Categories
Essays

I am the best!

Sometimes change can make a change. Anyway, so, for a change, I’ll address a novel written by Laurent Binet. I happened to read his novel titled ‘La septième fonction du langage’. My copy is the Finnish translation by Lotta Toivanen, titled ‘Kuka murhasi Roland Barthesin?’ (Who murdered Roland Barthes?). The English translation, also published in […]

Categories
Essays

Back in the day everything was better

My previous essay includes bits from Hannu Linkola’s article titled ‘Administration, Landscape and Authorized Heritage Discourse – Contextualising the Nationally Valuable Landscape Areas of Finland’. It refers to a report by the Finnish Ministry of Environment titled ‘Maisemanhoito. Maisema-aluetyöryhmän mietintö I’, translating to ‘Landscape management. Report I of the working group on landscape areas’, as […]

Categories
Essays

Oh, it’s tense!

It was already in my first post in this blog that I pointed out that I started broadening my horizons on all things landscape by picking up the concisely titled ‘Landscape’ by John Wylie. After that I have ventured into various articles that I happen to have found particularly insightful, as well as covered various […]

Categories
Essays

Ineeda, uneeda, weallneeda

In this essay I’ll be taking a look at an article first published in ‘Landscape’. The article is not particularly long, only nine pages, as republished in ‘Figuring the Word: Essays on Books, Writing and Visual Poetics’. The article in question is Johanna Drucker’s plainly titled ‘Language in the Landscape’. In this essay I’ll be […]

Categories
Essays

What’s missing?

The second part of my previous essay did not venture into things, rather remaining on a more general level of discussion. I’ll see to this in this essay, covering Bruno Latour’s somewhat provocatively titled text ‘Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts’. It was first published in ‘Shaping Technology/Building Society: […]

Categories
Essays

What’s playing who?

In this essay I’ll be covering something similar to what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari elaborate in ‘A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’. The focus still very much on things, or rather, objects, as discussed by Michel Serres and Bruno Latour. Anyway, I’ll start by examining quasi-objects, as defined by Michel Serres in ‘The Parasite’. […]

Categories
Essays

Things matter

This essay may seem a bit, well, unrelated to my own research, but I think it’s highly important when it comes to understanding why I focus on things instead of people. I mean studying language in the absence of people may seem odd and I hope that this in part clarifies the rationale to it. […]

Categories
Essays

Monsters and monster slayers

I couldn’t even remember who it was that stated it, despite at times loosely using it to get the message across, but yes, it was indeed Friedrich Nietzsche who (69) states in ‘Beyond Good and Evil’ that: “Whoever fights with monsters should see to it that he does not become one himself. And when you […]

Categories
Essays

Back in the day the world was different

What is landscape? I’ve covered this quite a bit already, going through a number of articles which address what it is and what it does, but I haven’t really delved into its origins. So in this essay I’ll do just that. Now, the thing with landscape is that it’s an ordinary word and you’ll find […]

Categories
Essays

Some change could make a change

I’ve been writing long essays on Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. It has been quite the effort in thinking and even more so putting it all into words in a way that would help me and others understand what landscape is and what it does. I could just rely on what others […]