I have spent the last two weeks conducting field research at a large music festival located in the interior of Portugal. Every day, I would wake up in my tiny tent and walk into a stunning landscape. Walking around the grounds of the festival every morning was my favorite activity, indulging in the lake around which the festival was built. Specific to this festival is the way the landscape is curated: riddled with art installations ready for you to stumble upon, leisure spots, but also an inaccessible land rehabilitation area. After several days wandering about, I have started to ask myself: “who is this for?” Is this land specifically designed for its enjoyment? What is left of the land in the landscape that thousands of people experience once a year?

Gaze, power and resonance

It seemed to me that the trees, lakes, wildlife, harsh and dry grass, and all of the elements of the festival grounds had been hijacked and transformed into a specifically designed environment meant to evoke certain responses. The landscape I woke up to every day for my and others’ gaze, a gaze shaped by aesthetic expectations and pragmatic affordances, a gaze shaped for the consumption of cultural symbols. Thinking of all this, I felt weirdly at ease with myself, feeling that I can understand the space and its function. At the same time, I felt let down, trapped in the same social mesh of symbols my day-to-day life unfolds in. I was reminded of W.J.T. Mitchell’s view that landscapes are inherently an objectification of land, a transformation of a place to make it available for a viewer in such a way that established relations of power are asserted and emphasised (Mitchell 2002). Mitchell’s take on landscapes did seem to apply here especially: a natural setting that was curated for the aesthetic enjoyment of festival goers, functioning as a medium for the ingrained consumerist logic governing most of our contemporary daily lives and cultural narratives. The resources of the land – the water, the natural paths, the trees and their shade – seemed here to have been repurposed to satisfy a specific consumerist gaze.

While this repurposing aspect was definitely present in the landscape, there was also something about it that was evading Mitchell’s conceptual framework. His landscape analysis captures what I held to be only one aspect of landscape exploration, one based on the culture-nature dualism dominating modern European thought and at the heart of contemporary consumerism. Within this dualism, human life is opposed to nature understood as the wild and non-social materiality of the world. This opposition carves a rift between human and nature that allows for two possible ways of interaction, both objectifying in their own way: either we contemplate nature from a detached vantage point, or we conquer and reshape nature into culture. Mitchell proposes that landscape (especially landscape art) grasps nature in such a way that a spectatorial (and passive) perception relationship to it is made possible. While the relations of power infused into the land I was carving my path through were apparent with every step, the spectatorial attitude implied by Mitchell’s theory didn’t quite map onto my experience of the landscape: people were not passively taking in a natural setting but were engaged by and with it, were exploring and acting in and with it. I was not just observing the landscape, but was embedded in it. Was I also a part of it?

My experience of the place matched more with anthropologist Tim Ingold’s analysis of landscape. He does not see in landscapes the opposition between human and nature but their confluence. For Ingold, any space is also a taskscape: a space that generates possibilities and forms of action in its being inhabited by actors – human and non-human alike. In his view, humans and the places they inhabit are intertwined in a co-constituting way: our perceptions and actions within a landscape are shaped by the affordances present therein, while what we do in the landscape shapes the land and the affordances supported by it. More plainly, the dancing, strawling, swimming, eating and camping occurring within the festival grounds are supported by its flat grounds, paths, lake and shaded areas, while at the same time these activities shape the specific appearance of the landscape. In this sense, landscapes are not simply presentations of natural settings to a spectatorial gaze, but they emplace us in an environment or – as Jeff Malpas (2011) argues – we grow with them and they with us.

Then, one night, I went for a drink and sat down on a fairly large rocky formation away from the hustle and bustle of the stages. While sitting down however, I realized the rock I was sitting on was weirdly round. I then noticed that it was not a rocky formation rising up from the dusty ground, but that it was placed there, together with other similarly shaped boulders. Yet another curated element – I thought to myself. This was not the case – at least not in the way I expected it. I had later found out that I was sitting on one of the many megaliths in the Portuguese region of Alto Alentejo – a vestige of a long-gone world of the Neolithic and Calcolithic. Suddenly, the landscape I thought was within my full grasp – delivered to me by an attentive curation – was bustling with new possibilities, with hidden dimensions and hints of contingency. I was sat not only on a rock, but on layers and layers of time, of history, of interactions, on what Ingold calls rhythms of temporality. A landscape is, in his view, not only the place in which various interactions happen, but also the various temporal unfoldings through which the landscape self-transforms. The megalith I was sat on entailed various temporal dimensions – its contemporary relation to me and all actors in the environment that may sit on it, bump into it, find shade at its footing on the ground – and its historic extension into a time accessible to me only through retrospective imaginings – from its first placement into the land, to its abandonment and transformation through the ages. All of these temporal aspects are interwoven for Ingold into the temporal fabric of the landscape, resonating with the temporal rhythms of the animals, plants, and humans dwelling within it but also with the large-scale cycles of the climate, geological structures surrounding it and so on.

In its present resonating with me, the megalith became the focal coalescing point of the landscape, giving it temporal and spatial depth, extension and coherence: “The landscape, in short, is not a totality that you or anyone else can look at, it is rather the world in which we stand in taking up a point of view on our surroundings.” (Ingold 1993:171). The landscape I was in was not simply a sight to be had, an exterior, separated world that finds its way into my perception through visual representation, but a space I was inhabiting, actively shaping my perception and actions in it, integrating me into its temporal unfolding and seeping into mine. And while I felt I was getting closer to what a landscape is and what I am in a landscape, the megalith I was sitting on – which was growing colder with the night – left a lingering concern in my mind. Its temporality stretched far beyond my attention or any “wakeful attention”, without which “there can be no resonance” according to Ingold. What was this place before my attention stumbled upon it? Was it this place or any place, for that matter? Was the landscape just an arbitrary delineation of a space based on collective interactions?

Object-Oriented Landscapes

The megalith and its temporal arms stretching back into early human settlements and beyond into prehistoric times, predating any human involvement, reminded me of Quentin Meillassoux’s fossil argument. In his “After Finitude”, Meillassoux argues that philosophy has, in general, been caught up in a correlationist way of thinking, i.e., that it has always defined reality in connection with human experience. Recent scientific discoveries, such as carbon-dated fossils preceding humans, afford us however, to reconsider the correlationist approach and consider ways of thinking about objects surrounding us as autonomous beings. Sharing the anti-correlationist setting, Graham Harman argues that the intentional behaviours characterizing human experience are not exclusively human, but can be extended to all beings.

In Harman’s view, a rock can attend to the plants around it just as much as a human can, albeit in a different manner. Whereas a human will attend to the plants around them with a cognitive, aesthetic or pragmatic reason, often accompanied by wakeful awareness directing that attention, a rock will attend to the same plants in an undirected manner, engaging in heat exchanges or chemical reactions. Crucial to Harman’s point is that the plants in question are not absolutely defined by the relations they enter in with neither humans nor rocks nor any other object that might attend to them. Said relations define only the surface qualities of the plants, the qualities that express themselves in contact with some other object. The plants have however, more depth to them than the surface qualities could ever express; they have a withdrawn core that remains autonomous of relations and changes that occur on their surface. Characteristic for Harman is that this withdrawn core is not diffuse or indeterminate, but qualitatively specific for each object such that any one object can be thought of as unique and ontologically autonomous: it depends on no relation to any other object in order to be real and maintain its identity. It need not be perceived in order to exist – against correlationism, it need not be explained by elemental building blocks nor by its functioning within an overarching system: “object simply means anything that cannot be reduced either downward or upward, which means anything that has a surplus beyond its constituent pieces and beneath its sum total of effects on the world” (Harman 2018:51). So what meets these criteria of objectuality for Harman? Everything, one might answer, from a grain of sand, to a rock, to humans or landscapes. A grain of sand and a landscape are equally real and independent of their relations to any other object. This however, does not imply that a grain of sand is equal to a human, only that they are both equally real, although qualitatively distinct and specific.

But isn’t a rock made of sedimentary soil? It is, but it is not just that, just as a grain of sand is not just the crystals coagulated in it nor the landscape just the elements within it. In Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology, objects emerge through what he calls symbiosis, a type of vicarious causation, through which objects “[commit] to irreversible bonds with other objects” (Harman 2018:121), a process that irrevocably changes one or both of the objects involved, or leads to a compound object. Such would be the case of the landscape in question, where the hills, the lake, the megalith and all of the actors roaming in it stand in a symbiotic relation to each other. This approach seems to map well to Ingold’s view of landscapes as resonant meshes of relation. There is however, one essential distinction: for Harman the landscape cannot be reduced neither to its constituent parts nor to its effects on others. More precisely, although we may regard human perspective taking or animal agency as constitutive to landscapes, we cannot fully explain landscapes through either one of those constituent parts. Instead, the landscape as a compound object is always more than its surface relations and qualities, it is always laden with a surplus of itself that is withdrawn from its surface. The same goes for the humans dwelling in a landscape: while they may be shaped by the affordances presented by the landscape, they cannot be reduced to how they act upon them. The interactions between humans, animals, weather, flora, and all other elements in a landscape define only the surface qualities of the landscape, which may change without affecting the integrity of the landscape itself. Indeed, Harman argues in an interview that landscapes can be seen as “the shining example of objects”, providing “an enduring background for constant change in detail” (Harman 2012). Here Harman speaks of landscapes as he does of all objects as possessing an essence that endures throughout the changes in sensual (surface) qualities and relations, where the tension between the essence and the sensual qualities define the space of the landscape. This tension keeps the landscape together throughout its temporal unfolding, it links various objects together “that all use it as a mediator” (Harman 2012). As soon as the tension diffuses, the landscape is no longer an autonomous object but may decay or transform into other objects: a plot of agricultural land, ruins, grass, rocks, sand, etc.

This conceptual framework opens the possibility to think of landscapes as autonomous from their relations to human or non-human agents, albeit the latter being constitutive to them. But can we think of landscapes without humans (or non-human agents)? If we take agents (human or otherwise) to be constitutive to landscapes – as Ingold and many others do – then it may be difficult to do so. What we can do is think of landscapes as places that at one point in their lives enter a symbiotic relation with one or several agents through which they are irreversibly changed from places to landscapes¹. At one point in the Neolithic, a place in the current Portugal was adorned with one (or several) megaliths that served as focal points for human activities. At that point, a compound object emerges: a landscape. Should humans and all life for that manner disappear, the landscape would become once more a place just like buildings would become ruins or political institutions would cease to exist. On this account, it seems then that we can think of the landscape as Ingold does, as a constellation of objects in relation, without constraining it to a relation with an agent endowed with “wakeful attention”.

As I was walking back to my tent, looking forward to switching off my wakeful attention, a question was still nagging me. Can I consider myself a constitutive part of the landscape without defining its identity, without at least contributing to it and it to mine? Keep in mind that for Harman, the identity of an object rests upon its surplus of reality, upon its withdrawn core that cannot be in relation to any other object. Something was bothering me about this withdrawal: it seemed to introduce an insurmountable distance between me and the landscape. A distance I felt wasn’t doing justice to my being within it. A distance that reminded me of the nature-culture dualism we started with and went to great lengths to overcome. A sentence from Ingold rang in my mind as I was laying down in my tent, too tired to think: “where an absolute distinction is made, it is generally premised upon the separation of mind and nature” (1993:169). While Harman rejects the separation of mind and nature, there seemed to me that a dualism was still at play in his objects that didn’t quite match my experience of the landscape. At the same time, his insistence on objects having a surplus of reality that resists any reduction to their parts or function seemed to be what I was missing from Ingold’s account. “Could we marry the two together?” was my last thought as I fell asleep.

Expanding sets

I woke up to a ruckus near my tent. I walked out to see what was happening. A group of people were huddled together, pointing towards the ground – some were amused, some were disgusted, some were letting out screeches of fear. My morbid curiosity took over, and I went closer to see what was happening. In the grass, with claws lifted up in the air in a gesture of authority, was a crayfish. A few meters away, another one, and a few meters more, another and another and another – all a few hundred meters away from the lake. This event completely changed my view of the landscape bringing to surface latent elements I would’ve otherwise overlooked: I started noticing the intense sounds of frogs that seemed to respond to the loud music invading their space; I started noticing how the lake had become murkier than in the first days; I realized that just as much as I was noticing more in the landscape so were the crayfish, the frogs, the lake, the trees and the hills. A banal event that made the surplus of the landscape bubble up a bit without being exhausted in the event. I thought back on the megalith as a similar event that brought up the rich history of the landscape and at the time of its placement that structurally changed the land. A series of events that shifted and deepened the landscape, which nevertheless didn’t seem like a new object. It seemed rather like the same place was carrying with it the weight of its history that contributed to its identity while highlighting the possibility of it changing. This reminded me of Badiou’s “Being and Event”.²

Taking inspiration from set theory, Badiou constructs an ontological framework in which Being is described in terms of multiplicities understood as sets. A set is an ontological space circumscribed by a set of axioms. Let’s say a landscape is a set defined by the axioms of a specific space that allows for activities to be performed within it in resonance with the elements found within it – to paraphrase Ingold’s definition. This axiom defines the elements that can be considered to belong to the landscape: the paths, the trees, the lake, the people and animals within it, its affordances and resources. The coup de grace in Badiou’s set theory ontology consists in considering the set and its axioms as locally determined and not constituting an absolute identity: the landscape can be structurally changed by an event.

Let me explain a bit more the two features on which this is based on and what it implies. First, a set can never be an absolute set as it can never include itself in itself. If set s1 were to belong to itself, it would be both a set and a subset of itself at the same, which would be contradictory. Instead a set is always marked by the reminder that it can always be more than it is. Second, a set is defined by the elements that belong to it on the one hand, and on the other by elements that may be latently present within it but not formally recognized by its axioms. Take the example of the festival landscape: the paths, the lake, the stages, the food and drink stations, the camping and so on belong to the landscape, while the crayfish do not although they implicitly present within it. The impossibility of self-inclusion and the latent elements present within a set but not formally belonging to it define the surplus of any set that drives the possibility of change in the axioms of the set such that they become formally recognized by it. Take the megalith as an example. The megalith was present in the place on which the landscape before my eyes formed, but it was not recognized as a megalith, as a form of human symbolism, but merely as a rock. Its usage for temple building constituted an event that structurally changed the axioms of the land, expanding it to include human symbolism: a new expanded set with more inclusive axioms is formed.

Crucially though, this new set does not replace the old one but retains it, included as a subset. Let’s say the initial set consisted in s1=[tree, land, animal, affordance 1, affordance 2, etc.]. The new set would consist in s2=[[s1], megalith, symbolism, updated-affordances]. S1 remains a set in its own terms that can exist without megaliths or symbolism and is thus autonomous. However, it can also belong as a subset to s2, an expanded version of itself. We could say that s1 accumulates upon itself like sediments accumulate to form a rocky formation that becomes more than the sediments within it (s2), without suppressing their autonomy. With time, the landscape set organically grows into enriched versions of itself to include more and more elements that were already within it, although not recognized as belonging to it. In my case and fast-forwarding a few thousand years, the festival landscape s3 = [[s1],[s2], music, stages, consumerism, curated spaces, etc.].

Importantly though, this current version of the landscape set is still a locally determined one, i.e., a set that is laden with a surplus of reality that can at any time drive change in the landscape. Any such change, though, would remain inscribed in the set defining its historicity and with it its specificity. From this vantage point, the landscape engulfed in music, dancing and consumerist behaviours is specific and unique, yet at the same time retains the traces of the megalith site or the crayfish territory. Or, to paraphrase Ingold, it grows together with all the actors and changes in it without becoming an absolute other. We can think of the temporal shifting of the landscape as geometrical variations within a stable topology³ – or topography for Ingold – that allows the landscape to change without losing its locally determined identity. At the same time, following Harman, it is always more than its parts or its impact on other objects due to its inherent and inescapable surplus, irreducible to any one relation it might have with any one element belonging to it. Unlike Harman, however, Badiou’s surplus is not an invariable substantiality, withdrawn and unaffected from the interactions within the set or its interactions with other sets. Instead, the surplus is implicit in any interaction as latent elements awaiting to bubble up to the surface occasioned by an event that forces the axioms to reconfigure themselves such that present yet unrecognized elements start belonging to the set in question.

En lieu of conclusion

Leaving the festival in a friend’s makeshift campervan, I found myself absorbed by the landscape seen through the window of a moving car, drifting away in a pure contemplative state. The spectatorial view I had contested at the start of this essay was just as present to me as was the embedded relation I had with the landscape, its plethora of trees, pebbles, dust, animals, insects, or socio-economic relations – all packed into each other like ingredients in a dough. As I was moving away from the festival through the sinewing country roads, its landscape grew larger and larger, taunting me with everything that the landscape is without it ever being it for me. Zooming out from the landscape, I could picture it configuring itself as an everchanging yet unique recognizable puzzle of sets, each with its own specificity and contributing to the identity of not only itself but also of the sets it was intermingling with. At the same time, I was fully aware that this puzzling framework could fall apart at any moment, occasioned by a surprising event. The only constant thought I had was that I had experienced an event that opened up my perception of a place, destabilized my habitual conceptual determinations I had of it and left cracks into it through which glimpses of what (else) it could be are still seeping in.

¹“When looking for the moments when a landscape became a substantially different thing, I would look
for the moments when it entered into long-term symbiosis with some other thing— whether it be a human historic event, the intrusion of an invasive species, a cataclysmic physical change, or some other incident that marked the intertwining of the landscape with something else.” (Graham 2012)

² I explain in more detail Harman’s and Badiou’s work elsewhere. See Sandru (2024)

³ Levi Bryant uses the similar concept of cartography “of entities and their relations in network time-space” to refer to landscapes (Bryant 2011).

References

Badiou, Alain. 2005. Being and Event. London ; New York: Continuum.
Harman, Graham. 2018. Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. Pelican Book 18. London: Pelican Books.
Ingold, Tim. 1993. ‘The Temporality of the Landscape’. World Archaeology 25 (2): 152–74. https://doi.org/10.1080/00438243.1993.9980235.
Malpas, Jeff, ed. 2011. The Place of Landscape: Concepts, Contexts, Studies. MIT Press.
Meillassoux, Quentin, and Quentin Meillassoux. 2014. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Mitchell, W.J.T., and W.J.T. Mitchell. 2002. Landscape and Power, Second Edition. Cultural Studies : Art History. University of Chicago Press. https://books.google.pt/books?id=8E3yVlUUK9AC.
Sandru, Adrian Razvan. 2024. ‘Relational or Object-Oriented? A Dialogue between Two Contemporary Ontologies’. Open Philosophy 7 (1). https://doi.org/10.1515/opphil-2024-0022.