Land — Landscape

Expanse, View, Cutoff

We had best be blunt and risk laying things out right away, without preliminaries or precautions. Otherwise, I fear we will get lost in the established inquiry. As vast as the literature devoted to this topic now is, perhaps no one has yet dreamed to venture back to the biases that first gave rise to our very notion of "landscape." Wary as I am, then, I wonder whether we in Europe might have begun with a bad definition of landscape, or in any case, from a definition that has thrashed, constrained, and perhaps strangled the possibility that landscape embodies. I wonder whether the problem isn't so much that our definition is incomplete or restrictive — for then we could always just supply the missing pieces — but that it derives from implicit choices: choices that have gelled into a system and, through their very coherence, have encumbered the deployment of the resulting thought. In other words, we as a culture have unwittingly mortgaged our landscape-thought, but to what (and how)? Like so much silt, our landscape-thought has settled into a fold. We hope to scoop it back out, but our hope has come at the cost of serial amendments and even theoretical revolutions. Will such measures suffice?

To put a finer point on the initial difficulty, we might ask whether these implicit choices or biases that undergird European thought, and through which it conceives what it has called "landscape," have not locked us into a certain perspective, snared us in "the obvious." Have we ever stirred from this position, and have we not as a result been led astray on the subject of landscape? The fact is, we remain stuck in a rut that we do not see. Europe coined the term landscape in the mid-sixteenth century (1549 in France). Since then the definition has languished in a strange fixity, advancing not a whit. In its most recent formulation (from the Robert dictionary of French) a landscape is said to be "a piece of land that nature presents to an observer." But this only repeats the definition set forth at the start, four centuries ago, in which landscape is an "expanse" or "piece" of land as it "appears to the eye." It is "the look of a piece of land," in the summary of Furetière's dictionary (1690): "the territory that extends as far as the eye can see."

I begin with European reason because landscape is a European term, an exemplary European term. The French word paysage, deriving from pays, is found in language after language, and the word's composition remains constant throughout — as if the notion could have no other point of departure and there were no imaginable way out of the semantics. In northern Europe we find Land — Land-schaft (German) and land — landscape (English). They say "landscape" was invented in the Low Countries, so perhaps we ought to have begun with Flemish: landschap. To the south the Italians have their paesaggio and the Spaniards their paisaje. Even the Russians follow suit, with [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. We have before us an indubitably European term: to wit, a term that sets out a theoretical geography of Europe, or a term I would say that "gives rise to Europe." If we dig down to the root we find Latin already Hellenizing things with topiaria (opera), which (in both Pliny the Elder and Vitruvius) derives from topos, or "place." Europe has not emerged from the idea — or the presumption, rather — that a landscape is something that the eye cuts out of a piece of "land."

It is noteworthy, too, that "landscape" was first named (thought through) with respect to painting. It is painting, we observe, that has borne landscape-thought in Europe, but in steering what course? The term landscape was developed by painters and for painting. It came to fruition through what was, for once, a generous exchange between northern and southern Europe: specifically, between the Flemish masters (e.g., Patinir), who brought nature from the background to the foreground, and the Italian masters, whose revolution laid down a new criterion for veracity. "Landscape" became a near tautology for "painting depicting a landscape," and then came to refer to the pictorial genre itself. All of this — landscape's development by painters and for painting, the north-south exchange, and the shift of referent from view to artwork and then again to genre — ought to surprise us, because landscape met with centuries of reticence in Europe before it was finally established. Landscape painting was, as we know, born of a change in the art, but for a long time before then all it did was fill the "empty corners." It was background, decor. It made but slow progress in European art, wriggling free of the hegemony of "history": that is, of both the significance of "action" (Félibien) and the ideal beauty incarnate in the body (Lessing).

Though it is early yet, we should review what we know of this story. It is a story we know well — all too well, perhaps. We have so thoroughly imbibed it that we no longer think it through. Indeed, it is perhaps already symptomatic that the story should flow without a hiccup through Europe's so very gradual adequation of painting and landscape. The delayed advent of landscape painting in Europe suggests resistance, but a resistance — let us ask — to what? In the scale of values, landscape was at first a minor genre, long subservient in academic hierarchies to the depiction of characters. (The painters themselves were in this respect more pioneering: witness Poussin and Claude Lorrain.) Not until the nineteenth century (e.g., in Turner and, to a lesser degree, Ravier) did landscape gain its independence, but it promptly fell apart right at the start of the twentieth. The new century looked askance at what we call "nature." We expected nature to be natural, but it was never free of artifice. And thus the twentieth century deliberately steered composition toward further abstraction.

In European painting, then, did landscape arise conceptually and come into its own as the mere temporary boon of a transition? Did it occur in the narrow window or tight niche of a scant few decades — after the close of the Romantic era, when painting tired of both the rigors of resemblance and the cult of ideal beauty, and before the way was cleared for brute sensation (or what we hoped was, at last, brute sensation) and for the indeterminacy of an elementary kernel? Did it occur before intellectual construction (or deconstruction) truly freed itself from representation — landscape being the final attempt at representation, or indeed the first drib to overflow the cup? Does this not already suggest that European painting-thought just happened to discover landscape along the way; that it sounded those depths without dropping anchor, opting instead to sail on to waters farther ahead; and that in prospecting it discovered a potential seam but found no proper way to mine it — no way to exploit what I have started to call the "resource"?

2

Thus it behooves us to venture back in our thinking — or rather into our unthought-of — with respect to "landscape."

We arrive first at what lies nearest: "what" we think, as object, and our cogitatum, what our thought "happens upon": what our thought happens upon when it thinks "landscape." But we have no purchase on "what" we think, on what our thought "happens upon." We have so little initiative in this regard that we are quickly stuck with this "what." It is already resultative. Anterior to this, further upstream — and more determinative as well — is "what we think about": what it occurs to us to think. For many centuries in Europe it never occurred to us to think about landscape. We were never compelled to excise and name something on the order of "landscape" within the nonetheless ever-expanding sphere of the paintable and the thinkable. To do that we needed new stakes to arise, new perspectives to appear. We needed new tools with which to think it — new tools indeed to prompt us to think it.

We are thus led further upstream, or deeper underneath, into the question of thought. As we might suspect, however, that "with which" I think (the point from which I begin to think) — beneath even that "about which" I think — is something I have trouble thinking, something I can approach only by detour: not methodically (in the Cartesian manner) but by "cunning." I can reach it only by deviation, by pulling free of the mire. "Doubt" falls short (for do we even know what we are supposed to be doubting?). I must take an oblique approach, make use of a divide, and employ a strategy, because this is what gives me the means to think in the first place. Probing the notion of landscape, then, leads us back to what has organized the work of thought in Europe. We are tempted to take these things for simple logical tools, all of them purportedly self-evident, but if we manage to step back to observe our landscape-thought, if we examine its historicity and fundamental choices, we might glimpse the singularity and invention with which those tools were forged. And our landscape-thought will in turn be clarified, once we have accounted for the condition of possibility that led to its advent.

Now that we have aroused our suspicions we quickly discern in European landscape-thought at least three substantial biases, whose incidence on the conception we must now gauge. They are of course known — all too "well known." But have we probed them? Has their all-too-well-knownness not in itself hindered their exploration? Right away we run into the fact, the discreet fact, that in Europe landscape was conceived in the shadow of the part-whole relation. A landscape, they tell us, is a "portion" of the land (land/landscape) that the observer's eye cuts out. Hence the delimiting "horizon." Yet I cannot help wondering what this odd thing called a "part" actually is. How deeply is our landscape-thought marked (affected) by dependence on a "whole"? The whole exceeds the limited part, which for this very reason becomes the landscape. We know this blind, as a matter of principle. But doesn't this shroud, reduce, and curtail the whole from the outset?

According to a second bias — readily (innocently) assumed to be self-evident, to need no further examination — landscape in Europe has been ascribed from the start, without the slightest discernible reluctance, to the primacy of visual perception. Our "piece of land" (says the Robert dictionary) is the part that nature "presents to an observer." In the usual definition the landscape "appears to the eye," or depends on a "vantage point." Here again, though, I wonder whether we shouldn't poke at the self-evidence of the visual, break up the monopoly (source of the obviousness), and achieve landscape's liberation. After all, isn't it "through" vision (or else what does "through" mean here?), by means of our eye and its domination, and by visual prospection alone, that we "accede" to landscape — that we tap its "resource"?

Finally, we cannot ignore another early structural influence on landscape-thought in Renaissance Europe. In parallel with the rise of science and its new apparatus, there was the ever so powerful subject-object relation. Indeed, it came first. It was the original bias. In the definition of science, the "observer" is on one side and "nature" on the other. The two are separate, established in a vis-à-vis. In other words, our landscape-thought ended up "folded" into (along) the subject-object coupling that undergirds the knowledge from which modern Europe draws its strength. And hasn't it struggled ever since to escape that fold? Everything has been said on this score, and curses have rained down on the infernal coupling, but could we imagine never referring to it again? Criticize, renounce, and stigmatize it as we might, we depend on it still. Can our landscape-thought ever hope to erase it?

3

European landscape-thought has found its perch upon a sort of theoretical tripod, and I wonder whether the tripod hasn't furtively constrained our landscape-thought from the start. In particular, I wonder whether the first leg, the first perspective, hasn't exacted an automatic cost — an ontological loss, say — by letting us regard landscape in the contradictory light of the part. One might object that the "part" of the "land" that constitutes landscape is what detaches it from the "whole," brings it forth, and promotes it. As a fragment, though, doesn't the part remain dependent on the whole of the land that includes it — the whole of which it will always be a "portion"? For a "part," as the Greeks quickly realized, is in truth an odd thing. It is one but a part. It is indeed "one," because we isolate it and consider it separately. And because it is one it also constitutes a "whole." At the same time, however, it is not "one," because it is also a "part": because it belongs to a whole that, by integrating it, exceeds it.

Let us first pause to consider that our landscape-thought runs up against a paradox, one that the Greeks delighted in playing with (it so agreed with their penchant for exacting logic). A part is one because it exhibits a circumscription of its own. That is why we speak of "a" part. But a part is "not one" insofar as it is not completely isolated and insofar as it connects with other, neighboring parts. Otherwise it would not be a "part" (e.g., the hand's relation to the body in Galen). In landscape too the unity (the totality) is relative, contingent as it is on a mobile subject and thus on the perspectival shift that results with his every step, from his slightest displacement. As a mere part it bears a flaw deep within its being. It invokes a lack, or at any rate betrays its own limit — the limit delineated by the horizon, horismos, which, as the landscape's "definition," cuts the landscape out of space.

The notion of a "part" by itself thus entails something further. It casts yet another shadow on the "being" of landscape. Because it is considered a "portion of the land," landscape is understood with respect to the "expanse" of which it is a part — "expanse of land seen from a single angle," says the Littré dictionary. From the start, that is, we perceive landscape only with respect to what remains once we have subtracted bodily forms and have thus arrived at what is peculiar to the expanse. We perceive it only when there remains no differentiating property (as with the res extensa in Descartes). Better yet, let us say that once the abstraction is done the only property remaining to the expanse that makes up the excised land is homogeneity. This residual property of the physical, a matter of pure mathematics (i.e., yielding in principle to measurement and division), prompts us to forget the incommensurability, and thus the capacity for individuation, that is peculiar to landscape. Homogeneity buries the capacity for singularization beneath "isotropy," whereas it is precisely singularization that promotes landscape.