One of the most famous debates in the intellectual history of time and space took place in the seventeenth century between Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz.
For Newton, greatly influenced by the invention of the clock, space was like time:
If the clock showed that time existed independently of events, then the same was true of space. Newton viewed time and space as abstract, absolute entities that existed independently of their measurement, ie., their existence was absolute, for their reality remained real regardless of whatever they contained or how they were measured. He argued in 1687, for example, that “Absolute, true, and math-ematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equally without relation to anything external” (quoted in Kern 1983: 11). Leibniz, in contrast, disliked the primacy of geometry in Cartesian thought, the implicit priority it assigned to space over time. Leibniz held that time and space were relational rather than absolute in nature, i.e., comprehensible only through frames of interpretation: dis-tance, for example, could only be understood as the space between two or more objects situated in space. Space and time, therefore, had no independent existence in and of themselves, but were derivative of how we measured them. Eventually, for reasons having little to do with inherent intellectual merit and much to do with the emergence of early capitalist modernity, Newton’s view triumphed decisively and Leibniz’s relational space was “resoundingly defeated in the Enlightenment”
(Smith 2003: 12).
This chapter is predicated on the argument that metaphors are a critical means by which we understand and appreciate the importance of space and spatiality in social life. Metaphors are a means of bridging the known and the unknown, and reveal much about a society’s assumptions and cultural logics, what it holds to be important or normal, or not (Barnes 1991). The focus here is on two radically dif-ferent metaphors of spatial relations, surfaces and networks, one historic and the other contemporary, which have underpinned popular and intellectual concep-tions of geography in a multitude of ways. It begins by examining the rise of sur-faces under early modern capitalism, the roles they played in fostering a distinct understanding of space conducive to the circuits of capital accumulation then stretching across the planet, the rise of the nation-state, and the certainty of visual knowledge or “scopic regime” (Gregory 1994) that they sustained. Second, it turns to the dynamics of postmodern, globalized capitalism, a world in which
space plays a very different role, one in which nation-states have declined in significance, and argues that surfaces have been displaced by a new metaphor more suitable to the contemporary age: networks. Drawing on the works of sev-eral poststructuralists, it offers sevsev-eral examples by which relational space may be conceived and portrayed in terms more appropriate to the current historical moment. In both cases, the metaphors of space do much more than simply reflect social circumstances; rather, they actively contribute to their making.
Surfaces: making space visible to the ocularcentric ego
The global expansion of capitalism that began in the sixteenth century brought with it innumerable changes in economic, political, cultural, and ideological rela-tions. The trading and colonial empires that flourished across the planet brought together vast realms of the planet under Western political, economic, and ideo-logical domination. Global conquest also initiated a new understanding of the world among the elites of Europe, or what Pratt (1992) calls an incipient plane-tary consciousness, an understanding of the globe as a unified entity in which localities were deeply intertwined. It is Eurocentric to portray this process as sim-ply one of reaching out across the surface of the earth; as Massey (2005: 4) notes,
“Conceiving of space as in the voyages of discovery, as something to be crossed and maybe conquered . . . makes space seem like a surface: continuous and given” rather than as a mutable social production.
A central figure in the Renaissance reconceptualization of space was the math-ematician and philosopher René Descartes. Among his other accomplishments, he may be regarded as the founder of modern ocularcentrism, the epistemologi-cal standpoint of early modernity that subscribed to the notion of a detached, objective observer capable of a “god’s eye” view of the world. Descartes pro-posed an explanatory model centered on what has come to be known as the Cartesian cogito: a disembodied, rational mind without distinct social or spatial roots or location (but implicitly male and white). Cartesian rationalism was pred-icated on the sharp distinction between the inner reality of the mind and the outer reality of 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. In geographic terms, ocularcentrism equates perspec-tive with the abstract subject’s mapping of space. 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 simultane-ously rendered the viewer bodyless and placeless. Illumination was conceived to be a process of rationalization, of bringing the environment into consciousness through the modality of vision. Cosgrove (1999: 18) observes that “Modernity is distinguished by its concern with the human eye’s physical capacity to register 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 60 Barney Warf
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 the early modern knowledge/
power configuration – an historically specific scopic regime – reproduced reality in the form of the “world-as-exhibition.” Cartesianism was thus simultaneously a model of knowledge and of the “individual,” i.e., an observer devoid of social origins and consequences.
Co-catalytic with the Cartesian model of the human subject was the geometric 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 engineer-ing and architecture, but it lay at the heart of a widely-accepted neo-platonic cos-mology.” Ideologically, this process led to the mathematicization of the sciences, the search for a single set of universal laws, and an enormously powerful scien-tific worldview that greatly expedited Europe’s technological prowess. As this perspective gained currency throughout Europe, the multiple vantage points in art or literature typical of the medieval world were steadily displaced by a single dis-embodied, omniscient, and panopticonic eye. Rather than the convoluted visual and aural worlds central to the medieval world, Renaissance thought emphasized homogeneous, ordered visual fields. “It was this uniform, infinite, isotropic space that differentiated the dominant modern world view from its various predeces-sors” (Jay 1993: 57). That this view arose precisely during the birth of modern science was hardly coincidental: as Jay (1993: 52) put it, like vision, space “func-tioned in a similar way for the new scientific order. In both cases space was robbed of substantive meaningfulness to become an ordered, uniform system of abstract linear coordinates.” Thus, it was no accident that the Cartesian model arose in tandem with capitalism, colonialism, and modern science (Kirby 1996).
The ascendancy of ocularcentrism also initiated the long-standing Western prac-tice 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 perspectivalism promoted the simultaneous and syn-chronic over the historical and diasyn-chronic in the explanation and elaboration of knowledge.”
The Renaissance rationalization of space was manifested in the explosion of cartography, which, as Harley (1989) stressed, replicated the assumption of an all-seeing, invisible creator cloaked in the mantle of objectivity. The rise of modern car-tography represented a shift in vision from local topologies to a fine, spatially referenced, spherical earth, a homogeneous graticule of latitude and longitude. The epistemology of cartography – its ocularcentrism, its purportedly scientific rendition of space – served a vital social function. Yet far from constituting a detached, objec-tive viewpoint from nowhere, a view that reduces map-making to a technical process, cartography was a social process deeply wrapped up in the complex politi-cal dynamics of colonialism. Under the expansion of colonial empires, the need to From surfaces to networks 61
represent distant places – to make them present for those who were not there – rose exponentially. Renaissance cartography thus effectively consisted of the “geo-graphing” of remote regions to facilitate their control. After all, in order to get to, conquer, govern, and administer their colonies, the Europeans first had to know them spatially. The grid formed by latitude and longitude was one of several such systems deployed worldwide to facilitate the exchange networks of early modern capitalism, making space smooth, fungible, and comprehensible by imposing order on an oth-erwise chaotic environment. For European navigators, this move entailed smoothing space by reducing it to distance, rendering the oceans navigable, and ordering the multitude of world’s places within a comprehensible schema. The projection of Western power across the globe necessitated a Cartesian conceptualization of space as one that could be easily crossed, a function well performed by the cartographic graticule. Inserting various places in all their unique, messy complexity into a global skein of meridians and longitudes positioned innumerable locales into a single, uni-fied, coherent, and panopticonic understanding of the world designed by Europeans, for Europeans, allowing different locations to be compared and normalized within an affirmation of a god-like view over Cartesian space at the global level. Colonial mapping was thus not simply a tool for administration, but equally importantly, a validation of Enlightenment science and central part of the colonial spatial order:
mapping offered both symbolic and practical mastery over space.
Thus, the discourses of space did far more than passively represent entities that existed before them, but were actively a part of producing that very geography;
they were, in short, simultaneously reflective and constitutive of the reality they represented. By subjecting the planet’s diverse people to the conceptual lens of Western modernist rationality, cartography enfolded the world within a particu-lar Western way of understanding, one that erected reality as a picture to be gazed upon from a distance, a totalized actuality that was ordered and structured, i.e., Gregory’s (1994) “world-as-exhibition.” O’Tuathail (1996: 53) notes that this process mirrored the ascending ocularcentrism of the age:
By gathering, codifying, and disciplining the heterogeneity of the world’s geography into the categories of Western thought, a decidable, measured, and homogeneous world of geographical objects, attributes, and patterns is made visible, produced. The geopolitical gaze triangulates the world polit-ical map from a Western imperial vantage point, measures it using Western conceptual systems of identity/difference, and records it in order to bring it within the scope of Western imaginings.
A parallel transformation occurred within the visual arts, in which bourgeois values became increasingly hegemonic (Cosgrove 1984). The key discovery in this regard was the invention of linear perspective, first demonstrated by Filippo Brunelleschi in 1425, which involved the ability to represent three dimensions on a two-dimensional canvas. Thus, “Linear perspective vision was a fifthteenth-century artistic invention for representing three-dimensional depth on the two-dimensional canvas. It was a geometrization of vision which began as an 62 Barney Warf
invention and became a convention, a cultural habit of mind” (Romanyshyn 1993: 349). Mumford (1934: 20) noted that “Perspective turned the symbolic relation of objects into a visual relation: the visual in turn became a quantitative relation. In the new picture of the world, size meant not human or divine impor-tance, but distance.” As Johnson (2002: 118) argues, the “replacement of aspec-tive art by perspecaspec-tive art was one of the greatest steps forward in human civilization.” Like cartography, perspective painting served a social purpose and a specific, hegemonic power interest, and came into being just as Florence came under the panopticonic gaze of the Medici aristocracy (Edgerton 1975).
Simultaneously, the process of printing deepened and reinforced the emerging European ocularcentrism. Printing was the first major step in the mechanization of communication, and accelerated the diffusion of information by packaging it conveniently, in the process democratizing books. This process undermined the centrality of the clergy in the production of knowledge: books, unlike hand-written monastic manuscripts, gave their audiences identical copies to read, experience, and discuss, and made censorship more difficult as well. Printing thus broke the monopoly on learning held by monks and fostered the growth of a lay intelli-gentsia. Eisenstein (1979) demonstrated the enormous power of printing in dif-fusing knowledge and mass literacy, facilitating the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, European expansionism, and the rise of modern capitalism and science. Printing in vernacular languages began to undermine the hegemony of Latin, establishing local tongues as the basis of emergent national identities and imagined communities. Anderson (1983) famously argued that nationalism co-evolved with the growth of print-based culture once vernacular languages became the norm of printed communications, as the printing press connected disparate populations spread over wide geographical areas. This process had enormous effects on the social and spatial structure of language. As the market for books in Latin became gradually saturated, vernacular languages became increasingly common and popular. Moreover, this process led to the very idea of a fixed point of view, a foundational part of the Cartesian metaphysic that underpinned both modern science and modern perspectives on time and space.
Printing did more than simply accelerate the dissemination of knowledge, ideas, and information, it also reinforced the emerging ocularcentrism of early modernity. As Jay (1993) and Jenks (1995) noted, the rise of printing, the reliance on the written word for communication, and the use of the telescope and micro-scope to bring the distant and the invisibly small into view all contributed to the tendency to equate seeing with knowing. Epistemologically, printing suggested that words were things, situating words in space far more than did writing and embedding language in the process of manufacturing, which in turn accelerated its commodification. The printing of maps began to accustom Europeans to visual, grid-based representations of territorial order, helping to establish abstract space as the dominant model of the early modern period. Thus, printing utilized the spatial organization of knowledge widely and effectively, generating visual surfaces with abundant and intense meanings, with enormous consequences for human perceptions of space and time.
From surfaces to networks 63
Finally, the construction of modernist geographies in the form of surfaces rested heavily on the rise of the nation-state: Smith (2003: 142) argues “The gen-esis of national states as a system for organizing the world’s political economy provided an eighteenth-century ‘spatial fix’ for specific economic dilemmas of emergent capitalism.” The international system legitimated by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 underscored the centrality of the nation-state to the early modern world system, a world of absolute spaces and explicit, non-overlapping boundaries. Such a geopolitical structure was unprecedented: “The modern state system of territorially fixed and mutually exclusive sovereignties is an histori-cally unique form of spatial organization” (Anderson 1996: 140).
The shift in scale from the city-state to the “power-container” of the nation-state (Giddens 1984) reflected a large variety of factors, including: the intensified commodification of land and labor; the centralization of law enforcement, partic-ularly regarding property rights; printing and explicit codes of law; the diffusion of paper money as a medium of exchange; apparatuses of taxation, surveillance, and documentation such as the census; the judiciary and penal systems; and grad-ual improvements in transportation such as turnpikes and canals. Within nation-states, banking systems created homogeneous financial spaces in which the cost of capital was almost totally invariant. Communications systems such as the postal service allowed more effective governance (not necessarily democratic), and the ability to mobilize the masses during emergencies. Military drafts social-ized young men from disparate backgrounds into a national identity. Mass liter-acy, newspapers, and the ideology of nationalism also contributed to the homogenization of culture that turned feudal societies into nation-states. Foucault (1972) stressed that under the disciplinary logic of modernity, vision became supervision: it lost the benign status of the detached observer and became a means of enforcement and surveillance. He argued that subtle social mechanisms of control – the police, the medical system, education, etc. – extended the power of the omnipotent sovereign to produce subjects who self-monitored their behav-ior, conforming to the taken-for-granted notions instilled in them from birth.
Nationalism also transformed abstract space into a territory imbued with selective interpretations of local history, a homeplace that fused the immemorial past with the future destiny of its people. By the early nineteenth century, increasingly stan-dardized public education systems played a central role in linking individual identities to the state, i.e., raising the scalar level at which people defined them-selves and one another. In producing the citizen, the nation-state also constructed moral geographies of similarity and difference, inclusion and exclusion, which sharply distinguished “us” from “them,” amplifying the differences between the community of insiders and foreign outsiders.
This homogenization was perfectly in keeping with the Cartesian view of space: as with linear perspective in painting, the nation-state in geopolitics came to be defined from a single, fixed viewpoint (Ruggie 1993). “As containers of a fledgling modernity, the expansionist new monarchies of the sixteenth century were slowly, unevenly, and erratically (depending on the state in question) imposing a general perspectivalist vision of space and a neutral conception of 64 Barney Warf
time upon the territories they incorporated and annexed” (Ó Tuathail 1996: 12).
In contrast to feudal empires, which often had diffuse boundaries, the nation-state was predicated upon a view of geography as Euclidean, a “horizontal order of coexistent places that could be sharply delimited and compartimentalized from each other” (Ó Tuathail 1996: 4).
Surfaces as the predominant form through which modern space was constituted ontologically and understood epistemologically continued to have a long and enduring emphasis in the twentieth century. The rise of logical positivism in the late nineteenth century added a aura of scientism to this view, mathematicizing it with the disciplines concerned with space such as geography and urban planning in the forms of isotropic planes, surfaces in which the distribution of social fea-tures is evenly distributed, e.g., the von Thunen model (see Isard 1972). Thus, approaches such as Central Place Theory continued a long tradition of ocularcen -trism (Gregory 1994). The emphasis on transport costs, as in Weberian location theory, reflected their role in the location decisions of firms. Similarly, urban space was largely depicted in terms of surfaces of differential rent and
Surfaces as the predominant form through which modern space was constituted ontologically and understood epistemologically continued to have a long and enduring emphasis in the twentieth century. The rise of logical positivism in the late nineteenth century added a aura of scientism to this view, mathematicizing it with the disciplines concerned with space such as geography and urban planning in the forms of isotropic planes, surfaces in which the distribution of social fea-tures is evenly distributed, e.g., the von Thunen model (see Isard 1972). Thus, approaches such as Central Place Theory continued a long tradition of ocularcen -trism (Gregory 1994). The emphasis on transport costs, as in Weberian location theory, reflected their role in the location decisions of firms. Similarly, urban space was largely depicted in terms of surfaces of differential rent and