Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Within the emerging West, the intellectual accoutrements of colonialism
included the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, which, fueled by the in
ux
of wealth, particularly silver, ushered in new, secular understandings of time
and space. Central to this project was the rise of ocularcentrism, the privil-
eging of the visual and its implicit equation with objectivity, as manifested in
the rise of the Cartesian cogito and the corresponding reduction of space to
surfaces. Cartography and the graticule of latitude, and later, longitude, were
vital parts of the emerging modernist imaginary, the formation of a com-
prehensive grid into which various locales could be placed and thus rendered
sensible. So too was the rise of perspectival art, which bolstered the ocularce-
ntrism of the age. And just as space was subjected to the disciplinary gaze
of rationality, so also did time become steadily linearized, an undertaking
initiated by Christianity but now rendered in secular terms.
Several forces contributed to the rise of bourgeois secularism and its mani-
festation as individualist ideology. The process of printing simultaneously
democratized information, freed the transmission vast realms of knowledge
from face-to-face contact, undermined feudal loyalties, accelerated the di
fl
u-
sion of news, and deepened the exploration of the inner psyche. As various
languages fell before the homogenizing power of the printing press, language
and nationalism became steadily fused. Early modern time-space compression
reached its zenith via the formation of the nation-state and the ideologies of
nationalism that suppressed internal di
ff
erences, an ostensible homogeneity
buttressed by a common currency, military draft, and other space-binding
mechanisms. The spaces of nationality were further integrated by various
canals, roads, stagecoaches, and postal systems. Far from the market, there-
fore, it was the state that played the lead role in this scalar transformation.
Finally, this process saw the gradual universalization of the Gregorian calen-
dar as the triumph of modernity imposed its time-keeping system upon the
plethora of cultures that lay vanquished at its feet. Local cultures of time
persisted, as evidenced by the multiple regional practices in colonial America.
However, Enlightenment rationality of space and time, made most explicit by
the metric system, eventually came to envelop most other representations of
these dimensions, just as Europe had itself come to envelop most of the world
in the tentacles of colonial empire.
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