[Image from "Zero Landscapes in the Time of Hyperobjects" by Timothy Morton in GAM 07; Ice island calves at the coast of the Petermann Glacier, provided courtesy of the NASA EO-1 team and the United States Geological Survey]
Not
too long ago we got our grubby hands on Timothy Morton’s provocatively titled
essay “Zero Landscapes in the time of Hyperobjects”. It was written for the Graz Architecture
Magazine, a publication of the Graz University in Germany and boasting of a
very fine editorial board and an absolutely bulletproof lineup in issue 7. Morton is the author of the recent
influential books Dark Ecology and The Ecological Thought, and has spent a
lot of time in the last year speaking on object- oriented philosophy. Last January we read on his blog the
following quote:
“I had such a
good time composing an essay for Graz Architectural Magazine that I thought I should just share
it a little bit. It's called “No Landscape”—the issue is about the role of
landscape in ecological design (I believe). I take the “Zero” in the issue's
title very seriously. I mean absolutely no more landscapes, whatsoever...”
We
were intrigued. And while Morton’s
writing style is the type that leaves you confused and squeamish, akin to your
uncle getting a bit boozy at the family reunion and inviting you into the
basement to check out his Norfolk and Southern model train dioramas, Morton’s
polemics are so relentless in banging home the point, like some kind of bass
drummer in a marching band, and the ideas so troubling that it is usually worth
the time to do the reading.
"Zero
Landscapes in the time of Hyperobjects" follows this trend. The essay weirdly relies on analogies laid
down in the Matrix, and while we are
fans of the mating of pop culture and scholarship that is still no excuse to
throw out quality, which is exactly
what you are doing when you venture in to the world of post-Point Break Keanu Reeves. In the essay Morton offers a schematic for his
“hyperobject” which he defines as “massively distributed in space and
time” and characterizes as “viscous, squishy, non-local and
transdimensional.” This is immediately
compelling.
The idea that the Mississippi River can be understood
as a hyperobject implicating everything from USACE technological regimes and
structures, the Laurentian Shield, the Gulf of Mexico, and Monsanto is
a powerful and challenging conception that serves to open up a wealth of new
questions and courses of action. It’s also nothing new. The idea that
historical landscape practitioners (be they designers, farmers, surveyors, or
foresters) did not consider the fact that a particular landscape is profoundly influenced by and consists of geological structures that expand beyond human
conceptions of time, the sun’s energy and light, and water from the air or
rivers beginning outside of the frame is wrong.
Of course, bad landscape
designers may not have considered some of these factors, but we generalizations
shouldn’t be drawn based on the Keanu Reeves of landscape. The simple fact that geologist Nathaniel
Shaler was a key faculty member and taught lecture and design courses as a
member of the first landscape architecture department in the United States
should be enough of an anomaly to call for further examination at the least.
The fact is that Morton’s definition of
landscape is fundamentally dominated by a Eurocentric art-historical
interpretation with special emphasis on the linguistic and etymological aspects
of the practice. And this is
understandable. Many of our most
prominent recent theorists have claimed to be full on champions of semiotics,
from Ann Spirn [the language of landscape] to James Corner [the hermeneutic
landscape], and the Betsy Rogers-style historiography that has tended to
dominate landscape pedagogy and practice in the modern period, a fact we
attribute in part to the European Turn.
In one of the best passages, Morton states:
If we’re going to
think beyond the modern period, beyond the era of philosophy, society and
ecology in which we have been stuck for about two hundred years, then we will
have to let go of the idea of landscape as a picture in a frame, even if the
picture is liquid and motile, like a movie.
Why? The problem is the notion of the frame, and the distance the viewer
has to assume for the landscape to appear as such. Because of this distance,
the landscape embodies a subjective (whatever word works best for you here,
“spiritual,” “ideological,” whatever) state. The picture is about the attitude
you must assume to look at the picture. It’s less about land, then, and more
about scape.
[a gorgeous map of the the Eerie Canal as landscape/hyperobject; image courtesy of David Rumsey maps]
We appreciate that “Zero Landscapes” serves as a powerful critique of the late 90’s tendency
of landscape practitioners within the academy to call everything “_scape”
(there was even a European journal by that exact name). But it is wrong to assume this trend is
indicative of a landscape ontology. Morton discards landscape because he sees it
as being situated within an artistic tradition of painting, without realizing
that this historical slice of landscape practice can be seen as drawing from
the larger field of the artes plasticas. This places landscape practice apart from
[though related to] the literary arts.
He also fails to realize the picture frame,
which for him is a fatally flawed instrument of aesthetic distance, is a
historically specific fact and not one that is ontological to landscape. People painted landscapes at that time and
put them in frames for specific reasons, much like people today take photos
with their phones, put them up and flickr, and then tweet them out. Both of these are interesting and germane,
but neither is fundamental to landscape practice.
We have argued that acts of territorialization,
the making and transgressing of boundaries, are fundamental to landscape
ontology. This act could be through the
aesthetic frame that enables the construction of specific views but this is
only one possibility. Acts of surveying, establishing
political-economic property boundaries, understanding ecological territories
such as a watershed, or the creation and policing of electromagnetic
territories for the Greenbank telescope are also acts of territorialization. What is more, it seems foolish to completely
discard or disregard the frame, even if we agree with Morton that it has been
way too heavily relied upon in the last two centuries. The whole epistemological notion of object-oriented
ontology is not to obliterate historical concepts but rather can be summed up
in two words: more everything!
The irony of the hyperobject schematic is that
it suggests a further definition of the idea of landscape. The spatial implications of Morton’s
hyperobject lead him to the conclusion that space is not a container but rather
a space-time manifold. This definition
is drawn directly from Graham Harman’s definition of space in Guerrilla Metaphysics and is based on a
topological understanding of space. This
area of study has not been explicitly explored by landscape theorists, but it
is fundamental to any real definition of landscape as a practice that is
concerned with the properties of an object that remain or persist under
continuous deformation, be it the erosion of slopes, the growth of plants, or
the contingent choreography of people tailgating before a football game.
We have proposed before that a topological
study of landscapes might offer a way in to better understand the differences
in fixity and contingency in the landscapes we inhabit. For all its flaws, Morton’s essay ultimately
establishes a different imperative:
“Once we become aware of long-term effects of hyperobjects, we cannot
abolish this awareness, and so they corrde our ability to make firm decisions
in the present. Hyperobjects force us to
live this paradox, and design with it.”
It’s all very Genesis 3:6. Nonetheless, it does point to a real
difference between intentionality and agency in the landscape, and compellingly
suggests future landscape designs will have to grapple with this minute chasm. More hopefully, it offers the rudiments of
some of the conceptual tools that will be needed in this task, specifically his
defining and characterizing of the hyperobject and challenging the historical
biases and weaknesses of the landscape approach. These should be further prototyped and tested
and added to the good work already underway.
[Adam, Eve, Satan, the hills, the sky, the groundwater, the mycorrhizae, all together in the Garden of Eden hyperobject/landscape on the Sistine Chapel]
