Depths and Folds: On Landscape and the Gazing Subject

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to take some steps towards a renewed understanding of landscape and the gazing subject. A first main section, ‘Depth, outlines Merleau-Ponty's final visual philosophy and its attempts to replace a spectatorial conception of vision with an embodied ontology that accords transcendance to the depth of the visual world. A second section, ‘fold’, engages with Deleuze's rendition of Leibniz's philosophy as a means of both critiquing and supplementing Merleau-Ponty's account. Through these analyses I seek to rewrite the visual gaze upon landscape by exploring the ontological processes (processes of depth, processes of folding) which afford its actualisation. I thus seek to produce an account of gazing as an eventful actualisation and distribution of selves and landscape, through attending to the depths and folds of an immanent plane, from which distinctive and durable selves and landscapes arise and with which they are always in relation. Here, landscape is not a way of seeing the world. Nor is it ‘something seen’, an external, inert surface. Rather, the term ‘landscape’ names the materialities and sensibilities with which we see.