Commentary
Back to back: a response to Landscape,
absence and the geographies of love
Mitch Rose
Department of Geography, University of Hull, Hull HU6 7RX
email: [email protected]
revised manuscript received 21 September 2009
Wylie’s (2009) Landscape, absence and the geographies
of love is another thought-provoking contribution
from one of the discipline’s leading thinkers on
questions of landscape. Like Wylie’s 2005 paper in
this journal, A single day’s walking: narrating self and
landscape on the South West Coast Path (also see
2002), this paper starts with a visual experience
and weaves a theoretical exposition around the
scene. Yet, there is a difference here. In his previous work, the question that occupies Wylie is about
relation, that is, how the imbrications of exterior
and interior bodies take place within a worldly
complex of resonances and sensibilities that work
to engender notions of here and there, proximity
and distance, self and landscape. While his previous work begins with a seemingly self-conscious
agent reflecting on a walking body, it quickly
moves to disrupt this scene, transferring the analysis from the nounal bodies involved, to the charged
ontological situation in which they operate. As he
suggests, the project is to:
‘reconstruct’ theoretically the visual gaze upon landscape by exploring the ontological processes (processes
of depth, processes of folding) which afford its actualisation . . . to produce an account of gazing upon landscape as an eventful actualisation and distribution of
selves and landscape through attending to the conditions of gazing to the depths and folds of an immanent
plane from which distinctive selves and landscapes
arise and with which they are always intertwined.
(Wylie 2006, 522)
In this sense, Wylie presents his project as an examination of how subjects and objects ontologically
(rather than simply sociologically) co-constitute.
How subjects come to be subjects by becoming
‘viewing subjects’ in a specific ontological milieu
that affords seer and seen to be articulated within
a distributed array of pre-subjective and a-subjective affectivities and perceptions.
Given the style and structure of Geographies of
love, it appears to be a continuation of similar
themes. And yet, this time around there is something different. Wylie seems to be less interested in
what is there – the charged affective milieu allowing subject and landscape to arise – than with what
is not there. In a lovely turn of phrase, the paper
thinks landscape as an ‘absence at the heart of the
point of view’ (2009, 278). Landscape is no longer
just an emergent resonance or an affective field. It
is no longer the view that allows a subject to arise.
Indeed, the landscape that Wylie describes seems
to no longer have this ontological quality. Its
resonance, while still resonant, is not indicative of
deeper formative principles. What gives here is not
the affectivities engendering seer and seen but
absence itself. This is a landscape of a different
order. Not something we are intimately entwined
and co-emergent with but something that estranges,
casting us out towards an abyssal horizon.
As someone interested in similar themes, my
aim here is not so much to critique, but rather to
make some distinctions about the kind of phenomenological projects Wylie and I are currently
engaged in. Distinctions that seem to me to be a
matter of perspective, or even temperament, rather
than doctrine. Indeed, it is odd to be claiming these
distinctions now since it is only now that Wylie
and I have come to a very similar theoretical place.
Despite working together for several years, we
have always had our own orientations – Wylie’s
Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 35 141–144 2010
ISSN 0020-2754 2009 The Author.
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more Deleuzian and mine more classically phenomenological. But recently these trajectories have
begun to cross. While the purpose of this response
is to clarify what keeps our projects distinct, these
distinctions concern not the theoretical place in
which we stand, but the way in which we stand
there. It is to illustrate how we can stand at the
same place and look at different things, or more
accurately, look at the same thing differently. The
point here is not simply about our distinctive takes
on phenomenology, post-structuralism and nonrepresentational theory (NRT), but about the different things these frameworks can be made to do.
Even though the geographic literature that uses
these perspectives is often oriented towards particular analyses or interests, there is room for work
that goes beyond and against these trajectories –
e.g. for work on identity politics, hegemony and
resistance, capitalist exploitation and other areas
that are sometimes disparaged in the post-structural ⁄ NRT literature. But before discussing these
things, and how they relate to the distinctions I
draw, I want to briefly describe the theoretical
place in which Wylie and I stand.
In Geographies of love, Wylie critiques both me
and himself for framing the relationship between
self and landscape (subject and object) in terms of
coincidence. As Wylie suggests, the problem of coincidence is its
association with a romanticised account of being-in-theworld, one troubled by both myths of primitivism and
baleful notions of authentic or proper dwelling – a coincidence of people with both the land and themselves.
(2009, 282)
The problem is a problem inherent to phenomenology itself. The problem of finding alterity within
the worldly confines of phenomenology’s claustrophobic ‘in-ness’, of how to find space for something that was not always already there, if not
present then awaiting presence (i.e. ‘ready to
hand’). While historically Wylie relied on the complexity of immanence to find this space (the unbridled potentiality of configuration suggested by a
charged Deleuzian ontology), Geographies of love
suggests a turn towards the aporatic – Derrida’s
(1982 1995; Derrida et al. 1994) notion of a radical
otherness that is inherently exterior to what can be
incorporated, known or possessed by a subject. My
most recent work has similarly taken this turn (e.g.
see Rose 2007 forthcoming). Thus, like Wylie, I also
see the memorial benches in Geographies of love as
marking a limit – the limit of a specific life and of
life in general. As a memorial to one’s beloved, the
benches signal both a continuation and interruption
of love. They remind us of love’s precariousness,
predicated as it is upon another person’s affections
whose future we can never guarantee. Love, like
futurity itself, signals one of the many vulnerabilities inherent in being. Another surface by which
the subject is exposed to an incalcitrant outside – a
radical exteriority whose presence is always
disruptive of self-ownership or possession.
It is this interest in the aporatic, the absent, the
exterior and the non-relational (love, future, death,
etc.) that, in many ways, defines the similar place
in which Wylie and I stand (a place influenced, in
no small part, by a series of articles by Harrison
2007a 2007b 2008). But what about how we stand
there? Here I would suggest that we stand not so
much shoulder to shoulder but back to back, seeing
the same situation but interested in different
things. The memorial benches in Wylie’s paper
mark precisely where the subject’s subjectivity dissolves or ‘flits away’, like his imagery of a crisp
packet in the breeze or a song-bird in the bramble.
As Wylie suggests, the benches are ‘radiating outwards and dispersing rather than enfolding or
gathering’ (2009, 281). While such a reading is no
doubt true, it is only half the truth. I take Wylie’s
point that the kind of work the benches do is different from that of a tomb. But they are, nonetheless, still tombs. And like all tombs they are built
not to evoke the presence of our beloved but to
mark a site where we can feel the pull of their
absence. As Wylie suggests, the absence at the
heart of the visible does not mark what is hidden –
a site of potential awaiting revelation. It is a hole
that marks a loss. A black hole whose anguish and
sorrow works its own gravitational effects – an
absence drawing in all light. I read the benches as
an effect of this gravity. A post in the earth that
marks and names not simply the mourned but the
ones who mourn. Thus, while the work of absence
is no doubt centrifugal and extensive, the work of
landscape is centripetal. It is precisely the benches
that give us, as subjects, the language to be subjects. The language to mark ourselves as mourners,
as remembers, and as lovers. To exist not as a set
of empty mouths (always already robbed by love
and death) but as subjects, announcing ourselves
through a dedication, a pronouncement, an evocation, a prayer, a place to sit. It is precisely the infinite nature of absence, its total and utter opacity,
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that summons us to be building, viewing, loving
and remembering subjects.
Perhaps this distinction is best conceived
through the language of coincidence. One of
Wylie’s aims in Geographies of love is to undermine
the ontological proclivity towards coincidence that
haunts phenomenology, the ambition or desire to
tether self and world in some form of primordial
worldly relation. To this end Wylie discusses how
Derrida (2005) critiques Merleau-Ponty (1968) for
circumventing the disruptive non-coincident
moment by situating coincidence as an always
unrealisable possibility – a ‘possibility in principle’.
The critique is no doubt a critique of Merleau-Ponty’s
inclination towards holism; a critique that Wylie
uses to reinforce phenomenology’s tendency to
make alterity safe within the confines of its ontology. But Derrida’s critique is not simply a critique
of Merleau-Ponty’s metaphysics. Implicitly there is
a critique of Merleau-Ponty’s desire for metaphysics, as if the desire itself were a problematic
gesture. But what would Derrida’s career be if this
desire were not there? Is there not something in
the desire itself, the desire for coincidence, that is
telling? While coincidence, as a culminative
ontological event, is no doubt impossible, as an
ambition it continues to appear as a ‘possibility’ –
an impossible dream that, nonetheless, exists as a
dream. A dream that announces itself in the annals
of Western metaphysics as well as on the shores of
Mullion Cove – the benches which stand for the
desire, the yearning, the ache for presence. A communion with something impossibly lost but still
desired.
It is this desire that I have come to term a
‘dream of presence’ (Rose 2004 2006), the impossibilities that hold themselves out to us as possibilities, calling us into various forms of being. Dreams
of presence emerge from absence, coming out of
the summons inherent in absence – an infinite
silence beckoning to be filled. This is the gravitational force of absence at work. The emptiness that
calls for a voice to speak. In this sense, the benches
are one mode of speaking. They are things built to
mark the dead and the hole in the world the dead
leave. A hole that must be marked if ‘we’ (as
mourners and mourned) are to be named at all.
So Wylie and I stand back to back, wondering at
the absence in the heart of the visible. For Wylie,
the hole is the threshold where landscape dissipates
into light and air. For me, the hole signals a
pre-ontological summons that gathers. Wylie looks
at the landscape and wonders at its hole. I look at
the hole and wonder at the landscape it gives. For
me, these distinctions reflect my proclivity for a
certain kind of humanism. A humanism anchored
in the gathering of the aporatic, rather than any
qualities of the human subject, but a humanism
nonetheless. A humanism that, I believe, has been
too quickly maligned by many corners of NRT with
its emphasis on becoming and the firmament of the
processual. It is precisely this gathering that Wylie
chafes against, oriented as he is towards that which
escapes. Derrida had a similar orientation, perpetually suspicious of the movements that gather, even
as such movements are inherent to the deconstructive gesture. This suspicion signals for me the limits
of deconstruction, the Derridian wall or the tain in
the mirror; the refusal to talk about the desire for
coincidence – the dream of presence. It is not that
Derrida didn’t recognise this dream – indeed, the
phrase ‘dream of presence’ is his (see Derrida 1982).
But Derrida’s orientation, like Wylie’s, is essentially
deconstructive rather than recuperative. We should
no doubt be suspicious of dreams of presence. But
it is precisely their presence that constitutes social
and cultural worlds – the investments we have in
the world (as our world) and ourselves (as a self).
While social science has been enamoured by selves
and worlds for a long time, and it is precisely their
fetishisation that NRT works so furiously against,
there is still much to say about being human and
the various investments that being human demands.
References
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Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 35 141–144 2010
ISSN 0020-2754 2009 The Author.
Journal compilation Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2009
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love Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34
275–89
Trans Inst Br Geogr NS 35 141–144 2010
ISSN 0020-2754 2009 The Author.
Journal compilation Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) 2009