Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
First, the viewer's stance is excluded from their gaze and hence rendered super-
fluous. Second, what is viewed can be understood in terms not of localized idio-
syncrasies and specific ecologies but of models whose structures are applied to,
rather than drawn from, the region. This panoptic perspective institutionalizes in
landscape an ambivalence which separates the observer and observed and that is,
as Brynes comments, ''voyeuristic in that it assume[s] a neutrality on behalf of the
viewer and a passivity on behalf of the subject'' (
2001
, p 34).
There are further silences in respect of the many journeys made across the
region. In not recording them, the modern topographical map constructs an image
of landscape in which journeys appear to be made anew each time through a virgin
empty space. In such a map, neither wilderness nor landscape is cumulative. It
does not ''grow or develop, it is made … so the world it describes is not a world in
the making but one ready-made for life to occupy'' (Ingold
2000
, p 234).
The philosopher Michel de Certeau describes the stillness of New York, when
viewed late last century from the top of the Twin Towers, as one whose ''agitation
[was] momentarily arrested by vision'' (de Certeau
1984
, p 91). De Certeau argues
that this gaze from above enables a totalizing conception of the city that, in turn,
directs cultural mechanisms to bound, standardize and organize. When one des-
cends to the hustle and bustle, the fabric of urban landscape changes. Here ''bodies
follow the thicks and thins of an urban 'text', … use the spaces that cannot be seen
… [and] compose a manifold story that has neither author or spectator, shaped out
of trajectories and alterations'' (Ibid).
De Certeau explores the dimension of walking as a form of spatial practice, and
a spatial acting out of place. It is with the 'chorus of idle footsteps' that the
properties of practice are articulated: ''They are myriad, but do not compose a
series …. Their intertwined paths give shape to places. They weave places toge-
ther'' (de Certeau
1984
, p 93).
An act of walking, like speech, is performative, rhetorical, particular, and
potentially limitless in its diversity. Walking expresses place, in that it is a form of
'phatic topoi' and a tactile making of place. Walking is not, however, merely the
acting out of an already-known place; place is generated in the process of being
known by its manifestations in the human subject's movements. It is through
practices like walking the land, rather than flying over it, that a landscape is made.
It is in such nuances that these 'forests of gestures' speak, and through which
landscape becomes local, particular and participatory.
Ingold considers a path ''is to be understood not as an infinite series of discrete
points, occupied at successive instants, but as a continuous itinerary of move-
ments'' (Ingold
2000
, p 226). A path is by its nature dynamic, even transient. It
directs the passage of people along its course. Yet it is also the product of that
activity being made and remade by its use, by the practice of feet, hooves and
wheels being pushed on and into the earth. It follows that a track, while established
by earlier journeys, is also the result of subsequent journeys, and that the quality of
passage that the path affords occurs both on the ground and through time. It is this
quality of conversation between movement and land that prompts Paul Carter to
contemplate whether ''the manner of going over ground were itself a poetic act,
