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and fauna, and, fi nally a layer of culture. The continuing power of the metaphor of
the theatre can be seen in the work of Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657-1757),
who is regarded as a central fi gure in promoting the modern conception of science.
Fontenelle writes in Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds from 1686:
I have always thought that nature is very much like an opera house. From where you
are at the opera you don't see the stages exactly as they are; they're arranged to give
the most pleasing effect from a distance, and the wheels and counter-weights that make
everything move are hidden out of sight. You don't worry, either, about how they
work. Only some engineer in the pit, perhaps, may be struck by some extraordinary
effect and be determined to fi gure out for himself how it was done. That engineer is
like the philosophers. But what makes it harder for the philosophers is that, in the
machinery that Nature shows us, the wires are better hidden - so well, in fact, that
they've been guessing for a long time at what causes the movements of the
universe....Whoever sees nature as it truly is simply sees the backstage area of the
theater (Fontenelle 1990[1686], p. 12).
For Fontelle the space of the theater functioned as a kind of 'sensorium' of nature,
providing a metaphorical framework within which its workings could be
understood.
Landscape, in this pictorial, scenic and theatrical sense described by Fontenelle,
provided a world-picture functioning at a metaphoric meta-level that facilitated the
ability of scientists to refl ect upon physical phenomena from their position as dis-
tanced observers, thus objectifying nature and separating it from the human specta-
tor. This notion of landscape, thus, helped shape the taken for granted world picture
that lay behind much scientifi c research from the Renaissance through the Enlight-
enment, though the science of geography had yet to be established as a formal uni-
versity discipline (Glacken, 1967). Landscape emerges as a focus of scientifi c
geographical interest with the development of modern geographical science as a
university discipline in the early 19th century, particularly through the work of
Alexander von Humboldt (Minca, 2007), and in the course of the 20th century
landscape became a central concept in the geographical discipline which was becom-
ing fi rmly entrenched at all levels of education and research (Sauer, 1925). The fact,
however, that geography was both a form of science and a key subject in schools,
inculcating world-pictures into the heads of children, means that the two dimensions
of the discipline cannot be explored in isolation from each other. It is thus necessary
to consider the ideological and educational role of landscape in geography before
considering its situation today.
The Landscape of the Theatre of State
One of the subjects of particular interest in the ongoing re-examination of the
assumptions of modernism is the role of the state. The rise of modernism went hand
in hand with the rise of the centralised state, which has been seen to be a central
agent of modern development. The issue of the state is important when examining
the ideas of geographers because they were so thoroughly implicated in the construc-
tion and functioning of the modern state. They not only mapped the regional
organisation used to make the state and its territory governable, they also produced
the textbooks used to educate the populace to see themselves as natural-born citizens
of the state, as the geographers Anssi Paasi and Jouni Häkli have amply shown
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