Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worlds

Geography and the Humanities

Stephen Daniels, Dydia DeLyser, J. Nicholas Entrikin, Doug Richardson, Stephen Daniels, Dydia DeLyser, J. Nicholas Entrikin, Doug Richardson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415589772
• eBook ISBN: 9781136883545
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

The past decade has witnessed a remarkable resurgence in the intellectual interplay between geography and the humanities in both academic and public circles. The metaphors and concepts of geography now permeate literature, philosophy and the arts. Concepts such as space, place, landscape, mapping and territory have become pervasive as conceptual frameworks and core metaphors in recent publications by humanities scholars and well-known writers.

Envisioning Landscapes, Making Worlds contains over twenty-five contributions from leading scholars who have engaged this vital intellectual project from various perspectives, both inside and outside of the field of geography. The book is divided into four sections representing different modes of examining the depth and complexity of human meaning invested in maps, attached to landscapes, and embedded in the spaces and places of modern life. The topics covered range widely and include interpretations of space, place, and landscape in literature and the visual arts, philosophical reflections on geographical knowledge, cultural imagination in scientific exploration and travel accounts, and expanded geographical understanding through digital and participatory methodologies. The clashing and blending of cultures caused by globalization and the new technologies that profoundly alter human environmental experience suggest new geographical narratives and representations that are explored here by a multidisciplinary group of authors.

This book is essential reading for students, scholars, and interested general readers seeking to understand the new synergies and creative interplay emerging from this broad intellectual engagement with meaning and geographic experience.

Part I

Mapping

1

Why America is Called America

Franco Farinelli

The Map and the Coin

Agathemerus writes that Anaximander, a pupil of Thales in the sixth century BC, “was the first one who had the audacity to draw the Ecumene on a small table” made of terracotta or bronze.¹ For this reason, Anaximander was judged most impious: he dared to represent the earth from above in a way that only Gods could do. So the story goes. But as a matter of fact things are more complicated than this. For the Greeks, nature was not a combined group of things but an ongoing perpetual process; nature was movement. From this perspective, Anaximander’s project appeared scandalous because it aimed to immolate Earth as a function of knowledge (of the dominion) of Earth itself. It is only because, with Anaximander, the Earth becomes a corpse that the rigor (the rigidity) of death becomes the equivalent of the rigor of science; rigor mortis allows us to measure only what was once alive but is no more. Anaximander might not have been the first one to talk about such a reduction in the Western world but he is certainly the first one to celebrate it in geometrical forms, and make it so pervasive that it comes to stand at the center of a complex Weltanschauung.²

It is such a deliberate reduction of reality into a corpse-like geometrical scheme that explains Anaximander’s tragic supremacy, his role of precursor that Western tradition strangely has assigned to him, despite the fact that maps existed long before his time. Michel Serres³ writes that the difference between the Babylonian tables dating back to the third millennium BC and Anaximander’s table corresponds to the difference between local and global. The tables have at their center the city and the river Euphrates; Anaximander’s table, on the other hand, provides a model of the world as a whole. These reflections, however, concern merely the descriptive plane. More significant in this respect are a series of bronze and silver circular tetradrachms coined in Ephesus during the fourth century BC. On the reverse these show a map of the city’s hilly surroundings traversed by the tributaries of the river Meander: on the recto a Persian satrap, holding an arch and the baton of command, is hurrying on; on the opposite side a series of valleys stretch amidst woody hills depicted with plastic precision. The absence of anything that would suggest human intervention, such as roads and cities or any other kind of nomenclature, is noteworthy. Precisely because of such absences it can be concluded that this coin was meant for local circulation limited to Ionia.⁴ However, one could object that until recently the Brazilian cruzeiro and the Taiwan dollar also carried on their reverse a map showing rivers and mountains, reminiscent of the silent maps of our childhood. The images impressed on these coins and the stories they continue to convey show that we still believe in maps just as we still believe in coins.

The Map is the Money

What is common to modern maps and coins is not merely a question of more or less limited circulation, rather it is their symbolic regime; this is functional to the exchange value rather than the use value of things. Whether or not the exchange value contains as much as an “atom” of use value, as Marx holds,⁵ or whether exchange value and use value are, on the contrary, driven by the same logic⁶ does not interest us here.What is important is the fact that the role of geographical maps at this point is not concerned with the recognition and localization of things on earth but rather with their possibility to be transformed into commodities, as the case of maps and coins devoid of any names plainly shows. This idea is clearly illustrated at the end of the nineteenth century by the author of the translation of that part of earth which we today call India into a geodetic map: on a “sound, square, geographical” map “based on systematic measurement” (i.e. triangulation), every point “on a boundary-line, every peak in a mountain system, every landmark of any importance in the country-side, has a value whose correctness can be proved just as easily in a London office as in the open field. And this value is not only incontrovertible, but absolutely distinctive, because every point on the whole world’s surface has its own special position in terms of latitude and longitude, with which no other point can interfere.”⁷

The analogy between cartographic representation and the market, which is its realization, can be clarified by rephrasing Holdich’s assertion using the language of Marxism: natural forms become value forms, commodities show a phenomenal form different from natural forms only with respect to the exchange value these have with other commodities. Things on a map share the same destiny: despite their differences, all things co-exist one next to the other; at the same time, they also submit to the same regime which assimilates them all. Commodities have a value only because all other commodities have a value in relation to the same equivalent, that is to say an equivalent commodity excluded from the realm of commodities represented on the map.⁸ The map is in turn the agent that produces a general form of value. Such a general equivalent is space, intended in the Ptolemaic sense of the standard linear interval between two geometrical points,⁹ in relation to which each use value, that is to say each place, is destined to disappear. In the middle of the sixteenth century the introduction of graphic scale into maps marks the beginning of the systematic use of space as the phenomenal form for the value of goods,¹⁰ in other words, as a universal commodity in relation to single types of commodities. In this way the map with its properties becomes the model of territory and produces the general form that stands for modern territorial value.

In other words, space and money become the same thing; cartographic symbol and money function in exactly the same way: the former in relation to the map, the latter in relation to the market. The consequence of their mutual, incessant tension toward the equivalence of all things has led to the poor generalizations that today mark our relations with the world. A few years ago, Immanuel Wallerstein wondered whether India really existed.¹¹ He reached the conclusion that India existed only as “an invention of the modern world-system,” in the same way as any other nation-state. Much earlier, as early as the end of the nineteenth century, the major expert of the land-systems of British India explained that India did not exist at all because no country in the world is called with this name: “within the borders of the area that is designated with this name on the maps, there are a series of provinces populated by different races often speaking different languages.”¹² What today escapes English social science was perfectly clear to the British Empire’s civil servants and beforehand to Metternich, who, two centuries earlier, at the Congress of Vienna, triumphantly declared that reality is its geographical, or more precisely, cartographic expression.

The Cartographic Project

The above statement remains valid even when it is re-phrased in more radical terms: reality is the product of its treatment, and the latter is in turn the product of the geographical – better cartographic – expression. On the reverse of the abovementioned tetradrachms, space does not feature yet. In its place we find the portrait of a territory delimited by money circulation, the image of the natural form of things, of their use value. More importantly the coin signifies natural data and simultaneously the potential equivalence of each element with the others and their possibility of being interchanged. This is the reason why names or representations of roads that already existed are missing:¹³ these are not significant. Such a mutual function has a two-fold preliminary characteristic. First, it consists of a simultaneous representation secured by the image itself. This is a fundamental characteristic of commodities that enables them to reveal their values in the same equivalent, that is to say, according to a general expression of values.¹⁴ Secondly, it coincides with the form of the vehicle of the representation itself, that is to say, the money, which is also the main agent in the market. Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s reflections are useful for understanding the functional identity of map and money in the form of coins; both of these, he remarks, are Ionic inventions that can be dated to the seventh century BC. It could be objected that the invention of money occurs at the beginning of the seventh century,¹⁵ while the first map appears a century after. This, however, means that the map can be defined, using the words of Marx, as an “extended reproduction” of money, a general sign that testifies to the existence of the market, which in this period is on the point of being born.¹⁶ At the same time, the coin also works as an unavoidable interface between what, according to Sohn-Rethel, is already directly connected: on the one hand, the money, that is to say, the real abstraction in the exchange process, and on the other, thought in abstract form. It follows that when, for example, Kant breaks up the object in abstract substance and phenomenon, he makes a distinction between the exchange value and use value of the goods.

According to Sohn-Rethel, concepts in the intellect exist in consciousness but do not originate from the latter. It is precisely money, the expression of the abstract exchange of things, that establishes the connection between social reality and conceptual ideals of formal abstractions. These are precisely the same abstractions of modern science represented by Galileo’s mathematical knowledge of nature, whose data have no direct relation to perceptions.¹⁷ This knowledge contributed to the destruction of the unity of mind and hand typical of artisanal production and paved the way to capitalistic production¹⁸ through the imposition of laws based on exchange-abstraction and money: “laws of uniformity, divisibility, of a particular kind of movement and quantification.” The introduction of mathematics in the productive process – in construction and in particular in military architecture concomitant with the development of firearms – further favored the development of capitalism.¹⁹ Considering all this, we can reasonably conclude that the first and main agent of the introduction of mathematics was the map rather than money. Sieges, obsidional techniques, and the use of openings for firearms required precisely drawn fortifications²⁰ and the development of the geometrical image for the modern city. The isometric drawing used to represent the front of buildings – their use value – as we are accustomed to see them gives way to the geometrical drawing produced by the impassable and dehumanized vertical viewpoint and expression of their exchange value; at the same time the quality of manufactured goods gives way to issues of dimensions and measures, a mere matter of quantities.²¹ If money changes the nature of the relationship among human beings, it is the map that changes the way we think of things and, prior to that, the way we name things.

“The Age of the World Image”

There is a history of the invention and construction of the Orient.²² There are descriptions of the way the Western world is seen today by its enemies.²³ Despite all the volumes that have appeared in the West, a real history of the invention of the concept of the West and how this appears in the eyes of those who are part of it remains unwritten. Foucault would say that there is still no complete genealogy of the Western world. This, I wish to argue, is the reason why there are still problems in recognizing the real value of geographical knowledge: its central role in molding all ideal models.

The West is geography and modernity is the latest invention of western geography. Heidegger would have been more precise had he defined modernity as the era of geographical representation rather than “the era of the image of the world.”²⁴ In the same way as space – the form of modernity²⁵ – modernity itself originates from a grin; that same implicit and deferred grin that gives a name to America. It is known that a name is a petrified laugh,²⁶ a laugh caught in the process of becoming something else, deferred, crystallized and finally made permanent. The American laugh, the name America, marks the end of the Colombian tragi-comedy, the end of the adventure of an explorer w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Prologue
• Introduction
• Part I Mapping
• Part II Reflecting
• Part III Representing
• Part IV Performing
• Index