LANDSCAPE AS A HIDDEN REPRESENTATION: THE SOCIOLOGY OF CULTURE AND ITS ALLEGORIES

Nataliya  VOLKOVA

doi:10.32523/3080-1281-2026-155-2-178-194

Authors

Nataliya VOLKOVA Independent Researcher Author https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6798-963X

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.32523/3080-1281-2026-155-2-178-194

Keywords:

landscape, risk, vision, comedy, organization, background, metaphor

Abstract

The paper explores the relationships among comedy and landscape, as suggested by Henri Bergson. Bergson argues that the landscape cannot be social, but can be used as a metaphor to distinguish between mechanistic and social features in the comedy of social life. In contrast to Bergson, the paper implies that the landscape is valuable not only as a metaphor, but also has a social dimension that is not necessarily representational. While Bergson focuses on social risks and drama as representations of social types, this paper turns to the concepts of natural risk and vision. The first part of the paper leads to the idea of risk as cultural, according to Jeffrey Alexander and Scott Lash. Two approaches differ in their understanding of the source of cultural risk, but both balance natural and social risks by introducing the division of past/present events or visible/invisible objects. In the second section, to introduce a strategy to overcome the divisions and representational character of Alexander’s and Lash’s theories, their conceptualisations will be developed with reference to Eisenstein’s three types of pathetic composition, as well as distinguishing the landscape’s figures and background. In conclusion, the landscape is defined as an allegorical method of testing social metaphors.

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