Heidegger, latour and the reification of things

The Inversion and Spatial Enclosure of the Substantive Landscape of Things – The Lake District Case

Bibliographic Data

ID8076404
AuthorsKenneth R Olwig (Department of Landscape Architecture, Planning and Management Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences Box 58 SE‐230 53 Alnarp, Sweden, corresponding author)
Year2013
Volume95
Issue3
Pages251-273
Publication date2013-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueGeografiska Annaler Series B Human Geography (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0435-3684 • E-ISSN: 1468-0467
PublisherTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/geob.12024
OpenAlexW2124585669
LanguageEN
Citations received16
References cited34

Thing” has undergone reification, and it has done so together with its linguistic “conjoined twin” – “landscape”. Whereas thing once was the name for meetings where people assembled to treat common things that matter, things, in the modern sense, have become physical objects (things as matter). Likewise, landscape's meaning has been reified from being a polity constituted by common thing meetings treating substantive things that matter, to becoming a spatial assemblage of physical things as matter. To fully grasp the contemporary meaning of both things and landscape it is necessary to understand the way in which those meanings are the intertwined outcome of a process of revolutionary inversion, or turning inside–out, by which the meaning of things has been spatialized, enclosed, individualized, privatized, scaled and reified as a constituent of the mental and social landscape of modernity. The potentiality of the concept of thing lies, it will be argued, in its continued containment of older, subaltern meanings that can work to empower an alternative “non‐modern” understanding of things along the lines of, but distinct from, Bruno Latour's notion of Dingpolitik, which will be termed “thing politics” here. This argument is analysed in relation to Martin Heidegger's concept of the “thing”, and exemplified by the mandate of the European Landscape Convention, and the modern planning usage of Landscape Character Assessment and Ecosystem Services, as applied to England's Lake District

Aesthetics · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Modernity · Political science · Politics · Reification (Marxism · Sociology · Ecology, Conservation, and Geographical Studies · Environmental Philosophy and Ethics · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Philosophy

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub