If research is the organized working-away of concealment, then no process in the history of the expansions of human knowledge fulfils this definition more dramatically or fully than the globalization of the earth via discovery between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The cultural philosopher Hans Freyer, who was temporarily attracted to the political far right but later held more sedate educated-conservative views, was not entirely mistaken when he wrote of this crude adventure: ‘Whether the technology with which people set off was primitive or modern, adequate or inadequate, is the wrong question to ask. All technology is the arming of a will to the point at which it can strike out directly.’1 The technological aspect in the mode of the early voyages of discovery comes to light most clearly when one examines how these enterprises rid themselves of the mission to create images of the traversed space. Even on the earliest expeditions, the captains and the scientists, artists, writers and astronomers on board had no doubts that it was their mission to collect and report conclusive evidence of their finds – in the form not only of commodities, samples and booty, but also of documents, maps and contracts. Crossing foreign waters can only be considered a secure achievement from the moment when a sighting is accompanied by an exploration, an observation by a record, and an appropriation by the creation of a map. The discovery of an unknown quantity – a continent, an island, a people, a plant, an animal, a bay, a sea current – presupposes the availability of the means to repeat the first encounter. What has been discovered, then, must never fall back into concealment, the antecedent Lethe, if it is to become the secure property of the lord of knowledge. To understand the phenomenon of discovery, then, it is indispensable to show the means of acquisition which guarantee that the cover concealing what was previously hidden is removed once and for all. Accordingly, whenever Europeans of the Renaissance spoke of discovery – découverte, descumbrimiento, Entdeckung – they meant episodes of finding and the things found, but above all the means of making them known and keeping them.
For the great majority of modern discoveries in the open terrestrial space, it was merely spatial distance that had acted as the concealing cover. The conquest of distance through the new means of transportation and the establishment of cross-oceanic traffic connections created the necessary conditions for a lifting of the ‘cover’ with lasting consequences. It is no language-historical coincidence that, until the sixteenth century, the word ‘discover’ meant nothing other than removing the covering of an object, that is to say an exposure of the known, and only later came to denote the finding of something unknown. The mediating factor between the two is traffic, which exposes the distant and is capable of taking the covering off the unfamiliar. From this perspective, one can say that the essence of this discovering traffic is the de-distancing of the world. Globalization here means nothing other than having access to the technological means for eliminating distance.
Where the successes of such reaching accumulate, the undiscovered can itself become a scarce resource. While barely half the globe was known to Europeans in its outlines in 1600, four fifths had already been explored by 1800. One of the atmospheric effects of enlightenment at the end of the twentieth century is that the earth's reserves of secrets were considered exhaustible; thus Columbus's belief that the navigable planet was ‘small’ attained its pragmatic goal. While the discovered world initially seemed to take on immeasurable proportions, the end of the age saw it shrink to a small ball, to a single point.
Discovery aims for acquisition: this gave cartography its world-historical function. Maps are the universal instrument for securing what has been discovered, in so far as it is meant to be recorded ‘on the globe’ and given as a secure find. For an entire age, two-dimensional maps of land and sea – together with the globe – provided the most important tool for localizing those points in the locational space of the earth from which the shroud of concealment had been lifted. The rise of the map at the expense of the globe is an indication that the acquisition of data soon extended to the most minute details, even for the furthest reaches.
While the globes – the main media of the Columbian age – later served ever predominantly summary and representative, and ultimately decorative functions, the increasingly precise maps took on ever greater operative significance. They alone could meet the demands of land description in detail, occasionally functioning as political land registers in the process. The new atlases brought about map collections revealing all countries and continents on interesting scales. (Since the introduction of the school subject ‘geography’ in the late nineteenth century, European schoolchildren were brought up to look at maps that had been presented to the princes and ministers a hundred years earlier by their returning conqueror-geographers like secret diplomatic dispatches and geopolitical gospels.) The general tendency is characterized especially by the creation of the planispheric world map – that depiction of the earth which reproduced the orb as a surface, whether in the form of the early heart-shaped maps, in the rolled-out representation of all continents and oceans (as often seen today in the backdrops of news studios), or in the classic double hemisphere, with the more land-filled Ptolemaic Old World in the right half, and the water-dominated American-Pacific New World in the left.
The irresistible pull towards the map repeats the process of conquering the world, highlighted by Heidegger, in the depictive media of globalization as an image. When the planispheric world maps push away the globe, when even the name Atlas no longer stands for the orb-bearer, only a bound book of maps – a transposition brought about by the most momentous map collection of the Modern Age: Gerardi Mercatoris Atlas sive cosmographicae mediationes de fabrica mundi et fabricati figura, Amsterdam 1608/16092 – the two-dimensional medium triumphs over the three-dimensional, and ipso facto the image over the body. Semanticists of the twentieth century would, therefore, have good reason to remind their contemporaries that the map is not the land – this warning anticipates the ‘return of space’ of which the history-weary thought of the closing twentieth century began to speak; it was for similar reasons that, at the start of the twenty-first, the suppressed arts of map-reading and geopolitical calculus can be recommended for rediscovery.3 In both name and substance, the planispheres – literally meaning ‘flat orbs’ – sought to erase the memory of the dimension not mastered by the imagination: the third dimension, namely spatial depth. What art history has to say about the problem of perspective in Renaissance painting barely scratches the surface of the war for control of the third dimension. Where people succeeded in committing spheres to paper and simulating spatial depth on canvases, the conquest of the world as picture opened up infinite new possibilities. Imperialism is applied planimetry: the art of reproducing orbs as surfaces and worlds as charts. The master determines the scale; sovereignty belongs to the one who decides on flattening. Only that which can successfully be stripped of one dimension can be conquered.
The land acquisition enabled by seafaring and cartography, then, preceded the genesis of the world system. Carl Schmitt, who enjoyed presenting himself as the last legitimist of European power in the world, did not hesitate in his study The Nomos of the Earth to claim that European expansion was only allowed to invoke the legal titles provided by discovery. The fiction of ‘finder's rights’ was based on this, as was that of a ‘communication right’ that went beyond mere visiting rights (the ius communicationis defended by Francisco de Vitoria in his famous relectio On the Indians). Only as discoverers and finders of foreign arts and cultures, he argued, had the Europeans become able to be the legitimate masters over the majority of the world; only their willingness to be masters trained them to take on the responsibility that fell to them from their superior devotion to the open world. The responsibility of discoverers, according to Schmitt, manifests itself first of all in the duty to reclaim the new territories for the European masters, usually royal clients, with formal gestures. The legal ceremonies of these claims included, beside the erection of crosses, stone coats of arms, padrãos, banners and dynastic emblems, the mapping and naming of the lands.4 In the European understanding, these could de jure only come under the dominion of their new lords once they had become localized, recorded, demarcated and named entities.
The coincidence of sighting, landing, appropriation, naming, mapping and certification is what constitutes the complete, legally consequential act of a discovery.5 This, according to Schmitt, is followed by the real subjection of a country to the legal jurisdiction of the discoverer-occupier. He gives the discovered the fruits of their discoveredness, namely the privilege of being protected by this master and no other – a prerogative that simultaneously covers the risks of exploitation by the distant sovereign.
As a ‘finding’ of seemingly or genuinely unclaimed objects that is relevant to ownership rights, discovery could never have been consolidated into a particular mode of appropriation if motifs from nautical natural law had not also influenced it. The venerable equation of the catch and the find declared – through the transference of an old habitus – the discoverers of new lands fishermen of a sort, whose claim to rightful ownership of their prey could not so easily be contested. In his great whaling novel, Melville reminds the reader of the difference between ‘fast-fish’ and ‘loose-fish’, which was supposedly an iron rule for the hunters on the Modern Age seas: a fast-fish belonged to the party ‘fast to it’ (when connected with an occupied ship or boat), while a loose-fish was considered ‘fair game for anybody who [could] soonest catch it’. Looting on land, as Melville noted, was subject to the same distinction:
What was America in 1492 but a Loose-Fish, in which Columbus struck the Spanish standard by way of waifing it for his royal master and mistress? What was Poland to the Czar? What Greece to the Turk? What India to England? What at last will Mexico be to the United States? All Loose-Fish. What are the Rights of Man and the Liberties of the World but Loose-Fish? […] What is the great globe itself but a Loose-Fish?6
It is unmistakably clear that Schmitt, a man as legally sensitive as he was morally thick-skinned, modelled his theorem of the legitimacy of European dominion through legal titles from discoveries on the Columbian mission described above, where the taker presents himself as the bringer of the more precious goods. While Columbus saw himself as the man who brought Christ's salvation to the New World, the conquistadors defended by Schmitt probably considered themselves justified as conveyers of European legal and civilizatory accomplishments.
Such justificatory fantasies were not a product of late apologetics and post factum applications of legal unscrupulousness, however; they were interwoven with the events themselves from the start. In the fourth canto of his epic of world-taking, The Lusiads, the poet Luis de Camões has the Indus and the Ganges appear to the Portuguese king Manuel in a dream, in the guise of wise old men who urge him to subjugate the people of India – whereupon the epic's king decides to prepare a fleet for the Indian voyage under the command of Vasco da Gama. Literature of the Modern Age is poetry of success.7 It is no coincidence that Manuel I, known as ‘the Fortunate’, would later include the globe in his coat of arms – a pictorial image that is being taken up once more today by countless businesses in their logos and advertising. In Manuel's century, this was a privilege afforded only to one man after him: Sebastian del Cano, who brought the Victoria back to Spain after Magellan's death, thus completing the circumnavigation, and was rewarded with the right to wear the globe in his insignia, accompanied by the motto primus me circumdedisti8 and a crown land, the royal Portuguese colony of Brazil, whose flag features Manuel's sphere to this day.
The fact that the association of globe-viewing and conquest had already become a metaphor-spawning fixed idea among European poets shortly thereafter is illustrated by some lines from Shakespeare's early dramatic poem ‘The Rape of Lucrece’ (1594), in which the rapist Sextus Tarquinius views the uncovered body of his sleeping victim:
Her breasts, like ivory globes circled with blue
A pair of maiden worlds unconquered …
These worlds in Tarquin new ambition bred.
It would seem that in the Modern Age's organization of fantasies, it is already sufficient for an object to appear round, desirable and asleep in order to become describable as a conquerable ‘world’.
But just as the national Portuguese epic provided the belated heroic justification for the factual conquest by declaring the expansionist Iberian people chosen from among the less worthy Christian peoples,9 the recorded land and sea maps served in the occupation as prosaic legal means and notarial files that certified the new conditions of ownership and dominion with a degree of formality. Cuius carta, eius regio.10 Whoever draws the map behaves as if they were culturally, historically, legally and politically in the right.
One of the hallmarks of European expansion was always the asymmetry between the discoverers and the inhabitants of found lands. Overseas territories were considered ownerless things as long as the discoverer-occupiers felt unhindered and unchallenged in the mapping of new areas, be they inhabited or uninhabited. Usually the inhabitants of distant lands were viewed not as their owners, but as part of the colonial lost property – its anthropic fauna, as it were, which seemed available for hunting and harvesting (though this, admittedly, also tended to apply to the vast majority of people inhabiting European territories in the feudal age). The so-called primitives initially had no concrete idea of what it meant that Europeans wanted to gain a concrete idea of them and their territories. Where the discoverers became aware of their own technological and mental superiority in their encounters with native peoples – which was slightly less often the case in Asian and Islamic realms – they generally concluded that this entitled them to take the land and subject it to the rule of European sovereigns. Even in retrospect, Carl Schmitt viewed these fateful and violence-laden events with unreserved affirmation:
Thus, it is completely false to claim that, just as the Spaniards had discovered the Aztecs and the Incas, so the latter could have discovered Europe. The Indians lacked the scientific power of Christian-European rationality. It is a ludicrous anachronism to suggest that they could have made cartographical surveys of Europe as accurate as those Europeans made of America. The intellectual advantage was entirely on the European side, so much so that the New World simply could be ‘taken’ […].11
Discoveries were made without prior permission of the discovered. Thus, legal title to discoveries lay in a higher legitimacy. They could be made only by peoples intellectually and historically advanced enough to apprehend the discovered by superior knowledge and consciousness. To paraphrase one of Bruno Bauer's Hegelian aphorisms: a discoverer is one who knows his prey better than the prey knows himself, and is able to subjugate him by means of superior education and knowledge.12
This means that the maps – especially in the early history of discovery – directly documented claims to civilizatory sovereignty. ‘A scientific cartographical survey was a true legal title to a terra incognita.’13 One is inclined to note that it is the map sovereign who decides on a discovered world's state of emergency – which applies when the finder gives a discovered and charted land a new name along with a new master.
It would be of immeasurable epistemological value for the theory of terrestrial globalization if a detailed history of geographical naming practices during the last five hundred years were available. It would not only mirror the primal scenes of discovery and conquest, as well as the struggles between rival factions of discoverers and conquerors; it could also explain how, in the world history of names, the semantic side of a world de-distancing carried out seemingly instinctively by Europeans came about. Only a few cultural regions proved able to keep their proper names despite the discoverers’ efforts; where this succeeded, it points to the resistance of sufficiently powerful empires to infiltration from without. Overall, the Europeans managed to catch the largest part of the earth's surface in their naming nets like a swarm of anonymous lost property and to project their lexica into the open world. The European discoverers unrolled The Great Map of Mankind – this resonant phrase goes back to Edmund Burke – and labelled it according to their naming moods. The christening of seas, currents, rivers, passages, capes, coves and shallows, of islands and archipelagos, and of coasts, mountain ranges, plains and countries grew into a century-long passion among European cartographers and their allies, the seafarers, merchants and missionaries. Wherever they appeared, a torrent of new names rained down on a world that had seemed mute until then.
Where there is naming, however, there can also be renaming. The small Bahaman island of Guanahaní, whose coast was the first in the New World to be visited by Columbus, on 12 October 1492, was given the name – a completely natural act on his premises – of San Salvador, a phrase that, in the ideology of the bringer, represented the highest value the conquerors could carry with them. The early discoverers barely ever went on land without believing, however vaguely, that the God of Europe was revealing Himself to these areas through their presence. In keeping with this habitus, any Buddhist conquerors would have had to give the island Guanahaní the name Gautama or Bodhisattva, while ‘The Prophet’ would have been a likely choice for Muslim invaders. After the English pirate John Watlin occupied the now deserted island in 1680 and made it his base, it retained the name ‘Watlin's Island’ until the start of the twentieth century, as if it had been the pirate's natural vocation to continue the legacy of the discoverer. The pirate's island was only given back its Columbian name in 1926 – not entirely without conflict, as five other Bahaman islands now also claimed to be the historical Guanahaní. The island known today as Rum Cay had been named Santa Maria de la Concepción by Columbus, establishing the Holy Family in the Caribbean. For a time, the later Haiti enjoyed the privilege of being dubbed Hispaniola, ‘Little Spain’. Similarly, thanks to Columbus, dozens of islands and coastal places assumed names from the Christian and dynastic nomenclature of Europe, though few of them had any historical longevity.
Admittedly the continent discovered by Columbus, that of Central and South America, was not named after him, as the rules of the globalization game would normally require, but after one of his rivals in the race for the exploration of the New World. Owing to a problematic naming hypothesis advanced by the German cartographer Marin Waldseemüller in 1507, the feminized (because continents, as vessels of life, must be feminine) first name of the merchant-discoverer Amerigo Vespucci came to be used for the continent, whose eastern coast the Florentine had, according to questionable sources, supposedly explored as far as the mouth of the Amazon in 1500. This naming success reflects the assertiveness of a roughly heart-shaped planispheric world map published by Waldseemüller – it is also (coming shortly after Contarini's 1506 map, produced as a copperplate) the oldest printed map made using the woodcut technique.14 Its establishment – there were supposedly 1,000 copies, of which only one has survived – was assisted by an accompanying text that had to be reprinted three times in the year of its publication alone. The year of Waldseemüller's map also saw the production of his globe, which suggests the same name for the southern half of the New World: America. One might ask whether the heart-like shape of the map – even if it is not developed as fully as in the later heart-shaped world maps of Oronce Finé and Giovanni Cimerlino15 – contributed decisively to the triumph of Waldseemüller's brilliant cosmographic feat; for what could seize the world-envisaging imagination more than the idea of depicting the surface of the terrestrial orb on a great heart? Waldseemüller's later abandonment of his Vespucci hypothesis could no longer impede the triumph of the name he (and Matthias Ringman) had advanced.16 On this foundation, the lands of the New World would develop into the United States of the Misnamed.
The Paris Globe Vert of 1515 seems to have been the first on which the name America was also applied to the northern part of the double continent. For a considerable time, however, more than a few rival labels for this part of the mundus novus were in circulation. As late as 1595, it appeared on a map by Michael Mercator as America sive Nova India; a Venetian map from 1511, on the other hand, calls the Columbian continent Terra sanctae crucis; on a Genoese world map from 1543, the entire North American continent remains nameless, while the southern part simply bears the aspecific marking Mundus Novus. For centuries, the North-east United States appeared as Nova Francia or Terra francisca, while the West and Midwest fell to their British name-givers as New Albion. The eastern coast of North America, which later became New England, was in fact temporarily termed Nova Belgia – meaning ‘New Netherlands’ – while Australia was known in the seventeenth century as Nova Hollandia.
These confusing traces of early name nationalism indicate the dawn of the age of civil imperialisms on the basis of capitalized nation-states. For an entire era, the prefix ‘new’ proved to be the most powerful module in the creation of names, matched only by the prefix ‘south’ during the race for Terra Australis, the hypothetical giant continent in the southern hemisphere. With the christening of ‘new’ cities (New Amsterdam), ‘new’ countries (New Helvetia), ‘south’ countries (South Georgia, New South Wales), saints’ islands (San Salvador), monarchic archipelagos (the Philippines) and conquistador countries (Bolivia, Rhodesia), Europeans enjoyed the prerogative of semantically cloning their own world and appropriating distant and foreign points through the lexical recurrence of the same.
Owing to the sum of its effects, the role of cartography in the actual progress of globalization cannot be overestimated. Maps and views of the globe not only served as the greatest lures of the first discovery periods; they were a manner of land register, documents of appropriative acts and archives of locating knowledge that accumulated over centuries, as well as route maps for seafaring. They also constitute the memory media of the Age of Discovery, containing countless names of nautical heroes and finders of foreign parts of the world – from the Straits of Magellan in southern Patagonia to Hudson Bay in northern Canada, from Tasmania in the South Pacific to Cape Chelyuskin in Siberia, from Stanley Falls in the Congo to the Ross Ice Shelf in the Antarctic. In parallel with the history of artists, which was taking shape during the same time, the history of discoverers had created its own hall of fame on the maps. Many of the later undertakings were already candidates in tournaments for the prize of an idealized status in charted history. Long before art and art history drew profit from the concept of the avant-garde, the vanguards of earth acquisition were moving on all fronts of future cartographical fame. They often set off from European ports as those who, if successful, would be the first to have reached some point or other.
Theatrical projects such as the ‘conquest’ of the North Pole and South Pole in particular were entirely guided by that mania of immortalization for which going down in the annals of discovery history was the highest distinction. Alpinism was also a variety of the vanguard hysteria that wanted no eminent point on the earth's surface to remain unconquered. For a long time, the hunt for the fame promised by the first visits to the poles would remain the purest form of this learned delirium. Contemporaries of aviation and space travel can no longer comprehend the popular fascination and scientific prestige that were still attached to the two polar projects around 1900. The earth's poles not only epitomized that which was distant, devoid of humans and difficult to reach; they were also the focus of the dream of an absolute centre or axial zero point, which was barely anything other than the continuation of the search for God in the geographical element.
In this context it is appropriate to remind ourselves that the era in which Sigmund Freud would make a name for himself as the ‘discoverer of the unconscious’ also saw the climax of the races for the earth's poles and the grand coalition of Europeans to extinguish the last white spots on the map of Africa. In its habitus of disclosure and foundation, the enterprise of psychoanalysis belongs to the age of empire builders such as Henry Morton Stanley and Cecil Rhodes (‘I would annex the planets if I could’). These were joined not long afterwards by Freud's age-mate, the young Hanoverian Carl Peters (briefly a Privatdozent in Leipzig), the later founder of German East Africa, whose philosophical treatise Willenswelt und Weltwille (1883) had conceptually realized the imperialization of the irrational ground of life in advance. Freud's ambition can only be explained in relation to the projects of those men. Had the unconscious not been present in vague outlines on the maps of the reflective spirit since the days of the young Schelling? Was it not natural to claim that its dark interior had finally become ripe for the ‘sickle of civilization’? If Freud, who was familiar with the works of the Africa-conquerors Stanley and Baker, chose the ‘true inner Africa’ in the psyche of every person on his path to fame, this choice of research area testified to an excellent imperial instinct.17
The Austro-Hungarian Arctic expedition of 1872–4, led by Karl Weyprecht and Julius von Payer, had achieved some succès d’estime with the discovery and naming of Franz Joseph Land and Prince Rudolf Island; as a whole, however, their results were only of frosty and provincial significance. Freud's self-assured scientism manifested itself in the fact that he claimed not an island on the icy outskirts, but rather a hot and centrally situated meta-continent for himself. His ingenuity exhibited itself impressively when, thanks to his topological maps, he succeeded in acquiring the unconscious de facto as Sigmund Freud Land. That he drew its borders with a ruler was in keeping with his time's ideal of rational territorial planning. He stoically took the white man's burden upon his shoulders when, summarizing his work, he stated: ‘Psychoanalysis is an instrument to enable the ego to achieve a progressive conquest of the id.’18 Even if the sad tropics of the id are meanwhile increasingly being managed by new occupiers, and unanalysable Calibans are even declaring their decolonization, the old Freudian landmarks remain clearly visible in many places. Whether they will be able to command more than touristic interest in the long run, however, is uncertain.