Counter-mapping and globalism
Author(s)
Hall, Peter
Griffith University Author(s)
Year published
2014
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
To begin, two images of Enlightenment’s optimism might be summoned to a convenient web browser: Thomas Hobbes’s (1651) Leviathan, illustrating the Body Politik in the giant torso of a sovereign straddling the landscape; and Gerardus Mercator’s (1609) engraving of Atlas as a ‘quiet and seated scientist holding the globe in his hand’ (as opposed to a God shouldering the burden).1 Modernity’s crisis of confidence in progress, political representation and a shared sense of the global might be attributed to the failure of both conceits: Hobbes’s vision of a society made civil and Mercator’s globe made manageable in the age of ...
View more >To begin, two images of Enlightenment’s optimism might be summoned to a convenient web browser: Thomas Hobbes’s (1651) Leviathan, illustrating the Body Politik in the giant torso of a sovereign straddling the landscape; and Gerardus Mercator’s (1609) engraving of Atlas as a ‘quiet and seated scientist holding the globe in his hand’ (as opposed to a God shouldering the burden).1 Modernity’s crisis of confidence in progress, political representation and a shared sense of the global might be attributed to the failure of both conceits: Hobbes’s vision of a society made civil and Mercator’s globe made manageable in the age of discovery. We are now perhaps more acutely aware that the Body Politik and the hand-held globe were only ever conceived from a particular perspective and by eliminating contradictory interests through a process of exclusion. So if the project has failed, what is the role of mapping as a means of representation today? As the spatial arrangement of represented entities, a map or visualisation can strive to reveal complex networks of conflicting interests, flows and environmental change in the era of globalism. Maps and visualisations of weather patterns, oil spills, temperature and CO in an instant. But to what extent can mappings and visualisations be mobilised against the dominant forces that have brought us to the current crisis of confidence, confidence in a viable future? To explore this question I will first address the curious deficit of critique in data visualisation and mapping discourse, seemingly exacerbated by an epistemological gap between the related disciplines of computer sciences and geography; then I will explore the challenges of turning these tools of representation against the powerful interests that have traditionally wielded them; finally I will discuss how efforts to theorise and mobilise a resistance in mapping are manifest in repeated efforts to redefine and rewrite space, the emphasis being on a lexical as well as visual representation. Ultimately this leads to a conclusion that a map or visualisation by itself is doomed to remain gestural unless it is part of what Bruno Latour (1986, p. 17) calls a ‘cascade of inscriptions’ that bring to the table the accumulated power of an assembly of allies and interests.
View less >
View more >To begin, two images of Enlightenment’s optimism might be summoned to a convenient web browser: Thomas Hobbes’s (1651) Leviathan, illustrating the Body Politik in the giant torso of a sovereign straddling the landscape; and Gerardus Mercator’s (1609) engraving of Atlas as a ‘quiet and seated scientist holding the globe in his hand’ (as opposed to a God shouldering the burden).1 Modernity’s crisis of confidence in progress, political representation and a shared sense of the global might be attributed to the failure of both conceits: Hobbes’s vision of a society made civil and Mercator’s globe made manageable in the age of discovery. We are now perhaps more acutely aware that the Body Politik and the hand-held globe were only ever conceived from a particular perspective and by eliminating contradictory interests through a process of exclusion. So if the project has failed, what is the role of mapping as a means of representation today? As the spatial arrangement of represented entities, a map or visualisation can strive to reveal complex networks of conflicting interests, flows and environmental change in the era of globalism. Maps and visualisations of weather patterns, oil spills, temperature and CO in an instant. But to what extent can mappings and visualisations be mobilised against the dominant forces that have brought us to the current crisis of confidence, confidence in a viable future? To explore this question I will first address the curious deficit of critique in data visualisation and mapping discourse, seemingly exacerbated by an epistemological gap between the related disciplines of computer sciences and geography; then I will explore the challenges of turning these tools of representation against the powerful interests that have traditionally wielded them; finally I will discuss how efforts to theorise and mobilise a resistance in mapping are manifest in repeated efforts to redefine and rewrite space, the emphasis being on a lexical as well as visual representation. Ultimately this leads to a conclusion that a map or visualisation by itself is doomed to remain gestural unless it is part of what Bruno Latour (1986, p. 17) calls a ‘cascade of inscriptions’ that bring to the table the accumulated power of an assembly of allies and interests.
View less >
Book Title
Design in the Borderlands
Publisher URI
Subject
Built Environment and Design not elsewhere classified