THE LOOP OF THE LANDSCAPE

by FRANCO FARINELLI

Exactly the same may be said today of the landscape as just a century ago might have been said –
according to Spoken in the Void by Adolf Loos - and indeed might still be said about the city: we have
no idea of the quantity of poisons that publications concertedly pour over the topic in order to cloud any
gaining of awareness. There’s no point naming names: it would only be distracting and make us lose
sight of the real issue at hand. On the contrary: the absence of terms actually means an absence of
limits. In other words, the landscape is a boundless issue; its existence poses the question of how a
whole may be at the same time visible yet boundless and hence immeasurable, and for this reason
entails a difficulty without any easy solution: the issue of totality. Which serves first of all to tell the
landscape apart from all the other models (territory, space) which may be applied to the face of the
Earth: quite the opposite, by virtue of their limited nature, although there has been a tendency for some
time to carelessly treat them as synonyms. We shall return shortly to the current objective need for
them to coincide; however, if we are not careful to separate the concept of landscape from that of space
and territory, even this need will become incomprehensible. Landscape, territory and space are not
ensembles of things, but ways in which to represent them. In the language of Frege – i.e. the founder of
contemporary analytical philosophy – they do not correspond to the meaning of the Earth (which is the
Earth itself: the meaning is the thing) but to its senses, to the various, specific ways in which the Earth
presents itself, in which it gives itself. And each of these ways depends on a particular intention, on a
different form of collective and historically determined will, following a gaze in keeping with a project
quite unlike the present one.
Maps are a device used in the translation (and transformation) of the world in terms of classical
geometry, of space. On the other hand, the landscape corresponds to all that which eludes these
devices, these demands: all that which the map is unable to capture and bring down to its own level, i.e.
to express from the point of view of the separation between subject and object, placing distance
between them. In this respect we must be even more incisive: only the diaphragm offered by the map
allows for the distinction between subject and object; on the other hand, the landscape model is based
on the very impossibility of such separation, such detachment, on the non-existence of any form of
interval between the two essential terms of the cognitive process. If it is hard for us to come to terms
with this, it is only because the epistemology is still waiting for something genuinely akin to that which in
the field of visual perception was to be known – as far back as the 1980s – as J.J. Gibson’s ‘ecological’
turning point: the acknowledgement of the impossibility to perceive information regarding the visual
world without postulating a subject in movement within the environment. In the case in hand, the
environment here corresponds to the entire planet Earth, and the length of the movement is that of the
entire history of humanity; thus the acknowledgement is that of there being no difference between the
history of explorations (let us call them so for the time being) and the history of knowledge. The attempt
to hold the two aspects together did not in fact last more than half a century: at most it concerned only
the first half of the 19th century, effectively closing with the passage from “culturally-critical public” to a
“culturally-consuming public,” in the words of the young Habermas, with the end of the Erdkunde
project: from a critical awareness of the Earth oriented in a politically civil sense, i.e. able to transform
bourgeois knowledge from aesthetic/literary to scientific knowledge, thus no longer capable merely of
describing the world but of controlling and modifying it.
It was in this way and within such a strategy that the concept of landscape – from its pictorial and
literary origins – came under scientific analysis thanks to Alexander von Humboldt, along with Carl
Ritter, the main representative of Erdkunde. In the second volume of his main work, Cosmos (first
published in Berlin in 1847), he traces the history of the aptitudes which have always underpinned
humanity’s vision of the world. “Means of encouraging the study of Nature,” as he calls them, including
of note the cultivation of exotic plants, the poetic description meant as “the reflection of the outside
world onto the strength of the imagination,” and landscape painting. And the entire reconstruction in fact
revolves around the strategic value offered by the landscape model.
To this effect, Humboldt distinguishes three degrees of knowledge, three stages in the cognitive
relationship between man and his environment, which hold true not only from the phylogenetic point of
view, that of the history of the human race as a whole, but also from that of ontogenesis, the history of
the single individual. The first stage is that of awe (Eindruck) which arises in the human soul as a
manifestation of its origins, as a primitive sentiment felt in the face of the grandiosity and beauty of
nature. Its cognitive medium is in fact that of the landscape, which corresponds to the world meant as a
harmonic totality of an aesthetic/sentimental type to which all rational analysis is (still) inapplicable, and
which thus concerns only the psychic faculties of the subject. Eindruck is a compound word, simple only
in appearance. ‘Druck’ in fact means ‘impression’, and is also used for the impressing of typefaces onto
a blank sheet of paper. For Humboldt, however, it also took onboard the sensitivity of the onlooker: the
blank sheet is his soul, and the lines of the landscape are the characters impressed upon it. But just as
important is the other half of the word, the prefix ‘Ein’. It apparently means ‘one’, but in actual fact it
plays a double role. On one hand it refers to the singular, the individuality of the onlooker, whose
looking sets off the process of knowledge. At the same time, it indicates the subject’s propensity to
reduce a range of impressions to one alone, in such a way that right from the beginning, and albeit
merely on the aesthetic level, that of the impression, the cognitive environment comes across as a
whole, as if it were all laid out ready to reveal the order “lying beneath the skin of all phenomena,” of
which the subject himself is an integral part.
It is the task of the following stage, that of Einsicht – the examination – to disarticulate the
sentimental totality and usher in its translation in scientific terms. In the term Ein-sicht, in fact, the
apparently identical prefix here means the opposite of that which it expresses in Ein-druck. ‘Sicht’ here
means ‘sight’, that gaze closely bound up in ponderous elaboration, in rational thought. And the
uniqueness expressed by the prefix here concerns not the subject but the object; it refers to the
concentration of thought on one single element among those present – in the form of totality – towards
the initial intimate impression. In the intermediate stage, that of scientific analysis, there is no longer
landscape (sentiment, aesthetic impression) hence no totality, but merely the cold and rational
dissection of the single components, with regard to which the subject takes its distances from.
The eclipse of totality is however temporary, and it only concerns the second level of knowledge. It is
wholly re-established in the third and last stage, that which Humboldt identifies with the concept of
Zusammenhang, i.e. totality provided by co-existence (‘zusammen’) in a relationship of mutual
interdependence between all the elements previously analysed. This is the synthesis, the point of
arrival, the final destination of the cognitive procedure. Within this, by virtue of the mediation provided
by the analytical examination, the original totality is transformed and restored, no longer on the level of
aesthetics and sentimental impression, but rather on that of science. According to Humboldt, the
development of all forms of knowledge is merely their translation into finally scientific terms of an
auroral impression, that in fact expressed by the landscape, which is not scientific in the slightest, but
without which all science would be impossible.
In the modern language of science, Humboldt’s Zusammenhang corresponds to complexity, indeed
to global complexity. And there is no doubt that when the history of global thought – i.e. globality –
really will be written, Humboldt will deserve a place of particular importance on the Western side. But
for the meantime, it is essential to bear in mind that it was thanks to Humboldt that the landscape
became part of the cognitive models of the Western world merely on the basis of a genuine
politicisation process of the aesthetic datum, necessary for the shift from an aristocratic-feudal structure
to the bourgeois structure of European society. And it is vital to remember all this now, for today the
exact opposite is taking place: with regard to the environment, and the analysis and management of it,
we have passed from the Humboltian politicisation of the aesthetic to the aestheticisation of politics,
with the ensuing reversal of the 19th-century imposition and the direct and immediate reduction of the
environment to the landscape (i.e. to the kind of pre-scientific model deployed at the beginning in order
to try and grasp the complexity of the world.) Proof of this may be found in the European Landscape
Convention adopted by the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe on 19 th July 2000, which
has been law in Italy for several years. The explicit purpose of the text lies in the transformation of the
territory and the environment into landscape, meant no longer as a stage in the cognitive process but
as a tangibly concrete field for the application of policies aimed at the safeguarding, requalification,
management and planning of landscapes within each of the member states. The problem with this lies
in the fact that the idea of landscape is based on the concept of equilibrium, harmony, and on the
pacific co-existence of different elements and the relationships between them. Nevertheless, today the
environment is subjected to ever more destabilising, violent and destructive practices, which inevitably
lead to disastrous consequences. And so, how can we think of environmental collapse, crisis and
disaster in terms of landscape?
In attempting any answer to such a question, it is perhaps possible in the above-described loop of
the landscape (from immaterial form to entirely material collection of things) to glimpse an absolutely
implicit meaning, capable of tracing the concept back to its origins, to the starting point, while at the
same time illuminating the relationship between the mind and the landscape itself in an unprecedented
manner. Gregory Bateson was right: ecology is something which concerns our minds first and foremost,
the models of thought with which we attempt time after time to come to terms with reality. What do we
do when we need to multiply two very large numbers? We take paper and pencil and break a complex
problem down into a series of simpler problems, coming up with the solution through an interrelated
series of iterations which complete the model, and through the recording of partial results such as the
paper will allow for. This is perhaps the first form of symbolic manipulation of which we were capable,
and it is here that the external environment becomes a fundamental extension of our minds. And indeed
it was here that classical artificial intelligence, based on the mere distinction between the symbol and
the rule, committed a fundamental mistake: it reduced to mere cognitive mental profile the complex
made up of the cognitive profile of the agent and that of the surrounding environment.
But over recent years, things have changed to the point that we no longer know where the mind
ends and where the world begins. In these terms we may speak of the ‘extended mind’, like for example
Andy Clark and David Chalmers, in whose writings it really is extremely difficult to tell apart – if not in
merely structural terms – man’s mental functions and those of the ‘machine of machines’, of the
cartographic device from which all machines originated, but also all that which makes up the complex of
elements that we synthetically refer to as the ‘environment’. This is because in 1969 the Net was born,
and – as Manuel Castells explains – when we say the ‘Net’ we refer to an aggregate within which it is
impossible to distinguish the machine (the hardware), the intelligence that it incorporates (the software),
and the men and women who make them work. Suffice to add that, just like the first Humboldtian level
of knowledge, the form of perception that the Net implies does not necessarily entail the distinction (i.e.
the distance) between subject and object, because – just like the landscape – the world of the Net is the
anti-Kantian world par excellence: that within which time and space are virtually meaningless, having
almost completely lost their constitutive function.
In brief, up to here (or nearly) the mental model has been that of the map, a limited but open
structure, and the whole of modernity has perceived and built the world around its image and likeness,
meaning spatially. But today, globalisation, through that lethal vehicle which is the Net, forces us to
recognise that the world is not a map but a sphere, indeed a globe, the structure of which (inapplicable
to that of the map) is on the contrary open yet limitless. This means first of all not only that there is no
longer any distance (if not difference) between subject and object, but that every perception of the world
is – exactly and exclusively like that of the landscape – a concrete and tangible image of the ‘sensible-
infinite’ as Humboldt would say, i.e. its character fatally bound up in that which we see, structurally
incomplete in terms of that which we know, programmatically biased (even when tending towards
totality) of what we do. In Humboldt’s day, the dunstige Ferne, the “blurry distance” which made the
horizon above the landscape shimmer, and that so fascinated Goethe too, was first and foremost a hint
of the world yet to be discovered, but also of the uncertainty of the German political situation, poised
between reform and revolution. Today on the other hand it leads straight to the spherical condition of
the shape of the world, the global nature and its functioning, which can no longer stand the logic of
space nor the narrowness and definedness inherent in the cartographic image.
At this point, who or what is stopping us from thinking that the next model with which we shall
represent our mind will not be that of the landscape? At this point, who or what is stopping us from
thinking, therefore, that the next model with which we shall represent scientific logic will not be the work
of the artist, that which has always pointed the same way as the world now points, in order to keep
together – if there really must be a divide between them – the subject and the object and vice versa?