Coordinates for Autonomy

In a complex and intricate tradition of flora gardens of the East, going thousands of years back, up to now forms an integral part of the cultural structure, where due to the fusion of material elements, the attention is focused on the transposed representative balance, which is perceived and constituted as harmony in the modes of consciousness. In this appearance of formed harmony the garden is a microcosm that represents at the same time the smallest part of the world and the totality of the entire world. The morphology of the perception of the  garden is conditioned by the flow of harmony of vegetation between different species, where visual expressions of vital organisms correlate with specific directions of philosophy. In the cultural tradition of the gardens of the West, there is a tendency to express rigid visual visions for plants through arithmetics: each plant has clear-cut geometrical externalization, an exact point in a space to mark power, as exemplified in the Gardens of Versailles. A sense of balance and harmony in gardens and their visualization are signified by representation that is legitimized through absolute control and order, where each leaflet has definite coordinates in space, designed by human hand. The play of the distribution of such meanings is antinomical: the exertion of total control over life manifests the balance of the world, the pursued harmony through the relationship between different forms of life – the human and the natural. Through this apparent perception of controlled natural composition human beings are able to experience and perceive a sensation of balance and harmony. This type of compositional perspective is constituted in the modes of mechanisms of perceptiveness, which is formed by human projection outwards for thousands of years, for example, in Ancient Greece the cosmos was conceptualized as an orderly, harmonious totality as opposed to the chaos.

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In Western thought the locale has its fluctuation of intersection within coordinates of placement, i.e. hierarchy of location. Michel Foucault pointed out that in the Middle Ages the logic of division was set unequivocally between the sacred places and the profane places, the protected places and the exposed places. Also, the celestial site was situated as direct binary of terrestrial, at a higher level the supercelestial situation was categorized as another degree opposition for celestial. The Galileo opened a possibility of infinite, open space, which reshaped and unlocked the established framework of locality. It worked as a side effect that started deconsecration of locations, positions. Nowadays many preformed notions of categorization of sites are either still deeply engraved or mutated in formalization of contemporary space. Foucault in his lecture The Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopia spoke about the gardens in the following way: The garden has been a kind of happy, universalizing heterotopia since the beginnings of antiquity. He described heterotopia as an existing dimension of space between utopia, where it occurs through a combination of both experiences, i.e. that between utopias there are these rather different sites, these heterotopias.

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Here I am trying to investigate a discourse on the relations of composite of spatial perception. I would like to inquire into the understanding of harmony, especially its institutionalization in worldviews. Probably I am navigating through the prototype contours of the spectator's harmony perception, speculating the denotations of comprehension of the landscape, where the power of uniformity/evenness flourishes. The human being has a habit to create modulation, patterns of order, which are partly perceived as a security guarantee that exists in the envelope of acquired evenness, the equivalent of harmony. In one of his lectures Slavvoj Zizek has discussed a kind of the contract people are making: when a young child goes to school, he learns that there is no Santa Claus, but returning home does not tell his parents anything in order to keep the scheme alive. The seek/requirement is not to disturb or disintegrate the clearness of enforced order.

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It seems that for more than one thousand years back, the man draws his mental coordinates within the constellation only in the framework of a monologue, which is disguised as an open form of dialogue. Why there are no speculations or hypothesis that beings of another planet knows about humans, but they are just not interested? Perhaps aliens are trying to avoid humans. It's seems it would be difficult to sustain such an approach, to grasp disinterest and unimportance. Thus until now the alien life is given/offered the characteristics of curiosity. The empty logos of aliens were fulfilled either with the idea that they are here to destroy or to save humans from their own destruction. In any case the others are perceived as showing somewhat of the interest, rather than indifference. Which still directs to clear assumption of feeling important and needing care.

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The vertebral of this text is a plant, which contains its weight in the logic it is attributed. I focus on a plant growing in a specific location, the one that sprouts between two tiles of the street pavement. In Lithuanian language this type of weed is called piktžolė, which literally means angry/wicked/vicious plant. It has a negative connotation that denominates its constitution. This type of location-plant is unquestionably defined as an irregular weed, which has to be removed by all means, to safeguard the smoothness of the predefined composition/pattern. This type of logic is prevailing in a city or, to be more precise, in the composition of a metropolis, where there is not a single tree that would have sowed and grown naturally. The greater the inflow of currencies, the more purified, orchestrated the vegetation is. This approach reveals a symptom of surplus - the increasingly derived, placement logic for composition of vital cells. A plant growing between the tiles instantly and volitionally is attributed to the unbeautiful - the plant is in the wrong place, a sovereign organism. This explicitly indicates clear formulation of a dividing scheme, to be more precise, it is based on the logic of correction, indicator of order. Immanuel Kant in Critique of Judgement wrote that the beauty comes from a relationship with the perceiver, the beauty is created by a certain preformed mood, i.e. we make "an objective beauty presumption when we say that the flower is beautiful. However, if the different kind of flower grows on the roof or between the tiles, the presumption of its beauty is suppressed, i.e. this kind of precondition is valid only in specific coordinates of space. The concern in this study is the activity and power of the beauty criterion in the perception of balance, harmony and value. It appears that the sense of beauty and the consolidation of the positive acceptance of a plant depends to a certain degree on localization, which constitutes the imposition of control.

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Similarly, the necessity of extreme evenness of location, reveals itself through skyscrapers conquering design of space, clear designation for projection of movement trajectory and correction logic for plants, which acts as indicator of power. Few decades ago a new kind of race has emerged - the constructions of the tallest buildings in the world. Nowadays the competition takes place even before the building is built, for example, it is publicly declared that The Kingdom Tower is the highest building, although it is still under construction. It has been aspired to build the tower over one mile tall, however the soil is too soft to hold such weight and the skyscraper would subside. With architecture of skyscraper the new term vanity height has come into full use, signifying the unused top part of the building that symbolizes excess and power.

It seems that there are no dots in the crowded space for an angry plant to flourish.