Mapping the invisible: knowledge, credibility and visions of earth in early modern cave maps

This paper examines cave environments as unique spaces of knowledge production and shows how visualizations of natural cavities in maps came to be powerful tools in scientific reasoning. Faced with the challenge of limited vision, mapmakers combined empiricism and imagination in an experimental setting and developed specific translation strategies to deal with the uncertain origin of underground objects and the shifting boundaries between the known and the unknown. By deconstructing this type of cartographic representation, which has barely been studied, this paper furnishes surprising insights into the scholarly practices and tools used to deal with this considerable epistemic uncertainty and to signal credibility and trust to potential users. The array of maps used for this study includes both archival and published sources, depicting caves in Europe, America and Siberia.

Materializing

The present article explores how cycles are brought into being through the practices and affordances involved in period-tracking with apps. Based on thirteen in-depth semi-structured interviews with period-tracking app users living in the Netherlands, it expands on literature discussing the relationship between embodiment, apps, and quantification. The contributions of this article are two-fold. Theoretically, it argues for the use of Karen Barad’s notion of apparatus to understand how bodies are (re)configured in relation to self-tracking technologies (1998). Empirically, it exposes how bodies emerge in localized period-tracking practices, within material-semiotic arrangements that both resist and reproduce cultural ideals about menstruating bodies. Period-tracking with apps, this study finds, brings the body’s interior processes into being in a “systematic” way, (re)configuring the cycle as either a series of phases or an interval with a certain (normative) duration. In all cases, periodtracking with apps becomes a means for users to access their internal body and to materialize the invisible processes of the cycle in ways that can be acted upon.

Approaching the Invisible

In modern times, Western philosophy eschews any metaphysical or occult references to invisible reality as being culturally obsolete. Modern culture now privileges language that reflects our unshakeable allegiance to materialism in which the things of the world no longer have any depth of meaning. This chapter compares two modern cultural approaches to invisible reality emerging in the late 20th century in response to the growing world-wide crisis of meaninglessness. The first approach gathers many different methodologies under the umbrella term The New Materialism. The second approach focusses on initiatory experiences once known as Spiritual Emergency. Both approaches are moving us towards a new understanding of matter, based on the reality of the invisible. Throughout the chapter, the author will italicise words such as “invisible,” “life,” “alive,” “alien,” “ether,” “spatial,” “virtual,” “fluid,” and “absence” in order to refer to a new kind of fluid, living, invisible matter that we are bringing to language in modern times.