In a glass darkly: landscapes, mirrors and Lacanian absences

Abstract

This paper engages with a key trope of landscapes as representation: their mirroring capacity. Contextualising the concept of ‘landscape’ within art history, the paper invokes several technologies that have been functional in the recognition of landscapes while themselves remaining invisible. One such technology is a 17th century technology known as the ‘Claude Glass’, which is analysed with the help of Lacanian concepts. The aim of the ensuing analysis is to advance the use of landscapes in public discourses, better to understand the work done by landscapes in different contexts. To illuminate this work, the paper deploys material landscapes formed in Ireland around so-called cilliní – unmarked graves of what were undesirable bodies in bygone decades.

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https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740241277198
cultural geographies
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DOI: 10.1177/14744740241277198
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In a glass darkly: landscapes,
mirrors and Lacanian absences
Ulf Strohmayer
University of Galway, Ireland
Miriam de Búrca
Independent Researcher, Burren College of Art, Ireland
Abstract
This paper engages with a key trope of landscapes as representation: their mirroring capacity.
Contextualising the concept of ‘landscape’ within art history, the paper invokes several technologies
that have been functional in the recognition of landscapes while themselves remaining invisible.
One such technology is a 17th century technology known as the ‘Claude Glass’, which is analysed
with the help of Lacanian concepts. The aim of the ensuing analysis is to advance the use of
landscapes in public discourses, better to understand the work done by landscapes in different
contexts. To illuminate this work, the paper deploys material landscapes formed in Ireland around
so-called cilliní – unmarked graves of what were undesirable bodies in bygone decades.
Keywords
cilliní, Claude Glass, Jacques Lacan, landscape, mirror
Introduction
The world of Lacanian geographies has become varied and multilayered over the last two decades.
Geographers and other spatially minded scientists have embraced a specific kind of psychoanalyti-
cal approach in attempts to situate the interface between world in general and human beings not
just where skin meets the material world but elsewhere as well. The nature of this ‘elsewhere’,
what is does and how we can learn from its composition, structure and actions, is the matter of
fruitful debates, as are the consequences of its embrace. Anna Secor, Paul Kingsbury and Lucas
Pohl have expanded on earlier engagements with psychoanalytic methods and theories by Steve
Pile, David Sibley, Heidi Nast, Felicity Callard and others towards an explicitly ‘Lacanian’ form of
engagement with space.1
Corresponding author:
Ulf Strohmayer, School of Geography, Archaeology & Irish Studies, University of Galway, University Road,
Galway H91 TK33, Ireland.
Email: ulf.strohmayer@universityofgalway.ie
1277198CGJ0010.1177/14744740241277198cultural geographiesStrohmayer and de Búrca
research-article2024
Article

2 cultural geographies 00(0)
Readers not thoroughly familiar with the writings of Lacan may nonetheless recall, first, his
opening gambit in Écrits, a collection of 35 essays that made his name in 1966, in which Lacan
reckons that ‘man is no longer so sure a reference point’.2 It is this ‘absence’ of a fixed form of
gendered subjectivity as either the point of departure or the goal of any psychoanalytical interven-
tion that makes Lacan’s work unique. Secondly, his infamous statement that positioned ‘the uncon-
scious as a language’3 firmly anchored the field of psychoanalysis within the world of structuralism.
Finally, he radicalised a spatiality already inherent in the thinking of Hegel and Freud by refuting
the epistemological ability to close (or heal) any ‘thesis/antithesis’ or ‘consciousness/subcon-
sciousness’ dialectical division. While all three key insights are present in this paper, it is the last
of these that has the most far-reaching consequences for any thinking about and every work accom-
plished through ‘landscapes’.
The paper will expand on the body of literature mentioned above through an engagement with
the material reality of landscapes as reflected in and through mirrors. If the former require little by
way of introduction to readers of this journal, it is the nexus with mirrors that requires explanation.
Long held to be a metaphorical approximation of what language and knowledge should aspire
towards: facilitating a mirroring relationship with reality, decades of post-foundationalist discourse
and practice have rendered ‘mirrors’ less innocent and passive than they may previously have
appeared to be.4 But if ‘landscapes’ do not mirror and thereby express social and cultural realities,
what do they do? And what of the mirrors themselves in the process of critical reflection – a term
that itself embodies ‘mirror-like’ properties? It is at this point in our engagement that the work of
Jacques Lacan can arguably offer fruitful avenues for future geographic encounters, which are
explored in the pages to follow. A key point of departure emerging from the meeting of Lacan’s
œuvre and landscape geographies is what Myung In Ji has fittingly described as ‘the fantasy of
authenticity’ – the demarcation of a representational impossibility that nonetheless brings about
consequential realities.5 Inflected towards a Lacanian analysis of landscapes, this ‘fantasy’ resides
in the recognition that as an object borne of a subject’s active or passive engagement with ‘world’,
any landscape is beholden to that subject’s constitutive structures and registers. Mirrors, as we
argue, are an integral element in the construction and maintenance of ‘fantastical landscapes’.
On ‘landscapes’, again
In choosing to focus on landscapes, we do not centre our attention on any old concept. Rather,
we acknowledge that ‘landscapes’ hold a particular value across the social spectrum and within
virtually all known cultures. Walking towards or within, driving across or simply looking at a
‘landscape’ counts as one of the more universally appreciated activities on this planet of ours, so
much so that renditions of landscapes fill our collective imaginations in the form of artistic, lay and
everyday representations using different tools and technologies across the ages. Unsurprisingly,
therefore, landscapes can be approached in different manners: they can be thought of as ‘positive’
representations of reality,6 as identifiable dynamisms within space,7 as the end result of work done
on the land,8 as moods and embodied sensations,9 veils,10 as psychological topographies11 and can
be approached with the help of so many more and different conceptual approaches.12 More recent
engagements with landscape have furthermore adopted a more overtly ‘political’ focus by develop-
ing moral claims towards the ‘right to landscape’13 while restrictions on individual mobilities
imposed in recent memory at the onset of the CoVid-19 pandemic in 2020 have heightened the
appreciation of locally accessible landscapes, especially in the form of parks located within walk-
ing distance from home.14
Our concern in this paper, however, is neither to advance, challenge nor to rehash debates of old
or to mitigate between them; rather, we will develop and argue for a different kind of engagement

Strohmayer and de Búrca 3
with the ‘work’ involved in the construction of landscapes. ‘Work’ here involves not merely straight-
forward analytical labour but an encounter with the conditions of possibility of such labour15; our
interest in this matter is thus a decidedly epistemological one that queries its own ‘constructed’
nature.
At the same time, engaging with landscapes often entails a public gesture: more than many
other material items deployed in public engagements, ‘landscapes’ have an innate and embodied
quality that rhymes with the everyday practices of most citizens. As many geographers have expe-
rienced, beginning a journey with a shared and concrete ‘landscape’ and from whence embracing
‘landscape’ as a concept yields constructive results. Starting from here, it often proves to be pro-
ductive to query backwards, to critique ideas and practices associated with landscapes. Key to this
analytical encounter is the starting proposition that ‘landscapes’ seemingly require the registers of
both singularity (or identity: ‘something’) and repetition (or language: ‘something else’) for them
to be present. When using landscapes publicly, we use representations of landscape; in so doing,
we engage in a double act of figurative replacement by highlighting the constructed nature of
landscapes with the help of embodying materials – paintings, postcards, photographs, collages,
films and other representational technologies. This is as it should be – and is both enjoyable and
occasionally effective. But it requires something to work which itself is not present in any public
setting: a gesture associating differences through the postulation of correspondences; in short, as
we’ll argue in a little while: a ‘mirror’ of sorts.
We use the term ‘gesture’ deliberately: we usually bridge these differences by pointing towards
that which we mean to imply and by associating words with that pointing gesture. In this manner
the quintessential Hegelian insight into difference – the ‘this is this because it is not that’ – is tem-
porarily overcome (the ‘synthesis’ in Hegel’s dialectic) by entering a referential relationship aimed
at bridging what is a constitutive distinction. But like all gestures, this one can be deceiving: for us
to know what we are pointing towards and are identifying in language, some property of ‘it’ has to
be lodged already on the other side of the divide – an unacknowledged anchor of sorts, so to speak.
The ‘lodging’ of ‘it’ is the work of culture: we understand pointing gestures because their practical
validity is confirmed to us daily in our practices and communication within a world of shared refer-
ence points. We do not question them because they work.
None of this will be news to readers attuned to post-foundational engagements in cultural geog-
raphy and beyond. Most of the work presently undertaken in that sub-discipline of geography bears
some mark of this formative insight: we dare not speak in absolutes, preferring instead to refer to
the always constructed character of what we write about. In so doing, we set aside or bracket the
gesture itself, the formation of a bridge between ‘this’ and ‘that’; in its stead, we prefer to embrace
its situated, embodied and pragmatic resolution into something that serves whatever purpose we
designed. Here and for the time being, the bridging gesture we discussed a moment ago thus
becomes its own foundational practice.
It is this systematised, local, and always already positioned relationship that exists between us
and landscapes that forms the heart of this paper. It asks two perceptively simple questions: what
is implied to be ‘at work’ when we posit or develop a relationship between a landscape, its repre-
sentation and us? And, complementing the first question, how do we approach constitutive silences
and absences woven into landscapes, their representations and the work they accomplish?
Mirroring effects
Whatever it is that is ‘at work’ here is not itself visible or perceptible. In fact, if it were it would
only get in the way of any aesthetic or contemplative engagement with landscapes. From an epis-
temological point of view, however, to accept, however implicitly, that because something works

4 cultural geographies 00(0)
it does not require explanatory labour is foolhardy at best and neglectful at worst. Such neglect can
originate, for instance, in not acknowledging the effect that a frame will bestow onto the represen-
tation of a landscape, creating inclusions and exclusions, establishing relations and a sense of scale.
Furthermore, just like a mirror really is no more than a glass plane coated with a reflective material
(silver or aluminium) attached on one side, so the bridging gestures we deploy when explaining
landscapes depend on something itself not visible but ‘in play’. Crucial for the purpose of this
paper is the recognition that when a mirror works, what it reflects is not necessarily what is seen.
As anyone struggling with their gender identity or body-shamed persons know all too well, mirrors
often fail those looking into them.16 We know of no better approximation of this reflexive chal-
lenge than the work of Gillian Weaving: her 2017 photographs Me and Claude in the Mirror and
Between a Mask and Mirror in particular express the conundrum at work and in play in a mirroring
relationship (Figure 1).17
Equally, mirrors do not merely reflect what can intuitively be recognised as such, they also
actively interfere with what is being reflected – from the infamous ‘objects in mirrors are closer
than they appear’ to other, often not innately perceptible distortions. Teaching landscapes qua rep-
resentations anchored in Western art history, for instance, is to become aware of effects created by
several such contraptions, starting with the adaptation of the vanishing point in Western painting
during the 15th century18 and extending towards cubist answers to the very same problem of rep-
resenting three dimensions on a two-dimensional plane. Famous amongst such technologies is the
so-called ‘Claude Glass (or “black mirror”)’, a name purposefully invoked by Weaving. A techni-
cal apparatus of the pre-photographic era named after the French Baroque landscape painter Claude
Figure 1. Gillian Weaving, Me and Claude in the Mirror, 2017 (framed bromide print, 52.4 × 39.4 cm;
© Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, NY, USA; used with permission).

Strohmayer and de Búrca 5
Gellée (called ‘Claude Lorrain’, 1600–1682), the ‘Claude Glass’ was a mirror positioned between
an artist and an object about to be captured. Its convex nature created a representation of land-
scapes in which a loss of detail (of colour in particular) was matched by an increase in perceptive
focus, thereby augmenting those picturesque or ‘pleasing’ qualities sought in the respective repre-
sentation of landscapes. William Gilpin, one of the inventors of the notion of the ‘picturesque’ in
the English language, likened the effect created by the Claude Glass to ‘the visions of the imagina-
tion, or the brilliant landscapes of a dream’.19 This effect is not merely a result of the convex nature
of the mirror but moreover owes something to the slightly oval shape of its frame corresponding
anatomically to the human eye. The translation of such an image into a rectangular picture frame
arguably leaves us, the onlooker, with the sense that more exists beyond a painting’s parameters;
all we have to do, we think, is move our head and we will discover what else is there.20 Although
there is no firm evidence to support Claude Lorrain ever using such a contraption, its effect is read-
ily apparent in his many paintings of landscapes; here, then, a potentially absent technology creates
a mirrored effect that mimics its presence (Figure 2).
To appreciate this ‘mirroring’ effect, we need to place it within two interrelated contexts. First
is the fact that historically, the surge of representations of landscapes during the Baroque area owes
a lot to the gradual emergence of ‘land’ as a commodity, moving away from erstwhile stable appor-
tionments of land in feudal societies towards more fluid, validated and tradable notions of land.
Figure 2. The ‘Claude Glass’, (© The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum, London, UK).

6 cultural geographies 00(0)
This is the story told in the late Denis Cosgrove’s 1984 landmark study Social formation and sym-
bolic landscape. Second and with a more overt epistemological bend, the Claude Mirror
[. . .] draws attention to the complex mediation between looking and mark-marking, framing and
representation, as well as the many interventions that occur between apprehending and understanding
landscape.21
Geographers would likely refer to the above processes as the ‘social construction’ of the emerging
‘represented landscapes’, which have since become a staple in most art museums around the globe.
It is important initially to differentiate the effect created with the help of a Claude Mirror from
outright distortions like the ones created by highly convex, fisheye lenses in photography. Rather,
the drifts created here denote more subtle shifts in how landscape are produced to become an
effect, an impression, a result. Combined, these two contexts brought about a profoundly different
appreciation of symbolised landscapes, which in turn began to shape the creation of landscapes
themselves: 18th European gardens in particular became increasingly moulded in accordance with
the image produced in a Claude Glass, effectively reversing the relationship between ‘real’ and
‘imagined’ landscapes.22
But there is another quite distinct quality of representational practice that we can see emerge in
the Claude Mirror: it reminds us of a potential loss of control over what emerges ‘in the mirror’ and
‘from the mirror’. Traditionally Western conventions had us believe that the relationship between
‘landscape’ and ‘representation’ was one controlled by an artist working within certain traditions.
Hence the many, often regionalised, ‘schools’ that can be found within the annals of art history. The
Claude Mirror adds another layer to this way of engaging with represented landscapes: by absorb-
ing the gaze and supplementing it, the mirror becomes prosthesis and generates its own unspecified
surplus of meaning. Not that this comes as a surprise given that such ‘surplus generation’ has been
in play in represented landscapes from cave paintings onwards – but it is in the mirror that the
production of such a surplus acquires a novel intermediary that is itself invisible. In other words:
the represented landscape simulates independence from its own production when it is possibly the
act of observation through the mirror and entangled with the mirror that creates it in the first place.
Arguably, it is this independence that requires analytical labour most – and nowhere more so than
in public engagements everywhere.
Through a glass: visions of self and landscape
Why should we concern ourselves with the Claude Mirror? After all, the invisibility of a structure
in the results it achieves is nothing new to analysists of landscapes who know well how to uncover
the implied workings of class,23 gender24 or race25 in historical and contemporary landscapes. The
Claude Mirror, however, also affords us with the opportunity to explore a different kind of relation-
ship across the mirror, a relationship that is less mono-causal and which resonates within a differ-
ent kind of register: that of epistemology.
It is at this precise juncture, we argue, that a psychanalytical analysis of landscapes can yield
novel insights
in the field of tension between linguistic and material turn. [Such an analysis] would question neither that
there is a physical world beyond the subject nor does it suggest a way towards approaching that world
independent from a subject. In contrast to both these propositions, [such an analysis] would query how
‘things’ are enabled to influence our actions, thinking and sensing [. . .].26

Strohmayer and de Búrca 7
Lucas Pohl’s move towards a reorientated epistemology directly challenges a topographical under-
standing of landscapes. Focussing on the work accomplished in the Claude Glass, positioned
between a looking subject and an emergent landscape, affords us with the opportunity metaphori-
cally to understand that concepts, too, are never more than the work they accomplish.27 In other
words, the Claude Glass invites us to shift our attention from the constructedness of landscapes
towards the conditions of their construction. Such a broadly structural understanding of the process
of landscape generation allows for analyses of landscapes that no longer require the postulation of
highly questionable subject-positions. Instead, ‘subject’ and ‘object’ become fragile and situated
positions within that creation, positions usefully analysed by psychoanalysis given the immanent
entangling of both. If the stability of this ‘immanence’ can no longer be maintained, what remains?
The resulting psychoanalysis of landscapes, we contend, is both richer and more relevant in a host
of contexts.
Note, however, that such a deployment of psychoanalysis is not per se interested in the adapta-
tion and subsequent utilisation of concepts from that field of inquiry; rather, it uses the structural
architecture of psychoanalytical discourses as a form of epistemological critique. Here we follow
Kingsbury’s call, which draws on the work of Joan Copjec, for a recognition that cause and effect
‘cannot occupy the same phenomenal terrain’ and that consequently, ‘observable fact and relations’
and ‘generative principles’ ought not to be accorded an identical epistemological realm.
In other words, language speaks volumes about its incompleteness and inconsistencies via, for example,
the symbolic practices of hesitation, distortion, deviation, evasion, stumbling, and so on. Psychoanalysis
suggests that these inscriptions of negation and quashing of force or functional blockages evince the
repression of their generative principle.28
Translated from the world of subject-interrogating methods into a context attentive to landscape-
generating practices, we can thus appreciate that the work accomplished by the Claude Glass in the
process of landscape creation emulates the process of subject formation in psychoanalytical tradi-
tions in that the constructed result (‘landscape’/‘(bodily)ego’) is defined by a lack – the withdrawal
of its own constructedness that is at once inevitable and incomplete.29 Following Pohl we could
call the result as arising from an ‘object-disorientated ontology’ – but more importantly in the pre-
sent epistemological context is that it allows for a critique of the naturalness of the mirroring ges-
ture itself.30
Echoing Lacan’s deconstruction of the ‘interior’ – ‘exterior’ differentiation in favour of what he
christened ‘extimacy’, ‘to account for something being “nearest to us, while at the same time being
outside us”’,31 the Claude Glass thus becomes a landscape-creating technology by crafting a rap-
port between either side of the mirror. Traditional accounts of the production of landscapes have
tended to focus on the relationship between a positioned, creating subject and the outcome of their
labour, that is, ‘landscapes’. We propose to stay a little longer with, indeed: in the mirror, better to
understand what its construction can tell us about the conditions of possibility of such labour. As
we have noted above, the Claude Glass reminds us that we cannot understand the process as simply
expressing a linear relationship. ‘Linearity’ can take on many forms, involving notions of ‘inten-
tionality’ and extending towards any fit we deem likely to exist between a subject’s position and
the outcome of their engagement with landscape. By contrast, the Claude Glass invokes a relation-
ship that is more topological than topographical in kind and orientation32: the relationship that
emerges across the mirror comes to resemble any of those late Lacanian figures, the Möbius strip
and the Borromean knot.33 In the metaphor of the knot, the affiliation between represented and
representation ceases to be a simple enough causal arrow that produces an outcome or an accom-
plishment and becomes a mutually constitutive relationship that remains incomplete: what we see

8 cultural geographies 00(0)
in the mirror is both ‘there’ and different because it is mediated. In this, the construction of land-
scapes brings to mind Lacan’s renowned ‘Mirror Stage’,34 by placing an overt emphasis on the
uncontrollable incompleteness of the relationship between represented and representation. The
latter thus emerges as part of what Lacan labelled the ‘Imaginary’: unable to shake off the fact that
it is incapable fully to engage with its own emergence, a subject will continuously defer its comple-
tion elsewhere (where it will find itself furthermore tied up with, indeed supported by, the
‘Symbolic’ – pre-existing structures, rules, culture and the like) and thus becomes more akin to an
‘object’ than the agent in control enlightenment-inspired modes of thinking would wish it to be. For
Lacan this process of ‘objectification’ in the Symbolic that is already at work in the Mirror Stage
therefore explicitly requires an ‘Other’ to confirm the unity of represented and representation35: the
unity we presume to be a ‘natural’ one present in a landscape can thus never completely shake off
its production, its ‘being made’, its remaining incomplete and dependant on something else not
readily available in an act of recognition.
Not coincidentally, Lacan’s depiction of an incomplete process of subject-formation echoes
Cosgrove’s process of land-formation in the early capitalist period as briefly discussed above: like
‘land’ begot ‘landscape’ in order to acquire a stable, commodifiable identity, so the modern indi-
vidual, faced with demands to adopt a stable identity from within a multitude of possible selves,
had to find itself on either side of the mirror, emulating ‘yes, that’s me there!’ all the while forget-
ting (and thus repressing) the work of the mirror in-between. Landscapes across from the mirror
are recognisable because modern subjectivity has positioned itself in such manner as to be able to
recognise its labour despite its proven inability to control the production process itself. But what if
we part company with this ‘modern’ shortcut? What if we acknowledge, with Lacan, that subject
and landscape are mutually constitutive in an altogether incomplete manner? What, in other words,
if we accepted the logical predominance of epistemology over ontology?
We keep returning to Lacan and topological reasoning in this context because we are reminded
of a key contribution psychoanalytic modes of reasoning can offer to anyone interested in land-
scape: rather than conceive ‘the fundamentally imaginary, specular origin of the ego’36 purely in
terms related to the construction of subjects, we can follow the lead of geographically inspired
research and extend it into areas concerned with the construction of spatially minded learning and
engagements. Again, Lacan’s own deployment especially of the Borromean knot is congruent with
such a gesture given that its thoroughly spatial approximation of the mutually constitutive emer-
gence of both subject and object through a process that lacks control of its own emergence. In the
context of landscapes we can immediately see two distinct if interrelated fields worthy of further
analysis: (1) the advent, as it were, behind our backs,37 of the constructed nature of landscapes and
(2) the transient vacuity of the pointing gesture: the ‘can’t you see, that’s [x] there’ that is always
open to misrecognition, not the least because the materiality of the ‘eye’ and every image-creating
‘gaze’, as Lacan reminded us,38 take place in differently embodied registers that meet in space. It
is this ‘meeting’ that concerns us here, defining and relying on a space that simultaneously belongs
to us in the form of the 2-m extension into space that clear-sighted humans command in every
effort to see without consciously focussing (known as an ‘empirical binocular horopter’, or, in
ophthalmology as the ‘Vieth-Müller circle’) and which simultaneously envelopes and elopes us, as
famously depicted in Lacan’s 1955 ‘L’ scheme (Figure 3):
Lacan’s scheme is helpful here – and in the context of our empirical landscape later – because
it unpacks a relationship normally assumed to exist in the singular only: the rapport between a see-
ing subject and any ‘given’ landscape. In the process, subject and landscape become embedded
within processes of gestation that leave an indelible and formative mark on both. Incidentally, the
very mention of ‘2 metres’ conjures up images of ‘social distancing’ enacted daily during the
CoVid-19 pandemic; it is hence a good time to be reminded of different forms of ‘distancing’ that

Strohmayer and de Búrca 9
abound in other social contexts as well – including those that dominate the construction of land-
scapes. To put this epistemological insight succinctly: we never ‘own’ or ‘author’ landscapes;
rather: we are what we are because we enter a relationship with objects – which may form land-
scapes in the case of a geographically informed curiosity.
Beyond the Claude Glass: landscaping technologies
The Claude Glass (or Mirror) is of course but one technology that invites an analysis of the kind
attempted above. The topological reasoning expressed in both the Borromean knot and the Möbius
strip is equally at work in the historically subsequent early photographic ‘capture’ of landscapes.
Daguerreotypes, or the act of exposing silver-plated copper surfaces polished to mirror, finished
and sensitised to light through halogen fumes, also embody a doubling of the mirroring gesture that
cannot eliminate its original production and must therefore remain ‘other’ and potentially ‘alienat-
ing’. No surprise, therefore, to note that this latter technology, from its first outdoor application in
the context of urban landscape generation on the Pont Neuf 1837 in Paris by Louis Daguerre him-
self39 has produced ghosts galore given its inability to render moving persons other than as striated,
blurred images. Metaphorically, the recognition of such ghosts40 serves to remind us of an often-
uncanny non-linearity at the heart of ‘mirroring’ affiliations: a sublime form of spatiality attaching
to the mobility that forms such relationships, and which has not surprisingly been worked over
time and again in literature, the arts – and especially in films from Jean Cocteau to Star Wars
(Figures 4 and 5).
What unites such cultural and pop-cultural refences is not merely the occasionally playful invo-
cation of Lacanian knots in the construction of psychologically resonating narratives but the prac-
tice of making an invisible and often silent mirror – the engine of the constructed landscapes
– recede behind that very narrative. As consumers of pop culture, we often appreciate the sophisti-
cation of the emerging landscapes, as well as the hidden nature of the deceiving mechanism.
In public settings like the ones that prevail on social media, appreciation is not the only, indeed:
is not the main game in town. When approaching landscapes we ought to communicate their con-
structed nature in all its facets, technological embeddings and self-supporting mechanisms. Where
and when a metaphorical ‘mirror’ is thus at work in the creation of possible landscapes, it ought to
be our responsibility as scholars to render its absent constructive apparatus open to democratic
Figure 3. Lacan’s ‘L’ (or ‘lambda’ = λ) schema [1954–1955; the ‘imaginary axis’ is customarily associated
with the ‘mirror phase’; Lacan, J,1977, Écrits, trans A Sheridan, New York, Norton, 193]. Photo taken by the
authors.

10 cultural geographies 00(0)
scrutiny through the application of epistemological rigour. This is all the more important given that
hidden mechanisms are operational because they remain hidden. Once again Lacan provides valu-
able insights at this juncture: as in the ‘mirror stage’, mirrors like the Claude Glass give birth to a
highly mobile materialisation of that which we are not (and which is thus external to us) but which
defines us nonetheless – nation, work, family, nature, sport, fashion, etc – qua desire. Recall that
for Lacan the symbolic order temporarily supersedes the possibility of misrecognition (expressed
most readily in his famous statement quoted at the outset of this paper that ‘the unconscious is
structured like a language’),41 resulting in the naturalisation of ‘objective’ constructs that are at
once collective – a copy – and ours solely; it is from this combination that such constructs derive
their power because we literally cannot turn away from them without getting lost. Here ‘landscape’
becomes a metaphor for that which we see but see partially, obliquely and as if in a mirror, see with
the help of technologies like the Claude Glass. Between the visible and the conditional, landscapes
arguably hold a privileged position: they emulate the spectacular origin of the subject outside the
subject and thereby objectify our position within a world not at all of our making. Lacan himself
attempted to capture this doubling of the constitution of the subject in his first published seminar,
stressing ‘the fundamentally imaginary, specular origin of the ego’, making object and subject
‘correlative [. . .] because their appearance is truly contemporaneous’.42
Figure 4. Jean Marais in Jean Cocteau’s Orphée (1950). Photo taken by the authors.
Figure 5. Daisy Ridley as Rey in Rian Johnson’s Star Wars VIII, The Last Jedi (2017). Photo taken by the
authors.

Strohmayer and de Búrca 11
Irish landscapes ‘beyond the mirror’
To exemplify insights facilitated by a psychoanalytical approach to landscapes, we will use the
concluding part of this paper to an exploration of a landscape that straddles divisions between both
‘object/subject’ and ‘absence/presence’. Such a focus, we contend, can meaningfully complement
other readings of landscapes that are more overtly anchored in critiques of ideology, aesthetics or
political motifs. In the context of this paper, ‘absences’ are different from that which does not
appear in a mirror; instead, they denote the reflected otherness that dare not speak its name. In this
precise sense, our use of the term ‘absence’ is thus different from the one customarily employed by
scholars working in the cultural sciences: it is not the diachronic absence of a presence, where the
one replaces the other in time, but a constitutive blind spot, a synchronic altarity that is integral for
the apperception of a landscape. It is different, too, from its implied Hegelian cousin ‘negativity’ in
that it does not adhere to the mechanical, mirror-like logic of othering.43 In the sense deployed
here, ‘absence’ is thus not epistemologically dissimilar from ‘presence’ in that both are produced
through structural processes that are, in turn, at least partially invisible.
Devoting attention to ‘absences’ is but a choice made in this paper: the dynamism inherent in
landscapes no matter their respective medium of expression, renders any landscape a likely candi-
date for providing anchorage to more durable symbolic ambitions. If these latter presently materi-
alise in the context of Irish landscapes through commonly identified tropes in the form of sectarian
murals,44 idealised representations of the non-modernised ‘West’,45 landscapes of remembrance,46
place names appearing on maps47 or gendered depictions of bodies,48 there are other components
of such landscapes not customarily accorded a presence in Irish landscapes.
One such present absence materialises in what are known in Ireland as cilliní. Denoting locally
recognised but not officially acknowledged burial sites for non-conforming bodies and lives and
often indicated by the presence of a seemingly random assortment of rocks and boulders in the
landscape, cilliní are thus signifying an underbelly to Irishness that literally dare not speak its name
and has consequently yet to be translated into the more widely practiced colonial language. For
bodies there are: the bodies of stillborn babies, of suicides, unmarried mothers, murderers, ‘for-
eign’ bodies often arriving on Irish shores because of shipwreck, mentally ill, excommunicates
and other such undesirable lives cut short, buried here because their final resting place could not
be allocated within the consecrated space that is an official cemetery. In Irish, the word cillin
symbolises a small (prison or monastic) ‘cell’, occasionally even referring to a small church.49
Geographically, cillíní are placed away from paths or roads, they are often awkward to reach, out
in the middle of bogs, up mountainsides, in dense thickets, set far back from any paths. Or, they are
hidden in plain sight, in a location that is so familiar that we do not notice it, like at a crossroad, or
the neglected-looking corner of a local field. There is often very little to see.50
As far as the Irish were led to believe, those buried in a cillín were not to be remembered, and,
acting as the repository for these ‘unimagined’ souls, the site that contained them was ideally not
to exist either – at least, not to the untrained eye. The wish to absent those buried is thus manifest
in the cillín’s placement and its non-descript topography. It clearly aims to deflect attention, not
attract it. In that respect, the cillín was never intended to be a ‘landscape’; the site itself is a black
hole, a blind spot of the psyche. Efforts that were made to ensure the evidence of a cillín’s exact
whereabouts would be physically compressed under a heavy blanket of humus, worn down by ero-
sion or washed away by the sea, and psychologically suppressed under the weight of shame, denial
and repulsion. The process of ‘absenting’, and the denial of their realness, has thus relied on the
chaotic, ‘topologically impossible’ materiality of organic matter camouflaging the organised, patri-
archal structure that has sustained it, forever inventing ways to banish its shadows – including
those buried in cillíní. But, the fact that cillíní do continue to exist, as does our – albeit hazy –
awareness of the bodies interred in them, presents us with a problem.

12 cultural geographies 00(0)
Over millennia, we have learned to invert, obvert and divert, rendering the unspeakable
unseeable. But despite being almost eliminated from our consciousness (and thus from our con-
science), cillíní continue to be; they are literally part of the ground we walk on, they are embed-
ded somewhere in our inherited memory and have found their way into the foundations of our
cultural values. When acknowledging their existence, Ireland can only bring itself to turn its
back and look at them through a dark mirror. The problem, however, is that even a dark mirror
rendered invisible did not show much by way of a ‘landscape’ given that the act of representation
comes into head-on conflict with the ultimate purpose; to ensure that the burial site and its
interred do not leave an impression on us or the land, neither physical nor in memory. The lan-
guage of these invisible but material burial sites thus, to pick up an earlier quote from Paul
Kingsbury, ‘speaks volumes about the incompleteness’ of Irish identity; more than that: their
absence from Irish landscapes has become formative in the construction of both, colonial and
post-colonial identities.
When attempting to represent the cillín, one of us faced the question of how to represent ‘it’ in
its invisibleness, its absence and nominal epistemological nothingness. The Claude Glass was used
to transform a reflected landscape into ‘a thing’. In the case of representing the cillín however, it
must be rematerialised; brought back from the projection of nothing- and no-bodiness that led to
its formation in the first place (and in which form it contributed to the formation of those identi-
ties). This ‘bringing back from nothingness’, is thus unlike a Claude Glass transforming an imag-
ined landscape (the artist’s view) into something real (the artwork); by representing the cillín, one
is reimagining the unimagined by rematerialising its immateriality (Figure 6).
Rather than expressing pre-existing or assumed identities, cilliní articulate identities denied. Or
rather, since no agency was ever involved: identities overlooked, neglected, supressed. They
become what Lacan referred to as the ‘objet petit a’, the leftover of the encounter between the
Imaginary and the Symbolic which serves as a reminder of an unattainable and unrepresentable
‘Real’. Cilliní thus become unacknowledged objects of desire, material reminders of incomplete-
ness, perhaps best thought of as open wounds.
The result is a landscape that is, to paraphrase Lacan, unlike a language we know how to han-
dle: unreadable, often undecipherable to the uninitiated eye or in mirrors of whatever kind and
utterly knotty. Our approach to such a landscape of ‘the real’, to use Lacan’s designation of that
Figure 6. Miriam de Búrca, Anatomy of Chaos IV: Amnesia Sampled (Ink drawing), 2018. Photo taken by
the artist.

Strohmayer and de Búrca 13
which we stumble into, often without fully appreciating its existence, never mind importance, is
not accidentally an artistic one. The shift towards art may seem like a departure from an episte-
mological pursuit. It is not. Our unpacking of the structural properties of knowing earlier on, with
their unavoidable dependencies on shifting, uncontrollable mirror-like constructs, with the ero-
sion of the subject-object delineation and the folding of possible manners of differentiating
between represented and representation comes an epistemological expansion in the ways we can
legitimately approach landscapes.
To make sense of this move, we finally turn to Lacan’s contemporary, the semiotician Roland
Barthes’ engagement with art – literature in the case of his late lectures at the Collège de France.
In his inaugural lecture in 1977, and having confirmed the post-structuralist insight that ‘human
language has no exterior: there is no exit’, Barthes went on to state that
for us, who are neither knights of faith nor supermen, the only remaining alternative is, if I may say so, to
cheat with speech (langue), to cheat speech. This salutary trickery, this evasion, this grand imposture
which allows us to understand speech (langue) outside the bounds of power, in the splendour of a permanent
revolution of language, I for one call literature.51
Barthes goes on to refer to this linguistic act of resistance as a ‘topological impossibility’52 and was
attempting to systematise its practices underneath the concept of the ‘Neutral’ in the years before
his untimely death in 1980.53 For Barthes, ‘literature’ was thus part of semiology, the teaching of
which was specifically aimed at studying the social uses of linguistic constructs – what Barthes,
following Brecht, referred to as ‘the Great Habit’.54 Researching such routine practices by scruti-
nising that which does not adhere to its innermost logic of creating, maintaining and justifying a
given habit is the core social function of such a Barthesian semiology, with ‘literature’ forming its
focus. We propose to cast the net of such critique of habitual engagements wider and advocate for
a legitimisation of more and differently articulated forms of engagement.
In such an appreciation, ‘art’ thus comes to resemble Lacanian psychoanalysis by aiming to
render visible, but never successfully substituting, for the impossibility that is the foundational
gesture of the subject and her/his/their identity. In our example, cilliní are a material mementos to
the construction of Irish identities through constitutive practices of not thematising, of forgetting,
repressing and silencing lives. A landscape of cilliní can therefore never aspire to be a landscape of
cilliní; at best, it can endeavour to become cognisant of its own constructedness and of the absence
it aims to map.
Faced with the task of exemplifying a ‘topologically impossible’ landscape of cilliní starts and
arguably ends with the act of naming that which functions as a reminder of the Real – beyond mir-
rors and similarly self-reflective tropes. We encountered a glimpse of such a practice in our referral
to an Irish landscape with the help of an Irish word. But beyond the well-worn trope of the impos-
sibility of translation, our invocation of art in general, art freed from the twin weights of the repre-
sentational order, apophatic art, approximates or ‘samples’ a collective amnesia that has been
characterising part of Irish identities – and continues to do so into the present. We argue that an
engagement with ‘landscapes’ through lenses crafted by psychoanalytical labours can provide
helpful approximations here, not the least by tracing the repressions that contributed so centrally to
the making of cilliní in the first place.
Given that the invalidation of lives and bodies we encounter in and through cillini has shaped
the history of Ireland in other ways as well, including the silencing of ‘fallen women’ in the infa-
mous Magdalene laundries, the invisibility of abused and murdered children in churches, cemteries
and schools or countless maimed bodies as a result of sectarian violence, we regard such hopeless
Barthesian acts as crucial in the context of endeavours of the kind we customarily engage in,

14 cultural geographies 00(0)
wherever they may take place. As such, our argument in this paper has not primarily been informed
by a critique of ideology (note the absence of terms like ‘alienation’ from our discussion) but aimed
at rendering the constitutive importance of ‘silences’ visible: like we have demonstrated in the
Claude Glass, that which is invisible is often centrally ‘at work’ in shaping realities, however
twisted and knotty the emerging engagement with landscapes and identities may be.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Ethics statement
This study relied exclusively on publicly available archival materials. No human subjects were involved in the
research process. All sources have been properly cited in accordance with academic standards. The research-
ers have made every effort to interpret the archival materials accurately and in their appropriate historical
context.
ORCID iD
Ulf Strohmayer https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4348-1567
Notes
1. A good starting point into the debates that have shaped the early engagement of geographers with psy-
choanalysis is F.Callard, ‘The Taming of Psycholanalysis in Geography’, Social & Cultural Geography,
4(3), 2003, pp. 295–312. See also S.Pile, The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space and Subjectivity
(London: Routledge, 1996), L.Bondi, ‘Stages on Journeys: Some Remarks About Human Geography
and Psychotherapeutic Practice’, Professional Geographer, 51, 1999, pp. 11–24. H.Nast, ‘Mapping the
‘Unconscious’: Racism and the Oedipal Family’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers,
90, 2000, pp. 215–55 and D.Sibley, ‘Geography and Psychoanalysis: Tensions and Possibilities’, Social
& Cultural Geography, 4(3), 2003, pp. 391–9. Rather than invoking the work of contemporary Lacanian
geographers at this stage, their insights will be deployed creatively later on in the paper.
2. J.Lacan, Écrits, trans. B.Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), p. 3.
3. J.Lacan, ‘Of Structure as an Inmixing of an Otherness. Prerequisite to Any Subject Whatever’, in
R.Macksey and E.Donato (eds), The Structuralist Controversy. The Languages of Criticism and the
Sciences of Man (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), p. 188. In his seminars of
1955–1956, Lacan presented an earlier version of this insight as “the unconsciousness is a language”
(The Seminars of Jacques Lacan, Book III 1955-1956, ed. J.-A.Miller, trans. R.Grigg, 11).
4. As concerns the argument developed here, Richard Rorty’s 1979 magnum opus Philosophy and the
Mirror of Nature is another reference point (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
5. M.I.Ji, ‘The Fantasy of Authenticity: Understanding the Paradox of Retail Gentrification in Seoul’,
cultural geographies, 28(2), 2021, pp. 221–38.
6. C.Sauer, ‘The Morphology of Landscape’, University of California Publications in Geography, 2(2),
1925, p. 19054.
7. D.Mitchell, They Saved the Crops. Labor, Landscape, and the Struggle over Industrial Farming in
Bracero-Era California (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012).
8. J.B.Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984).
9. C.Nash, ‘Remapping and Renaming: New Cartographies of Identity, Gender and Landscape in Ireland’,
Feminist Review, 44, 1993, pp. 39–57.
10. J.Berger and J.Mohr, A Fortunate Man. London: Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative (London:
Allen Lane, 1967).
11. N.Nichols, ‘Lacan, the City, and the Utopian Symptom: An Analysis of Abject Urban Spaces’, Space and
Culture, 11(4), 2008, pp. 459–74.

Strohmayer and de Búrca 15
12. J.Wylie, Landscape (New York: Routledge, 2007).
13. K.Olwig, ‘The Right Rights to the Right Landscape’, in S.Makhzoumi, S.Egoz and G.Pungetti (eds),
The Right to Landscape: Contesting Landscape and Human Rights (Farnham, Surry: Ashgate, 2011),
pp. 39–50.
14. J.Pries, E.Jönsson and D.Mitchell, ‘Parks and Houses for the People’, Places Journal. Epub ahead of
print May 2020. DOI: 10.22269/200512.
15. The ‘we’ deployed here and elsewhere in this paper refers to the collaboration of an artist and writer and
a professional geographer in the drafting of this paper.
16. We remain indebted to Gilian Rose’s thought-provoking engagement with the trope of the mirror in her
paper devoted to same. See G.Rose, ‘As If Mirrors Had Bled: A Masculine Dwelling, Masculine Theory
and Feminist Masquerade’, in N.Duncan (ed.), BodySpace: Destablising Geographies of Gender and
Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 56–74.
17. Mirrors have acquired a key role in art history. Modern and contemporary art is no exception – in
addition to Weaving’s work, we would like to pay homage to the work of Joan Jonas whose critical
engagement with mirrors paved the way for subsequent feminist work on identity. See A.Zivkovic, ‘Joan
Jonas’s Ecological Portraits: Echo and Narcissus’, Afterimage, 49(1), 2022, p. 63087.
18. J.Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 2008 [1972]), p. 18.
19. W.Gilpin, Remarks on Forest Scenery and Other Woodland Views (London: R Blamire, 1791), p. 225; see
also D.Marshall, ‘The Problem of the Picturesque’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 35(2), 2002, pp. 413–37
and D.S.Miall, ‘Representing the Picturesque: William Gilpin and the Laws of Nature’, Interdisciplinary
Studies in Literature and Environment, 12(2), 2005, pp. 75–93.
20. Here an oval shape corresponds to the ellipse, a well-known element of garden design in19th cen-
tury urban environments in that it nudges and lures those that encounter it to anticipate and suspect
something else, something more, to emerge just behind the next turn – or beyond the frame of a paint-
ing (see U.Strohmayer, ‘Urban Design and Civic Spaces: Nature at the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont
in Paris’, cultural geographies, 13(4), 2006, pp. 557–76 and U.Strohmayer, ‘Performing Marginal
Space: Film, Topology and the Petite Ceinture in Paris (with Jipé Corre providing art work)’,
Liminalities, 8(4), 2012, pp. 1–16 for explorations of the ‘curved’ nature of mobility-supporting
infrastructures).
21. A.McCay and C.Matheson, ‘The Transient Glance’, 2006, <http://web2.uwindsor.ca/hrg/amckay/
Claudemirror.com/Claudemirror.com/Claude_Mirror_Introduction.html>, chapter 1, ‘introduction’.
22. E.H.Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1960), pp. 44–46.
23. Mitchell, They Saved the Crops.
24. C.Nash, ‘Reclaiming Vision: Looking at Landscape and the Body’, Gender, Place and Culture, 3(2),
1996, pp. 149–70.
25. R.Schein (ed.), Landscape and race in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2006).
26. L.Pohl, ‘Das urbane Unbewusste’, sub\urban, 7(3), 2019, pp. 47–64, p. 57 (our translation).
27. See P.Kingsbury and S.Pile, ‘Introduction: The Unconscious, Transference, Drives, Repetition and Other
Things Tied to Geography’, in P.Kingsbury and S.Pile (eds), Psychoanalytic Geographies (New York:
Routledge, 2016), pp. 1–38, p. 7.
28. P.Kingsbury, ‘Becoming Literate in Desire with Alan Partridge’, cultural geographies, 22(2), 2015,
pp. 329–44, the quotes are from 330 and 332 respectively.
29. S.Cavanagh, ‘Gender, Sexuality, and Race in the Lacanian Mirror: Urinary Segregation and the Bodily
Ego’, in P.Kingsbury and S.Pile (eds), Psychoanalytic Geographies (New York: Routledge, 2016),
pp. 323–38, p. 324.
30. L.Pohl, ‘Object-Disoriented Geographies: The Ghost Tower of Bangkok and the Topology of Anxiety’,
cultural geographies, 27(1), 2020, pp. 71–84, p. 72; L.Pohl, ‘Ruins of Gaia: Towards a Feminine
Ontology of the Anthropocene’, Theory, Culture & Society, 37(6), 2020, pp. 67–86 extends this further
in a critical exploration of a ‘feminine’ ontology situated beyond the ‘nature’ – culture’ binary.
31. Jacques Lacan, quoted in Pohl, ‘Object-Disoriented Geographies’, p. 74.

16 cultural geographies 00(0)
32. See J.Allen, ‘Topological Twists: Power’s Shifting Geographies’, Dialogues in Human Geography, 1(3),
2011, pp. 283–98 and L.Martin and A.Secor, ‘Towards a Post-Mathematical Topology’, Progress in
Human Geography, 38, 2014, pp. 420–38.
33. J.Lacan, Écrits, trans. A.Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), p. 281. See also J.Lacan, The Seminar of
Jacques Lacan: The Sinthome, Vol. XXIII. (Cambridge: Polity, 2016) and A.Secor, ‘Topological City
(Urban Geography Plenary Lecture)’, Urban Geography, 34(4), 2013, pp. 430–44, p. 436.
34. Lacan, Écrits, pp. 1–7; see also J.Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Freud’s Papers on Technique,
Vol. I. (New York: Norton, 1988), pp. 163–75.
35. J.Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Anxiety, Vol. X. (Cambridge: Polity, 2014), p. 32.
36. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, p. 165.
37. We consciously deploy this allusion to dorsality, as developed in David Wills book of the same
name (Dorsality: Thinking Back Through Technology and Politics (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2008)) to allude, however briefly, to another aspect related to the analysis pre-
sented here: the phenomenological possibility that many of the required manners of construction
that elude our epistemological grasp might also literally take place where we cannot see. For a
more fully developed engagement with this train of thought, see S.Ahmed, ‘Orientations: Toward
Queer Phenomenology’, GLQ: A journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 12(4), 2006, pp. 543–74 and
M.Hannah, Direction and Socio-Spatial Theory. A Political Economy of Orientated Practice (New
York: Routledge, 2019).
38. J.Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. A.Sheridan (New York: Norton,
1978), pp. 67–78.
39. A.Gunthert, ‘Daguerre, premier portraitiste de la photographie’, L’image sociale, 12 September 2017,
<https://imagesociale.fr/5016> (25 November 2022).
40. See D.Delyser, ‘Authenticity on the Ground: Engaging in the Past in a Californian Ghost Town’,
Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 89, 1999, pp. 602–33; D.Dixon, ‘A Benevolent
and Sceptical Enquiry: Exploring “Fortean Geographies” with the Mothman’, cultural geographies,
14, 2007, pp. 189–210; D.Matless, ‘A Geography of Ghosts: The Spectral Landscapes of Mary Butts’,
cultural geographies, 15(3), 2008, pp. 335–57; J.F.Madden and P.Adey, ‘Editorial: Spectro-Geographies’,
cultural geographies, 15(3), 2008, pp. 291–295.
41. Lacan, Écrits, p. 44.
42. Lacan, The seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I, Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953–1954, Seminar XIII
(‘The see-saw of desire’), p. 165.
43. At the same time, we openly acknowledge the political and thus not epistemological use of a semantic
field created by the words ‘negative’ and ‘negativity’ as denoting opposition, critique and, as in Hegel,
the opening of thinking towards dialectical, rather than identitarian, manners of constructing an argu-
ment. For a productive engagement with this theme, see D.Bissell, M.Rose and P.Harrison, Negative
Geographies. Exploring the Politics of Limits (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021).
44. S.Brunn, S.Byrne, L.McNamara and A.Egan, ‘Belfast Landscapes: From Religious Schism to Conflict
Tourism’, Focus on Geography, 53(3), 2010, pp. 81–91.
45. M.Markwick, ‘Marketing Myths and the Cultural Commodification of Ireland: Where the Grass is
Always Greener’, Geography, 86(1), 2001, pp. 37–49.
46. N.Johnson, ‘Cast in Stone: Monuments, Geography, and Nationalism’, Environment and Planning D:
Society and Space, 13, 1995, pp. 51–65.
47. Nash, ‘Remapping and Renaming’.
48. R.Donkersloot, ‘Gendered and Generational Experiences of Place and Power in the Rural Irish
Landscape’, Gender, Place & Culture, 19(5), 2012, pp. 578–99; Nash, ‘Reclaiming Vision’.
49. C.Donnelly and E.Murphy, ‘Chapter 33: Children’s Burial Grounds (cillíni) in Ireland’, S.Crawford,
D.Hadley and G.Shepard (eds), The Archaeology of Childhood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018),
pp. 608–28.
50. M.de Búrca, Noblesse Oblige (London: Cristea Roberts Gallery, 2024), esp. 36–53.
51. R.Barthes, ‘Lecture: Inauguration of the Chair of Semiology, Collège de France, January 7, 1977’,
Oxford Literary Review, 4(1), 1979, pp. 31–44, p. 34.

Strohmayer and de Búrca 17
52. Barthes, ‘Lecture’, p. 36.
53. R.Barthes, The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France (1977–1978), trans. R.Krauss and
D.Hollier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); see also R.Teeuwen, ‘‘The Dream of a Minimal
Sociality’: Roland Barthes’ Skeptic Intensity’, Theory, Culture & Society, 37(4), 2020, pp. 119–34.
54. Barthes, ‘Lecture’, p. 39.
Author biographies
Ulf Strohmayer teaches Geography at the University of Galway in the West of Ireland. A native of Germany,
he studied and taught in Sweden, France, Pennsylvania and Wales before settling in Ireland. His widely pub-
lished research is rooted in social philosophies, historical geographies of modernity and are connected to
urban planning, with a particular emphasis on the geographies and histories of Paris, France. He is currently
writing a book on vacant urban spaces and conceptualising a monograph on the history of abattoirs in Paris.
Miriam de Búrca is a visual artist who lectures at Burren College of Art. She studied Fine Art at Glasgow
School of Art (BFA 1996) and the Ulster University, Belfast (MFA 2000, PhD 2010). She works with film,
photography, installation and drawing, examining contemporary legacies of patriarchy and colonialism
through a feminist and post-colonial lens. She mimics imperialist aesthetics and methods of knowledge-
gathering, effectively turning the scrutiny back on the scrutinisers. Her work has been exhibited nationally
and internationally, is part of numerous private and public collections and has been featured in several publi-
cations, the most recent being, ‘The Story of Drawing: An Alternative History of Art’, ed. Susan Owens, Yale
University Press, due out in October 2024. De Búrca lives and works in Galway, Ireland.