ABSTRACT
In order to close this discussion I will, in what follows, reflect on
some of the key points made in the book, clarify why I have exposed
an immense amount of data, documented hundreds of human prac-
tices related to total landscape, and unearthed the theory of total
landscape. Finally, I will open up the discourse in a few speculative
directions. I began this book years ago, not because I was interested
in theme parks, but because I was intrigued by a specific ensemble
of conditions as much characteristic of late modernity as they were
of the emerging postmodernity. I was puzzled by them, enthusiastic
about some aspects of their promise, but also troubled by their total-
izing effects. For the reasons laid out in the opening paragraphs of
this book, I named it ‘Total Landscape’. I believe, and I hope I have
persuaded the reader also, I have been right in arguing that the theme
park and the propast are its archetypal specialized spaces, and that
both are the ur-forms of total landscape. In that capacity, they suc-
cessfully reveal both subjects and objects of contemporary human
knowledge as well as their complex and intricate relationships. The
form that such a knowledge increasingly takes has been dramatically
departing from two humanistic beliefs: firstly, that the human being
must be at its center, and secondly that such a knowledge must be
grounded in specific places. Even though the second belief has been
irreparably shattered by total landscape, the first one still holds true,
but in radically different ways: the human being has been objectified,
abstracted, rationalized and instrumentalized as a means to a norma-
tive end. In that respect, the theme park and the propast are ‘ideal
symbols’ of the Twentieth Century, precisely because the general
conception of human being, as well as human knowledge of it, reveal
themselves immediately in a particularly illuminating form. It is for
such reasons, I have argued here, that the theme park and the propast
are the theory of total landscape. If I am right, one can, without doubt,
see how the human being has been erased as the subject of human
knowledge, ‘like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’, under
the effect of the emerging technocratic establishments and their
instrumentalization of human knowledge towards totalizing aims.
