One's own Present, and the 18th Century Present (original) (raw)
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What capacity does landscape have for 'agency' today? What kind of agency has been mobilized in contemporary landscape practices? What could it mean to situate these practices within a 'post-historical' framework? Reading both Vilém Flusser's understanding of 'post-history' and Peter Sloterdijk's more recent reinterpretation of it, this piece looks at the increasing interest in landscape as a site of ‘agency’ and object of socio-political transformation. I argue that landscape today is too often essentialized as an ahistorical category. As a result, our attempt to politically engage it increasingly ends up treating it as a found 'archive' of cultural and social history whose political valence, paradoxically, tends to fall away. Landscapes of post-history not only translate what is political into a private, moralized pedagogy for life, but through their increasingly symbolic capacity, landscapes also constitute a kind of accidental iconography of the biopolitical present. How can practices approach landscape as an always-already political category, opening up alternative possibilities?
2014. Past Landscapes. Questioning function and meaning
2014
While landscape is a term that is used within various disciplines in the humanities, one might question whether the term relates to the same notion across disciplines such as archaeology, landscape history and art history. In some instances landscape is considered to be the stage on which actors play out their lives and landscape is passive and objective. In other instances landscape plays a meaningful role in the perception of the human engagement with the world. Landscape is then active and subjective. The essays in this volume question this supposed dichotomy on the basis of case studies from archaeology, landscape history and art history.
Modern Landscapes and the Politics of Place
Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture, 1982
Four Insights about Landscapes I have for about fifteen years looked at, photographed, read about and otherwise examined landscapes over much of the western world, so I suppose that by now I should be some sort of authority. By landscapes I mean pretty well everything seen or otherwise sensed outdoors-rural, urban, industrial, or natural-and I am deeply curious about why they look as they do. Had I devoted my energies to biology, economics or psychology I could well be an expert on some specialized field within my discipline, receiving large grants to support fundamental research and regularly consulted by politicians and the talk-show hosts of local radio shows for my opinions. But the study of landscape is not like biology or economics. In those disciplines it is legitimate to plunge deeply into matters, to analyze a detail through the tunnel vision of microscope or economic theory. For landscape this is palpably impossible: the best one can do is to range over the surface of things, keeping one's eyes open, attending to interconnections, and trying not to deny wholeness. The philosopher Martin Heidegger argued that, while rigor in the physical sciences demands an attention to exactness, in the human or social sciences being rigorous requires that the inexactness of the subject should be respected (Heidegger, 1977, 119-120). So too with landscape-a rigorous understanding has to avoid any tendency to define, constrain, analyze and specialize in details, for these destroy the very thing one seeks to comprehend by breaking it into bits. With landscape there can be no experts and no authorities, only more careful observations and more thoughtful interpretations.