2002
MLA
Globalization and the Image I: Imagining the Global
Elena Glasberg
Duke University
The Intimate Sphere: Globalization and Postnational Citizenship
Do not cite
without permission of the author.
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 his
1998 re-orbit and its national pageantry, and most recently in the 30-year
celebrations of the original flight. 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.
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.
The redrawing of the maps of nations and citizenship. This goes, I would
argue, beyond Anglophilic nostalgia for empire, but points to as yet unimaginable
configurations of the post national and transnational globe.
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 in which 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.
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.2
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. Finally, I consider
the force of a post national knowledge production, or "space knowledge."
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. Bernard Saladin d'Anglure, a Canadian anthropologist,
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,3
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 [insert image], or as the dot in
the company email address right before the "com" tag. The effect
of these images is the internalization of the global - into either the
individual or corporate body. This is not merely an inversion or the deformation
of a big fish being swallowed by a little fish. The globe is both an object
external to human bodies and the mode 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 the human body, the 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 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
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 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.
Connect the trauma/ nausea of Jefferson's sublime "headache"
as he leans over the natural bridge for a view of the river below. Standard
readings discuss the episode as Jefferson's reaction to sublimity. And
this makes sense. But here is another level to the master architect's
distress at the view, which in the abstract, as the birds eye view of
the Rocky Mountains I discussed at the beginning of this essay, does not
cause disorientation or overwhelm its envisioner: this more embodied viewing
phenomena, in which the eyes are perforce part of the body and subject
then to all the limits of the body (not the mind) is the marker of the
natural sublime. 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.
A recently produced internet film of the lift off and flight of Apollo
17 reviews some of the features of Jefferson's two versions of how to
depict the land. 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
the atmosphere viewing downward, "back" to earth, and then suddenly
in space as earth recedes from a flat map of cape Canaveral and then the
entire hemisphere, to the by now familiar image of the blue marble earth
suspended in space, and then over the moon, ending finally with a shot
from the point of view behind the moon, across its gray lifeless surface
to its horizon filled with a setting, 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. So, the image of the eye hurtling away from earth,
in 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 landed on the moon. What
is less obvious, despite the disclaimer, is the complete fictionality
of this recreation of a supposed "real" sighting. 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.4 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 globe 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 postnationalism5
it has itself produced in which extranational space operates as uncommon
ground to produce 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.
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]
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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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 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.
3 Mapping the millennium
4 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.
5 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.