Imagining Landscapes

Past, Present and Future

Monica Janowski, Tim Ingold, Monica Janowski, Tim Ingold

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138244771
• eBook ISBN: 9781317118657
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The landscapes of human habitation are not just perceived; they are also imagined. What part, then, does imagining landscapes play in their perception? The contributors to this volume, drawn from a range of disciplines, argue that landscapes are 'imagined' in a sense more fundamental than their symbolic representation in words, images and other media. Less a means of conjuring up images of what is 'out there' than a way of living creatively in the world, imagination is immanent in perception itself, revealing the generative potential of a world that is not so much ready-made as continually on the brink of formation. Describing the ways landscapes are perpetually shaped by the engagements and practices of their inhabitants, this innovative volume develops a processual approach to both perception and imagination. But it also brings out the ways in which these processes, animated by the hopes and dreams of inhabitants, increasingly come into conflict with the strategies of external actors empowered to impose their own, ready-made designs upon the world. With a focus on the temporal and kinaesthetic dynamics of imagining, Imagining Landscapes foregrounds both time and movement in understanding how past, present and future are brought together in the creative, world-shaping endeavours of both inhabitants and scholars. The book will appeal to anthropologists, sociologists and archaeologists, as well as to geographers, historians and philosophers with interests in landscape and environment, heritage and culture, creativity, perception and imagination.

Chapter 1 Introduction

Tim Ingold

DOI: 10.4324/9781315587899-1

Perception and Imagination

In 1933, the Belgian surrealist artist, René Magritte, composed a painting which he entitled La Condition humaine. The painting depicts a window, curtained on either side, as seen from the inside of a room. In front of the window, and taking up about half of its area, is placed an easel upon which is mounted a completed painting. The painting (within the painting) is of a landscape including a tree, verdant hills, and a blue sky with scattered clouds. Through the remainder of the window aperture not obscured by the painting, one sees what appears to be a continuation of the same scene. The viewer is consequently led to believe that the painting represents, with canny realism, precisely what would be seen through the area of the window pane that it occludes, were it to be removed. The tree in the painting, for example, hides a tree that – if the painting were not standing in the way – could actually be seen through the window, and which would look exactly the same. Thus the tree is at once inside the room, in the painting, and outside it, in the actual landscape. Five years later, Magritte referred to this picture, in a lecture entitled ‘Lifeline’ (La Ligne de vie), presented at the Museum of Fine Art in Antwerp. Its purpose, he explained, was to reveal something fundamental about the way in which human beings see the world. ‘We see it’, he said, ‘as being outside ourselves, even though it is only a mental representation of what we experience on the inside’ (cited in Schama 1995: 12).

The human condition, in Magritte’s hands, is that of a being who can know the world, recognise its forms and appreciate their beauty only through their having been cast as interior images from the material of sensory experience. We think we see an outside world with our eyes, but that – for Magritte – is an illusion. In fact we see an inner world with our mind’s eye. Since what this mind’s eye sees is a picture of the world, the world as seen and its pictorial representation are continuous with one another, and only the faintest rectangular outline of the canvas and the presence of the easel allow us to tell where one ends and the other begins. Percept and image are all but indistinguishable. Do we seek the real tree behind its painterly representation? It too, as it turns out, would be part of a picture – one that Magritte might have painted of the same room, had he first removed the easel, with its canvas, from its position before the window. And the tree in this second picture would be identical to that in the first. Right now I am writing at a table in front of a window, not unlike the one that Magritte depicts. Outside the window I see the lawn of my garden, bushes and trees, the outer walls and roofs of houses on the street next to ours, and a generally cloudy sky which is just beginning to clear after yesterday’s rain. I do not think I am imagining these things – they truly exist for me. Yet if I were Magritte, I would have to admit that what I claim to see is really but a picture that my mind has painted for me.

All seeing, in this view, is imagining. To perceive a landscape is therefore to imagine it. This is the premise on which the historian Simon Schama bases his magnum opus, Landscape and Memory. ‘Before it can ever be a repose for the senses’, Schama contends, ‘landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock’ (Schama 1995: 6–7). Literally, landscape means ‘land shaped’, and the unification of land and shape for Schama is one of physical substance and ideal form. The world as it exists beyond the pale of human sensibility is formless and inchoate, comprised of matter in the raw – layers of rock deposited though geological processes. It is our ‘shaping perception’, Schama asserts, that converts this raw material into the kind of vista that we recognise as a landscape (ibid.: 10). And it does so by imposing a design whose source lies in the sedimentations of memory, ratified by convention and transmitted in culture, upon the otherwise chaotic flux of bodily sensation. ‘What lies beyond the windowpane of our apprehension’, writes Schama, referring back to Magritte’s depiction of the human condition, ‘needs a design before we can properly discern its form, let alone derive pleasure from its perception. And it is culture, convention and cognition that makes that design; that invests a retinal impression with the quality we experience as beauty’ (ibid.: 12).

For the psychologist of perception James Gibson, however, this conclusion could not be more wrong. It is simply fallacious, Gibson argues, to suppose that vision entails the mental enhancement of impressions stamped upon the surface of the retina. For the retina is not an eye: it may be in receipt of sensory stimuli, but it is not an organ of perception. The eye is a perceptual organ, or rather part of the dual organ comprised of our two eyes, set in a head that can turn, in a body that moves from place to place (Gibson 1979: 53). When we see, Gibson insists, this entire eyes-head-body system is at work. Thus visual perception is the achievement of the whole organism as it moves around in its environment; not that of a mind confined within the interiority of a body and bound to the interpretation of patterns projected onto the back of the retina. As we move around, the array of light reaching our eyes, reflected from surfaces in our surroundings, undergoes continuous modulation. Underlying these modulations, however, are parametric constants, or so-called ‘invariants’, that specify the properties and qualities of the things we encounter. To see these things is to extract their invariants from modulations of the optic array. Thus it is not the mind that gives shape to what we perceive. It does not shape the land, or its features. For these shapes are already there in the world, awaiting discovery by any creature (human or non-human) whose perceptual system is so attuned as to attend to them – or more precisely, to pick up the invariants by which they are specified.

It follows that the real word and the perceived world do not lie on opposite sides of an impermeable division between ‘outside’ and ‘inside’. For Gibson the perceived world is the real world, as it is given in relation to a being with certain capabilities of action and perceptual attunements – or in short, as an environment. In this perceived reality, however, there is no place for the imagination. Perceiving and imagining, far from being more or less the same, are poles apart. Gibson (1979: 256–8) proposes a series of tests that enable us to distinguish the reality of the perceived world from its imagistic representation. They boil down to the point that no more can be gleaned from an image than what has already been put there in making it. Suppose that you have before you, either on canvas or in your mind’s eye, an image of a tree, painted with the exquisite realism of a Magritte. Taking a magnifying glass to the leaves will not reveal the intricacies of their veins, nor will microscopic examination reveal their cellular structure. But with a real tree, there is always more to be discovered. The key test, in Gibson’s words, ‘is whether you can discover new features and details by the act of scrutiny’ (1979: 257). The real world is inexhaustible; the image contains only such information as the mind has already contributed to it. No amount of scrutiny will reveal what is not there. True, one might find in an image meanings of which one had not at first been aware, but this is to add to it by way of interpretation, not to discover more of what there is. Perceiving is to imagining, then, as discovery to interpretation.

It seems, in short, that Gibson’s ecological approach to perception has contrived to close the gap between the reality of the world and our perception of it, only by opening up a chasm between perception and imagination. But are we forced to choose between these alternatives? Must we side either with those who would attribute a decisive role to the imagination in giving shape to the landscapes of our perception, or with those for whom it plays no more than an ancillary or retrospective role, in the interpretation of landscapes already perceived? Our aim in this volume is to find a way beyond these alternatives: a way that would reunite perception and imagination while yet acknowledging the human condition, contra both Magritte and Schama, to be that of a being whose knowledge of the world, far from being shaped by the operations of mind upon the deliverances of the senses, grows from the very soil of an existential involvement in the sensible world. To achieve this aim, we will need to reconsider the significance of imagination: to think of it not just as a capacity to construct images, or as the power of mental representation, but more fundamentally as a way of living creatively in a world that is itself crescent, always in formation. To imagine, we suggest, is not so much to conjure up images of a reality ‘out there’, whether virtual or actual, true or false, as to participate from within, through perception and action, in the very becoming of things. What follows is an amplification of this suggestion.

Truth and Illusion

According to one commonly accepted meaning of the term, ‘to imagine’ means to conjure up, in the mind, or perhaps in words and images, things or happenings that are not actually present to the senses. One definition of imagination, gleaned from several in the Oxford English Dictionary, may serve as an example: ‘that faculty of mind by which we conceive the absent as if it were present’. Thus the archaeologist or environmental historian might imagine how a landscape could have looked in the past, and a landscape architect or designer might imagine how it could look in the future. The novelist might imagine a landscape that could conceivably have existed but which is nevertheless of his own invention; the surrealist painter might imagine one that could not conceivably exist at all. We could, if we were so inclined, distinguish landscapes of memory, of design, of fiction and of fantasy. But we could, just as well, adduce all sorts of reasons why these distinctions cannot be watertight. What work of fiction, for example, is not informed by its author’s memories and anticipations? And when have these memories and anticipations not been infused by – and in turn infused – our dreams and fantasies? It is not my intention to address these questions here. However a more general problem has to be tackled. How is it possible to square the ontological division between domains of reality and the imagination, with the division between absence and presence? Despite their radical differences, this is a problem that both the approaches introduced above have had to confront.

Let us consider first the view that in the shaping of landscape, the mind brings its own conceptions, culturally acquired and sedimented in memory, to the interpretation of retinal impressions. If what we believe we see ‘out there’ is, as Magritte would have it, but the projection of an internal image, then must we conclude that some images are imaginary and others real? Picture yourself in the room of Magritte’s La Condition humaine. The painted landscape includes a tree. You want to know whether there really is a tree outside, beyond the window. So you remove the painting from the easel and take a look. No tree. Did the painter, then, just imagine it? Did he paint an imaginary reality, so as to produce an image of the imaginary? Or alternatively: the tree is indeed there. So did the painter paint a real reality, so as to produce an image of the real? An image of the imaginary is, of course, what is more commonly known as an illusion, and it comes as no surprise that among both historians of art and psychologists of vision who have adopted this approach to perception, the study of illusions and of what gives rise to them has become something of an obsession. The problem, in essence, is this: if we can have no direct access to the world – if it cannot reveal to us what is there and what is not – and if, to the contrary, we can know the world only by bringing our own mental representations, bequeathed by culture and convention, to bear on the evidence of the senses, then how can we possibly distinguish truth from illusion?

The answer is that we cannot. The most we can do is to regard perception as a kind of guesswork. ‘There seems to be no sudden break between perceiving an object and guessing an object’, writes visual psychologist Richard Gregory. ‘If all perceiving of objects requires some guessing, we may think of sensory stimulation as providing data for hypotheses concerning the state of the external world’ (Gregory 1973: 61–2, original emphases). Thus every perception is a hypothesis, or a conjecture about what might be there. Illusions, then, are failed hypotheses (ibid.: 74). But we can never know, a priori, whether a perception is illusory or not. A hypothesis thought to be false may, on further testing against the data of experience, turn out to be true, and vice versa. For Gregory, the creative power of the human imagination lies precisely in its capacity to come up with hunches, conjectures, even visions of other worlds, which deviate from accepted truth. Though most will fail the test of experience, some may not, and in an ever changing world it is the latter that open the way to invention and discovery (ibid.: 94). In this, Gregory appeals to the model of progress in the history of science originally proposed by the philosopher Karl Popper (1950). Scientific knowledge, Popper had argued, advances through a perpetual process of conjecture and refutation. But an identical case can be made for the history of art, as Ernst Gombrich showed in his celebrated work on Art and Illusion. As science proceeds by hypothesis, test and revision, so in art, according to Gombrich, there is an endless process of ‘making, matching and remaking’ (Gombrich 1960: 272). At any moment in this process, however, the artist can only paint (project onto canvas) what is in his mind, not copy what is in the world. So too, according to Gregory, it is on the basis of our conjectures of the world, not of the data of experience, that we act (Gregory 1973: 89). The direction of formal projection is univocally from mind to world, not from world to mind.

Turning now to the alternative, ecological approach to perception, the problem of presence and absence appears in quite another guise. It is no longer a question of separating truth from illusion. Most people, most of the time, are not fooled by what they see, precisely because what they see is not a picture of the world. Take yourself back for a moment to the room of Magritte’s painting. Would you really be tricked into confusing the painting on the easel with the view through the window? Of course not, for one simple reason that Gibson is at pains to stress. The painting on the easel is two things at once: it is a representation of a scene, and it is an artefact with a textured surface and edges. ‘A picture’, as Gibson explains, ‘is always a treated surface, and it is always seen in a context of other, non-pictorial surfaces’ (Gibson 1979: 281). In this sense, the picture has just the same artefactual status as (say) the curtains flanking the windowpane. The treated canvas of the painting is just as real – just as present – as the woven fabric of the curtains, and indeed as the bark or foliage of the tree you see outside. All may be subjected to the same test for reality: they can be inexhaustibly scrutinised by the moving observer. That is why the conceit of the trompe l’oeil painters, to have fooled us into mistaking their depictions for reality, rings hollow (Gombrich 1960: 172–3, Gibson 1979: 281). The eye of the observer is fooled only if artificial constraints are placed on the viewing situation that prevent him from being able to pick up the invariants that specify what he is looking at. Such constraints, often built into the design of experiments on vision informed by retinal image optics, have no counterpart in the world outside the laboratory.

But if we can access, by direct perception, what is really there, what are we to make of our awareness of things that do not currently exist, or that cannot be discovered through the processes of information pickup that Gibson describes? This awareness, as Gibson acknowledges, can take many forms, including reminiscence, expectation, imagination, fantasy, and dreaming. Yet he is convinced that they have no essential role to play in perception itself: rather, ‘they are kinds of visual awareness other than perceptual’ (1979: 254–5). How, then, are we to account for these kinds of ‘non-perceptual awareness’? How is it possible, for example, to imagine a landscape other than that in wh...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Seeing Ruins: Imagined and Visible Landscapes in North-East Scotland
• 3 Scottish Blackhouses: Archaeological Imaginings
• 4 OrkneyLab: An Archipelago Experiment in Futures
• 5 Imagining Aridity: Human–Environment Interactions in the Acacus Mountains, South-West Libya
• 6 Meaningful Resources and Resource-full Meanings: Spatial and Political Imaginaries in Southern Belize
• 7 Imagining and Consuming the Coast: Anthropology, Archaeology, ‘Heritage’ and ‘Conservation’ on the Gower in South Wales
• 8 Imagining the Forces of Life and the Cosmos in the Kelabit Highlands, Sarawak
• Index