Points of the Compass

In his Prison Notebooks, the Marxist writer Antonio Gramsci rebuts the abstracted philosophizing of Bertrand Russell:

“Russell says approximately this: ‘We cannot, without the existence of man on the earth, think of the existence of London or Edinburgh, but we can think of the existence of two points in space, one to the North and one to the South, where London and Edinburgh now are.’ It could be objected that without the existence of man one cannot think of ‘thinking’, one cannot think at all of any fact or relationship which exists only in so far as man exists. What would North–South or East–West mean without man? They are real relationships and yet they would not exist without man and without the development of civilisation. Obviously East and West are arbitrary and conventional, that is historical, constructions, since outside of real history every point on the earth is East and West at the same time.”

Conventional though the compass points may be, they are real, not only as navigational points but as cultural markers. And, as Gramsci points out, they can become effective symbols of cultural power:

“these terms have crystallised not from the point of view of a hypothetical melancholic man in general but from the point of view of the European cultured classes who, as a result of their world-wide hegemony, have caused them to be accepted everywhere. Japan is the Far East not only for Europe but also perhaps for the American from California and even for the Japanese himself, who, through English political culture, may then call Egypt the Near East. So because of the historical content that has become attached to the geographical terms, the expressions East and West have finished up indicating specific relations between different cultural complexes. Thus Italians often, when speaking of Morocco, call it an ‘Eastern’ country, to refer to its Moslem and Arab civilisation.”

In short, though human constructions, “these references are real; they correspond to real facts, they allow one to travel by land and by sea, to arrive where one has decided to arrive, to ‘foresee’ the future, to objectivise reality, to understand the objectivity of the external world. Rational and real become one.”

(Quoted in Kate Crehan, Gramsci, Culture, and Anthropology, 35.)