I was writing a funding application, figuring out a list of journals that meet certain criteria, that I came across an article about landscape and Japan. It’s written by Minoru Senda and it bears the title ‘Japan’s Traditional View of Nature and Interpretation of Landscape’.
The title already suggests that there are different ways of viewing and understanding the world, what we might call interpreting the landscape. There’s the common view of it, which has European origins. It’s highly problematic and most of my work is concerned with it. I won’t get lost in all the details, but if you are interested in that way of understanding the world, read Denis Cosgrove’s article ‘Prospect, Perspective and the Evolution of the Landscape Idea’. If you are really interested in it, you can also read his book ‘Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape’.
Senda doesn’t comment on Cosgrove’s work, probably because it was fairly novel at the time and/or may not have been popular in Japan at the time. You couldn’t just look it up online. You actually had to get physical copies of articles or books. That said, Japanese academic circles were heavily influenced and, I guess, are still heavily influenced by western and, more specifically, European though. He (130) mentions the influence of Friedrich Ratzel and Paul Vidal de la Blache and comments on how there is this nature/culture binary that was imported from their works and from works of others. To me, this is interesting. I can’t be sure, but those names are properly old school. You’d think they would have already been considered passé in the late 1900s. Then again, this only proves my previous point. The world simply wasn’t as connected as it is these days. You could easily get these influences at a certain point in time and they could easily maintain their popularity, even though ended up going out of fashion elsewhere, even in the circles from which they were originally imported. He (130-131) laments their influence, how the Japanese way or ways of thinking were erased by these western imports, in an almost wholesale manner.
What interests me the most about this article is his commentary on the traditional Japanese way or ways of viewing and understanding the world. To summarize his (131) account of this, the traditional Japanese understanding of landscapes and their features is animist. In this view of the world, anything, including landscape features, including landforms, such as mountains, and therefore entire landscapes are inhabited by kami (神). The most apt translation for these are spirits that are concerned with just about anything, big or small, and not just with entities, like anything that can be understood as objects, but with phenomena as well, like fog, mist and wind.
What interests me in particular about this article is his (133-134) commentary on haiku (俳句). Why? Well, this connects to a certain pushback that you see among landscape researchers. I’d say that I am in the what discursive or textual camp or I am seen as belonging into that camp, whether I like it or not, even if this is just part of the story. I mean, that’s fair to say. That’s accurate, but only if we ignore what amounts to discourse or text. If we think of it as just synonymous with language, as many indeed think of it as, then we still need to be able to define what that amounts to, not so much as what it is, but as what it does. For the many, language and therefore, by extension, discourse and text, corresponds with the physical world. There are words that then correspond with things. For me, this is not the case. Instead, language is something that acts upon the world. It does not define the physical composition of the world, but rather how we make sense of it. It is used to classify it as such and such, so that something as seemingly simple as colors are not at all simple at all. For example, different languages conceive the color spectrum different, so that you get mismatches between them, as commented by Louis Hjelmslev (33) in his book ‘Prolegomena to a Theory of Language’ in reference to the differences between English and Welsh. This is also how I understand discourse, much like Michel Foucault (49) who addressed them in ‘The Archaeology of Knowledge’ and defines them, in plural, as linguistic “practices that systematically for the objects of which they speak.” So, in other words, language doesn’t represent the world. To be clear, it cannot represent it in any way as there is no true world, no original reality in itself. This is not to say that there isn’t a world or reality. It’s rather that there is nothing about it that can be re-presented. What language does is that it presents us that world, that reality, in a certain way. To me, this is why pragmatics is what matters the most in linguistics. There rest is just downstream from it.
What interests me about haiku is how well they exemplify this other kind of understanding of language that most people have never even heard of, for the simple reason that it is not taught at schools. You can kind of come across it at the university level if you end up specializing in discourse analysis, literature or pragmatics, but even then you might not get it. You might be tempted to think the way just about everyone else does and therefore fail to understand this other way of understanding language, for the simple reason that the people teach these things often don’t themselves understand what they are teaching, as their teachers most likely didn’t understand what they were teaching.
So, what is so special about haiku then? Well, firstly, there’s the brevity. You have these three lines or, rather three phrases, with the first and the third line or phrase being short and the second line or phrase being also short, but slightly longer than the first and the third lines or phrases. One could explain all this in greater detail, to account for how that works in Japanese and then how that works in other languages, but that would amount to getting lost in the weeds and that not really what’s interesting about haiku. Secondly, there’s the idea that a haiku can encapsulate the entire world, as commented by Senda (133):
“Their central concept that the whole universe is contained in each thing of the natural world is none other than ‘holographic’ thought.”
To make more sense of what he means by holographic thought, it’s important to know how holography differs from photography or, rather, from what people typically understand as photography. Luckily, he (133) explains this:
“Holography is a photographic technique achieved by using laser beams instead of lenses. It utilizes the optical phenomenon in which one parts contains the whole, such that it can reproduce the image of the whole from even only one part of an object.”
To be clear, that’s not possible with what is typically understood as photography. You indeed need lasers instead of lenses for that. The idea here is that the Japanese way of viewing and understanding the world amounts to holographic landscape and haiku is such a good way of achieving that through language, as commented by him (133-134).
It might be difficult to grasp this holography of haiku. He (133) exemplifies this way of thinking by noting that we can take just about anything, like a tree, and look at its features, like how the branches bend, and by doing this we can understand not what a tree is, in general, but how a particular tree has become the way it is, having such bendy branches, like how the wind has bent them and, more broadly speaking, how the tree expresses a certain climate. In his (133) words:
“Hence the minute object of just one tree within the universe tells us of the universe itself as a whole. In this sense, we can regard the natural landscape of just one tree as a holographic phenomenon.”
Now, it’s also worth acknowledging that haiku tend to deal with nature or what’s considered nature, as opposed to what’s considered culture, albeit that’s not strictly speaking necessary. They usually address the seasons and, more specifically, the changing seasons, as noted by him (133). I’m no haiku poet, but, for example, it can deal with Autumn by addressing the falling leaves. Something as simple as that, just a few words, can indeed conjure an entire landscape. A haiku is motivated by the landscape, what lies in front of the poet, but it also works in the absence of that landscape. When you read it, the idea is that what it mentions, such as a tree and some falling leaves, are capable of conjuring an entire landscape, which then may or may not resemble the landscape that the poet sought to encapsulate. The resemblance does not matter. What matters is that the part or parts can indeed contain a whole in them.
Reading the article then made me think of … don’t Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari mention haiku in ‘A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’? I was correct. They indeed mention them in the book. They (261) state that:
“[T]he haiku, for example, must include indicators as so many floating lines constituting a complex individual.”
Note here how they are not saying that haiku consist of points, like these fixed entities, some given individuals that they seeks to capture, but rather lines that constitute the individual. This is exactly the point Senda (133) makes with the tree example. A tree is not a given, just there for us to encounter. It is indeed constituted by what else is there and how it all moves, like how moisture nourishes the tree and how wind bends its branches. Now, of course, this applies to everything, not just to some particular individual that is constituted in this way. All individuals are particular and constituted in this way. Haiku address just some of them due to their brevity, but what’s marvelous about them is that they work regardless of their brevity. That’s the point Senda (133) makes about their holography.
It is also worth noting that, in this context, individual and individuality is not to be understood the way they are typically understood, as somehow given, that one is an individual and that one just has this individuality about them. It is rather that one is individuated, through individuation, as noted by Deleuze and Guattari (261).
The terms are, however, far from ideal, simply because mentioning those words, individual and individuality, makes people think of them as they are typically understood, as something given. I’d say that it’s therefore apt to speak of something being singular or about singularity, as also done by them (261) to explain what they mean by individual and individuality. They also (261) explain this other way of conceiving them through the work of Duns Scotus, namely his ‘Ordinatio II’:
“There is a mode of individuation very different from that of a person, subject, thing, or substance. We reserve the name haecceity for it.”
What is haecceity then? Well, Duns Scotus draws is from Latin haec, what amounts to “‘this thing'”, as specified in the notes (540). It is therefore about thisness, which is contrasted with quiddity, which is about whatness, as Duns Scotus (d. 3, p. 1, q. 4, n. 76) explains this in ‘Ordinatio II’. The core idea here, as I understand it, is that quiddity or whatness accounts for, for example, what makes a tree a tree, like why we call it a tree and not a bush, like what is common about what we encounter so that we come to have these classifications, trees and bushes, and thus use it to recognize something as a tree and not as a bush. Haecceity or thisness accounts for how it is that we can have this tree and this other tree, which are both trees, but not the same tree. It indeed “designate[s] a very singular individuation”, as stated by Deleuze and Guattari (261).
It is, however, worth emphasizing that haecceity or singularity must not be thought of as being concerning with physical objects or human subjects. It is about them as well, yes, as stressed by Deleuze and Guattari (262), but not only about them, which is exactly the case with Senda’s (133) tree example. Deleuze and Guattari (261) elaborate this:
“A season, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date have a perfect individuality lacking nothing, even though this individuality is different from that of a thing or a subject.”
The idea here is that haecceities cannot be reduced to this or that object, nor to this or that subject. We can, of course, address the objects and the subjects this way, but not in isolation from other objects and subjects. We also need to think of the objects and subjects in a completely different way from what people are used to, as haecceities or affects, as they (261) go on to add:
“They are haecceities in the sense that they consist entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected.”
This dual capacity to affect and be affected is the very definition of affect that they (253-260) borrow from Baruch Spinoza’s ‘Ethics’. They (256) specify that each object and subject or, simply put, each physical body consists of other physical bodies and has this or that capacity to affect and be affected. The former they (256-257) refer to as longitude, which deals with the extensive parts and their relations, i.e., how they all come together to appear in this or that arrangement, and the latter they refer to as latitude, which deals with intensive parts, i.e., what capacity to affect and be affected those parts provide the body. They (260) summarize this:
“[A] body is defined only by a longitude and a latitude: in other words the sum total of the material elements belonging to it under given relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness (longitude); the sum total of the intensive affects it is capable of at a given power or degree of potential (latitude).”
So, to connect this to haecceities, they are those arrangements of extensive and intensive parts. This is why ephemeral elements, such as “rain, hail, wind, pestilential air, or air polluted by noxious particles” matter a great deal, as they (261) point out. There is always this spatial and temporal specificity to haecceities, even to humans as haecceities, as they (262) go on to add:
“You are longitude and latitude, a set of speeds and slownesses between unformed particles, a set of nonsubjectified affects. You have the individuality of a day, a season, a year, a life (regardless of its duration)—a climate, a wind, a fog, a swarm, a pack (regardless of its regularity).”
It is also important to reiterate an earlier point. The objects and subjects are not somehow separate from haecceities. They are not something that one adds to them, nor can separate from them, as they (262) go on to emphasize.
“It should not be thought that a haecceity consists simply of a decor or backdrop that situates subjects, or of appendages that hold things and people to the ground.”
Now, there is yet another term for singularities, haecceities and affects that Deleuze and Guattari use in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’. It’s assemblage, as they noted by them (262) in this context:
“It is the entire assemblage in its individuated aggregate that is a haecceity; it is this assemblage that is defined by a longitude and a latitude, by speeds and affects, independently of forms and subjects, which belong to another plane.”
This is not to say that we cannot think of the world in terms of objects and subjects, as recognized by them (262) here, in reference to another plane. It’s rather that the point is that this is just one way of thinking about the world, which only ever accounts for how the world is, as it is, but does not explain how that world comes to be the way it is.
We could also further specify that singularities in relation to multiplicities. To my understanding, the former specify the latter, so that we can indeed apprehended there being this, i.e., a haecceity or an individuation that is not reducible to objects and subjects. This way you don’t deal with ones, like an object or a subject, nor with multiples, like objects or subjects, but rather multiplicities that give rise to singularities, apprehended as this.
To conclude this, a haiku consists of only handful of words that do not describe anything, even if it may seem to be the case. Instead, a haiku is holographic, as explained by Senda in his article. It conjures conjure a landscape, if not an entire world or reality. What I like about the art is its simplicity. Anyone can do it, even though it is fair to say everyone is not equally good in this art. What I’m trying to say is that because it is so simple and short, it could easily be taught to people, incorporated as a vital part of their education. This would allow people to view and to understand the world differently, in terms of affects, haecceities and singularities, without them having to read Deleuze and Guattari, Duns Scotus or Spinoza.
References
- Cosgrove, D. E. (1985). Prospect, Perspective and the Evolution of the Landscape Idea. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 10 (1): 45–62.
- Cosgrove, D. E. ([1984] 1998). Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
- Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari ([1980] 1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
- Duns Scotus, J. (1994). Six Questions on Individuation from His Ordinatio, II. d. 3, part 1, qq. 1-6. In P. V. Spade (Ed. & Trans.), Five Texts on the Medieval Problem of Universals (pp. 57–113). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company.
- 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.
- Senda, M. (1992). Japan’s Traditional View of Nature and Interpretation of Landscape. GeoJournal, 26 (2): 129–134.
- Spinoza, B. ([1667] 1884). The Ethics. In B. Spinoza, The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza, Vol. II (R. H. M. Elwes, Trans.) (pp. 43–271). London, United Kingdom: George Bell and Sons.