2001 MMLA
Globalization and the Image
S. A. Cohen
University of Virginia
Constellatory Modernism: Imperial Landmarks and Making the World One
Do not cite without permission of the author.
I want to begin by considering the image of global space offered by a
series of telegraph cable maps that appeared in the 1905 essay collection,
The Empire and the Century. [Cf.www.people.virginia.edu/~sac2n/peel] In
his contribution, "The Nerves of the Empire," George Peel champions
the success of the mid-century proliferation of British communications
technology and displays several maps illustrating the scope of Britain's
network of telegraph cables. These diagrams make up six of the seven maps
included in this hefty 900 page tome . Read alongside the other essays
in the volume, these maps visually chart the future of the empire with
the pure geometry of straight red lines. Drawing on his anatomic title,
Peel reminds his readers that the success of the empire depends on telegraph
cables which "annihilate time and space on behalf of [the nation],
[giving] unity to the disunion of her unfettered people, and substance
to her dream of an Imperial commonwealth."1 The image of the earth
from the implied heights of schematic representation reveals a newly discovered
sense of proximity among distant places which, Peel imagines, might just
be the harbinger of a new enlightenment under the sign of the British
empire.
In this paper I will sketch some of the cultural ramifications of these
images to argue that elements of the imperial project were under assault
from the very patterns of mastery represented by these cable maps. In
light of this crisis of imperial space, I offer a framework for analyzing
images emanating from the imperial metropolis and propose that the practical
politics of imperialism and the aesthetic practices of literary modernism
developed parallel, if opposing, solutions to address the images of global
space. For if the "enterprise of empire," as Edward Said has
famously asserted, "depends upon the idea of having an empire,"2
the image of the empire depicted in these telegraph maps contributed to
how the imperial periphery existed in space. But more importantly, here
I want to begin by teasing out the crisis that arises at the intersection
of the image of empire and the material practices of empire building to
suggest that the British empire slowly became a victim of its own spatial
success as much as its military and political failures.
Although George Peel's colorful maps of telegraph cables visually summarize
a century of imperial successes and decades of labor and diplomacy that
went into laying some 121,000 miles of cable, the skeletal image of empire
presented here is markedly different from the images that had dominated
imperialist geography for more than a century. These cable maps give a
new shape to the world, one less defined by swaths of imperial color than
by imagined trajectories through imperial circuits of trade. While the
familiar images of the "Imperial Federation Map of the World"
(1886) and the "Howard Vincent Map of the British Empire" (1886)
still dominated the popular British imaginary, the new topography of telegraph
maps was championed by imperialists for representing "the true nerves
of the Empire." These maps, in their schematic representation of
planetary space, stand out against the more familiar imperial "map-as-logo"-that
is, the "jigsaw effect" of coloring schemes of imperial dye
that Benedict Anderson rightly distinguishes for its "infinitely
reproduc[ablity]" and "instantly recogniz[ably]."3 This
jumble of intersecting lines, drawn with little concern for the actual
distance between places, produces an often barely recognizable constellation
of nodes throughout the empire.
By reducing the contours of continents to straight lines, oceans to short
gaps between cities, the telegraph map offers a graphical narration of
the more general shift in spatial perceptions that many critics contend
is one of the most enduring legacies of imperialist expansion. After all,
geography during the expansionist "age of empire" was in the
image business; as one historian suggests, geography "was promoted
largely to serve the interests of imperialism in its various aspects including
territorial acquisition, economic exploitation, militarism and the practice
of class and race domination."4 In "mak[ing] the world one,"
to borrow Said's well-known claim for the geographical and cultural implications
of empire, continental empires not only "integrated and fused things
within" their spheres of influence,5 they established routes, trajectories,
and networks for commerce and transport. Edward Soja's work highlights
the importance of imperialism's treatment of space in these terms: "Imperialism
. . . internationalized another circuit of capital, involved in finance,
money, and investment transactions, which more efficiently organized the
international economy for larger scale geographical transfers of value
than had ever before been possible."6 This new form of circulation
took place in and precipitated the production of what Henri Lefebvre calls
abstract space.7 Of course, this new global spatiality had a tremendous
influence on how individuals interacted with and perceived geographical
places. As one critic concisely put it: capital turns place into space.8
While the image of imperial totality was a rallying point for politicians
and statesmen, the spatial dynamic upon which these images rested, I want
to suggest, produced rather ambiguous results when it came to actual colonial
administration. Specifically, the resettlement of a growing urban population
on the colonial periphery was jeopardized by this global image. From the
1880s onward, the threat that a swelling working class would overwhelm
the ruling classes produced increasingly shrill calls for empire migration-from
Sir John Robert Seeley's prescription for the "superfluous population"
to Cecil Rhodes' fear of a "bloody civil war"9 to the pamphlets
of privately funded charity organizations like the East End Emigration
Fund and the Salvation Army. Such calls for the movement of a "surplus"
metropolitan population to colonial settlements and the propaganda of
colonial emigration was founded on a structure of feeling where specific
remote places flying the Union Jack promised the emotive possibilities
of place.
On the one hand, the totalizing optics of imperialism, what J. A. Hobson
called "the lust of the spectator" in his well-known discussion
of Jingoism, allowed for delighting in the shrinking of the globe and
the planetary image rendered by telegraph maps. After all, such a condition
underwrites the claims of empire migration enthusiasts who insisted that
a trip to the empire is no more difficult than a trip across the British
Isles. Yet on the other hand, such enthusiasm at the shrinking globe belied
the fact that trips to the colonies continued to be of the utmost importance.
In many respects, the cartographic pleasure gained by a new global image
was enjoyed at the expense of empire relocation which depended not only
on the promise of vast open spaces but the specific articulation of legible
identities ascribed to places within the empire. Quite simply, the success
of appeals to "Get Out!", as one empire migration advocate urged
his readers, depended on there being a place to get out to, a place that
would be attractive to a metropolitan audience at the center of the world
with the trophies of unprecedented imperial conquest exhibited just outside
their doors. As Raymond Williams put it in The Country and the City, "the
lands of the Empire were an idyllic retreat, an escape from debt or shame,
or an opportunity for making a fortune."10 The structure of feeling
evident in more than a century of colonial narratives depended on the
very basic fact of distance. In light of these new projections of global
space however, emigration enthusiasts found themselves in a difficult
position, yet not one beyond their powers to negotiate with their own
imaginative interventions.
If the difficulty of articulating the possibilities of a specific place
posed any obstacle to the empire migration enthusiast, then unreflective
movement offered at least an immediate solution. In the face of the "abolishment
of space and time," mobility became the driving force of imperial
geography during the period. As recent scholarship on the metropolitan
spaces of empire suggests, spectacles like Empire Day celebrations and
Imperial Exhibitions were successful precisely because they were seen
as "spaces in movement, shaped at least in part by the crowds that
pasted through them" and that the "rhetoric of ceremonial spaces,
and in the context of modernist urban planning in the imperial metropolis,
where the human traffic produced the meaning of these spaces and ultimately
feed imperial unity."11 The importance of human traffic did not end
with urban planning but was translated and reenacted on the global stage.
This is particularly evident in the work of H. J. Mackinder, the imperialist
geographer who in 1904 offered the memorable formula for Britain's global
supremacy where he asserts that understanding "the mobility of power"-from
roaming ancient tribes to rail and steam locomotion-would lend to a new
"geographical causation in universal history." 12
At the more mundane level of moving metropolitan populations to the colonies,
a similar logic is apparent in the rhetoric of William Booth, the founder
of the Salvation Army and preeminent empire migration enthusiast. In imagining
a constant flow of human traffic to the empire, Booth proclaims: "What
I think is required, and what I should like to see realized, would be
a bridge across the seas as it were, to some land of plenty over which
there should constantly be passing, under conditions as favourable as
the circumstances will allow, our surplus population, instead of its melancholy
gravitation, as at present, down to the filthy slums, hated workhouses,
the cruel casual wards, the hopeless prisons, and the like."13
Booth's image of a bridge, figurative as it was (though I should note
that Booth also worked on plans for a railroad from England to Australia
but gave up at the apparent insurmountable obstacle presented by the English
channel), demonstrates a particular sense of geographical space. Booth's
bridge is both a place and a form of mobility. Such a conception resonates
with Heidegger's insistence that a bridge is as much a trajectory and
condition of transit as it is a site in itself, one that can reinforce
specific locations: "the bridge does not first come to a locale to
stand in it; rather, a locale comes into existence only by virtue of the
bridge."14 By reading empire migration as a condition, practice and
location, the empire settlement bridge implies a certain place in the
experience of colonial traffic.
According to the voices behind the growing empire migration movement,
even the most destitute figure could no longer signify as merely a drain
on metropolitan resources and patience. This is evident in W. T. Snead's
essay inaugurating The Review of Reviews in 1890. Snead insists: "For
the ordinary common Englishman, country yokel, or child of the slums,
is the seed of the Empire. That red-haired hobbledhoy, smoking his short
pipe at the corner of Seven Dials, may two years hence be the red-coated
representative of the might and majesty of Britain in the midst of a myriad
of Africans or Asiatics. . . . No one is too insignificant to be overlooked."15
Snead effectively converts the everyday metropolitan loafer into a living
landmark to an imperial future, a figure who might one day be responsible
for illuminating a node on the imperial map with which we began.
Yet, as many imperialists at the turn of the century recognized, the danger
that the "seeds" of the empire would never germinate abroad
(or even worse, that they should wander out of the empire) was essentially
a problem of the global image. The difficulty becomes most apparent in
the metropolitan spectator's perception of empire, for whom maps figured
as narratives of imperial space and history. For example, one emigration
enthusiast encouraged his fellow "arm-chair" imperialists to
"get hold of the first map-the bigger the better-of any portion of
the Empire (it matters not which), and just pore over it. The sheet before
you will grow into an entrancing dream of seas and islands, of mountains
and lakes, of rivers and plains, of vast expanses, and of horizons limited
only by the visual powers of the imagination."16 Arguably, images
that featured networks cutting across abstract space were less promising
for such an exercise. The attempt to imagine the totality of empire, the
fantasy of open spaces, the imagined bridge to the colonies, the embracing
of what David Harvey called "time-space compression," all result
in complicating the fundamental tropes that had constituted and sustained
how the colonies had been imagined for two centuries. The itinerary, the
journey, the mission are all jeopardized by the projection of abstract
space, and all that remains, like city names on a telegraph map, are the
signifiers of places outside of lived experience.
While George Peel was drawing his telegraph maps, T. E. Hulme, the influential
modernist poet and thinker, was exploring a similar aesthetic of distance
in his notes towards a personal philosophy. Hulme surmises that "there
is a difficulty in finding a comprehensive scheme of the cosmos, because
there is none. The cosmos is only organised in parts; the rest is cinders."17
But the cindery chaos can only be ordered, Hulme imagines, "by drawing
squares over it" which at least allows for movement and location,
an activity he equates with the logic of a "sorting machine"
and the image of a "railway line in [the] desert." Such activities
cannot really offer coherence, Hulme insists, but they can facilitate
spatial understanding. Evincing the predicament of a global image, Hulme
turns to the imperial city from a distance asking, "Why is it that
London looks pretty at night?" His answer: "Because for the
general cindery chaos there is substituted a simple ordered arrangement
of a finite number of lights."18
The similarities between Peel's telegraph maps and Hulme's cityscape are
remarkable: both authors draw constellations to map diverse and complex
spaces. Yet in some ways it is not surprising that an ancient method of
rendering the incomprehensibility of the cosmos should be revived to represent
these complex spaces of modernity. I draw these two images into conversation
because the similarity of their responses to different representational
crises lends to a possible framework for understanding modernism's relationship
with empire. As Fredric Jameson has suggested, modernism's relationship
with imperialism is defined by the "representational dilemmas of
a new imperial world system." He continues to aver that the first
response to "this problem of a global space that is like the fourth
dimension somehow constitutively escapes you" is to "make a
map." 19 But unlike the cartographic impulse which Jameson rightly
asserts will be inadequate in its Lukácsian thrust toward totality,
the image of a constellation, I want to propose, gives rise to imaginative
possibilities unavailable in more conventional cartography or cognitive
mapping. As Michel de Certeau reminds us, maps are documents of barbarism
par excellence, enclosing the spatial practices and "eras[ing] the
itineraries" of their production. Effectively "coloniz[ing]
space," maps "collate on the same plane heterogeneous places,
some received from a tradition and others produced by observation."20
A constellation, however, highlights the very lack inherent in the representational
dilemma of mapping complex spaces and makes possible a variety of imaginative
interventions to fill the void.
In light of empire migration enthusiasts' dealings with the global space
that seemed beyond their grasp-infusing space with romance, constructing
imaginary bridges, and foregrounding movement-we should consider whether
or not the aesthetic practices of modernism produced a similar set of
responses to the new constellational mapping of the metropolis, responses
that might parallel the imaginative interventions of empire migration.
For a constellation is markedly different from map not only in its stark
and almost modernist rendering but in the ways it necessitates the infusion
of figurative, imaginative and even mythic qualities to flesh itself out
and make itself legible. But perhaps more importantly, a constellation
also figures to highlight location and position, something that is threatened
by a "sprawling imperial periphery." This hermeneutic is illustrated
later in Hulme's notes when he offers a closer look at London, giving
us a better appreciation for his earlier purchase on the city: "Only
in the fact of consciousness is there a unity in the world. Cf. Oxford
Street at 2 a.m. All mud, endless, except where bound together by the
spectator."
The framework of the constellation, I want to suggest, foregrounds both
the "pedestrian rhetoric," to borrow Certeau's term, and the
imaginary frontiers of the imperial spectator in the metropolis. Our challenge,
then, is to redirect our attention from the disjunction between metropole
and periphery to focus on the blurring and mutual mapping of these spatial
categories.
It is worth turning in conclusion to Walter Benjamin, not only for his
dedication to the difficult task of tracing interlaced images in their
global and local contexts, but for his remarks on the difficulty we all
face in understanding images and mapping our positions, a difficulty that
is amplified not attenuated by the roar of globalization and its images.
The city, Benjamin explains, is persistently masking and unmasking itself,
and the spectator faces the constant rivalry between the real and imagined
images of the city: "Yet one day the gate, the church that were the
boundary of a district become without warning its center. Now the city
turns into a labyrinth for the newcomer. Streets that he had located far
apart are yoked together by a corner like a pair of horses in a coachman's
fist. The whole exciting sequence of topographical dummies that deceives
him could only be shown by a film: the city is on its guard against him,
masks itself, flees, intrigues, lures him to wander its circles to the
point of exhaustion. . . .But in the end, maps and plans are victorious:
in bed at night, imagination juggles with real buildings, parks, and streets."21
Our challenge when approaching the image in the wake of globalization,
it would seem, is to exhaustively follow "topographical dummies"
to recognize how geographical abstractions enfold and enclose complex
spaces. While we probably can no longer share Benjamin's hope that a mass
cultural account of this experience would give us the clarity seek, as
critics and cultural historians we can be on our guard, and at least try
to see the images of empire and metropolitan spaces not only in dialectical
relation, not only connected by similar modes of apprehension by the spectator,
but we can also try to set these images into motion and revive the thrilling
terrain they delineate. Until we recognize the global image as moving
and shifting, as the product of real and imaginary relations, we are destined
to build our own "topographical dummies" from which we then
triangulate new positions only to find ourselves in an utterly unfamiliar
landscape.
Notes
1 George Peel, "Nerves of the Empire," in The Empire and the
Century: A Series of Essays on Imperial Problems and Possibilities (London:
John Murray, 1905), 287.
2 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1993),
11.
3 Benidict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 175.
4 B. Hudson quoted in Felix Driver, "Geography's Empire: Histories
of Geographical Knowledge," Environment and Planning D: Society and
Space 10 (1992), 27.
5 Said, Culture and Imperialism, 6.
6 Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical
Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 165.
7 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith,
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).
8 Roger Friedland, "Space, Place, and Modernity: The Geographical
Moment," Contemporary Sociology 21 (1992): 14.
9 J. R. Seeley, The Expansion of England [1883] (London: Macmillan,1921),
141; Rhodes quoted in Lenin Imperialism, 79.
10 Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,
1973), 281.
11 Felix Driver and David Gilbert, "Imperial Cities: Overlapping
Territories, Intertwined Histories," in Imperial Cities: Landscape,
Display and Identity, edited by Felix Driver and David Gilbert (Manchester:
Manchester Univ. Press, 1999), 8.
12 See H. J. Mackinder, "The Geographical Pivot of History,"
The Geographical Journal 23.4 (1904), 421-444.
13 William Booth, "Our Emigration Plans," in Proceedings of
the Royal Colonial Institute, Volume XXXVII [1905-1906] (London: The Royal
Colonial Institute, 1906), 145
14 Martin Heidegger, "Building Dwelling Thinking," in Basic
Writings (San Francisco: Harper, 1977), 356.
15 W. T. Snead, The Review of Reviews Vol. 1, issue 1. January 1890, 16.
16 Ernest Williams, The Imperial Heritage (New York: New Amsterdam Book
Company, 1898), 19-20.
17 Hulme, Selected Writings (London: Fyfield Books, 1998), 20.
18 Hulme, 21.
19 Jameson, "Modernism and Imperialism," in Nationalism, Colonialism,
and Literature (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1990), 51.
20 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven
Rendall (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1984), 121.
21 Walter Benjamin, "Moscow," in Reflections (New York: Schocken
Books, 1978), 99.