What Does Landscape Want? A Walk in W. J. T. Mitchell’s Holy Landscape (from Marina)
Applying Mitchell’s speculative notion of ‘What Do Pictures Want?’ to landscape, it investigates the possibility that beyond its desire to be loved blindly, landscape also needs to be filled by the dreams and memories of its beholders, to be an inclusive space of ‘totemic’ multiplicity in which fundamentalist idolatry and dogmatic iconoclasm are replaced by a shared discourse of ‘critical idolatry’.
Landscape ... is a relatively weak power compared to that of armies, police forces, governments, and corporations. Landscape exerts a subtle power over people, eliciting a broad range of emotions and meanings that may be difficult to specify. This indeterminacy of affect seems, in fact, to be a crucial feature of whatever force landscape can have – W. J. T. Mitchell
Mitchell takes the human tendency to animate images and think of them as having ‘a life of their own’, and turns it on its head, reversing the traditional relationship between picture and beholder into one in which the ‘desire of the image’ takes central stage. The spectator thus ceases to be sovereign over the visual order, and is turned into the imagined object of an autonomous, and demanding, pictorial gaze. While Mitchell himself is the first to identify the shortcomings of this ‘vitalist theory’, he insists upon its potential as a speculative poetic tool that can liberate visual studies from the closed circuit of hermeneutic and semiotic conventions, and provide a new (one is tempted to say ‘vital’) way of understanding the role of images in contemporary culture. The question to ask of images, he challenges, is not just what they mean or do, but what they want.
In the first edition of Landscape and Power, Mitchell proposes to ‘ask not just what landscape “is” or “means” but what it does’ (Mitchell 1994: 1). Now, armed with the insight gained in What Do Pictures Want?, it is time to return to landscape with a new, inevitable question: What does landscape want?
For an immigrant child with an urgent need to bond, landscape indeed became a significant medium of belonging. Of all the diverse and grand landscapes the country had to offer, I felt most connected to the moderate hills and valleys surrounding Jerusalem, with their stepped slopes, striated by countless man-made stone terraces built and maintained over the centuries to keep the fertile top soil from washing away. I was moved by the way these signs of human cultivation were integral to the natural landscape, the way this sense of continuous community was manifest in the geography itself.
On tiyulim and picnics, it was always exciting to come across one of the old ruins that were scattered here and there across the landscape, deserted stone houses with wild vegetation growing out of their crumbling roofs and walls. We called them hirbeh – ‘ruin’ in Arabic – but despite their culturally-specific name, for us they were beyond history, reminders of a time immemorial when men were part of the harmonious cycle of nature. The hirbeh gave land- scape its antiquity, collapsing human historical time and natural geological time into a combined mythological presence to be had, in both the erotic (‘biblical’), and the intellectual senses inherent in the ideologically loaded concept of Geography as Yediat Ha’aretz, ‘Knowledge of the Land’.
What then does landscape want? My first, tentative answer would be: to be loved. Landscape wants to seduce us, to embrace us, to draw us in to its bosom of unreserved belonging. Landscape wants to be loved in totality: it wants to be had passionately, like a lover, and emotionally, like a consoling and accepting parent. It promises exquisite release and comforting intimacy, and in return asks only that all critical thought be banished from the minds of its lovers.
This close and confiding communion with nature, via the construction of an imagined ‘homeland’ landscape, has been at the heart of all national identities, as has been landscape’s particular agency to ‘naturalise’ and render transparent the very ideological motivations that are at its source. Landscape, therefore, does not simply want to be loved; it wants to be loved blindly.
And the crumbling stone hirbeh interspersed between the fruit trees were now less the romantic ‘memento mori’ ruins so integral to the European culture of landscape, and more the chilling empty hulls of ‘depopulated’ Palestinian homes. The concept of ‘scopic regimes’, which came up so often in the intellectual discourse about ‘the gaze’ in the 1980s, was abruptly yanked out of the innocuous realm of theory to become a concrete political reality on the ground. Wherever I looked, I could no longer see innocent landscapes, only ‘scopic regimes’ designed to construct the gaze and control the consciousness.
The virginal white pages of Zaritsky’s beautiful modernist watercolors echoed the Zionist dream of an empty land, a clean slate upon which to start history afresh.