bordo

Winter 2000
Volume 26, Number 2

Excerpt from
Picture and Witness at the Site of the Wilderness
by Jonathan Bordo

Wilderness is a hallowed ground; it is at the origin speech, as in the phrase "the voice in the wilderness." It is the void and a voiding (tohu-bohu); clearing, the clearing; a wasteland, a nest of wild beasts, the raging sea, the Teutonic night, the forest; "quelques arpents de neige vers le Canada";1 terre des sauvages (from the seventeenth century), Terre sauvage (a painting by twentieth-century Canadian painter A. Y. Jackson); bereft of culture, the savage; the sacred precinct of summer camp. What condition is being addressed through the figural inscription of the subject in Wilderness? This is not only a question of the word wilderness behaving like a name tag attached to some one or group or tribe's intimate and parochial relationship to the real, to real estate. When it comes to wilderness, European tribal nations have come to be rather possessive of wilderness as its symbolics, a paradigmatic site for the symbolic staging of Benedict Anderson's imagined community of the nation-state: wilderness as the utopos of territory, the Republic in the Wilderness, the Great Trek into the Wilderness. Modern European linguistic dispensations of the word empasize the root (Indo-Germanic wilde), but what about the suffix, the -ness that qualifies the wild, so to speak? (fig. 1).

Despite the extraordinary, almost ubiquitous range of the word wilderness, four prognostically reoccurring clusterings of signification feed this problematization: (1) The wilderness as a tropic or symbolic orientation, tending northerly and westerly wherever it lands geographically; (2) the wilderness as a proper name used instead of inherited place names in colonial situations to justify the violent capture and dispossession of territory; (3) the wilderness as a transgressive way of acting that fabulates the "savage" way of life; (4) the wilderness as a temporality and an alleged past coincident with the emergence of the modern European idea of antiquity. These four clusterings taken together reveal the symbolics of the wilderness as a highly productive site for the very invention of modernity itself. This essay is concerned with the second theme, in conjunction with the necessary positing of a specular witness, constitutive of a kind of modern picturing. The specular witness performs a rather special and dual role. It exalts a picture that testifys to an unpicturable condition--the wilderness sublime--while simultaneously legitimating, as a landscape picture, terrain violently seized, dispossessed of its indigenous inhabitants, and reconstituted as territory.

1 Le Petit Robert, s.v. "arpent."

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