Landscape, fim and political aesthetics

from a paper given at the Screen conference in Glasgow last weekend. After a glorious weekend of thinking landscape, we spent a glorious day in it: at the summit of Ben Nevis, the highest peak in the UK

Critique founded on the ecological principle of the interconnectedness of everything is by that token necessarily and permanently incomplete. That very incompletion demands that we rethink the premises of much of our aesthetics, most notably the autonomy of the artwork and what we can hope to understand of the freedom of its subject. As Freud remarked of the work of mourning, when it is complete, 'the ego becomes free and uninhibited again' (1984: 253). But if, as in Deseret, that work is aesthetically and politically undone, we have two options: either an inhibited withdrawal from the world (as in the Thoreau tradition), or grasping its very lack of freedom as its proper political form. Does ecological critique demand a terminally reduced subject?

The conference version of the paper is here: the full version might come out in Screen