ON FOOTNOTES AND THE HAPTIC: AN APPROACH TO THE READING OF STONE INSCRIPTIONS ON SOUTH AFRICAN KOPPIES. Maja Marx 0110330R A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. Johannesburg, 2008 2 Abstract: A phenomenological study of chiasmic and haptic embodiment of the world through passage, in order to illustrate the reading of chalked stone inscriptions on South African koppies as ?footnotes? to a landscape as text. ? Phenomenology ? Chiasma ? The haptic ? Embodiment ? Passage ? South African stone inscriptions ? Footnotes ? Landscape as text 3 Declaration: I declare that this dissertation is my own unaided work. It is submitted for the degree of Master of Arts in the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. It has not been submitted before for any other degree or examination in any other university. _______________________________ Maja Marx _____________ day of _____________, 2008 4 To Gerhard 5 6 Contents: Page: List of Figures 7 Introduction 10 1. Naming Place: Towards a ?Topological? Space 17 2. A Subjective Epistemology: Phenomenological Approaches to Space and Place 32 3. Inscribing the Landscape 39 4. The Sensory Perception of Passage: Footnotes, Distances and the Immediacy of Experience 61 a. The Moving Eye 61 b. The Seeing Eye 82 c. The Touching Eye 95 5. Stones, Earth and Chalk: As Far As The Eye Can Touch 116 6. Conclusion 144 List of References 149 7 LIST OF FIGURES: Figure Page Figure 1: Photo: Courtesy of the Artist. 11 Figure 2: MAGNUS, L. 2006. ?Jesus? Dagvaar Burgemeester 12 Oor Rassis-bewering. Beeld. 2006.06.08. Figure 3: Photo: Courtesy of the Artist. 13 Figure 4: Photo: Courtesy of the Artist. 13 Figure 5: Photo: Courtesy of the Artist. 14 Figure 6: Photo: Courtesy of the Artist. 14 Figure 7: Photo: Courtesy of the Artist. 15 Figure 8: Ed Ruscha. In MORLEY, S. 2003. Writing On The Wall: 25 Word and Image in Modern Art. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press. Figure 9: Joseph Kosuth. In MORLEY, S. 2003. Writing On The Wall: 27 Word and Image in Modern Art. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press. Figure 10: Fra Angelico. In MORLEY, S. 2003. Writing On The Wall: 28 Word and Image in Modern Art. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press. Figure 11: MORLEY, S. 2003. Writing On The Wall: Word and Image 29 in Modern Art. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press. Figure 12: Albrecht D?rer. In MORLEY, S. 2003. Writing On The Wall: 29 Word and Image in Modern Art. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press. Figure 13: Rene Descartes, La Dioptrique Leiden 1637. In ALPERS, S. 43 1983. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.p 34. Figure 14: Albrecht D?rer. Unterweysung der Messung. Nuremberg. 1538. 45 In ALPERS, S. 1983. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.p 43. Figure 15: http://home22.inet.tele.dk/hightower/mobius.htm. 56 2007-12-12. Figure 16: Unidentified photographer. In SCHWARTZ, J & RYAN, J.R. 75 2003. Picturing Place. I.B.Taurus. p 152. Figure 17: David Goldblatt. http://www.michaelstevenson.com/ 75 8 contemporary/exhibitions/goldblatt/intersections2/ item4_9257.htm. 2008-01-15. Figure 18: Unidentified photographer. In SCHWARTZ, J & RYAN, J.R. 78 2003. Picturing Place. I.B.Taurus. p 156. Figure 19: Filippo Brunelleschi, http://www.acmi.net.au/AIC/ 85 HOOGSTRATEN_BIO.html. 2007-12-12. Figure 20: Photo: Courtesy of the Artist. 92 Figure 21: Photo: Courtesy of the Artist. 93 Figure 22: Photo: Courtesy of the Artist. 93 Figure 23: Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola. Le due regole della prospettiva 103 practica. Rome 1583. In ALPERS, S. 1983. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.p 56. Figure 24: Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola. Le due regole della prospettiva 103 practica. Rome 1583. In ALPERS, S. 1983. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.p 43. Figure 25: Jan Vredeman de Vries. Perspective. Leiden. 1604 ? 5. Plate 1. 104 In ALPERS, S. 1983. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.p 57. Figure 26: Jan Vredeman de Vries. Perspective. Leiden. 1604 ? 5. Plate 2. 105 In ALPERS, S. 1983. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.p 57. Figure 27: Jan Vredeman de Vries. Perspective. Leiden. 1604 ? 5. Plate 28. 105 In ALPERS, S. 1983. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.p 58. Figure 28: John Rocque, In BRUNO, G. 2002. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in 107 Art, Architecture, and Film. London & New York: Verso. P 180. Figure 29: Claes Jansz, 1622. In Holland Agenda 2008: 700 Years of 107 Dutch Cartography. Published by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Vianen: Habo DaCosta. Figure 30: Jan Vermeer. In ALPERS, S. 1983. The Art of Describing: 109 Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. plate 2. Figure 31: Jan Christaenz Micker. In ALPERS, S. 1983. The Art of 113 Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. plate 3. Figure 32: Google Earth. 113 Figure 33: Courtesy: Abrie Fourie. 118 9 Figure 34: Courtesy: Abrie Fourie. 120 Figure 35: Photo: Courtesy of the Artist. 122 Figure 36: Photo: Courtesy of the Artist. 123 Figure 37: Photo: Courtesy of the Artist. 124 Figure 38: Photo: Courtesy of the Artist. 124 Figure 39: Photo: Courtesy of the Artist. 126 Figure 40: Photo: Courtesy of the Artist. 127 Figure 41: Photo: Courtesy of the Artist. 128 Figure 42: Photo: Courtesy of the Artist. 128 Figure 43: Photo: Courtesy of the Artist. 128 Figure 44: Photo: Courtesy of the Artist. 128 Figure 45: Photo: Courtesy of the Artist. 129 Figure 46: Photo: Courtesy of the Artist. 129 Figure 47: Photo: Courtesy of the Artist. 129 Figure 48: Photo: Courtesy of the Artist. 131 Figure 49: Photo: Courtesy of the Artist. 132 Figure 50: Photo: Courtesy of the Artist. 132 Figure 51: Photo: Courtesy of the Artist. 134 Figure 52: Photo: Courtesy of the Artist. 135 Figure 53: Photo: Courtesy Abrie Fourie. 135 Figure 54: Photo: Courtesy of the Artist. 135 Figure 55: Streeknuus: Cullinan Rayton. 2007-02-09. p 1. 137 Figure 56: Photo: Courtesy of the Artist. 138 Figure 57: Photo: Courtesy of the Artist. 140 Figure 58: Photo: Courtesy of the Artist. 140 Figure 59: Photo: Courtesy of the Artist. 141 Figure 60: Photo: Courtesy of the Artist. 141 Figure 61: Photo: Courtesy of the Artist. 142 Figure 62: Photo: Courtesy of the Artist. 142 10 Introduction The art of the empty landscape is the pessimistic obverse of a wishful pastoral art that by the labour of hands makes the landscape speak, and peoples it with an ideal community. (Coetzee 1988:9) Let us imagine a white patch on a homogeneous background. All the points in the patch have a certain ?function? in common, that of forming themselves into a ?shape?. The colour of the shape is more intense, and as it were more resistant than that of the background; the edges of the white patch ?belong? to it, and are not part of the background although they adjoin it: the patch appears to be placed on the background and does not break it up. Each part arouses the expectation of more than it contains, and this elementary perception is therefore already charged with a meaning. But, if the shape and the background, as a whole, are not sensed, they must be sensed, one may object, in each of their points. To say this is to forget that each point in its turn can be perceived only as a figure on a background. (Merleau-Ponty 1962:4) The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory . . . . (Baudrillard in Foster 1988:166) The phenomenon of ?chalking? using white chalked stones is a familiar sight in the South African landscape. These white stones are used to mark property and place on the hillsides, often poignantly acquiring grave-like, bone-like associative qualities. In addition, they are most often in the format of recognisable signs such as crosses or written text, referring to place names, the names of farms, dates and a variety of religious-political vernaculars. The inscription of landscape by means of stone is by no means a purely South African phenomenon, and examples can be found globally. It can be argued these texts carry a basic reference to the age-old tradition of inscribing the landscape with stone such as those found in the stone circles in Europe or the large Nasca lines of Peru, but it is imperative to consider that there also exists a radical disparity between these. Rather than being tied to an ancient and presumably sacred symbology and significance, they are quite contemporary in their production and serve as reminder to recent colonial narratives. In this manner, they too are significant; they allow the readers of these large stone markings to investigate the landscape as text, with the stone inscriptions serving as 11 ?historiographic invocations? (Benjamin in Cohen 1998:3) to the colonial past from within a post-colonial present. Figure 1: Large chalked stone inscriptions in Laingsburg, Great Karoo, South Africa With the chalked stone inscriptions on our koppies, we find the domains of different epistemologies revealed: most of these sites expose information about the specific claiming of landscape; it discloses the use of cheap or correctional labour and ultimately allows for an investigation of the vernacular and the maintenance of social hierarchies through language and text. As an example, let us consider one of the locally more famous inscriptions as found on the central koppie in the district of Laingsburg in the Great Karoo (figure 1). In large white letters the reader is instructed in Afrikaans to ?DRA WOL? (directly translated to mean ?wear wool?). I have often marvelled at this appeal, directed at the passer-by as a request for a consumerist response to a local product or as large scale reminder and command to 12 the local inhabitants of Laingsburg, almost authoritatively demanding that they ?wear wool?. As such, the command (as with examples of stone inscriptions referring to place names) is reminiscent of a literal ?writing on the wall?, following a Menetekel- like1 function of making the voice of authority visible. In the case of Laingsburg, it is the Wool Council that speaks. In other cases we find the presence of a religious and colonial voice, for example in the Christian promise that ?Jesus Christ is Lord of all? (Beeld 2006.06.08) as seen on the farm of John Liversage in Mkondu, Mpumalanga (figure 2) and in colonial toponymic references to leaders such as Sir Harry Smith on the koppie of ?Smithfield? in the Free State (figure 3). Other examples include descriptive toponymic clues to the names of farms or nearby locales (see figure 4 & 5), as well as cases of grand scale advertising (see figure 6 & 7). Figure 2: Christian stone inscription on the farm of John Liversage in Mkondu, Mpumalanga South Africa 1 The writing on the wall (or sometimes 'handwriting on the wall') is an expression that suggests the visualisation of the voice of authority. It originates in the Biblical book of Daniel where supernatural writing foretells the demise of the Babylonian Empire, but it has come to have a wide usage in language and literature. The words ?Mene men tekel upharsin? translates into ?measured, measured and found wanting?. 13 Figure 3: Inscription on koppie: SMITHFIELD South Africa Figure 4: Inscription on koppie: MOOIFONTEIN South Africa 14 Figure 5: Inscription on koppie: BOUGAINVILLEA South Africa Figure 6: Inscription on koppie: LODGE South Africa 15 Figure 7: Inscription on koppie: OORD RESORT South Africa This dissertation is primarily concerned with a phenomenological approach to the reading of the chalked stone inscriptions on South African koppies, and holds that these inscriptions serve as literal ?footnotes? to the reading of landscape as text. In this sense, space is organised into a sequence of narration by means of a route, with the text in the landscape speaking to a broader narrative. In the following chapters I will investigate the critical aspects related to the development of an understanding of the text in the landscape as a key phenomenon concerning the chiasmic and haptic embodiment of the world through passage. Our investigation will pursue the course of a brief enquiry into the discourses around naming, text and image in Chapter 1, followed by an assessment of the phenomenological framework in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 and 4 will look into the ocular agenda of the inscription and representation of the landscape and the significant role performed by the moving viewer or passer-by in the production of topographical 16 space. Chapter 5 provides a brief survey of the artistic project and exhibition entitled As Far As The Eye Can Touch that served as practical component to my MA (FA), documenting a series of text based and mostly large-scale poetic interventions in the landscape. 17 1. Naming Place White invasion was a form of spatial writing that erased the earlier meaning. (Carter in Arthur 2003:53) The limit of a name serves, like a verbal fence, to enclose an individual place as a spatial self. (Frake in Feld & Basso 1996:235) As a child, the notion of having the responsibility of giving a place, street or an area a name appeared to be a very important job indeed, and whenever I had a chance I would imagine naming my ?own? places that still awaited naming: the koppie behind the Pick ?n Pay, the stretch of land where you could find heaps of quarts crystals, the peculiar site where a cement factory left their rubble, the mesmerizing storm water drains next to the big road. . . . I grew up in Verwoerdburg (now Centurion)2, just outside Pretoria (now Tswane)3, and stayed in an area identified by the names of rivers and stones: Limpopo Avenue, Zambezi Avenue, Molopo Avenue, Diamond Avenue, Turquoise Street, and our own: Jasper Avenue. Under standard contemporary South African procedure, the Post Office, a property developer or a governmental body such as a local authority generally makes the application for the approval of a name. After 1994 more than three-quarters of all 2 Verwoerdburg is a satellite city south of Pretoria, with a predominantly Afrikaans, conservative population, home to the South African military establishment. Formed by the amalgamation of various townships whose names are still to be found as suburbs, such as Clubview and Lyttleton, it acquired municipal status in 1964 and was named Verwoerdburg in 1967, a year after Hendrik Verwoerd was assassinated. It was renamed to Centurion in 1995, making it the first town in the world to be named after a sports stadium (Jenkins 2007:148 - 150). 3 In 2005, during the 150th anniversary of the founding of Pretoria, the ANC-governed City of Tswane Metropolitan Council decided to change the name of the city of Pretoria to Tswane. The Voortrekkers named the city after their leader, Andries Pretorius; in the mid 19th century the Nguni-speaking people adapted the new name to ePitoli; and during the apartheid era, Tswane had appeared on railway destination boards for third-class (black) carriages. In 2000 Tswane officially became the name of the local authority for the whole of greater Pretoria. 18 the names accepted were for post offices and other postal facilities such as agencies. Post offices had always formed a large proportion of new names, but after the 1994 South African democratic elections this noticeably increased as the Post Office committed itself to giving every citizen a postal address, bringing postal facilities within his or her reach4. As part of its new development programme, the South African Post Office post-1994 sent out field-workers to sound out local communities on the names they sought after for their post offices, clearly marking an amendment from the Apartheid past when bureaucrats sitting in offices would make the selections, which were in some were cases, unashamedly ideological (Jenkins 2007). The naming and classification of particular topographical features of sites, whether settlement, mountain peak or farm, is vital to the establishment and maintenance of their identity; essentially, ?names create landscapes? (Tilley 1994:19). Through the act of naming and through the development of human associations, such places become endowed with significance and meaning. Place names are of crucial importance because they serve to alter the completely physical and geographical into something that is historically and socially experienced, creating a shared existential space out of a so-called ?blank? environment (Weiner 1991:32, Basso 1984:27). Correspondingly, in White Writing: on the culture of letters in South Africa, J.M. Coetzee reflects on the colonial idea that ?landscape remains alien, impenetrable, until a language is found in which to win it, speak it, represent it? (1988:7). By 4 A few names record the response of communities, like Kgopudi (?a dream to remember about the wish to have a postal service?), Lamolatlala (?taking hunger away from the people ? post-boxes will bring registered letters containing money?), Moleboge (?thanks to the Post Office for the service it brings?) (Jenkins 2007:1). 19 naming places and things, they become confined in social discourses and act as mnemonics for the historical actions of individuals or groups (Tilley 1994:18). It is one thing to name a place, another to write that name on a place. Historiographically speaking, South African ?readers? of the landscape are faced with a colonial writing on the koppie as a ?wall?, a tabula, or a surface that is allegedly awaiting inscription. It is in this colonial approach to the landscape as supposedly ?empty? or semiotically ?mute?, that we find the principle which Coetzee (1988:9) describes as ?the labour of hands [that] makes the landscape speak?. It is through the working of the land, the physical transformation of landscape, the naming of place that the landscape is purportedly given a ?voice?. But it is also via this ?voice? that we find a revealing of the historiographic claiming of landscape through naming and inscription as a reflection on the annexation of our world (and its ordering processes) in a concrete manner. The naming of place is not only a necessary means of recognition and communication, but also a fundamental means of laying claim to territory. The process of naming is more than a value?free description of a point in space; it is also a means of conveying and nurturing senses of place and linking these with selected facets of the past (Ashworth & Graham 2005:16). Colonisation is a route in geographical space with a perspective of knowledge of ?here? and ?there?, at first differentiating between spaces that have been colonised and those which have not, and then between those which have been brought more closely into the area of colonial knowledge (Arthur 2003:54). The act of colonisation, the act of crossing the landscape, was not only a physical event but also a conceptual one, with colonial knowing commencing with the ?unknowing? of local knowledge in order to make it possible to ?create? the place as an ?unknown? space. 20 Paul Carter (Steddon 1998:24) argues that historically ?explorers? did not objectively record the land before them, instead they invented places to conform to European needs and expectations, naming ? which was in fact a re-naming ? gave substance to their inventions. Explorers were not dispatched to traverse deserts, but to locate objects of cultural significance: rivers, mountains, meadows, plains of promise. They had a social responsibility to make most of what they saw, to dignify even hints of the habitable with significant class names. They were expected to arrest the country, to concentrate it into reversible roads, which would summarize its content; they were expected to translate its extension into objects of commerce (Carter 1987:56). This inevitably brings the discussion to the politics of space itself; if space is to be measured as a medium for action, a resource which players draw on in their activity and use for their own intentions, it inevitably becomes value-laden rather than value-free and political rather than neutral. To the colonialist mind, once a space has been stripped of its original, unrefined and indigenous sedimented human meanings5, and considered to be completely epiphenomenal and extraneous, the landscape becomes a surface or volume like any other, ?open? for utilization and homogeneous in all places in its latent exchange value for any particular development (Tilley 1994:21). The establishment of a ?European landscape? in indigenous spaces like Africa or Australia has been created through a process involving a change in land use and a break with the previous histories of the land, amounting to a manner of denial that the land had a preceding history. Europeans occupied what (to them) was a previously unutilised environment, with the objective to ?release? the potential of the land. In the language of the colonist, terra incognita was used in a historical sense to illustrate the status of the land before widespread occupation by colonists, referring 5 As were to be found in pre-colonial South Africa, Australia and all other indigenous pre-colonies. 21 to large areas of land, not travelled across and reported about by non-indigenous people. In this manner the land is viewed as ?unknown? even though the colonial society is at the same time aware of the previous and continuing occupation of the native society. In this sense, ?the ?unknown? is concurrent with something that can be ?discovered? (not ?visited? or ?travelled to?)? (Arthur 2003:56). The past of the ?new? land had no existence except as it was reflected through the clashes of the moment. Instead, the colonists brought with them an ?old? past in the form of distant landscapes and toponymic references which aided their conceptualisation and prospect of the ?new? land (Morphy in Bender 1993:206 - 207). Names are firmly bound up with power and identity; attempts to change them can stoke major unease. Perhaps it is because of this that the South African post- apartheid government moved rather slowly to alter names. In 2005 it was reported that 57 000 South African place names were up for amendment by the South African Geographical Names Council. These included place names that demean, such as Kafferspruit and Boesmanskraal, and town names that duplicate those of other centres in South Africa or elsewhere in the world, such as Bethlehem, Parys, Morija, Ladysmith and Middelburg. Towns with names of colonial origin, such as George, Grahamstown and Queenstown, are also being considered (Mail & Guardian 2005.03.11). It is perhaps not astonishing to find that, as one people or political hegemony steps into the shoes of another, existing names are replaced: at the end of the Vietnam War, the communists changed Saigon to Ho Chi Minh City; in Russia, St Petersburg went through a process of being renamed Petrograd, then Leningrad, and is now 22 called St Petersburg again. One finds numerous examples of this in the former communist bloc countries of central Europe, and it is also not unusual to find this phenomenon in the Southern African subcontinent. Southern Africa holds a mass history of successive peoples that have been naming and renaming its geographical features, ranging from the hunter-gatherer San, the pastoral Khoi, the African, the Portuguese along the coast, the Dutch, French, British and other European and Indian immigrant influences (Jenkins 2007). In resonance with a worldwide colonial impulse, the Voortrekkers generally replaced indigenous names in the interior of South Africa, often favouring descriptive and expressive names or the names of their leaders (Jenkins 2007:79). One specific and well-known case in KwaZulu-Natal exemplifies the tragic history of the dealings between whites and indigenous people: Bloedriver6, also later called Blood River by English-speakers, is paradoxically called Ncome (beautiful) in isiZulu. Distinctly, the English settlers who came to KwaZulu-Natal in the middle of the 19th century did not alter many indigenous names, instead they followed the imperialist pattern seen elsewhere (for example in Canada), where they would often give new names that repeated place names from Britain and elsewhere in the Empire. Often this would be encouraged by an apparent resemblance in the locality, at other times by nostalgia. Less kindly, these choices might be attributed to arrogance or the lack of imagination. By the same token, it was popular to use the names of royalty, public figures and officials, followed by missionaries, clerics, military men and pioneers (Stayt 1971): Prince Albert, King William?s Town, Queenstown, Somerset East, Somerset West, Beaufort West, Fort Beaufort, Sir Lowry?s Pass, Colesberg, Port Frances, Malmesbury, to name a few. 6 Bloedriver was the scene of a battle between the Voortrekkers and the Zulus on 16 December 1838 in which the Zulus were decimated and the river ran with their blood. 23 There has been much criticism on both the English and Afrikaans names given to South African places, as Reverent Charles Pettman (Jenkins 2007:81) unsympathetically stated: Travellers and others have often remarked upon the sameness and baldness of much of our South African nomenclature; it is characterised generally by a want of nice and accurate discrimination, by not a little repetition, ? and also by a considerable amount of real ugliness, testifying to a lack of originality, a paucity of idea, and to an almost entire absence or aesthetic fancy on the part of the owners of the soil ? some of the native names would have been vastly preferable. Similarly, writes Thomas Pringle (ibid) in Thompson?s Travels and Adventures in Southern Africa (1827): It is strange to observe the barrenness of fancy of the boors (sic) in giving names to places. In every quarter of the Colony we find Brak River, Zwart River, Zeekoe River, Palmiet River, Baviaan?s Kloof, and so forth; the appellation being given generally for some quality common to many places, and seldom with that nice and accurate discrimination which seizes the distinctive and peculiar features alone, and embodies them in the name. As a democratic system, the contemporary South African multilingualism necessitates difficult decisions in the design of the country?s official maps by the Directorate of Surveys and Mapping. Up until now, it used to construct the 1:50 000 maps bilingually in both Afrikaans and English, and applied to features such as headings and the legend, providing details on scale and symbology. The maps are still bilingual, but instead of Afrikaans and English carrying main focus, they now feature English and one other language ? typically the language deemed to be the principal tongue of the region represented in the map. It is not easy to produce map legends in the African languages. In South Africa, there are various parallel names for the same places: with regional and alternative, local names, one finds that indigenous geographical terminology has often not been officially standardised and 24 there is often a difference in translations (Jenkins 2007:88). In addition, another kind of parallel naming existed pre-1994: If you look at a standard map of South Africa, you will see the names of many villages, towns and cities. However, you will not see the names of places where most South African live. Most maps will not show you where Khayelitsha or Mamelodi is ? yet each of them has more than 300 000 residents, placing them in the largest 20 urban settlements in South Africa. Probably none of them will show you where Winterveld is ? yet it has a population of around 400 000 people. . . . In this sense, our contemporary maps are inadequate, and this needs to be redressed (Payne & Stickler in Jenkins 2007:89). Black, coloured and Indian residential areas had to be mapped, listed and cross- indexed, both attached and free-standing to ?white? towns (Jenkins 2007:89), with the Automobile Association since following suit by providing in brackets under the name of each town the names of the principal residential areas that were formerly zoned for so-called ?non-Europeans?. The theoretical study of names, onomastics, suggests that name changes are to some level unnecessary, seeing as over a period of time the literal significance of a proper name is lost. On the other hand, it is important to acknowledge that people do pay attention to the origin, meaning and language of names, even if the approach is uninformed (Jenkins 2003). The landscape is a ?blackboard? that announces epistemological domains, inasmuch as it was historically crucial to ?write? the landscape and, perhaps more engagingly, in how it is still possible to ?read? the landscape in this historic format. Let us now consider the topographic dialogue between image and text. 25 A snow covered mountain, its white peak highlighted by sunlight, clear blue sky behind it: a Swiss landscape perhaps? Across the side of the mountain one can read a strangely ambiguous piece of text that looks as if it is actually being projected onto the face of the mountain itself: an advertisement, a slice of a billboard, a view through a shop window, a vitreous eye floater? Figure 8: Ed Ruscha -So 1999 64 by 64 cm Private Collection Courtesy Anthony d?Offay Gallery, London Those who are familiar with the work of Ed Ruscha will know that this is clearly no advertisement but rather his 1999 painting called ?-So?. It may indeed pursue the language of advertising and, despite the linguistic games that the work might 26 employ, the image also moves beyond that of an easy and commoditised visual to one that engages the viewer in two distinct modes of information gathering ? one involving the basic visual scanning of the image and the other the reading of words. The visual scanning of the image allows for the freedom of mental and sensual movement, and an openness of interpretation, with the reading of the text; the reader is confined to a predetermined route constructed from a horizontal row of letters to be deciphered from left to right and top to bottom. Without a doubt, the activities of seeing and reading take place at quite dissimilar tempos and engage different orderings of perception ? the brain has to organize consciousness in distinct ways for each separate activity and plainly cannot do both simultaneously. There are various interactions between the visual and the verbal sign. Morley (2003) singles four interactions out: firstly the trans-medial relationship. In this context, word and work are linked by way of transposition or substitution: the one is fundamentally supplemental to the other. This might include any kind of writing or imaging in which the linguistic and the visual continue to be clearly notable both in time and in space, and in relation to the separation of labour. This implies a hierarchy in which the text remains subordinate to the image (or vice versa), for example illustrated books, art criticism, theoretical discourses, or gallery wall labels. In more contemporary approaches to this relationship, the clarity of the division is blurred when artists take on the literary roles once laid aside for others, either writing within the traditional sites of literary discourse or else bringing words into the art gallery (see figure 9). 27 Figure 9: Joseph Kosuth One and Three Chairs 1965 A folding chair, a photograph of a chair and a photographic enlargement of a dictionary definition of a chair. Chair 82 x 37.8 x 53 cm, photographic panel 91.5 x 61 cm, text panel 61 x 61.3 cm Museum of Modern Art, New York Secondly, we find the multi-medial relationship, where word and image coexist more closely, partaking in the same space, though remaining evidently distinguished in terms of spatial relations, kind of intelligibility and often the division of labour. A good example of this category would be a shop sign, an advertisement or an artwork that incorporates title, caption or some clarifying text while still keeping word and image spatially and cognitively isolated. In the text of the 1430 Fra Angelico?s painting on the Annunciation of Mary, the viewer is introduced to an early forerunner of the speech bubble, there to secure and specify the Christian message also carried by the image (see figure 10). 28 Figure 10: Fra Angelico Annunciation (detail) 1432 - 1433 Tempera on wood 175 by 180 Museo Diocesano, Cortona A third association to consider is the mixed-media relationship, where word and image have less fundamental unity and are only minimally separated from each other, having been transferred into one another?s usual domains. From a pre-modern world we find a good example of this relationship in the emblem; while the modern world proves to be an exceptionally fertile ground for this relation, with artists often referring to the landscape of the sign that constitutes the urban environment (think 29 of Richard Estes? work) or borrowing basic stylistic elements (consider Ruscha?s ?- So?). The fourth relation that Morley (2003) discloses is the inter-media relationship. Examples range from the medieval Book of Kells (see figure 11), to D?rer?s artist monogram (see figure 12); here one locates writing in a strikingly visual form. The recognition of the visual, material face of letters (and of the performative and sensory aspects to the act of writing) is as much at the centre of the traditional practice of calligraphy, as it is of topography. Consider the contemporary extremes of deconstructivist design, and the work produced by designers such as Neville Brody and David Carson. This category emphasises the fact that writing is undeniably a visual language, that is it is something that appeals to the eye as well as to the mind (Morley 2003: 12). Figure 11: Figure 12: Book of Kells D?rer?s Monogram c. 800 Folio 8 recto, beginning of the Breves causae of Matthew Manuscript illumination Trinity College Library, Dublin 30 In chronological terms, the spatialisation and visualisation of language through the technology of writing originates after the basic development of complex systems of coded sounds. The origins of writing is said to lie with the development of explicitly visual modes of communication such as pictographic and ideographic forms that were totally independent from speech (Morley 2003:13). It was the innovation of the alphabet, though, that transformed writing into a medium intending to document or record of the spoken word. Hereafter it would be seen as secondary to oral language and be used in an increasingly non-pictorial manner (particularly in the West). The advance of moveable type further added to this circumstance: Gutenberg?s fifteenth century invention allowed writing to become a homogeneous and mechanised medium, ordered and housed within the space and format of the folio. In spite of image-making and writing sharing a common root, the activity of inscription became resolutely detached from the traditions of image making and its origins in the bodily gesture. Merleau-Ponty (1962: 401) remarks on the typical experience of reading a printed page: The wonderful thing about language is that it promotes its own oblivion . . . . My eyes follow the line on the paper and from the moment I am caught up in their meaning, I lose sight of them. The paper, the letters on it, my eye and the body are there only as the minimum setting of some invisible operation. Expression fades before what is expressed, and this is why its mediating role may pass unnoticed. We can concur that the inter-medial relation between word and image exposes the notion that writing and image-making share a common origin: that they share a visual nature of inscription and a basic language of technology (such as chisel, brush or pen). However, the inter-medial has in modern contexts come to indicate more than a mere melding of visual and verbal on a two-dimensional surface; in the framework of art and mass media, we find a radical reconsideration of the boundaries between the various media, generally involving the amalgamation of varied spaces, movements and sounds into a ?total work of art? (Morley 2003:14). 31 Here, we find a vastly expanded field of communication and information; it is no longer possible to speak of specific genres, either visual or verbal. We cannot image how a mind would paint . . . it is by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings. To understand these transubstantiations we must go back to the working, actual body ? not the chunk of space or a bundle of functions but that body which is an intertwining of vision and movement (Merleau-Ponty in Johnson 1993:123-124). In place of a blatantly linear, hierarchical and segregated association between reading and writing, seeing and reading, one finds an engagement with what has been called ?topographic? space, ?a space in which writing is severed from its role as mere verbal description and instead is experienced as both a verbal and visual phenomenon? (Bolter 1991:62). 32 2. A Subjective Epistemology: Phenomenological Approaches to Space and Place What is geography beyond the charting of landmasses, climate zones, elevations, bodies of waters, populated terrains, nation states, geological strata and natural resource deposits? (Rogoff 2000:21) Geography: the very root meaning of the term is literally that of ?earth writing?, from the Greek geo, meaning ?earth??, and graphien, meaning to ?write? (Barnes & Duncan 1992:1). In Terra Infirma, Irit Rogoff (2000) states that geography is a concept, a sign system and an order of knowledge that is established at the centres of power. As an epistemic category, geography is rooted in matters of positionality, in questions of who has the authority and power to name, of who has the authority to subsume others into its identity. Thus the critical activity which positions geography follows an active form of un-naming, re-naming and the revising of such power structures in terms of the relations between subjects and places (Rogoff 2000:21). The relation between the discourses on geography and those on space, are essential to this discussion. Human geography and archaeology have seen numerous convergences; both practices had until the 1960s been largely empiricist in approach and occupied with a concern in difference and distinctiveness. Human geography was subject to the study of regions at various spatial scales, in this way dealing with Africa, Asia, North America, Canada or Britain as a whole. Similarly, archaeology was 33 concerned with space-time systematics and the ordering of artefacts and other evidence into cultural units within a delimited territorial area with a supposed ethnic significance. With the introduction of ?new? geography and ?new? archaeology, there occurred a ?replacement? of these perspectives with a more positivist functionalism, making room for the notion of geography as spatial science and archaeology as a science of the past. New geography and new archaeology viewed space as an abstract dimension or container in which human activities and events took place, implying that activity, event and space were conceptually and physically separate from another and only contingently connected. Such an outlook on space decentred it from agency and meaning, proclaiming it as something that could be objectively measured as part of an abstracted geometry of scale, with space literally seen as a ?nothingness?, a simple surface for action, without depth (Hunt, Lipo, Sterling 2001). This view further maintained that space is seen as universal, everywhere and anywhere the same, with a cross-cultural impact on society and people. Thus the effects of distance and the changing possibilities of locations and sites could be objectively applied to one and the same spatial scale of measurement (Tilley 1994). As container, surface and volume, space was significant inasmuch as it existed in itself and for itself, external to and indifferent to human affairs, thus neutral and separate from any consideration of structures of power and domination. The lure of this approach was, without doubt, the room it offered for objective and comparative study, with new geography providing the basis for a mathematical spatial archaeology (Clarke 1977, Tilley 1994). As Wissler states: ?the real equipment of an archaeologist is a scientific mind? (Hunt, Lipo & Sterling 2001:xi). As a result and as part of the re-theorisation of human geography and archaeology in the 1970s and 34 1980s, the value of a ?scientific? conception of space abstracted from human affairs have been called into question (Soja 1989, Bender 1992, Tilley 1994, Harvey 1973). Alternatively, space can be seen as ontologically grounded in the differential structuring of human experience and action in the world. Phenomenologically, space is to be viewed as a medium rather than a container for action, as something that is involved in the action and not separate to it. As such, space cannot exist apart from the events and activities with which it is occupied; it is socially produced, and different groups, individuals and societies will act out their lives in different spaces. Thus space in itself no longer happens to be a ?meaningful term?: ?there is no space, only spaces? (Tilley 1994:10). As social productions these spaces are always meaningfully centred in relation to human agency and are expressly able to change because their formation takes place as part of the day-to day praxis of individuals and groups. A centred and meaningful space involves specific sets of linkages between the physical and space of the non-humanly created world, somatic states of the body, the mental space of cognition and representation and the space of movement, encounter and interaction between persons and between persons and the human and non-human environment (Tilley 1994:10). Space possesses a relational significance, explicitly developed via the relation between people and places; because different individuals and societies understand it differently, it can have no universal essence. In this sense, space depends on who is experiencing it and how, and is intimately related to the formation of biographies and social relationships (Tilley 1994). The key matter in the phenomenological approach to space is the way in which people experience and understand the world. Phenomenology is a philosophy for which the world is always ?already there? before reflection begins ? as an inalienable presence; and all its efforts are concentrated upon re-achieving a direct and primitive contact with the world, and endowing that contact with a philosophical status . . . 35 It also offers an account of space, time and the world as we ?live? them (Merleau-Ponty 1962:vii). Phenomenology involves the interpretive study of human experience, and aims to scrutinise and explain human actions, positions, meanings, and experience "as they spontaneously occur in the course of daily life" (von Eckartsberg 1998:3). It is about the relation between Being and Being-in-the-world, involving an investigation of the comprehension and description of things as a subject experiences them. Being-in- the-world is thought to exist in a process of objectification in which we objectify the world by placing ourselves separately from it, autonomously constructing a gap, a distance in space. It is of the very essence of being human that we create the distance between the self and that which is beyond or ?other?, that we constantly attempt to bridge this gap by means of certain deeds or ?doings?, including bodily actions and movements, and perception (sight, touch and hearing). Thus ?we get into place, move and stay there with our bodies?(Casey 1997:239). Both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty accentuate the relationship between inhabited space and our social Being-in-the-world. Heidegger (1971) maintains that spaces take delivery of their essential being not from ?space? but from locations. A scientific or mathematical ?space? of measurement is not humanised, therefore it can have no spaces, places or locations because, according to Heidegger, spaces open up by the virtue of the dwelling of humanity. In Heideggerian terms, ?staying with things? or ?dwelling? is an elemental part of that which makes us human, with the body necessarily the vantage point from which we understand the world. Merleau-Ponty argues that the human body provides the fundamental mediation point between thought and the world: Any perception of a thing, a shape or a size as real, any perceptual constancy refers back to the positioning of a world and of a system of experience in which my body is inescapably linked with phenomena. But 36 the system of experience is not arrayed before me as if I were God, it is lived by me from a certain point of view; I am not the spectator, I am involved, and it is my involvement in a point of view which makes possible both the finiteness of my perception and its opening out upon the complete world as a horizon of every perception (Merleau-Ponty 1962:303). In this sense, the world and the subject chiasmically flow into another through the body as living bond with the world, with notions of ?subject?, ?object?, ?consciousness? and ?nature? totalled and dialectically related through the Being of the body in the world. Perceptual consciousness, or awareness, is thus not merely a matter of reflection about the world; it also derives from bodily presence in relation to bodily awareness. As Merleau-Ponty states: ?far from my body?s being for me no more than a fragment of space, there would be no space at all for me if I had no body? (1962:102). Accordingly, we can say that we always find ourselves in places, however different the places themselves may be and however differently we construe and exploit them; it literarily serves as a ?pre-position? inasmuch as we are already in place, never not emplaced in one way or another (Casey in Feld & Basso 1996:17). The relationship between body and subjectivity is neither necessary nor accidental, it is contingent. The locatedness of the body accentuates the ?place character? of space (Casey 1993, 1997). The body is always in place; we cannot escape this fact. More significant, however, is the manner in which the body itself is spatial. Merleau-Ponty states that the spatiality of the body is not a spatiality of position but one of situation, with the implication that we should avoid thinking of our bodies as being merely in space or in time, rather, our bodies inhabit space and time: I am not in space an time, nor do I conceive space and time; I belong to them, my body combines with them and includes them. The scope of this inclusion is the measure of that of my existence (Merleau-Ponty 1962:140). 37 In view of this, active bodies, using the obtained systems and habits, position their world around themselves and constitute that world as ?ready-to-hand? (Heidegger 1962:83). And, in being active and hence able to move, our bodies ?measure? space and time in their active construction of a meaningful world. Accordingly, meaning and matter is intertwined. For Merleau-Ponty, the material world is not juxtaposed with an ideational world, as Crossley states: Merleau-Ponty refuses to separate the ideational and the material. All ideas and meanings are necessarily embodied (in books, rituals, speech, buildings, etc.), he maintains, and all matter embodies meaning and derives its place in the human world by virtue of that meaning? In this sense then he calls our attention . . . to the embodiment of culture, and he extends his argument against the abstraction of meaning and matter (Crossley 1995:59). In his emphasis on social practice, Lefebvre (1991:61) establishes a material basis for the production of space, which consists of ?a practical and fleshy body conceived of as totality complete with spatial qualities (symmetries, asymmetries) and energetic properties (discharges, economies, waste)?. In discussion of Lefebvre?s notions of body and space, Simonsen (2004:49) stipulates that the key prerequisite to the material production of space is that each living body is and has its space; it produces itself in space at the same time that it produces that space. In this manner, Lefebvre is echoing the ideas of Merleau-Ponty; in allocating a central role to the body in the ?lived experience?, the body representing a practico-sensory realm in which space is perceived through sight, smells, tastes, touch and hearing. The body subsequently produces a space that is both anthropological and biomorphic and will develop a relationship to the environment by means of a process of demarcation and orientation. These processes pull together under the notion of the ?spatial body?, and that ?a body so conceived, as produced and as the production of space, is immediately subject to the determinants of that space? (Lefebvre 1991:195). As a 38 result, the spatial body?s material character derives from space, from the energy that is deployed and put to use there. There is clearly a necessary affiliation between the body, practice and time-space; ?body-subject? relation with space involves an active engagement with the surrounding world and concerns a production of meaning. 39 3. Inscribing the Landscape The strata of sedimentary rock are like the pages of a book, each with a record of contemporary life written on it. (Winterson 2005:x) Texts have ways of existing that even in their most rarefied form are always enmeshed in circumstance, time, place, and society - in short, they are in the world, and hence worldly. (Said 1983:35) Vigilant is derived from the Latin vigilare, to watch, which in its French form veiller is the root of surveillance. Demonstrate comes from the Latin monstrare, to show. Inspect, prospect, introspect (and other words like aspect or circumspect) all derive from the Latin specere, to look at or observe. Speculate has the same root. Scope comes from the Latin scopium, a translation of a Greek word for to look at or examine. Synopsis is from the Greek word for general view. These are latent or dead metaphors, but they still express the sedimented importance of the visual in the English language. (Jay 1993a:1) Landscape is necessarily an unclear, ambiguous concept that encompasses both the physical and the conceptual; the term itself is uncertain, its meaning sliding between the actual and the virtual, the real and the represented. It refers both to the physical fact of inland scenery and the representations of that scenery. Daniels and Cosgrove see landscape as always and inexorably a kind of representation executed in a variety of materials and on many surfaces, be it paint on canvas or earth, stone, water, or vegetation on the ground. To them "a landscape park is more palpable but no more real, nor less imaginary, than a landscape painting or poem" (Daniels & Cosgrove 1988:1). Mitchell underpins the view of landscape as representation, by stating that: Landscape is itself a physical and multi-sensory medium . . . in which cultural meanings and values are encoded, whether they are put there by the physical transformation of a place in landscape gardening and architecture, or found in a place formed, as we say, by nature. . . . Landscape is already artifice in the moment of its beholding, long before it becomes the subject of pictorial representation (Mitchell 1994:14). 40 Traditionally and historically, the term ?landscape? had frequently been employed in a particular, elitist way of seeing; an imposing, imposed viewpoint that emerged alongside, and as part of, the development of mercantile capital in Western Europe. This can be seen as just one kind of definition of landscape which, even for those who have enjoyed ?finer prospects?, is perceived of in very different ways depending on finely graded and gendered subtleties of class (Williams 1973, Daniels & Cosgrove 1993). Furthermore, as can be seen in the historiographic traditions of South Africa, this class-driven viewpoint typically suppresses the landscape of those ?being viewed? or ?out of sight?. It ignores the labour that has gone into landscape and obscures the relationships between landscapes ? the connections, for example, between the worked landscape of fields and factories and the sheltered, isolated farmhouses, landscape gardens and parks (Said 1989). As discussed earlier, the late 20th century?s reconsideration of New cultural geography has called for a closer look into the mathematical and homogenised systems of description and representation of space, which had often not been fully concerned with the different individual experiences of a place and its disparate social contexts (Soja 1989, Bender 1992, Tilley 1994, Harvey 1973). ?Landscape is not a universal concept, applied in the same way by all people at all times, and thus cannot represent a definitive way of apprehending the world? (Thomas in Bender 1993:20). The South African landscape, in its actively stratified and multi-temporal histories, bears witness to a reconsideration of these homogenising approaches. It cannot be denied that our landscape has long been and still is a way to observe and to examine our different cultural environments, but it is by no means a singular investigation. We find this particularly evident in the varying manners in which different groups and individuals might respond to place names being re-examined 41 and changed, where personal and collective naming and story-telling, memory and authority, and history weave together into never a singular, but always a multi- ?historiographic invocation? (Benjamin in Cohen 1998:3). Phenomenologically and inter-subjectively, ?there is never a landscape, always many landscapes? to consider (Bender 1998:25). They are multiple and contradictory, they work on different scales and are reconstructed and re-appropriated over and over again (Bender 1998). They may also overlap, according to different discourses and communities. Landscape is not passive, not ?out-there?, because people create their sense of identity, - whether self, or group, or nation-state ? through engaging and re-engaging, appropriating and contestating the sedimented pasts that make up the landscape (Bender 1998:25). ?As a physical and multi-sensory medium, in which cultural meanings and values are encoded? (Mitchell 1994:14), landscape can be viewed as a socio-cultural construction always to be examined from varying positions. These positions might include the meanings of the landscape. It may also comprise of the landscape of memory (represented by the colonial map in which landscape is given value by its place in history, where place-names record the actions of human agents who played a role in transforming the country) and the landscape as memory (where the place- names refer to ancestral action with the capacity to reproduce the present in the form of the past) (Bender 1993:14). For the purposes of this investigation, it is vital to regard a key position, namely the textuality of the landscape or the landscape as inscribed surface. In returning to a discussion around representation and landscape, we find that on the one hand in prehistoric and non-Western art, place is rarely depicted in terms of an outward appearance. Rather, it is presented as an impression, feel, significance or 42 meaning, with place consequently experienced from the inside (Thomas in Bender 1993:21). On the other hand, we find that Western art history has since the Renaissance been dominated by an urgency to portray the world as realistically as possible. It can be argued that as part of this action, a certain amount of ?fixing? occurs, with a resultant ?freezing? of place as seen from a particular point of view. The emergence of landscape art is directly associated with the development of linear perspective (Cosgrove 1984), allowing painters to represent a three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional surface by sorting out represented objects in relation to another. The technique of perspective was regarded to be a means of revealing the truth (and not as an artifice). Additionally, perspective art was seen to represent a manner of visual control, which allowed for the ?fixing? of time and a presentation of things as they empirically appear to be. Apart from instituting spatial relations on the two-dimensionality of surfaces, perspective also established a fixed relationship between object and subject, locating the viewer outside of the picture and also outside of the relationship portrayed. Thus the viewer is rendered transcendental, outside of history, with landscape painting serving as ?a representation of a place which alienates land, such as it can be appropriated by a gaze which looks in from outside? (Thomas in Bender 1993:21). As such, vision is privileged over the other senses, an inclination recognisable in other practices that associated consciousness with vision, such as in Renaissance cartography and theatre, and also later in Cartesian philosophy. 43 Figure 13: Illustration of the Cartesian theory of the retinal image The supremacy of vision in our knowing and thinking about the world, or ocularcentrism, follows the Cartesian notion of a disembodied and rational eye as an instrument of order and control. Descartes was perhaps the first to lay the foundations for the modern inquiry into the visual as a main source of human experience and knowledge (Descartes 1970). By claiming that truth is only found in what one could see with one?s eyes, he equated sight with an objective and accurate way of discovering the external world of which images served as tangible and recordable evidence (evidence from Latin videre ?to see?, ?observe?, ?understand?). Knowing through seeing, in Descartes? understanding, was ?knowing through staring? (Jay 1993a), that is via an immobile, fixed gaze which examined objects always from a distance. Such passive intellectual engagement with the object of knowledge complemented by a physical detachment from it gave rationale to a clear-cut distinction between the body and the outside world, the seer and the seen. In terms of the stone texts on hills and its colonial history, we find a clear illustration of this 44 ideology of dominance; although passers-by are able to ?read? the texts, it is easily viewed as an experience limited to a disembodied and passive ?staring at? the text. There lies a power in the distancing of text from stone, not only dividing the seer from the seen but also in epistemologically implying a distance between the ?literate? passer-by and the historically ?illiterate? producer of text. There are two consequences to Cartesian perspectivalism. One is what Jay termed the ?modern epistemological habit of ?seeing? ideas in the mind? (1993a:70). Descartes did not imagine ideas to be mere sensory reflections of the material world; in his famous epoch?, it was the reasoning process and not empirical evidence that he found undoubtable. The other consequence, of particular importance to visual sociologists, is the ?legitimating mode of scientific investigation through visual observation of evidence? (Jay 1993a:70). Going back to the Greeks, Jay notes the identification of the mind?s eye with ?speculation? and binocular vision of two eyes with ?observation? (1993a:29). As visual sociologists we thus engage in a distinctly Cartesian project: treating the visually observed world (including photographs, landscape art and other representations facilitated by instrumentation) as empirical evidence from which we deduce such mental constructs as social relationships and speculate on their meaning. Returning to landscape art, we find that distance and position raises a particular idea of the world but that it is simultaneously denied; the view is taken as ?universal?, taking in everything as a homogenising whole. Given that landscape art presents the world from the point of view of the outsider, that which is inside the frame takes on the passive role of object to be manipulated, represented. The ?object? is alienated 45 and deprived of an agency of its own, it is ?laid bare? to the eye, to be surveyed at will (see figure 14). Figure 14: Albrecht D?rer Draughtsman Drawing a Nude 1525 Woodcut It can be assumed that a manner of looking automatically implies a politics of vision as can be found in the way in which land is looked upon as disengaged commodity, able to be sold, bought or claimed at will. In their direct implication of another, landscape painting and the idea of landscape are found to materialise in extension of capitalism (Bender 1993). Ocularcentrism deems that we live in a ?specular civilisation? (Thomas in Bender 1993:22). The prioritisation of vision is to be found in all areas of life. In a discussion on the emergence of the modern prison and the politics of vision, and as a metaphor 46 for state power in the modern era, Foucault makes reference to Jeremy Bentham?s Panopticon. As a ?laboratory of discipline? (ibid), the Panopticon7 functioned as a never-ending surveillance machine, its design guaranteeing that no prisoner ever see the overseer conducting surveillance from the privileged central location within the radial configuration of the prison. The prisoner could never know when he was being surveilled, allowing for a kind of psychological uncertainty that in itself would prove to be a crucial instrument of discipline. The chief consequence of the Panopticon was to cause in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assured the automatic functioning of power, rending the actual exercise of power needless. Bentham laid down the standard that power should be visible and unverifiable: visible in the sense that the inmate will always have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon, and unverifiable in that the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at but must be sure that he may always be seen (Foucault 1977). The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen (Foucault 1977:201). Ford (1991) argues that we use the medium of the scopophilic8 (Mulvey 1989:16) gaze to characteristically look at landscape and to characteristically represent place, be it via satellite image, map, aerial photograph, or GIS; they all function as particularly ?specular?. It is the seeing and recording of the landscape, and the communication of that vision to other colonists - particularly through surveyor reports and maps - which historically converted the land from ?unknown? to a something that can form part of the colonial process of knowledge via description. 7 ?All-seeing? 8 Mastering the world visually, or turning persons into objects 47 The custom of representing place and land through mapping and image making consequently entails an obvious link to the consideration of landscape itself as inscribed surface. In the framework of description9, the act of mapping involves the inscription of the world on a surface (Alpers 1983:136). In the case of the South African stone inscriptions, the landscape is a surface capable of being inscribed. It is in the context of this process of inscription and interpretation that our experience of landscape can be most usefully analysed in terms of our experience of a text. As a dynamic and multifaceted approach to our understanding of landscape, it can be argued that landscape is read and written by groups and individuals like a book (Marston & Knox 2004:237). In conceptualising the landscape as text, we find a shift away from conventional attempts to systematise or categorise landscapes based on the different elements they might contain. The view of landscape-as-text holds that landscapes do not come with ready-made labels on them; rather there are ?writers? who construct landscapes and their meaning, and ?readers? who consume the messages embedded in landscape. These embedded messages can be read as signs about practices, beliefs or values, and just as people differ in their interpretation of a passage in a book, so different messages will be taken from particular landscapes. As a text, landscape both produces and communicates meaning. Ricoeur (1971) argues that the model of the text serves as a fine paradigm of social science, and one to which the methods of textual interpretation are relevant. Barnes and Duncan (1992:6) suggest that his model for analysing social life as a text is also applicable to landscape. Ricoeur recognises four key characteristics of written discourse, which he uses to examine social action. These are that meaning in written texts becomes concretised when it is inscribed, that the text inevitably exceeds the intentions of its author, that the text is often more important than its immediate context and is 9 See chapter 5 for a brief investigation of the Dutch seventeenth century understanding of description and cartography. 48 interpreted and re-interpreted differently according to varying circumstances, and finally that the meaning of a text is unstable, depending to a large extent on the interpretations of its readers. In this sense, the metaphor of social-life-as-text is easily applied to an investigation of landscape and is characterised by all those features that Ricoeur identifies as definitive of a text. It too is culturally and socially produced. Landscape has a comparable objective fixity to that of a written text in that it also becomes detached from the aims of its original authors. Also, in terms of social and psychological impact and material consequences, the different readings of landscape will matter more than any authoritarian intentions. Additionally, landscape carries significance beyond the original situation for which it was constructed, always addressing a potentially endless range of readers (Barnes and Duncan 1992:6). Duncan and Barnes see landscape as characterised by all of these features, and suggest that ?text? is an appropriate trope to use in analysing landscapes because it conveys the inherent instability of meaning, fragmentation or absence of integrity, lack of authorial control, polyvocality and irresolvable social contradictions that often characterise them (Barnes and Duncan 1992:7). Landscape shares these textual characteristics with writing, and our interpretations of real and written landscapes are inescapably caught up in the inter-textual relationships between them and our understanding of the conventions of each of them. These conventions and relationships are vital to the manner in which we can decode landscapes as textual systems, but in order to decipher them we have to primarily "trace the process by which landscape effaces its own readability and naturalizes itself" (Mitchell 1994:2). 49 We have already established that the body is always in place. Similarly, the human presence is always figured in the landscape. For that reason, the experience of ?landscape as text? is always percolated through the experience of ?landscape as environment?. In being visible, landscape "has the effect of making invisible the operations that made it possible", a veiling which "exhibits the (voracious) property that the geographical system has of being able to transform action into legibility", which in so doing "causes a way of being in the world to be forgotten" (Mitchell 1994:2). At the same time, landscape is also caught up in systems of tradition and memory, both obscuring and encouraging its own legibility. Our experience of landscapes as textual systems forces us to consider landscapes as also bound up in narrative systems. Jameson believes that it is essential to restructure the problematics of ideology, of the unconscious and of desire, of representation, of history, and of cultural production, around the all-informing process of narrative [as] the central function or instance of the human mind (Jameson 1981:13). Moreover, it is necessary to remind ourselves that the narratives of landscape are multifaceted, as is the process by which we ?read? them - a process which Barthes view as intrinsically political (Barnes and Duncan 1992). George Steiner defines a text as "something which was read with the intention of submitting a response" (Smith in Barnes and Duncan 1992:79). Likewise, he stipulates that "landscape becomes a text when the reader intends to respond" (ibid) Whether we intend to react or not, in Smith's terms, we nonetheless do respond to landscape on a variety of levels, including an interpretative level, even if we do not intend to structure that response in words. As Smith points out, not only do we interpret the landscapes we come across but also, "everywhere we look we 50 encounter a pre-interpreted landscape, or a landscape made legible" (Barnes and Duncan 1992:82). The reason for this might not only be because of the interpretations and constructions of others which have left their marks on the landscape, but also because we try to reach an understanding of every new landscape we come upon in the context of all of the other real, written, and represented landscapes we have already encountered. This is also true of our experience of text, as Jameson puts it, we never really confront a text immediately, in all its freshness as a thing-in-itself. Rather, texts come before us as the always-already-read; we apprehend them through sedimented layers of previous interpretations, or - if the text is brand-new - through the sedimented reading habits and categories developed by those inherited interpretative traditions (1981:9). The stories we use in making sense of landscape will help to create and are structured around our sense of identity, this interrelationship permits us to obtain our ?sense of place?. Our value judgements of landscape, like our appraisals of any text, are inevitably based on our temporal, geographical, cultural and social position; hence no representation of landscape of any particular historical period could ever be superior to another. Our interpretations of landscape are relative and disclose just as much about ourselves as they do about the landscape we are examining. In this sense, the production of meaning is complicated by the interpretative acts of the literal or metaphorical reader of landscape ?texts?, be they written (for example in the format of a paragraph), represented (for example by photograph or painting), or actual (landscape itself). Roland Barthes holds that social reality is made up of multiple signifying systems of which landscape is merely one. These texts "should all be seen as signifying practices that are read, not passively, but, as it were, rewritten as they are read" (Barnes and Duncan 1992:5). The reader consequently becomes an essential connecting aspect between landscape and its representations, ?re- writing? his or her own concerns into both. It is imperative to regard how the "worlds 51 we represent" act upon and are altered by the medium in which they are represented, by the producer of that representation, and by the reader/viewer of the representation: given that when we write we do so from a necessarily local setting, the worlds we represent are inevitably stamped with our own particular set of local interests, views, standards and so on (Barnes and Duncan 1992:3). Associated with the use of the concept ?text? is the notion of intertextuality where as landscape and place is constantly being negotiated and re-written, it is also being read and re-read. In this system places have become inter-textual sites, and by the same token new places can be viewed as ?re-written old texts? (H?nnighausen in Benesch & Schmidt 2005:41). The notion of intertextuality ? the proposal that every text produces meanings and structures by absorbing and transforming other texts, utterances, and sign systems ? arrived on the scene of contemporary theory in the company of spatial metaphors. Consider Kristeva and Barthes: ?the space of the text? (Kristeva 1980:69), ?the volume of the social? (Barthes 1973:1015), ?text places itself in the history? (Kristeva in Bakhtin & Holquist 1981:259), ?the society inscribes itself in the text? (KRISTEVA 1980:65), and ?all the texts of the space that has been read by the writer function in the paragram of the text? (Kristeva 1998:29). Numerous current and future terms could be supplemented to this inventory, consider Genette?s ?hypertext? and ?palimpsest?, Derrida?s ?writing? and ?trace?. The emphasis on the spatial, considered to be fundamental to the idea of intertextuality, was provoked by the polemic against time-honored notions of verbal 52 interaction that represented communication as the linear transmission of an information ?package? from author to reader and backed by a monolithic common code. In contradistinction to such views, intertextuality, with its spatial models, suggests some conjectures with regards to the relationship between texts. Firstly, that every text is animated by an open dialogue producing a multifaceted and ever shifting network of inter-subjective relations and identity positions. And secondly, that semantic and structural patterns of the text, like tips of icebergs, lie on an vast sea of the implicit, on numerous layers of codes, utterances, and cultural representations. For this reason the patterns are dynamic, indeterminable, and subject to varied regimes of ascribing sense to linguistic data (Juvan 2004). In light of the spaces of intertextuality, it is possible to view intertextuality as a practice in which heterogeneous semiotic spaces are juxtaposed, transposed and merged - not only those spaces represented in the textual world but also those evoked by linguistic and genre forms on the textual surface. Barthes (1976:36) views the inter-text as ?what comes to me, not what I summon up; not an ?authority?, simply a circular memory. Which is what the inter-text is: the impossibility of living outside the infinite text?. The concern then is not that of ?authority?, but rather that of ?a circular memory? and of ?the impossibility of living outside? of context. Immediately then, within this ?infinite text?, we are able to find echoes between Barthes? ?impossibility of living outside the infinite text? and Derrida?s notion of ?il n?y a pas de hors de texte?. 53 In Derrida?s approach ?all that is, is text? and all is read as ?text?. There is a text as soon as there is a ?trace?, a reference from one trace to another distinct trace. Such references are never inert and traces are neither present nor absent. A text can consequently never be a closed system: it is a texture of traces, interwoven and interacting in mutual relation to each other. These traces are always in reference to something, which again is in reference to something as a trace. In this sense, texts are not limited to written texts. Derrida?s broad understanding of text implies that there is no perception of life and reality beyond text, including spoken discourse, action and ritual. By this understanding of ?text? Derrida does not mean to create some sort of ?text-centrism?, instead he emphasises that a text is not a centre but an open interplay of references without any restricting boundaries. With the conception of landscape as text that can be written and read, we are able to imagine a steady re-negotiation of meaning and reference into a constant re-writing and re-reading of the landscape as inter-textual. As ?inter-textual site? (H?nnighausen in Benesch & Schmidt 2005:41), place forms part of this circular memory in which a singular authority is absent. Therefore, in Bender?s stipulation that ?there is never a landscape, always many landscapes? (1998:25) we find that landscapes are written in a multiple and contradictory manner working on different scales and reconstructed and re-appropriated over and over again (Bender 1998). In this we find an overlap with other writings and readings, sometimes of the same text, sometimes of another. 54 In Barthes? words, every text holds the inter-textual, itself being ?the text-between? of another text and quite different to its ?sources?, but nevertheless marking the ?influences? and falling in with ?the myth of filiation?, even whilst of and in citations that are ?anonymous, untraceable and yet already read: they are quotations without inverted commas? (Barthes 1977:160). Inter-textuality is not just a recognition that one text informs another text, rather it is an acknowledgement that one text transforms another text, a transposition whereby: If one grants that every signifying practice is a field of transpositions of various signifying systems (an inter-textuality), then one understands that its ?place? of enunciation and its denoted ?object? are never single, complete, and identical to themselves, but always plural, shattered, capable of being tabulated (Kristeva 1984:60). Barthes writes that ?the text is a productivity?, it is ?the very theatre of a production where the producer of the text and the reader come together?, where ?every text is an inter-text, a new tissue of recycled citations? (Orr 2003:33). Landscapes are palimpsests. As a term applied to ancient parchments that have been written on again and again but improperly erased between successive uses (McIlwraith 1997), landscapes as palimpsest are similarly implicated by change, comings-and-goings, accumulation, construction, reconstruction and breaking down. Landscape boundaries may be demarcated, then wiped away and reconstructed. Hence, in a stratigraphic chain, layers are written, erased, covered, rewritten. A palimpsest is never finalised, but implies a incessant readiness for modification or re- appropriation. The notion of a landscape as palimpsest has been a root metaphor of archaeology; it connects both the past and the archaeological practice to the act of writing, with the landscape thus reading as ?text? (Barthes 1987). One finds that the palimpsest is full of acts of iconoclasm through erasure, renderings, ruptures and 55 breaks with what came before, leaving traces that need to be sequenced by readers of that landscape into linear time. However, landscape (like time) is complex, transformational, disorderly and multiple: as a multi-temporal ensemble, landscape is full of once distant material pasts that are now proximate and, likewise, material pasts close in linear time may also seem quite distant. The past can be viewed as a medium of percolation, of seeping into the landscape, allowing the multi-temporality of landscape to be experienced as present (Whitmore 2005). In this sense landscape is to be read not only in stratigraphic order with focus on what is more recent or, for that matter, most distant. Instead, the intertextuality of landscape as palimpsest needs to be responded to: as never a ?singular? landscape, always in overlap with other landscapes; past and present, and necessarily without a central author. Whitmore (2005) explains this by circumventing the expected temporal gaps or rifts of palimpsest found in the theory of percolation for the phenomenological notion of chiasma (see figure 15). Like a M?bius model, a ?cross-piece? or a ?cross-shaped mark? (Pearsall 2001), the chiasma refers to the crossing points of folds where various times (and spaces) come together, whether in the excavation of a possible burial site (digging where previously a hole had been made for a specific and meaningful purpose) or the finding of an ancient implement in a modern setting (for example, finding a stone tool washed out onto the concrete slopes of the Apies river). We are able to return to the past via our chiasmic relation to the present: we are now able to return to then. One is not only able to read and respond to the stone text in a contemporary setting, rather there is an overlapping between how it is read in the present, how and why it had been produced (written) in the past, and in our approach to its meaning: the ?past time? is still present and tangible in all its layers, but at the same time is also interpreted and discussed from a current viewpoint. It is 56 precisely in acknowledgement of the ?current? that Bender (1998) refers to Williams? (1973) ?structure of feeling?. Landscape, instead of merely embodying traces of people?s past activities, also represents a sense of ?being in? rather than merely ?looking at? landscape, thereby losing its overly referential faculty. By meshing Williams? position with a more phenomenological approach to landscape, we can ?move beyond mere descriptions of land-use, or legitimizing and homogenizing myths of origin, to explorations of tensioned and contradictory processes and experiences ? both past and present? (Bender 1998:28). The past is omnipresent in the landscape we inhabit. Olivier (2001:67) went as far as asserting that Right now, the present here is made up of a series of past durations that makes the present multi-temporal. The past is in the present, it is mainly the present. What will remain from this present instant is possibly an imperceptible layer of things, deposited on the surface of a huge accumulation of past temporalities, some of them relating to the most remote pasts: in the fields around, beside motorways and supermarkets, flakes of flint tools show through the surface, together with fossilised shells; down by the river, dark waters silently roll over rocks that came here millions of years ago. The present here is this imperceptible and continual process of increasing the unbelievable mass of the past. Figure 15: The M?bius strip. In The Visible and the Invisible (1968), Merleau-Ponty uses the term chiasm to relate to his theories of the lived experience, to touching and being touched; he refers to the chiasm between various senses as a cohesive perceptual intertwining of human 57 flesh and the flesh of the world. He argues that mind and body (1968:247, 259), the perceptual faith and its articulation (1968:93), subject and object, self and world (1968:123), as well as many other associated dualisms, are all related chiasmically, and he terms the interdependence of these various different notions: the Flesh (1968:248-51). We could argue that the bodily engagement with the world occurs on the border between body and its surroundings, at its margins. Flesh is not a substance in-between the body and the world but is to be understood functionally, as texture, articulation, framework, joints, as an element in which we live and move. . . . An intertwining that forms between things, others and myself, a chiasmus or a chiasma . . . [where] [w]hat is one?s own and what is not, constantly more or less overlap but never entirely coincide with each other (Waldenfels 1998:288-289). Merleau-Ponty proposes that the awareness of the world as not simply an object: does not mean that there was a fusion or coinciding of me with it: on the contrary, this occurs because a sort of dehiscence opens my body in two, and because between my body looked at and my body looking, my body touched and my body touching, there is overlapping or encroachment, so that we may say that the things pass into us, as well as we into the things (1968:123). According to Merleau-Ponty, then, this non-dualistic divergence between touching and being touched, which necessitates some form of encroachment between the two terms, also means that the world is capable of encroaching upon and changing us, just as we are capable of altering it. Such an ontology rejects any absolute opposition between self and world, as well as any notion of subjectivity that prioritises a rational, autonomous individual who is capable of imposing their choice upon a situation that is entirely external to them. Body and world, like past and present, he insists, are "interwoven" in such a way that seemingly neat conceptual distinctions between them are bound to distort and misrepresent the phenomena as we actually live and understand them in pre-conceptual, pre-reflective, pre-articulate ways. Carbone (2004) asks, 58 What in fact does simultaneity indicate, if not the chiasm of presence and absence sketched by the relation between visible and invisible? And how, then, does the relation . . . between the sedimented presence of the instituted element and the latency of possibilities of the instituting element appear, except as the chiasmic relation between visible and invisible? In response to the Cartesian notion of a disembodied and rational eye as an instrument of order and control, Merleau-Ponty?s (1964, 1968, 1993a, 1993b) phenomenology proposes an expanded conception of vision as a deeply embodied and pre-reflective involvement with the surrounding world where all senses intertwine, rather than form a hierarchy, to create a lived-out experience. His outlook on vision as an embodied involvement with the world, is characterised not by a superficial surveying of the distant objects but by a fundamentally reversible relation between the seer and the seen, the visible and the invisible, where the visual encounter becomes an intertwining of all sensory perceptions that experience the world in its pre-reflective rawness (Merleau-Ponty 1968; 1993b). In his understanding, it is the body that looks, not the eye or the mind. Merleau-Ponty argues that more than anything we are carnal beings who move around, smell, touch and hear, so that every visual contact with the world becomes a lived-out not thought-out experience of it. This makes us embodied ?agent[s]-at- grips-with-things? (Taylor 1989:7) who make sense of the world by acting in and on it. Our perception is always conditioned by our stance in space, our movement towards or away from the subject. In a dialogue regarding the chiasmic relation between things, Serres (in Serres & Latour 1995:60) explains: If you take a handkerchief and spread it out in order to iron it, you can see in it certain fixed distances and proximities. If you sketch a circle in 59 one area, you can mark out nearby points and measure far-off distances. Then take the same handkerchief and crumple it, by putting it in your pocket. Two distant points suddenly are close, even superimposed. If, further, you tear it in certain places, two points that were close can become very distant . . . . As we experience time . . . it resembles this crumpled version much more than the flat, overly simplified one. Being made of the same stuff, body and the world are part of flesh. The thickness of flesh between the seer and the thing is as constitutive for the thing of its visibility as for the seer of his corporeity (to be of physical body); it is not an obstacle between them, it is their means of communication (Merleau-Ponty 1968:135). In viewing koppies bearing chalk inscriptions as part of the landscape as palimpsest, I am interested in whether this could be read as a kind of text (stone inscription on koppie) on text (landscape as text). The inscribed word or mark thereby functions as a footnote or an ?aside? in the interpretation of the landscape, which, as I have argued, is already text. As an expository addendum to the text, an annotation and a reference, the footnote comments on part of the main body of text. As footnotes, the landscape inscriptions can be viewed as literalisations of the landscape as text. As a textual refererence to text, it can be argued that these inscriptions serve to contribute to, affirm and complicate the reading of the landscape. As literal textual references these inscriptions reveal the non-literal textual nature of the landscape, at the same time confirming that we are already in a state of reading the landscape as text. The inscription or writing of text (using stone as marker) onto land takes place in a performative manner. In this performance, the body takes the place of the hand in writing. Notions of proximity come into play as the body is consumed by the size of the text whilst writing/installing and therefore requires a distance in order to activate 60 legibility; the interplay between subjectivity (performance) and objectivity (reading) becomes a literalised performance in itself. 61 4. The Sensory Perception of Passage: Footnotes, Distances and the Immediacy of Experience So what one has is the observer travelling. . . .10 . John Cleever (Dyer 2005:33) Space . . . exists in a social sense only for activity ? for (and by virtue of) walking . . .or travelling. Henri Lefebvre (Bruno 2007:15) a. The Moving Eye Our experience of landscape is inexplicably tied to movement; in fact the movement of the body and the world is seen as a pre-requisite for life as it happens in places (Casey 1993). A consideration of motility, be it in vehicular or pedestrian manner, makes necessary a reflection on spatiality. In opposing the Kantian notion of space as a pure space "in the mind", Merleau-Ponty argues for a spatiality that is essentially associated with the "lived-body?, the kinaesthetic body embedded in spatiality and action. In this manner, the lived-body stands as an active partner to spatiality and that ?to be a body, is to be tied to a certain world; our body is not primarily in space: it is of it" (Merleau-Ponty 1962:267). However, to be "of space" is to also be an active collaborator in its creation. Merleau-Ponty thus unites spatiality and motility inasmuch as space and our facility to move are indivisible. To Merleau- Ponty movement is a displacement or modification of positions in terms of the relationships in objective space (1962:267). In essence, I know my movement without my being aware of its objective position; there is no movement without the moving body. 10 The complete sentence in Dyer?s book The Ongoing Moment is ?So what one has is the observer travelling on a train? (Dyer 2005:33). 62 Each voluntary movement takes place in a setting, against a background which is determined by the movement itself. . . . We perform our movement in a space which is not "empty" or unrelated to them, but which on the contrary, bears a highly determinate relation to them: movement and background are, in fact, only artificially separated stages of totality (Merleau-Ponty 1962:137-38). Likewise, one is able to recognise an object or its size immediately without any contemplation (Merleau-Ponty 1962:268). The spatiality of the body becomes the internal space of my body, via the spatiality of position and situation. In addition, the ?spatiality of thing? and the ?being as a thing? are both categories of "bodily space"11. This re-affirms the immediacy between our bodies and space in non- reductive active relation; body and space are interconnected. In the same way, he continues, space and time are not, for me, a connection of adjacent points nor are they a limitless number of relations synthesized by my consciousness, I am not in space and time, I do not conceive space and time: I belong to them, my body combines with them and includes them. The scope of this inclusion is the measure of that of my existence (Merleau-Ponty 1962:140). On the corporeality of practice in relation to space-time, Casey (1993, 1997) maintains that the locatedness of the body accentuates the ?place character? of space. The body is always in place, notwithstanding any developments of notions such as ?placelessness?, ?disembeddedness? and mobility: even if we are moving or in a state of flux, we are doing so from a position of emplacement. We cannot escape this fact (Simonsen & Baerenholdt 2004:48). Similarly, we cannot escape the reality that the body itself is spatial; Merleau-Ponty states that the spatiality of the body is not a spatiality of position but of situation. This can be applied to temporality as well: 11 Merleau-Ponty, in contrast to the Cartesian "cogito", views consciousness, the world, and the human body as a perceiving thing that are intricately intertwined and mutually `engaged'. The phenomenal thing is not the unchanging object of the natural sciences but a correlate of our body and its sensory functions. 63 we should not imagine our bodies as merely in space or in time, but rather consider that our bodies inhabit space and time. The ?moving body? positions the world around itself and constitutes that world as ?ready-to-hand? (Heidegger 1962:83); it is a ?measuring? of space and time in its dynamic production of the meaningful world (Simonsen & Baerenholdt 2004:48). Lefebvre (1991:61) contributes to this key argument by means of a strong accent on social practice and the production of space as consisting of ?a practical and fleshy body conceived of as totality complete with spatial qualities (symmetries, asymmetries) and energetic properties (discharges, economies, waste)?. Each living body is and has its space. It produces itself in space at the same time as producing that space; this is a vital precondition to the material production. Both Lefebvre and Merleau-Ponty highlight the vital role of the body in ?lived experience?. It comprises a practico-sensory realm that allows for an observation of space via sensory experience. In this manner the body constructs a space that is both anthropological and biomorphic in nature, and a relationship between the body and its environment is assembled via a ?double process of orientation and demarcation? (Simonsen & Baerenholdt 2004:49), functioning in a symbolic and practical manner. Lefebvre maintains that these processes are linked in a formation of the ?spatial body?: A body so conceived, as produced and as the production of space, is immediately subject to the determinants of that space . . . the spatial body?s material character derives from space, from the energy that is deployed and put to use there (Lefebvre 1991:195). Clearly, there is a necessary relationship between body, practice and time-space. The relation of ?body-subjects? with space is never one of simple location (Simonsen 64 & Baerenholdt 2004:49) but of active engagement with the surrounding world involving a production of meaning. De Certeau presents an account on the value of the ?moving body? through the metaphor of ?walking the city?? as having its own logic, its own rhetoric. In his essay, ?Walking the City?, he describes the experience of observing Manhattan from atop the World Trade Center. New York City unfolds below him like a panorama. His vantage point flattens the city into geometric patterns devoid of human activity as the city appears planned and rationally organised. This calls a spatial fair and square logic in which the scale of justice is equivalent to the scale of measurement used to equate two different entities in quantitative terms. A city composed of paroxysmal places in monumental reliefs. The spectator can read in it a universe that is constantly exploding. In it are inscribed the architectural features of the coincidatio oppositorum formerly drawn in miniatures and mystical textures. On this stage of concrete steel and glass, cut out between two oceans (the Atlantic and the American) by a frigid body of water, the tallest letters in the world compose a gigantic rhetoric of excess in both expenditure and production (de Certeau [1984b] in During 1994: 52). In being lifted to a summit, in being transformed into a voyeur, distanced from the mass below and looking down like a god over all surveyed, de Certeau believes the city is transformed into a text that can be read. This totalising eye which claims to know the city, this voyeur-god, de Certeau (1984a:93) tells us ?must disentangle himself from the murky intertwining daily behaviours? of the ordinary practitioners of the city down below where they walk with a knowledge of the city that cannot be seen. In other words, the ?everyday? escapes the imaginary totalisations produced by the panoptic eye, as the pedestrians moving down below create their world through their journeys and in accordance with their customs and practices. They are 65 following the urban pathways but at the same time are producing their own stories, shaped out of the fragments of routes and the alterations of spaces. This entails a process which combines narration and walking in which a mobilisation of meanings can be seen. The onlooker standing atop the World Trade Centre might remain "foreign" to the inhabited world below, but those who walk the streets become active participants. Though individually "illegible", the aggregate of many such movements constitutes the story of urban life: The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alterations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and indefinitely other (During 1994:153). Such uncoordinated movements, de Certeau argues, can not be adequately expressed through abstractions, whether those of the artist or the urban planner: Their story begins on ground level, with footsteps. They are myriad, but do not compose a series. They cannot be counted because each unit has a qualitative character: a style of tactile apprehension and kinaesthetic appropriation. Their swarming mass is an innumerable collection of singularities (de Certeau 1984a:97). De Certeau argues for a sociology that respects these "singularities" rather than searching for a totalising account. Here, places emerge not out of the sites of rooted dwelling as they are imagined in the Heideggerian tradition; instead they appear through kinds of boundary transgressions and the presence of ?open places? which are available to be appropriated and where people can find common ground. With reference to Merleau-Ponty, de Certeau [1984b] writes: These practices of space refer to a specific form of operations (?ways of operating?), to ?another spatiality (an ?anthropological?, poetic and mythic experience of space), and to an opaque and blind mobility characteristic of the bustling city. A migrational, or metaphorical city thus slips into the clear text of the planned and readable city (in During 1994:154). 66 De Certeau thus views ?walking the city? as one of these everyday practices or ?ways of operating? that allows ordinary people to move in a network of already existing forces and representations. It is a spatial practice utilising the urban system in a manner that influences the conditions of urban life. In acknowledgment of both Merleau-Ponty and Lefebvre, de Certeau believes the city to be a ?lived space?, where walking gives shape to spaces, uniting places and producing a diversity of subsystems whose existence in some sense makes up the city. The walker constitutes a location, a ?here and there?, thus establishing a conjunctive and disjunctive articulation of place. Walking is a space of ?enunciation?, in this sense having a triple function: of appropriation (of the urban topographical system), of spatial realisation, and its implication of relations among separate positions in the form of movement (Simonsen & Baerenholdt 2004:50). With de Certeau?s model of the city as backdrop, one is faced with different scales of looking or viewing: firstly that of the panoptic or totalising view (the city seen from above like a map), and secondly the singularity of experience on street-level (walking the city in a state of immediacy). It is important, though, to note that in discussing the South African phenomenon of marked hills, and when faced with inscribed examples in the form of texts in the landscape, that one is predominantly dealing with an additional and third scale of looking: that of the vehicular and distanced view of the passer-by travelling by train or car through the landscape, whether as passenger or as driver. In this sense, vehicular travel implies a clear line of advance and departure in the form of clearly marked and followed routes ? in the form of roads or the railway line - relying on a predetermined mapping of approach. Even though a vehicular and distanced scale of viewing is reminiscent of de Certeau?s panoptic and elevated view of the city as it shares a panoramic mode of distancing 67 and non-immediacy ? in comparison to the immediacy found in the singularity of the walking experience ? the third scale of viewing is very different too as it includes a view of the landscape in motion. In explaining how the railway or automobile ensemble imposes a particular form of distanced vision upon the traveller, Schivelbusch suggests that the speed at which the car or train moves and the ?mathematical directness? of the route dissolve the direct sensual relationship of the traveller to the travelled space (Smith 2001:129). Fore-grounded space cannot be absorbed visually. For this reason, the traveller loses connection with proximate space, focusing instead on distant space. This distant space moves by in a ?series of . . . pictures or scenes created by the continuously changing perspective? (Schivelbusch 1977:64). In effect, ?the traveller sees the objects, landscape, etc. through the apparatus which moves him through the world?, with the effect that ?evanescent reality has become the new reality? (Schivelbusch 1977:64). However, it is vital to note that the evanescent view also functions paradoxically as a fixed scene. As Leed suggests, in a discussion on the passage through space and the relationship between a point of disappearance or an aiming point, ?the motion of the traveller super-imposes a pattern of outflow and inflow upon an environment? and from this the traveller obtains an ?idea of an objective world, of that which does not change as one changes? (Leed 1991:75). In a sense, the evanescent view functions as fourth wall, separating and linking the viewer from the action in the landscape. To add to this there seems to exist a sense in the passing observer that everything on the outside is always rushing towards you, ?through? you, with elements on the horizon (such as text) serving as the only momentary ?fixed? points of reference on the outside. In this way the South African phenomenon of marked hills serve as simple targets for the eye to trace its 68 movement through the landscape, reminding us of the simple childhood act of following a mark in the landscape along its route through the car window. In addition to being markers, however, these inscriptions constitute a textual instruction or message that not only allows for a marking of horizon but also impose a specific reading of landscape as text. To travel through the landscape in this manner, therefore, implies a reading of the landscape through markers, in this case clearly textualised markers. Travelling, in other words, entails an act of reading, with the journey or passage through the landscape implying a landscape ? or passage - that is ?never stopping?, with the texts on the passing hills to be read as footnotes in the continuum of the landscape as text. De Certeau interprets the phenomenology of train travel (as is applicable to car travel) in post-modern terms; he holds that there are two sites of immobility put in relationship with one another in travelling through the landscape. On the inside of the vehicle (albeit car, train or motorcycle helmet), de Certeau suggests, only a rationalized cell travels. A bubble of panoptic and classifying power, a module of imprisonment that makes possible the production of an order, a closed and autonomous insularity ? that is what can traverse space and make itself independent of local roots? (de Certeau 1984a:111). The world outside reveals another kind of immobility, ?that of things, towering mountains, stretches of green field and forest, arrested villages and colonnades of buildings? (ibid). Hence, there are two locations of immobility, firstly relating to the fixedness of the geographical space through which the traveller moves, and secondly to the fixedness of ?rationalised cell? passing through space. Because ?vision alone continually undoes and remakes the relationships between these fixed elements? (de Certeau 1984a:112), only the eye (and I infer, also the window frame) lies between 69 the immobility of the inside and outside. ?Transporting? the eye, as it were, is the machine, the primum mobile (de Certeau 1984a:113). The practice of continuous motion through the landscape in return: resolves boundaries into paths, makes thresholds into perceptual tunnels of continuously evolving appearances, coverts limits into avenues. Passage, in short, dissolves the realities inseparable from place: the reality of boundaries, the recurrences of time and morality, all inherent containments with the defining and confining orders of place (Leed 1991:79). On the relation between rest and motion, Husserl (Kockelmans and Kisiel 1970:39) remarks that motion is experienced as relative to some ground-body experienced as stationary in relation to the body. However, this ground-body is itself experienced to be at rest, against the background of the world, which itself is not experienced as an objectifiable body. I can be in a car which in relation to my body is experienced to be at rest. But when I look out, I say that the car is moving, even though what I actually see is the landscape moving past my car. The train next to mine appears to be moving, until I glance at the railroad bed and see that it is really my train that is in motion. The reversal between rest and motion are based on the earth as ground, itself experienced not as a body, but as a horizon at absolute rest . . . (Husserl in Kockelmans and Kisiel 1970:39). In light of the mobile viewer, it is no coincidence that the railways and photographic representation ? perhaps the nineteenth century?s two most cunning means of social spatialisation ? developed a commanding and long-lasting relationship. Both were fresh technologies that lent themselves to the projects of modern governance and nation building. Photography was not only a fundamental component to the topographical surveys for the construction of new railway lines (Petro 1995), but also later an ideal means for supporting the development that would guarantee economically feasible traffic levels on them via promotion through photographic views. Photography?s apparent accuracy and clarity made it a palpable form of 70 representation for corporations founded on modernity and technology, with the medium?s reproducibility making it an ideal means for engaging the emergent middle class? interest in and desire to travel to new places. Both photography and the railways dealt with the ordering and regulation of time and space. Accordingly both operated as important tools in the definition of new political territories, especially in the colonies, where the relation between photography and the railways served to represent imperial progress and unity (Foster in Schwartz & Ryan 2003:141). In the case of South Africa, one observes a growth in the relationship between the railways, photography and nation building at the beginning of the twentieth century, with the South African Railways and Harbours (SAR&H) actively employed by the Union of South Africa as an instrument of nation building. As the largest employer in the sub-continent and in large measure accountable for the encouragement of settlement, investment and tourism in South Africa, the SAR&H also served as the main commissioner, publisher and supplier of images of the country. According to Foster (Schwartz & Ryan 2003:142) this relationship and history suggests important questions about how photography facilitates the transformation of space on the ground into place in the mind, and suggests that this transformation is not a linear, irreversible process, but rather an iterative dialogue between the space of lived experience on the one hand, and the space constructed or suggested by representation on the other. In the conversation around representation in the modern era, a great deal has been made of how visual imagery and photography in particular have altered the geographical imagination: photography supports the development of a mental map that can be shared by many by evening out the confusions, deviations and contradictions of the world, licensing that which is picturable over that which is not. The aptitude of large groups of people to occupy the same subjectivity of attitude 71 towards a shared space relies heavily on visualisation, imagery rendering the imaginary space somehow comprehensible to all. It can further be argued that the discursive representation of imaginary spaces creates a sense of community and that the representations of place, if not actually serving as representations of identity, are, at the very least, commanding agents in the construction of that identity (Daniels 1990). In contrast to this view, we find the phenomenological view produced out of a ?complete horizon of experience? (Foster in Schwartz & Ryan 2003:143) as not entirely intellectual, social or sensory but a mixture of all these, unfolding as a carnal subjectivity over time (Merleau-Ponty 1962:441). This kind of geographical imagination manifests itself as ?a generalized, qualitative, embodied subjectivity toward (or a way of being in) the physical world? (Foster in Schwartz & Ryan 2003:143). This conversation with a particular terrain is both practical and imaginative at the same time, and includes identification with the terrain and a projection of the self into that terrain by manner of a phenomenological ?body-world dialectic?. How is it ever possible to reduce this kind of geographical imagining into a mental map? In this manner, place is to be viewed as a lived experience constantly reworked through metaphor, association and narrative. The Union of South Africa came into existence in 1910, facing ?a state without a nation? (Beinart 1994), it was also a nation sporadically mapped and without definitive boundaries. At the time of the Union, maps of the region were based on a highly uneven collage of farm diagrams, railway surveys and military intelligence maps. Little detailed topographical information existed for large parts of the country (Liebenberg 1997:132). Before 1920, during the era of ?New Imperialism?, the constitution of the Union of South Africa also left open the option for a yet larger 72 British South Africa to materialise, in which the original four provinces would be joined to the British Protectorates, Rhodesia and even the mandated South West Africa (Foster in Schwartz & Ryan 2003:323). Central to this imperial vision was a notion such as that held by Buchan (1903:129) that the ?unpopulated? and temperate interior of South Africa had the potential to revitalise the ?moral? and physical health of the metropolitan masses, in which immigrants to South Africa could enjoy a ?classless? rural way of life. In this fashion, the South African interior had been culturally appropriated in the metropole as an exemplary imaginary realm and a remote region ?just off the map? (Foster in Schwartz & Ryan 2003:148). It was also a terrain whose appeal was grounded in unmediated bodily experience which one might describe as preceding the map, the kind that afforded Europeans an exhilarating and reflexive sense of their own agency and ?whiteness? (ibid). It can be argued that colonial nationalist SAR&H administration utilised this liminal vision of South Africa, defining ?South Africanism? in terms of a local vision of the South African landscape and the representation intended for both domestic and international viewers. Under such ambiguous representation, photography served as an ideal medium. However, a first-hand encounter with the terrain was necessary. Of course the medium?s accuracy and faculty for detail is noteworthy, but it is important to note that on many levels photography clearly lacks the ability to document the experiential dimensions of a terrain, the manner in which spaces unfold as one moves through it, or change in character over time. Significantly, it was the explorers themselves, not their audience, who were most aware of the way in which photography failed to reveal the ?lie of the land? that was so unlike the European landscape (Schwartz & Ryan 2003:149). In this sense, the geographical imagination of ?colonial nationalism? owed as much to the embodied aestheticism of the traveler or explorer as it did to the distanced and rationalizing ?gaze? of the scientist, entrepreneur or administrator (ibid). 73 As a medium, photography became an instrument for the attempted experience of a national ?lie of the land?. During a time when technology and modernity tended to take on ideological overtones, its use in exploring the inherent qualities of objects and landscapes suggested new possibilities for transcending and resolving the recurring colonial concern with the ?gap between the name and the thing? (Carter 1992:7). It can also be argued that the understanding of the ?lie of the land? is produced by the nomadic, itinerant quality inherent to movement and travel; more specifically it can be said that different ?lies of the land? are produced by different forms of travel, with the railways affecting the way in which people passed through the South African landscape at this time. As the SAR&H were encouraging people to travel, they were at the same time influencing their experiences along the way. As de Certeau (1984a:97) states: Surveys of routes miss what was: the act itself of passing-by. The operation of (moving through the landscape) is transformed into points that draw a totalizing and reversible line on the map? Itself visible, it has the effect of making invisible the operation which made it possible. Between 1910 and 1920 South African landscape photography experienced a shift in focus away from the a na?ve celebration of the civilizing influence of colonialism to subjects ranging from identifiable signs of local interest, objects or features that could be named and placed or locations of historic interest. Occasionally these kind of images would be supplemented by photographs of picturesque European-like landscape scenes, reassuring a colonial population through ?recognizable objects? and aiding in the establishment of a foothold in a new country (Carter 1992:45). In the 1920s these ?recognisable objects? were to be substituted for a new variety of photographs portraying the European view of the South African regional landscape as anonymous, ?unnamed? and ?un-peopled?12, ?unspoilt by the emblems of modernity? 12 To describe the South African landscape at this time as ?un-peopled? is of course highly problematic; the Natives Land Act having been sanctioned in 1913. 74 (Foster in Schwartz & Ryan 2003:152). These images were often simply captioned as ?the veld? (see figure 16) and proved to be integral in the development of a South African visual metaphor, still setting the pace today for many contemporary contemplations of South African landscape such as in the work of David Goldblatt (see figure 17). The similarity between the 1925 SAR&H photographic documentation of the veld and that of Foldboat?s Sheepfarm at Oubip between Aggenys and Loop 10, Bushmanland, Northern Cape, 5 June 2004 is clear. In this diptych, the sun- bleached landscape of the South African veld stretches unforgivingly and unchangingly. Devoid of an obvious composition with no clear focal point, they instead demand a meditation on texture and space. It is in this quality that we find a clear correspondence between these images and the SAR&H views of the veld. The strategy clearly relates to the way in which the early travellers viewed the inner landscapes of South Africa, especially the Karoo. Seen as featureless with nothing for the eye to settle on, these landscapes were typically considered as empty. In a contemporary response to the colonial notion of a mute and empty landscape, Goldblatt?s landscapes query these positions (De Waal 2005) by noting in somewhat hidden fashion the traces of human activity on the land: hidden among the bushes one finds a few sheep, some loose ends of human presence. These traces may be scarcely visible, or may have been immersed into the landscape itself, but they are there. 75 Figure 16: Unidentified photographer ?The veld? Published in SAR&H July 1925. Figure 17: David Goldblatt Sheepfarm at Oubip between Aggenys and Loop 10, Bushmanland, Northern Cape, 5 June 2004 2004 Archival pigment on cotton rag paper Diptych Page size: 92 by 112 cm Image size; 84 by 105, 5 cm The representation of a landscape that is ?empty? necessitated a transformation in both seeing and depiction. It calls for photographs that can organise ?empty? landscapes in such a way that ?the apparently vacant centre was revealed as part of a cohesive totality? (Foster in Schwartz & Ryan 2003:153). These photographs attempted to capture the unique relational qualities and characteristics of the 76 topography of the South African landscape, with particular focus on the interior and the open landscape. In conjunction with these views, another field of photo-based images emerged: the view from the train carriage window. Representing neither landscape nor train, but rather the effects of putting the two views side by side in a single image, these photographs usually appeared as separate items in the SAR&H Magazine, frequently without any accompanying text. Like the view that one has when traveling through the landscape by car, a narrative sequence is perceived. Foster (Schwartz & Ryan 2003) maintains that this type of view, more than any other, embodied the intricate relationship of bodily knowledge, representational empiricism and discursive effect at work in the SAR&H photography at this time. These views carried a similar peculiar quality to those earlier synecdochic scenes of the veld as empty landscape, displaying no obvious economic or touristic cause and illustrating no reachable destination, instead implying a continuous landscape rolling past. It is when we examine them as investigative efforts at picturing a national ?lie of the land?, and as accounts intended to negotiate the insinuation of gain and loss that sustained ?colonial national? subjectivity, that these images become clear (Foster in Schwartz & Ryan 2003:153, 155). For the first time, all parts of the country had been collected into a specific temporal and spatial frame of reference. With all weather-roads generally only extending short distances beyond city or town limits13, train travel operated as the only feasible form of long-distance travel in South Africa until the 1930s. Like the photograph, the train 13 The history of Gamkaskloof poses an interesting example of this phenomenon: no road existed into the Kloof until Otto du Plessis (Cape Provincial Administrator at the time) promised the inhabitants a road in the 1950s. The building of the road was started by the Roads Department under supervision of Koos van Zyl and was finished in 1962. Unluckily it had a detrimental effect on the ?klowers? as they started to slowly drift away to the outside world. By 1990 there only remained three actively farming families in Gamkaskloof. 77 window framed the national terrain as something ?seen?, as an observable fact that could be categorised and evaluated as a landscape. On a fundamental level it can be argued that the railway had detached the viewer from any direct bodily engagement with the landscape, as had been the case with animal?drawn transport (Dubow in Bender & Winer 2001:246), instead transferring the terrain into something distanced and panoramic (Schivelbusch 1977). In addition, as determined by the railway line, a unified national landscape following a single route had been made visible to a multitude of people, with the train journey described as a key to the understanding of the country and a move toward the development of a definition of what is typically South African. The idea of speed also serves a vital function in this process: due to the speed of previous modes of traveling through the landscape, it can be argued that the South African landscape had not been fully realised. At 80 kilometers per hour, train traveling allowed for a grasping of relational characteristics in the terrain. This emerged as an essential part of the narrative generated by movement, in turn establishing a new visualisation of the South African landscape. This new visible landscape was neither stationary nor a combination of separate sites, but ordered or ?choreographed? (Schivelbush 1977) into ?spatial presences and emptinesses that were part of one continuous imaginary realm? (Foster in Schwartz & Ryan 2003:155). This would have been unattainable without the synoptic unfolding vision activated through the train?s (and of course the passenger?s) movement across the landscape. In this manner, the photograph documenting the view from the train carriage window endeavored to make present some of the effects of train travel in relation to the experience of the landscape. Characteristically these views would be captured either from a compartment on the moving train or from the footplate of the rolling locomotive, framing the landscape in three steps: firstly by the photographer?s view-finder, secondly by the train window, 78 and thirdly by the train itself. The combination of train window and train movement link together the enclosed, secure train compartment with the great sweep of the landscape outside, the train window framing the curving form of the train and the train becoming a mediating device which affords the traveller a measure of an otherwise empty landscape (Foster in Schwartz & Ryan 2003:155) (see figure 18). Figure 18: Unidentified photographer View from a moving train in the Karoo, originally titled as ?Through the Little Karoo?, Aangenaam valley 1920 Foster highlights a noteworthy ?side-effect? to this type of view: that train travel (as with vehicular or car travel) accentuated the visible section of the landscape that was furthest away from the eye. This is precisely where the notion of the South African stone texts comes in: the distorted foregrounds and proximities of these views from 79 the train are separated from a more comfortably viewed middle and distant horizon, as they seem to pass more slowly in relation to the speed of the passing train. As part of the experiential realm, the landscape-as-horizon is reduced to its most elemental expression. In such scenes, the horizon represents a characteristic display of the landscape as a silhouetted figure against the sky. As the SAR&H Magazine (July 1929: 1147) noted: ? a railway carriage is nearly the only place where you can see, in perfect comfort, every kind of atmospheric effect over a broad expanse of changing country?. I would like to argue that it is precisely in the context of an accentuated and visible horizon that the applications of texts in the landscape are to be considered. Bearing in mind the ?static? environments adjacent to these sites of textual inscription in the landscape, one is repeatedly made aware of the same elements: firstly, the inscribed text will almost always refer to a nearby locale or centre of human activity (like a town or place), either by means of a toponymic reference or some other text or symbol relating to a human description of the landscape; secondly, there is always some form of vehicular route close by, either in the form of a wagon road or service road, or the present-day freeway or national road; and thirdly, all of these inscriptions have a railway line passing by them. Of course, the inscription of landscape as surface is by no means a solely South African phenomenon and the tradition of marking the landscape can be traced back for centuries. Examples of chalked stone texts can be found globally, almost always in proximity to some form of human transportation (roads, railways, harbours or flight routes). The stone texts in the South African landscape - as found in other colonial and new political territories - possess a specific and close historic association to the railway line, not only in the manner in which they are read in the act of passing by, but also in that the specific quality of blurred foreground and more immobile horizon serve to create fertile ground for the inscription and the reading of these text as footnotes in a landscape generally perceived as a continuous text. 80 Transporting the empty veld and reverie-permeated space of the train compartment into a virtual alliance with one another, we can argue that these views from the train window encouraged a subjectivity ranging between that of the lone explorer and that of the armchair traveller. The views, in their framing (through the photograph, train window and the movement of the train through the landscape), commemorate the notion of mobility and mastery over circumstance, introducing an abstracted version of the embodied and sensory encounter with the terrain and concurrent sense of individual agency into the national discourse (Foster in Schwartz & Ryan 2003:160). As a seemingly comprehensive representation of the landscape, it can be said that these photographic views function similarly to that of a map pushing away into its prehistory the operations of which it is the result (de Certeau 1984a:121). But the effects go even further still: they rehearse a viewpoint and an opinion that also talks about an identity or way of being in the world: These photographs, through an iterative oscillation between ideological intention and experiential resonance, saved and transmitted the sensibility of one group and generation to those that followed, albeit in a transformed version (Foster in Schwartz & Ryan 2003:160). Where the railway uncovered the fundamental relational structure in the landscape, photography framed and brought the viewer ?closer? to its material and sensory peculiarities, its vastness and so-called blankness, thus defining a national territory as a national topography (Schwartz & Ryan 2003). The construction of topography connects at the same time the act of describing a region and the ?lie of the land?, emphasising the presence of humans in a landscape as an organization of that landscape and a subjectivity that makes description possible (Schwartz & Ryan 2003). As Crary (1990:6) states: to observe something is to ?conform one?s actions with it?. 81 On the topographical, let us compare this experience to the opposite of a fast traveling view of the landscape: the immediate, intimate and slower moving singular experience of walking the landscape. This was a particular landscape ?beaten out by the footfall of travellers inflecting the patterns of the land as they went, or traversed by the wagon at each linking of the wheel? (Dubow in Bender & Winer 2001:247). Here the traveller is less a subject moving ahead between points than a body restoring itself to a world into which it is topologically working itself. In the immediacy of this experience, a ?tactical initiative? (de Certeau 1984a) is employed in the body?s practical reply to its ground and a logic which ?evinced by the path that needs veer around a bush or the route that bends to accommodate an obstructing stone, reveals the minute material act of passing by? (Dubow in Bender & Winer 2001:248). The imaginative topographic space as fashioned by the moving eye marks the travellers? heightened sense of the ?lie of the land? and rehearses the subject- position of the passer-by in an ?empty? landscape. At the same time, these views convey the experiential moments of the past, implying a body-subject relation caught between the loss of sensory closeness and the acquisition of mobility and agency (Schwartz & Ryan 2003:161), constructing, within the passing blur of the landscape, a horizon upon which to rest the eye and into which text can be inserted to speak to the broader narrative of the travelled landscape. 82 b. The Seeing Eye With response to looking, mediation and mobility, Deleuze (1994:55) notes that representation only has a single centre, a unique and receding perspective. In consequence representation employs a false depth: representation mediates everything, but mobilises and moves nothing in the landscape itself. The photograph, the landscape painting and the lyric poem alike will, as systems of mediation, attempt to move us closer to place, object or situation. But essentially what remains is an unmovable and disembodied documentation of experience. On the subject of representation and photography, Barthes maintained a paradigm of the photograph as denotative or connotative sign. He noted that connotatively photographs bore an iconic relation to the object represented as ?analogical perfection?; denotatively, photographs simultaneously existed as signs whose symbolic meaning required cultural capital to decode. Barthes (Jay 1993a:441) observes that science interprets the gaze in three (combinable) ways: in terms of information (the gaze informs), in terms of relation (gazes are exchanged), in terms of possession (by the gaze, I touch, I attain, I seize, I am seized): three functions: optical, linguistic, haptic. But the gaze seeks: something, someone. It is an anxious sign: singular dynamics for a sign: its power overflows it. This restlessness of the gaze is partly taken up in John Berger?s claim that ?in every act of looking there is an expectation of meaning? (Berger 1982:117). Essentially, then, in contrast to the embodied viewer, the viewer of a photograph is not as aware of the being-there of the thing (which any copy could provoke) but an awareness of its having-been-there. What we have is a new space-time category: spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority, the photograph being an illogical conjunction between the here-now and the there-then (Jay 1993a:443 ? 444). 83 In this way, ?the camera relieves us of the burden of memory? and ?records in order to forget? (Berger in Michaels 2000:23). The term ?aesthetics? derives from aesthesis (sense-perception). As Heidegger (1962) notes, for the pre-Socratic Greeks aesthesis was associated with the process of revealing and concealing (alethia), with sensory perception trusted as knowledge. From early Greek philosophy onwards, questions concerning the acquisition of knowledge have frequently been reduced to the condition of having seen, and thus the existence of things in the world becomes similarly confined to that which can be seen (as in the case of the verifiable photograph). This was especially the case during the period of post-Enlightenment. However, the history of aesthetics has overshadowed this sense of the term: from antiquity on, a history of philosophy and Aesthetic Theory alike commenced with a grand metaphysical project to divide sense perception from reason and logos. This project culminates in the Age of Reason, with the final subordination of all aesthetics to the categories of representation. Consequently, Post-Kantian philosophy and Aesthetic Theory has attempted to invert this hierarchy, willing representation into a subset of aesthetics. In the Cartesian model, the intellect inspects entities modelled on retinal images . . . . In Descartes? conception ? the one that became the basis for modern epistemology ? it is representations, which are in the ?mind? (Jay 1993a:70). Indeed, this primacy of visual perception has provided most of the conditions for a Cartesian objectivity (see also chapter 4), which separates the mind from the body, and continues to uphold the status of visualising technologies in both the scientific realm and that of popular culture. 84 The effect of this ocularcentrism on the subject-object relation cannot be overstated: the difference between subjects and objects of knowledge is largely sustained by a perceptual hierarchy where tactility, haptic proximity, motility and sound have been rendered subordinate and secondary to the act of seeing and the criteria of visibility. Inherently, representation involves a perceptual functioning: as Tuan (1990:12) reminds us, the notion of perception as a ?reaching out to the world? is recognised by its Latin root ?percipere? to take hold of, feel or understand. Essentially, this ?reaching out? is mainly experienced through our eyes and largely associated with our predominant sense of sight. One third of the highest level of our cerebral cortex is devoted to visual processing, with the world providing an abundant input of light signals to our eyes in a seemingly instantaneous action, with the eye serving a similar function to that of a camera (Long 1992:8). But while colour and shape provide sensations that our eyes translate, it can be argued that the same does not count for size or distance and that these have to be learned through experience. As a child I used to rest on the carpet looking up at the ceiling, and I would for hours without end allow myself to imagine that I could ?walk? the ceiling as if it was a floor surface of some kind. I could deceive myself into ?walking? the ceiling with my eye, shifting the ?above? into an optic ?below?. Perhaps similarly, one can call to mind the simple optic effect of an early Giotto painting, where the viewer is able to imagine touching the top of a mountain as if it is of the same optical distance as any fore-grounded figure. Traditionally, Brunelleschi is seen as the practical inventor of perspective, with Alberti almost universally acknowledged as the first theoretical interpreter of perspectival theory. In the development of a simple optic devise, Brunelleschi observed the fundamental techniques of perspectival observation: through a 85 peephole cut into a small panel, the viewer could gaze through the hole, observing the picture before his eye as flat and renderable. Figure 19: Brunelleschian perspective device: peephole and mirror In this manner, the three-dimensional rationalised space of perspectival vision could be rendered on a two-dimensional surface by following the transformational conventions as specified in Alberti?s De Pittura and later treatises by Viator and D?rer. The basic devise followed the concept of a symmetrical visual pyramids or cones with one of their apexes representing the receding, vanishing or centric point in the image or painting, the other representing the eye of the viewer or painter. In Alberti?s metaphor, the transparent window that was the canvas could also be understood as a flat mirror reflecting the geometricalised space of the scene depicted back onto the no less geometricalised space radiating out from the viewing eye. Notably, it was conceived as a singular, ?lone eye?, looking through the peephole at the scene in front of it. Understood to be static, unblinking and fixed, the singular eye moved with what later scientists called ?saccadic? jumps from one focal point to another (Jay 1993b:116). 86 Similarly, da Vinci explained the Albertian grid in simple terms: ?Perspective is nothing else than seeing a place behind a plane of glass, quite transparent, on the surface of which the objects behind the glass are drawn? (Pinker 1998:216). Despite the simplicity of this statement, Berger describes a significant implication of this kind of action: Perspective makes the single eye the centre of the world. Everything converges on to the eye as to the vanishing point of infinity. The visible world is arranged for the spectator as the universe was once thought to be arranged for God (1972:16). In this sense, the static and fixed eye of perspectival vision clearly follows the logic of the Gaze rather than that of the Glance, producing a visual take that was eternalised and reduced to a disembodied, singular point of view (Bryson 1986). In what Bryson (1986:94) calls the ?founding perception? of the Cartesian perspectival tradition, ?the gaze of the painter arrests the flux of phenomena, contemplates the visual field from a vantage point outside the mobility of duration, in an eternal moment of disclosed presence?. He argues that ?while in the moment of viewing, the viewing subject unites his gaze with the Founding Perception, in a moment of perfect recreation of that first epiphany? (Bryson 1986:94). The implementation of this visual order allowed for a number of consequences: the abstract indifference inherent to perspectival gazing resulted in the withdrawal of the painter or viewer?s emotional involvement with the objects viewed or depicted, consequently widening the gap between seer and seen. In addition, there occurred a loss of what St. Augustine had anxiously termed ?ocular desire?, the body of the viewer and painter forgotten in the name of an allegedly disincarnated, totalizing eye (Jay 1993b:117). Even in the case of D?rer?s Draughtsman Drawing a Nude (see 87 figure 14) the draughtsman is observing the female nude through a screen of perspectival threads, ?largely in the service of a rectifying male look that turned its target into stone? (ibid). It can be argued that the Albertian grid of perspective turned particular places into visual places to be manipulated; accordingly these sites become commodities rather than places of engagement. Quite suitably then, the Cartesian philosophy of cogito me cogitare finds a close relative in perspectival distancing; indeed Cartesian dualism valorises the disembodied eye, so much so that the spectatorial rather than incarnated eye implies a body consigned to objecthood and a denial of any link between subject and object (Jay 1993a:91). In this, vision consists of a basic and subtle power-play between the subject who looks and the object or target of the gaze, with the viewer denoting a dominant and typically masculine power; the object ? the landscape or body - is viewed, serving as a compliant and feminine receptor (Jay 1993a:228, Rodaway 1994:123). More than any senses, the eye objectifies and masters. It sets at a distance, and maintains at a distance . . . . In our culture the predominance of the look over the smell, taste, touch and hearing has brought about an impoverishment of bodily relations. The moment the look dominates, the body looses its materiality (Irigaray in Jay 1993a:493). Cartesian perspectivalism held a scientific view of the world as situated in a mathematically regular spatiotemporal order filled with natural objects that could only be observed from without and by the unemotional eye of the natural researcher. In a comparison to Alberti?s window, Berger describes this view as ? a safe let into a wall, a safe in which the visible has been deposited? (1972:109). 88 The technique of perspective relied on the artist and the subject remaining in the same fixed position with the Albertian velo or veil of threads projected from a single vanishing point. In order to keep a fixed perspective, the artist used one eye and did not move his head. Clearly, seeing with one eye through a piece of glass without moving one?s head speaks of a disembodied engagement with the world, where person, place and nature are synthetically divorced. What is seen is reduced to a view, a dot or outline, removed from worldly experience and relationship. The invention of perspective is typically seen as a movement away from the previously stylised, although expressionistic Byzantine depictions; in turn these depictions are to be seen as a development away from the naturalistic Roman frescoes. It can be argued that Renaissance perspective created space that was constructed rather than experienced, and that this soon became a code for visual reality and a radical tool for illusion fuelling a need for appearances of reality that still influences how we see and act in the world today. In this manner the advantaged, albeit static, centre of perspectival vision verified the objectivity of sight and separated the viewer from the world. As Jay (1993:54) points out ?no longer did the painter seem as emotionally involved in the space he depicted; no longer was the beholder absorbed in the canvas?. Distance was established for both the artist and viewer, with an ?ocularcentric discourse? and a history of vision as the ?master sense of the modern era, variously described as the heyday of Cartesian perspectivalism, the age of the world picture, and the society of the spectacle or surveillance? (Jay 1993a: 543). Distance ? and its dependency on measurement ? also contributed to the diminishing of place. This was a period of the ?mathematization of nature? (Dean & Millar 2005:16), whereby the world was engaged only insofar as it could be mathematically determined. Galileo, Descartes and Locke removed what were viewed as the ?secondary qualities? of place ? such as colour, temperature and texture ? from their 89 investigations, as none of these could be converted to assessable distances and so were extraneous to the matter at hand (Dean & Millar 2005). Building on perspectival theory, the tradition of landscape painting was soon to be followed by a commoditisation of the represented landscape and image in the form of oil paintings to be sold and possessed, with the natural world transformed into a ?standing reserve? for the surveillance (Heidegger 1978:298). Fundamentally, the capacity of perspective to distance and to subsequently create uniform, infinite, isotropic space was agreeable to both modern science and capitalism in that the ?placement of objects in a relational field, objects with no intrinsic value of their own outside those relations, may be said to have paralleled the fungibility of exchange value under capitalism? (Jay 1993a:57-59). It is important to note that the inscriptions in the South African landscape consist of both textual information (words, names, dates or phrases) and material information (they have been produced using stone from the specific locations and have been chalked white to be highlighted or made visible in an otherwise empty and continuous landscape of similarity). Building on gestalt psychology, phenomenologists have discussed at great length the figure-ground structure of both static and dynamic perception in which the figure is typically clear while the ground recedes eventually into an indeterminate background (Husserl 1982:70-71). Let us imagine a white patch on a homogeneous background. All the points in the patch have a certain ?function? in common, that of forming themselves into a ?shape?. The colour of the shape is more intense, and as it were more resistant than that of the background; the edges of the white patch ?belong? to it, and are not part of the background although they adjoin it: the patch appears to be placed on the background and does not break it up. Each part arouses the expectation of more than it contains, and this elementary perception is therefore already charged with a meaning. But, if the shape and the background, as a whole, are not sensed, they must be sensed, one may object, in each of their points. 90 To say this is to forget that each point in its turn can be perceived only as a figure on a background (Merleau-Ponty 1962:4). As Merleau-Ponty suggests, the basic tenet of Gestalt theory is that the simplest thing that can be given in perceptual experience is not a sensation or quality, but rather a figure on a background. But whereas the Gestalt theorists took this to be an empirical, psychological fact, Merleau-Ponty argues that this [figure on a background] is not a contingent characteristic of factual perception. . . . It is the very definition of the phenomenon of perception, that without which a phenomenon cannot be said to be a perception at all (1962:4). Phenomenologists consider perceptual experience to involve the implicit, background awareness of one's body. For something to be a likely object of perceptual experience it must be the kind of thing that can be experienced as being situated in relation to the spatial vantage point provided by one's body. Indeed, the spatial position of one's body determines in part the figure-ground structure of perception: the figure corresponds to the focus of one's gaze and the ground to what one sees in the surroundings. Furthermore, the perceptual surroundings can be differentiated into the immediate spatial context of the figure on the one hand and the indeterminate background of the periphery on the other, with the indeterminate background including the marginal presence of one's own body. Thus the background awareness of the body turns out to be essential to the figure-ground structure of perceptual experience: the perceptual object not only stands out against an external background, it is situated within an implicit bodily space. In Merleau-Ponty's words: "one's own body is the third term, always tacitly understood, in the figure- background structure, and every figure stands out against the double horizon of external and bodily space" (1962:101). 91 When passing by a stone text in the landscape, one can argue that to a certain extent, a distance between the viewer and the viewed is set and maintained in that the text is experienced on the horizon of vision. In the seeing and subsequent reading of text, the viewer is mainly sourcing information and significance in the form of understanding from the textual format of the marking or inscription. There is no true need or context for it to be viewed or materially acknowledged as made of stone. There is an insolvency of direct bodily relation to the materiality of the site. Quite appropriately then these stone texts, as seen in surrender to the colonial histories and settings of their production and functioning, provide resonance with the Cartesian dichotomy of the disembodied and spectatorial eye. Furthermore, on the loss of materiality and the distancing capacity of sight, Tuan (1990:10) observes that The person who ?sees? is an onlooker, a sightseer, someone not otherwise involved in the scene. The world perceived through the eyes is more abstract than that known to us through the other senses. . . . Distant objects can only be seen: hence we have the tendency to regard seen objects as ?distant? - as not calling forth any strong emotional response ? even though they may in point of fact be close to us. In the distancing of the stone texts, a maintainable horizon is given to an otherwise ?empty? or alleged semiotically ?mute? landscape (Coetzee 1988:9), with the focus on a passive reception of objectively confirmed information, by an uninvolved viewer. There exists a fundamental difference in viewing these inscribed landscapes from a distance and from within the landscape itself; from close-up the site reveals an essential materiality of production. On a most basic level, it is not possible to read the text from within the immediacy of the produced marks. Instead the eye is ?caught? in the materially of stone and chalk (see figures 20, 21) in a close, even if motile form of seeing. In short, the text is too large and too close to the body to be 92 read by the eye. ?Taken in at a footpace, it is a form of seeing that redraws the eye into the specificities of the physical environment as into the physical body of the seer? (Dubow in Bender & Winer 2001:249). It is only in leaving the landscape, in the activation of the disembodied eye that the texts reveal themselves in the landscape (see figure 22) and a way of reading the sign and not merely seeing it14 occurs. Figure 20: An example of the immediacy and materiality of the chalked stone in the text BEAUFORT-WEST, seen from up-close and from within the landscape. 14 For Rousseau, to know only of the formalised redescription of the landscape ? the written word, the cartographic sign ? would be to commit a fundamental epistemological error. He states: ?Without the idea of represented things, the representative signs are nothing. One must not read, one must see? (1991:827). 93 Figure 21: Only in providing some distance between the eye and the stone text, can the letter ?W? in BEAUFORT-WEST be discerned, here seen from the top of the koppie, looking back towards the freeway. Figure 22: In leaving the immediacy of the stone facture, the toponym BEAUFORT-WEST can clearly be viewed, here seen from the freeway that runs past the town of Beaufort-West, South Africa. Although we cannot escape the fact that these stone texts are aimed at a singular distanced viewer, we have to consider a critical reading of single perspective, with 94 the reading of these texts as significantly complex. Let me at this point acknowledge that perception is culturally determined by language, socio-economic factors and personal histories (Tuan 1990), and that the eye is essentially not passive in itself. Let us also recognise the deep suspicion that sets a backdrop to vision and its dominant role: If postmodernism teaches us anything, it is to be suspicious of single perspectives, which like grand narratives, provide totalizing accounts of a world too complex to be reduced to a unified point of view (Jay 1993a:545). We can no longer assume the universality of visual experience: the elemental qualities of phenomenology are understood to be a description of lived experience, with emphasis on the immediacy of this experience (Dufrenne 1973:549). Immediacy is phenomenologically seen as the fundamental characteristic of all actual experience, of experiencing; it is spatial and temporal, here and now (Schultz 1970:318). 95 c. The Touching Eye Csordas (1994) repeats Merleau-Ponty?s call for a theory of being-in-the world to evoke a sense of existential immediacy, in this he supports the phenomenological notion of the lived experience and the ensuing focus on embodied subjectivity. For Csordas (1994:10) this immediacy is a ?temporally/historically informed sensory presence and engagement? and seeks to place the body as a central analytic theme, as the ?existential ground of culture and self? (Hassard, Holliday & Willmott 2000:65). In the context of the stone inscription of landscape, the notion of the immediacy of experience (as found within the landscape) has to take account of multiple positions because, not only are these texts readable from a distance by the passer-by moving across the landscape, there also exists the possibility for these texts to be viewed from within the materiality of the stone landscape. To add to this, I propose that there arises a third option of experiencing a sense of immediacy of the stone text through the initiation of a special kind of sensory perception or what is otherwise referred to as the haptic. In the shift from the optic to the haptic, we find an alternative approach to the understanding of space as something that has been made room for. . . . A boundary is not that which something stops, but, as the Greeks recognised, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing. That is why the concept is that of horismos, that is, the horizon, the boundary. Space is in essence that for which room has been made, that which is let into its bounds. That for which room is made is . . . joined, that is, gathered, by virtue of a location, that is by such a thing as the bridge. (Heidegger 1971:146). 96 Heidegger?s understanding of the haptic sense, including the tactile, kinaesthetic and proprioceptive senses, describes aspects of engagement that are qualitatively dissimilar to the experience of the visual sense. Where the visual sense authorises a moving, distant and debatably disconnected viewpoint, the haptic sense functions by contact, contiguity and resonance. The haptic sense leaves the exterior or surface of the body ?porous?, being perceived at once inside (on the skin?s surface) and in external space, enabling the perception of colour, weight, pressure, balance, texture, temperature, vibration and presence15. Early research on haptic perception explains it as sensory stimulation involving contact adjoining the body, or made perceptible by the use of the body. In this manner, the haptic sense was considered a ?proximal? sense, one relating to the sensing of objects in contact with the body, with the hand considered to be the chief means of perceiving the character of surfaces and resistance. As a ?proximal? sense, the haptic is typically distinguished from vision and audition as ?distal? senses which perceive objects more distant from the margins of the skin?s surfaces (Loomis & Lederman in Boff, et al 1986). But what is significant about the haptic sense is that despite its categorisaton as a proximal sense it is indeed concerned with distal perception as well (Kennedy 1993). Accordingly, haptic perception can embody the energies involved in sensing space: its presences, temperature, pressure and resonances. It is the affective touch, a plane of feeling distinct from actual physical contact. And inside the skin it is interoception, an aspect of the haptic sense, which perceives the visceral workings and felt intensities of our interior bodies. It is, in other words, the look that touches an object. 15 Previously noted by Locke and Descartes to be ?secondary qualities? of place. 97 In developing the notion of the haptic, Deleuze and Guattari provides us with the impression of ?smooth space?16, a space that must be moved through by constant reference to the immediate environment, as when navigating an expanse of snow or sand, water or rock. Close-range space is navigated not through reference to the abstractions of maps or compasses but by haptic perception, which attends to their particularity. Deleuze and Guattari?s privileged agents of haptic perception are nomadic people, such as Inuit and Bedouins. It seems to us that the Smooth is both the object of a close vision par excellence and the element of a haptic space (which may be as much visual or auditory as tactile). The Striated, on the contrary, relates to a more distant vision, and a more optical space ? although the eye in turn is not the only organ to have this capacity (Deleuze & Guattari 1987:493). There is a clear political distinction evident in Deleuze and Guattari?s differentiation between the Smooth and the Striated, implying two ways of occupying space: smooth space is lived in intimately with an immediacy of experience, without a strong distinction between yourself and your surroundings17. Striated space is divided in order to conquer: in taking a distance on space, it is possible to mark it out, to map it, and to construct it into territory. In this manner, optical visuality perceives objects as distinct, distant, and identifiable, existing in illusionary three-dimensional space with a strong dependence on the maintenance of a clear, crisp relationship between figure and ground. Optical visuality is essential for distance perception: for surveying a landscape and for assembling close distinctions between things at a distance. The subject of vision - the beholder - is also regarded to be separate, as 16 Let us not be confused by the use of the term ?smooth? and the textural implication of this term: I do not describe the rocky qualities of the Karoo landscape as ?smooth?. The term here is in application to the immediacy of the lived moment, its close proximity to the body and ourselves and not texture itself. 17 This can be seen in the example of a landscape of snow or sand, but could easily be translated into a private space such as your room or bed. 98 having solid borders that demarcate the beholder from the thing beheld18. It conceives of the other, the object of vision, as distant and unconnected to the subject of vision. Optical visuality is necessary, but only serves to represent one side of vision: haptic visuality perceives the world as though it were touching it, close, inscrutable, seeming to exist on the surface of the image. Haptic images perturb the figure-ground relationship. Deleuze and Guattari (1987:492) considers the notion of close?range vision in contrast to long-distance vision, to be directly linked to ?tactile? or rather ?haptic? space, as distinguished from optical space. According to them the term ?haptic? is a better phrase than ?tactile? since it does not establish an opposition between the two sense organs (sight and touch), but rather invites the assumption that the eye itself may fulfil this non-optical function (Deleuze & Guattari 1987:492). It was Al?is Riegl that gave fundamental aesthetic status to the pairing of close- vision-haptic space (ibid). He borrowed the term from psychology, haptein, for a kind of vision that ?grabs? the thing it looks at19. Riegl?s teleological history of art narrates the ruin of a physical tactility in art and the rise of illusionary, figurative space. By contrast, haptic space relates to the image as object rather than illusionistic space for identification; it appeals to a perception that is embodied and material. Haptic space encourages a kind of recognition in which there is a joint dissolving of subject 18 This distinction serves a valid and important function; consider the value of optic visuality in firing a weapon for example. 19 Riegl was a historian of textiles and Persian carpets. These carpets with their endless, interleaved patterns do not allow the eye to rest in one place; they invite the eye to move along them, caressing their surface. Contemplating these patterns does something to dissolve the boundaries between the beholder and the thing beheld. 99 and object, viewer and viewed, where looking is not about power but about yielding. Haptic images invite our eyes to linger on the surface of the image rather than pull us into idealised space, assisting us in feeling the connectivity between ourselves, the image, its material support, and the world to which the image20 (or view) connects us. It is vital to take note that there is never an absolute separation between haptic and optical; rather they slide into one another. As an example, consider how our vision moves from optical to haptic when we admire our lover: haptic visuality has a strong sense of the material connection between vision and the object. It is thus mimetic: it presses up to the object and takes its shape. As the complement of symbolic knowledge, in which representation is based on abstraction, mimesis is a form of representation based on contact, getting close enough to the other thing to become it. I am not concerned in posing a binary between touch and vision, but rather with how the stone texts pose an intermingling of these sense modalities. While the visual gives trajectories ? sightlines ? between the viewer and the surfaces of the landscape inscription, the haptic defines the affective charge ? the felt dimensionality ? of a spatial context. To explain the relation between sight, felt dimensionality, and the immediacy of experience21, let us consider the following: on the matter of painting and the notion of smooth, haptic space, Deleuze and Guattari remark that the law of painting requires that it be done ?from close range, even if it is seen from a distance? (1987:493). Consider the stone texts in the landscape (their production in close range but subsequent reading by means of distance) in light of the following: 20 Note that an image itself can be haptic or optical, while haptic visuality is a term of reception. The viewer can choose, to some degree, whether to see optically or haptically: try taking off your glasses, or focusing on the windshield when you are driving, rather than the street beyond. 21 As a drawing lecturer, I have found that the technique of touching one?s face or body in order to draw it, serves to accurately describe the relation between sight, felt dimensionality and the immediacy of drawing. In this manner, touch serves to explain or identify what is seen through the body. 100 C?zanne spoke of the need to no longer see the wheat field, to be too close to it, to lose oneself without landmarks in smooth space. Afterward striation can emerge: drawing, strata, the earth, ?stubborn geometry?, ?the measure of the world?, ?geological foundations?. . . . (Deleuze & Guattari 1987:493). The idea of being ?absorbed? in the image is of course not unique to painting; Bloch considers the experience of immediacy, when one is so close to the subject that it essentially excludes the possibility of vision (Iampolski 2003:306). For Bloch, immediacy lies within the darkness of the lived moment, ?darkness? as a designation for immediate proximity. In his analysis, landscape as a Cartesian subject (and necessarily optically divided from the viewer) can ?appear? only when mediation penetrates actual immediacy, when distance is activated in order to view, map or read the text in the landscape, be it through the act of leaving the landscape or viewing it from afar. It is noteworthy to consider the notion of ?darkness?: that in the lived moment there no longer exists a division between the body and the world, the haptic and optic slide into one another and one loses oneself without landmarks in smooth space. Deleuze and Guattari refer to these as ?monadological? (1987:494) views that can be interlinked only on a nomadic or itinerant space; the whole and the parts give the eye that beholds them a function that is haptic rather than optical. In this sense the haptic is activated by itinerant nomadic actions or by movement across the landscape, whether by car, train or other devises of passing by. Resounding the relation between train views and photography, Bruno (2007) uses cinema as a metaphor for the haptic routes of spatiality22. As a kind of panoramic wallpaper, cinema has its spatial ancestry in the new ?fashions? of spatiality and the pursuit of cultural travelling that marked the rise of modernity: from the topographical views of painting and cartography to landscape design and panoramic 22 Film language speaks literary of travel: consider the French word for camera movement: travelling, also the use of the term ?pan? standing in English for ?panorama? and panoramique in French. 101 vision. At the heart of this is a transformation of vision taking effect not within the framework of an incorporeal eye but rather within the territory of a new travelling vision craving spatial expansion. While the spectator was immersing space in movement, a new architectonics and ?picturesque revolution? were put to action: one born of locating sites in moving perspectives, escalating outward to incorporate ever larger servings of space. The new sensibility occupied the physicality of observers, challenging their ability to take in space and more space ? a mobilised space (Bruno 2007:170). As the production of travel discourse (from literary to ocular and spatial constructions) started to increase during the eighteenth century, a haptic consciousness was being produced. This was embedded in the combination of a sensualist theory of imagination with the touch of physicality, with the spectator altogether ingrained in the joys of scanning sites and scapes, in moving through and with landscapes, as Corbin (1995:138) states: Taking in the panorama with a sweeping glance, evaluating its variety . . . letting the eye slide from distant horizon down to the foreground in a sort of travelling shot, and learning to expand the depth of field of one?s vision. . . . In this way, cinematic motion is said to have succeeded genealogically from the travelling history of spatial phenomenology: it is possible to trace a secure route ranging from topographical views and maps, to the architectonics of gardens, the exposure of the impulse of travel to more people, and the development of a leisure industry. Following the course of modernity, we find an array of advances: from view painting to garden views, from travel sketches to itinerant viewing boxes, from panoramas to other geographical ?-oramas? to forms of interior/exterior mapping, from the mobile views of train travel to urban streetwalking, the subject was ?incorporated? into motion pictures. It is this moving, haptic space that created the (e)motion picture and its spectator ? a body who is indeed a ?passenger? (Bruno 2007:172). The body and geography unmistakably share a material field in the terrain of lived space; the domain of physicality is deliberated at the crossroads of ?inside? and 102 ?outside?. ?The Enlightenment planner emphasised the journey. . . . Thus were the words ?artery? and ?veins? applied to city streets by designers who sought to model traffic systems on the blood system of the body? (Sennett 1994:261), defining a new mobile and haptic mapping between body and city. The fervour for travelling and the opening out of spatiality persisted in the nineteenth century?s mechanised version of the travelling eye, so much so that travelling, visiting museums, studying maps or observing a city?s plan were all optical processes by which the observer organised his visual memory and thoughts. In this manner a new field of observation that united distinct spatio-temporal configurations emerged, developing them into a new map, with a new observer with a spectatorial body. To return to the metaphor of the cinema, it is important to note that filmic space is not quite the homogenous space of unified central perspective, depicted as if positioned in front of the body and seen with a single and immobile eye (Panofsky in 1997:29). The filmic eye is not external and prior to representation, instead it represents a shift away from the Albertian perspectival model as a heterogeneous space comprised of metramorphic centres, ?the moving image ?embraces? the shifting trajectories of psychophysiological space, where the spectator-passenger is mapped within landscape? (Bruno 2007:178). It is crucial to recognise that historically not all perspectival drawing was uniformly composed to assert the unity of a body in space; various artists strove to acknowledge the framework of a shifting vision or the embodiment of the beholder, with Dutch art from the sixteenth century providing vital examples. 103 Figure 23: Albertian construction of perspective. Figure 24: Viator?s construction: In comparison Alberti and Viator?s constructions appear confusingly similar, but the difference is clearly exposed in Vignola?s diagrammatic comparison between the two: whereas Alberti?s viewer is disembodied, Viator?s eye is within the picture itself. The case of protofilmic spatiality found in the perspective drawings of Jan Vredeman de Vries exemplifies this approach: perceived to be the most important Dutch master of perspective, de Vries?s work made a strong impression on illusional architectural imaging. As an architectural designer, graphic artist and painter, he produced an important body of engravings on architecture, ornamental design and gardens. It is his drawings that produced the spatial effect that has been called an ?adding on of 104 views of the moving eye? (Alpers 1983:58). In his work, de Vries reiterated the views of the French priest Jean P?lerin, known as Viator. Viator assumed that representation replicates vision, which he defined in terms of a moving eye reflecting the light it receives like a burning mirror or miroir ardente23 (Alpers 1983:53). By significant contrast, Alberti stated that the operation of the eye itself is of no significance to a consideration of pictorial construction, with Viator in response placing the eye point not at a distance in front of the picture but instead on the very picture surface itself where it establishes the horizontal line that marks the eye level of persons in the picture. The eye of the viewer (characteristically prior and external to the picture plane in the Albertian construction [see figure 23]), and the single, central vanishing point to which it is coupled in distance and position, have their counterparts here within the picture (see figure 24). Figure 25: Jan Vredeman de Vries An illustration of the circular arc of the turning eye. 23 The miroir ardente refers to a curved mirror that can bring about fire by directing and concentrating its rays of light. 105 Figure 26: Jan Vredeman de Vries A graphic of a section of the circular arc transcribed by the turning eye, laid out flat as the horizon lie crossing the pictorial surface. Figure 27: Jan Vredeman De Vries The multiplication of distance points leading the eye to a variety of views up and down, in and out of an empty room. De Vries affirms these views with an illustration of the basic terms of Viator?s visual geometry (see figure 25 and 26), showing the circular arc as set down by the turning eye. This section, when laid out flat, is the horizon line crossing the pictorial surface. 106 A later illustration (see figure 27) by de Vries reveals the multiplication of distance points that are leading the eye to an assortment of views up and down, in and out of a vacant room; it is here that we find the effect of an ?adding-on of views of the moving eye? as recommended by Viator. The result is that when figures enter the space, they are ?captives of the world seen, entangled Gulliver-like in the lines of sight that situate them? (Alpers 1983:58), so much so that the various eyes and a multitude of things viewed that make up such surfaces produce a syncopated effect, and we can under no circumstances stand back and take in a homogenous space (Alpers 1983). Mapping the spectator in this cumulative motion, de Vries?s perspective anticipates filmic scenography. There is a clear inclusion of the inhabitant or intruder in these spaces, and in creating such space de Vries presents diversely embodied perspectives. The perspectival techniques themselves employ the dynamics of multiplicity: a compound system of exposed perspectival lines, generated from more than one viewpoint, captures the emotion of the body space. The moving spectator ? in its own right a body that is shifting in space ? is charted inside these architectural views (Bruno 2007:179). Beyond perspectivism, we are able to correlate these views (with de Vries in mind) to the mapping of space: the techniques of surveying architectural and landscape views expressed a relationship between space, movement and narrative, thus establishing a tradition of spatial storytelling (Bruno 2007:80). 107 Figure 28: John Rocque View painting: Garden plan of Chiswick House, Middlesex 1736 Figure 29: Claes Jansz Leo Hollandicus 1622 108 To a large extent we are indebted to the pre-photographic tradition of the topographical view in painting, such as the Dutch city view or the Italian Vedutismo24, which resulted in a form of depiction that moved narratively. ?View painting? sought to chart space in time, and by representing the life of the sites encapsulated its motion (see figure 28 and 29), so that spatial depiction became a pre-photographic historical documentation. As we have seen earlier in this chapter, with the development of photographic technology a space could be mapped at the moment that it was captured; later with motion pictures it became possible to map the spatio-temporal flow, thus re- embodying a sense of place. Mapping and its art of describing implies a haptic rendering mainly indebted to the multiple perspectives of views that illustrated lived space and made landscape inhabited or marked. In depicting place geographically, the explorative force at length mapped this terrain and formed sites into ??scapes?. These topographical scenes of places often expressed the viewpoint of representational documentation with the techniques of observation being mobilised, as Hollander (1991) refers to these painterly scene designs as ?moving pictures?. Often these views would employ techniques such as drawing remote objects closer and pushing back nearer ones. In an almost filmic analysis of space, these devises would separate it into parts to be read as a whole, in this way picturing place as an collection of incomplete views, a montage of spatial fragments panoramically linked by a mobile observer (Bruno 2007:181). In our consideration of the value of mapping as an art of describing and the relation between mapping, inscription and representation, we are provided with a clear 24 Vedutismo was a particular manifestation of the observational gaze: as a form of urban imaging, these city views merged the codes of topography and landscape painting, creating imaginative and staged representational maps, with close?ups of spaces or important geographical narratives. 109 pointer from Vermeer. In his painting ?The Art of Painting? (see figure 30), our attention is drawn to an impressive representation of a map. We are looking at a painter?s studio, the artist has started to render the leaves of a wreath on the head of a young woman that he is painting. A great map, hung so as to fill the back wall before which Vermeer has situated the painter and his model, creates the backdrop to this scene, but also serves to point out an interesting conversation around the close association between mapping and painting - and representation in general. The question is if this map is presented like a painting, to what impulse in painting does it correspond? Figure 30: Jan Vermeer The Art of Painting 1665 67 Oil on canvas 120 by 100 cm Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna 110 Vermeer answers this himself: in the upper border of the painted map, one can clearly discern the word Descriptio in finely painted letters. As one of the most common terms used to designate the mapping enterprise, ?description? was often applied to refer to mapmakers and publishers as the ?describers of the world? (Alpers 1983:122), but rarely applied to painters. Alpers (1983) argues that the aspiration of the Dutch painters of the time was to capture a great range of knowledge and information about the world on a surface. This included the use of words and, like mappers, they would often produce additive works that could not be taken in a single viewing point. Unlike the Italian model of art viewed through a ?window?, Dutch art functioned rather like a map or surface on which was laid bare an assemblage of the world (Alpers 1983:122). In ?The Art of Painting? the viewer is allowed an essential glimpse of this approach: framing the larger map of the Netherlands is a sequence of small landscape paintings, revealing a common scheme invented for topographical city views in the sixteenth century. In this map-to-painting arrangement the city is painted back into the mapping context from which it had emerged (Alpers 1983:124). It is not difficult to tell landscapes and maps apart by their look: maps give us the measure of place and the connection between places, while landscape images are suggestive and communicate a viewer?s sense of it; until quite recently this difference was upheld professionally. Of course the borders between these disciplines have become quite blurred in the fields of geography, art and cartography; still, cartographers and art historians have been in essential agreement to maintain boundaries between maps and art, knowledge and decoration. ?Topography? is again the term to use here, in this context normally employed to classify those landscape pictures or views that sacrifice art (as it is understood or defined) in the name of the recording of place (Alpers 1983:126). These boundaries would have perplexed the 111 Dutch, who instead of being embedded in an investigation of the line drawn between maps and art, focused on the overlap and the basis of their resemblance. The sixteenth century set the pace for a general demand for news and trade, with the map serving to provide the root to this knowledge. Mapping was quite a common pastime and carried the potential act of description, both in public and private form, in the very act of drafting a map. Many artists were engaged in some aspect of mapping, ranging from Pieter Pourbus to Pieter Saenredam, Gaspar Wittel, Pieter Bruegel, and of course key artists of the time: Jacob van Ruisdael, Hendrik Goltzius and Philips Koninck. The word ?picture?, as much as it was used in conversation around the pictorial presence of the map as something that made the world visually immediate (perhaps like a lens), was often accompanied or replaced by the term description, descriptio in Latin, description in French and beschryving in Dutch. All of these depend on the Latin scripto as an equivalent to the Greek graph?. At the time, it was uncommon to refer to a picture as descriptive, a term more commonly applied to texts; when the Renaissance geographers used the term description it wanted to call to attention not the power of words but the sense in which images are drawn or inscribed like something written. Therefore it referred not to the persuasive power of words but to a mode of representation, with graph? implying both picture and writing (Alpers 1983:136). In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the term ?description? was used to title both books relating to new surveying techniques and the more general kind of atlases or maps (such as the one in Vermeer?s painting). Similarly the word landschap was used to refer to both what the ?surveyor was to measure and the artist to render? (ibid). In making use of the term ?description?, the geographical texts accepted the graphic basis of their field while at the same time 112 relating their records to a concept of image making. In strong contrast to the Albertian views of the picture as a window with a distanced and disembodied human observer, both northern mapmakers and artists conceived of a picture as ?a surface on which to set forth or inscribe?, [or describe], ?the world rather than as a stage for significant human actions? (Alpers 1983:137). The question is: how can a map bring something to the eyes in the way a picture can? Consider the peculiarity of this claim, and reflect on the poignant example of a map (or is it a picture?) by the Dutch painter Jan Micker (see figure 31). Theorists believe that he based himself on the famous sixteenth century painting of Cornelius Anthonisz, and perhaps even closer to the truth: a work by Pieter van Ruisdael entitled ?Panorama of Amsterdam, Its Harbour and the IJ?. In the work, Micker literally painted the mapped Amsterdam (Alpers 1983:157). 113 Figure 31: Jan Christaenz Micker View of Amsterdam Figure 32: Google Earth view of inscribed and contoured hill, Jinging, China 114 In this peculiar work he attempts to combine the graphic nature of the map with the mirroring qualities of a painting, and a few clues help us in our search for these relations: the list labelling landmarks at the lower right casts a shadow onto the sea and, even more arresting, the city is delicately coloured and browsed by scattered light and shade cast by unseen clouds25. In this Micker discloses an interesting ambition that can be used to conclude the discussion on inscription and the physical landscape as surface. This can be unloaded by means of the introduction of another image, that of a Google Earth view taken of an area in Jinging, China (see figure 32). In this image the viewer is faced with an interesting view. Indeed, at first glimpse it seems that one is observing a map of some sort, made evident through the identification of contour markings clearly following the shape of a mountainous body, and the unmistakable application and inscription of the numbers 1, 2, 3 and 4. Of course this is not a map; instead one is observing a photograph of a desolate and mountainous landscape, with the mapping effect physically inscribed onto the landscape as a surface. One might argue that both of these views represent a manner of physically mapping the surface of the land and a literalisation of the mappa mundi or ?cloth of the world? effect. As with the stone texts in the South African landscape, these images reveal the merge between landscape and map and, instead of a linear, hierarchical and segregated association between reading and writing, seeing and reading, one finds an engagement with the body and the temporal dimensions to inscription in the physical mapping of the surface of the land. ?Topographic? space as ?a space in which writing is severed from its role as mere verbal description and instead is experienced as both a verbal and visual phenomenon? (Bolter 1991:62), becomes embodied space, with the view of the passer-by allowing for a slide of the optic into 25 The presence of shadow here implies a clear acknowledgement of corporeal experience. 115 the haptic. Landscape becomes text, and the inscription on the surface of the landscape serves as a footnote in the itinerant reading of this text in the course of passage. Envision a map so huge and intricately drawn, so exquisitely rendered, that it forms an exact replica of the territory it represents, its details blending flawlessly with the ground depicted, its topographical precision erasing any signs of dissimilarity between the land and the cartographic analogue. In his fictional fragment Of Exactitude in Science Borges describes such a map: In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and a map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forbears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars: in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. From Travels of Praiseworthy Men (1658) by J. A. Suarez Miranda (Borges 1998:325) 116 5. Stones, Earth and Chalk: As Far As The Eye Can Touch I turned to writing. For a week, toiling from dawn to sunset, I trundled the wheelbarrows full of stones across the veld until I had a pile of two hundred smooth, round, the size of small pumpkins, in the space behind the house. (Coetzee 1977:132) I am not the spectator, I am involved, and it is my involvement in a point of view which makes possible both the finiteness of my perception and its opening out upon the complete world as a horizon of every perception. (Merleau-Ponty 1962:303) Against a cliff overlooking the road, a hedge had been planted to read WELCOME TO UMTALI. During the war, the terrorists chopped out the ?L? in WELCOME, so that the subsequent greeting read a chilling WE COME TO UMTALI. As quickly as the women from the Umtali Gardening Club directed the ?garden boys? to replant the all-important missing ?L?, it was ripped out again, until the war was won (or lost, depending on whose side you were on) and the hedge was replanted to read, WELCOME TO MUTARE. (Fuller 2002:48) As Far As The Eye Can Touch is the title of an artistic project and exhibition created as practical component to my MA (FA), documenting a series of text based and mostly large-scale poetic interventions in the landscape. Over the last two years I have produced a chain of works by physically writing onto surfaces such as koppies, roads and frozen lakes using stones, earth, chalk or paint, and by physically modifying existing landscape inscriptions. As Far As The Eye Can Touch comprises of a collection of photographs and a series of site-objects produced in response to the notions of the passer-by and the surveying and marking of our ocularised landscapes. The exhibition was hosted by The Premises Gallery in Johannesburg in November 2007. In my artistic practice, the writing of text onto land is a performance: the body takes the place of the hand in writing. During the European winter of 2005 and 2006, I had 117 the opportunity to participate in the MAPS26 programme, an exchange between the Wits School of the Arts and the Ecole Cantonale d?art du Valais in Sierre, Switzerland. Sierre is located in the heart of the Cantonale Valais and serves as a kind of bookmark, a spacer dividing the mountain: towards the north, vineyards and sun; to the south, the icy blue entrance to Val d?Anniviers. Initially, in reply to the South African phenomena of chalked inscriptions on koppies, I envisioned a similar inscriptive placement of stone onto the inviting verticality of these mountains, but due to heavy snow, difficult working conditions and the uncompromising scale of these mountains, I soon realised I would have to revise my approach. Instead I chose to work with frozen bodies of water as tabula or surface for inscription, leading to the production of a site specific work entitled I Am The World On Which I Walk (see figure 33). As a landscape intervention, the work involved the exhaustive act of single-handedly moving frozen stones in a wheelbarrow over a substantial distance, from the River Rh?ne to a lake in the heart of Bois de Finges in Sierre, Switzerland and the subsequent writing with stone onto the precariously frozen surface of the water. Situated between the limestone massifs of the Bernese Alps and the granite reliefs of the Valais Alps, Bois de Finges is the biggest pine grove in Switzerland and one of the oldest forests in Europe. 26 MAPS is a Master of the Arts in the Public Sphere and entails an exchange programme between Wits School of the Arts and the Ecole Cantonale d?art du Valais in Sierre, Switzerland. 118 Figure 33: Maja Marx I Am The World On Which I Walk 1 2006 Stones placed on frozen lake Bois de Finges, Sierre, Switzerland It took days to move the stones to the site of the frozen lake, the iced footpaths in the empty forest acting as slippery arteries first up and then down into the hollow in which the lake rests. The process of inscribing the surface of the lake was not a simple one: firstly, the stones had to be lowered down onto the banks of the lake; they then had to be moved onto the surface of the frozen water. As part of the preliminary procedure of acquiring permission to use the site, I had make sure that the ice was frozen to a point that could withstand my weight and that of the stones. After an unanticipated increase in temperature and the ice subsequently turning unstable, I was forced to produce a series of arm extensions lengthening into spade and broom points. I then continued to manoeuvre the stones onto the ice and into a simple grid ready for inscription. Fortunately the temperature dropped after a few 119 days and I could commence to position myself on the ice itself. Thus started the slow task of moving the stones across the ice into the letters that would eventually form the sentence: I AM THE WORLD ON WHICH I WALK. In the immediacy of this action, I experienced an extreme tension: on the one hand I had to move particularly slowly so as not to disturb the ice, all the time listening closely to any changes in sound as this could serve as an indicator of surface instability. On the other hand the frozen stones would congeal onto the surface of the ice, making it impossible to move without great exertion. One can argue that it involved a doubly embodied state of production: at the same time involving a raw materiality via the experience of weight of stone and one?s own body, the intensity of needing to know where to put each stone, and the underlying knowledge that one is perched atop a temporary and transient substance such as ice. It is precisely this tension between the anchoring potentiality of stone and the temporality of the surface beneath it that attracted me to the concept of writing with stone on ice. Writing with stones on ice embodied a poetic literalisation of the sentence I chose to use, I literally became the world on which I walked, writing myself onto the temporary tabula of the ice, the stones at the same time marking my time and actions atop a transient folio, and serving as an optic bridge across the water beneath (see figure 34). 120 Figure 34: Maja Marx I Am The World On Which I Walk: Bridge 2006 Stones placed on frozen lake Bois de Finges, Sierre, Switzerland I Am The World On Which I Walk directly employed the concept of palimpsest and erasure as device: in writing with stones on ice, I created a Freudian ?mystic writing pad? or ?perceptual apparatus?. In his 1925 essay, Freud offers the ?mystic writing pad? as a concise and effective metaphor through which to think of the ephemeral operations of palimpsest and memory. In using the corresponding example of the classic children's toy in which marks are inscribed on a wax background and then ?mystically? erased by lifting the plastic cover sheet, Freud proposes that memory should be considered as a form of imaginary palimpsest where mnemonic impressions emerge, merge, and re(e)merge through variable processes of transmutable layering. The ?appearance and disappearance? of the lucid etchings on the magic writing pad are similar, he suggests, to ?the flickering-up and passing- 121 away of consciousness? in memory (Freud 1984:433). Apart from Derrida's reading of it as a successful model of the primacy of writing (1978), it also involves the invocation of the visual as a key element of mnemonic production, and the characterisation of memory as made up through a process of continuous movement, change and ?trace?. The impact of I Am The World On Which I Walk relies on an understanding of this apparatus, and is accentuated by one?s tempero-spatial ability to envision the text eventually being swallowed by the water as the ice melts. In addition to the operation of moving and writing with stone on ice, it is crucial to realise a further aspect to the production of this work. The singularity and immediacy of the act of writing with stone necessitated leaving the site of operation in order to read what was being written. This took on the form of constantly moving between the immediacy of the site of inscription and a position beyond the text as ?picture?, to that of the eye of a disembodied and distanced viewer. In this, I quoted D?rer?s 1552 Draughtsman Drawing a Nude (see figure 14) in producing - as an optic devise - a basic viewfinder or optic grid for the anamorphic perspective of the text (see figure 35). The result is a ?hovering text?, seen as if floating in the landscape when observed from the position of the viewfinder or aim. From within the immediacy of the stones on the ice, it was impossible to discern the text; instead only an anamorphic stretching of the letters was observable, transforming them into an analogous surface of stone. In repeatedly moving between the stone surface and the view of the grid as aim, I participated in a performance of physically and literally moving between seeing and reading, between writer and reader. 122 Figure 35: An optic grid produced in aid of the development of anamorphic perspective in the text The ?aim? as an optic devise is similarly employed in a later work entitled Where The Landscape Begins: 1 (see figure 36). Exploring the language of surveillance, the dynamic between the seer and the seen is revealed; here I have replaced the D?rer nude with a segmented sample of a hill as supposedly unspecified and empty repository awaiting meaning and description from the distanced observer through an optic grid as device. In this manner, the landscape is always observed via a filter or screen of comparison and definition; it is mapped by means of the eye and provided with an objectified and ?universal? meaning, taken in as a homogenising whole through the distance that is mediated through the disembodied eye. The ?object? is alienated and dispossessed of an agency of its own, it is ?laid bare? to the eye, to be surveyed at will, so that which is inside the frame takes on the passive role of object that is to be manipulated and represented. However, upon close inspection, one can 123 make out the simple coded references of a geographic and mapped nomenclature specifying the numbers 1 to 8 in the landscape. It is precisely in this cartographic clue that I recover an integral relation between the dynamic of surveillance and the concept of a described, inscribed and topographic landscape as text. Not only is the draughtsman observing a sample of landscape through the grid, the observed landscape is already inscribed, communicating the nomenclature of description as physically part of the texture and immediacy of the site viewed. The draughtsman is, in fact, describing an already described and embodied space: the landscape returns his gaze. Figure 36: Maja Marx Where The Landscape Begins: 1 2007 Lino print on Archers Here the word ?landscape?, in its reference to both what the ?surveyor was to measure and the artist to render? (Alpers 1983:136), elucidates the notion of ?description?. The Albertian view of the picture as a window with a distanced and disembodied human observer is placed next to the notion of the picture as ?a surface on which to set forth or inscribe the world? (Alpers 1983:137). In this, Where The Landscape Begins: 1 clearly resonates the inscriptive traits of the example of the 124 physically mapped site in Jinging, China (see figure 32) where the contours of the mountain and cartographic numbers are actually inscribed onto the surface of the land with stone and chalk. It is also in direct conversation with one of my photographic pieces entitled 12345 (see figure 37). Figure 37: Maja Marx 12345 2007 Inscription on koppie Laingsburg, South Africa Figure 38: Detail of 12345 As a photographic documentation of an inscribed site found near Laingsburg in the Karoo, the image reveals what a sharp-eyed passer-by would see: in the far off middle ground of a koppie, the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 are vaguely discernable from a left centre position. What a joy to stumble upon a message or code forgotten 125 in the landscape: in its deserted and under-maintained form, the numbers as figure almost disappear against the mesmerising sameness and repetition across the Karoo landscape as ground. Furthermore, how strange (even surreal) to find such a simple code produced on such a grand scale in such a desolate part of the landscape. Like a testing sequence, the inscription acts to direct the eye from left to right, the numbers - as with a tape measure or ruler - allowing for the calculation of landscape. But what is the motivation for this inscription: ?the oblique numbers resting on the slope of the mountain prompt the viewer to explore further down the slope, uncovering a series of man made forms, bunkers, ridges, worn vehicle tracks. Those unfamiliar with marksmanship and shooting ranges might not immediately identify the subject as such? (Hobbs 2007:21). In this manner the image provides a vital clue to the understanding of my artistic method. From a young age I was trained to shoot by my father, a master marksman. The act of identifying a target, taking aim and hitting it with a bullet surmises much of ocular technology. In applying this as a corresponding metaphor for the act of surveillance, it allows the eye to enter the landscape haptically, touching it with its gaze. Similarly, the theme of calibration and the concept of a targeted point of aim in the landscape surfaces in other works. In Cross (see figure 39), we are faced with a view of a koppie inscribed in the fashion of a footnote, with a Christian cross and an ?X? cross with a number attached27: perhaps some sort of ?calibration denotation? (Hobbs 2007:20), a negative no-entry symbol, an ?X marks the spot? sign or perhaps a target - for a parachute jumper, a bomber, the eye? The notion of ?propelling? one?s eye to a point in the landscape implies an enactment of the sliding of the optic into the haptic. In order to view the 27 Normally taking on the form of a note of text placed at the bottom of a page in a book or document, the footnote is often flagged by a number following that portion of the text that the note is in reference to. Typographical devices such as the asterisk (*) or dagger (?) may also be used to point to footnotes. 126 sign, a distance from the immediacy of the inscription is required; at the same the purpose of the sign is to ?draw the eye in?, to merge touch with sight. In addition, this inscription is typically viewed from the seat of a moving vehicle, with the passer- by establishing a reading of the horizon as demarcated by the X (and in effect also the cross), allowing the landscape to be read as a continuous scroll or text. Figure 39: Maja Marx Cross 2007 Inscription on koppie Westonaria, South Africa A Stone?s Throw Away (see figure 40) uses the same haptic language: produced in Switzerland in 2006, the work involved the slow process of removing stones from a site in the mountains, transporting it onto the jetty of Lac Geronde and then performatively throwing the stones back at the mountain. In thus visually ?placing? or ?propelling? the stones onto the inaccessible mountain as a postcard backdrop, I 127 endeavoured to merge two very South African practices centred around the uses of stones and power: firstly, the need to place text on mountainside as a process of naming and claiming the landscape; secondly evoking the visual language of protest, here, against the inaccessibility of the mountain as visual background. As a collection of stones is thrown back at the mountain, using a jetty surrounded by a frozen lake as launching pad or aim, the eye is propelled into the homogenous and idealist landscape that it scrutinises. The futility of this action is measured by the resultant radius of stones, which gradually formed on the frozen lake. A Stone?s Throw Away locates the subject and measures the body as locus to this action in protest against the ocularisation of the landscape. Figure 40: Maja Marx A Stone?s Throw Away 2006 Stones removed from mountain and thrown back at mountain Lac Geronde, Sierre, Switzerland As part of the exhibition at The Premises Gallery in Johannesburg, I proceeded to illustrate the concept of the eye being transported into the landscape by means of two site-objects entitled As Far As The Eye Can Touch - the title work to the exhibition (see figures 41, 42, 43, 44), and Where The Landscape Begins: 2 (see figures 45, 46, 47. Both work as key installations in the explanation and description of my artistic process. 128 Figures 41, 42, 43, 44: Maja Marx As Far As The Eye Can Touch 2007 Steel, chalk, wood and red earth 129 Figures 45, 46, 47: Maja Marx Where The Landscape Begins: 2 2007 Steel, chalk, Perspex 130 Drawing on the visual language of bent-steel farm signs, Renaissance optic devises and land surveyor tools, these objects were produced by forming letters out of steel and dipping the texts in chalk over a period of time. The result is a group of optic devises assembled in such manner as to direct the eye into a simulated landscape. Illustrating the anamorphous stretching of letters as found within the immediate operating devises of works such as I Am The World On Which I Walk (see figure 34), As Far As The Eye Can Touch utilises a double text, demonstrating the ocular shift between reading and looking. Firstly one reads a fundamental ?hovering? text as would be seen from a flattened distance, and secondly one is able to observe a taut anamorphic text displaying the optic stretch of the eye within the proximity of writing. Fluctuating between text and surface then, the anamorphic text optically flutters as the viewer moves, jumping between the lines revealing text and the rusty surfaces of the metal bar at times translated as flat plane. In the vein of an ?ocular rake? the metal text cuts into a heap of red earth, literalising the lines of perspective as the eye positions the text on the heap as if it is in fact on a hill. In Where The Landscape Begins: 2 I employed a similar illustration of perspectival projection: the work comprises of a simple relational layering of levels, firstly applying a metal viewfinder with which to position the eye and take aim with, secondly a grid to look through, and thirdly a metal chalked text, curved in such way as to point back to the eye with all letters simultaneously seen facing the front. On a basic level these objects examine the figure ground relation of the text in the landscape and, in applying the materiality of the whitewashed stone texts onto the steel letters, the text as ?horizon? is now brought in close proximity to the eye itself, in effect flattening the landscape as ground beyond. In the same way that aim would be taken when zooming in on a target in the landscape, the distanced view is brought ?closer? by means of focus. In this sense, the landscape haptically becomes ?as far as the eye can touch?, the landscape ?beginning? with the eye itself. 131 Returning to the physical inscription of landscape through the use of stones and chalk, it is essential to realise the scale on which these texts are produced in the landscape. Each letter can easily comprise of more than 25 metres in length, with texts like BEAUFORT-WEST stretching up to about 100 metres in width. The procedure is basic but by no means undemanding. First the area has to be cleared of vegetation: quite typically the rough square of each letter will be cleared of stones, large rocks and other impediments. The stones would then be piled to the one side28 and kept handy for later use in the stacking of flat stone mounds, which from a distance, would form the letters in the text. After each letter had been perfected, various layers of whitewash are applied. Figures 48: Maja Marx Stone text 2007 Walkerville, South Africa 28 This is also a common custom when clearing land for agricultural use. Quite often vineyards will be tailed by heaps of stones collected and removed from the plots. In the clearing of land we find a fundamental domestification of land and an objectification of stone. 132 Figure 49: Overgrown inscription Cullinan, South Africa Figure 50: The untended Cullinan inscriptions, as seen from an aerial perspective Cullinan, South Africa 133 It is common to find that these texts are maintained every few years, depending on the specific area and climate, but many of the smaller texts have been abandoned and are left almost invisible in the landscape. It calls for a trained eye to spot these forgotten inscriptions, seeing that without whitewash they tend to be totally camouflaged in their surroundings (see figure 48). The area of Cullinan is the site of similarly discarded inscriptions, dating back to its history as a military base during World War II. Even though the chalk on these discarded inscriptions are still visible, the texts are overgrown and the surrounding area has changed to such a degree that the texts are no longer fully visible, except when viewed from an extreme distance or from aerial perspective (see figures 49 & 50). These untended texts play host to a central aspect of my practical work, namely the action of intervening with an existing text. When travelling on the road between Rayton and Cullinan north of Pretoria, the word ZONDERWATER - the name of the original farm, which now forms part of the Correctional Services facility - is spelled out in neatly placed chalked stones. Between November 2006 and March 2007 I temporarily ?buried? the letter ?Z? of ZONDERWATER using 4 cubic metres of earth from the area, thus rendering the familiar Zonderwater (literally translated in Dutch as ?without water?) into Onderwater (the Afrikaans term for ?under water?) (see figure 51). In visually removing this letter from the text I ?buried? the Dutch Colonial past embedded in this name29, playing with the power dynamics inherent to colonial acts of description, naming and the claiming of the ?empty? landscape, and entering that history into the current polemics around name changes in the area (consider the change from Pretoria to Tswane). 29 In Afrikaans the term would be spelled SONDERWATER. 134 Figure 51: Maja Marx Zonderwater: 4 2006 Zonderwater Correctional Service, Cullinan, South Africa The burying of the letter ?Z? with earth entailed an act of erasure, and as with I Am The World On Which I Walk, was produced in consultation with the Freudian notion of the ?mystic writing pad?. Through the act of burying, the place ?without water? was temporarily drowned and positioned ?under water? in such a way as to linguistically ?increase the water level? in the landscape. One might argue that the letter ?Z? was literally buried into the landscape. However, it is important to note that, as part of this grand scale intervention, the process also incorporated the subsequent recovery of the 33 metre long letter ?Z?. The stones from beneath the earth were uncovered in an almost archaeological manner with a brush, and then officially re-chalked with the help of prisoners from Zonderwater Correctional service. 135 Figure 52: Prisoners rechalking the letter ?Z? in the Zonderwater text Zonderwater Correctional Service, Cullinan, South Africa Figure 53: Prisoners altering the existing text ?RICHMOND?into ?WWW.RICHMOND.CO.ZA? Richmond, South Africa, 2005 Figure 54: Altered stone inscription ?WWW.RICHMOND.CO.ZA?, Richmond, South Africa, 2005 136 In effect, the original process of inscription was chiasmically reversed and then repeated again: with the burying of the letter ?Z?, the stones were still there, waiting under the surface to be exposed. It is also notable that the same text assembled by prisoners a few years before was now recovered by another group of prisoners. In this, the dynamics of labour and authority inherent to the phenomenon of these chalked stone texts are illustrated. As a convention, these texts often utilised correctional labour (see figures 52, 53, 54) - including prisoners of war - as common aid, and we find many examples of this and other stonework across the country30. It is here that we find an alternative layer to the definition of inscription, with the introduction of the concept of exscription. Nancy (1993) places the notion of exscription in distinction to inscription: in his opinion inscription refers to a kind of writing or scripting onto or into something, while exscription is a writing or scripting out of something. In this sense exscription signifies a staging, a fragmentation, a denunciation and an uncovering, corresponding to exposure and opening. I am of the opinion that with the removal and retrieval of the letter ?Z? I activated an exscription of the text ZONDERWATER, in a sense positioning the reading of the new text ONDERWATER as a defamiliarised view to the original. It involves both a covering and uncovering, or shall I say a covering as uncovering, seeing that the text had been re-scripted out of landscape itself. As a public sign in the landscape, the transient return of the text to its former look allows it to carry traces of its own erasure in its revealing. In this we find a double defamiliarisation, firstly in the absence of the ?Z? being noted (see figure 55), and secondly after the subsequent return of the ?Z?, the ?absence? of ONDERWATER being observed. 30 To highlight a few examples: consider the use of prisoners of war in the building and repairing of bridges and roads such as Clarence Drive in the Overberg, the use of correctional labour in the lime quarries of Robben Island, and the production of stone texts in areas such as Richmond and Beaufort- West. 137 Figure 55: Image in Rayton & Cullinan local newspaper, Streeknuus, 9 February 2007 As a site, the text is approached via the specified route of the national road, or the railway line. In addition, it is ? like most other stone texts in the landscape ? observable from the sky. In the language of cartography, the image of the text from its aerial perspective (see figure 56), explores the phenomenon of the landscape as inscribed surface and serves to illustrate corresponding qualities to that of the image taken of Jinging, China and Jan Christaenz Micker?s View of Amsterdam (see figures 32 and 31). 138 Figure 56: Maja Marx Zonderwater: 4 2006 Zonderwater Correctional Service, Cullinan, South Africa In the same manner I looked to the urban locale and de Certeau?s (1984a:93) notion of a ?totalising? view of the city as text, in distinction to the views of singularity as found in the immediate and pedestrian walking of the city. With the series of works entitled Pedestrian Poetry, I produced a collection of six painted Zebra crossings in Twist Street, central Johannesburg. Using large stencils, the texts were painted between 01h00 and 05h00 in what is viewed by some as one of the most perilous areas in Johannesburg. The production of the texts took on the performative quality of official road construction and marking, including the use of uniforms, official road paint, security banners and flashing amber lights. Pedestrian Poetry points to an urban account of landscape inscription: in applying a textual intervention on systems of both access and division as is found in the case of busy roads and pedestrian 139 crossings in central Johannesburg. As a term, Pedestrian Poetry is indicative of the manner in which pedestrians walk the city as a text, with ?walking? pointing to the narrative unfolding of the text. In this sense, the specific locations chosen for the project are crucial; as one of the busiest inner city through fare, Twist Street represents a dynamic combination of different modes of movement, an exchange of different nationalities and a general space of cultural negotiation. In inscribing the pedestrian crossings in Twist Street, I responded to this narrative by inserting subjective statements (in the form of poetic text) into the space intended for pedestrian crossing. As a whole, the statements function loosely as a poem, with each crossing serving as an independent declaration that speaks back to its specific location, for example ?I AM IN AND OUT OF PLACE? (figure 57) where Troye Street becomes Twist Street, ?THESE ARE BRIDGEABLE DIVIDES? (figure 61) at the bridge crossing between Twist and Noord Street, or ?I WALK IN TWO WORLDS? (figure 62) between the disparate spaces of Joubert park, the Johannesburg Art Gallery, and the inner-city buildings on Bok Street. The texts serve as bridges between point A and B, between the one side of the road and the other, between down here and up there. In resonance with the transient nature of all of my landscape interventions, these painted Zebra crossings have been swallowed by the passing traffic, with the highly evocative photographs serving as the only surviving trace and documentation. 140 Figure 57: Maja Marx Pedestrian Poetry: In & Out 2007 Troye and Twist Street, Johannesburg, South Africa Figure 58: Maja Marx Pedestrian Poetry: Crossing 2006 Plein and Twist Street, Johannesburg, South Africa 141 Figure 59: Maja Marx Pedestrian Poetry: Passing 2006 Plein and Twist Street, Johannesburg, South Africa Figure 60: Maja Marx Pedestrian Poetry: Something 2006 De Villiers and Twist Street, Johannesburg, South Africa 142 Figure 61: Maja Marx Pedestrian Poetry: Bridgeable Divides 2006 New Road and Twist Street, Johannesburg, South Africa Figure 62: Maja Marx Pedestrian Poetry: Two Worlds 2006 Bok and Twist Street, Johannesburg, South Africa 143 The documenting images were taken from the view of the top of each building immediately concurrent to the text, and involved a lengthy process of negotiating access to the private and reputedly unsafe spaces of inner city apartment buildings. As seen from down below on street level, the texts disappear into the simple lines of zebra crossings. Seated in an approaching vehicle, one is able to scrutinise the texts from a distance, only to have them swallowed by the anamorphism of their immediacy as one draws closer. It is in this dynamic that I find a diagram of the different readings realised by the pedestrian, the moving passer-by and the disembodied and perceptually immobile panoptic viewer respectively. Only in leaving or approaching the immediacy of the inscription on street level in a state of motion can one discern the singular texts to a limited degree. And it is specifically from the position of a distanced view atop a building that can one can read the statements in static form. In addition, it is only in leaving the even relative immediacy of the building top in replacement for a more totalising view from the highest building or aircraft that can one distinguish the complete poem. 144 6. Conclusion The inscription of landscape as surface is by no means a solely South African phenomenon, but it is of great importance to consider its worth in providing traces to a historiographic invocation of a South African past and the attempts to develop and maintain a sense of nationality through an ocular definition of the land. As stationary witness to a literalisation of a ?labour of hands [that] makes the landscape speak? (Coetzee 1988:9), the colonist, farmer or voice of authority felt it necessary to supply the landscape with a so-called ?voice?. Furthermore, in its inscription, landscape is ?spoken for?. In the colonial approach to the landscape as supposedly ?empty? or semiotically ?mute?, this kind of inscription engages the physical description of the landscape as a surface that is claimed. This approach can be viewed as a sub-context to a broader consideration of landscape as text. Following the convention of writing as documentation and steady referent, it is precisely through this ?voice? that we find a revealing citation of the historiographic assertion of landscape through its naming and its inscription. It refers not only to an annexation of our world, but also involves an attempted physical anchoring of description, definition and meaning onto the landscape. In essence, we can acknowledge that there is an authority to any writing about landscape, even more so to writing onto the landscape. The inscribed texts on our hills engage the viewer in two distinct modes of information gathering: one concerning a fundamental visual examination of the landscape as represented image, the other relating to the reading of words. The obviously linear, hierarchical and segregated connection between reading and writing, reading and seeing, between word (spoken or written) and image, is 145 challenged. Instead one finds a dynamic engagement with the body and with was has been called ?topographic? space, ?a space in which writing is severed from its role as mere verbal [or visual] description and instead is experienced as both a verbal and visual phenomenon? (Bolter 1991:62). Here the term ?verbal? relates to the descriptive qualities inherent to text, and ?visual? to the perceptual evaluation of text as image. Our awareness of the footnote in the landscape has a vital effect on our reading of the landscape and it can be argued that in the physical alteration of these footnotes, we are able to transform or alter the reading of the landscape. In this, my subjective engagements with the notion of the footnote enable me to enter into a temporary dialogue with the general monologue and grand narrative of the ?voice? in the landscape. In ascribing the development of these inscriptions closely to the notion of ?passage?, it is possible to narrowly link the idea of a moving viewer to the function of these texts. In South Africa, the surveying traditions of bodies such as the SAR&H were poised to develop a sense of nationality through a definition and understanding of the ?lie of the land? (Foster in Schwartz & Ryan 2003). The close relation between photographic representation and railway passage across the landscape allowed for a surveying of South Africa. In effect this established a sense of a constant and readable terrain and a claiming of that terrain as ?belonging?, both pertaining to the notion of ownership and to a sense of being in place. Landscape is representation. It is a physical and multi-sensory medium in which cultural meanings and principles are 146 encoded, whether they are situated there by the physical transformation of a place, or found in a place formed by nature (Mitchell 1994:14). It is readable as text and, in light of the notion of passage specifically, as intertext. Landscape as text is never ?singular?; it is always in overlap with other landscapes past and present, it is multi- cultural, multi-historical and necessarily without a central or singular author. It can be argued that as the viewer passes across the terrain in a train, car or other primum mobile (de Certeau 1984a:113), the inscriptions on the distant horizons are read as footnotes to the continuous text of the landscape. Perceptually, the texts on our hills are interpreted and read in many ways: through a distant, totalising and disembodied eye, through a singular immediacy in the landscape, and through the sight-touch perception of a moving passer-by. The latter reveals a chiasmic slide of the optic into the haptic; a nomadic, itinerant (Deleuze & Guattari 1987:494) or mobilised space (Bruno 2007:170) is activated, with a cohesive perceptual intertwining of human flesh and the flesh of the world (Merleau- Ponty 1968). Phenomenologically, we could argue that the bodily engagement with the world occurs on the border between body and its surroundings, at its margins. In this sense Flesh is not a substance in-between the body and the world but is to be understood functionally as ?texture, articulation, framework, joints, as an element in which we live and move . . . an intertwining that forms between things, others and myself, a chiasmus or a chiasma (Waldenfels 1998:288-89). Merleau-Ponty proposes that the understanding of the world as not simply an object does not mean there was a fusion or coinciding of me with it. On the contrary, he proposes that this occurs because ?a sort of dehiscence opens my body in two, and because between my body looked at and my body looking, my body touched and my body touching, there is 147 overlapping or encroachment, so that we may say that the things pass into us, as well as we into the things (1968: 123). This not only relates to our ability to touch but also to the chiasmic cohesion between sight and touch. As we move through the landscape, fore-grounded and proximate space cannot be absorbed visually; instead we focus on distant space. As distant space moves by in a ?series of . . . pictures or scenes created by the continuously changing perspective? (Schivelbusch 1977:64), the traveller effectively sees the landscape through the apparatus moving him through the world, so that ?evanescent reality has become the new reality? (Schivelbusch 1977:64). In this set-up, the fleeting view takes on a paradoxical function of an unchanging scene. Consider the transaction that occurs between a passage through space and the point of disappearance as a focal point: it can be argued that the motion of the traveller super-imposes a pattern of outflow and inflow upon the environment and that from this the traveller obtains an ?idea of an objective world, of that which does not change as one changes? (Leed 1991:75). The evanescent view supplies a fourth wall, both separating and tying the viewer to the action in the landscape. To add to this, there seems to exist a sense in the passing observer that everything on the outside is always moving towards one, ?through? one, with elements on the horizon - such as text - providing the only fleeting ?fixed? points of reference on the outside. Like the childhood game of following a mark in the landscape along its route through a car window, the South African phenomenon of marked hills operate as a simple resting place for the eye to trace its movement through the landscape and as aim for the eye to be haptically propelled into that landscape. Of course, the textual instructions not only mark the horizon but also wish to aid in the specific reading of landscape as text. It can be argued that as footnotes, these inscriptions act as literal 148 textual references, revealing the non-literal textual nature of the landscape and at the same time affirming the reading of the landscape as text. In this sense, the footnote on the koppie discloses the landscape as both surface for inscription and as embodied space that can be travelled across. 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