relationship between nature and culture, but which is constitutive of a particular nature as subjectivity, psychology and physiology.

Like I dont want to talk about the economy other than as a way to emphasise the fact of the merging of bodies with money, as such the immaterialization of the body but also the solidity given back then to bodies (and concurrently to nature?) in a really specific way

(the reduction of (the idea of) eating to material subsistence or (the idea of) reproduction to the maximization of crop growth as the naturalization of a specific kind of relationship to materiality – but reciprocally the economization of time according to a logic of scarcity, which I would suggest is a logic constituted and constitutive of a form of straight experience.)

TWO: SCARCITY< EXCESS<TIME(QUEER?STRAIGHT)<MATERIALITY<SURVIVAL