Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
of chaotic
financing, and led to notions such as the discounting of future
costs and bene
fi
ts. Accounting was more than simply the rationalization of
economic transactions, it was also a form of disciplinary power: “Accounting
records provide a regular form of surveillance.... Not only is this form of
control continuous, it is also impersonal, proceeding in the absence of face to
face contact with supervisors and management” (Robson 1992:700).
Central to the emergence of early modern culture were the Renaissance
and the Enlightenment, the later, relatively secular counterpart and extension
of the former. Although there are profound di
fi
erences between these two
events in terms of their origins, geographies, historical timing, and con-
sequences, both may be held to represent part of the broader transformation
in Western thought that accompanied the transition from feudalism to capit-
alism. Moreover, there were signi
ff
cant variations across space and time within
the Renaissance; the same holds for the Enlightenment. Thus, rather than
seeing the latter as an abstract set of ideas suspended above space and time,
Withers (2007) encourages us to think about the Enlightenment as a set of
situated social practices, i.e., as a constellation of power/knowledges with
di
fi
erent time-spaces. There was not
one
Enlightenment, but many “Enlightenments,” each particular to its own
context. Despite these caveats, it is possible to note several facets of how these
two intertwined intellectual transformations played central roles in the rise
of early modern thought about space and time: the Copernican revolution;
linearized historical time; the Cartesian view of the subject and space; ocu-
larcentrism, or the dominance of vision as the hegemonic means of knowing
the world; the
ff
erent meanings and consequences in di
ff
fl
flowering of cartography; and perspectival painting. Each is
examined brie
y here.
Not coincidentally, the voyages by which Europeans came to discover the
remainder of the planet were accompanied by a wide-ranging transformation
in their discourses about the role of the earth in the heavens. This change in
part re
fl
ected the markedly higher levels of precise knowledge needed about
astronomical observations, key to maritime navigation. Astronomy, there-
fore, was as much a pragmatic science as one with theological implications.
As Boorstin (1983:47) puts it, “It is no wonder that astronomy became the
handmaiden of the sailor, that the Age of Columbus ushered in the Age of
Copernicus.” In this context, the microscope and telescope extended human
vision into vast new domains, small and large, and upheld the mechanistic
model of vision as objective observation guided by reason (Edney 1990).
The telescope, invented by Hans Lipperhey in the Netherlands in 1608 and
famously employed by Galileo to study the moons of Jupiter, revealed that
the universe is much larger than that available to human senses; indeed, as the
gargantuan sizes of astronomical distances became increasingly apparent,
astronomy became the most humbling of disciplines. Copernicus revealed that
just as Europe was no longer the center of the world, the earth was no
longer center of the universe. The Copernican revolution not only suggested
that the natural world operated on a clock-like basis, in contrast to magical,
fl
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