Discussion of the relationship between Ireland and colonialism has often revolved around similarities and differences between the Irish situation and other, more iconic, examples of colonised societies. This tendency has been partially encouraged by the prominence within Marxian scholarship of dependency theory, which contends that the underdevelopment of colonial societies is due primarily to their integration into the capitalist world economic system. In this analysis, all colonised societies can be characterised by this integration into world capitalism, and consequently share a common source of exploitation and disadvantage. This perspective has often located its source in Marx’s writings on India and, crucially for our current concern, Ireland. This article explores a different perspective on colonialism which the authors believe can be found in Marx’s consideration of the Irish situation.
This paper looks at how Irish landscape was interpreted in the mid 1800s, when modern tourism in Ireland began. It attempts to discover the ideological structures present in this appreciation of Irish landscape, and it does so in relation with the Hall's description of Co. Wicklow landscape. It argues that there are two ‘socially constructed’ ways to read Irish landscape, the picturesque and the oral interpretations, which create senses of detachment and attachment respectively to the local terrain. It explores in this context how the picturesque corresponds to the way an outsider wishes to gaze upon a landscape, either as a colonialising landlord or as a tourist. Although the picturesque excludes human work from its vision, it was manufactured in the demesnes of the landlord class according to compositional techniques. But the ideological structure of the beautiful aspect of the picturesque excludes the native people who actually live in the landscape, because they are seen as a source of disharmony. The native gaze, on the contrary, creates a sense of attachment to the local place.
This article explores how a form of visuality-the picturesque-became the essential framework for the emergence of a theme park on the landed estates of Anglo-Irish landlords in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The initial cultural forms of the picturesque, which evolved from the disciplines of landscape painting and the philosophy of aesthetics, later became the design principles that guided the English Informal style of gardening. Accordingly, the original abstract concepts of the picturesque become physically embedded in the Irish landscape ecosystems and subsequently established these spatial enclaves as a picturesque theme park. In becoming spatialised, the colonial ideology of the picturesque-designing Irish landscape to look like English landscape-became a colonised space that was inherently hegemonic with regard to the native sense of place. In physically embedding the picturesque visual principles into the local ecosystems, the cultural forms of the picturesque take on ecological dimensions, where aesthetic forms of society merge with the natural forms of plants and their metabolic systems. And in 'naturalising' the aesthetic principles of the picturesque, any portrayal of a scene from the theme park tended to replicate the hegemonic position of the picturesque as the dominant place ideology; since the portrayal tended to reproduce what the writer or author actually saw, the problem was that the scenes were already changed and manipulated to reflect the picturesque visuality. This picturesque visuality fell from its dominant position with the fall of Irish landlordism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.The capacity for seeing (nature) with the painters' eye was the Picturesque vision. (Richard Payne Knight)Where power was, there beauty shall reside. (Ann Bermingham)No natural laws can be done away with. What can change is the form in which these laws operate. (Karl Marx)For the house of the planter is known by the trees.(Austin Clarke)
This article argues that the physical structure of the front garden and its ecosystem is determined by an ensemble of diverse social and natural processes. The essential social form is that of visuality, an abstract compositional force that provides conventions for assessing objects as well as for reshaping their surface countenance and establishing their location within the garden. Accordingly, the social processes of visuality are materially realized in the labor processes of gardening, while their consumption is mediated through the concrete process of gazing. The identified social processes include the prospect, aesthetic, and panoptic dimensions of visuality. Labor conceives and creates them, while the physical structures and the natural processes reproduce and maintain them beyond the production time attributed to gardening. But they are increasingly undermined by the natural tendency of the plant ecosystem to grow. Consequently, the essential contradiction of the front garden is how the laws and tendencies of the plant ecosystem act as a countertendency to the social forms of visuality. This article demonstrates that beneath the surface appearance, there exists complex relationships between nature and society in this space we call the front garden.
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