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\u2019t have much to do with it, really, considering that no one sees the world as a landscape when they are born, and that it\u2019s the adults who teach them to see the world that way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, I wrote about what Kenneth Olwig wrote about the topic in \u2018Designs Upon Children\u2019s Special Places?\u2019. I didn\u2019t cover the other article, \u2018Childhood, Artistic Creation, and the Educated Sense of Place\u2019. I left it for this essay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In this article, he questions what it is to be a human being, because don\u2019t remain the same. He (4) does this by mentioning that saying \u2018childhood\u2019 is not accurate, because \u2018hood\u2019 gives the impression that that time of life is a state, like being<\/em>, instead of continuous change, like being in flux<\/em> or becoming<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As you might guess from the title of his article, he (4) deals with what he calls a sense of place<\/em> and likens it with art. He then contrasts this (4) with what Yi-Fu Tuan refers to as rootedness<\/em> in his article \u2018Rootedness vs sense of place\u2019, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He (4) connects the two by stating that children move from rootedness<\/em> to sense of place<\/em> as they grow. He (4) reckons that this also means that children do not differentiate or poorly differentiate between subjects<\/em>, objects<\/em> and signs<\/em>, whereas adults their difference and know what they are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But what does this have to do with landscape<\/em>? 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s not just that they can\u2019t see and then they can see. It\u2019s rather how what they see remains framed, like literally framed by the window. I don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cTheir environs become a \u2018landscape\u2019 which begins to make \u2018sense\u2019 as a locus of meaning.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n To weave in something from \u2018A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia\u2019, Gilles Deleuze and F\u00e9lix 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 \u2018Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is a reason for why children don\u2019t see the world that way. It\u2019s because they indeed fail to differentiate between subjects, objects and signs or, rather, they don\u2019t rely on such distinctions as we adults do. They operate in a different regime of signs<\/em> or semiotic system<\/em>, as Deleuze and Guattari would explain it. This is why Guattari (169) states in \u2018The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis\u2019 that:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIn fact, the machine of obligatory learning does not primarily have the goal of transmitting information, knowledge or a \u2018culture,\u2019 but of transforming the child’s semiotic coordinates from top to bottom.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Anyway, it won\u2019t 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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe 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 \u2018memories can grow.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019t serious or important. It\u2019s 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\u2019t do that. We also do this to other adults. In that case, it\u2019s, how to put it, almost like saying someone is a degenerate, because they haven\u2019t grown up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Olwig\u2019s (4-5) case he is challenging views presented by Jean Piaget in ‘The Child’s Conception of the World<\/em>‘. 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, \u2018There was a child\u2019, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To me, that\u2019s a very singular way of engaging with the world and why Deleuze and Guattari state (256) in \u2018A Thousand Plateaus\u2019 that \u201c[c]hildren are Spinozists.\u201d They (256) exemplify this with a famous psychoanalytic example known as \u2018Little Hans\u2019:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhen Little Hans talks about a \u2018peepee-maker,\u2019 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n The point they are making is that children only care about how things are drawn together and how that, all that, functions<\/em>, as they (256) go on to add:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cDoes a girl have a peepee-maker? The boy says yes, and not by analogy \u2026 It is obvious that girls have a peepee-maker because they effectively pee: a machinic functioning rather than an organic function.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s also not that male and female bodies aren\u2019t different, no, that\u2019s not the point here. It\u2019s rather that, for the child, a peepee-maker is simply anything that makes peepee and, certainly, both kind of bodies do make pee. It\u2019s a bit more complex than that, sure, as the peepee isn\u2019t made in what appears to be the peepee-maker, but that\u2019s not the point here. Anyway, they (256) continue:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cQuite 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).\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s exactly why \u201c[c]hildren are Spinozists\u201d as they (256) state. That\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u2018The Machinic Unconscious\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As a Spinozist myself, I can confirm, that\u2019s how it is. I\u2019d say it\u2019s still way more difficult as an adult than it was a child, not because it\u2019s 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\u2019t either. That\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Being a Spinozist makes your life way, way better, that\u2019s for sure. That said, it\u2019s not easy to be a Spinozist, just as it isn\u2019t easy to be Deleuzo-Guattarian. It\u2019s a lonely life, that\u2019s for sure. There aren\u2019t like a ton of others out there who are like that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Deleuze and Guattari aren\u2019t done with explaining Spinozism. They (256) add to that:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cDoes a locomotive have a peepee-maker? Yes, in yet another machinic assemblage.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019t matter that it doesn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What about other inanimate objects then? Well, they (256) have got this covered as well:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cChairs 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n So, as you can see, this type of semiotics also make sense. It\u2019s just different kind of sense. Not all objects then have peepee-makers. Only some make peepee. They (256) further clarify this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt has been noted that for children an organ has \u2018a thousand vicissitudes,\u2019 that it is \u2018difficult to localize, difficult to identify, it is in turn a bone, an engine, excrement, the baby, a hand, daddy’s heart…\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Why? Well, they do provide an answer, but before that they (256) mention that:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThis is not at all because the organ is experienced as a part-object.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n 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 \u2018Anti-Oedipus\u2019. Firstly, is an object that is composed of other objects. This is the simple way of thinking of it. It\u2019s not wrong, as such, but calling it \u2018part\u2019 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\u2019d 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 \u2018A Thousand Plateau\u2019s, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s clear then, eh? Anyway, moving on, they (256) provide an answer to their own question in \u2018A Thousand Plateaus\u2019:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Now that you know the two ways of understanding a part object<\/em>, or more accurately then, what is a partial object<\/em>, 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\u2019s how the bodies come together the way they do. This is what they mean when they refer to machinic assemblages of desire<\/em> in that book, even though often just refer to them as assemblages, thus possibly ignoring the collective assemblages of enunciation<\/em> in the mix, as they (256) appear to do here:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThis 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n They (256) then add to this that this is neatly exemplified by how children are in the habit of asking the adults these \u2018how is \u2026 made\u2019 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\u2019t, because it doesn\u2019t. 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\u2019s the change, flux<\/em> or becoming<\/em> that Olwig (4) mentions early on in his article.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What is Spinozism then? Well, it\u2019s 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\u2019t call myself Kantian, albeit, surely, in some ways I am, but not because I\u2019ve chosen not to call myself that, nor because I\u2019ve chosen not to associate myself with some society that specializes in Kantian philosophy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Their answer to that question is a bit shorter. It is the \u201cbecoming-child of the philosopher.\u201d Yes, I agree. That\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What Olwig (5) is talking about in reference to the Whitman poem is what Deleuze and Guattari (408) also refer to as a haecceity<\/em> or a singularity<\/em>. In their (263) view, something like \u201c[t]aking a walk is a haecceity\u201d. Why? How? Well, because, as a Spinozist will tell you, you can\u2019t 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<\/em> and the latitudes<\/em>. This also means that the bodies are in flux, merely metastable, subject to change, as they (262) also point out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If that didn\u2019t work for you, well luckily they do cover this quite a bit. To give you more examples, they (263) add to this that:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cClimate, 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! \u2018The thin dog is running in the road, this dog is the road,\u2019 cries Virginia Woolf.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n At a glance, it may seem like they\u2019ve lost it, that they\u2019ve gone mad, but that\u2019s not the case. To connect that, all that, to the previous example. Taking a walk can be all that. It\u2019s not just you, you walking, nor where you are, what else is there. It\u2019s that, but to pun a bit here, it\u2019s partially<\/em> that. It\u2019s how it all comes together, there and then. It\u2019s how it all works. That\u2019s why they (263) add:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThat is how we need to feel. Spatiotemporal relations, determinations, are not predicates of the thing but dimensions of multiplicities.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n To unpack that, note how they are stating that those relations or determinations, of those bodies, are not predicates. What are predicates<\/em>? It\u2019s not explained in this context, but you\u2019ll find Deleuze explaining this in Stoic terms in \u2018The Logic of Sense\u2019. He (21) states that:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe attribute is the proposition is the predicate\u2014a qualitative predicate like green, for example. It is attributed to the subject of the proposition.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, something like green, the color green, is not the greatest of examples here, at least not in English, because it\u2019s typically not used as a verb, which is what he (21) moves to state:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cBut the attribute of the thing is the verb: to green, for example, or rather the event expressed by this verb.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Ah, see, but we don\u2019t use the word like this. We don\u2019t say the \u2018the tree greens\u2019 but rather \u2018the tree is green\u2019. In Finnish, you can do both, saying that \u2018puu vihert\u00e4\u00e4\u2019 or that \u2018puu on vihre\u00e4\u2019. Finnish conveys this way better, in a way that people don\u2019t 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\u2019s just \u2018vihert\u00e4\u00e4\u2019, which is then the same as \u2018to green\u2019 or \u2018greening\u2019, and still works. A more example would be raining, which is fine as a word in English, but you are expected to say \u2018it is raining\u2019 or \u2018it\u2019s raining\u2019, there being that it, that subject, that rains, but in Finnish it\u2019s just \u2018sataa\u2019, which is \u2018to rain\u2019 or \u2018raining\u2019 and it would be conserved strange to say that something rains. Okay, passable, but strange.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Anyway, he (21) clarifies this further, making sure that you don\u2019t mistake one for the other:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cConversely, 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s why. His answer, in this book, is that you have the subject<\/em>, which is the thing, typically a noun or a pronoun, and then the predicate<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To be absolutely clear, he (21) distinguishes between the color \u2018green\u2019, which is a noun, and \u2018to green\u2019, which is a verb in its infinite form. Firstly:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201c\u2018Green\u2019 designates a quality, a mixture of things, a mixture of tree and air where chlorophyll coexists with all the parts of the leaf.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n So, here we are saying that \u2018green\u2019 is this thing that is, itself, a composite thing that we refer to as \u2018green\u2019. Secondly:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201c\u2018To green,\u2019 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n This may puzzle you. Keep in mind that he is explaining how language works in relation to the world. When I say that \u2018the tree is green\u2019, I am saying that the tree is green. I am the one attributing it through language. Outside language, none of this matters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019t mean that language does not matter, nor that other forms of expression do not matter. They do, but that\u2019s not the point they are making. This is rather about the subjects<\/em> and objects<\/em>, which they replace with desiring machines in \u2018Anti-Oedipus\u2019 and machinic assemblages of desire in \u2018A Thousand Plateaus\u2019, while signs, including linguistic signs, are dealt with in terms of collective assemblages of enunciation<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now the rest of Olwig\u2019s 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\u2019t interesting, but rather that it\u2019s not what I wanted to cover in this essay. Maybe another time. We\u2019ll see.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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\u2019t have much to do with it, really, considering that no one sees the world as a landscape when they are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3554,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[71,123,1676,279,1674,18,1675],"class_list":["post-5623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays","tag-deleuze","tag-guattari","tag-hansen","tag-olwig","tag-piaget","tag-tuan","tag-whitman"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogit.utu.fi\/landd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogit.utu.fi\/landd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogit.utu.fi\/landd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogit.utu.fi\/landd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3554"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogit.utu.fi\/landd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5623"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogit.utu.fi\/landd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5623\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5754,"href":"https:\/\/blogit.utu.fi\/landd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5623\/revisions\/5754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogit.utu.fi\/landd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogit.utu.fi\/landd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogit.utu.fi\/landd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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