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Plus Ultra: Coloniality and the Mapping of American Natureculture in the Empire of Philip II 2018

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Plus Ultra: Coloniality and the Mapping of American Natureculture in the Empire of Philip II 2018 Repositorium für die Medienwissenschaft Adam Wickberg Plus ultra: Coloniality and the mapping of American natureculture in the empire of Philip II 2018 https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/3447 Veröffentlichungsversion / published version Zeitschriftenartikel / journal article Empfohlene Zitierung / Suggested Citation: Wickberg, Adam: Plus ultra: Coloniality and the mapping of American natureculture in the empire of Philip II. In: NECSUS. European Journal of Media Studies, Jg. 7 (2018), Nr. 2, S. 205– 227. DOI: https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/3447. Erstmalig hier erschienen / Initial publication here: https://necsus-ejms.org/plus-ultra-coloniality-and-the-mapping-of-american-natureculture-in-the-empire-of-philip-ii/ Nutzungsbedingungen: Terms of use: Dieser Text wird unter einer Creative Commons - This document is made available under a creative commons - Namensnennung - Nicht kommerziell - Keine Bearbeitungen 4.0 Attribution - Non Commercial - No Derivatives 4.0 License. For Lizenz zur Verfügung gestellt. Nähere Auskünfte zu dieser Lizenz more information see: finden Sie hier: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0 EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF MEDIA STUDIES www.necsus-ejms.org Plus ultra: Coloniality and the mapping of American natureculture in the empire of Philip II Adam Wickberg NECSUS 7 (2), Autumn 2018: 205–227 URL: https://necsus-ejms.org/plus-ultra-coloniality-and-the-map- ping-of-american-natureculture-in-the-empire-of-philip-ii/ Keywords: cacao, colonial Spain, coloniality, Columbian exchange, early modern, environment, Francisco Hernández, Gonzalo Fernán- dez de Oviedo, history, mapping, media, natureculture, pineapple, to- mato Introduction By 1570 the Spanish empire under the reign of King Philip II had already ruled the part of Central America known as New Spain for half a century. The famous conquistadors like Hernán Cortés and Christopher Columbus were dead and gone, but stories of their great fortune were very much alive in the so-called old world of the European continent. An abundance of fantastic narratives facilitated by the printing press had created an image of America as the promised land of fortune in which everything from sea monsters and fountains of youth to vast gold and silver mines were to be found.[1] At the same time, reports were coming back to the government of a situation of virtual anarchy and very sinful living. The epistemological problem faced by Philip II and his ministers was that they lacked knowledge of the new conti- nent and its various human and non-human inhabitants, as well as of its ac- tual geographical layout. They were beginning to realise that the scale of their new territorial possession would demand new scientific methods to be effi- ciently ruled and exploited. The mapping impulse of early modern media grew directly out of the imperial ambitions of the Spanish monarchy and the rise of global political NECSUS – EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF MEDIA STUDIES expansionism. As the American continent emerged out of the Atlantic in the view of the early moderns, geopolitical conquest presupposed some kind of evidence to validate the claim that a particular piece of land would now be considered part of a given empire. In this way, media were integral not only to mapping but to the execution of political power itself. As Bernhard Siegert reminds us, the map is the territory in the sense that it is not just representa- tion of space but a space of representation. Understood as cultural tech- niques, maps are media that are in themselves agents of subject constitu- tion.[2] The development of a given cartographic technique therefore re- flects changes in an epistemic order which is enmeshed with historically-spe- cific power relations. Cartographic sketching along with name-giving, illus- trations, descriptions, documentation, and other forms of materially perpet- uated knowledge from empirical observation produced the territory that the empire claimed. In his spherological theory of globalisation, Peter Sloterdijk remarks that ‘the discovery of an unknown quantity – a continent, an island, a people, a plant, an animal, a bay, a sea current – presupposes the availability of the means to repeat the first encounter’.[3] These means were media and the end to which they were put was the mapping of the unknown for purposes of political subjugation and exploitation of its resources. The process of land appropriation therefore presupposed a double and more or less simultane- ous scientific achievement on both continents – partly carried out by those cosmographers, cartographers, and natural historians that were sent to the new continent to pursue empirical observation and documentation to be shipped back to Seville and then zealously guarded in the most intimate chambers of the government’s edifices, but also composed by the long-dis- tance orchestrating and calculation of what was rapidly becoming visible as an entire sphere: the globe itself as a possible object of appropriation. Hence the motto Plus Ultra, Latin for ‘further still’, as the limit of the unknown was to be continuously pushed as Magellan’s circumnavigation of the planet had paved the way for a cross-oceanic network of protocapitalistic commerce. The Atlas of Battista Agnese produced as a gift from Charles V to his son Philipp II in view of his ascension to the throne aptly captures the importance of mapping for the global imperial ambitions.[4] The empire over which the sun never set, which became another motto of Philipp’s as he took over Por- tugal and their colonies in the East Indies and Africa, is here depicted as an object of possession, a globe. The map reflects the change in European world 206 VOL 7 (2), 2018 PLUS ULTRA view over the 70 years from the end of the 15th to the middle of the 16th cen- tury. The discovery of its apparent roundness and the possibility to circum- navigate it as proved by Magellan’s expedition in 1519, which made the planet conceivable as such, also inaugurated the global race for resource possession and exploitation that is still ongoing and arguably a main feature of the An- thropocene, with oil and coal being the clearest and most salient features today. Fig. 1: Battista Agnese, Portolian Atlas (ca 1540), World map. Source: Library of Congress. Magellan’s journey is marked on the map with a thick line beginning and ending in Seville, aided by the powerful winds which surround the world and make nautical infrastructure possible, while the routes of the Spanish treas- ure fleets sustaining the trans-Atlantic empire are marked in red. The map thus visually marks the Columbian exchange that brought corn, potatoes, to- matoes, and beans to Europe, while sugarcane, wheat, livestock, and diseases were brought to the Americas. This mixing of previously separate biotas and the largest human population replacement in 13,000 years created a reor- ganisation of planetary life without geological precedent.[5] The role of cartography in the consolidation and codification of colonial discursive practices ‘can be identified in a series of key rhetorical strategies implemented in the production of the map, such as the reinscription, enclo- sure and hierarchization of space, which provide an analogue for the acqui- WICKBERG 207 NECSUS – EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF MEDIA STUDIES sition, management, and reinforcement of colonial power’.[6] Another im- portant aspect to stress in this context is the fact that modernity is highly en- meshed with coloniality in that its affirmation of Western civilisation as the here of geographical space and the now of historical time was completely contingent on conquest and colonisation.[7] These were all in turn depending on media for the process and storage of relevant geopolitical information.[8] Coloniality, media, and the Anthropocene The proposition for an epoch called the Anthropocene emerged among ge- ologists and stratigraphers in the new millennium. Paul Crutzen declared that one ought to stop calling the current epoch the Holocene, and that it should rather be called the Anthropocene, in reference to the impact made by An- thropos (‘man’).[9] Since then it has become a critical concept urging revision and new approaches throughout the sciences and humanities as well as in the art world, among journalists and activists. In the humanities in particular the geological epoch seemed to resonate with critical work being done since the 1990s to challenge notions of a sharp division between nature and culture and a progressive modernity.[10] For geologists and stratigraphers, the An- thropocene means a possible new time period that would follow the current Holocene, which started about 11,700 years ago. This in turn needs to be put in the context of millions of years of time that constitutes geological time- scales. To define any geological time unit stratigraphers need a so-called ‘golden spike’ – or GSSP for Global boundary Stratotype Section and Point – which is constituted by the clearest durable signal of transition. The GSSP is the lower boundary of the time unit, which marks the beginning of it. An early proposition for a GSSP from Paul Crutzen who coined the term was to place it at 1784, the year that James Watt patented the steam engine, as a symbol of the start of the industrial revolution and the carbonification of our atmos- phere by the burning of coal extracted from the lithosphere.[11] Paleoclima- tologist William Ruddiman argues that the Anthropocene began 5,000 years ago, when humans had already altered the biosphere
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