To establish the precedence of the outside, the bare fact of the first circumnavigations of the earth by Magellan and del Cano (1519–22) and by Francis Drake (1577–80) was not sufficient in itself. These two early deeds of nautical heroism nonetheless deserve a place in the history of terrestrial globalization, for their actors, in deciding to sail westwards, carried out a change of direction of world-historical significance with an inexhaustible wealth of spiritual meanings. Both Magellan and Drake were following the intuitions of Columbus, for whom the idea of a western route to India had become a prophetic obsession. And although, even after his fourth voyage (1502–4), Columbus could still not be convinced of his error in believing he had found the sea route to India – while on the Central American islands, he believed in all seriousness that he was only ten days’ sail from the Ganges, and that the inhabitants of the Caribbean were subjects of the Indian ‘Grand Khan’ – the tendency of the time was on his side. In opting for the western course, he had set in motion the emancipation of the ‘Occident’ from its immemorial solar-mythological orientation towards the East; indeed, with the discovery of a western continent, he had succeeded in denying the mythical-metaphysical priority of the Orient. Since then, we have no longer been returning to the ‘source’ or the point of sunrise, but rather moving progressively with the sun without homesickness. Rosenstock-Huessy rightly noted: ‘The ocean crossed by Christopher Columbus turned the Occident into Europe.’1 Whatever may have happened since then in the name of globalization or universal earth documentation, it was now entirely guided by the Atlantic tendency.
After the Portuguese seafarers from the mid-fifteenth century on had broken through the magical inhibitions obstructing the westward gaze with the Pillars of Hercules, Columbus's voyage gave the final signal for the ‘disorientation’ of European interests. Only this ‘revolutionary’ de-Easting could bring about the emergence of the neo-Indian dual continent that would be called ‘America’. It alone is the reason why for half a millennium, the cultural and topological meaning of globalization has always also meant ‘Westing’ and Westernization.2 The inevitability of this was pinpointed by Hermann Schmitz, initiator of the New Phenomenology, with welcome conciseness in the space-philosophical expositions of his System of Philosophy. Regarding Columbus, he writes:
In the West he discovered America for humanity, and thus space as locational space [Ortsraum]. This deliberately exaggerated formulation is intended to mean that the success of Columbus – and later the circumnavigator Magellan as the executor of his initiative – on the western route forced a shock-like change in the human notion of space that, in my opinion, marks the entrance into the specifically modern mode of consciousness more profoundly than any other transition.3
The westward turn induced the geometricization of European behaviour in a globalized locational space. Even the most summary description of the still widely unexplored zones of the earth must therefore follow a new methodological ideal from the outset: an even analysis of all points on the planet's surface in terms of their accessibility for European (which initially meant Iberian) methods, interests and measures – even if the actual access often took place only centuries later, or never. Even the famous white spots on maps marked as terrae incognitae acted as points that would have to be made known in future. They were the attractors of cognitive sadism, which took the quiet form of research. The words printed above the supposedly enormous Australian continent on some influential sixteenth-century world maps applied to all of these: Terra australis nuper inventa nondum cognita – recently discovered, not yet explored, but already marked as a space for future examination and utilization. The spirit of the not-yet speaks up, for the time being, as a matter among geographers. The Modern Age is the nondum age – the time of a promising becoming, emancipated as much from the stasis of eternity as from the circling time of myth.
The historical nub of Columbus's voyage lies in its sweeping effects on modern location-spatial movements. The West, formerly understood as a point on the compass and a wind direction, but even more as the zone of sunset (and hence of death for the ancient Egyptians) – a thoroughly direction-spatially defined factor – was assigned the civilization-historically far-reaching role of assisting the breakthrough of the location-spatial and geometrical imagining of the earth, and of space as such. The westward departures marked the start of movements that would one day culminate in indifferent traffic in all directions. Whether it is the Columbus expedition of 1492 or the penetration of the North American continent in the nineteenth century, the two greatest enactments of the imperative ‘Westwards!’ stimulated a spatial opening up that would later lead to the regular back-and-forth traffic between any given points in the explored zones. What the twentieth century would, with one of its most dulled-down terms, call ‘circulation’ (in the sense of traffic) only became possible through the triumph of location-spatial thought. For the routine mastery of the symmetry of outward and return journeys that is constitutive for the modern concept of traffic can only be established in a generalized locational space that gathers together points of equal value in a field to form timetables and images of routes. It is no coincidence that one of the most important power systems of the nineteenth century, the railway engines, were given the name ‘locomotives’ – locationally mobile units – for their introduction actually marks an exceptional stage in the evening-out of the locational space. The technicians of the nineteenth century knew that overcoming space through steam locomotion was closely connected to the ‘evaporation of space’ through electric telegraphy, whose wires usually followed railway lines.4
The precondition for what we call world traffic is that the discovery of marine conditions and terrain in geographical and hydrographical terms can be considered complete. Authentic traffic can only come about with a network that makes a given zone accessible, whether as terra cognita or mare cognitum, for routine crossings. As the epitome of traversal practices, traffic constitutes the second, routinized phrase of the process that had begun as the adventure history of global discoveries by the Europeans.