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Notes
1. In fact landscape engineering can be understood as a form of bio-power, or the technological-political control over life, underway since the eighteenth century in Europe, as Foucault has argued (Foucault Citation1990, 141) and now extended globally (Hardt and Negri Citation2000, 23–7).
2. Thinking relates to being and beings. Here we might follow Heidegger who reveals a flaw in Western thought by identifying thinking with subjectivity (Heidegger 1971, 23–4; 2000, 132–3). For Heidegger, thinking does not relate to subjectivity but to Being (the all-that-there-is) in terms of how things reveal themselves as beings for us. Thinking makes things come to a stand as a revealing or unconcealment. In this case, thinking and being are not separate; rather, thinking is that part of Being ‘demanded by Being itself’ (2000, 126). To reduce thought to subjective self-reflection is to institute a gap in being that is not really there.
3. Experience is never reducible to the law and to discourse. Rather, experience is a ‘testing’ of the law.
4. Sense is not the same as the senses. We cannot reach sense through an examination of the senses (for instance through empirical study of bodily reactions and perceptions). Sense is already sense the moment we sense the senses. Sense can only be described philosophically, as that mode of thinking that expresses being as positionality, for instance when we say ‘that makes sense’, thereby saying something about our relation with that which ‘makes sense’. This is not to be confused with signification, which is the production of sign value, or the difference between thought and what is sensed. Sense and signification are mutually present in the thought of being. Something may signify, but it may not make sense. Sense connects thought to the thing that is thought, while signification differentiates thought from the thing that is thought. Signification makes things significant in terms of signs, whereas sense makes things sensible in terms of the positional relation between bodies.
5. Aesthetics is primarily concerned with an initial gathering of the senses as aesthesis, or the potential for being as sensory connectedness. In the European tradition, aesthetics has been concerned with the gathering of the senses into a rationalized subjective sense, according to such things as balance, proportion, harmony, where sense becomes part of a unifying whole preceding it. For points along these lines, see Jauss (Citation1982, 34–5). See also Stolnitz (Citation1961) for the idea of disinterestedness in eighteenth-century aesthetics as a means of rationalizing the senses. Today, traditional aesthetics is challenged by an aesthetics based on distributed sense as sensory interconnectivity, in which the part exceeds the whole as a perpetually open configuration. For an aesthetics of distributed sense, see Rancière (Citation2004).
6. Subjectivity is a quasi-legal concept in which the subject relates to an object in the mode of obedience. A subject can only obey. A person, on the other hand, is an individual whose behaviour is subject to praise or blame (Keller Citation1999, 227). A person is therefore someone called to responsibility to the other. Sense relates to persons and to the personal, impersonal and interpersonal.
7. See my proposal for contact aesthetics (Mules Citation2006a), and also my forthcoming book, entitled Contact Aesthetics, to be published in 2008.
8. The spatial signifier of the open needs to be distinguished from that of the high. The open is open as distinct from being closed, whereas the high is high as distinct from being low. A politics of the open is always a matter of inclusion/exclusion, difference and proliferation, whereas in terms of the high, politics is always a matter of rank and hierarchy, domination/subordination. The high relates to sovereignty as power-over (Nancy Citation2007, 96–7), whereas the open concerns sovereignty as power-with, as the potential of a democratic relation in which the people are no longer subject to ‘themselves’ abstracted into the form of the state, but part of an open configuration of a mode of being that is always yet to come.
9. Sustainability is not an alternative to but a subtraction from the logic of improvement of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century landscape engineering. Sustainability retains a certain heritage sense of possessing and handing down from one generation to another, which is, of course, a major theme in Austen's novels.
10. See Paul Carter's book Material Thinking for a mode of creative research aimed at materializing discourse (Carter Citation2004, 9), that is, dissolving the discursive framework through which the earth is represented.
11. Gilles Deleuze has developed a philosophy of difference based on the thought of univocal being, revived from ancient Greek philosophy (Deleuze Citation1994). For Deleuze, ‘the essence of univocal being is to include individuating differences, while these same differences do not have the same essence and do not change the essence of being’ (36).
12. From a scientific perspective, earth is always terra nullius, that is earth devoid of human being. Science routinely denies the singularity of place in favour of its particularity with respect to a general system. Thus Sauer, in his proposal for a scientific mode of investigating landscapes as a geography of places, rules out the singularity of place expressed by landscape artists as lacking in generic features that would make it equivalent to a general system (Sauer Citation1963, 322).
13. Joy as affirmation of being has been employed by many Western philosophers in order to counter the Christian idea of human being as having fallen into sorrowful waiting for the kingdom of God. Well-known examples include Spinoza and Nietzsche (cf. Nietzsche Citation1954, 34; Spinoza Citation1992, 162). But see also Levinas who writes of a kind of joyous happiness as ‘total altruism’ through the dissolution of the ‘I’ into the ‘non-allergic [i.e. non-affective] presence of the Other’ (Levinas Citation1996, 18). Drawing on Bataille's idea of jouissance as violent excess, the contemporary French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy describes joy as an accompanying counter value to the profit motive in the capitalist world (Nancy Citation2007, 45–6). Profit and the desire for accumulation of value are accompanied by enjoyment, but enjoyment is not exclusively for profit. Joy is a surplus, an excess to owning, a sharing, or ‘shared appropriation’ (46) that becomes the reason for existence in a world that no longer has meaning beyond itself.
14. Jauss notes that aesthesis is ‘the enjoyment of a fulfilled present’ (Jauss Citation1982, 67).
15. In his book The Sense of the World, Nancy argues that ‘the world no longer has a sense, but is sense’ (Nancy Citation1997, 8). By this he means that once the world (and by this he means the post-Christian, secularized Western world) ceases to put itself in relation to another (God, a divine creator) it no longer ‘has’ sense, but ‘is’ sense: it becomes its own creation. This theme is further developed by Nancy in his more recent book The Creation of the World or Globalization (2007).
16. To bear witness is to be ‘just’, that is, to expose the singular in its being-with other singulars in a world. Justice relates to a sharing of being, a parcelling out in which each singular is entitled to its share as part of being-with.
17. Aboriginal place paintings are made by drawing patterns on a horizontal surface that express a sense of being-with country (sometimes directly on the earth, but also on canvasses). Only people who belong to country are allowed to paint them. The pattern does not represent an individual geographical place to the exclusion of all others, but is expressive of country as a specific configuration to be found in many places across the earth (see Rose 1996, 35–47). I am indebted to Cheri Yavu-Kama-Harathunian for our conversations regarding Aboriginal art, which helped to clarify these points for me.
18. This overflowing of place into places constitutes a region. I have discussed this idea of region and its relation to aesthetics in my article ‘The Edges of the Earth: Critical Regionalism as an Aesthetics of the Singular’ (Mules Citation2005).
19. See my paper ‘Earth, Landscape and Country’ (Mules Citation2006b) for further discussion along the lines presented here.
20. An anamorphic image is one in which perspective is distorted on one surface through reference to another. Anamorphic images can be corrected by use of special viewing devices, or by viewing them from an oblique viewing position (e.g. the signage on a sports field that sits up correctly when seen on television). Robinson's images do not correct themselves when viewed obliquely. Rather, they lead into a vertiginous space of fluid perception, in which the world seems to be in motion of its own accord.