Early navigational instruments forced coordination of lived position with abstract totality

Evidence

For the new instruments — compass, sextant, and theodolite — correspond not merely to new geographic and navigational problems (the difficult matter of determining longitude, particularly on the curving surface of the planet, as opposed to the simpler matter of latitude, which European navigators can still empirically determine by ocular inspection of the African coast); they also introduce a whole new coordinate: the relationship to the totality, particularly as it is mediated by the stars and by new operations like that of triangulation. At this point, cognitive mapping in the broader sense comes to require the coordination of existential data (the empirical position of the subject) with unlived, abstract conceptions of the geographic totality. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 167

Categorization

• XREF: The existential-data-plus-abstract-totality coordination parallels the reader’s project of cognitively mapping their own position in the world system.
• ADDENDUM: The compass/triangulation enabling the shift to abstract totality parallels how trees as infrastructure enable imaginary world-mapping in the grafting essay.