Читать книгу The Politics of Mapping - Bernard Debarbieux - Страница 14

At the same time, other theoretical and conceptual viewpoints have come to nourish a political analysis of the map. Many authors have pointed out that the reduction of the analysis of mapping to the question of representation has its own limits; they have advocated an analysis that takes into account the processes and practices of cartographic production (mapping) as much as the map as a product or artifact (Del Casino and Hanna 2006; Kitchin and Dodge 2007). Kitchin and Dodge (2007) have emphasized the need to question the “ontological (in)security” of maps, as they emerge through practices of territorialization. Pickles has sketched out the features of a pragmatics of the map by asking how it functions in practice. Drawing on the work of Michael Curry, he suggests that the map is “not a representation of the world, but an inscription that does (or sometimes does not do) work in the world” (Pickles 2004, p. 67). This hypothesis is reminiscent of the proposals of the sociology of science and technology, which, whenever concerned with the map, emphasizes the cognitive and political advantages that the map provides through its materiality, and through the circulation and accumulation of knowledge that it makes possible as an “immutable mobile”, i.e. a stable object which travels, carrying along its own content and power of influence (Latour 1987, 2005; Turnbull 2000; November et al. 2010).

In fact, these “more-than-representational” or “processual” approaches had already been raised 20 years earlier by Robert Rundstrom, who had pointed out that textual or representation-centered approaches could hardly be applied to societies with an oral tradition (1991). This was followed by the famous book series The History of Cartography – in particular the introduction to Volume 2.3 on African, American, Arctic, Australian and Pacific societies (Woodward and Lewis 1998, pp. 1–10), which constitutes a reference for several chapters of this book – that reaffirmed this necessity by relying on the anthropological plurality of the act of mapping. The political dimension of this development is twofold: on the one hand, in epistemological terms, it put an end to what Harley himself had called “scientific chauvinism” (Harley 1987, p. 4) in cartography; in other words, it challenged the Western hegemony over the definition of what a map and what cartographic knowledge is. On the other hand, this “more-than-representational” interpretation deepened the analysis of the expressions of power; this is no longer limited to the study of the map’s commissioners’ intentions or to their social and political effects; it also deals with the relationships of power as they unfold in mapping processes and practices.

Such a conceptual expansion allows us to fully grasp the challenges of the digital and online turning point of mapping, in particular, the non-representational dimensions of digital geographic information, as well as its circulation and dissemination. “In fact, maps are no longer maps,” says an article in the French newspaper Le Monde. “They are databases, i.e. sets of points, objects, names… which, on demand, are transformed into a particular map, with a different appearance according to needs” (Larousserie 2013, author’s translation). Yet, while this type of data is multiplying (big geodata), becoming ubiquitous in people’s daily lives (Global Positioning System (GPS) in cars, geolocation applications on phones, consultation of websites, etc.), it is becoming increasingly difficult to analyze the power relations that structure these new phenomena and their social and political implications. This is why, according to Pierre Gautreau and Mathieu Noucher (Chapter 3), understanding these “shifting” objects implies reinventing the concepts and methods of critical cartography. The question of intentionality becomes particularly complex to decipher since the distinction between amateur and expert, or between producer and user of a map (or of geographic information) often proves to be blurred (we then talk about “produsers”) (Noucher 2017; Gautreau and Noucher in this book). Finally, the contributions of pragmatics and semiology, attached to the detailed observation of the signs and micro-actions involved in cartographic production, have also consolidated the empirical validation of the critique, which has been said to be lacking in many previous works (Palsky 2003)⁶.

Finally, the range of theories and concepts that have been mobilized to think about and operationalize a critical cartography of state and colonial production has expanded considerably over time. The Marxist critique of the 1970s, which was in some ways the inaugural one, gave way to more detailed analyses of the relationships of power and domination as expressed in cartographic production, while also turning to questions of identity and culture (identity politics), under the influence of cultural studies and post-colonial and decolonial criticism. The problem of gender, on the other hand, has long constituted a silence in the approaches that are part of the “Harleyian tradition”. Indeed, while Harley was particularly sensitive to the intentional and unintentional silences of maps (Harley 1988b), he himself remained silent on the role of women in cartographic production and on one of the most structuring categories of social relations: gender. According to Nikolas Huffman, this blind spot is due to conceptions of society and space that have long since naturalized the masculinist episteme of science, and thus also of mapping (Huffman 1995, pp. 1622–1630).

This book, through its above-mentioned chapters, aims to give an account of the variety of political analyses of mapping (and geographic information) and their theoretical or methodological references. It goes beyond the perimeter of critical cartography by not limiting its scope to relationships of power and domination. While it takes into account the latter (politics), it does not ignore the institutional issues (polity) that effect the production of maps, nor the public policies that give rise to many maps, certainly in order to justify and design them, but also to distribute them (see Chapter 9)⁷.