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Gardener and garden. Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless words directed at us, conclusions grow up in us like fungus: one morning they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and gray. Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him! Nietzsche, Daybreak
e can recognize the difculties involved in two rather extreme attitudes toward environmental aesthetics, namely sentimentalism and technocracy. I describe these two positions briey, introduce concepts of territory and landscape by drawing on Deleuze and Guattari and American landscape theory, and conclude by sketching some exemplary moments in the human project of making aesthetic sense of nature through designed environments or landscape architecture: gardens, for short. Aesthetic sense is always entwined with political sense, as in Nietzsches phrase der Sinn der Erde.1 Sinn should be taken as direction, as well as meaning. It is Nietzsches raising of that question, I would like to think, that leads Deleuze and Guattari to call him the inventor of geophilosophy. Geophilosophy and geoaesthetics aim at new people, new earth.
gary shapiro
TERRITORY, LANDSCAPE, GARDEN toward geoaesthetics
national parks, nature preserves, and their associated practices of tourism, photography and the like. A book like Paul Shepards 1967 Man in the Landscape: A Historic View of the Esthetics of Nature provides a moving and intelligent picture of human artistic and aesthetic response to the land, based on an evolutionary account of human nature; Shepard begins, for example, by analyzing how the development of the human eye is attuned to a certain kind of wooded, shadowy environment.2 Valuable as such a study is for suggesting concrete links between our embodied selves and certain kinds of surroundings and their artistic modications or representations it comes dangerously close to the sentimental or nostalgic idealization of the picturesque. An opposing response, suspicious of
ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/04/02010313 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd and the Editors of Angelaki DOI: 10.1080/0969725042000272771
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nize, becomes a corporation, an abstract entity no longer identical with a geographical area or any of its specic inhabitants (sovereignty is not identical with the person of the sovereign; the American presidency is not identical with Washington, Lincoln, or the current occupant of the ofce). When under attack, in the event marked by the battle of Salamis, ancient Athens conceived of itself in deterritorialized fashion by thinking of the polis as a mobile political structure not tied to a xed place. Think of reterritorialization as a back to the land movement, the reclaiming of a territory that had previously been absorbed by a deterritorialized entity, as when Americans identify their political institution with its geographical expanse (America the beautiful). Although Deleuze and Guattari do not limit the use of these concepts to their literal applications to what we ordinarily call earth and land, this is surely one of their primary applications, and I follow it here. denition of landscape: a composition of manmade or man-modied spaces to serve as infrastructure or background for our collective existence.6 Note that composition corresponds roughly to Deleuzes assemblage and that Jackson studiously refrains from reducing landscape to either a natural given or a conscious human experience. With this alteration of the conventional usage in mind, Jackson distinguishes three different forms of landscape, labeled simply Landscapes One, Two, and Three. Landscape One is exemplied by the eclectic territory of the early medieval European world; it is characterized by relatively pragmatic and immediate efforts to turn land and resources to use and enable community work and survival. This landscape is characterized by an unending patient adjustment to circumstances; as devoid of visible signs of political history [it] is a landscape without memory or forethought.7 This approximates what Deleuze and Guattari call territorialization, in which human beings occupy a territory, and make it their own in a relatively simple sort of inhabitation. (In using these Deleuzian categories, we must not understand such territorialization as being a rst, primary, or innocent attachment to the land. The people who dwell in this way are, of course, already deterritorializing animals: they speak and use tools, for example.) These peasants and villagers drift to a particular place, put down roots, and do the best they can. This landscape is not laid out, bounded, or ideologically constructed in terms of the domination of the state, which plays a very weak role in the European hinterlands at this time.8 Jacksons Landscape Two is the ground of the most familiar use of the word, although not identical with it:
Its spaces, rural and urban, are clearly and permanently dened and made visible by walls and hedges or zones of open greenery or lawn. They are designed to be self-contained and shapely and beautiful. Landscape Two sets great store on visibility; that is why we have that seventeenth-century denition of landscape as a vista or view of scenery of the land landscape as a work of art, as a kind of supergarden.9
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Of course the state is also called territorial insofar as it asserts its authority over a given area; but the point of describing it as engaged in deterritorialization is to show that it subordinates this space to a higher meaning. Deterritorialization, then, is an idealizing process, and capitalism carries this even further when it takes as its object not the earth, but materialized labor, the commodity.11 All of this leads to the paradox that the hegemonic modern notion of the natural, whose images emerge in seventeenth-century landscape painting and eighteenth-century landscape architecture, is itself a creation of the state. Or, to put it in a Foucauldian way, man and nature, the building blocks of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thought, presumed to be prior to the state (as in
the Hobbesian and Lockean state of nature), are already state-oriented concepts, part of a power/knowledge system. The state, in other words, devises its own other, effectively excluding any exteriority that would challenge its domination. Jacksons analysis of what he elsewhere calls political landscape chimes with Landscape Two and with Deleuzian deterritorialization, when he emphasizes the high importance for this mode of dening the territory, marking boundaries, and forming a community of citizens or subjects.12 It will be important to articulate the ways in which such paradigmatic gardens as the French and English styles of these centuries are complicit with the states function of deterritorialization. If this is obviously the case in Versailles it is also true, in a more complex way, of the British parks and gardens which were meant to exemplify liberty in opposition to absolutism. For this was, after all, the liberty of landowners who presided over territories newly enclosed by acts of the state. Another name for Landscape One in Jacksons terminology is the vernacular landscape, where the vernacular suggests the native and the naive (he traces the word to the Latin verna, a freed slave).13 Landscape Three can be thought of as a reassertion of the vernacular landscape in a context that has already been shaped by the deterritorializing impulses of Landscape Two. The focus of Jacksons examples is on a fairly recent stretch of American history. He is thinking of such things as the proliferation of spaces and the uses of spaces that had no counterpart in the traditional landscape: parking lots, landing elds, shopping centers, trailer courts, highrise condominiums, wildlife shelters, Disneyland.14 He describes the principle of Landscape Three as people follow plumbing; communities tend to spring up wherever elementary public services are available. Here there is reterritorialization. These landscapes may occupy space marked by the boundaries of the deterritorialized political landscapes, but they tend to ignore, overow, and confound them. As in Landscape One the emphasis is on a pragmatic use and inhabitation, but now it takes charge of a place on the background of prior deterritorializations. The mobility and exibility of some of Jack-
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sons illustrations of Landscape Three are related to what Deleuze and Guattari analyze as nomadism. This original aspect of their thought constitutes an attempt to understand a form of being-in-the-world that is not primitive or prior to the state but lived in antagonism to it; nomadism and the state are coeval. Nomadic space is distinguished from the space of the state. The state (as in Jacksons Landscape Two) xes boundaries and organizes its territory for the sake of administration; it produces a heavily marked and striated space. The nomads have a proclivity for smooth spaces, unmarked and open to movement. Historically these are the desert and the steppe in the rst instance; but the more recent exurban spaces of sprawl that Jackson describes can also be construed as nomad spaces. As Jacksons analysis of Landscape Two suggests, and Deleuze and Guattaris account of the state form demonstrates, thinking about the earth has been dominated by urban ideologies. The consequences of this tendency have scarcely been comprehended, because so much of modern thought relies on an unexamined concept of the natural, a concept that is surreptitiously indebted to its contrast terms, such as culture and state. Could it be that the recent proliferation of the many forms of Jacksons Landscape Three is related to a corresponding decline of the state? If hegemonic visibility is the typical aesthetic mode of the state, as suggested in Foucaults analysis of the Panopticon form, then the decline of the state would plausibly be marked by the emergence of different spaces: idiosyncratic encampments, tourist bubbles, transitional spaces, and uctuating territorial occupation by squatters, guerillas, mercenaries, terrorists, and narcotrafckers.15 These and similar phenomena could be seen as the disruption of the striated space of the state by archipelagoes of smooth space, regions which are implicitly or explicitly in conict with centralizing authority. Martin van Creveld argues that the state has gone into decline since its apogee in the great international wars of 191445, as it has lost some of its military raison detre.16 Nuclear weapons have rendered major international conict unthinkable, and the defeats of the USA in Vietnam and of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan (a defeat contributing to its subsequent dissolution) demonstrate the limits of state military power against local resistance. States have backed away from providing the panoply of social services and the safety net that they had been promising and often delivering since the time of Bismarck. Deleuze and Guattari might respond that the state is not disappearing (or withering away as Marxism once had it) but that the illusion of its hegemony once enjoyed by people of a certain class in relatively wealthy parts of the world has been shattered by a series of dramatic events, ones that have shown that the war machine is not only separable from the state apparatus but implicitly opposed to it. A simple decline of the state may be averted when it reasserts itself as an enemy of a generalized terrorism. This leads to heightened reterritorialization of the homeland and its borders. The contrast between this geographical imaginary and the caves and warlord territories of Afghanistan may have been too great for the homeland media to sustain, which leads to a displacement onto the more familiar space of war within what appear to be nationally dened boundaries in Iraq (an appearance threatened by the tensions of Shia, Sunnis, and Kurds, still living in the residue of Ottoman territory).
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optical and pictorial construction of landscape and earth art, and then to the effective exclusion of these forms from art altogether. Modern aesthetics is only a relatively brief episode or minor fold in the larger history of thoughts dealing with the earth. Other strata in this geological accumulation of gardens, earthworks, markings, inscriptions, and environmental art can be discerned by means of the notion of the diagram as introduced by Foucault and developed by Deleuze. Foucault thinks of Benthams Panopticon as embodying a diagram of visibility: the diagram is not simply a graphic design or blueprint, but a mobile arrangement of forces, the counterpart in the visible of Nietzsches description of language as a mobile army of metaphors and metonymies. In contrast with the ultravisibility and individuation of the Panoptical diagram, Foucault describes the practice of modern painting in his lectures on Manet. Where Bentham had sought to open up a series of windows revealing each inhabitant of a total institution (prison, factory, or school), what Manet did was in effect to close the shutters of the window. He reversed the classical convention according to which a painting is a window on the world and instead devised ways for the canvas to insist on its atness and opacity, by eliminating depth and emphasizing strong horizontal and vertical lines that reinforced the rectangularity of the frame. The diagram of his painting taught us to look at the window, not through it, closing the shutters of the Panopticon.18 Can we generalize this conception of the diagram in order to make some sense of the various forms of land art? Let me offer a sketch of how to think of the landscape garden and some of its predecessors and successors. I will follow the pattern of four cognitive regimes that Foucault describes in Les Mots et les choses, hoping that this will be a relatively familiar framework. As diagrammatic experiments, the typical forms of landscape architecture should be seen not simply as reections of already formed philosophical or ideological positions but as ways of thinking with the earth, or, we might say, letting the earth think through us, as Merleau-Ponty quoted Ce zanne as saying that by painting he allowed the landscape to think through him. I will give extended attention to the informal English garden which ourished in the eighteenth century, since it still offers a deceptively natural model of both natural beauty and human landscape. The great Italian gardens of the Renaissance are governed by a diagram that proposes a correspondence, through analogy and similitude, of the microcosm and the macrocosm. The garden is constructed as a microcosmic image of the cosmos. It is not thought of as opening onto a free and unregulated nature but as exhibiting in miniature the structure and contents of a universal order. The prevailing ideals are plenitude and perfection, reinforced by astrological and mythological symbolism that employed such features as fountains, sculptures, and symbolic scenes from Ovid. It offers itself as a place of contemplation, its humanistic theorists drawing on the classical discourse of otium, arguing that a place of retreat will make possible an intellectual intuition of order. Unlike the medieval cloister, however, the main direction of attention is horizontal rather than vertical, toward the plane of immanence rather than worship of a transcendent god. It stakes out a territory that offers an image or mirror of universal order. Examples of such gardens are the Villa dEste in Tivoli and the Villa Lante in Bagnaia; the classic text is the polyglot and esoteric Hypnerotomachia Polyphilii, which offers a symbolic vision of an imaginary, complex garden, and an allegory of the achievement of cosmic understanding through its exploration.19 The classical garden, as we know it from the work of Andre LeNotre at Versailles and Vaux le Vicomte, is not intended as a mirror of nature or a place of contemplation. It is a demonstration of sovereign power, of the ability to shape, structure, and master human and natural forces, clearly subordinating them to a central plan. Its territorialization is carried out by means of an emphatically rigorous and symmetrical design, so that the will of designer and sovereign is everywhere evident. The plan is geometrical; its articulation requires exquisite cartographical skills and its execution draws on the developing science of engineering. There is a harmony of style in the French monarchy, the gardens of Versailles, and Cartesian philosophy. Each is
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beauty is the exercise of reective judgment, the awareness, most acute perhaps in the case of the Kantian sublime, that we are the judging agents, that it is our powers called into play by the beauties of the meadow or the raging seas. This is the cogito of the admirer of nature and of its mediation through art. Yet not only is there something mysterious in the phenomena, their elusive purposiveness without purpose, but there is also something unthought in the hidden ground of the harmony of our faculties that aesthetic judgment exhibits. At the same time, in considering the garden and its cousins, we can focus either on its many aspects, the items that go to make it up, how it is put together as a work of landscape architecture, or on its deep meaning, the sense that it promises of answering our questions about our ultimate relation to nature. And here we nd a parallel to what Foucault describes as the duality of the empirical and the transcendental. Finally, the analytic of nitude is caught in a movement that Foucault calls the return and retreat of the origin. Modern thought seeks an absolute beginning, an origin deeper than all supercial histories, the origin as conceived and approached by such questers as Holderlin and Nietzsche. But the further we go in casting aside dead traditions, the more we realize how elusive and perhaps imaginary that origin must be. The garden, as in myth, purports to be, to evoke, or to provide a trace of the origin, of a site where the human was in its proper place, a measure to be employed to assess our present condition. In this quest the English garden develops a rapid succession of styles; it works through a phase in which classical allusions, texts, and buildings attempt to evoke the idyllic world of pastoral poetry (some eighteenth-century gardens were explicitly modeled on the Aeneid and Georgics of Virgil, poems that were thought of as providing accounts of the origin of society and the golden age in the human relationship with the land); this is followed by a more streamlined form (the style of Improvement, for example, of Capability Brown) in which a smoother topography is introduced without the explicit cultural baggage of Stowe or Stourhead, which seems now to be unnatural; and the simplicities of this last style provoke a reaction in the extreme gardens of the picturesque and the sublime, as in the two competing gardens of the major late theorists of the movement, Price and Knight, which evince a contempt for Browns simplicities and also dispense with the classical allusions. But in this frenzied succession of styles, and in the controversy about the picturesque, the origin fails to appear. There is a suspicious contrast between the harmony and equilibrium sought in the authentic, proper form of the garden, and the agitated character of the search. As Robert Smithson says, the certainty of the absolute garden will never be regained.26 It is something like this aesthetics of nitude that provoked Nietzsche to react against the English taste in gardens as an exemplary modern taste, despite his love for the very painter, Claude Lorraine, whom the English took as their model. In his notebooks of 1880 and 1881, leading up to the rst inscription of the thought of eternal recurrence, Nietzsche continues to make notes on the meaning of landscape and gardens. Recall that the rst appearance of that thought itself has a topographic location in Sils-Maria: Six thousand feet above sea level and much higher beyond all human things.27 In the fall of 1880, Nietzsche is once again dipping into one of his most beloved books, Jakob Burckhardts Cicerone, and he makes this notation:
the taste of the English art of gardening to imitate free nature with its accidents J.B. is the entire modern taste. Such men wish to be poets: while it is another aim which those men have who make the laws of art productive [dienstbar]. NB I must wean myself away from elegiac sentimentality for nature. The contrast of free nature, which shines into the Italian garden from outside J.B. Fundamental condition of the impression. Such men of style work best within a half wild environment.28
The passage in Burckhardt that Nietzsche cites and comments on is a celebration of the Italian garden as developed in the seventeenth century, in which he claims that with its great mastery of space and its control of the intricacies of plant-
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trary to what some might imagine, has a complex history. Ten months before Smithson began construction of the Spiral Jetty there was a highly publicized centennial observance of the laying of the Golden Spike, an event of great importance in 1869, because it marked the completion of the rst transcontinental rail link in the USA. The Golden Spike monument is just seventeen miles from the Jetty, the closest outpost of civilization. Since then the railroad track has been moved. At or near the point where the USA congratulated itself upon its achieving a complete network of communication in a young nation, observing its restored unity after the Civil War, Smithsons work marks the necessity of entropy and death in a country that was being torn apart once more and which seemed to be on the verge of being strangled by its own technology. Smithson and some other recent land artists contribute to demystifying the problematic combination of environmental devastation and the fetishism of a constructed nature not recognized as such. Smithsons dialectic of site and non-site questions the frame of the museum. It should be understood as a form of thinking that works between the territory and the earth by opening up zones of indeterminacy. If philosophy involves geophilosophy, and aesthetics is geoaesthetics, then Smithson may have been working out an American aesthetics, one parallel to the American literature that Deleuze sees (as in Melville, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Burroughs) as opening up lines of ight and movement. He says of these writers: in them everything is departure, becoming, passage, leap, daemon, relationship with the outside. They create a new Earth; but perhaps the movement of the earth is deterritorialization itself.33 Smithson, a writer of the earth, comes out of that world, but he also knows that the West has been closed, and that the new frontier of space makes the earth into a more nite site than it once was. The Spiral Jetty names in the rst instance a construction of fteen hundred linear feet of rock in a desolate section of the Great Salt Lake, reachable only by dirt road, sometimes above water level and sometimes submerged. It also names a lm that Smithson made that puts the making of the Jetty into a context of natural and geological history and attempts to evoke the explosive power of the sun and the landscape. And it is the title of an essay by the artist that treats both the work and the lm, and that, among other things, situates both with reference to exemplary artists like Jackson Pollock, James Joyce, Constantin Brancusi, and Nicolas Poussin. Such distinctions of work, lm, and text are problematic, however, because Smithson was concerned to contest the binaries of work and text or earth and word. Within the lm itself he literalizes a quotation from a geology text that likens the history of the earth to a book that has been ripped up and fragmented
the earths history seems at times like a story recorded in a book each page of which is torn into small pieces. Many of the pages and some of the pieces of each page are missing
And as we hear this, we see the leaves of a book uttering to the ground, littering the surface of a cracked and ssured mud at. The earth is the ruin of a lost book. The notion of the earth as a ruin is not new; in the early seventeenth century, Thomas Burnet, in his Sacred History of the Earth, a book admired by Newton, attempted to demonstrate that the planet was such a ruin, the product of oods and convulsions that conformed both to the stories of Genesis and the laws of physics. Until the landscape revolution of the eighteenth century, mountains were regarded as marks of the ruin into which the earth had fallen as a result of the great ood. What Smithson adds to this venerable thought is the idea that the ruin is also that of a text, a language that has been stratied and folded. This is a gesture similar to Derridas, who speaks of a general writing, or to Deleuze and Guattaris, who invite us to think of a geology of ethics and of a general process of marking and remarking the earth. We might add that the history of thought and the history of what we call aesthetics are also fragmentary and ruined collections of texts; thought itself includes, as Derrida and Deleuze join in reminding us, those markings and tracings of the earth, that gurative language that is available to us now only in the form of mute monuments and topographical interventions, whether those of the
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notes
1 Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, eds. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980) 4: 14. 2 Paul Shepard, Man in the Landscape: A Historic View of the Aesthetics of Nature [1967] (College Station: Texas A&M P, 1991). 3 For a classic account of this shift in taste, see Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Innite (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1959). 4 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia UP, 1994) 85; A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987) 316. 5 See, for example, Paul Oskar Kristeller, The Modern System of the Arts in Renaissance Thought and the Arts (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1950); and, more recently, Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001). 6 John Brinckerhoff Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven: Yale UP, 1984) 3, 8. 7 Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape 15152. 8 See Martin van Creveld, The Rise and Decline of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), who points out that the Western European feudal system that followed the collapse of the Carolingian empire itself a short-lived attempt to
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the English garden, see John Dixon Hunt and Peter Willis (eds.), The Genius of the Place (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1988). 23 Joseph Addison, The Pleasures of the Imagination, The Spectator no. 412 (Monday 23 June 1712) in Joseph Addison, Essays in Criticism and Literary Theory, ed. John Loftis (Northbrook, IL: AHM, 1975) 412. 24 Foucault, The Order of Things 312. 25 Foucault, The Order of Things 30343. 26 Robert Smithson, The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: U of California P, 1996) 113. 27 Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe 9: 494. 28 Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe 9: 25556. 29 Jacob Burckhardt, Der Cicerone (Stuttgart: Alfred Kroner, 1964) 37980. 30 Gary Shapiro, Earthwards: Robert Smithson and Art after Babel (Berkeley: U of California P, 1995) 2158. 31 Smithson, The Collected Writings, Fredrick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape 15771. 32 Smithson, The Collected Writings 105. 33 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Columbia UP, 2002) 3637.
Gary Shapiro Department of Philosophy University of Richmond Richmond, VA 23173 USA E-mail: gshapiro@richmond.edu