Un-personed

I had a good exchange with John Krygier recently—thought-provoking as usual. It got me thinking more seriously about the experience of maps as performance. I know very little about performance theory, and much that I have seen I find frankly impenetrable. But I know a little about performance itself from having performed. So what I'm going to outline here is a framework that may well overlap what more experienced theorists have outlined. In any case, it's getting my thoughts down in a more thought-out form. Any recommendations of relevant and not-too-thickly-jargony performance literature is welcomed.

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The aspect of performance I've been reflecting on is the centrality of the performer. Humans pay more attention to (and have more cognitive tools to explore) other humans than any other subject. So it makes sense that looking at another person is qualitatively different from looking at something that a person has made. An actor is different from a stage setting, no matter how elaborate that set.

I've made the analogy before of cartography being fundamentally about the "stage setting" for a performance about space, that perforance not necessarily being performed within the map. Well, any serious performer will tell you setting is an integral part of performance (for that matter, so is the audience). The whole thing, the entire constructed experience, is the performance.

And yet, there is something different about the designated "performer." It's a person, and so we instinctively pay more attention to that person. I think it may be that simple.

To me, this puts a new spin on the whole idea of attempts at "objectivity," in which the biases and idiosyncrasies of individuals are intentionally de-emphasized. The idea is, while maintaining a clearly human-made voice, to partly "un-person" that voice. It's not exactly the same as what I'm describing, but it is a useful device in a number of ways.

First, it allows the user to put her or himself directly into the performer role. Thus a "base map" is like a karaoke track. It fuctions a lot like the "voice" of a recipe. I had an interesting discussion with my wife Ingrid about this the other night. She reads a lot of food writing, and she confirms that it is common practice, even when the prose style is very fluid and personal, to then drop out of that personal voice into the "recipe voice", in which instructions are neutral. The goal is to de-emphasize the personal viewpoint of the author and to put the reader directly into the driver seat.

Second, it allows for the creation of the idea of a "common truth." This drives many contemporary carto-critics crazy, because they believe the common truths modern cartography has been emphasizing are fundamentally false, leading us straight to the destruction of our ecosystem and so ourselves. But on a smaller scale, it is often useful to have available a "referee voice." It's why we've always had a role in our societies for judges of one sort or another. And by putting off the personal voice and adopting an un-personed voice, we make that more possible.

I'll admit that second one is a loaded bomb. Before you all pile on, let me just ask you to consider, not whether it is right and good for us to do this, but whether it is a basic human reaction to seek someone speaking in an "neutral" voice.

I'm not sure exactly how the idea of anonymous monastic performances done for the glory of God (the Book of Kells, for example) fit into this, but I think they do.

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Ther other thing that's been on my mind is the priveleged place of performance. Larry Shiner (whom I've discussed earlier) talks about the creation of contemplative frames for the fine arts (the concert hall, the gallery wall, the silent library) as being a big part of those fine arts distinction from "craft" or "artisan" work. Something analagous happens whenever we recognize a performance is taking place. It is different from ordinary social space: we do not expect performers to have the same relationship to those around them as they would when they are not performing. Some of it is a matter of allowing for concentration, but some of it is also that performances are specifically about "setting aside space" to allow for a different experience.

It feels very like the suspension of disbelief that is essential to fiction.

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And that's all the ideas I have energy for tonight. I'm going to call it good.

Pretty Maps

I've felt out of the loop for a few months, busy with other stuff. There was a thread recently in Carto-Talk about GIS folks and "pretty maps" that got me going. My response was:

It's the phrase "making the map pretty" that gets me. I don't make pretty maps. It's like saying that the fine arts are about pretty pictures.

The world of modern cartography isn't about pretty, though sometimes that is a pleasant side-effect. It's about clarity and effectiveness as a visualization tool. But the same things that make a picture pleasant to look at (pretty), are core parts of effective, clear communication: awareness of emphasis, harmony and contrast of color sets, attention paid to the framed shapes and to an overall sense of visual balance. What makes a good piece of modern cartography work is that attention to these things is not in the service of "pretty"—a vacuous word—but in the service of meaning and understanding.

I'm going to recommend an obscure book that really helped me parse this out, by one of my favorite illustrators, Molly Bang. It's called Picture This, and I really enjoyed it.

I think what people who talk about pretty maps don't get is that visual harmony is not the same as pimping your ride. I came to cartography from graphic design 19 years ago because I didn't want to do any more ride-pimping. There's a distrust of design in some quarters because it is, in the wider world, often used to deceive and entice; it's an advertising and marketing field in large part.

And so, I think, some people resist the idea of cartographic design because it sounds like covering up the data with some rhinestones and lipstick. They believe that a map that is "plain" and unadorned, is one which is most honest.

But what I think most folks don't realize is that "plain" is not the same as "lazy." Plain is just as much of a carefully crafted visual statement. I certainly have made that mistake in my personal life: I'm a lazy dresser, and I think I sometimes excuse myself by painting myself as "plain." The Amish put a fair amount of effort in preserving their sober dress: cleaning, ironing, etc. That's different from slapping on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt.

"Pretty" is a straw-man used by those who want to get out of making a map work visually, by equating attention to visual flow and structure with propagandistic manipulation. Good "plain" design is just as much work, and requires just as much attention to design as an effectively pimped-up map will.

Familiarity

Kate Stanley pointed to this lovely piece from the NY Times by Verlyn Klinkenborg. An excerpt:

The surprise wasn’t just being reoriented so abruptly. It was also discovering that an unfamiliar world lay a few dozen yards off a road I drive all the time. In a way, the unfamiliarity of that world has been eroded now by driving through it once.

The more I think about that seam between the familiar and the unfamiliar — and how it feels to pass from one to the other — the clearer it becomes that humans instinctively generate a sense of familiarity. You can sense it for yourself the next time you drive someplace you’ve never been before. Somehow, it always feels as though it takes longer to get there than it does to get back home again. It’s as if there’s a principle of relativity, a bending of time, in the very concept of familiarity. The road we know is always shorter than the road we don’t know — even if the distances are the same.

Fictional input

I've stumbled across a bunch of really interesting stuff, beginning with the online blog/journal OnFiction. Not all up my alley, but...

I enjoyed the entries (1 and 2) by Valentine Cadieux on dérives and psychogeography as exercises in geographic freeing-from-preconception. Or something. Still not clear what the things are for, but it feels like they relate to my earlier discussions of pilgrimage as a possible metaphor for a modern performative cartography:

However much these mechanisms may be associated with a particular way of exploring places, they are really merely the training wheels of psychogeography: tools to break the habits of everyday automatic interactions with place and perceptions of place as real and given. Disrupting such habits leaves mental resources for more exploratory stances toward the environment, in which explorers tune in to the behaviors or emotions that the situation and setting most afford.

Also enjoyed Keith Oakley's essay on art, which in turn referenced a really interesting (and obvious, in a good way) article in Greater Good magazine, on, essentially, the functional benefits of fiction. This in a way turns me back full circle to things I was reading 20 years ago about children's literature and the "uses of enchantment," to use Bruno Bettelheim's phrase. I ought to go back an read Jane Yolen's Touch Magic, Bettelheim, and some other stuff I have sitting on a shelf downstairs...

So much to learn, so little time.

Over to you

There's something enormously powerful about a performer turning "it" back to the audience. I remember being deeply impressed with Peter Gabriel's closing of the Amnesty tour in 1986, when he essentially turned the closing cries of "Biko" over to the audience, and then left the stage. Here's a video from that tour:



My brother saw the Philadelphia leg of the tour, and reports that the chanting went on for several minutes after everyone had left the stage. Somehow that image gives me chills.

I'm thinking of two other memorable theatrical instances of this. One was a performance of Shakespeare's The Tempest with Patrick Stewart. The play ends with Prospero alone on stage, addressing the audience:

Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have's mine own,
Which is most faint: now, 'tis true,
I must be here confined by you,

Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got
And pardon'd the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;

But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands:
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,

Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant,
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,

Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.

What I remember is how Stewart's emphasis of "you" really did transfer the power of the magical play over to us, the audience.

The other theatrical event I'm thinking of is the finale of Nicholas Nickleby, the mammoth Royal Shakespeare Company production that came to the Broadway in 1982 (?). Smike has died, and the boys who escaped from Squeers' "school" are wandering the countryside in the cold. As the cast sings a gorgeous version of "God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen," with soaring counterpont of "and it's tidings of comfort and joy," Nicholas (played by Roger Rees), who is rushing across the stage, sees a shivering boy huddled at the front of the stage, dressed in rags, perhaps already dead. Nicholas stops, walks over, tenderly picks up the boy, and holds it up to the audience, looking straight at them with a look that says, "And what are you going to do?"

Blackout.

I still get shivers from that one, 27 years later.

And this kind of theater is what I love about Pete Seeger. Regardless of his politics (and it doesn't hurt that his politics are pretty close to mine), what I like most about him is his insistence on "over to you" as part of his performance and all of his public work. It's like what we call "empowerment" nowadays, but it's not just about power. It's also about responsibility. And when we say "power," it's a specificaly democratic sense of power: the performance consciously gathers force and focus on the stage, and then finds a way to hand that force and focus back to the audience for them to carry it out into the world. I really like that. I wish more performers and makers of things knew how to do that.

Silly Stories

From Kenneth Lillington's Josephine:

"Ah, you are thinking of Frankenstein, Miss Tugnutt. By Mary Shelley. Shelley's wife, you know. A very silly story."

"Silly?"

"Dreadfully silly. Frankenstein's monster is eight feet tall. You'd think that would make him a bit conspicuous, wouldn't you? Not a bit of it," said Mr Cropper, chuckling. "He hides in a hut adjoining a remote cottage where he remains undetected for several months. He watches the occupants through a chink in the wall, and learns their language so well that he can speak it in a style indistinguishable from theirs. He also – still depending on the chink – learns to read. His books include Plutarch's Lives and Paradise Lost. He becomes widely informed in geography, metaphysics and natural philosophy. He achieves in a few months what it took mankind, through the more laborious process of evolution, thousands of years –"...

"How did Frankenstein make him?"

"Ah! we never know.... The author simply assures us that "the secret is too terrible to be told."

"An easy way out!"

"Yes, indeed. It is a very silly story."

"Why did anyone ever read it, Mr Cropper?"

"Because, my dear Miss Tugnutt, men have a great need for silly stories."

I do enjoy Kenneth Lillington.

True Stories

Fictions are stories that are admittedly not accurate reportings of the real world, but which are valued because they tell general truths about the world. Non-fictions are stories that are valued as accurate reportings on the world.

So far so good. But then we get into religious stories, where we fight each other over whether the stories are true or not. Fiercely.

Why is it important to us whether these stories are fact or fiction?

There's been a similar (if more restrained) fight in the map-theory world over the "truthiness" of maps, and I think a similar question here can be raised: why is it so important that maps be seen as a reflection of the "real world"? Here, the answer is clearer: we want an accurate portrayal of the earth so we can use it as the basis of discussion of the real world. If it's not accurate, we can't use it the way we want to.

Is the same thing true of religious stories? Fundamentalist approaches to religion take this tack: "Everything in my Scripture is literally true, so I can use that as my Certainty. That's my foundation, my bedrock." But less fundamentalist points of view still need a sense of certainty in their stories... they need to look at their scriptures not as myth, but as something closer to Truth.

I think what often happens is, religious truth goes in a different compartment than everyday truth. Because what is said in religious texts is largely about extraordinariness rather than repeatable-experiment reality, we can put them into a mental space that is neither "made up" nor "verifiable", but is instead "non-verifiable but believed in." And religious texts do contain material that, like good fiction, contains general truths about the world: morals, ethics, love, justice, the very idea of truth.

The reason maps and other reference materials carry that peculiar aura about them is that they can (within limits) be relied upon. That in doing this they satisfy a need says to me there is something inherent in humans that needs this foundation. When people then ascribe to maps a level of "objectivity" or "truth" that we cartographers are aware they don't warrant, this is not an indication that people are stupid. I think it's an indication that people are people.