A History of Spaces by Pickles John

Author:Pickles, John
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781135104917
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

TRANSCULTURAL MAPPING AND THE GEO-BODY OF THE NATION

In deconstructing the ‘power talk’ of the power of maps, we need to ask about the ways in which hegemonic visions were in fact constructed and disseminated, and to question the metaphors of imposition, overlay and eradication. Actually existing modern hegemonies are, or were, rarely hegemonic in an absolute sense, and this was precisely why Foucault (1979) distinguished between sovereign power and modern power in Discipline and Punish. Modern hegemonies are complex interweavings of coercion and consent, as Gramsci (1981) suggested, and in these inter-weavings bodies, subjects and identities are produced and inscribed in multiple ways and forms.

Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 1987) have described at length and in great detail the many ways in which such decodings and recodings shape the particular form of the socius, but also how such codings also always fail to capture the lines of flight of what they call ‘desiring machines’. In the production of productions, inscriptions and consumptions, maps have played a fundamental role of decoding, recoding and over-coding nature, space and the socius. This is, I think, the same impulse we find in Mapping Men and Empire. Here Phillips (1997: 5) documents the ways in which imperialism went hand in hand with mapping as an enterprise of naming and possession, charting the world and then colonizing it. But he also stresses that ‘while geographical imaginations and narrative adventures often appear committed to “continuous reinscription” of dominant ideologies of masculinity and empire, the geography of adventure is neither deterministic nor static.’ Indeed, he goes on, alongside such reinscriptions of dominant ideology are ‘points of departure’ leading in entirely different and transgressive directions. Against functionalist and reductionist readings of adventure writing and mapping, we need also readings open to these transgressive moments. It is to the first of these that we now turn.

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