Lost and Found in E11

In 'The Allotment' (David Crouch and Colin Ward) - Chapter 2: Cultural Landscapes and freedom - 'Fields, plots and people' there is an expression of a Utopian vision, in which John Seymour is cited as arguing for a 'peopled landscape in terms of Kropotkin's argument for a use of land in which people control their own lives and the landscape they create' - the cutting up of 10,000 acres of exhausted farm land into a thousand plots of 10 acres each; and each plot to be occupied by a family trained to use it. In 10 years, he asserts, the landscape would be transformed from the indifference of mono-culture to one of 'happy and healthy' multiplicity. (p.37) 

I arrived at 'pseudopia' by applying some Venn and artless psycho-maintenance to our days in the field. We would like this field study to be a Utopian project however it soon became clear that our vision is misinformed (and disinformed) by a trinity and triumvirate of hallucination, illusion and delusion. It is unlikely there will be any genuine radical and social transformation in our project unless we attempt a deconstruction of those three phenomena, which are vaguely employed and all too often confounded. The prospect of a deconstruction of distraction found me out of my depth and floundering in the mediocrity of my critical faculties. Field Study's Man in E11 complained I have made a wholesale (and retail) liberal capitulation to capitalism. I retorted he had made a serious omission in not prefixing liberal with neo-. 'You are such a pseudo', he replied. I tried to negotiate the fading transition from psycho- to pseudo and gave up, all most. FSMiE11, det...

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