UPDATED 03/07/04

PROLEGOMENA TO EVERY FUTURE LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

1/ The 'categorical' experience of the world since Immanuel Kant (and post-Kantian Critical Idealism), and the translation of such experience to fields of creative activity, is historically determined.

2/ These determinations are not prefigured in individual subjectivity but culturally constituted forms of acceptable and unacceptable behavior and conduct -- they follow one another in the architectonic of deterministic logic, not unlike lemmings.

3/ The cultural framework of this subject-object relationship is dynamic, salient and indexed at the formative and discrete threshold of language -- the so-called place of taking-place -- the intersection of structural and modal operations -- the latter which constitute the mechanics of control inherent in all discourse or language games.

4/ The language games of landscape + architecture may be constitutively altered -- in advance -- by laying bare the bare-naked operations of its genus -- through an analogical purge of its chief baggage, the formalistic game-playing of styles and empty syntactical elaborations. To this end, ludic paratactics come into play.

5/ An Artaud-inspired landscape-as-theater, or landscape-of-cruelty, where the 'dialogic' nature of landscape (nature/culture) is eliminated and the common origin of both is recovered, is the 'first return' to the nominal 'archaic' and 'pre-modern' (a putative 'pre-rational', but actually sur-rational state/site, characterized by the mark of the critical-poetic Sublime) -- a move to be repeated in a series of historiographic thrusts to the pre-Adamic, mute ground of landscape + architecture. Such a 'return' is, paradoxically, also a quantum leap forward.

6/ This mute territory, since it is also a mythic ground, may be reconstituted as an ideal condition within landscape + architecture, to be established as a liminal terra vague and/or a 'wilderness' of phonemes and archaic utterances -- a primitive topology (not typology, nor topography, but somehow both at once).

7/ This territory is unnameable and untameable -- thereby, it is also unclaimable by discourse and rhetoric. This territory should, as a result, constitute the closest approach to the language of the world (of things-in-themselves), prior to all interpretive, instrumental and categorical operations. This 'wilderness' would serve, then, as a 'reserve' within landscape + architecture, a place to return to for 'wild' breeding stock in every future landscape + architecture, while also disclosing the source code for both things and non-things.

Gavin Keeney (2000)

On-line version w/ hyperlinks – http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/prolegomena.html