This chapter provides the theoretical and conceptual foundation of the present work. These comprise on the one hand a survey of the main theoretical perspectives of a social constructivist approach to landscape and its aesthetics, and on the other a brief outline of the concept of power.

2.1 Social Constructivism

A notable gap has opened in recent decades between the largely constructivist positions of the social sciences and humanities and the (for the most part) realist perspective of the natural sciences (Egner 2010). The tension can be felt within individual sciences like psychology, sociology and geography, whose roots lie in both cultures, and which make an essential contribution to landscape research. Trepl (2012, p. 29) illustrates the different approaches in terms of their attitude to concepts: “Concepts for the natural scientist are on the whole means to an end; for the human and social scientist the understanding of concepts is itself the end”—so long, I would add, as we are not talking about those aspects of the human sciences, like quantitative sociological research, that predominantly use the methods of natural science.

The realism of natural science springs from an acceptance of the possibility of objective knowledge and of its attainment through appropriate empirical procedures. This, in turn, presumes the existence of a reality structured independently of human knowing processes but accessible through those processes (Gergen 1985; Bailer-Jones 2005; Burr 2005; Gergen and Gergen 2009). The extreme case of realism, known as ‘naïve realism’, amounts to an unconditional belief in the reality of the physically perceived world (Wetherell and Still 1998). Burr (1998, 2005) distinguishes three aspects of what we call ‘reality’: truth as opposed to falsehood, materiality as opposed to illusion, and essence (what a thing is in itself) as opposed to construct (what human/social knowledge makes of it). In contrast to such realism, constructivism sees reality as the product of everyday social practice: the result not just of thought but of action (Berger and Luckmann 1966). This immediately involves a critical dimension: “Social constructivism insists that we take a critical stance toward our taken-for-granted ways of understanding the world, including ourselves” (Burr 2005, pp. 2–3; see also Schütz and Luckmann 1973). From the thesis that “reality is socially constructed” Berger and Luckmann (1966, p. 1) derive the conclusion that “the sociology of knowledge must analyze the processes in which this occurs”.

Hence, far from being anti-empirical, social constructivist research is devoted to empirical investigation of “which specific interpretations of reality do, and which do not, achieve normative status” (Kneer 2009, p. 5). The focus here is on the contextual anchoring of empirical knowledge—indeed, the constructivist question itself arises in the context of specific scientific concerns. Since the initial appearance of the movement in the 1960s, many research fields—from gender and cultural studies, through critical and discursive psychology, to discourse analysis, deconstruction, post-structuralism, and postmodern approaches in general—have adopted social constructivist ideas (Burr 2005; Kühne 2006a, 2008a; Gergen and Gergen 2009). In contrast to radical constructivism (see e.g. Luhmann 1984; Maturana and Varela 1987; Glasersfeld 1995), social constructivism, however, is not rooted in the biological sciences, nor does it pursue a full-scale epistemological program. It is more concerned with pre-scientific life practices and their social dimensions of change (Hacking 1999; Miggelbrink 2002; Egner 2010; Kühne 2013a; Lynch 2016). Reusswig (2010, p. 79) cites the example of climate change to illustrate the latent conflict in these approaches from a constructivist point of view: “That natural scientists so often reject the basic thesis […] of the social ‘construction’ of climate is due as a rule to an erroneously derived, abstract perception of social actors and systems as ‘physical objects’ bound up in some sort of causal chain with natural processes.”

Social constructivist approaches are particularly indebted to the phenomenological sociology of Alfred Schütz, which in turn takes its cue on the one hand from Max Weber’s sociology of Verstehen (understanding informed by empathy), with its key concept of ‘meaningfully derived action’, and on the other from the ‘phenomenological philosophy’ of Edmund Husserl. This, according to Zahavi (2007, p. 13), entails “the philosophical analysis of the various forms in which objects appear”. For Husserl (1973 [1929]), intersubjective experience is constitutive for the development of the individual subject, who can only experience ‘the world’ as a member of society. Linking Weber’s sociological approach with Husserl’s philosophy, Schütz (2004 [1932]) extended this by introducing the concept of ‘social meaning’: i.e. the meanings men and women accord to their actions. This shifted the focus of sociological research onto the individual subject and the meanings that may be associated with their actions—a way of thinking fundamentally different from that of natural science, whose objects develop no self-awareness, no understanding of the world, and no interests, motives or ‘meanings’ (see Schütz 1971 [1962]).

In line with these reflections, interpretations of the (socially generated) world by social scientists can be thought of as “second level constructs: constructs of constructs formed in and by the social activities of men and women whose behavior scientists observe and seek to explain in accordance with the procedures of their science” (Schütz 1971 [1962], p. 7). ‘Construct’ here “does not imply an intentional act, but a preconscious cultural process” (Kloock and Spahr 2007, p. 56). For every act of perception is informed by prior knowledge of the world in the form of abstractions (Schütz 1971)—as in the present instance with respect to ‘landscape’: “nowhere is there such a thing as a pure and simple fact” (Schütz 1971 [1962], p. 5; Burr 2005). The social construction of ‘world’ takes place in the fusion of individual sense percepts into an overall picture; nor should perception in this sense be thought of as an isolated event: it is the result of “a highly complex process of interpretation in which present percepts are related to past ones” (Schütz 1971 [1962], pp. 123–124) and referential structures thereby actualized.

Of central importance in the experience of ‘world’ as the social reality in which we live, learn, grow and suffer (Schütz and Luckmann 1973) is a process of typification that gains in importance with increasing social distance: “The typifications of social interaction become progressively anonymous the farther away they are from the face-to-face situation. Every typification, of course, entails incipient anonymity” (Berger and Luckmann 1966, p. 31). The process of typification involves a socially communicated body of values, roles, rules and norms—one need only think of the maxims cited in everyday actions—that ascribe normality and abnormality to situations, actions and appearances, as well as to spatial objects and clusters. It follows that, far from being isolated interpretive schemata, typifications rely for their genesis and meaning on mutual interconnectedness (Schütz and Luckmann 1973). Here, objects play a central role, for “every object and every utensil points to those anonymous people who produced it so that other anonymous people could use it to attain typical ends with typical means” (Schütz 1971 [1962], p. 20). Typifications of this sort construct a familiar, routine world without our having to reflect on the conditions and processes through which it has come about (Berger and Luckmann 1966; Garfinkel 1967; Zahavi 2007). For the point of familiarity and routine is not that we should know some truth but that we should be able to act in a social context.

Knowledge comes about in a threefold network of familiarity, recognition and belief (Schütz 1971 [1962], 1971):

  • Something is familiar if we “understand not only what it is and how it is constituted but also why it is so” (Schütz 1971, p. 157)—for instance, those houses are built of wood so that people can live in them.

  • We recognize something if we “know what it is but do not ask why” (ibid.)—for example, we can recognize a blast furnace if we see one, without (unless we are specialists in the field) knowing how it works.

  • If we do not know, or only vaguely know, what something is, we might say ‘I believe it is a such and such’. Belief in this sense may be more or less well founded, or based on trust in authority, or be the fruit of ignorance (ibid.). Thus, a shield volcano may be recognized as a volcano without any knowledge of how it came to have its particular form, or it may be thought of simply as an elevation in the landscape.

Knowledge grows and is communicated through social interactions and continuously changing processes of interpersonal relation and exchange. It is these, rather than immediate individual perceptions, that are responsible for most of what a normal adult knows. Social processes of negotiation and mediation are also constitutive in the development of the individual. For, as Mead and Morris (1967) observed, one does not primarily perceive oneself directly but indirectly, from the viewpoint of other members of one’s social group, either individually communicated or generalized. By taking over the attitudes of others, one objectifies oneself (ibid.). Knowledge, in other words, is socially communicated (Schütz and Luckmann 1973). We do not ‘naturally’ know what is and is not a volcano: we learn this in various ways, from family, friends, teachers etc.

Two sorts of social interaction can in this context be distinguished: ‘non-symbolic’—instinctual interactions that require no reflection; and ‘symbolic’—interactions whose meaning is generated in a process of social negotiation or definition using signs (Mead and Morris 1967; Blumer 1973). Signs become symbols when the same meaning is made for the recipient as for the giver of the sign: for example, when concertgoers clap their hands the pianist regards this as a sign of approbation for the performance; or where a flowerbed is marked off from the path with a low hedge, this is taken to mean that one should not walk on the bed—i.e. it communicates the will of the person who planted the hedge. Symbolic communication involves what Berger and Luckmann (1966) describe as processes of externalization and internalization. Externalization is the ascription of meaning to objects, making them into signs—e.g. a knife as a commonly accepted sign of aggression (Burr 2005; see also Costonis 1982). Conversely, internalization refers to the socialization of objects and actions in the symbolic world of a particular society with its everyday meanings, institutions, rules and typifications (Burr 2005; for greater detail see below: Sect. 4.1—Socialization of Landscape Constructs).

Symbolic interactions are generally connected with ‘things’ in the broadest sense of whatever a person perceives in their world—physical objects, like a tree or a chair; other people, like friends or enemies; institutions, like school or the government; ideals and principles, like independence or honesty; the actions of others, like commands or wishes; and whatever situations an individual encounters in daily life (Blumer 1973). For in relation to things, people act on the basis of the meaning these things have for them, which originates in their mutual social interactions (Blumer 1973), one meaning adding to another. Such meanings are not stable or irreversible: they “are negotiated and changed in the interpretive process engaged in by the individual with the things they encounter” (Blumer 1973, p. 81). Their inherent reversibility opens these meanings to the power processes of discourse, which may be deeply interested in their preservation or revision; and this introduces the question as to who has this power, who can promote or defend one meaning against another (see e.g. Weber 2013; Hannigan 2014; Kühne and Weber 2015).

Social constructivist landscape research regards physical objects like trees, houses and fields “as symbols […]—concrete material embodiments of social ideas, relations, habits, lifestyles etc.—in which the social is abstracted from its physical embodiments by a process of interpretation” (Hard 1995, p. 52). This perspective distinguishes social constructivism from other constructivist viewpoints like radical constructivism or the discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe (1985—see also Glasze and Mattissek 2009; Weber 2013, 2015), which focuses on social communication to the (virtual) exclusion of the material dimension of communicative power processes.

To return to the question of knowledge: the acquisition of knowledge, and hence knowledge itself—especially in the case of socially communicated meanings—is not equally available to all. It is both socially and culturally differentiated. The reality of a Tibetan monk—to cite the example given by Berger and Luckmann (1966)—is quite different from that of an American businessman. Moreover, this variation in the construction of ‘reality’ and the distribution of knowledge indicates the historical nature of thought (Berger and Luckmann 1966; Stearns 1995). The sociocultural differentiation of knowledge is in many cases also geographical—as the example of the monk and the businessman already suggests. Berger and Luckmann (1966) argue, however, that among the many realities of science, business, administration, politics etc. one stands out as the cornerstone and point of relation of all the others: the reality of everyday life. This is characterized by pre-arranged patterns; it seems already objectivized, for its meanings have already been inscribed before the individual subject encounters and acts within it: We are born into a world whose conceptual framework and categories are already given in the inherited culture” (ibid.; see also Burr 2005). The reality of the everyday world seems to be ordered around the ‘here’ of the body, as the condition of all spatial experience of the world in which we live (Merleau-Ponty 1945), and the ‘now’ of the bodily present. This ‘here and now’ is the starting point for the construction of the individual’s world: it is accepted as real and requires no further verification (Berger and Luckmann 1966). In this sense, the reality of the world is socially mediated: “The reality of everyday life further presents itself to me as an intersubjective world, a world that I share with others” (Berger and Luckmann 1966, p. 23).

The everyday world is, then, perceived as real and objective (Berger and Luckmann 1966). This involves the objectivization of essentially subjective experiences—i.e. their embodiment in the processes and objects of daily life: “The reality of everyday life is not only filled with objectivations [sic]; it is only possible because of them” (Berger and Luckmann 1966, p. 35). Three stages of objectivization can be distinguished (Schütz and Luckmann 1973; Rammert 2007). In the first stage, it takes the form of actions in shared situations—e.g. the discursive agreement to (constructively) judge a landscape beautiful. In the second stage, the term is applied to the physical products of human action—technical devices and constructs such as gardens, woods, cultivated land, settlements etc. The third stage is characterized by the situative decoupling effected by the abstract sign systems of language. These introduce a new level of anonymization and idealization (Schütz and Luckmann 1973)—for example, the word ‘landscape’ releases specific associations irrespective of whether or not it is used in a physical space that might normally be referred to as landscape. Abstraction and anonymity increase with increasing distance (social as well as spatial) from the point of reference of an individual’s ‘here and now’ (Berger and Luckmann 1966). Individualized personal perceptions will then often yield to generalizations like ‘they are typical nouveau riches/on benefits/Americans/East Germans etc.’ (see Schlottmann 2005).

The structures of everyday reality remain unproblematic so long as the routine typifications that generate them are not disturbed by the need for adjustment; or as Schütz and Luckmann (1973) put it, so long as the unbroken chain of everyday structures can be taken for granted. This also applies to persons: the stranger who conforms to the expected roles of my world is unproblematic, he ‘fits in’, he is ‘integrated’; he only becomes problematic when I have to adjust my own perspective to fit him (Berger and Luckmann 1966). Or in other words: “The world is accepted as familiar and in that sense ‘real’ up to the point, at least, when it becomes problematic and needs to be questioned” (Werlen 2000, p. 39).

The social division of knowledge which has accompanied its rapid expansion in the course of the modernization of society has created more or less closed provinces of meaning that are clearly marked off from everyday knowledge—one need only think of academic sociologists and philosophers, or of mechatronic engineers, designers and planners. All such groups tend to develop their own symbols of authority, ranging from working apparel and dress codes to specialist language, which distinguish them from laypeople (Berger and Luckmann 1966; for greater detail see below: Sect. 4.2). These symbolic worlds are in constant competition with each other—as evidenced, for example in the question, whether landscape is a physical object or a social construct. However, the development of alternative symbolic worlds shows that the interpretations inherent in earlier worlds of meaning were neither conclusive nor mandatory; for absolute knowledge of the world (including oneself) is unattainable. As Berger and Luckmann (1966, p. 116) observe: “Because they are historical products of human activity, all socially constructed universes change, and the change is brought about by the concrete actions of human beings”. The application of this insight to landscape, with its implications of continuing historical change, is a central concern of this book.

2.2 Landscape

From a social constructivist perspective landscape is not an objective, univocally definable entity existing within a physical, material world: it is the sociocultural product of a process of mediation (Wojtkiewicz and Heiland 2012; see also Cosgrove 1985; Greider and Garkovich 1994; Graham 1998; Ipsen 2002; Mitchell 2002; Soyez 2003; Kaufmann 2005; Ahrens 2006; Kühne 2006a, b, c, d, 2008a, 2009; Chilla 2007; Backhaus et al. 2007; Lingg et al. 2010; Micheel 2012). Greider and Garkovich (1994, p. 2) explain this process as follows: “Through sociocultural phenomena, the physical environment is transformed into landscapes that are the reflections of how we define ourselves”. Cosgrove (1984, p. 13) succinctly characterized the transition from an objectivist to a constructivist understanding of landscape in visual terms: “Landscape is not merely the world we see; it is a construction, a composition of that world. Landscape is a way of seeing the world.” This reflected the approach of W.G. Hoskins in The Making of the English Landscape (2006 [1956]), which examined not only the development of physical structures but also the historical process of affective appropriation in which the concept of England and its landscape came into being. Commenting on the academic dimension of this insight, Cosgrove (1985, p. 47) warned that “the landscape idea is a visual ideology; an ideology all too easily adopted unknowingly into geography when the landscape idea is transferred as an unexamined concept into our discipline”. Ideological blindness of this sort has not been restricted to geography; it was (and to some extent still is) to be found in neighbouring disciplines as well; but, as already observed—and thanks not least to Dennis Cosgrove’s work—the situation in geography has improved.

Landscapes are the product on the one hand of abstraction, on the other of emotive projection (Goodman 1951; see also Daniels and Cosgrove 1988; Greider and Garkovich 1994; Agnew 1997; Cosgrove 1998; Graham 1998; Howard 2011); the interpretation of sense impressions that generates them is—as indicated in the previous section on social constructivism—based on what the individual learns in and from the long social evolutionary process of normative acculturation. Landscape, then, is experienced not as a visual image of the world but as an integral aspect of its meaning (see also Burr 1995; Assmann 1999; Wöhler 2001); or as Helmut Rheder already observed in the early 1930s, “that nature is grasped as landscape is the work of thought” (1932, p. 1). It is this that produces forms and distinctions between the similar and dissimilar, between “what human vision separates and moulds into separate entities, […] into the individuality of ‘landscape’” (Simmel 1996 [1913], p. 95).

The process is unconscious—which is why “it does not appear to us as a social construction, but as reality” (Ipsen 2006, p. 31). Gailing (2012, p. 3) describes it as follows: landscapes become “more or less distinct spatial units, reified into an ontological synthesis”—reification (or hypostasization) being what Werlen (2000) has called the mental transformation of a concept of landscape or space into a thing. Following Schlottmann (2005), Gailing (2012, p. 149) understands the reification of ‘spaces’ or ‘landscapes’ as the “unequivocal conception of spatial units as independent of human action and the human observer, and hence as in principle non-negotiable” (see also Miggelbrink 2002); this represents, he continues, “the treatment of abstractions as substantial entities” (ibid.). The construct ‘landscape’ is thought of as an immediately perceptible object. This entails, however, a linguistic process commonly observable in phrases such as ‘the Camargue/Cape Breton etc. landscape’, which are normative as well as descriptive, for in everyday usage they associate with terms denoting beauty, wildness or other values connected with the desirability of conservation. In any investigation of landscape—as in all constructivist research—the “context of language usage” (Strüver and Wucherpfennig 2009, p. 117) plays an indispensable role. This immediately poses the question of power: Whose language? Who constructs landscape, in what social context, and how? Who establishes the construct as normative?

The conscious perception of ‘landscape’ as the inherent form of specific objects entails more than merely recognizing those objects, “just as understanding a text entails more than recognizing the meaning of its words” (Berendt 2005, p. 29). In the terminology of systems theory it can be seen as an act of complexity reduction, or what Miggelbrink (2009, p. 191) calls “a reaction to a perceived need for structuring” (see also in a landscape context Papadimitriou 2010; Kühne 2004, 2014)—an act that enables (and is indispensable for) orientation. Without such reduction, “every tree would have to be encountered anew, for none is quite the same as any other” (Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1997, p. 901), and no number of adjacent trees would be recognizable as a wood (see also Tuan 1974; Kaplan et al. 1998; Nohl 1997; Kühne 2008b). Burckhardt (2006 [1991], p. 82) draws these considerations together when he calls landscape a “trick of our perceptions that allows us to collate heterogeneous factors into a picture, excluding other factors”.

It would, however, be wrong to think that in a social constructivist perspective objects like trees, houses or grass do not exist—that they are mere fictions or products of illusion. What that perspective maintains is something quite different: that the reality of those things is the fruit of a process of social production. Edley (2001) states clearly that language is not the only reality social constructivists accept (see also Newman and Paasi 1998; Chilla 2007; Marshall 2008): “They do not suppose that, say, Nottingham appears in the middle of the M1 motorway because it says so on the page and neither do they imagine it somehow springs into existence at the moment it is mentioned. The way that constructivism upsets our common-sense understandings is much more subtle than this. Instead, a constructivist might point out that Nottingham is a city by virtue of a text (i.e. by royal decree) and that boundaries—where it begins and ends—are also matter for negotiation and agreement. The argument is not, therefore, that Nottingham doesn’t exist, but that it does so as a socially constructed reality” (Edley 2001, p. 439).

Our stock of knowledge of landscape also has a history. Following the general principles outlined by Schütz and Luckmann (1973), this is part of our ‘sedimentary experience’ (this will be treated in greater detail in Chap. 3). The experience of landscape does not derive only—or even principally—from direct sensory confrontation with physical objects designated as ‘landscape’. Other elements of the socialization process—interaction with parents, peer group, teachers, films and books (see Kühne 2008a)—play a more crucial role in cultivating the ability to construct physical space as landscape, and hence in the genesis of individual concepts of landscape. This ability depends on one’s socially mediated individual stock of knowledge—a cultural mediation that is “as a rule a guideline to [a process of] selection, a filtering out of impressions” (Burckhardt 2006 [1995], p. 257; see also Jacks 2004).

As shown, the socialization process conveys specific social interpretations, assessments and symbolic occupations of objects. Accordingly, “spatial images play so important a role in the collective memory” (Halbwachs 1992 [1939], p. 2). The starting point for the symbolic attachment to and occupation of objects is the inescapable spatiality of social activities: “Every group and every kind of collective activity is linked to a specific place, or segment of space” (Assmann and Czaplicka 1995, p. 7). Through physical objects, social action is structured—a house becomes a private retreat, emotionally charged and thus becomes a home (cf. Häußermann and Siebel 1996). Deep social bonds, ritualized in their spatial anchors, lead to the fact that people describe physical objects that they see as landscapes as their homeland (Kühne and Spellerberg 2010; cf. also Petermann 2007).

Certain places are attributed special significance for the formation of collective identities (see for example Graham et al. 2000; Ashworth et al. 2007; Legg 2007). In Switzerland, for example, the Rütli meadow, where representatives of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden are said to have conjured up a pact of support, has become the central site of the national founding myth (Kreis 2004). A place can be anchored very different in the (here national) myths. Stalingrad (in relation to the battle there between 1942 and 1943) was—not least because of the name of the city after the Soviet dictator—particularly mythically charged and symbolically linked to the turning point of the Second World War. In the Soviet Union, the city was associated with the beginning of the victory in the ‘Great Patriotic War’. From a German perspective, the battle is now a symbol of a dubious military action in which hundreds of thousands of soldiers were sacrificed senselessly (in conservative to nationalist interpretation: ‘heroically fought to the last’; cf. Ebert 1989; Troebst 2005; in general concercing national iconography Paasi 1996).

From a social constructivist perspective, things and social constructs stand to each other in a mutually conditioning relation—and this applies to both the social and individual construction of landscape (see e.g. Muir 2003; Marshall 2008; Kost 2013). In other words, a constructed landscape goes hand in hand with a ‘not-landscape’—which exemplifies the process of complexity reduction noted above. For ‘landscape’ says far less than might be said about spatial complexes in general, making it a special case of the more general concept of space.

Like all other sign systems, social patterns of interpretation and ascription of landscape have to be learned: “There is no naïve relationship to landscape prior to society. The naïve individual cannot perceive landscape, for he has not learned its language” (Burckhardt 2006 [1977], p. 20). The process of construction of landscape has recourse to culturally rooted, socially mediated and temporally conditioned typifications; for “[we see] in general only what we have learned to see, and we see it as the style of our age requires” (Lehmann 1973 [1950], p. 48). Landscape arises, then, as a cultural image in which our surroundings are structured and symbolized (Daniels and Cosgrove 1988; see also Berendt 2005; Matless 2005; Kühne 2008b); and the acquisition of knowledge of landscape represents the sedimentation of current experience in structures of meaning along already acquired lines of relevance and typification (see in general: Berger and Luckmann 1966; Schütz and Luckmann 1973; specifically on this point: Kühne 2008a). These structures, in turn, consist for the most part in adopted patterns of socially current interpretation and evaluation. In addition, this process is rarely continuous: the immediate encounter with physical objects in terms of ‘landscape’ is in modern and/or postmodern society more often sporadic. For, in our urban society, human settlements are not commonly thought of as ‘landscape’: the experience of landscape is generally confined to weekend trips and vacations (see e.g. Kühne 2006a).

As with other such constructs, the concept of landscape is initially taken for granted. Only when deviations from the unreflected sediment of meaning and typification are noticed will it be questioned—although an exception must be made for those engaged professionally in this area. As observed in the preceding section, knowledge of landscape characteristically takes the form of familiarity, recognition or belief:

  • ‘familiarity’ is knowledge of e.g. the climate, geology, vegetation, patterns of housing, agricultural usage and aesthetics of a specific area

  • ‘recognition’ is knowledge of the discursive existence of an area commonly considered a ‘landscape’ (for example, the San Bernadino Mountains, the Lake District)

  • ‘belief’ is knowledge e.g. of the existence of landscapes other than those I already know.

Individual knowledge is generally restricted, but can combine all these forms. A person familiar with the geology of their own region may merely ‘recognize’ other aspects of that region in the same way as they do the geology of other regions. Moreover, of course, knowledge may grow step by step from one level to another (Schütz and Luckmann 1973). The growth of knowledge about the physical structure of the British Isles through the classification of fossils, and with it the launch of geology as a discipline, exemplifies this process, for the first geological mapping took place in the context of discourse on stones and fossil finds in the houses of their genteel collectors—a discourse, incidentally, in which the Bible was increasingly thrown on the defensive (see Kühne 2013a).

Social constructivist landscape research—like social constructivist research in general (Gergen and Gergen 2009)—takes place essentially on a meta-level. It “investigates and casts light on what people mean when they speak of ‘landscape’” (Haber 2001, p. 20; see also Leibenath and Gailing 2012); it is concerned, in other words, with what brings us to share our generalized concepts of reality and value with others in respect of certain spatial complexes (Gergen and Gergen 2009, p. 100). On the research level, two further aspects can be distinguished: the microsocial aspect of an individual’s anchoring in social and communal contexts (see Berger and Luckmann 1966; Gergen 1999); and—in the wake of deconstructivism—the macrosocial aspect of the structuring power and function of language (Myers 1996; Burr 2005).

The prime interest of social constructivist landscape research is not ontology (how things exist, what landscape is) but language usage and how this expresses its psychological and ideological roots (Mitchell 2002, p. 1; and see Lacoste 1990; Potter 1996; Leibenath and Gailing 2012; Kühne 2013a). Questions arising from this focus include:

  • How, why and in what circumstances is the term ‘landscape’ ascribed to a specific space?

  • What is excluded from such ascriptions and why?

  • How are such ascriptions communicated? How and in what circumstances does landscape become thematized?

  • What patterns of power and knowledge distribution are in play here? Who defines landscape, and decides where and when it should be declared worth protecting?

The factors underlying the designation of an agglomeration of material objects as landscape may be as varied as an active person or persons, a body of social knowledge, or the material objects themselves. To enable analytic consideration of such disparate dimensions, I have—following Pierre Bourdieu, Karl Popper and Martina Löw—developed the concept of four distinct but related levels of landscape (see Kühne 2006c, d, 2013a, b). The structuring in levels is indebted to Bourdieu (1991), who developed the threefold categorization of ‘social’, ‘physical’ and ‘appropriated physical’ space. For Bourdieu social space is a metaphor for society as an arena of the fight for status and position; physical space arises “when one intentionally ignores the fact that space is appropriated and inhabited, as e.g. in physical geography” (Funken and Löw 2002, p. 85); and physical space is appropriated when it is inscribed with social relations (as, for instance, a fence symbolizes restricted rights of access). Popper (1973; see also Hard 2002 [1987]) contributed his ‘three worlds’ hypothesis, distinguishing ‘World 1’: the world of physical objects and events; ‘World 2’: the world of individual perceptions and awareness; and ‘World 3’: the world of cultural and scientific knowledge. The third theoretical angle derives from Löw’s (2001) reflections on the relational ordering of objects, which, she argues, “depends on the relational system of the observer” (Löw 2001, p. 34; original emphasis). Against this theoretical background the four levels (or perspectives) of landscape are as follows:

  1. (a)

    Social landscape is the socially constructed, aesthetic dimension of landscape, a “socially defined object and ensemble of signs” (Hard 2002 [1987a], p. 227) that belongs to Popper’s ‘World 3’ (1973). It comprises what in a society or social grouping is understood as ‘landscape’—see the various cultural perspectives described above.

  2. (b)

    Individually appropriated social landscape has symbolic, aesthetic, emotional and cognitive dimensions, inasmuch as it is characterized by personal knowledge, preferences, emotions, and patterns of interpretation and evaluation, these latter also entailing the distinction between actual and target values (see Agnew 1997; Ipsen 2002; Kühne 2006a; Kühne and Spellerberg 2010). As a personally appropriated perspective it goes beyond the social landscape on which it is based (see de Certeau 1990). It belongs to Popper’s ‘World 2’.

  3. (c)

    Physical space in general can be defined as the ordering of material objects in a spatial relationship irrespective of their social or individual designation as landscape. As the material substratum of the other perspectives it belongs to Popper’s ‘World 1’.

  4. (d)

    Appropriated physical space comprises physical entities infused with individual, socially molded meanings that are assumed into the construction of social space and its individual actualizations. Without using this terminology, Ipsen (1997, p. 7) explains this perspective as “the intensification of a spatial agglomeration of objects into an image that we can interpret and evaluate”. Appropriated physical space is what specialists in the field mean when they speak of ‘landscape’. It belongs to Popper’s ‘World 1’. As the “largely unstable” (Mrass 1981, p. 29) consequence of social acts, appropriated physical space can be further described as “a juxtaposition of long and short term, latent and manifest developments” (Békési 2007, p. 23). Its instability has two aspects: in their physical manifestation material objects are subject to the impact of socio-historical developments (e.g. 19th century industrialization, 21st century expansion of renewably sourced energies), and as social landscapes they are subject to social as well as individual constructions of meaning. That these are inherently changeable (Kühne 2006a; Olwig 2009) can be seen, for example, in the fact that up to the 1970s heavy industry plants in Germany were generally considered ugly, whereas today they rank as a valuable cultural heritage attracting frequent events and continuous tourism (see e.g. Hauser 2001; Kühne 2006c).

The constitutive factor in appropriated physical space is not a relation immanent to the object, as positivist approaches to landscape would have it; nor is it the ‘essence’ posited by essentialists as immanent within a specific topography (on these two trends see Kühne 2013a; Chilla et al. 2015). The concept is best understood as deriving from that of the individually appropriated social landscape, whose sign system is assimilated in the course of socialization by a process of selection and synthesis (at least logically) before individual actualization can occur.

2.3 Power

Power has already been mentioned as a prime factor in the definition of landscape, but the following section will focus on this multifaceted issue in order to approach the conceptual development of landscape in a more differentiated fashion. The concept of power itself is of almost universal application, but perhaps for this very reason its definition is wrapped in what Han (2005, p. 7) has called a “theoretical chaos”, and its evaluation in insoluble contradictions. On the one hand, it is associated with freedom, on the other with oppression; here with order, there with social pressure; in one instance with right and rectitude, in another with willful arbitrariness. Power, then, is a many-sided, chameleon-like, contradictory concept, but—as Sofsky and Paris (1994, p. 11) observe—it remains a “central form of socialization”, omnipresent within any context concerning social beings (see also Imbusch 1998). From a systems theory perspective, more or less stable power relations can be described as an essential element of the stability of society. They would satisfy the need for reliability and security (Parsons 1951; cf. also Anter 2012). A view that Dahrendorf (1963) vehemently contradicts by referring to the social productivity of conflicts arising from different power distributions.

From the point of view of power, human interaction knows “no sterile circumstances” (Popitz 1992, p. 272). Power cannot be grasped in a simple cause-effect relation: it is a recursive process “immersed in the rules of social intercourse and at the same time following those rules” (Sofsky and Paris 1994, p. 11). Power in this sense is, then, a normal and normative function of human relationships (Paris 2005; Imbusch 1998). It produces order, but not without conflict; in fact power struggles are “an integral aspect of the ongoing establishment of normality” (Paris 2005, p. 7). Popitz (1992, p. 12) underlines the anthropogenesis of power when he writes that “power structures are not God-given, not bound up in myth, not ordained by natural necessity nor hallowed by immutable tradition; they are the work of man”. As such, they are in principle as reversible as the interpretations of the world in which they operate (Popitz 1992; and see previous sections of this chapter).

Weber (1976 [1922], p. 29) described power as “sociologically amorphous”; for “every conceivable human quality and circumstance” can lead to “the assertion of the [individual] will in a given situation”. For Weber (1976 [1922], p. 28) power implies “the capability, in whatever circumstances, to assert one’s will within a human relationship even against the will of others”. This definition formulates four criteria (Anter 2012):

  1. 1.

    The category of ‘chance’ refers to the potentiality of power.

  2. 2.

    ‘Social opportunity’ refers to the personal character of power.

  3. 3.

    The ‘own will’ refers to the voluntaristic element of power.

  4. 4.

    The word ‘reluctance’ refers to a potential resistance that opposes ‘one’s own will’.

The definition of Max Weber includes, in other words, the capacity to directly or indirectly compel others to give up their own aims (Foucault 2006 [1976]). Power is not, however, the property of a specific individual or group; nor is it stable. On the contrary, it is, at least at times, eminently reversible and—depending on place, time and situation—discontinuous. It may also, as Latour (2002, p. 218) dramatically illustrates, depend on actual (or at least potential) use of an instrument:

With a weapon in your hand you are someone else, and the weapon in your hand is not the same either. You are a different subject because you are holding a weapon; the weapon is a different object because of its relation to you. It is no longer a weapon in the safe, or in the drawer, or in your pocket. No, it’s a weapon in your hand now, and it’s pointing at someone who is yelling for their life.

The social context in which the acquisition, establishment and loss of power evolve generally includes other factors than just the more and the less powerful (Sofsky and Paris 1994). This means, according to Butler (2001), that the principal actors are neither fully determined by power nor fully determine it. The game, in fact, has various roles: that of observer or ally as well as that of protagonist. Sofsky and Paris (1994, p. 14) describe such configurations as “a complex weft of mutual, asymmetrical relations involving several persons, groups or parties, in which change in one relation effects change in the others”.

The sociologist Popitz (1992) distinguishes four basic types of power:

  • Active (coercive) power is the power to hurt others. Based on the one hand on the vulnerability of the human body, on the other on the ability to withdraw means of subsistence and social participation, it operates typically through physical superiority and the threat of violence.

  • Instrumental (persuasive) power is the capacity to ordain reward and punishment, to grant or withdraw privileges in order to produce conformity; it operates typically by instilling hope and fear.

  • Authoritative (directive) power directs the behavior and attitude of others; it operates typically by engendering unconscious, willing obedience based on unquestioning submission.

  • Technical (structural) power—also called by Popitz the ‘power of data constitution’—resides in the creation and possession of technical artifacts that can structure the actions of others; it operates typically through technological dominance.

The actual incidence of these four types is variable in composition and dosage, as well as in place and time. In the course of social and technological development, the emphasis has shifted from active and instrumental to authoritative and technical power. Central to my argument here is the role of artifacts in the mediation of power. As developed by Popitz, this contradicts both the treatment of artifacts as banalities and their over-dramatization (Fohler 2004, p. 42). The former position was taken by Koelle (1822) and Kapp (1978 [1877]), for whom artifacts were simply a means to self-knowledge and the perfection of the human being—or what Fohler (2004, p. 40) describes as “the projection of human organs and functions as an external condition”. Gehlen (1986) pursues the same thought when he characterizes the human condition as essentially lacking. The opposite position of over-dramatization of artifacts sees “the unparalleled hegemony of science and technology as [threatening] to destroy the foundations of society” (Fohler 2004, p. 40), for humankind has unleashed upon itself objects capable of autonomous development (see e.g. Jünger 1946).

Power involves knowledge (in what forms and ways will be detailed later); indeed for Foucault (2006 [1976]) it is the ‘will to knowledge’, and as such reciprocally related to the production of truth (Foucault 1983; see also Leibenath 2015). The symbiosis of these two forces can be seen in their mutual conditioning: power does not exist without knowledge, nor does knowledge without power. Alternatively, put negatively, power resides in the person “who can afford not to have to learn anything” (Deutsch 1969, p. 171). As Foucault stated in 1977, power systems generate knowledge systems and vice versa. Not that knowledge per se implies power; it only does so in the case of “exclusive knowledge—knowledge that one person has and another needs but does not have” (Paris 2005, p. 42). In this sense, however, social differentiation entails a knowledge and information gap that also conditions power. Far from being centrally focused either spatially or functionally, power operates decentrally in an omnipresent network of tension between governor and governed (Bourdieu 2001). In opposition to Weber, Foucault (2006 [1976]) describes it not as an objectively measurable resource (see Leibenath 2015), but as the multiple interrelation of forces operating within and organizing a specific area; and he characterizes these relations as a game which in never-ending struggle and confrontation transforms, reinforces and inverts those relations and the systems of support they create with each other—or the displacements and opposing tendencies with which they isolate each other (ibid.).

These relations can often be felt at the edge of spatially and temporally restricted knowledge milieus and networks (see Castells 2001; Matthiesen 2006). Called ‘KnowledgeScapes’ by Matthiesen (2006, p. 167), these hybrid structures are characterized by a specific topography of knowledge which, despite rapid fluctuation, facilitates their identification and location in social (and even physical) space (see Honneth 1989). The differentiated monopolization of knowledge brings with it the growth of intricate self-multiplying hierarchies in many areas and subsystems of society (see Willke 2005; Ortner 2006). These, however, are inimical to the purpose of a democracy, with its reliance on the formation of collective knowledge for collective decisions (see Willke 2002). For a democracy not only “fosters the growth of collective knowledge, but cultivates dissent, diversity and heterogeneity; it aims not to suppress social complexity, but to intensify it” (Willke 2005, p. 48).

Closely connected with the general concept of power is that of domination, which Luhmann (1984, p. 37)—from a systems-theory perspective—calls simply a “mode of systems description, […] a manifestation of the immanent control exercised by a system over itself”. For Weber (1976 [1922], p. 541) domination is “a specific instance of power”, and he defines it in contradistinction to power as the probability that a specific command will be obeyed—or as Luhmann (1971, p. 92) puts it, “that one’s goals will become the goals of others”. Domination, for Weber, is legitimated when it is accepted by those subjected to it, irrespective of its impact on individual lives and opportunities; and he names three grounds for such acceptance: reason—the thoughtful weighing up of interests; custom—doing what has always been done; and emotion—acting from personal inclination (Weber 1976 [1922]). In contrast to power, domination is more specific: it does not include absolute control over others, but “is always limited to certain contents and identifiable persons” (Dahrendorf 1972, p. 33; following Max Weber). Dahrendorf (1983) sees this stronger organization of (undifferentiated) power to rule as a central aspect of peaceful social development (as can be found, for example, in the representative democracy he favored). According to Weber (1976 [1922]), the development of power into rule begins with the emergence of the modern state. This came to the multitude of local rulers, power relations were centralized and increasingly regulated in a generally binding manner (i.e. law applies equally to all and compliance with it is guaranteed by the state). The development of the state is accompanied by the monopolization of physical violence (which, of course, remains incomplete, because otherwise there would be no ‘violent crimes’) and the specific organisation of knowledge in the form of bureaucracy (cf. Anter 2012). Both developments are likely to generate security, which in turn is an essential basis for the acceptance of a central power (see Anter 2012). As, however, these grounds are relatively unstable, domination must itself ensure stabilization of the subject’s belief in its legitimacy. On the basis of the above-named grounds, Weber (1982) distinguishes three types of domination:

  • legal domination is legitimated by the rational belief in the right of governance invested in those who exercise it

  • traditional domination is legitimated by the common belief in the hallowed nature of established traditions and the right of governance invested in its officials

  • charismatic domination is legitimated by the exceptional qualities (holiness, heroism, nobility etc.) invested in a particular person and the order of governance they create or reveal.

Domination, as opposed to power, is relatively stable. Following Weber (1976 [1922]), Imbusch (2002, p. 172) defines it as “a permanent, institutionalized power invested in a person or group in relation to another person or group that possesses at least a minimal will to acknowledge and obey”. In the same tradition, Neuenhaus sees this will, backed by reason and discipline, as “elevating social awareness to the level of an automatism, and the corresponding domination to that of an end in itself, devoid of meaningful purpose and demanding universal obedience. Its ‘case-hardened cage of conformity’ (Weber 1976 [1922]) quells the struggle for power and leads to a uniformity of social action” (Neuenhaus 1998, p. 78).

Treiber (2007, pp. 54–55) describes the development of the concept of domination in the following terms: “the more precise definition of the concept of domination sought by Weber consists in positing the power relation as permanently institutionalized through processes of depersonalization, formalization and integration. That this leads to the typical asymmetry of ruler and ruled is a function of the conditional programming inherent in the horizon of expectations of a probabilistic concept of causality.”

Along these lines, Popitz (1992) further defines the three processes of institutionalization mentioned by Treiber as the subjection of power to increasing:

  1. 1.

    depersonalization: “Power no longer stands and falls with the individual who has the say at the moment, but is connected sequentially with specific functions of a suprapersonal character” (Popitz 1992, p. 233);

  2. 2.

    formalization: the exercise of power is governed by ever more rules, procedures, norms and rituals;

  3. 3.

    integration into a superior system of order: power “binds itself and is bound up in a social structure that supports and is supported by it” (Popitz 1992, p. 234).

The domination uses bureaucracy. Bureaucracy does not only serve to enforce rule, it is itself the wearer of power (Weber 1988 [1918]). On the one hand, this brings together the specialist knowledge acquired by the staff in a wide variety of training courses, and on the other hand, the staff members have exclusive knowledge of the official organisational processes (where they are able to exert an influence on the society). The official organisation is characterised by hierarchy, division of labour, effectiveness and predictability (more on Fukuyama 2013). Once introduced, “a virtually unbreakable form of power relations has emerged” (1976 [1922], p. 570). In the sense of Popitz, with the perfecting of the ‘data-setting power’ “in the late 20th century, a supervisory state has thus emerged, which—theoretically speaking—can find out everything about its citizens” (Anter 2012, p. 73).

A critique of power and domination has been mounted from two otherwise mutually antagonistic positions: liberalism and critical theory. Liberalism is committed to maximizing individual freedom, which it sees as jeopardized by increasing state power. Hence classical liberalism in particular confines the tasks of the state to “protection of property, freedom and peace” (Mises 1927, p. 33). State intervention in the marketplace not only causes economic imbalance, and with it an inefficient distribution of production resources; it also concentrates power in a few hands, enhancing the danger of its abuse (Mises 1927)—in liberalism a deep-seated, skeptical thesis. The other side of this coin is the loss of power and increasing conformism of the governed (Paris 2005). Inevitably “power crystallizes into domination”, for “it is not the law itself but the subject’s compliance with it that causes institutionalization” (Sofsky 2007, p. 17), robbing the individual of freedom. Unwittingly and without resistance “the conformist lives and moves in a rigid mental prison, without noticing the damage long since inflicted on the power of thought” (Sofsky 2007, p. 129). That power entails the will on the part of the governed to constitute themselves as subjects has been forcefully expressed by Hillebrandt (2000, p. 120): “Only the immanent self-subjection of the individual creates awareness of the disciplining eye of domination”. Moreover, this can be seen in the example of prison, where physical power over the body works “to approximate the prisoner to a behavioral ideal, a model of obedience” (Butler 2001, p. 82). The prisoner, in Foucault’s words (1977, p. 260), becomes “the principle of [his or her] own subjection”—a process that in Popitz’s terminology exemplifies authoritative power.

It is for such reasons that liberalism rejects the hope—often associated with a deeper belief in the state—of attaining an optimal future societal condition, for this hope is undermined by the “intolerance and abuse of power” (Dahrendorf 2008, p. 76) that accompany it. The adherents of critical theory, on the other hand, reject domination, not so much from experience of its violent excesses, which in some cases have even instigated a reign of terror, but in principle; for domination, “to maintain itself in domination, tends always to totality” (Adorno 1969, p. 105). This is especially evident in its social effects, like maximizing disparities in the possession of symbolic capital and hence perpetuating inequalities of opportunity and, as a result, also of living standards (see Dubiel 1992; Imbusch 1998).

For Bourdieu (1979), symbolic capital is a central means of power and the exercise of power. He explains the concept as the opportunity, “perceived and accepted as legitimate”, to gain and preserve social recognition and prestige. Concretely it can take the form of either economic, social, or cultural capital (Bourdieu 1979, 1982a, b, c):

  • economic capital consists in material possessions that can be converted into money;

  • social capital resides in social networks that engender recognition;

  • cultural capital has three manifestations: objectified (books, artworks, technical devices); incorporated (education, cultural and creative abilities); and institutionalized (academic titles, certificates and memberships).

The social standing of an individual depends on “(a) the volume of their capital; (b) its structure—i.e. the relation of the different types of symbolic capital to each other; and (c) the relation of starting capital to actual capital” (Wayand 1998, p. 223). This also determines whether one is on a rising or falling social trajectory (Bourdieu 1979). Moreover, the three sorts of capital are in principle interchangeable, and economic capital in particular can be readily converted into the other two types. Differences in symbolic capital create a vertical differentiation in society that manifests itself above all in differences of taste between the social classes. According to Bourdieu (1972), these derive, not merely from individual and collective perceptions and intentions, but from the “appropriation of the same objective structures” within a single class.

Based on symbolic capital Bourdieu (1979) distinguishes three social classes:

  1. (a)

    The ruling class consists of entrepreneurs (with high economic but low cultural capital) and intellectuals (with high cultural but low economic capital); this class determines ‘legitimate’ taste with its values of cultivated discrimination.

  2. (b)

    The middle class (aka petite bourgeoisie) comprises the downwardly mobile (above all practitioners of traditional trades and crafts), the new middle class (new professions without higher qualification—e.g. salespersons, animateurs etc.), and middle management (employees who invest considerable time in ‘improving themselves’ educationally); this class determines conventional taste, which is marked by the values of education and industry.

  3. (c)

    The lower class (the ruled) comprises the rest of society; it determines popular taste, which is governed by life’s necessities and the values they impose.

In today’s milieu-based society, the concept of class as a social determiner seems rather antiquated. Nevertheless, Bourdieu’s aesthetic distinctions also hold for social milieus and are in this sense still valuable for sociological landscape research (see e.g. Hradil 1992; Zerger 2000; Kühne 2008a; Irrgang 2014). Taste remains a factor in the distribution of social opportunity: the ruling class is interested in setting aesthetic standards that will preserve its position in the asymmetric distribution of opportunity, the middle class is interested in evening out that asymmetry, and the ruled have generally come to terms with existing imbalances.

A central factor in the perpetuation of social inequality is what Bourdieu calls ‘habitus’: the ingrained physical embodiment of socialization (Bourdieu 1996) specific to each class. It is “a system of boundaries” (1982a, p. 33); for “to know a person’s habitus is to know intuitively what behavior is for that person forbidden” (1982a, p. 33). Habitus can be described as a transmission mechanism between mental and social structures and the daily life of society. The inscription of those structures within the individual creates a correspondence “which according to Bourdieu induces an immediate spontaneity in social actors to do what society requires of them” (Wayand 1998, p. 226; see also DeMarrais et al. 1996). In the respect habitus—especially that of the lower classes—is the key element in the perpetuation of political domination, because it is this that grounds people’s readiness to be ruled (Bourdieu 2001). As a social mechanism for maintaining domination, its efficacy is a function of its covert nature; for habitus is rarely recognized and evaluated as what it is (Bourdieu 1977). Or as Han (2005, p. 56; see also Lenski 2013) starkly puts it: “The ruled even relish their deprivation. Poverty becomes a chosen lifestyle. Compulsion and repression are experienced as freedom.”

The attitudes and values of habitus are transmitted through the educational system. It is striking that precisely economically disadvantaged families, whose children are barred by lack of social and cultural capital from higher educational establishments, believe most strongly in “talent and competence as decisive for scholarly success” (Bourdieu 1977, p. 16). The social function of schooling, according to Wayand (1998, p. 226), is to bring “the dialectic between subjective expectations and objective structures” to a standstill; its function as an instrument for maintaining established domination becomes all the clearer when one reflects that school as an institution binds “the organized learning processes of the coming generation […] into an official apparatus governed by the state, so that learning can in this way be administratively controlled and politically influenced” (Tillmann 2007, p. 113). For Althusser (2011 [1970]), school can develop abilities, but it does so in ways that ensure compliance with the ruling ideology, and/or mastery of its practice; and within any system of hierarchically skewed power relations (Tillmann 1976) this submission will prevail even in situations of competition between formal equals (Bernfeld 1925). For ‘no ruling class’, Althusser continues, can hold power for long without at the same time imposing its hegemony over and within the ideological channels of government (2011 [1970]).

School classes, then, “of set purpose, serve to mediate influence [and] are directed towards the acquisition of socially desired knowledge, abilities and values” (Tillmann 2007, p. 114). To stabilize the system and legitimate its concept of training (Masuch 1972) socially useful qualifications are granted, while at the same time the forms and modalities of capitalism are practised (albeit without serious reflection on their inevitable contingencies). Thus, concealed “under a cloak of neutrality” (Bourdieu 1973), the educational system reproduces established social structures, “instilling respect for the ruling culture in the children of the ruled, without granting them admittance to that culture” (Fuchs-Heinritz and König 2005, p. 42; see also Sidanius and Pratto 2001).

Education devalues the culture of the lower classes; its prime means of so doing is language. In the “system of signs and rules” (Werlen and Weingarten 2005, p. 192) that constitutes language, members of the lower class will “earn low marks as soon as they speak their own language; their pronunciation and grammar etc. are simply deemed wrong” (Bourdieu 1982a, p. 49). Without any need of physical intervention—Popitz’s ‘active power’—habitus produces, here too, unquestioned acceptance, “directing [personal] actions, so that established structures of domination are reproduced in a quasi-magical fashion that remains below the horizon of reasoning” (Han 2005, pp. 56–57). For Bourdieu (1984), the university incorporates similar power structures and establishes the same inequality of opportunity, reproducing in its own structures those of the arena of power and passing them on through its own communicative and selective functions. Althusser (2011 [1970]) sees state and private media, as well as churches, clubs and associations, as playing a role complementary to that of educational institutions, and Gramsci (2001) includes them all in what he calls the ‘apparatus of hegemony’.

In sum, the entire educational system—reinforced by patterns of behavior and socialization mediated by parents, age-group, peer-group etc. (see Fromm 1936)—contributes massively to the conversion of external to internal constraints which Elias (1992) sees as characteristic of the development of civilization. For, as societies grow more complex (the process known as sociogenesis), its members are compelled “to regulate their behavior in a more balanced, stable and differentiated fashion” (Elias 1992, p. 117). This entails an internalization of norms, which in turn implies the internalization of what was initially an externally imposed domination. As Foucault observed (1974, p. 95): “Humanity does not move slowly from conflict to conflict until a universal state of understanding is achieved; it anchors its violence in rules and regulations, moving from one [manifestation of] domination to another.”

Liberal thinkers tend also to see school (along with its sister institutions) as an instrument for the stabilization of domination, although with a stronger focus here on the domination of the state (Prollius 2014). Despite a fundamental belief in the opportunities afforded by education, school as an institution is viewed by liberals with critical differentiation, for the multiplying function of education multiplies the power of the state, whose existence and action—“including state television and radio and state schools” (Prollius 2014, p. 187; see also Kersting 2009; Sofsky 2007)—are, as a direct upshot of this, taken to lack any alternative. In such a perspective inequality of opportunity will, it is objected, pass without reflection or comment; it will simply be normalized or, where consciously perceived, earn only a shrug of resignation. The critique of state schooling goes back as far as the classical liberal thinker Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), for whom education was the prerequisite for a self-determined life in possession of its rights (Humboldt 1960). However, this ideal of the free and responsible individual could, Humboldt asserted, only be cultivated in a privately established environment. This, then, must be preferable to a state-run system intent only on producing obedient citizens.

The argument of this book will have frequent recourse to the concepts of power developed by Popitz and Bourdieu. Popitz sheds light on various dimensions of power that apply in particular to activities related to terrestrial spaces (Kühne 2015). Bourdieu laid down guidelines that facilitate investigation of the means and mechanisms through which social interests are defined and generalized. Among these—and hence, too, in the perpetuation of power structures and the unequal distribution of life’s opportunities—aesthetic judgments play an essential role.

2.4 Aesthetics

The relation in which landscape stands to the world, however culturally and professionally differentiated, is commonly held to be aesthetic (for such relations in general see e.g. Sheppard 1987; Townsend 1997; Graham 2005; Schweppenhäuser 2007). The word ‘aesthetic’ derives from the ancient Greek, where it was used to denote the science (or philosophy) of sense perception (aisthētikḗ episteme), which was complementary to that of thinking (logikḗ episteme) and moral action (ēthikḗ episteme). In the early European thought of figures like Augustine (c. CE 390) and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (c. CE 500) the three areas of logic, ethics and aesthetics reflected and underpinned the unity of the true, the good and the beautiful (see Augustinus 1962; Pseudo-Dionysius 1988); it was, in fact, only in the Enlightenment that aesthetics became an independent branch of philosophy (see Gilbert and Kuhn 1953; Majetschak 2007). Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Aesthetica (2007 [1750–1758]) introduced a new approach that “increasingly supplanted the ancient and medieval paradigm of an ontologically founded theory of beauty” (Schneider-Sliwa 2005, p. 7). The key relation for Baumgarten was between the aesthetics of art and the logic of science. Ritter (1996 [1962], p. 43) explains: “ When the wholeness of nature—of heaven and earth as aspects of our existence—no longer falls within the ambit of science, the sensitive mind creates the aesthetic image, the poetic word, in which [that wholeness] is realized in its affinity with our existence and its truth can be felt.” While analytic science unravels the world in order to examine its many contexts, the aesthetic perspective draws the threads together again (see Peres 2013). There was (and is) an undoubted clash of interests here; nevertheless—or perhaps for that very reason—aesthetics gained increasing attention during the Romantic period, when modern science, too, was burgeoning.

Five central, continually intertwining strands (or questions) can be distinguished in aesthetic discourse (Kühne 2012, 2013a):

  1. (a)

    What is defining quality of the aesthetic: the beautiful, the sublime, the picturesque or the ugly?

  2. (b)

    Has aesthetics to do with art or nature or both, and how and why is this so?

  3. (c)

    Does the aesthetic reside in the object or its beholder: objectivist versus subjectivist aesthetics?

  4. (d)

    How can/should we approach the aesthetic: rationally, emotionally, or via the senses?

  5. (e)

    How is the aesthetic socially evaluated: high versus popular (trivial/kitsch) culture?

The following paragraphs of this section will consider these questions in turn, especially in their bearing on landscape research.

  1. (a)

    Beauty remains a central issue in aesthetics; indeed Borgeest (1977, p. 100) sees the development of aesthetics as a “continuous reinterpretation of the idea of beauty” (see Fig. 2.1). Traditionally understood as “unity in multiplicity” (Schweppenhäuser 2007, p. 63), beauty was characterized by Kant (1956 [1790]) as what commonly pleases without any mediating concept or immediate (e.g. economic) interest on the part of the beholder. As far as landscape is concerned, the panoptic vision of objects to form an Arcadian landscape, accompanied by an aesthetic judgment of its beauty, presupposes that the viewer has no other interest (e.g. as a farmer or landowner) in the scene. Dewey (1929, 1988 [1934]) and others rejected Kant’s separation of the aesthetic and practical worlds on the grounds that the construction of beauty also involved individual consumer interests, and that it was rooted in an interaction between object and subject.

    Fig. 2.1
    figure 1

    Relations between the beautiful, the ugly, the sublime and the picturesque

    Full size image

The concept of the sublime is traditionally distinguished from that of beauty as having to do with “nature in relation to man or, more precisely, nature in its capacity to arouse moral ideas in the observer” (Gethmann-Siefert 1995, p. 90; see also Cronon 1996; Graham 2005; Loesberg 2005; Wicks 2011). Nature in the aesthetic context can be understood as the “world of human realities perceptible to the senses that has arisen (and continues to arise) without human agency” Seel (1996, p. 20). For Burke (1989 [1757]), the beautiful differed from the sublime in its emotional impact: where beauty stimulates love, sublimity arouses awe; beauty is accordingly associated with small and pleasant objects, sublimity with great and even threatening ones (e.g. volcanoes). Kant saw beauty as rooted “in the harmonious interplay of mind and sensible imagination” (Peres 2013, p. 38; and see Graham 2005)—to which Gethmann-Siefert (1995, p. 90) adds that this interplay is “free”—whereas “sublimity derived from a disharmony between mind and imagination” (Peres, p. 38). Kant (1974) further observed that sublimity might be found in a formless object if this indicates boundlessness or totality. Therefore, in contrast to Burke, the sublime was, for Kant, not just a matter of physical quantity: it could also imply a superordinate quality. From this, he derived the distinction between the mathematically sublime, inherent in the sheer size of an object, and the dynamically sublime, inherent in its power (see Kant 1974). The power of nature, being of this latter kind, can be found (and felt) in landscape. Yet the perceived sublimity of nature derives not from the ‘things of nature’ but from human creativity. Nature and reason are two different powers: the true source of sublimity is the knowing subject in its capacity for reflection—a function Butler (2001, p. 27) regards as disposed to “assume ardent desire into the circle of self-awareness” (and see Casey 2006). Sublimity took on a new lease of life in the post-1970s discussion of the intangible/ineffable centered on Lyotard (1991) and postmodernism (see Peres 2013). At the same time “the aesthetically beautiful […] was reduced uncritically to the field of design and the status of a mere consumer product” (Friesen 2013, p. 90). Nevertheless, contemporary philosophy is also concerned with the ‘aesthetics of the living environment’, and with a critique leveled—e.g. by Rüdiger Bubner, Odo Marquard and Wolfgang Welsch—at “the threat of excess and satiety, numbing sameness, and social desensitization” (Recki 2013, p. 229).

A further aesthetic dimension—first extensively treated by Rosenkranz (1996 [1853])—is that of ugliness. Far from possessing significance in its own right, ugliness is regarded as “negative beauty”, and as such “essentially secondary” (Rosenkranz 1996 [1853], pp. 14–15). Rosenkranz grounds this thesis in an analogy with good and evil, pointing out that evil, too, has a place in ethics: “Hell is not just a religious and ethical concept, it is also aesthetic. Ugliness surrounds us”. According to Rosenkranz it does so in three basic forms:

  • amorphousness (formlessness, indefiniteness of shape)—lack of appropriate boundaries, of unity in required diversity (Pöltner 2008);

  • asymmetry—lack of balance between opposites, lopsidedness;

  • disharmony—disproportion between parts and whole; lack of unity, with false contrasts where there should be agreement.

According to Rosenkranz (1996 [1853]) the ugly can be elevated aesthetically by transformation into the comical; for the comical “takes the ugly (which always contains an element of compulsion) back into the freedom of beauty, combining beauty and ugliness, freeing each from its (pseudo-ideal) one-sidedness” (Hauskeller 2005, p. 61). This is true above all of caricature, where exaggeration and imbalance become a virtue.

It should be noted in any consideration of aesthetics that the sublime is not a “median value between the beautiful and the ugly” (Seel 1996, p. 132) but a category in its own right. Complementing that ‘aesthetic triad’ (Seel 1996), is the picturesque (Kühne 2013a). If the beautiful is characteristically small, fine and subtly various, and the sublime big, strong, intense and awe-inspiring, the picturesque falls somewhere between those poles. Encountered frequently in landscape painting, where the fore- and middle-ground are marked by ‘beautiful’ tree, bush or flower motifs and the background by ‘sublime’ mountain ranges or wild seas, it is typically complex, irregular, and differentiated (Carlson 2009; see Fig. 2.1).

Whether a landscape can also be ugly depends on the breadth of the concept. In German usage, a narrow view of landscape judges quality solely in terms of ‘historical and cultural maturity’ (see e.g. Hokema 2013), allowing room for the attributes ‘beautiful’, ‘picturesque’ and ‘sublime’. But to predicate ugliness of a landscape as an element of its social construction, the concept would have to be extended to any space that can be grasped as an aesthetic unity—if this is not to contravene norms of usage long since recognized in international discussion (see e.g. Hartz and Kühne 2009; Hokema 2013, 2015; and Chap. 3 below).

  1. (b)

    Closely bound up with the development of philosophical aesthetics is the question of the relation between nature and art as aesthetic dimensions. Kant (1956 [1790]) ranks nature above art in this respect, for the beauty of nature lacks intentionality. Hegel (1970 [1835–1838]) for that very reason takes the opposite line: “artistic beauty, a beauty born and reborn of mind, is superior to nature in the same measure as mind and its products stands higher than nature and its manifestations” (Hegel 1970 [1835–1838], p. 14; original emphasis). Beauty, for Hegel, arises in the concord of concept and external reality; it is, then, an ideal value and can as such be termed the ‘truth of appearances’. Unconscious nature cannot effect such truth: “Mind lies beyond [nature]; there it is only hinted at. Nature lacks the unconditioned unity and autonomy of the concept” (Hauskeller 2005, p. 52). Hegel’s aesthetics, therefore, “belongs wholly to the philosophy of art” (Peres 2013, p. 32); it no longer, as Baumgarten had proposed, has to do with the “emancipation of the senses” (Friesen 2013, p. 80). Croce (1930) took Hegel’s argument to a new level of intensity when he asserted that beauty lay in expression, and expression was a function of the mind; nature, therefore, because it is passive and mindless, must be excluded altogether from the ascription of beauty.

In recent decades, with the growing crisis of environmental pollution, issues of nature and natural beauty have gained new topicality—not least in the question of an aesthetic revaluation of nature in the wake of its colonization by a technologically driven society (see Adorno 1970; Lundmark 1997; Tiezzi 2005). The contemplation of natural beauty remains a human concern, but nature is not simply thought of as a physical resource for aesthetic appreciation (see van Noy 2003; Haber 2006), and the dichotomy between natural and artistic beauty is accordingly fading. “Aesthetically speaking, both are ‘unitary phenomena’” (Seel 1996, p. 269), evoking correspondences between object and observer which are, however, (generally) ascribed to the object (Hartmann 1953). The issue of nature versus art (or artifact) is also relevant to the distinction (or construct) between natural and cultural landscapes—for example in the question how natural and/or cultural objects should, for aesthetic (and other) reasons, be preserved; or whether the aesthetic designation of a specific space as landscape depends on a judgment of its quality as nature and/or artifact.

  1. (c)

    Another aesthetic issue is whether such a judgment is rooted in objective qualities or is purely subjective. Shusterman (2001) calls the first position ‘naturalism’, the second ‘historicism’. Plato (4th century BCE) was in this sense a ‘naturalist’, teaching that the ‘idea’ inherent in the object was the ground of its being (Platon 2005), and the more intense the imprint of this idea in the material object, the greater its beauty. Francis Hutcheson (1694–1747), on the other hand, propagated the subjectivist position that beauty, while grounded in the consonance of unity and diversity within the object, depended particularly on the ability of the observer to respond to it (Hutcheson 1988 [1725])—or as Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1922, p. 438) later succinctly put it: “Beauty is an act, not a thing.” As the “product of the mental disposition and abilities of the [human] subject” (von Hartmann 1924, p. 3), beauty has social foundations—an aspect to which Kant (1956 [1790], 1959 [1781]) had already drawn attention, aesthetic judgment being based on “sociocultural values, acquired norms, personal experience, and qualities of character, imagination and desire” (Frohmann 1997, p. 175).

Kant (1956 [1790]) also taught that aesthetic judgments were not concerned with knowledge; they were judgments of taste, not logic, and as such “based exclusively in subjective reflection” (Peres 2013, p. 35). Nevertheless, taste, as “a synonym for aesthetic judgment” (Illing 2006, p. 8), was a matter of social discourse and negotiation. What should be deemed aesthetic, when, and by whom, without loss of social kudos, was, therefore, variable? Borgeest (1977, p. 100) makes the same point with regard to the concept of beauty: “There is no single point of view, accepted at all times and by all, from which beauty can be ascribed, that does not equally justify the opposite assertion.” While naturalism takes an essentialist position in this matter, historicism takes a constructivist view. Empirically, a preference for certain object-centered structures can be established and at the same time the question asked by whom, how and in what circumstances such preferences are expressed (see further Chap. 4 and Peres 2013).

  1. (d)

    Individual aesthetic taste operates largely at an unconscious emotional level, but express judgments of taste often also involve cognitive processes. Satter (2000) illustrates the two aspects with the example of music, where basic sensitivity to sad and happy sounds is a prerequisite for any emotional response, but a more highly cultured sensitivity will require a qualitatively higher music to elicit such a response. Satter (ibid.) concludes that, on a scale of values, ‘neutral’ taste is purely emotional, but any judgment of musical quality presupposes cognitive input. Both depend on sense perception, but an aesthetic judgment, as an act of cognition requires the combination of sense with intellect. This view elevates aesthetics above the merely sensory plane and replaces it precisely where Baumgarten had set it, as the ‘science of sense perception/knowledge’ (Satter ibid.). Nelson Goodman (1992) likewise rejects the reduction of aesthetic experience to sense perception and emotion: Any picture of aesthetic experience as a sort of emotional bath or orgy is plainly preposterous. Compared with the fear, grief, depression or enthusiasm induced by a real battle or loss, defeat or victory, the emotions at work there are usually quiet and oblique, and generally no more intense than the excitement, despair or pleasure that accompany scientific research and discovery.

The interpenetration of emotional and cognitive inputs in the genesis of ‘world’ is reflected in the relation of art to science. Goodman (1978) sees these as two ultimately inseparable cultures, as mutually conditioned ways of creating the world in which we live and think—with the result that aesthetics can be seen as a particular form of epistemology. As a synthesis of art and science, the aesthetic attitude has been characterized as ‘restless, searching, testing’ (Goodman 1968), and its knowledge component as less concerned with producing truth than with generating “various models of the world (in science as in art)” (Gethmann-Siefert 1995, p. 110). Goodman (1978) emphasizes the contextual dependency of art when he suggests that asking ‘What is art?’ invariably entails asking ‘When is art?’. In this sense, too, it can be asked whether a narrow view of landscape, bound to the norm of historically developed rural cultural space (see Sect. 4.2.1), is to be preferred to a broader view that would include, for example, suburban settlements. The issue can, in fact, be interpreted as a matter of taste (see Hokema 2009, 2013; Wojtkiewicz and Heiland 2012; Kühne 2013a).

  1. (e)

    The creation of different models of the world and their acceptance as equally valid is a central feature of what has been called the ‘radical tolerance’ of postmodern aesthetics. One aspect of this is the transcending of the dichotomy between high and popular culture or ‘kitsch’ (see Welsch 1988a, b). The stigma of bad taste attached to the latter by adherents of the former amounted to the accusation of an evolutionary (or educational) shortfall in relation to standards regarded as universally valid (Illing 2006; for the architectural context see Stevens 2002). In contrast to modernity, however, postmodern culture, far from being conceptually “bound to universal authorities […] and norm-giving hierarchies” (Kastner 2002, p. 232), is marked by “interpretive polyvalence” (ibid.). The attempt to establish and discursively preserve a single cultural standard has been increasingly undermined by the social shift from class-based to milieu-based differentiation, which entails and encourages the multiplication of cultural discourses, and at the same time dismantles the values on which the distinction between high and popular culture was based. Kitsch is no longer seen as the “false expression of false needs, nor as the false expression of true needs: for the tolerant aesthetics of our day, it is a true expression of true needs” (Liessmann 2002, pp. 26–27).

Postmodern aesthetics reflects the perspectivity and relativity of postmodern thought. It can be seen as the fruit of a process that “has been increasingly moving since Kant towards the insight that the basis of what we call reality is fictional” (Welsch 2006, p. 8). What in modernity was a matter of enlightened reason is in postmodernity a matter of aesthetic judgment. Reality reveals itself increasingly as “not realistic, but aesthetically constructed” (Welsch 2006, p. 7; see also Trigg 2009), and postmodern culture is accordingly marked, not by innovation, but by reshaping and recombining, quoting and ironically plagiarizing (see e.g. Federman 1991). Here simulation and so-called ‘playgiarism’ have replaced the real and authentic (Seidman 2012). As far as landscape is concerned, this provides fertile ground for constructivist approaches and the broadening of the concept of landscape mentioned above (see Hokema 2013).

That the foregoing five strands of aesthetic discourse are closely connected with the construction of landscape can be illustrated as follows:

  1. (a)

    The question of the aesthetic values of beauty, picturesqueness, sublimity and ugliness as applied to appropriated physical landscapes is central to landscape research. What is the physical basis of such differentiation, for example, between the picturesque and the ugly? Why, if all are appropriated, are some landscapes preferred to others? What combination of beauty and sublimity informs the judgment that a set of physical objects is picturesque?

  2. (b)

    The question of the aesthetics of art versus that of nature informs the definition of cultural versus natural landscape, and even more so the conscious shaping of landscape. When should a landscape be ‘read’ as art and when as nature—when as a hybrid of nature and culture?

  3. (c)

    The question of the objectivity or subjectivity of aesthetic judgments is crucial to landscape research in determining whether the values predicated of a landscape are grounded in its physical structures or constructed subjectively on the basis of social interpretations and evaluations.

  4. (d)

    The question of the role of reason, emotion and the senses in aesthetic judgment has a multiple bearing on landscape research: What sense impressions are synthesized into landscape? Can landscape aesthetics be explained rationally? How does emotion inform the construction of landscape? Given the dual role of emotion and cognition, are these elements in harmony or in competition?

  5. (e)

    The question of the social aspect of aesthetic values (high vs. popular culture) bears on the discursive hegemony of landscape definitions and values, as well as on the social mechanisms of their construction, and their temporal and cultural dependency.

In the social constructivist approach of this book, the answer to Question (c) must be that the appropriation of landscape is subjective: its aesthetic qualities lie not (as the essentialist view would maintain) in the physical object but in the judgment of the beholder, made in the context of social norms and values. This position conditions the answers to the other four questions, transferring these from object- to meta-level—which means, in general, examining socio-historical contexts rather than physical objects.

  • This is the case in determining, for example, in what circumstances physical landscapes are described as beautiful, picturesque, sublime or ugly (Question (a))—see Sect. 4.2: Distinction and landscape, and 5.4: Conflicts of power—landscape and the extension of renewably sourced energy).

  • Question (b), too, is addressed through a research approach that asks in what contexts natural and cultural landscapes are respectively valued more highly—a question that runs right through this book.

  • The issue of rationality, sense and emotion (Question (d)) is examined by asking in what contexts people respond cognitively and/or emotionally to what they conceive as landscape (see especially Sect. 4.1: Socialization). (This rules out the reduction of ‘landscape’ to an emotive entity on the object level, for if the aesthetic appeal of landscape is purely emotional, an (objectively!) cognitive research approach is inevitably redundant.)

  • Finally, the dichotomy between high and popular culture (Question (e)) resolves in landscape research into asking who defines and decides the terms of the argument—i.e. the power question in Bourdieu’s sense (see Sect. 4.2: Distinction and landscape).

In this perspective, social constructivist landscape research applies the general principles of philosophical aesthetics—or what Peres (2013, p. 36) calls the “conception and usage of aesthetic predicates, value judgments and standards”—on two levels, focusing on the one hand on landscape (rather than e.g. sculpture), on the other on social processes. For the aesthetic construction of landscape this means that it is no longer enough simply to recreate “the context of place, ethics, and spirituality (loosely, ‘meaning’)”, for this “is inevitably embedded in a social, economic and political matrix” (Porteous 2013, p. 10). Rooted in social and individual processes of construction, as well as in physical objects, this ‘theoretically impure’ (Leibenath 2014) approach is in line largely not only with the philosophical research tradition in aesthetics but also with that of positivist landscape research (Kühne 2013a)—which makes its results also suitable for use in planning processes (see Bruns and Kühne 2013b).