Maps are often seen as a starting point, for dreaming or planning trips, for finding your way
in a new place. Cartographers pride themselves on the objectivity of maps, but Lewis
Carroll first pointed out the absurdity of this idea.
“That's another thing we've learned from your Nation,” said Mein Herr, “map-making. But
we've carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would
be really useful?”
“About six inches to the mile”
“Only six inches!” exclaimed Mein Herr. “We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then
we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually
made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!”
“Have you used it much?” I enquired
“It hasn't been spread out, yet,” Said Mein Herr, “the farmers objected: they said it would
cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its
own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.”
Sylvie and Bruno Concluded by Lewis Carroll, 1893
This idea is explored in Mapping it Out ed. Hans Ulrich Obrist, in which the editor writes:
For me, the only genuinely accurate map ever drawn is the one Lewis Carroll gave us in
The Hunting of the Snark. Addressing his crew (all of whose titles, as though to emphasise
their status as Beings, start with the letter B), the vessel's Bellman rhetorically – and
brilliantly – asks
What's the good of Mercator's
North Poles and Equators,
Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?
So the Bellman would cry:
And the crew would reply,
'They are merely conventional signs!'
The Bellman then pulls out – four whole decades before Malevich, it should be noted – a
piece of paper, white as an albino whale, on which precisely Nothing is depicted. And the
crew erupts in jubilation: no cartographic fools, they understand the huge importance of the
document they've just been gifted:
'Other maps are such shapes,
with their islands and capes!
But we've got our brave captain
to thank' (so the crew would protest)
'that he's brought us the best A perfect and absolute blank!'
I am interested with the idea of my research into the community and place of Crathes to
involve map-making in some way. Maps that come out of our individual and collective
experience, knowledge, memories, hopes and plans. Maps that glory in their subjectivity!
This is from for space by Doreen Massey (pp106-109) which makes the case for an
alternative approach to space starting from three propositions:
That we recognise space as the product of interrelations; as constituted through
interactions, from the immensity of the global to the intimately tiny.
That we understand space as the sphere of the possibility of the existence of multiplicity in
the sense of contemporaneous pluraity; as the sphere in which distinct trajectories coexist; as the sphere therefore co-existing heterogeneity. Without space, no multiplicity.
Without multiplicity, no space. If space is indeed the product of interrelations, then it must
be predicated upon the existence of plurality. Multiplicity and space as co-constitutive.
That we recognise space as always under construction...It is never finished, never closed.
Perhaps we could imagine space as a simultaneity of stories-so-far.
Pp
Obviously maps are 'representations'... Obviously, and inevitably too, they are
selective (as is any form of representation)... Moreover through their codes and
conventions and their taxonomic and ordering procedures, maps operate as a 'technology
of power'. But it is not these things that are important to me here. It is not even – as we lay
the map (the country we shall visit, the town, the region to be conquered) out on the table
before us. - the much maligned notion of 'the view from above'. Not all views from above
are problematical – they are just another way of looking at the world (see the
disagreement with De Certeau in chapter 3). The problem only comes if you fall into
thinking that the vertical distance lends you truth. The dominant form of mapping, though,
does position the observer, themselves unobserved, outside and above the object of the
gaze. None the less, what worries me here is another and less recognised aspect of this
technology of power: that maps (current western-type maps) give the impression that
space is a surface – that it is the sphere of a completed horizontality.
But what if – recalling the arguments of Part Two – the assumption is abandonned
that space and time are mutally excluding opposites? What if space is the sphere not of a
discrete multiplicity of inert things, even one which is thoroughly interrelated? What if,
instead, it presents us with a heterogeneity of practices and processes? Then it will not be
an already-interconnected whole but an ongogin product of interconnectionsn and not.
Then it will always be unfinished and open.
This is space as the sphere of a dynamic simultaneity, constantly disconnected by
new arrivals, constantly awaiting to be determined (and therefore always undetermined) by
the construction of new relations. It is always being made and always, therefore, in a
sense, infinished (except that 'finishing' is not on the agenda). If you really were to take a
slice through time, it would be full of holes, of disconnections, of tentative half-formed first
encounters. 'Everything is connected to everything else' can be a salutary political
reminder that whatever we do has wider implications than perhaps we commonly
recognise. But it is unhelpful if it leads to a vision of an always already constituted holism.
The 'always' is rather that there are always connections yet to be made, juxtapositions yet
to flower into interaction, or not, potential links which may never be established. Loose
ends and ongoing stories. 'Space', then, can never be that completed simultaneity in which
all interconnections have been established, in which everywhere is already (and at that
moment unchangingly) linked to everywhere else.
Loose ends and ongoing stories are real challenges to cartography. Maps very of cours.
On both sides of the Atlantic, before the Columbian encounter, maps integrated time and
space. They told stories. While presenting a kind of picture of the world 'at one moment'
(supposedly) the also told the story of its origins. Mappae mundi advertised the world as
having christian routes, and produced a cartography which told the christian story.
Mappa Mundi from Hereford Cathedral
On the other side of the Atlantic, in what was to become the Americas, Toltecs, MixtecaPuebla and other groups designed cartographies which accounted for the origins of their
cosmos. These are maps which recount histories, which integrate time and space. There is
an irony here. This turning of a migration into a line on a map, a line of footsteps on the
Codex Xolotl, is one of the many routes by which representation has come to be called
spatialisation. A movement is turned into a static line. [but] The directionality of the
footsteps makes it clear that there is no reversability here...[but[ these are representations
of space and time. It is not the spatial which is fixing the temporal but the map (the
representation) which is stablising time-space...They were attempts to grasp, to invent, a
vision of the whole; to tame confusion and complexity.
Aztec footsteps in the Codex Xototl
Tenochtitlan. Aztec depiction
Tenochtitlan. Spanish depiction
Some mappings, on the other had, work to do the opposite, to disrupt the sense of
coherence and of totality. Situationist cartographies sought to disorient, to defamiliarise, to
provoke a view from an unaccustomed angle....and to expose the incoherencies and
fragmentations of the spatial itself. This is the opposite of the synchrony of the
structuralists: a representation of geographical space, not an a-spatial conceptual
structure. Here there is exposure rather than occlusion of the disruptions inherenct in tehs
spatial. Here the spatial is an arena of possibility. Such a cartography attempts what Levin
has called a mimesis of incoherence. It is a map (and a space) which leaves openings for
something new.
More recently there have been other experiments...Mapping seems to be crucial to
post-modernity. The figure of the map has been taken up in some post-colonial and
feminist literature as a form that can on the one hand stand for past rigidities but that can
also, on the other hand, be reworked from within. In these projects maps can be both
deconstructed and then reconstructed in a form which challenges the claims to singularity,
stability and closure, which characterises our usual notion of (and indeed in most cases
the intentions of) cartographic representation.
Here, the Derridean opening up of representation is brought to bear on the classic
form of the western, modern map... It is a challenge which aims to unsettle 'the classic
western map' in a number of ways. On the one hand, it disputes the internal coherence,
the singular uniformity, to which the classic map lays claim – it points to the 'blind spots',
the 'forgetfulness of antecedent spatial configurations', the 'discrepancies and
approximations' which cannot be obliterated. In other words, the hints of multiplicity. On the
other hand, the deconstructive challenge recognises a necessary provisionality and
transitoriness which undermines the claim to fixity, to pinning things down, which
characterises the classic western modern map. What is going on here then – in these
feminist and post-colonial reimagings of the possibilties of cartography – is a pushing
further of the critique of maps as 'technologies of power' to lever open our understanding
of the form of the map itself.
And yet 'blind spots', the 'forgetfulness of antecedent spatial configurations' and the
coloniser's 'necessary yet contradictory assumptions of an uninscribed earth' all draw, in
the post-colonial context, on the notion of the colonial text as writing over a thereby
obliterated other. They figure multiplicity through the form of the palimpsest....But while this
deconstructive strategy may enable critique of colonial discourses and a pointing towards
other voices, other stories for the moment suppressed, its imagery is not one which easiily
provides recources for bringing those voices to life...it continues to imagine the
heterogeneous multiplicity in terms of layers. Yet 'layers' would seem rather to refer to the
history of a space than to its radical contemporaneity. Coevalness may be pointed to, but it
is not established, through the metaphor of the palimpsest. Palimpsest is too
archaeological. In this story, the things that are missing (erased ) from the map are
somehow always things from 'before'. The gaps in representation (the erasures, the blind
spots) are not the same as the discontinuities of the multiplicity in contemporaneous
space; the latter are the mark of the coexistence of the coeval. Deconstruction in this guise
seems hampered by its primary focus on ' text', however broadly imagined. To picture this
argument through the figure of the palimpsest is to stay within the imagination of surfaces
– it fails to bring alive the trajectories which co-form this space. Thus Rabasa writes of the
'strata of palimpsests underlying cartography'. But this is to imagine the space being
mapped – which is a space as one simultaneity – as the product of superimposed
horizontal structures rather than full contemporaneous coexistence and being.
Situationist cartographies, more recent deconstructions, attempts to think in
rhizomatic terms, are all wrestling to open up the order of the map. Deleuze and Guattari,
in combat against the pretensions both to representation and to self-enclosure, distinguish
between a 'tracing' (at attempt at both) and 'the map' which is 'entirely oriented toward an
experimentation in contact with the real...It is itself part of the rhizome'. But within the
dominant understanding of the space of the 'ordinary' map in the west today the
assumption is precisely that there is no room for surprises...in this representation of space
you never lose your way, are never surprised by an encounter with something unexpected,
never face the unknown... On a road map you won't drive off the edge of your known
world. In space as I want to imagine it, you just might.
As a counter-point to this theorising, I have been enjoying Kei Miller's new book of poetry
The cartographer tries to map a way to Zion. In this anthology, he puts two different types
of knowledge, represented by the western cartographer and the jamaican rastaman, in
conversation with each other. This conversation is a witty and beautifuil examination of the
points made by Doreen Massey and also about the world as it is and the possibility of a
better, fairer world. He explores the links between knowledge and language, native land
and native tongue. A series of poems are called Place Name and tell the story of the
people's name for a place, as opposed to its official name. This makes me think of the
Ordnance Survey in the 19th century, when surveyors in Ireland and Scotland did not
speak gaelic and often wrote names incorrectly on the map, or left them out. In the final
two poems, about reaching Zion, this is not a place on a map but a state of being, a
sensibility.
What the Mapmaker Ought to Know
On this island things fidget.
Even history.
The landscape does not sit
willingly
as if behind an easel
holding pose
waiting on
someone
to pencil
its lines, compose
its best features
or unruly contours.
Landmarks shift,
become unfixed
by earthquake
by landslide
by utter spite.
Whole places will slip
out from your grip.
vii
But there are maps
and then again, there are maps;
for what to call the haphazard
dance of bees returning
to their hives but maps
that lead to precise
hibiscus, their soft
storehouses of pollen?
And what to call the blood
of hummingbirds but maps
that pulse the tiny bodies across
oceans and then back?
And what are turtle born with
if not maps that break
eggs and pull them up from sand
guide them towards ocean instead of land?
x in which the cartographer asks for directions
Sometimes the cartographer gets frustrated when he asks an I formant how to get to such and such a place, and the I-formant
might say something like Awrite, you know the big white house at the bottom of
Clover Hill with all the windows dem board up and
with a high shingle roof that look almost like a church?
Yes, the cartographer says.
And in front the house you always see a ole woman,
only three teeth in her mouth, and she out there selling
pepper shrimp in a school chair with a umbrella tie to it.
And beside her she always have two mongrel dog and
one of them is white and the nedda one is brown?
Yes, I know exactly where you mean, the cartographer says.
And in the yard there is a big guinnep tree that hang
right out to the road, so school pickney always stop
there to buy shrimp and eat free guinnep?
Yes,yes, the cartographer insists. I know it.
Good, says the I-formant. Cause you mustn' go there.
References
Obrist, Hans Ulrich (ed) (2014)
Mapping it out
Thames and Hudson: London
Massey, Doreen (2005)
for space
Sage publications: London
Miller, Kei (2014)
The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion
Carcanet: Manchester