Patrick Keiller, Mark Fisher, W.G. Sebald and Will Self on the possibilities created by engagement with the landscape

I came across an edited extract of the following quote from Patrick Keiller in Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life. This is the full passage from Keiller’s essay Landscape and cinematography published in cultural geographies 16 in 2009:
“I had embarked on landscape film-making in 1981, early in the Thatcher era, after encountering a surrealist tradition in the UK and elsewhere, so that cinematography involved the pursuit of a transformation, radical or otherwise, of everyday reality. I recently came across a description, in Kitty Hauser’s Bloody old Britain, of O.G.S. Crawford’s photography: ‘Like photographers of the New Objectivity, clarity was his goal. Like them, he favoured stark contrasts, with no blurring or mistiness. His focus, like theirs, was on the object or the scene in front of him, which it was his aim to illuminate as clearly as he could. [. . .] It was commitment that lit up his photographs [. . .] Such photographs suggest a love of the world that was almost mystical in its intensity.’ I had forgotten that photography is often motivated by utopian or ideological imperatives, both as a critique of the world, and to demonstrate the possibility of creating a better one, even if only by improving the quality of the light.”

Elsewhere in the essay, Keiller cites Fredric Jameson. ‘It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the break-down of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations.’ (The seeds of time, 1996). Mark Fisher also drew on Jameson’s statement for the animating thesis of his book Capitalist Realism, published in the same year as Keiller’s essay, 2009. Fisher identified Capitalist Realism as “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.” He argued that capitalist realism could only be overcome through the development of a new collective imagination, one that is capable of envisioning and creating alternatives to the current system. His proposed “politics of possibility” would open up new avenues for collective action and social transformation. Much like Keiller had seen the possibility of transforming reality through landscape film-making.

The Jameson quote was paraphrased by the author Will Self in a talk he gave the other night (20th December 2022) at St George’s German Lutheran Church in Whitechapel, entitled: The Ghost of Future Past – WG Sebald and the Trauma of Modernity. In his talk Self noted how Sebald was far more concerned with the looming ecological catastrophe and environmental breakdown than he is given credit for. He recounts a chance encounter he had with Sebald on Dunwich Heath in 1992 while he was living in the area writing his novel Great Apes. Self was ‘knuckle-walking’ like a chimp as research for the book when he came across Sebald’s path. Sebald was embarked on a walk along the Suffolk coast for his seminal work, The Rings of Saturn. Self did not know who Sebald was at this point, and it’s not clear if Sebald recognised Will Self who, although lauded for his excellent debut collection of stories, The Quantity Theory of Insanity (1991), hadn’t yet punctured the mainstream in the way he was shortly to do. Self recalled how their conversation had centred around the subject of ecocide. This encounter was retold in the early drafts of Rings of Saturn (with the Will Self character dressed in white silk pantaloons) and later edited out.

The fact that Patrick Keiller, Will Self and Mark Fisher are drawing from the same critique of late-capitalism should not be surprising given their shared interest in the changing nature of place and landscape. I’m not sure what Keiller made of Sebald’s writing but I found echoes of Keiller’s Robinson character in the eponymous central figure of Sebald’s novel Austerlitz. Stephen Watts, who’d guided Sebald through the East End on his research walks for Austerlitz, was in attendance at St George’s for the Will Self talk.

David Anderson links Keiller and Sebald (along with Iain Sinclair) in his book, Landscape and Subjectivity in the work of Patrick Keiller, W.G. Sebald, and Iain Sinclair. Anderson points out that all three draw from two principle lineages: the tradition of the ‘English Journey’, and the continental ideas generated by Surrealism and Situationism. Mark Fisher was a great admirer of both Sebald and Keiller and there are connections between their ideas of the landscape with Fisher’s promotion of hauntology. “Walking in ruins places us in a strange state of temporal dislocation, in which the past is simultaneously absent and present, for which Derrida coined the term ‘hauntology’ (in Spectres Of Marx, 1993)” – Frieze magazine, 2008.

Despite the pessimistic tone that emerges from all the writers mentioned here in their engagement with the landscape, Keiller does raise the possibility that a better world could be created – merely by looking at it.