The body, the gaze and the theorist: remarks on a strategic distinction

Julia Lossau

Geographisches Institut, Universita ¨t Heidelberg While emotions have become a relevant, even fashionable topic in Anglo-American geography in recent years, German-speaking scholars are more reluctant to take on board the lessons of emotional and sensual perception. This reluctance became especially obvious in 2001, when the Germanspeaking realm witnessed an unusually fierce debate over the value of the aesthetic for the discipline's system of thought. While the protagonists of emotional and aesthetic thinking celebrated an increasing significance of the 'softer' and more bodily aspects of knowledge, the antagonists criticized what they regard as a return to the traditional paradigm of Landschaftsgeographie and its conservative ideology. While fully sympathetic to the critique of an allegedly aesthetic 'geomantic geography', this paper demonstrates that considering questions of aesthetics does not necessarily imply a revitalization of ancient paradigms, but can lead instead to a challenging of formerly taken-for-granted epistemological foundations. To achieve this goal, this paper summarizes the German debate, highlighting the antagonists' distinction between a cognitive and scientific realm, on the one hand, and an aesthetic, pre-scientific or everyday realm, on the other. The deconstruction of this distinction leads to a more complex notion of the relations between aesthetic and cognitive spheres, or between the body and the gaze. The acknowledgement of this complexity can, in turn, be regarded as a point of departure for ways of thinking between the body and the gaze. Broadening the perspective towards such an in-between point of view does not only reveal certain absences within the dominant approaches to German-speaking geography, but provides a critical appraisal of some lines of argument within the Anglo-American preoccupation with the emotions.

I n various disciplines emotions have long been a topic of research. Compared to the feelings, fears and phobias of everyday life, the emotions of researchers, particularly with regards to their objects of study, have been of much less interest. In geography, as in many other fields, these emotions have been hushed up and implicitly or explicitly regarded as obstacle e´piste´mologique -as a barrier to scientific insight. 1 In recent years, though, both the subjective nature of much research and the influence of emotions on the research process have been given more serious attention. Especially in the Anglo-American realm, the (researchers') emotions have become relevant, even fashionable, both methodologically and as an area for geographical research, figuring as a focal point in written statements and oral debate. [START_REF] Anderson | Editorial: emotional geographies[END_REF] Paying attention to 'the emotions as ways of knowing, being and doing in the broadest sense; and using this to take geographical knowledges . . . beyond their more usual visual, textual and linguistic domains', 3 the scholars concerned both criticize the traditional notion of the 'emotionless researcher' and express frustration 'with those aspects of cultural geography which seem (to some) to be esoteric, inward-looking and apparently oblivious to any real world'. 4 Compared to what can perhaps be represented as a recent 'emotional turn' within Anglo-American geography, German-speaking scholars are more reluctant to take on board the lessons of emotional and sensual perception. This reluctance became especially obvious in 2001, when the German-speaking realm witnessed an unusually fierce debate over the value of the aesthetic for the discipline's system of thought. Although the contents of this debate have been almost as complex as the aesthetic itself, it can be reduced, if only for heuristic reasons, to two main lines of argument represented by two prominent scholars: one proposing and one opposing 'aesthetic thinking' in geography. 5 The protagonist, Ju ¨rgen Hasse, regards an 'aesthetic rationality' as essential for any geographical reasoning in the present era. [START_REF] Hasse | A ¨sthetische Rationalita ¨t und Geographie. Sozialra ¨umliche Prozesse jenseits kognitivistischer Menschenbilder[END_REF] In his opinion, reality itself has fundamentally changed in postmodern times, showing more and more aesthetic qualities. As a consequence, he pleads for aesthetic instruments of apprehension, equating 'aesthetic' alternately with 'emotional', 'artistic' or 'sensual', and defining it 'as the other of reason and language'. [START_REF] Hasse | A ¨sthetische Rationalita ¨t[END_REF] Due to the substantial but blurred semantic dominion of the aesthetic in Hasse's writings, two figures can be introduced here. While that of the body will henceforth stand for the aesthetic, the gaze will serve as metaphor for the realm of reason. It can be assumed that Hasse would approve of these figures: the (feeling-)body stands at the heart of his emotional approach to geography, and the gaze is widely regarded as a symbol of reason. Hasse's aim, however, to renew geography on aesthetic grounds -the switchover to the body -is vehemently opposed by the antagonist, Gerhard Hard. According to Hard, Hasse's sensual approach, first, is characterized by a melancholic critique of progress and civilization and, secondly, reproduces the traditional geographical concept of 'space', epitomized in the holistically perceived Landschaft as the organic custodian of political, social and economic development. As such, Hasse's writings, for Hard, first and foremost represent 'a revitalization of some . . . aspects of the German Landschaftsgeographie of the 1920s and 1930s'. [START_REF] Hard | Hagia Chora''. Von einem neuerdings wieder erhobenen Ton in der Geographie[END_REF] At first sight, the opponent seems to provide a consistent and resounding critique. The 'aesthetic geography' proposed by Hasse can indeed be said to show both normative and methodological parallels to the traditional paradigm of Landschaftsgeographie. 9 While the critique of the 'new aesthetic geography' is hence both legitimate and necessary, closer consideration reveals some shortcomings in Hard's argument. The antagonist follows the stringent logic of a theory of science, one that replaced the paradigm of Landschaftsgeographie within German geography as late as the end of the 1960s. In accordance with this logic, which continues to inform the most powerful approaches within Germanspeaking geography, the antagonist has to discriminate strategically between a cognitive and scientific realm, on the one hand, and an aesthetic, pre-scientific or everyday realm, on the other. Put differently, along with a theoretical background that sharply discerns between the social and the material word, Hard cannot but reduce the relations between the gaze and the body to a strategic and exclusionary dichotomy of either/or. Against this background, the following paper is an attempt to expose the unavoidable interdependence between the supposed polarities. In accordance with feminist and postcolonial strategies of challenging ready-made opposites, its theoretical position is characterized by two premises. First, underlining the complex relations between the body and the gaze is aimed neither at dialectically reconciling the two sides of the demarcation line nor at dismissing the discursive 'properties' on either side of the divide. What is at issue, instead, is an attempt to work with the antagonism in order to show that it implies a 'false dichotomy': that the demarcation line can never be fixed but always remains subject of discursive definition and redefinition. Put differently, what is at issue is making use of the antagonism to render it both productive and progressive for its own deconstruction. Secondly, and as a consequence, working with the 'properties' of either side of the demarcation line is not intended to reduce the multiple meanings of the rational and the aesthetic to a predetermined and definite content. On the contrary, the semantic diversity of both terms will be highlighted and, thus, happily endured -rather than limited. 10 It is in this vein that the demarcation line between supposedly supreme scientific cognition and pre-scientific or everyday aesthetic perception will be deconstructed. In doing so, more 'circumspect' ways of coming to terms with the aesthetic will be presented, and the viewpoints of the two parties involved in the current debate will be confronted with another -an in-between -perspective. To achieve this goal, the paper consists of four steps. In the next section, I provide a discussion of the German debate, highlighting Hard's valuing distinction between a scientific realm on the one hand and an aesthetic realm on the other. The deconstruction of this distinction, undertaken in the third section, not only reveals its contingent character but leads to a more complex notion of the relations between cognitive and aesthetic discourses. Recognizing this complexity leads, in turn, to a perspective operating between body and gaze (section four). The relevance of this perspective -not only for the German-speaking context but also for the Anglo-American one where the emotions are now of considerable interestwill be sketched out in the conclusion.

Discussing the German debate

At first sight, discussion of the 'aesthetic debate' might seem of little importance. Arguments about the aesthetic dimension do not match the major paradigmatic debates, which mainly revolve around different theoretical approaches to space, place and region. 11 The dominant arguments are informed by social theories, most obvious perhaps in the popularity of Benno Werlen's 'social geography of everyday regionalizations', 12 sharply discerning the ontological modes of the material, the subjective and the social (as already sketched out by Popper). The related social-scientific approaches are, however, challenged from at least two sides. At the one and rather marginal side, a number of 'traditional' geographers, many of them physical geographers, still keep hold of the traditional 'one-worldism' which lacks the stringent distinction of a physical world on the one hand and a social or subjective world on the other. 13 On the other side, there is the rather recent import of cultural theories. By replacing the distinct worlds of social science (and, of course, the holistic 'one world' of the traditional

The body, the gaze and the theorist paradigm) with a paradigmatic multiplicity of innumerable and incommensurable world views, many scholars replace the traditional notion of objective truth with the concept of situated and partial knowledge. Notwithstanding the quantity of articles meanwhile published in this guise, though, the influence of the social-scientific viewpoint on the paradigmatic debates within German-speaking geography remains strong. 14 Compared to the discussions and developments at this broad level of debate, the 'aesthetic debate' indeed seems to be of an esoteric nature, addressing quaint topics of mere historical interest. Nonetheless, it has caused considerable turmoil in the German-speaking geographical community. Controversies over the initial intervention led to the installation of a discussion website, 15 and the journal Erdkunde devoted an issue to questions of aesthetics, nature and Landschaft, containing articles from both proponents and opponents of aesthetic thinking in geography. 16 In the light of these activities, one might ask whether a discussion of the 'aesthetic debate' is as dispensable as it might look at first glance.

What is the debate about?

One of the focal points of the debate is summarized in the title of one of the papers published in Erdkunde, Gerhard Hard's ' ''Hagia Chora'': on a newly arisen geomantic tone in geography'. 17 'Hagia Chora' provides a resounding critique of a joint paper by Reinhard Falter and Ju ¨rgen Hasse, 'Landscape photography and hermeneutics of nature: the aesthetics of nature in experience and depiction'. 18 The latter is beyond doubt an exceptional piece of work. According to Hard, the outlook of its first author, the philosopher and geomancer Falter, is characterized by revolutionary conservatism and anthroposophical spiritualism. 19 Hasse, in turn, is said to combine (a residuum of) Adorno's dark analyses [START_REF] Adorno | Aesthetic theory[END_REF] with Hermann Schmitz's phenomenology of the feelingbody. [START_REF] Schmitz | Neue Grundlagen der Erkenntnistheorie[END_REF] As the authors project these approaches onto the symbolic, emotional and spiritual meaning of (true) Landschaft, which, as a consequence, appears as 'Hagia Chora' -as 'sacred landscape' 22 -the paper conveys a sort of 'landscape racism', making out true and harmonious landscapes deemed superior to (supposedly) less true and harmonious ones: 23 It is absurd to ask whether these [the American] landscapes provide space for anything humane. Their impact is indestructible. As such, they provoke the aspiration of the European who has to tread carefully if he [sic] does not want to tread anything down. The European longs for wildness, mistaking it for crude incivility. However, one tends to forget that it is only in Europe or in contrastable landscapes (East Asia) that culture in the manner of a Mozart symphony or of a Chinese landscape picture could come into existence . . . . The American way of life [in contrast to the European or the Chinese way of life] corresponds . . . to landscapes where one cannot be at home; it derives from the fundamental incapacity still to understand at all what it means to be at home. [START_REF] Falter | Landschaftsfotografie und Naturhermeneutik[END_REF] Since such 'landscape racism' entails crude landscape determinism, it is unlikely that geographical journals will provide a further stage for joint papers by Falter and Hasse. [START_REF]It has to be noted, though, that the journal Erdkunde published another joint paper by Falter and Hasse and a rejoinder[END_REF] Likewise, the following remarks will focus less on Falter's nature-religiousness and more on Hasse's sensualism. This is not to say that Falter alone was to blame for the political implications of the paper while Hasse's work could be easily divorced from the landscape-racist tendency. It is merely to say that elsewhere Hasse focuses less on the sacred spirit of particular landscapes and their alleged healing forces. Characterized by a somewhat postmodern approach to the ambivalence of 'things' in an aestheticized reality, [START_REF]polaire] (Virilio), which freezes the poly-morphology of the world onto the surface of a screen (Baudrillard)[END_REF] these other writings more broadly reflect on sensual and bodily experiences of the environment. Nonetheless, the subtitle of Hard's 'Hagia Chora' -'on a newly arisen geomantic tone in geography' -can serve as a starting point.

The case that Hard makes is similar to the one made by Kant 200 years ago. Against 'a newly arisen noble tone in philosophy', Kant spoke out against the supposed truths of intuitive feelings regarded as somehow discharged from logical explication. [START_REF] Kant | Von einem neuerdings erhobenen vornehmen Ton in der Philosophie[END_REF] Like Kant, who stated that 'the philosopher of the vision' could not be tolerated by 'the police in the realm of science', 28 Hard, among other things, criticizes the intuitionism expressed in Hasse's writings. Indeed, it can be argued that the aesthetic thinking of the latter heavily draws upon intuitive and sensuous (self-)knowledge. Hasse believes himself to exist in 'medial' and 'fictionalized spaces' full of decay, 'false illusiveness' and 'ubiquitous illusion', [START_REF] Hasse | 30 As such, these 'awakenings' perhaps remind readers of the resisting potential of the sublime as formulated by Adorno. 31 See Hard[END_REF] from which only experiences of the feeling-body -including abruptly 'awakening', 'blitz-' or 'shock-like' moments of potential reconcilementcan provide relief. Theoretically, these sudden 'awakenings' are thought to provide a way of transcending the fictions of the estranged here and now towards the utopia of a better life. 30 Practically, however, this utopia can never be realized, since all of its concrete features necessarily run the risk of being complicit with the very illusive fiction they are deemed to transcend. 31 Hasse can thus be regarded (and seems to regard himself) as a 'melancholic', suffering from the ubiquitous systemic colonization of the allegedly decaying and alienating spaces of social life, 32 and as a scholar whose aesthetic approach resembles the intuition (Anschauung) of the holistic methodology of the traditional geographical paradigm. Besides this methodological similarity, his 'aesthetic geography' echoes some normative characteristics of Landschaftsgeographie. For Hasse, as well as for the traditional geographers of Landschaft, contemporary society is characterized by fragmentation, a triumphal but destructive procession of technology, and a loss of balance and harmony. Against the lost unity of landscape and human life, (internal) nature is set as the overarching positive other, the lessons for which humankind has to show more serious consideration if it does not want to perish. 33 Like a hundred years before, it is suggested that only aesthetic thinking can lead the way to an appropriate perception of reality, because only aesthetic thinking is able to discern the spectacular (post)modern illusiveness from a mysteriously occluded ideal reality. [START_REF] Gelinsky | A ¨sthetik in der traditionellen Landschaftsgeographie[END_REF]

Remarks on the antagonist's line of argument

Against such a background, Hard's echo of Kant's 'call for the police' is legitimate, even joyous at first sight. Yet, despite its legitimacy and adequacy, Hard's critique can itself be criticized. In order to formulate his critique, Hard has to discriminate strategically between two self-contained entities: a scientifically productive realm, associated with objectification and rational cognition; and a pre-scientific or everyday realm, considered as the cradle of subjective and aesthetic irrationality. This is not to say that Hard

The body, the gaze and the theorist was not aware of the subjective nature of much research and the influence of emotions on the research process. On the contrary, scientific work, for him, is always accompanied by 'reveries and imaginative encounters', [START_REF] Hard | Geographische Zuga ¨nge zur Alltagsa ¨sthetik[END_REF] aesthetic experiences and perceptions of the object of study. In a paper published in 1995, for instance, he sketches out possibilities for setting 'the two modes of experience in a more fertile, more subtle and sophisticated, relationship [than had been the case in Landschaftsgeographie]'. [START_REF] Hard | Szientifische und a ¨sthetische Erfahrung in der Geographie. Die verborgene A ¨sthetik einer Wissenschaft[END_REF] And in 'Hagia Chora' he submits that 'the unconscious always participates in the research process; from its very beginning, analysis is stimulated by emotions (particularly positive ones). The emotional and libidinal appropriations of the object might alter as the research process unfolds, but in general they do not weaken but strengthen.' 37 Somewhat surprisingly, though, he seems to regard these appropriations as strictly separated from the cognitive process of gaining 'real knowledge', arguing that aesthetic experience of the scientific object mainly functions as an obstacle e´piste´mologique. 38 In order to try and formulate an explanation for Hard's contradictory stance, I turn to the specific logic already mentioned: the logic that gained currency at the end of the long-winded and highly controversial process of geographical 'scientification', when the idiographic, holistic and essentialist paradigm of Landschaftsgeographie was finally replaced with more stringent, social-scientific methodologies. According to this logic, modern sciences tend to construct their objects of study 'beyond a rupture e´piste´mologique', separating the taken-for-granted world of the everyday from the analytic and reflexive world of rational science. [START_REF] Hard | A ¨sthetische Dimensionen in der wissenschaftlichen Erfahrung[END_REF] The object of Landschaftsgeographie, in contrast, is said to stem from the aesthetic realm of the former, i.e. the pre-scientific world. Landschaftsgeographie, it is argued, therefore, represented a prototype -if not the exceptional example -of a modern science that combined scientific and aesthetic experience, because both scientific and aesthetic experience coincided in the study of the object -the Landschaft. When geography finally began to transgress its rupture e´piste´mologique at the end of the 1960s, however, landscape was gradually replaced by scientific concepts (space, place and region). As a consequence, aesthetic 'entry' into the objects of study became much more difficult.

From the social-scientific point of view, many contemporary geographers are likely to compensate for the resulting lack of aesthetic experience and fulfilment by re-mystifying their objects, promoting geography as a 'hermeneutics of nature', 'social natural science' or 'ecological aesthetics of nature'. 40 The resulting outlook of a 'romantic science' 41 is condemned predominantly by those scholars whose intellectual biographies are, in one way or another, linked to the defeat of Landschaftsgeographie at the end of the 1960s. For them, the switch-over to the body, as suggested by Hasse, necessarily represents not a renewal of but a regression in geography, which has to be contested if essentialist perceptions -and essentialist concepts -of landscape are to be foreclosed. In this vein, Hard admits that if his writings were motivated by one single concern, this would be the saving of 'the phenomenon of landscape from dull reifications in the manner of certain landscape geographers'. 42 While this might seem strange, from an Anglo-American perspective, endeavours to contest essentialist and reifying concepts of space and place cannot be underrated in German-speaking geography. 43 It can be argued, therefore, that this is why Hard, while allowing the aesthetic dimension a positive role as a stimulus to inquiry, cannot but dismiss the aesthetic dimension as irrelevant and misleading when it comes to the actual realization of scientific research. In other words, it is because of this concern to avoid essentializing accounts of landscape that Hard cannot but regard truth as a matter of the logos and not of aesthetic perception. As a consequence, he (re)produces a specific technique of power in which the theorist draws a distinction, usurps the positive side of that distinction, and who then by design becomes the master of both sides. Criticized by postcolonial and feminist scholars, this strategy has been described as l'englobement du contraire ('the embracing of the contrary'). 44 Like the moralist who takes the very distinction between good and bad for good, or the jurist who has no doubt that courts do right when they tell right from wrong, the social scientist knows that (s)he is right in discerning a realm of scientific truth from another one of mere aesthetic 'wisdom':

Real knowledge always presupposes a radical break with . . . inward-fantasies-in-the-outward-world, these attractive and intimate worlds of images and symbols that always have already occupied the realm of the scientific object. There is no real knowledge until the 'rupture e ´piste ´mologique' has been transcended. 45

Deconstructing the dichotomy

The evaluative distinction standing at the heart of Hard's critique can be traced back to Greek philosophy. Plato, polemically banishing the poets from his ideal state in the 10th book of the Republic, conceptualized the perceptions of the senses as inferior to rational (philosophical) reasoning. This position was, albeit in the very different philosophical and historical context of the seventeenth century, reproduced through the writings of Descartes, who codified the Enlightenment with a specific sense of scientific rationality. Despite the fact that Cartesian philosophy has not gone unchallenged over the centuries since, the belief in a realm of scientific rationality supposedly superior to the sensuous, fictional and 'irrational' realm of the senses has become a taken-for-granted truth in many quarters.

Yet, the distinction between two separate realms represented a false dichotomy from its very beginning. It can be argued that Plato 'invented' the empire of true philosophical reasoning as the positive mirror image of poetry and art, which he blamed for offering nothing but fiction and illusion. Put differently, he required the existence of an inferior realm as a negative to 'invent' the positive sphere of philosophical truth. More adequately, therefore, the two realms should be regarded as 'imagined entities' requiring the existence of each other to come into existence themselves. The distinction between inferior sensual perception and superior scientific cognition did not 'fall from heaven'; it cannot be found in the 'objects as such', but only in the languages and imaginations of those who interpret, categorize and valorize (the objects of) the world by means of it. Involving 'aesthetics' is not meant to name a definite sphere, but to make a distinction: the distinction between 'aesthetic' and 'scientific reason'. The only truth that we can claim about this distinction is that it is 'true' neither out of reach of those who drew it nor before it was drawn. It represents a matter of context -of culture, of practice or of interest -but it 'is' not per se. Therefore, the scientific and the aesthetic should

The body, the gaze and the theorist be conceptualized as both interdependent and internally different spaces, not as selfcontained, homogeneous entities.

These 'purely' epistemological remarks can be further underlined empirically. 46 This 'empirical deconstruction' of the demarcation line between the two realms will be undertaken by 'interviewing' -or, rather, interpreting -'eyewitnesses' from either side of the divide. These interviews will highlight the permanent displacements to which the boundary between the realm of the body and the realm of the gaze was, and continues to be, exposed.

In the realm of the gaze

Given these deconstructionist intentions, it might seem strange to write about -and, thereby, to discern -a realm of the gaze. However, the strategy of this paper is to work with the body=gaze dichotomy in order to make it productive. Rather than representing a signifier for the pre-discursive existence of an essential realm of the gaze, the distinction hence serves as a device on the way to 'empirical deconstruction'. The ambivalence of this strategy is somehow prefigured by the term 'gaze' itself, denoting both conceptual ocularcentrism and one of the senses.

Accordingly, the first eyewitness to be interviewed did not write solely about the gaze. On the contrary, he disapproved of the ideal of Cartesian science and annexed the concrete, the particular and the individual to philosophy, thus upgrading the supposedly inferior capability of the senses. It was Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten who, in his 'Aesthetica' (1750), qualified conceptual truth as poor, abstract and unable to embrace reality. 47 Against the program of 'exact science' and conceptual thought, he introduced the aesthetic to enhance perception by systematic training of the 'inferior' senses -a project which, as Eagleton argues, had a stimulating impact on the philosophical Zeitgeist of the eighteenth century:

It is as though philosophy suddenly wakes up to the fact that there is a dense, swarming territory beyond its own mental enclave which threatens to fall utterly outside its sway. That territory is nothing less than the whole of our sensate life together -the business of affections and aversions, of how the world strikes the body on its sensory surfaces, of that which takes root in the gaze and the guts and all that arises from our most banal, biological insertion into the world. The aesthetic concerns this most gross and palpable dimension of the human, which post-Cartesian philosophy, in some curious lapse of attention, has somehow managed to overlook. 48 Parallel to its emphasis on the 'dimension of the human' -the subjective, the individual, the sensual and the emotive -Baumgarten's aesthetic also claimed cognitive grounds. Defined as the science of how an object was to be perceived sensually, it was thought of as a complement to traditional philosophical apprehension of the world. 'True' cognition, in this approach, was conceptualized as a combination of aesthetic perception and logical cognition.

Philosophy's claim to the body, i.e. the aesthetic dimension within cognitive discourses, became even stronger in the aftermath of Baumgarten's intervention. According to the 'oldest systematic programme of German idealism', 49 the true and the good are united only in the beautiful. The 'highest act of reason' was stated to be an 'aesthetic act', and the 'philosophy of the mind' (Geist) was regarded as 'aesthetic philosophy'. 50 The new hegemony of the aesthetic was repeated, for instance, in the philosophies of art of both Hegel and Schelling, where the dynamic of the beautiful resulted from its very capability to reconcile the true and the good. 51 The fact that both Hegel and Schelling not only 'domesticated' the arts for philosophical purposes but paradoxically discredited sensual perception 52 does not undermine the argument that the demarcation line between the two realms was shifted far into the realm of the gaze; it points to the internal differences of the various discourses in the realm of the gaze.

These differences, in turn, highlight the impracticality of subsuming the manifold discourses in the realm of the gaze under the umbrella of one overarching definition. What unifies the discourses specified above, though, is their embracement of aesthetic perception. According to these discourses, the true cannot unfold without the beautiful, and neither without the good. The involvement of the latter is revealed, for instance, in the 'Critique of the power of judgement'. 53 Despite being regarded -paradoxically or not -as the foundation of aesthetic autonomy, 54 the teleological impetus and the moral imperative of Kant's philosophy can be easily revealed. 55 Many philosophical discourses, it can be summarized, are imbued with aesthetic implications -as well as with moral ones.

In the realm of the body

After having explored the lack of essence in the realm of the gaze, the reverse will now be done for the body. As in the previous subsection, the act of reinforcing the empirical existence of such an entity merely serves as a strategic move to highlight the contingent nature of the body=gaze distinction and, thus, of the realm of the body itself. In contrast to the previous subsection, however, the eyewitnesses are no old philosophers but young artists who have recently been interviewed for a research project dealing with politically and socially committed practices of public art as a possible means to revitalize urban landscapes. 56 Above and beyond its applied aspects in the context of urban planning, this project also focused on the degree to which artists still work according to the traditional divide that represents the art world as the province of fiction and illusion, providing 'loopholes' of emotional escapism and relief from the hard facts of everyday life.

When I asked the artists about how they perceived themselves and their work, all distanced themselves from the romantic preconception of the artist as the special curator of feelings and emotions. For instance, Glasgow-based sculptor Kenny Hunter stated that there is a perceived notion of the artist being . . . romantic, being individualistic. Artists are seen as flighty and mad; that is still a very old, a romantic perception of the artist. Whereas to some degree, actually, people like myself who work in the public field, probably know more or are exposed to more of the world. Through my work, I had to . . . communicate with people from different areas. So, to some degree, the artist is open and should be open to different view points and life styles, which kind of works against . . . the stereotypes.

Moreover, many of them underlined the importance of research for their work, thus suggesting a decisive closeness to academia. According to Glasgow-based artist Graham Fagen, the research

The body, the gaze and the theorist takes a long period time, sometimes years . . . . And maybe for a scientist, it's the same. Surely, you have an aim or a goal or a subject area, you spend a very long time researching, and then, once you know what you can do with it, you can very quickly publish results. But to publish the results is a relatively short and quick thing, but it's at the end of a period of research. And I think that's what I do.

So, are the preconceptions of the sensitive, inward-looking artist all wrong? Where is the place of emotions in the art world? Kenny Hunter replied that there is an artist called Anselm Kiefer, and he said that, in order to make art, you needed three things, feeling, thought and will. And first you must start with a feeling. And then the thought process is to judge whether that feeling is, you know, important enough . . . or, does it connect with your subject? . . . You're gonna have to think about that feeling. And then you need the will to make it happen, to make it physical.

If one needs both feeling -embodied passion -and thought -disembodied rationality -then the question is how they are mediated in the process of doing art. How do they work together? Graham Fagen asserts that there are lots of artists who work out with the matter of fact. Work made with that kind of thinking can be very dry, . . . and obviously very matter-of-fact. And maybe work that is more about emotion, on the other extreme, can be. . .ridiculous [laughs], because it's not checked, it's not thought about in a way that other people might be able to communicate with. And I guess, like any of these sorts of opposites, the best thing you can go for is that both things work together and that you find a bit . . . half of one and half of the other to make a decision.

These are only a few examples, but they indicate how it can be argued that any preconception of the art world being the special curator of emotions is as inadequate as the image of science as the custodian of 'emotionless' rational cognition. This claim returns us to the assumption that the body's realm is dependent on the existence of a realm of the gaze, and that the realm of the gaze, in turn, has always been subjected to sensual temptations. This conclusion is supported by Plato's biography. Plato, who downgraded the perception of the senses and wanted to expel the poets from the ideal state, was not as clear about assessing the value of the body and the gaze as is often thought. 57 He himself had to be persuaded by Socrates to become a philosopher (and not a poet), and at the end of the polemic in Republic, he confesses that he articulated his polemics as a spell to prevent himself from falling again for his old passion: poetry.

Between body and gaze

What are the consequences of -and what are the lessons to be learned from -these deconstructionist endeavors for the current discussion within and, of course, outside of German-speaking geography? What are the possible ways of dealing with the aesthetic in the light of this deconstruction? The search for an answer to these questions, which will be given in the conclusion of this paper, can begin with a detour into their opposite: how should the aesthetic not be conceptualized? The shortest answer to this question is perhaps: 'As in the case of the new aesthetic approach to German-speaking geography'. Taking into account the antagonist's reinforcement of the traditional predominance of cognitive and scientific rationality, Hasse's approach might seem congenial because it takes the side of the oppressed. However, it cannot stand as an option after the supposed dichotomy between the gaze and the body has been deconstructed. Apart from the fact, of course, that it now has become difficult to renew geography on aesthetic grounds, in that such a project would re-establish the dichotomy between the two realms, there are two principal reasons why this is the case. In order to explicate them, I will examine the work of the philosopher Wolfgang Welsch, himself one of the main protagonists of an alleged 'aesthetic movement' -the so-called 'aesthetic turn' 58 -and a strong influence on the writings of Hasse.

First, Welsch regards the present as being essentially aesthetic. In the 'general process of the aestheticization of reality', he witnesses an 'aestheticization on the surface' as well as an 'in-depth aestheticization'. 59 While the former refers, among other things, to the 'face-lifting' of our cities or the hedonistic and spectacular relish of our culture, the latter 'concerns basic structures of our reality as such: of our material reality as a consequence of new technologies, of our social reality due to its medial intermediated-ness, and of our subjective reality due to the replacement of moral standards with self-stylization'. 60 What is problematic with this analysis is that the author projects his assumptions onto the world, where he finds them necessarily validated. 61 Put differently, the problem is that the author mistakes his observations, assumptions and imaginations of the reality for reality. 62 In so doing, Welsch reproduces the paradoxical logic of visibility, in which a particular order of things is made visible and naturalized because it is seen in the way it is seen. [START_REF]For a more detailed description of this paradox of visibility, see A. Nassehi, 'Die Paradoxie der Sichtbarkeit. Fu ¨r eine epistemologische Verunsicherung der (Kultur-)Soziologie[END_REF] After the previous section, one is, moreover, tempted to ask what such an essentially aestheticized reality might actually look like -or, more precisely, what might allow us to discern an aestheticized reality from its rational, cognitive or non-aesthetic antecedent.

The second reason to question the 'aesthetic turn' is even more acute. On the basis of the postulated 'ontological' or 'empirical aestheticization', Welsch testifies to, and indeed demands, a subsequent aestheticization of thinking, an 'epistemological aestheticization'. If reality becomes more and more aesthetic, so it is argued, then philosophical exploration and investigation have to draw upon aesthetic categories. As a consequence, we are invited to develop the epistemological aestheticization as it is said to have already materialized in the writings of Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, Vattimo, Cacciari and, in the German-speaking context, Kamper and Sloterdijk. [START_REF] Welsch | A ¨sthetisches Denken. 65 In becoming the new prima philosophia, however, the 'non-foundationalist' nature of the aesthetic is[END_REF] The aesthetic is regarded as the new prima philosophia or 'first philosophy' which is said to encompass both moral and logical dimensions. 65 The problem is that the scholar, who, like Welsch, postulates an empirical aestheticization and demands, as a consequence, an epistemological aestheticization does not only involve a dubious causality, [START_REF]Most poignantly, this causality has been criticized by Martin Seel, who argued that, if we were to follow this logic, our research would become more and more xenophobic, (only) because reality is becoming more and more xenophobic. See M. Seel, 'Wider das a ¨sthetische Denken[END_REF] but reproduces the same effect as the scholar who postulates the dominance of cognitive or scientific rationality. Nonetheless, there is still a key difference, in that, whereas the latter regards the truth as the property of rational reason, the former regards the truth as the property of the aesthetic: What is crucial . . . is that the aesthetic pertains to . . . the basic dimensions, precisely the fundaments. 'Rationality', in contrast -the second essential moment concerning truth -is the decisive factor only with regards to resulting processes on the basis of strictly aesthetic foundations. 67 The idea of truth independent from position and context, however, has been abandoned by various theorists. Whether it be for Foucault how knowledge is linked to power, or for Derrida how nothing exists outside differential references, or for Rorty how discourse represents not a reflection of but an intervention in the world [START_REF] Derrida | Diffe ´rance[END_REF] : in their writings, there is no truth conceivable which is not partial and not somehow dependent upon the perspective of the actual speaking position. Likewise, for many postcolonial or feminist scholars, postulating objective truth on the basis of either the cognitive or the aesthetic equates to a theological operation, because reality is then observed from the perspective of nowhere. In this vein, Donna Haraway criticizes the 'god trick of seeing everything from nowhere'; [START_REF] Haraway | Situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of the partial perspective[END_REF] the god trick of the gaze that 'makes the unmarked category claim the power to see and not to be seen, to represent while escaping representation'. 70 Writings such as Haraway's -writings that take into account the significance of partial and preliminary thinking -can be regarded as writings between body and gaze. The reason for this is not so much that they deal with aesthetic phenomena or that, due to their aesthetic qualities, they can be consumed like art, as argued by Welsch. [START_REF]This is actually why (some of ) the scholars which I read as authors between body and gaze, are represented as 'aesthetic thinkers[END_REF] Rather, it is because they break with logocentrism, anthropocentrism, monosemy and the primacy of the gaze -the traits of rational reason -without falling for the supposed truth of aesthetic perception or aesthetic thinking.

Conclusion

What can be learned, against such a background, from the deconstructionist endeavours according to which there is no such thing as cognition without the body and no such thing as sensation without the gaze? If the empirical existence of a 'superior', objective and scientific realm, on the one hand, and an 'inferior', subjective and aesthetic realm, on the other, merely represents the outcome of a discursive distinction, and did not exist until that distinction, for whatever reasons and in whatever context, was made, then the rationale of 'either rational or emotional' should be replaced with an in-between perspective. Post-structuralist writings that are aware of the situated and contingent nature of knowledge, it has been argued, can be conceptualized as such writings between the body and the gaze, breaking with the traits of rational reason without falling for the supposed truth of an 'aesthetic rationality'. Such writings can offer alternative ways of dealing with the supposed dichotomy between the body and the gaze -both within German-speaking geography and beyond.

In the German context, what is in order is a dual strategy that, first and foremost, criticizes the supposed supremacy of scientific cognition as it is conveyed by the antagonist of aesthetic thinking in geography, but also critiques a simple replacement of scientific cognition by aesthetic thinking, since such a move would reinstate the dichotomous notion of two separate realms. Questioning the gaze's supremacy should lead instead to a challenging of the theorists' reclamation of truth either in the name of scientific rationality or in the name of the aesthetic. The impetus is that we not only carefully analyse our own positionality (our 'situatedness in time and space'), but acknowledge what Pierre Bourdieu termed 'a much more fundamental and pernicious alteration': 72 our own involvement in the 'invention' of our objects, which, in turn, is linked to particular theoretical and practical interests at particular times and in particular places.

This impetus also has consequences for some lines of argument within the current Anglo-American preoccupation with the emotions. Taking into account the interrelatedness of the body and the gaze, I am uneasy about the recent attempts to strengthen the subjective or the emotional in geography, especially when they are combined with calls for 'non-constructivist approaches -approaches associated with being and doing, with ways of knowing that depend on direct experience . . . more so than reflection, abstraction, translation and representation'. 73 Such calls can be problematic for three interrelated reasons. First, they can lead to a -willing or unwilling -restitution of the traditional dichotomy between the body and the gaze. Secondly, they run the risk of simply exchanging the gaze's supremacy with a superior body -a risk that is even higher when these calls suggest the possibility of 'coming closer to truth' by 'the disclosure of things subterranean'. 74 Thirdly, although my unease does not derive from the social-scientific logic for which the emotions represent a barrier to real knowledge (but rather from the insight that there is no 'real knowledge' at all), it seems to me that 'non-constructionist' or 'non-representational' approaches to the social world can, as in the case of the German-speaking context, prepare the ground for a return to the reifying logic of traditional geographical world-views. These world-views have been overcome, and should not be introduced again to a discipline talking about a 'policy turn' and trying to give 'the concept of [social and political] relevance a new lease of life'. [START_REF]For the recent debate on (political) relevance, see e.g. N. Castree, 'Border geography[END_REF] Against this background, it finally becomes obvious that a discussion of the 'aesthetic debate' within German-speaking geography is not as dispensable as it might look at first. Far from debating quaint topics of mere historical interest, the lessons learned from the deconstruction of the body/gaze dichotomy can indeed be valuable with regards to the paradigmatic level of debate. It is perhaps vis-a `-vis an increased popularity of poststructuralist -or in-between -approaches within German-speaking geography that Gerhard Hard self-critically asks whether his pronounced reference to social theory is still relevant in the face of contemporary trans-disciplinary discourses, where the differences between philosophical, anthropological and social-scientific approaches are blurred and dissolve into the broader discourse of the humanities. [START_REF] Hard | Raumfragen[END_REF] Answering this question is difficult: there are good reasons for insisting on the stringent epistemology of social theory that forecloses reifications of space by rigorously differentiating between the ontological modes of the material, the subjective and the social world. Certainly, taking into account the deterministic logic of the traditional, holistic worldview, either still unchallenged or (potentially) revitalized by the protagonists of aesthetic or emotional approaches to the geographies of contemporary life, it is surely not the worst strategy. Nonetheless, it seems to be somewhat outdated.

drafts. Thanks also to the Chair of Social Geography at the University of Jena, where an earlier version of this paper was presented in June 2002. All viewpoints expressed in this paper are the sole responsibility of the author.

Notes

Landschaftsgeographie, landscapes were conceptualized as individual and unique parts of the earth's surface. The key interest behind their examination was an assessment of the relationship between the socially and culturally formed 'levels' of a given landscape (Kulturlandschaft), on the one hand, and the purely natural 'levels' (Naturlandschaft), on the other. According to the scientific Zeitgeist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, natural factors were regarded as the determinants of political, social and economic development. Nature even gained normative power, in that the natural gestalt of a Landschaft was regarded as giving directions to its people (Volk). Methodologically, the landscapes under scrutiny were both scientifically examined (as products of causal interrelations) and aesthetically perceived (as internally harmonious and unique organisms). For a detailed account of the traditional approaches within German-speaking geography, see H.-D. Schultz, Die deutschsprachige Geographie von 1800 bis 1970. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte ihrer Methodologie (Berlin, Geographisches Institut, 1980). 10 There is a certain danger of romanticizing the theoretical position at work in this paper -a danger which is even more substantial in the face of the associations of the word 'happy'. It should hence be underlined that the aim of 'happily enduring diversity' explicitly tries to avoid conceptualizing heterogeneity as a romantic vision to be longed for. What is avoided, likewise, is the similarly inappropriate conception of diversity as a looming programme stimulating melancholic thoughts of a lost identity. In contrast to romance or melancholy, this paper regards (internal) differences as mere 'facts' that provide, as Edward Said notes with regards to the postcolonial critique, an appropriate starting point of the 'real' work; see E. Said, 'The politics of knowledge', Raritan 11 (1991), pp. 17-31. 13 By 'disregarding' the distinction between the material, the subjective and the social world, the scholars concerned continue to project phenomena of the subjective and the symbolic worlds onto physical locations, and thereby reify these phenomena. Against this move, the socialscientific logic insists on replacing the notion of (material) spatial structures and 'spatial containers' with strictly social concepts of space, focusing on how the latter is constructed and dealt with as a means of representation. 14 See e.g. the review essays of Werlen's geography compiled in P. Meusburger, ed., Handlungsorientierte Sozialgeographie. 15 See http:==www.geographische-revue.de=index2.htm 16 Erdkunde 55 (2001). 17

cultural geographies 2005 12: 59- 76 #

 76 Edward Arnold (Publishers) Ltd 2005 10.1191/1474474005eu314oa

  11 See the contributions to a special session at the Deutscher Geographentag 1999 (German Meeting of Geographers 1999), 'Paradigms of human geography in the 21st century: a theoretical discourse', published in H. H. Blotevogel, J. Oßenbru ¨gge and G. Wood, eds., Lokal verankert -weltweit vernetzt. Tagungsbericht und wissenschaftliche Abhandlungen (Stuttgart, Steiner, 2000), pp. 461-505; W. Sahr, 'Der Ort der Regionalisierung im geographischen Diskurs. Periphere Fragen und Anmerkungen zu einem zentralen Thema', in P. Meusburger, ed., Handlungsorientierte Sozialgeographie. Benno Werlens Entwurf in kritischer Diskussion (Stuttgart, Steiner, 1999), pp. 43-66. 12 B. Werlen, Sozialgeographie allta ¨glicher Regionalisierungen, vol. I: Zur Ontologie von Gesellschaft und Raum (Stuttgart, Steiner, 1995); B. Werlen, Sozialgeographie allta ¨glicher Regionalisierungen, vol. II: Globalisierung, Region und Regionalisierung (Stuttgart, Steiner, 1997).

  Hard, '''Hagia Chora'''. 18 R. Falter and J. Hasse, 'Landschaftsfotografie und Naturhermeneutik. Zur A ¨sthetik erlebter und dargestellter Natur', Erdkunde 55 (2001), pp. 121-37.

Acknowledgements

This paper was supported through a European Commission Marie Curie Fellowship. I would like to thank Gerhard Hard, Tilmann Mu ¨ller, Chris Philo, Ulf Strohmayer, Don Mitchell and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments on previous

The body, the gaze and the theorist


come

cultural geographies in practice

Linked: a landmark in sound, a public walk of art

Toby Butler

Royal Holloway, University of London=Museum of London

Graeme Miller

Artist and composer I n 2003 a new permanent public art installation, Linked, by Graeme Miller, was estab- lished along a four-mile motorway in East London. 1 This is a discussion of Linked by Toby Butler, followed by Graeme Miller's account of his work in their conversation about the project.

I am getting off the tube at Leyton. It is nearly four o'clock on a cold autumn day. Soon the narrow platform will be filling with schoolchildren. I hurry up the steps to the exit. I put the battery that I took out of the smoke alarm this morning into the tiny radio receiver. I put the spongy headphones on. No sound, but the sponge helps warm up my ears. I walk through the ticket office, and out on to the street. Mostly I can see traffic -cars, buses, taxis. I take a few steps along the pavement. Suddenly I hear music, a voice in my head. I am startled -of course, the headphones. They are working already! A violin is softly playing two notes repetitively. A male voice is talking about a plan for a supermarket -he says it will obliterate the local economy. He says his house will be made into a motorway. I am looking down on an enormous Asda. It looks like it has just opened. I realise I am standing on a big road bridge. It passes over the Central line and a busy motorway. The traffic is barely moving on one side of the carriageway.

I walk back to the tube station, which is on the highest point of the bridge, to get better reception. The violin is still playing, and a brass hand bell rings occasionally, gentle, powerful music. A Cockney voice asks: 'Where's London? Where's London?' He goes on to say: 'The only time my dad ever got somewhat emotional was when he thought of the war. And he was a fire warden. He went and stood on the bridge at Leyton tube station. And the whole of London was on fire.' I look over to the tower blocks and sky scrapers on the horizon. It is a view of London I haven't seen before. The sun is ready to start its descent behind the city. The voice says: 'And it was burning from stem to stern. And you could smell the burning flesh. And you could feel the heat.' I start to feel slightly choked up. A strange wave of emotion passes through my body. '''Where's London? Where's London?'' These people were from Blackpool and then the fire engine had come down from Glasgow. And this bloke said to him, ''Where is London mate?'' And my dad said to him, ''There it is mate. There it is mate''. I look. There it is.'

The voice continues: 'We are finished. No, we are not finished. We are not finished. And my dad said no. They can bomb us, they can burn us, but they will never break us. And that was my dad's attitude. And my mum's attitude. My old mum said they will never break us. No. We will pick ourselves up and sort ourselves out. Victorian terrace houses that survived the Blitz. They were flattened slowly by earthmovers, cherry-pickers, bulldozers. The homes were flattened for a road-building scheme designed to provide a faster route for traffic to get into London and remove traffic from local roads. I am standing above the M11 link road which, by the time it opened on 6 October 1999, had displaced a thousand people. 3 As I stare at the new road four years later, another voice speaks to me from my earphones. 'I know that if my house was still there, it would be hanging in space above the inside northbound lane. I can still feel myself in that place, that bit of air, the place where I lay down to go to bed, the place where I had showers, I feel a bit naked suspended in the air there.' 4 Linked, by Graeme Miller, is subtitled 'a landmark in sound, an invisible artwork, a walk.' 5 It is also an outdoor exhibition, a journey into the past and present and an extraordinary use of oral history recordings. It consists of 20 transmitters, mounted on lampposts along the borders of a six-lane motorway in east London. The transmitters continuously broadcast recorded testimonies from people who once lived and worked where the motorway now runs. The broadcasts can be heard with the aid of a small receiver which is available free of charge from local libraries. The range of the transmitters varies according to the terrain, but can generally be heard within 50 metres of the lamp-posts. A map of the walking trail is handed out with the receivers; it follows neighbouring roads along the route, frequently passing next to or over bridges across the motorway which give dramatic views of the road and the surrounding landscape.

Linked is funded by, amongst others, the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Museum of London. The involvement of bodies devoted principally to history in a contemporary arts project might be surprising to some. But several aspects of the project were extremely attractive to the Museum. First, Linked involved the gathering of 120 hours of in-depth oral history interviews that will be added to the Museum's important collection of recorded interviews with Londoners. The museum had already been given a large collection of photographs and documents by the 'No M11 Link' campaign in 1999. Secondly the installation, which spans nearly four miles of Leyton, Leytonstone and Wanstead in east London, provided the opportunity to display history away from the museum, and a series of related exhibitions were prepared by the museum for display in four libraries along the route. Finally, Linked was not the first site-specific artwork to enter the museum's collection -for around 15 years the museum has actively collected works of urban art. 6 Linked also fitted in nicely with the Museum's 'Voices' programme of lottery funded activities designed to reach new audiences and experiment with the presentation of oral history. Yet there are also interesting differences between the cultures of museum display and contemporary art. Miller was keen not to have the transmitters marked on the map that walkers will follow. He wanted the public to happen upon the recordings, like an Easter egg hunt. The museum staff, perhaps more used to making things as accessible as possible, were keen to make the route easier and more user-friendly. Miller interestingly identifies this as a cultural difference in approach:

[We are] torn between my desire to allow people to get a bit lost, because I think it is good to get a bit lost, and the consumer's desire to have everything cut and dried and expecting to hear continuous sound from FIGURE 2. 'I know that if my house was still there, it would be hanging in space above the inside northbound lane.' View of the M11 link road from the Linked route. (Photograph by Toby Butler.) one end to the other without any interference or problems isn't necessarily the point. So there is a slight difference of culture between the slickness of a modern exhibit in a museum that is all very cut and dried and crisp and well tailored, and my desire, my elements are more kind of interventionist, about say enticing people to get lost in a Tesco's car park in Leyton but to discover something wonderful en route; to drift; but that involves making that investment of their own time.

I became involved in the Linked project through my involvement with the Museum as co-sponsor of my research. My minor (but interesting) role was to attend a series of meetings held throughout the process of gathering testimony from people who had once lived or worked at the road site. Bi-weekly meetings were attended by the fivestrong interviewing team, the artist Graeme Miller and Mark Godber from Arts Admin (the organization administering the project). My role was to liaise between the Linked team and the museum, and come up with some guidelines for collecting and documenting interviews that would make sure that the resulting recordings could be successfully (and legally) archived by the museum.

Some sound alternatives

Linked is an adventurous experiment in mounting an exhibition outdoors. Of course, museums are no strangers to self-guided walks and history trails; for example, the Museum of London has previously worked on a 'wall walk' along the site of the old walls of London. Walkers can follow a circular trail following the wall foundations and signs have been placed at points of interest around the city with historical information. Using earphones to hear narration of an outside area is also a wellestablished technique: for example, English Heritage principally narrate the history of Stonehenge using audio guides which visitors carry with them on their walk around the stones. Companies such as Acoustiguide are developing ever more advanced headsets. In exhibition halls all over the country visitors can tap numbers into compact disc players -or even palm sized computers -to instantly hear information about an artwork or an exhibit.

Six years ago, when Linked was first planned, the use of transmitters to play recordings was very unusual; now it is becoming more widespread in exhibitions. So it is fair to say that the technology that Linked uses is not particularly remarkable, or at least not as remarkable as it once was. However, in some respects the use of the Linked technology does push the boundaries of public oral history. With the cooperation of the local authority, transmitters have been mounted high on lamp-posts over a large area, making the urban street a long Tarmac stage for exhibiting oral history. This has some very exciting possibilities for presenting and interpreting urban landscape, city culture and architecture.

The transmitters, which were custom made and cost £1 000 each, are built to last: the recordings are broadcast from particularly stable, non-volatile computer chips and the transmitters are solid-state -they have no moving parts to wear out. The company that constructed them, Integrated Circles, have even guaranteed them to work for 100 years. All they need to keep going is electricity, so it seems entirely possible that Linked could run for many years, even decades -an unusual span of time for an exhibition, particularly for the art world, which is more used to exhibitions running for weeks or months rather than years. The changing landscape of Leyton, Leytonstone and Wanstead will also play a big, unchartable role in the future artwork which spans several miles and many years. Miller says that Linked has been designed with this in mind:

The context will change beyond what was intended, in a sense what was intended was to embrace that change; I don't have any particular expectations. [The broadcasts are] not memories that you can write in stone anyway, they are almost deliberately sabotaged not to be a version of the truth because they are too incomplete to tell any coherent version, but they can arouse a lot of curiosity. . .[in the future] people will come and have another look at it, people change generation, outlook, landscapes change, it will be interesting how audio hieroglyphs stand up to test of time.

I have already noticed this change in context at work, just three months after the launch. Leyton's landscape is mutating already; next to the new Asda, the route passes by the new plate glass of a Fitness First gym. Walking through the acres of cars in the supermarket car park, where I have learnt from the transmitter there were once cows grazing, I can now ponder the link between driving to a shop instead of walking, and the soon-to-open mirrored room of treadmills next door. This, I now realise, is a linked moment; I have been linked.

The consciousness of listening

Miller's approach to editing memories from oral history interviews might shock those purists amongst us who like their oral history straight, and preferably with a transcript to hand. At times it is as though all meaning has been pulled out completely; interviews are cut up, mixed and diced; excerpts are repeated; bells, chords and sounds are added. For the most part stories are coherent; some touching and funny anecdotes survive intact, but periods of the broadcast initially seem anarchic and even unfathomable.

The opaqueness of Linked has much in common with Janet Cardiff's The missing voice, a Walkman-guided walk around the streets of Whitechapel, which presents a series of observations, unanswered questions, bursts of music and elusive fragmentary stories. 7 As David Pinder notes, the overall effect is to heighten your senses. The stories mix with your own thoughts and memories as you wander the streets; ambiences are created, affecting the senses of self through what Pinder terms urban space-times. He notes that the 'melding' between the artwork and the consciousness of the participant also means that the walk is a highly specific experience that will differ according to the mood and circumstances of each listener on a particular day; 'it will clearly not be experienced by people in the same way.' 8 Miller uses several methods to encourage the listener to become sensitive to their present, unique surroundings and thus develop a unique experience: musicality (including rhythm and repetition); building in space for thought, both in the broadcasts themselves and between the receivers; and finally the occasional use of the present tense by the broadcast voices.

The overwhelming effect of the musicality and repetition in the broadcast is to slow listening down. Verging on hypnotism, they encourage the listener to concentrate and really pay attention to what is being said. Miller describes these background musical textures such as tolling bells and violin strings as an 'audio Oxo cube' which thickens the atmosphere and creates a sense of suspension. He also allows room in his compositions for the listener to think for themselves, as there are frequent periods of time without words, or word repetitions that are musical rather than meaningful. He deliberately leaves musical spaces, 'a lulling moment', between fragments of stories to allow the listener time to participate with their own thoughts; 'a kind of mutual surface for where your voice meets other peoples. . . for that reason slowing things down is very desirable, because it filters out, it creates a kind of architecture of space that is the equivalent of silence actually, it is like a little church, you are creating a little church on a street corner that filters out the background.' I found that these textures had a large part to play in an effect that I would describe as a hyper-aware meditative state. It is hyper-aware because, through the words and emotions of the speakers, you are receiving vivid experiences from the past. Meanwhile you are visually and, next to busy roads, aurally confronted by the present.

Miller actively uses the present in his work in several interesting ways. The streets of Hackney deliver new details that might seem unrelated to the Linked experience but, in a state of creative awareness of your surroundings, can soon be integrated into the journey in some meaningful way; a piece of graffiti perhaps, a new building or a poster that you would usually pass by and ignore. Making connections between the past and the listening present can become playful, surprising and rewarding. Conversely, at its most disorientating and at times frustrating, Linked offers no visual clues or reference points to what you are hearing. You might as well close your eyes. I did exactly that when I heard deeply personal descriptions of homes that have been replaced by the motorway trench before me. There just seemed to be no point of reference to hang the descriptions onto -just acres of Tarmac. The houses have to be entirely constructed in the imagination and it isn't easy.

Yet it is the geographical present that can give an audio story immense power. I began with the description of London in the Blitz from Leyton bridge. Looking at London's skyscrapers and tower blocks, built on the bomb craters and ashes of a burning city which I could sense once again, gave me a new awareness of urban spacetime, a lurching feeling of time travel. At times this effect was heightened considerably by the way interviewees speak. The interviewing team were asked to encourage people to talk in the present tense, viewing the past in their mind's eye as if it is happening in front of them. Being interviewed in this way can feel like a session with a psychiatrist, and many participants found it difficult or impossible to keep up for long, drifting back to the comfort zone of the past tense. Yet some interviewees clearly enjoyed the challenge, and Miller used several of these accounts in Linked. The effect can be quite startling, because the interviewee sounds strangely present in an almost ghostlike way. The idea is that the voice is present alongside the listener in a temporal as well as a geographical sense, so two people's present tenses are meeting in the same place. Although Miller's own voice barely features on the walk, it is not difficult to appreciate that Linked is also a deeply personal work. The artist lived for ten years in Grove Green Road and for several years he brought up his handicapped son there. He lived, along with many other artists, in houses that were condemned for the road building programme. He never considered his neighbourhood as material for an art project; he just lived there, finding that he was making closer links with his local community as he connected to support networks in bringing up his son. He also lived through the biggest road protest that Britain had ever encountered. Experiencing the trauma of watching his neighbourhood, and finally his own house, get torn down by the Highways Agency led to a desire to somehow rebuild what had been destroyed. To get a better idea of the artist's thinking and feeling behind the project, I asked Graeme to explain in his own words how he came to create Linked, his extraordinary sonic artwork. FIGURE 1. The Linked route follows and crosses the M11 link road.

In the last year [of living in the house] I was working on the only other transmitter piece that I have done, in Salisbury, and became very involved in the meaning of the land and what it is to walk there and what the memories of that place were. But even then I wasn't particularly thinking about where I was. But it was beginning to disturb me and more and more to the point that it caused me to make an extremely dark bit of theatre called The desire path, which was about walking, about being in a city and that city swallowing you up.

And the experience of blight, of watching houses disappear when you are there . . . one day you would walk past a house the next day there would be a gap. And the sense of a power that was bigger than you that could just wipe away buildings. The paranoia of familiar things being removed -it is like someone sneaking into your house and removing the fireplace overnight. You develop those bonds with the exterior. I didn't have a lot of time to think about what it meant at the time other than that I didn't like it. It causes a sense of deep disturbance in me and sense of foreboding. Almost a sense of what was to happen.

One morning after the protest had finished by a day, everything seemed to be settled, finally out of this place in two months' time and rehoused. At 8.30 am the front door smashed down and police and bailiffs stormed into our house in riot gear, Robocop style, kept us all separated, completely freaked my son out, went through all our files, all our folders, just did a full sort of military police job on us, then told us that we had a few minutes to get all our stuff out. We finally negotiated for 24 hours and people came from all over London to get our stuff out. And the moment we brought the last box of stuff out, this huge bulldozer came down and tore the house down behind us. You could physically see, it was like closing the latch and having the keys in my hand, I had the keys in my hand but the whole house was gone, the front door was left standing. It led to nothing. It was very, very, very traumatic.

It probably took me about two years for the noise to stop really, I was so unprepared for that, although people go through things like that in Palestine on a routine basis -but I am sure it takes them that long for them to recover as well, and worse.

But it was strange -again hard to explain to people who lived only a mile away what it was to be in this war zone or to have been an accidental victim of something . . . one of the protestors who was our friend, Paul Morazo, who was a sort of eco-activist, asked if he could spend the night with us and I think that may have been [the reason for the raid]. So in a sense we experienced what collaborators may have done sheltering people from the Resistance, and then the state coming down on you like a ton of bricks. But it didn't make any sense -there were two things, one that I had for myself to find some kind of revenge. Revenge was the first word that came to me --but I thought I can't make this into a revenge piece, but an answer, a response, I have to respond to this and I didn't have the strength to respond to it, but I kept thinking well, what I have got is my voice -don't muck around with a writer or an artist, you are able to bite back in some way.

Also what I later thought about was this idea that there is memory within the landscape. That had been with me a long time and I was working with that idea. And then my direct experience of what was wrong, what was happening during the blight years was that memory was being erased, there was a sterilization process going on, both I think for accidental reasons, that would happen through any major reconstruction of an area, so it becomes unrecognizable, but also through the political desire to expunge the places of resistance if you like. I can really see that happening now -the Israeli army, for example, seem to be using the bulldozer as a political mop, as if that will get rid of the actual political opposition that lies behind. I'm sure it won't succeed, but time and again people use it; like areas of London like the Jago, which became such a problem of poverty and crime they just obliterated it and rebuilt in a 'let's start again', way.

The denial of history seems to be something that I feel I need to respond to as an artist. Years before, I did a workshop in Denmark, where I was told a story about a road that was built in Bratislavia. A military highway was built by the Soviet authority right the way through the city and it went across the front door of the cathedral. It couldn't open against the rail of the highway and you had to go in through the side door. The road also demolished what was then one of the oldest synagogues in Europe and the whole Jewish quarter around it; it was an act of political road-building. But the brilliant bit about the story, in the space underneath this elevated section of road, people started chalking the ground plan of the synagogue on the ground. And then people would come and scrub it away. And the next morning it would get re-drawn, not by any one person but by a group of people. Then they started extending it to include the baker shop next door to the synagogue and eventually this whole Jewish quarter would reappear in chalk. They said that when you talked to people, it was as if the road didn't exist and as if the synagogue did exist, and I thought, that's it, that is more or less what I can do, just as an intervention -I became interested. Not all art you do will necessarily have that aim, but I think every now and again there might be an opportunity, uncool as it is, to make a difference. I felt there was this possibility of really intervening in a real area and to sort of do something that would make those houses reappear.

The fourth element that triggered Linked is going back not long after to where my house was, this building site, and I couldn't put my ten years back. That compounded that thought about a sort of, I would now call it, an ecology of human memory and landscape that you both read and write into the landscape, and you can even sense narratives. You may not know what they are, but you know that they are there, you sense them inhabiting, they seem to like nooks and crannies, they seem to have certain requirements. They don't like big, flat uninhabited spaces and in the same way birds won't nest -they will hunt on the edge of the motorway, but they won't nest within a certain distance of big highways.

I think stories, history are instances of it. If you stop on the hard shoulder, you have broken down -you are stuck with some shredded tyres and bits of cassette tape in the bushes -and there is no sense of time whatsoever, even though real, horrible major events happen there, people lose their lives and you can't get a grip on what those might have been. It is just forgetting -I don't know why, it is the traffic, the concrete -it feels timeless, time doesn't seem to flow there.

So at the simplest level and motivation I was going to put the houses back, I was going to put them back and do them in a way that would just project them back literally with radio waves, radio waves would fill up that space, so literally, that volume . . . because the road is a trench as well, it is going to be even more clear that it is an empty space rather than a flat plane, because it is carved down -it seems to occupy a certain volume, and that seems like the empty volume that you can pump full of radio waves and rebuild those houses.

And so the trick was -and still is -to get as many people to experience that as possible -to somehow reach that same critical mass you might reach, say, in the Bratislava instance, where somehow you could argue that the houses exist at least as much as the road does -they just exist at a different level -but it tips the balance. So this idea that you put something in place that would tip the balance came out of living there, having already had that sort of distanced view of landscape and space and memory as an artist, but then fuelled by this direct experience about what it is to have your own memoryscape removed by external forces -not just by your own forgetting.

  FIGURE 1. 'Where's London?' View of the city from Leyton Underground station. (Photograph by Toby Butler.)

Acknowledgements

Toby Butler has been supported in his research by ESRC CASE studentship award no. PTA-033-2002-00039.

Notes

1 Linked receivers and a map of the route can be borrowed free from public libraries at Leyton, Harrow Green, Leytonstone and Wanstead (on the Central Line). See www.LINKEDM11.net 2 Track 2, Graeme Miller, Linked (London, 2003). 3 Leyton MP Harry Cohen gave these figures in a speech to Parliament. House of Commons debate, 11 Mar 1994 (London, Hansard, 1994), col. 593. 4 Track 5, Graeme Miller, Linked. 5 Graeme Miller, Linked (catalogue) (London, Arts Admin and the Museum of London 2003). 6 Cathy Ross (Head of Later London History Department, Museum of London), 'Forward', in Linked (2003) p. 3. 7 Janet Cardiff, The missing voice (case study B) (London, 1999). 8 David Pinder, 'Ghostly footsteps: voices, memories and walks in the city', Ecumene 8 (2001), p. 15.