Human Body/North America Map, etc.

Here is the map I was talking about in class... pretty macabre. Here is a link to the website I found it on... http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/ Beware, however, this blog is addicting.

I wanted to add a few things that I was thinking about after class in terms of the connections Chris made between the telegraph and capitalism, as well as the shrinking of space and time in terms of whiteness. I mentioned a connection between the telegraph and Anderson's concept of print capitalism in Imagined Communities. Basically, his argument was that the printing press, specifically the newspaper in the New World was one of the fundamental tools for establishing a feeling of simultaneity across a wide expanse of space. So in terms of the Eastern Seaboard, newspapers would print not only local news, but also recent news to the north and south, and occasionally news from across the Atlantic. So someone living in Boston would be relatively up to date about what was going on in Charleston, allowing them to not only speculate on shipping, etc. but also giving a sense that the people who lived in Charleston were in the same community as the people living in Boston. This, among other things, gives rise to the nacent concept of the nation. As far as the telegraph is concerned, we mentioned that it simply speeds up the process. However, I think we might be able to say a little more about the concept of speed connecting time and space. In Italy during the 1930s saw the development of Futurism, an art movement which was extremely interested in the notion of speed and acceleration (they were a precursor to Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase" and cubism). In the 40s, however, this group became the main source of propoganda posters under Mussolini and were strong proponents of fascist ideals. Is there a connection between fascism and speed? Or between fascism and the breakdown of time and distance?
In another one of my classes this semester, we read an article by Kathleen Biddick on mapping, the astrolabe, travel literature and antisemitism in the late middle ages. One of Biddick's arguments is that medieval Christians thought about time typologically (a statement which is hard to disagree with). So for them the Old Testament and the Jews were prefigurations of the New Testament and Christianity, where Christ is both modeled on and supercedes what came before (in this case the Israelite prophets). You can see this in any medieval commentary on the Bible, where scenes from the New Testament are shown to be similar to and a fulfillment of scenes in the Old Testament. This may seem a topic far afield from our own class, but bear with me. In this Christian typological view, then, the Jews live in the past. Biddick talks about when the Victorines were translating the Hebrew Bible in Paris during the 1100s and 1200s they were in constant contact with Parisian rabbis... for the Victorines, consulting with these rabbis was like "placing a long distance call to the Old Testament." We might read this as a form of cosmopolitanism if we wanted to be optimists, but the truth is that these same Victorines were involved in associating the Jews with Gog and Magog in John's Revelation, a highly anti-semitic move which persisted well into the renaissance and beyond. In actuality what is going on with the Victorines is a move which places the Jews in the past as a superceded people, a move which denies them what Biddick calls "coevalness." So what ends up happening to the Jews of Europe is a result of this denial: either they must be exterminated, as happens in the widespread pogroms of the 1400s, or they must be converted and integrated into Christian society. They cannot remain a separate, coeval entity as that would imply that Christ did not supercede them.
I see the same thing going in the Whitman poem we read for today. When he talks about India he is always placing it not only in the distance which is about to be overcome, but also in a mythologized past. The people of India are not simultaneous with him, do not share anything with him, and it is only in the abolition of time and space, in the spiritual realm, that any sameness might occur. We see the same image of typology in the first stanza, where he talks about the connection with the past, "for what is the present, after all, but a growth out of the past?" India is tied to "the primitive fables" which Whitman likens to "ye facts of modern science," where science is equal to (but also later and therefore superceding) the myths of the "East." Perhaps the most telling lines are his encomium to the engineers and sailors who are taking the passage to India: "You, not for trade or transportation only, / But for God's sake..."
I don't think it is too far of a jump to start talking here about Western corporate interests in the East, and the rise of British capitalism vis a vis India, nor the "white man's burden" of civilising Africa by enslaving africans to work in the mines and teaching them about Christ. This all seems sort of part and parcel of the Victorian project. Whitman also rides roughshod over the history of the American railroad itself, built largely by the labor and brutal subjection of Chinese immigrants to California and other western states. No, for him the point is the bringing together of all points in space through technology,
The earth to be spann’d, connected by net-work,
The people to become brothers and sisters,
The races, neighbors, to marry and be given in marriage,
The oceans to be cross’d, the distant brought near,
The lands to be welded together.
Again, we might read this as Whitman being cosmopolitan, attempting to erase the differences between lands and peoples. But what is really being erased, and who are these people who will "become brothers and sisters"? Are they not already brothers and sisters? Must they be transformed, even eliminated? What is the true nature of the rapturous messianic immanence in this poem that we talked about in class? It is definitely an erasure of time and space in some kind of mystical union, but what else is being erased in this moment? It doesn't help his case that the figures he uses to talk about cultural encounter are Vasco de Gama and Columbus... two men who were not exactly friendly with the "natives."
In the same class in which we read Biddick we have been talking alot about universalism, and I think some of the language we have developed there might be useful here. Basically, we might define two kinds of universalism: 1. All people are fit into a single pre-existing category. In this situation, "others" must be transformed or eliminated in order to create the perfect unity of mankind. So for Christians, all people must become Christians and recognize universal truth. Or, in the case of our own world, all people must be converted to democracy and capitalism. But there is another way of thinking about universalism. 2. Categories themselves are "superceded" by a meta-category which allows local difference but a global identification, such as the fact that we are all humans. This seems utopian, and it is. The main problem with it is that efforts to usher in the second kind of universalism almost always fall back into the first kind. A good example is St. Paul, who argued that all people, men and women, Jew and Greek, could break bread together and coexist as children in the truth of a resurrected Christ, the event which for him changed history and remapped all social boundaries (I'm channeling Badiou here). Over time, however, and particularly with the election of Christianity as the Roman state religion, to be a Christian was once more a category of self and other... we are the Christians, the others need to be converted. The second problem with this form of universalism comes from Derrida: in defining a category of universal humankind, we necessarily exclude the non-human and create the "animot." It is in the very action of claiming universal human brotherhood that we dispossess either other humans or other forms of life in general.
For the telegraph and the railroad, I might point out that their developments are contemporary with the massacre and deportation of Native American populations, as well as the wholesale destruction of buffalo, passenger pigeon and other animal life we talked about in relation to Audubon and the hunting narratives. Like India in Whitman's poem, America's Indians were a symbol of the landscape's past, the people who prefigured and were superceded by the white settlers, and as such either had to be converted to European culture or destroyed. The native species of America also had to be superceded by European species.
Just as speed was connected to fascism and the extermination of European Jews during the 1940s with the Futurists, the acceleration of communication and travel in 19th century America is connected to the erasure of peoples. The Native Americans either had to be "brought up to speed" or die in the process.
All of this seems very much in line with second wave ecocriticism. But I think we may need first wave ecocriticism to solve the problem (if it can be solved at all). Maybe we need a meta-meta-category encompassing all life, the de-anthropomorphized view which acts as the fetish of all first wave ecocriticism, in order to step out of these typological circles of violence. And maybe this is only possible in the moments when we step outside of language, when we can see the landscape and everything outside of our heads not as trees and rocks and animals and other people (i.e. as concepts), but as something undefinable. Something perceptible, but not conceptual, not an object of knowledge or discourse. What the mystics might call union with the mind of God.