Policies, Landscape and Politics

Elias Canetti warned us that behind any model there is always a metamodel whose nature is malign. The nature of the landscape model is thus political, a specific form of malignance. Just think of Alexander von Humboldt’s project, without which landscape would never have moved from the purely artistic to the scientific sphere: a decisive transition because it was preparatory and even essential to the current equating of landscape and territory, a term that at the end of the Roman empire in the Code of Justinian is explained as falling within the scope of political power because it derives not from “terra” (earth) but rather from “terrore” (terror). How this extraordinary backflip leads from aesthetics through the reinvention of nature to the political, and its effects, has yet to be fully elucidated. In any case, Humboldt’s problem was to ensure the success of the Weltbürgerplan, the bourgeoisie’s plan for world domination against the interests of the originally feudal aristocracy, and he chose the concept of landscape as his preferred vehicle for the indispensable structural mutation of the culture of that era’s civil society who were called to abandon their “vacuous poetic games”, as Humbolt himself would say, in favour of knowledge that was not only contemplative but also functional to action, control and the management of the world, for knowledge no longer of only arts and the humanities but finally scientific.