Elsewhere Journal: Mapping Desire

Elsewhere: A Journal of Place is now on its fourth edition. The journal is beautifully designed. I have a hard copy - a hard copy version of a journal is a rare thing in academia, where we mostly access journals online. Many academic journal are not particularly aesthetically pleasing, often having an uninspiring cover, a ‘traditional’ layout and little in terms of images. Not only does Elsewhere have a lovely cover, but there are beautiful images throughout (see below) and the journal is richly illustrated in both black and white, and full colour.

This particular edition concentrates on mapping and includes geographical places such as Wales, Australia and Madeira. Subjects comprise: post-industrial inner London, community mapping, walking in the post Eastern-bloc city and an interview with a cartographer. The introduction to this edition states:

Maps can be political tools, drawing boundaries to be debated across contested territory. In mapping the land they can offer the promise of riches in the natural resources that are waiting to be exploited, as well helping us understand better a landscape and the communities that call it home. At the same time, this knowledge can threaten the social and economic systems that already exist, threatening communities and creating conflict. Maps are not neutral, and their distortions or omissions can have profound consequences. (Paul Scraton and Julie Stone)

This final sentence draws to mind Mark Monmonier’s famous book on cartography: How to Lie With Maps (1991). It opens, thus: “Not only is it easy to lie with maps, it is essential".While I’m not a cartographer, maps and map-making are a fundamental part of psychogeography, so they have been of interest to me for as long as I have been in academia. I have made my own maps (and had them published), ran emotional mapping workshops and given lectures on maps. While not a cartographer, I am a schizocartographer. Schizocartography is underpinned by the concept of desire that is a key theme of the work of the psychoanalyst turned philosopher Félix Guattari. So, I am especially interested in forms of subjective mapping (cognitive, vernacular, emotional), such as the article in this edition of Elsewhere entitled ‘Community mapping and nation building: Papua, Indonesia’. This is what the author says:

The act of mapping is tacit acknowledgement of the reality of modern systems, and the relenting need to define, categorise, administer and manage…The necessity for mapping is borne from a world that tells entire communities that what they know of themselves and their surroundings is not enough, is not real, not in any way that counts. (Ho Ming So Denduangrudee)

This is a salient reminder of the modernist cartographic project, its history and its effects. But, the various forms of vernacular mapping that are employed as a counter movement are both enabling and offer hope.

Cognitive Mapping

While Fredric Jameson dedicates Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism to the cognitive map problem, he does not provide a definitive answer on how to proceed. However, he does offer his analysis on the concept of cognitive mapping as it appears within postmodern theory:

These are, then, not really theories, but rather themselves unconscious structures and so many afterimages and secondary effects of some properly postmodern cognitive mapping, whose indispensable media term now passes itself off as this or that philosophical reflection on language, communication, and the media, rather than the manipulation of its figure (2009: 417).

He highlights the problem at its most fundamental level: if the system itself does not change, then all we are able to do is contemplate it within its system of effects (and with the tools) it produces. This is not a new problem for theory – the inside/outside dichotomy of language – but, it does leave us with the perennial problem of where to go. The concepts highlighted above – such as the need for tools to navigate the environment, and the materiality of space and its system of effects – lend themselves to discussion within the field of psychogeography and under the umbrella of cognitive maps, also.

Roger M. Downs and David Stea’s Maps in Minds: Reflections on Cognitive Mapping (1977) is an extensive geo-psychological study of cognitive mapping, although it does not deal with mental and physical space in any political sense. It offers a concise study of psychogeographical cognitive effects and provides definitions of cognitive mapping: “Cognitive mapping is an abstraction covering those cognitive or mental abilities that enable us to collect, organize, store, recall and manipulate information about the spatial environment” (1977: 6). They explain that cognitive maps are not just visual images contained in our minds but are also connected to our other senses (1977: 23). While they acknowledge ‘the social’ as one part of what influences our cognitive maps, they do not deal with the complexities of postmodernity as it pertains to culture and/or capitalism. However, since their text was published in 1977, it may have been too early to take a retroactive position on postmodern space.

In his essay ‘Cognitive Mapping the Dispersed City’, Stephen Cairns cites Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City as his own influence. While Lynch provides an analysis by form – looking at various urban elements such as paths, landmarks and edges – he adopts a post-war narrative, the book being written in 1960. Cairns’s critique is in the way that Lynch’s cognitive mapping may be further used to decentre the subject in the form of how they appear as “‘the user’, ‘the community’ and ‘the people’” (2006: 193). This could be seen as both positive and negative, depending on differing perspectives attached to ‘where you stand’. Decentring is considered a common position for the individual to take up in the postmodern text (such as in deconstruction). When that text is the city landscape, this may enable an opening up of other views of the city, such as its edgelands. It encourages differing perspectives with regard to a sense of place. However, the concept of decentring may be considered as a devaluing of the citizen in the centre of public life (as it pertains to the city as civic centre).

Cairns is concerned with what is not representable in and of the city. Citing Harvey, Jameson, Baudrillard and Debord, he discusses the material reality of the city with its postmodern problems of wayfinding, while seeking out its ‘blind spots’ in an attempt to answer some questions about cognitive mapping. These “blind spots” appear on “a refined spectrum between social space and architectural space such that conventional representational logics simply cannot register them” (2006: 203).

Please click here for a free online article on Cognitively Mapping the Campus

Related Links:
GPS Trails on Campus
Blue Plaques on Campus

Bibliography:
Cairns, Stephen. 2006. ‘Cognitive Mapping the Dispersed City’, in Christoph Lindner (ed.), Urban Space and Cityscapes: Perspectives From Modern and Contemporary Culture (London and New York: Routledge), pp. 192-205.
Downs, Roger M. and David Stea. 1977. Maps in Minds: Reflections on Cognitive Mapping (London and New York: Harper and Row).
Jameson, Fredriç. 2009. Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London and New York: Verso).