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Light it up!

Before I carry on to cover discourse, formations, diagrams and abstract machines as discussed by Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, I’ll address something even more, I’m not fond of the word but whatever, fundamental. In his ‘Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel’, Foucault (110-111) writes of light: “[T]here is a sovereign white […]

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Essays

Wow, that’s acidic!

My previous post, or rather essay, got sidetracked quite a bit, yet it touched on the issue I wanted to cover, more or less, even though my intention was not to examine passports. Somehow I managed to be unaware of the new expanded edition of ‘Landscape and Englishness’ by David Matless that came out in […]

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Getting carded

In his book simply titled ‘Landscape’ John Wylie (117) characterizes understanding of landscape as discussed by David Matless concisely not as a matter of property, but propriety, more specifically “as a matter of conduct and forms of ‘proper’ bodily display and performance.” It is not that the ownership of land and its connection to landscape […]

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Space: the primal frontier

The topic has been set on representation recently and I already once alluded to someone whose work I should comment on. That someone is Henri Lefebvre, whose understanding of space will be elaborated this time. In his ‘La production de l’espace’, he argues for understanding space as socially produced. Condensing the some 450 pages here […]

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Why am I impressed?

Denis Cosgrove provides us some of the finest reading (no pun intended) on landscapes. One should take a look at his work on landscape and representation, namely his major works: the ‘Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape’ and ‘The Palladian Landscape’. By no means is his work limited to the said works, but those are the […]

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More of that fine French vintage please

Maurice Ronai covers various aspects of landscape in his plainly titled article ‘Paysages’. He addresses landscape through ‘géoscopie’ (126-133), ‘géographie’ (133-139), ‘géosémie’ (139-153) and ‘géophilie’ (153-159). Ronai also discusses space, a related concept, and what is understood as the objective reality is referred to as the real or real space. The first part on ‘géoscopie’ […]