6.5.3 Presence and affect

As with Dubow and Lorimer, the work of Mitch Rose (2002b, 2004, 2006) – another cultural geographer concerned with the question of landscape writing in the wake of non-representational theories – also explores the interrelations of landscape and movement. Here, however, movement is not figured as a displacing of notions of origin, territory or dwelling, nor as a criss-crossing of life histories and landscape affinities. Instead the direction of travel is, so to speak, inward: landscape, for Rose, is conceptualised in terms of an enfolding and creative movement of care. And this conception stems in part from a critique of the forms of contemporary North American landscape analysis discussed in Section 6.2 above. For Rose (2002b, p.459), despite their ostensible embrace of a poststructural understanding of power and identity, these geographies remain fundamentally structuralist:

On the one hand the landscape is a cultural symbol that can be diversely interpreted, and on the other it is a stable image whose existence depends on its interpretation being contained. Although struggles in space affect, disrupt and even re-write the hegemonic ideologies that produce the landscape, they do not in themselves define the landscape.... Thus, while landscape is described in terms of struggle, it is defined in terms of structure.

At the same time, much North American (and indeed UK-based) cultural geography emphasises landscape as a terrain of contested meaning, and this, Rose notes, relies upon the ability of actors to resist, ignore or disrupt the imposition of dominant, already-structured meanings. Here, therefore, there is a dilemma, a contradiction even:‘one cannot derive highly interpretative social agents from a society that is fundamentally structured. Neither can one derive fundamental structures from a highly interpretative society’ (ibid., p.460).

Rose (2004, 2006) seeks to move beyond this problematic blend of structuralist and humanist positions by exploring instead the ways in which enduring and imaginatively compelling ideas of landscape and self are cultivated. In particular, to advance upon a notion of culture as a code to be broken, he argues, we must learn to ‘recognise not only the movement of deconstruction but also the movement of what Derrida calls our “dreams of presence”: our dreams of being a subject’ (Rose, 2004, p.465). Landscape and self, for instance, may be understood as ‘dreams of presence’ – not as actual, stable or pre-given presences, but as nevertheless constituent parts of an incessant, nurturing or caring movement-process, in which the world is imagined as whole and coherent. For Rose (2006, p.547):