Читать книгу The Politics of Mapping - Bernard Debarbieux - Страница 23

It has been found (Monmonier 2019 [1991]) that the map can be a site of lies. This is often the case in geopolitical propaganda, where states compete with untruths to transform what will be an aggression or a conquest into a defensive posture or a simple recovery of a lost territory. The Nazi map shown in Figure 1.1 is a good example. It was served by the semiological qualities of German cartography at the time which, under the impulse of the Hitlerian cartographer-general Karl Haushofer (1869–1946) and the Zeitschrift für Geopolitik journal he founded in 1924, found new balances between data accuracy and communication simplicity.

The reader is easily led to believe that, by their very position, Czechoslovakia and Poland represented serious threats to the Reich. The point can be generalized by saying that, when community visions clash, with allegiance to the nation being one of the most productive in geographical statements, the clash of myths hinders any cognitive approach. Another myth, that of a truth intrinsic to the very idea of the map, collapses: as a language, no more and no less than other languages, the map can belong to different discursive registers, that of ideology as much as that of science.

Figure 1.1. Lying with the map (source: Der Reichsführer SS/SS-Hauptamt, “Der große Betrug von Versailles” in Der Reichsführer-SS, Der Weg zum Reich, Berlin: SS-Hauptamt, 1942, p. 105)

The use of maps for the purpose of deception does exist and is present in political fights. The question of the regimes of truth that can be identified in cartographic communication deserves to be explored in greater depth, and this will be the subject of the first part of this chapter. However, the relationship between cartography and politics cannot be limited to truth and lies. From this perspective, four other areas of interaction between maps and politics will be addressed: the enrichment of electoral cartography and the uses made of it in public debate; the dynamics of political cartography in relation to recent developments in the social sciences of space (“geographic turn”, “spatial turn”); the emergence of an ethical component in the work of the cartographer; and finally, the new ways of representing the relationship between science and citizenship.

As we shall see, these different questions come together in the recognition of the strong presence of the political issues of cartography and, consequently, in the attention paid to preserving and making the cognitive autonomy of cartographic work prosper, which is more essential than ever.