Overmapped

Flying out of O'Hare, bearing southeast, the strict crosshatch of Chicago's streets and close-set houses gives way to more liquid suburban subdivisions, and then to Indiana's fields, green and tan and brown, sections and half sections and quarter sections and little rectagular subsubsections.

They call it a checkerboard, as if Jefferson's curse was a game. It's a game that doesn't end. There is no checkmate. Chess, checkers, Scrabble, go, the gridiron of the football field... each contains our ambitions to eviscerate the opponent, each outlines the field of play. We walk off th field, and the game is over. But we cannot walk off of Jefferson's gameboard without leaving home.

Ptolemy never meant his latitude and longitude to be inscribed back onto the ground, to guide roads and property lines. He wanted to create a guide, a system to transfer his sketch map of places and coastlines into the freshly-plastered wall. He wanted others to draw the same picture of the vast world he had recorded, over and over.

One and a half millennia later, transplanted rationalists saw in the New World a clean slate, and so city after American city rose, squared and aligned with the next. The people who lived here prior to these rationalists worshipped the four directions; the Europeans carved them over and over into the ground, they used them to worship their own dreams of empire.

Here's what I think we need: storytellers who walk new dreamlines, or find the old dreamlines, in our world. We need to unmap ourselves, ungrid the land. Then we can map lightly, the lines left imaginary. We can measure without cutting, and know without pretending to own.

With thanks to the Harrisons.

The territory of race

The thing that keeps coming back to me, after the White Privilege Conference I attended a couple weeks ago, is a futile sort of ping-pong:

Point 1: While the justification for the idea of race is "biological," there is no real basis for "races" in terms of genetic variation. There are no "subspecies." There's more genetic variation within sub-Saharan Africans than there is between all of the peoples who in 1500 were living in the arc between England and Japan. So: race is arbitrary. It doesn't have a basis in biology.

Point 2: Race has become fundamental to identity. You can't just say "race is meaningless," because this deeply disrespects the suffering that has been endured in its name, and the sheer effort that has been made to reclaim identity and pride. It has meaning grounded in history.

Point 3: The founding of the idea of race is bound up in power. People brought to America from Africa in the age of slavery weren't "black" or "Negro" or "colored" or even "African" before they arrived here— they were whatever nation or tribe or clan or other classification they identified with in Africa. Same is true of "Indians"/"Native Americans"/"First Nations." These broad terms only make sense within the context of European colonization of the Americas. And today, the terms used in the United States for people from vaguely south of the border, or from Spanish colonial heritage within our borders, terms like "Hispanic" and "Latino/a" and "Chicana/o" only make sense in the context of the United States: in Venezuela the terms are effectively meaningless, because the major cultural divides there are other than Anglo/Spanish-speaking. So the very idea of race as we live it has no meaning outside of our American culture.

Point 4: Just because something is a construct, specific to your culture—an arbitrary line drawn in the sand—doesn't mean it doesn't hold extraordinary power...

Just like the Grid—latitude, township, plat and so forth—we've spoken of so much here.

But—as I've argued about the Grid—race (or rather the thing race is supposed to measure) is not inherently evil. In the case of race, the idea of grouping people by ancestral heritage isn't the problem. I dance English folk dances in my spare time... nothing actually dangerous about that. Consider how different European heritages in American that were once at each others' throats have become essentially fodder for folkloric festivals and tourism in midwestern towns; you never see anti-Irish riots like you did 150 years ago. The sense of identity we white people derive from our specific heritages adds variety and interest to what is sometimes a bland "American" cheese product...

So: where is the cause of race as a cancer?...because the use of race as a basis for action is a cancer on this country. Look at the populations in our prisons, in our slums, in our schools, in our places of employment, in our graveyards...

I go back to my earlier discussions of the Grid, and my conclusion that the problem is not in the Grid itself as a tool for measurement, but in its checkerboard reapplication back on the land, ignoring the texture and shape of that land in itself.

Race was never a really useful way of measuring out the American people, except as it provided an excuse to summarily take away rights and property from some and give it to others. It is grounded in enslavement of Africans and the de-nationing of American Indians and Spanish-speaking colonials. It doesn't actually say anything about what we are capable of as individuals. Nevertheless, it forms a part of our heritage...

It's a mistaken and misused shorthand for ancestry—where we and our parents came from. It's a way of not saying our actual ancestor stories, but instead linking to a common story. In this sense it's like latitude, which links to a planet we do not interact with as a planet on a day-to-day basis. And unlike latitude, it doesn't even actually relate to real physical differences.

Race only means anything because people were and are forced to live within its arbitrary lines. And that in itself carries a lot of meaning, as much like nation-states, whose arbitrary lines make territories we send soldiers out to die over. Our history of enslavement, displacement, lies, cheating, and papering it all over with niceties about law and rights.... that is the can of worms. When we address it forthrightly, as for example Howard Zinn did, and as all sorts of "radical" or "alternative" historians and artists have done, we don't necessarily heal anything, any more than making a map solves a mess like Israel and Palestine.

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I feel as if, in my sense of the world, I have cleared away a pile of brush that covered a big, unsightly hole. It's more exposed, but it looks raw and ugly from here. We can't fill it—that's what the brush was, an attempt at covering it over. What we can do is step back and see how we can make it a useful and pleasing part of the landscape. Can we take race and make it charmingly ethnic over time? Can we plant seedlings and let it grass over, not changing its shape or denying it was ever there, but making it a part of our landscape? I think something like that may, in the end, be the best we can hope for...

The International Date Line

My son asked a random back-of-the-car question the other day, about whether there was a place where the day changed too, not just the time. There is, of course, and it's the International Date Line, more-or-less located at 180° longitude, opposite the globe from the Greenwich meridian. (the picture attached is from Wikipedia)

What I found interesting about the question, though, was how the idea of such a line requires a leap of how we think about time. For most of us, time is local: our makers are sunrise, noon, sunset, midnight. Like the Archimedean, Earth-centered model of the universe, and like earth-navel cosmologies, it makes "us and ours" the center of all things, both in space and time.

20 years ago, I took a course at Carleton College from the late Mike Casper, "Revolutions in Physics," that was mocked by some as "Physics for Poets." Which isn't really fair, although I can see the case that it really was as much a history of science course as anything. The course was divided into three sections: the Archimedean, earth-centered universe, the Newtonian universe, and the Einsteinian universe. The goal of each was to immerse the students in what historically were comprehensive worldviews. And it worked. It was fascinating how useful the oldest model, the one we've mocked as "wrong" since grade school, really is.

It's of course incorrect that the sun goes around the earth, but there's a lot to learn about seasons and the sun's movement in the sky if you think that way. And I became aware that I simply had not paid that much attention to how the sun moves in the sky over the years. For example, that it is always due east or west at 6 o'clock (either one) local time. Or that the angle of the sun's path is constant in the same location, but that the constant-angled path moves up and down vertically with the seasons in relation to the horizon. I dunno, maybe everyone else got that from day one, but it was new to this college student and it was cool, and it depended on thinking locally.

The Copernican/Newtonian model of the universe that shifts this around. Suddenly, we're on a planet, and really there is only one day, and it keeps rotating around the globe—or rather, the globe keeps turning and the day is the glow from the star at the center of our solar system. Instead of the sun as a clock that keeps our time, we are fixed points on a moving sphere, which keeps its time in turning us and everything else in the world.

And it's in this world that International Date Lines become necessary.

Interestingly, it wasn't scientists who first proposed such a line. It was an 11th-century Jewish scholar, who was concerned that all the Jews in the diaspora should observe the same Sabbath, and so proposed a system which kept the same day-observance for all of Asia, and made a break somewhere in the Pacific. The "Circumnavigator's Paradox" was in fact a real paradox, discussed in the late middle ages (see the excellent History of the International Date Line for much of the source material in this post): Apparently it surfaced when Magellan arrived at the Spanish outpost in the Philippines, having come from the east by way of Cape Horn, and disgareed with the Spanish officers there, who had come from the west, via the Cape of Good Hope. Their dates, of course, were off by one.

In a world where one set of grandparents is an hour earlier and another is an hour later, and where we can fly to Europe where it's six hours later, it's commonplace to think about time zones. But it was not always so. It was not until railroads needed to keep precise time in their east-west journeys that the need for standard time became apparent. Before the railroads, punctuality was enforced within local communities. A parishioner coming to church on time, or a worker arriving at the mill, or any citizen keeping any of the other appointment-keeping arrangements we make, either had to judge by the sun, or by the bells of the church tower, or later by the local-time clock or sundial, how close they were going to cut it. And travel, by foot or horse, essentially re-set the clock.

By instituting standard time, we essentially said, railroad time is more important than where the sun stands in our sky.

And much the same thing, on a global level, happens with the International Date Line: we are forced to recognize that this is a round, whole planet, which moves in one time, simultaneously. And for better or worse, this means we depend less on what we see—here and now over our heads—to regulate our lives by.

Healing the Lowry Gash

I spoke in meeting today, about how places heal. In particular, I was thinking about the great gash in the ground in Minneapolis around the Lowry Tunnel. When looking at old maps of Minneapolis (here's one from 1900, and another from 1929), it seems like the city moved naturally from downtown into the Lowry Hill residential area. The Hennepin Avenue-Lyndale Avenue intersection was apparently simply known as "the bottleneck" (see Jack El-Hai's wonderful Lost Minnesota for a piece on the Plaza Hotel that once stood between Loring Park and what is now the Sculpture Garden)—it was an annoying part of town, but you couldn't really tell where downtown started and south Minneapolis began.

Then the interstate came through. I-94 was completed from St Paul through to Hennepin Avenue in 1968 (see a photo of construction at Blaisdell Ave, near Nicollet Ave here). There actually aren't many pictures of the construction in progress, but what there is, isn't especially exciting to anyone who has seen interstate highways under construction. There's an interesting piece about the tunnel here. The point is, the continuity was broken. It's especially dramatic if you look out from Hennepin Avenue south of the Hennepin Avenue Methodist Church, at the big gash in the ground that was dug to bring the highway down to tunnel-level.

So here's what the area looks like today, 28 years after the tunnel opened. And the thing I've noticed, over the 19 years I've been mapping the area, is how it's healed over. It's not that the gash is gone, but it's been built around. It was created in the midst of a city that was never designed for it, but as each new project and plan in the area was built, it was built with the knowledge that the big roaring river of traffic was there. And so the interruption to the city became part of what the city was.

All without a Master Plan To Heal the Gash.

What I said in meeting, was that, as I've been worrying over this and that discontent and conflict and trouble within meeting over the last few weeks, I've been thinking along the lines of "what can we do?" I've been hoping for some sort of Master Plan. I've been thinking about Liz's continued pain over the meeting not uniting easily to give the boot to a visitor who was preaching anti-gay bile, and the sense of a few commenters in that thread of "why can't we just..." And about pain around theist vs non-theists in our meeting.

But... we don't want a gash through our meeting. And there's the rub. Because we have theists and non-theists in meeting. And many on either side of that divide do feel strongly about their path to where they are, and while we at least say we are open to convincement, neither are we interested in being untrue to our personal experiences.

What can be healed then, is the pain around the divide. And it happens the same way the Minneapolis healed: one block at a time, one project at a time, one member and one friendship at a time. Now, we perhaps can build a Master Plan-type framework within which that healing can occur, and I'd argue we do that already, but we also just need time, and a long-term, low-level commitment to make that divide not a gash but just part of our city.

I want to say one more thing before I sign off, and it goes back to discussions last year about "the Grid," referring to the measured squares we impose on the landscape. As I said then, my conclusion is that the problem with this grid is not in is use as a tool for measuring, but in its imposition back upon the world being measured. It's when the ruler lines are cut back on the landscape with little regard for the shape of the land itself.

But what I'm saying here I think applies as well: once the cut is made, we can't go back and entirely un-cut it. What we can do (and sometimes have done) is to take this scarred land and make choices that heal around it. Like the mounds that dot the central part of the continent, we can let the grid become part of the land—because it is part of the land, however uncomfortable that makes us.

Rules

I've had two interactions recently that put my earlier thoughts on the Grid into perspective. Both of them were about the idea of rules.

First, Jeanne Burns on her Quakers and Social Class blog posited that:

Middle and owning class people make the rules, and when working class or poor people don't follow the rules, there are dire consequences

This was followed up by some interesting comments. I'm sorry she wasn't willing to take it further, but I stand by my suggestion that (A) rules in general are something most folks desire, that they provide strcuture, and (B) that while many rules become means of maintaining position—that they are about the rich stayig rich and the powerful staying powerful—some rules are also about everyone being able to be part of the same "game," whether that game is a marketplace, a social interaction, a religious practice, or a game. And some are about keeping everyone safe and alive.

The second kind of rules are like the measuring kind of grid that has been discussed here before: rules of the marketplace say that certain kinds of contract are binding, that prices can be negotiated in these circumstances but not those, that my $10 is the same as your $10 (and yes, there are rules in many marketplaces that say the opposite, but these are the other, pernicious, keep-them-in-their-place kinds of rules).

As a parent of a seven-year-old, I am especially aware of the third kind of rule, and how easily it can be seen as the first kind ("Why can't I bungee-jump off the roof? It's not fair! All the other kids are doing it. You're just trying to keep me from having grown-up fun!" Not an actual quote, but close enough). Seatbelt laws as another means for the power elite to grab more power.

All rules feel like power-reinforcement tools when you're not in power.

And yet, we humans need some sort of internalized structure. Practices can form much of that structure, but so do rules. I'm thinking of the Rule of St Benedict, the basis for much of western Christian monastic life. It is highly structured and full of rules, but it allows those who submit to it the space to pursue a deeply spiritual path. It removes a variety of external anxieties.

Because at their best, rule systems are like a kind of group handshake. We agree when we walk onto the field that these are the rules of the game, and so we can feel confident that we are not going to have to work too hard to avoid being maimed by the other team.

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The other conversation about rules was from a relatively recent arrival at meeting, who asked me via email about the unwritten rules of the meeting. Jeanne also talks about the unwritten rules as specifically enforcements of middle-class values. In her response to my comment, she wrote:

As for rules evolving from truth...there's a very good reason why Quakers have testimonies and don't consider them rules. One is that truth is always evolving; setting the truth in stone makes it that much harder to see new Light. Another is that our testimonies are evidence of our changed hearts, not guidelines to live by. First comes the changed heart. Then the new way to live life. Not the other way around.

This is all true. My response to the question about unwritten rules was:

One of the peculiar things about Friends is the weird (from the standpoint of society at large) way there appear to be unwritten rules. Often Friends chide one another for "breaking" these rules, but the rules are uncodified for a reason. In the end, there are structures and habits and usual practices, but no rules, as I understand the term.

The entirety of Quaker practice comes from the idea that the forms of worship and of living in the spirit ought to emerge out of convincement, of real spiritual feeling. Early Quakers were specifically rebelling against the falseness they saw in churchly "outward forms" and so they rejected rituals of baptism and communion, believing that inward baptism and inward communion were what was important, and that it was too easy for people to fake these sacraments, making them empty forms.

So, there are no codified "rules" as people usually use the term.

That does not mean "anything goes." It is customary, for example, to speak only once, if at all. In extraordinary circumstances, someone does speak twice, but that second spoken ministry had better be something that shakes the meeting's rafters, and it better have the sense that the speaker was given no choice but to speak twice, that he/she was PUSHED into speaking against his/her own reluctance. And that it was not self doing the pushing. If not, other many attenders will think the speaker is being self-indulgent.

The problem with rules—or forms in general—in a religious context is how easily they move from "our rules made by us meant to fill our need for structure" to "God's Law." And once something is no longer our rule, but is imposed from above, it becomes something we enforce on others. Like the Grid: I argued earlier that the real problem is not the existence of the grid as a tool for measurement and mutual understanding, but when that grid is enforced back on the earth, and the contours of the land are ignored in the Grid's favor. Same is true for rules: we need them, they are ours, and they give us limits within which to operate in a given context. When they become the Rules of the Parents/God/Ruling Class/Overseer, then they become pernicious. They then become tools of power.

Naturalized

I'm on the same morris dance team(s) as Douglas, but I've only occasionally gotten a glimpse at what he does in his day job, which is as a philosopher of science at the U of Minnesota. I can't remember how the subject came up, but my interest was greatly piqued when he mentioned his talk this summer in Brazil (PDF here), on naturalization as a type of error, specifically in biology. Naturalization is essentially what happens when a statistical norm (e.g. two sexes) becomes seen as "natural," and conversely exceptions to that norm become "unnatural."

Douglas uses a few examples: sexual duality and the entirely "natural" exceptions to that statistical norm; the idea of competition as the basis for natural selection (again, a common factor in evolution but apparently originating as a "natural law" in nineteenth-century views of human nature); the transition of exceptional anomalies in human development ("monsters" in popular usage) from atypical "wonders" into being seen as "abnormal" and therefore "mal-formed."

Then he hits us with (to my mind) the big one:

The difference between anomaly and abnormality is basically the difference between pattern and expectation. Similarly, the error with male-and-female is primarily expecting intersexes, hermaphrodites and polysexes to fit the male/female categories because those categories are, or seem, pre-established. In our competitive culture, who is positioned to recognize competition as anything but an expected foundational principle? The errors, then, are ultimately not just about sex or development or natural selection. They are all about expecting nature to adhere to strict rules. That, in turn, is based on assuming a fundamental and enduring universal order. This expectation itself represents, I contend, yet another naturalizing error: the very concept of laws of nature.

Douglas argues essentially that we have created unchangeable laws of nature where there may be no laws, that the very idea of laws is rooted in our cultural or more generally human biases.

Recently, historians have profiled the cultural and religious context that guided the origin of the modern/Western concept of laws of nature (Steinle 2002 [also an interesting read; it's available in part here]). Here, I want only to draw attention to how powerful a hold the concept of laws of nature has on our minds. The very language is highly charged. In human society, laws specify what we ought to do. They ensure social order. We tend to interpret laws of nature in the same way, as guaranteeing the natural order. Laws of nature profile how nature should act. Once established, descriptive laws take on a prescriptive character. Pattern becomes expectation. This is how local regularities, or the familiar, or the "normal," become naturalized.

I think this relationship between description and prescription (or proscription) reflects on the earlier discussion of "the grid."

And on a lot of other notions of ordered systems.

Profound stuff. The whole paper bears a close reading. Thanks Douglas.

45°NE

OK, I'm plunging ahead with a new long-term project this month. I figure if I announce it, it may actually happen, so I've started a project blog (45°NE), and put in the following introduction:

I'm embarking on an experiment.

I've been ruminating for a long time about how to express sense of place in maps (I'm a cartographer).

For a few years I've been thinking about how to channel experience of place into a form true both to the objectivity-seeking values of cartography and the personal-expression values of the fine arts (I was a studio arts major in college).

And I've been trying to think of a way to use the 45° N latitude line that runs a block and a half south of my office, right across the Northeast Minneapolis Arts District.

After a thought provoking time at NACIS, I reached the conclusion that the way to open up that 45°N line to experience was through some combination of exploration (more mundanely, "fieldwork") and pilgrimage. In one, there is a specific subset of information one looks to gather; in the other, one is looking for an opening to (in religious terms) grace, the miraculous, the other... the unexpected.

So.

I'm going to start regular monthly traverses of the line, beginning at Central Avenue, walking to the river. I'm going to record the results here. I hope to do the traverses with a variety of people, and in between to contact property owners to discuss with them how the line traverses their property.

Here's a crude GoogleMaps base of the traverse (the blue line shows the approximate actual line; the red shows my estimate of a walkable line on public right of way).

Anyone who wants to join me, drop me a line! Probably the easiest way is via my work email form. Or my cell phone (612-702-1333).

Any and all advice or commentary is welcome.

identity grid

I was walking around our building's First Thursday open studio, and in the back of my mind, as I chatted with artists of all stripes, was the question, "How and why do they call themselves artists?" Not in an insulting way, but honestly what makes them different? And the best answer I could come up with, is marketing. People generally buy art from artists, so if you want to make your living drrawing, painting, sculpting, ceramicizing, etc., then you need to call yourself an artist.

I think it's interesting how in the world of people who make things for money, you can divide their self-definitions two ways: definition by what sort of subject-matter they choose, and definition by what sort of medium they work in. In the arts, this means you're a portraitist or a painter; in graphic design it means you're a cartographer or a book designer; in writing it means you're a financial writer or a journalist.

In any of these examples, there are conventions, there is a sense of commonality of language and understanding when two or more people of like self-identity meet. The narrower the common self-definition (financial ceramicisists working in terracotta mergers and acquisitions), the more they will share a network of shared experience and understanding. And the closer they get to having the same experiences in their work, the better the chance that their conversation will move from "isn't that interesting what you're doing over there" to "don't poach my turf." When two people interested in the same things realize they're fighting for work the same clients. Or the same tenure committee. When one or both of them decide the town ain't big enough for both of them.

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I'm trying out the thesis developed in the discussion over the Grid (in cartographic terms), that the problem isn't in the gridding per se, its in the reimposition of that grid back on the subject. Does that apply to identity? I'm thinking of ongoing discussions in meeting about Quaker identity, but I think it applies to all identity groups: Is the problem less with the identity group and more with when the code which binds us is then reimposed back on us?

We human beings come up with structures, codes, grids, networks, any numbers of systems we lay our understandings of the world over the top of. Saying we shouldn't do that because systems end up dividing us is like saying we should stop using language because we'll be misunderstood.

We also like to form community (or better yet find community, because its easier) around identity, to be able to say "these are my people." And it seems sensible then to put these two together, and to codify what it is that brings us together. Maybe it's a hierarchy (I'm with you because of a feudal system, or because we're part of this family tree). Maybe it's a creed (I agree with enough of the planks in your platform, I'm in). Maybe it's just cultural clues (You like chicken? I like chicken!). Maybe it's a bunch of people who all know the same songs (I know I'm not the only one who had a near-religious experience at a Pete Seeger concert).

But...

The problem arises (I would submit) when we then look at the "official" set of common-identity markers, and judge ourselves (or worse, allow others in the group to judge us) based on our adherence to those markers. To make the Grid the marker of value, not the thing itself.

Don't forget the primates

Just back from a week visiting my folks and my high school reunion. Nice bunch of people.

I spent a bunch of the day on Monday with my friend Nathan who was in my class in second and fifth grades and in high school and whose parents then moved to New Hampshire near where I lived for seven years. So we've kept in touch. He's doing interesting work in forestry now, and our conversation turned to his interest in restoring old-growth forests through management. This sounds utterly counter-intuitive if we're used to a wilderness-based way of thinking, but it echoes some other interesting reads recently.

My favorite book from last year is Charles Mann's 1491. And its most controversial claim seems to be that much of the Americas that we grew up thinking of as wilderness was in fact managed, just using very different techniques than Old-World-style agriculture. I gather it's controversial in part because some environmentalists think of this as an excuse to bulldoze the Amazon, and because it challenges the ideal of a human-free wilderness.

Nathan says he has a line he uses to try and get past the human/wilderness mind-block: "Don't forget the primates." Think of us as a species who has been an integral part of the ecosystem. Don't assume that the best way to restore a functioning ecosystem is to remove the homo sapiens. Seems obvious to me, but so much of our basic thinking about the environment in the modern western world is bifurcated: here's the boundary of the park, and on this side is people's land, on the other side is not-people's land (on this side of the line is the Euro-American land, and on that side (until my brother bilks you out of it) is the Amero-American land).

And so I go off on a variant riff of the "grid" conversation of a couple months ago. As I was arguing then, the trouble is not with the grid as a measure, or as a way of organizing information. The trouble is when the grid is used to impose lines back onto the land. This reimposed grid is a symptom of the same sort of disassociation with the landscape that posits "non-human" wilderness.

Eugenics

Good lord.

Yes, I've read about the eugenics movement before, here and there, but was still shaken by the exhibit we went to see at the Science Museum of Minnesota this past weekend. It's called "Deadly Science: Creating the Master Race." It's organized and circulated by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and not surprisingly, it does a really good job, as my wife Ingrid put it, of taking you on a guided tour through Hell.

The point of the show to my mind is to follow the slippery slope from genetics to genocide, which it does well. It's easy to put the label "monster" on the people involved in the events in Germany, but the exhibit is effective in keeping them very human as long as possible... criminal, yes, but still human.

Ouch. It reminded me of the sensation of watching The Talented Mr Ripley, as the title character keeps choosing the violent and brutal over the tender but painful, becoming action by action more of a monster in an effort to protect himself and the lies he began with.

I was talking with Ingrid afterwards, and asked her where she thought the eugenics people went wrong. It's not as easy a question as it sounds: we use genetics all the time, breeding apples and dogs and meat animals (and yes, I know vegetarians have a point here). But there are clearly also positive aspects to studying the human genome, in terms of dealing with human disease.

Ingrid's thought was that the emphasis on "use" was one of the eugenicists' biggest mistakes, the idea that Downs Syndrome people aren't "useful" and so should be (big euphemism here) discarded (full disclosure: she had a distant cousin who was one of the "discards"). The Third Reich's ideology came out of a very functionalist mindset—it's a German stereotype, but there is a strongly materialistically practical worldview that is part of German identity (when we were over last year we greatly enjoyed the Ritter Sport chocolate's motto, translated as "Square. Practical. Good.").

"Use" is about power; it applies to tools. Applying it to people makes them into tools—objects— and removes empathetic connection.

Which speaks I think to what Steven was saying about the grid: it removes empathetic connection to the earth.

Except of course there are plenty of cartographers and map users who still have that connection. When you go to NACIS and listen to people talking about doing the maps they love, its an exercise in opening up a connection they feel to the landscape to other people. I certainly feel that way about the urban maps I make. So where is the problem?

The problem comes, I think, in enforcement of abstract systems back onto the world as a way of not dealing with its complexities. It's so much easier to just put a graticule down on top of a continent, repeating six-by-six-mile townships over hill and dale, wetland and mesa, always the same. It's easier to just say "you're the wrong sort of person, so you go in that line there."

All of these knowledge structures—the graticule, genetics, or the Dewey Decimal System—have histories, and they have biases and cultural codes locked inside them. As platforms for communication, they also provide a truly open-source basis. Where they most egregiously fall down is when their structure is applied back onto the subject of the knowledge as an exercise of power: when genetics stops being a way of discussing and exploring hereditary characteristics and starts being a way of sorting people; when books are rejected for not fitting into a filing system; when graticule lines are physically cut into the earth.

912

That's Dewey Decimal for Cartography.

To the extent that the graticule (latitude/longitude, UTM, or whatever system you're using to grid out the earth and map it) is a "neutral" framework designed to hold whatever information you want to hang on it, it's a lot like other knowledge frameworks.

I immediately think of library shelving systems. You have books on any conceivable subject (and you need to leave space in the system for books based on subjects you haven't thought of yet). Dewey Decimal System, Library of Congress, or simple alphabetization... all these are meant to present a "neutral" framework.

Well, of course they are not neutral. Melvil Dewey had Big Ideas, and, well, he was a 19th-century American. A quick glance at the basic classifications of the system show all of the non-Christians shoved into 1/10 of the religion section, the non-European languages shoved into 1/10 of the language and literature sections, and so forth. Interestingly, the geographically-organized sections are the most democratic: a full section for every continent.

My qustion is: Does this structure cause users of the systems to become biased? If your library has as many books about Islam (297) as about Christianity (210-289 inclusive), will the reader be affected by the Islam's classifications having longer numbers than the Christianity's? I think the reader would look more at the numbers of books than the numbers on the books.

What bias does a rectangular grid provide? Well, it certainly has affected how the middle of the United States (and Western Canada) were developed, a vast sheet of graph paper laid out on the landscape. But this is a case of the graticule being applied to the land, like a library giving the exact number of shelf inches to each Dewey classification.

Jefferson's gridding of western territories is part of a longer tradition of rational development. Penn's Philadelphia, the nine squares of New Haven, the Mason-Dixon line, the Treaty of Tordesillas line: from the beginning of the European colonial era, people tried to impose their will (or God's will) on the landscape using lines and grids.

The problem any rational book-filing system runs into is the multiple-entry problem. If you have two authors, which do file it under? More importantly, if you have a book about religion and science, does it get filed in the science or religion section? Not just libraries have this problem. Why do some books get filed into genre fiction shelves in bookstores while others get filed under literature?

In geographic terms, a place can have multiple identites, which a map may not communicate. I've worked this over in the Neigborhoods of Minneapolis article on Wikipedia: Some major neighborhoods like Uptown are not officially defined by anyone, while others have primarily political significance, and still others (like Linden Hills) have both informal and formal recognition. On a more politically dangerous note, two warring nations may claim the same land as "homeland." Of course Kosovo and Israel/Palestine have more issue than "the map," but the absoluteness of boundaries on modern maps surely isn't helping.

But this is different than the underlying grid: territories are accurately mapped using the grid, but the two territories above are not defined by the grid. What would the same sort of problem cross-discipline books face loo like in geographic terms? I'm imagining a surveyor for some large construction project being told it has to follow a township line, come hell or high water. And there's this canyon in the way. It would be much simpler, cheaper, easier and less destructive to shift the project a mile west for a little while. And this is usually what happens in the real world, where dollars are more important than grid lines.

Even this doesn't work as an exact parallel. The classification of ideas and fields (like the my old favorite, the ontology of maps) occurs on a surface that is non-continous. Any given spot on a latitude-longitude grid is unique, just as a call number in a library is unique. But while a subject classification reflects a position on a conceptual framework which is non-absolute, the latitude and longitude are based on specific measurable attributes. Abstract attributes, but similar to (for example) title and date of purchase of a book.

But all this kind of puts what Steven and other cartographic critics have said into the realm of the ridiculous, which was not my initial intent. Clearly the grid represents a way of looking at the world that disturbs some folk. Heck, it disturbs me sometimes. What is it then that is disturbing us? I would argue it is not the grid itself, but its inappropriate intrusion into the physical world.

More next time.

Maps and Violence

I'm still working on Steven's comment a few days ago. The thing I found so hard to digest was the violence implied directly to "the grid." I respect Steven's work a lot (sorry, part of my initial confusion was also not knowing who you were, Steven), and actually knowing he was the one making the response makes it clearer where he is coming from.

I had a similar reaction to elin o'Hara slavick's Bomb after Bomb: A Violent Cartography, which she presented a selection of at NACIS last year. Her art is a deeply-felt indictment of bombing as an anonymous evil: bombs kill without the killer having to directly face the consequences. Her maps with stains and wounds painted over them were really powerful stuff. The problem I had was her equation of cartography with the violence it enabled: she spoke of hegemonic mapping, of mapping as the anonymous-making of space. Maps as implicit in murders and bombings.

So here's my question: when, in general, are whole abstract systems responsible for the evil that people do while using them? There's a lot of powerful arguments for language (for example) being responsible for violence and for other perversions of humanity (think Orwell's Newspeak in his 1984). But Orwell himself was writing in language to make this point, and was not indicting language per se, but the control and manipulation of language from above.

Much cartocriticism works from the vantage point of cartography as the exercise of such power: modern cartography arose out of military and political power-struggles, out of desire to control. But one of the peculiar things about it is that while power has been the sponsor of cartography, the resulting maps themselves were in a sense a democratic, decentralizing visual expression.

One of the huge cultural shifts over the last umpteen hundred years, but especially over the last 500, has been that of lord-and-vassal relationships to citizen-and-citizen relationships. Of course power still exists and is exercised, but in the West only the mad kings and their followers these days seriously believe that God gives rights of power to kings, and that it flows down from them like mana. I find it hard to imagine a world in which my basic legitimacy as a person was based in my relationship to my lord and master rather than in the assumption that "I am a person and so I count."

Modern cartography—including the grid—reflects this humanist point of view, in that space is not privileged. We don't just make New York City bigger because it's more important; a mile is a mile is a mile. Kind of spatial one citizen one vote. Classed information are made larger and smaller not out of ordainment, but out of quantitative measurement.

So. Maps and violence. Maps, the grid and violence I should say.

I feel the grid. I am frustrated by the inability of my pidgin graphic tongue to speak poetry. But, that isn't what cartography was built for, and almost no-one speaks pidgin as their first language. But pidgin evolved to deal with places like New Guinea with hundreds and hundreds of languages: sure it would be great to sit and take the time with everyone we meet and learn the nuances of their mother tongue, but we are here to trade our goods for a goat.

It is easy to work backwards from the horrors that have resulted from some uses of cartography (and yes it is true, bombing would not be possible in a modern sense without cartography). But I would suggest the opposite is also true. In my better moments making maps, I feel like a native guide to a new place. I don't speak my charge's native graphic tongue, but in my pidgin, I can get him or her to a warm place to eat and rest. At cartography's best, this is true in general: it is a plain language, reduced to the smallest vocabulary you can get away with, which lets strangers meet and be cordial and hospitable, and smooths whatever business they need to do.

Collective geography

I've been looking at a 1996 article, "Experiential and Formal Models of Geographic Space," by David M. Mark and Andrew U. Frank. It's written as part of Mark and Frank's work in "naive geography," the study of common-sense, everyday experienced geography, with the goal of making GIS's more user-friendly and analagous to everyday geographic experience. The point of the article is that there is a divide between quantitative, measured, Euclidean (I say Cartesian, but same difference) geography, and geography as experienced by us as an immediate phenomenon. [disclaimer: I know this is a 12-year-old article in a field with a lot of reserach... bear with me].

The paper approaches this divide from a cognitive science angle, looking at how we categorize things instinctively, which is based not so much on a rigorous Venn-diagram sort of thinking (This is bird, this is not a bird) as an exemplar-centered way of thinking:

Rosch and her co-workers discovered that, in many cases, all members of a category are not 'equal'. For example, when asked to give an example of a bird, subjects tend to name robins and sparrows as examples far more often than they mention turkeys or penguins or ducks. [...] Lakoff (1987) later discussed this in terms of a radial structure for some categories. He noted that peripheral members of different arms of a radially-organized categories may have nothing in common, except different chains of resemblance to some common prototype.

It goes on to talk about "schemata" as an intermediary step in cognition between perception and understanding: schematic distinctions like "near and far" and "center and periphery" are models we use to process sensory information. The take-home is that in many cases we don't instinctively form categories and then file experienced objects within them; instead we form categories around exemplars, so that things are more or less "bird-like." Our organization of the world from experience has soft edges.

Getting to (to me) the meat of the paper, a distinction is made between two scales of spatial understanding:

Downs and Stea (1977, p. 197) distinguished perceptual space, studied by psychologists such as Jean Piaget and his colleagues and followers (Piaget and Inhelder, 1956), from "transperceptual" space that geographers deal with, and that we are focusing on in this paper. They claimed that "the two scales of space are quite distinct" (p. 197) in the ways people perceive and think about them. Later in the book, Downs and Stea (p. 199) contrasted the terms "small-scale perceptual space" and "large-scale geographic space." At about the same time, Kuipers (1978, p. 129) defined large-scale space as "space whose structure cannot be observed from a single viewpoint," and by implication defined small-scale space as the complement of this. The large-scale vs. small-scale distinction of Kuipers does not quite correspond to a geographic vs. non-geographic contrast, since as Kuipers pointed out, a high mountain viewpoint or an aircraft permits direct visual perception of fairly large areas. Nevertheless, we will follow Kuipers, and use the term large-scale space as he defined it, and small-scale space to refer to subsets of space that are visible from a single point.

Seems sensible enough, though it's a little confusing to a cartographer to have "large-scale" and "small-scale" reversed in meaning. The next bit goes into more detail about how we learn about small-scale space using sensory data with a lot of built-in cognitive processing, which is contrasted against "objective" Euclidean models of space which were originally formulated to make sense of large-scale space.

The argument (before the paper veers off towards its target audience of GIS-makers) is basically that the Euclidean model is not how we think about space in general, and it would be good to design geographic systems that take into account our innate spatial reasoning, which is grounded in the more fluid, less rigorous, and very relativistic way we innately create categories.

My problem with the paper is that it proposes a duality where I think there's a third player, and that's communal understanding. We all perceive our own peculiar space, things looming large and small in importance depending on our own specific background and our own specific immediate needs and goals.

I can tell you more about the details of the road, sidewalk, stairs and hallway between the parking lot and the door to my office than you probably want to know; this knowledge looms large in my internal geographic framework for my neighborhood. There are others who share my general daily pattern; they park in the same lot, enter the building and go up at least some of the same stairs. But most of them go to different offices, and all of them bring different judgmental frameworks (I hate ice and am annoyed by the seriously decayed roadway and sidewalk in front of our building. Others may find the sidewalk charming and enjoy the slippy sensation of ice underfoot). Nevertheless, there is a commonality to our geographic understanding: if there were a notable event in the street (a sinkhole swallowing up an entire delivery truck), we would be able to ask specific questions to one another about the space in which it happened. If I had to tell someone where I parked, it would be easier to do with someone who is in this group because we can all visualize how the parking lot is laid out.

This collective understanding is different than the individual cognitive framework I have developed, and it is different from a detailed numerical-Euclidean survey. A friend of mine habitually counts stairs, and so for her, a part of the description that looms large is the specific number of steps on each course of the stairwell. The common geography would say that there is one set of concrete steps outside, and to get to the third floor there are four sets of stairs with a landing between. (On the other hand, it should be said that there is no single common geography. My friend's detailed knowledge would fall into the common geography of blind visitors to the building, for example)

The averaging of all our experiences, the least-common-denominator quality of our knowledge, forms a useful and necessary basis for all our common local geography. It is the organization of this knowledge that allows maps to be made and used, and this is where Euclidean geometry has been extremely useful; it acts as a "neutral" meeting ground. We can all agree that the sidewalk here is 12 feet wide (once we agree that a foot is as long as this ruler in my hand).

The distinction between "large-scale" (i.e. large area) geographic space and small-scale experiential space is a false one. The reason geographic space (say a map of a state or a nation) is rendered in a Euclidean way is that it makes discussions open. This flies against the whole body of critical cartography, which posits that the Cartesian/Euclidean/Ptolemaic grid is an exercise of power. Power is exercised through that grid, yes, but this is possible because it allows sharing of information across large networks of people without extensive initiation.

So much of our theory is based on "creators" and "users." I don't think we really know how to talk about commonality except as a collections of individuals. I would think it would at least be an interesting exercise to start with commonality and see where that leads us...