I already wrote about this, but I went through only one of the articles related to the topic, which is that what do children have to do with landscapes? I pointed out that they don’t have much to do with it, really, considering that no one sees the world as a landscape when they are born, and that it’s the adults who teach them to see the world that way.
So, I wrote about what Kenneth Olwig wrote about the topic in ‘Designs Upon Children’s Special Places?’. I didn’t cover the other article, ‘Childhood, Artistic Creation, and the Educated Sense of Place’. I left it for this essay.
In this article, he questions what it is to be a human being, because don’t remain the same. He (4) does this by mentioning that saying ‘childhood’ is not accurate, because ‘hood’ gives the impression that that time of life is a state, like being, instead of continuous change, like being in flux or becoming.
As you might guess from the title of his article, he (4) deals with what he calls a sense of place and likens it with art. He then contrasts this (4) with what Yi-Fu Tuan refers to as rootedness in his article ‘Rootedness vs sense of place’, which is more like a sense of home, rather than a sense of place. The difference between the two is also that sense of place is active and conscious, whereas as rootedness or sense of home is passive and unconscious, as Olwig characterizes them.
He (4) connects the two by stating that children move from rootedness to sense of place as they grow. He (4) reckons that this also means that children do not differentiate or poorly differentiate between subjects, objects and signs, whereas adults their difference and know what they are.
But what does this have to do with landscape? Well, he does address that also in this article, just like does in that other article that I covered in a previous essay. He (4-5) deals with this when he mentions a children’s novel written by Martin A. Hansen, in which a teacher removes whitewash, i.e., white paint, from classroom windows, so that the children can see outside.
Now, think of that situation. You have a classroom and windows. With the whitewash, the children cannot see outside, but light comes in, of course. Without the whitewash, they can see outside. However, it’s not just that they can’t see and then they can see. It’s rather how what they see remains framed, like literally framed by the window. I don’t know that particular fictional school, nor about Danish schools, not to mention post World War II Danish schools, but something tells me that the window is rectangular, as they often are, you know, just like in most landscape paintings.
In the long quote from Hansen, Olwig (5) also wants to point out that the window, that narrow opening to the world, is important to the way we come to see it as landscape. This is then juxtaposed with a different kind of relation to the world, when children just roam outside, doing whatever it is that they do, without admiring it from afar, like they do from the classroom window, as indicated in the part of the novel quoted and translated by Olwig (5). For him, this is how children shift from being rooted in a place, like having a sense of home, there and then, without much thinking of it, to gaining a sense of place, taking their time to make sense of it, so that it appears to have meaning to it:
“Their environs become a ‘landscape’ which begins to make ‘sense’ as a locus of meaning.”
To weave in something from ‘A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (167, 173) call that, how things appear to as white walls that mark our faces and landscapes, that signifiers then attach to. This is also what they (11-12) refer to as recording surface or inscription surface in ‘Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’.
There is a reason for why children don’t see the world that way. It’s because they indeed fail to differentiate between subjects, objects and signs or, rather, they don’t rely on such distinctions as we adults do. They operate in a different regime of signs or semiotic system, as Deleuze and Guattari would explain it. This is why Guattari (169) states in ‘The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis’ that:
“In fact, the machine of obligatory learning does not primarily have the goal of transmitting information, knowledge or a ‘culture,’ but of transforming the child’s semiotic coordinates from top to bottom.”
Anyway, it won’t take long for them to do that though, thanks to parents and teachers. They learn to look at things at a distance, like through a window, like Olwig (5) emphasizes in the article:
“The school window provides the means by which the children can gain some detachment from their immediate experience of the environment and learn to think and reflect upon it. This, in turn, enables them to experience their environment as a landscape in which their ‘memories can grow.’”
I remember checking on this after having this article the first time. I asked a young relative of mine what is landscape and, if my memory serves me, the answer was that it is the window, like when you are on a train and you see the landscape outside the train. I was amazed. This must have been before school age, but, anyway, old enough to being told by the parents that you look out the window in a train and see the landscapes flash in front of your eyes.
Anyway, Olwig (5) moves on from that, to challenge how childhood is typically viewed in negative terms, like as that state that we are expected to grow out of, to grow into adults. This is also evident from our everyday language. We often call something, like what someone does, or someone childish if it isn’t serious or important. It’s like, come on, grow up! When you think of it, we do this to children, to some extent, like letting them do some childish things, like letting them play, only to occasionally tell them not to do something because it is childish, like you need to grow up, like grown ups don’t do that. We also do this to other adults. In that case, it’s, how to put it, almost like saying someone is a degenerate, because they haven’t grown up.
In Olwig’s (4-5) case he is challenging views presented by Jean Piaget in ‘The Child’s Conception of the World‘. He juxtaposes this with how poet Walt Whitman depicted children as engaging with the world in a way that indeed has little to do with subjects, objects and signs. In the example, ‘There was a child’, a child basically associates with what else is there, like becoming it, or it becoming the child, or part of the child, there and then, for as long as it did.
To me, that’s a very singular way of engaging with the world and why Deleuze and Guattari state (256) in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’ that “[c]hildren are Spinozists.” They (256) exemplify this with a famous psychoanalytic example known as ‘Little Hans’:
“When Little Hans talks about a ‘peepee-maker,’ he is referring not to an organ or an organic function but basically to a material, in other words, to an aggregate whose elements vary according to its connections, its relations of movement and rest, the different individuated assemblages it enters.”
The point they are making is that children only care about how things are drawn together and how that, all that, functions, as they (256) go on to add:
“Does a girl have a peepee-maker? The boy says yes, and not by analogy … It is obvious that girls have a peepee-maker because they effectively pee: a machinic functioning rather than an organic function.”
It’s also not that male and female bodies aren’t different, no, that’s not the point here. It’s rather that, for the child, a peepee-maker is simply anything that makes peepee and, certainly, both kind of bodies do make pee. It’s a bit more complex than that, sure, as the peepee isn’t made in what appears to be the peepee-maker, but that’s not the point here. Anyway, they (256) continue:
“Quite simply, the same material has different connections, different relations of movement and rest, enters different assemblages in the case of the boy and the girl (a girl does not pee standing or into the distance).”
That’s exactly why “[c]hildren are Spinozists” as they (256) state. That’s also why many artists seek to tap into their childhood, like trying to harness that time of their life in their works, as Olwig (6) points out. It’s not actually trying to be a child, or going back to their childhood, or the like, emulating it, but rather trying to engage with the world as we all did when we were children, well before our semiotic coordinates were reconfigured, as Guattari (169) puts in in ‘The Machinic Unconscious’.
As a Spinozist myself, I can confirm, that’s how it is. I’d say it’s still way more difficult as an adult than it was a child, not because it’s inherently more difficult to be a Spinozist as an adult, no, but because other people are not Spinozists and they for sure do their best to make sure that others aren’t either. That’s why I pointed out that we are in the habit of calling other adults childish when act in ways that remind of us of children.
Being a Spinozist makes your life way, way better, that’s for sure. That said, it’s not easy to be a Spinozist, just as it isn’t easy to be Deleuzo-Guattarian. It’s a lonely life, that’s for sure. There aren’t like a ton of others out there who are like that.
Deleuze and Guattari aren’t done with explaining Spinozism. They (256) add to that:
“Does a locomotive have a peepee-maker? Yes, in yet another machinic assemblage.”
Now, without getting lost in the jargon, as I usually do, as you can surely read me doing that in my other essays, explaining it, again and again, even though I try my best to not repeat things, the point here is that, yes, indeed, even a locomotive, a vehicle that pulls trains, has a peepee-maker. Again, it doesn’t matter that it doesn’t match the human male or female peepee-maker. What matters is that it makes peepee, which, for the child, is that which is peed, that which comes out a male or female body, or the body known as a locomotive.
What about other inanimate objects then? Well, they (256) have got this covered as well:
“Chairs don’t have them: but that is because the elements of the chair were not able to integrate this material into their relations, or decomposed the relation with that material to the point that it yielded something else, a rung, for example.”
So, as you can see, this type of semiotics also make sense. It’s just different kind of sense. Not all objects then have peepee-makers. Only some make peepee. They (256) further clarify this:
“It has been noted that for children an organ has ‘a thousand vicissitudes,’ that it is ‘difficult to localize, difficult to identify, it is in turn a bone, an engine, excrement, the baby, a hand, daddy’s heart…’”
Why? Well, they do provide an answer, but before that they (256) mention that:
“This is not at all because the organ is experienced as a part-object.”
I tried my best not to start explaining, but here I kind of have to. A part object can be understood in two ways, as clarified by the translators (309) in ‘Anti-Oedipus’. Firstly, is an object that is composed of other objects. This is the simple way of thinking of it. It’s not wrong, as such, but calling it ‘part’ tempts you to think of the object as, somehow, missing something, as if there was this complete or full object out there and then somehow part of it went missing, which gives you this impression that those objects are then somehow broken, lacking in their completeness. Secondly, a part object is that, but, I’d say, only in the Spinozist sense that it is composed the way it is, from other objects, hence the parts, but that being what it is then, and not in reference to some ideal, complete or full version of itself which it, somehow, it no longer is fails to be, like as if aspiring for that. I know this is a slightly different way of explain this, because the translators (309) emphasize in their note that these objects are rather partial objects and not part objects, as they are translated in ‘A Thousand Plateau’s, because, in their view, this is more apt as partial can be understood as part of, but also as partial to. In my view, explains how the parts are connected to other parts, like how they come together as this or that, whatever this or that may be, like how they are partial to one another, so that they are drawn together. In this way the parts are no longer inherently complete, but rather parts of something else, which are also parts of something else, ad infinitum, hence the Spinozism of it all.
That’s clear then, eh? Anyway, moving on, they (256) provide an answer to their own question in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’:
“It is because the organ is exactly what its elements make it according to their relation of movement or rest, and the way in which this relation combines with or splits off from that of neighboring elements.”
Now that you know the two ways of understanding a part object, or more accurately then, what is a partial object, this should make more sense to you. This is Spinozism. This is how everything is: all bodies are bodies within bodies, like parts, but, as bodies, they are constitutive of bodies, because of that movement or rest, because everything moves or is in rest, and then that’s how the bodies come together the way they do. This is what they mean when they refer to machinic assemblages of desire in that book, even though often just refer to them as assemblages, thus possibly ignoring the collective assemblages of enunciation in the mix, as they (256) appear to do here:
“This is not animism, any more than it is mechanism; rather, it is universal machinism: a plane of consistency occupied by an immense abstract machine comprising an infinite number of assemblages.”
They (256) then add to this that this is neatly exemplified by how children are in the habit of asking the adults these ‘how is … made’ type of questions, to adult which adults often first take a moment to think, like how to explain it, not to offend the child, while it is offensive to their adult mind, and then say that, well, some things locomotives or chairs are made, but not people, or animals, or their body parts. For a child, this makes not difference, because it doesn’t, because it doesn’t. If you are a Spinozist, you can only agree. Fundamentally, they are all made. Everything is made. Or, rather, they are all in the making. Everything is in the making. That’s the change, flux or becoming that Olwig (4) mentions early on in his article.
What is Spinozism then? Well, it’s the same as being a Deleuzian, or Guattarian, or Foucauldian, or whatever it is, whoever it is, not in the sense that you belong to some camp or school, like as a member of some society, but rather someone who relates to and, in a sense, also adheres to a certain philosophy, way of thinking and/or doing something to this or that extent, whatever that may be, without requiring any formal recognition. Like I wouldn’t call myself Kantian, albeit, surely, in some ways I am, but not because I’ve chosen not to call myself that, nor because I’ve chosen not to associate myself with some society that specializes in Kantian philosophy.
Their answer to that question is a bit shorter. It is the “becoming-child of the philosopher.” Yes, I agree. That’s a good way to put it. You can explain it in many other ways as well. This is not the only answer, but it is a good answer, nonetheless.
What Olwig (5) is talking about in reference to the Whitman poem is what Deleuze and Guattari (408) also refer to as a haecceity or a singularity. In their (263) view, something like “[t]aking a walk is a haecceity”. Why? How? Well, because, as a Spinozist will tell you, you can’t separate the bodies and their movement or rest from one another, and what they (260) add as their capacity to affect and being affected by other bodies which is, of course, in part defined by the bodies, their movement or rest, what they (262-263) then refer to as the longitudes and the latitudes. This also means that the bodies are in flux, merely metastable, subject to change, as they (262) also point out.
If that didn’t work for you, well luckily they do cover this quite a bit. To give you more examples, they (263) add to this that:
“Climate, wind, season, hour are not of another nature than the things, animals, or people that populate them, follow them, sleep and awaken within them. This should be read without a pause: the animal-stalks-at-five-o’clock. The becoming-evening, becoming-night of an animal, blood nuptials. Five o’clock is this animal! This animal is this place! ‘The thin dog is running in the road, this dog is the road,’ cries Virginia Woolf.”
At a glance, it may seem like they’ve lost it, that they’ve gone mad, but that’s not the case. To connect that, all that, to the previous example. Taking a walk can be all that. It’s not just you, you walking, nor where you are, what else is there. It’s that, but to pun a bit here, it’s partially that. It’s how it all comes together, there and then. It’s how it all works. That’s why they (263) add:
“That is how we need to feel. Spatiotemporal relations, determinations, are not predicates of the thing but dimensions of multiplicities.”
To unpack that, note how they are stating that those relations or determinations, of those bodies, are not predicates. What are predicates? It’s not explained in this context, but you’ll find Deleuze explaining this in Stoic terms in ‘The Logic of Sense’. He (21) states that:
“The attribute is the proposition is the predicate—a qualitative predicate like green, for example. It is attributed to the subject of the proposition.”
So, you have a subject of the proposition, like in an utterance or a sentence, and then the predicate, like in an utterance or a sentence. This is that basic.
Now, something like green, the color green, is not the greatest of examples here, at least not in English, because it’s typically not used as a verb, which is what he (21) moves to state:
“But the attribute of the thing is the verb: to green, for example, or rather the event expressed by this verb.”
Ah, see, but we don’t use the word like this. We don’t say the ‘the tree greens’ but rather ‘the tree is green’. In Finnish, you can do both, saying that ‘puu vihertää’ or that ‘puu on vihreä’. Finnish conveys this way better, in a way that people don’t mind, so that it is the tree that is becoming green. There is something about the tree, its constitution that is greening. You can even drop the subject, so that it’s just ‘vihertää’, which is then the same as ‘to green’ or ‘greening’, and still works. A more example would be raining, which is fine as a word in English, but you are expected to say ‘it is raining’ or ‘it’s raining’, there being that it, that subject, that rains, but in Finnish it’s just ‘sataa’, which is ‘to rain’ or ‘raining’ and it would be conserved strange to say that something rains. Okay, passable, but strange.
Anyway, he (21) clarifies this further, making sure that you don’t mistake one for the other:
“Conversely, this logical attribute does not merge at all with the physical state of affairs, nor with a quality or relation of this state. The attribute is not a being and does not qualify a being; it is an extra-being.”
Why is he adamant about this distinction? My answer is that he wants to remain Spinozist: only bodies deal with bodies, only thoughts deal with thoughts and therefore they never ever cross over. The physical and the semiotic, in this case the linguistic, are not capable of crossing over. That’s why. His answer, in this book, is that you have the subject, which is the thing, typically a noun or a pronoun, and then the predicate, what else is there, most importantly the verb. So, you have the body and then what is then said of the body, which is not the body itself, but rather what we attribute to that body through language.
To be absolutely clear, he (21) distinguishes between the color ‘green’, which is a noun, and ‘to green’, which is a verb in its infinite form. Firstly:
“‘Green’ designates a quality, a mixture of things, a mixture of tree and air where chlorophyll coexists with all the parts of the leaf.”
So, here we are saying that ‘green’ is this thing that is, itself, a composite thing that we refer to as ‘green’. Secondly:
“‘To green,’ on the contrary, is not a quality in the thing, but an attribute which is said of the thing. This attribute does not exist outside the proposition which expresses it in denoting the thing.”
This may puzzle you. Keep in mind that he is explaining how language works in relation to the world. When I say that ‘the tree is green’, I am saying that the tree is green. I am the one attributing it through language. Outside language, none of this matters.
So, to go back to Deleuze and Guattari (263), spatiotemporal relations and determinations are those bodies and how they come together and the predicates, or the attributes, whatever you want to call them have not part of them. To be clear, this doesn’t mean that language does not matter, nor that other forms of expression do not matter. They do, but that’s not the point they are making. This is rather about the subjects and objects, which they replace with desiring machines in ‘Anti-Oedipus’ and machinic assemblages of desire in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, while signs, including linguistic signs, are dealt with in terms of collective assemblages of enunciation.
Now the rest of Olwig’s article has more to do with how we think of our childhood, the role of memory and nostalgia, than how children see the world before they learn to see it as a landscape and then find it difficult to see it anything else than a landscape. This is not to say that the rest isn’t interesting, but rather that it’s not what I wanted to cover in this essay. Maybe another time. We’ll see.
References
- 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 ([1972] 1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (R. Hurley, M. Seem and H. R. Lane, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
- Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari ([1980] 1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
- Guattari, F. ([1979] 2011). The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis (T. Adkins, Trans.). Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).
- Hansen, M. A. (1966). Løgneren. Copenhagen, Denmark: Gyldendal
- Olwig, K. (1990). Designs Upon Children’s Special Places? Children’s Environments Quarterly, 7(4), 47–53.
- Olwig, K. (1991). Childhood, Artistic Creation, and the Educated Sense of Place. Children’s Environments Quarterly, 8 (2), 4–18.
- Piaget, J. (1929). The Child’s Conception of the World. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
- Tuan, Y-F. (1980). Rootedness versus sense of place. Landscape, 24 (1): 3–8.
- Whitman, W. (1949). There was a child. In Louis Untermeyer
(Ed.), Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman, (pp. 346–348).
New York: Simon and Schuster.