Renaissance And The Enlightenment Essay

traces the changes in the production of time and space from the medieval period through the Enlightenment. For medievals under feudalism, space was sensuous and direct, and individual locations were situated in an unknown, "weakly grasped" cosmology; medieval maps emphasize the sensory qualities of space rather than the rational and objective qualities (240-2). The Renaissance instituted a number of changes that affected the production of space -- artistic perspectivism; mathematical developments; rationalized, "objective" and "functional" mapping according to a Ptolemaic system; Newtonian optics. Rationalization and abstractification of time also occurred during this period due to the increased availability of mechanical timekeeping devices.

Harvey takes de Certeau's arguments as generally representative of the problems of Enlightenment space and time: insofar as the map is a "totalizing device," it homogenizes and reifies the diverse forms of spatiality that are actually produced in the area that it represents. Moreover, it converts the real fluidity of experience in the represented area into a fixed representation, thereby doing violence to it, causing the alienation of the occupants of the space from the representation of it (252-3). Following Lefebvre, Harvey notes several problems with the strategy of conquering space through abstractification (cartographically) and fragmentation (by dividing it up into alienable land parcels): (1) principles of pulverization need to be established; (2) "production of space" is made into an explicit political-economic problem; (3) "abstraction" of space obscures the social relations that produced the concept of space in the first place; (4) "homogenized" space undercuts conceptions of "place"-as-meaningful location. Finally, and most importantly, (5) space can only be conquered by producing space-as-concept -- but there are inherent contradictions in this