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At
the risk of the charge of literal-mindedness, I propose to approach
the conflux of globalization and the image through an investigation
of representations of the mapped globe. My basic premise will be:
as flat projection maps of the world are to nation, globes and other
models/ representations of the earth are to postnationalism. Building
on the literature describing the political uses of map making for
the projects of nationalism, imperialism, and colonialism, I want
to think about new mapped strategies of imaging territory for the
contemporary postnational era. In particular I will consider as
an organizing moment of visual ideology the production of the globe
suspended in space through the first manned US orbit by John Glenn
in 1962. Second, I will consider the renewal of that image in Glenn's
1998 re-orbit and its national pageantry, and most recently in the
30-year celebrations of the original flight. Another order of images
I will look at is the commercial proliferation of earth-as-globe.
Globes are increasingly and strikingly deployed in a range of advertising.
Globes are ubiquitous backdrops for the talking heads on news programs,
they appear strangely infixed and contained within images of bodies
or interior spaces. The circulation of maps as consumer objects
and as print design motif for innumerable objects of individual
consumption in the private sphere.1 In these images the globe can
be seen as a material expression of the global idea and globalization
itself as an ideological process of post-national organization.
I will trace the paradoxical use of the globe as an icon of national
representation (US ownership of the material and symbolic production
of the vision of the globe suspended in space) and now of corporation-consumer
cross-identification. My overall thesis sees the globe suspended
in space as a mapped representation linked to US empire. I will
examine the relationship between the technological abstraction of
the representation and deployment of the human body in extraterritorial
exploration and that body's anxious reclamation for a range of nationalist
projects.
Body/Nation/Map
In 1781, while writing his response to query IV on Mountains for
Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson looked for inspiration
to a map of colonial Virginia drawn by his father Peter and Joshua
Fry. One eye on the map and the other on the page, Jefferson sketched
out an image of the Blue Ridge mountains as providential territory.
These mountains were not random or accidental features, "solitary
and scattered confusedly over the face of the country," he
wrote, but rather "disposed in ridges one after another, running
nearly parallel with the sea-coast" (18). Jefferson described
a self-evident, harmonious and well-ordered territory of reason.
Most striking in the account of the mountains is the way Jefferson's
point of view and references shifted seamlessly among map, mountaintop,
and narrative. Although he began on the mapped ground of his father's
survey, Jefferson easily ascended to a god's-eye view looking down
from the heavens upon the land that he had indeed traversed and
surveyed in parts, but whose extent he had no means to know. Yet
lack of technological means did not stop the flight of Jefferson's
imperial gaze. Positioned far above the scene, Jefferson's gaze
erased indigenous as well as transplanted populations, depopulated
the territory, and failed to recognize the traces of human culture
implicated in its very viewing. Jefferson's god's eye view and the
well-ordered and providential land it produced remind us of the
technology of the map and survey, along side the technologies of
narrative and the gaze as they combined in Notes on the State of
Virginia to assert U.S. ownership of a territory he characterized
as destined to be part of the nation.2
Two hundred and seventeen years since the Notes, the god's eye view
of the earth and its implication in US imperial mapping remains
dominating and effective, even while its technology has changed.
Cartography based on either ground surveys and mathematical projection
onto a flat map or globe have given way to ariel photography, satellite
relay, and computerized graphics. While we might commonsensically
allow that such technological advances have resulted in a truer
map of the nation, ariel and satellite technologies do not so much
fill in blank spaces on maps or provide more accuracy as they become
operative within different cultural climates, producing new arrangements
of power and meaning. For instance, Jefferson's real inability to
traverse the entire Appalachian chain and the limits of his embodied
vision in no way prevented his construction of a view from a handy
mountaintop. Although we now can image what Jefferson referred to
as the "spine of the country between the Atlantic . . . and
the Mississippi" (19) with technology that actually can look
down on the terrain, that terrain is not necessarily known more
accurately now than it was to Jefferson, whose embodied vision marked
the map as his culture constructed it as part of the nation. Regardless
of the seeming technological innovation, then, mapping remains a
representation of the relation between culture and space, a kind
of "cultural cartography" that finds its limit less in
the problem of physical embodiment than in the epistemological and
ideological implications of bodies and space.3
I begin with the image of Jefferson's national body both hovering
above the land and pushing up like the spine of the colonial map
in order to extend the consideration of technologies of vision,
embodiment, and empire to a relatively "new" post-national
terrain: outer space. Focusing on the globe suspended in space as
a mapped representation linked to US empire, this paper examines
the relationship between the technological abstraction of the representation
and deployment of the human body in extraterritorial exploration
and that body's anxious reclamation for the nation's imperial profit.
In this paper's second half, I focus on the contemporary moment
of millennial celebration of the earth orbits and moon landings
of the 1960s. In particular, I interrogate the role of our new old
man in space, John Glenn, whose return to orbit in November 1998
works as an attempt to anchor a cultural cartography of extraterrestrial
exploration that actually no longer needs the human body. The contradiction
between the loss of the body's primacy for imperial exploration
and the nation's continued ideological dependence on the human has
resulted in the strange compulsion to repeat we witness in NASA's
restaging of its former epochal achievements before an global audience
created under quite distinct political and technological circumstances.
The
Metageography of Globes
Globes are spherical maps operating on a logic of mimetic representation.
In this they are distinct from flat map projections which sacrifice
the seeming realism of the globe in order to obtain mathematical
projections of terrestrial truths. Globes as maps are always maps
of the world; there is no point in making a globe of a part of the
world or of a particular nation. Mapped globes offer a fantasy of
total global knowledge. They are by definition representations of
the whole earth. Yet they escape neither partial-ness or partiality.
As geographer John Agnew has argues, "in masking their selectivity
behind empiricist claims to accurate representation [globes] provided
a powerful means of picturing the world as a whole as if it existed
independently or separately of all attempts to conquer, tame, or
exploit it" (19). Globes as representations of knowledge about
the world are always de-particularized; they promote relativization;
they tend toward abstraction and less detail; their meaning often
comes from contextualization. For example, renaissance portraits
of powerful men often featured a richly painted and imposing globe
to symbolize not only the gentleman's local power and imperial ambition
but also his transcendence of the scope of that culture's knowledge
and the frame of the painting itself. Because globes and flat maps
are capable of representing quite distinct relations among territories,
state regimes of information choose their maps strategically. Canadian
anthropologist Bernard Saladin d'Anglure writes about the way that
North American and European states continue to emphasize the use
of flat maps and not globes for state-led agencies. During the Cold
War, US generals favored a flat map polar projection which greatly
exaggerated the size of the then Soviet Union, making it appear
to loom over North America, creating an image of threat that globes
could not as convincingly represent (King 100-101). While it can
be argued that from the modern globe's mathematical projection of
latitude and longitude to cover and measure the earth developed
the notion that "anywhere is linked to everywhere" (Agnew),
thus lending a metageographical naturalness to imperial territorial
aggrandizement, globes could just as easily problematize practical
territorial expansion. Globes are bulky and cannot easily be sectioned;
opposed to flat maps, they are less subject to strategic cropping
or framing; and they are limited by size in the detail they can
functionally provide. Now that computer projection and digitized
imaging are the representational modes of choice of geographers,4
the map as globe seems forever outmoded as an instrument for a scientific
or technological function and more closely tied to the cultural.
To understand the globe's cultural function we need to back up for
one moment. Remember that the globe emerged as a product of the
pursuit of knowledge of the earth, to give representational coherence
to the imperial ambition to plot all territories. Yet the visualization
of the globe as a unified, knowable sphere lacked the technological
accuracy to carry the old style agenda of local or nation-based
imperialism forward. In fact, the globe subverted local power by
being bulky and providing only vague details. The rise of digitized
computer projection that has rendered the globe as a technology
of mapped space hopelessly outdated explains in part the globe's
"demotion" to the realm of the cultural. In excess of
its technological attainment, this globe has become a familiar commodity.
Especially for communications corporations, images of globes visually
map for consumers a mystified, instantaneous transit between and
among local spaces and limitless externalized sites.
The Intimate Sphere
The image of the globe in advertising is no longer the disorienting
vision of a human territory distinct in the context of space yet
unimaginable through other than extreme technological mediation.
Now globes are domesticated, familiarized, personalized, even trivialized
in countless images.
One
major motif plays with the idea of the globe as the container of
the very media and humans depicted and implicated in the message
(be it for a truly global telecommunication corporation or a local
limousine service hyperbolically boasting the wide range of its
services) by inverting the relation between the globe and the earth-bound
perspectives. Typically, the scene begins with a shot of the globe
suspended in space. As the shot retreats and the context is revealed
we see the globe refunctioned as the pupil of an eye belonging to
a blue-eyed female, or as the dot in the company email address right
before the "com" tag.
The effect of these images is an internalization of the global -
into either the individual or corporate body. This is not merely
an inversion or a deformation of spatial logic such as an image
of a big fish being swallowed by a little fish. The globe is both
an object external to human bodies and the mode - created from within
human culture and long preceding the "realist" knowledge
of the earth-as-globe - through which those bodies partake of a
shared, communal location (planet earth). Bodies outside of space
- or unplaced bodies - are very difficult to imagine, though that's
exactly what is at stake in posthuman representation and technology.
This internalization or insertion into locatable embodiment (or
other forms) of human culture of the very mode of locating humanness
results in a radical refiguring of the relation among human body,
planet, and culture as a medium defining and explaining these. With
individuals no longer organized as outside of the non-human but
instead containing these spaces, the standard epistemological coordinates
of national citizenship no longer operate. Rather, new forms of
citizenship not predicated on a contract between an individual and
the externalized state as location (which is comprised of the very
individuals subject to its collective body) become imaginable.
The meaning of the image of the globe suspended in space thus oscillates
between familiar, comforting icon of national power and a more disruptive,
system-breaking mise-en-abyme that pulls the viewer into a hall
of mirrors effect in which normative relations of size, scale, inside,
outside, borders, center/periphery no longer underwrite visual logics
of being. The globe as eye breaks with a modernist epistemology
in which the human subject is able to contemplate the planet through
a fantasy of extrojection. The internalized globe, rather, introjects
or swallows the globe, splices discontinuous and unrelated modes
of being and of comprehending in a postmodern pastiche that demonstrates
the basic illegibility and fantasy of the naturalized image of the
globe suspended in space and forces a new visualization of an inverse
universe of unpredictable and irrational movement. This interplay
among mapping, embodiment, and visuality is an effect I am tracing
through these linked examples.
Jefferson's ability to launch himself above the earth's surface
so to describe and order it had a flip side in which the body impeded
the ability to see and to know the terrain. His description of the
Natural Bridge is in almost all its details the very opposite of
the disembodied, universal-scientific gaze produced to depict the
Rocky Mountains. The view of the natural bridge posed a different
sort of challenge for Jefferson, who notes ". . . few men have
resolution to walk to [the fixed rock parapets] and look over into
the abyss [below the bridge]. Disdaining the fear and ignorance
of the locals, who he scorns for not making to effort to know this
great work of nature, Jefferson describes the effects of ascending
this bridge for a view: "You involuntarily fall on your hands
and feet, creep to the parapet and peep over it. Looking down from
this height about a minute, gave me a violent head ach." In
this too embodied, local mode of seeing the terrain, Jefferson suffers
a nausea and fear that disorients and threatens to interrupt his
rational depiction of the land. This vignette of overwhelmed, embodied
seeing is infixed within an overarching discourse of rational, ordered
seeing which opens this essay. Jefferson constructs an interplay
between a local view in which "piles of rock" signify
"disrupture and avulsion" and a "distant finishing
. . . of a very different character. It is a true contrast to the
fore-ground. It is as placid and delightful, as that is wild and
tremendous. For the mountain being cloven asunder, she presents
to your eye, through the cleft, a small catch of smooth blue horizon,
at an infinite distance in the plain country, inviting you, as it
were, from the riot and tumult roaring around, to pass through the
breach and participate of the calm below. Here the eye ultimately
composes itself; and that way too the road happens actually to lead."
(Notes On the State of Virginia). Jefferson's ability to fashion
from that moment of overwhelmed, embodied seeing a vision of a masterful
mapping eye of the nation and his moving from the one to the other
represents a still constant dialectic between individual/ nation,
local/national as well as a common sense understanding of the physiology
of sight. Jefferson refers to the consolation of the "middle
ground" as opposed to the horror of the cliff view or the safe
indistinction of "distant finishing." The middle ground
was the space of political action, argumentation, and science.
NASA has recently produced an internet film of the lift off and
flight of Apollo 17 that interestingly recapitulates features of
both Jefferson's gods-eye view mapping and his local embodied traumatic
view of the land.
http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/data/ev216/ev21611_apollo_320_sor.mov
Produced
to commemorate the original Apollo flights, earth orbits, and moon
landings, the 21 second animated film depicts the vertiginous ascent
of a rocket from its launching pad on earth, through a tumultuous
and disorienting ascent designed to cause nausea, to an ultimate
calm in which we might say, after Jefferson, the "eye composes
itself" in a vision of the distant earth suspended in space.
The film begins with a point of view aimed downward, "back"
to earth, moving suddenly to space as earth recedes from a flat
map of cape Canaveral to ever wider landscapes of Florida, the Caribbean,
the entire hemisphere, and finally to the by now familiar image
of the blue marble earth suspended in space. The flight continues
as earth spins in the distance as your line of sight further recedes
over the moon. The film ends with a shot from the point of view
from behind the gray surface of the moon as its horizon sets with
a vivid blue earth. Accompanying text explains that while the entire
sequence is an "artist's depiction" individual images
are culled from actual satellite images produced through the Apollo
program, which included the first manned orbits and the initial
moon landings and walks. So, the image of the eye hurtling away
from earth, to space, and to the dark side of the moon, all the
while trained back toward the originating earth is meant to mimic
an astronaut's seeing of earth from the original vantage point of
his manned orbiting and from the later point of view of the astronauts
who walked the moon. What is less obvious, despite the disclaimer,
is the complete fictionality of this recreation of a supposed realist
vision. For on, there is no reason that the point of view must be
towards earth. The orbiting eye might have trained its vision on
any number of sights; the stars, the equipment panel, empty, dark
space. The mimetic effect of this point of view only works if the
audience agrees to want only to see what the filmmaker wants one
to see, or to allow that there might be nothing else worth seeing
but earth as originator and space/ moon as destination. The creation
of a narrative of events and sights using the stills produced by
the Apollo program underscores the imposition of narrative strategies
to produce meaning from static images which in themselves are no
way free of ideological manipulation. All this aside, the view or
ride is dizzying and in a strange way more than familiar: we indeed
have seen these images and this narrative sequence countless times
in the years before, during, and after the manned space program.
Its arbitrary logics - Why doesn't the point of view shift? Why
only look back at earth? What would one see if the sun was not backlighting
the whole thing? - work to naturalize this view of the earth.
My interest in such miniaturized and infixed discursive deployments
of the globe arises from their ability to spacialize the organization
of new imperial national consciousness by mediating for US subjects
a specific form of global intimacy, one that works to anchor national
subjects in a remapped understanding of the terrain and trajectories
of a seemingly unified US imperial gaze. The imperial desire figured
by the globe, like that of the globe in the renaissance portraits,
allays fear of the impossibility of the very global knowledge and
desire it conjures. It is precisely to counter fear of the limits
of knowledge (and of capitalist expansion) that the national imaginary
takes on global consciousness through a domesticated and intimate
form of knowing the globe. In order to illustrate my point about
the cultural and de-technologized use of the globe in relation to
US national formation, I will discuss John Glenn's role in the history
of a particularized human presence in space that has justified military
build up and naturalized US hegemony into extraterrestrial realms.
What follows explains the particular visual/ cultural history behind
the production of a global aesthetic linked to US empire that I
will call the Glenn-globe.
The "Glenn Globe" and Moon Landing Re-hearsals at the
Millennium
John Glenn's 1962 orbit in a space ship around the earth provided
a powerful narrative of human sight to anchor as natural (as opposed
to "merely" technological) the now pervasive photographic
image of the globe suspended in space. While this view of the earth
as a global unity had been thinkable since before Archimedes used
earth's axis as a fulcrum to gain a post-earth perspective on the
globe, and while unmanned space exploration made it "realist"
with photographic relay, it was not "available" as an
embodied perspective until Glenn gained that vision for the nation.
Glenn's seeing for all Americans - his embodied sight - unseated
the priority of the robotic lens and in many ways distinguished
that earth-as-globe from all previous ones. It also confirmed US
sovereignty in the Cold War race against the Soviet Union. His sight
thus brought into everyday familiarity one of our most taken for
granted icons of Americanization and twentieth century technological
progress. Because of this humanizing of technology, we can now have
a connection to global consciousness that is seemingly unmediated,
because based in the immediacy of human sight. But to what extent
can Glenn's seeing be understood as unmediated? His sight was already
after the fact, after technology had provided the ability to see
the globe suspended in space.5 The globe we now see is a humanizing
"un-mediation" of the visual technology of US empire,
which is to say, an open eye encased within a mass of government-funded
metal and space technology, hardly natural in its nationalized deployment,
but confirming for the nation its heroic arrival at the new frontiers
of global knowledge.
Considering the monumental contribution of the naturalized visual
technology of John Glenn's body to US global mastery over the symbolic
of a new space frontier and its role in conferring precedence to
the US as sole super nation, we must wonder why this moment of his
seeing had to be repeated in 1998, especially when space technology
has long outmoded "man" as the primary mechanism or self
conscious medium of imperialism. For those of you who have already
forgotten this latest extraterrestrial imperial adventure, let me
set the scene: Glenn, after having moved from the high orbit of
space in the 1960s to the almost as high vantage point of Capitol
Hill in the 1980s, is called back into action in a brilliant publicity
move by a space program that had suffered public lack of interest,
catastrophic failures, purposelessness, and defunding. In a highly
publicized mission (or better, "remission"), the 77 year
old Glenn returned on October 30th 1998 to orbit in a new breed
of space shuttle. With communications technology providing the opportunity
for instant interviews, Glenn's activities and thoughts were reported
in the early days of November 1998. Predictably, Glenn reprised
his role as the human 'eye' for a US-based omnipotent vision.
A November 2nd Los Angeles Times headline, for instance, read: "Adrift
in Heavens, Glenn Reasserts Faith in God." While I might point
out that Glenn was far from really being adrift since he was part
of a highly structured if risky experiment whose major features
of flight and orbit had been well tested, the term "adrift"
plays well with the subject of Glenn's musing, which is all about
asserting certainty on a cosmic and local level. Glenn went on to
opine: "I pray every day, and I think everybody should. I don't
think we [meaning the shuttle's crew] can look at Earth every day
- to look out at this kind of creation and not believe in God is,
to me impossible." Glenn's re-presence in space -- his particular
body in space - has produced a nostalgic global consciousness; in
this case, a white male framing of US empire. The specificity of
this embodied gaze in the context of its unlikely resurrection of
Cold war geopolitics onto the millennial moment is an apt symptom
of the anxiety surrounding the white male body and the future of
the nation in an era of not simply new global alliances and transnational
capital flows, but of the end of socialism and the welfare state.
As the junction point between nation and the post-national territory
of outer space, Glenn's body contains the contradictions in this
ideological mapping of the future. Attempting to bridge the incommensurability
of the national and the post national, reportage of Glenn's mission
has flirted with post human imagery, seeming to acknowledge that
the body is no longer the organizing location for knowledge. Referring
to the many wires and monitors appended to his body, Glenn tells
a group of on-line school children that he "looks like some
kind of bug" - or a cyborg desperately trying to hold on to
its humanizing aspects. Of course, scientists have long known that
"space is a terrible environment for humans" (LA Times
7 Nov A14) and that consequently the future of space colonization
rests on disembodied technologies of robots, computers, and satellite
links. Yet our primary mediation for the technological future of
space empire remains the body of the new old founding father John
Glenn.
I want to shift attention from John Glenn's body to the effects
of his embodied vision on the production of the globe as symbolic
of US empire and on the mapping of new post-national territory in
outer space. I want to shift, in other words, from the Glenn Globe
to the "Glenn Moment." In particular, I want to emphasize
another function of the imperative to repeat Glenn's orbiting of
the earth: that through the performance of nationalist pageantry
such as the one under discussion today, nations create a sense of
origin. In this case, the creation of a US originary presence in
space lays a claim for the territory of outer space. This claim
attempts to create a recognizable territory in space based on colonialist
models of inhabitation. This is a form of mapping outer space that
goes beyond representations of the globe: it is a national territorialization
based on time. The frontier is a spacialization of time: it represents
the future of empire. Through repetition and pageantry the Glenn
moment of first arrival in space places a temporal unity on space.
In fact, the "original" Glenn gaze was itself a look back
at earth from the future of space. To use language made available
by Thomas Jefferson, Glenn's look back provided a "distant
finishing" on a territory that from any other perspective but
that of the god-ordered map would be uncontrollable, not destined
to become incorporated within the nation.
Lost
In Space: The Failure of Gore's Globe
Another way to understand the images of the globe in many advertisements
is that the globe has come to represent travel as destination, or
both the idea of travel and destination in one. Yet the globe as
a destination implies a space somehow outside itself, an Archimedean
access point not implicated in the globe as site of the human. Such
an external "lever" into culture (as represented by the
globe) is not possible under generally accepted philosophy or politics
or ecology (there is no outside to ideology, society, or the ecosystem).
Therefore, this implicit outside position, in its production of
the globe, allows a fantasy on the part of the viewer of distancelessness
and immediacy based on a utopic joining of modernity and postmodernity,
inside and outside, consciousness and cosmos, and space and time.
This is the point at which might enter the new global citizen-subject,
the individual hailed by the advertising and popular appeals to
travel, global access, immediacy, connection, and simultaneity (Canclini,
Hedetoft). Therefore, it would not have seemed like such a miscalculation
in March of 1998 for then-presidential hopeful Al Gore to launch
his own vision of the globe suspended in space. The headline announced
the vision for an internet channel devoted to viewing the globe
in real-time: "Gore's satellite would give you a constant global
view" (www.cnn.com/TECH/space/9803/13/gore.satellite).
With the announcement of his plan coming at his appearance at the
aptly-named Earth Summit meeting, Gore, in a move calculated to
play off of and rival the power and vision commanded by former astronauts
such as Glenn, proposed his own signature emblem of his global concern
as well as his global ambitions. A satellite would be poised to
render continual and real time universally available images of the
globe to its inhabitants. Gore seemed aware of the power of images
of the earth for national meaning, "[n]oting that the last
full-view pictures of earth came from the Apollo moon missions"
(http://the-tech.mit.edu/V118/n13/cgore.13n.html)
and that the time was ripe for a renewal, under his own sign, of
these highly successful national icons. However, the plan was widely
ridiculed and by the next year had been officially refused funding
by Congress. While the plan was expensive and contained technical
flaws and limited immediate use-value, the same - and worse - could
be said for Glenn's widely hailed reorbit. Gore's globe might have
been a technical innovation that would have taken a step toward
developing real use and capitalist value for virtualization. The
vision of a million computer screens framing a real-time earth suspended
in space might have provided a material structure for the production
of a global citizen-consumer making use of sustainable virtual technology.
The failure of the vision has less to do with Gore's reputation
as techno flake or with its expense to the public and everything
to do with the nation's paradoxical reliance on a superseded representational
politics of embodiment. The nation is not ready to embrace the state
of postnationalism6 it has itself produced in which extranational
space operates as uncommon ground to produce new, unpredictable
and as yet unaccountable flows of bodies and ideas.
National ways of knowing are always temporalized and spacialized.
Without the control of national formation, space knowledge -- that
is, knowledge detached from location, from the real, the human body,
and from history -- would seriously undermine the operations of
the state as it moves from frontiers within and between nations
to a so-called "global frontier" that covers for US imperialism,
and that translates the futurity of the concept of frontier into
the intimate interior of consumer subjectivities that can now mobilize
post-citizens and reconstitute national belongings beyond the limits
of knowledge and humanity. The nation, in short, cannot let go of
human inhabitation and the colonial model which spawned its usefulness.
The distant finishing of the globe suspended in space will remain
the image through which the US attempts to unify outer space under
one gaze and under one nation. But in its details, its close-up
particularity, the plan of that map of empire fails to hold the
contradictions of futurity and humanity within the scope of nation.
John Glenn's space odyssey is as we already know, old news.
Works Cited
Agnew,
John. Geopolitics: Re-visioning World Politics. London and New York:
Routledge, 1998.
Anderson,
Benedict. Imagined Communities.
Aravamuden,
Srinivas. Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency 1688-1804. Durham:
Duke University Press, 1999. [For 18th visions of trope of globe
suspended in space as knowledge/power nexus]
Baudrillard.
Simulations.
Bruckner,
Martin. "Lessons in Geography: Maps, Spellers, and Other Grammars
of Nationalism in the Early Republic." American Quarterly 51.2
(June 1999): 311-43.
Bruckner
discusses "geoliteracy," a concept that explains the promulgation
of nationalism in the printing and representational practices of
the early republic. He begins with landscape portraiture in which
maps and globes are displayed, arguing the familiar point that landowners
sought to extend their purchase on the land through such representational
practices. The portraits of Ralph Earl in the 1780s and 90s demonstrate
how "globes and atlases entered the intimate spaces of boh
sexes..." (311-12) and thus how "print discourse of geography
[is] the literary container of a socially unified but spatially
divided citizenry" (313). Webster's spellers and Morse's geographies
as specific forms of print culture operating to unify a proto national
culture in an imaginary print spatiality. Morse was first to provide
maps based on an "America-centric perspective" (326).
Map as ideal reading material for comprehending the nation as a
print form." (328); Morse's perspective offered the "promise
that both American lands and political territories become commensurate
spaces" (328). "[Morse's] lessons in map-literacy in the
end point to the iconolgy of the map image as a printed logo, as
a universal sign that is as easily recognizable as the logo of Coca
Cola is today, through which to insert the subject "America"
into the daily reading fabric of the new citizens. The printed map
rather than the word has become the nation's territory and the representational
source of national identity" (330).
While Bruckner describes the cultural use (and circulation) of the
mapped image of America, I want to focus on the production of that
map from Jefferson's word-map of the territory to other spatial
flights of (embodied) projection, unification, and strategic generalization
to 20th century images of the globe from space......
Jefferson as a "geographic author" (333). Bruckner describes
Morse's concept of a textbook as a "'Master-text' that formally
dictated the interpretation of the visual and the verbal 'lines'
offered by the maps and book entries [in the geography textbooks
and primers he designed]" (333).
The larger project that the geography texts contributed to was the
proleptic function of typing localities organized horizontally into
a national rhetoric that became a self-fulfilling prophecy. "As
maps and geographic narratives simultaneously maintain and reconcile
the gap between the local and the national, they inculcate as a
reading strategy the paradoxical notion that there is unity in diversity"
(333). A "geographic reading strategy" which articulates
literary and spatial visual representation into a "national
grammar" then, correlates to the broad oscillation of ideology
as it operates on the level of the quotidian and the deeply symbolic
to naturalize a nationalized unity among geographically and culturally
distinct regions and peoples.
Map as a "material form" for abstract ideology of nationalism
(334).
Canclini,
Nestor Garcia. Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural
Conflicts. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota press, 2001.
Clary,
Mike. "Adrift in the Heavens, Glenn Reasserts Faith in God."
Los Angeles Times 2 November, 1998: A12
------.
"Keeping the Glenn Glow is NASA's Daunting Task." LA Times
7 Nov, 1998: A1; 14.
Cosgrove,
Denis. Apollo's Eye: A Cartographic Geneaology of the Earth in the
Western Imagination. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Press,
2001.
Hall,
Stephen S. Mapping the Next Millennium: How Computer-Driven Cartography
is Revolutionizing the Face of Science. New York: Random House (Vintage),
1992.
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Thomas. Notes the State of Virginia. Edited by William Peden. Originally
pub. 1781. New York: W. W. Norton, 1954, 1983.
King,
Geoff. Mapping Reality: An Exploration of Cultural Cartographies.
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996.
Hedetoft,
Ulf and Mette Hjort, eds. The Postnational Self: Belonging and Identity.
Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2002.
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Arctic Delusion" Arctic Vol 37, No. 4 (Dec 1984): 448-452.
Notes
1. Denis Cosgrove in his introduction notes the connection between
images of globes and the process of globalization that"it is
from images of the spherical earth that ideas of globalization draw
their expressive force. The fascination that global images exercise
over the millennial imagination is apparent from even the most casual
glance at newspapers and magazines, television, and advertising"
(ix).
2. Srinivas Aravamuden in Tropicopolitans and Denis Cosgrove in
Apollo's Eye both discuss early modern and 18th Century European
traditions of writers who position themselves imaginatively above
the surface of the earth, and as Aravamuden writes, achieve "agency"
as a "detached, omnivoyant spectator" (Aravamuden 291).
3.
The literature on mapping and its relation to culture and specifically
nation formation has a long lineage. Most recent criticism stems
from Benedict Anderson's demonstration of the significance of the
map in the creation of East Asian modern nations in Imagined Communities.
Mark Monmonier has published a series of works on the politics and
techniques of mapping under modernity. Richard King's Mapping Reality
combines analyses of literature, film, and politics to underscore
the way that mapping, or what he calls the process of "cultural
cartography" is composed of an array of functions that produce
real situations. Jean Baudrillard's concept of simulation in which
the "territory no longer precedes the map" but rather,
the map produces the territory, outlined in Simulations, in some
ways has been foundational for contemporary cultural study of mapping.
4. Geographers have made use of new technologies to create maps
of traditional objects such as geomorphic surfaces, even as the
concept of mapping has expanded into other fields as both technique
and as metaphor and onto less traditional objects, such as the human
genome. This state of contemporary knowledge production is rendered
with clear examples in Mapping the Millennium.
5. King makes a similar point about the cultural mediation and technological
production of the image of the globe in space in the case of the
astronauts for whom the experience of flight and the vision of the
earth from space had been "exhaustively preconditioned or preceded
by a welter of imagery" (92) produced by NASA training. In
this case, to paraphrase Jean Baudrillard, the map truly preceded
the territory.
6. Postnational, like the postmodern, references a shift in the
conceptual and temporal understanding of nation. Features of the
postnational - such as flexible borders, multiple citizenship and
identification, the growth of non-governmental organizations (NATO,
Greenpeace) and issues (immigration, pollution, trade agreements)
- do not necessarily mark originary or new developments; similar
features have long permeated traditional national rubrics. Instead,
the "post" marks a shift in the politics of the possible,
not necessarily in the daily effects of nationalist governments.
It is not that the present moment is somehow quantitatively more
post-national than the period in which nationalism established itself
as the dominant, if not only recognizable, political form of organization
on earth. The post of postnational registers only the limits of
nationalism, not its demise. One of its features is the self-conscious
coterminity of governmental and cultural arrangements of population
and territory such that hard, militarized borders coexist with redrawn,
contested, or permeable ones; strict citizenship exclusions coexist
with revolving and extralegal forms of immigration; and, blockades
operate contrary to free market trade agreements. In terms of territory,
the nationalization of borders of the major landmasses and habitable
areas of the earth has never spread to the deep oceans, the continent
of Antarctica, and outer space. These never-nationalized territories
are difficult to categorize under national or postnational rubrics.
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