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Chapter 2: Dethroning the View from Above: Toward a Critical Social Analysis of Satellite Ocularcentrism
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2 @ Dethroning the View from Above Toward a Critical Social Analysis of Satellite Ocularcentrism barney warf A colleague of mine, working in a remote part of Amazonia, showed a local illiterate farmer there a satellite image of his property, explaining that it was taken by a machine floating so high up in the sky that it could not be seen. Incredulous, the farmer denied that such a thing was possible; it was, simply, beyond the horizons of possibility in his worldview. The enormous discrepancy between the views held by my colleague and the farmer illustrates that satellite images, far from constituting some “objective” vision of Earth, are always wrapped within and bounded by cultural understandings and assumptions. One of the two primary functions of satellites is to “see” vast regions of Earth’s surface to monitor land use and incorporate, process, and transmit visual data for remote sensing and weather forecasts. (The other primary function is communications.) Satellites may “see” in either a passive mode, with optical sensors that acquire radiation emitted by a sensed object, or active mode, using radar to “see” at night or through clouds. This chapter is concerned with the political and philosophical dimensions of satellite imagery, which are inextricably intertwined, particularly such imagery’s relation to a mode of knowing called “ocularcentrism.” Modern Western society has long held vision as the paramount sense called upon to produce knowledge , suggesting that seeing is synonymous with knowing. However, vision, as Martin Jay argues, is not simply a function of biology, but also a historically specific way of interpretation.1 To visualize, to gain insight, to keep an eye on something, is to invoke a host of cultural and linguistic tools to make sense of reality. Yet while seeing and vision appear so natural, obvious, and un- deserving of attention as to be taken for granted, satellite observations in fact are products of a long line of Western thought that privileges sight, manages it, and shapes it through a variety of cultural assumptions. In this light, satellites not only have profound economic and social impacts but epistemological ones as well. This dimension of the technology is rarely considered in the literature on this topic. Indeed, many readers of this essay may find the entire project rather puzzling, so entrenched is the domination of the visual within contemporary discourse. Rarely do the literatures on satellites and contemporary social theory intersect. The goal here is to bring these two bodies of thought into a creative tension with one another. The chapter starts with a historical overview of ocularcentrism, how it came to be, and its changing forms as vision was repeatedly reconfigured in Western knowledge. Starting with the Renaissance, and the tsunami of intellectual change that it unleashed in philosophy, art, and cartography, the chapter maintains that ocularcentrism is not a natural, inevitable way of understanding the world, but a historically specific construct. Next, it turns to the ocularcentrism that dominates the use of satellites, focusing on three particularly important dimensions: the transmission of television imagery, the role of satellite data in challenging national sovereignty, and the panopticonic role of satellites in monitoring individuals and changing the contours of privacy. The conclusion points to alternative forms of analysis of satellite data that incorporate “ground truths,” local knowledges, and the interests of the subjects of surveillance. Throughout, the goal is to motivate scholars of satellites to view them, and the images they produce, as more than simply technical phenomena, but as systems of knowledge irretrievably intertwined within changing relations of power, culture, and space. Historicizing Ocularcentrism The origins of ocularcentrism as a hegemonic mode of Western thought arguably lay with René Descartes, who argued persuasively that the only valid form of knowledge is the one that equates perspective with the abstract, disembodied , rational subject’s mapping of space. Cartesian rationalism was predicated on the distinction between the inner reality of the mind and the outer reality of objects; the latter could rationally only be brought into the former through a neutral, disembodied gaze situated above space and time. With Descartes’s cogito, vision and thought became funneled into a spectator ’s view of the world, one that rendered the emerging surfaces of modernity visible and measurable, and rendered the viewer without body or place. The multiple vantage points in art or literature common to the medieval worldview were displaced by a single, disembodied, omniscient, and panopticonic eye. Illumination was conceived to be a process of rationalization, of bringing the environment into...