Landscapes are not kinds of landscapes

Posted: November 17th, 2009 | Filed under: Modern / Not Modern |

We had a great visit from Matt Coolidge of the Center for Land Use Interpretation today. We walked around with Matt to visit some infrastructural highlights of this mega-campus, our laboratory for the world. Matt’s presentation on CLUI revealed the organization to be even bigger than I thought.

I hadn’t kept up with their recent growth to branch offices all over the country. And they’re doing some amazing surveys of really crucial subjects. I’m a total sucker for what they’re doing - the sites they visit and highlight are fascinating to me, and the way in which they do it also engaging.

Still, I left with some questions. (Admittedly I could have hung around to ask, and didn’t. I had already stayed later at school than is my wont these days.)

I was taken aback by Matt’s initial introduction/explanation of CLUI’s mission. He explained that no site, no landscape, has any intrinsic worth, identity, meaning - only in the eyes of humans. This he explained as a way of describing CLUI’s mission - to understand all the ways humans make meaning of the land, as they set about changing it.

This statement  - which, to be fair, isn’t on their mission page - along with their dependence on the database and other traditional tour technologies, does locate the project firmly within a modern/secular critical paradigm. Like the Frankfurt School / Marxist approach to cultural critique, CLUI’s work allows that human intervention and organization is never neutral, is always a struggle, that there are weaker and stronger in this struggle. But any critical distance afforded by CLUI’s P.O.V. - aerial, databased - never questions the base assumptions of the modern project, in which humans are the center of the picture.

I’d love to see a CLUI project that, instead of surveying across the human use of landscapes, moved through multiple human, animal, and vegetable inhabitations of a single landscape, like Berry’s description of the view outside his window, or perhaps a Perec-ian cityscape, or even PrairyErth.

I hope it’s not reductive to wonder whether a database, even a creatively constructed one, can afford a different relationship to the land - unless that database is at least somewhat influenced by the modes of being and knowing that were excluded during the occupation and exploitation of that land.

Wilkins/Borges’ “Chinese Encyclopedia” is helpful because it is an impossible taxonomy, one that contains multiple, simultaneous, and exclusive points of view. For other alternatives to the safely-modern critical database, we could look to religious taxonomies of quality and service, the “chains of being” or other models that eschew modernity’s Platonic taxonomies of “kind.”

I want this because I want these landscapes to have some worth without human knowledge and use of them. Surely it must be possible to do this without falling to the sorts of essentialism that renders the landscape wholly other, exotic.

Otherwise, what is the point of all this endless continuation of modernity’s chief organizational tools? At least other infrastructural studies are done in the name of producing better infrastructure.

In the same spirit, CLUI was one of the first living art groups I’d come across to adopt the language of bureaucracy in the service of critique of institutions. Since then, there’s been an explosion of this language in the arts -  fake departments and institutes, Craig Saper’s Bureaucratic Poetry run wild. There are times when this adoption of the clothing of power is in the spirit of carnival; the absurd renders the king a fool. Other times though, it seems more like young boys playing at war, mimicking the violent tools they cannot yet afford to buy.

I don’t count CLUI among the latter, but their language and their tools do give me pause. I still think of Coco Fusco’s admittedly polemical salvo to the effect that maybe there’s nothing that can be done with maps that isn’t already violent.

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