ANGELAKI

journal of the theoretical humanities volume 9 number 2 august 2004

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

i territory: nostalgia, technocracy, and beyond

There is a continuing nostalgia for a pure or unspoiled nature, the sort of sentiment that fueled the popularity of Claude Lorrains paintings and the enthusiasm for the picturesque English landscape garden. This now seems an overly sentimental approach to many, despite the persistence of the cult of the natural in

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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sentimentalism, holds that nature is essentially a social construction, not an absolute given, and points to the specic historical factors that lead to transformations in taste such as the revolutionary change in the status of mountains in the eighteenth century; at rst they were taken to be signs of the painful and dangerous postlapsarian world and then they became sublime markers of an exalted natural sensibility.3 If the rst approach veers toward the naive and sentimental, the second risks complicity with the industrial framing and transformation of the earth: after all, if we take the earth to be nothing but our social construction, we may nd ourselves applauding the wholesale reshaping of the planet as a great conscious exercise of our freedom. Martin Heidegger offered a chilling vision of what such a world would be in his conception of a totally technological world-view, where everything is seen simply as a resource for the framing and shaping efforts of technology itself. But should we be seeking an alternative, less intrusive world-view? Heidegger argued that the very notion of a world-view or image of the world (Weltbild), the idea of a comprehensive perspective on things, is a specic product of the modern, Cartesian world. His suggestions about how we might see beyond the limits of our technological world seem mired in nostalgia; at best they are inspired by Holderlins poetry, which harks back to a vanished German landscape, and at worst they are complicit with the mythologizing geopolitics of people and soil that fueled Nazi ideology. This is not to say that we should avoid the quest to nd philosophical bearings in our attempt to make sense of our changing relations to land, and the explicit and implicit conceptions that we bring to these relations. So we might begin by seeking suggestions from thinkers who have been centrally concerned with concepts of earth and territory. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have made the experiment of understanding human history, including its art and philosophy, in terms of a complex process of territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization. They have articulated the theme of geophilosophy as a red thread running through the history of thought. Theirs is a naturalism and materialism that is not reductive, but is informed by Spinoza, Marx, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Freud. The title of their magnum opus, A Thousand Plateaus, indicates their indebtedness to geological and geographical thought and their desire to think in a way that is both thoroughly immanent and pluralistic, and the human interaction with the earth is a central theme of that books predecessor, Anti-Oedipus. While Deleuze and Guattari creatively extend their concepts to include more than geographical territories in a narrow sense, these concepts do have an especially compelling relation to what it means to live on and think with the earth. On their view, human beings have tendencies both to nd and invent meanings within concrete earthly territories (whether in settled or nomadic modes) and also to free themselves from these territories by political organization, religion, and philosophy. Thinking, they say, takes place in the relationship of territory and the earth and the artist is the rst person to set out a boundary stone, or to make a mark.4 I offer a minimal and schematic summary and translation. We (and all living things) territorialize by staking out a space, a place: we settle down, we cultivate a eld, we mark the borders of our situation, whether it is the lines that the Australian aborigines trace with their song lines, or the homeless persons little stretch of sidewalk or space under the bridge. But the living being frees itself from the immediate connes of its environment, even by developing organs like hands and feet that allow greater exibility with regard to its surroundings. The use of tools, or, more specically, the formation of assemblages involving implements and organisms, leads to more options. At the extreme, human deterritorialization consists in a movement by which actual, physical space becomes subsumed within some structure requiring a more conceptual denition. A political state, an empire, now declares that a certain assemblage of people, land, and resources has a unied structure and meaning. In their account of the origin of the state, Deleuze and Guattari see it as a primordial upsurge of such a deterritorializing structure, rather than the result of a gradual evolution. The state, as Hobbes was perhaps the rst to recog-

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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

ii landscapes, vernacular and otherwise

Perhaps these categories can be made more accessible by mapping them onto some concepts of recent human geography. Distinctions made by the geographer John Brinckerhoff Jackson can be articulated in terms of Deleuzian categories. Jacksons late collection of essays, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, begins by recalling the complex history of the language we employ to discuss our surroundings. A landscape once meant a picture or painting of a view; then it came to mean the view itself. Intervening in this process is the entire set of practices, aesthetic sensibility, and theory which went into the formation of the genre of the English landscape garden (which I trace below). It was, to put it briey, an aesthetic construction of the earth in the age of the world-view (keeping in mind the reservation that the aesthetic itself is a product of this age).5 As a view, a portion of land which the eye can comprehend at a glance, landscape is susceptible of being idealized in such a way that we occlude the real connections of land with human activity. Jackson proposes a new

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Landscape Two is heavily structured by concepts of ownership and political power. Here, land is not merely inhabited and used, but is seen as an ingredient of a world in which places are distributed in a meaningful fashion; property is owned and land comes under the dominion of identiable powers. It is put on display. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Europeans developed the two great competing forms of the French and English gardens; the former exhibited the land as the seigniorial domain of the king or his representatives, while the latter was said to embody the liberty of the individual (typically aristocratic) landowner. But each put land on display as part of a political theater, and in this context the dispute between the two forms of the garden may seem rather parochial. This combination of display and political order is an indication of Deleuzian deterritorialization. To objectify the earth (or other materials), to make it subject to ownership and political authority, is to deterritorialize it, and the generic name for the organization or apparatus that does this is the state. A Thousand Plateaus observes that
since Paleolithic and Neolithic times, the State has been deterritorializing to the extent that it makes the earth an object of its higher unity, a forced aggregate of coexistence, instead of the free play of territories among themselves and with the lineages.10

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).

iii archaeology of the garden

In Deleuze and Guattaris chapter on Geophilosophy they suggest that there are distinctively different national and historical traditions of managing a groups relation to the land and to thought. Philosophy itself is a deterritorializing activity, always seeking the creation of universal concepts. Yet philosophy takes place in specic contexts and circumstances; it is carried on by actual thinkers within particular ethnic and national traditions, in specic languages, and in determinate geopolitical settings. Spinoza may be the prince of philosophers, and his great work, the Ethics, written in Latin, appears not only to speak of an innite God but somehow to mime divine thought. Yet it is also possible to place Spinoza in the context of early

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modern republicanism and capitalism; he is the heir of a Marrano tradition in which secret Jews were forced to reinvent private (and generally rationalistic) versions of their religion. And he wrote in several languages, including the vernacular Dutch, as a citizen of a cosmopolitan trading nation and the son of an active man of business.17 It is not a coincidence that Spinoza articulates his vision of human power at a time when the Dutch are creating a new landscape, as in the complex of architecture, land, sea, and canals that is seventeenth-century Amsterdam. Because of this relationship to territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization, philosophy typically takes on a local or national form, despite its universalist claims; these forms help to constitute the specic aesthetics of nature within various traditions. In their chapter on Geophilosophy, they suggest a typology of three main forms of national thought. The French build; they are like landowners living off the cogito. The Germans are obsessively committed to the project of laying foundations (think of Kants rather involuted gure of philosophy as architectonic). The English inhabit, meaning that they pragmatically and sometimes recklessly adopt whatever shows promise of working. Consider some cases. The French cogito receives a classic formulation in Descartes, who explicitly develops the architectonic metaphor in his Discourse on Method; it is expressed in other terms in Bergson, who begins his Creative Evolution by appealing to our internal sense of constant change and temps duree, and in Sartre, who denies the cogito as substance in order to emphasize its freedom and its power of innite negativity, and who goes on to chart its reemergence with variations in the neo-Marxist narrative of the Critique of Dialectical Reason. In building on the cogito they produce systems, whether to accommodate the new physics, evolutionary biology, existential solitude, or the demands of a humanistic Marxism. The French are always laying out a great park which, like Versailles or Hausmanns Paris, is structured by central axes referring back to a sovereign principle, a political center which is analogous to the sovereignty of consciousness. The Germans lay foundations for thought, wanting to assure themselves of a denite ground, one that will not collapse or be stolen by others. Kants variation on the architectonic trope involves the coordination of various dimensions of surveying, so that no aspect of the project will be neglected. The emphasis is not on the specic character of the grand estates that will be laid out on the basis of this critical examination of the faculties that must lie at the foundation of science, morality, and judgment, but on the necessity of shoring up the foundations themselves. Once they are in place, others can do the actual building. Husserl radicalized this activity. Declaring himself a perpetual beginner, he never rested content with any of his efforts at articulating the Grundprinzipien of phenomenology, always looking for an unplumbed, unexamined assumption that could be brought to light. He allowed his students to ll in some of the possible sites that he explored with regional phenomenologies of space or the emotions, but his own efforts were always at digging deeper. Heidegger brings this more or less unconscious thought of excavation and exhumation to light with his talk of getting back to the ground of metaphysics, or of seeing the fundamental connection of building, dwelling, and thinking; his repetitions of Holderlins po etic interrogations of the German earth, his analysis of the primordial opening of world and closure of earth in the Greek temple or van Goghs notorious painting of two shoes (speculatively attributed to the world of the peasant woman) suggest that he has literalized and fetishized the metaphor he had unearthed, digging himself deeper into the ditch of his predecessors. The Germans sometimes borrowed the forms of their gardens and parks from the Italian Renaissance, Versailles, or English landscape architecture; however, they have also seemed obsessively concerned with securing and justifying their territory, often through the quest for mythic origins in the soil. From this perspective modern aesthetics, the only aesthetics there is, can be seen to be driven by a deterritorializing impulse, one that is evident in its approach to gardens and other forms of art that work with the earth. This deterritorialization or idealization leads rst to a narrowly

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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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governed by a clearly identiable center (the monarch, the palace, the cogito), each has a bounded sphere of action within which its power is unlimited (the French state, the grounds of the garden, the human will).20 In contrast, the English garden is the form taken by land art in the age of man and his doubles.21 It abandons pretensions to mirror cosmic order or to instantiate total sovereignty, just as the philosophy of nitude, whether in Kant, Marx, or the early Heidegger, gives up the aspirations of classical metaphysics to provide a rational discursive account of being. As the analytic of nitude devotes itself, in its many forms, to tracing out those conditions of action and knowledge that are both the limits and foundations of the human subject, so the new form of the garden accepts the nitude of the viewer and stroller. The visitor can never achieve an all-encompassing perspective on the garden, but is constantly being invited to discover horizons previously hidden. The theorists of the picturesque, like William Gilpin, Uvedale Price, and Richard Payne Knight, theorize the effective diagram of the English garden as a structure of intricacy, complexity, and diversity at the same time that their contemporary Bentham is elaborating the diagram of the Panopticon as an instrument of total surveillance, including selfsurveillance.22 If the Panopticon is the hypertrophic form of the sovereign gaze, the concretizing of Platonic vision and the inversion of the spectacle of the cave, with the spotlight now turned on the prisoners, the English garden, designed for those who regarded themselves as very much at liberty, is the theater of the glance, the passing, perspectival, and partial look. The English garden surrounds itself with a hidden frame, a ditch or earthwork known as a haha (the term derived from military fortications), invisible from within the garden, but which functions so as to exclude unwanted intruders, animal or human. The effect of the haha is that from any point within the garden it appears to be continuous with the surrounding landscape, thus helping to produce, as Joseph Addison said, an Image of Liberty, where the Eye has Room to range abroad, to expatiate at large on the Immensity of its Views.23 This frame frames by concealing itself. It frames the territory by producing the illusion that there is no frame. The aesthetic idea, archetype of the English landscape garden, is constituted in an essential way by a ditch designed to keep out varmints and straying cows. Derrida has explored the problematic status of the frame or parergon in the Critique of Judgment. In section 14 of the Critique, Kant is at pains to distinguish what is absolutely essential to a work of visual art, its design, from everything adventitious, such as charms or ornaments, and it is when he mentions ornaments that he adds, parenthetically, parerga. The frame is said to be external to the work, and yet, if it adds to the works form and intensies our tasteful response, it seems to be part of the work. The English garden then exhibits an uncanniness that parallels the strange gure of man, described by Foucault as an enslaved sovereign, observed spectator.24 It requires boundaries and limits and yet also must create the impression that it is continuous with the world. The English garden oscillates between a deterritorializing pictorial framing, as in Kants optical reductionism or in the image of the Claude glass, and an active reterritorialization that aspires to break down the boundaries between the world and the park. In his essay on Man and his Doubles Foucault offers an archaeological account of how the analytic of nitude wavers between a series of alternatives in its attempt to construe that peculiar creature, man, as the one who comes to knowledge through grasping his own limits.25 Let us take the modern garden, as its theorists urge, as a philosophical organon, a way of coming to terms with the human entanglement in a nature that it does and does not transcend, because it is the site in which nature and art work out the terms of their agon and their harmony; then we might expect to see the doubles played out in the garden (nature/art) and its discourses as well as in epistemological thought from Kant to Merleau-Ponty. Nature is the counterpart of nite man, that which completes and renews him, but which also ineluctably reminds him of an alterity that he cannot subsume within a totalizing structure of meaning. So, on the one hand, the contemplation of natural

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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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ing, avenues, line and perspective, fountains, and grottoes, it is impossible to imagine anything of this sort that would be more complete. He contrasts the weak, modern, English taste for crooked paths, hermitages, Chinoiserie, straw huts, ruined castles, gothic chapels, and so on with the great, synoptic, symmetrical division of spaces with determinate character of the Italian garden.29 Burckhardt also acknowledges, as is reected in Nietzsches citation, that the effect of the Italian garden is enhanced by the sight of free nature mountains and sea coast, for example beyond its bounds. Nietzsche adopts Burckhardts critique of the English garden as an egregious instance of modern sentimentality, where sentimentality is understood to be the determined project of blurring the boundaries of nature and art. Is there, then, a postmodern aesthetics of land and environmental art, a geoaesthetics that might accompany a Deleuzian geophilosophy? I have suggested elsewhere that the very notion of postmodernism is contradictory, if it is taken to designate a historical or stylistic epoch; for what the most rigorous thought that has been called postmodern (usually not by its practitioners) opposes in modernism is precisely the latters obsession with seeing the history of art in terms of a meaningful succession or progression of periods and styles. So we might better call this form of thinking postperiodization, to adopt an explicitly unwieldy and paradoxical expression.30 I take it that Foucault, Deleuze, and many recent environmental artists are drawn to archaeological, geological, or meteorological models of history and thought for just such reasons. There are many varieties of land art or earthworks with rather different programs and afliations. They range from the relatively ephemeral photographed paths of Richard Long and the re and ice events of Andy Goldsworthy to the heavy alterations and earth moving involved in the earthworks of Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, and others. Here I take Smithson, designer of the Spiral Jetty which extends fteen hundred feet into Utahs Salt Lake, as exemplary; he worked simultaneously in and outside the museum, as a writer, an earth-mover, and a lm-maker. That multi-sided activity testies to his determination to avoid what he saw as the deceptions of the English garden tradition. When he did come to appreciate some offshoots of that tradition (as in the work of Frederick Law Olmsted, co-designer of New Yorks Central Park and designer of many others), it was an appreciation of what he called the dialectical landscape that opened itself up to time, natural process, and continuing interaction with the human environment.31 Smithsons works in the multiple forms of artifacts like the Spiral Jetty, the writings that explore art in geological and cosmic context, and the lm which deterritorializes the Jetty exemplify what land art might become when it is informed by concepts of geology, writing, difference, and no longer insists on a sharp distinction between ne and industrial arts, interior and exterior of the museum, or earth and language. The gardens of history, Smithson says, are being replaced by the sites of time.32 At the least, this says that the forms of the garden as we know them, even in their diversity, are tied too closely to history as intelligible narrative, and this is so, indeed especially so, when the gardens purport to stand outside of time, providing access to an eternal nature; so this is the case in the Christian story of creation, sin, and salvation that begins with the Garden of Eden, in the humanist garden that situates the scholar in his contemplative space as the heir of past learning, or in the picturesque garden that allows the gentleman landowner to demonstrate his taste in an articial pastoral utopia. More than this, Smithson announces the possibility of a form of working with the earth that does not set itself in opposition to time, but welcomes it. It will be an art that acknowledges entropy, rather than seeking the eternity of the museum (mausoleum). So the Spiral Jetty, at rst rising just a few feet out of the reddish water of the Great Salt Lake, and taking its color from the same red algae, sank below the surface as the water level changed, only to emerge in whitened form because of changed conditions in the water. More than manifesting the irreversibility of time, these sites will show times work, revealing the strata and folds of the geological record. The Spiral Jetty occupies a place which, con-

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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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Nambikwaras paths through the Amazon jungle, the Celtic monoliths, or the hexagrams and mandalas of the Chinese and the Hindus. The sites of time, which Smithson sees as displacing the gardens of history, evoke the possibility of a new people and a new earth; they do this not in the form of a model for urban and rural land use but by insistently restating Nietzsches question: what shall be the direction (Sinn) of the earth? These earthworks are embodied questions, questions inscribed in and on the earth.
impose order on the disorder resulting from the barbarian invasion that had destroyed Rome was decentralized even by the standards of similar regimes elsewhere (59). 9 Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape 152. 10 A Thousand Plateaus 45354. 11 Ibid. 12 Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape 13. I have added the alternative of subjects; Jackson, focusing on the example of the USA (and perhaps other Western countries) is thinking of nondespotic, relatively democratic forms, but the conceptual apparatus of A Thousand Plateaus comprehends a much more diverse range of deterritorialized states. 13 Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape 149. 14 Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape 154. 15 Michel Foucault, Different Spaces in Essential Works of Foucault, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1998) 2: 17585. 16 Van Creveld, The Rise and Decline of the State 336421. 17 See Steven Nadler, Spinoza: A Life (New York: Cambridge UP, 1999). 18 See Gary Shapiro, Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003) 293317. 19 Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Polyphilii, trans. Jocelyn Godwin (New York: Thames, 1999); Liane Lefaivre, Leon Battista Albertis Hypnerotomachia Polyphilii (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1997). The authorship of the book is in doubt; Lefaivres study has important suggestions for an embodied, earthly reading of this esoteric and inuential text. 20 See Alan Weiss, Mirrors of Innity: The French Formal Garden and Seventeenth Century Metaphysics (New York: Princeton Architectural P, 1995). 21 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random, 1970) 303 43. 22 For selections from major texts dealing with

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