# THE FUNAMBULIST PAPERS 33 /// Mapping Intervals: Towards an Emancipated Cartography by Nora Akawi

Today’s guest writer comes from my dear friend Nora Akawi, who was kind enough to make it happen in a very busy schedule between her practice and teaching in Jerusalem, and her new responsibilities as the curator of the Amman Lab, the branch of New York Columbia University’s Studio-X in Jordan. In the following text, Mapping Intervals: Towards an Emancipated Cartography, she introduces the archive, and more precisely, the map as instruments of power through the subjective narrative they convey. Colonial mapping, collective forgetfulness, cultural genocide and domain name system are as many problematic aspects of the dissensus created by the attempted collective materialization of memory. In this regard, Nora quotes Jacques Derrida who affirms that “there is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory.” From there, she examines what could possibly be an “emancipated cartography”, which would not refuse this control without which there is no political power, but rather would attempt to articulate the multiplicity of cultural narratives as the very essence of its materialization.

The Funambulist Papers 33 /// Mapping Intervals: Towards an Emancipated Cartography

by Nora Akawi

The map as a tool for domination is the visual inscription of a seamless story for a specific group of people sharing specific characteristics. It represents their history, knowledge and claims for control within a territory with specific borders.

So what is a map as a tool for liberation?

That would be a visual representation of and by a multiplicity of publics. It would represent their history, experience, knowledge and imaginaries of and within a shared space. Multiplicity entails ruptures. Within those ruptures lies the possibility for democratic spatial representation and organization.

This tool is not to be confused with tools for negotiations. This is a public platform for the collective formation, aggregation and dissemination of public opinions. Nor is this a practice of counter-mapping, as it doesn’t consist of building upon an initial map for developing its counter-product.

The institutional archive is an inscription of events selected for the act of collectively acknowledging their existence. The uninscriptable events are rendered ruins until they are sent into forgetfulness.

As the institutional archive aggregates its content to form a coherent and homogenous whole, it attempts to erase the fractures that inevitably exist within it, the same fractures that maintain within them the possibility for practicing democracy. Similarly, the map drawn to tell a static seamless story sends into spectral ruins the cracks assembling it. The cracks become the specters that haunt us as we look over a map further engraving the illogical and imposed division of Palestine in our psyche, for example. It is through the visualization of those cracks and disagreements that we can collectively re-draw, re-imagine, and hence reshape our shared space. Disagreement and contestation would then continuously redraw the map, as the publics should continuously reshape the city.

To make this argument, this essay introduces briefly a theory of the map, a theory of the archive, and a realization that both are in fact a theory of democracy. It also investigates a theory of the network and the possibilities that information technology creates for building a platform for mapping as a tool for liberation.

Here, this essay is presented as a series of mini-chapters:

– MAPS AS INSTRUMENTS OF CONTROL
– SOVEREIGNTY, TERRITORIALITY AND FEAR
– MAP-MAKING AND BOUNDARY MARKING: A RACE TO IMPRINT THE SCARCELY MANIFESTED’
– CREATING MAPS, ERASING HISTORIES
– BYPASSING INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE: CARTOGRAPHY’S TRAJECTORY INTO SPACE
– WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU RULE: THE PRIVILEGE OF OPTICS
– DIGITAL CARTOGRAPHY AND THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF MAPPING
– THE AVAILABILITY OF CARTOGRAPHIC DATA AND SELF-DETERMINATION
– ACTIVE FORGETTING: A NATIONAL CONSENSUS
– LIEUX DE MÉMOIRE
– THE ARCHIVE: SITE FOR FABRICATING COLLECTIVE MEMORY
– CRITICISM IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE
– THE PRINCIPLE OF CONSIGNATION
– THE DEATH DRIVE
– TARGETING THE ARCHIVE: CULTURAL GENOCIDE
– DISSENSUS AND DEMOCRACY
– DISSENSUS IN THE ARCHIVE: CHALLENGING CONSIGNATION
– DIGITAL NETWORKS: LIMITS AND ADVANTAGES
– REFUSING PROTOCOL: RESISTANCE IN CONTROL SOCIETIES

MAPS AS INSTRUMENTS OF CONTROL

Territoriality is a “basic geographic expression of influence and power.”[i] And maps define and represent territory. According to Brian Harley, geodetic measurements, cartographic representations of landforms and demographic data, synthesis of statistics in thematic maps, are all ways of claiming possession and asserting knowledge. Maps function as instruments of control.[ii]

SOVEREIGNTY, TERRITORIALITY AND FEAR

Sovereignty as a concept emerged from efforts to push out fear from a territory. The term territory is derived from fifteenth century’s French term terrier, or ‘to frighten’ (terrorize) and territor, or ‘frightener’ (terrorist). The term’s original etymology was displaced in the eighteenth century by the Latin term territorium, which combines terra(land) and thorium(belonging to, or surrounding). With the role of sovereignty as ‘overcoming [a territory’s] ‘primitive’ disorganization’, territory was then haunted by the fear of the ‘primitive.’ In other words, the ‘primitive’ was what the sovereign subject hoped to displace, in her role as the controller or organizer of space.

MAP-MAKING AND BOUNDARY MARKING: A RACE TO IMPRINT THE ‘SCARCELY MANIFESTED’

In international law, sovereignty is defined as ‘the control of a well defined territory,’ and territory designates the land ‘under the jurisdiction of a sovereign’.[iii] Also according to the law, a sovereign state could acquire territory through ‘an act of effective apprehension, such as occupation or conquest.’[iv] Map-making and boundary-marking became the way to establish sovereignty over a territory.[v] The law stated that “states may, by convention, fix limits to their own sovereignty, even in regions such as the interior of scarcely explored continents where such sovereignty is scarcely manifested, and in this way each may prevent the other from any penetration of its territory.”[vi] Cartography became a primary tool for conquest.

CREATING MAPS, ERASING HISTORIES

According to the definition of sovereignty and territory, pre-conquest territories belong to no one. In Australia, the doctrine of terra nullius, held in 1992, defined pre-conquest Australia as a ‘territory belonging to no state, that is territory not inhabited by a community with a social and political organization.’[vii] “Territoriality in fact creates the idea of a socially empty space.”[viii] Conquest, in the imagination of the colonizer, was the invasion of a void, an unoccupied space. “The modern conception of space involves a perpetual separation of places and things followed by their recombination as an assignment of things to places.”[ix] As a result, we have the notion of virgin or empty land that is waiting to be filled by self-claimed ‘civilized’, and ‘politically organized’ communities. Sovereignty, like maps, became linked to erasure: creating a territorial blank on which one could construct colonial rule and authority.[x] “The colonial map is as much about the boundaries of modern human identity, as it is about territorial designations. Colonial surveyors, however, could only create maps by relying upon indigenous geographic information and indigenous guides to the land. But the western cartographer’s distrustful relationship with the ‘native informant’ will lead to the desire to eliminate the indigenous population and their resources as a source of knowledge.

BYPASSING INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE: CARTOGRAPHY’S TRAJECTORY INTO SPACE

In colonial discourse, the indigenous people of the colonized land are described as having insufficient or uncertain knowledge of the territory. Here the map is viewed as a purely scientific document.[xi] The concept of cartography as a ‘science’ developed with the technological innovations and scientific discoveries of the Enlightenment. ‘[Cartography] evolved by slowly distancing itself from lived experience,’ and defined its methods as ‘objective, and excluding all subjectivity.’[xii] The ‘insufficiency’ of the indigenous people’s knowledge (it’s ‘primitivism’) is the colonial justification for invasive mapping projects. To pursue ‘scientific’ knowledge of the land, cartography began moving away from the threat of native ‘disorganization,’ literally by leaving the ground. The trajectory of cartography into space is manifested in the shifts of the mapping technology over time: the establishment of the prime meridian, the development of aerial photography, and the emergence of satellite/computer mapping.

WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU RULE: THE PRIVILEGE OF OPTICS

Cartography left the ground in order to overcome the gendered and racialized subjects, and to pursue ‘scientific’ objects of territorial information for promoting imperialism’s claims to objectivity: “In order to fulfill its fantasies of objectivity, colonial discourse eliminates the very indigenous knowledge upon which it relied to produce the map.”[xiii] With the aerial camera in 1915 “mappers were no longer required to ‘slog’ into the messy reality of the field in order to produce the maps.” The elimination of the native from the ‘scientific process’ is dependent upon the production of the pilot who sees through the camera.[xiv] Geography and cartography are considered to visually, ‘self-reflexively, write the world,’[xv] and through this writing, they create objective realities. Accordingly, sovereignty in colonial discourse is constructed through sight.[xvi] In the race to map the colonies, the common attitude was that what is seen can be claimed and owned.

DIGITAL CARTOGRAPHY AND THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF MAPPING

The democratization of mapping provided the public with the access to previously inaccessible data. It has also turned the unidirectional flow of spatial information into a multi-directional network allowing individuals to gather and create data, as well as distribute it globally. However, technological innovation regarding the acquisition and visualization of spatial and geographic information are generally triggered by military considerations seeking control over the territory. The emergence of intelligent maps is no exception. Maps are a tool for social control, and are intended to serve the designs of their creators, rather than inform the public. Although many national mapping agencies were required to be more market-oriented and actively promote the public use of their database, the mere possibility for policies of openness and freedom of information is offset from the increasing monetary cost of spatial data to the average citizen.[xvii] Furthermore, the refined production of GIS technologies occurs primarily in first-world countries – just as satellites are owned by the most industrialized nations. Maps in developing countries are often out of date, the resources are uncharted, and census data generally weak or unavailable.[xviii] “The poorer the country, the less and worse the data.”[xix] Nations with ‘less and worse’ geographic information automatically become subjects for satellite data acquisition from developed countries.

THE AVAILABILITY OF CARTOGRAPHIC DATA AND SELF-SUSTAINABILITY

The availability of information is seen as being of fundamental importance to decision making processes. Those with the information see themselves as did the producers of the colonial maps: as empirically more suitable to make decisions than those who do not have access to the data. “Urban Space and Cartographic Space remain inseparable.”[xx] The technologies providing the tools for visually understanding, interpreting and representing space, are the same tools which enable a critical perspective towards the territory as well as those which facilitate the visualization of its alternative spatial organization.

ACTIVE FORGETTING: A NATIONAL CONSENSUS

Collective identities are based on a consensus of a shared experience from the past. The narrative of this experience, as a collective narrative, is built through the selection of stories and events. The process of selection requires not only active remembering, but also active forgetting of certain elements of the past. According to Ernst Renan, in order to define a new identity, or redefine an existing one, all those included in it must consent on a shared act of forgetting any formerly built identity. National consensus is thus an agreement to actively forget the past, an action facilitated in part by the fabrication of official collective archives: the materials and documents that are selected to be injected into a nation’s collective memory. Cartography is a primary tool for the fabrication of such documents. Each map is a reformulation of the identity of the space it represents; each map is an archive. Every time an area is mapped, a new set of elements are strategically selected and rendered ‘significant’, as they are granted the qualification required to appear on the map. Every time an area is mapped into a new identity, former identities are inevitably erased and sent into forgetfulness.

LIEUX DE MEMOIRE

The realms of memory (places, texts, symbols, or rituals), according to Pierre Nora, have become increasingly important to modern societies, deprived of ‘real’ memories. The ‘real’ memories (passed on orally, based on experience rather than evidence) have no place in mass culture of modern, industrial societies. They have been replaced by a memory that is distanced from the individual, artificial, bureaucratized, and institutionalized: “Modern memory is above all archival. It relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image.”[xxi]

THE ARCHIVE: SITE FOR FABRICATING COLLECTIVE MEMORY

In the museum, collected and displayed objects go through a signifying process; they are valued and remembered institutionally. Susan Crane explains that the museum, as an archive, removes articulated memories from the mental world and places them in the physical world.[xxii] It holds the material manifestations of cultural and scientific production as records. Through material representation and preservation in the museum, collective memory is objectified and publicized; it belongs to audiences, publics, collectives, and nations, and is represented in the museum’s collections. The process of collecting, organizing and displaying in the public archive culminates in what is perceived as the narration of collective memory. Archives are also the locus for interaction between personal and collective identities, between memory and history, between information (the past) and social imaginaries (the desired future from this past). Individual memories (and identities) rely on the frameworks of collective memory (and identity) for their articulation (Halbwachs, 1992). And collective memory, in turn, is fabricated by the organization of the past in the lieux de mémoire, creating meanings that groups later assimilate into collective identity. Through the lieux de mémoire, the organizers of the past select and discard from the infinite realm of materialized representations of memory, protecting against the loss (or forgetting) of the ‘valuable’. According to Crane, ‘lack of memory’ may be regarded by curators as less of a problem than ‘loss of memory’: loss implies what is desired, but missing; lack connotes what is absent and unwanted despite its existence (not a lost memory, but a memory evaded).

CRITICISM IN THE PUBLIC SPHERE

With the Enlightenment, the public institution (including the public archive), was advanced as the facilitator of the production of a public sphere, as one which promotes public exchange and debate; the production of a public, political subject. The public sphere is distinct from the state. In fact, ‘it [is] a site for the production and circulation of discourses that can in principle be critical of the state.’[xxiii] Criticism is amongst the basic requirements for the manifestation of a political subject. The public sphere is where public opinion can be rendered into political action, a process demonstrating the exercise of participatory democracy.

THE PRINCIPLE OF CONSIGNATION

In Archive Fever,[xxiv] Jacques Derrida’s essential question concerns the politics of the archive. By analyzing an entity’s policies on the visibility of and accessibility to the public archive, we can understand its ideals on the political and economic organization of the world. Derrida writes that the question on the politics of the archive is not “one political question among others. It runs through the whole of the field and in truth determines politics from top to bottom as res publica. There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation.”[xxv] The selection process of public archives is guided by what Derrida calls the principle of consignation:

“By consignation, we do not only mean, in the ordinary sense of the word, the act of assigning residence or of entrusting so as to put into reserve (to consign, to deposit), in a place and on a substrate, but here the act of consigning through gathering together signs. […] Consignation aims to coordinate a single corpus, in a system or a synchrony in which all the elements articulate the unity of an ideal configuration. In an archive, there should not be any absolute dissociation, any heterogeneity or secret which could separate (secernere), or partition, in an absolute manner.”[xxvi]

There is a Tribunal, says Jean Louis Doette,[xxvii] which judges the stories and events of history and includes or excludes (inscribes or erases) them from public record. The Tribunal’s role is to cleanse the collective archive from friction and dissensus; to maintain a coherent homogenous record of the past in order to ensure homogeneity in the perception of collective identity and in the social imaginaries of the future. Deotte elaborates on the link between the ruin and the event, explaining that the event, (l’événement, le cas) is ‘casus’ in Latin: the term’s root is found in the verb ‘cadere’, which means ‘to fall’.[xxviii] As for the ruin, it is rooted in the Latin verb ‘ruere’, also meaning ‘to fall’. The notion of collapse, as it appears both in the ruin and in the event inscribed, produces the archive as a gathering of ruins (or fragments), in search of a whole. Doette criticizes the national archive as the main fabricator of historical events since it is the most representative of the national Tribunal: selecting what is seen as worth archiving, and sending to ruins that which is not, despite its existence. He is haunted by the unrepeatable event, that which has ‘fallen’ (cadere) already as a ruin: that event which took place as it was burning all of its possible surfaces for inscriptions and identification, all which could have identified, recognized and authenticated it: the uninscriptible catastrophic event.

THE DEATH DRIVE

The archive’s very raison d’être lies in its potential destruction. Derrida links the forgetfulness inbuilt to the archive to Freud’s ‘death drive’ (sometimes referred to as ‘destruction drive,’ or ‘aggression drive’). “The archive always works, and a priori, against itself […]. It destroys in advance its own archive, as if that were in truth the very motivation of its most proper movement.”[xxix] The archive holds within it the memory of the arkhë. Arkhë, Derrida writes, is both commencement and commandment. “This name apparently coordinates two principles in one: the principle according to nature or history, there where things commence–physical, historical, or ontological principle–but also the principle according to the law, there where authority, social order, are exercised, in this place from which order is given–nomological principle.”[xxx] As for the latin term archivum or archium, the meaning of ‘archive’ originates from the Greek arkheion: the house, domicile, address or residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded.

“The citizens who […] held and signified political power were considered to possess the right to make or to represent the law. On account of their publicly recognized authority, it is at their home, in that place which is their house […] that official documents are filed. The archons are first of all the documents’ guardians. […] Entrusted to the archons, these documents in effect speak the law: they recall the law and call on or impose the law.”[xxxi]

TARGETING THE ARCHIVE: CULTURAL GENOCIDE

The fallen event takes place as its traces are burning into ashes, what Derrida calls the archiviolithic power, the power to destroy the archive. “The struggle of man against power, is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”[xxxii]

The constitutive violence of a political power ‘rests on the possibility […] of refusing to recognize one or another debt. This violence is defined in contrast to the very essence of the archive since the denial of the archive is equivalent to, strictu sensu, a denial of debt.”[xxxiii]

DISSENSUS AND DEMOCRACY

The maintenance of homogenous narratives and identities are necessary for the total regulation and control of the masses. This is achieved by the construction of what Robin Evans calls a ‘wall against information,’[xxxiv] in order to achieve a uniform and predictable society. According to Jacques Rancière, a political community is ‘a community of interruptions, and fractures, [it is] irregular and local, through [it] egalitarian logic comes and divides the police community from itself. It is a community of worlds in community that are intervals of subjectification: intervals between identities, between spaces and places. Political being-together is a being-between: between identities, between worlds.’[xxxv]

Consensus, for Rancière is anti-democratic, and therefore anti-political. Chantal Mouffe also stresses that democracy is required to provide a choice between conflicting alternatives. Democratic politicization must come with the ‘production of conflictual representations of the world, with opposed camps with which people can identify, thereby allowing passion to be mobilized politically within the spectrum of the democratic process.’[xxxvi] She argues against the ‘unified, pacified world’ based on consensus.

DISSENSUS IN THE ARCHIVE: CHALLENGING CONSIGNATION

“Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and the access to the archive, its constitution, and its interpretation.”[xxxvii] Mouffe and Rancière’s argument, mentioned above, is in fact a theory of the Archive. In this sense, Mouffe calls for the dehomogenized archive: one that includes within it conflicting materials, rather than an edited ‘whole,’ ‘beautiful,’ and homogenous narrative. The confliced archive allows the public to actively aggregate, interpret, criticize and qualify information according to a reasonable debate and the quality of arguments. Deotte believes that public archives must facilitate debate and confrontation, and provide a space for encounter with the other, with the stranger.[xxxviii] In other words, to challenge the homogeneity which Derrida finds essential to the institutional archive. This challenge for Derrida is the exercise of deconstruction; deconstructing the archive is to challenge consignation.[xxxix]

“[Wherever] one could attempt […] to rethink the place and the law according to which the archontic becomes instituted, wherever one could interrogate or contest, directly or indirectly, this archontic principle, its authority, its titles, and its genealogy, the right that it commands, the legality or the legitimacy that depends on it, wherever secrets and heterogeneity would seem to menace even the possibility of consignation, this can only have grave consequences for a theory of the archive, as well as for its institutional implementation. A science of the archive must include the theory of its institutionalization, that is to say, the theory both of the law which begins by inscribing itself there and of the right which authorizes it. This right imposes or supposes a bundle of limits which have a history, a deconstructable history […]. This deconstruction in progress concerns, as always, the institutions of limits declared to be insurmountable […]. The limits, the borders, and the distinctions have been shaken by an earthquake from which no classificational concept and no implementation of the archive can be sheltered. Order is no longer assured.”[xl]

DIGITAL NETWORKS: LIMITS AND ADVANTAGES

“Before computerized information management, the heart of institutional command and control was easy to locate. In fact, the conspicuous appearance of the hall of power was used by regimes to maintain their hegemony. […] Even though the monuments of power still stand, visibly present in stable locations, the agency that maintains the power is neither visible nor stable. Power no longer permanently resides in these monuments, and command and control now move about as desired.”[xli]

Alexander Galloway builds on Michel Foucault’s treatment of biopower to explain the role of protocol in the society of control. He writes that ‘protocol is to control societies as the panopticon is to disciplinary societies.’[xlii] On the one hand, TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) enables the Internet to create horizontal distributions of information from one computer to another. On the other, the DNS (Domain Name System) vertically stratifies that horizontal logic through a set of regulatory bodies that manage Internet addresses and names. It is crucial to understand networks as ‘materialized and materializing media’[xliii] in order to understand the power relationships in control societies: “Networks, by their mere existence, are not liberating. They exercise novel forms of control that operate at a level that is anonymous and non-human, which is to say material […]. They are […] a form of contemporary power, yet no single subject or group actually absolutely controls a network.”[xliv] Rather than stored in the monuments of power localizable in time and space, power and command in control societies float in the digital networks of data and code. Although digital networks are not intrinsically anarchistic and media spaces for communication are largely privatized, since no single person or group controls the network as such, the homogeneity of digital archives can never be fully guaranteed.

REFUSING PROTOCOL: RESISTANCE IN CONTROL SOCIETIES

“It’s true that, even before control societies are fully in place, forms of delinquency or resistance (two different things) are also appearing. Computer piracy and viruses, for example, will replace strikes and what the nineteenth century called ‘sabotage’ […]. You ask whether control or communication societies will lead to forms of resistance that might reopen the way for a communism […]. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control.”[xlv]

Let us consider Gilles Deleuze’s suggestion to constructing circuit breakers and noncommunication as the ultimate form of resistance in the digital age. This relates to Jurgen Habermas’ concept of the public sphere. Providing a platform where private individuals came together as a public in order to discuss and criticize cultural production and political domination, the public sphere ‘had to rely on secrecy; its public, even as a public, remained internal.’[xlvi] The call for an absolutely decentralized and horizontal system of information distribution for the sake of democracy, also prevents what Habermas and Deleuze find essential to social disobedience and resistance: the possibility for secrecy and distance from dominant powers. This contradiction will remain unsolved in this chapter, but one suggestion could be the distinction between delinquency and resistance through activism. Digital activism consists of subverting the infrastructure of the Internet for unlimited social outreach and political mobilization, free accessible education, horizontal distribution of otherwise hidden information (it is not necessarily the act of “shutting down the system” and achieving the end of domination).

Refusing protocol, suggests Alexander Galloway, is the act of directing proto-logical technologies, whose distributed structure is indeed empowering, toward what Hans Magnus Enzensberger calls ‘an emancipated media’. Emancipated media is created by active social actors rather than passive users.[xlvii]

On digital resistance, Christopher Kelty suggests that what binds geeks together as a public is that they share an imagination on the moral and technical order of the Internet. This moral and technical order projects both on technology (software, hardware, networks and protocols), and on an imagination of the ‘proper order of collective and commercial action’[xlviii] (how society and economy should be organized). Recursive publics, he continues, exist independently, and as a critique, of constituted forms of power (market, corporations, or the state). They aim to change the relations of power and knowledge. What is specific to the geek recursive public is that not only do they argue about technology, they argue through it. They construct the platform that allows their ideals to exist.

Notes: