Environment, Space, Place

INTRODUCTION

Images of the earth, globe, world, and planet are so pervasive in contemporary media, culture, and advertising as to have sunk into the unobtrusive, largely unscrutinized backdrop to everyday life.² Skeletal graticules promote banks and haulage companies. Whole earth favicons emblazon browser tabs. Fragile planets figure on protest [End Page 1] banners. Spinning globes introduce newsroom broadcasts. Such visions have assumed a heightened significance in the current moment of planetary ecological derangement and afflicted geopowers, not despite their being so commonplace, but rather precisely because they are ostensibly trivial. From the unremarked thresholds of our attention, images of the earth mediate how societies imagine climate heating and other unfolding planetary upheavals precipitated by fossil capitalism. Endowed with these subtle capacities, they have been enrolled in support of various, often competing agendas and embody starkly divergent apprehensions of the “globe” at stake in global environmental change. Yet whether they cast the planet as a borderless commons or agglomeration of resources, pliant geode or elemental manifold, images of the earth have at least this much in common: that they take a stand on the character of terrestrial existence and beckon onlookers into entering specific relationships with earthly totality.

As Jennifer Wenzel has observed, a frequent maneuver in contemporary critical discourse is “to invoke the globe and global as the index of a hegemonic epistemology . . . against which suppressed or emergent utopian alternatives can be articulated.”³ Although the intention behind this move is to preserve diverse cultural visions of earth from being subsumed under prevailing constructions of globality, taking the hegemonic modern globe as a critical foil for various counter-imaginaries in this way risks flattening the complexities of dominant global images. Indeed, global visions are often construed as paradigms of objectification and estrangement, inspiring “an intoxicating sense of a total overview, global and dominating.”⁴ Estrangement and objectification are crucial to the story of how the earth has been represented in modernity, to be sure, and feature prominently in what follows. But my claim is that they are just part of the story. Modern cultures apprehend earthly space in ways that exceed critical tropes of the estranged total overview, which, though indispensable, neglect other dimensions of global spatialities.

If existing work on images of the earth tends to contrast a dominant global overview with marginalized alternative perspectives, this essay explores disjunctures within hegemonic Western traditions of global representation.⁵ I am referring to differences not of rhetoric, formal presentation, or overt political agenda, but of underlying, largely implicit [End Page 2] understandings of what global space fundamentally is. To show how dominant modes of representing the earth diverge at this basic, ontological level, I approach them in conjunction with ideas drawn from the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, the theoretical source for many critical accounts of dominant global visions. Indeed, in attempting to grasp how images of the earth configure human attitudes toward environments, commentators working across various disciplines and critical perspectives have found an irresistible point of reference in Heidegger’s searching reflections on planetary technicity and modern representationalism.⁶ The well-known essay “The Age of the World Picture” (1938) is especially resonant in this context, its very title implying that global representation, over and above all other phenomena of modern history, defines the age and so gives it its name. A number of scholars have taken up Heidegger’s description of the objectification of the world in this essay to claim that global representations encapsulate modern societies’ detachment from and domination over terrestrial environments.⁷ This is not to suggest that all writing on global images proceeds in a Heideggerian vein; far from it. Still, even where scholars of global visions do not invoke Heidegger explicitly, his thinking of modernity and the world picture often exerts an indirect influence through the anthropologist Tim Ingold’s much-cited essay “Globes and Spheres,” which, as Cory Austin Knudson persuasively argues, “rather straightforwardly ventriloquizes Heidegger’s anxieties” concerning humanity’s estrangement from the earth figured as a globe.⁸

My contribution to this discussion unfolds from a recognition that despite the clear resonances of Heidegger’s work with the theme of global representation, especially in “The Age of the World Picture,” the ways in which his philosophy actually bears upon images of the earth are more elusive and fraught than appearances might initially suggest. Several issues might be mentioned in this regard, but in this essay I am concerned with a problematic arising from how Heidegger’s thinking of modernity is to be interpreted. A number of commentaries on Heidegger assume that his later writings address a cohesive ontological condition—a singular modernity, as it were.⁹ In this secondary literature, Heidegger’s descriptions of various modern processes and phenomena are packaged together as belonging to this one determination of being, often defined in terms of “enframing” (the most common [End Page 3] English translation of Gestell, Heidegger’s term for the technological casting of being). Even some of Heidegger’s most perspicacious readers gloss over key complexities and disjunctures in what they see as his narrative of modernity-as-enframing, which Thomas Sheehan goes so far as to call it a “Solzhenitsyn-like jeremiad against modernity au large.”¹⁰

Eschewing this received grasp of Heidegger’s thinking of modernity in the singular, I take my bearings from revisionist readings of his later writings, which stress that for Heidegger modernity is marked by not one, but two determinations of being.¹¹ Rather than reducing the diverse phenomena of modern history to a single ontological disclosure, Heidegger actually traces an unfolding rift within modernity, whereby one, established casting of being is progressively overtaken by another. In the first of these ontologies, which Heidegger designates Machenschaft (machination), existence is disclosed in terms of self-encapsulated Cartesian subjects imposing their will on “makeable” objects, defined by their capacity to be reconstituted through external imposition. Although I go on to query Heidegger’s periodizations, his history of being describes how machination arose in the sixteenth century and remained dominant into the twentieth. He names the second ontology Gestell, which in this article I have chosen to translate as “enordering” for reasons set out later on. Within the horizon of enordering, the distinction between subject and object wanes. People, things, and environments show up instead as “standing reserve,” flexible and fungible resources that are endlessly switched and driven about to perpetuate and optimize technosocial systems. On my reading, Heidegger implies that this second ontology began taking hold in the decades following World War Two.

Taking up these concepts in a discussion of images of the earth, I realize, involves extracting them from Heidegger’s wider thinking of modernity, much of which I leave aside.¹² Still, my aim is not to explore the permutations of the global in Heideggerian philosophy, but to use his meditations on machination and enordering to discriminate between different ontologies at stake in global representation.¹³ Drawing on Heidegger’s intuition of the ontological fissures running through modern history, my argument emphasizes how images of the earth, far from being the culmination of a singular modernity, reveal and reinforce a discordant, even aporetic ontological condition, riven by clashing, [End Page 4] equally total determinations of being. In making that argument, I analyze a series of global representations drawn from various situations of modernity, showing how they apprehend the earth in ways that both parallel and complicate Heidegger’s thought. To accentuate basic differences in how the earth has been disclosed over modern history and stress how even dominant geographical traditions are refracted through fundamentally discrepant global visions, I have chosen to look at images of the earth that were made centuries apart and each reinforced hegemonic perceptions of earthly space in their time. Far from exploiting these cases merely to illustrate or concretize Heideggerian ontology, I approach them as theoretical objects, able to complicate and contribute to the philosophical discourses posed alongside them.

This remainder of this essay is structured as follows. First, I explore how the dynamics of machination played out in the cartographic culture of the early modern Netherlands. Having explained Heidegger’s thinking of machination, I show how Dutch world maps and global images positioned the human as a detached ocular subject, set above an objectified world. Whereas for Heidegger the world under machination is fundamentally pliant and amenable to human design, I argue that this “makeability” was fully established in global representation only centuries later, in slated globes: blank chalkboard spheres popular in nineteenth-century schoolrooms. Presenting earth as a tabula rasa inviting reinscription, slated globes literalize the modern world’s malleability.

The second half of the essay turns to enordering. After describing this disclosure, I show how it is articulated in the geospatial application Google Earth. Embedding networked users in a digital globe augmented with their media, the program disperses subjectivity through the world against which it was previously defined. A teeming mosaic of photographs, the program also embodies the standing reserve’s restlessness and replaceability. That said, I stress how Google Earth tempers Heidegger’s absolute conception of enordering. Whereas he describes enordering as a system of global fungibility and functionality, so encompassing and hyperconnected that space and distance evaporate, Google Earth is not only littered with anomalies, profanities, and glitches that confound utility, but asserts the continuing importance of space and location amid frenzied circulation and replacement. [End Page 5]

In disclosing the space of world, images of the earth articulate basic possibilities for being, thought, and action that people and polities might act upon according to their political situation and interests. To show how this is as true today as in any other phase in the history of global representation, I close the essay by reflecting on how the global visions implicit in machination and enordering are now playing out in the context of ecological politics.

MACHINATION

In distinguishing between machination and enordering in line with recent rereadings of Heidegger, it is important to note that Heidegger does not explicitly do so himself. The difference between them is not a programmatic distinction, but an inchoate divergence that must be extrapolated from his writings. It would therefore be uncharitable to claim that commentators get Heidegger wrong in blurring machination and enordering. My impression is that, although he sensed a shift in the postwar period, the ambiguities of the transition meant that Heidegger did not quite take the step of announcing a new dispensation of being.

Nonetheless, his writings indicate an unfolding ontological break within modernity. This section describes the first of the two disclosures that emerge from that divergence: “machination,” Heidegger’s name for the casting of being that prevailed from the seventeenth into the twentieth century. Although ordinarily machination signifies “plotting,” Heidegger explains that he intends the word “to point to making”: it names “an interpretation of beings which brings their makeability to the fore.”¹⁴ This sense of the world’s malleability arises from a bifurcation of beings into objects and subjects. In “The Age of the World Picture,” Heidegger argues that this split is crystallized in the category of representation. Although the modern concept of representation “is first expressed by the [Latin] word repraesetatio,” its key resonances for Heidegger’s argument are pronounced in the German vorstellen, literally “fore-placing” or “setting-before.” In Heidegger’s usage, the term foregrounds relations of estranged confrontation among entities, such as obtain between an image and its observer or maker. Here representation involves “making everything stand over and against [oneself] as [End Page 6] object,” a process that “masters and proceeds against” things, rather than allowing them to unfold from themselves.¹⁵

The concept of the world picture emerges from this errant grasp of representation. Although “initially the word ‘picture’ makes one think of a copy of something,” Heidegger takes pains to stress that the world picture is not a picture of the world—not a “painting of beings as a whole” such as those discussed in what follows—but “the world grasped as picture.”¹⁶ Understanding the “world picture” literally as referring to mimetic depictions, which resemble a reality from which they remain distinct, would obscure the ontological truth that in modernity the world itself takes on the qualities of representation. It becomes a vast objectivity, set before a human viewer. This explains why the world picture is essentially and exclusively modern. Although there were certainly ancient and medieval pictures of the world, Heidegger argues that in these periods there was no world picture, for the character of being was not determined by representation. It would be wrong, then, to imagine a modern world picture, one world picture among many. “That the world becomes picture at all,” Heidegger claims, “is what distinguishes the essence of modernity.”¹⁷

The age of the world picture is marked by distance, objectification, and malleability. By distance, in that representation establishes an ontological and often spatial interval between self and world. This split marks the emergence of the human as an empowered, self-encapsulated subject, imagined as looking in upon or facing up to the world from outside. Heidegger throws this externality into relief by drawing a comparison between modernity and ancient Greece. In this narrative, the Greeks lived among captivating beings and overbearing forces in an encompassing world: “To be looked at by beings, to be included and maintained and so supported by their openness, to be driven about by their conflict and marked by their dividedness, that is the essence of humanity in the great age of Greece.”¹⁸ On this telling, whereas the modern subject gazes on the world from without, in this period humanity was drawn into moods, immersed in environments, and in thrall to creatures and things. People may have been “looked upon by beings,” but no gaze was set above the world, for being was not determined by detached representational relations. [End Page 7]

By objectification, in that the emergence of the estranged subject is paralleled by another shift, whereby the multiplicity of beings is recast in terms of objectivity. For Heidegger, this is clearest in modern science. Isolating beings as “objects of explanatory research,” scientific practice renders their properties measurable and verifiable: “The objectification of beings is accomplished in a setting-before, a representation, aimed at bringing each being before it in such a way that the man who calculates can be sure—and that means certain—of the being.”¹⁹ As present and verifiable, objects have a certain stability, even intransigence. So much is implicit in Francis Bacon’s description of the scientific project as that of torturing nature into divulging secrets, which presumes that objects have a constancy and integrity that can be pinned down and revealed. Although Heidegger suggests that being was first fully “defined as the objectness of representation” in Descartes’ philosophy of science, he argues that objectivity has come to determine “modernity in general,” with beings presencing as objects far beyond the laboratory.²⁰

By malleability, in that the disclosure of beings as calculable objects renders them liable to human molding, inviting subjects (individual or collective) to reshape the world according to projected designs. Rather than dwell on this city blueprint or those utopian designs, Heidegger emphasizes the mode of presencing that makes the transformative projects of modernity possible. Existence, he writes, “has released itself into sheer accessibility through calculation,” establishing a “malleability in which everything is made out ahead of time to be ‘do-able’ and altogether at our disposal.”²¹ The stage is set for “unconditioned planning and arranging” and human “dominion over the globe as such.”²²

MAPPING MACHINATION

Having described machination, I now want to show how this ontology played out in the cartographic culture that emerged in the Dutch Republic during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The world picture may not be a picture of the world, but many maps and globes presuppose this determination of being and embody its defining characteristics. The explosion of mapping in the early modern Netherlands, I argue, belongs to the crucial opening phase of the age of the world picture. [End Page 8] The chronologies align: Heidegger argues that “being was defined as the objectness of representation” in the thought of René Descartes, whose major works were composed amid the flourishing of Dutch map-making.²³ The basic image of the terraqueous globe that predominates today was cemented in this period, absorbing and withstanding subsequent challenges and remediations. If the world was “conquered as picture,” to paraphrase Heidegger, then major early battles were fought during the formation of the United Provinces.²⁴

The interface between self and world, so crucial for Heidegger’s thinking of machination, became newly prominent and problematic in early modern Europe. Colonial contact with the Americas, combined with religious and philosophical controversy, disrupted and denaturalized received conceptions of humanity’s place in a created world.²⁵ Amid this tumult, Dutch mapmakers reimagined how the human self relates to earthly space, offering viewers new subject positions premised on ocular detachment. In Europe in the centuries before the early modern surge in mapmaking, geographical images commonly articulate a sensuous and haptic apprehension of earthbound places.²⁶ The world maps that emerged from Antwerp and Amsterdam’s publishing houses from the sixteenth century onward, in contrast, invite onlookers into a zenithal viewing position, elevated above and beyond a world that has been methodically flattened and marshaled into conformity with one, synoptic vision.

This viewing position, I claim, institutes a split between the detached subject and objectified world such as Heidegger describes. At the onset of Dutch cartographic modernity, the relationship between self and world is imagined in terms of elevation and externality: the world mapped was the world seen from on high. To do justice to critical cartographers’ hard-won gains against myths of objectivity, I should stress that maps are not transparent windows but complex sign systems: there is no vantage point from which the earth resembles its cartographic image. But that says little about how mapped space has been culturally understood, not least in the early modern Netherlands, in which the difference between self and world was imagined through tropes of flight, height, and spectacle. I will name three such tropes, parsing how each configures attitudes toward earthly space. [End Page 9]

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Figure 1.

Typus orbis terrarum, Abraham Ortelius, 1570. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Parallel Histories: Spain, the United States, and the American Frontier.

First, the Typus orbis terrarum, Abraham Ortelius’s world map of 1570, represents global space girded by billowing clouds, as if from an airborne platform (Figure 1). The atlas to which it belongs includes a poem by the diplomat Adolf van Meetkercke, which describes how Apollo had permitted Ortelius to accompany him as he rode his “four-horsed chariot over the air,” the mapmaker seeing “regions utterly unknown and situated far below.”²⁷ Initially, this image of an airborne chariot suggests a roving visuality, unshackled from earthly constraints; across Western history, Apollo has embodied a “dream of transcendence” and “will to power” associated with global visions.²⁸ On reflection, this focalization of the world picture also draws limits. Charged with towing the sun through the sky, Apollo’s chariot is bound to an interminable cycle of sunrise and sundown. Further, in Van Meetkercke’s rhapsody, Apollo allows Ortelius to ride with him only temporarily, suggesting that the world map, far from defining a properly human subject [End Page 10] position, offers a fleeting glimpse of a god’s inhuman vision. And the idea of flying beside Apollo inevitably recalls the cautionary tale of Icarus, who fell emulating Apollonian transcendence.

Second, Gerhard Mercator opened his Atlas by promising to “set before your eyes, the whole world,” presented “as from a loftie watch tower” (Hexham’s 1636 translation of Mercator’s “veluti ex alta animi specula”).²⁹ The image is ambivalent; the tower might be construed as benevolently watching over the world or a sign of occupation. Regardless of this, Mercators stress on the tower’s loftiness—which connotes not just elevation but performed distinction—separates its sentries from earthbound people and things, which are miniaturized and flattened in the manner of the objectified world picture. The conceit of a tower so tall that it overlooks, impossibly, the entire world recalls the Tower of Babel, which was also global in that it was built by a united humanity. In Mercator’s time, God’s leveling of that edifice was interpreted as punishing human pride. The elevated power signified by this image, then, is shadowed by anxiety that to vertically transgress humanity’s earthbound condition is to court disaster.

Third, many early modern atlases bear the word theatrum in their titles, the earliest being Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (theater of the earthly sphere), in which the Typus appears. The world becomes a stage across which human history plays out, viewers its audience. Unlike the watchtower and aerial chariot, the theater is grounded and horizontally orientated. Although that might suggest a flat ontology, images of theatrical spectatorship, arches, and curtains cement a gap between spectator and spectacle. Some early modern maps and prospects are shown bordered by drapes and stage curtains, amplifying and dramatizing map frames’ separating function.³⁰ Yet this metaphor can also soften the division between viewer and world. Rendered literally, the Greek théatron might mean a “place for viewing,” suggesting “rational detachment,” but the early modern stage often featured rowdy exchanges among players and the crowd, which would only settle into a docile audience in the nineteenth century.³¹ If the image of the theater casts the earth as a detached spectacle, from this slant it also affords the possibility of unruly commerce between self and world.

Despite hinting at countervailing possibilities, these images of a chariot, tower, and theater set viewers at an imagined remove from [End Page 11] earthly space, which dovetails closely with Heidegger’s concept of representation as “placing before,” whereby an objectified world is set “over and against” a human subject. The triumph of vorstellen in Dutch mapmaking is clearest not in maps themselves but depictions showing the subject facing the mapped globe from a third viewpoint. In particular, I am thinking of the title page to Gerhard Mercator’s posthumous Atlas Sive Cosmographicæ Meditationes De Fabrica Mvndi Et Fabricati Figvra (Atlas or cosmographic meditations on the creation of the world and the image of the created) of 1595. In titling this compendia of maps Atlas, Mercator conceptually consolidated a visual genre that has retained that name for more than four centuries. The engraving on its title page depicts the mythological figure of Atlas, who is shown braced in a Renaissance portico with two globes (Figure 2). Mercator is not simply parading his classical learning. Following Ayesha Ramachandran, who argues that the figure is “utterly unlike conventional allegorical depictions of Atlas,” I claim that by reworking the traditional Atlas, Mercator’s title page encapsulates a newly detached and assertive human bearing toward the world.³²

Most ancient and Renaissance renditions of Atlas present the Titan as an exhausted elderly man straining under the weight of the cosmos, which suggests an agonized resignation to one’s place in a received or imposed order, or simply to life’s hardships and responsibilities. Atlas was condemned to his task after revolting against the Olympian gods, suggesting that attempts to impose one’s will on the universe only lead to further submission to it. Mercator’s Atlas, by contrast, is a muscled geometer, cooly measuring a globe with a compass. Whereas the conventional Atlas looks away from the sphere, which is manifest to him through weight exerted on his shoulders, here Atlas holds and visually contemplates it. The globe is at his disposal. Further, if in ancient mythology and visual culture Atlas carries the heavens or cosmos, Mercator seems to be modulating the figure toward modern variations in which he is laden with the terraqueous globe instead. The globe at Atlas’s feet features oceans and landmasses; that in his hand is a bare graticule. Far from being subordinate to the heavy heavens, this Atlas can seek to understand—and potentially remake—his own conditions down on earth.

This is more than simply a divergent visual rendering of an otherwise stable mythological figure. In the early modern period as today, [End Page 12] Atlas was widely identified as a straining Titan, compelled to carry the cosmos. In his introduction, though, Mercator explains that his Atlas refers to another ancient Atlas: “a most skillfull astrologer” and the first person “that disputed the Sphœre . . . excelling in erudition, humanitie, and wisedome.” The prototypical humanist, this other Atlas was a fitting model for the subject of Dutch cartographic culture. By presenting this obscure Atlas as an alternative to the burdened Titan, Mercator founded the atlas, that quintessential genre of world-picturing, on a radical recasting of the human as newly autonomous and assertive. In his lone confrontation with the terrestrial globe, Atlas condenses the detached

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Figure 2.

Title page (detail), Atlas Sive Cosmographicæ Meditationes De Fabrica Mvndi Et Fabricati Figvra, Gerhard Mercator, 1595. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

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and confrontational relations between self and world named by machination. The human becomes subject, an encapsulated self, abstracted from the quiddity and flux down on earth. Atlas does not inhabit the world, but peers at it from a place outside, as if through parted stage curtains. And the world, whether flattened out through cartographic projection or conjured as a globe, becomes an objectified, pictorial surface.

As Tim Ingold has argued, once the earth appears in this way—as a face or something faced up against—then we are already amid the transformative programs of modernity.³³ The face of the earth is a surface primed for inscription. Indeed, for Heidegger, the world’s “makeability” is the defining feature of machination. Aspects of my analysis seem to support this; consider how Mercator’s Atlas looms over the world, which, objectified and available, appears primed for remaking. Yet despite appearances, the transformative dimensions of world-picturing remain inchoate in early modern cartographic culture. Atlas brims with Promethean energy and Mercator describes the world as “this Fabrick,” a product of “workmanship.”³⁴ Yet here the worldmaking is performed not by the human subject, but the Christian God, whom Mercator calls “the workmaster of all things.”³⁵

Early modern Dutch mapmaking might embody the world picture’s distance and objectification, but in this period the sense of the world’s fundamental amenability to human intervention is still emergent. Although Mercator’s fabricated world anticipates visions of human mastery, centuries would pass before the human “makeability” of beings would be fully articulated in global representation. I therefore track forward here to the nineteenth century, which saw the spread of so-called slated globes. Unlike conventional globes, which are covered in gores representing landforms, oceans, and geobodies, slated globes are blank spheres, often finished with slate liquid or powder, allowing them to be drawn upon with chalk. Some include continental outlines; others are featureless orbs. Consider a slated globe kept at the Smithsonian Museum (Figure 3). Save for some nicks and traces of chalk, the sphere is pristine, awaiting inscription. Its surface presents no impediments (nor stimuli) to imagined journeys or designs, no bodies or forces for aspirant worldmakers to account for. Most slated globes were pedagogical tools facilitating demonstration in geography, geometry, and geodesy. They were especially popular in US schoolrooms in the nineteenth [End Page 14] and twentieth centuries. In this context, Mahshid Mayar persuasively argues, they fulfilled an ideological desire to wipe away entrenched European imperialisms that had thoroughly mapped and occupied the globe, making way for new, American ambitions.³⁶

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Figure 3.

Slated globe, unmarked, probably late-nineteenth century United States. Courtesy of the Division of Medicine and Science, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

My claim is that slated globes have an ontological significance that goes beyond any one imperial project. A slated globe is the tabla rasa [End Page 15] par excellence, a surface into which new orders can be impressed without resistance. No longer a great accretion of recalcitrant beings and processes, the earth is potentially remakeable or actually remade, an artifact of external design. Though extreme in their sheer blankness, slated globes concretize a broader, typically modern transformative impulse. Their “makeability” implicitly pervades many conventional spatial representations used to inform and expedite transformative designs. Gathering and articulating the essential malleability of the world disclosed by machination, slated globes conjure the prospect of an earth so comprehensively reconstituted that “man,” in Heidegger’s gendered phrasing, “would everywhere and always encounter only himself.”³⁷

ENORDERING

Laying out an objectified, progressively pliant earth before an estranged and empowered human subject, the world pictures of machination were crucial to the formation and functioning of modernity’s global empires and transformative projects. Yet drawing on revisionist accounts of Heidegger’s later work (particularly that of Andrew J. Mitchell), I stress how machination is but one of two ontological disclosures at work in modernity for Heidegger. The other is Gestell, which Mitchell insists “is not to be identified with machination,” for it is “essentially different from the order of objectivity and representation.”³⁸

Whereas machination involves detached subjects imposing their will on stable objects, Gestell entails the purposeless yet ceaseless circulation and switching about of fungible and flexible resources. Heidegger begins using the term after World War Two and it resonates with the postwar period’s intensified commodification and globalization. In “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger explains that although the word Gestell usually designates an apparatus or structure such as a “bookrack” or “skeleton,” he wields it in a “thoroughly unfamiliar” manner.³⁹ This new usage signifies “the way of revealing that holds sway in the essence of modern technology,” which “demands that nature be orderable as standing-reserve” (that is, as flexible resources).⁴⁰ Despite being widely translated as “enframing,” this falsifies the term’s ontological import. To grasp Gestell “as some kind of framework or scaffolding thrown over the world,” Mitchell explains, [End Page 16] “is to persist in the belief that this incursion of the technological would be something that came to us from the outside, that it would remain somehow extrinsic to all that is.”⁴¹ As a translation, then, “enframing” obscures Heidegger’s signal point that Gestell represents a transformation within being. Despite notions of framing being suggestive in relation to visual renditions of the planet, I therefore translate Gestell as “enordering.” This is not intended to conjure up an image of subjects ordering the world, as under machination. Enordering is rather meant in the sense of “placing an order,” someone “awaiting orders,” or a product being “on order.” It speaks to the restlessness of beings under this casting of being. People and things are perpetually on call to be summoned off to this or that destination, for this or that reason, always already stretched beyond themselves, entering circulation, and assuming new forms.

Enordering annuls the distance, objectivity, and malleability of machination. If previously the subject was placed “over and against” the object, implying an interval between them, Mitchell explains that “there is now a suffusion into that space and a smothering of the difference between subject and object in the general transformation into standing reserve.”⁴² Humans no longer presence as secluded Cartesian minds, but are drawn down into technological flows, included among bewitching commodities, and driven about as part of their frenzied mobility. Far from lording it over a petrified world, the subject too is “taken as standing-reserve.”⁴³

This does not mean that human subjects cross the threshold of representation to join the agglomeration of objects previously at their behest. Heidegger is clear that “there are no longer objects” under enordering.⁴⁴ Both subjects and objects are recast as something new: standing reserve, which, Mitchell notes, “does anything but stand.”⁴⁵ Indeed, entities in the standing reserve are constantly marshaled or leveraged to facilitate new opportunities for operation; always being called toward the next assignment; ever mutating to execute new functions. “Standing,” then, should indicate that beings are perpetually on standby, at the ready for renewed application. Contrast the stable and discrete object of machination. Entirely present and simultaneous with itself, the object bears consistent properties that the Baconian subject can pin down and work upon. The item of standing reserve offers no [End Page 17] such solidity; it never coincides with itself. Instead, its being is dispersed through endless replacements and transformations in a chain of deferral that forecloses the possibility of the item being gathered up and set before a subject as an encapsulated entity.

This ontological instability is manifested in the standing reserve’s replaceability, mutability, and placelessness. In replaceability not simply because ample substitutes stand ready for outmoded items and exhausted labor. A “piece of standing reserve,” Heidegger explains, is “already imposed upon for replaceability” long before its actual replacement.⁴⁶ Its very being consists in replaceability: “The stock of items is already here replacing the item,” Mitchell expands, “and this whole movement is written into the item itself.”⁴⁷ Items of standing reserve are existentially defined by fungibility, then: their being is distributed across myriad absent replacements and equivalents.

In mutability, in that the standing reserve is ceaselessly changing. The object and item of standing reserve are both plastic, but their plasticity takes contrasting forms. Whereas subjects strive to remold the objectified world to realize determinate designs, the mutation of the standing reserve is endless that in it both goes on going on and has no goal beyond maintaining and increasing sociotechnical systems. As Heidegger remarks in his Der Spiegel interview, “everything functions,” which “propels everything more and more toward further functioning.”⁴⁸ The object’s malleability is replaced by the standing reserve’s endless flexibility and adaptability. In discussing a hydroelectric plant, Heidegger describes how the “energy concealed in nature is unlocked, what is unlocked is transformed, what is transformed is stored up, what is stored up is in turn distributed, and what is distributed is switched about ever anew.”⁴⁹ For Hubert Dreyfus, these conversions presuppose that beings are “completely flexible, adaptable, optimizable” in ways that anticipate “digitalized information,” which, in being sampled, scraped, transferred, encoded, and aggregated, is defined by its capacity to be “switched about ever anew.”⁵⁰

In placelessness, for if the standing reserve is replaceable and constantly available, then each item is always anywhere else, despite being here, and every other item is always here, despite being elsewhere. “Even when ‘in’ place,” Mitchell explains, “the standing reserve is already tending ‘toward’ something else, arriving from somewhere [End Page 18] else.”⁵¹ This placelessness implies a complete and closed—that is, global—space of exchange and circulation, what Heidegger calls the “circuit of orderability,” around which the standing reserve switches about endlessly.⁵² This global circuitry of instantaneous supply, mobility, and exchange, Mitchell emphasizes, “does not lead any where, it only ever feeds back into itself.”⁵³ As such, global infrastructures materially instantiate enordering’s inward-turning logic of continually optimized functionality without ultimate purpose.

ENORDERING EARTH

Global images pervade contemporary culture and locational media. Although initially this might suggest that the world is presencing as picture more completely than ever, my claim is that the transformation of global representation precipitated by digitization actually signals the waning of machination and waxing of enordering. I make this argument through a discussion of Google Earth, the most prominent digital figuration of the global to date. Although one might suppose Heidegger’s thought to have little to say about geospatial technologies developed after his time, it is worth recalling his well-known remark that “the essence of technology is nothing technological,” but consists instead in “a mode of revealing.”⁵⁴ In line with this, by approaching Google Earth alongside Heidegger’s thinking of enordering, I hope to mount a specifically ontological analysis of the application, attuned not just to its technological affordances but also to the basic disclosure of the world that they presuppose and articulate.

Developed in the late 1990s before being acquired by Google in 2004, the program presents a spheroid mosaic in which thousands of aerial and satellite photographs are layered onto a coordinated geode (the World Geodetic System 1984). In allowing users to view, rotate, reorient, and (in certain extensions) remap the globe, Google Earth appears to reproduce the distance, objectification, and malleability of machination. It would be perverse, therefore, to argue that Google Earth represents a clean break with the age of the world picture: to a degree, it still operates in a universe of detached visuality. Yet this is true only of aspects of the program. Its most distinct features—those which mark it out as belonging to a new, digital and distributed phase [End Page 19] in the history of global representation—transgress machination’s founding distinctions and disclose the earth in ways that approximate enordering’s endless flexibility and fungibility. I begin by describing how Google Earth empties and disperses subjectivity through the represented world.

Three functions combine to diminish, if not annul, the difference between the viewing subject and objectified world that defined machination. First, the program’s zoom invites users to transition rapidly among spatial scales, from the whole earth with which it opens to innumerable locales (Figure 4). If previously the subject saw the world from afar, the zoom induces users to span that distance, which is substituted for proximity. More radically, Vittoria Di Palma argues that the zoom does not simply span distances, but renders questions of size, space, and distance irrelevant by cycling through different “degrees of resolution” in ways that do “not necessarily have anything to do with physical displacement.”⁵⁵ Jettisoning the gaze from “the anchoring dimensions of the human body,” the zoom eschews intuitions of distance and hierarchies of scale, such that “the infinitely large and the infinitely small—the world and the atom, the planet and the point—are made comparable.”⁵⁶ Whereas the detached subject of machination confronts an earth conceived as a vast objectified body, the zoom operates beyond near and far, large and small, echoing Heidegger’s stress on the “distancelessness” of enordering. This creates what Di Palma calls the “fantasy of an intimate globe” in which both globality and locality are “present and immediately accessible simply by dragging or clicking the mouse.”⁵⁷

Second, Google Earth’s diminution of distances accelerated with the integration of Google Street View in 2008. After dropping a dangling avatar into a photographed roadway, users transfer into Street View, where they navigate branching ground-level prospects captured by vehicle-mounted cameras. Viewers are drawn down to earth, moving from a satellite to an earthbound view. No longer a surface set against them, the world comes in encircling vistas. It might be countered that Google’s roadway panoramas objectify people and places on a horizontal plane in much the same way that modern maps vertically conquer the world as picture, but this overlooks how the next feature blurs the very distinction between self and world. [End Page 20]

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Figure 4.

Google Earth’s zoom (Santiago). Map data: Google, SIO, NOAA, U.S. Navy, NGA, GEBCO, Landsat/Copernicus, Maxar Technologies, Data LDEO-Columbia, NSF, and IBCAO.

Third, Google Earth incorporates user-generated media. Users upload personal archives of photographs and videos,⁵⁸ which, linked to relevant locations, build a common, networked spatiality; geotag businesses and social ventures, which link to websites, photographs, reviews, and related locations; and create overlays, which map specific, [End Page 21] often personal themes, as well as “stories” (multiform presentations combining maps, aerial and street views, videos, photographs, and text) that can be shared online. Even forums criticizing Google Earth can be expanded from placemarks affixed to the globe. In this way, Jason Farman explains, the program can “present user-generated content and dialog spatially on the very object that such content critiques.”⁵⁹

Together, these features indicate that in Google Earth human being is not defined by its detachment from the extant world, but dispersed and articulated through it. The earth becomes a dynamic texture in which the self is embedded and expressed. This indicates neither the objectification of the self nor subjectification of the world, for subject and object exist only in their difference. Instead, both self and world collapse into flexible, often searchable data, which, as Dreyfus suggested, can be read as embodying the standing reserve’s restless mutability.

The subject fades into the standing reserve, then, in tandem with the onset of another disclosure of the earth. In many respects, Google Earth’s representation of the earth reflects Heidegger’s description of how enordering casts beings not as objects but items of standing reserve. At one level, the program facilitates the expansion and circulation of the standing reserve. Presenting an indexed, searchable, and navigable globe, it coordinates diverse sites to, from, and across which resources are summoned and switched about. At another, the digital globe itself embodies the move from object to standing reserve. Whereas the world picture of machination offers a stable surface, Google Earth presents a teeming mosaic of periodically refreshed satellite photographs in a continually honed interface.

Although Google Earth is readily construed as a slated globe for the digital age, inheriting and extending the world picture’s malleability, its plasticity is of a different order. If subjects set out to transform the “makeable” world picture to realize determinate socio-spatial blueprints, under enordering beings and environments are perpetually altered and adapted to ensure uninterrupted service and facilitate unending growth, without an ultimate existential purpose. Constantly mutating through myriad piecemeal updates, modifications, and additions, Google Earth mirrors the standing reserve’s restlessness and replaceability, in which beings are always already shadowed by their impending substitution. Timestamps underscore how satellite photographs [End Page 22] and street panoramas await renewal from the moment they are uploaded; thousands of networked users thicken the terrestrial surface with their media; and occasionally geographies are physically rearranged to address Google’s satellite gaze. Instead of pushing toward some final condition in modernist fashion, these changes expand and optimize technosocial systems, from the program itself to the economies it mediates.

In other respects, Google Earth’s vision of being is more fraught and ambivalent than Heidegger’s stark description of enordering might suggest, tempering two aspects of Heidegger’s account in particular. First, Heidegger describes how beings revealed as standing reserve are constantly conscripted, allocated, and transformed to ensure endless, uninterrupted operation. Beings are “placed into application,” which is “ordered in advance as a success,” defined as “that type of consequence that itself remains assigned to the yielding of further consequences.”⁶⁰ Circular, inward-turning functionality reigns. Google Earth, in contrast, is cluttered with anomalous sights, technical glitches, and ludic possibilities that have little imaginable technological or economic utility (save perhaps as curiosities in online attention economies). This comes forth in Kingsbury and Paul Jones III’s vivid description of the program as “an uncertain orb spangled with vertiginous paranoia, frenzied navigation, jubilatory dissolution, and intoxicating giddiness.”⁶¹ Concerned to complicate the received critique of global images as exemplars of detachment and domination, they stress instances of errancy and anachronism, frenzy and play, breakdown and mystery that proliferate in the inter-stices of the geocoded world, including conspiracist sightings of black helicopters, glimpses of nudity, profanities mown into cornfields, mysterious tears in the global surface, and the joys of navigating a composite earth. If these things seem purposeless, it is not the purposelessness of the standing reserve, which is endless precisely because it is locked into a circular compulsion to optimize its own operation. Google Earth’s oddities fall outside the imperative that beings should apply successfully and yield more successful applications without end. Far from ushering in total mobilization, then, enordering’s global reach only illuminates regions of beings that elude subsumption into the standing reserve.

Second, anticipating globalization theorists of the 1990s, Heidegger emphasizes how “all distances in time and space are shrinking” into the [End Page 23] “uniformly distanceless” with the acceleration of travel and proliferation of media.⁶² No mere technological feat, this is ontologically preconditioned by enordering, under which beings show up as so available and replaceable that they are neither near nor far, never entirely here or there. That Google Earth, a geospatial application, has become so popular and pervasive troubles this emphasis on distancelessness. At one level, in making remote places navigable, the program collapses distances as Heidegger describes. At another, though, its success indicates that space and location not only persist as basic horizons of everyday life, but have become all the more important amid the frenzied circulation and replaceability of beings in the standing reserve. Capitalizing on the fact that many search queries contain geographical terms (thirty percent according to one technologist), Google organizes many results geographically, prompting users to transfer into its geospatial applications.⁶³ Including expandable media, which encode users’ memories, Google Maps and Earth also thicken locations into places. Perhaps these dynamics interact in Google Earth, which both facilitates the atrophy of distances and switching about of resources and betrays an impulse to assert location, spatial orientation, and sites of memory against placeless globality.

CLASHING GLOBES

Midway through his fraught interview with Der Spiegel magazine in 1966, Heidegger described being “shocked when a short time ago I saw the pictures of the earth taken from the moon. We do not need atomic bombs at all—the uprooting of man is already here. All our relationships have become merely technical ones. It is no longer upon an earth that man lives today.”⁶⁴ Equating existential estrangement with atomic devastation and fetishizing rootedness, these remarks exhibit Heidegger at his most mournful and absolute. This partly has to do with the interview’s dynamic, with Heidegger attempting to impress the urgency of his thinking of planetary technicity on his often dead-pan interlocutors. Moreover, as Lazier points out, he was responding not to the luscious “Blue Marble” and “Earthrise” images, but forbidding monochromes taken by Lunar Orbiter 1, in which earth appears farther off, dwarfed by a desolate moon. These, understandably, might have seemed “frightening in the extreme.”⁶⁵ [End Page 24]

Nonetheless, in reaching for photographs of the earth to concretize the existential uprooting wrought by technicity, Heidegger’s somber remarks in this interview have set the parameters within which many subsequent writers have construed representations of the earth. Looking beyond this emphasis on the alienation wrought by planetary technicity, this essay has ventured a more expansive and multivalent Heideggerian approach to global representation, premised on the thought that images of the earth can be read as visions of being in its shifting historical modes. My analyses show how a handful of global representations distill and set forth the two divergent ontological determinations that, for Heidegger, undergird modern history. Establishing vertiginous distances between self and world, early modern world maps conjugate with Heidegger’s description of how beings bifurcate into subjects and objects under machination. Presenting a global tabula rasa, slated globes crystallize the world’s malleability in this casting of being. And in embedding networked users in a global mosaic, Google Earth collapses the distance between self and world and embodies the restlessness and replaceability of beings under enordering.

But these test cases also speak back to Heidegger’s thinking of machination and enordering. Although early modern mapmakers invoked metaphors of elevation and externality to configure a transcendent new subject, these never quite put the self beyond earthly claims. Aspirant Apollos go the way of Icarus, towers teeter, crowds mob the stage. As for enordering, Heidegger described how it conditions a system of complete functionality, so encompassing and connected that space and distance evaporate. Yet Google Earth not only asserts the persistence of spatiality against distancelessness, but is peppered with oddities and glitches that confound utility. As an ontological vision, the program underscores how enordering, for all its totalizing propensities, will never subsume everything under placeless technicity.

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In closing, I want to gesture toward the contemporary resonances of my discussion by pushing against another aspect of Heidegger’s thinking: his account of the history of being, in which a series of disclosures of the world emerge, ground the unfolding of the epochs in which they appear, and then wane as another dispensation takes hold.⁶⁶ Although [End Page 25] the possibility of creatively reappropriating past ontologies is ever-present, Heidegger narrates this history as a sequence of largely discrete stages. Mitchell and Dreyfus reproduce this periodizing impulse in extrapolating the distinction between machination and enordering from Heidegger’s writings. Stressing how the two disclosures correspond to distinct epochs, they describe machination as “modern” and enordering “postmodern.”⁶⁷ So much is in keeping with Heidegger. My analyses, however, prompt me to query the extent to which disclosures of being come in consolidated blocks. Mapping a global space of circulation (not least for trading Moluccan spices), Dutch cartography prefigures enordering’s frenzied switching about of fungible stock. Further, although the world becomes picture in early modern mapmaking, it is grasped as a wholly makeable surface only centuries later, in slated globes, indicating that machination did not take hold evenly, all at once. And in allowing for detached viewing alongside other, more immersive vantage points, Google Earth lingers in the age of the world picture.

All of which leads me to think that machination and enordering are best imagined not as anything so neat as encapsulated periods but rather as discrepant yet enduring faces of modernity. This is not to diminish the difference between the two ontologies, but to acknowledge how they variously clash and overlap across modern history. Either might come to the fore under particular circumstances or recede for a period; that I have been able to present Dutch world maps and slated globes as paradigms of machination and Google Earth as exemplifying enordering suggests as much. Even so, neither machination nor enordering ever wins out over the other entirely. Far from mapping onto a single chronological break, the ontological fissure between them cuts jaggedly across diverse situations and stages of modernity.

This grating between contrary ontologies may be among the basic perplexities afflicting the current moment of climate doom loops and faltering geopowers. In salient discourses among mainstream environmental analysts and policymakers on how societies might redress climate heating, the emphasis on rendering global capitalism ecologically sustainable is increasingly accompanied by proposals to cool the earth’s climate through geoengineering. These approaches are distilled, respectively, in carbon offsetting, “whereby quantified units of environmental harm . . . are traded or ‘offset’ for compensating units of [End Page 26] environmental health at different places,” and solar radiation management, which involves “injecting aerosols into the atmosphere to block incoming sunlight.”⁶⁸ Establishing equivalences among incommensurable ecosocial processes, offsetting bespeaks a world in which the very materiality of beings and practices is negated across spectral doubles in remote times and places. Instead of seeking physically to manipulate resources and remake environments in line with machination, carbon offsetting substitutes otherwise constant processes for each other in a way that suggests the pervasive fungibility of enordering. And in venturing to modify the atmosphere, solar radiation management takes the earth as the pliant object of human design. Programmatically reconstituting the planetary environment in this way would represent the very essence of machination and apogee of the age of the world picture.

To me, the prominence of these strategies indicates that ecological policy and practice are pulled between discrepant visions of the planetary ecology they promise to rectify, visions that conjugate with the disclosures traced through this essay. Which other human practice depends so completely on the replaceability of beings established by enordering as carbon offsetting? Which other undertaking enacts the subject of machination’s managerial attitude so faithfully as solar geo-engineering? Far from sedimenting into distinct periods, these global ontologies play out jarringly in contemporary ecosocial practice, unfolding in increasingly extreme and concentrated forms. [End Page 27]