In accepting an ontology that takes imminence and becoming as given and subverts any gestures towards ossifying movement into coherencies such as culture, it is difficult to explain how certain kinds of subject–object relationships, such as the cultural landscape, present themselves to us as stable and a-contextually fixed. How might such apparent coherencies be accounted for? The question calls for a shift not only in what we mean by representation but, more importantly, in how we ‘take’ representation—that is, how we engage, interact, or acknowledge the presentation of a stable, demobilised, and closed world. I argue that this shift can take place only if landscape studies jettisons its reliance on concepts such as culture to explain the presence of the landscape and begins to think about such coherencies as a performance of coherence rather than coherence itself. I draw upon Derrida's idea of ‘dreams of presence’ to describe these performances of coherence as well as to theorise more broadly how an always-already deconstructing world can often be presented to us as closed.
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