Maps offer us parameters in which to live in practical terms, as above, but potentially the idea of orientation also includes social or even spiritual connotations. As writer Stephen S. Hall suggests: “Orienting begins with geography, but it reflects the need of the conscious, self-aware organism for a kind of transcendent orientation that asks not just where am I, but where do I fit into this landscape” (Harmon 2004, p. 15). Duncan Campbell, cited by Walford Davies, defines psychogeography as “a species of border-writing, standing uneasily between so many oppositions (mind and world, city and country, myth and history), never resolving in favour of one side or another, and above all, never forgetting” (Davies, p. 23). To say that one belongs here is implicitly saying one does not belong elsewhere.
Maps and the (In)visible
Maps shape our view of the world and mirror our cultures. They can chart us at the centre of the universe or make us disappear. It is this power that can make them dangerous.
Etymologically the map is a conception of the arrangement of something as much as it is a representation of the earth’s surface. The state’s cartographic violence thus helps it define who or what exists and in what order. Maps are thus a means of both physical colonization and conceptual control, involving both a cognitive paradigm as well as a practical means of political administration. (Neoclaus 2003, p. 419)
Mark Neoclaus in Off the Map: On Violence and Cartography discusses the relationship between the map and the state arguing that the widespread use of cartography was concurrent with the birth of the nation state (circa 1600) and that since this point maps have been utilised as a state tool to legitimise and control state territory. Such a political understanding of cartographic practice is at odds with more traditional views. The International Cartographic Association has defined the map as “a symbolized image of geographic reality, representing selected features or characteristics, resulting from the creative efforts of cartographers and designed for use when spatial relationships are of special relevance.” (International Cartographic Society cited in Dorling and Fairbairn 1997, p. 3) Although this definition is broad and allows for the ‘creative’, the map is designated as an object containing ‘geographic reality’ and attributing the ability to create this reality to a specific profession: ‘cartographers’. Further to this, cartography is understood to utilise scientific methods which suggests scientific certainty or at least objectivity on the part of the creator (Godlewska 1999, p. 21). The subjective choices of the cartographer must then come at the point of selecting which ‘features or characteristics’ to represent. It is into this gap between the objective and subjective that Dennis Wood, author of The Power of Maps, steps, suggesting that “... all maps, inevitably, unavoidably, necessarily embody their authors’ prejudices, biases and partialities...” (Wood 1992, p. 24). Taking the map as a text which is contrived, conceived and edited it would necessarily contain the ‘prejudices, biases and partialities’ of the author not only through what is included, but also though what is omitted; an overtly political, and potentially violent, act.
Karen Piper, author of Cartographic Fictions: Maps, Race and Identity, suggests that the editing process utilised by cartographers, the decision over what is shown and what is hidden, always has a political agenda:
The history of cartography has […] been a history of coding the enemy, making a “them” and “us” that can be defended with a clear border. It has been, above all, a history of pushing “them” out of territory that is considered ours—denying their existence, deleting their maps, drawing lines in the sand. (Piper 2002, p. x)
Such a schism between the political reality of a country and its representation, has led J. B. Hartley to question the ‘geographic reality’ proposed by the International Cartographic Society: “If a map asserts that the status quo is good, and the status quo is actually evil, then the map is to that extent incorrect...” (Hartley 2002, p. 21). To what extent it is the role of a map to address concepts such as ‘good’ and ‘evil’ is questionable yet if maps can be conceived as providing us with “reality” (Wood 1992, p. 4), which Wood suggests goes beyond geography alone, then it seems unavoidable that they should contain some form of value judgement. Viewed in this moral context, a map of a country under fascist rule could, as Woods states, be described as ‘incorrect’ as the ‘status quo’ represented is generally considered unacceptable, and in the case of many countries in Europe during the Second World War was fatal for a large proportion of the population. A novel, on the other hand, has the ability to articulate the human experience of living within the geographical space in which the action takes place.
To be ‘Off the map’ according to the Oxford English Dictionary is to be “Out of existence… an insignificant position; of no account; obsolete” (OED cited in Neoclaus 2003, p. 417). This is often the case for spaces inhabited by the marginalised and bordered, the migrant ‘jungles’ in France for example are invisible upon the map of France and thus exit both inside and outside of French territory in the political imagination.
This is perhaps best highlighted by Michael Shapiro, author of The New Violent Cartography, who points to the Pentagon’s new ‘map of danger’:
From the point of view of the US executive branch’s geography of enmity, not being an intimate in the global exchange of resources—for example being an Iran rather than a Saudi Arabia—increases your chances of becoming a ‘rogue state’ or part of the ‘axis of evil’ and thus a potential target. (Shapiro 2007, p. 304)
A point clearly reinforced by Trump’s 2017 travel ban on Muslim majority countries Libya, Iran, Somalia, Syria and Yemen as well as North Korea and Venezuela. Shapiro believes the maps necessarily create this ‘enmity’ between ‘vulnerable bodies’ and that this aspect of mapmaking, which he dates back to the Westphalia Treaty of 1648, has dangerous consequences in the modern world:
Ultimately, the biopolitical dimensions of USA’s anti-terrorism initiatives (the decisions about what lives to waste and what ones require exclusion or containment) are deployed on particular bodies, both those that are targets and those that are the ones that must confront those bodies in dangerous terrain. (Shapiro, 2007, p. 299)
When Shapiro discusses Tomas Munita’s photo of an American soldier in an abandoned building used as a look out post in Afghanistan he points to:
… a history of vulnerable bodies seeking temporary refuge and a place for safe observation in hostile landscapes that seem both benign, because they are temporarily devoid of hostile engagement, and threatening, because their encompassing scale appears to thwart human attempts to manage them securely. (Shapiro 2007, p. 293)
Here the vulnerable body is that of both the state actor (in this case an actor from a foreign state, protecting state interests far from the borders of the territory they seek to protect) and, if we consider the unseen other, their opposite, out of view because they are also vulnerable to attack. Mapping has sought to alleviate the fear of the state and thus its actors by creating a defined territory that can be easily defended against outsiders. The project of the nation state has relied upon this concept since its birth. As Neoclaus states: “the political importance of the map is obvious: it is one of the most explicit assertions of sovereignty” (Neoclaus 2003, p. 419). If an area such as the ‘jungle’ does not exist on the map then it does not exist in the state and can be easily defined as an area of ‘otherness’. The refusal to accept the existence of a portion of society, and thus their potential claim to state resources such as health care or financial support, is a fundamentally violent act against ‘vulnerable bodies’, in this case the body of the migrant. Yet this perceived vulnerability must also be called into question, as Yurimar Bonilla, cited by Sheller (2018, p. 104), “Vulnerability is not simply a product of natural conditions; it is a political state and colonial condition.” and as Jones argues it is the border itself which creates the violence it seeks to prevent (Jones 2017, p. 91) and the state which creates an individual’s vulnerability to such violence.
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