Motor of Darkness: On the Cartographic Visual Drive of Anthropocene Culture

This chapter explores the establishing, and subsequent reproduction, of modern western cartographic visuality. Such visuality has been a contributing factor in the transformation of the planet during the Anthropocene, the magnitude of which we have only begun to understand in recent years. My main thesis is that, over the seventeenth century, Western Enlightenment cartography developed in correlation with a dark, imaginary space, set apart from perception of the circumambient world, a space unfolded in the chiaroscuro of the Baroque. Together, they formed a complex cartographic and visual motor which contributed to making the modern, Western subject at least partially incapable of comprehending, imagining, and imaging the actual pulsating world it both found itself in and affected. The characterization of this cartographic visual complex as a motor is a term coined by the author of this chapter. The chapter is uncovering the ways in which this complex was and still is epistemically possible, how it functions, and which worlds it allows and disallows Western man to perceive.