Читать книгу The Politics of Mapping - Bernard Debarbieux - Страница 13

First of all, this narrative pays little attention to the reflections and work that preceded the “Harleyian turning point”. Throughout the 20th century, and well before the 1970s, geographers emphasized the use of maps for political purposes.

Isaac Bowman, for example, director of the American Geographical Society and Chief Territorial Specialist, appointed by Woodrow Wilson to advise the American delegation to the Paris Conference in 1919, was astonished by the quantity of contradictory linguistic and ethnic maps placed on the negotiating table to decide the European borders in the aftermath of the First World War, each illustrating the claims of the states concerned (House and Seymour 1921; Smith 1984). In the aftermath of the Second World War, Hans Speier and a few others analyzed Nazi propaganda maps, showing the fundamentally rhetorical and persuasive nature of maps (Speier 1941)⁵. Finally, authors relying on Marxist theories, such as Yves Lacoste with the topographic map (Lacoste 1976), have endeavored to show how mapping has served the objectives of military, social or imperialist domination. In comparison with the production of previous decades, the “Harleyian turning point” can hardly be characterized by the mere (re-) discovery of the political nature of maps.

Besides, this “turning point” is not characterized by a single problematization of the coupling between maps and politics nor by a stable body of theoretical references. It is true that Harley favored a critical interpretation of the map very early on; in doing so, he was concerned with placing it in its social context of production. However, at first, this interpretation was also mainly fed by Marxist theories and questioning (as in Harley 1988a, pp. 277–312). It was only gradually, under the influence of very different postmodern authors – Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault (who we are still surprised to see grouped under the single banner of “French theory” in the English-speaking world) – that Harley called for a research program aimed at “deconstructing” (Harley 1989) the map, “denaturalizing” it in the opposite direction to what the modernist project had sought to do, and recognizing within it intentions that were indistinguishable from the productions. In this respect, Harley’s work is not isolated. It is nourished by numerous new reflections on maps and mapping, as shown by the reference to the catalog of the exhibition “Cartes et figures de la terre”, organized in Paris in 1980 (Centre Georges Pompidou 1980), in his first theoretical text on the subject (Blakemore and Harley 1980). Moreover, this work was undertaken in parallel with others who drew, in part, on the same theoretical references: this is the case of Claude Raffestin, who was undoubtedly the first European geographer to take advantage of the Foucauldian method to analyze geographic and cartographic discourse, for example, when he wrote: “The zenithal gaze is dominant by nature and is inscribed in the desire to see everything in order to know everything and to be able to do everything” (Raffestin 1988, p. 136 author’s translation; see also Raffestin 1979).

Drawing on Foucault’s early work, Harley emphasized the disciplinary and authoritarian potential of state mapping. Many of those who have extended his work, however, have favored Foucault’s second generation of work, particularly that devoted to the notion of governmentality. In doing so, attention shifted from topographic and political maps to thematic maps, which better reflected the need for knowledge and the control of populations and were even more easily manipulated than topographic maps (Raffestin 1988, p. 137). With this view, John Pickles wrote in 2004 that “mapping as a power-knowledge also functions as productive power to constitute objects, identities and practices that are part of (and constitutive of) our world” (Pickles 2004, p. 114). Mapping is therefore of interest as much for its contribution to the territorialization of state power as for its participation in the adoption and dissemination of hegemonic concepts of territoriality. Such analyses lead several authors to think of the map as a condition for the territoriality of the modern state (Winichakul 1994; Kitchin and Dodge 2007; Debarbieux 2019), and for that of modern societies as a whole. Pickles himself puts it this way, “Maps and mappings precede the territory they ‘represent’” (Pickles 2004, p. 5).

This kind of thinking has led Joe Painter to speak of “cartographic anxiety” in order to refer to the need of states (but also any other political entity) to have a territory whose very nature can be shaped by maps: “I want to suggest that dominant understandings of concepts such as ‘territory’ and ‘region’ have been structured in important ways by cartographic reason, and therefore that related practices of territorialization and regionalism are generated, in part, by cartographic anxiety” (Painter 2008, p. 346). At this point, the interpretation of the map as an instrument of power has seen its epistemological character coupled with an ontological one: it participates in an ontogenesis of the state and the corresponding society. In this book, Franco Farinelli’s chapter on the role of mapping in the spatial production of modern societies (Chapter 2) and Bernard Debarbieux’s chapter on the cartographic production of modern states (Chapter 5) attempt to explain and illustrate this perspective.

However, this thesis only holds if it is supported by a detailed analysis of the system of signs of which a map is constituted, or even by a theory of political representation. That the map requires an organized system of signs is a given, even before the invention of the map legend, at the end of the 17th century (Harvey 1993). The constant improvement of this system was the main preoccupation of those who, from Bertin to MacEachren, strove to optimize the map’s capacity to communicate information. However, the analysis only takes on a critical and political dimension when one looks at the selection and prioritization of mapped objects and the political effects of these choices. Harley himself distinguished between the “external power” of maps and mapping – the power exercised over them through political commissioning, or exercised with them, through their political, administrative, religious or legal use – and the “internal power” of maps and mapping (in the same way as one might speak of the power of words), namely, their performative character and their political effects, engendered, among other things, by the choices made in representation (Harley 1989, pp. 12–13).

The analysis of the maps produced following the voyage of Christopher Columbus, accompanying the colonization of the American continent by Europeans, is emblematic of the identification of this “internal power”, including the invisibilization of the Indigenous populations and the concern taken to visually offer a space to be conquered (Harley 1992). It is to this “internal power”, mainly linked with the choice and arrangement of signs, that the often-used expression “power of maps” refers (Wood 1992). In fact, it was long before 1992 and the peak of critical cartography, represented by the highly controversial celebration of the 500th anniversary of the “discovery” of America, that some people were busy subjecting the map to the prism of theories of representation. Already, in the 1970s, Louis Marin’s detailed analysis of the components and general layout of Jacques Gomboust’s 1652 map of Paris, including the text boxes, was a true statement of method. For Marin, this portrait of Paris is an “effect machine” among other effects, particularly effective in the simultaneous institution of what it designates (the city) and of the one who commands it (the King of France) (Marin 1973, 1980, pp. 47–54). Around the same time, Raffestin used the work of another representation theorist, Hillary Putnam – who claimed that “objects do not exist independently of conceptual frameworks” (Putnam 1984, p. 64, author’s translation) – to remind us that the cartographer does not describe the real as it is, but constructs a system of objects that reflects an intentionality (Raffestin 1988).

Beyond English-speaking geographers and cartographers, it is those on the European continental mainland who seem to have taken the analysis of the “internal power” of the map the furthest. We can cite the works of Ollson (2007) and Farinelli (2009, see also Chapter 2 of this book) on “cartographic reason”, in particular, the recourse of modern cartography to Euclidean geometry and its social and political effects. In this same vein, in the work of Casti (1993, pp. 79–101, 2005), and the research group she has built around her at the University of Bergamo, Italy, the analysis draws more specifically on critical semiology. At the same time, Jacques Lévy and his team have, since the 1990s, been engaged in a symmetrical exercise, this time an epistemological one: by postulating the existence of a “cartographic turning point”, Lévy has been proposing avenues of map analysis regarding the political dimension of societies, while at the same time distancing himself from Euclidean metrics (see Chapter 1).