Has ‘Geography’ Always Been Modern?: Choros, (Non)Representation, Performance, and the Landscape

Abstract

The geographical subdiscipline of chorography, as described by Ptolemy and as interpreted in the Renaissance, played an important philosophical and practical role in the development of landscape as a form of spatial representation. This applies both to representation in the form of pictures, as in landscape painting, and to representation through the medium of perspectival theater scenery. These pictorial and scenic forms represented a reconfiguration of Platonic binaries between celestial and terrestrial nature and between mind (intellect) and body (sense). This reconfiguration generated a characteristically ‘modern’ dichotomy between society and its natural surroundings as well as the qualitative and the quantitative. The root of chorography is choros (also spelled chora), which basically means ‘place’. Present-day philosophical explorations of the meaning of choros suggest that the Plato-inspired Renaissance artists were essentially seeking to represent that which for Plato was actually unrepresentable. This interpretation is born out by an examination of the classical Greco-Roman chorography, as well as the expression of choros through the medium of classical Greek theater. This nonrepresentational notion of choros and chorography, as interpreted in present-day philosophy, has important implications for the contemporary concern with nonrepresentational geographies, landscape, and performance.