Landscapes

A landscape is not neutral, but rather something that we construct through our experience of it. And construct anew each time we experience it. A story within a space that is dynamic, over time. Landscapes are not simply expressions of physical geography: there can be a cultural landscape, a political one, a landscape of technology, and one of trust. All, at times, superimposed, or cohabiting, the same geography.

This is on my mind as I am thinking about the landscape of my work, which is, by it’s nature, exploratory. My method of exploration is not forensic (although it is research led): it does not provide a scaled representation, but rather a sketch map. It’s probably enough to show the relative locations of certain features of the Social Age, like ‘community’, ‘trust’, and ‘belonging’, but not a clear route map to move between them.

I mention this as I have had a feeling recently that I am superimposing a layer on top of what I have already documented: not adding greater detail, but rather a layer of context or interpretation.

I guess that contextual interpretation would be a feature of knowing a landscape over time (just as a map of your street may show the same houses over decades, but with a contextual layer that showed changing patterns of ownership and habitation.

This is not to relinquish the desire to explore: I still find myself at the boundaries (boundaries themselves being a feature of the new context I am exploring), as with the new Planetary Philosophy work. But it does perhaps represent a more detailed ‘knowing’ of the place. Almost as if I have a certain comfort or familiarity that permits me to move without navigating, without fear of getting lost, and hence to spot new landmarks of features as my eyes are no longer needing to stare at my feet so much.

There is risk in this of course: I would normally challenge that our own comfort and certainty are key features of our self delusion and failure. But without some certainty, some platform, we have nothing to stand upon at all.

The notion of landscapes, and my identity as ‘explorer’ formed a central part of my doctoral research, and hence perhaps why, as I come to the end of that journey, I find it leaching back out into my writing and work more broadly. Learning has a way of doing this, not simply changing what you know, but rather of changing the ‘you’ that does the knowing.

Metaphors of landscape, and of exploration, as well as a consideration of the social structures within which we explore, have always formed a backdrop to my work. It perhaps represents something of my thought process, which is that of the generalist or trans-disciplinary practitioner, or polymath, in that I probably hold a breadth of knowledge more so than a depth of it, but with the advantage that the breadth allows for a broader model of pattern recognition, or interconnection across boundaries.

And in a time of change, this may be a useful feature.

The Planetary work is proving a useful excuse to delve into some of this more deeply, and to situate my broader work in a new context: understanding that certain feature of our social context are desegregating, or unbundling, and that the landscape, at a tectonic level, is in motion.

#WorkingOutLoud on landscapes and knowing.