Material Fuzziness: Landscape as Operational Background

The natural condition of the human being is exteriority, being exposed and affected. As Spinoza wrote, ‟it is impossible for
the human being not to be a part of nature”. We cannot protect ourselves in isolation and confinement, that will only bring gloom and impotence. This is why the modern biopolitical project has relied on the construction of forms of interiority that separate us from our affections and anaesthetise our bodies, distancing our experience from the noise and friction of matter. In the last few years, specially since the arrival of surveillance capitalism, this has been done through an aesthetic regime of totalising hypervisibility, exhaustive datification and traceability. Under these circumstances, we want to stop and think about the substitution of an aseptic infrastructural spatial matrix of flows and high-definition traceability for the material depth, uncertainty and fuzziness of landscape as an emergent socioecological and cultural assemblage.

Paper presented at the ECLAS «Stop and Think» Conference 2021