This month flew by, that’s for sure. I mainly spent it working on a couple of articles. I also spent tens of hours playing a video game. Oh, and what a treat it was, to just play and play, like … no … not like there’s no tomorrow … but like today is, suddenly, already, tomorrow or, rather that tomorrow is, suddenly, already, today. Now, I won’t comment on that here, as I’ll reserve that for another essay or essays, but, yeah, what a treat it is to have time like that, just going on for hours. It used to be like that for me, when I was like half my age or so. With work, of course, you really don’t have the time for such, and I like to keep it that way. It’s also something that I feel like I need to do, just so that I know at least something about games, like what’s what these days, because students are into that stuff. It’s tough to be a teacher and not have the faintest clue what the students are into and, perhaps, would like to write about in their work.
Anyway, work being work, while I was writing an article, I did what people like me do and used some keywords to check if there’s anything particularly relevant and recent out there, something I haven’t had the opportunity to read, yet. Long story short, I landed on a very recent book edited by Chris Post, Alyson Greiner and Geoffrey Buckley, ‘The Routledge Companion to the American Landscape’.
I was particularly happy to read Richard Schein’s foreword to the book ‘Foreword: Reading the Landscape’. Why? Well, he summarizes much of his own work, what he has done and the way he has done it, without getting lost in the weeds. If you want something to familiarize yourself with what I particularly like, check it out. You may also want to check out his previous work, if you want all that detail to it.
Why do I like his approach? That’s a tough one. I guess there are multiple answers to that. What most likely attracted me to it was what I had read previously, namely Donald Meinig’s ‘The Beholding Eye: Ten Versions of the Same Scene’, Peirce Lewis’ ‘The Beholding Eye: Ten Versions of the Same Scene’ and Marwyn Samuels’ ‘The Biography of Landscape: Cause and Culpability’. You can find him making good use of those essays in his article ‘The Place of Landscape: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting an American Scene’, which probably struck a chord with me.
Then there’s the methodological aspect to it, like the way he approaches landscape. I think it’s pretty Foucauldian and having familiarized myself with Michel Foucault’s work, namely the centrality of discipline in contemporary societies, it must have also struck a chord with me. Okay, I’d say that I prefer or have come to prefer Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s work more, because their work addresses landscape, whereas, to my knowledge, Foucault’s doesn’t. Then again, they are so similar that they both get the job done for me. It’s just a matter of preference, really. I happen to like the way they explain the role of desire in it all, so, yeah, which is the difference between my approach and Schein’s approach to landscape.
Then there’s the attention to detail that I like about Schein’s work. It’s also twofold. Firstly, it’s clear that he knows what’s what and is afraid to show it. I mean, if I did the calculation right, he includes, what, 37 citations in a single paragraph in ‘The Place of Landscape: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting an American Scene’. Some might call that name dropping. I call it good work. I love people who are thorough. Secondly, that detail is also there in the analysis. Some might call it tedious. I call it good work. Again, I love people who are thorough.
Oh, and while I may have mentioned these as reasons why I like his work, and consider it similar to mine, or rather, mine similar to his, I don’t think I’ve mentioned how I appreciate the photos in his work. Some of them are his own, while others are by others, I appreciate the work that he puts in this way as well. Having photos is not, of course, an end all, be all, but it’s a nice touch and doing it yourself does show that you aren’t afraid of work.
Now, to be clear, it isn’t all about the work involved. An essay, an article, a book chapter or a book doesn’t get better simply by spending more hours working on it. It’s rather that if you put in the hours, you tend to get good at whatever it is that you are doing. If others don’t like it, because it may, of course, come across as showy, if not smug, that’s on them. It’s the jealousy talking, that ressentiment over someone else doing good, while being well aware that you aren’t doing good, simply because you aren’t putting in the hours to get good at it.
Complaining that someone includes plenty of references to the work of others, in acknowledgement of their relevance and, in some cases, importance, is nothing out of ordinary. It’s kudos. If you don’t like it, it’s probably telling of your insecurities and lack of effort, not knowing what’s what. It’s just so, so much easier to go against that than it is to take the time that’s needed to figure out whether the other person has put in the hours or not to know what’s what. That’s the difference of working hard and being lazy for you.
Anyway, to address the foreword, what I like about it is how he reminds his readers that landscape is not simply something out there, waiting for us to address it, to uncover it, but, in part, in our heads. This is what Meinig pointed out in his essay decades ago. He didn’t provide an exhaustive list of the ways we come to see the world as landscape, nor what we come to pay attention to, but that was his point. It all depends on us, on “the perspective we bring to the scene”, as Schein (xxii) points out.
To be clear, as I’ve pointed out many, many times, this doesn’t mean that the world is unique to each of us. No. Why? Well, if it was unique to us, we couldn’t understand one another. In other words, experience is always collective, something that we can indeed share.
This ties the discussion here back to the importance of work. You can indeed experience the world the way others do, if you just put in the hours. It’s not always feasible though. You can’t experience it all. There’s just no way that you can know it all, share in all that collective experience, so that you can experience in all those ways. Even if you didn’t have to do anything for living, you’d probably still run out of time. Now, that doesn’t mean that it’s then all somehow pointless. No, no. I think you can learn just about anything. It’s then rather whether you are willing to put in the hours to do that.
To explain that in terms of research, if you want to focus on, let’s say, the biological aspects of a certain landscape and you don’t happen to have a background in biology or some other related field or discipline, you can put in the hours to make it possible. All it takes is hard work. It’s just that whether you want to do that or not. Maybe, just maybe it’s better that you focus on something that’s already familiar to you and have someone else focus on that, because they don’t have to put in all those hours for it, having done that in the past.
Again, I’m sure you can do that, inasmuch as you dedicate your time to it. I know plenty of stuff that I’m not expected to know, because I spent countless hours on all kinds of stuff. Why do I do that? Well, I just do. I’m just that way, at least at the moment.
It clearly bothers a lot of people in the academics, because, to them, it indicates that I don’t know my place. It’s like how dare he do that, without our permission, without having a degree in it, without having been on our courses, without having been supervised by us. To honest, I don’t do it because I want to annoy people. I don’t really think about them. When I learn something, it’s me and that knowledge, that collective experience, that I tap into. It’s all about my engagement with it. There’s no one else there, not even librarian who’d stare at me intensively and disapprovingly for enjoying myself too much. I just do what I do, because I do, and I don’t really see the point involving anyone else in it, not to mention ask their permission to do it.
That does make me a bit of a hermit or, well, that’s how it may come across to others. It’s not that I don’t like the company of others. No, that’s not it. I mean, I am what I am, at any given moment, because of others, because of their company. That I owe to them. And I do enjoy a bit of good craic every now and then. I love good banter. I’m gregarious like that. But that’s the thing. I’m more of a lone wolf than a hermit. I prefer to work alone, because, like with banter, I want others to be at my level. If we don’t share the same sense of humor, it’s highly unlikely that we’ll end up spending time together any more than is necessary. It’s the same with work. If we don’t share the same work ethic, it’s highly unlikely that we’ll cooperate on anything. If I can do what you do, on my own, when I want it done, I don’t see the point involving you. Also, even if you have something to contribute, I won’t ask for your involvement if it takes forever you to do it. I’m just the kind of guy who’d rather not ask you, knowing that I’ll figure it out myself in the meanwhile, so that when you get back to me, your contribution is no longer needed. What can I say? I like to get things done.
It’s, of course, demanding of me to be that way. I mean, I know a lot and in many cases I have no use for that knowledge. Then again, that may help me in the future. It makes me less dependent on others. Plus, I don’t like asking people for something. It’s, well, needy.
Right, where was I? So, yeah, Schein (xxii-xxiii) provides a number of examples of how we can see the world differently, depending on our backgrounds. It could be anything, so it’s pointless to repeat his examples here. Instead, I think he (xxiii) summarizes that neatly by stating that:
“In short, we already are conditioned to read landscapes, albeit often unconsciously and ephemerally.”
I can only appreciate this and not just because it’s about having been conditioned to see the world in a certain way and to pay attention to certain things (or to not pay attention to certain things, that’s a thing as well), but also because it is indeed often unconscious and fleeting. In other words, the way people come to see the world is rarely attentive. It sort of just happens, under the hood, and being conscious about it is infrequent.
This is something that really, really riles up people though. If you point this out, that they don’t really pay attention to their surroundings, not to mention hardly ever question what’s there, they get really angry with you. It’s understandable. To use the word he uses, they’ve been conditioned to be that way, inattentive, while also self-assured. They think they are free, that they are autonomous, having a separate existence from the surrounding world, and they do not like it when you explain to that to them. It’s a knee jerk reaction. I get it.
It took me quite a bit to wrap my head around that. It was, at times, really, really challenging. Letting go of that image of yourself is the hardest thing about it. I’ve mentioned this in the past, but the only reason I ended up where I ended up is because I wanted to understand what’s the deal with landscape. I read this and then I read that, but it felt like something was always missing, like it didn’t make any sense, like how on earth does landscape have any influence over us if we are the way we’ve been taught we are, free, autonomous, having an existence that is neatly separated from what else is there. I read article after article, just baffled by it, only to realize that I’m never going to understand what these people are going on and on about, at times, pointing fingers at one another and disagreeing over something that I didn’t know was worth getting up in arms about, if I don’t engage with philosophy. So, I did.
Now the difficult thing is to explain it to others. I get it, but they don’t. Okay, maybe a handful of landscape scholars get it. They might still think that I’m bananas and a bit unhinged, but that’s fine. I don’t mind that. I mean, come on, I am a bit unhinged, if not bananas, but at least they get it (which then explains why I am or, rather, appear a bit unhinged, if not bananas) and that’s what matters to me. Oh, and I’m fine if they still disagree with me, if they are like, dude, you and your post-structuralism, your constructivism, your post-empiricism, and what not, when it’s phenomenology that’s the thing. I don’t mind it. It’s better that way. It’s healthy. What isn’t healthy is to think that you know it all, that it’s all for sure. So, yeah, I want to leave things a bit open, kind of like a door that won’t shut properly, because, you know, it’s slightly off the hinges.
To get back on track here, again, I also appreciate how he (xxiii-xxiv) reckons that we need to realize two things when we deal with landscape. Let’s go one by one. So, firstly, he (xxiii-xxiv) states that:
“[I]f we are to move beyond our own, sometimes solipsistic engagement with the landscape[,] we need to take landscape seriously as a social phenomenon[.]”
Indeed. Forget yourself. That’s the first step. It’s not about you. You don’t matter in any of this. Okay, you matter to yourself, but that’s the point, you need to let go of yourself. Landscape is all about the interplay between us and the world, what we could simply refer to as the interplay of the text and context, if you will. Your part is just like anyone else’s part. You are just part of it, like anyone else. You are just there, in the middle of it all, occupying a certain position, just like anyone else.
Then, secondly, he (xxiv) states that:
“[T]o move the social requires a more disciplined attention to reading the landscape itself.”
Yep. You need to learn to read landscape. That’s the hard work I’ve been going on and on, and on, in this essay. But that’s not all there is to it, as he (xxiv) goes on to add. To understand how landscape works, that interplay, that interaction, whatever you want to call it, you need to be disciplined about it or, as he (xxiv) points out, to be systematic about it. None of it is whimsical. It’s no like ‘I’ think it’s this or that way. No, no, and once more, no.
This connects the two realizations to one another: to be systematic, you need to let go of yourself, that pesky ‘I’ that keeps cropping up. Remember, this is not about you, what you think, nor what you feel. You are in the mix, sure, but you just occupy a certain position in relation to what else is there.
So, what’s important then is not how you or someone else sees the world, nor what you or that other person think of it, but how you or that other person come to see the world that way and to think of it the way you do. That’s the text for you. You do play a part in (re)producing it, yes, but you are also its product. Of course, you do need the context, which is the material world, what it consists of, you included, and the way it happens to be composed, how it is all connected, inasmuch it is, this and/or that in relation to this and/or that.
What’s also important is to think of the text and the context together. If we think of landscape just as a text, we ignore the context where it all unfolds, the material aspect of it. If we reverse that, if we think of landscape just as the context, as the material world where it all takes place, we ignore the text, how it is that we make sense of the world, ordering it in a certain way, through language or, more broadly speaking, semiosis.
Now, the difficult thing about text is that there’s always more to it. There’s always text behind text, if you will. You can’t get to the bottom of things, really. You can’t uncover meaning, to understand what something means, by going through texts, like layer by layer, in hopes of unearthing the first or the original layer underneath all those layers. Why? Well, that’s intertextuality for you. Texts are composed of texts. They are all composites of other texts.
This is the sense in which text is simply another word for discourse, or vice versa, if you prefer text over discourse. Discourse functions the same way. There’s always more to it. There’s always discourse behind discourse, but no original discourse.
What’s common with the two, text and discourse, is that they are formed or produced, on the basis of what has already been formed or produced. This is why I like Foucault’s definition of discourse, as provided in ‘The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language’:
“[P]ractices that systematically form the objects of which they speak.”
It’s just so good. Discourse is not just something that’s there, waiting for us. No. It’s something that’s (re)produced, all the time. It’s also a matter of practice, something that we do. While it’s, perhaps, a bit unnecessary to state that it’s systematic, considering that a practice is about something that gets done over and over again, the thing here is that it’s not whimsical. It is in this sense that it’s always based on what it is, so that what’s formed or produced is always based on what’s been formed or produced.
To account for contexts, we also need to be careful with that. It’s tempting to say that there are all these contexts, let’s say the academic context or the essay context, the home context or the work context, you name it. The problem with that is that we end up treating them according to their type. It’s like, as if, all homes were the same, even though they are not. It’s not that this isn’t useful. It is. It’s rather that context needs to be highly specific, like what are the actual material conditions, there and then, and not in some abstract sense of it.
Okay, to account for contexts, including those specifics, that granularity that I’m talking about, we do it, of course, through text. So, it is in this sense that landscape is always a matter of text. What’s non-discursive, that context, is therefore inseparable from the text. We can’t address the context, all that’s non-discursive, that composition, that where and when, without having recourse to text, that’s to say discourse.
So, whatever objects we deal with, while we acknowledge their materiality, their composition, and what else is there, as well as their relations, they are all discursive objects in the sense that it is we who come to recognize them as such and such only because they’ve been attributed such and such discursively.
This is where it gets pretty difficult if you are not familiar with Foucault’s work, or others who define this the same way. So, to be clear, whatever we have, let’s say this keyboard (my usual example), is recognized as such, as a keyboard, because we have systematic practices that produce such objects of which we speak as keyboards. Simply put, we whatever it is that this thing is that I type on, which we’ve come to attribute as a keyboard. The difficult thing here is that there’s nothing inherent about it to warrant it to be attributed as just that, as a keyboard. There’s no otherworldly idea of a keyboard or keyboardness that this, in its materiality, somehow represents or corresponds to.
So, in short, we have the text and the context, the discursive and the non-discursive, or, as Deleuze and Guattari prefer to refer to them, the expression and the content, and their composition, their interplay, their interaction, but one is not the other, nor corresponds to the other. That’s it. It might take a while to get used to that, to wrap your head around it, but once you get it, it’s simple really.
If you struggle with the notions of expression and content, as borrowed from the work of Louis Hjelmslev by Deleuze and Guattari, take a look at what one of their translators, Brian Massumi, has to say about them in the introduction to a book he edited, ‘A Shock to Thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari’. Early on, he (xiii) points out that expression (i.e., discourse or text) has a long history of being thought as being subjective, whereas content (i.e., non-discourse or context) has been thought as the real deal, what’s objective. The point he (xiii) wants to make here is that expression is often thought as merely something that expresses content, the point for humans then being that we are expected to communicate or transmit that content from one person to another through expression. In other words, expression gets a bad rap because it’s thought to be liable for not getting that content across.
The thing is, however, that this is not how it works for Deleuze and Guattari, nor Foucault, nor for Schein. I think Massumi (xiv) does a great job at summarizing this:
“The assertion that expression is actively formative of its content, or its ‘objects’, is a constructivist strategy underpinning most contemporary anti-communicational semiotics.”
This goes back to how, for them, content is, in itself, expression of some content, which is also, in itself, expression of some content. They remain distinct, but they are intertwined in this way. You can’t think of content without the expression. You need both, as Hjelmslev (30) points out in ‘Prolegomena to a Theory of Language’.
It’s also worth noting how this way of thinking goes against what, I’d say, most people think. As Massumi (xiv) points out, content does not causally determine expression. Note how it’s the exactly opposite way around, so that it is the expression that changes content or, rather, has the capacity to change content. If you are familiar with what became known as the speech act theory, this is nothing new to you. If that’s new to you, all you need to know is J. L. Austin’s book title ‘How to Do Things with Words’. That’s it. That’s the secret sauce.
Anyway, Massumi also accounts for discourse in relation to expression. To me, they are interchangeable, although, I guess expression is more particular, whereas discourse is more general, or something. So, he (xiv) states that:
“‘Discourse’, by this account, constructs the subject by constructing the objects in polarity with which the subject forms.”
Again, we could replace discourse here with expression, but that’s not really that important, as long as you get what he’s after. He (xiv) continues:
“The subject’s expression is still causally linked to its content, but the nature of the link has changed.”
This goes back to the point about how you can’t have one without the other. He (xiv) expands on that:
“What traditionally appeared as a one-way determination of expression by a mirroring of or a moulding by its content … reappears as a formative polarity[.]”
This is what Deleuze and Guattari (86) mean when they state that there’s no “correspondence nor conformity” between the two, so that the expression isn’t something that’s determined by the content so that it would simply represent, describe, or aver some corresponding content.
To give you some examples, think of paintings and photos. We can think of the world as what we are painting or photographing. That’s the content. The painting or the photo is then the expression. But is the painting or the photo merely a representation of the content? Well, it is if you insist that it is, but it is not, if you don’t insist that it is. If you think it is, it is, but if you don’t think it is, it isn’t. Just think of it. A painting or a photo may certainly look like the world or, rather, a portion of it. It may therefore resemble it or be similar to it in that regard, but that’s not all there is to a painting or a photo. If someone paints or photographs, there’s nothing inherent about that which would require the painting or the photograph to represent the world, that is to say re-present it.
To explain what Deleuze and Guattari are after here is that the painting or the photo has capacity to change the world. It may or may not look like the world, or a portion of it, sure, but there’s more to it. This is why I like Hayden Lorimer’s take on this in ‘Cultural geography: the busyness of being ‘more than representational’’, how he asks us to think not representationally, nor non-representationally, nor anti-representationally, but rather more-than-representationally. It acknowledges how things may appear to us as similar, but without privileging that when we assess something, in this case a painting or a photo.
To be honest, while I try not to use words like represent and describe, because it makes people think in terms of resemblance or similarity, as well as fidelity, how well this and/or that represents something in terms of its resemblance or similarity, the word itself isn’t the problem. It’s the way we think about the world that is the problem.
I actually like the word (OED, s.v. “represent”, v.1), in the sense that it has to do with assuming a role or a function or occupying a certain position, having been granted the right to do so on behalf of this and/or that person or group of persons. It has that sense that this is not that, but it functions in its position, for whatever reason. The problem with the word is when it gets tied to resemblance.
Heck, even Deleuze and Guattari use the word every now and then. For example, in ‘A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’, they (118) mention nomads as the representatives of the countersignifying semiotic. They (128) also note that in the postsignifying semiotic the subject “conceives of itself following a line of deterritorialization represented by methodical doubt.” They (146) indicate that “pragmatics (or schizoanalysis) can be represented by four circular components that bud and form rhizomes”, that “the face represents a far more intense, if slower, deterritorialization” (172), “popular Ethiopian scrolls representing demons” (182) and “the first zone is represented by the public central bank” (226). It’s not so much the word representation as it is resemblance or understanding representation as a matter of resemblance that they (233) object to, as notable in this passage:
“It is all there: there is a becoming-animal not content to proceed by resemblance and for which resemblance, on the contrary, would represent an obstacle or stoppage[.]”
Note here how you have resemblance. It’s presented as a problem. Then there’s becoming, which cannot be defined in terms of resemblance, which, in fact, represents something that must be overcome. In short, the problem with representation is that we tend to think of it as a matter of doubling, so that this represents that, having this or that fidelity, resembling it well or not so well, as opposed to a matter of function, this acting on behalf of that.
To get back on track here, Deleuze and Guattari ask us to think the exact opposite way. So, as crazy as it may seem, it is not the subject that simply expresses some content, but rather that content gets expressed through the subject, as noted by Massumi (xiv). To limit this just to language, for the sake of simplicity, it’s not really accurate to say that we say that we speak language, but rather that language speaks through us.
Massumi (xv) also offers a handy summary of how Deleuze handles language in ‘The Logic of Sense’. So, in short, there are three things that we need to account for. Firstly, there’s the designation, which is that objective material world. We refer to it, so that, for example, there’ this and that. That’s it. It’s what’s there. Yes or no. It’s that simple. Secondly, there’s manifestation, which is the person who speaks. This is what’s subjective about this. Thirdly, there’s signification, which is the play of signifiers. What matters here is that we all these words that deal with things in general, not in particular. What’s missing here is the discussion of sense, but I will not get tangled up on that here, as I’ve explained in the past.
Most people ignore signification. They think that words correspond to things, so that when you (the subject) say something, you are simply saying something about the world (the object). By doing that, they ignore how truth is always conditional, as conditioned by language, or to be more specific here, by signification, as noted by Massumi (xv). Now, it may seem like we can fix that by turning our attention to signification, but the problem with that is that it leads to nowhere, signifiers do not lead to signifieds, but to other signifiers, in an infinite chain, as words can only ever be explained by other words, as explained by Deleuze and Guattari (112) in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’. Plus, as the two (66) also note, relying on signification end up replicating the naïve take as the word is thought to be the signifier and the thing it supposedly refers to is thought to be the signified.
I also like how Massumi (xvi) explains the role of the subject in all this as its particularly important to why you, the subject, just aren’t important in the study of landscapes. So, as he (xvi) points out, a subject does not simply speak of objects, as in represent them through language. No, no, and no. Instead, the subject is a product of how it all works, as he (xvi) also points out:
“[A] subject is made to be in conformity with the system that produced it, such that the subject reproduces the system.”
Agreed. The problem with this is, however, that if the subject is merely the product of the system, the system never changes, as acknowledge by him (xvi). That’s why he (xvi) goes on to add that:
“What reproduces the system is not what the subject says per se. The direct content of its expressions do not faithfully reflect the system[.]”
Indeed. If the subject faithfully reproduced the system, nothing would change, as I just pointed out. This does not, however, mean that the subjects seek to change the system. As you may have noticed, things do have a tendency of staying the same or, at least, pretty much the same. The thing here is that the subject must appear as if it did choose to reproduce the system, even though it is the system that seeks to reproduce itself through the subject, making it reproduces the system, as (xvi) commented by him. I really like how he (xvi) condenses that into a couple of sentences:
“The subject does not express the system. It is an expression of the system.”
So, as I just explained this, we are expressions of that system and thus bound to reproduce it. To be clear, we don’t have to reproduce it. We could change things, but, well, we don’t. This doesn’t mean that things don’t change, nor that we don’t want anything to change, but rather that the system tends to remain very much the same.
Anyway, what’s important here that the system tends to reproduce itself not because it is in your best interest for the system to reproduce itself, but because you are produced to think that way, that it is in your best interest for the system to reproduce itself.
This ties well with what Schein (xxiii) has to say about our largely unconscious and largely ephemeral engagement with our surroundings. Inasmuch as we think that liking something, like a particular landscape or its features, are a matter of preference, that we choose to like it the way we like it, we are bound to keep things the way they are and object to any suggested changes.
This discussion of (re)production of existing states of affairs also ties well with what Schein (xxviii) has to say about our relation to our surroundings. To be clear, things do not change wildly. Like this keyboard just doesn’t disassemble itself and then reassemble itself as something else. No. That said, a lot of things still change. We just don’t notice it, unless we compare how things were and how they are now, let’s say ten years apart. Then it’s clear that, oh, yeah, that has changed and that has changed. In short, things do change, quite a bit, we just like to think that they don’t and would like to keep things the way they are, probably because we are afraid of change. Now is good, so why change anything. That’s the gist of it. Whether now is good is, of course, another thing.
Anyway, Schein (xxviii) recognizes this, how things do, in fact, change, all the time:
“In the end we recognize that all landscapes are everywhere in the constant state of becoming[.]”
What does this mean in terms of research? Well, there’s two ways to go about this. Firstly, we can keep track of the changes, producing more and more research. That happens all the time. It’s fine, but it does make you think or, at least, it has made me think. Secondly, we can focus on how those changes occur, inasmuch as they do or, as explained by Schein (xxviii):
“[W]e recognize … that our landscape reading is about asking how landscapes work.”
I don’t know about you, but I’ve come to prefer this way of going about this. We can, of course, keep doing what we do, pushing out article after article, addressing the states of affairs, in comparison with previous states of affairs, but I’d say that it’s much more useful to understand how you do that in the first place. That allows you to understand how the world works. You then no longer need someone like me to tell you how things are as you can figure it out yourself.
To be clear, I’m not against doing research. I can appreciate a good study and find it fascinating to compare how things were with how they are now. It’s rather that I find it more useful if everyone can do that, instead of just a select few.
This is all for now. This is all I had in store for this month (and a bit more, as I ended up on a couple of tangents while I was writing this). I don’t know what’s in store for next month. We’ll see.
References
- Austin, J. L. ([1955] 1962). How to Do Things with Words (J. O. Urmson, Ed.). Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
- Deleuze, G. ([1969] 1990). The Logic of Sense (C. V. Boundas, Ed., M. Lester and C. J. Stivale, Trans.). London, United Kingdom: Athlone Press.
- Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari ([1980] 1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
- Foucault, M. ([1969/1971] 1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language (A. M. Sheridan Smith and R. Swyer, Trans.). New York, NY: Pantheon Books.
- Hjelmslev, L. ([1943] 1953). Prolegomena to a Theory of Language (F. J. Whitfield). Baltimore, MD: Waverly Press.
- Lewis, P. F. (1979). Axioms for Reading the Landscape: Some Guides to the American Scene. In D. W. Meinig (Ed.), The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays (pp. 11–32). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
- Lorimer, H. (2005). Cultural geography: the busyness of being ‘more-than-representational’. Progress in Human Geography, 29 (1), 83–94.
- Massumi, B. (2002). Introduction: Like a thought. In B. Massumi (Ed.), A Shock to Thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari (pp. xiii–xxxix). London, United Kingdom: Routledge.
- Meinig, D. W. (1979). The Beholding Eye: Ten Versions of the Same Scene. In D. W. Meinig (Ed.), The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays (pp. 33–48). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
- Oxford English Dictionary Online (n. d.). Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
- Post, C. W., A. L. Greiner, and G. L. Buckley (Eds.) (2023). The Routledge Companion to the American Landscape. Abingdon, United Kingdom: Routledge.
- Samuels, M. S. (1979). The Biography of Landscape: Cause and Culpability. In D. W. Meinig (Ed.), The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays (pp. 51–88). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
- Schein, R. H. (1997). The Place of Landscape: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting an American Scene. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 87 (4), 660–680.
- Schein, R. H. (2023). Foreword: Reading the Landscape. In C. W. Post, A. L. Greiner and G. L. Buckley (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to the American Landscape (pp. xxii–xxxii). Abingdon, United Kingdom: Routledge.