Том 33, № 1 (2023)

The article is devoted to the discussion of the key problems of critical cartography, to which the materials presented in this issue of Logos are devoted. At the beginning the main points of this problematics are outlined by analyzing Buchra Khalili’s art project The Mapping Journey Project (2008–2011). Then the idea of critical cartography is introduced. Firstly, the critique is aimed at the ideas of modern Western common sense and official scientific ideology, first of all professional cartographers themselves, about the map as a neutral and objective representation. Secondly, it is aimed at the ways, contexts and consequences of the production and use of the map in socio-political practices from colonization, wars and the reshaping of social communities to the management of territories, nation-building and routing.

According to critics of cartography, maps record not the landscape as a concrete material reality, but a strictly defined set of relations to this reality, conditioned by social, political, cultural and economic realities. The map is an important part of broader communications and practices. Despite the relative conceptual autonomy of mathematical and technical constructions and actions necessary for the production of the map, it can in no way be considered as something autonomous. It is essentially instrumental, situational and has significance only to the extent that it is part of the broader systems in which it is functionally included. In this sense, the map can be represented as an object in the process of constant formation, it is never ready and always needs to be finalized. The map is the result of the work of many institutions, a large chain of collective actions from data collection and systematization to mathematical processing, layout and circulation. In conclusion, the semiological aspect of maps is discussed: it is defined by the syntagma of the route and the syntagma of the border. Therefore, if the map expresses itself, this statement has two modes — “travel” and “delimitation.”

The authors argue that cartography is profitably conceived as a processual, rather than representational, science. Building on recent analysis concerning the philosophical underpinnings of cartography they question the ontological security of maps, contending that it is productive to rethink cartography as ontogenetic in nature; that is maps emerge through practices and have no secure ontological status. Drawing on the concepts of transduction and technicity the authors contend that maps are of-the-moment, brought into being through practices (embodied, social, technical); that mapping is a process of constant reterritorialization.

Maps are never fully formed and their work is never complete. Maps are transitory and fleeting, being contingent, relational and context-dependent; they are always mappings; spatial practices enacted to solve relational problems (e.g., how best to create a spatial representation, how to understand a spatial distribution, how to get between A and B, etc.). The authors contend that such a rethinking provides a fresh perspective on cartographic epistemology, and could work to provide a common framework for those who undertake mapping as applied knowledge (asking technical questions) and those that seek to critique such mapping as a form of power/knowledge (asking ideological questions). They illustrate their argument through an analysis of mapping practices.

This article is an adaptation of the first chapter of the authors’ book of the same name. The main conceptual move they propose is to take seriously the ambiguity of the expression “nature of maps” — the need to investigate the nature of maps by investigating the nature of maps, and vice versa. Each of these two natures can only be understood in light of the other. The article consists of three thematic parts. The first, based on the ideas of Gérard Genette and Roland Barthes, presents the map as a complex semiotic device and inevitably an ideological construction. By analogy with the paratext, which Genette divided into peritext and epitext, the notion of paramap (perimap + epimap) is introduced, allowing us to describe the map as a powerful mechanism for the creation and transportation of authority in matters of territory and, ultimately, power over territory.

The second part of the paper, in the mode of preliminary assumptions, substantiates the thesis that cognitive linguistics with its basic principles and notions (first of all, mental space and mapping) is a good model for thinking about cartography. The third part, using concrete maps as examples, shows how they participate in constructing and reconstructing our ideas about nature, and indeed about many different kinds of nature: nature threatened and threatened, nature sublime and nature generous, nature that we collect and nature that we explore, nature mysterious and unknowable, nature where we go for a picnic. The cards turn out to be players in a complex social game that defines the relationship of the human species to the rest of the world. But pretending to be a mere scorekeeper of the game, the cards reveal themselves, rather like a ball, to be the very medium by which moves are made in this game.

The article tries to review the geographical maps as a specific type of semiological system. Application to semiology carried out through two basic cartographic constructs usually denoted in verbal language as “route” and “border.” The paper shows that both these constructs could be considered as a sample of particular cartographic “syntagms” with such “speech” equivalents as travel and demarcation correspondingly. The distinctive attribute of travel (route) is predominantly metonymic type of discourse, while the distinctive attribute of demarcation (border) is predominantly metaphorical one. It is possible to delineate such zones in which one plane overlaps the other and a paradigm extends into syntagm and vice versa. In such zones the cartographic “discourse” assumes distinctly aesthetic dimension. The article determines the main characteristics of maps as facts of a special semiological system, which include arbitrariness, isologicalness and what the author defines as locouniqueness.

The article also considers the types of semiotics involved in mapping. It is shown that since the signifieds of the maps are themselves semiotics (which include the codes assigned by the inhabitants to their habitat), the majority of maps made as part of a routine mapping procedure that does not involve any super-purpose use are nothing more than semiologies. In particular, the signifiers and signifieds of the maps are invariants in contrast to variants of the signifiers and signifieds used by inhabitants in their local languages. It follows that any semiological description of maps is not semiology, but metasemiology. One manifestation of this is the fact that variants of routes and borders in cartography have acquired the status of invariants in our study. They became basic concepts for defining the two axes of the language (according to Roman Jakobson) and made it possible to divide cartographic “statements” into two fundamentally dissimilar categories, one of which tends to be metaphorical (paradigm), and the other to metonymic (syntagm).

Starting from criticism of concept of “zooming” (understood as and economical way of saving effort with the goal of determining non-evident facts and essences on the base of a map), the author interrogates the relation between zooming as a doubtful epistemological procedure and philosophical concepts with their economy. Bruno Latour presents a clear-cut instance of criticism of zooming: the latter is declared to be a visual effect, a user interface that covers the real working of knowledge up. But the analysis of Gilles Deleuze’s definition of philosophical concept reveals that questioning of zooming implies the tradition of transcendental criticism and, henceforth, the opposition between transcendence and immanence which can be read now as an economic one.

What if immanence were founded on the imperative of a fair effort, on the ban of any shortcut, and on the impossibility of mastering anything that is not present at hand? Nevertheless, this kind of anti-economical immanence can’t be articulated coherently, it needs, as Deleuze proved, an instance of “overflight” implying that immanence can hardly be articulated in an “immanent” way. Henceforth, there are two sorts of immanences, but both are not free from a dogmatic remnant. If it is the case, zooming plays a role of a mediator, relating immanence to itself, and so transcendence can be just a metaphor of immanence. At the end of the day, a minimal transcendence of a concept does not mean it is framed as a transcendental instance, so zooming is still a productive moment of any mapping.

The article considers the evolution of digital maps and virtual globes and current issues associated with their creation and use. The author shows that as technology has evolved, digital cartographic applications have become increasingly different from traditional maps and globes, becoming essentially three-dimensional interactive digital models of the Earth and near-Earth space, territories, objects and processes. These models often also act as an interface for interacting with large volumes of poorly structured data. Characteristic new qualities of such 3D models of the Earth (virtual globes), according to the author, are multiscale, multitasking and multitemporality.

Analyzing the features of modern digital cartographic applications, the author highlights the key problems and potential risks associated with their creation and use. These include, first of all, the issues of data status in virtual worlds and trust in them; control of information flows between digital models and the real world; manipulation of user perception through software algorithm settings, data filtering or spoofing. The article focuses on the issues in legal regulation of 3D documents, including virtual globes, as well as issues of user responsibility for the possible consequences of their actions in the virtual models and technological difficulties in providing a comfortable work with 3D models in stereo mode. As a consequence, according to the author, two-dimensional mapping products, including traditional maps, are still preferred by most users, although they are now created on the basis of three-dimensional digital models. Prospects for further development and application of digital 3D reality models depend not only on the improvement of technology, but also on the formation of new habits of working with information.