“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Monday, May 2, 2011

Zero Landscape: Unfolding Active Agencies of Landscape


GAM 07 is out and it looks incredibly beautiful. The subtitle is ‘“Unfolding Active Agencies of Landscape.” My essay “Zero Landscapes in the Time of Hyperobjects” is in there. Thanks to Klaus Loenhart, Ingrid Boeck and the other marvelous editors.

3 comments:

Brian Davis said...

thanks for this link. looks great.

regarding your "landscape is a painting" critique, check out this essay by geographer JB Jackson. That definition of landscape is impoverished.

Timothy Morton said...

I know that essay. I'm far less sanguine that a new and improved definition of landscape will change the basic problem.

Brian Davis said...

perhaps- it is certainly a problematic and ambiguous word.

nonetheless, saying "it's a painting" seems to me neither true nor useful. It's grabbing a common usage at a particular moment in time (which has passed- which isn't to say it's completely irrelevant), decontextualizing it, and using it for rhetorical purposes. 50 years ago the notion that an ecology could exist in an urban area would have seemed an anachronistic and absurd definition.

i'd be interested to know if you think "landscapes" exist (in the way that buildings do, not in the way that objects do)?

I'm not sure that they do, rather I suspect that it might best be defined as a phenomenon (always contingent and ephemeral), resulting from the combination of specific human and non-human practices (surveying, hammering, deposition, cultivating, walking, etc). And the human/non-human dichotomy also seems fundamental to landscape (as it does for a building, or an ipad).