1. Questions of words
Firstly, I would like to thank the organizers of this conference for their invitation to speak in the city that we call Gérone on the other side of the Pyrenees. I should also, of course, give these thanks and the lecture in Catalan, but I can only ask that you tolerate my rough Spanish replete with Gallicisms. I hope, however, that this will usefully contribute to the hybridization of this hybrid conference, introducing a picturesque variety into your linguistic landscape.
I am even more grateful as the theme “trajection and landscape” has been the very substance of my research over the last quarter century. It was in fact the research and work on the relationship of Japanese culture with nature, particularly in the kinds of landscape, that led me, in the spring of 1985, to coin the neologisms of trajection, trajectivité, trajectif, trajecter. At that time I was living in Tokyo. A little later, in order to present these notions in Japanese, I had to translate them for the neologisms of tsûtai, tsûtaisei, tsûtaiteki, which was very useful for understanding more clearly some of the mechanisms in play. Indeed, the sinogram tsû (tong in Mandarin Chinese), when we read kayoi, means “going to and from”; and as we will see later, the image of a movement to and fro decisively illuminated the way in which I have gradually constructed the concept of trajection.
In other words, this concept, to some extent, was constructed when crossing the border between two languages, French and Japanese. In fact, the problem of the translation needs reflection on the exact meaning of the concepts that we must transfer to other words. Experience shows that concepts do not have a pure meaning, transcending words. For this reason, as is said in Italian (but cannot be said on the other side of the Alps, in French or in German), traduttore traditore. In French, traducteur traître, or in German Uebersetzer Verräter have nothing of the spiritual; they are simple and banal enunciations. Certainly, to translate is to betray to some extent, but, on the other hand, it is to construct a new meaning, which can sometimes lead to the discovery or invention of fruitful paths. In any case, when dealing with a neologism, whose meaning is still fresh and malleable, one cannot talk of betrayal; translation is part of the process of construction of the concept itself. For the same reason, I hope that this colloquium, which outside of Japan is the first to explicitly approach trajection, will contribute decisively to developing this concept.
From the lexical point of view, trajection comes directly from the Latin trajectio, which means “crossing”; from the preposition trans, “beyond, on or to the other side of”, and from the verb jacere, “throw, establish”. Beyond what? When I coined the word, it was precisely about saying what happens when crossing the ditch that modern dualism has dug between human beings and their milieu, establishing the two theoretical poles of subject and object, which were respectively gradually pinned down. In the ambit of this modern classical Western paradigm, which made possible the scientific revolution, are the two worlds of the res cogitans (the subject) and of the res extensa (the object), as Descartes said, which cannot be mixed. However, the reality of the landscape is obviously removed from this dualism; it is clear that in no place can the pole of the subject or of the object be reduced. In order to name this place, which is not simply subjective or objective, but precisely between the two, it would be necessary to name its intermediate and dynamic state – the dynamic of the crossing from one pole to the other. This made possible the new word: trajection, after a preliminary stage in which I spoke of trajet de paysage, “landscape crossing”. Of course, trajection is far more general than trajet de paysage; what it expresses is no less than the fundamental process of constituting a concrete reality.

2. The island of trajection
When we say that something is “concrete”, we are generally under the direct influence of the dualist paradigm of modernity; in other words, we understand it as a material and palpable object, out there. In contrast, we understand “abstract” as something immaterial and impalpable, within our head. This is exactly the definition given by the New Oxford Dictionary of English: concrete “existing in a material or physical form; real or solid; not abstract; specific, definite; denoting a material object as opposed to an abstract quality, state or action.” This is no less than the res extensa that Descartes identifies as matter and contrasts with consciousness. A good example of this way of seeing ourselves is provided by the English language, in which concrete means both something specific and a construction material. Concrete (in the latter sense) is a defined object which is clearly there, outside of consciousness.
However, concrete comes from the Latin concretus, which is the past participle of concrescere: “grow (crescere) together (cum)”. Concretus is what has been formed through this shared growth. Sometimes it is this very process of growth.
In terms of reality, the problem is: what are these things that grow together? From the point of view of modernity they are objects. For example, in the case of concrete, they are “broken stones or gravel, sand and cement”, according to the New Oxford Dictionary of English, sometimes adding a reinforcement of iron or steel bars. Mixed with water, these objects grow together and change into concrete. The whole of this process is outside of consciousness. It develops within itself, out there.
But there is nothing concrete about this way of seeing. It is purely abstract; because, in fact, this process, from beginning to end, involves the presence, the representations, the feelings, the projects and the actions of human subjects. In short, it involves human existence, without which concrete would not exist. This is, concretely, reality. Concrete in itself is an abstraction: something from which an essential component, human existence, has been abstracted (taken out).
In other words, concrete reality involves growing together; put another way, the common history of things and of human beings. This common history is what I call “trajection”. And like all real things, concrete participates in this common history. In fact, concrete is not a pure object; it is trajective.
If I have employed this terminology for around twenty years it is because it did not emerge out of the blue from an abstract reflection, as Minerva sprang fully armed from the head of Jupiter. Concretely, it has involved a long gestation period, in which the experience of alien geographical realities was decisive.
In particular, I can say that the concept of trajection was the result, around ten years later, of the preparation of my thesis in Hokkaidô, in the early seventies. Hokkaidô is a large island in the north of Japan, which in fact was not colonized before the Meiji Restoration (1868), although the Japanese had been crossing the Tsugaru Strait (between Hokkaidô and the main island of Honshû) since the 12th century, and permanently settling on the southern coast since the 15th century. Still today, the southern part of Hokkaidô is called Watarishima, or “the island (shima) [to where it is necessary] to cross (wataru).” Cross beyond the Tsugaru Strait.
In Hokkaidô, I also had to cross beyond, outside my familiar surroundings, and in particular beyond the conception of the landscape that I had inherited from my training as a geographer; that is, an object, being in itself, out there. That object that was the very object of geography as some of the founding fathers of the French school of geography thought, for example Max Sorre.
What I discovered in Hokkaidô was that the landscape is not an object as such. It does not exist in itself but depends on the way in which people see their surroundings. Of course, I knew that writers, such as Amiel (1821-1881), had been able to write that the landscape was a “mirror of the soul”. I had even read, in the sixties, Man and the Earth (L’Homme et la terre, 1952) by Eric Dardel. Today, Dardel is recognised as a precursor of phenomenological geography, which started to be developed in the seventies, precisely at the time that I was preparing my thesis. But for me, at first, all of this was no more than literature. Literature on subjective representations, different from reality. Reality was objective, out there. And it was about analyzing it objectively in order to produce a true geography thesis.
However, living in Hokkaidô and studying the history of its colonization must have gradually made me understand that reality was different. The way in which the peasants who had emigrated from Honshû saw the northern island could not be reduced to mere subjective representations; because this way of seeing was, at once, a way of feeling, living, thinking and acting, in short, a way of existing, whose concrete result was the birth of a new fûdo, that is, a new milieu that was not a mere reproduction of that of Honshû, nor a reproduction of the model that the American advisors to the Japanese government had advocated to develop this northern island, whose surroundings evoked for them that of their own milieu, that of New England. They advised, therefore, an agriculture focused on wheat, potato and milk production. But what the peasants carried out was focused on the cultivation of rice, which, at first, had been prohibited by the government. In around fifty years, the rice fields reached almost to the region of Nemuro, in the northeast, where summer is less warm than in Stockholm.
This process was, strictly speaking, a “growing together”, a common history of the peasants and of rice because it was possible not only through human innovations – for example, the takoashi (“octopus arms”), a sower with eight arms which made it possible to go much faster than the traditional method of replanting the rice seedlings – but also with a mutation of the plant itself, which produced a particular variety of rice, called bôzu (bonze) because it had a bald ear like the head of a bonze. This bôzu, particularly in its hashiri bôzu variety (“running bonze”), was very resistant to cold, and it benefited as far as possible from the brief summers of Hokkaidô.
The result of this common history were those landscapes that my eyes saw in the region of Abashiri at the start of the seventies: rice fields under the snow, with the sea ice of Okhotsk as the background. They were not the subjective “mirrors of the soul”, of simple peasants, imprisoned in myths arbitrarily superimposed over the objective surroundings; it was the concrete reality of Hokkaidô, born out of the common history of an immigrant society and alien surroundings, trajected into a new milieu. Precisely the reality that I had to get to know for my thesis.

3. Trajection and landscape
If it was my experience of the landscapes of Hokkaidô and my research into its history that made me outline the way towards the concept of trajection, the very construction of its theoretical framework cannot do without a philosophical work for which I read the writings of landscape designers such as Nakamura Yoshio, Higuchi Tadahiko, Bernard Lassus, of psychologists such as James Gibson, of philosophers such as Henri Lefebvre, Watsuji Tetsurô, Martin Heidegger, Nishida Kitarô, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Alain Roger, Anne Cauquelin, of sociologists such as Pierre Bourdieu, of anthropologists such as André Leroi-Gourhan, etc.; without forgetting classics such as Physics by Aristotle or Timeus by Plato to understand what a place is. This work took around twenty years, at the end of which I was able to attempt a synthesis of the ecumene, which from this point of view is the relationship of humanity with the Earth, or put another way, the whole of the milieus of the various human societies.
The leading thread of this research was the question of landscape. I really began – that is, not only as vague impressions or disperse notations – with the discovery, in the library of the Nordic Studies Centre at the University of Hokkaidô where I taught French, of a treatise on the regional geography of the Japanese empire, published during the “Fifteen Years’ War”, as it is called in Japan, in which there was a chapter about the landscapes of Hokkaidô, stressing their distance and comparing them with those of Honshû. This reading made me sense what a landscape must be for the Japanese. It was something that my eyes, until then, had not perceived, because they had other points of reference, other landmarks, emphasising other features.
With respect to the concept itself of landscape, which my training as a geographer had made me consider as a universal object, the decisive aspect was my discovery, in the writings of Alain Roger, Anne Cauquelin and others, that this notion had not existed at all times, or in all societies. It is a historical notion, which as is known emerged in China around the 4th century, and in Europe in the Renaissance. Before the epiphany of the landscape, what people saw in their surroundings was something else, which was expressed with other words, and was manifested with other attitudes and ways of acting; for example, with other forms of architecture, unaware of the balconies which, in the case of France, appeared in the 16th century. The balcony is something that serves to enjoy a view of the surroundings, in other words, the landscape. Before its invention, people were interested in things other than the landscape, and consequently did not construct balconies.
Here one must stress that, when dealing with the existence or absence of the landscape, we must distrust our ways of seeing, which, being landscapely, perceive the surroundings as landscape. We must not trust anachronism and ethnocentrism. One should add that the absence of the landscape in this or that culture is not a shortcoming, a backwardness, which progress would resolve or correct. It is nothing less than the manifestation of another way of being in the world, another way of existing, no more or less complete than ours. Societies that do not possess the notion of landscape perceive their surroundings in other terms, which we do not perceive and that we have to learn if we wish to speak of concrete reality.
Perceiving the surroundings as landscape, or as another reality, is an effect of trajection; in other words, it is the concrete result of the common history of a society and its milieu. Other histories produce other realities, which have their own denominations in the societies concerned; for example the Tjukurrpa of the Kukatja, in the western desert of Australia. Western ethnologists have translated this word as “dreaming time”, or simply as “dreaming”; which clearly shows that, for them, the Tjukurrpa is no more than a myth, or a collective illusion arbitrarily projected onto the objective surroundings. But, for the Kukatja, the Tjukurrpa is no more than the reality they perceive in their milieu. This reality exists as Tjukurrpa, exactly as for the “Aussies” (the Australian immigrants from Europe, etc.) the same surroundings are manifested as landscape. The reason for this difference is that these are (exist) in another world alien to that of the Kukatja, while in both cases they are on the same Earth, with the same physical surroundings.
Here it can be seen that the question of landscape is a particular aspect of a more general question: that of the relationship between milieu (which involves human existence) and physical surroundings (which does not involve it). On another level, and from another point of view, this is also the question of the relationship between the world and the Earth.

4. Trajection and predicative world
In the course of my personal experience, I have discovered these questions through the reading of three philosophers: Watsuji Tetsurô (1889-1960), Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) and Nishida Kitarô (1870-1945), but they were first set out by a naturalist, who was one of the fathers of ethology: Jacob von Uexküll (1864-1944).
In his Incursions into the Milieus of Animals and Humans (Streifzüge durch die Umwelten von Tieren und Menschen, 1934), which is renowned in particular for his analysis of the world of the tick, Uexküll makes a fundamental distinction between what he calls Umgebung and Umwelt. Umgebung is the “surroundings” (um) which are “given” (Gebung, the fact of geben, giving) to a living being; in other words, what there is (es gibt) objectively in his surroundings, and that can be analyzed with the technical means of modern science. We can translate it as “the environment”. On the other hand, Umwelt is the “world” (Welt) “around” (um) that exists effectively for the animal species concerned, for example the tick. We can translate this term as “the milieu”. The milieu of the tick is not that of the rat, which is not that of the dog, etc., although all are in the same physical environment. They do not perceive the same things, and consequently they do not behave in the same way. Each species lives in its own milieu. It is the same for the human being. Our species has its own milieu, which is not that of other species. For example, we do not perceive the smells that a dog does, but in contrast we see colours that it does not, and so on.
Although not directly referring to Uexküll (but to Heidegger, who in this respect was inspired by Uexküll), the Japanese philosopher Watsuji, in a book called Fûdo (1935), established in his turn an essential distinction between the physical environment (shizen kankyô) and the milieu (fûdo; in this case it is only the milieu of human beings, not of other species). According to Watsuji, the difference between the two is that the milieu involves a human existence approach, while the physical environment does not; it is an object abstracted, by science, from the existential and concrete relationship of the being with its milieu. He calls this relationship fûdosei (which I have translated as “mediance” ), and defines it as “the structural momentum of human existence” (ningen sonzai no kôzô keiki). One should understand “momentum” here as in mechanics, where the “momentum of a force” is a power to move. Analogously, mediance is an ontological structure that has the power to motivate the existence of human beings who live in a certain milieu, which is specific to their culture and history. As Watsuji says, mediance is to space what historiality is to time. What temporally is historiality, spatially is mediance. They are mutually involved, and mediance incarnates historiality, which feeds it.
One must emphasise the fact that this thesis, in principle, has nothing to do with geographical determinism, which is a matter of physical environment (Umgebung, shizen kankyô), not of milieu (Umwelt, fûdo). The error of determinism is precisely to confuse the two, which is as absurd as confusing the milieu of a snake (which sees infrared rays, but not ultraviolet) with that of a butterfly (which sees ultraviolet rays, but not infrared). This confusion overlooks the focus of human existence. In contrast, what Watsuji clearly sets out is that in the first place this focus (shutaisei, “subjecthood”) must be considered with the method of hermeneutics, to understand what the milieu specific to a certain society is. The milieu cannot be reduced to the universal and anhistorical causality of the physical environment; it is necessarily unique and historical, because it is not an object but a human way of existing.
For his part, Heidegger was inspired by Uexküll in another way, which took him to the idea that the animal is “poor in World” (weltarm), while the stone is “worldless” (weltlos) and the human being is “world-building” (weltbildend). In terms of the world itself, that of the human being, and particularly of his relationship with the work of art, Heidegger, in The Origin of the Work of Art (Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, 1935) has also spoken of a “strife” (Streit) between the world (Welt) and the Earth (Erde). The nature of this strife is very obscure, but, from my point of view, it is no more than what happens between the physical environment and the milieu; adding that the milieu of a human being cannot be reduced to that of a mere living being, because it is not only a relationship between Umgebung and Umwelt in the sense of Uexküll, but also between Umwelt and Welt. Put another way, the problem is not only the relationship that exists between the planet (which is a physical-chemical entity) and the biosphere (which is an ecological entity, involving life), but also the relationship that exists between the biosphere and the ecumene (which is a medial entity, involving, moreover, the technical and symbolic systems specific to human existence).
The ecumene is all the milieus specific to the human being. In other words, our milieu is not only something ecological, like that of the other living beings, but an eco-techno-symbolic thing. In short, a medial thing. This mediance involves a historical development that cannot be reduced to mere natural evolution of the other living beings in their respective milieus; because, as André Leroi-Gourhan (1911-1986) has shown in Gesture and Speech (Le Geste et la parole, 1964), it has involved the exteriorization, in the form of increasingly more developed technical and symbolic systems, of functions that, initially, were limited to the animal body itself. For example, using a carved stone was an exteriorization of the function of teeth and nails, making it more efficient. Adding a handle to this stone was a supplementary exteriorization of this function, making it increasingly more efficient and so on. Leroi-Gourhan called the combination of these exterior systems “the social body”, as it is neither individual nor genetic but involves a social and cultural transmission. For my part, I call it “the medial body”, as it is not only social (techno-symbolic), but also ecological. It is no less than our milieu.
The question remains of the nature of what Heidegger calls “strife” (Streit). I think that this cannot be illuminated without reference to Nishida Kitarô, a Japanese philosopher whom Heidegger had no doubt heard of, although he does not mention him, and particularly what he calls “logic of the place” (basho no ronri) or “logic of the predicate” (jutsugo no ronri). From this thinking, let us pick up the idea that the world is not an object, that is, a logical subject; it is a predicate, that is, logically what is said about a subject. In other words, it is a way of seizing this object. From the ecumenal point of view (which is not that of Nishida), what the world (or culture) “predicates” is the Earth (or nature); and the “predication” of this “subject” as a world is no less than the trajection of the physical environment into the milieu specific to the human being; that is, into our medial body.

5. Trajection and reality
Reducing it to a logical form, this relationship can be represented as the following: r = S/P, in which r is reality, S the subject (the Earth, or nature) and P the predicate (the world, or culture), and which is read as reality is S as P. For example: reality is the physical environment as landscape; or even: reality is the physical environment as Tjukurrpa, and so on.
Of course, this “as” (the slash “/”) is not limited to a logical relationship in the strict sense. It is much more; it is the onto-cosmological relationship in which the human being unfolds the ecumene from the biosphere, in the same way that life unfolds the biosphere from the planet. But neither is this way a predication in the strict sense, because it is not only a verbal representation, but a way of feeling, thinking, naming and transforming the physical environment. In short, a way of existing, in the mediance (the structural momentum) formed by our animal body and our medial body.
It is important to specify here the relationship between mediance and trajection. As we have seen, mediance is the combination of the two sides of the human being, of which one is his animal body, and the other his medial body. It should be said that these two sides are the two “halves” of the being. In fact, although I have coined it in reference to the notion of milieu (as, after long reflection, I had decided to translate fûdo as “milieu”), this word comes lexically from the Latin medietas, which means “half”). Therefore, the definition that Watsuji gives of mediance (fûdosei), “the structural momentum of human existence” can be understood as the dynamic combination of these two halves, the animal body and the medial body.
The problem is the nature of this “momentum”, or dynamic relationship. As we have seen, according to Leroi-Gourhan, the origin of the social body (which I call medial) is the exteriorization, in the form of technical and symbolic systems, of functions initially limited to the animal body. The technical systems are clearly extensions of the animal body, and their dynamic is clearly an exteriorization, coming from the animal body towards the world. But from my point of view, the symbolic systems function in the inverse sense. They are not exteriorizations, but rather interiorizations, which return the world to our animal body.
In other words, the function of the symbol is exactly inverse and complementary to that of the technique: what the technique exteriorizes in the form of medial body, the symbol interiorizes in the animal body, that is, in our brain, in the form of neuronal connections. In summary, it can be said that the technique cosmicizes the animal body (making a milieu based on it), while the symbol somatizes the world (reflecting it in the animal body).
We must distinguish between this progressively growing complementarity (concrete, i.e. cum-crescens, “growing together”), or movement to and fro between the world and the body, which is at work from the beginning of the evolutionary process of hominization (the emergence of the human species), of a mere subjective and arbitrary projection of the human being, already completely constituted as in the Bible, on the objective environment, as modern anthropology often sees it. For the same reason, we must be aware that the technical systems are not limited to technical objects, which are out there in the objective surroundings, and over which we would arbitrarily project subjective representations, for example, names such as “hammer” or “nail”. These systems, from the outset, actively come and go between our animal body, in which they are present in the form of neuronal connections and sensory-motor schemes, and our medial body, in which they are present in the form of concrete things.
This movement to and fro (kayoi in Japanese) is what I call trajection. It should be noted that it is a movement of functions, not of material substances. The carved stone that was an exteriorization of the functions of the teeth and nails was not initially inside the animal body, and consequently its new functions did not materially need to move the teeth and nails in the stone. What was technically trajected from the body to the stone was only an immaterial function. In the same way, and at the same time, what was symbolically trajected from the stone to the brain was not the stone itself, but a representation of this function, from now on concretely associated with the stone.
Thus, what trajects (what comes and goes) between the animal body and the medial body are not substances and objects but relations, which I call as ecumenal. In other words, they are predicates. They are not S, but P. The stone changes into tool as an initially corporal function is delegated to it. In this delegation, the tool is not an object (S). It is not a substance that would exist in itself. It exists trajectively, as it receives this delegation of the body; that is, as it is a concrete thing (S/P), which has in common with the body something that is no less than this “as”. In other words, that it is predicated.

6. The reality of the landscape
This trajection works in the same way with all the things of the milieu, not all of which are the objects of the physical surroundings. They are not the Umgebung, but the Umwelt of our existence. What we have in common with them are not substances (S), but predicates (P). This – the S/P relationship – is the nature of the dynamic of the structural momentum of human existence.
It should be added that, from the ecumenal point of view, this is no other than what Heidegger calls the “strife” between the Earth and the world; as in this relationship, the Earth – I prefer to write it with a capital, because it is also the planet – is S (the substance of the subject which is predicated), and the world is P (the whole of the innumerable as, or predicates, that make up our world). It is indeed a strife, because the predicate is not the subject in itself. It is a way of seizing the subject, which diverts it from its own nature, because it involves our existence above that of this subject (which in itself is no more than an abstraction).
In the same way, there is a strife between the landscape (P) and the physical environment (S). The landscape is not the environment itself. It is a particular way of seizing it, which sets it apart from its own substance, trajecting it with our existence. The strife between the two is reality (S/P); which, as in all human reality, is not natural but historical.
This historicity is particularly clear in the case of the landscape because we know when and where this predicate was born: in the 4th century in southern China, later in the Renaissance in Flanders. We can also test the historicity of many other predicates, but most of the as that make our world cannot be dated or located. This is not only because of the lack of historical documents; it is because we are not only human beings, with a techno-symbolic body but also and primarily living beings, with an animal body rooted in the most profound mundanity (predicativity) of the biosphere, which does not belong to history but to evolution. We cannot consciously represent this mundanity ourselves, because it is our own life, which produces our consciousness (and not the inverse). We can only experience it unconsciously, exactly as the tick experiences its Umwelt.
The reality of the landscape, although this predicate appeared on a certain date in history, is also rooted in the most profound predicates of the biosphere, which ecologically link our being to the Earth. This relationship, certainly, is not the landscape itself; but it sustains it and is necessary to it, just as the Earth sustains our world – which we pompously call “the World”.
We must be careful because this necessity is not reciprocal. It is not mutual. The Earth, which is universal and necessary, does not need our world, which is unique and contingent like the history of its predication. We must not confuse the two, and we must not forget that the ecumene cannot do without the biosphere, while the biosphere, perhaps, could do without the ecumene. The physical environment (S) can sustain any world (P), bringing the landscape or the Tjukurrpa or other predicates of all kinds; but all of these “as” have only one basis: the physical environment, which, by the way, is ontologically inferior, but is the condition sine qua non of our being – which we pompously call “Being”.

Maurepas, 18th June 2006.