A Rhizome of Landscapes: a geophilosophical perspective

about contemporary global spaces

Laura Menatti
Department of Philosophy, University of the Basque Country, Spain
laurettamenatti@yahoo.it
Abstract: Geophilosophy is an innovative and interdisciplinary approach to the study of place, space and landscape in the nowadays globalised world. In this paper I will analyse the concepts of rhizome and milieu, the former considered as a new model for the relation between
global and local landscapes, the latter as the core of the processual relationship between culture and nature. Furthermore I will address the
issue of the distinction between landscape and environment, considering the latter from an ecological rather reductionist point of view;
in doing so I will refer to the bridge-notion of affordance, meaning with this term the wide range of possibilities that place gives to our
perception. From this stand point I will explain the ethical and political consequences of these two theoretical remarks.
Keywords: aesthetics, affordance, ethics, geophilosophy, globalization, landscape, place, rhizome, space.

1. Introduction
Geophilosophy is a philosophical and interdisciplinary approach
which focuses on the study of the contemporary issues of place
and space, by conducting a genealogical analysis of terms such as
landscape, milieu and territory. Geophilosophy belongs to the domain of environmental aesthetics and it is quite considerable in
the deinition and comprehension of contemporary landscapes.The
term was irstly introduced by Gilles Deleuze (1991), then adopted
in Italy and France by some philosophers (e.g. by L. Bonesio, M.
Cacciari) who have extended the scope of investigation and have
detached themselves from Deleuzes thought. Despite that, I argue
that one of the central igures in geophilosophy remains, without
any doubt, Gilles Deleuze, not simply because he invented the term
but because, as I will show, he offers the possibility of applying the
geophilosophical thought to the study of contemporary landscapes
by introducing the model of the rhizome. Furthermore my approach is aimed at widening the thought on landscape towards the
ecological perception by introducing the term affordance, used to
describe the possibilities that the environment can offer.

2. Geophilosophy: space, place and landscape

The term geophilosophy was introduced by Deleuze with the aim
of reorienting philosophy from concentrating on temporality and
historicity towards focusing on spatiality and geography, because
thinking takes place in the relationship of territory and the earth
(Deleuze 1991, 86). Furthermore, according to him, ancient philosophy was born in Greece in the moment in which a deep bound
between thought, events and space was established, thus philosophy was born as a non-accidental conjuncture between cultural
concepts and space.
Starting from this idea geophilosophy has developed in these years
a deep genealogical analysis of the concept of space, place and landscape. The distinction between the irst two terms constitutes one
of the theoretical bases of geophilosophical thought. It is inspired
by a distinction proposed by the phenomenological geography of
Eric Dardel (1952) between geometric and geographic space; the
former considered homogeneous, uniform, neutral, and quantitative; the latter, instead, qualitatively differentiated. Thus, for geo19

philosophy, place corresponds to Dardels geographical space. It is

considered as recognizable, symbolic, mythical, and religious. It is
local and regional; it is the landscape too, it is the concrete setting for local culture, and concerns the process of sense-making. In
this respect I would like to strongly highlight that the connection
between place and local is not a matter of scale: we can, on the contrary, characterize the term local as something regional, multiscalar,
by providing an idea of local that avoids the peril of closure, tribal
identity and localism. I think that this clariication is quite important
to prevent possible misunderstandings especially in reference to
some concepts such as heimat (Menatti, 2011, 2012).
Space, instead, is something global; it refers to measurement, calculation, ininite extension, and homogeneity. It is a term belonging to
Modern Western philosophy, expression of Cartesianism and to a
speciic idea of nature in the history of ideas. E. Casey argues, in fact,
that for many centuries, in philosophical thought and in the history
of ideas, persists what he has called disdain for the specialness of
place (Casey, 2007), implying that the place with its own qualitative,
perceived, relational, and historical features has been substituted by
the concept of Cartesian space, characterized as empty, calculable,
ininite, and homologated.
Nevertheless the core of this paper is the idea of landscape considered as the visible and invisible shape of a place. It is well known
that landscape is a cultural product of a society; it is not something
universal and did not exist in every age. In the last thirty years many
philosophers, sociologists and anthropologists have spoken about
the deinition of landscape: for example A. Berque (1995), comparing Western and Chinese landscape, afirms that some societies
were not landscape-aware. Berque, quoting the famous assertion
by Czanne that the peasants of Provence had never seen (from an
aesthetical and artistic point of view) the Montaigne Sainte Victoire,
argues that many societies have worked with the environment, but
never wondered about landscape. For many authors, landscape has
been invented by city-dwellers and artists during the Modern Age,
while ancient civilizations (e.g. Ancient Greece) did not have in its
language a world for landscape. An aesthetic conception of landscape emerged both in China, about two thousand years ago, and in
Europe during the XV century, within Flemish art.
As we know, an innovative concept of landscape, which overcomes the aesthetic reductionism, has been introduced thanks to
the European Convention of Landscape (2000). I argue that one

Landscape and Imagination - Epistemology

of the most interesting ideas of this document is its new conception of landscape: in the Florence Convention we read, in fact, that
landscape does not merely mean a beautiful landscape (a postcard
landscape). Indeed, the convention acknowledges that landscape is
not only a view (landskaap), but also a place (lanshaft), with its own
culture (Howard, 2004). The postcard model has distinguished for
many centuries interesting and beautiful places (e.g. panoramas)
from ugly ones. As a consequence, urban planning and environmental national laws have often safeguarded only postcard places, leaving an insane property speculation free to destroy places that were
considered as ordinary or ugly. On the contrary, according to the
Convention: the landscape is an important part of the quality of
life for people everywhere: in urban areas and in the countryside,
in degraded areas as well as in areas of high quality (Preamble).
This is quite interesting for the analysis of globalized contemporary
landscape and, as I will explain, in the clariication between place
and non-places.
I want also to emphasize the aspect of landscape related to practices, and not just its symbolic and spiritual characteristics. I think
that practices are an important element which needs to be taken
into consideration. On the one hand it allows us to avoid the risk
of making place something metaphysical. On the other hand it enables the understanding of the connection between landscape and
territory. I argue that landscape can be considered as a territory of
practices (De Certeau, 1980), and I use the concept of territory as
a valid instrument for describing the complex nature of a landscape.
I quote De Certeau, not with regards to his controversial distinction between space and place, but in reference to the fact that the
concept of practice can entail the idea of an experienced landscape
(lived and composed of paths and continual reconstructions). By
speaking of practice, I point out the sensible characteristic of a
landscape and its evolution.
Thus the notion of landscape is composed by a wide range of elements, all entailing the relation between cultural and natural aspects. Therefore the term refers to a wide spectrum of concepts,
and, as I said before, since landscape is everywhere and it is not
merely a view, it can contain in itself the notions of place, space,
territory and milieu. We can consider all these terms as several
meanings of the concept: for this reason I will show later how the
term environment is a fundamental part of the landscape too and
how I absolutely reject the idea that the environment is simply a
name for a biologistic description of place according to the modernist approach.

3. Territorialisation and deterritorialization: a model

to understand globalized landscape
Contemporary landscape is a very problematic issue: one of the
reasons is clearly that it is globalized. As I showed elsewhere, a parallelism can be identiied between the space-place difference and
the opposition between place and non-place by the French anthropologist Marc Aug. Even though I consider it important to take
into consideration the distinction between places and non-places
in order to understand the aspects and the dynamics of contemporary globalization, I advocate that contemporary landscape can be
better described by using the concept of rhizome and by deining it
through a continual dialectic between deterritorialization and territorialisation acts.
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Deleuze introduces these terms in order to describe the processes

of creation and dismantling of a territory, as two movements of a
continuous dialectic characterizing the dwelling on the Earth. In
particular, as he stated, in Anti-Oedipus (1972), in the Post-Modern
world deterritorialization is related to madness and it implies the
disconnection of the sick body without organs of the schizophrenic from the nature of his own body and of the Earth. In the
same way Deleuze uses the word territorialities to describe the
neurotic (with his Oedipus territorialities). The schizoid, instead,
for him is someone who is continually wandering about, migrating
here, there, and everywhere as best he can, he plunges further and
further into the realm of deterritorialization, reaching the furthest
limits of the decomposition of the socius (Deleuze 1972, 35).
Thus schizophrenia becomes an interesting model to describe
contemporary migrants and deterritorialization (Buchanan 2005).
According to Deleuze ancient states and city states carry out a
deterritorialization by adapting the territory to a geometrical extensiveness; the imperial spatium of the State and the political extension of the City are deterritorializing principles of an originally
nomadic place, that once was connected with the Earth (Deleuze
1991, 85). But it is with capitalism and the despotic State that deterritorialization reaches its climax. For Deleuze modern societies
are characterized by continuous processes of deterritorialization:
what they deterritorialize with one hand, they reterritorialize with
the other. These neoterritorialities are often artiicial, residual, and
archaic. Thus every territory in history is subject to both these
activities.
The concepts of deterritorialization and re-territorialization can be
applied to the explanation of the dialectic between local and global
landscape: local is something connected with place, whichever its
extension, and with the creation of territory; global, on the other
hand, is connected with deterritorialization.
Nevertheless the issue is not so easy. I sustain that every culture
entails local (earth as a place) and global (earth as a globe) actions. Every culture is characterized by both deterritorializing and
reterritorializing movements. This kind of relation is never static,
sedentary, but implies a continuous movement in connection to
global luxes. However, it is also true that globalization itself is a
deterritorializing process because, as Deleuze points out, capitalism
applies extensive measurements to the Earth that, on the contrary,
needs intensive and qualitative modalities of approach. On the other hand, globalization does not just erase the differences and the
speciic characteristics of places (I think we have to consider also
the different historical phases of globalization, not just the last one,
dominated by the capitalism of trades). Rather, globalized world
means a continuous dialectic movement between local place and
global space.The poles of this dialectic are not in radical opposition,
but are complementary. Global becomes the relation and the connection between different places. According to Deleuzes theory,
in fact, territory is unpredictable in what concerns its shape (landscape) and the luxes that pass through it: especially in the Postmodern age there is neither temporal stability nor spatial ixity.We
cannot simply and nostalgically speak about a place whose qualities
are erased by globalization; on the contrary, the luxes that cross
a territory can now erase its qualities and conigure a new and
deeper kind of landscape. Whether this shape is in harmony with a
place (considered as historical, symbolical) or not, depends on the
complexity of elements that need to be analyzed. Hence, the crucial
point is to understand which kinds of deterritorializations and re-

Laura Menatti - A Rhizome of Landscapes

territorializations, which kinds of places and spaces have emerged
in the Post-modern age. Non-places are surely a distinctive aspect
of Post-modern deterritorialization, yet in this short paper I want
to point out that the simple dichotomies between place/non-place
and space/place as something contrastive are not enough to understand the contemporary landscape. Moreover, from the ethical
point of view, I suggest, they are not enough to take care of all kinds
of landscapes in the world. I argue that when a space is marked
as no-place/junk space or a similar deinition, an aesthetical and,
consequently an ethical (meaning by this the action of taking care)
judgment is implied. As I said above, landscape is everywhere, is
global and local, with each landscape entailing a speciic kind of
relationship with the human beings. The task of the philosopher is
to understand the relationship between people and contemporary
landscape, and to encourage the development of educational practices aimed at dwelling in a landscape, and feeling that landscape.

4. A Rhizome of landscapes
The rhizome (from the ancient Greek rizo-, root) is a biological
term that denotes the modiication of the underground stem of a
plant. If a rhizome is separated into pieces, each piece may give rise
to a new plant. In Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze, 1987) the concept
of rhizome is used to denote a network in which, unlike in the
tree-like organizations, any node can immediately connect with any
other node. Networks replace hierarchies, but it is too trivial to associate the rhizome with the net: rhizome also involves the idea of
process and it is aimed at explaining the relation between different
concepts, which are only apparently in opposition. In fact, the notion of rhizome can express the relation between global and local,
between space and place, as a conceptual model of the complexity
of spatial systems and of the new conigurations of globalized space.
Carl Gustav Jung used the metaphor of rhizome to speak about the
deep and invisible nature of life; Deleuze uses it to introduce a new
model of science, language and space (Deleuze, 1987, 21). Deleuzes
idea of space constitutes a pragmatics of the transit, of the dissemination of the sense (as Derrida would say) and it never closes the
igure of space, that is, it is never completely deined and enclosed.
Thus rhizome can be used to denote a processual network of landscapes. Applying this concept to the question of landscape has the
two following consequences: (1) inside the rhizome we have different processual landscapes. I call processual landscapes every mutual
relationship belonging and constituting a landscape and involving
the couple nature and culture, human being and environment, ecology and history of ideas; (2) the identities of landscapes are not
something ixed, pre-given, unchanging and decided a-priori, but
landscape is always in evolution. Thus I can assert that the contemporary coniguration of places implies a collection of rhizomatic
landscapes mutually deined. The rhizome is important because it
allows us to say that nowadays its still possible to speak about
identities of places, but at the same time we need to characterize
identity as something not static, and that cannot be reconstructed
merely through the concepts of heimat and genius loci (elements
which belong to places, that are distinguished for their beauty or
memory). In the Post-modern age, identity is something not clear,
changeable. Above all, it is built on the relationship between us and
the place, and between different places all over the world.
Furthermore, I suggest that rhizome is an open system: it involves
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the idea of a global space formed by multiple landscapes. Each landscape can be connected with others without necessarily following a
unique and ixed trajectory.The production of places and landscapes
happens according to different scales and relational modalities. The
rhizome is a source of diversity: from the cartographic point of
view it opens to ininite possibilities. The rhizome has never an end
but, rather, a milieu from which it grows and which it overspills. It
constitutes linear multiplicities with n dimensions having neither
subject nor object, which can be laid out on a plane of consistency,
and from which the one is always subtracted (Deleuze, 1987, p.
21). Thus the rhizome refers to the multiplicity of places, as well as
to the important concept of milieu: Deleuze, in fact, uses the latter
to denote the core of such a place-space, which is related to symbolic elements that are not always in evidence. I think that one of
the challenges of thinking about the identity of place is constituted
by elaborating a new concept of space made of a multiplicity of milieux.The concept of milieu is as crucial as the rhizome.The term is
used in contemporary geography to denote places, landscapes and
territories illed with cultural and social elements. We were not
born in a milieu, but we create a milieu by an elective and emotional
relationship. The concept of milieu allows us to go beyond the idea
of place as something original, sedentary, and given by birth. Without the need to recur to a deterministic approach, we can say that
the environment affords us to build a milieu. I think that the milieu
is the historical, memorial, and at the same time potential, core of a
landscape, according to a non-deterministic interpretative grammar
that focuses on the relation between culture and nature. For this
reason I think that the rhizomatic global space can be considered
as made of milieux, multiple contexts, which constitute different
places that we have to take care of.

5. Ecology of perception: the affordance

Such a complex topic as the notion of landscape requires an interdisciplinary approach. As a geophilosopher I study the genealogy
of concepts such as place, space, landscape, milieu and territory,
trying to embed them in the contemporary global horizon. Yet as
a researcher of cultural studies and history of ideas I could miss
an important point in analyzing the landscape: that is the ecological question connected to the term environment. The concept of
environment is often criticized for being used in a reductionist and
realist way to describe the physico-biological (objective) elements
of nature. The problem is that the environment also belongs to
landscape, and has a role in deining the latter, especially if we consider the environment from an ecological perspective.
Hence, I suggest using the bridge concept of affordance to connect the cultural study on landscape to the biological and ecological ones. Landscape is not only inhabited, but also perceived. Even
though landscape is often considered only a cultural issue, belonging to humanities, or at least to human geography, I argue, that the
study of landscape should comprehend also the ecology of perception (Gibson, 1979). In 1979 J. Gibson introduced the concept of
affordance, that is what the environment offers the animal, what it
provides or furnishes, either for good or ill [] I mean by it something that refers to both environment and the animal in a way that
no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal
and the environment (Gibson 1979, 127). The affordance is the
propriety of the natural environment, offered to the animal and the

Landscape and Imagination - Epistemology

human being. Two speciications are required: irst of all, affordance

is not a property, neither an a-priori, nor a universal measure. It is
something unique for every animal and it belongs to (and within)
the relationship between the environment and the perceiver. The
perceiver (a human being) is not a Cartesian subject (characterized by the hardware/software dichotomy): I suggest that natural
vision depends on the eyes in the head on a body supported by the
ground, the brain being only the central organ of a complete visual
system (Gibson 1979, p. 1).
Therefore a human being is someone emplaced in the place, in
the nature and in the landscape, and the affordances are revealed
as perceptional characteristics during the interaction between the
environment and the perceiver. The human being and landscape
(constituted by affordances) are in a mutual and dynamical relation:
as a consequence we need to introduce the concept of processual
landscape. Affordances does not imply a realistic approach to the
nature/culture problem, neither do they exist without interaction.
Hence the processual landscape is the product of the dialectic between the culture and the affordances of a place. This relationship
is neither realist, nor conceptually determined, but it is a process
in continuous evolution, happening in the interaction between environment (and the complexity of the affordances and invariants) and
the perceiver (a body in moving) in the place, who uses his nature
and culture to create a relationship/boundary with the environment.This relation is what I called processual landscape.What continuously results from this kind of ongoing process can be places,
spaces and landscapes.

6. Conclusion

ation the perceptive aspect of landscape: that is, introducing the

concept of affordance, belonging to ecological psychology, in order
to widen the range of study and to be able to deal with what nowadays is a higher and higher number of factors concurring to the
creation of a landscape. In conclusion, this paper is aimed at preventing the risk of a simplistic cultural determination of landscape,
but at the same time, preventing the risk of a realist approach to
the issue of landscape.
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Aug M, 1992. Non-lieux. Seuil, Paris. [Non-places. Introduction to anthropology of supermodernity.Verso, New York 1995].
Aug M, 1997. Limpossible voyage. Le tourisme et ses image. Payot &
Rivages, Paris.
Berque A, 1995. Les raisons du paysage : de la Chine antique aux environnements de synthse. ditions Hazan, Paris.
Buchanan I, Lambert G (ed.), 2005. Deleuze and space, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.
Dardel E, 1952. Lhomme et la Terre. Nature de la ralit gographique,
Presses Universitaire de France, Paris.
De Certeau M, 1980. LInvention du quotidien, Vol. 1, Arts de Faire. Union
gnrale dditions, Paris.
Deleuze G, Guattari F, 1972. Capitalisme et schizophrnie. LAnti-Oedipus.
Les ditions de Minuit, Paris. [Anti-oedipus. Capitalisme and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1983].
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Plateaux. Les ditions de Minuit, Paris. [A Thousand Plateaus. Athlone
Press, London 1987].
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de Minuit. [What is philosophy, Columbia University Press, New York
1994].

In this paper I tried to make a short genealogy of the concept of

landscape. The distinction between space and place, so important
for geophilosophy, anthropology and human geography has been
widened in relation to terms such as rhizome and processual landscape. The contemporary globalized world forces us (as an ethical
imperative) to take into consideration several kinds of landscapes
(e.g. the idea of the third landscape proposed by G. Clment). Furthermore I think that cultural studies should take into consider-

Gibson, J. J. 1979, The ecological approach to visual perception. Houghton

Miflin, Boston.
Menatti L, 2011, Disneyland Paris: From Non-place to Rhizomatic Place.
Environment, Space and Place, n. 3(2). ZetaBooks, pp. 22-50.
Menatti, L 2012, Which Identity for places? A geophilosophical approach.
Interculturalism, Meaning and Identity. Inter-Disciplinary Press, UK (in
press).

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