Nature - autonomous learning

118 de-naturalisationof discussions across the political and moral spectrum. Thesedays, among left-wing analysts at least, it is routinely interchangedwith the terms ‘hegemony’ and ‘discourse’. I’ll say more aboutthese two terms in the next section of this chapter.Box 3.2 THE DE-NATURALISATION OF LANDSCAPEAround a decade after Harvey’s essay (1974), Denis Cosgrove putforward an arresting argument about one of nature’s collateralconcepts and one of geography’s main objects of analysis: namely,landscape. In Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (1984), heargued that landscapes are not simply physical environmentsexisting ‘out there’ for people to see, study, use or enjoy. Instead,he argued that landscape is a specific ‘way of seeing’ coincidentwith the emergence of capitalism in Europe from the sixteenthcentury onwards. When we think of the word ‘landscape’ we oftenthink of fields, water courses, trees, sky, fields and livestock arrayedbefore us. Cosgrove argued that we have, historically, learnt to seethe apparently objective facts of landscapes in a certain way. Fromthe period of the European Renaissance, capitalism began tosupplant previous modes of production, while the invention ofthree-dimensional perspective and new cartographic and surveyingtechniques permitted a new way of representing urban and ruralspaces that fast became ‘common sense’. Cosgrove showed hownewly wealthy urban merchants and industrialists purchasedestates in the countryside and began to commission paintings oftheir properties. These paintings typically contained little or nohuman presence, gave the viewer a detached all-seeing perspectiveon a ‘natural’ panorama, and appeared to be highly realistic.Cosgrove’s point was that the view of landscape here was bothconstructed and highly particular. For him, it not only reflected thelandowner’s desire to match his physical ownership with visualownership. It also deliberately made invisible the work of peasants