When figures of knowledge make their way into detective stories, this indicates just how popular they have become. Over the past decade, Miles Harvey’s The Island of Lost Maps Reference Harvey1 has probably done more than any other single publication to establish the reputation of topography and cartography in this respect. In 2001, a controversy resembling a real-life adjunct to Harvey’s literary account kept feuilletonists on their toes. It arose over the acquisition by the United States Library of Congress of a map of the world, originally prepared by Martin Waldseemüller in 1507, from Prince Waldburg-Wolfegg. It was not the fact that the American library acquired the last extant copy of this particular map for the enormous sum of $10 million that caused the stir, but profound concerns over national culture. Since the map, which is made up of 12 woodcuts, and measures about three square metres in total, is the first to use the name ‘America’, thereby bearing witness to the discovery of the New World, the Waldseemüller Map has come to be known as ‘America’s birth certificate’ in the United States. That the name ‘America’ is based on a mistake appears not to detract from the value of the map as a ‘geographical baptismal certificate’.2 In 1507, Waldseemüller assumed it was the Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci, and not Christopher Columbus, who had discovered the new continent. Upon recognizing his mistake, he crossed out the name on subsequent editions. Notwithstanding the revision, 1000 copies of the original map – entitled Universalis cosmographia secundum Ptholomaei traditionem Americi Vespucii aliorumque lustrationes – had already been printed and had attracted a great deal of attention.
Two singular reasons had long motivated the United States to acquire the Waldseemüller Map: first, its significance as the first document to name the continent; and secondly, the fact that this was the last extant copy of the 1507 original. Conversely, the interest of the German government for the map to remain within the country had been officially ratified by its inclusion in the ‘Convention for the Protection of German Cultural Heritage’, thereby subjecting its export to strict governmental control. When it was sold, a heated debate ensued not over the criteria defining ‘German cultural heritage’ but over an altercation between the German Federal Government and the individual states of the federation about the precise allocation of responsibility and the exact nature of the ratification procedure. It is left to the passage from the arts pages of a newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, to suggest one possible reason for including the Waldseemüller Map on the register of cultural property of ‘outstanding national importance’. It concerns the prerogative and rights that come with original discovery and invention:
Why should we not grant the United States possession of their geographical baptismal certificate? Any cultural patriot would object that while the Germans missed out on the discovery of the New World, at least they were the first to map it. It is therefore imperative to safeguard this testimony.3
Such reasoning, however, is flawed, since Waldseemüller cannot be made to serve the German heritage at will;4 furthermore, other Europeans, including the Dutch cartographer Johannes Ruysch (1507) and his Italian contemporary Francesco Roselli (1508), had prepared maps of the New World at around the same time. Aside from such inconsistencies in the national – German – claim to the right of primogeniture, the controversy over the Waldseemüller Map makes evident an interesting struggle over interpretation. First, whereas one party employs the 12 printed sections to furnish unmistakable evidence of its origin, the same prints serve as a milestone in the history of cartography and fuel another’s endeavour to substantiate its claim that it made a decisive contribution to the history of scientific and technical progress. Secondly, while the United States of America invokes the document as authentic representation, Germany entreats cartographic authorship. While one side identifies the designatory function of the cartographic images and signs as the central theme, the other petitions techné. Such conflicting national interests, moreover, involve a controversy over symbolization that highlights the double meaning of topographic depiction: as representation on the one hand, and as a technical procedure in the history of knowledge on the other.
Through these different approaches to cartography and topography, and their discrepant notions of writing, which in turn rest on particular readings of spatial representation, the feud over the Waldseemüller Map manifests significant differences between the development of theory on either side of the Atlantic – or rather, it renders obvious the conceptual divergence between Cultural Studies and Kulturwissenschaften. In recent decades, a distinct topographical turn, which can be seen as a theoretical vanishing point of the recurrently invoked linguistic and pictoral turns, has occurred in both fields. The differences, however, probably outnumber the similarities – even if they contrast less explicitly than some pointed assertions about the status of maps and geography would suggest. For instance, Alfred Korzybski’s claim that ‘the map is not the territory’,5 which Wolfgang Schäffner cites in his study of the topographical disposition of military, navigational, and philosophical operations in the Netherlands around 1600, contrasts expressly with David Turnball’s programmatic Maps are Territories (1989). Whereas Korzybski is concerned with the semiotics of cartography, Turnball foregrounds the power of symbolic constructions and the use of maps in the history of colonialism. Against this background, I explore how topographical figures are treated as an area of theoretical inquiry, in which significant differences between Cultural Studies and Kulturwissenschaften become apparent in almost paradigmatic fashion.
The topography of Cultural Studies
The rise to prominence of topographical discourse in Cultural Studies, coupled with social theory claiming the concept of space for itself, originally stems from criticism levelled at colonial history. One exemplary case in point is James M. Blaut’s Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (1993).6 Blaut’s book-length study of Europe’s colonial worldview not only implements Edward W. Soja’s programme ‘to spatialise the historical narrative’, but also defines the central category serving Cultural Studies as a negative foil, and from which it delimits its own theorems: ‘the West’, that is, the geographical space occupied by the European continent together with all Europeanized cultures such as the United States of America and Canada.7 The year 1492 – that is, the notion of Europe before and after 1492 that serves as a workable organizing principle – also occupies a central position in other accounts. José Rabasa’s ‘Dialogue as Conquest: Mapping Spaces for Counter-Discourse,’ for instance, discusses Hernán Cortés’s letters to Charles V in order ‘to gauge the distance separating the interested conqueror from the neutral anthropologist.’Reference Rabasa8 Rabasa focuses on Cortés’s map of Mexico City (1524) as the visual representation of what the conquistadores considered to be an ideal city. He observes that the map represents the city as a zoological or botanical garden, thus overriding and rendering invisible the codes of Mesoamerican civilization without, however, erasing them entirely:
The destruction of the city obviously does not imply the disappearance of Mesoamerican civilization. The codes registered within the plan continue to exist, though in a dismembered form. And it is precisely in the interstices of this objectification of the city that a whole array of the oppositional practices of everyday life proliferates in an invisible mode.Reference Rabasa9
Such ‘oppositional practices of everyday life’ echo Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), originally published in French as Arts de Faire (1980), a book which describes everyday modes of action as a kind of rhetoric that leaves behind not only material, visible traces in space, but also invisible ones. De Certeau’s grammatological approach reformulates concepts of socially marked spaces, which subsequently contributed to theorizing the paradigm of the readable city.10 It occupies a highly specific position in the history of theory, namely one that follows, but also opposes, at least partially, Michel Foucault and his influence. While Foucault’s writings11 initially prompted architectural theory and urbanism in the 1970s to describe the modern city in terms of his notion of surveillance, de Certeau’s Arts de Faire intervened in this concept of the city as a large prison through foregrounding the poietic dimension of its inhabitants’ everyday cultural practices.
In Rabasa’s reading of Cortés’s map of Mexico City, the Arts de Faire are translated into oppositional practices emerging in the interstices of colonial representation. Such an operation obviously stems from the historical index of Rabasa’s own theoretical project, namely to advance a postcolonial critique of colonialism. Therein, however, the specific historical constellations underlying his theoretical apparatus are neglected – and hence remain misunderstood. His interpretation of the depiction of the city falls similarly short: while the botanical garden, that spatialized image of classificatory knowledge, only became a dominant topographical model of knowledge in the context of the Histoire naturelle, that is, in the 18th century, Cortés’s map of Mexico City instead refers to the topos of the hortus conclusus, pursuant to medieval representations of paradise. Mapping Spaces, however, ignores such historical differentiation, since Rabasa’s theoretical endeavour, as his title suggests, aims at establishing a programmatic Counter-Discourse. His reading of Cortés’s map can be understood as an allegory of such an endeavour, that is, as the unfolding of counter-discourses in the interstices of a colonized and also Eurocentric topography.
The figure of the ‘interstice’ subsequently became one of the highly charged symbolic sites of Cultural Studies, when these established themselves as the leading theory within minority discourse. Forging a counter-discourse, however, should not proceed from a vantage point that opposes cultures, but from one situated in-between.
Paul Gilroy adduces the following reasons for his investigation of ‘modernity and double consciousness,’ as the subtitle of his book The Black Atlantic (1993) frames his attempt to conceive this specific political and cultural formation as a ‘counterculture of modernity’:
The contemporary black English, like the Anglo-Africans of earlier generations and perhaps, like all blacks in the West, stand between (at least) two great cultural assemblages, both of which have mutated through the course of the modern world that formed them and assumed configurations.Reference Gilroy12
The term ‘Black Atlantic’ here designates less a territory than a programme. The situation of ‘stereophonic, bilingual, or bifocal cultural forms’ (Ref. Reference Gilroy12, p. 3), in which Black people living in those regions bordering the Atlantic (Africa, England, North or South America) find themselves, becomes the paradigm of an intercultural and transnational counterculture of modernity. Remembrance of the culture of those colonized and enslaved serves to nurture this counterculture. Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic is thus less a historiography of a particular geographical space, like Fernand Braudel’s magnum opus The Mediterranean,Reference Braudel13 than an attempt to conceive a symbolic topography for theoretical discourse.
Thus, the topographical turn in Cultural Studies is less about mapping in metaphorical terms than transforming ‘classic’ discourse-historical criticism, like Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), into a prescriptive conception of another, alternative theory, founded upon the experience of cultural identity no longer equalling national territory. Such experience becomes heightened in the figure of displacement, which takes the place of conventional concepts of migration, such as ‘exile’ or ‘diaspora’. Mapping and the discourse of spaces literally become topoi, that is, commonplaces of Cultural Studies signalling the replacement of a historiographic narrative with ethnographic perspectives. The ethnographer now becomes the model theorist, with James Clifford’s Traveling Theory (1989) leading the way.14 Cultural Studies thus transformed themselves into a theory of culture influenced by ethnography. Its writings were dominated by topographical concepts, such as Mary Louise Pratt’s contact zone (1986)Reference Pratt, Clifford and Marcus15 or, for instance, in Frederic Jameson’s Geopolitical Aesthetic (1992), Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial Location of Culture (1994), and Irit Rogoff’s Terra Infirma (2000). Charting postcolonial cultural practices was undertaken through achieving close rapprochement between ethnography and Writing Culture. Inasmuch as literary theory is highly sought after within such a project, it often obtains its concepts at the intersection of narration and topographical figures.
Literary topographies and translating theory
In Topographies (1995), J. Hillis Miller writes that a ‘novel is a figurative mapping’ (Ref. Reference Hillis Miller16, p. 19). Within the range of meanings of the term ‘topography’ – as the graphic configuration of a place or space, as spatial metaphor, as cartographic diagram, or as designating a spatial or cartographic order – Hillis Miller’s account focuses in particular on the significance of places, landscapes, and concepts of space in literature and philosophy. He considers literary topography as a paradigm of all those procedures through which meanings are projected onto spaces or landscapes.
Topographical figures also occupy a central role in many other theories of literature, since literary representation faces the structural task of shaping the relationship between time and space within the textual continuum. Movement in space, for instance, is thus a prominent literary procedure for the representation of individual or cultural evolutions in the temporal dimension, thereby producing a whole register of topographical figures. First, such thinking recalls the notion of ‘chronotopos’ that Mikhail Bakhtin developedReference Bakhtin and Holquist17 in The Dialogic Imagination (1981) to describe the compression and narrative visualization of time in particular space images; these four essays ultimately constitute an archive of topographical figures of meaning. Secondly, it echoes Walter Benjamin’s The Origins of German Tragic Drama, originally published as Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (1927), where he develops his idea that history enters the action on stage. Thirdly, it elicits Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, originally published as La poètique de l’espace (1957), in which, by means of allusion to psychoanalysis, he introduces topoanalysis, that is, the ‘study of the locales of our inner life’ situated in the ‘theater of the past’. Thus, Bachelard also identifies space as a repository for compressed time.18
Unlike those theories of literary representation that foreground topographical figures, Hillis Miller’s account of the relationship of philosophy, literature, and topography – besides exploring philosophical concepts of spatiality, Heidegger’s in particular – investigates the significance that maps and topography have for various authors, and, by implication, how places and landscapes serve as preconditions for literature. As distinct from Cultural Studies, what ensues from the topographical turn in literary theory is that places are no longer viewed merely as narrative figures or topoi, but also as specific, geographically identifiable locations. For instance, Franco Moretti’s Atlas of the European Novel (1998) examines maps expressly not as metaphors, but employs them as an analytical tool to investigate the topographical circumstances abiding in a wide range of 19th-century European literature.Reference Moretti19 Moretti supplements his reading of selected texts with maps and graphs, such as ‘Jane Austen’s Britain’ or ‘Sherlock Holmes’ London’. He uses particular symbols to mark murder scenes and other criminal incidents on a map of London, and to delineate Holmes’ movements through urban space.
The engendering of various literatures from specific geographical and cultural topographies creates the problem of their (un)translatability, not only of the literature itself, but also of the theoretical conceptions arising from the reading of specific texts. J. Hillis Miller notes that ‘Literary theory is born, that is, from a certain kind of reading.’ But this assertion effectively reaches beyond literary theory to encompass all theory – including more recent cultural theories – arising from reading texts and other cultural practices in certain ways rather than others. This leads Hillis Miller to infer the untranslatability of theory; that aside, his diagnosis holds true for both the core concepts of any theory and their potential reduction during translation to ‘abstract theoretical formulas’.Reference Hillis Miller20
He observes that not only current practice runs counter to this diagnosis: ‘The most important event of the last thirty years in North American literary study is no doubt the assimilation, domestication, and transformation of European theory.’Reference Hillis Miller21 He subsequently confronts his own thesis with a precept for the translation of theory. Rather than resolving this contradiction in theoretical terms, he proffers a reading of the Old Testament’s Book of Ruth. Therein, the story of Ruth becomes an allegory for the problem of transferring theory: she, that is, theory, alleges that other laws literally ‘cross borders’. This constellation of transferring theory from one language and culture to another serves as a further commentary on Cultural Studies as discussed earlier. Such transfer renders concepts indifferent toward their originating cultural topography. Consequently, they become mere tools, entailing the paradoxical phenomenon that the topographical turn in Cultural Studies coincides with a rupture within the topographical provenance of theoretical concepts. This observation is intended neither as a fundamental objection to the transfer of theory nor its use as a tool. Transfer as such has problematic effects only when concepts, stripped of their topographical genesis, return to their place of origin to be applied there as allegedly neutral historical and cultural implements, thereby disregarding their specific cultural implications.
Theories of space as cultural theories in Europe
The topographical turn describes a different constellation within the development of theory in Europe than in Anglo-American Cultural Studies. The latter focused less on theorizing topography than on reconceptualizing space and its meaning (and interpretation). Viewed against the so-called ‘return of space’ and the interest in geopolitical issues, the topographical turn in Europe emphasizes the word ‘graphic’. While space has occupied a pre-eminent role in the formulation of postulates in theories of knowledge and perception throughout the history of European philosophy (from Euclid to Kant), it became relevant (again) for cultural theory in the 20th century – not only in early 20th-century cultural theories of modernity, but also in the most recent culture-oriented reformulations of the humanities, which has brought about a renaissance of those cultural theories. Space is their common focus for philosophical (e.g. Cassirer), sociological (Simmel) and anthropological (Spengler) analysis of cultural configurations.
Compared with the concepts of space devised in the first half of the 20th century, the importance of space was subject to radical reformulation toward its end, namely as a signature of material and symbolic practices. Such rewritings include Michel Foucault’s Of Other Spaces/Heterotopias (1967), in which he analyses spatialized images of culture as constellations featuring inherent structural division.22 They also comprise Marc Augé’s Non-Lieux (1992), which develops the notions of ‘culture as text’ and of ‘the localized society,’ and criticizes more recent culturalism for its implicit pursuit of the ethnological model of spaces conceived in anthropological terms, where a society is equated with its localizable, homogeneous culture.Reference Augé23 But principally, such reconceptions include Michel de Certeau’s above-mentioned Arts de Faire. De Certeau considers space no longer to be what occasions events and their narration, but rather a sort of text in itself whose signs or traces necessitate semiotic, grammatological, or archaeological decoding. The graphic turn that occurred within the discourse on space becomes plainly evident in the stark contrast between deconstructive and postmodern topographies on the one hand, and a landmark study of the cultural history of European space on the other.
In his epoch-making historiographic account of the Mediterranean, Fernand Braudel assigned himself the task ‘to depict the relations between history and space’.Reference Braudel24 Originally published in 1949, and reprinted in a heavily revised version in 1966, Braudel conceived and developed La Méditerannée in the 1920s within the larger endeavour – not merely of the Annales School – of introducing cultural and socio-historical perspectives into historiography. His study, however, is less a history of space than an attempt to infer social phenomena and historical events from the seemingly natural circumstances of a given space. Each of its three volumes corresponds to one level of time, distinguished in terms of their distinct rhythms: first, ‘quasi-motionless history’, also referred to as ‘the longest duration [la plus longue durée]’, which concerns geographical circumstances; secondly, the history of ‘slow rhythms,’ also known as ‘the social history […] of groups and groupings’, which musters infrastructural and economic data; and thirdly, ‘the restless, undulating surface’ of the history of incidents and events, which primarily constitutes the history of wars and warfare (Ref. Reference Braudel24, p. 13).
Conceived thus, time and space constitute a continuum in which time increases to the extent that space recedes.25 In Braudel’s history of the Mediterranean, time appears to grow out of space. Its motto would then read: in the beginning was space. For him, space engenders anthropological regularities and rules, which he derives from a typology of various landscapes – mountains, elevated and alluvial plains, and others – that together form the ‘entire cartography’ of the Mediterranean. Based thereon, Braudel homogenizes this otherwise heterogeneous space, first through reiterating its common climate and transport routes, and secondly through average calculation. The second volume discusses the development of transport systems, administration, and postal and monetary systems as a struggle against space. Braudel dubs space ‘enemy number one’, since its inertia stifles social and cultural activity (Ref. Reference Braudel24, p. 326). Whereas his detailed account of the circulation of information and money is candidly entitled ‘Economies: The Measure of the Century’, increasing homogenization and modelling reduce all nuances to a common level of mediocrity. Phrased differently, Braudel’s calculation of averages follows the logic of economics, and transforms heterogeneous spaces into a single, unified space – ‘Europe’. Strikingly, ‘Europe’ appears precisely at the transition from heterogeneous spaces (plural) to homogeneous space (singular) and designates an ideal entity, but one whose relationship with the space occupied by the Mediterranean is strained (Ref. Reference Braudel24, p. 172).
The introduction of the notion of culture is also linked to the time–space continuum that structures the entire narrative. ‘Culture’ is demarcated from ‘society’ following the rhythm model: culture is constant and persistent, slow and durable. Braudel cites the adherence of culture to space, and religion as what drives culture, to account for these characteristics. Braudel’s delimitation can be summarized thus: society equals culture minus religion and ‘down-to-earthness’. The notion of the ‘Occident’ also appears in this connection, notably in its well-established opposition to the ‘Orient’. The vanishing point of the second volume of Braudel’s Mediterranean trilogy is thus the victory of the Occident in the guise of the Reconquista’s reconstitution of Europe. He argues, furthermore, that Europe could not come into its own before the Baroque period, which Braudel hails as the epitome of Christian Mediterranean culture. Thus, Braudel proposes a new foundation myth of Europe that is exactly the reverse of the ancient legend of a Europa abducted from another continent. Now, it is Europa herself who conquers the Iberian Peninsula to celebrate her victory in the guise of a unified Christian culture. Braudel’s account thus depicts history as a process of ongoing standardization, encompassing climate, traffic routes, the word ‘Europe’ as a common designator, and ultimately the victory of Christianity.
Braudel’s contemporaries shared his interest in the cultural-historical significance of space, although its role in their theories of culture assumed a wide array of forms. For instance, Carl Schmitt’s self-acclaimed ‘deliberations on the history of the world’, Land und Meer. Eine weltgeschichtliche Betrachtung (1942) (Leipzig: Reclam), recounts the history of Europe as a struggle between ‘the sea and the land’, playing off territorial beings or ‘those who tread on land [Landtreter]’ against ‘those who churn the sea to foam [Seeschäumer]’. Such binary topographies were prised open in contemporary theories of culture through accommodating space within a triad comprising space, time, and number. One case in point here is Oswald Spengler’s Untergang des Abendlandes (1918 and 1922),26 which starts out with numerical data. Another, albeit strikingly different example is Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (1923–1929),Reference Cassirer27 which reformulates the philosophical notions of space in light of the epistemology of physics and mathematics gaining ground at the time. Sociological and political-science perspectives were also employed to prise open the prevailing homogeneous cultural models of space. Such work includes Georg Simmel’s analysis of the ‘language of space’ and the hallmarks of spatial form (such as exclusiveness, delimitation, specification, proximity and distance, and movement), which are relevant for the various modes of constituting communities and are being investigated with regard to particular configurations of space.28 Simmel’s philosophy of space attaches as much importance to the interstice, that is, the space between human individuals, as Hannah Arendt later attributed to the notion of the political: ‘The human being is apolitical. Politics comes into existence in the space in-between human beings, and thus by all means outside the human being.’ She adds: ‘Politics concerns the being together and conjoining of differences. Human beings organise themselves politically in accordance with certain essential similarities within an absolute chaos of […] differences.’29 Insofar as European philosophy identified the interstice as the site where the social and political are constituted, it is less well-suited to occupy a programmatic role in the politics of theory, which, as observed, it assumes in Cultural Studies.
Philosophy and techné of topographical knowledge
In the history of European philosophy, however, space is intimately involved in another tradition of knowledge, based on cultural technology. This is because deliberations on the relationship between space and number evidently appear to have preceded those on time and space. Or at least this is how Walter Burkert discusses the conceptual genesis of three-dimensional space in the works of Plato, Aristotle, and Euclid in his observations on ‘Constructions of space and spatial categories in ancient Greek thought’. Burkert, for instance, explains that within Aristotle’s system of inferential logic, numbers are first derived or ‘conceived’ from the principles (archaí) of ‘unity’ and ‘indeterminate twoness’, and subsequently ‘produce the dimensions of space through determining the indeterminate’. Thus, the number two produces the line, the number three the area or plane, and the four the body. Burkert concludes that ‘the number four brings together perception and the physical world’. Thereupon, Aristotle conceives ‘a model of the world as a figure in space, that is, a form defined in stereometric terms’.30 Aristotle’s account also explains the discovery of the sphericity of the world and the ensuing conflicts between physical (Plato’s spherical cosmos) and geometric space (Euclidian geometry). It amounts first to the claim that techné precedes knowing, and secondly that spatial thinking, so prevalent in European philosophy, necessarily arises from the intuition of space. The lack of a history of space, which Burkert laments at the end of his essay, still holds true, even if various scholars have since outlined such an undertaking. Among these are Margaret Wertheim, whose Pearly Gates of Cyberspace. A History of Space from Dante to the Internet (1999) (New York: Norton), interprets the virtual space constituting cyberspace as a techno-religious construction that has taken the place once occupied by the Christian firmament in The Divine Comedy. The great arc spanning the two endpoints of Wertheim’s account of European ‘longue durée’ conceptions of space comprises the central perspective, ‘the cosmological revolution of perspectivist painting’, Newton, Descartes, Kant, and, finally, Einstein’s theory of relativity.
Without claiming to furnish any comprehensive historiography of space, Franco Farinelli frames the central perspective somewhat differently. His succinct contribution to a collection of essays on spatial thinking bears the subtitle ‘A Critique of Cartographic Reason’. Farinelli’s account holds out the promise of a hugely extensive research project, and opens up far-reaching perspectives for close collaboration between philosophy and technologies of space. He discusses the significance of the rediscovery of Ptolemy’s Geographia in the 15th century both for the renewal of cartography and topography and the development of a linear central perspective in the Renaissance – specifically with regard to the emergence of the notion of projection. Farinelli here refers to Francis Aguilon’s 1613 treatise on optics: ‘Projectio est rei solidae in planum transcriptio,’ that is, projection is the transposition of solids onto a flat surface.31 Based on this concept of projection, Farinelli establishes interesting correspondences between Ptolemy and central perspective on the one hand, and between the latter and philosophy on the other:
On balance, we can easily invert Gerling’s apodictic statement ‘geography is not ontology’ to read thus: geography is genuine ontology. While this eludes geographers, not so artists, who have transposed Ptolemaic projection into perspective. That is, the distinction did strike one geographer, Immanuel Kant, who thus ceases to be a geographer and becomes a philosopher.32
Farinelli reads Kant’s epistemology in the light of the Ptolemaic transposition of a terrestrial globe onto a plane, observing that ‘Kant shifted from empirical geography to one based on reason or, as he phrased it, a geography of “the dark realms of the human mind”’. Against this background, Farinelli makes reference to the numerous cartographic and landscape topoi running through Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. While he does not necessarily affirm Kant’s a priori axiom of ‘pure intuition that I entitle space [reine Anschauuung, welche den Namen Raum führet]’, Farinelli nevertheless analyses it as a specific procedure of intuition that corresponds to the technique of projection. In doing so, he cites Kant’s description of the use of transcendental ideas:
to direct reason toward a certain goal, in view of which the directional lines of all his rules converge in one point, which, whether it be merely an idea (focus imaginarius), that is, a point from which the concepts of understanding do not in actual fact proceed, as it lies entirely outside the range of possible experience, nevertheless serves to afford them the greatest unity along with the greatest expansion.33
At this juncture, Farinelli asks: ‘Is it too far-fetched to see in Kant’s focus imaginarius the Ptolemaic Point G and in the “lines of direction” the axes emanating from it?’ Following his reference to Kant’s explanation that the ‘systematic entity (as a mere idea) is solely a projected entity’, Farinelli posits the following thesis in response to his own question: ‘The Ptolemaic Point G is nothing other than pure reason, and Kant’s first Critique the cartographic description of projection’.34
Farinelli’s critique of cartographic reason thus asserts that philosophical intuition presupposes cartographic technique.35 He thus delineates perspectives for a cartographic history of European knowledge beyond the opposition of metaphorical cartography and geography ‘proper’. Farinelli is concerned neither with inferring (European) history from space nor furnishing a history of European concepts of space. He neither posits Europe as a single, unified territory, whose boundaries delimit cultural-historical reconstruction, nor does he foreground the topography of theoretical figures. Instead, he offers guidance for investigating the significance of topography and cartography as cultural technologies serving the constitution of those cultures that have asserted themselves in Europe during its history.
On the evidence of their divergent approaches to conceiving and symbolizing space, the differences between Cultural Studies and Kulturwissenschaften do not amount simply to an opposition between politicizing and historicizing. Crucially, we need to heed the specific implications – in terms of the histories of theory and cultural technology – of figures that often seem to bear the same name.
Sigrid Weigel is Professor for Literary Studies at the Technical University of Berlin (TU), and director of the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung (ZfL) in Berlin. She has published widely on various aspects of modern European literature and culture, as well as on the relationship between science and literature and the cultural history of science in general. One of her current research projects is the investigation of the topography of multiple cultures in Europe. Her most recent publications include: Walter Benjamin. Das Heilige, die Kreatur und die Bilder (Frankfurt M. 2008); Märtyrer-Portraits. Von Opfertod, Blutzeugen und heiligen Kriegern (Ed., Paderborn, 2007); Genea-Logik. Generation, Tradition und Evolution zwischen Kultur- und Naturwissenschaften (München, 2006); ‘Reading the City: Between Memory-image and Distorted Topography. Ingeborg Bachmann’s Essays on Rome (1955) and Berlin (1964),’ in: S. Spier (Ed.) (2002) Urban Visions (Liverpool).
