The cultural landscape, the cognitively perfect landscape of Geo-graphy, the narrative landscape with an aesthetic value, the challenge of the ineffable, for a semiotics of the narrative-aesthetic landscape, the mythical landscape, polysemy as a value.

The cultural landscape

In dealing with ‘landscape polysemy’ I will take as my starting point the notion of cultural landscape, which, as is well known, has been made particularly topical by recent European Union policies aimed precisely at the protection and enhancement of ‘cultural landscapes’. There is in fact a close relationship between polysemy and landscape culture, since the breadth and heterogeneity of the polysemous horizon of the landscape depend precisely on the culture we have of it.

To tell the truth, in the European Union documents that I have had the opportunity to consult (Conseil de l’Europe 1997), there is no precise definition of ‘cultural landscape’, although it can be indirectly inferred from reading the documents themselves. From the opposition between the ‘natural landscape’ and the ‘cultural landscape’ one can in fact deduce that this would be the landscape formed by the signs imprinted by man; landscape, therefore, understood as the material expression of the culture of the society that has inhabited it and that inhabits it; landscape that would cease where those signs, not being legible, only give way to the signs of intact nature, that is to say, to the ‘natural landscape’. In this meaning, the cultural landscape can be traced back to the anthropological concept of ‘material culture of a civilisation’ (Cantoni 1963) or to the historical concept of ‘document-monument’ (Le Goff 1978) or of ‘artificial memory’ (Leroi-Gourhan 1964-65).

It is hardly worth noting that, although there was a time in history when culture became more energetically dissociated from nature, in today’s world, where there is no longer any place that does not bear some trace of human actions (if only because of the global pollution that now affects every remotest corner of the ecosphere), the boundary between nature and culture is untraceable. Perhaps in no other epoch has nature, where we have still acted most weakly, been so charged with meaning and value, becoming, to all intents and purposes, an imposing ‘cultural phenomenon’. It is, however, evident how here the word ‘cultural’ appears in a different meaning from the previous one, no longer as ‘material culture’ in the anthropological sense, but as culture in the semiotic sense, according to which all landscape, regardless of whether it has been or is inhabited is a ‘sign’, is a phenomenon of signification and therefore culture: the landscape becomes culture at the very moment in which it is charged with meaning. If we can speak of landscape, it is because we have transformed our perception of a portion of the world into a complex of meanings; and what is our culture if not the complex of meanings we attribute to the world?

Evidently, the two definitions are not alternatives, since the semiotic one includes within it the anthropological-cultural one: it is more extensive in that it considers all the meanings that our culture attributes to the possible signifiers of the landscape and not only the meanings of those signs that have been imprinted by man on the face of the Earth.

Since we have to deal with the ‘polysemy’ of landscape, the semiotic definition thus allows us to deal with the issue in its fullest extent: what are the meanings that our culture attaches to those signifying portions of the world that we call landscapes?

The cognitively perfect landscape of Geo-graphy

‘The problem of any science is to match the South Seas, their immense and jagged blue, with the blue map of the South Seas.’ (Claudio Magris)

I believe that anyone attempting to give an answer to the last question posed cannot avoid feeling a sort of vertigo of the innumerable. Indeed, the meanings we can attribute to a portion of the world are truly innumerable: firstly, because the complex of the world’s perceptual information is infinitely segmentable, and each segmentation becomes a generative locus of meanings; secondly, because the complex of meanings we attribute to the world, that is, what semiologists call our Encyclopaedia, is connected by a network that makes it possible to pass from one meaning to any other within a practically unlimited system of concatenations: ‘knowledge of the world, or encyclopaedic knowledge, is in its totality, unrepresentable (…), because if one ‘opens up’ the meaning to include all the knowledge relating to a given term, the representation tends to explode and become unmanifiable. ’ (Violi 1997, 87). In the transformation of the world of things into a world of meaning we have the twofold problem of expanding meaning to the point of dominating the infinite segmentability of the universe and at the same time keeping meaning within the limits of dominability.

In this work of controlled fission expansion of the universe of meaning, scientific knowledge plays an indispensable role in contemporary culture: no dialogue on the meaning of the world will be possible if it cannot come to terms with what is possible in science, and this also applies to landscape: here today we could not even begin a dialogue on the meaning of landscape if we did not have that common cultural basis that we derive from Geo-graphy. So it is from there that we must start in search of the meaning of landscape.

It is not my intention to attempt an overview of the state of the art of the various geo-graphies, firstly because I would not be able to do so, and secondly because it is another issue to which I would like to draw attention. Briefly, however, I would like to observe that scientific knowledge in the environmental field is experiencing a season of veritable explosion: research is being conducted at all levels, databases are being set up (the most modern form of artificial memory), increasingly sophisticated theories, methods and techniques are being elaborated, and this is probably only the beginning of an era that knows it cannot do without increasingly perfected scientific knowledge of the processes that govern the state of the ecosphere and a technology capable of effectively intervening on these processes. Moreover, the more rapid the development of knowledge, the more rapid is its process of obsolescence: our semiotic nature condemns us to meaning and its provisionality.

Probably the paradigm of complexity, which also because of its relative novelty fascinates us more than others, is destined to have repercussions, to provoke some restructuring even within the semantic universe of geo-graphies and, as a result of these restructurings, certain contents may be put into crisis and replaced by others deemed more in keeping with what we believe to be the sense of the world. On the other hand, this is precisely the process of the metamorphosis of knowledge and never before has this process accelerated.

Here, then, is a fundamental part of the sense of the world and of what we can provisionally call ‘landscape’ and, given that scientific research is also that which leads to the most perfect form of knowledge, we could say that the scientific landscape of geo-graphies is synonymous with the cognitively perfect landscape; taking it for granted that, since eternal perfection is not within our reach, the perfection we can afford is only the ephemeral one that manages to savour the success of a season.

The geographic landscape is thus affected by an ever-expanding polysemy due to the increasing segmentation and specialisation of knowledge, which requires that the unity of knowledge be rediscovered at new levels and in the light of new paradigms; it is, by the same token, also a form of polysemy characterised by an increasing degree of provisionality.

There is, however, an underlying fact that unites the various geographies and that we find in their atlases, that is, in the representations they provide us with of their landscapes. This central idea is that ‘the whole is connected to the whole’ and that ‘everything is part of a system of systems’. Then what the model of a ‘system’ should be is also only provisionally defined, just as how to apply this model to each of the aspects of the world, how to segment and pertinentise it in order to make it a system, is constantly under discussion. But there is still this underlying conviction that unites the various scientific disciplines, whereby reality is a system of systems of which the knowing subject is an integral part. Whether this model is then an ontological property of Being or is simply the most effective way of organising the meaning we attribute to Being is a question we can leave to metaphysics enthusiasts.

Having said that, since we are social animals (like many others) we must agree on the configurations of the system and its laws, and this requires negotiation: that is, it seems that the discovery of the system cannot take place except as a discovery of the community and except in the form of a socially approved and shared culture.

Then there is another aspect that the various geo-graphic disciplines have in common: each of them deals with a well-defined segment of the Global Semantic Universe, over which it exercises a kind of cognitive dominion and for whose enrichment it is responsible. Sharing the idea that the universe is a system of systems and dealing with a well-defined system that is open to the rest of the universe seem to be indispensable prerequisites for admission to the Consortium of Geo-graphic Disciplines.

We cannot do without this polydisciplinary landscape, unless we want to fall back into a culture that no longer belongs to us and that can only interest us in understanding what we have been and where we come from. We cannot do without this landscape if we want to successfully change the existing landscape into a possible and desirable landscape: there is no project of change that can do without the meaning of the geo-graphic landscape, because it is the meaning that has been constructed in the most efficient way to guide the practical action of our relationship with the world.

A question arises, however: does the geo-graphic landscape exhaust the possible meaning of landscape? Or is there a further sense beyond the sense of the geographical landscape, one that we do not find written down and represented in atlases? The problem is to understand what is left out when we limit ourselves to the cognitively perfect sense of geo-graphies, which look at the world of things as a complex system of systems.

The narrative landscape with an aesthetic value

“Il paesaggio è qualcosa di simile all’archeologia: una stratificazione di segni in cui lentamente affondi, per lasciare emergere storie”(Claudio Magris)

Non v’è alcun dubbio che il paesaggio sia suscettibile di essere caricato di un senso ulteriore al di là di quello delle geo-grafie. È sufficiente che ci poniamo di fronte ad una porzione di superficie terrestre senza le finalità proprie della conoscenza scientifica o senza qualche scopo pratico, ma con la sola intenzione di osservare il paesaggio (una volta si sarebbe detto di “contemplarlo”), che immediatamente questo si carica di una molteplicità di significati solo in parte riconducibili a quelli degli atlanti geografici. Se lasciamo che la semiosi (cioè l’atto della significazione con cui, sulla base di un ‘codice’, associamo ‘significati’ a porzioni ‘significanti’ dell’informazione percettiva) si muova liberamente nel reticolo dell’Enciclopedia, senza preoccuparci di chiudere univocamente il senso; se ci lasciamo trasportare dalla semiosi anziché mantenerla (come si fa nella semiosi scientifica) nei binari di codici univocamente prestabiliti e tali da assicurare l’approdo semantico all’interno di ben delimitati settori sistemici dell’Enciclopedia; se in questo assecondare la spontaneità della semiosi annotiamo non solo i significati che possiamo esaurientemente esprimere nel linguaggio parlato, ma tutto ciò che possiamo far rientrare nel senso, anche quelli che ci appaiono come ‘effetti di senso’ difficilmente esprimibili a parole, come ad esempio le emozioni; allora ci predisponiamo davvero ad assaporare l’infinita potenzialità semantica del paesaggio.

Non dico che solo facendo funzionare in questo modo la semiosi si disveli il paesaggio, ma certo questa è la sensazione che personalmente ne abbiamo: solo così ciascuno di noi può assaporare, nella sua pienezza, il senso del proprio paesaggio. Quando ci atteggiamo in questo modo, il paesaggio, che è stato ed è lo spazio scenico del flusso del vissuto, ci restituisce il racconto avventuroso del vissuto. “Il paesaggio come teatro” dell’esistenza (Turri 1997), come scena che ha concorso a dar senso all’esistenza e a cui l’esistenza ha dato senso, diviene parte inscindibile del testo narrativo della nostra storia.

E qui possiamo subito osservare una differenza tra il paesaggio geo-grafico e questa forma narrativa di paesaggio. Il primo si presenta attraverso il linguaggio referenziale delle scienze, che ci consente di sapere tutto – o quasi – del paesaggio ecologico, di quello geologico, di quello politico, di quello socio-economico, di quello storico, ecc. e dei loro processi di morfogenesi; il secondo viceversa comunica attraverso “l’intricato stile incessante della realtà, con la sua punteggiatura di ironie, di sorprese, di presentimenti singolari come le sorprese” (Borges); il paesaggio narrativo parla attraverso il linguaggio evocativo della memoria e questa lo fa funzionare alla stregua di un testo ambiguo, dove i significati immediati delle cose, quelli soliti, quelli geografici, sono solo i significanti di significati altri, non univocamente definibili e che inducono a compiere passeggiate inferenziali all’interno della nostra Enciclopedia alla scoperta di un senso altro da cui non sono scindibili effetti emotivi.

Questo tipo di semiosi, che fa funzionare il paesaggio come un testo aperto, cioè a valenza estetica (Jakobson 1963, Eco 1962), sembra procedere in senso contrario a quello della semiosi scientifica delle varie discipline geo-grafiche: queste sono tutte intente a controllare la semiosi chiudendola in ben delimitati sottosistemi semantici; il paesaggio narrativo sembra aprire la semiosi all’intero Universo Semantico, senza assicurare approdi certi, univoci e oltretutto non contraddittori, anche perché di contraddizioni e di contrasti inestricabili è impastata la nostra storia.

Che fare di fronte a questo tipo di paesaggio di cui non possiamo negare l’esistenza, ma che è semanticamente inafferrabile e pericolosamente affetto da idiosincrasie? Credo che in sede di ricerca disciplinare possiamo assumere due possibili atteggiamenti:

(i) This landscape does not interest us for a few good reasons. In the first place, it does not have what it takes to be accepted into the Consortium of Geographical Disciplines, both because the inferential connections of its semiosis do not adhere to the discipline of the scientific code, and because, as a result of this, its semantic landing place cannot be delimited to a precise subsystem and is therefore unmanageable for practical purposes (moreover, it also includes ineffable sense effects such as emotions: and what can we do with emotions?). It is precisely a typically idiosyncratic landscape, specific to each of us and therefore can only have relevance in the private sphere as a personal form of landscape enjoyment, but cannot have public relevance;

(ii) this landscape interests us for some good reasons. It is true that the sense it arrives at is based on idiosyncratic experiences, but it is also true that it constitutes a phenomenon of social significance, being the current way of subjectively perceiving and experiencing the landscape. It is true that the semantic landing is subjective, but it is also true that it has the claim to be communicated and to be shared by the universe of subjects, for the simple fact that, if this landscape were taken away from us, we could not even tell our story to others: the landscape, as the scenic space of the flow of experience, is inseparable from the narration of experience; outside of our landscape we are unspeakable. It is true that unspeakable effects of meaning come into play, such as the emotions of aesthetic experience, but it is also true that if we neglect these effects, we would lose a slice of the sense with which man charges his experience of the world (a slice that is not negligible, given that it is that sense with which our faculty of enjoying beauty and producing art plays, and art is a phenomenon of public interest).

I understand that modern geographies have been concerned with providing a foundation for a landscape other than the aesthetic one; because their aim was to arrive at a cognitive landscape that would be useful for taking possession of the Earth, for modifying it and for using it. What I cannot understand is why this landscape, which is cognitively perfect for exercising dominion over the world, was set up as an alternative to the narrative landscape, which, by the way, is also the only one capable of making us savour the beauty of the landscape. That is to say, I understand it and I only justify it in the light of the myth that has made positivist cognitivism a purification project of the Universal Encyclopaedia and its Atlas. I simply do not share it, especially from the point of view from which I am professionally positioned as an architect: if it makes sense to try to give a foundation to a discipline that can be called ‘Landscape Architecture’, then certainly this will have to be steeped in geographical culture (otherwise the least that can happen to us is to place houses in flooded or landslide areas), but in the end it will have to be able to give an account of how the landscape functions as theatre and how theatrical scenes can be designed composed according to the syntactic rules of an existence that does not renounce beauty (it does not renounce making art with the landscape).

This is why I consider it useful to deal with this strange landscape, which allows us to recover that imperfect sense of the world that is irretrievably contaminated by emotion, by estesis (Greimas 1987). I believe that if I were to convince myself that the only landscape it makes sense to be concerned with is that of the perfect cognitivism of geo-graphies, I would be inclined to end up resembling the Calvinian Inexistent Knight, all logic and calculation and no emotion, also a halved character whose other half is played by his squire Gurdulu, all immediate emotionality and no signification; the one and the other unable to connect the emotional with the cognitive, which is precisely the indispensable condition for enjoying aesthetic pleasure.

The challenge of the ineffable

What is needed is a scientific analysis of that strange form of semiosis that transforms the landscape into a narrative text with aesthetic value: we need a semiotic look at the aesthetic point of view. Since it is clear from the outset that, in doing so, we are not about to give rise to yet another geo-graphic discipline aimed at founding knowledge of some subsystem of the world, what we need to understand is how the mechanism of semiosis generates the most polysemous, the most open, the most ambiguous of landscapes: the aesthetic landscape, precisely.

This type of enquiry is complicated by the fact that the aesthetic landscape forces us to expand the notion of sense to include those sense effects that take the form of an ineffable emotion (or, as Greimas put it, of an ‘esthetic grasp’); but even the ineffable poses the challenge to the semiotician to be explained precisely in its nature as a sense effect, that is, as a product of semiosis.

It is barely worth noting the difference in approach between a semiotic analysis of the aesthetic phenomenon and the philosophical reflection that has marked the aesthetics of landscape, particularly in the context of Italian culture. I refer to the elaboration, albeit important, of Rosario Assunto, who has continued, well beyond what the times would have advised, a reflection in an aesthetic-romantic key. In this type of philosophical aesthetics, the aim is not to examine the semiotic structure of the text and the reasons why it can exercise an aesthetic function:[1] the aesthetic is essentially inexpressible, depending on that mysterious faculty that is intuition[2]. By renouncing an explanation of the semiotic functioning of the aesthetic text, this Aesthetic ends up focusing above all on the construction of a code of sensibility, whereby, for example, when faced with the infinite spectacle of the mountains one must experience the sense of the ‘Sublime’, which is a certain state of the soul that one is concerned to describe. Where this Aesthetics seeks an underlying motivation for the aesthetic nature of the landscape, in a typically romantic move, it appeals to myth and its symbols, and what myth is in this case more pregnant than that of the Promised Land and the lost Eden (Assunto 1984)?

Ten years before Assunto published his ‘Landscape and Aesthetics’ (1973), Roman Jakobson published his ‘Essais de linguistique générale’. Peirce’s ‘Collected Papers’, a fundamental work of semiotic thought, are forty years earlier. I believe there is a need, even in the field of landscape reflection, for a scientific update that seeks to make use of the tools on which the analysis of the aesthetic text in the field of literature as well as in the figurative arts has been based for some time now (Corrain, Valenti 1991).

Perhaps I am mistaken, but I have formed the idea that the sometimes bitter refusal to address the problem of the aesthetic nature of the landscape depends on the persistence of an old conception of the aesthetic (or even a vulgar conception whereby the aesthetic semiosis is reduced to a simple judgement on the beauty or ugliness of things) and the inability to come to terms with its cognitively imperfect mechanism.

[1] ‘Typical of romantic aesthetics is to describe the effect the work of art produces, not the way it produces it. Romantic aesthetics does not lay bare the artifice, as the Russian formalists would have said, but recounts the experience of those who are subject to the allure of artifice.’ (Eco 1984, 221).

[2] On this subject, see: ‘Croce, Intuition and the Mess’, Appendix 2 to Kant and the Platypus (Eco 1997, 375-387).

For a semiotics of the narrative-aesthetic landscape

If we chose to interpret the landscape through the codes of the geographical disciplines, we would have no need to pass through semiotics: it would be enough to know those codes and train in their correct use. But if we were to set ourselves the problem of understanding how it is possible for the perceptive information of the world to be transformed into a narrative text with an aesthetic value, that is, if we were interested in understanding how it is possible for a landscape to be charged with that effect of meaning that we very loosely indicate with the word ‘beauty’, then we would not find, at the moment, any code as well packaged and ready to use. The structure and functioning of this complex and aleatory code entail an investigation into that strange faculty that is narrative-aesthetic semiosis: semiotics we might never mention, but we must nevertheless know that the work to be done is semiotic. How, then, can we set up a semiotic study of landscape in such a way that it makes us understand its aesthetic functioning?

That of semiotics is a tricky one, because it contrasts with our habitual perception of the world, or rather, with the sensation we have of it: where we see objects, things, where we perceive smells, sounds, semiotics sees the workings of semiosis. We perceive things and at the same time nurture towards our perception a kind of blind trust that it reveals to us the very nature of things. All people with normal perceptual faculties perceive things in the same way; thus things are as we perceive them, perception is objective, because it offers us the things of the world as they are. What, then, is more objective than the ‘perceptual landscape’, the ‘visual landscape’? When we speak of perception, we commonly think of the information that comes to us from the perceptual stimulus, so our visual perception would not be very dissimilar to that of a camera. Semiotics challenges this ‘perceptual faith’ of ours (Merleau-Ponty 1964). For semiotics, the information of the stimulus is only the raw material on which perceptive semiosis operates, and it operates through a work of selection that grasps only the signifying information, leaving out the non-signifying information, where the former is only that which corresponds to the meanings we are accustomed to assigning to things: we ‘perceive’ only that which responds to our expectations of signification. To perceive is to signify, and the ability to signify depends on the meaning that dwells in the semiosphere of our Encyclopaedia (Lotman 1985). Stimulus information that fails to become signified does not enter our semiosphere and is lost in the void. The landscape we see is only that which we are able to recount: how many landscapes have we lost because we have not observed them in order to recount them?

As Merleau-Ponty put it, ‘it is true that the world is what we see, and it is also true that we must nevertheless learn to see it’ (1964, 32), and since vision is semiosis and this leads to meanings that change as our Encyclopaedia changes, we can say that we never stop learning to see it.

We often hear it said that aesthetic judgement is subjective (which would be a flaw in itself), but it is unfortunate that subjectivity operates well before aesthetic judgement can be uttered; it renders the very act of perception ‘flawed’, for there is nothing more subjective than looking and listening (Barthes 1977).

In light of these considerations, we can immediately clear the field of a non-existent landscape that dwells in contemporary pesaggistics: that ‘visual or perceptual landscape’ that is the child of ‘perceptual faith’. What is the ‘visual landscape’? It is what we see. And what do we see? What our vision offers us…. If we want to break out of this vicious circle, we have to start ‘naming’ the things we see, but naming is precisely assigning meanings to a portion of the perceptual stimulus: we only see what we are able to transform into meaning. Perception we feel is so intimately fused with semiosis that we no longer have the ability to distinguish between ‘perception as stimulation’ (what happens on the retina as on the film) and ‘perception as signification’ (what allows us to talk about what we see), so that meaning appears to us as something inherent to the world, whereas it is only the sense we give it and of whose provisionality we have spoken at length.

I do not agree with the fruitfulness of definitions that are the result of a deception of habit; the notions of ‘visual landscape’ and ‘perceptual landscape’ should be expunged from the lexicon of landscape design, because non-sense cannot be fruitful; it can only be the sterile premise on which to base a self-deception, unless the analysis of the visual landscape is taken to the point of becoming fully aware of that boundary that divides the visible from the invisible; but this brings us back precisely to an investigation of the perceptive semiosis, its functioning, the structures that support it and its possible semantic landfalls.

Incidentally, we can see how the subject is highly topical: it is no coincidence that, after ‘Il trattato di semiotica generale’ where perception was only marginally treated, Umberto Eco felt the need to write ‘Kant e l’ornitorinco’ (Kant and the Platypus), largely dedicated to an investigation into perceptual semiosis and how it transforms the stimulus into a sign. But we could refer to research in the field of cognitive science or artificial intelligence. To remain with semiotics, we could point to the Greimasian strand of ‘generative semiotics’ where it comes to terms with the source moment of meaning, where language separates itself from sensoriality, where sense effects, which involve the deep layers of the ‘thymic’, are transformed into communicable meanings through that surface syntax that is proper to language (Greimas 1970).

It is not possible here to develop, even in its general lines, what we might call a grammar of the narrative-aesthetic landscape, and for this I find myself obliged to refer to my other work (Socco 1996, 1998).

However, I would like to mention an important aspect that a semiotic theory of the narrative-aesthetic landscape must address: the basic format of the landscape text. Semiotics, we have seen, tends to reduce everything to a ‘system of signs’, and since the most evolved model of a system of signs is the text-narrative, the word ‘text’ has come to be synonymous with any system of signs, such as a painting, a musical composition or even a portion of the world. Obviously, a narrative text is one thing, which is a sequential structure of signifiers syntactically devised to communicate meanings, and another thing is, for example, a place made up of things arranged in space without a communicative intentionality. Hence the problem arises of how to format it in a way that conforms to what occurs in semiosis. In other words, it is a question of understanding how semiosis structures the perceptive information of space in such a way that it can be translated into a narrative text with aesthetic value. On this aspect, it seems to me that the metaphor that Turri proposes to us of the ‘landscape as theatre’ is more than a metaphor: it is the model of textual structure. Actually, in Turri’s conception ‘theatre’ appears in a broader and richer meaning than the one in which I intend to use it. For Turri, the landscape-theatre is the place where we are actors and spectators of the play that is our existence and, at the same time, we are the shapers of the scene that hosts the play. I recover this model in a narrower meaning of scenic space that constitutes the ineliminable context of every object and every action as signs.

We find this concept of ‘scene-context of a sign’ in semiotics where it comes to terms with the form of the Encyclopaedia. Since the meanings we attribute to the world are related to each other by a structure, the problem of any semantic theory, that is, of the system of meanings, is to identify the form of that structure.

In semantic theories, one tends to distinguish between a structure in the form of a Dictionary and one in the form of an Encyclopaedia (Eco 1984). The Dictionary would concern ‘the circumscribed set of linguistic knowledge constitutive of meaning, whereas the Encyclopaedia would represent the general set of knowledge about the world, factual in nature and potentially open, if not unlimited’ (Violi 1997, 87). In other words, the Dictionary includes only the current denotative meanings of things, regardless of the context in which they appear; the Encyclopaedia records all the further meanings that can be loaded onto the denotative meaning depending on the context and circumstance in which things appear (Eco 1975, 1979; Fillmore 1985). Indeed, if we did not admit that things can take on different connotations depending on the contexts, we would not be able to explain the differences in meaning of the various contexts and objects in each context, thus ending up flattening the sense of the world into a summation of the usual denotative meanings of things taken individually. The structural form of the Encyclopaedia thus succeeds in accounting for the complex of connotations with which each thing can be charged, the different meanings and shades of meaning that, for example, make that thing we call ‘water’ become a boundless universe of meaning depending on the real and possible landscapes in which it appears and the plays that nature, with its climatic variations, plays there and those that man plays there with his own actions. It is in the intricate structure of the various possible contextual and circumstantial insertions of our Encyclopaedia that we find the possible universe of meaning.[1]

If the ‘scene-context’ is the basic model through which semiosis formats the various signifiers in order to assign the various possible meanings to them, then it is also the model that semiosis adopts for the formatting of that singular form of text that is the place that contains us: the ‘scene-context’ is the model of the basic unity of the narrative landscape (Socco 1998). Gambino is right when he draws our attention to the crucial problem of the right format of the landscape unit and its defining complexity as we move out of the individual geographical landscapes, each with its own landscape units, and try to enter that holistic landscape form that condenses the full meaning of the landscape itself (Gambino 1997). But this model is the same one that semiologists have had to develop in order to explain how it is possible that the same sign (or object) can be charged with different meanings depending on the contexts (or places) and how the contexts are bearers of overall (or global, holistically assumed) meanings, which cannot be expressed as the summation of the meanings of the individual component signs (due to that well-known hiatus that exists between the local and the global, between the component element and the overall system).

The landscape text therefore presents itself in the form of a ‘scene-context’ caught in a certain acting circumstance. This ‘scene-context’ consists of a list of objects and actants caught in a certain circumstance (i.e. lexematic content); each object is placed in a certain position in the topological structure of space and changes its connotative meaning according to its position in the structure itself (which therefore constitutes the syntactic structure of syntagmatic connections); each object is the bearer of a plastic chromatic-eidetic-material information in relation to which it is charged with different expressive connotations (Greimas 1984) (and it is at this level that a problem of landscape morphology arises). As can be seen, there are the premises for giving foundation to a grammar of the narrative landscape in its lexematic, syntactic and morphological articulation. There remains the problem of discovering what increases the degree of ambiguity of the landscape text by imprinting on it that which is its aesthetic value; but it seems to me that there are, at least tentatively, the premises for doing so.

[1] The encyclopaedia is ‘the only model capable of accounting, both theoretically and as a regulatory hypothesis for concrete processes of interpretation, for the complexity of semiosis’. (Eco 1984, 255).

The mythical landscape

Is there, in addition to the geographical landscape and the narrative-aesthetic landscape, a landscape that makes a further contribution of meaning to the already vast polysemy of landscape? Or can the landscape on which it makes sense to focus disciplinary research be exhausted in these two complementary, non-substitutable forms of landscape?

Indeed, our Encyclopaedic Atlas harbours a relevant content, which always hovers when one extends one’s gaze beyond the geographical readings of the world’s various subsystems: I refer to the mythical content that anthropological-cultural analyses have brought to light, giving rise to an important mythological geography, which in Lévi-Strauss’s Sad Tropics (1955) reached its climax. In this regard, however, a distinction must be made between myth and mythology. An interesting distinction seems to me to be that between mythology of the sacred and mythology of the aesthetic.

The mythology of the sacred is that which fills the world with symbols, which find their profound motivation in something that cannot be explained except by recourse to the Arcanum, to some first and ultimate reason that is not of this world, something that insofar as it is supernatural can only be worshipped and that only an act of faith can bring into existence. All archaic mythology, which animates the primordiality of our culture, can be traced back to this model of sacred myth: it is the myth of prehistoric thrill and mystical aesthetics, which made Nature a temple and the landscape a forest of symbols (Turner 1967). Now myth, being nothing more than a possible sense of the world, as it is dropped onto the Earth, draws boundaries and divides the Earth into countries and landscapes. Thus the myth of race and blood generates regions even where no geographical and historical research can identify them for the simple fact that they exist only by the will of the Arcane. These archaic myths die hard and often survive history. Thus, for example, it may happen that, as history begins to draw a European landscape, there are crowds guarding the borders of Padania while their priests celebrate the myth of the Po.

Even among archaic myths, a distinction must be made. For there is not only the myth of race, the myth of power and domination over the different, inseparable from the terror of the barbarian siege. There is also the myth of Odysseus and of the voyage of discovery of the infinite variety of landscapes of which the world of us all is made, of the voyage that does not stop at what the gods say are the boundaries of the world, of the adventurous voyage of discovery of the manifold meaning of the world and which alone allows us to discover the meaning of our Ithaca: ‘Ithaca gave you the voyage,/without her you would never have set out/ on the journey: what else do you expect? But that of Odysseus is precisely the myth of the vitality of semiosis, of the drive to go beyond the boundary of the given Semantic Universe, of the adventurous discovery of the possible sense with which we can charge a Universe that does not need to have a sense in order to exist.

Myth, however, is not only the sacred myth of archaic culture: even in the secularised culture of contemporaneity there remains a mythical dimension that is deeply ingrained with semiosis itself. I refer to that mythology of contemporaneity that Roland Barthes so masterfully unveiled. That mythical dimension that is intrinsic to language because myth can only be ‘that which is subject to the laws of discourse’ (Barthes 1957, 191). Mythic is a sense that operates without appearing, placed between the folds of meanings like a parasite that empties the meanings themselves and reduces them to pure signifying forms of a ‘formless, unstable, nebulous condensation’ (id., 201). Myth can pervade every act and every object that is an expression of meaning: from clothing, to food, to cars, to advertising, to that total expression of the world that is landscape as culture.

What to do when faced with the mythical landscape? I would say that with regard to the archaic myths of sacredness, despite their tenacity, we have only to investigate them in order to place them in a historical perspective so as to increase the awareness of our origins: we can only hope to get rid of them, if only to relieve the landscape of what is no longer part of our living and fertile Encyclopaedia.

The discourse that can be made with regard to the second type of myth is different: that which semiosis itself has the innate capacity to generate. And here it seems to me that two directions of work open up: one is the one traced, for example, by Barthes himself in his acute analysis of today’s myths, that is, the unveiling of the ideological behind the enunciated meaning; the other is the use of this potential of semiosis to produce a surplus of meaning that nourishes the aesthetic.

With reference to the first direction of work, I believe that a culture of landscape also has the task of uncovering the ideological use of landscape itself, that use which flattens landscape into the stereotypes of the ‘tourist village’, the ‘allotment of the diffuse city’, ‘the consumerist ceremonials of television advertising’, in short, the stereotypes which, in order to sell landscapes and products, flatten every difference and with it erase the multiplicity of the meaning of landscape. But the aspect that, as an architect, most interests me is the second, that is, the use of mythological-symbolic potential with that completely harmless purpose that aims to create the illusion that the landscape says more than its everyday use normally does: but this purpose is none other than the aesthetic one, that of a ‘modern poetic symbolism’, that is, of a ‘secularised symbolism where language speaks of itself and of its own possibilities. (Eco 1984, 254).

Polysemy as a value

We have seen that beyond the geo-graphic landscape and the aesthetic landscape, there are nothing but archaic remnants, which rightly fascinate cultural anthropology enthusiasts, but which would do well not to disturb the sleep of territorial planners or designers of the theatre of our existence. On the other hand, we have seen that these two forms in themselves load the landscape with more than enough meaning to fill our admittedly endless Encyclopaedic Atlas.

We have seen how geo-graphies are intent on expanding their atlases with ever new meanings, forcing them to constantly redraw world maps. What are architects doing dealing with aesthetic landscapes? In a world that runs the risk of reducing the polyvocity of the landscape, in order to make it tell more or less the same story everywhere, the architect (with the inevitable cooperation of geographers) can attempt to keep the sense of the landscape open, designing landscapes that function as open texts: it may not be much, but it is perhaps the most advanced way of creating culture by designing the landscape-theatre of our existence.

I believe that, if it still makes sense to talk about ‘guiding ideas’, that of ‘culture’ (and landscape as an ineliminable part of culture) is perhaps the guiding idea of contemporaneity: the fundamental reference value. We know that beyond the sense we assign to the world there is no elsewhere we can talk about; but we also know of the precariousness of the acquired sense and this constantly pushes us in search of another sense: it is so in scientific work as in that incessant work of reinterpretation of our history, necessary to continually recalibrate the project of our future. Perhaps the reference value lies precisely in this unstable precariousness of culture; of a culture that is produced as the result of an ever broader and more active participation of individuals. If this were true, then the destiny of the cultural landscape is that of an increasing temporariness not only of the sense with which we load it, but also of the forms we give to it in order to make it an expression of sense, that is, precisely of culture: nothing is more unstable than the sense and landscapes of those societies that are undergoing rapid and tumultuous transformation.

But for an age that has made the temporariness of meaning a way of life, it becomes equally indispensable to preserve historical memory in order to make it available to that continuous work of reinterpretation needed to redefine one’s cultural identity and future. Ours is also an era that, precisely because of its pronounced hermeneutic consciousness, fears the loss of memory (of what our culture and cultural landscape has been) more than others: perhaps it is indeed true that for this culture of ours the most feared myth is that of the burning of the Library of Alexandria.

Innovation and preservation are the two polarities of reference around which the landscape of contemporaneity is being defined (Gambino 1997): a landscape of increasing temporariness in which we design the future of our culture (and what are the megacities of developing countries if not this? But can we keep the suburbs of our metropolises, our ‘diffuse cities’ as they are, or must we not trigger in them a profound process of continuous transformation to make them the landscape expression of a new culture?), but also a landscape that is a treasure chest of memory, that is a museum of our history (what must historic centres be if not this? But are not agricultural or natural landscapes of ancient formation and still relatively intact the right equivalent of historic centres?).

We must protect the landscape-theatre of our history because of the wealth of memory it carries, and we must establish rules that allow for broad citizen participation in shaping the landscape of temporariness as a theatre of the metamorphosis of meaning. It is a question of rules of wisdom that force each one to come to terms with the delicate ecological balances and the limits of resources; but it is also a question of rules of language, of the language that each one must learn in order to compose the landscape as an open narrative text, of a landscape made up of a great wealth of scene-context, of a continuous and conscious search for effects of scenic decontextualisation to make the usual things express unusual meanings. Even the language of images through which we give form to the landscape-theatre seems contaminated by what Calvino called the ‘plague of language’: ‘images that for the most part lack the internal necessity that should characterise every image, as form and as meaning, as a force to impose itself on attention, as a wealth of possible meanings. A large part of this cloud of images dissolves immediately like dreams that leave no trace in the memory; but a feeling of estrangement and unease does not dissolve’. (Calvino 1988). It is this inability to grasp the language of images in all its expressive potential that ends up impoverishing the sense of landscape and making it a culture poor in meaning.

Landscape is one of those ‘fatally suggestive’ objects, as Baudelaire said of Woman. Its suggestiveness derives precisely from the inexhaustibility of its meaning, the problem is therefore not to limit its meaning, nor is it to dismember a part of it in order to claim some form of disciplinary primacy over the whole landscape: in this eagerness to take the lead we have seen geomorphologists, historians, architects, even quantitative economists take turns in the long history of landscape, and today we see mainly ecologists. In these academic contentions, the landscape ends up being dismembered, becoming unrecognisable.

The research strategy, which is perhaps more effective in order not to lose sight of the landscape, seems to me to be the opposite one; a strategy where each person from his or her own point of view works freely with the intention of enriching the sense of the landscape precisely in order to preserve its fatal fascination.

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