Yantras are square charms whose power is based on words and diagrams. The above yantra was obtained from a market in Ahmedabad, India and contains the principles of India geomancy on which much architecture is based. Vastu Shastra gives particular meaning to the cardinal points. In the Vastu Purusha Mandala, the earth is represented by a square. In this case, the direction on top is east. The morning sun is considered especially powerful. While North is ruled by Kubera, the god of wealth, South is governed by Yama, or death.

Moonshadow is considered one of Cat Stevens greatest songs and his personal favourite of that period. It imagines the loss of body parts as a form of liberation.

One curious verse talks about the loss of teeth:

And if I ever lose my mouth
All my teeth, north and south
Yes, if I ever lose my mouth
Oh if, I won’t have to talk..

So what is ‘north and south’ in relation to teeth. The obvious reference seems to be upper and lower teeth. Why?

Well, it helps the rhythm of the song and establishes the rhyme very nicely. But at the same time it does highlight the perverseness of verticalism. There seems no direct link between the upper teeth and north, other than via a modern convention to orient maps in books and on walls with north at the top. The personal is the cartographical.

Oh, I’m bein’ followed by a moonshadow, moonshadow, moonshadow
Leapin and hoppin’ on a moonshadow, moonshadow, moonshadow

New critique or old myth?

You could be forgiven for thinking that the recently released Up in the Air heralds a new wave of American films that reflect the real social realities of America exposed by the Global Financial Crisis.

‘ target=_blank>Rolling Stone claims that ‘Up in the Air is a defining movie for these perilous times’ and gives a ‘bravo’ to its exposé corporate cynicism.  The ABC At the Movies gives the film top rating – ‘It is part of the reality of contemporary economic life in America, as opposed to this totally superficial life that he’s living.’

But do we see any change in the key values that lead to the piracy on Wall Street. Take some key features of the film:

• The young woman who challenges the elder male is shown to be an emotional child needing his assistance
• The world is nothing but the United States of America and the key characters (apart from those being sacked) are all white Anglos
• There is not one reference to the carbon emissions generated by jet travel
• The human ‘shark’ who is employed to do the dirty work by faceless companies is revealed to be warm and responsible person compared to the alternative of online retrenchments
• The humble mid-Western couple ‘grounded’ by poverty are gifted a round the world flight by the generous corporate brother (the meek will orbit the earth)
• It celebrates the verticalist fantasy that the world above is exempt from the realities of what lies below

Up in the Air is an attempt to maintain ‘business as usual’ in a culture that is destroying itself and the world through an unbridled capitalism. Just when reality seemed to expose the irresponsibility at the heart of this system, Hollywood coopts the anti-corporate narrative in order to reinforce the very world that created the problem.

Don’t board this flight. I have a premonition that this plane will not arrive at its advertised destination.

Virgin Airlines have just released their first direct flight between Sydney and Johannesburg. To  tempt Aussie travellers to experience the wonders of Africa, they released a brief clip.

The clip starts in a sedate fashion, with images of relaxing familiar scenes involving swimming pools and safaris, but then it builds up pace to a vertiginous series of scenes mostly involving positions of great altitude:

• View from Table Mountain looking down on Cape Town
• Epic dam
• Majestic waterfalls
• Abseiling down Table Mountain
• Flying in a helicopter
• Teeing off from a precipice
• Motorbike jumping
• Flock of birds flying
• Bridge bungee-jumping

Naturally, this is an airline company, so they are keen to promote the experience of flight. But the resulting engagement with Africa is puzzling. Would you fly to Africa in order to hit a golf ball into the seeming void? Surely, this is simply the expression of a deeply embedded colonial mentality that sees Africa as a vast playing field for Western adventure.

Sustaining this mentality is lofty point of view by which we gaze down on Africa. While they settle on a horizontal plane of nature, we move along the vertical axis of experience.

Today, few of us would admit to any racist attitudes towards those in Africa. Wearing Make Poverty History bracelets, we see ourselves as far from the brutality of those who scrambled for Africa in the nineteenth century. Yet, the Virgin ad shows us that the imaginary architecture of colonialism remains deeply embedded.

Come on down.

This paper was presented at the International Conference on Hegemony, Counter Hegemony and Alternatives to Hegemony: Implications for the South in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia, February 2009

My starting point for this paper on hegemony is somewhere below the level of formal political relations. I address certain cognitive elements that we employ when we attempt to orient ourselves in the world. But this is not to avoid the political. Rather, I attempt to explore the extent to which hegemonic structures reach into our personal consciousness. I argue that the south-south axis requires not just a political re-alignment, but also a radical re-visioning of our everyday world.

To locate this everyday world, it is useful if we gather together at the same location. For a location, I am using this image of a country landscape that I obtained from Flickr. It’s a typical pastoral scene of a rural field with the sun setting over a mountain in the distance. To locate ourselves in the phenomenological dimension, let’s consider the very basic scenario. You’re touring around the area and decide to stop the car and take a stroll to get some exercise. You know there are no laws about trespassing here so you are free to travel where you wish. So where would you go?

Most people when asked this question will elect to walk up the hill on the horizon, towards the setting sun. Not everyone chooses the same direction, but this seems the default option. The actual direction itself is not critical to my argument. But by considering some of the dimensions at play in the decision to take the default direction we can begin to think about how the world might be skewed towards dominant powers at an everyday cognitive level.

So, where are we going when we move towards the hill? In the first instance, we are moving towards the light. The illuminated world provides us with a space of knowledge and action, as opposed to the darkness looming behind us. In following the sun we travel west, toward the future, leaving the past behind.

As well as moving towards the horizon, we are also fixing our journey on a hill that stands out from the plains. We are choosing a singular element that acts as a figure on the ground of the landscape.

And, finally, we are more than just focusing on a unique destination; we are also elevating ourselves above the general scene. From this point, we can then see not only the field that we have emerged from, but the distant horizon beyond, on which another hill sits.[1] But there’s more than simple information gain in reaching the summit. There’s also a sense of power in being able to survey the world around us. So we used to say as children whenever we found a vantage point above our playmates – ‘I’m the king of the castle, you’re the dirty rascal.’ The choreography of power seems essentially vertical.

Looking up to power

Thank you for lingering at this scene. My challenge now is to reward your patience by taking us back to the matter of common concern—the global hegemony in which the interests of capital in the North dominate the lives of the poor in the South.

Let’s step back and consider our terms. The word ‘hegemony’ is derived from the ancient Greek word hegeisthai, meaning ‘to lead’. In the political scene, the dominant class leads subordinate classes. The most efficient mode of leadership is self-managed, where those in the subaltern position orient themselves of their own accord towards the interests of the hegemon. This is particularly effective at the level of everyday habitus, as we go about ordering our priorities and orienting our trajectories. This quotidian activity is grounded in our phenomenological being—not in the contingent levels on our decision-making focus, but in the evaluative dimensions by which we order priorities. This kind of hegemony operates not when we decide to become a lawyer or a banker, but in our overall interest in making our way up in the world. There are the evaluative dimensions that make a decision possible.

Some of the links between these phenomenological dimensions and power have been well studied. The dimension of light is one of the most pervasive. In developing the concept of ‘heliocentrism’,[2] Derrida traced light as a dominant trope of Western thought from Plato’s myth of the cave to the celebration of Enlightenment. But Derrida was also interested in the shadows cast by this trope. In order to shine the light on reason, shadows had to be cast over the darkness of the world. Such a metaphor colluded with the construction of empires through a slave trade that required the denial of empathy to those with darker complexions. Whether or not this metaphor was originally conceived in classical times as justification of empire, its reproduction during European colonisation was certainly allied to the control of colonised peoples.

As we noted in our rural scene, in being drawn towards light we are also oriented westwards. In the idea of West[3] that informed British colonisation, the setting sun signalled the future of the world. With the Enlightenment came a developmentalist position that placed the West at the forefront of historical time, and consigned the colonised world to backwardness.[4] Thus we have the hegemony of the already developed world over the still developing—the world that arrived first over the world that came in third.

The second dimension was towards the unique element. The privilege of the rare above the common is synonymous with hierarchy. The aristocratic control of rarity in the feudal times was eventually replaced by a bourgeois set of values that Bourdieu identifies as ‘distinction’.[5] From the post-revolutionary world emerged the great art galleries owned by the state and wealthy patrons. These galleries were filled with the singular world treasures, often looted from the periphery. And within the West, the cult of masterpieces was constructed through the invention of ‘genius’ as the gateway of value through rare gifted individuals. Genius is the gold standard by which the art market has flourished as a system of global money laundering for the elite of the elite.

When we attempt to visualise a hierarchical society, we often imagine a pyramid. Even a nation founded on democracy such as the United States of America takes the pyramid as its official seal. Designed in 1782, the US seal consists of an unfinished pyramid over which is an eye within a triangle, as a detached summit. The motto above Annuit cœptis—‘he approves of our undertakings’—is taken from Virgil’s Aeneid. The motto below Novus ordo seclorum— ‘a new order of the ages’—also taken from Virgil, though in this case the Eclogue.

This eighteenth century design is a confident expression of a new republic, assured that its future destiny is to govern the world. As a committed democracy, the current is not underpinned with the portrait of a monarch. The summit of the pyramid is replaced by the single eye, representing providence.[6]

But rarity is not enough to account for the choice of pyramid as a symbol. It can equally be represented two-dimensionally by the centre of a circle. The pyramid is inevitably a symbol of verticality. Rarity ascends. The precious is elevated above the common. From this height, we can survey the vertical dimension that pervades our very understanding of what a hierarchy is. This dimension distinguishes superiors from their inferiors and high ideals from base motives. The upper classes rule over the lower classes. Our lofty ideals transcend shallow thinking. It seems something at the core of our being that we gaze upwards. Combined with the twin symbol of the eagle, the American dollar is predicated on this logic of verticalism that identifies power as a form of elevation above all.

Verticalism

Verticalism and power seems almost synonymous. There are strong reasons why we orient ourselves upwards. As noted by the art historian Rudolf Arnheim, the vertical dimension has gravity on its side.[7] Any physical force coming from above thus has an extra advantage over its opponent. And in terms of strategic information, the general who surveys troops from a hilltop has advantage over his rival in the valley. That power rises to the top seems too obvious even to articulate.

Yet there are countervailing valencies that favour the lower end. After all, the base of our world is solid. And in the ground lie buried the roots from which sustenance is gathered for the world above. Despite this alternative perspective, power is not seen to emanate from below, at least in the West. Verticalism is characteristic of the neo-Platonic tradition of thought, which raised ideas above the base world of matter.[8] Christian cosmology helped enforce this distinction with the image of a heaven above and a hell below.

We could very well then align this ‘verticalism’ alongside ‘heliocentrism’ as a dominant metaphor of Western thought. But does it bite? The metaphor of light was clearly complicit in the practice of slavery and colonisation of darker peoples. There seemed no obvious difference in the bodily heights of coloniser and colonised. So how did the imperial power come to be positioned above its subjects?

We have to step back and look at the world as a whole to see this vertical orientation of power. Drawing on the classical traditions of the world map-making, Ptolemy constructed a two-dimensional image of the world in which one part is arranged above another. As the classical concept of the antipodes was developed during the middle ages, this vertical order was aligned with a moral topography that contrasted the civilisation in the north from the savagery below. Macrobius’ commentary on Cicero’s Dream of Scipio presents a bipolar moral world:

This quarter of the earth, which is inhabited all the people with whom we can have any contact, verges towards the north pole, and the spherical shape of the earth causes the south pole to be plunged into the depths… The south pole, on the other hand, once buried from our sight, as it were, by the location of our abodes, will never show itself to us, nor the stars with which it is undoubtedly adorned. And this is what Virgil, knowing nature’s ways full well, meant when he said, ‘One pole is ever high above us, while the other, beneath our feet, is seen of black Styx and the shades infernal.’[9]

With the age of exploration and the conquest of the New World, the vertical orientation of north as up and south as down eventually became cartographical convention in the West.[10] But more than a code for specialist navigators, this northwards orientation has configured the very way in which we see ourselves in space.

Nowadays, north-centrism is a taken-for-granted element in how we orient ourselves around the world. Last week I told my family that I was flying up to Kuala Lumpar, and that on Friday I would be flying back down to Melbourne. Yet in terms of my experience this particular trajectory is largely horizontal. So how is it that our cognitive representation of movement so blatantly contradicts our immediate knowledge? I could have simply said ‘flying to Kuala Lumpar’. The ‘up’ is superfluous. There must be broader agendas at work in this vertical orientation of the world.

Going South

With the rudimentary understanding of North as up and South as down comes the use of these directions as metaphors of fortune. If something ‘goes South’, it inevitably indicates a downturn of fortune. This has a contemporary application in the global financial crisis. If you Google the phrase ‘market heads south’ you’ll find it used in many instances to ornament stories about plummeting stock values and declining profit lines.[11]

So it is ingrained in way the world views itself that the hegemon is positioned above the dominated, the north above the south and the first above the third world. The world is clearly not a level playing field. This coincidence of vertical value with cartography may seem trivial, but alongside the other hegemonic values that divide the coloniser from the colonised, it is at the least complicit with a global hierarchy. It is the subliminal ‘leg up’ that impels a talented worker to rise in the world, to find a position in the north.

We know this individual ambition broadly as aspirationalism. Here an individual orients his or her life towards escaping the plight of their class in order to enjoy the fruits of the class above them. In Australia, this is associated particularly with consumption of ever more valuable goods, such as four-wheel drives, and holidays in the North.

Now comes the challenge. Given the way in which verticalism is interwoven with our daily engagement of the world, how it be contested? How can we begin to unravel the structures on which the hegemony of the North is based?

I’d like briefly to outline three alternative paths. The first direction reverses our orientation entirely. How do we look down, rather than up?

Alternative paths

The carnivalesque response

A recent publication in Chile has identified this phenomenon as ‘arribismo’, roughly translated as up-ism. In Siútico: Arribismo, abajismo y vida social en Chile, Oscar Contardo[12] reflects on the particularly Chilean concern to be seen as different from its southern neighbours – as an ‘England of the Pacific’. Individually this upward passage is accessible by a number of different ladders. In Santiago, it is to have a house in the hills, particularly Las Condes, above the smog of the valley. Biologically, it is to have predominantly European genes, untainted by Mapuche blood. Arribismo (or up-ism) can be seen as a common phenomenon among the bourgeoisie of colonised societies who orient themselves towards the values of European colonisers above rather native cultures below.

What’s interesting about Cantardo’s book is that he heralds a counter trend growing in Chile, which he calls ‘abajismo’, or down-ism. This trend reflects the move down from the hills by the children of upper class parents in order to submerge themselves in the culture of the street, particularly in noisy neighbourhoods such as Bellavista. It is particularly fashionable to frequent low dives, where reside the Guachacas, the coarse ordinary Chilean folk with loud Ranchera songs, ribald jokes and comfort food. Optionally, this is accompanied by a taste for things indigenous, including Mapuche jewellery and Aymara weaving. Given its bourgeois origins, such taste is ripe for satire, as down-ism itself becomes an elite pursuit, akin to poverty chic of the Paris catwalks.

While there’s no doubt some truth in this, there are less cynical forces at play. This reversal of polarity is a distinctive feature of Chilean culture, evident particularly in the communist poetry of Pablo Neruda who praised the common. We see parallels in this across the south with a ‘rediscovery of the common’ evident in movements like poor craft in Australia.

One response to verticalism is thus to reverse the poles. In the case of class politics in a country like Chile, this involves identifying with the common in its honest coarseness. Such reversal can be understood as an up-turning of hierarchy, characteristic of the carnivalesque. While radical in the immediate sense, such gestures are often seen as short-term. They inevitably reinforce the axis of hierarchy as a whole.

Horizontalismo

An alternative direction was borne from the struggles in Latin America. Here the dominant alternative form of political thought proposes a right angle to verticalism. Horizontalismo has developed from the collective Marxism adopted by the Zapatista rebels in Chiapas province of Mexico. This became particularly relevant in guiding popular response to the economic crisis in Argentina at the beginning of this century.[13]

Here mass organisation on the street was seen to oppose the vertical orientation of power known as clientism in the era of Peron. Contrary to the organisation of masses through centralised media outlets, this movement occurs virally through messages posted on walls and word of mouth. This is dramatically expressed in the cacerola, a banging of pots that rippled through the barrios like a Mexican wave. Key to horizontalismo is the goal ‘to change the world without taking power’.

Complimentary to horizontalism is the emergence of relational aesthetics as an art form, particularly in the south-south gatherings of the South Project. Here the pyramid-like relation of artist and audience is replaced by the role of artist as an event-manager who brings people together. This is a collective art that is best read not by artistic expression but by group energy. Like the cacerola in Argentina, relational art events seem particularly effective in opening up spaces in a democracy for new forces to emerge. But questions arise about whether it be successful in sustaining these forces.

Horizontalism is vulnerable to the same kind of criticism of abajismo. While effective in breaking existing structures of power, it can be argued that it is not effective in creating alternative structures to replace them.

Lateralism

The final path forward involves a synthesis of abajismo and horizontalism. This involves a lateral association of southern cultures woven together through common projects.

In the context of this current workshop, the phenomenon of regionalism is seen as a relevant antidote to global hegemony. What I commend is a direction sympathetic to the various counter-hegemonic measures against verticalism. It is a direction which seeks to reverse polarities, construct a non-centred network, and understand the broader ecology of cultural values. It does this within a regional focus.

In the case of vertical structures of power, the kind of regional alliance that confronts this directly is along the lateral south-south axis. This is predominantly understood today as an alliance of low income nations against the more powerful Northern economies. But we can look at broadening this to include the post-colonial world which suffers from the inferiority complex orchestrated by perceiving ourselves to be the bottom of the world. We are conditioned to be looking North for recognition and way forward. The radical alternative here is to look sideways, to share our own commonalities rather than someone else’s ideals.

This lateral axis is still relatively undeveloped. There have been many proposals to find points of commonality in artistic expression. There are common southern hemisphere concerns, such as ocean life, Gondwana heritage and weather. And there are common Global South themes, such as the history of colonial commodities such as sugar and coffee.

One area of initial activity is in the construction of the methodology by which such work might be possible. In the case of understanding of southern cultures, it is important to review the Western concept of art that has been inherited as a focus on individual expression. There is much benefit to be gained in sharing paradigms for understanding languages of cultural expression particular to the South. And in terms of future activity, the prevalence of north-south activity in design-craft collaborations has the risk of a new kind of primitivism through ethical consumerism. The development of a Code of Practice to promote authentic partnerships seems an important step forward.

Conclusion

So if we return to our original scene, we find ourselves now back in the same position as we were before. But hopefully there is one critical difference. We can now begin to consider alternative paths. We can follow the western way, raising ourselves above others, riding off into the sunset. We can settle at the base of the mountain, enjoying the wildlife. Or we can move sideways, to find similar valley scenes where we can discuss our dilemma with others.

Recognising that choice exists is the first step.

Thanks to Kalak Kav for the landscape photograph.

[1] While relatively common, there is sometimes a cultural specificity to these values. Some cultures orient themselves towards the past—the east where the sun has risen. What is more universal is the very need to have an orientation in order to make passage through the world, to know where to go.

[2] Jacques Derrida ‘Violence and metaphysics: An essay on the thought of Emmanuel Levinas’, in (ed. ) Writing and Difference (trans. Alan Bass) London: Routledge, 1978 (orig. 1967)

[3] Loren Baritz ‘The Idea of the West’ The American Historical Review (1961) 66: 3, pp. 618-640

[4] All the peoples whose history is recorded fall somewhere between our present degree of civilization and that which we still see amongst savage tribes; if we survey in a single sweep the universal history of peoples we see them sometimes making fresh progress, sometimes plunging back into ignorance, sometimes surviving somewhere between these extremes or halted at a certain point, sometimes disappearing from the earth under the conqueror’s heel, mixing with the victors or living on in slavery, or sometimes receiving knowledge from some more enlightened people in order to transmit it in their turn to other nations, and so welding an uninterrupted chain between the beginning of historical time and the century in which we live, between the first peoples known to us and the present nations of Europe.

Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat Condorcet Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (trans. June Barraclough) London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson General, 1955 (orig. 1795), p. 8

[5] Pierre Bourdieu Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (trans. R. Nice) Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984 (orig. 1974)

[6] Now, from our current end of history, as the American empire seems to be unravelling, the eye appears to presage the role of spectacle in the operation of global power.

[7] ‘In the vertical, the gravitational axis dominates the system.’ Rudolph Arnheim The Power of the Center: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983, p. 230

[8] This is particularly evident in the work of Plotinus, who reinforced the distinction between the eternal world of forms above from the transient realm of matter below—‘to lift clay into the heavens is against nature’ Plotinus The Enneads (trans. Stephen McKenna) New York: Pantheon, 1969 (orig. 270), p. 86

[9] Ambrosius Aurelius Theodosius Macrobius Commentary on the Dream of Scipio (trans. William Harris Stahl) New York: Columbia University Press, 1952 (orig. 420), p. 153

[10] If the West had not proven to be the dominant power, we might be facing in the opposite direction. Arab cartography up to the time of the renaissance oriented maps to the south.

[11] But this idiom can also have an alternative reading, purely incidental. In many cases it means simply the relocation of business to the physical South, particularly the southern states of the USA. As a metaphor, South sits uneasily between idiom of decline and geographic region.

This ambivalence can sometimes be quite ironic, as in the title of an article in the Australian, ‘Australia goes south in the first guide to the Oscars’. Isn’t Australia already south? It appears that the story is about the absence of likely prospects for Australian film to win one of those precious trophies, the Academy Award.

[12] Oscar Contardo Siútico: Arribismo, abajismo y vida social en Chile Santiago: Vergara, 2008

[13] See Marina Sitrin Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina AK Press, 2006

How was the world oriented north? We take it for granted that north is up because you place the more important things on top. But does this mean that people in the South must feel forever inferior? To counter this psychological disadvantage, it is important to understand the historical processes that led to this arrangement.

The most obvious point of reference is the map. Who decided that North was up? It seems that the vertical orientation of the world map was developed during the Italian renaissance, accompanying the great voyages of discovery by Columbus and co. Before that, the Arab maps were oriented upside down to us, with the south up. So as the practice of map-mapping passed from Eastern to Western empires, was it informed by a particular north-orientation in the Judeo-Christian tradition?

We are now on the verge of the great Jewish ritual of Passover, which commemorates the escape of the Jews from Egypt to find the promised land of Israel. In the Bible, the relationship between Egypt and Israel is vertical. In Genesis, Abraham goes ‘down into Egypt’ to escape famine (10). Later Joseph is brought ‘down to Egypt’, followed by his brothers (39). And the Exodus (32), Moses is described as the man that brought the Jews up out of the land of Egypt.

At the Passover feast, those gathered for the Passover feast read from the Haggadah, which includes the Afro-America spiritual Go Down Moses, expressing the hope among slaves that they would find a Moses to release them from bondage. William Faulkner’s story of the same name clearly identifies Pharaoh as the white slave master.

Up and down feature elsewhere in the Bible, but not along the north-south axis. The Book of Ezra tells the story of the Persian king Cyrus who invaded Babylon and released the Jews from bondage. Though himself a Zoroastrian, Cyrus had a great respect for other religions and won the allegiance of Babylonians by praying at the temple of Marduk. He also vowed to help the Jews re-established their great temple in Jerusalem. Cyrus proclaimed, ‘Anyone of his people among you—may his God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem in Judah and build the temple of the LORD.’ Though the trajectory from Iran-Iraq-Israel is along the east-west axis, it is still a matter of going ‘up’ to Jerusalem.

The particular Jewish arrangement of cardinal points seems quite independent of this vertical axis. The most important direction is Kedem, or east, towards which everything of importance is directed. They share with the Arabs an understanding of North as left and South as right.

The Hebrew word for ‘go up’ is aliyah. At one level, it describes the process of migrating to Israel, from the exiles of ancient Babylon to the more recent diaspora from Russia. At a more immediate level, it also describes when someone is called in the Synagogue to come up to the front and read from the Torah.

The opposite of aliyah is yerida, to go down. This is clearly a less desirable direction. There is even today argument about whether Abraham sinned when he committed yerida in going down to Egypt. One interesting paradox is yerida l’tzorich aliya (go down in order to come up), as evident in the folk wisdom about the necessity of hard times to acquire knowledge of the world.

So, the vertical root that surfaces in the Renaissance seems to strike deep in the Judeo-Christian tradition. But where does it begin? It becomes more difficult to find sources, but there’s an interesting resonance in the culture of Babylon itself. The creation epic known as Enûma Eliš is one of the first references to a sacred domain above. It pictures the beginning of the world… ‘When in the height heaven was not named,/And the earth beneath did not yet bear a name…’

And where did the Babylonians acquire their verticalism from? Where do we stop?

From the Judeo-Christian roots, we have a better understanding of why it is important whatever is given the elevated position. But it still does not explain how this privilege was granted to the North. We may have to go back to the Renaissance for that answer.

Thanks for Bernard Rechter and Paul Forgasz for their assistance with this issue.

Episode #38 is one of the classics. ‘Somebody’s Going to Emergency, Somebody’s Going to Jail’ is set in the carnival atmosphere of ‘Big Cheese Day’ when lobbyists are granted access to key decision makers. White House Press Secretary CJ Cregg is assigned the Cartographers for Social Equality, which she dismisses as an empty duty, ‘I won’t really be listening to them’.

The scene is set up as an amusing diversion from the stress of world affairs. The cartographers appear typical of the earnest myopic NGOs that flood the White House on this day. Her colleague Josh Lyman appears impatient, and says to CJ as he leaves, ‘These guys find Brigadoon on that map, you’ll call me, right?’ But when presented with the corrected Peters Projection of the world, CJ begins to listen carefully. When this map is then rotated with the south at the top, CJ objects that it isn’t right. And when asked for a reason why, she can only say ‘Because it’s freaking me out.’

The other story line concerns Deputy Communications Director Sam Seaborn who is trying to obtain a pardon for a friend’s grandfather, a White House staffer who was convicted during a McCarthy purge. By the end of the show, Sam faces the difficult realisation that the initial charges were actually true, he was a Soviet spy. Shattered, he says, ‘It’s just there are certain things you’re sure of… like longitude and latitude.’ His colleague quips, ‘according to C.J., I wouldn’t be so sure about longitude and latitude.’

So Sorkin brings to together the seeming light-hearted line about turning the world’s map upside down with a revolution in someone’s moral outlook on the world. He offers no resolution to the north-south orientation, but uses its seeming arbitrariness to question our pre-determined ideological world views. While the cartographical question plays a subsidiary role to the main plot, episode #38 does demonstrate its power as a ‘natural symbol’ for the particular world order that we inhabit.

Above is the second appearance of the Cartographers for Social Equity. You can see the first appearance here, but it is also worth looking at a serious take on this episode here. 

If you’re in Pretoria, you go ‘down’ to Johannesburg. Melbournians travel ‘up’ to Sydney. Cariocas in Rio pop ‘down’ to São Paulo. The expression ‘up’ or ‘down’ has nothing to do with any incline in the journey. Then why do we use a vertical dimension when talking about horizontal travel?

The association of ‘south’ with ‘down’ seems deeply embedded. If ‘language is the house of being’, then the blueprint for this arrangement lies in the Oxford English Dictionary. Open the OED and the first definition of ‘south’ is ‘directly opposite to the north’. So, it would be reasonable to assume that when you ‘north’ you find it defined as ‘directly opposite the south’? No, ‘north’ is defined as ‘the direction of the part of the horizon on the left-hand side of a person facing the rising sun’. So why isn’t ‘south’ the ‘right-hand side…’? Why does our reckoning start only with the north?

History is not kind to ‘south’. Most established references for ‘south’ in the OED are self-evident. However, in recent times it has developed a negative idiomatic use. The term ‘global south’ is first cited in an Economist article from 1975. At the very same time, the direction ‘south’ becomes associated with economic decline. A 1975 article in Business Week included the phrase, ‘If the market is headed South… there is a point beyond which information and growth prospects are meaningless.’ Recently, ‘south’ has been used idiomatically for any downturn, including marriage going ‘south’ (R. B. Parker, 2003) and a night scene that is ‘south of anemic’ (N.Y. Times, 2006).

It may seem a minor conceit. This use of ‘south’ is metonymically related to the downward trajectory of financial graphs at times of economic decline. But it is clearly a powerful idiom given its generalisation to all situations of decline.

This use of ‘south’ has particular power in the USA. The phrase ‘going south’ also refers to someone who absconds with money gained illicitly at a poker game. The allusion is to someone who has escaped to Mexico, beyond the reach of the law.

Given this geographic locus, it would be interesting to know if this pejorative use of ‘south’ is limited to English. We can perform a simple test. When you type the phrase ‘market is going south’ into Google, you receive 5,150 hits. Whereas if you enter the same phrase in Spanish (‘mercado va sur’), you draw a blank. This Anglo usage of ‘south’ prompts a question. Is the ‘verticalisation’ of ‘south’ one of those turns of language designed to service a specific power structure? Imagine the Board meeting of a New York-based financial organisation determining whether to relocate to Buenos Aires—‘Why would we want to move down there’?

The subtle operations of power in language have been noted before. In Violence and Metaphysics, Derrida described the ‘heliological’ metaphor of the Enlightenment as ‘providing an alibi for the historical violence of light’. The identification of light with knowledge was complicit with the operations of slavery and exploration that serviced colonial power. Derrida illuminated the dark motives at play in the gloomy minds of blackened characters.

But we shouldn’t be too downbeat about the idea of South. By following its path through history and space, we might have a better understanding of how it has been constructed.

So why is South left scraping the bottom of the barrel? Let’s see what we can discover from the different ideas of South.