Lines,contours and legends

Abstract

Harnessing the cartographic attributes of line, contour and legend, this paper generates a conceptual vocabulary attentive to the proliferation in everyday mapping. By developing theoretical work that questions the representational certitude of cartography, the paper argues that attention needs to be focused on the non-representational vectors of mapping. This is to establish the grounds for future empirical research into quotidian cartographies and their politics. Instead of categorizing these variegated, mapping practices as either ‘counter’ or ‘indigenous’ movements, the notion of ‘vernacular mapping’ is proposed as one way in which geographers might begin to encounter the vibrant micropolitics of contemporary cartography.

Keywords

cartography contour legend lines non-representation vernacular

I Introduction

It is better for us to begin from the premise that cartography is seldom what cartographers say it is. (Harley, 1989: 1)

Prefaced by Harley’s contention that there is more to be said of cartography than is articulated by its practitioners, this paper is a discursive development of contemporary work in critical cartography that attempts to decouple maps and mappings from any sort of ontological security (Kitchin and Dodge, 2007; Kitchin et al., 2012). Specifically, working under the three modes of lines, contours and legends, the aim of this paper is both to mobilize these familiar cartographic attributes as staging posts for rethinking maps as more-than-artifact and, in holding fast to non-representational geographies, to contend instead that maps and mappings are emergent processes and performances. Moreover, in diagramming lines, contours and legends not as static attributes but as processes in themselves, the paper emphasizes a conceptual concern with affect, the virtual and performance so as to begin exploring the non-representational vectors of cartography, in particular harnessing the recent upsurge in everyday ‘vernacular mapping’ (Gerlach, 2010; Thrift, 2012). The paper is structured as follows.

In section II, ‘Contours’, the paper traces current geographical scholarship which rattles the assumed ontological certitude of cartography. In section III, ‘Lines’, the paper addresses the disciplinary vocation of lines and their role in simultaneously holding apart and weaving together the dualisms that pervade everyday geographies. The section goes on to interrogate how lines might be diagrammed otherwise, and how they fold into the generation of a cartographic micropolitics. In section IV, ‘Legends’, the conceptual push is to propose that the noun ‘legend’ be refigured as the process of ‘legending’; a form of fabulation for thinking about cartographic terms and concepts in non-representational registers. This is to put at risk the notions of affect, virtual and vernacular so as to figure what work these concepts might do in the context of quotidian cartography and to question how geographers might make sense of the contemporaneous explosion in everyday mapping practices, digital and analogue. In sum, lines, contours and legends are established as conceptual coordinates for understanding and engaging empirically with vernacular mapping; not as coordinates fixed in steadfastly Euclidean terms, but as cartographic attributes that are transient, contingent and fleeting. It is in these three most recognizable cartographic attributes that a turn to vernacular mapping begins to emphasize a micropolitics, to borrow from Perec (1974), of the ‘infra-ordinary’.

Before diagramming these cartographic attributes, a note on vernacular mapping itself; a provisional definition. Less a flight to the local, vernacular mapping is more an ethos and range of performances that harness and sustain both an upsurge in quotidian cartographic technologies and a contemporary recuperation of mapping of and for the everyday. The motif ‘vernacular’ is one way in which to elide the awkwardness of assigning scale or an upfront, specious political meaning to the welter of worldly goings-on in modern cartography. Instead, vernacular in this instance recognizes the avowedly hybrid practices and entanglements at work in the likes of online mapping collectives such as OpenStreetMap (see Dodge and Perkins, 2008). Vernacular mapping inheres in the material co-production of cartographies by humans and non-humans alike whereby the underlying ethos remains intensely political, but in a tenor distinct from the representational politics allied traditionally to maps. Vernacular mapping, rather, is a valorizing of mundane cartographies that are caught up in the generation of an as-yet untold micropolitics. Such a provisional definition of vernacular mapping prohibits a strict policing of what cartographic practices count as vernacular; nonetheless, some constraint is useful. Vernacular mappings are non-statist, extra-institutional, participatory, cartographic practices, either digital or analogue in their composition, in which such performances are not taken to be technologies of capture, but as techniques of addition; of adding more to the world through abstraction; of adding to the riskiness of cartographic politics by proliferating yet more renders of the world. Lastly, vernacular mapping is also an analytical concern for the nearly-there materialities of cartography; the non-representational coordinates of maps; affect and the virtual.

II Contours

Much like contours, cartography is constituted by undulating and overlapping series of non-conformist performances held in relationally different relief to each other; contours that bubble and sink by way of historico-geographical ‘sedimentations, by the irregular seams and cracks of lived practices, by uneven operations of power, by fluctuations in rhythms and temporalities and the like’ (Seigworth, 2011: 316). The history and geography of cartography, then, if indeed one can be written, is not a straightforward teleology of progress, but a turbulent geo-pageant of competing practices, impulses and ideas.

Since Claudius Ptolemy’s claim in c.ad 120 (Ptolemy, 1991) that geography’s vocation was one of representation through the drawing of maps, cartography has long been held as a geographer’s disciplinary motif (Pickles, 2004) and valorized as a major structural pillar in the production of geographical thought (Harvey, 2001). Even when found awkwardly complicit in pernicious, colonial war machines, geographers reinvigorated their engagement with maps, propelled by Harley’s foray into deconstructionist thought (Harley, 1989, 2001). Echoing the sensibilities of a cultural turn in geography, the latest rapprochement of mapping by geographers has been described as marking a ‘cartographic turn’ (Cobarrubias and Pickles, 2009), characterized by posthumanist influences. As Crampton (2009a, 2009b, 2010a, 2010b) traces the geo-historical contours of cartography in great detail, I intend here to concentrate on recent work that nudges at the non-representational intensities of mapping.

In doing so, it is important to turn to Kitchin and Dodge’s (2007) radicalization of previous attempts at unsettling cartography’s representational accord (see Crampton, 2001, 2002; Pickles, 2004). The crux of their argument lies in the claim that ‘maps have no ontological security; they are of-the-moment; transitory, fleeting, contingent, relational and context dependent. They are never fully formed and their work is never complete’ (Kitchin and Dodge, 2007: 335). Putting to work the notion of ontogenesis (processual emergence), Kitchin and Dodgesuggest that maps come into being through their continual practising; produced and reproduced as relational solutions to spatial problems. These claims are not only the vanguard of a substantial, non-representational critique of cartography, but they also serve to collapse cartographic ontology and epistemology onto one other. Put simply, to question how a map performs is to ask the same question of what it is.

That maps are processually emergent evinces profound political implications insofar as, echoing Deleuze and Guattari (2004), the binaries between map/map user, and between subject/object, like that of the ostensible schism between ontology and epistemology, appear to dissolve in the very performances of mapping. In other words, ‘maps have always been engines rather than cameras’ (Thrift, 2011: 9), a statement that resonates with a Deleuzo-Guattarian sensibility of becoming over being, and also Massumi’s (2002) evocation of the virtual; the perpetual motoring of unfolding spaces of potential.

To summarize, Kitchin and Dodge’s contentious, provocative contour imbibes previous scholarly energies to unsettle cartography’s assumed security, while articulating a broader remit for cartography within geography in which ‘rethinking’ has become the eminent leitmotif (Del Casino and Hanna, 2006; Dodge and Perkins, 2008; Dodge et al., 2009). Such rethinking both builds on and develops a broader empirical repertoire for geographers to investigate cultures of map use (Perkins, 2008), the performances entangled in map art (Bhagat and Mogel, 2007; Harmon, 2004; kanarinka, 2006; Paglen, 2007), noise mapping (Cidell, 2008), community mapping (Lin and Ghose, 2008), ‘counter-cartographies’ (Nietschmann, 1995; Peluso, 1995; Roth, 2009; Sletto, 2009; Wainwright and Bryan, 2009), narrative mapping (Caquard, 2013; Pearce, 2008) or even the emergence of humorous maps (Caquard and Dormann, 2008); the type of novel, cartographic practices that hitherto have received little attention from geographers – a hint, perhaps, of a residual ‘carto-anxiety’ (Painter, 2008). At the same time, the contemporary swell in everyday cartographic and GIS practices (Elwood, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2011), geocoding subjects (Wilson, 2011), ubiquitous mapping (Gartner et al., 2007) or ‘else/where’ mapping (Abrams and Hall, 2006) based primarily on internet platforms (Zook and Graham, 2007) offers the opportunity to gauge differently long-established cartographic tropes.

In surmising the variable theoretical contours in the conceptualization of mapping, the most significant shift in cartography, arguably, has manifested itself in the tonality of critique. As Crampton and Krygier (2006) elucidate, the purpose of critique is not fault finding, nor the trial of concepts by Kantian tribunal, a style of critique that has sometimes characterized cartography’s, and indeed geography’s, disciplinary history. Instead, the vocation of critique is closer to one of affirmation, pivoting on Foucault’s own resolution of critique as ‘an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical [and geographical] analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them’ (Foucault, 1997: 132).

The historical and geographical contouring of cartography is such that linearity cannot be wrought out of its kaleidoscopic heritage, and claims to cartographic ‘newness’ need to be treated with caution. Moreover, this is only to speak of the extremely narrow band of mapping identified as the western, geometric science of cartography, which in the last decade or so has been regarded as increasingly ‘performative, participatory and political’ (Crampton, 2009b: 840). Taken together with the unsettling of its ontological premise, geographers are faced with a number of questions.

Specifically, if the conceptual tenor of cartography moves from one of ontology to one of ontogenesis, what does this entail for geographers attending to maps empirically? What methodologies or techniques might be cultivated in witnessing non-representational tendencies, or in witnessing cartographic emergence? Furthermore, what is at stake, politically, ethically and geographically, in the assertion of a cartography that is constantly in the making? Harley’s (1990: 16) question resonates once more: ‘are cartographers concerned at all with how maps could answer the Socratic question, “how should one live?”’. Does this processual and contingent emergence absolve cartography of the responsibility of its performative consequences, or does it conjure an alternative register of political pathways for acting in the world differently? Harley’s ethical rhetoric here is inadvertently patronizing, if not outright insulting toward cartographers who are doubtless well aware of what is gained and lost in the lines of a map; but what this prompts is a need to conjure ethics less as a problematic, moralistic code of behaviours and to move toward ethics as an ongoing process of attunement to emergent events and situations (McCormack, 2003), one that sits alongside a processual rendering of cartography.

For now, the contours outlined partially here have been a ‘foregrounding of the samenesses and differences, the rejections, emergences, and formalizations played out’ (Mitchell, 2007: 38) in the so-far histories and geographies of cartography. In the following sections, the paper explores how such contours reverberate in lines and legends.

III Lines

People inhabit a world that consists, in the first place, not of things but of lines. (Ingold, 2007: 5)

Having traced some of the contours of critical cartography in such a way as deliberately to elide linearity, this section, somewhat counter-intuitively, invokes a conceptual tracing of lines as a technique for pursuing some of the conceptual claims made in the previous section. Constituting the very architecture of cartography, lines play a crucial role not just in the material composition of the map, but also in the often immaterial propagation and modulation of the Manichean ‘modern constitution’ of particular societies and philosophical traditions (Latour, 1993). Put differently, lines have been caught up in the engineering and deployment of dualisms and binaries; trademarks of western, Enlightenment thought. To work through lines here is to involve non-representational geographies in mapping through an introduction of Deleuze and Guattari’s manifold cartographies; maps anchored not to pre-existing grids, but ones that generate lines following Deleuze’s (1995: 44) conjunctive ‘and, and, and …’, proliferating yet more lines; lines of escape and lines of flight; lines to worlds in the making.

Longitude, latitude, contours, grids. Walking, surveying, drawing, etching. Straight, bendy, gradient and undulating. What is cartography, to paraphrase Gunnar Olsson, if not the drawing and interpretation of a line? (Olsson in Pickles, 2004). Maps and mapping practices are shot through with lines, some traced, some gestural, some fixed, some ephemeral, some ghostly. Material and immaterial, lines are at once the DNA and outward expressions of cartography, exemplified by Olsson’s (2007) historical and painstaking account of the proto-cartographers Pytheas’, Erastosthenes’ and Ptolemy’s ceaseless pursuit of accurate geodesic projections; stretching truculent grid lines across spherical globes. If cartography is indeed the drawing and interpretation of a line, then what can these lines do? Straightforwardly, these cartographic lines perform. Likewise, in their unfolding effects and affects, lines are performative. Following Tim Ingold’s incessant work on lines (Ingold, 2006, 2008, 2011, 2012) and in particular his genealogy and taxonomy of lines (Ingold, 2007), their assumed mediocrity is replaced by an acute political charge. Lines have a disciplinary function; they perform and enforce frontiers, while simultaneously orientating and disorientating bodies; walk the line, do not cross the line, a line drawn in the sand, lines as a form of rhetoric (Olsson, 2007). Similarly, lines might be generative in their constraint, cultivating pathways to as yet unrealized space-times; gestural lines that might lead one off the edges of the map.

In literal and metaphorical terms, the line in itself continues to be a frontier between a plurality of supposedly distinct ontological domains. The line, in other words, extends and protends simultaneously (Carter, 2009), sustaining the glut of binaries that characterizes western thinking through its posturing as a mediation between certain dualisms. Lines, then, play into a cartographic reasoning of the world; the Cartesian accord of subject/object, nature/society, mind/body, human/non-human and, most salient in this context, reality/representation. In the last of these classic dualisms, the line performs an ambiguous role. At one and the same time, for cartographic purposes, the line must hold apart as two separate domains, reality and its representation, so as to reinforce the axiom that ‘distance lends one truth’ (Massey, 2005). Conversely, the line is expected to narrow the gap between reality and representation, so as to make claim to both accuracy and a sense of cartographic verisimilitude in which the map user places their wayfinding trust. In other words, lines do the work of holding apart abstraction and experience, if only to offer cartography its epistemological underpinnings as an objective, rationalist science, an epistemology thoroughly interrogated by numerous disciplinary turns, cultural and spatial.

In geography, the variegated lines of represen-tational critiques form a patchwork of disciplinary traditions from phenomenology to neuroscience that have coalesced under the purview of non-representational theory (Thrift, 1996, 1997, 2000, 2007). Less a theory and coherent narrative (Cadman, 2009) than a mode of engagement (Anderson, 2008), non-representational thinking is at once a critique of the epistemological certitude of representational, and by the same token cartographic, reasoning, while also affirming a geography of things happening (Anderson and Harrison, 2010). For Harrison (2000: 499), non-representational thinking is in part a response to ‘the inability of knowledge in social analysis to do anything other than hold onto, produce, represent, the fixed and the dead; a failure to apprehend the lived present as an open-ended and generative process; as practice’. To be clear, non-representational theory is not a dismissal of representations, but is instead a tentative ethos of attending to their emergence, becoming, process and performance; to the tendency and push of worlds, human and non-human materialities alike (Hinchliffe and Whatmore, 2006; Whatmore, 2002). The recourse to non-representational thinking in this paper is not to signal the wholesale imposition of a travelling theory framework upon contemporary cartographic practices. On the contrary, its manifold lines are deployed as points of inflection for experimenting in thought processes that do not reduce cartography into a constructivist narrative of conquest and resistance. Moreover, the conceptual tapestry that is non-representational thinking allows for a certain degree of what Guattari (2009) labelled, wryly, ‘idea-theft’, a magpie-like tendency to harness and modify concepts to do the theoretical work required in research. The flip side to this purloining of concepts is an attendant responsibility to put those ideas at risk of being modified, redesigned or even dismissed (Stengers, 1997).

This ethos attends to both the ‘nagging problems of how to add movement back into the picture’ (Massumi, 2002: 3) and also to the ‘soliciting of the event’ (Dewsbury, 2003: 1926), diagramming and performing the space-times of the in-between and the not-quite-there (Dewsbury, 2000; Latham, 2003; McCormack, 2005). For Thrift (2007), these modes of thinking furnish a speculative topography, one that responds to posthumanist contentions that there is no stable human or non-human existence because so much of what happens in the world, what moves, what becomes, from day to day and throughout spaces, does so before it passes the threshold of cognitive recognition. The methodological and ethical project of such thinking is therefore not to capture pre-figured states, identities, spaces and assemblages, but to proliferate both somatic capacities to move, act and perform differently, and to relocate the process of thinking and politics away from a purely mental, cognitive staging, and toward a kinaesthetic register (McCormack, 2003), to witness the unfolding of worlds (Dewsbury, 2003). In sum, non-representational thinking pokes mischievously at the binary scaffolding of Cartesian convention. Importantly, representations are figured as emergent from the world, and thereby transformative. Likewise, what counts as ‘subject’ and ‘object’, already a ‘poor approximation of thought’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 95) becomes unclear, and in terms of cartography the map’s oft-cited labour of division of these categories (Law and Benschop, 1997) is put under considerable strain. It is not enough, as Foucault (1984: 369) argues, ‘to say the subject is constituted in a symbolic system … it is [also] constructed in real practices’.

Recalling lines, under the influence of non-representational geographies, their conceptual and empirical work can be unshackled from the vestiges of a Cartesian divide, and need no longer be an arbitrator between reality and representation. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari (1994), mapping, like thinking, is neither the presence of a line drawn between subject and object nor the revolving of one around the other. Maps, then, ‘are their own practitioners’ (Thrift, 2007: 58).

Thought processually, far from holding abstraction apart from experience, lines, something in-between and transversal (McCormack, 2004), help conversely to narrow abstraction and experience as immanent to one another, whereby lines and maps can be understood as lived abstractions (Manning, 2009). In taking ‘lines for a walk’ (Ingold, 2007), ‘cartography shifts from being a “point” or fixed location and moves instead to an encounter between people and places’ (Irwin et al., 2009: 62). Moreover, ‘some kinds of ghostly line … can have very real consequences for peoples’ movements’ (p. 69). To signpost these transversal qualities of a line is to say that it can weave across spaces actual and virtual, so that a line might be considered not as a path composed of discrete positions, but instead as ‘non-decomposable; a dynamic unity’ (Massumi, 2002: 6) or as constitutive lines of force and futurity (Coonfield, 2008). A line drawn, gestural or otherwise, can be diagrammed, following once more Kitchin and Dodge (2007), as an ongoing emergent practice whose work is never complete; its vocation never entirely qualified. What emerges here in addition to Ingold’s (2007) ‘parliament of lines’ is the beginnings of a political autonomy of lines, divorced from their Euclidean rendering and charged instead with the potential to take flight. Taking this thought-experiment further, Deleuze and Guattari’s (2004) multiverse and schizoid cartographies are the next point of departure for rethinking lines.

To begin with a proposition, ‘[i]ndividual or group, we are traversed by lines, meridians, geodesics, tropics, and zones marching to different beats and differing in nature. We said that we are composed of lines’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004: 223). In this manifesto for lines, Deleuze and Guattari hint at their predilection for cartography as a method for apprehending psychoanalysis in starkly different terms to Freud. The use of cartography in this instance is not allegorical, but experimental, a counterpoint to what Deleuze and Guattari regard as the archaeological edifice of the Oedipal unconscious. Instead, the deployment of a cartographic method is intended to generate pathways of becoming and existing that are not reducible to linguistics and a staid psychoanalysis. In a similar gesture, this paper is in part pushed by an attendance to Deleuzo-Guattarian cartographies, folded empirically through everyday mappings. Cartographic lines, therefore, are not to be regarded as metaphor, but as conceptual coordinates for engaging with the material and immaterial performances of vernacular mappings.

Primarily, Deleuze and Guattari’s mapmaking marks a shift from ‘aborescent’ to ‘rhizomatic’ forms of thinking and assemblage. That is to say, such a move is oriented as a critique of the kind of western thought foregrounded, its binaries grounded in a radicle or fascicular root system, leaving little room for political manoeuvre. Rhizomatic thinking, conversely, ‘is not amenable to any structural or generative model. It is a stranger to any idea of genetic axis or deep structure’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004: 13). Maps and cartographies, then, are composed of rhizomatic lines, distinguishable by their orientation, ‘toward an experimentation in contact with the real’ (p. 13). It is at this stage that Deleuze and Guattari make one of their most oft-cited cartographic claims that ‘the map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. It fosters connections between fields’, and thereby conclude:

the map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation. (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004: 13–14)

What might this all mean? First, it suggests, as Deleuze and Guattari themselves recognize, that the map is all to do with distributed and diverse performances. The lines of cartography are found not just in the etchings of a map, but also in the gestural enactments and negotiations of mapping practices. Moreover, in its identification as a form of rhizomatic thinking, the ontological apparatus of cartography is further rattled and, by accentuating a map’s vulnerability and susceptibility, the political charge invested in cartography becomes far more dangerous insofar as its potential refuses a straightforward motive or identity. This potential:

is not a map in which to locate or recognize oneself in a predetermined plane with fixed coordinates … [but] where things may go off in unforeseen directions or work in unregulated ways … a map meant for those who want to do something with respect to new uncommon forces, which we don’t quite yet grasp. (Rajchman, 2000: 5–6)

For mappers that align themselves with movements in so-called ‘counter-cartography’, Deleuze and Guattari’s mapping manifesto constitutes a cartographic clarion call, demanding that lines be drawn so as to ‘make room [in the world] for things to happen’ (Carter, 2009: 15).

Elsewhere, Deleuze and Guattari make distinctions between different lines, specifically between ‘molar’ and ‘molecular’ lines. Whereas the former is rooted to the state and rigid strictures of identity, the latter is nomadic and a flight risk; a line of escape (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004) or a line of flight that engenders not just deterritorialization, but reterritorialization too. In working up this political genealogy of lines, it is important to state here that cartographic lines can be as generative as they can be destructive. As such, for affirmative critique to be sustained in critical cartography, their productive valence needs to be highlighted and practised continuously. Furthermore, their transversal characteristics lend these lines the ability to criss-cross verticality and horizontality; a tactic for undermining the vertical and scalar sensibilities of an orthodox cartographic geopolitics.

In their assertion that maps are implicated in the construction of the unconscious, Deleuze and Guattari again nod to the performative registers of mapping and also to the possibility that maps and cartographies are in the business of generating immaterial geographies; affective and virtual spaces inflected by the afterlives of gestural lines, spaces that are under constant perturbation and modification; an ontogenetic cartography ‘that is co-extensive with the whole social field’ (Deleuze, 2006: 30) whereby encounters, actual and virtual, are not diagrammed in advance. The map expresses and journeys at the same time, simultaneously animating and generating its pathways, its territories, its worlds; a further entangling of lines and their involvement in weaving abstraction, experience, subject and object. These lines too, by their very becoming, are relational:

maps … are superimposed in such a way that each map finds itself modified in the following map, rather than finding its origin in the preceding one: from one map to the next, it is not a matter of searching for an origin but of evaluating displacements. (Deleuze, 2006: 63)

The danger to Deleuze and Guattari’s lines is that molecular and segmented lines are continually at risk from being crystallized into molar lines of rigid formations, trapping molecular movements into partitioned molar aggregates (Doel, 1999), hence the micropolitical demand that molecular lines be drawn anew over and over again; or, indeed, that lines be allowed to draw themselves into existence, divested of any authorial control. To do otherwise, to draw a map and continually to enunciate the tired semiotic, propositional claim ‘this is here’ or the distributive order ‘that goes there’ is, in Deleuze and Guattari’s opinion, tantamount to a micro-fascism in which macropolitical demands are sedimented through molar lines.

That risk aside, Deleuze and Guattari’s cartographies and cartographic method are useful, albeit not straightforward points of departure for thinking about the lines and the performances caught up in contemporary cartographic practices, most significantly because they detach cartography as a staging of fixed points, and instead animate a processual cartography characterized by ‘lines of variation, which do not even have constant coordinates’ (Deleuze, 1992: 4). As the threads through which maps and mappings are composed, lines have been treated axiomatically and traced in cartographic isolation, but in working alongside the emergence of non-representational geographies this section has interrogated the role of lines in maintaining the modern constitution, while suggesting that lines might be diagrammed in such a way that points to their transversal potential and also their concomitant ability to contract the interval between abstraction and experience. Put otherwise, this is a call to geographers and cartographers to follow Deleuze and Guattari’s diagramming of lines in making them more, not less, abstract; a thought experiment in creating a cartographic vocabulary and practice more attuned to ‘the excessive force of materiality’ (Latham and McCormack, 2010: 87). What then, of legends?

IV Legends

Across territories, maps and their legends, reside the promise of fabulist swerves, fortuitous misapprehension and half-wilful misunderstandings. (Seigworth, 2011: 315)

Imprinted on maps as artifacts, legends are ubiquitous, normally tucked into corners, acting as orienteering devices for the map itself, almost as a form of epistemic guarantee; north is north because the legend designates as such. Legends also betray the problem of an abstraction taken too far, or understood as withdrawal from the world, whereby the claim of the map as an accurate simulacrum of reality needs to be propped up by a series of discursive codes and explanations. Legends, as Wood and Fels (1986) surmise, carry a heavy burden; semiotically, aesthetically and politically. They are charged with the labour of representation and, concomitantly, the work of maintaining a stubborn Cartesian dualism. To that end, legends are prime targets for deconstructionist analyses of cartography. In this instance, however, the aim is to work beyond legends as signifying codes, and to dwell instead on the notion and practice of ‘legending’ as a technique for developing the core conceptual vocabulary of vernacular mapping. What is involved, then, in the performance of legending? In sum, it is a move away from the being of cartographic legend to the becoming of conceptual legending, a practice of inflecting established ideas in such a way that allows them to be mobilized in alternative ways to their most common-sensical or intuitive usage. The term `legending' derives from Deleuze’s reading of Bergson’s (1997 [1935]) own notion of ‘fabulation’, both a query and response to the paradox of fiction; namely, the problematic of how people can exude and feel ‘real’ emotion toward ‘unreal’ events and entities. This is not to suggest that legending as a reworking of fabulation is a form of myth-making, for, as Mullarkey (2006: 3) makes clear, ‘though it connotes fabrication, fabulation is not wholly unnatural, nor unfounded: it is not fictitious or purely relative to individual whimsy’. Instead, through Deleuze’s politicizing of fabulation, legending is a ‘generative unfolding of new possibilities’ (Bogue, 2007: 106), demonstrated by Deleuze’s own reading of Bergson’s concepts.

Bogue (2007: 100) goes on to suggest that legending is also a ‘practice of a minor people engaged in a process of self-invention’, and it is with this ethos of creative invention in mind that here legending is mobilized as a technique at once disruptive and generative in its apprehension of the key concepts to be examined; specifically the notions of vernacular, affect, the virtual and performance. Indeed, in its motivation for reimagining, reworking and reinvention, the process of legending has much in common with the performances of being and becoming vernacular; of recombining everyday, sometimes mundane, practices. Put simply, this is to understand legend as much a verb as it is a noun (Jacob, 2006); ‘squeezed into its own minimum the map is a double fold, verb turned to noun, noun to verb’ (Olsson, 2007: 115). A further aim in this process of legending is to consider what is at stake in this turn to the processual within the context of the current upsurge in participatory and user-generated cartographies.

The process of legending begins here with the concept of ‘vernacular’ as a means of reimagining its political valence and potential. This is not a straightforward process, not least because the vernacular is saddled with a quarry of limiting definitions and connotations, identified as ‘something countrified, homemade, traditional … [the] tendency to associate the word with a local form of speech and a local form of art and decoration’ (Jackson, 1984: 85, 149) whereby the vernacular is linguistically rooted to a particular locality or areal unit (see Snow, 2007). So far, so prosaic. In geography, the problem is compounded by a handful of case studies which use the term vernacular as a foil for hooking political concerns to specific scalar units. Lamme and Oldakowski (2007), for example, map the ‘vernacular regions’ of Florida, variously labelled Bible Belt, Dixie, Sunbelt (nomenclature devised not by Floridians, but imposed lexically by the authors; an awkward form of cartographic determinism that holds the vernacular as axiomatic). Elsewhere, Lane et al. (2008) cite the importance of vernacular heritage in modulating environmental policy in the Murray-Darling watershed in Australia. While they argue that the vernacular is lively and performed, the tendency to grip to the local is, in this context, steadfastly retained.

Howard (2008) outlines an intuitive but misplaced notion of the vernacular which can be identified by three characteristics. First, that the vernacular tends to co-exist with a dominant culture, so that it stands in dialectical relation to hegemony. Second, that the vernacular is rendered subaltern, a focus of discursive recalcitrance; counter-hegemonic and affirmative. Third, that the vernacular is the vanguard of the common; a community of shared goals itself remarkable in its alterity to institutional knowledge. The point here is not to police the notion of vernacular in such a way as to dismiss the meanings outlined above, but it is to recognize that, as the idea stands, the vernacular appears to have been afforded little room for (micro) political manoeuvre.

To legend a vernacular that has more at stake, a version that might move with the world instead of trying to capture it, is to think beyond its fusty dictionary definitions. In addition to conceiving of a vernacular characterized by a set of parochial dialects, idioms, signals and literacies, the vernacular might also be understood as the productively mundane and quotidian, or as ‘spatial forms for routines of everyday life’ (Stangl, 2008: 245). Crucially, the vernacular needs to be understood as the co-production of knowledges, materials and spaces. Taking a lead from Whatmore et al.’s (2003) ‘vernacular ecologies’, the notion of the vernacular can be shaken from its pejorative malaise and charged with a micropolitical vibrancy when considered as the ‘space times of everyday life co-fabri-cated between human and non-human practices and pathways’ (p. 18). From this, the notion of vernacular mappings begins to emerge; cartographies of and for everyday lives enacted through cosmopolitical and hybrid performances that themselves enrol and extend political recognition to more-than-human company (Whatmore and Hinchliffe, 2010).

Vernacular mappings are cartographies that in their ethos and practice are more vulnerable and susceptible to change and perturbation; cartographies that perform the unsettling of epistemological and representational certainties while affirming spaces for inhabiting and navigating the world otherwise; ‘if understood as vernacular processes, and performed as such, maps [become] not mere static renderings of the world but instead can move alongside, and indeed, change the world’ (Gerlach, 2010: 166). The vernacular, and specifically vernacular mappings, rely on the experiential (Whatmore, 2009) and it is the valorization both of the presently corporeal and of experience that is one of the distinguishing features of contemporary cartographic practices.

To employ the notion of the vernacular is also to elide the use of problematic categorizations such as ‘counter’ and ‘indigenous’ that feature prominently in modern critical cartographic discourse, and instead conceive of a mapping that refuses an obvious representational politics. After all, cartography does not need to be entangled perpetually in conflict, or embroiled in the articulation of marginal demands; for example, the open-source mapping organization, OpenStreetMap, is as much concerned with bicycle paths as it is with belligerent land claims. OpenStreetMap is a signal example of vernacular mapping insofar as it is a reimagining of cartography in which the map, by virtue of its wiki-platform, is perpetually susceptible to change, transformation and even vandalism; there is no singular politics to OpenStreetMap, no singular vision or representation of the world hermetically black-boxed (Lin, 2011). Both digital and analogue in its composition, OpenStreetMap valorizes the experiential, an affective remote-sensing of space. Likewise, the cartographies generated are the continual negotiation between the actual and the virtual; a negotiation never resolved, but instead proliferated deliberately to provoke multiple renderings of the world. Historically, too, Surrealists and Situationists also generated vernacular mappings, understanding cartography less as a process of capture and more as a collaboration of ‘gathering, working, assembling, relating, revealing, sifting and speculating’ (Corner, 1999: 228). This is not to dismiss outright the terms ‘indigenous’ and ‘counter’, not least because of the myriad complexity that constitutes each of these terms, but also because of the work done and activism undertaken by, inter alia, Nietschmann (1995), Peluso (1995), Wainwright and Bryan (2009) and the North Carolina based 3Cs: Counter Cartographies Collective. These interventions make evident the vibrant and crucial political purchase of such identitarian labels. The contention here, instead, is that vernacular mapping might be regarded as an additional, not alternative, notion that works in the conceptual interstices of counter and indigenous cartographies so as to point to the micropolitics generated by contemporary cartographic practices.

What remains is an ethical question, as stated by Crampton (2010b); what counts as an indigenous map or mapping practice? Indeed, as he continues, can OpenStreetMap, for example, be figured as an indigenous project? Unlikely; the notion of ‘indigenous’ itself is heavily circumscribed and there exists a postcolonial reluctance to recognize technological innovation as an indigenous achievement in and of itself. The term ‘counter’ is problematic in that it implies conflict and resistance on a monumental scale. To be sure, ‘counter-mapping’ is an oft-cited and widely deployed practice in, for example, Palestinian struggles against settlement (and indeed in Israeli recalcitrance: see Wood et al., 2010). Yet, the practices that feed into such maps can be mundane, unspectacular and more generative than the label ‘counter’ suggests; it is not simply the appropriation of state technologies and official practices by everyday communities to use to their own ends; vernacular mappers are involved in the invention of the mapping techniques themselves. The term vernacular, then, is a way of navigating the conceptual impasse created by the terms counter and indigenous. Useful terms indeed, but resolutely implicated in upholding certain staid geometries of human relations.

By contrast, in its convivial performances of mapping into knowledge (Whatmore, 2003) and generation of newly emerging cartographic publics, vernacular mappings put at risk the divide between scientific and lay knowledges. Indeed, in the case of OpenStreetMap, its cartography relies on a curious mixing of amateur and expert knowledges to the extent that attempting to distinguish between them as discrete spheres of genius is futile, if not disingenuous. Such multifarious, participatory carto-practices pose a significant risk to the established configuration of cartographic institutions and the global mapping industry as a whole; an architecture of cartography that has long been under the patronage of states and a small coterie of geospatial agencies.

The legending of the vernacular here is deliberately to introduce an uncertainty (DeSilvey, 2012) into its conceptualization and tentative definition. The reason for this is twofold. First, as per the risk of molecular lines crystalizing into staid molar lines, there is a concomitant risk that if defined precisely the experimental notion of vernacular mapping will lose its open-ended, relational vocation. Second, uncertainty arises insofar as the intention of the study and practice of vernacular mappings is to imbibe, perform and express the non-discursive tendencies of contemporary cartographic practices that are otherwise missing from orthodox accounts of mapping. Specifically, this entails a further legending of the vernacular to take into consideration affect, the virtual and performance. Traditional maps are, as Seigworth (2011: 316) remarks, ‘notoriously limited in displaying “emergent processes” or affective capacity’. What work, therefore, might affect, the virtual and performance do in the service of vernacular mapping? In proffering a tentative response, it is worth outlining here what is involved in these concepts, by no means intended as an exhaustive or definitive glossary, but rather as an extension of thinking alongside the rhizomatic tendencies of non-representational geographies.

Echoing the materialist returns of recent cultural geographies (Whatmore, 2006), the tenor of the analysis and practice of mapping shifts from one concerned with representation, identity, essences and static beings to one animated by reimaginations, affect, events and becomings. Moreover, working through affect, the virtual and performance, as constituent intensities of the conceptualization and practice of vernacular mapping, ‘offers a hitherto undrawn map of the possibility of “thinking otherwise”’ (De Certeau, 1984: 197). This thinking otherwise might then be transposed to mapping otherwise, opening, proliferating and modifying micropolitical spaces of and for the itinerant rhythms of the quotidian and seemingly mundane.

Moreover, writing of affect here is also to speak of the legending done by the likes of Deleuze and Guattari in conjuring a concept at once diaphanous (Lorimer, 2008) and of increasing interest to geographers (McCormack, 2003) and cultural theorists alike (Grossberg, 2010). Affect is understood here as intensity, or rather the continual surging and ebbing of emergent and relational intensities between bodies. As a corporeal intensity, ‘a virtual force, a material effect and an immaterial disposition’ (Dewsbury, 2009: no pagination), affect might be regarded as the motor of being (Connolly, 2001, 2002) or rather the inconstant engine of becoming. Conceptual interpretations of affect are as variegated as affect itself (Anderson, 2006; Thrift, 2004), so, in order to provide some degree of conceptual restraint, the shade of affect at work here is one that borrows from Deleuze and Guattari’s ethological take about Spinoza’s treatise on the affects – the distributed, variable and `indefinite capacities' (DeLanda, 2005: 62) of bodies to affect and be affected – and his subsequent ethical manifesto that greater perfection can be attained through the training of bodies to increase their affective capacities. Importantly, affect is distinct from emotion in its pre-personal, visceral and proprioceptive tenor (McCormack, 2003; Massumi, 2002), compared to the cultural, cognitive fixing of feeling that characterizes emotion, and cannot be located within the confines of an individual body; ‘affects are not feelings, they are becomings that go beyond those who live through them’ (Deleuze, 1995: 137).

This particular legending of affect is not without its critics, not least because of a lingering suspicion toward bodily immanence and the accusation that the autonomy of affect (Massumi, 2002) might be read as a lack of guarantees in political and cultural formations (Grossberg, 2010). However, the reason for folding affect into a study of maps is twofold. First, a consideration of affect amplifies the often ignored non-discursive potential of maps; it is also a declaration that contemporary vernacular mappings valorize this affective vector of cartography, one of bodily experiences. Put differently, cartographic thought and practice, through the invocation of affect, becomes a type of distributed, corporeal thinking (Thrift, 2004), and not a turgid process of cognitive mapping, an unlikely ocular overcoding of orientation along imagined Euclidean gridlines that has passed its sell-by date (Massumi, 2002). Second, the affective lives and afterlives of maps (Oliver, 2011) are worth diagramming for their virtual lines and contours, or, in other words, paying attention to affect necessarily involves attending to the virtual, micropolitical forces of cartography.

The concept of the virtual is doubly located in vernacular mapping, at once as an empirical concern for the digitally virtual; online geospatial platforms and the use of various cartographic softwares and hardwares, and then also as a conceptual concern for the virtual as the realm of the unrealized (Grossberg, 2010) or the realm of potential (Massumi, 2002); the real without being actual (Deleuze, 1991). This sense of the virtual is a legending from Bergson’s work on time, memory and duration; an abandonment of chronological time (reduced, unfortunately and inadvertently, to the confines of crudely spatialized units), and in its place a contention that, in duration, the past is constantly actualized in the present by incipient tendencies toward a futurity. In other words, time and memory are indivisible in their composition.

For Bergson, the virtual, worked through the example of music and memory, is understood as:

the performance of the movements which follow in the movements which precede, a performance whereby the part virtually contains the whole, as when each note of a tune learned by heart seems to lean over to the next to watch its execution. (Bergson, 2004: 112)

Taking this further, the virtual can be understood as the sensing of something yet to come (Manning, 2009), a cartography of speculative pathways; ‘the pressing crowd of incipiencies and tendencies’ (Massumi, 2002: 30), generative of potential, ‘where futurity combines, unmediated, with pastness’ (p. 30). The virtual, then, is a ‘lived paradox where what are normally opposites coexist, coalesce, and connect; where what cannot be experienced cannot but be felt – albeit reduced and contained’ (p. 30).

Cartography, through its lines, contours and legends, has a role to play in folding and unfolding the virtual and the actual; a journey made through cartography might be understood as the actualization of the virtual. More important, however, is the tentative, not-quite-there, anticipatory quality of the virtual and the manner in which maps could be understood as technologies and performances of anticipation, or ‘technique[s] for inhabiting possible futures’ (McCormack in Latham et al., 2008: 95). Indeed as Thrift (2007: 60, 61) remarks, ‘qualities like anticipation and intuition … [are] not just spirits, but material orientations’, which in turn raises questions about the micropolitical capacities of vernacular mappings. To what extent are vernacular mappings embroiled in a micropolitics of affect and the virtual, or in the production of assemblages of enunciation (Guattari, 1995), or ‘strategies for the constitution of new territories, other spaces of life and affect, a search for ways outside of territories seemingly without exits’ (Guattari and Rolnik, 2008: 3)?

One way of attending to the non-repre-sentational contours of affect and the virtual, of the vernacular, is to think about performance, both conceptually and methodologically. A pervasive motif within the social sciences, Thrift (2007) documents the various interpretations of ‘performance’ from its legending in dramaturgical circles through to its animation both in performance studies and in social theory and philosophy (Deleuze, 1995). In the specific context of this research, the legending of performance here is important in three respects.

First, performance is important in a non-representational sense whereby meaning and identity are not the defining avatars of an artifact, process or event. Insofar as vernacular mappings involve bodily gestures, movements, motions, disruptions and liminal space-times which orientate and disorientate each other, they can be sketched and diagrammed, but never captured fully; performances that exceed representation and refuse compartmentalization into subject-object relations. In a broader context, all cartographic articulations are caught up in some form of theatrics, a staging of propositions, claims and anticipations, so it is vital to think about maps as performances or, to invoke a now well-rehearsed refrain, to diagram maps as continually in the making. Second, performance is important in its performative guise (Butler, 1997). Here, the notion of performativity adds to the growing trend outlined earlier in wresting maps away from accounts of their neutral or mirroring propensities, and instead assigns a far more active and political role to cartography; one which animates maps as enmeshed in generating eventful spaces through their repetition, staging and attendant claim-making. Third, performance is important in terms of thinking through how to attend to the affective and virtual contours of the very performances engendered in contemporary examples of vernacular mapping. To attend to performance in this way is to state an ethical commitment to finding ways of animating the processual and the emergent without dissipating the affective, virtual and immaterial resonances threatened by the dulling effects of representational practices. By attending to performance thus, geographers are in position to elide semiotic or identitarian interpretations of cartography, which necessarily involves a speaking-on-behalf–of-others and which can close down certain political space-times in doing so.

V Speculative traces

Lines, contours and legends have been traced throughout this paper so as to act as conceptual coordinates for considering how geographers might attend to the rise of participatory mapping practices, actors and their attendant politics. In diagramming such cartographies as ‘vernacular’, the paper highlights how a reworking of lines, contours and legends can generate a vocabulary that speaks of and for the politics and performances of emergent, everyday mapping practices. Such lines, contours and legends constitute only speculative traces, only speculative cartographies (Guattari, 2013), and demand that geographers continue to experiment with the non-representational intensities at work in one of the discipline’s most prominent motifs, the map. Insofar as maps and mappings cultivate and modulate spatial sensibilities (Yonomoto, 2000), the recent growth in vernacular mapping suggests that a different kind of cartographic politics is at hand, one not tied to statist or imperial concerns as per cartographies of the past, but a more subtle micropolitics concerned with affective dispositions, bodily (dis)orientations and spatial strategies for quotidian journeys. A vernacular mapping, in other words, animated by an:

unstable linkage of … struggles and diagrams, a kind of linkage that generates something new, that simultaneously dismantles existing assemblages, space-times, physics and generates mutations, hybrid formations that always operate through a kind of shared excess, through a peculiar sense of resistance or struggle, and through an experimental kind of empiricism. (C.Cred, 2007: 120)

Thinking through cartographic performances alongside non-representational geographies goes some way to eroding the subject-object binary, and concentrates on the affective processes of maps and mappings coming into being and the generation of the virtual, unqualified political potential. As geographers increasingly focus attention toward the knowledges and politics generated by participatory spatial media (Elwood and Leszczynski, 2012), of which vernacular mapping is part, it is crucial that, alongside an interrogation of representational valence, there is also a speculative concern for the micropolitical lines, contours and legends of maps and mappings.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Rob Kitchin and three anonymous reviewers for their instructive comments. Thanks also to Derek McCormack, Sarah Whatmore and Thomas Jellis for their support and advice.

Funding

This work is supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (award number PTA-031-2007-ES/F020023/1).

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