To what extent are maps simply the embodiment of information and technique?

AS and A Level Politics

‘'All Nature faithfully

But by what feint

Can Nature be subdued to art’s constraint?

Her smallest fragment is still infinite!

And so he paints but what he likes in it.

What does he like?

He likes, what he can paint!’

(Freidrich Nietzsche)

In this poem, Nietzsche stated his comment on the claims of realism, reminding us of the limitations of artistic means. The artist tends to look for motifs that he is capable to render with his style and skills, and I believe that this goal is echoed in cartography. It appears that no skill as much as will dictates the preference over what is embodied; the selective and somewhat subjective art of mapmaking depends upon the extent to which mapmakers distort reality. All mapmakers use generalization and symbolization to highlight critical information and suppress detail of lower priority (Monmonier, 1996). In fact I would go as far as to agree with Monmonier’s supposition that it is essential to lie with maps, and that in order to fulfill their purpose, they must offer an incomplete view of reality. Thus, Nietzsche intimates, a single map is but one of an infinitely large number of maps that could be produced for the same situation, but more importantly, it is the incentive of his ‘Realistic Painter’, the cartographer, that we must question.

Commenting on the subjective in maps is not a new phenomenon as Wright (1942)

points out, “maps are drawn by men and not turned out automatically by machines, and consequently are influenced by human shortcomings”. Every map is thus a reflection partly of objective realities and partly of subjective elements. Nietzsche's comment above reminds us that science is rooted in the human notion of use, and is driven by human values. The success of a map can only be measured against the motivating human values in whose service it has been put to use. In this respect, no matter how mechanized and determined a universe the cartographer may imagine, the purposive actions that drive his study are themselves stubbornly teleological. Questioning how far the subjective interferes, accepts the school that suggests maps are more about social control, and are usually created to serve the designs of their creators, rather than to inform the map user. Thus, it is dangerous to take maps at face value, and we should not accept that cartography is the pure technological operation of translating reality onto paper.

Maps can be seen to operate at a more subtle level than their benevolent creation. The fact that governments and the operations of state support the creation of maps suggest that there is also a political role being played. For example, the outline of each country is a potent political symbol, and rarely is the boundary a completely physical feature, moreover, it is usually a political artefact, exemplified in the scramble for Africa with the drawing of an arbitrary grid system to divide the conquered territory. Boundaries afford a country its shape and suggests uniformity within that shape that separates it from the ‘other’. However, the very existence of boundaries on maps questions political motivation. The contemporary philosopher Alain de Boton discusses the many paintings of Cypresses by Van Gogh in order to explain the divide between the reality of that which exists only when it has been committed to canvas. Van Gogh felt that the cypresses he saw in the wonderfully abstract landscape of the South of France couldn’t exist in the memory of embodying the landscape, until he had captured them in many guises on canvas. This then leads me onto question whether boundaries exist unless/until they are drawn on a map? Perhaps the answer is that in order to operate in a geopolitical forum, a suitable map must exist.

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However, there is a large use of maps in propaganda with a view to conscious and deliberate deception in the service of special interests (Wright, 1942). For example, propaganda maps created by the Nazis during the second world war serve to show the ‘weak’ position of Germany in relation to the rest of Europe. Thus, there is suggestion that maps contain prescribed power, as well as the representation of knowledge. We can openly criticize with maps of our own times when our own knowledge exceeds that of the mapmaker’s, but maps of foreign lands often shape our perceptions with impurity, and it is when representing the people and places that we know least about that the most damage is done (Dorling & Fairburn 1997). Mapmaking gives people the means to represent space as somethng that can be manipulated, often at the expense of those that live there, and the goal to “search for the social forces that have structured cartography and to locate the pressure of power – and its effects – in all map knowledge” (Harley, 1989) is a plight that aims to separate the quantitative persuasiveness from the social manipulation, which is assumed to exist in all maps.

Breaking of the geopolitical code of how the world ought to be shown is one reason for cartographer’s hysteria surrounding publication of maps that appear ‘different’, such as the publication of the Peter’s projection (a new projection created as an equal area projection which overcame some of his objections to Mercator). Interestingly, Mercator enlarges Europe and shrinks the equatorial land masses, another geometric distortion that at the time was unquestioned. These distortions however can be non-deliberate. The greatest example is the 1250AD Mappae Mundi. As Rome fell, Christianity became the authoritative power in all fields including geography, and with the Bible as its cornerstone, Genesis created a foundation for geographic thought. Chapters nine and ten describe the world being divided to each son of Noah, and it is these three sons that the three continents of the known world (Africa, Asia, and Europa) were to represent. The cartographic of a circle (the world) divided by lines (three continents, lines of the cross) depiction became known as the T-O pattern, and the Mappae Mundi shows Jerusalem at the center of the T-O pattern with Christ holding a symbolic T-O globe in His hand. It is doubtful that the cartographers of the time deliberatley set out to decieve people, many almost certainly believed that they were telling the truth. Thus, the manipulative power afforded to maps is not necessarily confounded.

Further unconscious distortions or silences appear on maps, such as old countryside maps that exclude poor farm workers cottages because they don’t fit into the idyllic rural landscape, or Victorian maps that often neglected to include the courts where the urban poor lived. These however are more deliberate consciously crafting the social situation. Map users who understand the constraints of cartographic generalization and the opportunities for manipulation will approach with caution map silences as well as the facts. The history of cartography is rich in examples of maps that reify the territorial assertions of map authors who deliberately suppress assumptions. Yet Dorling & Fairburn (1997) do suggest that any kind of real world depiction contains unconscious messages as well as conscious ones from the author.

What makes a map different from another type of representation is that it is so fact-filled. There’s no other way of cramming so much readable information onto one piece of paper than by drawing a map, and because maps are so full of facts it is easy to forget that their signs are also symbols, and that the drawing is not entiely constrained by scientific rigour, reminding us again that there are an infinite number of pictures to be drawn of any one place. Innocuous map symbols tend to present the status quo as given, rather than as an option, and they are often used as tools by those who are conservative to change (Dorling & Fairburn, 1997). In general, maps are only changed years after social systems have altered presenting a picture of the past as ‘correct’, a picture against which current changes appear as errors. Thus I believe the ephemerality of our world is not correctly represented through mapping, with the Machiavellian assumption of cartography a misrepresentation; cartography gets away with deception mainly because the mapmakers are continuing conventions.

Maps are rhetorical communications readily adapted to the mapmakers agenda, and can customarily afford respect by users ill equppied to question the motives or authority (Monmonier, 1991), and just as map makers are human so too are map users. The qualities of integrity, judgement, critical acumen and the like are as much required in the interpretation of maps as in the preparation of them. We cannot question then the Imperialist notion that the sun would never set on the British Empire, when indeed every map produced represented this, and the Imperial peoples were used to interpreting World maps with Britain in the middle, not for scientific reasons but to demonstrate British supremacy it is easy to see that looking at the orientation of a map, in most cases, elicits the authority of the maker. Wood (1992) argues that the authority of a map is not derived from its accuracy but from the authority of the person who draws it, with Dorling & Fairburn going as far as to say that a picture is a map when it is drawn by someone with the authority to draw maps, in this case, British scholars. Thus, there can be no neutral map of place, and certainly no neutral map of the world (Dorling & Fairburn, 1997).

Maps have three basic attributes: scale, projection and symbolization. Each element is a source of distortion, and as a group they describe the essence of the map’s possibilities and limitations. No one can use maps or make maps safely and effectively without understanding those three attributes. Many maps have a scale, determining how large objects on the map are in relation to their actual size, with a larger scale showing more detail, and thus requiring a larger map to show the same area. Some, though, are not drawn to scale, with a famous example being the London Underground map. If the map covers a large area of the surface of a globe, such as the Earth, it also has a projection, a way of translating the three-dimensional real surface of the geoid to a two-dimensional picture; the one most commonly used for navigation is the Mercator Projection. The ultimate value of a map then depends on how well the generalized geometry and generalized content reflects a chosen aspect of reality with respect to the chosen scale, projection and symbolization.

The conventional view is that a picture is a map when it resembles the world in miniature and the better it resembles the world, the better a map it is, but this of course is temporally bound. Views propounded in ancient civilizations varied enormously from viewing the Earth as a square (Hon dynasty in China 200BC) one of a number of flat platforms (intermittent Babylonian philosophy), the shape of a tree (Scandinavian mythology) or as a globe (Gk 610-546 BC under Anaximander). In all cases the philosophical contemplations were unaffected by any direct observation of the Earth; but such world views fulfilled their purpose in explaining and propagating particular myths in encouraging further investigation into the nature of the environment and in promoting a search for order and understanding. Maps today could be argued to be explaining what the maker wants them to explain, just as has been evident in history.

Because maps are abstract representations of the world they are not neutral documents and must be carefully interpreted. It is, of course, this abstraction that makes them useful. Lewis Carroll made this point humorously in ‘Sylvie and Bruno’ with his mention of a fictional map that had ‘the scale of a mile to the mile’. A character notes some practical difficulties with this map and states that ‘we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well’. This conceit is something that is increasingly evident in mapmaking. As abstract representations of our world, maps need interpretation and explanation, and the increased representations of single places make cartography unique. The governments and powerful organizations who control most cartographic production choose what information they collect and how they show it in quite partisan ways, and thus I believe that mapmaking is not simply the embodiment of information and technique. It is much more, namely the elucidation of political power relations into permanent documents through the dialogue of mapmaking.