Fermental Health
2020 - Writing - Sean Roy Parker
Sean Roy Parker is an artist, environmentalist and fermenter currently based in Derbyshire. His work examines the lifecycle of materials, complexities of civic responsibility, and problem-solving through collaboration. He practises analogue approaches to craft and art-making, using leftover or abundant items of nature and artifice to explore feelings of eco-anxiety in late-stage capitalism.
http://seanroyparker.com/
‘Fermental Health’
Text by Kate Paul
ID: A screenshot of Instagram messages between Sean and Kate. Sean writes 'Yes' 'I'm an processing medium'. The next day (February 21st, 2021, at 8:32am) Kate sends him a screenshot of the Wikipedia entry for processing medium, and quotes it underneath: 'Gaseous, vaporous, fluid or shapeless'.
I have encountered Sean Roy Parker’s project, Fermental Health, over a period of around two years, and have met it gradually in glancing at its various forms: images of eco-dye t-shirts and swap economies online, scanner-bed reprocessed trash and weeds, handwritten school workshop instructions, kimchi swaps, pay-what-you-can food services, Instagram post and zine articulations of methods which pertain to processes of learning - radical amateurism, non-judgemental observation.
These many-textured elements have an integrity because they continually meet a set of connected problems, forming the outline of these problems because contacting them and leaving relief marks. Fermental Health is a craft practice which gradually finds and offers a means of everyday response to the capitalocene. The capitalocene is a name given to this our own geological period of eco-destruction enacted largely by corporate capitalism. Here’s a list of our capitalocene problems which cannot be combatted on individual bases, and are therefore, demonstrably, difficult for us as individuals to process emotionally and practically:
‘[...] the impacts of conventional farming, monoculture, pesticide resistant insects, GMOs, and the increasing privatization of seeds and genetic material [...] the decline of global fisheries or the accumulation of microplastic pollution in the oceans, reductions in biodiversity, threats to ecosystem services, and the extinction of species’ p.46 T J Demos, Against the Anthropocene
It is overwhelming, and so there is widespread denialism. It is generally not a denialism that actually denies, for example, global heating, but a denialism that refuses to process it.
How does the craft of Fermental Health work? I think it is by skilling a person as a processing or reprocessing medium in the capitalocene era. That is, a being that is present, collaborative, and responsive, something like the photographic paper for a cyanotype, or like bacteria in air with sugared water to catch it, or something like a scanner bed, or something vaporous, something fluid, something occasionally shapeless. A processing material is not easy to describe as agential, alone, and it is not possible to be occasionally shapeless. Fermental Health is work against the idea that you can retain full control while processing, and against the myth that we, as industrial materials, can be dominated by the artifice of precision and control as moral values.
In continually glancing and absorbing iterations of Fermental Health crafting, I have gradually started to allow myself to even think about all this mess of capitalocene. Gradually, elements of Sean’s thinking have come into my own thinking. I’m going to write here principally about the iteration of Fermental Health craft work which emerged over the course of the lockdown, which is the Fermental Health substack. As a writer who finds Sean’s approaches energising within my own practice, I want to think about how the craft of Fermental Health, an intensely social craft practice, can come into writing.
I know that Sean thinks of all craft as processing, because he said so to me once. Is all processing crafting? In Fermental Health, the processing is usually a social-emotional processing which meets materials with hands, dyes, scanner beds. Learning to cord plastic on videocall is a way to process eco-trauma. Social-emotional processing can be called a pedagogy, and a large part of Sean’s practice is explicitly pedagogical, involving the passing on of skills and ideas in workshops. I wonder how this pedagogy is written. I start with the ethic of transference.
In the substack of the October 9th 2020, Sean wrote, of his workshop ethic:
‘No matter how much time I spend preparing a workshop, what my pickles taste like, or whether I say the right thing, as soon as there is a transfer it no longer belongs to me.’
This approach is an anomaly in the clout economy that artists are asked to insert themselves into, in which all artist transmissions are supposed to build the brand of the artist, rather than belonging, as Sean writes, to whoever receives them. It’s a disowned materials processing logic taking itself into pedagogy, and not a clout logic taking itself into a university.
It’s hard to completely avoid a clout logic, but it can be resisted through firm expressions, like Sean’s, of alternative ways of defining and participating in the exchanges which take place in your work. Writing is the right vehicle for this self-defining, because writing is a medium which can define itself.
The transference ethic is probably also an anxiety logic. Doesn’t anxiety produce adaptive responses? Doesn’t the name Fermental Health include within itself a gesture to psychoadaptive responses, the adaptive responses which make life difficult but which, in themselves, are revelatory?
The idea of transference and disowning is especially useful in coping with the task of writing, because the idea that an owned and expressed idea might be a part of your self-formation is itself anxiety inducing. What I am saying is that any possessive way of thinking about writing wants binning if you would like to think of a linguistic exchange as energetic rather than as evidence of the goodness or badness of your VERY BEING. This anxiety induced and energy prioritising transference logic is extremely appealing to me, as a nervous and overprocessing writer, because I don’t want to have to care about whether my writing is bad and therefore whether so am I. I’m just a form of medium level energy, leave me alone.
When Sean introduced the substack he wryly revealed the embedded and integrated logic of it. He said it was going to be:
‘An irregular delivery of half-baked, gelatinous, send-it-back writing on environmentalism, food poverty and justice, local solidarity systems and class dynamics in the market.’
Promising irregularity is a stubborn refusal to accede to the demands of capitalist time, within which timeliness and convenience are sold because capitalism creates them as necessary assets. Saying writing is send-it-back is a reminder that the writing does not require you to value it, both defensive and generous. And saying that your newsletters might be half-baked and gelatinous seems to me to describe the way in which Sean’s substack contains many different textures of processing. I want to dwell on this last thing.
At times, the writing is dialectical, highly assertive, as in the substack of the 3rd December 2020, entitled Choice Paralysis: Supermarkets and Food Capitalism’, which displaces capitalism’s justification of itself, through its agents and defenders, as a good enough system for meeting the needs of The People. Sean wrote:
‘We are trapped in an abusive system that we have been forced to love; the vast sociocultural power that these organisations wield hides a skillful manipulation of our perceptions and the constant threat of restricting access to our basic needs.’
If there’s space for arguing with this, I can’t find it. I feel that I am Being Told, when I read it (‘be told’), and I don’t mind because I agree with the telling, and it is giving me something, but mostly because I am, according to our writerly host Sean, allowed to send-it-back. I am allowed to say no. Much persuasive writing has a currency because it tries not to allow your no, but Sean is never manipulative in his rhetorical style. He is straightforward, considered. You can take it, you can have it, you can reject it if you need to.
But at other times the writing in the substack has to do with spaciousness and softness, a texture of experience mediated through delicious materials or night skies or the big lump head of hangovers. In one of Sean’s Lithuania diary substacks, or which there are four I think, he sent his entry for the 15th August:
Saturday 15 Aug
hangover, wake up midday
eat melon
go for a burger, then ice-cream
back for a nap
picnic buffet on the beach under the stars at Pakrante
it was beautiful
This is from the substack of August 20th 2020, just five days after the diary was originally written, so a kind of fresh texture of processing. In the same series of substack newsletters, Sean describes a wound healing, wrapped with yarrow from a riverside in Lithuania. You can see the image of his healing toe wrapped in its yarrow, a little bloodied, small, processing. You don’t enact the whole process of skin healing, you can’t, but you encourage it, you place processing materials where they need to be, and you hope for the best.
This mixture of writing styles is tasting a ferment at different stages and noting the changing textures. I persistently call it a kind of teaching, which is the processing transference that can happen through writing. I respect this kind of teaching which is direct and unencumbered by the negotiation of highly abstracted power networks, unencumbered unlike any teaching that is promoted with that branding copy that borrows the aesthetic pull of the word radical without any capacity or desire to reach institutional roots. But there are always compromises in the capitalocene, within which we’ve been formed. How to negotiate compromise?
I always think of this when I think of any teaching:
In Mel Baggs’s 2007 YouTube video, In My Language, sie teaches about the association between normative communication and access to personhood by describing the compromise forced upon hir, which is that to have hir personhood respected, sie must speak in a ‘language’ which is not expressive of hir natural mode of processing the world. Mel Baggs was precise about the kinds of regulations distorting and causing and forming hir transmission. This is in itself a tutorial. And these Mel Baggs tutorials are YouTube tutorials in a landscape of bros, already annoyed at the ineptitude of their ideal listeners, delivering their knowledge, take it don't send it back, in tutorials about Final Cut Pro. I think about this in relation to Sean’s substack, which reaches people directly in their email mailboxes, among detritus of capitalocene living.
I think that if we are to learn through existing in this time, this capitalocene, we need to pay attention to how various forms of regulation are hitting us from all sides, bouncing off or going in like a kind of UVA over-radiation, an over-solarity, and we need to try to speak honestly as possible about what that’s like, retransmitting ourselves as we are, over-radiated, a little distorted, compromised. It is only in this way that we can articulate the sources and meanings of our problems, which are large, consuming. I think this is what writing can do, and I think that this is how the craft of Fermental Health comes into the craft of writing. This is what I meant when I said, earlier, that it is not possible to be shapeless, because you are always formulated strangely by your environment. And your environment is itself being formulated strangely, wrongly.
I will end with this: probably the best way of explaining the Fermental Health substack, or the form of pedagogical processing that can come through substack writing, is in a form which it holds within itself, which is the form of the recipe. A ferment recipe is the transference of a processing skill, and it is also, in Fermental Health, a kind of assertive manifesto. Sean wrote, in the substack of October 9th 2020, that:
‘Fermentation is a multi-dimension collaboration. Players (agents) include:
Recipes
Vegetables
Salt
Water
Bodies (human and bacteria)
Time
Once the practical preparation of a ferment has been completed, we relinquish control to Time.’
Read Sean’s essay on Kate Paul’s work HERE.
