The Phenomenology of Real and Virtual Places

Erik Malcolm Champion

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351603614
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

This collection of essays explores the history, implications, and usefulness of phenomenology for the study of real and virtual places. While the influence of phenomenology on architecture and urban design has been widely acknowledged, its effect on the design of virtual places and environments has yet to be exposed to critical reflection. These essays from philosophers, cultural geographers, designers, architects, and archaeologists advance the connection between phenomenology and the study of place. The book features historical interpretations on this topic, as well as context-specific and place-centric applications that will appeal to a wide range of scholars across disciplinary boundaries. The ultimate aim of this book is to provide more helpful and precise definitions of phenomenology that shed light on its growth as a philosophical framework and on its development in other disciplines concerned with the experience of place.

1 The Inconspicuous Familiarity of Landscape

Edward Relph

Landscape is an unavoidable, ubiquitous companion whenever we are outside or, for that matter, indoors looking out through a window, whether at mountains or a city street. It consists of assemblages and collages of earth and sky, of trees, buildings, streets, cars, and people and may be predominantly urban, rural, or wild. It is the context of wherever we are, filled with sights, sounds, memories, possibilities, and movement. Landscape is the background, context, and visible manifestation of the polysemic phenomenon of place. Regardless of whether place is understood in terms of geographical location, territories of meaning, nodes in networks of social and economic relationships, built spaces, somewhere that can be branded in order to attract business, a container, a gathering, and opening in the world, or an extension of the body, and regardless of whether place is real or a virtual construction, it is impossible to imagine place without landscape.

Yet, landscape is easily taken for granted or even ignored. This is partly because it is such a familiar aspect of the world, partly because we are immersed in it much the same way we are unthinkingly immersed in time, and partly because it is elusive and our attention is usually drawn to particular things in landscapes, such as displays in store windows, other people, architecture, gardens, or highway signs. Unlike these sorts of things, landscape is untouchable. Though we may sit to contemplate a view of landscape, we can never walk to its other side because it unfolds as we move through it. Furthermore, landscapes continually change with the weather, the rhythms of daily life, and the cycle of the seasons. They evade definition or objective analysis even though they surround us and we know them simply by looking around. Nevertheless, it is possible to disclose their elusive character through phenomenological description.

The Limits of Conventional Definitions of Landscape

The English word “landscape” is usually defined and commonly understood as an attractive piece of inland rural scenery. This isn’t altogether surprising because the word, though it has origins in Old English, came into widespread use in the early 17th century as a corruption of the Dutch landschap, a term that was used to describe paintings of mostly rural scenery that business travelers were bringing back from Holland as souvenirs. It soon came to be used to refer to any well-composed rural view that could be seen from a suitable prospect, and in due course was applied to a genre of poetry and painting that aimed to convey the aesthetic qualities of attractive scenery, and then was applied to the landscape gardens of grand country estates. English is not alone in this rural emphasis. The French word paysage, which is usually translated as “landscape” and is the origin of the Italian paesaggio and Spanish paisaje, derives from the Latin word pagus, meaning a rural district, and is conventionally defined as the general appearance of a rural area. These definitions need to be set aside because they have nothing to contribute to a phenomenological understanding of landscape as the visible assemblages that surround us everywhere.

The origins of the words ‘landscape’ and ‘paysage’ do, however, point to deeper and more complex meanings. The suffix –scape in “landscape” is the equivalent of the suffix –ship in English words such as friendship or companionship and means a state or condition of things being together. So, in its Old English context, landscape meant something like “being together with the land.” Similarly, the suffix –age in ‘paysage’ means an ensemble or grouping together of things, or perhaps an action of perception linking subject and object. In these meanings, there are indications of the wholeness that is implicit in everyday experiences of landscapes.

Landscape Comes Before Environment

In his essay “Thought and Landscape,” the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan (1979, 100) made a distinction between landscape and environment. He began with the phenomenological observation that to understand the world at all we must start with the evidence of the senses and our feelings about them. But he then argued that it is “environment” that surrounds us and to which we respond unthinkingly in automatic and subconscious ways, while landscape is essentially a cultural phenomenon that involves learning and cognition. In other words, he gave phenomenological primacy to environment. This interpretation is, I think, flawed both because it assumes an everyday idea of environment and a contrived, pictorial definition of landscape, both of which have become increasingly inappropriate.

In the decades since Tuan wrote his essay, the idea of environment has been systematically objectified and detached from immediate experience. Environment has become the object of research in ecology, environmental science, physical geography, geophysics, and climatology and has become variously subjected to policies and practices of degradation, exploitation, management, assessment, sustainability, and conservation. It has become almost impossible to use the word “environment” without abstract and scientific associations. There is little about environment that now might be said to involve unthinking responses.

In contrast, the word “landscape” has begun to shed its former connotations associated with art and rural scenery. It is widely applied to cities, especially through its offspring terms “townscape” and “cityscape,” and is frequently used metaphorically (as in “the political landscape”) to convey the idea of a broad spectrum of backgrounds and contexts. I believe it is now preferable to regard landscape rather than environment as the aspect of the world to which we respond unreflectively in automatic and subconscious ways. Landscape, with its original implications of togetherness, comes closer to capturing the experiences we have of the world around us as we walk the streets of our city, look out of the window of the bus on our way to work, or when we travel to other regions, cities and countries.

Landscape Experience

At the end of the street where I live in Canada is a major inlet of the Pacific Ocean, the Strait of Juan de Fuca. To get to it, I walk past houses with gardens filled with flowers and shrubs. I meet a few people, some with their dogs on their way to an off-leash park. The street is lined with magnolia trees that I remember were covered with white blossoms in the spring. A bus passes. I feel the cool wind that carries the salt smell of the ocean. I hear waves breaking on the beach. Seagulls and occasionally eagles soar in the sky. On the grey-green water of the Strait, a giant container ship is heading out towards the Pacific. In the distance are the blue outlines of the Olympic Mountains, some of them snow-capped. Some cars are parked on a rocky promontory overlooking the ocean edged by a pebble beach covered by a jumble of bleached logs and tree roots that have washed ashore. If I chose, I could walk a mile more to the center of the city with its office towers, crowded sidewalks, bank machines, restaurants, and homeless people begging.

Everything I have described here involves experiences of landscape. This is the best word available to refer to the way in which all the things I have mentioned – houses, seagulls, the sky, people, ocean, cars, and so on – are always and unavoidably seen in conjunction with and, at the same time, as everything else that is in view or being heard and sensed. We have numerous words for these individual things, and our attention is repeatedly drawn to them, but they are always experienced in the context of countless other things. Concepts of nature or city, environment, transportation, countryside, community, society, or economy are not part of our initial experiences of landscape. I do not step out through my front door and see nature or a city. What I see all together and all at once is the togetherness of familiar houses, trees, clouds, street lights, wires, people walking, and parked cars. Concepts and theories about cities and nature all come later and are the consequence of reflection and generalizations that are derived from diverse experiences of different places and landscapes and the things within them. These concepts and theories can, however, become so entrenched in habits of thought and perception that act as useful but distorting lenses to make sense of the world, that the experiences of landscapes from which they arose and to which they refer are almost completely suppressed.

The Elusiveness of Landscape Experience

In the preface to his Philosophical Investigations, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who spent many years reflecting on the nature of language and how it conveys meaning, suggested that there exists a family resemblance between language and landscape. “The philosophical remarks in this book,” he wrote (1958, 7), “are, as it were, a number of sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of these long and involved journeyings.” He thought that language is too elusive for systematic logical analysis, and his analogy suggests that landscape is no less elusive. Later in the book Wittgenstein (1958, 200) made this explicit: “The concept of ‘seeing’ makes a tangled impression,” he wrote, “…I look at the landscape, my gaze ranges over it, I see all sorts of distinct and indistinct movement; this impresses itself sharply on me, that is quite hazy. After all, how completely ragged what we see can appear!”

This raggedness is confirmed by our experiences. Study any scene carefully and there is always more in it than can be depicted or described. Even the highest resolution photographs leave out smells and sounds and everything that is above, below, and on either side of them. Even the most skillful writers and artists cannot depict entire landscapes. All they can do is select details that imply a complete landscape and then encourage our imagination to grasp and extend those implications so that they correspond with our own ragged experiences of similar or imagined landscapes.

Variations in Landscape Experiences

Experiences of landscapes are neither uniform nor constant. They vary both with the character of scenes experienced and the moods and intentions of those experiencing them. Some landscapes consist mostly of trees or fields, others of buildings; some are closed in, for instance the busy streets of Manhattan, while others, such as the view across the Strait of Juan de Fuca, are open to distant horizons. The dispositions of all landscapes are affected by weather. I was once in Manhattan during a blizzard when the streets, including normally noisy, crowded Broadway and Times Square, were carpeted with snow, almost deserted, free of traffic, and completely quiet. If I am depressed, my feelings are likely to be projected onto the landscapes I encounter and everything appears despondent. Some individuals are especially sensitive or attentive to smells, or sounds, or colors, or plants, or buildings, and these inevitably influence their perceptions of landscapes.

While at any given moment in any given place there may be some who are contemplating the ragged togetherness of the landscape around them, there are many more who are engaged in conversation, worrying about work or what to prepare for lunch, talking on cell phones, or driving. Yet, even when our attention is distracted or focused on something else, the inclusiveness and wholeness of landscape is unavoidably present. It is a constant though usually inconspicuously familiar backdrop to everyday life.

Nevertheless, relatively small changes and events, such as trees coming into bloom, a repainted house, unusual weather, or a parade, may make us temporarily aware of the wholeness of landscape. In effect, we then see things in a different light and notice what has changed in its larger context. When we travel to see other places and countries, even if we are part of a tour group or spend most of our time going to beaches, the unfamiliarity of distinctive local landscapes is likely to engage our senses and become a source of interest and pleasure. In these instances, what is usually inconspicuous becomes conspicuous by virtue of its difference from what we normally experience. This can also happen through a deliberate effort to grasp the meanings of landscapes and the processes that have made them look as they do.

Landscape Surfaces and Identity

Eric Dardel wrote in his phenomenological account of geography, L’Homme et la Terre (1952, 41), that landscape is more than the juxtaposition of picturesque details: “it is an assemblage, a convergence, a lived-moment.” It is a combination of many things that create contexts for each other, an assemblage that constantly changes as the things in it change and as we move through it. He suggests that the landscape consists mostly of surfaces that offer insights into our connections with Earth. He writes of “telluric” surfaces, such as those of granite and hard rocks, which offer experiences of solidity and suggest the dense substance and mass of the planet. In contrast, the aquatic landscapes of waterfalls, rivers, breaking waves, and the ocean are restless and seem to open to the unseen world beyond the horizon, to lead elsewhere. The constructed landscapes of cities and industrial zones, of cultivated farmlands, which are the ones that most of us experience most of the time, offer fundamentally different qualities of experience because they are evidence of human effort and labor, of accomplishment or despoliation, and of meanings that can be interpreted. These constructed landscapes cannot be experienced without some recognition, however fleeting, of the hopes and intentions that have gone into making them.

However, the space of air and sky, Dardel suggests (1952, 32), is an omnipresent aspect of landscape that has no surface. It is atmospheric and diffuse, “invisible and always present, permanent yet changing,” a medium for smells and sounds, subject to changes in temperature and humidity, to night and day. It is simultaneously close to us yet reaches to a horizon that is not a limit but a permeable boundary that travels with us. More than anything else, the space of air, sky, and horizon reveals the elusiveness of the landscape as something that is always here, always around us, yet cannot be pinned down, delimited, divided into parts, measured, or analyzed.

The distinctive characteristics of the everyday landscapes we encounter, whether telluric or constructed, everyday or exceptional, provide the basis for our dreams, thoughts, and feelings. They enter into our memories and contribute to a greater or lesser extent to our character and identity. The phenomenological philosopher Jeff Malpas (1999, 189) has expressed this concisely: “The landscape in which we find ourselves is…as much a part of what we are, of our minds, our actions, and ourselves, as the food we eat and the air we breathe.”

Reverberations

Gaston Bachelard’s book The Poetics of Space (1964) is a phenomenology of the intimate interior spaces of the house as they are revealed in poetic images. He referred to his study as a topo-analysis of felicitous and intimate spaces, and he devoted his attention to drawers, attics, nooks, and corners. He also noted that experiences of these small spaces have a quality of what he called “intimate immensity” because the reverberations they induce bring about an awakening of feelings that transcend the moment and the intimate space and open into an appreciation of the entire world (Bachelard 1964, xviii–xix and 183–210).

Landscapes also have this capacity to generate reverberations of immensity and an appreciation of human existence. The English landscape poet William Wordsworth wrote in the last decade of the 18th century of his recollections of the bucolic rural scenery of the Wye Valley on the border of England and Wales (where I lived as a child): “It has not been to me as is a landscape to a blind man’s eye” but instead offers

…a gift in which the heavy and weary weight of all this unintelligible world is lightened…For I have learned to look on nature not as in the hour of thoughtless youth, but hearing oftentimes the still, sad music of humanity, nor harsh, nor grating, but with ample power to chasten and subdue.

(Wordsworth 1798, lines 25, 39–40, 89–91)

Eric Dardel offered a similar but more prosaic version of this. “Landscape is not, in its essence, made to be looked at,” he wrote (1952, 44), “but rather is an insertion of man into the world, a place of life’s struggles, a manifestation of being.”

Such reverberations sometimes have spiritual force. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, the philosopher William James (1961, 71) quotes an account of someone’s experience on the summit of a high mountain:

I looked over a gashed and corrugated landscape extending to a long convex of ocean that ascended to the horizon…What I felt was a temporary loss of my identity that was accompanied by an illumination of deeper significance than I had previously attached to life. It is in this that I can say that I have enjoyed communion with God.

Experiences such as this, in which an encounter with the totality of a particular landscape expands into a sense of the meaning of the world or spiritual revelation, are both deeply personal and yet intersubjective. Their depth and strength of meaning can be recognized and appreciated by others, even those who pay little attention to the world around them and may never have had anything more than hints of such revelations. Or perhaps it is the case that it is only when a poet or philosopher provides appropriate words that we are able to recognize that something similar has happened to us in our own experiences of lan...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Inconspicuous Familiarity of Landscape
• 2 Landscape Archaeology in Skyrim VR
• 3 The Efficacy of Phenomenology for Investigating Place with Locative Media
• 4 Postphenomenology and “Places”
• 5 Virtual Place and Virtualized Place
• 6 Transactions in Virtual Places: Sharing and Excess in Blockchain Worlds
• 7 The Kyoto School Philosophy on Place: Nishida and Ueda
• 8 Phenomenology of Place and Space in our Epoch: Thinking along Heideggerian Pathways
• 9 Norberg-Schulz: Culture, Presence and a Sense of Virtual Place
• 10 Heidegger’s Building Dwelling Thinking in Terms of Minecraft
• 11 Cézanne, Merleau-Ponty, and Questions for Augmented Reality
• 12 The Place of Others: Merleau-Ponty and the Interpersonal Origins of Adult Experience
• 13 “The Place was not a Place”: A Critical Phenomenology of Forced Displacement
• 14 Virtual Dark Tourism in The Town of Light
• List of Contributors
• Index