Both the notion and the technology of panorama represented a development in visual culture and the relationship of imagination and representation; it was how we saw – or how we desired to see – the world around us. Today we have Google Earth: the panoramic syntax has been inverted: we no longer see the world around us, we now see ourselves around the world.
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In the panorama there is the meeting of subject and object. It is also a demarcation of the horizon, and the horizon is what would be limits in every direction on one axis – it is like an unfixed, unlocatable limit. Being in the panorama meant being surrounded. We were surrounded by the world, but now we are surrounded by the beyond. The shift from the panoramic to the globular is the addition of a set of two axes. It is a shift towards the conflation of limits with their content: it is the difference between a panoptic and an omnioptic view of the world.
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The expression, the gesture shared by the panorama and Google Earth is one of pointing at the horizon. The horizon is not of the realm of language except in being an interstice. It is like a phatic inscription, or one absent from what is inscribed, not part of its content, but rather the trace of voidness, an inscription by structure upon itself. Both of these technologies, both creations are imprints of an entire horizon, imprints of that which pervades everything of meaning. Since there content is endless and absolutely encompasses the World, their form, in being the possibility of form itself, in encompassing everything offset by some kind of vanishing point, allows them to be read as representing all potential representation. In representing the horizon, we indicate the necessary moment before meaning production: form itself, a realization and distinction of absence and presence. And, since it is the condition for the meeting of subject and object, it is, as Barthes described, the basis for a “habitat”, the possibility of representation. In re-presenting the horizon, they imply, bare and nebulous, the imminent difference that somehow comes before everything. Since a limit alway implies whatever unknown is beyond it, GE is presentation by way of hiding : The horizon represents a trace of absence: that which would otherwise inscribe itself on the unnameable. It appears as a center very much as Derrida wrote of center: it is the center of the structure while at the same time not located within the structure. In fact it is perpetually dislocated, its location is constantly deferred, within it, we are constantly arriving. This center, this non-object is the unnameable thing that is its name: the co-implosion of symbol and thing that, through its confusion, is found wordless; a kind of impossible gateway to the void, to the absence of language. What is expressed by representations of the horizon is both the impossibility of its own expression, and the possibility of all expression.
The view of new York from the top of the WTC “Allows one to read it, to be a solar Eye, looking down like a god. The exaltation of a scopic and gnostic drive: the fiction of knowledge is related to this lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more” (Michel De Certeau). This is how GE today represents knowledge of the world or ‘worldly knowledge’.
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The shift identified here is one of the drawing of a horizon, a redrawing of the interstitial object that surrounds everything. The development is within the correlation between technological development and visual culture, and within our consciousness of what we name “the World”. The worlding function of the horizon does not shift in an obvious, direct way, nor are the correlations involved straight forward or consistent. The panoramic conception of the world persisted long after the discovery of a round earth. The globular map on its own did not bring forth Google Earth. The latter is the product of the culmination and combination of various factors: it represents the total development of globalization, technologically and culturally.
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This development in our imagination of The World is also one of narrative. The content of a panorama constitutes a single image and a single location. The verisimilitude, the depictive accuracy was subordinated to the message: the beauty of a landscape, the glory of a battle, the history of a nation that the viewer is lead through, lead around.
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