Cultural Geography

masks the artificial and ideological nature of its form

and content. Its history as a social construction is

unexamined. It is, therefore, as unwittingly read as it is

unwittingly written. (1990: 19)

There is, of course, a problem with pitting text

against vision. Texts, after all, have to be read.

While it may be possible to read texts haptically,

the most obvious way is by looking. Despite this

critique Duncan’s view of landscape is a more

embodied and practised one than Cosgrove’s.

Cosgrove, adopting the classical definition,

resists getting too involved. The landscape is

seen from a distant, slightly elevated point.

Landscape paintings are seen as part of the con-

trol of nature – the taming of chaos. The use of

perspective arrests the temporal and makes a

moment stand forever. The artist becomes the

possessor and the people in the landscape – the

world of practice is denied – are frozen out.

VISION AND THE OBLITERATION

OF PRACTICE:THREE VIEWS

FROM ABOVE

The ‘gaze’ at the centre of dominant conceptions

of landscape has been critiqued for being mas-

culinist. Another effect of this way of seeing is to

remove the active subject (whether people in the

world or the onlooker) from the world. This

effect is explored in similar ways by Raymond

Williams, Michel de Certeau and J.B. Jackson.

In Raymond Williams’ novel Border Country

(1960) we see the hero Matthew Price returning

to the place of his childhood in the Welsh bor-

ders after spending many years in England. What

follows is an examination of the gap between the

idea of the village as ‘landscape’ and the idea of

the village as a lived and felt ‘place’. As

Matthew realizes he has become an outsider in

his own village, he reflects on his change of

perspective:

He realized as he watched what had happened in

going away. The valley as landscape had been taken,

but its work forgotten. The visitor sees beauty, the

inhabitant a place where he works and has his friends.

Far away, closing his eyes, he had been seeing this

valley, but as the visitor sees it, as the guide book sees

it. (1960: 75)

Later in the novel Matthew gets back into the

routine of the village: ‘It was no longer a land-

scape or view, but a valley that people were

using’, yet from the top of a nearby hill ‘The

patch was not only a place, but people, yet from

here it was as if no-one lived there.’

The contemplative gaze obliterates the

world of the practical

The world of practice teases apart landscape in

its orthodox form. The traditional image of

landscape that haunts Matthew Price in Border

Countryis very much like the now poignant

and not a little ironic view of New York from

the top of the former World Trade Center

described by Michel de Certeau in The Prac-

tice of Everyday Life (1984). From this view-

point the city was comprehensible and

masterable – it appeared laid out before the

viewer as though the viewer could command it

and take it in – just as the eminent urologist

was able to provide a survey of all the latest

developments in the field. The grid pattern of

upper Manhattan was out there somewhere

ordering the world nicely. The exclamation

marks of other skyscrapers provided another

dimension and sense of perspective to this

landscape. When one is ‘lifted out of the city’s

grasp,’ de Certeau writes, ‘One’s body is no

longer clasped by the streets that turn and

return it according to an anonymous law; nor is

it possessed, whether as player or played, by

the rumble of so many differences and by the

nervousness of New York traffic’ (1984: 92).

De Certeau does not mention landscape but he

does reflect on all the ingredients that make up

landscapes – fixity, vision, power.

The totalizing eye imagined by the painters of earlier

times lives on in our achievements. The same scopic

drive haunts users of architectural productions by mate-

rializing today the utopia that yesterday was only

painted. The 1370 foot high tower that serves as the

prow for Manhattan continues to construct the fiction

that creates readers, makes the complexity of the city

readable, and immobilizes its opaque mobility in a

transparent text. (1984: 92)

The view from the streets is slightly different. In

the turmoil of Fifth Avenue or from the middle

of Washington Square it is hard to keep hold of

the word ‘landscape’. Everything is always

changing, in process, becoming. Skateboarders

flip their tricks. Young men and women dance in

front of the ice cream stand, the trees move in the

breeze. The place is not finished, not obviously

ordered and not easily framed. It is blurred at the

edges. This is the space of practice. The view

from on high is, as de Certeau puts it, based

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