Geography Reference
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from its various predecessors” (Jay 1993:57). Harley (1989) stressed that these
same values were replicated within cartography, with its all-seeing, invisible
creator assuming the mantle of objectivity. That this view arose precisely
during the birth of modern science was hardly coincidental: as Jay (1993:52)
put it, like vision, space “functioned in a similar way for the new scienti
c
order. In both cases space was robbed of substantive meaningfulness to
become an ordered, uniform system of abstract linear coordinates.” Cartesian
space and linear time thus co-emerged as two facets of one broader social
transformation that commodi
fi
ed both. The ascendancy of ocularcentrism
also initiated the long-standing Western practice of emphasizing the temporal
over the spatial. Ó Tuathail (1996:24) argues that “the privileging of the sense
of sight in systems of knowledge constructed around the idea of Cartesian per-
spectivalism promoted the simultaneous and synchronic over the historical
and diachronic in the explanation and elaboration of knowledge.”
The Cartesian/Euclidean notion of space—in
fi
nite, absolute, and homo-
geneous—was replicated throughout the Renaissance and the Enlightenment,
forming the basis for Newtonian physics and the theory of gravity. For ex-
ample, calculus, invented by both Newton and Leibniz, portrayed time as
an in
fi
nite series of small but discrete units. Newton argued in 1687 that
“Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature,
fl
fi
flows equally without relation to anything external” (quoted in Kern 1983:11).
Newton's great rival Leibniz, however, disliked the primacy of geometry in
Cartesian thought, the implicit priority it assigned to space over time. Despite
the claims to universality made by Enlightenment thinkers, their thought in
many respects re
fl
ected the emerging nationalism of the era: Newton's scien-
ti
c presuppositions, for example, including the “essential properties” of the
atom in empty space, were shaped by the bourgeois ethos of contemporary
England (Freudenthal 1986).
Drawing upon Descartes and Newton, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
attempted to navigate between French rationalism and British empiricism.
Kant framed time and space in
a priori
terms, arguing that they formed neces-
sary conditions for the perception of reality but could not, by themselves,
measure anything else (Petersson 2005). Kant held that time and space could
be rendered void of their contents, yet still retain their identity, upholding a
Cartesian view amenable to the time-space compression of early modernity.
He thus enshrined Euclidean geometry as the architecture of the mind, a
structure, like time, that made experience possible. However, he disavowed the
Newtonian notion of absolute time and space because it did not allow room
for how they are experienced by people, thus recasting the Leibnizian per-
spective by introducing the issue of perception. He did not, however, simply
dismiss time and space as subjective illusions, maintaining that time and
space are “real” only inasmuch as the mind perceives them and makes order
of them. This argument shifted the focus from the world as it is in itself to the
world as known by human beings, and problematized the question of sensory
experience and its relations to reality. Experience is the continual synthesis of
fi
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