The Territorialization of Land

Abstract

In chapter one, I briefly explored a number of allusions to enclosures in the English novel from its beginnings in the eighteenth century to the midtwentieth century. These manifold references are not to be taken at face value as passively reflective of historical developments. Rather, their preponderance points to a larger dramatic shift in the ontology of land in England: a shift from that of a communal relation based on a nonsovereign selfhood of “inhabitancy,” to an individual-oriented territorialization of the land founded on an economy of “standing-above” the land.

It is … more essential to say that the earth shelters the dead. The Iliad, XXIII, 244 speaks of being ensconced in Hades. Here the earth itself and the subterranean come into relation with sheltering and concealing… . For the Greeks, death is not a “biological” process, any more than birth is. Birth and death take their essence from the realm of disclosiveness and concealment. Even the earth receives its essence from this same realm. The earth is the in-between, namely between the concealment of the subterranean and the luminosity, the disclosiveness, of the supraterranean (the span of heaven). For the Romans, on the contrary, the earth tellus, terra, is the dry, the land as distinct from the sea; this distinction differentiates that upon which construction, settlement, and installation are possible from those places where they are impossible. Terra becomes territorium, land of settlement as realm of command. In the Roman terra can be heard an imperial accent.

—Martin Heidegger, Parmenides

The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging, which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such… . [A] tract of land is challenged into the putting out of coal and ore. The earth now reveals itself as a coal mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit. The field that the peasant formerly cultivated and set in order appears differently than it did when to set in order still meant to take care of and to maintain. The work of the peasant does not challenge the soil of the field. In the sowing of the grain it places the seed in the keeping of the forces of growth and watches over its increase. But meanwhile even the cultivation of the field has come under the grip of another kind of setting-in-order, which sets upon nature. Agriculture is now the mechanized food industry.

—Martin Heidegger, “The Question concerning Technology”

We have begun another campaign against the foreign enemies of the country… . Why would we not attempt a campaign against our domestic foe, I mean the hitherto unconquered sterility of so large a proportion of the surface of the Kingdom? … Let us not be satisfied with the liberation of Egypt, or the subjugation of Malta, but let us subdue Finchley Common; let us conquer Hounslow Heath; let us compel Epping Forest to submit to the yoke of improvement.

—John Sinclair, speaking during the Napoleonic Wars