The Politics of Mapping

Bernard Debarbieux, Irene Hirt

• Publisher: Wiley-ISTE
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781789450675
• eBook ISBN: 9781119986744
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Maps and mapping are fundamentally political. Whether they are authoritarian, hegemonic, participatory or critical, they are most often guided by the desire to have control over space, and always involve power relations. This book takes stock of the knowledge acquired and the debates conducted in the field of critical cartography over some thirty years.

The Politics of Mapping includes analyses of recent semiological, social and technological innovations in the production and use of maps and, more generally, geographical information. The chapters are the work of specialists in the field, in the form of a thematic analysis, a theoretical essay, or a reflection on a professional, scientific or militant practice. From mapping issues for modern states to the digital and big data era, from maps produced by Indigenous peoples or migrant–advocacy organizations in Europe, the perspectives are both historical and contemporary.

1
The Map as a Legitimate Space: Cartography as a Language, a Stage and an Issue

Jacques LÉVY

Director, Spatial Intelligence Chair, Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France, France

1.1. Introduction

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.

1.2. Map truth regimes

The two maps, as shown in Figures 1.2 and 1.3, of Jewish history have been constructed in an attempt to understand the gap between the dominant view within Judaism and, to a large extent, outside of it, and that of scholars.

Figure 1.2. The mythical history of the Jews according to the dominant tradition (source: maps by E. Chavinier and J. Lévy in Lévy 2015)

In the first map (see Figure 1.2), we are talking about a population located in Palestine, which has been dispersed into many parts of Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, which makes the proposal that this population could rebuild a state in its place of origin through the creation of Israel coherent. In the second map (see Figure 1.3), constructed on the basis of the work by the historian Sand (2008), we discover that the Jews were much more numerous and, at many historical periods, more powerful, outside of Palestine – notably in the Roman Empire, in the Maghreb, in Yemen, in Ethiopia, on the shores of the Black Sea and then in northeastern Europe – than inside; the “Diaspora” never happened and most of the Jews before the Nazi extermination were much more likely to be natives than refugees, and the Palestinians of today are the main descendants of the Hebrews of Ancient Rome. The aim of the project was to make these different visions comparable through graphic semiology. However, these two maps are so divergent in all phases of their conception and realization that it would have been technically acrobatic and intellectually dangerous to make them visually comparable. Here, the map refrains from creating a common language, but instead highlights the incommunicability between two representations of space.

Figure 1.3. A recent historical approach to Jewish history (-300–1600) (source: map by E. Chavinier and J. Lévy in Lévy (2015, pp. 178–179))

The notion of a regime of truth, developed by Foucault (1977), can be useful in getting away from simplistic dichotomies. The hypothesis that truth is inscribed in a series of regimes does not aim, against a common belief, for a relativization of truth as such. On the contrary, it helps to show the complexity of the pathways to truth. And truth is ultimately found as the construction of a statement that maintains a clear homology, according to principles of evaluation fixed in advance, with a reality of reference external to this statement. Scientific research imposes a regime of truth on itself, based on coherence (no internal contradiction in the statement), relevance (a search for indicators ensuring an unequivocal link between the theory and the empirical), refutability and communication with all pre-existing or alternative propositions. Esthetics offer other regimes in which the discourse/actual homology is more vague, but not non-existent, and where refutability is replaced by fuzzier modes of validation, leaving room for the subjectivity of the receiver. Art and science can be considered as two cognitive modalities producing truth by being situated on a rational or on an esthetic side (Lévy and Sartoretti 2018). The technical truth regimes that can be summarized by the idea of plan, whether organizational, collective or personal, find their specificity in the fact that the judgment on the correspondence between referent and referred is the achievement of the plan itself. In the affective world, the circulation between the layers of the self (intimacy) produces situations in which the world of sensations and feelings, however autonomous it may be, interacts with the individual’s cognitive practices: self-awareness, self-lucidity or hybrids between projects and affective life are common expressions of these interactions. Finally, although the ethical, political and legal worlds do not fundamentally belong to the cognitive sphere and are not intended to produce truth, they are not totally alien to it, because of the strongly argumentative nature of public debates. Thus, a citizen cannot convince another citizen by simply asserting his/her support for one value or public policy over another. They must work to demonstrate that, if they are followed, positive effects will be felt by society as a whole. We can therefore consider that there are specific regimes of truth in the world of affects, interpersonal or ethico-political.

The crude dichotomy between true and false maps is of course still strong when it comes to factual errors or deliberate manipulation of data. For the rest, it appears to be the heir of an era when cartography belonged to the imagination of a weakly reflexive positivist engineering: it was believed that there was one “true map”, satisfying the mathematical rules of projection and geolocalization, and all of the others were false. If, on the other hand, we see all maps as true, each in their own way, as can be said, for example, of the discourses of people answering semi-structured interviews as part of scientific surveys, we have a large corpus on which we can propose statements concerning the regime of truth (intentional l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Introduction
• 1 The Map as a Legitimate Space: Cartography as a Language, a Stage and an Issue
• 2 Cartography and Spatial Production of Society
• 3 Farewell to Maps: Reformulating Critical Cartography in the Digital Age
• 4 Mapping and Participation in the Topos and Chora Test
• 5 The Cartographic Factory of Modern States
• 6 Statistical Cartography and International Governance in the Age of Big Data
• 7 Indigenous Mapping: Reclaiming Territories, Decolonizing Knowledge
• 8 Chorematic Representations in Participatory Processes of Territorial Projects
• 9 National Territorial Prospective Maps
• 10 Making Maps to Fight Unjust Migration Policies
• List of Authors
• Index
• End User License Agreement