Science Debates and Constructed Landscapes:
Themes and Perspectives
I. The Deconstruction of Science:
–Debate focuses on whether science is a universally valid method that uncovers the
‘laws of nature’, or rather is a world view that partially reflects the politics and culture of
the society from which it emerged.
–Postmodern criticisms:
•There cannnot be total objectivity, since all observers are socialized into a particular
culture and world view.
•Knowledge claims are partially dependent upon one’s position in society:
–Harroway and Harding: situated knowledges, i.e. knowledge that takes account of the
position of the observer and takes this as its starting point.
II. Feminist Criticisms of the Scientific Method
•Emergence of science was characterized by a devaluation of ‘the feminine’.
•This occurred first theoretically, as science was conceived as a discipline that acquired
mastery over nature, with nature being conceived as a woman in the works of Francis
Bacon, (Fox-Keller).
•It also involved a devaluation of women’s knowledge, as for example in the ascendance
of medicine and persecuting of women healers, who were conceived as witches by both
the Church and the emerging scientific establishment.
•Also based on a dualistic gendered culture, in which women were viewed as being more
emotional and closer to nature than men, who were deemed more objective and rational.
•Importance of ‘situated knowledge’: changes in social location can influence perceptions
of ‘nature’, ‘nurture’ and ‘landscape.’
III. The Rise of Scientific Modernity and Shifts in Visual Perception
•The birth of science, associated with the Renaissance (1600s) and the Enlightenment
(1700) had a major influence on the ways that landscape and the environment were
perceived in Europe.
•Rise of the printing press, and reprinting of Ptolemy’s Geographica reintroduced
perspectival maps to the wider public.
•Darby: geometry and mathematics were the scientific roots of the perspectival gaze in
which the observer is always outside and above the action.
–Landscape painting of the Italian Renaissance, also introduced the notion of realist
perspective into art.
–Perspectival mapping also introduced a notion of visual appropriation.
IV. The Rise of Capitalism, Discovery, and Colonialism
•Darby: The growth of a scientific perspective on space was connected in both direct and
indirect ways to the rise of capitalism and colonialism.
–“Whether examined as forms of discourse, representation of physical reality, landscape
and territory are embedded in relations of power and knowledge.”
–Perspectival maps were needed both for measuring land that was becoming
increasingly commodified and for mapping new areas of discovery that were increasingly
important in European expansion.
–Perspectival maps represented the new country houses as large spaces devoid of the
labour that farmed them.
–Connected to the fusion of aristocratic, landed capital and emerging mercantile and
finance capital centred in the City of London.
V. The Rise of Capitalism in England: the Enclosure Movements 1500-1800 AD
•Beginning with the elimination of monasteries and their common lands under Henry VIII,
tenant farmers were gradually evicted from their landholdings over a 300-year period.
•Major impetus was the rise of a pan-European market for English wool, which was its
leading industry until the early 19th century.
•Scottish Enclosures of early 1800s: 70% of the population lost their tenure.
•The enclosures also involved the closing off of village commons that had been
previously used for village pasture and firewood.
•By the mid-nineteenth century, the amount of ‘common space’ in England had declined
steeply.
VI. The Emergence of Capitalism and Formation of a Working Class
•“A multitude of little proprietors and tenants, who maintain themselves and families by
the produce of the ground they occupy by sheep kept on a common, by poultry, hogs,
etc. and who therefore have little occasion to purchase any of the means of subsistence,
will be converted into a body of men who earn their subsistence by working for others,
and who will be under a necessity of going to market for all that they want…”
–In themselves, money and commodities are no more capital than the means of
production and subsistence are. They need to be transformed into capital. But this
transformation can itself only take place under particular social circumstances that meet
together: i.e. the contact and confrontation between 2 different types of commodity
owners; on the one hand, the owners of money, and with it means of production and
subsistence, who are eager to valorize the sum of values they have appropriated by
buying the labour power of others; on the other hand, free workers, the sellers of their
own labour-power and therefore the sellers of labour. Free workers, in the double
sense, that they form neither a part of the means of production, as would be the case
with slaves and serfs, nor do they own the means of production, as would be the case
with self-employed peasants. The workers are therefore freed from any means of
production of their own. With the polarization of the commodity-market into these two
classes, the fundamental conditions of capitalist production are present (Marx 1976:877).
VII. The Erasure of Enclosures and the Emergence of ‘Space’
•Emerging working class migrated to cities or overseas.
•Simultaneously, the representation of ‘space’ became increasingly mathematical and
geometric.
•Shown in the renderings of country houses, in which labourers, and the symbolic
renderings of church, school, commons, and people were absent.
•Facilitated and enabled by the emergence of a scientific method that became
increasingly dominant in the ways that people related to the ‘environment’, to nature, and
to ‘landscape.’
•Conception of space that became dominant (or hegemonic) was that of a
mathematically defined areas that contained quantifiable ‘resources’, whether these
were defined in terms of territory, mineral, or biological resources.
•Disenchantment of landscape, emptied of its former spiritual, religious meanings.