ABSTRACT

Two characteristics of visualizing global space emerged at the outset of the European Age of Discovery. Ever since, they have been reproduced in the governing principles of geographic thought and through the practices of statecraft. The first, and the one that has received most recent comment, is that seeing the world-as-a-picture, as an ordered, structured whole, separates the self who is viewing from the world itself. The observer stands outside of terrestrial space, so to speak, and frames the world as apart from and prior to the places and people it contains. This seems to be a peculiarly European perspective in origin; associated with the Renaissance-era separation of the observer from the world and an approach to knowing that insists on privileging vision as the most ‘noble’ of the human senses. What is ‘seen,’ even from over the horizon by means of such tools as world maps, is what exists. The map is an accurate report of what is there. Representation and world are as one. In reaction to this ennobling of singular vision and the absence of skepticism about its impact, much recent philosophy has become deeply suspicious of visuality and what Martin Jay (1993, 14) terms ‘its hegemonic role in the modern era.’ This doubt can be traced to the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s (1844-1900) and more recent feminist and other critiques of the ‘view from nowhere;’ there can be no pure, will-less, timeless, placeless knower, no pure reason, no absolute knowledge or absolute intelligence. All seeing and knowing is a

perspective, drawn from a situated point of view. From this contrarian standpoint, real objectivity lies not in the promulgation of a single perspective from within a singular historical experience but from the introduction of as many eyes (perspectives) as possible. There is never a single view from nowhere.