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The Shape of the Land

Tim Ingold

Landscape: The Word

Over the years, a number of terms have entered the vocabulary of aca-demic anthropology, and even of lay discourse, that have their origins in far-fl ung regions of the world, among peoples whose ways of speaking, knowing and being could hardly be more different from our own. Thus, native North America gave us ‘totem’, Polynesia ‘taboo’ and Siberia ‘sha-man’. In every case, the term has a richness and multivocality in its region of origin that is lost in its co-option as a term of art for a universalising discourse. The same fate, however, has befallen words whose provenance lies much closer to home, yet which are of such historical depth that the contexts of their original usage are as far removed from our contemporary analytical endeavours as are those from which terms like totem, taboo and shaman were drawn. One such word is landscape.

The story is often told of how the word was coined by Dutch artists of the seventeenth century to refer to a painterly depiction of natural scen-ery, or to the scenery itself to the extent that it evoked such a picture in the mind of a viewer (Hirsch 1995: 2). In Dutch, the word was written as landschap, initially Anglicised as landskip. Although it was indeed co-opted in this sense to the painterly ends of what Svetlana Alpers (1983) has called the ‘art of describing’, the widely held belief that the notion of landscape has its origins in the practice of this art, and thus that it is irrevocably tainted by the sensory and scopic regime of its practitioners, is wholly mistaken. Indeed it makes no more sense to claim that ‘land-scape’ originated with the Dutch painters of the seventeenth century than it does to say that ‘totem’ originated with Scottish anthropologists of the late nineteenth century or ‘taboo’ with Viennese psychoanalysts of the early twentieth. For as landskap (alternatively landscap, landskab or land-skapr), the word had been around in what is now northern Europe and the Nordic countries at least since the Middle Ages, if not before. Just as

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anthropologists did with ‘totem’ and psychoanalysts with ‘taboo’, artists simply took it over and used it to serve their own purposes. The key dif-ference between the fate of ‘landscape’ and those of ‘totem’ and ‘taboo’, however, was that it involved a translation across time rather than space. For this reason, its modern usage by scholars, painters and nowadays pho-tographers, especially in European centres of learning and art, takes place against the background of persistent echoes from a premodern past.

Etymologically, the suffi x -skap, in landskap, is derived from the Old English sceppan or skyppan, meaning ‘to shape’ (Olwig 2008a: 82). Thus a landscape is literally a land shaped. Medieval shapers of the land, however, were not artists or architects but farmers and woodsmen, whose purpose was not to lend ideal form to the material world, or to render it in appear-ance rather than substance, but to wrest a living from the earth. Shape, for them, was no mere outline or exterior contour, nor was it a phantom of reality. It was as intrinsic to the constitution of the land as is weave to the constitution of cloth. Just as cloth is woven from the intertwined threads of warp and weft, so in medieval times, the land was scaped by the people who, with foot, axe and plough, and with the assistance of their domestic animals, trod, hacked and scratched their lines into the earth and thereby created its ever-evolving texture. This was work done close up, in an immediate, muscular and visceral engagement with wood, grass and soil – the very opposite of the distanced, contemplative and panoramic optic that the word ‘landscape’ conjures up in many minds today. But it was also distinctively agrarian. And this at once qualifi es the applicability of the concept of landscape, in its original sense, to peoples whose ways of life are less sedentary, such as nomadic pastoralists and hunter-gatherers.

Landscape and Earth-sky

If the agrarian landscape could be compared to a woven fabric, the way the land is worked into nomadic life might better be compared to the making of felt. Indeed, philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have drawn on precisely this distinction between weaving and felting to substantiate their contrast between the ‘striated’ ground of sedentary farmers and the ‘smooth’ ground of nomadic pastoralists. Felt, they say, is an antifabric. ‘It implies no separation of threads, no intertwining, only an entanglement of fi bers’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 524–25). The ground of smooth space, likewise, is comprised of the entangled trajectories of growth and move-ment of people, animals and plants as they fi nd a way through, following no predetermined direction but responding at every turn to the conditions of the moment and the possibilities they afford to carry on. Compared with the farmed landscape, straked with rigs, furrows and dykes, the ground presents itself to pastoral herdsmen as a patchwork of continuous variation, extending without limit in all directions. To follow the medieval

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precedent, and to identify the scaping of the land strictly with its striation, is clearly to render the concept of landscape inapplicable to such smooth ground. By what alternative concept, then, should we know it?

The most exemplary form of smooth space is of course the ocean. The mariner ensconced in his vessel, feeling the waves as they lap the hull and catching the wind in his sails, all the while scanning the sky for the move-ments of birds by day and of the stars and other celestial bodies by night, is a point of rest in a world in which all around is in movement (Gladwin 1964: 171–72). In striving to rein in or harness the forces of the elements he is the precise opposite of the farmer who bends muscle and sinew to counteract the friction of an immobile and often unyielding earth, drag-ging himself and his equipment over the hard ground and inscribing tracks and pathways in the process. To describe the mariner’s surroundings from the farmer’s perspective, as a seascape (Cooney 2003), would be to confer on waves and troughs, or on becalmed or turbulent waters, a permanence and solidity that they lack in reality. The Vikings, who knew a thing or two about both farming and seafaring, compared their ships to horses, on which they rode the waves, but only very rarely to ploughs with which to furrow the ocean (Jesch 2008: 2–4). Setting sail, the mariner does not simply relinquish one set of surfaces, of the land, for another, of the sea. Rather he enters a world in which surfaces take second place to the cir-culations of the media in which they are formed. Here the grounded fi xi-ties of landscape give way to the aerial fl uxes of wind and weather above, and the aquatic fl uxes of tide and current below (Ingold 2006: 10). These fl uxes, and not the surface of the sea, absorb the mariner’s effort and at-tention. The world he inhabits is not, then, a seascape but what we could call an ocean-sky.

Let us now invert our customary point of view and, instead of viewing the sea from an agrarian perspective, consider the land from a maritime one. This is to think of the land as smooth space, rather than of the sea as striated. If, in the experience of the mariner, the world is a blend of sky and ocean, then for the nomad it is a blend of sky and earth. Pastoral herdsmen and hunter-gatherers, we could conclude, do not inhabit a land-scape so much as an earth-sky world (Ingold 2007a). There are surfaces in this world, of course. But they are surfaces of a different kind. The land-scape, carved and striated, has turned against the sky. It is, as Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 530) say, closed off and apportioned. But in the smooth space of the earth-sky world, the surfaces of the land – like those of the sea – open up to the sky and embrace it. In their ever-changing colours, and patterns of illumination and shade, they refl ect its light; they resonate in their sounds to the passing winds, and in their feel underfoot or under-hoof they respond to the dryness or humidity of the air, depending on heat or rainfall. In smooth space, to continue with Deleuze and Guattari, ‘there is no line separating earth and sky’ (1987: 421). One could not exist without the other.

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Landscape and Dwelling

Another way of getting at the same difference, between the striated space of the landscape and the smooth space of the earth-sky world, would be through a comparison of types of dwellings. Among his whimsical refl ec-tions on design and the shape of things, Vilém Flusser (1999: 55–57) con-trasts the solid walls of buildings with the screen walls of tents. The walls of the farmer’s cottage or outhouses, be they of stone or timber, are held down by the sheer weight of blocks or beams placed atop one another. The force of gravity allows the building to stand, but equally can bring it tumbling down. The walls of the tent, by contrast, are analogous to the sails of a ship. They are ‘wind-walls’. Within the enclosure formed by the four solid walls of the house, Flusser argues, things are possessed – ‘prop-erty is defi ned by walls’. But as a calming of the wind, a locus of rest in a turbulent world, the tent is a place where experiences are assembled, pro-cessed and disseminated in a way that precisely parallels the treatment of fi bres in fashioning the material, such as felt, from which the screen walls of the tent are made. Indeed the very word screen suggests, to Flusser, a piece of material that is ‘open to experiences (open to the wind, open to the spirit) and that stores this experience’ (1999: 57). The carpet, another invention of nomads, embodies the same principle. But whereas with felt, there is no warp or weft – no entwining, only entanglement – in the car-pet, the woollen weft conceals the striations of the stringy warp behind a smooth expanse of knots (Flusser 1999: 96).

The difference is still more apparent if we take on the perspective of the resident of the cottage, on the one hand, or of the tent, on the other. The cottage is roofed, while a door and windows are set in the vertical walls. Floorboards provide insulation from direct contact with the earth. Imagining ourselves in such a building and looking out, we see the ground and the sky, separated by the line of the horizon. But now let us take up residence in a conical lodge, a type of nomadic tent dwelling that is widely distributed across northern North America and Eurasia. Squatting or ly-ing on the earth, and looking up to where the light streams in through the smoke-hole at the apex, the feeling of the bare earth and the light of the sky are immediately combined in experience. In the conical lodge, earth and sky are not divided at the horizon, as they are when viewed through the cottage window, but unifi ed at the centre, where the smoke from the hearth rises to meet the sky. In this regard the lodge has much in common with the vessel at sea. We have reports of Micronesian mariners lying on the bottom of their canoes when travelling far out of sight of land, feeling the swell with their bodies while fi xing their gaze on the sky (Mack 2007: 12). In Mesolithic and Neolithic Scandinavia, where the sea appears to have been strongly associated with the world of the dead, excavated graves included canoes in which the bodies of the deceased were evidently laid – a tradition that extended to the Bronze Age and beyond (Bradley 2000:

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133–34). Though we may think of these burials as situated in a landscape, from the perspective of the deceased they were evidently laid to rest in an earth-sky world. There they are still, at least until disinterred by archae-ologists, buried in the earth, but looking up into the sky.

Although I have so far stressed the contrast between earth-sky and landscape, along the lines of the distinction between the smooth and the striated, the differences should not be overplayed. As even Deleuze and Guattari are forced to admit (1987: 525), the nomadic pastoralists of North Africa, unlike those of Inner Asia, make their tents from woven fabric rather than felt. Their attempt to get around this snag by arguing that unlike the weaving of sedentary people, which annexes the body to the interior space of the house, nomadic weaving indexes the body to the open, smooth space of the exterior, looks like a case of special pleading. Conversely, even the sedentary farmer, as he works his fi elds, ‘participates fully in the space of the wind, the space of tactile and sonorous qualities’ (1987: 531). As much as pastoralists weave cloth into the fabric of the stri-ated, so peasants contend with wind and weather in the atmosphere of the smooth. Likewise the sea, although the archetype of smooth space, was gradually converted through voyages of colonial discovery and conquest into a space to be inscribed, as on the ruled pages of a manuscript. Com-menting on the journals of Christopher Columbus, José Rabasa compares writing on the blank page with sailing in uncharted waters: ‘The ship’s rostrum and the pen’s stylus draw patterns on surfaces devoid of earlier traces’, enabling a writer-mariner like Columbus to lay claim to both text and territory (Rabasa 1993: 56). Even the Vikings spoke of carving the sea’s surface with their ships. In the smooth and the striated we are not, then, dealing with an opposition so much as with two ways of being that coexist in a tension that may be constructive or destructive. It is a tension epitomised in the idea of the thing.

Landscape and Thing

We have already seen that the medieval landskap was land shaped by agrarian toil in woods and fi elds. But the term also had a political sense that was just as ancient, and just as rooted in agrarian practice. Lands-kap, in this sense, encompassed a vaguely delimited portion of land bound into the customary usages and subject to the unwritten laws of those who would meet together and resolve their affairs at a single ting, or place of assembly. Thus from earliest times, there was an intrinsic connection be-tween landscape and thing. On the one hand as a gathering, a knotting together of life-courses and paths of activity, the thing enfolds the land-scape. On the other hand as a source of law, the thing unfolds into the landscape – in the practices guided by it, of dwelling and habitation, and of tilling the soil. Yet as historical geographer Kenneth Olwig (2008b) ob-

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serves, in a brilliant account of the political landscape of medieval Jutland (now part of Denmark), the thing is an empty place. The countryside of Jutland is dotted with rounded earthen mounds or barrows, and many of these bear the name Tinghøj (‘Thing Hill’). In the past these were holy places, located along ancient lines of travel. Buried within the mounds are often chambered graves or tombs. They are so inconspicuous, however, that they can scarcely be discerned today. The most extraordinary quality of ting sites, Olwig remarks, lies in ‘their unmarked anonymity and the absence of monumental signs’ (2008b: 33).

Olwig compares the paradox of the thing with that of the number zero, signifying in Indo-European cosmology the unknowable nothing from which everything comes. Imagine a traveller, making his way towards a thing-place along one of the tracks that leads there. In his sights, the thing appears as a speck in the landscape: a mere bump on the horizon of an otherwise striated surface. In itself, it is nothing. With its ‘womb-like hollowness’ (Olwig 2008b: 33), the ting calls to mind the example of the empty jug in Martin Heidegger’s celebrated meditation on The Thing. The thinginess of the jug, Heidegger argues (1971: 166–74), lies neither in its physical substance nor in its formal appearance but in its capacity to gather, to hold and to give forth. Likewise the thing-place gathers the lives of people who dwell in the land, holds their collective memories and gives forth in the rulings and resolutions of unwritten law. But now let us sup-pose that the traveller, having come to the place, lays himself down to rest upon the mound. At once, the horizon disappears beyond the periphery of his visual awareness, which merges with the shimmering luminosity of the sky, while his body is wrapped in the embrace of the damp earth. What had been a speck in the landscape opens up from the inside to re-veal the unbounded immensity of the earth-sky world. Such would be the experience of the mound itself, were it gifted with sensory awareness, as indeed it would be of the body or bodies buried beneath. As we have already seen in the case of prehistoric boat burials from the same region, the switch in perspective from moving towards a place in the landscape, to merging with it in the world of earth and sky, is associated with the tran-sition from land to sea, and from life to death. In this switch, everything comes from nothing.

Landscape, Mound and Monument

The burial mound, however, is not a monument, and the contrast between them bears critically on the question of how the modern sense of landscape differs from its medieval precursor. We generally think of the monument as a structurally coherent edifi ce, built to the specifi cations of an architec-tural design, and set upon solid foundations. But the mound has none of these attributes. In the principles of its formation, the mound is the very

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opposite of the monumental edifi ce. To construct an edifi ce, starting from the foundations, each successive piece has carefully and deliberately to be placed upon the last so that static equilibrium is maintained. The mound, however, builds up precisely because the materials of which it is made are continually falling down. Indeed whenever material is heaped up but al-lowed to settle of its own accord, it generally takes the form of a mound that is roughly circular in plan and bell-shaped in elevation. From mole-hills to ants’ nests, mounds are among the commonest forms in nature, but they often result from human activities too – think of shell middens, com-post heaps, sandcastles and stone cairns. In every case the roundness of the form emerges spontaneously rather than by design, due to the way the pressure of material added from above displaces material already depos-ited, equally in all directions. Nor is the mound ever complete. One can always carry on adding further material. As it rises in height, the mound also expands at the base. Unlike the edifi ce, it is not tied to fi xed founda-tions – indeed properly speaking, it has no foundations at all. Although every particle comes to rest on other particles, the mound as a whole does not rest upon the earth. For it is as much of the earth as on it.

The mound that confronts us today is the cumulative by-product of all kinds of activities, carried on over long periods of time and not only by human beings. Burrowing animals, from worms to rabbits, have played their part in its evolution. The roots of trees, bushes and grasses, threading through its volume, have helped to fi x it. The weather, and above all the rain, has shaped it internally and externally, in the creation of patterns of drainage and runoff. Crucially, these organic and hydrological processes continue in the present as they have always done in the past. To observe the mound today is to witness their going on. The mound, we could say, exists in its mounding. This is to think of it not as a fi nished object, stand-ing on foundations and set over and against its surroundings, but as a lo-cus of growth and regeneration where materials welling up from the earth mix and mingle with the fl uxes of the weather in the ongoing production of life. The mound has not turned its back on us, as we might suppose, hiding secrets within its dark, enclosed interior that we can discover only by tunnelling in. On the contrary, it is open to the world. As the ever-emergent outcome of the interplay of cosmic forces and vital materials, the mound is not built but grows. Like the growth of the compost heap or ant’s nest, the mound’s mounding is the very process of life becoming earth.

Landscape and Memory

Now as Olwig (2008b: 32) makes clear, thing-mounds are places of mem-ory, gathering into themselves the custom and practice of the surround-ing landscape. This is not to say, however, that memories are contained

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in them. ‘It is a common mistake’, notes historian Mary Carruthers, ‘to confuse the activity of remembering with the “things” humans may use to locate and cue their memories’ (1998: 40). Carruthers is concerned with the liturgical processions of early medieval pilgrims as they went from site to site. For these pilgrims, it mattered little whether any physical record remained at each site of the personages or events with which it was as-sociated. What was real and authentic about the sites, for them, lay not in the objects to be found there, but in ‘the memory-work, the thinking to which they gave clues’ (1998: 42, original emphasis). Sites of pilgrim-age, like things in the landscape, are places where the work of memory is carried on, not depositories in which to store its more durable products. Conversely, of course, the preservation of the past in such products holds no guarantee that it will be remembered. Countless edifi ces, intended by their architects to seal their immortality, lie buried and forgotten, lost in the mists of time. Others have been given a new lease of life in the modern project of state building, in an idiom that consigns the past to a bygone if heroic age. For example, the great stones of the parish of Jelling, erected by King Harald Bluetooth in the tenth century to the memory of himself and his parents, have been recast in monumental form as the ‘birth certifi -cate’ of the state of Denmark (Olwig 2008b: 19–20). Carved with runic inscriptions, the stones speak, but in a language comprehensible only to antiquarians. What they may have meant to Harald and his contempo-raries is strange to visitors today. It belongs to a different conversation.

‘At the Ting’, Olwig writes, ‘law was committed to living memory, whereas the monument literally chisels memory into dead stone’ (2008b: 33). The mound, as we have seen, is a thing, in a landscape of things. So too, writes Heidegger (1971: 182) in his essay on The Thing, are ‘tree and pond, … brook and hill, … each in its own way’. As the mound exists and indeed persists in its mounding, every thing is a going on, or better, a place where several goings on are gathered together. To observe a thing is to be invited in to the gathering – to participate, as Heidegger rather en-igmatically put it, in ‘its thinging from out of the worlding world’ (1971: 181). This is just how the mound differs from the monument. For the monument, in Heidegger’s terms, is not a thing at all, but an object. What defi nes the object is its very ‘over-againstness’ in relation to the setting in which it is placed (1971: 167). It stands before us as a fait accompli, pre-senting its congealed, outer surfaces to our inspection. Where the mound, as a thing, invites us in, the monument shuts us out. It is closed, fi nished. Many erstwhile places of memory, of course, have now been designated as ancient monuments, and are assiduously preserved in what are imagined to have been their fi nal forms. For visitors to leave marks or traces of their presence in such places is no longer to contribute to their formation but to threaten their preservation. A cairn, for example, is just a pile of stones that grows as every traveller, passing by a particular place, adds a stone picked up along the way as a memento of the trip. But a cairn that

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has been designated as a monument should remain untouched: to add or remove any stone would be to commit an act of despoliation.

It is precisely this shift from mound to monument, or from thing to ob-ject, that differentiates the shaping of the land, in its modern sense, from its medieval precursor. In medieval times, the land was shaped by work in fi elds and forests, according to the law of the ting. The modern sense of shaping the land, by contrast, has its roots not in agrarian practice but in architecture. Since the Renaissance, it has been the conceit of the architec-tural profession that every built form is the realisation of a design, fully conceived by the intellect in advance of its realisation in the material. The architect would like to think that the building stands as the crystallisation of an original design concept, with all its components fi xed in their proper places. Should any components be added, or taken away, the entire struc-ture would be reduced to incoherence. Ideally, once fi nished the building should hold for all eternity to the form the architect intended for it, a monument to his original conception. ‘The whole idea of architecture’, writes the inventor and designer Stewart Brand, ‘is permanence’ (1994: 2). The same is true of the post-Renaissance idea of landscape, and there is indeed an intrinsic connection between the two ideas. Serving as both stage and scenery, the landscape is taken to furnish the solid foundation on which the architectural monument is erected and the scenic backdrop against which it is displayed or ‘set off’ to best advantage. Together, the monument and its landscape comprise a totality that is understood to be complete and fully formed. Here, land is to scape as material substance is to abstract form, and the land is shaped by their unifi cation. In short, land-scape equals matter-form.

The Sense of Landscape

The shape of the land, then, no longer lies in its weave, nor would one fi nd it by following the striations of its texture, as does the ploughman as he cuts the earth of his fi elds, or the journeyman as he wends his way, most likely by foot, along its tracks and trails. It is found, rather, by a kind of back-projection by which the world is cast as though fully formed, in appearance but not substance – that is, as an image – upon the surface of the mind. This is to set up an optical relation between mind and world, a relation based on distance and detachment, as opposed to the close-range, ‘hands on’ or haptic engagement of a mind that sews itself into the land along the pathways of sensory involvement.

This, no doubt, is why the concept of landscape is so often assumed to be tainted by a visualist bias, even though there is nothing in either ‘land’ or ‘scape’, if each be taken on its own, to suggest that this need be so. It is the relation between land as the worldly object of perception and scape as its mental image that is understood as an optical projection. The apparent

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resemblance between scape and scope tends to bolster this understanding. The resemblance, however, is entirely fortuitous and has no foundation in etymology. ‘Scape’, as we have seen, comes from Old English sceppan, ‘to shape’. But ‘scope’ comes from the Greek skopein, ‘to look’. Skopos, according to Carruthers (1998: 79), ‘is literally the target of the bowman, the mark towards which he gazes as he aims’. It thus combines the sense of aim or goal with that of vision at a distance. For medieval thinkers, the fi rst of these senses was undoubtedly predominant. Wisdom, in their meditative practice, lay in following a trail towards a destination, trac-ing the lines of the liturgical text as the pilgrim would trace pathways in the land (1998: 116). With the advent of modernity, however, the second sense, of distant vision or the aerial view, gained the upper hand. As Mar-tin Jay (1988) has convincingly shown, there was not one such view or ‘scopic regime’ but several. The Dutch artists of the seventeenth century, who adopted the term landschap to describe their painting, exemplifi ed just one of these, based on the idea of cartographic projection, a scaled mapping of the surface of the world onto the surface of canvas or paper (Jay 1998: 10–15).

We should not necessarily assume, however, that the relation between land and scape identifi ed above as ‘optical’ is confi ned to the sensory mo-dality of vision, nor conversely, that the contrasting relation identifi ed as ‘haptic’ is confi ned to the modality of touch. As Deleuze and Guattari stress (1987: 543–44), the opposition between the optical and the hap-tic should not be confused with that between eye and hand. In close-up work, the eye can be as myopically entwined in the fi ne grain of the world as the hand. Think of the seamstress, peering at her fabric as she draws in the threads, or the medieval scribe whose eye is caught up in the inky traces of his writing (Ingold 2007b: 92). The ears of the ploughman, too, are close to the ground, alert to the sounds of share against earth. In this sense, vision and hearing can be just as ‘haptic’ as touch. Conversely, to the extent that they mediate a relation of projection, the organs of touch and hearing can fulfi l optical functions. This is how Descartes thought of blind touch, in his Optics of 1637. The blind, he thought, could use straight sticks to perceive the forms of objects at a distance, just as the sighted use light rays (Descartes 1988: 67). Likewise the gloved hand of the clinician, detective or curator, who handles possibly invisible objects in order to extract their form while ensuring that there should be no con-tact or exchange of materials across the surface of the skin, exerts an opti-cal touch. In the case of hearing, we might compare the experience of the singer, whose very being is launched on the sound of her own voice, and of the audience whose ears, distributed around the auditorium, are both everywhere and nowhere. For the singer, the sound is her voice, for the audience the sound projects it.

In recent years it has become fashionable to multiply sensory scapes. Thus we have soundscapes, touchscapes and smellscapes. We would have

The Shape of the Land ◆ 207

visionscapes too, were the term not rendered effectively redundant by the assumption, noted above, that landscape is already inherently visual. Yet all these neologisms, I would contend, imply an optical relation between mind and world. In every case, the scape is a formal mapping, in the mind, of the material world of sensory experience. I would like to conclude with the suggestion that to grasp the realities of quotidian life, we might do well to return to an earlier understanding of landscape – one that is closer to the ground, more haptic than optical. Though the inspiration for this move comes from Deleuze and Guattari, I have taken considerable liber-ties with their approach. For them, the opposition between the haptic and the optical corresponds to that between the smooth and the striated. In this, I believe they are fundamentally mistaken. The perception of striated space is just as close-up, if not closer, than that of smooth space: the differ-ence between them lies in the extent to which practitioners’ perceptual en-gagements are with the surfaces of things or with the surrounding media – of earth, air and water. Are they launched with the winds and currents, or do they follow the lines of track, ridge and furrow along the ground?

The inhabitant of striated space, as I have shown, sees, hears and touches the things of which the landscape is comprised and, in so do-ing, joins with them in their thinging – in their going on. In the smooth space of the earth-sky world, on the other hand, the perception of things is overwhelmed by the experiences of light, sound and feeling to which they open up. The optical ‘scapes’ generated by the scopic regimes of mo-dernity, however, are neither striated nor smooth. In them, light, sound and feeling are reduced to vectors for the projection of fi nal forms, cut out from the processes that give rise to them. These scapes can be viewed, studied, analysed, interpreted. But they cannot be inhabited. In order to regain a sense of what it feels like to inhabit the world, let us then rejoin the farmer, the herdsman and the mariner in following the material grain of the world’s becoming and in harnessing its forces and energies. There is beauty here, in the workshops of life, and not just in a ready-made world framed in the detached optic of aesthetic regard.

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