Land-scopic Regimes: Exploring Perspectival Representation Beyond the ‘Pictorial’ Project

Abstract

This paper re-examines the question of perspective as a representational strategy in the context of landscape architectural design and description. The alignment of perspective with a limited understanding of its representational potential, primarily as pictorial/compositional operations of picturesque space-making, has compromised its agency in the exploration of landscape spatiality. In this context, the term land-scopic regimes derives directly from Martin Jay’s (1988) identification of the “scopic regimes of modernity” (“descriptive,” “baroque,” and “Cartesian perspectivalism”) and is proposed here as supplemental to, and co-existent with, the more familiar operation of Cartesian representational modes. Thus land-scopic regimes refer to those revised visual discourses that engage habits of perceiving the landscape specifically as primary representational modes, for example, those familiar categories of the dioramic or (photo)montagic, and the new category of the phenomenological picturesque within a picturesque scopic regime. This paper also posits that perspective and landscape both perpetually engage the condition of the in-between. The representational structure of perspective itself may be understood to operate both across an interval—that is, between the space of the viewer and its contingent worldly relations—and as an examination of intervals per se, the projection of future and contingent relations. Alternative interpretations of perspective structure as perspectival representation proposed here emphasize its open-ended, mutable, relational properties that engage the space of the in-between, a condition in which and through which landscape processes and spatiality operate. Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) contemporary ontology of dynamic relations exemplified by the “Body without Organs” and the “rhizome” promotes reconsideration of the in-between as a potentiality, as the place wherein futurity and becoming unfold.