areal association or assemblage of things on the
landis a moment in processes of production and
social reproduction, as an ideologyit is a partic-
ular means of organizing and experiencing the
visual orderof those things on the land (Baker
and Biger, 1992; Berger, 1971; Cosgrove, 1985;
1998; Daniels, 1993; Rose, 1993; Williams, 1973).
Landscape is seen and experienced from outside –
from beyond the limits of the landscape – as when
one looks out and down upon the view from a
viewpoint along a highway. In Cosgrove’s
words, ‘in landscape we are offered an important
element of personal controlover the external
world’ (1998: 18). We can, to some degree, con-
trol the view, order it to emphasize what we find
important or appealing. The ‘insider’s’ view,
thus, is not a landscape view: ‘ “place” seems a
more appropriate term’ for such existential inside-
ness(1998: 19).^10
If there is an ‘element of personal control’,
however, that element is itself deeply conditioned
by the historical relationship of the landscape way
of seeing to the commodification of land – to the
transformation of land and place into property.
Distance is achieved through alienation. To the
degree that land can be set apart, alienated, and
made exchangeable for other like and unlike pieces
of land, then to that degree the distance can be
achieved that allows land to be seen as landscape,
as that which is ‘out there’ – as a separable thing
which, in its specific morphology, can be viewed
as a totality. In turn, this transformation of land
into landscape, into something to be viewed, pre-
supposes a specific division of labor in which the
owner does not perform the labor that turns his
land into a landscape; it presupposes a capitalist
division of labor. The landscape is a specific way
of seeing, a form of what Cosgrove (1998) calls a
‘visual ideology’, but it is so because the worked
land that is landscape is a commodity. Like the
strawberry, the look of the landscape reveals little,
directly, about how it was made. Thus, contra
Sauer, it is simply impossible to read ‘culture’ out
of the landscape, at least not without first doing
the hard work of determining just what sets of
social relations constitute that ‘culture’ in the first
place. The landscape mystifies.
This is the sense in which Raymond Williams
(1973: 32–4) remarks that ‘landscape’ erases
work, and the existence of workers. He does not
mean that landscapes are unworked. Rather he
means that the work that goes into making the
landscape is both hidden from view and alienated
from those who performed it (Daniels, 1989).
Either that, or landscape serves to aestheticize
work, to make it picturesque, which, of course,
has the parallel effect of erasing not work itself,
but the conditions under which work is done(Williams, 1973: 56). Based on a technology of
linear perspective that places the viewer in the
‘divine’ position of having the whole of the view
structured and ordered for him (Cosgrove,
1985),^11 the landscape serves as a ‘realistic’ view
that ‘is in fact ideological .... Subjectivity is ren-
dered the property of the artist and the viewer –
those who control the landscape – not those
belonging to it’ (Cosgrove, 1998: 26). What is
depicted and what is seen – what is understood to
be meaningful – therefore, is determined from a
point external to the landscape, and in the realm
of (property-based) ideology: what Williams calls
‘the explicit detached view of landscape’ (1973:
56). As such, the meaningof the landscape, while
constrained both by the ‘place facts’ that consti-
tute the morphological landscape, and by the
historically developed currents of ideology within
which the landscape is viewed, is itself, therefore,
a site of social contest. The meaning of the land-
scape is neither given nor ever stable; it is strug-
gled over, its very ‘naturalness’ and ‘realism’
continually contested, its components continually
reordered by interested social actors in their
efforts to usethe view to show the world new
things, different aspects, better ways of seeing.
What do the strawberry fields of the Central
Coast and my suburban hometown farther north
therefore mean? That’s an open question, the
resolution of which is determined by and deter-
mines the way that social life – and the relations
of production and reproduction – are played out
over space and time. The meaning of landscape,
in other words, is also a (contested) part of the
political economy, and one of my goals in this
chapter is to expose and contest, if only in a very
small way, what the strawberry growing and sub-
urban landscapes of California mean, to show
how what look like pretty ordinary landscapes of
agricultural production and suburban consump-
tion are in fact complex, and inextricably linked,
placesdefined by a geography of injusticethat
allowed me to live an easy California life only
becauseothers’ labor – other dead labor – had
made that life possible, even as the landscapes of
production and consumption fetishize and mystify
those relationships. All that is to say, the meaning
of the landscape is a function of who has the
power to representthat landscape.^12Where the landscape isTo make even that small claim, however,
requires that I transform the meaning of land-
scape – or expand it in some particular ways.
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