Essays

Foucault states:

"The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis, and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the menacing glaciation of the world. The nineteenth century found its essential mythological resources in the second principle of thermodynamics. The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein."

So Foucault talks about the cognitive progression of space:

1. Medieval Space - Space as Emplacement

In the medieval era, space was hierarchal, chosen, and divinely ordained. People lived where they did because it was believed to be chosen by God. This perpetuated a hierarchical power system: a royal or pope was ordained by God, while a farmer was also divinely assigned their position. Breaking out of these roles was seen as blasphemous.

2. Galileo - Space as Extension

Galileo's era introduced the idea of space as extension—a thing’s place being where it is now, subject to change. His heliocentric model unsettled the medieval notion of emplacement, replacing it with the concept of infinite, open space. A thing's position became defined by its current spot and its movement. This was deeply offensive to the Church as it challenged the notion of Earth—and humanity—being chosen by God. Religion had to adapt to accommodate this paradigm shift.

3. Contemporary - Space as Site

Today’s understanding of space focuses on its relational properties. Space is defined by its relationships—proximity, interaction, and roles. This view of space reflects a broader understanding of relativity: identity, history, and geography are all studied through their connections to other things. No longer defined by divine path or personal history, space is now understood through roles and relationships.

This shift invites reconsideration of how we understand space. It can encourage architects, planners, and analysts to justify decisions through Foucault’s narrative. However, this perspective is limiting because it often reflects only Eurocentric histories. For example, how did Arabs navigating barren deserts understand space? Their geometry would be celestial, not terrestrial, relying on the sky to map and orient themselves.

This raises the question: can Foucault’s model be applied to non-Western contexts? In barren landscapes like deserts, plains, or seas, navigation depends on larger-scale celestial or meteorological maps. These landscapes demand a different psychology of wayfinding and timetelling, where shifting projections, not linear landmarks, define space.

Time and Space

Foucault also touches on the interplay between time and space:

"Time probably appears to us only as one of the various distributive operations that are possible for the elements that are spread out in space."

This raises another important point: how time and space are understood and represented depends on cultural contexts. Western interpretations often detach the sacred from time and space, reducing them to measurable constructs. However, non-Western traditions often embed sacredness in their understanding, blending time, space, and the divine seamlessly.

Ultimately, applying Foucault’s model universally risks erasing diverse ways of understanding space and time. Landscapes like deserts, oceans, and plains offer alternative psychologies and geometries of orientation that deserve exploration. These perspectives enrich our understanding of humanity’s interaction with the environment, offering lenses that are “strange” yet beautiful in their divergence from Western norms.

The blind spot of science, in my opinion, is one of the most interesting, but also most dangerous, aspects of everything that we know. We categorize, place into boxes, into labels, and this is something we must do to advance science. There really is no other way to do it.

However, while this process is necessary, it is also necessary that we must not forget what we’ve taken as fact. We constantly make the error of mistaking the name of the thing for what it really is.

Wittgenstein, in his famous Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), states, "Nothing in the visual field allows you to infer that it is seen by an eye."

The eye is the invisible condition of seeing. In the same vein, the knower is the invisible condition of knowing. The tool is the invisible condition of the observation. The clock is the invisible condition of time. The map is the invisible condition of (space?) (orientation?).

In the history of knowledge, I do think there are specific points in which the tool, what will soon become invisible, is clearly there right before it vanishes. For example, Galileo Galilei mathematized natural phenomena. He put a quantifiable scientific method (which was taught to him by Vincenzo Galilei, his father) to what we previously attributed to God’s unquestionable handiwork. By doing this, he created something tangible for us to compute and dispute, and therein lies his genius. However, by doing this, he also squeezes reality into boxes of ideal variables. Everything became only valid when it could either fit or equal to or create these ideal boxes. This allowed more and more sciences to advance and become more robust, and slowly built a foundation upon which more knowledge could be built. The foundation grows higher and higher, with much less teetering, because of the rigidity of those boxes.

However, what comes after this is a world of scientists who are mistaking the ideal, quantifiable version of the phenomena to be the phenomena itself. Science grows more and more efficient, more robust, more prolific, the better the quantities fit into each other, but also, a large part of the phenomena being studied gets lost, and the human connection to the phenomena becomes untethered and disoriented.

Objectivity is a way to advance the science, but let’s be aware that it cannot really be truly objective. Whatever the phenomena is, is bent, skewed, slightly shaved, because of what is used to measure it or understand it. Of course! Can we really be so self-absorbed to believe our limited mathematical tools, or our digital representations, can measure the movement of heavenly bodies? How can we trust our devices as much as we do? How can we trust cameras? Maps? Limitations are the condition of understanding. So we cannot see anything outside of the blind spots.

However, what we can do, and what we should do, is examine the blind spots as well as we can. Let’s go back to Wittgenstein’s "Nothing in the visual field allows you to infer that it is seen by an eye." I disagree with this, as do many others. There is a way to infer that it is seen by an eye. You could close your eyes, and everything would turn black, and then you’d know that your eyes are being used. You could observe someone else. You could try seeing with your nose, for example, and then work by the process of elimination to get to your eye. You could look in the mirror and observe. You could ask someone with no eyes at all and ask if they could see.

In these ways, you are inferring that you are seeing with your eyes. With other blind spots, could the same thing work?

The way we’ve structured science is through inductive reasoning, which is an argument that applies the past to the future. We do this to clarify mysteries. We examine life in hindsight, and then try our best to apply it forwards. A forgotten side effect of this wonderful scientific process is that it works so well—it clarifies so much ambiguity—but perhaps too well, where there is no wonder or mystery left at all.

"The clock is the invisible condition of time." So let’s examine time by changing the clock.

??

??

??

Foreignness created a divide between the reality of the Middle East and its representation in dominating media. Foreignness, when combined with awareness, can be a catalyst to explore new horizons and ways of life without allowing the inevitable bias of the observer to impose upon existing ideas. However, foreignness without awareness can lead to false representations that ultimately impose themselves on the studied subject. These false representations materialize into harmful practices in building, economy, or dealing with the environment.

In the case of colonizing countries in the Middle East, Western forces failed to acknowledge their own biases, instead seeing them as truth. They evaluated the practices, culture, and environment they encountered based on Western standards. For example, when observing the Arabian desert, the colors, textures, and nature of the scenery were judged through a Western lens of environmental health. Beige tones, high temperatures, and the scarcity of water are natural to this landscape. However, when perceived by a European onlooker, it might evoke a dead or burned landscape.

The false idea of the Middle East being overgrazed, parched, or unlivable is what Davis refers to as an “environmental imaginary.” This, in itself, is not yet problematic. Observations come from schemas—previous knowledge of certain things—which allow us to make connections. These can be reframed or built upon. The issue arises with the next step. Instead of allowing these notions to propel fruitful research, they materialized into invasive actions aimed at “rehabilitating” the land, with the intention of “improving” or “saving” the “dying” landscape. Of course, this was not a humanitarian effort; it was thinly veiled imperialism.

“The consequent need to ‘improve,’ ‘restore,’ ‘normalize,’ or ‘repair’ the environment provided powerful justifications for innumerable imperial projects, from building irrigation systems to reforestation activities to the bombing of ‘unruly’ tribes to the sedentarization of nomads as a measure to prevent ‘overgrazing.’ … Determined to boost production of economically profitable crops such as cotton, a great deal of energy and resources was spent on dams, canals, and other technologies to improve and spread irrigation infrastructures in most of the Middle East and North Africa.” (Davis, 2011)

Al Ula is a new, popular site for internal tourism in Saudi Arabia. Before this, the “city of Al Ula” was a small Bedouin agricultural town. These are unofficial descriptions based on personal experience, so the vocabulary may be poorly translated. The “city” part could be driven through in ten minutes, and it seemed to have the necessities. There were no international franchises or malls. The only recognizable logo was a Dunkin’ Donuts truck (not even a café) that appeared only in winter.

Most of Al Ula was open landscape or beautiful farms filled with desert trees, horses, camels, flowers, and various grasses. In learning about the desert and the stars, it became clear that the imposed environmental imaginaries were not just a case of miscommunication leading to imposed ideas, but also a misunderstanding in how ideas are documented and shared from the outset.

Two thousand years before Ptolemy wrote Almagest, or his famed astronomical atlas, the Arabs had already perfected the science and mathematics of astronomy. They used the stars to tell time in terms of seasons, then months, then days, hours, and for experts, down to the minute. They also used the stars for navigation, with precision that could reach up to 50 cm (as described by an astronomer I learned from).

In fact, the Arabs delved deeper into astronomy than any other civilization in history. Yet, today, astronomy is attributed to the Ancient Greeks, even though their knowledge was preceded and later built upon by the Arabs. We can see clues of this today: 41% of the scientific names of the stars are Arabic, while the remaining 59% are divided among other languages. Stars like Al-Debaran, Al-Rigel (Orion’s foot), and Al-Tair are official scientific names, clearly Arabic. These names were recorded only when other civilizations, such as the Persians, requested translations. For 2,000 years, no one wrote down the precise science of the stars until it was necessary for translation. When this knowledge reached the Greek civilizations, it was organized into books by astronomers like Ptolemy. When these books returned to the Arabs, they were expanded upon and corrected.

Take the astrolabe. The dimensions and mechanisms of the astrolabe were passed down orally through poetry in the Arab world. Entire families were dedicated to the craft (like the family of Mariam Al-Astrulabiyya). The Greeks made their astrolabes using these rules. The Greek astrolabe had one level of precision, or one piece of metal used to find the angle of the stars relative to the horizon. The Arabs took this tool and added ten pieces of metal, or ten levels of precision. These histories are well documented.

The word “documented” implies an organized encyclopedia of facts that can be referenced. However, these histories were documented through poetry and oral tradition. Initially, I was skeptical of this. Stories can easily become distorted without proper referencing. But the astronomer who explained this to me asked me to approach random people and ask about the stars. In one of my first encounters, an otherwise unremarkable, “uneducated” bus driver shocked me by reciting poetry—a scientific observation of a star and its use in forecasting the weather. He even mentioned that he navigated using the stars, something I eventually had to learn as well.

In short, misunderstandings between native Arabs and colonizers could be addressed similarly. The issue was not a literal misunderstanding due to a language barrier, but a fundamental misunderstanding of how information is transmitted and built upon. Speaking in tongues in London, for example, could be seen as either witchcraft or a humorous Shakespearean performance. However, in Al Ula, speaking through poetry, telling time in verse, or discussing precise sciences and mathematics using romantic language is the norm. The divorce between science and art is not an Arab idea. They peacefully coexisted before Western rational thought forcibly separated the two, leaving both incomplete and supporting the imaginary portrayal of an uneducated, unaware Arab who ruined his environment and needed to be rehabilitated and taught how to live “correctly.” The information that explains the Arab way of life is readily available, but it is misunderstood as unscientific or unreliable because it is not evaluated based on the original standards. Instead, it is evaluated by a foreign observer, leading to severe misinterpretations.

I will say that the tilt of the summer vs. winter axes is not accurate to how the sun actually “moves” astronomically; the arcs are not at a tilt, they are at a displacement. But I made them tilt because that’s how it seems from our vantage point on Earth, and the way things seem to be is much more important to understand than how they actually are.

There is a point to be made behind why this map tracks the sun based on our imagination or our experience when there exists a scientifically accurate, legible model of the sun used in architectural engineering.

Modern astronomy—what we see in scientific illustrations that depict the accurate and mathematical paths and trajectories of the cosmos—is not a reflection of our direct human experience. They do not even occur on our scale. They are not based on our sight, our natural sense of space, our natural sense of movement. So it comes as no surprise that we are completely divorced from our surroundings and rely on a satellite’s sense of time and space. What am I supposed to do with the fact that the sun is in the center? Or if the Earth is in the center?

Sure, modern astronomy is the truth, but it must be refitted into our intuitive understanding of the world. In modern astronomy, our earlier concepts of the world are looked down upon—even laughed at. Haha, how could they really think the Earth was flat? Or that the sun rotated around the Earth? What idiots! That’s like astronomy 101!

But they operated based on intuition, and the feeling of being centered, and seeing the sun travel from East to West was a clear reflection of the direct human experience.

The point of this argument is not to deny modern research, only to put it in perspective.

Milestones in the History of Astronomy

To contextualize this, let’s look at some milestones in the history of astronomy. The Greeks persisted in the Earth-centered view even after scientists like Aristarchus of Samos (c. 310–264 BC) declared it was the Earth moving around the sun because the Greeks felt like man was connected to the universe and at the center of it, placed there by God. The Church backed this because it was beneficial for them to adhere to the philosophy of humans being “chosen” somehow.

Then, the Copernican revolution. It brought science into the humanities. However, the mechanics of the cosmos are not the only way to see reality. They do not make up all of human nature, or history, or cognition. If for thousands and thousands of years, everything we knew and know came from the sky, what sky was it? It certainly wasn’t the sky drawn by satellites but the sky that we saw and understood with our eyes. So to understand the way we think, we have to see that sky again.

What’s interesting is that sun-centered and Earth-centered models don’t actually contradict each other. They are two sides of the same coin because they both had to arrive at the same conclusions—that the sun makes the day and the absence of it makes the night, and everything else relies on that. The two ways of thought: one determined by technology and an accurate God-view model, and the other by direct human experience.

A Broadway Metaphor

Imagine you attend a Broadway show, a depiction of Romeo and Juliet. You’re deeply moved by this show, even brought to tears. The play affects your life profoundly. You find yourself amazed by the real effect it had on your life.

Will that effect change if, a month later, you decided to follow the actors backstage and inquired about their real lives? Would it be of any benefit to you to know the actors don’t have any romantic chemistry offstage? That ‘Juliet’ is actually married to someone else—that she’s older than ‘Romeo,’ and that she actually looks down on him as an actor.

Would that change the effect, the wonder, the sparkle you had in your eyes the first time you saw it? Would it change any of the epiphanies you had in your own life or the way the story played out?

The Importance of Intuition

The way humans untangled the mysteries and patterns of the sky, the way they drew their culture from it, their mathematics, their language, their psychology, their travel, their daily lives, and the way it played into their folklore, was the blueprint to everything we know today. The way we’ve drawn time into years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes. The way we know the compass, latitude, longitude, the way we’ve made our devices, the way we imagine scale, and science, and religion, all came from the stories that we wove from the sky. To push all that aside and replace it in schools with modern astronomy leaves a huge gap in human understanding. Let’s not write it off because of its mathematical inconsistencies.

Anyway, the point is that these maps aren’t meant to take you away from technology—of course, we need Google Maps and the time dictated by Greenwich—but they are meant to put it all into context.