Geography Reference
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objects; the latter could only be brought into the former, rationally at least,
through a neutral, disembodied gaze situated above space and time. Such
a perspective presumes that each person is an undivided, autonomous,
rational subject with clear boundaries between “inside” and “outside,” i.e.,
between self and other, body and mind. With Descartes's cogito, vision and
thought became funneled into a spectator's view of the world, one that ren-
dered the emerging surfaces of modernity visible and measurable and ren-
dered the viewer body-less and placeless. Medieval, multiple vantage points in
art or literature were displaced by a single disembodied, omniscient, and
panopticonic eye.
However, vision, as Jay (1993) argues, is not simply a function of biology,
but also an historically speci
c way of knowing the world. To visualize, to
gain insight, to keep an eye on something, is to invoke a host of cultural and
linguistic tools to make sense of reality. Illumination was conceived to be a
process of rationalization, of bringing the environment into consciousness
through the modality of vision, which is but one of several competing forms
of gaining understanding. Cosgrove (1999:18) observes that “Modernity is
distinguished by its concern with the human eye's physical capacity to regis-
ter and to visualize materiality at every scale.” The perspective had deep roots
in western history: Ó Tuathail (1996:70) posits that “What was initiated in
Greek philosophy was augmented by the innovations of perspectivalism and
Cartesianism. Perspectivalist vision made a single sovereign eye the center of
the visible world.” Gregory (1994) likewise maintains that this particular
knowledge/power con
fi
c scopic regime—
reproduced reality as “world-as-exhibition.” Cartesianism was thus simul-
taneously a model of knowledge and of the “individual.” Ideologically, this
process led to the mathematicization of the sciences, the search for a single
set of universal laws, and an enormously powerful scienti
fi
guration—an historically speci
fi
c worldview that
greatly expedited Europe's technological prowess. As Mumford (1934:20)
noted, “Perspective turned the symbolic relation of objects into a visual rela-
tion: the visual in turn became a quantitative relation. In the new picture of
the world, size meant not human or divine importance, but distance.” Thus, it
was no accident that the Cartesian model arose in tandem with capitalism,
colonialism, and modern science (Kirby 1996).
Co-catalytic with the Cartesian model of the human subject was the geo-
metric view of space that it suggested; the ascendance of vision as a criterion
for truth merged Euclidean geometry with the notion of a detached observer
(Hillis 1999). This worldview had powerful social and material consequences.
Cosgrove (1988:256) notes, for example, that “in late Renaissance Italy not
only was geometry fundamental to practical activities like cartography, land
survey, civil engineering and architecture, but it lay at the heart of a widely-
accepted neo-platonic cosmology.” Rather than the complex, convoluted
visual and aural worlds central to the medieval world, Renaissance thought
came to emphasize homogeneous, ordered visual
fi
fi
fields. “It was this uniform,
in
fi
nite, isotropic space that di
ff
erentiated the dominant modern world view
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