Warwick Mules

Open country: Towards a material environmental aesthetics

The sustainable development of the environment is one of the great hopes of Western governments and their technocracies for the twenty-first century. The idea of sustainability suggests that the environment has never been a pristine domain of nature set apart from human occupation, but is always a constructed milieu of naturally occurring material and cultural practices, structures and values that can be managed in various ways. In short, an environment is a landscape in the sense initially proposed by Carl Sauer in the 1920s, as a ‘general system’ (Sauer 1963, 321) corresponding to laws and principles couched in scientific terms, and leading to calculations and predictions in the service of man’s control over the earth. Environments are an outcome of the rationalization of the earth, underway since colonial times, as the transformation of land into landscapes, reaching a zenith today through the application of what Nigel Thrift has called ‘landscape engineering’ (Thrift 2004, 68), or the myriad mechanisms of micro-power that inhabit and produce a landscape as a living, breathing space for human occupation. It is not difficult to see, then, how proposals for sustainable development of the environment are inevitably couched in human terms, as the definition in Our Common Future, the landmark Brundtland report from the United Nations suggests: ‘Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (1987, 54). The idea of a sustainable environment retains a will to power over the environment as a means of managing resources for current human needs but with a view to the future. This constitutes a form of technological exploitation in which the environment is considered as a resource for human use. The environment is not something existing independently of human interests, but something that waits for humans as ‘standing reserve’, as Heidegger has argued in his essay ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ (Heidegger 1977, 17). Sustainability thus seeks to protect and manage the environment not on its own terms but as something already given to human being as that which needs to be preserved for future human generations. In essence, this is no different from the kinds of exploitation that programmes of sustainability are designed to counteract. In his book World Risk Society Ulrich Beck has argued that institutionalized scientific activities in the name of sustainable development are both the cause of and the solution to global environmental problems. This makes them, at best, a problematic response to the

Lines, Dots and Pixels: The making and remaking of the printed image in visual culture

In keeping with the romanticism of its narratives, information technology implicates itself in people’s attempts to progress from one sphere of existence to another. The new sphere includes both the digital utopia promised by much IT commentary and literal transcendence through immersion in the ‘consensual hallucination’ of the digital matrix, digital ecstasis, and participation in an ideal unity (Coyne, 1999, p. 9).

Creativity, singularity and techné: The making and unmaking of visual objects in modernity

In an essay published in 1918, Walter Benjamin sets forth a task that will concern him for the rest of his life: The task of a future epistemology is to find for knowledge the sphere of total neutrality in regards to concepts of both subject and object; in other words, it is to discover the autonomous, innate sphere of knowledge in which this concept in no way continues to designate the relation between two metaphysical entities. (‘‘The Coming Philosophy’’ 104) Benjamin seeks an ‘‘autonomous, innate sphere of knowledge’’ that bypasses the Kantian dualism of subject and object to ‘‘form a pure and systematic continuum of experience’’ (105). He wants to break down the relation between subject and object that has led to the ossification of experience in fixed modes of life, in order to develop a theoretical thinking that ‘‘grasps the world as such as an undivided whole’’