nature's façade of irrepressibility

So we've heard from Franklin on lowland waterways (including engineered systems such as canals and drains) and from Molona on 'domesticated places' (such as artificial ponds, canals again, and redeveloped 'brownfields'). Today I'm just going to quote Adorno on the asethetics of industrialised landscapes. (The passage comes from Aesthetic Theory.)

In naively condemning the ugliness of a landscape torn up by industry, the bourgeois mind zeroes in on the appearance of the domination of nature at the precise juncture where nature shows man a façade of irrepressibility. That bourgeois condemnation therefore is part of the ideology of domination. This kind of ugliness will vanish only when the relation between man and nature throws off its repressive character, which is a continuation rather than an antecedent of the repression of man. Chances for such a change lies in the pacification of technology, not in the idea of setting up enclaves in a world ravished by technology.

The aesthetic disparagement of the locations mentioned by Franklin and Molona is certainly to do with a sense of the 'ugliness of a landscape torn up by industry', or, in the case of drains at least, space made subservient to intensive economic exploitation. So is the 'bourgeois' impulse to disparage them motivated, as Adorno puts it, the corollary of an ideology of domination. Is the 'irrepressibility' of nature in these spaces at the root of this condemnation?

Back here, I wrote about Derek Jarman on 'modern nature' and now it strikes me that his garden in the shadow of the power station at Dungeness may be just the kind of space that resists the status of 'enclave' in a world 'ravished by technology' and implies - in Adorno's terms - a 'relation between man and nature' that has divested itself of its 'repressive character'. What I wonder, though, is whether these landscapes 'torn  up by industry' haven't undergone a romanticisation of their own or been reclaimed for a bourgeois mentality. I don't think this is the case with Jarman. He doesn't strike me as a bourgeois thinker. And it certainly doesn't seem to me the case with angling. After all, fishing is a form of engagement with this kind of aesthetically 'problematic' landscape that long predates the romanticisms of 'industrial heritage' and 'postindustrial melancholy'. I'm wading now in waters that - to me - feel quite deep. But I do think this stuff needs thinking about, especially since time spent with nature seems an important aspect of the perceived value of fishing and, what is more, a part of the way in which it might produce a quality of wisdom.

The route of the Sheffield to Keadby Canal as it pass sts through Tinsley.