Heidegger, latour and the reification of things: the inversion and spatial enclosure of the substantive landscape of things – the lake district case

Abstract

“Thing” has undergone reification, and it has done so together with its linguistic “conjoined twin” – “landscape”. Whereas thing once was the name for meetings where people assembled to treat common things that matter, things, in the modern sense, have become physical objects (things as matter). Likewise, landscape's meaning has been reified from being a polity constituted by common thing meetings treating substantive things that matter, to becoming a spatial assemblage of physical things as matter. To fully grasp the contemporary meaning of both things and landscape it is necessary to understand the way in which those meanings are the intertwined outcome of a process of revolutionary inversion, or turning inside–out, by which the meaning of things has been spatialized, enclosed, individualized, privatized, scaled and reified as a constituent of the mental and social landscape of modernity. The potentiality of the concept of thing lies, it will be argued, in its continued containment of older, subaltern meanings that can work to empower an alternative “non‐modern” understanding of things along the lines of, but distinct from, Bruno Latour's notion of Dingpolitik, which will be termed “thing politics” here. This argument is analysed in relation to Martin Heidegger's concept of the “thing”, and exemplified by the mandate of the European Landscape Convention, and the modern planning usage of Landscape Character Assessment and Ecosystem Services, as applied to England's Lake District.

Key words:

• Ecosystem Services
• Lake District
• landscape
• Landscape Character Assessment
• the European Landscape Convention
• thing