Lucas Hickok

I found this reading to be quite difficult to grasp, but overall I came to the conclusion that WJT Mitchell’s piece “Imperial Landscape” is attempting to redefine and decontextualize different meanings of landscape. Specifically, Mitchell is concerned with a more realistic, almost pessimistic (he refers to it as the “darkside of landscape”) of landscape. Mitchell says: “this dark side is not merely mythic, not merely a feature of the regressive, instinctual drives associated with nonhuman ‘nature’ but a moral, ideological, and political darkness that covers itself with innocent idealism” (166). I find this quote the most intriguing and I believe it summarizes many of the main ideas covered in this piece very well. The reading continues later on to reference that a problematic notion exists that landscape painting is uniquely Western and modern, and contradicts this notion by alluding to the antiquity of Chinese landscape painting. Not only has Chinese landscape painting existed before modern western thought, but it has played a crucial role in the formation and development of English landscape aesthetics. This subversion is pertinent because it speaks to the immorality that exists within the modern discourse of landscape. The burial of this deep history of landscape representation is indicative of the power structures at work and not only the literal imperialism (land) of the English/European/Western world, but the imperialism of knowledge as well. Imperialism has manifested itself into discourse of imperialism, and this cycle has reinforced an uneven structure of power within the global systems of both land and knowledge.

https://web.colby.edu/allen-island/2016/10/25/987/

The central idea in Stephen Daniels and Denis Cosgrove’s piece is that what matters most about landscapes, is the mental schemas and the social or emotional associations we have with them. The meanings of landscapes are embedded within our own perception of  the social flows around us. The most important aspect of the essay is that landscape’s meaning is based on our own perception: “The post-modern apprehension of the world emphasizes the inherent instability of meaning, our ability to invert signs and symbols, to recycle them in a different context and thus transform their reference” (p. 7). Apprehension of place is terribly unstable. As postmodernity would have us believe, there is no single or simple classification of a place. In his piece on cartography, Harley would have us believe that consumption of place becomes universal through a hegemonic control of its representation. This piece leads me to challenge that thought with the notion that it is our own imagination that allows us to deconstruct landscape. My own physical experience of the Allen Island sail loft has interacted with my knowledge about the island to create an entirely knew perception of the sail loft, that exists outside of space and time. From being a store in 1822, to a sail loft later on in the century where rugged Mainers would hang out and smoke cigarettes, to now being a museum, the building is a timeless mental image for me, where I try and retrace its meaning as place to others throughout history. Nevertheless, this imagination is fully my own, and is filtered through my own experience of the buildings history and its current existence.

“Deconstruction urges us to read between the lines of the map—’in the margins of the text’—and through its tropes to discover the silences and contradictions that challenge the apparent honesty of the image” (3). We have had many class discussions where we discuss different trends of representation and how its consumption becomes concrete in the belief systems of those consuming. In other words, if an artist paints a scene of Maine lobstering, but it is done in a studio with props, it is clearly embodying a level of artifice. However, when this painting/piece of art is put out into the world, those viewing the painting have no way of detecting this artifice. This portrayal of lobstering is believed to be a realistic representation of what lobstering actually is, even though this is a false notion. J.B. Harley’s point in his piece “Deconstructing the Map” is that this idea is especially relevant with the creation of maps. Harley’s postmodern view exposes the influence of power, and more importantly, knowledge over the creation of maps. Harley references Foucault: “the key revelation has been the omnipresence of power in all knowledge, even though that power is invisible or implied, including the particular knowledge encoded in maps and atlases” (3). Western cartography has falsely affirmed objection, reality, truth and accuracy with the creation of maps. When looking at the maps provided for this class, I am led to ask certain questions that would go deeper than the surface of this map. Who was given the privilege of making the map of downtown Camden, and why were they chosen over others? Why is it that certain parts of this map are included over others? What cultural entities are excluded from this map and why? This reading leads one to dig deeper when thinking about the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. Maps are much more than a means to figure out where one is going.

“They [space and time] fuse into spacetime. Memories and dreams are the stuff of such fusion”. When we thoroughly went over this claim in class one day, I still felt a little bit confused and blurry when it came to this fusion of spacetime. However, as mysterious and gothic as Stephen King’s story may have been, The Reach helped me come to understand this idea a bit more. With this fusion, there is no separation between mental experience of place, and the place itself. Everything that Stella Flanders experiences on the island is inextricably tied to the island itself and nowhere else. The reach is a concept just as much as it is a physical object. This is sort of like Stella and other Goat Island inhabitants’ , such as her grandchildren, ideas about the dead. Goat Islanders are constantly asking questions about the Reach and the mainland, while also asking themselves questions about the dead (“do the dead sing?”). When Stella actually crosses the Reach and begins to interact with her friends and family who have passed away, is when I began to try and interpret this idea of spacetime as it relates to this story. Every mental vision that Stella has, whether real or not, is a manifestation of her previous, real, physical experiences with Annabelle and Bill. Yet it is still an unreality. A mysterious vision that is based in truth but has arrived at a time when Stella is exploring a physical realm that she has not yet explored. It is the simultaneous blending of two truths, and two mysteries, that are ultimately rooted in place, or rather, the experience of place. It is what Stella knows in time and space past, fusing into her present experience of spacetime.

Reading about Meinig’s ideas about “landscape as ideology” brought me back to the class where we attempted to identify and define different types of geographers. Specifically, I recall talking about marxist geography, the relationship between place and its economic foundation. This type of place analysis is concerned with the capitalist production of space, or place being reactionary. Initially, I found this idea to be somewhat depressing, seeing ways in which the world around us is constructed through a hierarchal financial system, in which efficiency is prioritized. Yet, Meinig’s piece fleshed these ideas out in a more optimistic way. Through an ideological analysis of landscape and place, we can move past the phase of marxist geography that simply identifies the roots of space construction, and think optimistically about the potential for the future: “if we want to change the landscape in important ways we shall have to change the ideas that have created and sustained what we see” (Meinig 42). It is easy to be caught in the mind’s trap that space or place is absolute and fixed. We, as culture/community/society, have the ability to interact with the landscape in new ways. In Waterville, we can arguably see the negative effects of globalization, a capitalist mode, on space with the abandoned mill buildings along the Mesalonskee. We can simultaneously see the potential for that space to become a new place for other types of production, whether it be jobs, living space, artistic production, or anything that might contribute to the creation of a multitude of new and positive places to members of a community. This community.