The impossible gaze of the ecological subject
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the impossible gaze of
the ecological subject
alex murdin
Presentation for the Home and the World conference 21/06/12
We are now living in the Athropocene. This informal term, coined in 2000 by Paul Crutzen is
now common currency amongst scientists and describes the current time period in the
geological scale where humankind has acquired the status of geological agent in the scale of
its interventions. Some are sceptical but in environmental terms the impacts are
demonstrable, melting ice caps, sea level rise, acidic oceans and increased extinction rates -
the current extinction rate is the 6th largest ever (Zalasiewicz et al, 2010: p. 2228-9). These
are threats to the survival of at least some or quite probably all of humankind; hence the
rise of environmentalism as a political movement from the mid-20th century onwards.
1
The environmental movement covers a broad range of issues and positions but can be
characterised by two poles of thought.
At one end are those that perceive ‘earth’, ‘nature’, ‘ecology’ and so on, as a holistic system,
the “deep ecology” of Arne Naess, or the Gaian thesis of James Lovelock that earth is a self-
regulating entity would be examples.
2
At the other pole is what Arne Naess calls “shallow ecology” in which the earth is
externalised as a mechanistic system, a human resource or object of study. Genetic biologist
Richard Dawkins is equally rude about deep ecology and what he calls, “the temptation of
‘Gaia’: the overrated romantic fantasy of the whole world as an organism; of each species
doing its bit for the welfare of the whole” (Dawkins, 1998: p.222).
However both these poles can be said to share a position which requires a dialectic object,
an ‘original’ state of the earth or nature, sometimes called wilderness.
3
For science the original state provides a benchmark of how science, and its co-dependent
technology, can ‘fix’ environmental problems with solutions. For the more holistic the
original state is also required so that there can be a return to the past where all was
harmony and the current imbalance can be rebalanced. Both require to some extent the
‘world without us’, an extrinsic Other that provides the measure of our action, or inaction.
In his new book, Living in the End Times, the controversial philosopher Slavoj Zizek
contends however that any conception of this “world without us” is dangerous, both in
theory and in practice. From a practical point of view he says:
""Nature" on Earth is already "adapted" to human intervention to such an extent - that its
cessation would cause a cataclysmic imbalance - Human "pollution" is already deeply
implicated in the shaky and fragile equilibrium of "natural" reproduction on Earth “
From a theoretical or psychoanalytic point of view he suggests that both poles of thinking
on the environment are flawed because they are founded on what he calls the impossible
gaze, described as a: “fundamental subjective position of fantasy: to be reduced to a gaze
observing the world in the condition of the subject's non-existence...witnessing the Earth in
it's pre-castrated state of innocence, before we humans spoiled it in our hubris." (Zizek,
2011: p80).
4
In my opinion this fantasy has become deeply embedded in some arts and ecology thinking.
For example lets look at Herman de Vries’ “sanctuariums”, built in various cities from 1993
to 2002. These are brick walls or wrought iron railings that enclose in a circle a small plot of
land in a park, or derelict suburban land, that exclude human presence. Some of them
contain “oculi” holes in the wall that allow people to see what is within.
It is obviously important from de Vries’ point of view that the sactuariums are visually
permeable in order to allow the audience to have an external perspective of the natural
space being created within.
5
De Vries’ states his intent that this gaze into the site will create the potential of “enriching
experiences that might exist if nature were allowed to develop freely here”.
Just so we are in no doubt about this, the sanctuarium built for Skulptur Projekte Münster in
1997, says around the top “Om. This is perfect. That is perfect. Perfect comes from perfect.
Take perfect from perfect, the remainder is perfect”. Images of the work soon after
completion, show an immaculate brick wall capped with a light sandstone which contains
beautiful wild grasses and other non-cultivated plants.
However on my own visit to the work in 2007 this perfection had changed. The wall had
been covered in graffiti and within the walls natural succession had produced a bramble
threaded thicket, liberally studded with plastic bags, drinks cans and other human detritus.
As the non-human element of the ecological system has fulfilled its entropic destiny, so too
have the users of this area, some at least seemingly unaffected by the potential or actuality
of an “enriching experience” in the face of the current version of de Vries’ “perfect” nature.
Perhaps this treatment is due a comparison by local people between what nature does on
their doorstep with the spectacular nature portrayed in the media.
6
According to Zizek the popularity of nature documentaries, safaris and ecotourism is due to
a nostalgic desire to experience a “natural order” where the subjective and social order is
predetermined. It is also a reinforcement of distance, again this idea of observing a "world
without us" watching nature with the “impossible gaze”.
Let us examine then what the impossible gaze actually is. According to Zizek:
“the fantasmic narrative always involves the impossible gaze by means of which the subject
is already present at the scene of its own absence. When the subject directly identifies its
own gaze with the objet a, the paradoxical implication of this identification is that the objet
a disappears from the field of vision. This brings us to the core of a Lacanian notion of
utopia: a vision of desire functioning without an objet a and its twists and loops. It is
utopian not only to think that one can reach full, unencumbered "incestuous" enjoyment; for
it no less utopian to think that one can renounce enjoyment without this renunciation
generating its own surplus-enjoyment." (ibid: p. 84)
Let’s translate a bit here. In simple terms the objet a is a Lacanian term for what we desire in
the Other, love, sex, comfort and so on. In this case we are talking about our desire as
ecological subjects to be part of nature. The paradox though is that as soon as we try to
identify with, or become part of the object, truly possess our desire, it disappears.
To illustrate – please turn to the person next to you and look at them. Now imagine that you
are actually them and occupying the inside of their head with your consciousness. Imagine
that you are looking out through their eyes. In fact what you are now doing is looking out
7
through their eyes at yourself. Please notice though that whilst you are looking at yourself
through your neighbour’s eyes, that your neighbour has disappeared from your field of
vision.
What is being said here then is that what we desire in someone other than ourselves, or
more widely “the world without us”, is ultimately unobtainable or utopian. This is the fantasy
of ecology as “wilderness”, which is an enjoyment of nature unencumbered by ourselves.
8
In case though we are tempted to therefore withdraw from nature, ZIzek goes on to point
out that if we absent ourselves from environmentally problematic sites in order to enjoy our
moral rectitude we are equally compromised – after all we should be doing something about
the situation, shouldn’t we ? This is a core issue with restorative environmental utopias,
such as that created by de Vries. It is the double bind of the environmental subject, existing
at a point of moral oscillation, or what is also known as cognitive dissonance, between
absence and presence.
In ruralrecreation’s projects we are particularly interested this point of moral oscillation. One
example is a work from 2007 called Inclusive Path. This was an installation which took as its
starting point the tension between the conservational remit of contemporary land
management authorities and the economic driver of tourism. This tension is implied in the
rhetoric of the organisation “Fix the Fells”, funded by the Lake District National Park, the
National Trust and Natural England. The campaign says “Our high level paths are
surprisingly fragile, and with millions of visitors each year, grass is compacted by feet, and
worn away. You can help by treading more carefully.”
Inclusive Path as a project therefore proposed a “solution” to this problem with its implicit
criticism of walkers and suggested an un-tourism where visitors will be able to visit
sensitive sites like Scafell Pike without the need to walk on them, and yet still take away
precious memories of the experience.
9
The form of the project was a series of boards showing portraits as a standing male, a male
in a wheelchair and two children set against a rocky backdrop. Holes were cut where the
faces should be, reminiscent of old seaside attractions, which allowed the user be
photographed as if at the top of a mountain.
There were 249 direct participants in the Inclusive Path project who demonstrated a range
of responses in their use of the photo panels. For me the project provided an outlet for
participants to experience something of the impossible gaze, to enjoy the fun fair fantasy of
being able to be instantaneously on top of a mountain without effort or environmental guilt.
10I am also concerned with these projects to have both tone and volume and therefore try to
find a way to introduce the media to amplify the work. In this case we tried to have the
project on the village green in Grasmere. The green looks like a public space but is in fact
owned by the National Trust, who objected to the work on the grounds that it was anti-
tourism. We therefore reported this to the media who responded with the headline “Artist
banned by National Trust”. For me this amplification of the compromises involved in land
management was a key point – the Trust is supposed to be preserving the environment but
objected to this work as it looked as if it was against the economic driver of tourism which
they simultaneously blamed for eroding the paths in the first place.
Another example of working with the impossible gaze was an unrealised proposal, One Mile
Wild in 2009.
The proposal was made as part of an open competition for “Re:place”, a programme of site
specific work being commissioned by the Derbyshire Arts Development Group from 2008 to
2011 in that county.
11It started from a similar point to Inclusive Path but also dealt with the political heritage of
the countryside and access to it. Derbyshire is surrounded by some of the largest
conurbations in the UK and 1932 was the site of a mass trespass on private land at Kinder
Scout. The mass trespass was part of on-going process of political conflict in the
countryside, stemming from enclosure of common land which dates back to the
industrialisation of agriculture in the 18th century.
The trespass was organised by the British Workers Sports Federation as a protest against the
laws which forbade them to walk on hills and moors in the area, preserved at the time for
the recreation of wealthy landowners such as the Duke of Devonshire, e.g. for hunting,
shooting and fishing.
12The trespass was successful in asserting the right of access of this group to what they
described as this “fine country presently denied us” 1 and still resonates today as it appears
in leaflets as part of walking tours. It is interesting to see this political act as an aesthetic
one. To quote Jaques Ranciere:
"By making themselves spectators and visitors, they disrupted the distribution of the
sensible which would have it that those who work do not have time to let their steps and
gazes roam at random; and that the members of a collective body do not have time to
spend on the forms and insignia of individuality. That is what the word 'emancipation'
means: the blurring of the boundary between those who act and those who look; between
individuals and members of a collective body." (Ranciere, 2009: p. 19)
1 Manchester Guardian, Monday 25 April 1932 http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/1932/apr/25/1 Accessed 19/01/2009
13However, the aesthetics of the political act continue to compete with traditional landscape
preservationist aesthetics, ecological sensibility and environmental politics. The result of
Kinder Scouts’ popularity has led to a physical inscription onto the landscape through the
actions of walkers. In the same fashion as in the Lakes and Fells the site has now been
eroded by its popularity.
Mike Innerdale, the National Trust's project manager in the Peak District says 'If we don't act
now the whole place will be bare rock in 50 years.
Kinder Scout holds a very special place in people's hearts. The Mass Trespass is historic.
And it really cannot be lost to the nation…'… Today it is believed to be the worst degraded
area of blanket bog in Britain. “2
The word “degraded” is interesting here. Common in landscape management terminology,
its meaning is an empirical reduction in quality or value. However it also has the subjective
sense of moral characteristics which are corrupted or depraved. In this case the depravity of
the bog cannot be attributed to its own inclination and therefore, by association, the
responsibility for it’s the corruption rests with the moral subjectivities of human users of the
site. Walkers and climbers at this site are sensible of freedom of gaze, movement and so
on, at the same time as being morally culpable for acting to its detriment in environmental
terms. We therefore have another site of moral oscillation where the impossible gaze kicks
in.
2 The Observer, Sunday 20 April 2008, Caroline Davies
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/apr/20/conservation.wildlife?INTCMP=SRCH Accessed 19/01/2009
14The penitentiary act required by the “conservationists” and land managers is the restoration
of the bog to its previous state, implicitly of greater aesthetic and biophysical value than
bare rock.
What this means is that the area will exist in a closed loop, a permanent state of managed-
naturalness. It will be restored to the state as it was before the Mass Trespass occurred, as
the event of the Trespass itself marks the point of expansion of access and therefore
becomes the start of erosion. Then presumably it will be degraded again, then restored and
so on. As the visitor is caught in a eco-ethical singularity so is the actual site caught in an
eco-political one.
The irony of course is that the emancipatory act of the Trespass has created what is now
regarded as an offence against the environment. It is what ensures this interminable cycle of
ecological “degradation” and restoration; the rights of access created are now enshrined in
the Countryside Rights of Way Act of 2000 and therefore are politically ineradicable, at least
at this point.
15What alternatives are there then to the impossible gaze in this case ?
Similarly to Inclusive Path, One Mile Wild extended the logic of ecological restoration to one
of its extrapolated end points.
The proposal was for a process to enclose a square mile of land encompassing Kinder Scout:
which would
“Establish the legal & planning framework required for disowning land e.g. in trust,
or as “commons”…
Set out who will manage the unmanagement of the land.”
This “unmanagment” of the location is the repair of the boundaries and policing of them in
order to keep people out. It is this un-managed and dis-owned land which proposes a
resolution for the moral ambivalence of the ecological subject and the impossible gaze. For
the viewer of One Mile Wild at its boundary, it would exist simultaneously in a state of
wildness (absence behind an enclosure) and as an object of land management (the presence
of a barrier) at the same time.
It is a bit like Schrodinger’s cat where two states of matter can be said to be in
superposition, coexisting as states x and y at the same instant, until observed. The project
would then create a stabilised moral point where the ecological site is manifest in its visually
unobtainable state as an object of pure desire.
16What becomes though of the heritage of the site in One Mile Wild if it is based on exclusion?
How does this respect or maintain fidelity to the “revolution” of access that took place here?
It does this as a radical subtraction. “Subtraction” is a term used by Alain Badiou and Steven
Critchley to describe a strategy of resistance to hegemonic, capitalist practices. Badiou
describes each revolutionary Event as “something that can occur only to the extent that it is
subtracted from the power of the State.” (Badiou, 2010: p. 244). In social and environmental
terms we can think of a range of artistic and other practices; nomadic lifestyles, alternative
communities, subsistence smallholders and living “off grid”. Subtraction here “withdraws
and disconnects; reduces complexity to minimal difference; and in this way attempts to
destroy the existing order” (Zizek, 2011, p 129). The subtraction of One Mile Wild follows all
of these paths and is therefore true to the radical intent of the mass trespass, which was to
create a new common landscape for the people.
80 years ago landscape was valued aesthetically for its ability to restore the senses of the
new urban majority. Recently we have a new type of common land - landscape + : the
accessible aesthetic landscape along with its soil, air and water quality, its value for bio-
genetic diversity and so on. One Mile Wild on the other hand is the future commons. It is
landscape - held inaccessibly in common for the future world, preserving all life, generating
oxygen, capturing carbon and so on.
I don’t know though whether acts of subtraction are enough to escape from the fantasy of
the impossible gaze. Zizek is though dismissive of subtraction as a strategy and says ”to
address forthcoming energy, food and water shortages it will be necessary to invent new
forms of large scale collective action; neither the standard forms of state intervention nor
the much-praised forms of local self-organization will be up to the job." Zizek, 2009, P.84)
17Personally I continue to inhabit the point of dissonance, somewhere between presence and
absence. Our latest project Submergency which is sited in the grounds at the moment also
does. We wanted to create a portable lifeguards chair which could be used by wild swimmers
for self-surveillance. Legal advice though was that as soon as it is used, the person
occupying the chair is liable for any injury or deaths that occur as it implies the river or lake
or sea being watched is safe. This chair is therefore fitted with an FM transmitter which fills
in for a lifeguard and narrowcasts music, safety advice and relaxing new age whale song….
18As in previous projects the work is encouraging an audience to be safely at risk. Also as in
previous projects we are uncertain whether a subtraction can actually be heard by anyone
else, and we have again used the media to amplify the point of moral oscillation.
To conclude, as Žižek' concludes in his discussion of the impossible gaze, with the
injunction “not to abandon the topos of alternate reality as such”, that’s to say new ways of
thinking our lives and environment but that, “…the task is rather to unearth the hidden
potentiality (the utopian emancipatory potential) which was betrayed in the actuality of
revolution and its final outcome (the rise of utilitarian market capitalism).” (Zizek, 2011:
p.84)
References
Zalasiewicz, J., Williams, M., Steffen, W. & Crutzen, P. The new world of the Anthropocene,
2010
Dawkins, R., Unweaving the rainbow, 1998
Zizek, S., Living in the end times, 2011
Zizek, S., First as tragedy, then as farce, 2009
Ranciere, J., The emancipated spectator, 2009
Badiou, A. The communist hypothesis, 2010
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