The Changing Meaning of Landscape

 

Difficulties with landscape

The subject of this conference, “landscapes,” evokes pleasant associations.   Landscapes bring to mind the earliest modern use of the term, in the seventeenth century, that applied ‘landscape’ to “a picture representing natural inland scenery.”  Only later was the word ‘landscape’ applied to actual scenery.[1]  Both meanings of landscape remain in common use and have their application to a genre of painting and a tradition of nature appreciation. 

At the same time, this meaning of landscape excludes from consideration much of our present, actual experience of nature.  Because its meaning is honorific, landscape has no place for scenes of natural devastation:  earthquakes, forest fires, flooded city streets,  and tornadoes.  Nor does landscape easily embrace most of the scenes of human life.  While the picturesque allows us to include bucolic settings of rural cottages, flocks of sheep, and perhaps even charming village scenes, there is no place for the daily habitation of most of the world’s population in cities and their peripheral suburbs and slums.  It has been necessary to devise new terms, and expressions such as ‘cityscape’ or ‘urban landscape’ have come  into use.

Just as landscape restricts the objects of appreciation to attractive natural scenes, it is also limited in another, more profound sense.  For not only does the idea of landscape objectify nature; it turns nature into a visual object, into something to be viewed from a single point.  None of the rich sensory scope of nature appreciation is thus allowed:  the delight in the dank, musty smell of a woodland or the soft verdurous scent of a meadow.  A visual landscape has no place for the tactile appeal of the textures of bark and foliage, for the kinesthetic enjoyment of moving along a country road or pursuing a path through a wood.   Vision is blind to the songs of birds and rustle of wildlife in the underbrush, to the taste of berries and cold spring water.  These rich dimensions are forsaken when landscape enjoyment is reduced to a visual direction. 

In recognizing that the experience of environment is far broader and more varied than the idea of landscape can accommodate, and to include the diversity and range of the appreciative experience of nature, the concept of landscape has had to be stretched in many directions:  from an object to an area, from a visual experience to a multi-sensory one, from natural scenery to the whole range of human-made transformations of nature.  This expansion of the idea of landscape is further complicated by the fact that landscapes are never stationary but are constantly in transition.  Some changes are predictable.  There are the complex, superimposed cyclical patterns that result from planetary motion, such as the diurnal cycle of light and darkness and the succession of seasons.  To these we must add the biological cycles that all living things follow, from inception through growth to inevitable decline and death.  Besides these regular, predictable changes, catastrophic changes irregularly intrude on those patterns in the form of both natural disasters and human-caused environmental calamities.

Indeed, landscapes are ever-changing, but their usual representations are unable to depict this and only occasionally succeed in evoking their transitoriness in moments rich with impending change.   Transformed from a static array to a dynamic process, landscape is indeed a transient state of affairs and a concept that identifies a transitional process.  Burdened with all these limitations, it may be necessary to liberate our thinking from the constraints of the concept of landscape.  Perhaps it would be best to consign the idea of landscape to its historical purview and look for other ways to aid us in understanding human experience in nature.

Landscape, then, is limited by its history and common associations to scenic views emulating painting, and to visual arrays that are either selected in natural surroundings or designed by architects to mirror their pleasing configurations.   It is an idea that, in the light of living experience, must itself be reformed.

Re-thinking landscape

What idea would best express the wider uses and meanings of landscape?  What would allow us to include the varied material conditions in which people live as well as see, together with the fact of change that is part of a living landscape?  Is there some concept that can help us transform our idea of landscape from a visual object to a setting as part of which humans are actively engaged?  For we must acknowledge not only that landscapes do not stand apart from human activity but that every landscape is a human artifact.   Whether framed by a camera, cultivated as farmland, conserved as a nature reserve, or preserved as so-called wilderness, every landscape is identified and chosen by humans, and embodies and displays the effects of human action. 

A promising successor to the idea of landscape is “environment.”  This concept does not tend to constrict our experience to the natural world, as does landscape.  It does not limit that experience to visual perception alone but readily engages all the sensory receptors.   Environment also admits the world of human construction more readily:  the city, the highway, the farm, the suburb, the industrial “park,” and the shopping mall, so that we speak easily of the urban environment, and we even extend the natural environment to include the atmosphere.[2]   Moreover, when we replace landscape by environment, we are no longer confined to visuality.  Environment is not an object but is connected with a human presence.

There is a danger, however, in replacing landscape with environment, for environment also carries baggage that is false to experience.  It, too, can be objectified, so that we easily refer to the environment, as if environment were an object, a thing apart and isolable.  The science of ecology, however, has made us realize the fact that environments are systemic, that they are living systems in which all the physical and organic constituents function in a complex reciprocal interrelationship.  We should, therefore, speak of “environment” rather than “the environment.”  Insofar as humans are concerned, we are a functioning part of every environmental system.  So environment is never “out there;” it is always “here.” 

The concept of environment is, then, broader than that of landscape.   It is fuller by including more conditions, built as well as natural.  It is fuller by engaging all our sensory modalities, not just the visual.  And it is fuller by relinquishing any claims to objectivity and recognizing the continuity of human presence and participation.  Most important of all, it is fuller because it enables us to recognize that every environment embodies a wide range of values in relation to human uses.   For landscape as environment is not neutral but embraces a complex mix of values.  The normative significance of environment is profound.[3]

Negative aesthetics

Like landscape, the extended meaning of environment includes its beauties, and among the aesthetic values of environment, beauty is what we most readily associate with nature.[4]  It is, I suspect, the source of much of our fascination with natural landscapes and it is the motivation of much nature poetry and nature writing.  Beauty, together with its relative, the sublime, is a motive and a reward for our free activities in nature:  hiking, camping, gardening, sightseeing.  And an encounter with the sublime may be the principal reason for the search for ultimate experiences in nature, such as mountaineering, extended voyages in small boats, lengthy treks in wilderness areas, and voluntary encounters with extreme environmental conditions. 

But making this elaborate case for an ecological conception of environment just to acknowledge its beauty could easily be accused of belaboring the obvious.  That has not been its purpose, however.  Once we understand how the human presence imports values into the landscape, environment becomes rich with normative significance, for it is suffused with a full range of values in relation to human activities.  Recognizing this is significant because it not only extends the scope of appreciation but it allows us to recognize and judge the scope and variety of environmental values.[5]

There is a tendency to romanticize our encounter with nature, and to think of nature as landscape tempts us easily into the error of thinking of it as always positive.[6]  We have seen how considering nature as landscape leads to objectifying nature, seeing it as separate and apart from humans, and confining it to pleasing visual experience.  It is tempting to externalize nature as the “outside world” and romanticize it, regarding scenic nature as valuable largely because it is one of our rare encounters with purity:  the delicacy of a simple flower, the nobility of the panoramic view from a great height, the immediate delight in the glint of sunlight on the foliage.  These have a directly emotional appeal and we value those experiences.   On such occasions a profound intimacy develops, an almost mystical bond.  Such experiences may be among the deepest sources of human connectedness, not only with nature but also with one another.  Schiller wrote compellingly of this, calling the aesthetic condition a whole that is self-sufficient.  But he went further in considering the aesthetic to be the ground of morality. [7]  Finding the basis of morality in the aesthetic can be related to Schiller’s claim that the experience of beauty instills a social character in humans by establishing harmony in individuals and from thence into society.[8]

Yet the rich experience of beauty in environment tends to blind us to other values more characteristic of everyday human situations.  In fact, the human influence is pervasive:  one can argue that “nature untouched by man” is a romantic myth.   The fact is that the human hand has left its mark everywhere, from the polar icecaps to the ocean depths, and the experience of environment is not always positive.  One of the most powerful motives behind the global environmental movement comes from recognizing the abuse and degradation that characterize environmental practices.  Such negative values involve not only the ethical criticism of wasteful and destructive practices and their widespread harmful effects on the planet but they include the fact that such practices also offend our sensibility; that is, they have aesthetic as well as moral consequences.   Indeed, the literature of environmental ethics often acknowledges an aesthetic underpinning of ethical values.[9]

For aesthetics, both etymologically and conceptually, concerns perceptual experience, and this suggests thinking of the aesthetic as developed sensibility.[10]  All environmental experience is, ipso facto, perceptual, and positive occasions of beauty occupy but a portion of such experience.  We find frequent offenses to our aesthetic sensibility not only in the abuses of nature from narrow-minded, heedless, exploitative construction and industrialization but also in  abuses in the built environments of our urban centers.  To be sure, most cities contain oases of natural beauty, such as parks and preserves, but they are often surrounded by an urban desert.   Recognizing this has led to an increasing effort to landscape highways and install trees on city streets.  Residents, too, often plant gardens and arrange flower boxes and pots around their dwellings in an effort to ameliorate their immediate environment.

But these only emphasize by contrast the pervasive aesthetic disagreeableness of much urban experience.  Consider the offense to sensibility in the aesthetic intrusion of the noise produced by motor vehicles, machinery, public loudspeakers, and now inescapable cell phone conversations.  Then there is what we might call aesthetic pain from the noxious fumes emitted by motor vehicles that combine with emissions from coal and oil furnaces and toxic industrial effluents.  We suffer aesthetic distortion not only from drugs that are endemic in modern life but from sensory filters like smog and colored lenses that affect color perception and from electronic sounds and the strident colors of signage.  Moreover, most city dwellers, except for the privileged, suffer aesthetic deprivation from inadequate exposure to natural light and to the sun, from the cramped spaces of housing and of many public places, from conditioned and re-used air, and other forms of sensory impoverishment.  To this list of aesthetic affronts we must add the aesthetic (i.e. sensory) depravity  from the environment we ingest in addictive foods with high sugar and fat content, from sensory excess of alcohol, sex, or drugs, and in a perceptual consciousness  infiltrated by hard porn and vulgar amusements.

Indeed, our full sensibility is affected by these and other such conditions, for we perceive sensorially not through discrete and separate channels but rather synaesthetically in perceptual wholes.  In addition to the customary list of senses that include sight, hearing, smell, tactility, and taste, there are modes of organic sensibility.  We have a kinesthetic sense that involves muscular awareness, and we experience skeletal or joint sensation through which we perceive position and an awareness of solidity through the degrees of resistance of surfaces. 

Moreover, our bodies possess a vestibular system located in the labyrinth of the inner ear through which we are aware of body movement and balance in climbing and descending, turning and twisting, encountering obstructions and moving freely.  In addition to our sense receptors, our vestibular system imparts a somatic sensitivity to mass and height.  The built environment may also challenge this domain of sensibility, for decisions involving architectural design, urban planning, and traffic circulation often ignore the human body in favor of mechanical efficiency and narrow utilitarian considerations of economy and convenience in design and execution.   As a consequence, most cities trap their inhabitants in a scale of mass and space that is overpowering and that oppresses and diminishes the human body.  Skyscrapers are a monument to engineering technology; like giant tombstones, they loom above a population they have buried.  Heavy vehicular traffic acts as a moving barrier to free walking, and speeding vehicles appear out of nowhere to cut down the unwary pedestrian.  And even the proximity of thick crowds of human traffic is an invasion of one’s intimate space.  Disturbances of scale in relation to the human body and its activities are endemic in urban experience.

It is, of course, true that an increasing awareness of the inimical character of the modern city has stimulated important efforts to ameliorate the most egregious offenses.  Pedestrian malls and streets are becoming increasingly common (although vehicles still insidiously manage to penetrate them).  Some cities have passed noise ordinances and pollution control regulations.   Many cities whose history has provided them with the gift of pre-industrial, historic districts have endeavored to preserve their character.  And some far-sighted cities like Paris and Helsinki like Paris and Helsinki have established height limitations in their central districts.   For all the ocularity of modern Western culture, we have been blind to visual oppression in the strident signage of commercial districts. 

Aesthetic sensibility thus covers a wide range.  I do not mean to denigrate the city for, from its earliest history, urban life has been the center of the arts, of education, of culture, of civilization itself.  But I mourn its abuses and its failures all the more from an awareness of its possibilities.  Of course, cities are not the only site of negative environmental aesthetic experience.  There is an even longer history of the abuse of nature.  Degraded and denuded mountains have long been a casualty of human misuse, and examples can be found throughout the world, from ancient Greece and Italy to the present-day Philippines and the Large Menderes Basin in Turkey.  Deforestation is especially intense in tropical regions across the globe and has become a major environmental issue today in the rapid deforestation of the Amazon basin in Brazil.

The negative sublime

There is another domain of the aesthetic whose negative form must also be recognized:  the sublime.  In traditional thinking, the sublime signifies a powerful and elevating experience of nature that, from its very forcefulness, exceeds our ability to comprehend it rationally.  We encounter the sublime tremblingly and with fear yet without actually being endangered.  The classic accounts of Burke and Kant associate the feeling of the sublime with such things as the breathtaking view from a mountaintop, the magnitude of the starry sky, and the power of a raging storm viewed in safety from a protected coast. [11]  Kant drew a helpful distinction between the mathematical and the dynamical sublime.  In the first, the magnitude of the absolutely great is a measure that imagination cannot wholly encompass,^[12] whereas the second, the dynamical sublime, involves the fear for our safety that we feel in response to the enormous power of nature.^[13]

The sublime is an intriguing notion and continues to fascinate scholars, but it has a negative dimension that has not generally been recognized.  The sublime is valuable for identifying not only the overwhelming experience of awe among the towering peaks of a mountain range, but also the overwhelming feeling of oppression amidst the towering skyscrapers of the modern city.  Indeed, on such occasions one finds the very features associated with the sublime:  awe, fear evoked by irresistible power or massiveness without actually being in immediate danger.  Unhappily, however, the negative sublime occurs as well in modern nature suffering under the human hand.  Familiar examples appear in industrial failures:  the oil slick from a grounded tanker or an uncapped oil well covering an area whose extent can hardly be encompassed by a satellite photo,[14] surface mining operations that create endless expanses of slimy devastation,[15]  and mountaintop removal.  The unimaginable has become fact.

Like the starry sky for Kant, what we can see is but a fragment of a whole that the power of the imagination cannot encompass.  Kant thought that reason or the understanding could accommodate the sublime in a rational judgment, such as the idea of infinity.[16]  Without Kant’s rationalistic and religious reassurances, we may try to give the negative sublime the guise of rationality by transforming the overwhelming power or the wide, indeterminate extent of the devastation into the pseudo-rationality of a numerical calculation, a mega-number.  But it is necessary to question the possibility of conceptualizing the negative sublime using a visual or mathematical methodology for, In these human-made disasters in nature, even a satellite photo is but a small representation of its extent, both below the surface of the water and in the larger ecosystem.  And its effects must be multiplied endlessly as they ripple outward both in space and in time.  A photograph is but a synecdoche of an inconceivable and unimaginable whole.  For such reasons, one can say that the negative sublime exceeds both imagination and reason.

The idea of the sublime is intriguing because it identifies a limitation of our capacity to encompass nature by rational thought.  As human actions continue to radiate in every direction, the idea of the sublime, originally elaborated in the eighteenth century, has reappeared to help explain experiences in the world of our time.   The late twentieth-century French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard applied the concept of the sublime to assist in understanding the modern and post-modern worlds.  The modern aesthetic of the sublime, he held, “present(s) the fact that the unpresentable exists.”  It makes present something that can be conceived and yet cannot be made visible.[17]  The modern sublime, he claims, presents the unpresentable in the identity of consciousness (Proust) and in the very writing itself (Joyce), as the missing contents, while retaining the solace of a recognizable form in the genre of the novel.[18]  

The sublime, then, cannot be fully presented but is rather a feeling evoked by something we can experience, a presentation of the unpresentable.  In this respect Lyotard seems to be in accord with Kant.[19]   For Kant, as well, the sublime presents the unimaginable, but while imagination cannot comprehend the enormity of its magnitude, reason can claim absolute totality.  The fact that we are capable, through reason, of thinking infinity as a whole “indicates a faculty of the mind which surpasses every standard of sense.”[20]  But when Lyotard describes the postmodern sublime, he differs sharply from thinking of it as rationally determinable.  The postmodern sublime, Lyotard holds, conveys a stronger sense of the unpresentable:  what makes it different is its inconclusiveness.   The work does not conform to any rule but rather has the character of an event. [21]

Characterizing the sublime as the presentation of the unpresentable makes it adaptable to a negative aesthetics.[22]   And although Lyotard’s reference is to the arts, his concept of the sublime can easily be applied more generally to the contemporary world overall.  The feeling of a negative sublime is evoked by our awareness of the unpresentable in the colossal extent of recent environmental disasters.  Like Kant’s mathematical sublime, the environmental damage of a major oil spillage to wildlife, to the ecosystem itself, is incalculable quantitatively in the lives affected or extinguished and is incalculable qualitatively in the disruption of the complex balance of the ecosystem. 

But there are occasions when the negative sublime is difficult to approach perceptually because the consequences are so indeterminately extensive in time as well as in space as to be unimaginable.  The awesome possibilities of a nuclear disaster have only been anticipated by the events at Chernobyl and in Japan.  The consequences of a nuclear war for the human environment exceed our comprehension even more.   The effects of the melting of the polar ice caps are not only climatological but astronomical.  Indeed, the scale of the consequences of global warming is unimaginable.  The power of such occasions suggests Kant’s dynamical sublime.  

As in Lyotard’s postmodern sublime, where the unpresentable cannot be referenced by a form, the negative sublime cannot provide the intellectual comfort of a totality, even in the idea of infinity.[23]   What Lyotard claims for art applies, a fortiori, to the modern world, where we cannot conceive the unpresentable in the events and situations we have identified.  Burke had thought that what distinguishes the sublime is the overpowering feeling of terror.[24]  The negative sublime denotes a condition for which terror may be the only appropriate response.[25]  We have seen how the negative sublime can be applied not only to natural disasters but to cataclysmic environmental catastrophes that result from human actions and practices.   Moreover, Kant’s distinction between magnitude and power cannot easily be retained, for the disasters that result from human misuse render such a distinction pointless.  Both overwhelming magnitude and incalculable power are inconceivable, although the fear may, so to speak, become tangible.  Lyotard’s formulation may be more germane.  The postmodern sublime, he holds, makes “the unpresentable perceptible.”[26]  That is what the industrial images of Edward Burtynsky do.[27]  That is what the photographic reports of the nuclear disaster in Japan do.  That is what the symptomatic metaphors of poetry can do. 

But it is when the unpresentable cannot even be made perceptible that the negative sublime comes fully into its own.  Perhaps only the mediating metaphors of literature are capable of evoking in indirect perception the negative dynamical sublime we experience in the insidiously imperceptible power of the modern state, of the global corporation, and of mass social movements.   To make such invisible power present, to present the imperceptible, as in the blind brutality of mass movements, the metaphorical resources of literature may be the most effective means (Kafka). 

Conclusion

I began by acknowledging the uplifting beauty in the romantic conception of landscape.  That picture has darkened radically over the course of this discussion.  However, I do not want to end on an entirely dissonant note.  For hidden in this cacaphony is a purer sound that is mostly drowned out by the surrounding blare.  It is possible, though not likely, that reason and humane judgment may prevail over our barbaric condition, and that they will re-direct the powers exemplified by the negative sublime toward a world in which human energy will serve human hope, and where avariciousness and force will be consigned to the slag heap of the meanest human motives.  In their place will arise a positive aesthetics out of the mutual concern and material abundance of which the human world is capable.                      

 

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