Nonvisual Geographies

The interpretation of nonvisual landscapes explores the role of sensory and perceptual modes other than vision in the construction of geographic space. This topic positions itself at the boundary between social theory and behavioral geography by examining the ways in which nonvisual modes of information acquisition and processing reflect geographic environments and in turn shape those same places by structuring the subjective understanding and behavior of people and their symbolic understanding of space. This understanding and representation of geographic space emanates from several diverse conceptual perspectives, including behavioral geography and poststructuralism. At the individual level, we gather information in an environment from all our senses other than vision alone—hearing, smell, taste, and touch, which includes kinesthe-sia (muscle memory). Our spatial behavior is informed by these other sense modalities facilitating an understanding of space and place.

A vast array of information informs, guides, and shapes our understanding or misunderstanding about a place. The social construction of vision is dominant and is a historically con textualized way of knowing, also known as ocularcentrism. By delving into what vision is not, this line of [Page 2043]thought sheds new light on the role of vision in the making of place and spatial behavior.

Geography has long been emphatically ocular-centric, privileging the visual as a means to acquiring and representing spatial knowledge. Behavioral geographers note the fundamental role of vision in the acquisition of environmental information. A large body of work concerned with representations of space, ranging from cartography to GIS, has illustrated the complex ways in which graphical knowledge is related to visual perception. Many authors have noted the dominance of vision in human understanding, both at an individual behavioral level and at a social-cultural one. Vision is a metaphor for the ways in which we symbolically appropriate the world; for example, we often say “I see” for “I understand.” From Kant onward, the cogito of Western knowledge obtained objectivity (even if only mythically) by seeing everything.

The hegemony of vision—the unquestioned naturalness of sight—has come recently under mounting attack from diverse quarters. The changing role of vision in the late 19th century, as the experience of space and time was subjected to massive compression through photography, the telephone, and the automobile. More recently, geography has witnessed a remarkable convergence in social theory and cognitive-behavioral studies around this topic; increasingly, researchers in both of these domains have delved into the social construction of perception.

As a result, the “natural” dominance of vision has been undermined, and its hegemony has been shown to be a historical product. The linkages between ocularcentrism and modernity have been explored and have uncovered the masculinism of the “gaze” that sees all—and thus knows all. Building on Habermas's theory of communicative interaction, Rorty argued that it holds that the proper model of knowledge is not the mimetic mirror but the conversation. The shift from visual to aural metaphors reflects the hegemony of post-positivist modes of understanding and the corresponding emphasis on knowledge as a multivocal dialogue. Critical social theorists like Lefebvre have argued that visual knowledge is grounded in its historical and political context and that every way of knowing is simultaneously a way of interacting, reproducing, or challenging social structures that are intimately embedded in individual ways of comprehending the world. Academics teaching geography have reflexively questioned activities that require vision, such as field trips, computer-based spatial learning, and viewing PowerPoint slides. The analysis of geographic representation has been extended to the world scale, where visuality is a consistent theme. Vision, in short, is a political phenomenon as much as a behavioral one.

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