Media's Mapping Impulse 3515124241, 9783515124249

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Geographie

Media Geography – 6

Franz Steiner Verlag

Media’s Mapping Impulse Edited by Chris Lukinbeal, Laura Sharp, Elisabeth Sommerlad and Anton Escher

Media’s Mapping Impulse Edited by Chris Lukinbeal, Laura Sharp, Elisabeth Sommerlad and Anton Escher

media geography at mainz Edited by Anton Escher Chris Lukinbeal Stefan Zimmermann Veronika Cummings Editorial Staff Elisabeth Sommerlad Volume 6

Media’s Mapping Impulse Edited by Chris Lukinbeal, Laura Sharp, Elisabeth Sommerlad and Anton Escher

Franz Steiner Verlag

Cover illustration: Imagination of a Media Mapping Impulse, Thomas Bartsch, Eric Dedans und Elisabeth Sommerlad, © 2016 Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek: Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über abrufbar. Dieses Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist unzulässig und strafbar. © Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 2019 Druck: Hubert & Co., Göttingen Gedruckt auf säurefreiem, alterungsbeständigem Papier. Printed in Germany. ISBN 978-3-515-12424-9 (Print) ISBN 978-3-515-12425-6 (E-Book)

CONTENTS Acknowledgments

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Chris Lukinbeal and Laura Sharp Introducing Media’s Mapping Impulse

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The View From Here Denis Wood Mapping’s Complicated Media Impulse

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Marcus A. Doel The Swamp of Signs

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Cartographic Anxiety Giorgio Avezzù Cinema and the Crisis of Cartographic Reason

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Paul C. Adams Mapping the Influx: Cartographic Responses to Europe’s Refugee Crisis

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The Map and the Territory David B. Clarke Memento and the Haussmannization of Memory

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Sam Hind and Alex Gekker On Autopilot: Towards a Flat Ontology of Vehicular Navigation

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Eva Kingsepp Mythical Space: Egypt in World War II TV Documentary Films

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Maps on the Net Gertrud Schaab and Christian Stern Mobile Map Apps: Toys or Tools?

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Víctor Aertsen, Agustín Gámir, Carlos Manuel and Liliana Melgar Analysis of a Filmed Urban Area Through a GIS Tool: Madrid Movie Map

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Tobias Boos Online Neighborhood Mapping: The Case of Siena’s Online Eco-Museum

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Gregor Arnold Crowdsourcing, Bottom-Up Web 2.0 and Critical Web Mapping of Vacancies: The Power of Digital Maps and Urban Movements on City Development 255 Checking In: Maps and Social Media Mengqian Yang and Sébastien Caquard Mapping the Shawshank Redemption: Film Tourism, Geography and Social Media

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Matthew Zook and Ate Poorthuis The Geography and Gaze of the Selfie

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Contributors

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Most of the essays in this volume derive from the international symposium “Media’s Mapping Impulse,” which took place in June 2016 at the Institute of Geography at Johannes Gutenberg-University in Mainz, Germany. Twenty-four scholars from all over the world accepted the invitation of the editors to discuss on an interdisciplinary level the manifold relations between different media (e.g., film, social media, apps, video games), cartography, geospatial technologies and locative media (Tab. 1). From the different professional perspectives of geography, cartography, film and media studies, the question was posed as to how media and maps influence perception and interaction with our everyday world. A central assumption was that mass media in their everyday work permanently create spaces of communication through which meanings, ideologies and power relations are spread. They have an obvious yet subtle mapping impulse: the constant reinvention and mapping of the world in Hollywood films, the localization via media based on geofencing, geo-tagging or geocoding, or the location of a virtual world via social media are just three examples. Essential philosophical questions of the symposium were: How central are media mapping processes for the geographies of our everyday world? When, where, how and why do we arrange things and ourselves in certain orders? To what extent are myths created and transported through media mapping? All in all, the presentations and controversial discussions revealed the complexity of the concept of Media’s Mapping Impulses. The symposium has produced fruitful results and new opportunities for interdisciplinary, international academic cooperation. All the more reason for us to be pleased that in this volume we are able to bring together some of the conference contributions, as well as some additional essays, which were kindly contributed by distinguished authors. We would like to express our sincere thanks and appreciation to all the speakers, guests and discussants of the symposium for the inspiring dialogs and the success of the event as well as all the contributing authors for the implementation of this anthology. A large number of people and institutions, without whom the entire project could not have been implemented, were involved in both the book and the previous symposium. We would like to take this opportunity to express our sincere thanks to all of them. We would like to thank the Center for Intercultural Studies and the Internal University Research Funding of Johannes Gutenberg-University for their generous financial support of the symposium. We would like to thank the students of the Master’s program “Human Geography: Globalization, Media, and Culture” (class 2015/16) for their organizational cooperation before and during the symposium, as well as all scientific assistants and employees of the Geographical Institute of JGU for their support. Media’s Mapping Impulse represents the sixth volume of the series Media Geography at Mainz. Many thanks, therefore go to Susanne Henkel

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and Andrea Hoffmann from Steiner Verlag for their great backing in implementing the anthology. The final completion of the book project would not have been possible without the wonderful support of Jessica Andel and Polichronios Vezirgenidis in the formatting and layout of the volume. Chris Lukinbeal, Laura Sharp, Elisabeth Sommerlad & Anton Escher Mainz and Tucson, Spring 2019 Symposium: Media’s Mapping Impulse June 16th–18th 2016 Thursday, June 16th Keynote Tom Conley: Old Maps and New Media: Sentient Geographies Friday, June 17th Marcus Doel: On Location – Here and Now, or Modernity Unhinged David Clarke: Memento and the Haussmannization of the Memory – or, The Rat Man’s Desinterrance Gavin MacDonald: Two Dutch Landscaped: Art and the Mainstreaming of Geomedia Chris Lukinbeal & Laura Sharp: Scale: (Dis)embodiment, Possession, and Alienation Sam Hind & Alex Gekker: On Autopilot: Towards a Flat Ontology of Vehicular Navigation Johnny Finn: Identity, Space, Media, and Mapping: Media as Vectors for Mapping Social Identities Stephen Buckman: Tracing Shoreline in the Great Lakes Communities Giorgio Avezzù: Cinema and the Crisis of Cartographic Reason Denis Wood: Mapping’s Complicated Media Impulse Saturday, June 18th Ate Poorthuis & Matt Zook: The Geography and Gaze of the Selfie Gertrud Schaab & Christian Stern: Mobile Map Apps: Toys or Tools? Stephan Pietsch: Cartography and Video Games Paul Adams: Refugee Risk Maps: The Anxious Cartography of Displaced Person Flows Susan Mains: Love in the Time of Cartography: Reimagining Media Narratives of Magic, Mobility and Danger in Colombian Tourism Eva Kingsepp: Relations between Memory Culture and Popular History Teresa Castro: What does the World Picture want? On the History of Spinning Globes, Animated Maps and GIS Imagery in Film Verena Andermatt-Conley: Sentiment and Sediment: A Sensory Topography of Media Archaeology Final Discussion Table 1: Program of Media’s Mapping Impulse

INTRODUCING MEDIA’S MAPPING IMPULSE Chris Lukinbeal and Laura Sharp Media’s Mapping Impulse is an international and interdisciplinary collection of essays that explores the fundamental relationships between cartography, geospatial technologies, and new and traditional forms of media. The foremost of these relationships is that cartography is one of the oldest forms of media and that media is a type of cartography. Media scholars and cartographers alike have shed light on the tendency for representations to objectify both social and spatial relations of power. It therefore makes sense that, to understand the mediation of our socio-spatial world, we find ourselves turning to the seemingly rational and objective scopic regime of cartography to lend a calm and ordered schema to an otherwise chaotic phantasmagoria of images and events. When we consider media – “new” or “old” – through the lens of cartography, we begin to uncover how meaning, ideology, and power are negotiated across space and time in a way that may otherwise be difficult to ascertain. Media, in this sense, is underpinned by what Teresa Castro (2009) has called a mapping impulse – a drive to be rendered comprehensible through spatial and cartographic metaphors of topologies, networks, and flows. To pry this idea apart further, it helps to consider what is meant by impulse. A mapping impulse is the ability of a medium to “shape our understanding of the world and to inform our relationship with the world” (Avezzù 2016, 1), it is a mediation between subject, media, and the world. Media’s mapping impulse is “a drive to explore through visual and audiovisual means the diversity of the physical world, the space but also [the diversity] of people and everything else that lives in the world” (Castro 2016, 1). An impulse is a sudden, overwhelming feeling that compels the person or object experiencing it to act without hesitation or thought. What might cause such an immediate and unwavering drive to render in explicit, cartographic terms the otherwise implicit spatiality of media and the way we communicate about the world? In this introduction, we suggest that media’s mapping impulse is compelled by an anxiety that arises from the need to fill in the uncharted void on the map, a “horror vacui or discomfort at leaving empty spaces” (Van Duzer 2012, 393). Horror vacui is a visual arts term developed by Mario Praz to refer to the desire to fill in every blank space of a piece of art. For Chet Van Duzer (2012), horror vacui helps us understand the positioning of monsters, text, and images on the blank spaces of maps. In this sense, horror vacui is the visual and figurative demarcation of cartographic anxiety on the map, bringing into representational form the subconscious and perhaps unconscious demons underlying the Cartesian drive to document the known world (Figure 1). This anxiety is offset by a mapping impulse of discovery, an impulse to reveal the unknown, map the terrae incognitae, and

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communicate this discovery to others. This cartographic anxiety not only underlies media’s mapping impulse but acts as its driving force. To unpack this claim, in this introduction we examine how Cartesian logic of representation came to the fore with the European Renaissance and the conceptualization of the “world as picture,” a mathematical and representational modality of looking at and colonizing the world by rendering it as a series of artifacts and commodities. The Cartesian logic of representation is formulated through Euclidean geometry, gridded space, and scalar techniques that provide a foundation to transform three-dimensional objects into two-dimensional form while maintaining mathematical principles of equivalence and aesthetic principles of realism. Essential to Cartesian representation is the cartographic paradox, which provided the techniques to produce scaled representations of the world through a vertical cartographic view from above (projectionism) and the more subjective, horizontal view of the world from below (perspectivalism).

Figure 1. Robert Walton, Map of America (1660) is used by Van Duzer to show the phenomenon of Horror Vacui with its decorative flairs, sea monsters, smoking canoes and boast made of Hydas

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CARTOGRAPHIC ANXIETY Cartographic anxiety is a term coined simultaneously by Derek Gregory (1994) and Sankaran Krishna (1994) in reference to Bernstein’s (1983) idea of Cartesian anxiety. Richard Bernstein (1983) derived the phrase in a critique of Descartes’s (1993 [1641]) second meditation in Meditations on First Philosophy, which is often referenced as one of the great rationalist treatises of modern times and in which Descartes argues that the purpose of human reason is a search for truth. For Bernstein (1983, 27), Descartes’s quest for a “foundation or Archimedean point” is the “quest for some fixed point, some stable rock upon which we can secure our lives against the vicissitudes that constantly threaten us.” Cartesian anxiety is thus the “dread of madness and chaos where nothing is fixed, where we can neither touch bottom nor support ourselves on the surface” (Bernstein 1983, 27). Cartesian anxiety is not just about the fear of being unable to objectively document the known and knowable. Rather, with chilling clarity, Descartes leads us with an apparent and ineluctable necessity to a grand and seductive Either/Or. Either there is some support for our being, a fixed foundation for our knowledge, or we cannot escape the forces of darkness that envelop us with madness, with intellectual and moral chaos. (Bernstein 1983, 27)

In short, Cartesian anxiety is the fear that there is no fixity or basis to distinguish between reason and unreason, a necessity for the existence of Cartesian thought (Painter 2008). Gregory (1994, 72) argues that this anxiety of the strange and alien is not something that is outside amassing at the gates of Reason, but rather is already here, already “constitutively inside” Reason. Gregory (1994) argues that cartographic anxiety underlies modern human geography. Cartographic anxiety is the drive to make geographical space legible, knowable, and by proxy, conquerable: to rid the world map of the terra incognita and remove the horror vacui that plagues the discipline. Cartographic anxiety was part of the European scopic regime of the “world as exhibition” wherein, at the closing of the 19th century, the world was increasingly rendered as objects to be viewed (Gregory 1994; Pickles 2004). This rendering of a world as exhibition or picture references a very specific type of representation, one that not only relied on mathematics but also positioned the viewed objects as resources for use and capitalization. According to John Pickles, (2004, 84) the “world as picture” was projected as ta mathemata, as a mathematical manifold. The projection of the world as mathematical was, for Heidegger one of the fundamental ways in which modern metaphysics understands itself and the foundation for the modern sciences and for technology as we know them.

Avezzù, Castro, and Fidotta (2018, 1) point out that the Heideggerian claim of grasping the world as picture is a “fundamental cartographic problem” that also hides the “picture’s performativity or agency as a specific media artifact.” Articulation of the world as picture requires language and as Marcus Doel points out in his chapter, language, and the articulation of meaning through it, is adrift in a “notoriously treacherous terrain” because we cannot separate it, nor remove our self to an Archimedean point to contemplate or represent it. Doel’s

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examination of semiotics exposes how the sign enunciates meaning and resists articulation of meaning. The relation between signifier and signified is troubled by what Saussure calls a double articulation, or what Lacan calls a resistance or barrier. This resistance, Doel suggests, leaves floating or sliding signifiers struggling in “vain to pin/pen down” their slippage. Krishna’s (1994) interest in cartographic anxiety was for its association with postcolonialism. Here, cartography refers to representational practices that inscribe meaning onto an entity and names it, in Krishna’s case, India. He argues that “under such a definition, cartography becomes nothing less than the social and political production of nationality itself” (Krishna 1994, 508). Cartographic anxiety, then, is also a symptom of the postcolonial condition wherein identity as a nation is defined by colonization, which is writ large through cartography as the principal means by which to define territory and ownership. Joe Painter (2008) argues that what Gregory (1994) and Krishna (1994) evoke through cartographic anxiety are two interrelated logistics of boundary: the epistemic boundary between reason and unreason, and the spatial boundaries produced through cartographic reason and representation. Harley puts it more succinctly, saying that “the map is not the territory yet it often precedes and becomes the territory” (Harley in Wood and Fels 2008, 190). As Denis Wood and Jon Fels (2008, 190) note, “the map is nothing more than a vehicle for the creation and conveying of authority about, and ultimately over, territory. Cartographic anxiety is bound up in issues of “the political unconscious in maps” (Harley in Wood and Fels 2008, 190), issues that underlie how we conceive of, deal with, and stress over territory, (national) identity, and even the survival of the nation. Wood argues in this volume that maps, constructed the state, that literally helped to bring the state into being, maps were endowed with their strongest media impulse: they were literally pulsed out into the world to enable citizens and aliens alike to participate in their graphic performance of statehood.

Cartographic anxiety is about clearly defining and delimiting nations on maps and bodies, of producing markers of us and them. This demarcation is central to Paul Adams’s essay (current volume) on migration maps and the routes, paths, and lines that bound, shape, include, and exclude refugees seeking asylum in Europe. Adams shows how cartographic media are “performances of control,” a matter of regulating the anxiety brought about through the breach of cartographic boundaries. Migration maps in these cases are acting as a medium to communicate international and domestic geopolitical information and imaginaries and serve as a vehicle for practices of inclusion, caring, and belonging, as well as exclusion and xenophobia. The relationship between the map and the territory is central to cartographic anxiety, deriving primarily from the question of whether there is an ontological relationship between territory and cartographic/Cartesian reason or whether cartographic reasoning is an imposition onto the territory. David Clarke’s chapter on the film Memento questions the relationship between map and territory by probing memory, obsessional neurosis, the unconsciousness, the Oedipal complex, and mental maps. In contrast to Fredric Jameson’s aestheticization of cognitive mapping, which illustrates its own cartographic anxiety, Clarke draws from Baudrillard’s invocation of Borge’s fabled tale of the Empire’s decline. In so doing, Clarke shows

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that the issue at stake is not a question of precedence between the map and territory, but rather, that something has disappeared: an allegorical residue where the distinction of map and territory can no longer hold “a firm division between ‘things that mean’ and ‘things that are meant.’” In their chapter, Alex Gekker and Sam Hind contend that rather than something lost, or divided, the map and territory occupy the same ontological plane, especially when it comes to self-driving cars. Gekker and Hind suggest that with the advent of driverless cars, the map and territory are no longer distinguishable in the digital age and that through flat ontology everything exists in the same plane with no object being undermined or “overmined.” Following the logic of Farinelli and Olsson, Avezzù argues in his chapter that cartographic reason was a foundational concept for Western thought. This was reinforced through the cartographic paradox wherein perspectivalism and projectionism normalized the circular logic and self-referentiality between map/territory and presentation/representation. This self-referentiality underlies the practice of turning the map into territory and naturalizes claims of territory through representational techniques. However, Farinelli, similar to Jameson, argues that because globalization undermines cartographic reasoning, it is no longer useful to delimit, domesticate, and territorialize the world. Further, the perpetuation of cartographic reasoning produces and maintains a cartographic anxiety that is reflected in logic, cartography, and cinema where the desire to map the known and knowable spaces of the world run up against the terrae incognitae of reason, space, and consciousness. The recent interest in cinema studies in cartography, mental maps, and GIS is embedded in the cartographic logic of mapping out the known world to domesticate knowledge. This is what Avezzù calls the crisis of “cinematographicity,” or the waning ability to grasp the known and knowable world through cinema’s mapping impulse. Sharp (2018), in her analysis of Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala, shows how cartographic anxiety is encoded in the language of cinematic form, necessitating its release through the aesthetic practice of geographic realism (Lukinbeal 2005, 2006) invoked by establishing shots (Lukinbeal 2012). Sharp (2018, 90) argues that establishing shots are a fulcrum that orient and reorient the film voyager on their narrative journey. By grounding the audience in a geographically “real” or believable locale, establishing shots assuage the discomfort caused by cinema’s innate cartographic anxiety and place the audience back “in the realm of the knowable.” THE CARTOGRAPHIC PARADOX Heidegger’s mathematical view of the “world as picture” is based on two scopic regimes that arose from the European renaissance and traced their roots to the rediscovery of Ptolemy’s Geography, which represented a “sudden birth and growth in mapping” (Conley 1996, 1) or the “emergence of a new map consciousness” (Pickles 2004, 96). Pickles refers to the coevolution of perspectivalism and cartographic projectionism as the cartographic paradox: two related but distinct scopic regimes reliant on mathematics. The paradox that Pickles refers to is that, although these two scopic regimes arose from the same period and region and informed one

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another’s development, they each produce very different representational outcomes. To understand these scopic regimes, we should turn back to Ptolemy’s Geography. Ptolemy proposed three projection methods to map the world. One of those methods, which was similar to Leon Battista Alberti’s (1991 [1435]) linear perspective, was distant-point perspective. Samuel Edgerton (1975, 104) argues that Ptolemy’s distant-point perspective was “the first recorded instance of anybody – scientist or artist – giving instructions on how to make a picture based on a projection from a single vantage point representing the eye of an individual human beholder” (Edgerton 1975, 104). Because Ptolemy’s distant-point perspective and Alberti’s linear perspective both use a single vantage point, they are often considered to be equivalent. Svetlana Alpers (1983, 138) has suggested, however, that while the two scopic regimes are similar, they also have significant compositional differences: Whereas the “Albertian perspective posits a viewer at a certain distance looking through a framed window to a putative substitute world,” the Ptolemaic perspectives “conceived of the picture as a flat working surface, unframed, on which the world is inscribed.” Further, while Ptolemy offers the tools for a human-centered perspective, his approach is really about geometric extrapolation: What is called a projection in this cartographic [Ptolemaic] context is never visualized by placing a plane between the geographer and the earth, but rather by transforming, mathematically, from sphere to plane. Although the grid that Ptolemy proposed, and those that Mercator later imposed, share the mathematical uniformity of the Renaissance [Albertian] perspective grid, they do not share the positioned viewer, the frame, and the definition of the picture as a window through which an external viewer looks. On these accounts, the Ptolemaic grid, indeed cartographic grids in general, must be distinguished from, not confused with, the perspectival grid. The projection is, one might say, viewed from nowhere. Nor is it to be looked through. It assumes a flat working surface. Before the intervention of mathematics its closest approximation had been the panoramic views of artists – Patenir’s so-called world landscapes – which also lack a positioned viewer. (Alpers 1983, 138) (Figure 2)

Alberti’s theory of linear perspective relied on the logic of a grid but a grid wholly different from the graticule that underlies projectionism. The perspectival view seeks to mimic the optical view of an individual’s perspective from one fixed point. Projectionism as a mode of description follows the lineage of panoramic paintings, planimetric landscape profiles, and topographical city views. In these cases, the viewer is presented with a people-less landscape, “where distance is preserved and access is gained” (Lukinbeal 2010, 9). By removing the viewing subject, projectionism objectivizes the world, turning subject-object relations to object-object relations. In contrast, perspectivalism disassociates the subject by naturalizing the scene as an objective view of reality. In both cases, the dissociation of the subject configures these scopic regimes in dialectic relation with the “real and the unreal … the body and disembodiment; possession and alienation” (Doane 2009, 64). The disassociation of the subject from the “world as picture” has been termed the mirror of phallocentrism (Rose 1995), revealing an embedded gendered logic within the representational process. Further, the window metaphor used in linear perspective allows for a drawing plane on which to produce representations, which Luce Irigaray (1985) interprets as the mirror of hegemonic masculinity and Gillian

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Rose (1995, 764) refers to as the inherent interrelationship between “phallocentric subjectivity and its visualized space” (Figure 3).

Figure 2. Joachim Patinir, Landscape of Saint Jerome (1516-1517)

Figure 3. Albrecht Dürer, Der Zeichner des liegenden Weibes (1512-1525)

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Together, these scopic regimes became powerful tools to mediate the known and knowable world and, concomitantly, a means to articulate mimetic or absolute realism, thus imbuing these regimes with the power of autonomous realism. The belief in perspectivalism’s mimetic power is notable in Alberti’s statement wherein he claimed that perspectivalism was not an aesthetic technique but rather a means to construct a “real space in the sense that it functioned according to the immutable laws of God” (Alberti 1435 in Edgerton 1975, 30). Edgerton (1975, 24) explains, Linear perspective … with its dependence on optical principles, seemed to symbolize a harmonious relationship between mathematical tidiness and nothing less than God’s will. The picture, as constructed according to the laws of perspective, was to set an example for moral order and human perfection.

The power of mimetic realism also seemed to be granted to projectionism because it emphasized spatial equivalence, thereby codifying “our view of particular social processes” (Edwards 2006, 8). In this sense, maps not only represent space but actively “negotiate the identity, the legitimacy, and the agency of individuals, groups, and ventures” (Edwards 2006, 2). Thus, according to David Harvey (1989, 246), the geometric aesthetic of projectionism made the world “conquerable and containable for the purposes of human occupancy and action.” Projectionism and perspectivalism can be situated within Ptolemy’s distinction between geography and chorography where the former studied the world as a whole, the latter described the world in parts. This distinction positions geography as a spatial science associated with projectionism, objectivity, and cartographic reason while associating chorography with perspectivalism, the humanities, subjectivity, and place. Through geography, we get the projectionist view from above, situated at an Archimedean (but not a fixed) point from which to survey the world and produce models of the earth’s size, shape, and surface. However, projectionism is more accurately defined as a view from nowhere by no one. Perspectivalism, by contrast, is the subjectively situated view from below as it looks out on the world through a metaphorically framed (window) view. Perspectivalism, based on the geometrical construction of the vanishing point (as demonstrated by Filippo Brunelleschi), relies on the viewer’s gaze and the frame to create its realistic, representational effect. The projectionist representational method is not reliant on a frame or a vanishing point to produce its realism. While both scopic regimes can provide a view from above, only projectionism provides an orthographic view, one that both displaces the view to directly above all points on the map at once and preserves either conformality or equivalence in the transformation from 3d to 2d. The views from above and below, which we’ve described here, are what drives media’s mapping impulse. Most forms of media provide a situated, perspectival view of the world that maps cannot attain on their own, and vice versa. The current, possibly subconscious, trend toward mapping in new media and thinking cartographically about old media is about trying to combine these two views to gain a more holistic picture. Sharp (2018), for example, has combined these scopic regimes through the forms of mapping (projectionism) and video (perspectivalism) to understand and communicate the everyday experiences of film location scouts in

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Los Angeles, California. She argues that by taking a “cyborg” positionality that inhabits both the view above and below we are better equipped to “think critically not merely about the map’s underlying epistemologies but more importantly the implications this epistemology has for how we understand the geographies of cinema.” These scopic regimes provided European’s with the tools to make the “world as picture” and accurately and realistically represent, document, classify, catalog, inventory, assess, and record the world. Although we may point to these scopic regimes as a newly emerging mapping impulse, the power embedded in maps has also required the opposite impulse: the “pall of secrecy” (Wood, current volume). Maps document military intelligence, as well as show locations and pathways to great wealth, which required concealment for much of history. This points to a paradox that underlies cartographic anxiety and media’s mapping impulse: that there is a desire to reveal, to chart out, to turn the darkness into light and expose the unknown world, but at the same time, the underlying power that maps hold is valuable and creates a desire for possession, control, concealment, and suppression. As Denis Wood notes in this volume, maps can “rise to the level of notoriety” or “be as reticent as … the grave.” THE CORPOREAL IMPULSE TO MEDIATE AND MAP THE WORLD The mapping impulse of media is not simply a cartographic one but is also constituted by the mediation of body and space. The body produces space and the techniques of communication ground the process of mediation and provide an ongoing epistemological assessment of the spatial situatedness of the self. The mapping impulse of media begins from this situatedness, the spatial primitive or primal urge of self-mediation: the desire to understand the relationship between the self and world, body, and space. J. B. Harley (1987, 1) expressed the underlying desire to communicate and express our sentient spatiality thusly: There has probably always been a mapping impulse in human consciousness, and the mapping experience – involving the cognitive mapping of space – undoubtedly existed long before the physical artifacts we now call maps. For many centuries maps have been employed as literary metaphors and tools in analogical thinking. There is thus also a wider history of how concepts and facts about space have been communicated, and the history of the map itself – the physical artifact – is but one small part of this general history of communication about space. (Harley, 1987: 1)

This is not a static mediation but one that always involves movement – of the eyes, body, mind, and emotion. According to Tom Conley (2016, 1), Mediation is about the relations one establishes with respect to one’s difference in relation to the world. The world is not who or what one is and that difference that is felt in life is a mapping impulse. Where am I with respect to this alien condition in which I find myself, and with which I deal as an alien form in mediating and so my mediation becomes manifest through psychogeography, or the mapping I make of where I am or where I think I am in time and space.

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Here, Conley pulls from Guy Debord’s (1955, 1) idea of psychogeography, or the “study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” In this sense, the mapping impulse is a spatial primitive, one haptically grounded by the “reciprocal contact between us and the environment” that requires “the abilities of our bodies to sense their own movement in space” (Bruno 2002, 6). However, the mapping impulse is not just about externality, but rather follows JeanFrançois Lyotard’s (2004, 2) formulation of “emotion as a motion,” where the body mediates between the external movement through space and internal movement of emotions. Just as the body mediates between itself and the environment, it also mediates interiority and exteriority, or what Jacques Lacan referred to as operational montage, a process of projection and introjection (Lukinbeal and Sharp 2014). Media’s mapping impulse, therefore, is an innate desire to reflect upon, communicate, and (emotionally) express how and where we are in relation to the spaces we occupy. Mediation of one’s mapping impulse produces relationalities between things like subject/object and self/other. In this sense, media is not just the production and communication of information and images. It is also about mediation, or the basis of living in the world where we find that “we are constantly positioning ourselves – we are mediating ourselves in relation to the shifting, changing environment through which we are moving. It’s extraordinarily simple but comes forward in all media we encounter and especially in cartography and cinema” (Conley 2016). Mass media changes the pattern of interaction between self and world; it forces us to mediate on information, meaning, ideology, representation, and being. Media not only reflects reality but produces reality. It is a fundamental component of mediation – a constant remapping of an ever-changing world. Media is an assemblage of culture, technology, representation, and practices that mediates transactions between us and the world, between human and non-human, in such a way that it translates as it modifies the assemblage of us, world, human, non-human, culture, technology, and representation. Media, as one part of our mapping impulse mediations, is not a socially constructed set of binaries or dialectical relationships. Rather, it is an act(ion), a “shift from media as an empirical collection of artifacts and technologies to media as a perspective for understanding” that “allows us to reassert the crucial and highly dynamic role of mediation – social, aesthetic, technical and (not least) critical” back into the definition of media (Mitchell and Hansen 2010, xxi-xxii). This shift from media as artifact to media as mediation moves media geography away from studies focused on objects or content that communicates. As W.J.T. Mitchell and Mark Hansen (2010, -xxii) posit, “rather than determining our situation, we might better say that media are our situation.” Similarly, rather than media’s mapping impulse as a drive to chart the unknown, or define location and boundaries, the mapping impulse is an ontogenetic practice of positioning oneself in the world, a corporeal expression of placing and place-making. Cinema is uniquely equipped to express the ongoing mediation between self and environment. Cinema developed during the industrial revolution, a period that

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saw the development of a number of new technologies that produced new ways to mobilize modes of viewing and inhabiting space and place. Cinema is the ultimate realization of the application of perspectivalism and provides a subjective mapping of the world through pictures in motion, montage, and editing. THE CINEMATIC IMPULSE TO MEDIATE AND MAP THE WORLD Teresa Castro (2009, 10) used the phrase “mapping impulse” to reference cinema’s “particular way of seeing and looking at the world, a visual regime.” Castro argues that early cinematography was enveloped in a mapping impulse, one that was a visual and moving art of describing and which is seen through various cartographic shapes like panoramas, atlases, and aerial views. In so suggesting, Castro associates cinema with Alpers’s (1983) reference to the mapping impulse of Dutch painters who sought to paint “aspectively” by rendering that which is seen into the artists’ scene. Stephen Heath (1981) references a similar perspectival conversion in cinema where the act of narration transforms framed space into narrative space. This is the conversion of that which is seen (from a perspectival window) into the narrative scene in which the frame “is the point of conversion” (Heath 1981, 32). The mapping impulse of early cinema must be situated within a larger series of technological and cultural changes of Western society’s industrial revolution. Not since the Renaissance had such a massive reorganization of knowledge and social practice taken place. Where the Renaissance brought about visual practices of perspectivalism and projectionism, the industrial revolution took those practices and produced new communication technologies, modes of transportation, and architectural wonders that reshaped how we understood and experienced space and time. According to Giuliana Bruno (2002, 17), on the eve of cinema’s invention, a network of architectural forms produced a new spatio-visuality. Such venues as arcades, railways, department stores, the pavilions of exhibition halls, glasshouses, and winter gardens incarnated the new geography of modernity. They were all sites of transit. Mobility – a form of cinematics – was the essence of these new architectures.

Technologies provided tools to better map and mediate our representations of space but also propelled us through space and created new spaces and places for occupation. Cinema was one such technology that presented itself as a modern form of cartography, opening up new spaces and allowing for flanerie and a “‘modern gaze that wanders through space, fully open to women” (Bruno 1997, 10). The “modern” city and cinematics were grasped through movement and montage, which were essential elements to Benjamin’s Arcades Project. Cinema extended flânerie and opened the “world as picture” for exploration. In this volume, two chapters, one by Eva Kingsepp and another by Victor Aertsen, Agustin Gamir, Carlos Manuel, and Liliana Melgar, show how cinema opened the “world as picture” for exploration in very different ways. Kingsepp explores the documentary films from the WWII North African Campaign. She focuses in particular on the famous “Duel in the Desert,” the battles of El Alamein, and how these are situated within a mythical space that reflected European identity and Oriental-

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ism. For Europeans, North Africa was seen through these films as an empty space with little or no culture, a non-place in effect that acted as a location of transit or warfare. These documentaries, Kingsepp argues, show how documentary films act as a modern cartography through which we see how mediated places become saturated with meaning, myths, and cultural values. In contrast, Aertsen, Gamir, Manuel, and Melgar’s chapter highlights the spatial humanities’ increased interest in applying geographic information systems (GIS) to cinema. In their chapter, they explore the establishment and use of the Madrid Movie Map, an online GIS-based web application. The Madrid Movie Map includes two hundred and fifty movies, thousands of georeferenced movie scenes, and a vast digital humanities database that places movies of Madrid in a spatial context, allowing for online flânerie. The Madrid Movie Map highlights one example of the new developments in online mapping. With web 2.0, mapping has become a collaborative venture that early advocates hailed as the democratization of cartography, detractors decried as the loss of spatial thinking and that others, following critical reflection, deemed to be cartography’s (hierarchical) business as usual. Just as Walter Benjamin (1968, 236) expressed enthusiasm for cinema’s ability to “burst this prison-world asunder” and allow us to “calmly and adventurously go traveling,” the enthusiasm for user-oriented cartography is undeniable and challenges us to rethink cartographic practices and how bodies interact with Cartesian representations produced by the cartographic paradox. THE IMPULSE OF MEDIATING THE MAP Developments in mobile and web computing have not only increased the pace, flow, and interaction of media across space, but also the ubiquity, and thus the taken-for-grantedness of mapping. In their chapter, Gertrud Schaab and Christian Stern take us on a tour of the vibrant and diverse range of mobile mapping apps, their use, language, and economy. They note that mobile map apps are primarily used to provide navigation and orientation or to assist with spatially-aware media for searching and depicting location-based information. They further note that mobile map apps involve participatory sensing, heat mapping, and volunteered geographic information. The growth and usage of mapping applications have risen to dizzying proportions and because of this, Schaab and Stern also provide a cartographic critique of why user-centered designs matter. Since the mid-2000s, there has been a steady rise in spatial media on the Internet and mobile devices. This escalation follows closely upon the transition of the Internet to web 2.0, or when static content was increasingly replaced with dynamic media, user-generated content, and social media. While dependent on cartography, new spatial media has been driven by everyday users. At its best, new spatial media is a public enterprise that allows people to produce geographic information, engage with the map-making process, and produce counter hegemonies to authoritarian cartographies. The first decade of the new century found many exuberant supporters of this line of thought. Crampton and Krygier

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(2005) referred to these new possibilities as the un-disciplining of cartography, while Del Casino and Hanna (2006) called it the democratization of mapping. Barney Warf and Daniel Sui (2010, 200) declared that “neogeography has helped to foster an unprecedented democratization of geographic knowledge.” In the years following these declarations, however, writers questioned whether this development ought truly to be labeled “democratic.” Haklay (2013), highlighting the uneven access to spatial media and the Internet as well as variances in the skills and knowledge of their use, has described the democratization of mapping as a delusion. Haklay draws on Feenberg’s critical theory of technology to posit that the supposed democratization by neogeographers is based on an underlying assumption that technology is value free. This work highlights how media’s mapping impulse is caught up in hierarchies and hegemonies that position advanced technology users in a privileged class and uninformed users in a disempowered, laboring class. More and more, owing to the practices of the neogeographers of the Geoweb, media requires a geographical situatedness in which and for which media can take place. Here, spatial media relies on programming languages and APIs (application program interfaces) to construct geo-fencing, geo-tagging, and geo-coding and to produce applications and services that localize and individualize information to one’s liminal, transitory, and fleeting lived space. Consider, for example, the ways in which (geo)web 2.0 unites one’s virtual and physical presence (if such a distinction can be made) via services such as FourSquare and Snapchat, geotagged photos on Instagram, or Facebook check-ins that announce one’s whereabouts to friends and acquaintances. Web 2.0 fills the mapping impulse for the building of communities through the process of coming-to-the-world, demonstrated by Tobias Boos in this volume as he examines Siena, Italy’s online eco-museum. In this chapter, Tobias Boos shows how communities inhabit the geoweb, weaving together the material, technological, and social through a bricolage of histories and the practices of placing and remembrance. Web 2.0 can also fill a different mapping need, one that allows counter cultures to fight the spatial inequalities and the right to the city’s vacant properties in Germany. To this end, Gregor Arnold’s chapter examines how the crowdsourcing platform Leerstandsmelder.de serves as a collective tool for a social movement focused on the use of empty building spaces for public use. By mapping vacant buildings in German cities, Leerstandsmelder.de acts as a subversive form of urban development, enabling the public to question the hegemony behind the process of city land use and development. Neogeography and web 2.0 emphasize the democratization and mediation of maps, as well as the process (rather than finished product) of representational cartography. Using Twitter, Flickr, and TripAdvisor, Mengqian Yang and Sébastien Caquard (current volume) examine film-induced tourism that arose in response to the film Shawshank Redemption at the Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, Ohio. Their analysis shows how the different social media platforms may be more appropriate to examine phenomenon at different scales: While Flickr proves the most useful to understand the phenomenon locally, Trip Advisor is most telling at the regional scale and Twitter at the global scale. Zook and Poorthuis also look to social media

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but do so from a different perspective by examining the smartphone/social media phenomenon of the selfie, asking: What is the geography of the selfie? In their analysis of eight-million geotagged tweets, Zook and Poorthuis situate their results within the two different views provided by the cartographic paradox. Whereas the view from above (projectionism), or spatial analysis, helps us understand where selfies come from in the world, the view from below (perspectivalism) situates the selfie within specific socio-spatial contexts. These two papers highlight how the epistemological outcome of research on social media data is framed by the scale at which that data is analyzed. With geovisual technologies increasingly moving into augmented/mixed/hyper reality, our understanding of spatial relations between subjects/objects and map/ territory are more ethereal, challenging our cartographic anxiety in new and profound ways. Geospatial technologies are frequently credited with the rise of counter-mapping and maps 2.0, but they also underlie a specific kind of cartographic anxiety, one where the map precedes the territory. As Nora Newcombe, a Temple University psychologist who studies spatial cognition, observes, “GPS devices cause our navigational skills to atrophy, and there’s increasing evidence for it … the problem is that you don’t see an overview of the area, and where you are in relation to other things” (Stromberg 2015, 1). Greg Milner (2016, 113) posits that most deaths-by-GPS are due to uncritical acceptance of navigation instructions. He states, “something is happening to us…not only are we still getting lost, we may actually be losing a part of ourselves.” More and more, many individuals are letting smartphones do their spatial thinking for them. Spatial thinking, according to the National Research Council (2006), entails knowledge of space, representation, and reasoning. When geospatial technologies take on the task of spatial thinking, individuals become delocalized and often enter multiple technological and social spaces at the same time. These representational spaces or enhancements of space are not lived spaces, “at least not in the sense of ordinary or everyday experience of space in its relations to the body, but abstracted, alienated” (Doane 2009, 69). Fundamental to the abstraction and alienation of this new mapping impulse is the epistemological underpinnings of scale, its role in producing realism, and its effects on subject / object relationships. IN/DIFFERENCE OF SCALAR REPRESENTATIONS Due to the representational techniques of projectionist and perspectival scopic regimes, we have become acclimatized to the mediated projection of objects that are indifferently scaled. A human may appear 100 feet tall when projected on the side of a building by a projector but appear inches tall on a person’s cell phone. It is often noted that geographic information systems are scaleless because they no longer rely on the reference of a printed map (i.e., one inch on the printed map equals one mile on the ground). In a digital environment, we can zoom endlessly in and out with no scalar reference point except the legacy at which the data was captured and modeled. In a world of mediatization (Fast et al. 2018), the scaless-

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ness of geographic information’s mapping impulse pushes the boundaries of the optical unconscious (Benjamin 1968), bringing that which is on the edge of vision to the front, transforming the extraordinary into the ordinary and the ordinary into the obscene (Baudrillard 1988). Further, as the shock of seeing the extraordinary become ordinary (Benjamin 1968) is normalized, the relationship between subjects and objects becomes more and more dependent on visual technologies and our corporeal optical register. The problem with this, according to Jennifer Roberts (2016, 11), is that “we can judge the real size of objects through learned calculations of perspective and other perceptual cues, but we can never have a primary, visual experience of size.” Size, through the representational practice of scale embedded in perspectivalism and projectionism, is always an abstraction in which we can see and apprehend that there is something there. To understand size, however, we must stabilize the relationship between our subjective body and the scaled object through our haptical rather than optical register (Summers 2003, 317) (Figure 4).

Figure 4. Without a human to offer a scalar referent, a Saguaro cacti’s height it difficult to judge

Scalar representations as a system of coherence, of unity, relies on the logic of difference as separation. Difference as separation allows for the distinction between that which is present and that which is re-presented, between “existence (things) and writing (words)” (Doel 1993, 379). According to Doel (1993, 379), The presupposition of difference as separation ensures that everything takes place within REPRESENTATION. Representation is the space in which modern human geography unfolds; it is the assumption that everything is present to itself and that this identity can be re-presented through this difference from what is other (I=I=Not you).

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However, difference is not about separation, cutting, size, or scale and it is not responsible for shattering the unity of a scalar image produced through either projectionism and perspectivalism. Rather, difference grows; it is about movement, flow, and process – it is “a fractal of infinite dimension” (Doel 1993, 379). According to Henri Lefebvre (1991, 373), “the formal theory of difference opens of itself onto the unknown and the ill-understood: onto rhythms, onto circulations of energy onto the life of the body.” In contrast to difference as separation, difference as multiplicity deconstructs representation. Deconstruction is not about dismantling or destruction, rather, “deconstruction of representation produces an infinitely hollow and infinitely flat SIGNSPONGE: it functions, but there is nothing to interpret or explain” (Doel 1993, 379). With difference as multiplicity “scale is an unstable ontogenetic representational practice in that it defines its existence by referencing itself in an endless system of deferral, a mise en abyme” (Lukinbeal 2010, 13). While scale provides clarity and unity to representations, it only works by ridding itself of its own alterity: that difference is separation and not multiplicity. According to Heath (1981, 115), in its classical form in our ‘advanced societies,’ representation is the achievement and operation of systems of coherence, of unity, which make up for the process of their structuration with strategies of completion that mask the heterogeneity – movement, difference, contradiction, fading – that effectively serve to contain, to figure out.

Scale provides a practical referent to aid the transcription of three-dimensional forms into two-dimensional representations. This transcription from three dimensions to two is stabilized and given coherence by the frame. Two-dimensional representational space is a container (the frame) within which geometry (the skin of scale) covers over the image and keeps the “other,” non-framed (terra incognitae) meanings at bay. The frame generates and signifies the representational field. It is through framing that we get the metaphor of perspectival representation as a “window on the world” (cf. Alberti De pictura 1.19, 1435). The frame acts to unify and naturalize scalar representational space within the mise en scène as well as exclude that which is outside the frame, the extra-diegetic. The framed space invites an indexical understanding as if there were something simply out there, something just outside our window to view. The process of framing acts to neutralize lived space within the framed view; it strips space of social meaning. In the words of Heath (1981, 29) it is, a real utopianism at work, a construction of a code – in every sense of vision – projected onto a reality to be gained in all its hoped-for clarity much more than onto some naturally given reality … a practical representation of the world which in time appears so natural as to offer its real representation, the immediate translation of reality in itself.

Though projectionism does not require a frame to produce the transcription from three-dimensions to two, projectionism is still framed by either the study area under analysis or the spatial expanse selected for display. Cartography is a science of reduction, an ongoing iteration of the relationship between the need to neutralize the meaning of a space at a particular scale and the need to describe the space for the purpose of focusing the viewer’s attention on a particular subject matter and/or

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rhetoric. Generalization and abstraction of neutralized space are required to epistemologically bind the cartographic thematic overlay to the reference layer. Spatial extent and the cartographic thematic overlay naturalize the representational space. Scalar representations can be perceived as either presenting unified, coherent information, or as presenting fragmented, contradictory, and fabricated information. Fragmentation occurs when a scalar representation breaks the analogous relationship between the real and the re-presentation, either when an image seems to be purely an ontological representation of something real and fails or when the cultural message placed within the image stands out as unreal. A representation can be “fixed” to amend the analogous contradiction – a break in mimesis – through editing, bricolage, or montage. Editing, bricolage, and montage are means by which the unrealism of the representation is rectified through cuts and/or sutures. These processes can also be a form of resistance: a representational means to expose the alterity of the naturalization or hegemony embedded within the unseen structure of perspectival and projection-based representations. However, the ability to fix or correct a fractured representation is subsumed under the logic of difference as separation. With difference as multiplicity, there is nothing to correct, scale is infinitely hollow and filled with contradictory meanings (Lukinbeal 2016). Scalar representational space is thus both full of social, historical, and geographical meaning as well as removed from that meaning and context. Scale has the perfect alibi for its implication in social power relations: It was never there despite always underlying the meaning of there. Rendering scalar representations into a Cartesian plane requires an abstraction of space so that objects become points, lines, areas, surfaces, volumes, and attributions for these entities along with quantified valuation of those entities. Scale permits the transcription of objects into a representational matrix where objects are transformed from substance to abstraction, the manifestation of mimesis onto representation – scale is transmogrified from a cultural practice to an ontological being. The problematic issue of abstracting geometric representations and embracing them as “true” practices of realism, or what is considered “real,” was central to Charles Louis de Saulces de Freycinet’s treatise La Question d’Égypte (1905). De Freycinet (1905, cited in Grigsby 2003, 3), a four-time Prime Minister of France’s Third Republic and an elected member of the Academy of Science in 1890, argued that the, first abstraction by geometry consists therefore of retiring from the body its own material and leaving only the place it occupies in space… This abstraction seems to us simple because we have been habituated to it… But it is the boldest [abstraction] one can make, and it requires a very great effort of imagination. We need to withdraw from a body that which constitutes it, that by which it exists, and speculate on a sort of phantom.

De Freycinet (1905) goes on to explain that, the body being thus led to a state of simple volume or geometric form, we envision its exterior contour, the ideal envelope which contains the volume, and we give the name of surface to this infinitely thin skin, or better to this appearance of skin under which it seems to us that the body still subsists. This is not at all material, it is... a ‘being of reason.’ It is the separation between

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Here, de Freycinet points out how geometric representations work to produce an abstracted space in which bodies are turned into entities with skins enveloping hollowed volumetric shapes. In effect, de Freycinet inverts Euclid’s procedure of explaining geometry by starting with the idea that the point is self-evident. Rather than starting from an Archimedean point, de Freycinet takes us straight into the horror vucui, the ghostly, massless, hollowed out world of Cartesian space, the world of cartographic anxiety. As Darcy Grigsby (2003, 5) notes, “once you have slipped into the massless, timeless space of geometry, mass and time are no longer an issue.” CONCLUSION With this introduction, we have sought to begin the conversation about media’s mapping impulse by highlighting a few central themes. Cartographic reasoning is central to Western thought and this axis mundi provides a foundational belief that there exists an Archimedean point from which we can survey the objective, known world and vanquish the horror vacui. This horror vacui, an underlying anxiety of cartographic reason, persists and has perhaps already flowered into a full-scale obsessional neurosis that works to unbind the relationship of map and territory and unhinge the consistency of the territory itself. A second theme discussed here is the cartographic paradox, which points to the two geometric means by which Cartesian reasoning has been able to produce horizontal and vertical realism through representations and endow them with autonomous, ontological status. Through projectionism and perspectivalism, technologies of the visual were culturally codified, imposing on the world a picture and enabling the subjects and objects therein to be capitalized upon for possession and control. Whereas projectionism codified the objective view from above, perspectivalism provided a ground-level, subjective view from below. Both were fraught with naturalization tendencies, however, and empowered a masculine gendered logic. The industrial revolution brought about new technologies of the visual that allowed for media’s mapping impulse to change our relations between space, time, and subjectivity. Of these new technologies, it was perhaps cinema – with its peripatetic gaze and subjective point of view – that brought forth claims of a new modern cartography, albeit one from a chorographic, perspectival view. With the rise of the digital revolution and web 2.0, we are witnessing a new mapping impulse, one that seeks to democratize cartography and bring about new socio-spatial relations but perhaps at the cost of our own spatial cognitive capacities. The new mapping impulse of the geospatial and digital revolution further challenges our corporeal association of scale. Now more than ever, the slippery distinctions between subjects/object, real/representation, map/territory become blurred with virtual realities, the optical unconscious, and the obscenity of the visual. James Clifford (1986, 22) has pointed out that “there is no longer any place of overview

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(mountaintop) from which to map human ways of life, no Archimedean point from which to represent the world.” However, media’s mapping impulse grows stronger in the digital age with the desire to flesh out the blank spaces on our maps. Further, this desire seeks to merge the view from above with the view from below through the use of geospatial technologies. Media’s mapping impulse may also be extended to the vital process of bodies in space and the cognitive mapping of space by humans. Navigating the cultural, urban, and physical landscape has become more complex, and humans have developed and imposed new modes of communicating about space and place. The underlying cognitive process of finding our way or situating our self in the world remains similar, though, even if mediated differently by different people in time and space. Media can be conceived singularly as an artifact of mass communication, or in its plural as a medium, or mediational membrane through which interactions occur. Regardless of whether conceived in the singular or plural, if media are our situation, then mapping is our impulse. REFERENCES Alpers, S. (1983): The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. Chicago. Avezzù, G. (2016): Interview with Georgio Avezzù at the Media Mapping Impulse Symposium. Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Avezzù, G., T. Castro and G. Fidotta (2018): The Exact Shape of the World? Media and Mapping. NECSUS, January 28, 2019. https://necsus-ejms.org/the-exact-shape-of-the-world-media-andmapping/ (accessed March 23, 2019). Baudrillard, J. (1988): The Ecstasy of Communication. New York. Benjamin, W. (1968): Illuminations. New York. Bernstein, R. (1983): Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics and Praxis. Oxford. Bruno, G. (1997): Site-seeing: Architecture and the Moving Image. Wide Angle 19 (4), 8–24. Bruno, G. (2002): The Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. New York. Castro, T. (2009): Cinema’s Mapping Impulse: Questioning Visual Culture. The Cartographic Journal 46 (1), 9–5. Castro, T. (2016): Interview with Teresa Castro at the Media Mapping Impulse Symposium. Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Clifford, J. (1986): Introduction: Partial Truths. J. Clifford and G. Marcus (Eds.): Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley, 1–26. Conley, T. (1996): The Self-Made Map. Minneapolis. Conley, T. (2016): Interview with Tom Conley at the Media Mapping Impulse Symposium. Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. Crampton, J. and J. Krygier (2005): An Introduction to Critical Cartography. ACME: An E-Journal for Critical Geographies 4 (1), 11–33. Freycinet, C. de (1905): La Question d’Egypte. Paris. Descartes, R. (1993 [1641]): Meditations on First Philosophy. Cambridge, MA. Debord, G.-E. (1955): Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography. Les Levres Nues 6. http:// library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/2 (accessed March 23, 2019). Del Casino, V. and S. Hanna (2006): Beyond the ‘binaries’: A Methodological intervention for interrogating maps as representational practices. ACME: The E-Journal of Critical Geographies 4 (1), 34–56.

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Doane, M. (2009): Scale and the Negotiation of ‘Real’ and ‘Unreal’ Space in Cinema. L. Nagib and C. Mello (Eds.): Realism and the Audiovisual Media. New York, 63–81. Doel, M. (1993): Proverbs for Paranoids: Writing Geography on Hollowed Grounds. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 18, 377–394. Edgerton, S. (1975): The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective. New York. Edwards, J. (2006): Writing, Geometry and Space in Seventeenth-Century England and America: Circles in the Sand. New York. Fast, K., A. Jansson, J. Lindell, L. R. Bengtsson and M. Tesfahuney (2018): Introduction to Geomedia Studies. K. Fast, A. Jansson, J. Lindell, L. R. Bengtsson and M. Tesfahuney (Eds.): Geomedia Studies: Spaces and Mobilities in Mediatized Worlds. New York, 1–17. Gregory, D. (1994): Geographical Imaginations. Cambridge, MA. Grigsby, D. (2003): Geometry/Labor = Volume/Mass? October 106, 3–34. Haklay, M. (2013): Neogeography and the Delusion of Democratisation. Environment and Planning A 45 (1), 55–69. Harley, J. B. (1987): The Map and the Development of the History of Cartography. J. B. Harley and D. Woodward (Eds.): The History of Cartography Vol. I, Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean. Chicago, 1–42. Harley, J. B. (1989): Deconstructing the Map. Cartographica 26 (2), 1–20. Harvey, D. (1989): The Conditions of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford. Heath, S. (1981): Questions of Cinema. Bloomington. Irigaray, L. (1985): Speculum of the Other Woman. New York. Krishna, S. (1994): Cartographic anxiety: mapping the body politic in India. Alternatives 19 (4), 507–521. Lefebvre, H. (1991): The Production of Space. Cambridge. Leszczynski, A. (2014) On the Neo in Neogeography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104 (1), 60–79. Lukinbeal, C. (2005): Cinematic Landscapes. Journal of Cultural Geography 21 (1), 3–22. Lukinbeal, C. (2006): Runaway Hollywood: Cold Mountain, Romania. Erdkunde 60 (4), 337–345. Lukinbeal, C. (2010): Mobilizing the Cartographic Paradox: Tracing the Aspect of Cartography and Prospect of Cinema. Digital Thematic Education 11 (2), 1–32. Lukinbeal, C. (2012): On location filming in San Diego County from 1985–2005: How a cinematic landscape is formed through incorporative tasks and represented through mapped inscriptions. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 102 (1), 171–90. Lukinbeal, C. (2016): Scale and its Histories. Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers 78, 1–13. Lukinbeal, C. and L. Sharp (2014): Living Montage: A Gastronomy of the Eye. You Are Here: The Journal of Creative Geography 17, 96–98. Lyotard, J.-F. (2004): Libidinal Economy. London. Milner, G. (2016): PinPoint: How GPS is Changing Technology, Culture, and our Minds. New York. Mitchell, W. J. T. and M. Hansen (Eds.) (2010): Critical Terms for Media Studies. Chicago. National Research Council (2006): Learning to Think Spatially. Washington D.C. Painter, J. (2008): Cartographic Anxiety and the Search for Regionality. Environment and Planning A 40, 342–361. Pickles, J. (2004): A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping and the Geo-coded World. London. Roberts, J. (2016): Introduction: Seeing Scale. J. Roberts (Ed.): Scale. Chicago, 10–24. Rose, G. (1995): Distance, Surface, Elsewhere: A Feminist Critique of the Space of Phallocentric Self/Knowledge. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 13, 761–781. Sharp, L. (2018): But how do you show that in a film? Absence, Cartographic Anxiety, and Geographic Realism through the Landscapes of Akira Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala. Geohumanities 4, 80–96.

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Stromberg, J. (2015): Is GPS ruining our ability to navigate for ourselves? https://www.vox. com/2015/9/2/9242049/gps-maps-navigation (accessed January 8, 2019). Summers, D. (2003): Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism. London. Van Duzer, C. (2012): Hic Sunt Dracones: The Geography and Cartography of Monsters. A. Mittman and P. Dendle (Eds): The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous. London, 387–435. Wood, D. and J. Fels (2008): The Nature of Maps: Cartographic Constructions of the Natural World. Cartographica 43 (3), 189–202.

THE VIEW FROM HERE

MAPPING’S COMPLICATED MEDIA IMPULSE Denis Wood

The use of the word “media” as a catchall for wide varieties of communication, especially in their popular print, broadcast, and digital forms, is about as old as they are, so maybe dating to the first quarter of the twentieth century. At that time, the word was generally used in the phrase mass media, originally to refer to newspapers but, after World War II, to radio and magazines, to television. Its later extension, by academics, to refer to almost any form of communication doesn’t date back much farther than the last quarter of the twentieth century, so the idea that “cartography is one of the oldest forms of media” is radically anachronistic, though very much in tune with the idea of media’s mapping impulse, which is anything but. Of course, before there was a mapping impulse in media, there was an impulse in mapping toward distribution, toward media; and while this has a long and interesting history, from the very beginning suppression had a part in it. As we know them today, maps are about five hundred years old. Of course, there were all sorts of earlier maplike things, even some earlier maps; but there weren’t very many of them – maybe one a year anywhere on the globe for the preceding couple of thousand years – and consequently there was no development of any sort of mapmaking tradition. Not that the human ability to make maps is that recent: that’s been with us since we’ve been human, but for millennia it was rarely exercised. I mean, what was the point? The world was small. It was very well known. And as people grew up they learned it as their parents had; they exchanged spatial information orally or used their hands or scratched it in the sand. There was nearly zero call for making maps which, as we have used the word for the past four or five hundred years, has referred to a more or less permanent, more or less graphic artifact supporting the descriptive functions in human discourse that link territory to other things, advancing in this way the interests of those making (or controlling the making) of the maps. Because the evolution of maps depends on the emergence of larger, more complicated societies, maps of our kind have comparatively shallow roots in human history; and in fact, almost all the maps ever made have been made during the past hundred years, the vast majority in the past few decades. So many maps are made today, and they are reproduced in such numbers, that no one any longer has any idea how many. The maps printed annually by no more than the world’s newspapers easily number in the billions. All exhibit a fluorescent media impulse. When societies in earlier periods did become more complicated, maps sometimes were called for. For the most part, these had no or extremely limited media impulse – property maps in Babylon for instance, or property maps in medieval Japan – while maps with any sort of media impulse – the Forma Urbis Romae, for

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example – were rare to the point of uniqueness. And this was more or less the state of affairs when, more or less in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, maps began their maturation pretty much everywhere in the world. This parallels, of course, the emergence of the early modern state, in whose service the mutually supportive and simultaneously emergent maps played increasingly important, and increasingly strategic roles. While the fact is that at this time the overwhelming majority of maps were made – usually in single copies – to support border control, for water management, for treaty negotiations, and for property control, none of which had particularly well-developed media impulses, maps were also made with the opposite impulse, that is, under the pall of secrecy. These maps concerned themselves with military intelligence, with the planning of battles, with the defensive and offensive postures of armies, with fortifications, and indeed with anything else that state officials could construe as valuable, often extending to maps of cities and territories. Often, maps were drafted in single copies for people with “a need to know,” and this at the very time that the printing press made them easy to spread around. Given that this was the same time that monopoly capitalism was on the rise, maps of routes, maps of trading partners, maps of colonies too were commonly for “eyes only.” For example, the maps and sketches made during Drake’s circumnavigation of the globe were regarded as state secrets, while a Portuguese charter of 1504 banned the making of globes and it limited the mapping of the African coast to that north of the Congo; Dutch practice was similar; the Hudson Bay Company sealed its map archive to all outsiders; and so forth and so on. Among other impulses pushing states to relax this control – never fully given up, operating around the world as I speak – were the absolutely positive benefits to be gained from the widest possible circulation of routes, claims, colonies, borders. For example, as a bulwark against encroachments, a Qing emperor of China published an atlas that laid out what China was to the rest of the world; just as British maps of its North American territories were deployed to help readers on both sides of the Atlantic understand who was in charge. Indeed, as artifacts that constructed the state, that literally helped to bring the state into being, maps were endowed with their strongest media impulse: they were literally pulsed out into the world to enable citizens and aliens alike to participate in their graphic performance of statehood. Territorial structures of other sizes understood this equally well, and so the media impulse of mapping became widespread, embracing estates, towns, cities, counties, provinces, states, nations, and national alliances, even being used as a form of advertisement. Today, the impulse has diffused throughout the endlessly diffusing world of mapping without, however, diminishing the countervailing demand for secrecy one iota. Perhaps not surprisingly, the greatest practitioner of this sort of secrecy was the world’s greatest empire, an improbable amalgamation of much of central and northern Europe, the Iberian Peninsula, the entire New World, and the Philippines, with claims in the East Indies, along the Indian and African literols, and even, if only in mind … on China. From 1519 on, Charles V was the Holy Roman Emperor, which is to say of Austria and Germany; ruler of the Spanish Empire with its New World

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and other possessions; of the Netherlands; of southern Italy; of Sicily; and of Sardinia. When his son, Phillip II became the King of Portugal, he took over the widespread Portuguese territories as well, including Brazil. Though by then his father had given up his title to the Holy Roman Empire, the phrase, “the empire on which the sun never sets,” was used with respect to the swaths of territory over which Phillip held claim. That is, from 1516, when Charles assumed the thrones of Castile and Aragon until the death of his son in 1598, a big piece of the world was under the ultimate control of a single man for whom the ultimate source of power was the gold, and then the silver that flowed from his mines in Mexico and Peru. Though Phillip regarded all this as his personal property he actually had at best nominal hegemony over his myriad ethnic groups, nationalities, and confessions, and in the end what held the Spanish Empire together was its fabulous wealth, wealth continuously being ferried to Spain across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans in fleets of galleons. With respect to these fleets, to these fleets and the territories whose wealth was being plundered, Charles and Phillip took a defensive posture, one that both censored and prohibited the circulation of maps, descriptions, and historical accounts. Maria Portuando says: The rationale behind the secrecy policy was very straightforward. If documents that revealed the geodesic coordinates, geographic features, coastal outlines, hydrography, and natural resources of the New World were produced and circulated publically, these, in the hands of enemies, could be used to reach the New World and inflict harm on the crown’s patrimony and the people the state had the obligation to protect. Thus this type of knowledge was considered to have strategic, defensive, and monetary value and needed to be safeguarded from foreign and internal enemies alike. (Portuando 2009, 7)

In doing this, the Spaniards were following in the footsteps of the Portuguese who had prohibited the circulation of nautical charts, rutters, and other descriptive material about their discoveries as early as 1481. By 1503, the Spaniards had set up the Casa de la Contratación – the House of Trade – which had full jurisdiction over colonization, of which an essential part was navigation, including rutters and sea charts. All of this was put under the control of the Council of the Indies following its establishment in 1523, above which the crown (with its bureaucracy) stood alone For most of the sixteenth century, then, the way things worked was as follows. The Casa de la Contratación maintained a secret map and later maps, accompanied by a book collecting pilot statements, jointly known as the Padrón Real (later, the Padrón General). One copy of the Padrón was kept in a locked case in Seville (where the Casa was located) while a second was maintained at the Council of the Indies with the royal court. This official master map was the template for every chart carried in Spanish ships throughout the sixteenth century. We have records of twelve major revisions to this master map, though the map was made on parchment to permit, and indeed to encourage continuous refreshment (Sandman 2007, 1142). A ship returning from a voyage would present its chart and rutter at the Casa de la Contratación from which everything not in the original material would be extracted and applied to the Padrón Real, which in this way was regularly updated; though when more wholesale revisions were required the whole would be scrapped and a

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new Padrón created. Typically, this happened in the midst of heated debate, and indeed it’s only from the records of these meetings that we have any of the information we have about the Padrón. Here’s how secret these padrones were: none have survived. The only reason we have any idea what they were like is because decorative versions were made to be given by the king as royal gifts (Padrón 2011). All ship pilots were obligated to be licensed, and as part of the process of licensure, pilots had to swear not to give, sell, or lend their charts to foreigners (Sandman 2007, 1104). The chart makers responsible for copying the Padrón Real had likewise to be licensed, and furthermore, their product had to be inspected and approved as well. Although rules and regulations varied across the length of the two reigns, in general getting increasingly tighter, the cosmographer in charge of the Padrón and the pilot major both had to inspect the charts at the pilots’ licensing exams; they had to inspect them before each voyage; and, before allowing a ship to sail, a port inspector had to certify that the earlier inspections had actually taken place. The journey taken by one of these charts was, therefore, roundtrip: copied from the Padrón Real, carefully inspected before sailing, and then at the journey’s end returned to the Casa de la Contratación where, after being milked, it was often destroyed. How many of these charts have survived? Again, none: they too were kept that close. An interesting point is that, while these charts evidently had no media impulse at all, their mere existence points to the media impulse behind the Padrón Real itself which was, after all, maintained to be copied, literally hundreds of times as the century wore on. Perhaps we should think about the Padrón as a secret shared. When all this came to end with the death of Phillip II – though by then the secrecy had been fraying for years – it not only came to an end, it reversed itself. Portuondo says that: Under Phillip II, the value of geographical knowledge lay in how it could provide an intelligence advantage in the case of war or defense, or a way of protecting economic assets by keeping them “hidden” from covetous enemies. For Phillip III, geographical knowledge was most valuable if it could be deployed, albeit properly contextualized, to create a public image of Spanish domination and prestige. Demonstrating this knowledge to the public worked to create the perception that Spain, because it knew its territories so well, controlled them effectively. (Portuondo 2009, 260)

thereby exhibiting the positive benefits to be gained from the widest possible circulation of routes, claims, colonies, and borders. But the reign of Phillip II produced a plethora of secret maps other than those of his colonies or those enabling the trans-oceanic movement of silver. For example, there was the planning and implementation of his invasion of England, which required maps and guidance for no fewer than 130 vessels, guidance which, given the paucity of experienced pilots, meant detailed descriptions (perhaps two of these maps have survived (perhaps)). And Phillip planned his wars on land with the same cartographic care. One of these concerned Phillip’s commissioning in 1558 of Jacob van Deventer to measure and draw the towns of the Low Countries, together with nearby villages, rivers, roads, and defenses, and “to arrange all in one book that

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shall contain a map of each province followed by a plan of each town in particular,” as the commission put it (Koeman and van Egmond 2007, 1272). These images weren’t published for three hundred years. Another effort involved the movement of 10,000 troops from Phillip’s garrisons in the north of Italy to the Low Countries – then in revolt – along a route through neutral territory that became known as the Spanish Road. This army was led by the Duke of Alba who, in addition to a new map of Franche-Comté – whose publication he then forbade for twelve years – commissioned two maps (Figure 1) which, in Geoffrey Parker’s words: … reveal everything that an army on the march needed to know: the route it should follow, the bridges available, the impassable obstacles (rivers and forests), the alternative itineraries, and the position of the nearest towns. The maps are highly selective and schematic; the anonymous cartographer omitting everything irrelevant to the army’s need. (Parker 1972, 73)

None of these maps, of course, was ever published, or at least not until the late twentieth century.

Figure 1: Map of Franche-Comté, showing the sort of things an army on the march would need to know, prepared for the Duke of Alba in 1573: lacking any whiff of media impulse

Nor was Spain alone in making secret maps for military purposes. Henry VIII’s break with Rome over his divorce from Catherine of Aragon led to a destabilizing break with Charles V and with Francis I of France. This, in turn, led Henry to a sudden interest in the defenses of England, and so to a sudden commissioning of maps of his coasts. These were followed by a profusion of plats made by military engineers who, sent as spies, produced maps of the French and Dutch coasts. Few

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of this increasing multitude of maps have survived and none were published until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These maps were made to be used – some were little more than sketches – and their preservation was never a priority. They had absolutely no media impulse. Neither did most of the maps produced under Henry’s heir, Edward VI, or that of Edward’s half-sister, Mary, though those that emerged under her half-sister, Elizabeth, while including plenty of secret maps, were more or less well preserved; and very many displayed a florid media impulse, especially given the map-obsession of her principal minister, William Cecil (Lord Burghley), though the annotations Burghley made on his maps, many concerned with defense, had no media impulse at all (Figure 2). Nor did the maps made in France under Henry IV by Jacques Fougeu in his role as lodging-master. Fougeu made hundreds of maps, none very elegant, for as David Buisseret says: … they were basically field notes, designed to tell lodging-masters how many hearths they could find in the villages along a given line of march. But these scrappy-looking little maps together form an astonishing compendium of information about France’s towns and villages around 1600. Take, for instance, Fougeu’s map of the mouth of the River Sonne [(Figure 3)]. It has a roughly correct outline of the river and coast, and also marks, in about their correct position, over one hundred towns and villages. The only readily available contemporary printed map, in the Theatrum of Ortelius, marks just twelve towns in the same area … The king thus possessed a remarkable source of information. But it remained secret. (Buisseret 1992, 109111)

Need I add that none of these maps was ever published, or not at least until the later twentieth century: their media impulse was less than zero.

Figure 2: Sketch map, with genealogical table, made of the Bristol Channel by William Cecil, Lord Burghley, around 1590: no media impulse whatsoever

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Figure 3: Map of the mouth of the River Somme made by Jacques Fougeu: obviously without media impulse

But then war has always been the most fertile ground for the propagation of maps with severely limited and tightly chained media impulses; over the past four hundred years, these were produced with ever-increasing abundance and in ever-increasing frequency. Militaries evolved over this period, of course, and drastically, but they never ceased needing the most up-to-the-minute knowledge they could develop about the world around them; and as colonization became an ever more present reality, and as wars moved to increasingly larger stages, more and more often militaries found themselves needing maps of the entire world, maps with a degree of detail, of detail and accuracy, that civilian maps could only dream about. Naturally enough these maps, along with the mapping projects that produced them, had to be cloaked in the greatest secrecy. The most recent episode of secret military mapping – that has been reasonably declassified – was that carried out by the US and the Soviets during the Cold War, which ran from, say, 1947 to 1991. The two main superpowers competed for domination, and with their development of atomic and then hydrogen weapons, the need to know what was going on inside the Soviet Union and China became as acute for the US, as knowing what was going on in the US became acute for the Soviets. “Ordinary” spying provided only so much help, while overflights with existing aircraft were too easy to detect. Though Lockheed had developed the U-2, a singlejet-engine, ultra-high altitude reconnaissance aircraft, for the CIA as early as the mid-1950s, Soviet radar still proved capable of tracking its initial overflight in 1956. So when four years later the Soviets shot the aircraft down, the US launched its first successful reconnaissance satellite (part of a program actually begun in 1958), and this first Corona mission provided far more photo coverage of the Soviet Union than all the U-2 flights taken together. This was a return-film satellite, that is, a satellite that jettisoned its film canister for mid-air recovery, and the film provided very high-resolution imagery: By 1963 the system had attained a resolution of 3

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meters, which increased to one-and-a-half meters in 1967 (Ruffner 1995). This top-secret program, declassified only in 1995, achieved, among others, the world’s first photo reconnaissance satellite; the first recovery of a vehicle returning from space; and the first mapping of the earth from space (a total of 520 million square miles of it!). Commercial satellite imagery, not available until 1972, when Landsat was first launched, had a resolution of only 80 meters, which over its long history gradually increased to an average resolution of 30 meters (though under special conditions this could be increased to 15 meters). Today, it’s assumed that military sensors can achieve resolutions up to 10 cm. Nobody knows, of course. It’s totally secret. I probably shouldn’t have to say, but the Soviets had a perfectly parallel development and deployment of reconnaissance satellites, its Zenit series, which flew from 1961 to 1994. These too used return capsule systems, though the Soviets returned the cameras along with the film. Apparently, these had comparable degrees of resolution as well. It’s assumed that they contributed to the extraordinary topographic maps the Soviets produced of much of the world, including the US. These had a richness of detail that exceeded any potential source material, things like “the precise width of roads, the load-bearing capacity of bridges, and the types of factories” (Miller 2015), although much of this would have been available only to eyes on the ground. The maps were surrounded by the usual fences of security, signatures, returns. “Even if it gets destroyed, you need to bring the pieces back,” Miller quotes a former Soviet soldier saying. There were maps inaccessible to ordinary soldiers too, as they yet remain to us. Again: no media impulse at all. The fact is, despite the implicit media impulse au fond in the map’s being a discourse function – an impulse implicit in every instance of military mapping – maps actually have no inherent drive to be sown broadcast on the wind. To be sure, they are a communication device, but in the end, there really is a difference between communication and media, a difference residing in media’s compulsion to be broadcast and the mere potential for broadcast residing latent in communication. It’s that between the cooing of lovers nestled in each other’s arms and the embracing lovers emblazoned on the billboard advertising the next cinematic blockbuster. Maps can rise to that level of notoriety – I mean The Power of Maps poster was plastered on the sides of 5th Avenue buses during the map show’s run in New York – but they can also be as reticent as … the grave. REFERENCES Buisseret, D. (1992): Monarchs, Ministers, and Maps in France before the Accession of Louis XIV. D. Buisseret (Ed.): Monarchs, Ministers, and Maps: The Emergence of Cartography as a Tool of Government in Early Modern Europe. Chicago, 99–123. Koeman, C. and M. Egmond (2007): Surveying and Official Mapping in the Low Countries, 1500– ca. 1670. D. Woodward (Ed.): The History of Cartography Volume Three, Cartography in the European Renaissance, Part 2. Chicago, 1242–1295. Miller, G. (2015): Inside the Secret World of Russia’s Cold War Mapmakers. Wired, July, 2015. http://www.wired.com/2015/07/secret-cold-war-maps/ (accessed April 20, 2016).

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Padrón, R. (2011): Charting Shores. J. Dym and K. Offen (Eds.): Mapping Latin America: A Cartographic Reader. Chicago, 33–37. Parker, G. (1972): The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road, 1567–1659: The Logistics of Spanish Victory and Defeat in the Low Countries’ Wars. Cambridge. Portuondo, M. (2009): Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World. Chicago. Ruffner, K. (1995): Corona: America’s First Satellite Program, Center for the Study of Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency. Washington, D.C. Sandman, A. (2007): Spanish Nautical Cartography in the Renaissance. D. Woodward (Ed.): The History of Cartography Volume Three, Cartography in the European Renaissance, Part I. Chicago, 1095–1142.

THE SWAMP OF SIGNS Marcus A. Doel

We return to the swamp of spots. (Guattari 2015, 179)

Figure 1: S20 © Emma McNally. Graphite on paper. Reproduced by permission of the artist, Emma McNally

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Our theme – Media’s Mapping Impulse – lends itself to a consideration of how various media, such as photography, film, and television, have been intimately concerned with mapping and suffused with desire, and how these ‘media forms’ and ‘mapping impulses’ have co-evolved over time and space, with all kinds of often interesting, unexpected, and revolutionary ramifications. For there are obviously innumerable historical geographies of media mappings – just think, for example, of the incredibly rich and varied historical geographies of cartography and ‘psychogeography,’ or the deep-seated ‘geopolitical unconscious’ that animates so much of Hollywood cinema and other so-called ‘national cinemas,’ or even the lurid and ludic virtual worlds that are algorithmically conjured up by the combined forces of the civilian and military computer-gaming industries, from Spacewar! to America’s Army (e.g. Harmon 2004; Harmon and Clemans 2009; Jameson 1992; Mead 2013). In this chapter I want to consider what many may regard as a blast from the past: the oldfangled medium of language, and the mapping impulses that traverse it, especially the lines and surfaces by way of which it is ‘articulated,’ so to speak – lines and surfaces that are precariously cast over a ‘swamp of spots,’ as Félix Guattari (2015, 179) so aptly put it; lines and surfaces that force the swamp of spots to yield sense. Now, despite the recent ‘algal bloom’ of ‘alternative facts’ and ‘fake news’ in the once reputedly languid ‘post-political’ lagoon of transatlantic social and political ecology (Guattari 2000), my concern is not so much to dredge the swamp for sense (Derrida 1986), or even to drain it of sense (Baudrillard 1990), but to ply the swamp once more (Doel 1994). Traversed by desire, media such as language are there to be plied: bent, twisted, and folded (double); molded, shaped, and worked over; applied, wielded, and routed; handled, traded, and exchanged. My concern, then, is with the articulation of the spots, lines, and surfaces that compose language – with the jointing and pliability of language; with language as a ‘media player,’ a ‘media splayer,’ and a ‘media plyer’ – in every sense of the term (merchant, trader, navigator, solicitor, cabby, sailor, etc.). Here as elsewhere, I am invariably snared by the criss-crossing, splicing, and folding of space and place – splace. For when all is said and done, the customary ‘plying place’ for a geographer is the ‘drift-work’ and the ‘step-not’ – splacing (Doel 1999, 2014; Derrida and Malabou 2004; Lyotard 1984)1. My concern, then, is with the drift of language; with language as a media drift, a medium of drift, and a medium adrift – its splacing, its pliability, and especially its flotation. Hold on to this word, if you can: flotation. Now, suffice to say that even before the so-called ‘linguistic turn’ caught so many people’s attention in the closing decades of the twentieth century, the medium of language was well-trodden terrain by all manner of linguists, semioticians, philosophers, psychoanalysts, and anthropologists, amongst others. In the wake of this turn, however, which at one point was so all-encompassing that it appeared to be a veritable ‘prison-house of language’ (Jameson 1975) from which all the exits were blocked, the medium of language has been traversed and trampled by all and sundry, who have left practically no stone unturned and no crevice unexplored in 1

Plying place: a place where a porter, cab, boat, or suchlike stands for hire.

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the process. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the medium of language has been thoroughly worked over to the point of exhaustion. Indeed, perhaps the time has come to launch a restoration project to re-enrich the spent medium of language, enabling the more or less extinct flora and fauna of meaning, reference, and sense to flourish once more. However, it is precisely the despoiled landscape of language that I wish to traverse afresh, particularly its vast toxic swamps, where all reference, meaning, and sense appear to sink without trace into the semiotic ooze that gurgles away on its pockmarked surfaces. For my own peregrination into the more or less spent medium of language, I will be following in the footsteps of many others, especially those loosely dubbed structuralists and poststructuralists (Dosse 1997a; 1997b; 1999), and in those of Ferdinand de Saussure, Jacques Lacan, and Félix Guattari in particular. Although well trodden and all but exhausted, language is, however, a notoriously treacherous terrain: lethal, in fact – and not simply because the landscape has been swept clean of its valuable resources and left in a state that is liable to collapse. One of the medium’s most perilous features is certainly worth highlighting from the outset. Language cannot be isolated, separated out, and set off at a comfortable distance for contemplation, representation, and interrogation. Language is an immersive medium that has neither outside nor inside, just a play of surfaces upon which the phantom presence of subjects, objects, meaning, reference, and sense are fleetingly conjured. There is no meta-language for language, no ‘other’ medium within which ‘language itself’ might be grasped or beheld, just a folding, unfolding, and refolding of the same linguistic material that runs all the way through, without beginning or end, the Möbius spiralling of which deconstructs any seemingly secure position or opposition in the round: sign and referent, signifier and signified, form and content, expression and expressed, word and thing, presence and absence, identity and difference, and so on and so forth. For those who dare look into it, the medium of language invariably ceases to be transparent – a means of communication – and becomes opaque – a means of ex-communication (Baudrillard 1987). And yet, if it proves impossible to think about language except in language, and to sift through language to find anything other than language, then at least this weird play of surfaces might lend itself to a certain spatial analysis: geo-graphical and geo-logical, perhaps; or topo-graphical and topo-logical, even (Olsson 1980; 1991; 2007). For my part, the invitation to dwell on ‘media’s mapping impulse’ offers an opportunity to reconsider the warped and pliable spatiality of language once more: the sedimentary and geomorphological history of the sign, so to speak; or, more precisely: the ‘plane’ of signifiers and the ‘plane’ of signifieds; the ‘arbitrary’ articulation of these two planes; the ‘flotation’ of the signifier over the signified; the ‘sliding’ of the signified beneath the signifier; the ‘occlusion’ of the signified by the signifier; and so on and so forth. This reconsideration is worthwhile because even though the medium of language may be well worn, threadbare, and all but spent, the ‘Empire of the Sign’ nevertheless continues to reign over us, and a line of escape remains as elusive as ever. Before alighting upon the sign itself, then, I will begin with a brief foray into this fearsome empire that demands that everything yields to sense.

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THE EMPIRE OF THE SIGN Empire of Signs? Yes, if it is understood that these signs are empty and that the ritual is without a god. (Barthes 1982, 108) Only signs without referents, empty, senseless, absurd and elliptical signs, absorb us. (Baudrillard 1990, 74)

The Sun no longer sets on the Empire of the Sign, the Empire of Meaning, and the Empire of the Signifier, just as it no longer sets on the Empire of Capital. The tyranny of the signifier has made everything mean something, and despite some resistance here and there to the demand that the world make sense, the dominance of significance and meaning seems to be largely accepted and generally unquestioned. Indeed, what seems intolerable today is for something to lack significance, for something to elude meaning, and for something to evade sense: “the pleading things of the world are begging our senses for meaning,” says Michel Serres (2011, 51, original emphasis). It is no longer tolerable for something simply to exist, for something simply to be there. Its existence must mean something. Its being-there must count for something. Even silence is forced to speak louder than words. The signifier is to sense and sensation, as capital is to our life and our world. Everything must now submit to the power of the signifier, just as everything must now submit to the power of capital. Everything must ‘mean’ something, just as everything must be ‘worth’ something – even if that meaning is nonsense and that value is naught. For us, the Sun no longer sets on the Empire of the Signifier, just as it no longer sets on the Empire of Capital. “From the moment that there is meaning there are nothing but signs. We think only in signs” (Derrida 1997, 50, original emphasis). The Empire of Meaning, like the Empire of Capital, has become fully globalized. The ‘tyranny of the signifier’ is the key insight of structuralism and the turn away from its despotism is the driving force behind post-structuralism, especially for deconstruction (Derrida 1988), schizoanalysis (Guattari 2011; 2013; Perez 1990), symbolic exchange (Baudrillard 1993), and other drift-works (Dews 2007; Harland 1987; Howarth 2013; Lyotard 1984, 2011). In his novel Snow White, which shifts the fairy tale action from an archaic feudal fiefdom to a contemporary American suburb, Donald Barthelme (1996) offers a beautiful characterization of the tyrannical slurry of signs that now engulfs us. One of the seven dwarves, Dan, explains his ‘rubbish theory’ to someone who is visiting the factory where they all now work, tending vats of Chinese baby food while mass-producing plastic tat in eager anticipation of the complete trashing of the entire political economy of value: Klipschorn was right I think when he spoke of the ‘blanketing’ effect of ordinary language, referring, as I recall, to the part that sort of, you know, ‘fills in’ between the other parts. That part, the ‘filling’ you might say, of which the expression ‘you might say’ is a good example, is to me the most interesting part, and of course it might also be called the ‘stuffing’ ... But the quality this ‘stuffing’ has, that the other parts of verbality do not have, is two-parted, perhaps: (1) an ‘endless’ quality and (2) a ‘sludge’ quality ... The ‘endless’ aspect of ‘stuffing’ is that it

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goes on and on ... The ‘sludge’ quality is the heaviness that this ‘stuff’ has, similar to the heavier motor oils, a kind of downward pull but still fluid. (Barthelme 1996, 102, original emphasis)

That the Empire of the Sign reigns over us almost goes without saying, and some geographers have gone to great lengths to explore and map its domain (e.g. Abrahamsson 2008; Abrahamsson and Gren 2012; Kato 2015; Olsson 1991; 2007). Much of this work has taken an algebraic, geometric or topological approach to semiology and semiotics (to which we shall return in due course by way of the algorithm S/s), but since I introduced the medium of language in landscaped terms it may be helpful to begin with a more obviously worldly depiction of the sign, its signifying modality, and its signifying matter. What I have in mind are two seascapes by René Magritte, entitled Clear Ideas and The Castle of the Pyrenees, painted in 1958 and 1959, respectively. René Magritte’s Clear Ideas depicts a solitary cumulous cloud above a gently breaking wave, set against an otherwise clear blue sky and essentially calm ocean. There is, however, something else floating in mid-air, immediately between the cloud and the wave: a large rock, which seems to be suspended incongruously above the horizon, midway between the little fluffy cloud and the meekly falling surf. Not only does the rock defy gravity, but the cloud and the wave appear to be complicit in its defiance. Betwixt and between gaseity and liquidity, there is nothing but insolidity. Such is the insolence of matter, perhaps. Magritte’s The Castle of the Pyrenees toys with similar elemental concerns: solidity, liquidity, and gaseity. Once again the rock remains suspended in mid-air, in defiance of gravity, above a gently rolling wave; but the rock is no longer cast beneath a solitary cloud. Rather, the cloud formation has receded into the background, as if in deference to this spirited defiance of gravity; and a castle now sits atop the enormous bulk of the hewn rock. In both Clear Ideas and The Castle of the Pyrenees, although the base of the rock is shrouded in deep shade, neither rock formation casts a shadow on the surface of the water below. The rocks float – with insolence, with insolidity, and with indifference. The rocks float, to be sure, but do they float freely? Do they start to slide? Or are they tethered? Are they held in place by cables or chains? This nagging ‘but’ should give us pause for thought, not least because so many of our inherited ideas and cherished conceptions have long-since started to float and long-since started to slide. Relative space and time upped anchor and drifted away from absolute space and time long before hot-air balloons started ascending over Europe in the seventeenth century, for instance, and, more recently, all manner of structural and post-structural contraptions for launching space and time have risen up and been carried away. We fondly remember the dialectical machination of infrastructures and super-structures, and the deconstructive play of reversion and re-inscription, as well as the emergence of monstrosities such as the duality of structure, structuration, and actor-networks. And now, as ‘structures’ and ‘networks’ recede in the rear-view mirror of our ‘accelerationist’ obsessions (Noys 2014), like so many flattened pancakes or Rorschach inksplots, the juggernaut of social and spatial theory seems to have entered a stretch of ‘topology’ engulfed in ‘foam.’ It would appear that the flotation of space and time is sliding into a region of plasticity and fragility, puffed up with volumetric and morphological pretensions: continuous deformation

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and fulsome shape-shifting. Indeed, the ‘topological turn’ towards what is conserved, preserved, and remains invariant during continuous transformation is of a piece with the drive towards resilience: the security of the figure blends seamlessly into the figure of security. No cutting. No tearing. No shredding. No rupture. No break. Just swirling slurry on the surface of which more or less discernible figures and formations may temporarily appear to take dissolute shape. After the orgy, everything fades into the indistinct blue-gray of capital, money, and exchange-value (Lyotard 1998). “Capitalism reduces everything to a fecal state, to the state of undifferentiated and unencoded flux,” says Guattari ; it “is the regime of generalized interchangeability: anything in the ‘right’ proportions can equal anything else” (Guattari 1986, 188–189). The Empire of the Sign is less terra firma than atmos-terror (Sloterdijk 2009) – the ‘regimes of signs’ within which we dwell have turned lethal; the air that we breathe and through which we speak has become toxic; the surface of things has become inhospitable and uninhabitable; and life withdraws into its burrows, its bunkers, and its trenches. I observe, I accept, I assume the immense process of the destruction of appearances (and of the seduction of appearances) in the service of meaning (representation, history, criticism, etc.) that is the fundamental fact of the nineteenth century. The true revolution of the nineteenth century, of modernity, is the radical destruction of appearances, the disenchantment of the world and its abandonment to the violence of interpretation and of history. I observe, I accept, I assume, I analyze the second revolution, that of the twentieth century, that of postmodernity, which is the immense process of the destruction of meaning, equal to the earlier destruction of appearances. He who strikes with meaning is killed by meaning. (Baudrillard 1994, 160–161)

Hereinafter, the term that comes to the fore is flotation: floating signs, floating signifiers, floating values, floating money, floating attention, floating identity, floating time, floating space, etc. Everything is unmoored, unhinged, and adrift. “The ideal of order ... can never be completely attained,” says Guattari (2011, 13), because “languages drift in all parts.” To understand why takes us back to Saussure’s pioneering Course in General Linguistics, the urtext of structuralism, which was published posthumously in 1916, from an adept synthesis of his students’ lecture notes. THE SIGN UNHINGED Nothing is more complicated than a line or lines. (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 94)

“The linguistic unit is a double entity,” according to Saussure (1974, 65), “one formed by the associating of two terms.” This double entity associates “not a thing and a name,” as one might perhaps naively expect, “but a concept and a sound-image” (Saussure 1974, 66). Saussure depicted this double entity as a split oval surrounded by up and down arrows, thereby suggesting that the association is well

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articulated and securely bonded, with each term ineluctably referring to and recalling the other (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Untitled. Ferdinand de Saussure 1974, 67

No concept, then, without sound-image. And no sound-image without concept. Either the entity is double, or else there is no entity at all. Saussure famously compared language to a sheet of paper, whose front and back are thought and sound respectively: “one cannot cut the front without cutting the back at the same time; likewise in language” (Saussure 1974, 113). Saussure retained “the word sign to designate the whole,” but replaced “concept and sound-image respectively by signified and signifier,” arguing that “the last two terms have the advantage of indicating the opposition that separates them from each other and from the whole of which they are parts” (Saussure 1974, 67, original emphasis). Every sign is a discrete combination of a signifier and a signified, and outwith such a combination there is neither a signifier nor a signified, least of all a sign. When it comes to signs, then, it is always a matter of double or nothing. Whence Saussure’s modernity, since the sign as a whole is a derivative, a duplex effect of difference. Signs are differential and thereby liable to crack open. As Badiou (2008, 14) said of Gottlob Frege: “There is no trace of any privileging of the One in Frege (precisely because he starts audaciously with zero). So one – rather than the One – comes only in second place” (original emphasis)2. Neither signifiers nor signifieds ever travel alone. They are always doubly articulated (cf. Martinet 1964, for whom the ‘double articulation’ is sequential because speech is linear: a first articulation forms meaning-bearing sounds [monemes], and then a second articulation forms those articulate sounds into meaningful signs [phonemes], which thereby enables an 2

From this vantage (or vanishing) point, the attentive reader may well espy post-structuralism on the horizon of our explication. “The passage to a second modernity of the thinking of number obliges thought to return to zero, to the infinite and to the One. A total dissipation of the One, an ontological decision as to the being of the void and that which marks it, a lavishing without measure of infinities: such are the parameters of such a passage. Unbinding from the One delivers us to the unicity of the void and to the dissemination of the infinite.” (Badiou 2008, 14–15, original emphasis)

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infinite array of meanings to be expressed by a small set of sounds). “The linguistic entity exists only through the associating of the signifier with the signified. Whenever only one element is retained, the entity vanishes” (Saussure 1974, 102–103). The two-sided nature of the sign is poorly expressed through the body–soul metaphor, avers Saussure. “A better choice would be a chemical compound like water, a combination of hydrogen and oxygen; taken separately, neither element has any of the properties of water” (Saussure 1974, 103). When all is said and done, then, a sign is an indivisible twinset, twosome or twofold. Hold on to this fold, if you can. Given these elementary building blocks, Saussure advanced two key principles that turned out to have profound implications: “the arbitrary nature of the sign,” and “the linear nature of the signifier” (Saussure 1974, 67 and 70, respectively). While there is “the rudiment of a natural bond” between the signifier and the signified of a symbol (such as the ‘scales’ of justice or the ‘strength’ of reason or the ‘heat’ of debate), there is no such natural bond for a sign (such as ‘tree’ or ‘horse’ or ‘green’). For example, the association between the sound-image ‘tree’ and the concept of a tree is purely conventional and essentially arbitrary. Neither the word ‘tree,’ nor the sound ‘tree,’ nor the notion of ‘tree,’ nor the wordly ‘tree’ are in any way, shape or form treelike. Other associations could have been forged. The second principle stems from the fact that in being spoken the signifier takes time and takes place. The signifier occupies space and time. It has extension and duration. “The signifier, being auditory, is unfolded solely in time from which it gets the following characteristics: (a) it represents a span, and (b) the span is measurable in a single dimension; it is a line” (Saussure 1974, 70). Or again: “In contrast to visual signifiers (nautical signs, etc.) which can offer simultaneous groupings in several dimensions, auditory signifiers have at their command only the dimension of time. Their elements are presented in succession; they form a chain” (Saussure 1974, 70). So, on Saussure’s account, every sign is arbitrarily and insecurely bonded, stretched out as a line, and strung out as a chain, by way of which it begins to drift and slide. Its stabilization can never be assured. And this ineluctable pliability and destabilization at the heart of the sign comes before the much more familiar form of semiotic pliability and destabilization that arises from the fact that identity is carved out by way of negative difference and takes its place amid a set of differential traces that re-mark and scarify it. There is neither identity nor difference as such, just the dissipative and disseminative driftwork of différance (Derrida 1978; Lyotard 2011), to which we alluded to above (see footnote 2). Slavoj Žižek (2012) puts it beautifully with reference to a scene in Ernest Lubitsch’s film, Ninotchka: [T]he hero visits a cafeteria and orders coffee without cream; the waiter replies: ‘Sorry, but we’ve run out of cream. Can I bring you coffee without milk?’ In both cases, the customer gets straight coffee, but … each time accompanied by a different negation, first coffee-with-nocream, then coffee-with-no-milk. What we encounter here is the logic of differentiality where the lack itself functions as a positive feature. (Žižek 2012, 765–766)

Now, at this point we could follow Derrida (1997) in his deconstruction of all of the binary oppositions that Saussure has articulated thus far – signifier and signified, sign and symbol, natural and conventional, motivated and arbitrary, auditory and visual, speech and writing, identity and difference, positive and negative, time

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and space, line and surface, etc. – but what is striking about such a deconstruction is that it reinscribes an undecidable ‘trace’ in its wake: both/and, neither/nor – ‘plus d’un,’ as Derrida was fond of saying, which could be variously translated as ‘more of one’ or ‘more than one,’ but also ‘no more one’ or ‘no more of one.’ The bond between a signifier and a signified is already starting to come undone and beginning to drift. “Language is radically powerless to defend [itself] against the forces which from one moment to the next are shifting the relationship between the signified and the signifier. This is one of the consequences of the arbitrary nature of the sign” (Saussure 1974, 75). The ‘bond’ between signifier and signified is “loosened” and the “relationship” between them “shifts” (Saussure 1974, 75). This is evidently a tectonic conception of the sign, where two plates or planes meet at a subduction zone, the denser one of which bends and slides beneath the other, curving down into the mantle of nonsense below, and in so doing releases seismic shocks all around: earthquakes, seaquakes, and airquakes. So, a sign is not simply the combination of a signifier and a signified, but of a signifying plane and a signified plane; a plane of ‘expression’ and a plane of ‘expresseds’ (or ‘contents’), respectively. (Like the deposition of tephra in the wake of volcanic eruptions, the sign is spread out and laminated.) This is how we should understand Baudrillard’s (1996a, 97) claim that planes such as these “each follow their course without merging: at best they slide over each other like tectonic plates, and occasionally their collision or subduction creates fault lines into which reality rushes.” Meanwhile, Roland Barthes (2000) famously employed such a ‘tectonic’ conception of the sign in order to explain how mythology and ideology function. They take a sign that is already ‘full’ of signification, ‘drain’ it to leave an ‘empty’ signifier, and then ‘re-fill’ it with a new signification. While the ‘full’ sign is more or less tightly bound up with its conventional signified, which it is thereby condemned to denote rather slavishly (e.g. a rose is a rose is a rose), the ‘drained’ sign is open to a seemingly limitless ‘constellation’ of ‘re-fills,’ which it is thereby free to connote without limit (e.g. a rose may connote love, compassion, virtue, secrecy, reason, wisdom, rebirth, balance, honor, and so on and so forth). For Barthes, then, it is not simply that a ‘full’ sign is repeatedly drained of its meaning and re-filled with other meanings, but that during the cycle the sign undergoes a tectonic shift and incorporeal transformation: the ‘full’ sign becomes the ‘empty’ signifier for a completely different ‘full’ sign. Baudrillard (1996b; 1998) makes a similar argument with respect to the system of objects in the consumer society. For Saussure, then, the linguistic sign articulates two distinct planes or chains: a sound-chain (signifiers) and a thought-chain (signifieds). As we have noted, the sound-chain “is only a line, a continuous ribbon along which the ear perceives no self-sufficient and clear-cut division; to divide the chain, we must call in meanings” (Saussure 1974, 103). Listening apportions the continuous sound-chain into discrete sound-images. It calves out the articulate from the inarticulate. It cuts out a chain of signifiers from the flux of sound. “The sound-image is what is heard; not the sound heard but the being-heard of the sound,” notes Derrida (1997, 63, original emphasis). “Being-heard is structurally phenomenal and belongs to an order radically dissimilar to that of the real sound in the world.” (For this reason, Lyotard

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(2011, 209) argues that “Hjelmslev is quite right in wanting to call the linguistic signifier a ‘ceneme’ [from the Greek, kenos, meaning empty]: the continuum from which the segments are cut does not contribute to the production of signification.”) Likewise, “[o]ur thought – apart from its expression in words – is only a shapeless and indistinct mass. ... Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula” (Saussure 1974, 111–112). Try to think, for example, of a red-tailed fox or a coffeewithout-cream in the absence of words. So, for Saussure, language is composed of two parallel planes or chains: one of concepts and the other of sound-images. “In an accurate delimitation, the division along the chain of sound-images will correspond to the division along the chain of concepts” (Saussure 1974, 104). He visualizes this well-composed isomorphism in the following manner, which is invariably taken to be a vertical section rather than a horizontal plan (Figure 3):

Figure 3: Untitled. Ferdinand de Saussure (1974, 112)

There are five things to note with respect to this depiction. Firstly, the relation between the two chains or planes is one of ‘correspondence’ rather than ‘reference.’ The relation between them is ‘arbitrary’ rather than ‘motivated,’ ‘conventional’ rather than ‘causal,’ and ‘contingent’ rather than ‘necessary.’ Secondly, even though there is extensive ‘correspondence’ between the two chains or planes, they nevertheless remain separated by a space that appears abyssal. Thirdly, the chains or planes could easily be displaced in relation to one another, thereby breaking off the current correspondences whilst enabling new ones to be forged. Fourthly, it is unclear if this is a view from above (as if it were a river or an isthmus) or from the side (as if it were a tunnel or a pipe). Moreover, it is unclear whether Saussure is depicting something solid, liquid or gaseous. Anticipating Magritte’s Clear Ideas and The Castle of the Pyrenees by almost half a century, Saussure says that the upper region (labeled A) depicts the “floating realm of thought,” while the lower region (labeled B) depicts the “plastic substance” of sound, and the relation between them (the dotted lines) depicts their “reciprocal delimitation” (Saussure 1974, 112), in the sense that the segmentation of the two realms complements one another. For Saussure, then, “language is a system not of fixed, unalterable essences but of labile forms” (Sturrock 1979, 10). Finally, linguistics can “be pictured in its total-

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ity – i.e. language – as a series of contiguous subdivisions marked off on both the indefinite plane of jumbled ideas (A) and the equally vague plane of sounds (B)” (Saussure 1974, 112). Or again: the discipline of linguistics “works in the borderland where the elements of sound and thought combine; their combination produces a form, not a substance” (Saussure 1974, 113, original emphasis). Anticipating Marshall McLuhan’s (1994) famous dictum ‘the medium is the message’ by almost half a century, Saussure characterizes language as “the domain of articulations” (Saussure 1974, 112). This primacy of form over substance means that substance is essentially a question of form (e.g. amorphous matter is formed into particular substances through molding and modulation; molecular fluxes are formed into molar aggregates through channeling and pooling). Hence the light manipulation of McLuhan’s original formula: the medium is the massage (McLuhan and Fiore 1967). “Instead of the imperialism of the signifier,” which we will encounter with Lacan, “it’s the imperialism of form” (Guattari 2006, 206, original emphasis) that Saussure proffers. There is, then, a profound tension between, on the one hand, Saussure’s elliptical depiction of the sign, which seems securely composed, with its firm bonding of a well-proportioned signifier and a well-matched signified, snuggly encased within a protective shell, and, on the other hand, his seismological and meteorological depiction of language as a whole, with its indistinct forms, loose and ephemeral articulations, and hollowed-out core. It was Lacan’s genius to step into the breach opened up by this tension in order to revolutionize what it entails to make sense. By re-turning to Saussure (and Sigmund Freud), Lacan introduced a twist into the fabric of the sign that bent the lines, chains, and planes of language into a Möbius strip, upon which sense ran aground. A TWIST IN THE FABRIC OF THE DISARTICULATED SIGN Linguistics still has not found its Marx and Engels who would reset it on its feet.3 (Guattari 2011, 335)

Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s (1992) exemplary reading of Jacques Lacan’s 1953 paper, The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason since Freud (Lacan 2006), stresses the way in which Lacan ‘formalizes’ Saussure’s conception of the sign. He regards it as an algorithm – ‘a logical calculus’ – such that “it is essentially a question of subjecting the Saussurean sign to a certain treatment. To algorithmize the sign, if we can risk that expression, will practically mean to prevent it functioning as a sign. We could even say that as it is posited, it is destroyed” (Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe 1992, 34, original empha3

Guattari is alluding here to Marx’s enigmatic remark in the 1873 afterword to the second German edition of Capital, Volume 1. “The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.”

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sis). For while Saussure placed the signifier beneath the signified, implicitly privileging thought over its material support (in keeping with the long-standing notions of elevated thought and base matter), Lacan inverted this arrangement by placing the signified beneath the signifier. Lacan also accentuated Saussure’s line by referring to it as a ‘bar,’ which he then treated algebraically. Saussure’s equatorial ‘line’ of congruence ( – ) was twisted by Lacan into a ‘bar’ of division (/). Hereinafter, the signifier’s (S) access to the signified (s) is barred: /. (And as we will see, with the signified placed ‘under erasure,’ so to speak, the signifier is forced to redirect and displace itself laterally, thereby tracing out “a stringed series of enlaced erasures” (Derrida 2007, 175, original emphasis) for which Derrida coined the neologism ‘seriasure.’ No wonder, then, that Guattari (1986, 17) should have said that “the best way for capitalism to insure semiotic subjugation is to encode desire in a linear way.”) Whether or not Lacan’s algorithmic twisting of Saussure is a forced reading, a false reading or even an overreading (Davis 2010) is a moot point. After all, Saussure himself “programmatically declared several times that langue should be expressed in the form of algebra” (Bouissac 2010, 80), and, as we shall see shortly, he was also drawn towards overreading. Lacan (2006, 414) rendered Saussure’s sign as an algorithm: S — s He presented this algorithm as the founding and grounding of linguistics as a discipline, and said that it should be “read as follows: signifier over signified, ‘over’ corresponding to the bar separating the two levels” (Lacan 2006, 415). Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe (1992, 35) list four key differences between Saussure’s notation and Lacan’s algorithm, some of which have been alluded to above: (1) “The disappearance of a certain parallelism between the terms inscribed on both sides of the bar, since, as Lacan indicates, we must not read merely ‘signifier over signified,’ but ‘capital S’ over ‘small s’”; (2) “The disappearance of the ever present ellipse which ... symbolizes the structural unity of the sign;” (3) “The substitution of the two stages of the algorithm for the Saussurean formulation of the two faces of the sign;” and (4) “the emphasis placed on the bar separating S from s.” There is the signifier qua numerator, the signified qua denominator, and the fraction bar that divides them (both in terms of partition, but also in terms of splitting). In other words, while Saussure stressed the relation of signifier and signified (i.e. structural integrity, mutual association, reciprocal determination, and double articulation), Lacan stresses the resistance of the bar to signification: “the primordial position of the signifier and the signified as distinct orders initially separated by a barrier resisting signification” (Lacan 2006, 415). Paradoxically, then, language and expression resist meaning, reference, and sense; they harbor the resistance of meaning, reference, and sense. Hence the affinity between semiotics, “whose existence is dependent upon the bar of equivalence between what is said and what is meant,” and psychoanalysis, “whose existence is dependent upon the bar of repression between what is said and what is silenced” (Baudrillard 1981, 68). For Lacan, “the signi-

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fier is the screen through which the effects of the unconscious do not pass” (Guattari 1984, 177). (I will leave the question of whether or not semiotics and psychoanalysis are resistance movements or revolutionary movements for another occasion. Suffice to say that I anticipate resistance.) Barred from passing over to the signified, the signifier is compelled to slide along the bar, from signifier to signifier, in an endless a-signifying ‘play’ of signifiance, for which Derrida (1978) coined the terms différance and dissemination. “One could call play the absence of the transcendental signified as limitlessness of play” (Derrida 1997, 50, original emphasis). For Lacan, then, the signifier no longer answers to the function of representing the signified. Instead, it is redirected and rerouted so that “a signifier represents the subject to another signifier” (Lacan 2006, 694), which entails re-presenting itself in (the) place of the subject4. Like a rogue dog that has slipped its leash, the signifier no longer answers to the master’s call of its name. As a pack animal, the signifier calls forth and answers only to other signifiers. On Lacan’s algorithmic reading of Saussure, the signifier is torn away from the sign. “The algorithm is not the sign. Or rather: the algorithm is the sign insofar as it does not signify (in the mode of the representation of the signified by the signifier)” (Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe 1992, 39). The algorithm is a “sign under erasure, rather than a sign destroyed. A sign not functioning. None of the concepts of the theory of the sign disappear: signifier, signified, and signification are still there. But their system is disrupted, perverted” (Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe 1992, 39). Such a sign is non-representational and a-signifying. It gives rise to signifiance rather than to signification; to the dis-semination of sense and meaning rather than to their in-semination. After Lacan, the sign neither engenders meaning nor makes sense. It spills, slips, slides, and voids. In short, the signifier falls and stalls on barren ground, like a skimmed pebble that may inadvertently come to rest on something that could easily be mistaken for an abacus. This is why Derrida (1981) links ‘dissemination’ with ‘dissemenation.’ As he watched, the stars began to slide about, to realign themselves upon the black canvas of the sky as though to spell out some message for him. … Whut do they say, oletimer? he asked. Whut do the stars say? … After a long silent time, the Indian said: They say the universe is mute. Only men speak. Though there is nothing to say. (Coover 1998, 83)

So, “as long as we have not jettisoned the illusion that the signifier serves [répond à] the function of representing the signified, or better, that the signifier has to justify [répondre de] its existence in terms of any signification whatsoever,” says Lacan (2006, 416), then we will fail to appreciate that the signifier is otherwise engaged. “Only mathematical algorithms resist this process; they are considered to be devoid of meaning, as they should be.” This brings us back to Saussure, or rather, to the 4

In his structural and algorithmic ‘return’ to Marx, Baudrillard (1981) makes exactly the same argument as the one that Lacan makes here, except that he does so in relation to exchange-value and use-value (i.e. money and need). Baudrillard places the ‘structural homology’ of the commodity-form and the sign-form at the heart of his critique of the political economy of the sign: exchange-value is to the signifier as use-value is to the signified.

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Figure 4: S35 © Emma McNally. Graphite on paper. Reproduced by permission of the artist, Emma McNally

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so-called ‘other Saussure’ of the anagrams; the Saussure who was convinced that he had discovered an anagrammatic subtext or urtext hidden within the ancient Latin poems that he was studying (Arrivé 1992; Bouissac 2010; Culler 1988). Saussure was unable to decide whether these anagrams were a real material feature of the texts or a wish-fulfilling phantasy projected on to the tissue of signs; whether the anagrams were the cryptic key for unlocking the true sense of the poems or merely a mirage rising up from the skein of signs (Culler 1988). Was there really a latent treasure hidden ‘beneath’ or ‘amongst’ the manifest content? Or was this ostensible patterning simply the luster of fool’s gold? And, if truly present within the texts, what would these anagrammatic patterns signify – if anything? With this enigmatic and undecidable ‘discovery,’ Michel Arrivé (1992, 4) argues that Saussure had happened upon “something not entirely dissimilar to the unconscious.” Hereinafter, sense will have to be refracted through an essentially a-signifying medium. McLuhan’s (1994) famous dictum is already on the horizon of Saussure’s anagrammatic fixation: the medium is the message. From this perspective, language seems not so much a system of signs, each joining a signifier with its signified, as an infinite pattern of echoes and repetitions, where readers are confronted with the problem of determining which of numerous possible patterns to pursue, which to treat as endowed with significance. Signs are not simply given to perception: to perceive the signifier at all is to confer on some patterns and not others the status of meaningful expressions. It has been fashionable recently to speak of the play of the signifier or of the production of signifieds by the signifier, but this is something of a misnomer for the question is precisely which identifiable features of a linguistic sequence belong to the signifier and which do not: whether patterns or relations are of the order of the signifier. (Culler 1988, 224)

With the gentlest of nudges or the slightest of tilts, then, Saussure’s floating signifier becomes Lacan’s sliding signifier. But wait: through a fortuitous complicity between Lacan’s algorithm and Saussure’s anagram, the floating sign has always already been on the slide. Indeed, Lacan says that Saussure’s schema of the ‘two floating kingdoms’ illustrates “an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier,” and that the “fine streaks of rain” (Lacan 2006, 419) serve as fleeting ‘anchoring points’ or ‘quilting points’ (“button points” [points de capiton]) that struggle in vain to pin/pen down the sense of the signifier’s slide – although in truth nothing can arrest the interminable slipping and sliding of the signifier. “It is a twofold flood in which the landmarks ... seem insubstantial” (Lacan 2006, 419). Moreover, given the “pure function of the signifier” (Lacan 2006, 418), the signified could be said to remain in the algorithm only for ‘memory’s sake,’ like a residual. Hereinafter, the disabled signified is made redundant. It no longer has a function. It no longer functions. It is, then, laid off in two registers at once: it no longer has a place within either the division of labor of signification or Lacan’s “mathemic thought” (Guattari in Stivale 1988, 204). The signified has neither a work function nor a mathematical function. At best, it is left to play the role of a simulacrum in the masquerade of nonsense (Deleuze 1994). Now that the signifier has well and truly begun to slide, it is necessary to recall that, for Saussure, “in language there are only differences without positive terms” (Saussure 1974, 120, original emphasis). Each signifier is the articulation of a

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differential structure – neither a ‘thing,’ then, nor an attribute of a thing, even, but rather an ‘articulation’ and an ‘expression.’ “The signifier is thus the difference of places, the very possibility of localization,” say Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe (1992, 42), which Lacan illustrates thus (Figure 5).

Figure 5: Untitled. Jacques Lacan 2006, 416

In lieu of a single signifier, Lacan offers differential terms (Ladies and Gentlemen); and in lieu of a distinct signified for each of the two terms (Male and Female), Lacan offers twin doors – spacing and placing; solitary confinement and empty repetition: “the autonomous functioning of the algorithmic chain insofar as it is conceived as a chain of differential marks which mark nothing by themselves except their reciprocal positions and the relations (or combinations) through which a ‘meaning’ is fabricated” (Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe 1992, 47). For Lacan, the signifier “is no longer the other side of the sign in relation to the signified, and consisting only in this association, but rather it is that order of spacing, according to which the law is inscribed and marked as difference” (Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe 1992, 46). Hereinafter, the ‘floating kingdom’ of the signifier is an order of spacing – on the slide. The ‘law of spacing’ is an enforced sliding, so to speak. Derrida (1978; 1981) dubs it différance and dissemination, and Badiou (2009, 11) calls it “the outplace against the splace.” There where the signifier takes (its) place it is not. Such is Claude Lévi-Strauss’s paradox: two series being given, signifying and signified, there is a natural excess of the signifying series and a natural lack of the signified series. There is, necessarily, a ‘floating signifier, which is the servitude of all finite thought ...’ And then there is on the other side a kind of floated signified, given by the signifier ‘without being thereby known,’ without being thereby assigned or realized. (Deleuze 1990, 49, original emphasis) There is a whole regime of roving, floating statements, suspended names, signs lying in wait to return and be propelled by the chain. The signifier as the self-redundancy of the deterritorialized sign, a funereal world of terror. (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 113)

We can now better appreciate Lacan’s take on Freud’s famous maxim: ‘Wo Es war, soll Ich werden.’ [Where it was, shall I be.] “What does that mean? That the subject

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is already at home at the level of the Es” (Lacan 2008, 83). The subject is the flickering effect of the signifying chain: bared, displaced, and erased. Or again: The subject is defined as ‘what the signifier represents,’ which should be understood in the following way: if the subject is the possibility of speech, and if this speech is actualized as a signifying chain, then the relation of a signifier to another signifier, or that which a signifier ‘represents,’ as Lacan says, for another signifier – namely, the very structure of the chain – is what must be named ‘subject.’ (Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe 1992, 69)

There is, however, a final twist, since the sliding signifier is doubly articulated in its slippage: on the one hand, ‘signifier to signifier’ (i.e. connection and association; passage and relay; the work of metaphor); and, on the other hand, ‘signifier for signifier’ (i.e. substitution and transformation; in lieu of an other and in view of another; the work of metonymy). Under the tyranny of the signifier, “something always has to recall something else – metaphor or metonymy” (Deleuze 2006, 57). Explicating the tension between going ‘to’ and being ‘for’ would take us to the heart of the kind of ‘spatial expression’ advanced by Deleuze and Guattari (1986; 1988), but in order to get there we would need to pass by way of Guattari’s encounter with the work of Louis Hjelmslev (1961; 1970), whose functional and reversible recasting of the algebraic sign provided Guattari with a “way of (1) escaping the tyranny of the signifier–signified binarism; (2) eluding the abstraction of the signified; (3) breaking the negative, differential identity of the sign defined against other signs ad infinitum; and (4) challenging signifier despotism and fetishism” (Genosko 1998, 181). I follow such a trajectory from Hjelmslev to Guattari in a complementary text (Doel and Clarke 2019), in which the “linguistics of the signifier was ... replaced by a completely different linguistics of flux” (Dosse 2011, 231). For the latter, “what matters is the reverse of ... focusing on the signifier ... It seeks to foster a semiotic poly-centrism by assisting the formation of relatively autonomous and non-translatable semiotic substances, by giving equal acceptance to all desire whether it makes sense or not” (Guattari 1984, 77). Accordingly, to round off this peregrination into the despoiled medium of language, suffice to say that the rot sets in from the moment that one yields to the demand to make sense of the swamp of spots. The line of escape from the Empire of the Sign takes flight from the realization that not one jot or splot needs to make sense. When all is said and done, the medium of language is media slurry.

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Figure 6: F4 (Detail) © Emma McNally. Graphite on paper. Reproduced by permission of the artist, Emma McNally

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REFERENCES Abrahamsson, C. (2008): Topoi/graphein. Uppsala. Abrahamsson, C. and M. Gren (Eds.) (2012): GO. On the Geographies of Gunnar Olsson. Farnham. Arrivé, M. (1992): Linguistics and Psychoanalysis: Freud, Saussure, Hjelmslev, Lacan and Others. Amsterdam. Badiou, A. (2008): Number and Numbers. Cambridge. Badiou, A. (2009): Theory of the Subject. London. Barthelme, D. (1996): Snow White. New York. Barthes, R. (1982): Empire of Signs. New York. Barthes, R. (2000): Mythologies. London. Baudrillard, J. (1981): For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. St. Louis, MO. Baudrillard, J. (1987): The Ecstasy of Communication. New York. Baudrillard, J. (1990): Seduction. Basingstoke. Baudrillard, J. (1993): Symbolic Exchange and Death. London. Baudrillard, J. (1994): Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor, MI. Baudrillard, J. (1996a): The Perfect Crime. London. Baudrillard, J. (1996b): The System of Objects. London. Baudrillard, J. (1998): The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. London. Bouissac, P. (2010): Saussure: A Guide for the Perplexed. New York. Coover, R. (1998): Ghost Town. New York. Culler, J. (1988): Framing the Sign: Criticism and Its Institution. Oxford. Davis, C. (2010): Critical Excess: Overreading in Derrida, Deleuze, Levinas, Žižek and Cavell. Stanford, CA. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1983): On the Line. New York. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1986): Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature. Minneapolis, MN. Deleuze, G. (1988): Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. San Francisco, CA. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1988): A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London. Deleuze, G. (1990): The Logic of Sense. London. Deleuze, G. (1994): Difference and Repetition. London. Deleuze, G. (2006): Dialogues II. London. Derrida, J. (1978): Writing and Difference. Chicago, IL. Derrida, J. (1981): Dissemination. Chicago, IL. Derrida, J. (1986): Glas. Lincoln, NE. Derrida, J. (1988): Limited Inc. Evanston, IL. Derrida, J. (1991): ‘Eating well,’ or the calculation of the subject. E. Cadava, P. Connor, and J.-L. Nancy (Eds.): Who Comes After the Subject? London, 96–119. Derrida, J. (1997): Of Grammatology. Baltimore, MD. Derrida, J. (1998): Resistances of Psychoanalysis. Stanford, CA. Derrida, J. and C. Malabou (2004): Counterpath: Travelling with Jacques Derrida. Stanford, CA. Derrida, J. (2007): Psyche: Inventions of the Other. Volume 1. Stanford, CA. Dews, P. (2007): Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory. London. Doel, M. (1994): Something resists: reading – deconstruction as ontological infestation (departures from the texts of Jacques Derrida). P. Cloke, M. Doel, D. Matless, M. Phillips and N. Thrift (Eds.): Writing the Rural: Five Cultural Geographies. London, 127–148. Doel, M. (1999): Poststructuralist Geographies: The Diabolical Art of Spatial Science. Edinburgh. Doel, M. (2014): And so. Some comic theory courtesy of Chris Ware and Gilles Deleuze, amongst others. Or, an explication of why comics is not a sequential art. J. Dittmer (Ed.): Comic Book Geographies. Stuttgart, 161–180 and 216–223.

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Doel, M. A. and D. B. Clarke (2019): Through a net darkly: Spatial expression from glossematics to schizoanalysis. T. Jellis, J. Gerlach and J.-D. Dewsbury (Eds.): Why Guattari? A Liberation of Politics, Cartography and Ecology. London, 19–33. Dosse, F. (1997a): History of Structuralism, Volume 1: The Rising Sign, 1945–1966. Minneapolis, MN. Dosse, F. (1997b): History of Structuralism, Volume 2: The Sign Sets, 1967–Present. Minneapolis, MN. Dosse, F. (1999): Empire of Meaning: The Humanization of the Social Sciences. Minneapolis, MN. Dosse, F. (2011): Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari: Intersecting Lives. New York. Genosko, G. (1998): Guattari’s schizoanalytic semiotics: Mixing Hjelmslev and Peirce. E. Kaufman and K. J. Heller (Eds.): Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy, and Culture. Minneapolis, MN, 175–190. Guattari, F. (1984): Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics. New York. Guattari, F. (1986): Soft Subversions. New York. Guattari, F. (2000): The Three Ecologies. London. Guattari, F. (2006): The Anti-Œdipus Papers. New York. Guattari, F. (2009): Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews 1972–1977. Los Angeles, CA. Guattari, F. (2011): The Machinic Unconscious: Essays in Schizoanalysis. Los Angeles, CA. Guattari, F. (2013): Schizoanalytic Cartographies. London. Guattari, F. (2015): Psychoanalysis and Transversality: Texts and Interviews 1955–1971. South Pasadena, CA. Guattari, F. (2016): Lines of Flight: For Another World of Possibilities. London. Harland, R. (1987): Superstructuralism: The Philosophy of Structuralism and Post-Structuralism. York. Harmon, K. (2004): You Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination. New York. Harmon, K. and K. Clemans (2009): The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography. New York. Howarth, D. R. (2013): Poststructuralism and After: Structure, Subjectivity and Power. London. Hjelmslev, L. (1961): Prolegomena to a Theory of Language. Madison, WI. Hjelmslev, L. (1970): Language: An Introduction. Madison, WI. Jameson, F. (1975): The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism. Princeton, NJ. Jameson, F. (1992): The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. Bloomington, IN. Kato, S. (2015): Place of Geometry. Helsinki. Lacan, J. (2006): Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. New York. Lacan, J. (2008): My Teaching. London. Lyotard, J.-F. (1984): Driftworks. New York. Lyotard, J.-F. (1998): The Assassination of Experience by Painting – Monory. London. Lyotard, J.-F. (2011): Discourse, Figure. Minneapolis, MN. Martinet, A. (1964): Elements of General Linguistics. London. McLuhan, M. and Q. Fiore (1967): The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. London. McLuhan, M. (1994): Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, MA. Mead, C. (2013): War Play: Video Games and the Future of Armed Conflict. New York. Motte, W. (Ed.) (1998): Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature. Lincoln, NE. Nancy, J.-L. and P. Lacoue-Labarthe (1992): The Title of the Letter: A Reading of Lacan. Albany, NY. Noys, B. (2014): Malign Velocities: Accelerationism and Capitalism. Alresford. Olsson, G. (1980): Birds in Egg/Eggs in Bird. London. Olsson, G. (1991): Lines of Power/Limits of Language. Minneapolis, MN. Olsson, G. (2007): Abysmal: A Critique of Cartographical Reason. Chicago. IL. Perez, R. (1990): On An(archy) and Schizoanalysis. New York.

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Saussure, F. de (1974): Course in General Linguistics. New York. Serres, M. (2011): Malfeasance: Appropriation Through Pollution. Stanford, CA. Sloterdijk, P. (2009): Terror From the Air. Los Angeles, CA. Stivale, C. J. (1998): The Two-Fold Thought of Deleuze and Guattari: Intersections and Animations. New York. Sturrock, J. (Ed.) (1979): Structuralism and Since: From Lévi-Strauss to Derrida. Oxford. Sutherland, K. (2011): Stupefaction: A Radical Anatomy of Phantoms. London. Žižek, S. (2012): Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London.

FILMS Ninotchka. Director: Ernst Lubitsch. USA: MGM, 1939.

CARTOGRAPHIC ANXIETY

CINEMA AND THE CRISIS OF CARTOGRAPHIC REASON Giorgio Avezzù This chapter investigates a possible evolution or, rather, involution, in the relationship between geography and film in light of what has been called the “crisis of cartographic reason.” The issues discussed here may sound abstract, and indeed, the nature of this ‘evolution’ poses a quintessentially theoretical problem, yet, as I argue, it can be observed in a number of textual phenomena. In the pages that follow, I discuss the geographical aspect of cinema in relation to specific films – including some mainstream, even obvious Hollywood titles – with the intent of clarifying and giving concrete illustration of the problem at hand. This chapter is, therefore, concerned with a problem. It revolves around the state of the relationship between film and geography, a relationship whose recent evolution has been driven by the changing roles of both actors, cinema and geography, in the contemporary culture. As much as geography has, in fact, undergone a radical reconsideration, both as a science and as the epistemic project of modernity, a project whose ideology – its discursive, non-neutral, “interested” character – has been deconstructed, for example, by recent trends in critical cartography, so has cinema seen fundamental changes in its cultural role after more than a century since its invention. The new course of this relationship impacts a wide spectrum of topics; here, I only touch on a number of essential points, sketching, so to speak, a rough outline of the issues facing cinema and geography at this historical juncture. THE “GEOGRAPHICITY” OF CINEMA At the root of this discourse is what many scholars describe as the intrinsic geographical vocation of cinema. Indeed, the emergence of the cinematic medium ought to be addressed within the framework of the time-space compression brought forth by modernity, i.e., within the context of a series of technological endeavors leading to the creation of an image of the globe as a “knowable totality” (Harvey 1992, 246). This is what scholars mean as they often and rightly mention the “geographical penchant” of cinema (Bruno 2002, 111), the “strong visual and rhetorical connection between cinema and cartography” (Castro 2009, 10): Cinema exhibits a “cartographic impulse,” a “furor geographicus” (Bruno 2002, 181, 174), it “could transform the obscure mappa mundi into a familiar, knowable world” (Shohat and Stam 1994, 106). The new medium was born “within a context of feverish production of views of the world, an obsessive labor to process the world as a series of images” (Gunning 2006, 32), a context marked by a veritable “frenzy of the visible. […] The effect of something of a geographical extension of

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the field of the visible and the representable: by journeys, explorations, colonizations, the whole world becomes visible at the same time that it becomes appropriatable” (Comolli 1980, 122). And indeed “it may very well be – in fact, it makes sense for it to be – that early cinema belongs as much to geography as it does to ‘cinema,’ an institution yet to be,” “the dominant category of films until 1914 was ‘geographical’” (Rohdie 2001, 32, 10). As the quotations above evinces, geography and cartography often appear in this debate as if they were interchangeable. And indeed, insomuch as we understand the map as a mental function, as I do later following Jacob, geography and cartography can be seen to overlap. Strictly speaking, of course, the two ought to remain distinct, yet it is worth remembering, as Dematteis (1985, 91) has it, that “at the origin of Western thought and modern thought alike we find an almost perfect correspondence between cartography and geography.” In the present volume, Lukinbeal and Sharp also write on the interchangeability of cartography and geography, and on how these differ from topography. Unlike them, however, I emphasize the role played by cartography and geography in relation to the cinema, and I do so in order to move away from those approaches that focus exclusively on the ‘subjective’ (and ‘perspectivist’) qualities of cinema, such as those informed by topography. Rather than that, my intention is to bring to the fore precisely that ‘objective’ quality one finds in geography and cartography (and in ‘projectionism’ as well). With all the ambiguity surrounding the term, in fact, it is objectivity itself, as it became incorporated in the medium, that went on to play such a fundamental role in the theory and in the cultural history of cinema for more than a century. There is quite a wealth of literature regarding the “planetary mission” shared by cinema and geography, viz. the medium’s ability to produce an adequate and organized description of the world, and I do not want, here, to discuss it much further. It is perhaps worth remembering in passing, however, that Kino und Erdkunde, possibly the first volume dealing with the relations between geography and film and which, in a sense, established this area of research, was published more than a century ago, in 1914. Written by Hermann Häfker, a Kinoreformer and Esperantist who then died in Mauthausen, the volume is still waiting to be rediscovered and studied. Cinema, Häfker says, is meant to offer a great depiction of the whole world, and, like geography, to turn the Earth into our home, offering a view of the globe “freed from horrors,” explained and subordinated to humanity, creating knowledge of the homeland and of the colonies, illustrating trading benefits, and ultimately offering a better transnational comprehension of the countries and the peoples thus framed by a superior, global vision (1914, 7). While it can undoubtedly be interesting to map this sort of prehistory of our area of research, the more or less explicit intersection, in literal and metaphorical terms, of geography and cinema in early film theory, our line of reasoning needs to focus on the present. Among the scholars who more recently discussed the mapping impulse of cinema is Teresa Castro, most specifically in her, La Pensée cartographique des images, published in 2011. Her book attempts, perhaps more extensively and systematically than any other before, to describe the intimate “geographicity” of cinema.

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The deep geographic discourse of cinema, Teresa Castro says, explicitly emerges at the textual level of films through specific “cartographic forms” or “cartographic shapes,” as she calls them. Using a mineralogical vocabulary, she also refers to these privileged sites of cartographic reason emerging on the surface of filmic texts as “epigenies.” Under this rubric, Castro lists the panorama, the aerial view, and the atlas. The first term identifies the nineteenth century’s spectacular tradition of the painted panorama, which would then survive in the form of the panoramic shot in twentieth-century cinema; the second refers simply to any footage shot from the air; and finally, the third term, the atlas, is intended as a form of découpage, a way of assembling images of the world in an orderly fashion. These epigenies, in Castro’s understanding, operate as crystallized forms in which cinema represents, to itself and to the spectator, its own geographicity at the level of the text: the fact, to put it otherwise, that it is producing geographical discourse. Drawing upon the vocabulary of semiotics, I would rather describe these geographically charged forms as “enunciative places” or “enunciative configurations.” According to the semiotic theory of enunciation, in fact, enunciative configurations are precisely those portions of text that “fold up in some places, […] appear here and there as in relief [and] lose this thin layer of themselves that carries a few engraved indications of another nature (or another level), regarding the production and not the product” (Metz 1991, 754). In short, they are parts of the text that “talk to us about this text as an act.” In our case, the forms listed by Castro are precisely parts of the filmic text that condense and summarize the geographical character of the cinematic discourse. I shall return later to these three “cartographic forms,” which are, understandably, of fundamental importance for the problem at hand: If in fact, these enunciative places make the geography of cinema visible within films, then any evolution of the relationship between geography and film as a whole is likely to be registered there. As privileged sites of geographicity, the panorama, the aerial shot, and the atlas are bound to carry the symptoms of the ongoing evolution I am discussing, which in turn makes them the ideal litmus test when assessing the direction of that very evolution. QUESTIONING THE CARTOGRAPHIC REASON OF CINEMA I now turn to the central pivot of Castro’s volume, the notion of “cartographic reason.” As initially proposed by Italian geographer Franco Farinelli (2003), and later discussed by Swedish geographer Gunnar Olsson (2007), the concept describes the map as a foundational dispositive in the history of Western thought, and indeed posits the existence of “cartographic reasoning” as a preliminary condition to every discourse that developed within the Western tradition. The modern episteme based the relationship between the subject and the world on the spatial rules of Renaissance perspective, which in turn, as Samuel Edgerton (1975) shows, were derived from the Ptolemaic instructions for projecting the whole terrestrial sphere onto a plane surface. The order of the world, therefore, was

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always prefigured and reproduced by the map, and the map – this “technology of the intellect” (Goody 1977) – served in turn to sanction the existence of that very order, in a circular process that Giuseppe Dematteis (1985) calls “mimetic morphogenesis” (see Figure 1), Emanuela Casti (1998) “cartographic self-reference,” and Brian Harley (1989) the “logic of the map.” Such mutual adjustment between world and representation grounds our conviction that the world is understandable, knowable in its operational order (both in logical and social, economic, political terms), while in fact this order is prefigured, produced, projected, or taken for granted through and only through the mediation of the map. Geographical representation, relying “as it does on patency and common sense, produces con-sensus, i.e. provides subjects with ‘normalized’ spatial images (images, that is, that comply with the general order of representation). Out of those normalized images equally ‘normal’ behaviors arise, which is to say behaviours that can be integrated in collective practices. These practices, acting on the Earth, turn it into territory, which in turn becomes the object of geographical representation. The more effective the representation, then, the more the Earth turns itself into territory – i.e. the more it assumes an order that complies with that of society – the more the Earth faithfully mirrors geographical representations, the more those representations prove to be effective, and so on” (Dematteis 1985, 101–102).

Figure 1: “Mimetic morphogenesis” (Dematteis 1985, 101)

A similar circular process between subjects, images, Earth, and territory exists in relation to cinema. Teresa Castro is indeed right in pointing to the cartographic reason of cinema, for cinema not only interprets and fuels the geographical imaginary of modernity but is also informed, one could say technologically, by those very same epistemic paradigms that oversaw its foundation: Cinema, the quintessential medium of modernity, is deeply rooted in the logic of the map. The medium really played a role in transforming the Earth in a series of images and vice versa, conflating fiction and concrete reality, combining the world and its representations, confusing the map and the territory. In doing so, cinema thus helped humanity in its efforts

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to “domesticate” the Earth – not by chance, the phrase “cartographic reason” is modeled after La Raison graphique, the title of the French adaptation of Jack Goody’s, The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Building on Castro’s suggestions discussed so far, I now turn to another aspect of the relation between cinema and cartographic reason, which I believe deserves careful consideration. It is indeed crucial to note that when Farinelli tells the story of cartographic reason, his aim is actually to demonstrate how this once formidable paradigm is not useful anymore to understand and to produce the functional order of the world. Both of his most recent works deal in fact with the crisis of cartographic reason, a phrase that appears in the very title of his 2009 volume. Globalization, Farinelli (2003, 6) argues, undermines our notions of measure, distance, and limit, thus eroding the necessity of a correspondence, or isomorphism, between the world – “the complex of social, economical, political, cultural relations in which men live” – and what is visible, extended into space and mappable. All the most valuable things today (capital, labor, money and information) are invisible: the world has withdrawn into a space that is beyond representation. A similar stance can perhaps be recognized in the last pages of Martin Heidegger’s The Age of the World Picture, where the philosopher foresees the emergence of the “gigantic” and the “incalculable” as possible obstacles to our modern “world view” (1977, 135–136). The inability to map the circulation of everything that is most valuable in the contemporary world will inevitably have a traumatic impact, Farinelli maintains, for a culture that is used to associating knowledge with sight and traditionally presumes to be able to infer how the world functions from how it appears on its surface. As far as the more modest scope of this chapter is concerned, and remaining within the disciplinary boundaries of film and media studies, it should be observed that the phenomenon discussed by Farinelli cannot but pose a radical problem in light of the affinity between cinema and geography mentioned above. The very notion of the cartographic reason of cinema should lead us to ask: If cartographic reason, today, is considered less powerful, less effective, or even in disarray, what has become of the geographicity of cinema? How does a medium with an ancient geographic penchant interpret and/or comment on the crisis of its own cartographic reason? We already know where to look. The very same cartographic forms analyzed by Teresa Castro seem to suggest that contemporary cinema often considers its own geographicity problematically, making it the object of a sort of Foucauldian archaeology. Indeed, a closer scrutiny reveals how the same forms that for over a century have served to express the powers of the geographical discourse of cinema have now become the signposts of a new ambivalence towards the geographical powers of the medium, a textual site where cinema itself questions the rules and the conditions that inform, or have informed, its ability to describe and narrate the world. If we look at those three cartographic configurations in contemporary films, we can see how they do not simply declare or celebrate the geographicity of cinema, but they address it as a problem.

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FOILING THE PLAN First, let us consider the panorama. As I said above, Castro, when discussing the intrinsic panopticism of cinema, uses the phrase in relation to the panoramic movements of the film camera. She is not alone in doing so, and there are indeed some good reasons for this analogy: Robert Barker’s 1787 patent already mentioned the necessity for the spectator of his Panorama to turn around in order to appreciate the view in its entirety, and this movement is what was then transferred to the film camera, when “panorama” became “the most populous of early motion picture titles” (Uricchio 2011, 226). Indeed, those who discuss the notion of “panoramic perception” in relation to cinema often cite Schivelbusch’s important study on the subject, and do so, typically, to insist on the connection between the Panorama and a new, mobile spectator-subject (e.g., Kirby 1999, 42). Here, however, I am more interested in how Schivelbusch himself links this panoramic perception to the emergence of what Erwin Straus calls “geographical space.” Unlike the “space of landscape,” geographical space is systematized, ordered, closed, and “therefore in its entire structure transparent. Every place in such a space is determined by its position with respect to the whole” (Schivelbusch 1986, 53). It is such a space that the Panorama and its “overview” helped to grasp as a whole. Then again, it is perhaps even more telling, for our purposes, to take the phrase in its original connotation, and think of the painted panorama, the architectural installation, that 360 ° illusionistic spectacle that gave to several million of spectators the feeling of a world organized around them, one that could be controlled and mastered. The panorama building can be seen as a metaphor for the nineteenth century’s aspirations to visual, physical, and political dominance over a rapidly expanding world (Miller 1996). It is the ideal model of a “well-constructed space,” of a “proper disposition of the whole”; the whole world as a transparent, enclosed, systematic, Humboldtian totality, and this Humboldtian descent was indeed explicitly claimed by James Wyld (1851, xiii), the mapmaker and creator of the famous “Great Model Globe” panorama, located in Leicester Square in London. That circular architecture was, to paraphrase what Foucault says about the panopticon, the expression of a political and representational utopia. Now, if one accepts not to go searching for some equivalents of the panorama in film style, but simply to think of it literally as a possible object of representation, an architectural arrangement that at the same time is a symbolic form standing for some geographic ambitions and, meta-discursively, for the very situation of filmic “communication” (as a cartographic form of cinema), then it is striking to note how contemporary cinema insistently tells us the story of the breach of this kind of narrative space. In short, contemporary cinema often speaks of the breach of a narrative perimeter, which is to say a transgression, the violation of a panorama. In the first lines of the chapter I promised obvious examples, and indeed, one of the most archetypical films of recent mainstream cinema can be seen as a precise illustration of the breach I talk about here. In the screenplay of The Truman Show, a film that served as a blueprint for innumerable other contemporary movies, the wall that encircles the space of the simulation is literally referred to as a “cyclo-

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rama.” The architect, the designer, the director of the simulation is not able to convince Truman of the finiteness of this panorama. Incidentally, the One World/Whole Earth iconography of the TV show logo in the film contains the famous Apollo 17 photograph taken in 1972, which was appropriately called by Martin Roberts (1998) “the ultimate panorama” in his seminal essay on “world cinema” and the globalist aesthetic of much contemporary cinema. But in Weir’s film, the photograph is used ironically and becomes a metaphor for a world that is now impossible to comprehend and to enclose, a world that is not fully representable without letting something, or someone, slip away. The panorama served the purpose of projecting a logical order into the world, but contemporary cinema shows its failure, as attested by Weir’s film and by the numerous other examples of ‘profaned’ panoramas emerging in recent films from The Matrix to The Village or even The Hunger Games. These are panoramas whose domes collapse and whose walls crumble, de-materialize, or are trespassed. Yet, what truly appears to be failing in contemporary cinema is the underlying logic of the panorama, its raison d’être as a cartographic operation. As Christian Jacob (2006, 11) says, the map as a dispositive is not an object but a function, i.e., a mental scheme, the model of an abstract, intellectual order, which in turn demands to be projected, to materialize in the real world. Now, what these ‘post-panoramic’ film texts denounce is a mismatch between the map and the world. To put it differently, they expose the problem of the non-correspondence between some practices, i.e., some narrative patterns, and the logical order implied by “geographical space,” that “container-space” whose characteristics are closeness, transparency, and systematization (Schivelbusch 1986, 53; Dematteis 1985, 97). While in The Truman Show the limits of the panorama are reached and transgressed, in another film, Oliver Stone’s Alexander, the outer limits of the ecumene, which also happen to be circular – being those of the river Ocean – cannot be found where they should be according to the map, the map that Aristotle showed to his student Alexander when he was a young boy. Alexander is indeed the story of someone who stubbornly and in vain tries to verify the coincidence between a world map, the “great vision” it implies, and the world itself. On its part, the world resists and humiliates the globalist dream of the leader and proves to be bigger and more complex than the (obsolete) maps trying to describe it. In The Adjustment Bureau, another conspiracy film evidently derived from The Truman Show (and an adaptation of a story by Philip Dick, though with a different ending), a similar pattern seems to be at work. Here, the main character, for the love of a woman, rises up against what he discovers to be the plan – which looks like a map – describing his destiny, a plan that was set for him and everyone else by a mysterious Chairman (“The plan is wrong!”). The observance of the plan is guaranteed by the men of the Adjustment Bureau: Their job is to assure the correspondence between plan and reality, yet, as the plot progresses, they increasingly struggle to trace and to anticipate all the deviations from the plan. Needless to say, the plan is defeated in the end and has to be rewritten considering the opposition of the rebellious protagonists.

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Another good example of the traumatic mismatch between map and territory is The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Melquiades, a Mexican cowboy working in Texas, is killed by mistake by a Border Patrol officer. Pete Perkins, a friend of the deceased, is thus left with a promise to fulfill. With the help of a handmade map drawn by Melquiades himself, he is to carry his body back to Mexico, to his native village of Jiménez, where Melquiades’ wife and children live. What initially seems a powerful narrative with a strong moral element, modeled perhaps after the folkloristic model of the “grateful dead” story in which a body receives an appropriate burial, veers abruptly in the end into something else: Melquiades has no family, Jiménez does not exist, the map is false, but Perkins, no longer lucid, refuses to acknowledge the truth and eventually convinces himself of having found all the landmarks described by the Mexican in an abandoned place in the countryside. He then makes a sign reading “Jiménez,” stakes it in the ground, restores the walls and the ceiling of a house in ruins, and buries his friend. In an article dating back to the 1970s, Yves Lacoste first discusses the “collusion” (1976a) between geography and cinema from the standpoint of a “critical geopolitics,” an approach in which geography is seen as both an expression and an agent of state power. In a more recent contribution, however, Lacoste picks up the issue again, to restate, in more general terms that “the raison d’être of geography seems to be very near to that of cinema” (1999, 155). Lacoste addresses his claim specifically to the Western, a genre that he sees as particularly “geographical.” If we follow this suggestion, then, The Three Burials – an “epistemological western” (Pye 2010) – should maybe be read metaphorically as pointing to something fundamental about the nature of cinema as a medium. The mere presence of a geographic map within a film, scholars often claim, serves – or at least has traditionally served – to evoke the ‘cartographic’ ability of both cinema and geography to represent the whole world. Maps appearing in the filmic diegesis (usually) function as metaphorical props signaling the deep cartographic reason of all cinematic images: “the map within the film might account for this singular power, shared by the cartographic and filmic dispositifs” (Castro 2008; cf. Conley 2007, 2, 20). The ‘proper’ functioning of a map in a film thus mirrors the ‘proper’ functioning of cinema itself. Ella Shohat also says something similar: “Geography was microcosmically reflected in map-based adventures such as travel narratives and fiction of exploration, which involved the drawing or deciphering of a map – often used as an instrument for the telos of rescue – and its authentication through physical contact with the “new” land. Western cinema, from the earliest anthropological films through the Indiana Jones series, has also relied on map imagery for plotting the Empire, while simultaneously celebrating its own technological power […] to illustrate vividly the topography with which the hero comes into touch. […] By associating itself with the visual medium of maps, cinema represents itself as a twentieth-century continuation of the cartographic science.” (Shohat 1991, 46)

Then again, the few cases we have briefly discussed seem to depict something different and radically new. In fact, the opposite of what Castro and Shohat describe seems to be at work: There is no authentication, no verification. It is indeed

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a “ground-truthing” operation that fails and, therefore, there is no indirect self-celebration of the medium. Insomuch as it alludes to something about the medium itself, the map in the film can also be regarded as an “enunciative place.” Here, however, following Castro’s typology, I prefer to consider it as a particular declination of the panorama because, as we have seen, the map is, first of all, a “function,” and that function is quite similar to that of the panorama. If the map always comes before the territory, and if the history of geography, as Farinelli maintains, is indeed “the history of a confusion between the model and the reality” (1989, 4), between map and territory, then all our examples show that, in contemporary cinema, something in the classical mimetic process of morphogenesis does not quite work. These films describe the failure of simulation (and not the contrary, not even where that might appear to be the case, as in The Matrix), their narratives denounce the loss of the map’s power to prefigure and shape the world, to produce a world-effect, or even just a place that can be safely inhabited by the characters. HUMILIATING THE GAZE We can now move on to the second cartographic configuration of cinema described in Castro’s typology: the aerial view. The aerial view is often seen as the allegory of the “intellectual position of the geographer.” Indeed, “any cartographical understanding of the Earth presupposes the capacity to raise oneself above the ground” (Besse 2003, 340) in order to hold the world at a distance and see it better. The view from above is traditionally considered objective and effective, scientific, perfect, and infallible. It transforms the world in a complex set of signs, making these signs readable, turning them into lines and geometries that signify both the laws of nature (such as soil erosion, for example) and the beliefs and ideals informing those human cultures that actually inhabit the land, as sociologists and cultural anthropologists have often claimed (most notably Marcel Griaule, a true enthusiast of the aerial view). The aerial perspective, then, is able to register all sorts of visible traces (the material “incrustations” of the world: the shape of a city or village, the grid of roads and rails, the disposition of houses and public buildings, the dimension and shape of cultivated fields, etc.) and infer from those visible traces the social, economic, and cultural principles of a collectivity – the “infrastructure of [its] unconscious” (Chombart de Lauwe 1948, 343) – which would be otherwise invisible from the ground. Once made visible, these very principles can thus become the knowable objects of human intervention. Much has been written about the importance of this Apollonian gaze in a wide variety of contexts: archaeology, anthropology, urbanism, geography, military strategy, and so forth (e.g., Cosgrove 2001). Spanning across these disciplines is the belief, well captured by the president of the Royal Society in the 1920s, that the aerial gaze is necessary to “convert chaos into order” (cf. Adey 2010, 97). Aerial imagery, in its centuries-old history and therefore also in the history of modern

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visual culture and cinema, traditionally represents a powerful optical paradigm connected to ideas of precision, effectiveness, and victory. Archibald MacLeish (1942) called the vision of the Earth from above (the “airmen’s Earth”) the “image of victory,” meaning both the real objective of WWII and the reward for winning that war. As far as the cinema is concerned, Teresa Castro maintains specifically that the aerial view serves as a stylistic configuration in which the cinematic medium epitomizes its promises of comprehension and mastery: qualities, she then argues, still substantially untouched today (2011, 40). For the purposes of this chapter, however, I want to try to question her claim. Is the view from above truly still considered such a Promethean tool, the expression of a “virtuous” gaze (Gregory 2011)? My contention is that the aerial view is, in fact, undergoing a deep rhetorical shift in a great part of contemporary American cinema and that many films now show a completely new attitude that, if not completely mistrustful towards the “god trick” (Haraway 1988) of aerial imagery, opts instead to reveal its violence and deceitfulness as well as its ineffectiveness and distance. This new attitude is particularly apparent if we consider recent war films set in the Middle East. War is always “a way of seeing,” and the war film genre has always had a strong inclination towards the experimentation with and evaluation of optical paradigms – to locate and kill the enemy, obviously: to seek and destroy. Criticizing this way of seeing found in the war genre can also be seen as criticizing the visual and epistemic prerogatives of geography: after all, geography, as Lacoste (1976b) famously put it, serves first and foremost to make war. Films that display a polemical attitude about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the way they have been fought carry out their criticism by challenging not only the politics of these specific conflicts but also the traditional mode of visualizing war and fiercely contesting the once glorious aerial view. Among the first movies of the 21st century to show a different attitude towards aerial imagery is the left-leaning Syriana, which blames the violence of the satellite perspective. The prince of a Persian Gulf country, who could harm the American economy by denying future agreements with American multinational oil companies, is executed by a satellite-guided missile at the end of the film. The ‘live’ satellite images showing the assassination are intentionally hideous, and they are meant to expose the questionable geopolitical aims of the United States in the Middle East. Other films show the mendacity of aerial imagery, as do Green Zone and The Fair Game, two films that thematize the embarrassment around the non-existence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq in spite of the aerial imagery that was meant to document it. The main character of Green Zone is chief warrant officer Miller, an American soldier whose duty is to find the weapons using information, maps, and satellite photographs provided by the military intelligence. Having discovered that many “verified sites” are actually empty, he realizes that the intelligence information, including the satellite photographs and maps provided, are systematically wrong and that the WMD are just a fictional pretext. The film is another example of cinema tackling the mismatch between cartographic representa-

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tion and reality, the impasse in the mechanism of mimetic morphogenesis described above: “I’m saying there’s a disconnect between what’s in these packets [i.e. maps and satellite images] and what we’re seeing on the ground.” Fair Game articulates its criticism from a slightly different angle. If one of the most important qualities of aerial photography is its ability to make the signs of the world discernible and legible, the film seems more intent on blaming the aerial image as unreadable. The plot revolves around the true story of two CIA agents who witness the WMD deception and have their lives nearly ruined after revealing the hoax. In an interesting scene, we see agent Plame examining a blown-up satellite photograph with a big magnifying glass trying to identify the weapons of mass destruction. The texture of the image, however, is too fuzzy and blurry, and it is clearly impossible for her to spot anything despite a big arrow meant to indicate the exact location. Unreadable or mendacious, the view from above has thus lost much of its power to turn the world into an object of knowledge. Not surprisingly, the ability to act on that ‘aerial’ knowledge is also critically impaired. Other recent films focus on the ineffectiveness of aerial imagery. Robert Redford’s Lions for Lambs, for example, partakes in the effort to deconstruct the assumed primacy of American aerial reconnaissance. The impossibility to exercise “the ability to observe” from a vantage point is stressed in different scenes, most noticeably in the ending when the film shows the failure of a rescue operation: The drone images are disturbed because of a storm, and for that reason both the diversionary bombings and the rescue operation, monitored from above, come late and fail to achieve the intended results. The aerial gaze, once glorified as a powerful instrument of action and intervention, here is completely worthless. Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies is even more eloquent in showing the ineffectiveness of the aerial view. It depicts two different CIA agents. On the one hand, veteran Edward Hoffman is an overweight functionary who wants to save Western civilization by telephone from Langley, Virginia. On the other, Roger Ferris is a young front-line agent who risks his life every day on the field and is often hurt trying to obtain precious information. Hoffman cannot stand the Middle East, whereas Ferris speaks Arabic, is familiar with Islamic culture, is willing to move to and live his life in those remote countries, and even falls in love with a Jordanian nurse. Hoffman and Ferris embody two incompatible approaches to the war and the Middle-Eastern “situation,” approaches that unavoidably end in a clash. In short, Body of Lies draws a clear opposition that is primarily spatial, between here and there, between physical contact on the battlefield and detached observation from afar. Interestingly, the inadequacy of Hoffman’s approach corresponds with the deficiency of the aerial reconnaissance technology he deploys. The most revealing scene in that sense depicts Ferris abandoned in the desert and waiting to be taken hostage by the insurgents as part of a plan to meet the kidnapped nurse. He is watched over by a drone, the images from which are blown up and cleared according to Hoffman’s instructions in the operation room. But when the militiamen eventually arrive and abduct Ferris, four off-road vehicles manage to blind the drone, circling around the agent at high speed and raising a thick cloud of sand to obstruct

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the view from above. The drone thus loses sight of Ferris, and Hoffman cannot determine which of the four vehicles has picked up the agent. Unable to follow all of them at the same time, he is beaten. Ferris will later be rescued by men of the Jordanian secret services, who won’t spare ironic remarks on the prowess of American aerial reconnaissance. The last shot of the film starts as another drone shot before turning into a satellite image. We see Ferris in the streets of Amman after his divorce from the CIA. Back in Langley, Hoffman decides to “clear off target” and leave his ex-colleague alone, forgoing, in a sense, his own claims to comprehension and action through distanced observation. The drone gradually reduces the depth of focus of the camera before the shot transitions to an increasingly frantic montage of satellite images, combined in a split-screen, and sometimes overexposed. Body of Lies thus begins and ends with satellite images, which continue to stream on the screen as the ending credits roll. What these films seem to imply is that satellites and drones are, at best, unreliable, incapable of discernment: The aerial view they provide cannot help to understand (and win) the war, the enemy’s territory, and its culture. It is surely not “the image of victory” anymore: its ancient – moral, cultural, epistemic – qualities are disabled, and the relations of power between subject and object of vision are subverted. Far from being an image of superiority, in these last examples the aerial view appears as the epitome of frustration. These shots offer inadequate and defeated images, and their abstract “figural” quality is all that is left to them, having lost every power of understanding, any ability to intervene on what they depict. While the war film genre is certainly a good indicator for assessing the currency and adequacy of an optical paradigm, contemporary criticism on the aerial imagery, I suggest, goes far beyond. Indeed, something similar emerges in films very different in tone and style, such as, for example, Up in the Air, where the aerial view is associated with the immorality of head-hunting as opposed to the morality of ground-level familism, and Burn After Reading. The latter, in particular, opens and closes its chaotic narrative with aerial shots, respectively zooming in and out of the CIA’s headquarters in Langley: a gesture that reveals a sort of ironic quality, especially when compared to the rhetorical power these types of shots usually have in spy films. The satellite views at the beginning and end of Burn After Reading are clueless, just like the characters of the plot, and offer no help to the viewers, neither with making sense of the story nor with trying to extract a moral. The criticism of the view from above, therefore, is not necessarily limited to the problems posed by an asymmetrical war in terms of locating and framing an invisible enemy, or with the territorializing of a “radically de-territorialized” conflict (Gregory 2004, 50). On top of that, it also reflects a broader phenomenon affecting contemporary visual culture as a whole. The rhetorical détournement of aerial view, in other words, is symptomatic of a larger crisis in the techno-cultural discourse that upholds the legitimacy and efficacy of a particular way of seeing. These criticisms point to a failure in the cartographic structure of thought that structured much of Western culture, one that assigned to the view from above the power to access the deepest sense of the world.

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A closely-related consequence can be observed in what I see as a new representational impasse. In my view, the new attitude towards aerial imagery has also produced a new difficulty in the resolution of the so-called “cartographic paradox” in contemporary cinema. I refer here to the difficulty experienced by contemporary films with integrating two different ways of looking at the world, namely the two different techniques of representation that founded geography: planar projection and linear perspective (Pickles 2004, 89). Throughout its history, cinema was able to successfully “mobilize” and blend together these two techniques (Lukinbeal 2010). In many recent films, however, the gaze from above and that from the ground – strategy and tactic – seem to diverge, rather than work together. Another recent war film, Good Kill, is a good example of this difficulty. Such dis-integration articulates, in a sense, the difficulty of zooming in and out, moving from the general to the particular, shifting from the global to the local and vice versa. The effects of such a strong polarization between the two opposite extremities of the gaze are apparent in all those films (including some of those mentioned above) that stage a dichotomy between characters operating on the ground, usually connoted as positive, and other characters operating from a distance, often through a technological and optical mediation, who are typically connoted as negative, deluded, or frustrated. These latter characters cannot carry out the task of measuring, controlling, understanding, imposing a fixed meaning to the world, because their perspective, from a narrative as well as “optical” standpoint, is presented as wrong, violent, false, ineffective, or distant. These characters and their way of looking at the world are hence humiliated, that is to say, in the original, etymological sense of the word, brought down to ground level. AN OPAQUE WORLD Let us now proceed to the third and last of Castro’s cartographic forms of cinema: the atlas. The form is concerned, predominantly, with the correct composition of multiple images of the world. As such, it reflects a double belief: a belief in the possibility to visualize the world and a belief in the possibility to build a coherent and continuous narrative of it, a well-organized découpage. The cinematic character of the atlas has been famously asserted by Christian Jacob (2006, 74–75) and indeed, as some scholars argue in favor of the cartographic vocation of cinema, others point to the cinematic vocation of cartography. The cinematic character of the atlas lies in the “continuity” of the successive maps that form it, and it is no coincidence that the (spatial) “continuity” of editing is, in turn, also the keyword for understanding classical Hollywood cinema. But the atlas acting as a “cartographic shape” in cinema can also be seen as the principle behind the production of filmic inventories depicting many distant places: travel films from the last decades such as Until the End of the World and worldist documentaries such as Koyaanisqatsi have also been labeled as cinematic atlases by critics (Castro 2009, 15).

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Now, I want to suggest here that the problems faced by contemporary cinema as a medium, problems that seem to threaten its functioning as an “atlas,” derive from the complexity of the contemporary world system and can be seen particularly as the consequences of a double crisis: a crisis of presentability of the world and a crisis of indicability. Both reflect the more general crisis of the cartographic reason of cinema we are taking into consideration. First, let us address the crisis of presentability. Complex storytelling and network narratives of the sort that have become a trend, and a fortunate one, in recent cinema, have more to do with space than they have with time: “[…] the goal is a spatial one, so that time appears only as the deferral of a spatial conclusion, the solved puzzle” (Cubitt 2009, 52). On a subtler level, complex storytelling and network narratives can be interpreted as the structural analog of the late capitalist world and its complexity: they structurally match, so to speak, the entanglement of contemporary relations of production, consumption, and their spatial and geographical dissemination (e.g., cf. Kerr 2010). The vertigo produced by complex storytelling in the viewers, in turn, can be seen as allegorizing our collective difficulty of comprehension: the strain in our cognitive mapping of a world that refuses geographical representation, the difficulty of giving it a disciplined shape, of making it visible. Think for example of the many bulletin boards displayed in these films, displayed as metaphors to indicate difficulty of editing the cinematic world. One of the archetypal films of this tendency is Pulp Fiction. Not by chance, critics have spoken of a “Tarantino effect” (Ramírez Berg 2006). The film features “curious resonances,” as Kirsch (2002) puts it, with its own true and yet never really represented, referent: Los Angeles. As the ultimate postmodern city, Los Angeles refuses every structure, always moving and without borders, “tough-totrack,” impossible to encompass as a whole, resisting the traditional markers of topography, confusing the eye of the citizen and the interpretation of the planner. Projected on a global scale, a similar anxiety about the problematic combinability of the (different parts of the) world is what really underlies many examples of cinematic network narratives such as Babel or Contagion, not to mention all those films showing the circulation of objects in disparate parts of the Earth whose aim is to trace this circulation, to compose it, and to give it a unified meaning but which end up giving the impression of a great fragility, betraying, as it were, the randomness of the interconnection they depict, or, which amounts to the same, the impossibility of découpage. This leads us to the crisis of indicability, or, using Kevin Lynch’s term (1960), of “imageability.” At stake, here, is something different from the crisis of indexicality affecting the cine-photographic image of the digital era, a crisis that some maintain is at the core of the image’s present problems of referentiality and credibility. On closer inspection, the core of this crisis does not stem from the image and its new numerical and manipulable nature, but, on the contrary, from the world itself – from what Fredric Jameson calls the invisibility of the contemporary world system.

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The problems faced by the medium thus mirror an objective difficulty of representation: Where could directors find places that effectively show and demonstrate the functioning of the world when the very mechanisms of globalization are intrinsically invisible? Late capitalism is an impossible, absent, unrepresentable totality. Capital and the “hidden social order” can only have the form of an unimaginable, infinite, global network, which is by nature non-visual (cf. Jameson 1992; 1995, 31). As a reaction to this, directors trying to convey a coherent picture of the globalized world cannot but fall back on tried-and-tested modernist strategies of representation, trying to visualize various aspects of the supply chain, industry, and labor in ways that look obsolete and surely are not those immediately associated with advanced capitalism. For example, the three films forming the so called “globalization trilogy,” shot in many different parts of the Earth by Michael Glawogger (1998; 2005; 2011), namely Megacities (Mumbai, New York, Moscow, Mexico City), Workingman’s Death (Ukraine, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, China, Germany) and Whores’ Glory (Thailand, Bangladesh, Mexico), describe types of labor and production, such as those involved in the metal and mining industries, that are much more representative of early modernity (not to mention the fact that the “world’s oldest profession,” described in the third film, is unlikely to be considered emblematic of the age of globalization). In fact, by attempting to show “places where the world’s dirty work is done,” Glawogger engages in the somewhat reactionary gesture of making globalization materially visible. The very dirtiness of the work portrayed functions as a form of its visibility – that same visibility that globalization denies in many sectors of our contemporary economic, informational, social and cultural life. Indeed, the newfound importance of the invisible for understanding the world is what is repressed in these films, and what, at the same time, manifests itself symptomatically through the films and through its very absence. The same happens in The Forgotten Space by Noël Burch and Allan Sekula, an essay film that follows container cargoes across the globe. The film, I contend, betrays a deep anxiety about the traceability of the world in the age of (invisible) financial speculation, which is the ideal – and declared – counterpart of what is actually depicted in the film. In effect, The Forgotten Space reveals a desire to describe and comprehend the whole world economy, following ships, barges, trains, and trucks, while at the same time staging the strenuous effort to make that same economy visible, extended in space, and concrete. In short, the film tries more than anything to dispel a fundamental difficulty of representation, for the cinema and for global culture in general – what has been called the “dematerialization of the geographic object” (cf. Farinelli 1992, 78, quoting Russell 1979). Should this crisis of presentability and indicability force us to scale down the ambitions of the cinematic atlas? “No social atlas in the literal and figurative sense represents society,” Adorno (1977, 81) wrote, and this can be even truer today: “How can we imagine Atlas today, when linear distance (measure) is more and more incapable of functioning as any map demands, i.e. as a constitutive and therefore explanatory principle of reality? […] By virtue of this [dematerialization], atlases themselves, which apparently depict

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While dissimulating their unease about it, contemporary cinematic atlases try to restore an ideology of visibility, giving visible form to the mechanisms and connections through which the world functions, in films as different as Babel and The Forgotten Space. Will these films succeed in this struggle to repair the forgotten meaning of space? Or will cinema surrender to the threat of an invisible world that cannot but fall off of the cinematic map? CONCLUSION I have tried to address the question of the geographical vocation of cinema by discussing how contemporary films thematize issues that deal, self-reflexively, with the medium’s geographical powers. My approach has been to address films as theoretical places, or places where cinema can be seen thinking about itself. From this perspective, I have focused on what Teresa Castro describes as “cartographic shapes,” which I regarded precisely as places where cinema reflects on its nature and powers or, in semiotic terms, “enunciative places.” Seen in light of the “crisis of cartographic reason,” these cartographic shapes prove to be much more problematic today than what was previously thought. The traditional geographic penchant of cinema, I suggest, should be considered less obvious and self-evident in light of numerous contemporary films that take critical stances towards that approach. To be sure, there surely are many films that still work geographically, and that, for example, enthusiastically re-propose the aerial view as a virtuous and powerful paradigm, both optically and epistemically – among them several documentaries on nature, ecological films, and even apocalyptic movies. Those films, however, ought perhaps to be considered reactionary, nostalgic, and conservative on the representational level (even in spite of their proclaimed progressivism), as they strive to restore the ancient rhetorical power of those images, reassigning to the cinematic medium the “burden of representation” (Shohat and Stam 1994, 182) of the whole world. More interesting, in my view, are those films that seem to narrate new difficulties, namely, the crisis of the classical representational strategies discussed above, a crisis possibly arising from the loss of centrality experienced by the medium in the present mediascape. Contemporary cinema is indeed carrying out a sort of archaeology of its own gaze and in doing so it seems to express a particular form of “cartographic anxiety” (Gregory 1994, 70): It deconstructs itself and its geographical discourse as much as contemporary critical tendencies in the field of geography have cast new light on geography as a discourse, revealing hidden meanings, a

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political agenda, a specific rhetoric, and some representational limits. It is my contention that cinema as a medium is revisiting its epistemic relation with the world, recasting its cartographic tendencies in a contested, if not downright critical, manner. While declaring, sometimes symptomatically and other times explicitly, the limits, and indeed the inadequacy of its own geographic gaze, cinema also confesses to be aware that its cultural role has changed, that it cannot represent and understand the world in a certain way anymore. The medium of modernity has come to admit that something in the world is now beyond its grasp. The crisis of cartographic reason of cinema, then, stands as a synonym for the crisis of “cinematographicity,” the disappearance of a way of looking at and arranging the world: a dispositif and a geometry that used to describe the positions of subjects and objects, their value, and, ultimately, their meaning. REFERENCES Adey, P. (2010): Aerial Life. Spaces, Mobilities, Affects. Oxford. Adorno, T. W. (1977): Sociology and Empirical Research. T. W. Adorno, H. Albert, R. Dahrendorf, J. Habermas, H. Pilot, K. R. Popper (Eds.): The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology. New York, 68–86. Besse, G.-M. (2003): Aerial Geography. A. S. MacLean (Ed.): Designs on the Land: Exploring America from the Air. London, 336–363. Bruno, G. (2002): Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film. New York. Casti, E. (1998): L’ordine del mondo e la sua rappresentazione: Semiosi cartografica e autoreferenza. Milan. Castro, T. (2008): Les Cartes vues à travers le cinéma. Textimage 2. http://www.revue-textimage. com/03_cartes_plans/castro.pdf (accessed June 5, 2016). Castro, T. (2009): Cinema’s Mapping Impulse: Questioning Visual Culture. The Cartographic Journal 46 (1), 9–15 Castro, T. (2011): La Pensée cartographique des images: Cinéma et culture visuelle. Lyon. Chombart de Lauwe, P.-H. (1948): La Marque de civilisations I. Civilisations et civilisation. P.-H. Chombart de Lauwe (Ed.): La Découverte aérienne du monde. Paris, 327–374. Comolli, J.-L. (1980): Machines of the Visible. T. de Lauretis and S. Heath (Eds.): The Cinematic Apparatus. New York, 121–142. Conley, T. (2007): Cartographic Cinema. Minneapolis. Cosgrove, D. (2001): Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination. London. Cubitt, S. (2009): The Supernatural in Neo-baroque Hollywood. W. Buckland (Ed.): Film Theory and Contemporary Hollywood Movies. New York, 47–65. Dematteis, G. (1985): Le metafore della Terra: La geografia umana tra mito e scienza. Milan. Edgerton, S. (1975): The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective. New York. Farinelli, F. (1989): Pour une théorie générale de la géographie. Geneva. Farinelli, F. (1992): I segni del mondo: Immagine cartografica e discorso geografico in età moderna. Scandicci. Farinelli, F. (2003): Geografia: Un’introduzione ai modelli del mondo. Turin. Farinelli, F. (2009): La crisi della ragione cartografica. Turin. Goody, J. (1977): The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge. Gregory, D. (1994): Geographical Imaginations. Cambridge, MA. Gregory, D. (2004): The Colonial Present. Oxford.

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Gregory, D. (2011): From a View to a Kill: Drones and Late Modern War. Theory, Culture & Society 28 (7–8), 188–215. Gunning, T. (2006): ‘The Whole World within Reach’: Travel Images without Borders. J. Ruoff (Ed.): Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel. Durham, 25–41. Häfker, H. (1914): Kino und Erdkunde. Mönchengladbach. Haraway, D. (1988): Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. Feminist Studies 14 (3), 579–599. Harley, J. B. (1989): Deconstructing the Map. Cartographica 26 (2), 1–20. Harvey, D. (1992): The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge, MA. Heidegger, M. (1977): The Age of the World Picture. M. Heidegger (Ed.): The Question Concerning Technology, and Other Essays. New York, 115–154. Jacob, C. (2006): The Sovereign Map: Theoretical Approaches in Cartography Throughout History. Chicago. Jameson, F. (1992): Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham. Jameson, F. (1995): The Geopolitical Aesthetics: Cinema and Space in the World System. Bloomington. Kerr, P. (2010): Babel’s Network Narrative: Packaging a Globalized Art Cinema. Transnational Cinemas 1 (1), 37–51. Kirby, L. (1997): Parallel Tracks: The Railroad and Silent Cinema. Durham. Kirsch, S. (2002): Spectacular Violence, Hypergeography, and the Question of Alienation in Pulp Fiction. T. Cresswell and D. Dixon (Eds.): Engaging Film: Geographies of Mobility and Identity. Lanham, 32–46. Lacoste, Y. (1976a): Cinéma-géographie. Hérodote 2, 153–159. Lacoste, Y. (1976b): La Géographie, ça sert, d’abord, à faire la guerre. Paris. Lacoste, Y. (1999): Western et géopolitique. J. Mottet (Ed.): Les Paysages du cinéma. Seyssel, 154–163. Lukinbeal, C. (2010): Mobilizing the Cartographic Paradox: Tracing the Aspect of Cartography and Prospect of Cinema. Digital Thematic Education 11 (2), 1–32. Lynch, K. (1960): The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA. MacLeish, A. (1942): The Image of Victory. H. W. Weigert and V. Stefansson (Eds.): Compass of the World: A Symposium of Political Geography. London, 1–11. Metz, C. (1991): The Impersonal Enunciation, or the Site of Film (In the Margin of Recent Works on Enunciation in Cinema). New Literary History 22 (3), 747–772. Miller, A. (1996): The Panorama, the Cinema, and the Emergence of the Spectacular. Wide Angle 19 (2), 34–69. Olsson, G. (2007): Abysmal: A Critique of Cartographic Reason. Chicago. Pickles, J. (2004): A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping, and the Geo-coded World. New York. Pye, D. (2010): At the Border: The Limits of Knowledge in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and No Country for Old Men. Movie (1). http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/film/movie/ contents/at_the_border.pdf (accessed June 5, 2016). Ramírez Berg, C. (2006): A Taxonomy of Alternative Plots in Recent Films: Classifying the “Tarantino Effect.” Film Criticism 31 (2), 5–61. Roberts, M. (1998): Baraka: World Cinema and the Global Culture Industry. Cinema Journal 37 (3), 62–82. Rohdie, S. (2001): Promised Lands: Cinema, Geography, Modernism. London. Russell, D. (1979): An Open Letter on the Dematerialization of the Geographic Object. S. Gale and G. Olsson (Eds.): Philosophy in Geography. Dordrecht, 329–344. Schivelbusch, W. (1986): The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century. Berkeley. Shohat, E. and R. Stam (1994): Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. London.

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Shohat, E. (1991): Imaging Terra Incognita: The Disciplinary Gaze of Empire. Public Culture 3 (2), 41–70. Uricchio, W. (2011): A ‘Proper Point of View’: The Panorama and Some of its Early Media Iterations. Early Popular Visual Culture 9 (3), 255–238. Wyld, J. (1851): Notes to Accompany Mr. Wyld’s Model of the Earth, Leicester Square. London.

FILMS Alexander. Director: Oliver Stone. USA, UK, Germany, Netherlands, France, Italy: Warner Bros. et al., 2004. Babel. Director: Alejandro G. Iñárritu. France, USA, Mexico: Paramount Pictures et al., 2006. Body of Lies. Director: Ridley Scott. USA, UK: Warner Bros., Scott Free, De Line Pictures, 2008. Burn After Reading. Director: Ethan & Joel Coen. USA, UK, France: Focus Features et al., 2008. Contagion. Director: Steven Soderbergh. USA, UAE: Warner Bros. et al., 2011. Good Kill. Director: Andrew Niccol. USA: Voltage Pictures et al., 2014. Green Zone. Director: Paul Greengrass. UK, France, Spain, USA: Universal Pictures et al., 2010. Koyaanisqatsi. Director: Godfrey Reggio. USA: IRE Productions, Santa Fe Institute for Regional Education, 1982. Lions for Lambs. Director: Robert Redford. USA: MGM et al., 2007. Megacities. Director: Michael Glawogger. Austria, Switzerland: Fama Film AG, Lotus Film, 1998. Pulp Fiction. Director: Quentin Tarantino. USA: Miramax, A Band Apart, Jersey Films, 1994. Syriana. Director: Stephen Gaghan. USA, UAE: Warner Bros. et al., 2005. The Adjustment Bureau. Director: George Nolfi. USA: Universal Pictures, MRC, Gambit Pictures, Electric Shepherd Productions, 2011. The Fair Game. Director: Doug Liman. USA, UAE: River Road Entertainment et al., 2010. The Forgotten Space. Director: Noël Burch, Allan Sekula. Netherlands, Austria: Wildart Film, 2010. The Hunger Games. Director: Gary Ross. USA: Lionsgate, Color Force, 2012. The Matrix. Director: The Wachowski Brothers. USA: Warner Bros. et al., 1999. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Director: Tommy Lee Jones. France, USA: EuropaCorp, The Javelina Film Company, 2005. The Truman Show. Director: Peter Weir. USA: Paramount Pictures, Scott Rudin Productions, 1998. The Village. Director: M. Night Shyamalan. USA: Touchstone Pictures, Blinding Edge Pictures, Scott Rudin Pictures, 2004. Until the End of the World. Director: Wim Wenders. Germany, France, Australia, USA: Argos Films et al., 1991. Up in the Air. Director: Jason Reitman. USA: Paramount Pictures et al., 2009. Whores’ Glory. Director: Michael Glawogger. Germany, Austria, Thailand: Lotus Film et al., 2011. Workingman’s Death. Director: Michael Glawogger. Austria, Germany, Indonesia, France: Arte et al., 2005.

MAPPING THE INFLUX: CARTOGRAPHIC RESPONSES TO EUROPE’S REFUGEE CRISIS Paul C. Adams The claim “borders are everywhere” (Balibar 1998; Rumford 2010) indicates more than a trend toward greater mobility or a new awareness of how commodities, bodies, ideas, capital, energy and environmental impacts are constantly crossing borders. It implies a growing contradiction between dividing lines we envision as existing on the ground, lines we draw in cartographic space, and a proliferation of networked actions and actor-networks. Bordering practices now pervade everyday life, organizational communications, public discourses, and social power relations suggesting a complex, volumetric, 3-dimensional logic (Dalby 2013; Elden 2013). Geographers increasingly recognize that borders are simultaneously in place and out of place, linear and distributed, limits of assumed sameness and zones of encountered difference that exist in tension with any mapped pattern of bounded, cellular territories. This chapter traces the dissolution of borders and the multiplication of cross-border flows, through the reconfiguring of cartographies of power and dominance (Sparke 2004); it traces a host of practices that simultaneously assert the continuing importance of borders and highlight the limits of bordering practices. We enter the borders-are-everywhere discussion by considering efforts to map the flows of human bodies toward, over and across Europe’s borders in the past few years – a time of unprecedented change for Europe. The artifact of interest is the migration map; the dominant question is not which maps are better or worse, but rather how mapping becomes a kind of performance, a visuality saturated with the more-than-visual. This close look at maps of European migration reveals not just efforts to depict movements of human populations but also anxieties about what “European” means, who Europeans are, and how Europeans meet (or fail to meet) “Western” ideals and ethics. Like many other critical engagements with cartography, this project’s origins can be traced to the path-breaking work of J. B. Harley (1988), David Woodward (1992) and John Pickles (1992) who showed that whereas geographers were once content to map borders and assume that these borders literally made up the world, a new sensibility was needed that interrogated maps as partial and strategic representations of the world. Cartographic representation was shown to be not merely mimetic but also persuasive: “propaganda maps are not merely one more medium or form to be interpreted, but are in many ways an archetypical form of the age of technicity. They are exemplars of the manipulation of symbols and writing” (Pickles 1992, 228). On this account, maps used for explicitly political purposes differed from other maps in degree but not in basic character. Geographers were justified to

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engage with all maps as propaganda maps, questioning “the map itself, the immediate context of the map (its caption, the chapter and the work of which it is a part), and the wider context of the map (the opus of the individual cartographer or school, the opus to which the text itself belongs, the socio-cultural context of the work)” (Pickles 1992, 219). In short, full engagement with cartography required scholars to work their way through hermeneutic circles. More recent understandings of cartography build on this sensibility but “seem to be moving from a niche–based study of maps as objects to a more comprehensive (and potentially interdisciplinary) study of mapping as practice, the knowledges it deploys, and the political field of its operations” (Crampton 2009a, 840; 2009b). The argument is that mapping, as a social activity, cannot be reduced to the threeway relationship between the subjective cartographic gaze, the objectified world, and the map, however complex these three elements may be. Mapping is also a kind of performance. The fourth facet of cartography is social performance around the map’s creation and appropriation, involving impulses that are artistic and expressive yet also contentious and politicized (Peluso 1995; Sletto 2009). On top of the hermeneutic circle we must layer a sensitivity to questions about the non-representational dimensions of mapping which enables new kinds of participatory shifts. How do internet users who re-post or link to a particular map not only endorse that map but also perform a particular relationship toward various modes of spatial perception, social hierarchies, political engagements and geographical processes? What brings these various practices together – bordering, map-making, and map-using – was articulated a long time ago by John Berger (1972) as “ways of seeing”; the term pointed scholars beyond the image or representation to particular ways of inhabiting and thinking about the world. Maps enact what Martin Jay (1988) calls a “scopic regime,” a god’s eye view not only in the sense of a detached, vertical perspective, but also in the sense of its effort to flatten reality and capture the world on a two-dimensional surface even as the map-maker and map-user betray the depth and entanglement of spatial practices. The map is an image, of sorts, but as Jay points out elsewhere (1994, 9) “image” is a flexible word, including “graphic, optical, perceptual, mental, or verbal phenomena.” On this account if a migration map starts out as a picture of who is “in place” and who is “out of place” (Cresswell 1996) then it ends up as, more than this, “a document which in the same gesture both shows and tells, a performance which is not merely about something but is that something itself” (Olsson 2007, 213). Each migration map becomes a gesture of inclusion and/or exclusion, a particular way of placing human bodies. The purpose of this chapter is therefore to examine migration maps as performances of control with a focus on the borders of Europe. The maps under scrutiny are distinct in their focus on the influx of immigrants from Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia and their entry into the Schengen Area. I initially cast my net widely to capture as many digital maps of this human flow as could be identified in early 2016 on the Internet, using the English terms “refugees,” “immigration,” “map,” and equivalent terms in Scandinavian languages and French. The simple criterion of inclusion was that a map had to be produced within the past five years and must show some aspect of immigration into Europe. As a prelude to a more systematic

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assessment of this cartographic genre, this study seeks only to sample these images, their textual online explanations, and their re-posting. The purpose is to reveal the range of cartographic performances by many different map-users, groups and agencies rather than, for example, to measure relative percentages of various types of migration maps. A systematic comparison of maps generated or used by different language communities must also await a future project. As suggested above, the purpose of this exploration goes beyond questions of representation, however, to examine how European migration maps perform notions of identity and belonging – the why of cartography – although this inevitably returns us to the question of what is represented and how. The interest in performativity points towards control – mapping as an enactment of control over potentially uncontrollable geographic processes. The study begins with a consideration of theories linking bodies, bordering, security and rights. It then introduces a key organizational player – Frontex – before turning to examine migration maps and their networks. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND: MAPPING RISKY BODIES “The modern geopolitical imagination is a system of visualizing the world … It is a constructed view of the world, not a simple spontaneous vision that arises from simply looking out at the world with ‘common sense.’” (Agnew 2003, 6)

Systematic displays of risk, including migration maps, can be seen as a means of governing. An example of this is the homeland security advisory system adopted in the United States following the attacks of September 11, according to which risk was coded in five colors corresponding to the following levels: low, guarded, elevated, high and severe. During the nine years during which the system was in place (2002 to 2011) people were urged to tailor their alertness to match five levels of officially designated risk – or rather three levels since the blue (guarded) and green (low) threat levels were never used. These announcements of risk directed at the general population caused anxiety among the mentally ill, disabled, racial minorities and immigrants; populations most likely to modify their behavior in response to the highest alert levels (Eisenman et al. 2008), and anxiety and avoidance behavior resulting from the system were recognized by authorities as tools for political manipulation. In The Test of our Times, Tom Ridge, the former head of the Department of Homeland Security, details how President George W. Bush and top officials in his administration demanded that the risk level be raised in the lead-up to the 2004 presidential election although there was no evidence of increased risk at that time. Such warnings would be expected to reduce the turnout of the marginalized populations which, on the whole, were less supportive of President Bush and his administration while galvanizing support among the more hawkish, nationalistic voters. Institutionalized risk definition mapped onto geographical spaces and bodies served as a means of manipulating the electorate. Migration maps may be

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used in a similar way, not to facilitate state governance, but more abstractly to rescue the supra-state entity from what appears as a crisis of integrity. Relative to a supra-state entity, an unstoppable flow inwards (or outwards) over borders raises questions about the viability of the collectivity as an actor – whether this flow consists of ideas, goods (such as drugs or contraband) or human beings. Thus, “the unauthorized immigrant’s body constitutes a violation of sovereignty (Diener and Hagen 2012, 83). Cross-border flows are expediently inflated in public rhetoric and imagination as sources of contamination, subversion, and disruption. When a collective actor that is conventionally viewed as monolithic is revealed to be limited and fragmented, a resident/citizen may take it personally, so to speak, reading the border crossings as a direct attack on him or herself. This xenophobic rhetoric was demonstrated famously by Donald Trump in a June 2015 speech about immigrants from Mexico: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” As Yi-Fu Tuan points out, “Europe” came into use in the seventeenth century as a “handy term with which to describe a geographical area and an assortment of peoples” (1991, 689). Insofar as Europe can function as an actor at all, despite being a large and heterogeneous entity lacking clear borders, its “actorness” depends on maintaining some degree of cohesion, authority, autonomy and recognition (Mamadouh 2001). These elements permit Europe to act in an integrated fashion, with legal support, free from external control, while being recognized as an actor by other geopolitical actors (Caporaso and Jupille 1998; Beauguitte et al. 2015). This attribution of collective agency exists in tension with nationalist and localist worldviews, but is common nonetheless, for example framing the EU as what Léonard calls “a monolithic actor” (2010, 233). Evidence supporting or undermining belief in this monolithic actor comes in many forms, but for our purposes what is most important is that a huge migration influx puts strains on every dimension of Europe’s actorness, not merely creating logistical problems but also creating a crisis of legitimacy for the supranational union. The influx draws attention to Europe’s rather uncertain external borders, and the potential of hardening the “internal” borders of the Schengen Area, that is, the borders between the 26 countries that are party to the Schengen agreement.1 The result is what could be called a cartography of securitization, with the latter indicating: “extreme politicisation of migration and its presentation as a security threat” (Léonard 2010, 231). The State of Exception To place this in ethical context we must theorize the body in a geopolitical context. In modern democratic states like the members of the EU, a person is accorded basic civil rights by being human rather than by fitting into a certain social status, such as being male or owning land. One has rights simply because one is human, i.e. has a 1

Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Liechtenstein.

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human body. Giorgio Agamben explores the implications of this situation in Homo Sacer (1998) cautioning that there is a fundamental flaw lurking behind this universalizing logic of inclusion. If the modern democratic state exists by assuming “the care of the natural life of individuals into its very center” (Agamben 1998, 5) then those who are not formally recognized as belonging to the state may be subject to policies excluding them from life itself. When a system guarantees rights to all human bodies, the logical implication of social exclusion is exclusion from life itself. Falling outside the scope of state sovereignty, certain individuals embody what Agamben calls a “state of exception” permitting their destruction. Whoever has the misfortune of belonging to an excluded group challenges the principle that rights and life go together, so to maintain the system’s logic such people may be deprived of life itself. The logic of inclusion, being total and organic, precipitates the dissolution of bodies which cannot be assimilated within that logic; it is easier to cause or permit certain bodies to perish than to offer the persons with those bodies a conditional or partial type of citizenship. To facilitate this treatment, bodies may be herded together into camps, enclaves, and ghettos – contained yet excluded. Treatments of this sort were applied to bandits and outlaws in pre-modern Europe; Jews and other racialized groups under the Third Reich, refugees and paperless immigrants today, in each case revealing how order is linked to disorder precisely by the opposition between the state’s inside and its outside (Agamben 1998, 104–111; 131–133; 166–180). The state’s reduction of rights to mere existence, to what Agamben calls “bare life,” means that those with a questionable social status may, in the name of (bio)political order, be expelled from the state, while being enclosed within the state, and thereby systematically being deprived of life itself. Agamben’s “state of exception” is presented as: “the bare life that modernity necessarily creates within itself, but whose presence it can no longer tolerate in any way” (Agamben 1998, 179, italics added). Here his logic falters, I believe. States have geographical limits and as such they include certain persons while excluding others. Boundaries inscribed in space imply boundaries inscribed onto the body of humanity; but this bounding process does not occur because exclusion from life is necessary to the logic of inclusion within territory. There are two rather different things going on here. It is one thing for states to treat human beings as equal under the law within a particular territory but another thing for the state’s sovereignty to require the annihilation of people who lack citizenship. If rights are afforded on the basis of each person’s humanity rather than by virtue of certain social criteria, it could be argued just as easily that the logic of the modern state, if taken to its conclusion, guarantees the same rights to every human being on the planet. The risk in Agamben’s meticulous dissection of bare life is that his critique could be taken as a point of departure and a logical justification for a return to government in which certain people, though human, are excluded from rights just because they are too old, too sick, too weak, or too young, have a certain complexion, or are female. His theory shows the peril of identifying a failure in practice and reading that failure as a necessity. He ignores the practical implications of rejecting the principle itself and is unfortunately close to a philosophical justification of what he despises rather than offering a set of alternative guidelines that would help move

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away from such forms of exclusion. Agamben’s critique of bare life is therefore flawed, but it offers a sense of direction to discussions of rights by asking how particular people come to be excluded from the rights other people seem to enjoy merely by virtue of their humanity. In regard to Europe’s current refugee situation, the state of exception is evident at the margins of the Schengen Area and particularly in the waters of the Mediterranean, Aegean and South Atlantic. There, the principle of bare life is revealed in a rite of passage – a watery ordeal that must be suffered by the body in order to set foot on territory where certain rights apply. Maps of human flows that ignore all bodies except “illegal” bodies like the ones crossing the sea in flimsy boats perform a kind of threshold, mirroring the practices interrogated by Agamben. Migration maps attempt to visualize flows that go somewhere but are reconstructed as going nowhere, trajectories that lead across the borders of Europe from the outside, but are classified as failing to enter Europe nonetheless. Notwithstanding the flaws in Agamben’s interpretation these are best understood as movements of humans into a space of exception from which they may be subsequently removed. The arrows track movements of bodies that quite often fail to meet the criteria for inclusion; they make visible the difference between Western notions of rights and the bare life of the asylum-seeker, routinely exposed to grave risks. The Return of the Oppressed What Sigmund Freud called the return of the repressed (1966) was the psychic manifestation of a traumatic event that had been forgotten. A past trauma would return to the present in the form of a symptom driven by an autonomous impulse to penetrate the consciousness. In analogous fashion, the traumas of colonization are returning from the past, or rather reasserting themselves as continuing factors in the present, in the form of geodemographic flows, autonomous movements of human bodies over and across boundaries that are meant to order and control space. Europe is not new to the descendants of colonized people, even if they are new to Europe. The European colonial projects which proliferated throughout the 19th century then collapsed in the 20th century gave rise to various forms of political and economic disruption, as well as the geographical connections which today serve as corridors for migration from the global periphery to the global core. While colonial ties were asymmetrical and oppressive, they led to independence movements throughout the 20th century with their claims to individual rights and democracy, drawing on European enlightenment ideologies. Colonialism was all about asymmetrical pathways through space, facilitating movements to and from the colonies by Europeans, inhibiting such movements by non-Europeans, using these paths to extract valuable goods and commodities from the colonies to Europe, while diffusing ideologies and theologies that incorporated themes of universalism (Capitalism, Christianity, democracy, scientific reason, and notions of human rights). The universalizing ideologies were never meant to challenge the underlying hierarchies of colonialism, although each ideology had to be interwoven with internal contradic-

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tions for this to be the case. The asymmetry has evolved but remains present in its basic outlines while being revealed all the more starkly by the specter of increasing numbers of people seeking the promise inherent in the universalizing ideologies promoted by the Europeans. In this way the fluidity of the current geo-political and demographic landscapes reflects ties between places that were established during the colonial era, while the current human influx potentially troubles the European conscience. Geographical ties have remained along with the structural inequalities at the heart of colonialism – inscribed both then and now in colonial languages. These linguistic transfusions facilitate the process of migration, albeit to a degree limited by multiple dimensions of linguistic otherness – accents, dialects, coinages, linguistic borrowings, diglossia, and multilingualism. Likewise, political and economic ties between colonial powers and former colonies persist. In countries such as France, Germany, and the UK, whose economies and social welfare apparatuses offer powerful pull factors (Insee 2014) people of non-European background constitute less than ten percent of the population. As recently as 2010, all EU countries combined received less than 300 thousand applications for refugee status per year. With the Arab Spring movement and the rise of the Islamic State movement in the Middle East, however, the number of applicants has more than tripled (Eurostat 2016a). Primary countries of origin are Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, followed by Iran, Albania, Pakistan, Eritrea, Nigeria and Russia, while “stateless” is ranked number seven in the list of immigrant sources (Eurostat 2016b). Most of these immigrants are entering the EU through Greece and the countries bordering on the Balkans (BBC 2016). This migration flow is increasingly represented as a crisis (rendered in French as crise migratoire or in Swedish as flyktingkatastrofen, for example). In the context of the pre-existing institutional frameworks of the EU and the Schengen agreement, as well as the border control organization Frontex, these terms suggest: first, a logistical crisis; second, a social crisis marked by growing fear of risks such as terrorism, criminality and social unrest (Léonard 2010, 231); third and most subtly, there is a crisis directly attacking the “actorness” of Europe. When faced with something that cannot be controlled, any actor (human or otherwise) is brought up against the limits of autonomous agency. In short, cartography is employed to provide a form of symbolic closure in the midst of an open-ended process; to restore a modicum of ontological security to the actor called the EU even when the secure geographical division between its inside and outside, here and there, is disrupted by flows of seemingly unrecognizable bodies. Migration maps serve not merely to document the influx of refugees but also to place that influx within a larger frame of reference that performs ethical and ideological bordering. While sharing these traits, the maps differ in regard to their purpose – a range of variation we can capture in terms of three basic performances or enactments: informing, excluding and including. The next section takes up these performances.

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MIGRATION MAPS To explore cartographic responses to the current wave(s) of migration into Europe a Google image search was conducted using the terms “refugee,” “migrant,” “route,” and “crisis,” “map,” and related terms in Swedish, Norwegian, and French – languages selected on the basis of the author’s ability to interpret the accompanying articles. Many of the images were drawn from media and agencies that would be available internationally, for example, the BBC, UNHCR, and Frontex; the searches, therefore, suggest a broader set of stakeholders than just the primary speakers of the four languages. This is not an exhaustive survey but rather a sampling of each type of cartographic performance. Maps were classified on the basis of their purpose: informational, inclusive, or exclusive. Informational maps were those dedicated to the control and management of European territories, particularly the Schengen countries, as well as the dissemination of information about immigration sources, destinations, camps, routes, casualties, and the like. Inclusive maps were associated with efforts to bolster pro-immigrant sentiments and with humanitarian efforts to assist refugees and asylum seekers. Exclusive maps were associated with efforts to show perceived risks of immigration and strengthen border control. While seldom explicitly anti-immigrant, many maps in this group were designed in ways that accentuated the perception of immigration as a problem and a few were outright expressions of xenophobia. These classifications are best understood as overlapping rather than mutually exclusive categories, since maps designed to inform can also alarm, and vice versa, while the inclusive and exclusive tendencies employ surprisingly similar graphics in some cases. The risk of categorizing in this way is that each category seems to say more than it actually does. To say there exist “informational” maps is not to say that these maps offer a mirror or transparent window onto reality. As Harley argued almost 30 years ago, to judge cartography merely in terms of its accuracy is to overlook the ways in which maps are cultural products reflective of the values, assumptions, and power relations in which they are embedded (1988). However, despite the fact that informational maps are created to support a particular framework of knowledge, and knowledge is always entangled with power (Foucault 1980), these maps offer a kind of knowledge that can be developed into both inclusive and exclusive maps. This polyvalent quality distinguishes maps as contingent on cartographic networks, including not only maps but data sources, scopic regimes, forms of iconography, map creators, and map users. The category “informational maps” unfolds to reveal particular networks, and the same is true of the maps I am calling “inclusive” and “exclusive.” A map that is of interest to a defender of immigrant rights may be taken up by a group or individual that is hostile to immigrants. Thus, the distinction is less dichotomous than the words perhaps imply. The qualities of inclusivity and exclusivity reside in the networks of users and sometimes dwell side by side.

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Informational Maps The primary sources of informational maps are Frontex, the Emergency Response Coordination Centre (ERCC) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Within Frontex, cartographic products are primarily created by the Risk Analysis Unit, located in Warsaw. The data sources collated and mapped by this office analyze and present data collected by Frontex itself as well as from organizations that share data with Frontex, including INTERPOL, UNHCR, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the International Organization for Migration (IOM), EUROPOL, and the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD) (http://frontex.europa.eu/intelligence/risk-analysis/). Frontex maps are graphically sophisticated. They often combine graphic elements including weighted arrows, choropleth shading, scaled circles and embedded charts (Figures 1 and 2).

Figure 1: Detected illegal border-crossings in 2014 and percentage change over 2013. Source: FRONTEX Risk Analysis Unit (2015). Annual Risk Analysis 2015, p. 19. Frontex reference number: 4613/2015

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Figure 2: Illegal border crossings by source and route. Frontex Risk Analysis Unit (January 2016). FRAN Quarterly, Quarter 3, July–September 2015, p. 9. Warsaw, Poland. Frontex reference number: 20617/2015

What emerges initially from a consideration of migration maps is a language of human masses and trajectories, represented as circles and arrows (Figure 1). There is nothing natural about the conjunction of circles and arrows when representing flows of objects, but it is a familiar cartographic language. However, people are not objects so this graphic language does a kind of violence to the people it captures – reducing them to volumes, masses, and quantities, bodies more than people. Furthermore, these migration maps exclude other kinds of flows, for example flows of military personnel and weapons into the migration source countries from the US and Europe, or the longstanding flow of goods and capital out of the source countries to the US and Europe. By decontextualizing a single kind of flow from the various other globalizing flows, these maps not only invoke the trope of crisis, they also divorce that crisis from many of its causes, in effect extracting and abstracting the flow of bodies itself as the cause of the crisis. In that closed perspectival framework, the first solution that comes to mind is to staunch the flow of bodies by erecting a “wall,” a system of hardened borders, patrols, and surveillance technologies at Europe’s southern and eastern margins. Another key form of elision in the migration maps with their circles and arrows is the fact that the edge of Europe is not simply a closed, two-dimensional area but numerous points of contact via air, water and land – a three-dimensional volume. In fact, the majority of illegal nonresidents in Europe arrive via air rather than land or water and overstay their visas (Vaughan-Williams 2015, 60). So there is nothing natural about visualizing migration as circles and arrows.

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In Frontex’s Annual Risk Analysis there has been a shift away from red and other warm colors since 2012. The newer maps use cool colors, as evident in Figure 1. This shift may be an attempt to reduce the implication that immigration is a threat, however, the more alarming color scheme can still be found in other Frontex publications (e.g. Figure 2). Interestingly, the scaling of map elements also reveals internal variation in Frontex cartography. The arrow weight and size of the circles in Figure 1 are scaled, but with relatively low “resolution,” such that the circle showing the Black Sea route with 433 immigrants and the Eastern land border with 1275 immigrants are drawn the same size, while the arrow pointing to the Canaries is the same size as the arrows pointing to Sicily although the flow to Sicily is 600 times greater. The scaling appears much more careful in Figure 2, which has the effect of increasing not only the precision of the map but its emotional impact, as well. The three arrows are rendered in shades of red, and this color scheme combined with the continent-spanning scale of the Western Balkan and Eastern Mediterranean arrows could easily give an anxious European observer the impression that Europe is about to be engulfed or consumed. Thus informational maps grapple with questions of inclusionary and exclusionary forms of bias. Frontex maps are often borrowed by other users such as state governments and newspapers (e.g. Assemblée Nationale 2013; Aftonbladet 2016; The Economist 2015). Other actors use data from Frontex to construct their own maps. The agency therefore plays a major role in visualizing the flow of human population into Europe. Minor sources of informational maps include national governments and media such as the Agence France Presse, BBC, Le Figaro, and Business Insider. Frontex was created in 2005 in the wake of calls for better coordination of border control activities among the European countries. The more cumbersome formal name of this powerful organization is the European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders of the Member States of the European Union. Although created by the European Council (an intergovernmental organization at the heart of the EU) its mandate is to monitor entry into the boundary jointly defined by the Schengen countries. An additional need articulated by the representatives to the European Council from Greece (which held the EC presidency in 2003) was for: “a monitoring mechanism and … a method for independent and thorough evaluation as well as for the processing and utilization of results” (Ekelund 2014, 106). Surveillance was subsequently linked to freedom in the agency’s founding document: “the main objective of Community policy in the field of the EU external borders is to create an integrated border management, which would ensure a high and uniform level of control and surveillance, an essential prerequisite for an area of freedom, security and justice” (European Commission 2003, 4). Thus surveillance of the excluded population was a central capability of Frontex from the outset and was seen as logically tied to freedom of the included population. The Schengen area has a complex land and sea border including the Black Sea, Mediterranean, Adriatic, North Sea and Baltic Sea, as well as the Atlantic coast of Africa (thanks to the Canary Islands). With 42,673 km of sea borders and 7,721 km of land borders (European Commission 2016a, 8), the Schengen Area borders

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directly on Turkey, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova, and is separated by a mere 14 kilometers from Morocco. Sections of this border have attracted attention as points of entry for undocumented immigrants and also as fatal sites with death tolls in the thousands – most notably Lampedusa off the coast of Tunisia, the Strait of Gibraltar, and the crossing from Morocco and Western Sahara to the Canary Islands (Blanchard et al. 2012). The charge with monitoring the external borders of the Schengen area complements the objective of maintaining unimpeded border crossings within the Schengen area. The breakdown of one objective can predicate retreat from the other. Six states (Norway, Sweden, Denmark, France, Austria, and Germany) had implemented temporary border controls with other Schengen countries as of February 2016. This effectively stepped back from the Schengen objective of creating an open space for human movement (European Commission 2016b) and was a response to “irregular immigration” flows into Europe. The annual budget of Frontex has grown to over 140 million euros ($ 160 million US dollars) per year (Frontex 2015) – a figure dwarfed by the $ 38 billion budget of the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS 2015) but of course this figure does not include the various European states’ budgets associated with tasks of monitoring and controlling access to individual state territories. Frontex has a more restricted role of coordinating state-based border controls. The organization was originally tasked with managing rapid border interventions through the Rapid Border Intervention (RABIT) program but after 2011 the organization’s scope expanded to include routine border control and monitoring both within and beyond the Schengen area. Its activities include turning back watercraft attempting to cross into European coastal waters, surveillance and management of personal identity data, and forced expulsion of people who have entered Europe illegally or overstayed their visas or residence permits (Casella-Colombeau 2012). The organization has been accused of human rights abuses, but it claims immunity from liability for such violations (Ekelund 2014, 100; Majcher 2015). Frontex has an unusual relationship to the notion of “immigration control” and it is this less conventional sense that I intend to explore here. While control consists in part of practical activities like barring entry and returning those who have gained entry without the proper paperwork, it also involves a psychological or emotional component. In this regard, we can think of the power of control as a political symbol – the sense of being able to determine what happens to “our space.” This aspect of control partly explains why terrorism, one of the least likely causes of death in Europe, nonetheless occupies a large slice of the public discourse. The primary risks from immigration relate to the loss of control over territorial borders, and the associated threat to established notions of Us and Them, insiders and outsiders as well as collective agency or “actorness.” Thus “risk analysis is at the heart of the agency’s activities” (Ekelund 2014, 101), competing with the more mundane task of logistically coordinating member states’ joint border control operations. The operations of Frontex reflect and magnify the geographical complexity of Europe. It operates in seven maritime theaters of operation stretching from the Atlantic to the Black Sea. There are dozens of cooperative agreements between

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Schengen countries and non-Schengen neighbors governing immigration control regimes enacted on land and water. The organization employs over two dozen helicopters, more than a hundred boats and more than 20 planes. Less impressive but equally important are the organization’s cartographic endeavors. Frontex maps are created by the Risk Analysis Unit which is located in Warsaw. These maps reflect the shared intelligence of Frontex’s collaborators: the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol), the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the European Police Office (EUROPOL) and the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD). As we will see in the next section, this networking plays a crucial role in generating a cartography of migration. Exclusive Maps Some maps serve less to inform than to facilitate and guide exclusionary practices. This stance is evident not only in elements of cartographic content, such as the color and scale of graphic elements, but also in the context of the maps. By context what is indicated is both the immediate textual relationships to other images and text within a particular newspaper or website (for example) and also the more elusive aspects of the map’s use which include the audiences and their preferred readings, or ways of “audiencing” (Fiske 1994).

Figure 3: “La carte de repartition des réfugiés (INFOGRAPHIE)” (Sept. 8, 2015) (map of the distribution of refugees)DH.be. (La Dernière Heure, Belgium) http://www.dhnet.be/actu/belgique/la-carte-de-repartition-des-refugies-infographie-55edce813570ebab3d995493

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Figure 3 shows an illustration from a 2015 article that appeared in DH.be, the online version of La Dernière Heure, a Belgian newspaper. The immigrant populations are shown with bright red circles and the use of color is semiotically important as is the scale of the circles, which fills Germany from east to west and outscales Belgium and the Netherlands. The circles end up in the North Sea, because of their scale. These cartographic choices say “crisis” in visual terms but the text accompanying the map leaves its politics somewhat more ambiguous. Rather than emphasize the threatening economic impacts or disruptive social impacts, to offer just two possible discursive angles, it maintains a more neutral stance by reporting on efforts to fairly distribute the burden of accepting refugees among the European countries. However, the short article ends with a mention of the planned increase in funding to support refugee services in countries bordering on Syria, thereby engaging intertextually with the threatening map to suggest that such economic aid effort is in the interest of a demographically overwhelmed Europe.

Figure 4: “Malta: Medelhavet blir en kyrkogård” (Malta: the Mediterranean is becoming a graveyard) “Flyktingkatastrofen” (refugee crisis) Aftonbladet, October 12, 2013. http://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/article17645754.ab

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A more literal evocation of crisis can be seen in Figure 4, the October 12, 2013 front page of the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet. The term flyktingkatastrofen (immigration catastrophe), the use of red for the arrows showing migrant flows, and the use of foreshortening to emphasize the source regions and reduce the apparent scale of Europe, all converge to construct immigration as a threat to a vulnerable Europe. Context again complicates this interpretation, however. This appears in conjunction with an article which tells of a boat that capsized in the Strait of Sicily leading to the drowning of some fifty would-be immigrants. Here the catastrophe is verbally portrayed as the loss of life by immigrants while the visuals suggest immigration itself as the catastrophe. The result is polysemous or multivocal. Perhaps the most potent map from an exclusionary standpoint is a dynamic map created by the Finnish company Lucify (http://www.lucify.com/the-flow-towards-europe/) (Figure 5). Lucify is a data visualization company with a focus on migration and without a particular political agenda. The map’s creators, Ville Saarinen and Juho Ojala, have solidified their claim to expertise in migration mapping by producing an interactive world map showing the costs of migration broken down by year, amount actually funded, and refugees vs IDPs (http://www. lucify.com/the-cost-of-displacement).

Figure 5: Screen shot from the interactive online map created by Lucify, http://www.lucify.com/ the-flow-towards-europe. In the original, the black dashes move rapidly toward the bases of the columns, and the columns slowly grow, while moving the cursor filters the view to show only the flows to a single European country or out of a single non-European country (The image colors have been modified for publication)

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What makes “The Flow Towards Europe” an exclusionary map is worth examining. There is no evidence that the map was meant to promote a particular agenda vis-àvis immigration. The map’s data was published by UNHCR, a source is used in the informational and inclusive maps as well. If the map promotes xenophobia (and for many who posted links to it that is clearly the case) it does so in part because of cartographic choices that were perhaps made inadvertently. Most important of these is the choice to show flows dynamically rather than statically. Migration flows to Europe are shown not as aggregated counts or arrows but as streams of white dashes with bright heads and dim tails, like missiles. Each tiny missile represents 25 people streaming toward Europe from points south, southeast and east. Moving the cursor over the image allows the user to select one particular destination country (in Europe) or one particular source country (outside of Europe). Placing the cursor on a sea or off-screen turns off the filter and reveals the entire migration flow to Europe, though not the streams originating and terminating outside of Europe, nor flows from one EU country to another. The graphic begins with January 2012 and ends with the present (the plan of the map’s creators is to continually update the data behind their map). Where the bias of this map emerges most clearly is in the process of its appropriation. The sites linking to the Lucify map can be identified, for example by using the web service called Moz, which identifies the websites that link to a given website, and also by a Google image search, which allows one to visually identify the same map appearing at multiple websites. Downloading a list of inbound links to the Lucify migration map on Moz offers a profile of the politics behind the act of “borrowing” this dynamic map. A somewhat different story is told by the Google image search. The interactive migration map by Lucify was re-posted and used by various sources, listed in order of their interest in the map obtained from the Moz search: (1) middle of the road news sites; (2) left-wing news and opinion sites; (3) rightwing news and opinion sites; (4) sites focusing on art, graphics and mapping; (5) sites focusing on technology; (6) NGOs; (7) religious organizations.2 A somewhat different story is told by the Google image search. The algorithms used by Google are proprietary, but they prioritize more popular sites, which would imply that image searches would, in this case, foreground the most popular sites that link to the Lucify map. Here the question is not merely whether a site links to the Lucify map, but also whether that site is, itself, the destination of a large number of links. In other words, Google selectively foregrounds the most popular sites that link to the Lucify map. Out of the 25 sites identified as linking to the Lucify site via the Google image search, 8 were right wing news and opinion sites, 6 offered left wing or centrist news, 3 were associated with business and investment, 3 were associated with social media (YouTube, Pinterest, and Twitter), 2 were about maps, 1 was for computer programmers, and 1 was associated with a science museum in Dublin. The remaining site was unfinished and contained only the link to the Lucify 2

This ranking reflects an analysis of the first 50 links to the Lucify site that were identified via moz.com and that could be interpreted by the author.

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map. Considering the links identified by Moz, Lucify attracted about 80 percent more interest from left-leaning than from right-leaning websites, but the Google image search tells a different story, indicating that the sites that managed to attract attention with the Lucify map were predominantly conservative. Nicolas Lambert formulated a critique of its right-leaning persuasive potential in the 4/11/2015 Neocarto web posting, Une carte à abattre (a map to slay) (2015a, author’s translation): Like all maps, this one tells a story. But the story is questionable in many ways … By selecting only a portion of the information (only the South to North flows), this map shows a partial view of reality that is not clearly explained. The World Bank website informs us, for example, that Turkey welcomed 1,587,374 refugees over the period 2011–2015 as opposed to only 252,264 for France over the same period, which is 6 times more. Yet, on this map, Turkey is represented as a “sender” of migrants and not as a destination country. The map therefore lies, knowingly concealing an important part of the information.

Lambert’s critique expands to include cartographic technique, which he refuses to treat as merely technical, instead showing that the chosen techniques of representation perpetuate certain assumptions and worldviews (Lambert 2015a, author’s translation). … On this animated map, population movements (asylum seekers) are represented by small strokes that move from country to country. This graphic semiotics describes by its movement a continuous migration flow that never dries up until it overflows … [T]he movement traces are straight. The winding realities of actual trajectories are annihilated. Contrary to how it may seem at first, this map is not situated at the level of individual paths. It does not tell the stories of migrants. Worse, it dehumanizes them. On this map, each feature (which is 25 or 50 people) follows a straight path like a missile launched towards Europe. A missile it would be impossible to stop, a missile that destroys what it strikes. In short, in many ways, this graphic semiotics stages a scenario of invasion, quasi military, with European countries attacked (and overrun) by foreigners. Disgusting!

The title of the map explicitly references migration to Europe, so Lambert’s critique may stray from the explicit purpose of the map. However, his points draw justified attention to the complexity of cartographic representation and the fact that graphic choices can deliberately or inadvertently align with certain political angles. The links to this map originated from websites written in English, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Czech and Russian, indicating an international cartographic audience. Intertextuality and internationality go hand in hand when maps posted online by someone in one country are reposted or linked to by websites in another country. An example with heavily exclusionary implications is the map posted on Every Kinda People, a conservative Swedish blog (http://everykindapeople.blogspot.com/). This image was reposted from the website of John deNugent, an outspoken antisemite and racial supremacist who lives in the United States (https://www.johndenugent.com/). The map with its prominent red arrow (Figure 6) offers a simplistic explanation for migration from Syria to Germany, implying that greed is motivating the immigrants. The map erases interstate variations in policies relating to refugees and asylum seekers, issues of variable access to labor markets, and so forth. The map’s appearance of straightforwardness is devious, fostering a kind of rhetoric that presents itself as brutally honest but in fact leaves out virtually

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every element of a story, in this case, the story that could be told about this immigration stream. If Pickles is right that propaganda maps are archetypes for maps in general then this map serves as a warning regarding the semiotics of arrows as means of representing migration. Among the many arrow-based migration maps the missing elements of the story are similar in nature, albeit differing in their details.

Figure 6: WAR/NO WAR, Satirical map posted on the conservative Swedish blog Every Kinda People (http://everykindapeople.blogspot.com/), copied from the website of the American racial supremacist John de Nugent (https://www.johndenugent.com/)

Inclusive Maps Counter-mapping (Peluso 1995) is also alive and well in the context of European immigration maps. One of the main proponents is the organization Migreurop, which is closely tied to the Migrinter research lab at the University of Poitiers. According to the Migreurop website (2016), “Migreurop is a European and African network of activists and researchers whose objective is to expose and fight against the widespread detention of foreigners and the proliferation of camps functioning at the heart of the EU externalization policy” (author translation http://www.migreurop.org/rubrique378.html?lang=en). The organization’s maps present information that is less likely to promote exclusionary sentiments and more likely to promote sympathy, for example, quantities of persons refused entry to Schengen countries, areas of surveillance activities by Frontex, locations of migrant camps, and mortality counts for those who have died en route to Europe (Figures 7 and 8). The maps produced by Migreurop are visually appealing and easily legible, while their use of cartographic elements like color and scaled circles is more nuanced than that of Frontex. In the original color version of Figure 7 it is clear that Slovakia, Greece and Ireland sequester immigrants in different kinds of camps (the

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Figure 7: Principal Places of Detention of undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers in Europe. Source: MIGREUROP (2012). Atlas des migrants en Europe: Géographie critique des politiques migratoires, cartography by Nicolas Lambert. Paris: Armand Colin, p.80-81

first dedicated to admission, the second dedicated to expulsion, the third combining penal imprisonment with migrant housing). In Figure 8, it is easy to see that Germany’s immigrants are living (and dying) in a more distributed pattern than those of France, who are clustered in Paris. The participants in Migreurop clearly understand cartography not only as a political lever but also as a graphic art. The map shown in Figure 7 was republished in Le Monde Diplomatique, a left wing monthly that is an independent subsidiary of Le Monde. Created by Olivier Clochard of the Migrinter research group at the University of Poitiers, France, and posted by Migreurop, the map also credits the group Noborder. Networks of collaboration and mutual support linking academic researchers to mass media to nongovernmental organizations are evident simply by looking at the authorship and publication of this map. While these actors share a commitment to the rights of immigrants, the map itself is more ambiguous. A less sympathetic reading could interpret the thousands of fatalities as evidence of foolhardiness or simple foolishness on the part of the immigrants. A more sympathetic reading would blame the European structures of governance, and particularly state border controls and Frontex, for failing to assist the immigrants, creating unnecessary risks and applying a double-standard with regard to the application of laws governing social welfare and the right to emergency assistance and medical care. Thus this powerful map leaves much up to the reader’s interpretation.

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Figure 8: “Des morts par milliers aux portes de l’Europe” (Deaths by the thousands at the doors of Europe) with breakdown by cause: drowning, suicide, asphyxiation, starvation, lack of care, hypothermia, fire, homicide, poisoning, land mines, accidents, and other. Source: Migreurop (2012). Atlas des migrants en Europe: Géographie critique des politiques migratoires, cartography by Nicolas Lambert. Paris: Armand Colin, p.134

Minor cartographic contributions of an inclusive type come from numerous organizations such as FRONTEXIT, noborder.org, borderdeaths.org a.k.a. the Human Costs of Border Control or HCBC, SOS Children’s Villages International, The Migrants’ Files, Migrants at Sea, Missing Migrants Project, and Doctors of the World. The last of these is the less well-known and currently more political of the two international medical organizations started by Bernard Kouchner, the other being Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders). Cartographic attention to the extent of casualties among immigrants is also provided by Reliefweb (http:// reliefweb.int), the online presence of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. The sources of counter-mapping are numerous but most offer only limited cartographic output. Some, like borderdeaths.org, have nonetheless created striking maps and graphics, either static or interactive. The interactive map created by www.borderdeaths.org offers an interesting demonstration of cartography designed to undo the depersonalizing work of typical migration maps with their masses and trajectories (Figure 9). Above the map, a grid of circles represents up to 3188 people (depending on the time interval selected),

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Figure 9: Human Costs of Border Control: Death at the Borders of Southern Europe. Online file at: http://www.borderdeaths.org accessed 5-17-2016

counting deaths occurring at the borders of Europe. A slider bar permits the user to bracket the timespan to any subset of the period from 1990 to 2013. This reversal of the typical map’s representation of immigrants from showing a mass of living bodies to a mass of dead bodies retains the cartographic convention of transforming bodies into masses – using spots or the area within a circle. One has to look elsewhere within this graphic for a more radical disruption that of cartographic conventions. Above the map and to the left one sees a box with three silhouettes and the words “who are they?” Clicking on this box causes the dots to reorganize themselves into subgroups indicating demographic characteristics, or place of origin, or cause of death. The movement of the dots across the screen when selecting each of these options suggests a kind of autonomy or personality to the dots, not unlike individual people. At the top center of the image is a gray outline of a boat with three dozen heads projecting from it. The body count for the selected period is written in this shape, for example: “3188 people trying to reach Europe were found dead between 1990 and 2013.” Here again the graphics achieve a bit of personalization. The interactivity of this map conveys a message, as well, albeit a more subtle message. Insofar as meaning resides not in the image but in the audience’s encounter with the image, interactive web maps invite a different stance toward immigra-

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tion, one of exploration. The same could be said with regard to the map by Lucify that was discussed in the previous section. If one participates with information about immigration, then arguably one has taken the first step towards participating with social responses to immigration. This promotion of agency could work either way, for or against the interests of migrants, but coupling interactivity with efforts at personalization, and including an emphasis on casualties and risk, as well as cartographic symbolism that moves away from mere masses toward the idea of immigrant as individual (even if only as an individual dot that sorts itself into various groups), all of this points in the direction of a more inclusive cartographic practice.

Figure 10: World New Map, Rafat Alkhateeb, https://www.cartoonmovement.com/cartoon/23058

A final notable contribution to the collection of inclusive maps is labeled “World New Map.” The image, less a map than a piece of political art incorporating cartographic elements, first appeared on Twitter and circulated on various social media. This graphic (Fig. 10) shows the body of Alan (sometimes written Aylan) Kurdi, a three-year-old boy whose body washed up on a beach in Turkey in September of 2015. The boy had drowned when a small inflatable boat in which he and his family, and over a dozen others, were fleeing to the Greek island of Kos capsized in the Aegean Sea. In the image, his body lies on one side of a jagged concrete wall topped with razor wire while the continents are jumbled on the other side, with Europe scarcely recognizable as it is caught beneath the wall. The dead boy lies face down on the two thirds of the map that are a watery blue. He has clearly been denied a place on solid earth. While the artist rather oddly failed to include a recognizable outline of Europe, the message of this hybrid image, this marriage of map, painting, and photograph is clear: those Europeans who could have provided a home for the child failed to do so, instead erecting an exclusionary barrier. However,

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the image elides the complicated path the boy would have taken. His father hoped to join relatives in Canada and the fateful boat trip was only the first leg of an intended journey to North America. Rather than suggesting this multi-step trajectory of migration, the image simply isolates the boy’s body in a nonspace, cut off from geographical space. Both the visual preponderance of water in the image and the size of the boy’s body suggest that this is not simply about Alan Kurdi; the phenomenon of exclusion is vast in impact and significance. The caption “WORLD NEW MAP” and the intentionally unreadable legend are disruptions of cartographic convention and suggest a counter-mapping impulse (Peluso 1995). The first does so by reorganizing a familiar but problematic term, the second, by suggesting the meaninglessness of the existing representational conventions used to convey world views. Roland Barthes uses the concept of punctum to capture the aspect of a photographic image that “pricks, bruises, disturbs a particular viewer out of their usual viewing habits” (Rose 2016, 122). Another word for this function, etymologically related but perhaps more self-evident, is poignancy. The poignancy of a photograph is the aspect that punctures a viewer’s sense of reality and his or her sense of self, pricking the conscience. Various photos of Alan Kurdi circulated in the media, all of which relate to the notion of punctum, not the poignancy of a single photograph, but the poignancy of a visual image occupying the intertextual space of convergent visual media all of which turned for a moment to gaze upon the tiny, face-down body. Part of this poignancy is certainly the posture of the body – precisely that of a sleeping toddler yet jarringly out of place – face-down in the sand and lapped by the waves. A Google image search for “Alan Kurdi” and “Aylan Kurdi” conducted on April 2, 2016 turned up roughly equal numbers of images showing the body on the beach, Turkish emergency response personnel retrieving the body, and placebased works of art/performance that appropriated and translated the image of the dead child in various ways. The image of the corpse on the beach resonates with Agamben’s bare life – suggesting the underlying cause as a state of exception, where being stateless or between states translates into being lifeless. Finally, the fact that this image included a kind of map – albeit distorted and stylized – indicates media’s mapping impulse, juxtaposed with Agamben’s state of exception. Any mediated image of the immigrant draws paradigmatically on the numerous maps that have been deployed to represent migration. The maps are inescapable, yet their work presses towards the impersonal; it transforms individual lives into masses and trajectories – masses of living and dead bodies, completed trajectories and uncompleted trajectories. Counter-mapping works to restore a sense of the individual caught in geographic spaces that affect lives and the loss of life, while problematizing the practices of geo-graphing (Ó Tuathail 1996, 11). DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION What is mapped by migration maps? Superficially, these maps show borders, particularly the external borders of Europe (meaning the EU, or the Schengen countries),

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and flows, especially flows of bodies across Europe’s collective borders. But the images are maps of something more subtle – affective maps of anxiety. Where the space of Europe remains somewhat undefined, particularly around the edges, it is the integrity of Europe that is particularly undefined. What is the essence of European integrity and hence of European actorness? On the one hand, the cross-border flow of human beings prompts a fear that this tenuous organism which has so far struggled to maintain coherence and solvency, will be overrun and overtaxed. Rather than the classical problem of imperial overstretch (Kennedy 2010) there is a legitimate concern about overstretching the social welfare state to support a large population from less developed regions that lacks the skills and cultural dispositions to contribute to developed European economies. This concern cannot be dismissed as racist or xenophobic, although it finds fertile ground for expansion among the racist and xenophobic segments of European societies. The stretching induced by absorbing large immigrant flows is an internal stretching, involving not an expansion of borders but an inward increase in diversity and economic dependency. Here we find the basis for a legitimate concern with integrity. The term has a dual meaning. On the one hand, something with integrity holds together, like a well-built house. Using planks of the wrong thickness or the wrong kind of wood may reduce the integrity of a house, and for a society with a high degree of cultural and linguistic homogeneity, it may seem that immigration reduces integrity by bringing in a group that doesn’t fit, a band of misfits. Here the concern addresses the way that culture itself depends on norms and shared understandings, while immigration creates a clash of norms and a plethora of partial and more or less total misunderstandings. Of course this view fails to recognize the human ability to learn and adapt, just as it overestimates conditions of pre-existing coherence. A second definition of integrity is: “the quality or state of being of sound moral principle; uprightness, honesty, and sincerity,” a term synonymous with honesty (Webster’s New World Dictionary, 2nd Edition). For the countries signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights, the key stipulation is Article 2 of Protocol No. 4: “Everyone shall be free to leave any country, including his own.” The logical implication of this is that people must have the right to enter a country other than the one where they legally reside and, therefore, migration is itself a right. To treat migrants as criminals violates this principle and makes liars of the countries that are signatory to the Convention, undermining their ethical integrity. If Europe is bounded by borders, it is not reducible to those borders. It is a set of shared ideals ostensibly related to humanity writ large. Migration into Europe shows that integrity of the territorial sort and integrity of the ethical sort exist in perpetual tension. By organizing migration maps into three categories – the informative, the inclusive, and the exclusive – I have oversimplified the terrain of cartographic representation. My objective in doing so has been to explore mapping as a performance along with its expressive elements and its contentious elements. Maps, in this case, are a kind of political art, grounded in the arts of both domestic and international politics. The anxieties traced by these maps are not merely confined to questions of security. If security is reduced ultimately to questions of bodily harm

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and policing, or shared wellbeing and economic distribution, we fail to include one of the main motives for these maps. We need to include also the quest for ontological security based on the perceived integrity of a space called Europe, whether that integrity is interpreted as a matter of territorial integrity with implications of a clear Us versus Them division and hardened borders, or ethical integrity with the implications of European notions of universal human rights based ultimately in the all-inclusive boundaries of human biology. Perhaps it is this very ambivalence around questions of integrity that drives the mapping impulse. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My thanks to Chris Lukinbeal and Anton Escher for inviting me to participate in the “Media’s Mapping Impulse” conference, and to Elisabeth Sommerlad for shepherding this work to completion. The Norwegian Research Council funded the project under the auspices of the Responsible Adoption of Visual Surveillance Technologies by the News Media (ViSmedia) research project, coordinated by the University of Bergen under the direction of Astrid Gynnild. The research also benefited from the Anne-Marie and Gustaf Ander Foundation for Media Research which supported me as Ander Visiting Professor in Global Media Studies during the 2016–2017 academic year at Karlstad University, Sweden (Department of Geography, Media and Communication). Finally, I am indebted to the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin, for a Supplemental College Research Fellowship which provided supplemental funding during the same time period. REFERENCES Aftonbladet (2016): Malta: Medelhavet blir en Kyrkogård. Aftonbladet, January 2, 2016. http:// www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/article17645754.ab (accessed March 3, 2016). Agamben, G. (1998): Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA. Agnew, J. A. (2003): Geopolitics: Re-visioning World Politics. New York. Amoore, L. (2006): Biometric Borders: Governing Mobilities in the War on Terror. Political Geography 25, 336–351. Assemblée Nationale (2013): Projet de Loi de Finances n ° 1395, Tome VII, Immigration, Asile et Intégration par M. Jean-Pierre Dufau, Deputé. Paris. BBC News (2016): Migrant Crisis: Migration to Europe Explained in Seven Charts. BBC News, February 18, 2016. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34131911 (accessed February 21, 2016). Beauguitte, L., Y. Richard and F. Guérin-Pace (2015): The EU and its Neighbourhoods: A Textual Analysis on Key Documents of the European Neighbourhood Policy. Geopolitics 20 (4), 853–879. Berger, J. (1972): Ways of Seeing. New York. Blanchard, E., O. Clochard and C. Rodier (2012): Compter les Morts en Migration. Migreurop (Ed.) (2012): Migreurop Atlas des migrants en Europe: Géographie Critique des Politiques Migratoires. Paris, 134–137. Caporaso, J. and J. Jupille (1998): States, Agency and Rules: The European Union in Global En-

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vironmental Politics. C. Rhodes (Ed.): The European Union in the World Community. Boulder, CO, 213–229. Casella-Colombeau, S. (2012): Frontex: Aux Marges de l’Europe et du Droit. Migreurop (Ed.) (2012): Migreurop Atlas des migrants en Europe: Géographie Critique des Politiques Migratoires. Paris, 52–55. Crampton, J. W. (2009a): Cartography: Performative, Participatory, Political. Progress in Human Geography 33 (6), 840–848. Crampton, J. W. (2009b): Cartography: Maps 2.0. Progress in Human Geography 33 (1), 91–100. Cresswell, T. (1996): In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, and Transgression. Minneapolis. Dalby, S. (2013): The Geopolitics of Climate Change. Political Geography 37, 38–47. DHS (2015): Budget in Brief. Department of Homeland Security. https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/ files/publications/FY15BIB.pdf (accessed February 21, 2016). Diener, A. C. and Hagen, J. (2012). Borders: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford. Ekelund, H. (2014): The Establishment of FRONTEX: A New Institutionalist Approach. Journal of European Integration 36 (2), 99–116. Eisenman, D. P., D. Glik, M. Ong, Q. Zhou, C.-H. Tseng, A. Long, J. Fielding and S. Asch (2009): Terrorism-related Fear and Avoidance Behavior in a Multiethnic Urban Population. American Journal of Public Health 99 (1), 168–174. Elden, S. (2013): Secure the Volume: Vertical Geopolitics and the Depth of Power. Political Geography 34, 35–51. Eurostat (2016a): Asylum and First Time Asylum Applicants by Citizenship, Age and Sex; Annual Aggregated Data. http://appsso.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/nui/show.do?wai=true&dataset=migr_ asyappctza (accessed February 21, 2016). Eurostat (2016b) Asylum Quarterly Report. http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index. php/Asylum_quarterly_report (accessed May 16, 2016). European Commission (2003): Proposal for a Council Regulation Establishing a European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders, COM (2003) 687 final/2. Brussels. European Commission, November 20, 2003. http://ec.europa.eu/transparency/ regdoc/rep/1/2003/EN/1-2003-687-EN-F2-1.Pdf (accessed March 14, 2019) European Commission (2016a): Europe Without Borders: The Schengen Area. http://ec.europa.eu/ dgs/home-affairs/e-library/docs/schengen_brochure/schengen_brochure_dr3111126_en.pdf (accessed February 21, 2016). European Commission (2016b): Temporary Reintroduction of Border Control. http://ec.europa.eu/ dgs/home-affairs/what-we-do/policies/borders-and-visas/schengen/reintroduction-border-control/index_en.htm (accessed February 21, 2016). Fiske, J. (1994): Audiencing: Cultural Practice and Cultural Studies. N. K. Denzin and Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.): Handbook of Qualitative Methods. London. 189–198. Foucault, M. (1980): Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and other Writings, 1972–1977. New York. Freud, S. (1966): Extracts from the Fliess papers, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume 1. London. FRONTEX (2015): Amended Budget 2015 N3. http://frontex.europa.eu/about-frontex/governance-documents (accessed February 21, 2016). Gandy, O. H. (1993): The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information. Boulder, Colorado. Goss, J. (1995): “We know who you are and where you live”: The Instrumental Rationality of Geodemographic Systems. Economic Geography 71, 171–198. Guralnik, D. B. (21980). Integrity. Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language New York, NY. Harley, J. B. (1988): Maps, Knowledge and Power. D. Cosgrove and S. Daniels (Eds.): The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments. Cambridge, MA, 277–312. Insee (2014): Les Immigrés Récemment Arrivés en France. Institut National de la Statistique et des

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Études Économiques. http://www.insee.fr/fr/themes/document.asp?reg_id=0&ref_id=ip1524 #inter1 (accessed March 16, 2019) Jay, M. (1988): Scopic Regimes of Modernity. H. Foster (Ed.): Vision and Visuality. Seattle, WA, 3–23. Jay, M. (1994): Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA. Kennedy, P. (2010): The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. New York. Lambert, N. (2015a): [BILLET] Une Carte à Abattre. Carnet NEOCARTOgraphique. http://neocarto.hypotheses.org/1963 (accessed April 6, 2016). Lambert, N. (2015b): [INFOGRAPHIE] Délires cartographiques. Carnet NEOCARTOgraphique. http://neocarto.hypotheses.org/1140 (accessed April 6, 2016). Léonard, S. (2010): EU Border Security and Migration into the European Union: FRONTEX and Securitisation Through Practices. European Security 19 (2), 231–254. Majcher, I. (2015): Human Rights Violations During EU Border Surveillance and Return Operations: Frontex’s Shared Responsibility or Complicity? Silesian Journal of Legal Studies 7, 45–78. Mamadouh, V. (2001): The Territoriality of European Integration and the Territorial Features of the European Union: the first 50 years. Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 92 (4), 420–436. Migreurop (2012): Atlas des Migrants en Europe: Géographie Critique des Politiques Migratoires. Directed by O. Clochard with collaboration by E. Blanchard, V. Carrère, A. Morice, P.-A. Perrouty and C. Rodier. Paris. Olsson, G. (2007): Abysmal: A Critique of Cartographic Reason. Chicago. Ó Tuathail, G. (1996): Critical Geopolitics: The Politics of Writing Global Space. Minneapolis. Paasi, A. (2006): Texts and Contexts in the Globalizing Academic Marketplace: Comments on the Debate on Geopolitical Remote Sensing. Eurasian Geography and Economics 47 (2), 216– 220. Peluso, N. L. (1995): Whose Woods are These? Counter–Mapping Forest Territories in Kalimantan, Indonesia. Antipode 27 (4), 383–406. Pickles, J. (1992): Texts, Hermeneutics and Propaganda Maps. T. J. Barnes and J. S. Duncan (Eds.): Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape. New York, 193–230. Rose, G. (2016): Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual Materials. Los Angeles, CA. Rumford, C. (2010): Guest Editorial: Global Borders: An Introduction to the Special Issue. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28 (6), 951–956. Sletto, B.I. (2009): We Drew What We Imagined. Current Anthropology 50 (4), 443–476. Sparke, M. (2004): Political Geography: Political Geographies of Globalization (1) – Dominance. Progress in Human Geography 28 (6), 777–794. The Economist (2015): Migration to Europe: Death at Sea. The Economist, September 3, 2015. http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/09/migration-europe-0 (accessed March 16, 2019). Trump, D. (2015). Presidential Announcement Speech. New York, New York. June 16, 2015. Transcript published online as: Here’s Donald Trump’s Presidential Announcement Speech: http:// time.com/3923128/donald-trump-announcement-speech. (accessed May 16, 2016) Tuan, Y.-F. (1991). Language and the Making of Place: A Narrative-Descriptive Approach. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 81(4), 684–696. Vaughan-Williams, N. (2015). Europe’s Border Crisis: Biopolitical Security and Beyond. Oxford. Woodward, D. (1992): Representations of the World. R. F. Abler, M. G. Marcus and J. M. Olson (Eds.): Geography’s Inner Worlds: Pervasive Themes in Contemporary American Geography. New Brunswick, NJ, 50–76.

THE MAP AND THE TERRITORY

MEMENTO AND THE HAUSSMANNIZATION OF MEMORY David B. Clarke

No matter how different the reasons may be, the result is always the same; the scandalous alleys and lanes disappear to the accompaniment of lavish self-praise from the bourgeoisie on account of this tremendous success, but they appear again immediately somewhere else. … The same economic necessity which produced them in the first place, produces them in the next place also. (Engels 1935 [1872], 74–7) Everything happens as if the impasses inherent in the original situation moved to another point in the mythic network, as if what was not resolved here always turned up over there. (Lacan 1979 [1953], 415) ‘Now where was I?’ (Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) in Memento)

BEING-ELSEWHERE – OR, EXISTENCE AS ALIBI A map in a film prompts every spectator to consider bilocation. (Conley 2007, 3) GEORGES FRANJU: Movies should have a beginning, a middle and an end. JEAN-LUC GODARD: Certainly, but not necessarily in that order. (Knowles 1999, 342)1

A brief episode from Freud’s Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis – the Rat Man case-history2 – can serve as a kind of establishing shot, anticipating something of what is to come: for what follows can only be understood backwards, yet must be read forwards (Calle and Baudrillard 1988). The episode in question concerns the Rat Man and his lover:

1 2

Exchange at Cannes, 1962: Henri-Georges Clouzot, rather than Franju, is sometimes cited as Godard’s interlocutor. Freud’s ‘Rat Man’ (Ernst Lanzer) obsessively engaged in elaborate forms of behavior to ward off fears of a terrible fate supposedly awaiting his (already dead) father and his future wife. Freud attributed Lanzer’s condition to childhood sexual contact with his governess: a sense of guilt and fear of discovery by his father led to an association between sexual pleasure and punishment, displaced onto others as a defense. Lanzer’s commanding officer’s sadistic tales of “a specially horrible punishment used in the East” involving rats (Freud S.E. X, 166) precipitated or exacerbated Lanzer’s irrational fears.

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David B. Clarke On the day of her departure he knocked his foot against a stone lying in the road, and was obliged to put it out of the way by the side of the road, because the idea struck him that her carriage would be driving along the same road in a few hours’ time and might come to grief against this stone. But a few minutes later it occurred to him that this was absurd, and he was obliged to go back and replace the stone in its original position in the middle of the road. (Freud S.E. X, 190)

“The theory of the unconscious means you can never get the stone in the right place,” says Easthope (1999, 170). In Zupančič’s (2013, 25) more formal statement of much the same idea: “the unconscious is not a subjective distortion of the objective world, it is first and foremost an indication of a fundamental inconsistency of the objective world itself, which … allows for and generates its own (subjective) distortions.” The problem lies with the territory, not the map – or, perhaps, with the relation between the two. The impossibility of getting the stone in the right place has far wider bearing than on cases of obsessional neurosis alone or even in relation to the unconscious more generally. It is palpably evident in the dynamics of capitalism articulated by Engels (1935 [1872], 74), who observed that the bourgeoisie could find no better answer to the “housing question” than to move the problem around, “in such a way that the solution continually reproduces the question anew.” The correspondence between Engels’s account and Lacan’s (1979 [1953]) characterization of obsessional neurosis affords an opportunity to complete an unwritten chapter in the history of relations between psychoanalysis and historical materialism. That this possibility has been neglected arguably reflects the way in which Marx is drawn upon in Deleuze and Guattari’s (1984 [1972]) denunciation of psychoanalysis, which they paint as failing to comprehend psychosis, remaining fixated on neurosis and its oedipal origins. Anti-Oedipus diagnoses “the deficiencies of psychoanalysis as equally linked to its deep roots in capitalist society and its failure to grasp its own schizophrenic basis. Psychoanalysis is like capitalism: although it tends toward the limit of schizophrenia, it’s constantly evading this limit” (Deleuze and Guattari 1984 [1972], 20–21).3 Absorbing Marx’s (1973 [1858], 334) insight that “capital … is the endless and limitless drive to go beyond its limiting barrier,” the implication is that schizoanalysis is not only primed to overcome the impasses blocking revolutionary desire (by superseding Freud’s dramaturgical account of the unconscious), but also better understands capitalism’s constant striving to “tear down every spatial barrier,” “conquer the whole earth for its market,” and “annihilate this

3

Deleuze and Guattari (1984 [1972]) define schizophrenia, not in clinical terms as a psychiatric disorder but in socio-historical terms as the unhinging of meaning resonant with the fluidity of capitalism: the schizophrenic “scrambles all the codes” (1984 [1972], 15), just as the delirium unleashed by capitalism sees all that is solid melt into air. This contrasts not only with the fixed beliefs of traditional societies but also with schizophrenia’s polar opposite under capitalism, paranoia, which remains preoccupied with authoritatively fixing meanings. Lacan’s (1993 [1981]) theorization of psychosis centers on the psychotic subject’s foreclosure of the paternal function: the schizophrenic is ‘the only subject not to defend himself against the real by means of the symbolic … because for him the symbolic is real’ (Miller 2002 [1988], 9). Cf. De Waelhens (1978 [1972]).

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space with time” (Marx 1973 [1858], 539).4 Yet the proximity of Lacan’s (1979 [1953]) own anti-oedipal account of obsessional neurosis to capitalism’s dynamics is striking. The impossibility of getting the stone in the right place similarly colors accounts of the colonization of the real by its double that accompany “attempts to make the real … coincide with … models of simulation,” which Baudrillard (1994, 2) paints as the contemporary form of ‘imperialism’ (an allusion to Borges’s (1975 [1946]) tale of a once-great Empire, which constructed a 1:1 scale map of its entire territory). Insofar as obsessional neurosis is characterized by doubt, the etymological connection between “doubt” (Zweifel) and “double” (zwei) – registering the uncertainty introduced by a choice between alternatives – is evident in the revenge the double invariably exacts once it breaks free from its role as a dutiful copy, confined to the mirror (Borges with Guerrero 1974 [1967]). “Modern unreality no longer implies the imaginary,” says Baudrillard (1990, 29–30): “Hyperrealism … ‘gives you more,’” but “by giving you a little too much … takes away everything.” The real strikes back in a manner perfectly encapsulated in Fredric Brown’s short short-story, Experiment, here paraphrased by Žižek (1989, 161–2): Professor Johnson has developed a small-scale experimental model of a time machine. Small articles placed on it can be sent into the past or the future. He first demonstrates to his two colleagues a five-minute time travel into the future, by setting the future-dial and placing a small brass cube on the machine’s platform. It instantly vanishes and reappears five minutes later. The next experiment, five minutes into the past, is a little trickier. Johnson explains that having set the past-dial at five minutes, he will place the cube on the platform at exactly 3 o’clock. But since time is now running backward, it should vanish from his hand and appear on the platform at five minutes before 3 – that is, five minutes before he places it there. One of his colleagues asks the obvious question: “How can you place it there, then?” Johnson explains that at 3 o’clock the cube will vanish from the platform and appear in his hand, to be placed on the machine. This is exactly what happens. The second colleague wants to know what would happen if, after the cube has appeared on the platform (five minutes before being placed there), Johnson were to change his mind and not put it there at 3 o’clock. Would this not create a paradox? ‘An interesting idea,’ Professor Johnson said. ‘I had not thought of it and it will be interesting to try. Very well, I shall not … ’ There was no paradox at all. The cube remained. But the entire rest of the Universe, professors and all, vanished.

Žižek furnishes this illustration with the apothegm cited by Kant in Perpetual Peace (1795): Fiat justitia, pereat mundus! – Let justice be done, though the world 4

For Deleuze and Guattari (1984 [1972], 25), the family psychodrama enshrined in Freud’s “tripartite formula – the Oedipal, neurotic one: daddy-mommy-me” – sees the “world-historical … crushed in the Oedipal treadmill” (1984 [1972], 104), whereas “All delirium possesses a world-historical … content” (1984 [1972], 97). This appeals to Marx’s remarks on capitalism’s inauguration of world-history – “World history has not always existed; history as world history [is] a result,” i.e. an effect (Marx 1973 [1858], 109) – and its “tendency to create the world market” (408).

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perish! This maxim might equally apply to Leonard Shelby, the amnesiac protagonist of Christopher Nolan’s neo-noir revenger’s tragedy, Memento (or at least to his superego). Memento is characterized by temporal reversibility (half the film is presented in reverse-chronological order, conveying a semblance of Shelby’s inability to forge new, lasting memories). The resulting dislocation aligns with a world wracked by a self-destructive search for justice (the story chronicles Shelby’s mission to avenge his wife’s rape and murder in the face of his debilitating ‘severe anterograde memory dysfunction’).5 Just as Brown’s temporally disadjusted universe spontaneously vanquishes itself to another dimension, Shelby’s dissociated world is marked by a fatal attempt to restore an impossible equilibrium in the face of the obdurate and opaque qualities of the real. Recalling Lacan’s programmatic definition of the real as impossible, Zupančič (2001, n. p.) insists that “the whole point of the Lacanian concept of the Real is that the impossible happens:” “the fact that ‘it happens (to us)’ does not refute its basic ‘impossibility:’ the Real happens to us (we encounter it) as impossible” (Zupančič 2000, 235). Consequent attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable – and note that subjectivity itself is premised on an inescapable search for an unattainable goal – engenders a perpetual displacement, the nature of which forms the focus this chapter. It draws on Lévi-Strauss’s (1963 [1958]) account of myth, as developed in Lacan’s (1979 [1953]) analysis of the Rat Man case-history, which borrows Lévi-Strauss’s proposal that neurosis constitutes an “individual myth,” where “myth … is understood as responding to the inexplicable nature of the real” (Lacan 1994, 67; in Leader 2003, 45). Examining this conception, the question of the “close link between capitalism and psychoanalysis on the one hand, and between revolutionary movements and schizoanalysis on the other” proposed by Deleuze (1995 [1990], 24) comes under scrutiny, obliquely broaching the opposition between psychoanalysis and schizoanalysis arguably defining the major fault-line of contemporary theory. THE MAP AND THE TERRITORY What psychoanalysis calls the resolution or dissolution of the Oedipus complex is a complete joke, it’s precisely the way an endless debt is inherited, the analysis never ends, Oedipus infects everyone, passed on from father to child. Deleuze (1995 [1990], 17) We have here something quite different from the triangular relation considered to be the typical source of neurotic development. … [T]he element of the debt is placed on two levels at once, and it is precisely in the light of the impossibility of bringing these two levels together that the drama of the neurotic is played. Lacan (1979 [1953], 415)

5

The Appendix outlines Memento’s structure.

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Freud considered that two traumas (and not one as it is so commonly said) are necessary in order to give birth to this individual myth in which a neurosis consists. Lévi-Strauss (1963 [1958], 228)

There is a striking resonance between the map that Shelby mounts on his motelroom wall, as a means of tracking down his wife’s alleged killer(s),6 and the map Freud appends to the Rat Man case-history, attempting to follow the convoluted logic his patient expounds in recounting a journey he felt compelled to undertake. Whilst the perpetual presence engendered by Shelby’s amnesia might suggest a schizophrenic reading of Memento, this cartographic resonance prompts an obsessional-neurotic reading. Anti-Oedipus sees neurosis as Freud’s Achilles heel. Yet it is salutary to note that Lacan (2007 [1970], 137) had already declared the Oedipus complex as “Freud’s dream,” rejecting the oedipal origins of obsessional neurosis as early as the 1950s: the “whole oedipal schema needs to be re-examined,” Lacan (1979 [1953], 422) pronounced. For Tomšič (2015, 178), “neurotic repression contains an assumption of castration and reveals in neurosis a particular protest against [a] structurally imposed perversion” that relates to “the various traumatic effects of capitalism.” Before engaging Memento to elaborate upon this, the entanglement of certain perspectives that serve to muddy the theoretical waters requires further attention. Deleuze and Guattari (1984 [1972]) attacked a psychoanalysis they saw as complicit with capitalism and hence counterrevolutionary. Ridiculing the “analytic imperialism of the Oedipus complex,” they accuse Freud of failing to grasp psychosis by insisting on the schizophrenic’s “resistance to being oedipalized” (1984 [1972] 25), thereby allegedly missing the opportunity to see not only that “schizophrenia is the exterior limit of capitalism itself or the conclusion of its deepest tendency, but that capitalism only functions on condition that it inhibit this tendency, or that it push back or displace this limit, by substituting for it its own immanent relative limits, which it continually reproduces on a wider scale” (Deleuze and Guattari 1984 [1972], 246). Capitalism relentlessly “axiomatises with one hand what it decodes with the other” (Deleuze and Guattari 1984 [1972], 246), a point inadequately grasped in Jameson’s (1983) equation of “schizophrenia” with the experience of what was once quaintly termed postmodern culture: “the transformation of reality into images” and “the fragmentation of ‘me’ into a series of perpetual presents” (Jameson 1983, 28). Despite superficial resonances with Shelby’s entrapment in a perpetual present, Jameson’s faltering, would-be Lacanian account of schizophrenia is problematic. Jameson’s diagnosis of the “schizophrenic” experience of temporal discontinuity and spatial disorientation characterizing late capitalism drew inspiration from Lynch’s (1960) seminal account of non-alienating, “imageable” urban environments: “The incapacity to map socially is as crippling to political experience as the analogous incapacity to map spatially is for urban experience” (Jameson 1988, 6

In Memento, the fingerprints of the double are all over the scene of the crime. Ambiguity surrounds the number of intruders involved in the attack on the Shelbys: one or two – as Leonard insists, seemingly against the official police line.

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353). Yet prescribing “an aesthetic of cognitive mapping” (Jameson 1988, 353) as the remedy for a lost sense of collective direction embodies a nostalgic hope. Secreting the unacknowledged implication that maps are “extensions of Man,” prostheses of mental maps hardwired into the brain (O’Keefe and Nadel 1978) – a conception originating in Tolman’s (1948) experiments with lab rats navigating mazes and long found wanting as a means of comprehending spatial cognition (Boyle and Robinson 1979) – the appeal of Jameson’s metaphor belies the crisis of cartographic reason (Olsson 2007; Farinelli 2009). Jameson (1988, 353) sees in cognitive maps – people’s perceived relation to their environment – “a spatial analogue of Althusser’s great formulation of ideology ... as ‘the Imaginary representation of the subject’s relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence.’” Yet Jameson misquotes Althusser (1971, 153), who held that “Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.” The very relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence is imaginary, not (just) the representation of that relationship. Ideology is not a matter of false consciousness, of misleading representations distorting an underlying reality and our relationship to it. It is “profoundly unconscious” (Althusser 1969, 233). It works by forging the very terms through which (what passes for) reality is apprehended in the first place.7 When Jameson (1984, 83) characterizes the “latest mutation in space” as “postmodern hyperspace,” evoking Baudrillard’s hyperreality, he simultaneously jettisons Baudrillard’s insistence that ideology has no purchase in a world where “there is no division between things that mean and things that are meant” (Bauman 1993, 36); that is, where the distinctions between image and reality, map and territory, no longer hold. Insofar as the “hyperreal effaces the contradiction of the real and the imaginary” (Baudrillard 1993, 72), it implies neither the transformation of reality into image, nor image into reality, but their short-circuiting: “abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality” (Baudrillard 1994, 1). By invoking Borges’s (1975 [1946]) fable of a 1:1 scale map – once co-extensive with the entire territory of a great Empire, now an index of the Empire’s decline, the tattered remnants of the map’s fabric littering the Deserts of the West – Baudrillard offers a strategic reversal that serves as a poetic vehicle, mobilized to disarm any lingering faith in the rational kernel of the real. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra – that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself. (Baudrillard 1994, 1)

Yet “even inverted,” Baudrillard concedes, “Borges’s fable is unusable.” It is “no longer a question of either maps or territories. Something has disappeared: the 7

Lynch’s (1960) work more readily calls to mind Sartre’s (1958 [1943]) reworking of Lewin’s (1938) hodological space (Mirvish 1984).

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sovereign difference, between the one and the other, that constituted the charm of abstraction” (Baudrillard 1994, 2). In a world of simulation, “all things stand ultimately for nothing but themselves. … It is just by linguistic inertia that we still talk of signifiers, bereaved of signifieds, as signifiers; of signs which stand but for themselves, as ‘appearances’” (Bauman 1993, 36). “Only the allegory of the Empire, perhaps, remains” (Baudrillard 1994, 2). This allegorical residue holds together Jameson’s appeal to cognitive mapping as well as Harvey’s (1989, 240) account of a new experience of space-time, ushered in by “processes that so revolutionize the objective qualities of space and time that we are forced to alter … how we represent the world to ourselves.” Such accounts cling to a lost world in which the map and the territory remain distinct, where the conditions for maintaining a firm division between “things that mean” and “things that are meant” remain intact. Memento offers an allegory of a world where such solidity has been liquidated, where “each such division is but momentary, protean, and ultimately reversible” (Bauman 1993, 36); where the sovereign difference between the real and the imaginary, the map and the territory, has been dethroned. In the absence of the Other, we are nonetheless condemned to remain mapmakers and some maps serve better than others.8 Certain maps deliberately lead astray. Shelby’s map, like the Rat Man’s, “is a pointer to the nature of the problem itself: obsessional neurosis is nothing less than a map designed to mislead” (Leader 1993, 35). James and Alix Strachey, the editors of the English-language Standard Edition of Freud, felt compelled to redraw the map that Freud added to the Rat Man case-history, but “even the emendations of the Stracheys leave matters cloudy” (Mahoney 1986, 53). If we return to the earlier edition, “What we find is a map in the form of a cross, as if it were parodying itself by crossing itself out, putting itself sous rature, like a repressed memory” (Todd 1990, 14). Shelby’s wall-mounted map, annotated Polaroids, scribbled notes, and the principal clues to his wife’s killer(s) indelibly inscribed on his body, serve as prosthetic memories, ostensibly providing Shelby with sufficient means to orient himself and continue on his mission, unhindered by the memory disorder stemming from the trauma sustained at the hands of his wife’s killer(s). Yet Memento’s labyrinthine structure drip-feeds the audience with information that retroactively unseats Shelby’s account. Its incipient circularity paints Shelby’s substitute memories as the mythic dimension of his world, providing “a discursive form for something that cannot be transmitted through the definition of truth” (Lacan 1979, 407).

8

I am grateful to Rob Lapsley for stressing this more generous reading of Jameson.

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TIME’S MIRROR “I have done that,” says my memory. “I cannot have done that,” says my pride, and remains inexorable. Eventually – memory yields. (Nietzsche 1966 [1886], 80) I have no desire to suffer twice, in reality and then in retrospect. (Sophocles, Oedipus Rex (c. 429 BC)) [T]he amnesia brought on by repression is one of the liveliest forms of memory. (Lacan 2006 [1966], 217)

Without the central conceit of its non-linear narrative, Memento would amount to a run-of-the-mill tale of violent revenge, set against an alienating backdrop of post-industrial urban decay, featuring the usual cast of noir characters: the hapless victim; the fatally flawed protagonist; the double-crossing cop; the duplicitous femme fatale. Yet if the story Memento recounts is straightforward (at least by Hollywood standards), its plot is (literally) anything but. The reverse-chronological sequence shaping the narrative sees the viewer constantly “dropped into situations in medias res, which is, of course, the condition of Leonard’s life” (Carroll 2009, 136). Shelby cannot recall what has just happened and nor can the audience – although the audience has yet to witness the events about to unfold in the reverse-chronological presentation. The viewer’s consequent ability to piece together the bigger picture entails that Memento delivers a false approximation of Shelby’s condition. If its spectators face an unfamiliar viewing experience, the film nonetheless reflects an experience far from uncommon outside of the cinema: “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards,” in Kierkegaard’s celebrated aphorism.9 Kierkegaard’s disadjusted temporality resonates with the mechanism that Freud named as Nachträglichkeit, variously translated into English as “deferred” or “delayed” “action” or “interpretation” (or simply “afterwardness”). At its most basic, the term captures the way in which memories are perpetually subject to retrospective revision, ever open to reinterpretation in the light of present experience, just as Shelby constantly amends the annotations on his Polaroids in the wake of more recent discoveries.10 Freud’s advancement lies in recognizing the retroactive 9 10

“It is quite true what philosophy tells us, that life must be understood backwards. But with this, one forgets the second proposition, that it must be lived forwards” (Kierkegaard 2001, 194 [1843, JJ: 167]). Freud maintained that later experiences, particularly of a sexual nature, may reactivate certain childhood memories, retrospectively endowing them with traumatic significance (the “seduction theory” of the aetiology of neuroses). In a letter to Fliess of 4th October, 1897, Freud acknowledged: “A harsh critic might say of all this that it was retrogressively fantasied instead of progressively determined [nach vorne]” (in Masson 1985, 270). Against Jung’s “retrospective fantasizing” (Zurückphantasieren), however, Freud insisted that the past plays a determinate role in a present that necessarily recaptures something of that past – stressing that the reactivated memory, not the past event, induces trauma. Borrowing Laplanche’s (2005) analogy, Nachträglichkeit accords to the model of a time-bomb: something is primed at an earlier stage, only to be activated later. Laplanche rejects Freud’s supposed abandonment of the seduc-

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function this performs, the resultant a posteriori influence cast by the present on the past. “History is not the past. History is the past insofar as it is historicised in the present” (Lacan 1988 [1975], 12). It is to Lacan that an appreciation of the preeminence of Nachträglichkeit in Freud’s thought and its retroactive implications – the après-coup – must be credited.11 For Lacan (2006 [1966], 247), “What is realized in my history is neither the past definite as what was, since it is no more, nor even the perfect as what has been in what I am, but the future anterior as what I will have been, given what I am in the process of becoming.” Tellingly, Shelby’s name evokes the simple future (“shall be”). He is not, for instance, called Willoughby. As Fink (1997, 129) notes, “The obsessive lives posthumously, sacrificing everything (all satisfaction in the here and now) for the sake of his name – having his name live on.” For its audience, Memento’s retroactive temporality insistently undercuts the veracity of Shelby’s account of the violent attack, screened periodically in brief bursts of flashback, to which he and his wife were reputedly subjected. Particular doubt is cast by the uncanny echo of a parallel case from Shelby’s previous life as an insurance investigator. Again screened intermittently in flashback, the case of Sammy Jankis concerns the accidental death of another amnesiac’s wife, who, with inadequate proof to support a health-insurance claim, left her insulin injection in her husband’s hands to put the veracity of his memory loss to the ultimate test.12 Ostensibly an episode from Shelby’s past over which he retains a sense of guilt, the Jankis sub-plot recalls the retrogressive screen memories that Freud (S.E. III) defined as the overwriting of the past by a fantasy construct that is nonetheless dependent on that past. In a description of Meyer’s The Monk’s Wedding that might retrospectively be ascribed to Memento, Freud suggests that the work: magnificently illustrates the process occurring in later years in the formation of fantasies – a new experience is projected in fantasy back into the past so that the new persons become aligned with the old ones, who become their prototypes. The mirror image of the present is seen in the fantasied past, which then prophetically becomes the present. (Letter to Fliess, 7th July, 1898; in Masson 1985, 320)

Freud surmised that the purpose of fantasy is to fulfill an unconscious wish: fantasies express something unacceptable at the level of consciousness, which would be consciously denied and is consequently repressed – only to return in symptomatic form, delivering a satisfaction that disregards the subject’s conscious wishes. This conclusion was obtained in respect of Freud’s own dream of Irma’s injection: “its content was the fulfilment of a wish and its motive was a wish” (S.E. IV, 118–19). By shifting the onus of his own failure to effect a cure onto another doctor, “Otto,”

11

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tion theory (Laplanche and Pontalis 1968 [1964]; Laplanche 1989 [1987]). Verhaeghe (1998) offers a compelling Lacanian account maintaining the same position. “The real implication of the nächtraglich … has been ignored, though it was there all the time and had only to be picked up” (Lacan 1978 [1973], 216). Cf. Derrida (1978 [1967], 203): “the concepts of Nachträglichkeit and Verspätung [delay/deferral] … govern the whole of Freud’s thought … The irreducibility of the ‘effect of deferral’ (à-retardement) – such, no doubt, is Freud’s discovery.” A happy coincidence determines that the French for “unawareness” is “l’insu.”

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Freud interpreted his dream as expressing a wish: It “acquitted me of the responsibility for Irma’s condition;” and not only this, for where, on a previous occasion, “Otto had … annoyed me by his remarks about Irma’s incomplete cure … the dream gave me my revenge by throwing the reproach back on to him.” To be absolved of responsibility whilst being permitted to exact revenge precisely encapsulates the situation Shelby’s memory disorder sanctions. Moreover, the cases of Leonard Shelby and Sammy Jankis explicitly recall Freud’s “dream pairs:” Suppose … that the dream-wish had as its content some illicit action in regard to a particular person. Then in the first dream the person will appear undisguised, but the action will be only timidly hinted at. The second dream will behave differently. The action will be named without disguise, but the person will either be made unrecognizable or replaced by someone indifferent. (S.E. XXII, 27)

Memento’s parallel cases, like Hamlet’s play within a play,13 signal that the “truth is supported only by a half-saying” (Lacan 2007 [1970], 110). The incongruous resonances of the excessive violence of rape and murder, and the excess insulin injections and fatal overdose – both involving penetrative acts, each representing perversions of life-affirming or life-preserving actions that result in death – confirm Lacan’s insistence that “half-saying is the internal law of every species of the enunciation of the truth, and what incarnates it best is myth” (Lacan 2007 [1970], 110). The truth lies neither in the accidental death of Sammy Jankis’s wife nor the violent attack on the Shelbys that motivates the desire for retribution. “It is not that the forbidden thought is simply disguised … but rather that it only exists … as the slippage between the one and the other” (Leader 2003, 44). Hence Nolan’s directorial commitment to rendering everything undecidable, nurturing the “indeterminacy of the viewer’s own memory of what definitively happened” (Clarke 2002, 176). Nothing is unequivocal, unambiguous, or indisputable; nor can the reliability of any character’s pronouncements be taken at face value – not even when the shadowy (ex-)cop, Teddy, elides Shelby’s and Sammy Jankis’s stories. LEONARD: What the fuck are you talking about? TEDDY:

(theatrical shrug) I dunno... your wife surviving the assault... her not believing about your condition... the doubt tearing her up inside … the insulin –

LEONARD: That’s Sammy, not me! I told you about Sammy – TEDDY:

Like you’ve told yourself. Over and over. Conditioning yourself to believe. ‘Learning through repetition’ –

LEONARD: Sammy let his wife kill herself! Sammy ended up in an institution – ! […] TEDDY:

Sammy didn’t have a wife. [Leonard freezes, staring at Teddy.] It was your wife who had diabetes.

(Nolan 2001, 218–19)

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Mallin (2010) explores the resonances between Memento and Hamlet.

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Yet Teddy – John Edward (“Teddy”) Gammell – is also a source of information on the alleged killer’s name: … ‘John G.’ If it becomes increasingly apparent that Teddy is manipulating Shelby, aiming to frame a drug dealer, Jimmy Grantz, in order to benefit from the proceeds of crime, this merely hints at the more disturbing implications of Shelby’s situation. Thus, one of Shelby’s tattoos qualifies the name “John G.” with: “or James.” Shelby’s amnesia means that he would be unable to recall avenging his wife’s murder, even if he had already got his man (or men). Within the brief 48 hours covered by the film’s reverse-chronological sequence, Shelby not only kills Jimmy Grantz. He also kills Teddy – in the opening scene, in fact, which forms the first segment of the reverse-chronological sequence. Shelby’s actions seem destined to repeat themselves interminably, as one conspicuous tattoo ambiguously confirming, “I’ve done it,” implies – although all interpretations as to what this might mean are left in play. As intimations of Shelby’s culpability nonetheless insinuate their way into the viewer’s consciousness, Memento aligns itself with a series of neo-noir films, “such as Angel Heart or Blade Runner (the director’s cut), where it emerges at the end that the hero is himself the criminal he is looking for;” where “the hero – the detective – is, without knowing it, implicated in the crimes he is investigating” (Zupančič 2000, 246, 245).14 Yet whilst “some have … seen in Oedipus the King the prototype of the noir genre” (245), matters are arguably far more complex. SYMBOLIC DEBT I take a walk in a town seen then for the first time. At every street corner I hesitate, uncertain where I am going. I am in doubt; and I mean by this that alternatives are offered to my body, that my movement as a whole is discontinuous, that there is nothing in one attitude which foretells and prepares future attitudes. Bergson (1911, 110) He who is to perform a horrendous act should imagine to himself that it is already done, should impose upon himself a future as irrevocable as the past. Borges (1998 [1941], 121) [T]he obsessive neurotic always repeats the initial germ of his trauma. Lacan (1977 [1959], 17)

“You don’t want the truth, the truth is a fucking coward. So you make up your own truth,” Teddy spits at Shelby in one particularly heated exchange. Adopting the perspective of trauma theory, Thomas (2003, 201) proposes that Memento deals with the “difficulty of knowing and the need to know” in the wake of memory loss. Such an approach has severe limitations. It fixates on demarcating historical reality and retrospective fantasy, overlooking such transversal possibilities as the material reality of the “enigmatic signifiers” underlying the genesis of the unconscious 14

In Nolan’s early short, Doodlebug (1997), a man attempting to swat an insect with his shoe eventually succeeds, only to discover that the insect is his doppelgänger in miniature.

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(Laplanche 1997; 1999) and missing the point that “encounters with the real of the Other’s desire are always traumatic” (Lapsley 2009, 329) or have the potential to be so. Such encounters precipitate what Lacan terms the fundamental fantasy. This conception, indispensable to understanding Shelby’s situation, may loosely be regarded as “constitutive of … psychical reality” (Fink 2014, 47): the reality each subject fantasizes in attempting to negotiate its relation to the Other.15 Far from expressing a “need to know,” Shelby’s position expresses a “knowledge that can’t tolerate one’s knowing that one knows” (Lacan 1973–4; in Feldman 1989, 77); “something which is known unbeknownst to the ego” (Fink 1997, 232n). The unconscious does not deal in recoupable knowledge, of the kind recorded in conscious memories or, in Shelby’s case, on scraps of paper, photos, maps or inked onto the skin. [I]n Freud’s work something quite different is at stake, which is a savoir certainly, but one that doesn’t involve the slightest connaissance, in that it is inscribed in a discourse of which the subject – who, like the messenger-slave of Antiquity, carries under his hair the codicil that condemns him to death – knows neither the meaning nor the text, nor in what language [langue] it is written, nor even that it was tattooed on his shaven scalp while he was sleeping. (Lacan 2006 [1966], 680)

For Lacan (2006, 459), “the unconscious is the Other’s discourse.” A truth other than the one the subject intends will out. In a sense that will become apparent, “The tattoo … has the function of being for the Other, of situating the subject in it” (Lacan 1978 [1973], 205–6); whilst the fundamental fantasy must be understood “in the most rigorous sense of the institution of a real that covers (over) the truth” (Lacan 2006 [1966], 873). Shelby likes to imagine that his problems began at the point when violent intruders (two rather than one) put paid to the possibility of plenitude (absolute jouissance) imagined in the (impossible) ideal of domestic bliss: the vicious rape scene enacts the absence of sexual rapport in the most brutal form imaginable. An attack from the outside, however, renders as contingent what is in fact inevitable, on account of the symbolic castration marking the subject’s accession to language. The subject’s constitution in and on the terms of the Other necessarily divides it from itself, irrevocably alienating the subject from a vital part of its being. And “when one is made into two, there is no going back on it. It can never revert to making one again, not even a new one. The Aufhebung [sublation] is one of those sweet dreams of philosophy” (Lacan 1982 [1972–3], 156). Although the real of the subject’s being is excluded from the symbolic, a trace of it nonetheless remains as objet a – the impossible object of desire that the subject is compelled to seek yet destined never to find – which is irretrievably lost on account of its being indefinitely deferred. “The object is by nature a refound object,” says Lacan (1992 [1960], 118), casting the loss that permits the refinding as anterior to what is lost. Yet the 15

The formula for fantasy, $ ◊ a, posits an impossible relation between a barred subject (reliant on the Other, the subject can never be self-complete) and objet petit a (= l’autre; the object of desire arising from the separation of the subject from the Other). The subject’s negotiation of the cause of desire – its dependency on the Other – determines the form the fundamental fantasy takes.

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subject’s inevitable failure to attain the lost object paradoxically yields a surplus jouissance: a plus-de jouir which “appears as the positive correlate of a subject who appears as a negative magnitude of the symbolic” (Zupančič 2006, 162) on account of its “unrepresented presence in the Real” (Zupančič 2008, 167). The French plus-de jouir embodies a marked ambiguity: (no) more (than) jouissance. As Zupančič (2006, 156) avers, “the loss of the object, the loss of satisfaction, and the emergence of a surplus satisfaction or surplus enjoyment are situated, topologically speaking, in one and the same point: in the intervention of the signifier” – primordially the unary signifier that first “represents the subject for another signifier” (Lacan 1978 [1973], 218), assigning it its place in the Other. The unary signifier operates in the way that tally marks function as unary numerals in primitive counting systems: “The subject himself is marked off by a single stroke,16 and first he marks himself as a tattoo, the first of the signifiers. When this signifier, this one, is established – the reckoning is one one” (Lacan 1978 [1973], 141). These two ones constitute the divided subject, which, like the Rat Man’s stone, is forever dislocated. Constantly displaced along the chain of signifiers in ceaseless pursuit of objet a, the subject, witnessing events in the rear-view mirror, “is there to rediscover where it was” (Lacan 1978 [1973], 45). The neurotic’s response to the predicament of subjectivity, personified in Shelby’s memory disorder and the irresoluble uncertainty it affords, takes refuge in the fantasy that absolute jouissance is merely forbidden (by paternal interdiction), not impossible (the consequence of symbolic castration). The Oedipus is “elaborated as a myth to allow the [subject] a positioning in the symbolic” (Leader 2003, 42). As Andrès (1987, 61) puts it: “Castration is not the effect of the myth, rather the myth is an effect of castration” (in Lapsley and Westlake 1992, 44). Oedipus is the exemplary means by which the neurotic takes flight from the real of the Other’s desire, for fear of being eclipsed by it. “What the neurotic does not want, and what he strenuously refuses to do … is to sacrifice his castration to the Other’s jouissance, by allowing it to serve the Other” (Lacan 2006 [1966], 700). Insofar as fantasy also expresses the Other’s desire, there can be no escape: only the forked path tracing the impossible relation between the barred subject and objet a: $ ◊ a. [In neurosis] we find fantasy’s two terms split apart, as it were: the first, in the case of the obsessive, inasmuch as he negates the Other’s desire, forming his fantasy in such a way as to accentuate the impossibility of the subject vanishing, the second, in the case of the hysteric, inasmuch as desire is sustained in fantasy only by the lack of satisfaction the hysteric brings desire by slipping away as its object. (Lacan 2006 [1966], 698)

Where the fantasized self-sufficiency of the (typically male) obsessive seeks to occlude the cause of desire in the Other whilst vigorously pursuing objet a, the 16

Lacan invokes Freud’s (S.E. XVII, 64) suggestion that unconscious identification with another may adopt a “single trait” (einziger Zug), such as a cough – implying a symbolic rather than an imaginary identification (which would involve wholesale imitation) – in situations where “identification has appeared instead of object-choice, and … object-choice has regressed to identification.” Satisfaction derives from the unconsciously adopted trait rather than an invested object: “the investment is transferred to the unary trait that marks this loss” (Zupančič 2006, 157).

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(stereotypically female) hysteric constitutes herself as the object that is the cause of the Other’s desire, endlessly seeking to provoke it in order to confirm her existence.17 Both situations see the neurotic beset by doubt. For Lacan (1993 [1981], 174), echoing Heidegger, “the structure of a neurosis is essentially a question,” varying only in its modulation and mode of address. The hysteric’s “Am I man or woman?” is inflected in the obsessive’s questioning of the contingency of existence, “Am I dead or alive?” (Hamlet’s “To be or not to be?”). The hysterical manner of questioning, either … or …, contrasts with the obsessional’s response, negation, neither … nor …, neither male nor female. This negation comes about against a background of mortal experience and of hiding his being from the question, which is a way of remaining suspended from it. The obsessional is precisely neither one nor the other – one may also say that he is both at once. (Lacan 1993 [1981], 249)18

Whilst superficially suggesting the “acting out” of oedipal themes – “‘love for the parent of the opposite sex’ and ‘death wishes against the parent of the same sex’” (Fenichel 1990 [1946], 91) – what is actually at stake “has nothing to do with reality” (Lacan 2013 [2005], 44) but with “the points at which the symbol constitutes human reality” as a separate dimension, which “Freud constantly emphasizes when he says that the obsessive neurotic always lives in the register of what involves the elements of greatest uncertainty: how long one’s life will last, who one’s biological father is.” As matters evading “perceptual proof,” Lacan says, they are constructed by “symbolic relations that can then find confirmation in reality. … [B] efore we can know who he is with certainty, the name of the father creates the function of the father:” the symbolic father. As in Shelby’s case, the guilt of surviving and living on in the place of another – a clinically well-documented aetiology – sees the obsessional neurotic confront the “unfillable gap constituted by the symbolic debt against which his neurosis is a protest” (Lacan 2006 [1966], 303). This, however, ultimately reflects the privation the obsessive suffers in the wake of “the mortification the signifier 17

18

Taking Shelby for a hysteric, Aitken (2009, 229) asks, perplexingly: “Is hysteria a psychosis or is it simply a condition?” Hysteria is a neurosis, not a psychosis; and the “either/or” distinction is inapposite: the structural position occupied by the psychotic is distinct from a clinical psychosis, whilst “psychoanalytic research finds no fundamental but only quantitative distinction between normal and neurotic life” (Freud S.E. V, 373). Where Freud saw obsessional neurosis as a “dialect” or “variant” of hysteria, Lacan distinguishes distinct structural positions – eminently subject to what Freud terms Neurosenwahl (choice of neurosis). The hysteric’s question subverts earlier psychoanalytic debate over male hysteria – originating in cases of ‘railway spine’ and, later, shellshock – and subsequently taken up in certain non-Lacanian feminist circles and film studies (Kirby 1988; Kroker and Kroker 1991; Aitken and Lukinbeal 1997, 1998; Lukinbeal and Aitken 1998). Some confusions on this score emanate from Mulvey’s (1975) account of the gaze as masculine, reducing woman to its object. For Lacan, the gaze belongs to the object, not the subject. It marks the blind spot in the subject’s field of vision, which, regardless of gender, the subject can never master, just as Holbein’s painting, The Ambassadors (1533), cannot be encompassed from a single vantage point: the memento mori, appearing in anamorphic perspective, frustrates viewing (as death frustrates worldly vanities). For Lacan, all subjects are subject to the Other’s gaze, which frames desire, posing the impossible question of what the other wants (Lacan 1978 [1973]).

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imposes on his life by numbering it” (Lacan 2006 [1966], 513): one one. The attendant evacuation of jouissance to the margins of the body’s erogenous zones engenders an overriding sensation of the body as dead, overwritten by the signifier, as Shelby’s tattoos serve to suggest. In Leader’s (1993, 38–9) astute antimetabole: “a hysteric is a person to whom things happen whereas an obsessional is a thing to whom persons happen.” In other words, he will do everything he can to avoid an encounter with the jouissance, the living dimension, of another subject. When he does encounter this, he tries to deploy the signifier to absorb all of the jouissance. The empirical result of this attempt at reduction to the signifier is mortification. We see this for example in verbal obsessions: a subject’s whole life can be structured by some simple verbal command. (Leader 1993, 39)

The diagonal tattoo on Shelby’s chest – enjoining Shelby to “find him and kill him” – redoubles this by literalizing it. Yet despite the obsessive “being caught up in the perpetual giddiness [vertige] of destroying the other, he can never do enough to ensure that the other continue to exist,” since this preserves and perpetuates his own precarious existence (Lacan 2015 [1991], 203). Shelby’s amnesia guarantees and determines that history shall be repeated: for the obsessive, once is never enough – nor, for Shelby, is one intruder, one suspect, one act of vengeance. Not even one motel room will suffice (the motel clerk rents him two). If Shelby’s affliction leaves him open to manipulation by others, in obeying the compulsion animating his phantom existence, he is perfectly happy to act at the expense of his own satisfaction, assuming “the transcendental function of ensuring the jouissance of the Other” (Lacan 2006 [1966], 700). “Castration means that jouissance must be refused in order to be attained on the inverse scale of the Law of desire,” writes Lacan (2006 [1966], 700). By approaching neurosis “in possession of the thread that makes it possible to posit fantasy as the Other’s desire” (698), it becomes possible to see that, in line with the prohibition issued in the Name-of-the-Father,19 the Other enjoins the subject to enjoy (“Jouis!”) at any cost – echoing, in Sadean tones, the maxim cited by Kant: Fiat justitia, pereat mundus! In contrast with the neurotic’s interrogative, “the super-ego is an imperative” (Lacan 1988 [1975], 102): not simply the ego’s moral conscience or censor, “the superego is at one and the same time the law and its destruction.” Its functioning resembles Kafka’s (1996 [1919], 53) “peculiar apparatus,” by means of which the condemned man has his crime fatally tattooed on his body: a corporeal pronouncement of his death sentence that is felt in the flesh. The super-ego has a relation to the law … a senseless law, going so far as to become a failure to recognise [méconnaissance] the law. That is always the way we see the super-ego acting in the neurotic. … [T]he morality of the neurotic is a senseless, destructive, purely oppressive, almost always anti-legal morality. (Lacan 1988 [1975], 102)

Shelby readily adopts an anti-legal morality, moving seamlessly from investigating life-insurance claims to conducting fatal investigations that claim lives, mobilizing a sadistic streak that responds to the superego’s categorical imperative. His conviction persists amidst the growing confusion wreaked as an obscene jouissance takes 19

Nom-du-père and Non-du-père are homophonic.

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hold. Like Benjamin’s (1968 [1940], 257) Angel of History – who, with his wings caught in the wind blowing from Paradise, is driven “irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high” – , Shelby’s doubts mount inexorably. “Compulsion turns into doubt, Zwang into Zweifel, as Freud first observed in the case of the Rat Man” (Miller 1988, 37). Obsessional neurosis (Zwangsneurose) is “characterized by phenomenal evidence of Zwang, i.e. phenomena of constraint and compulsion manifested in the subject’s thoughts and acts” (Miller 1988, 34). “Compulsive acts,” Freud (S.E. X, 194) observed, invariably take place “in two successive stages, of which the second neutralizes the first,” as the Rat Man’s stone perfectly exemplifies. However much the obsessive rationalizes his actions, “their true significance lies in their being a representation of a conflict between two opposing impulses of approximately equal strength” (typically love and hate). Such conflicts cannot be resolved via the hysteric’s mediation of contradictory desires: “what regularly occurs in hysteria is that a compromise is arrived at which enables both the opposing tendencies to find expression simultaneously – which kills two birds with one stone” (Freud S.E. X, 194). It amounts to “a mode of expressing two in one” (Miller 1988, 37). In obsessional neurosis, however, “each of the two opposing tendencies finds satisfaction singly, first one and then the other, though naturally an attempt is made to establish some sort of logical connection (often in defiance of all logic)” (Freud S.E. X, 194). Obsessional neurosis involves “constraint without compromise” (Miller 1988, 37). Condemned to repeating his actions, “constantly suspended in the time of the Other” (Lacan 1977 [1959], 12), Shelby remains trapped in the “labyrinths of the Zwangsneurose” (Lacan 2006 [1966], 232), convinced that there must be a way out. DÉJÀ VU One does not simply need the blueprints to a reconstructed labyrinth, nor even a pile of blueprints that have already been worked up. What is needed above all is the general combinatory that no doubt governs their variety, but that also, even more usefully, accounts for the illusions or, better, shifts in the labyrinth that take place right before one’s very eyes. Lacan (2006 [1966], 526)

Lacan’s (1979 [1953]) interpretation of obsessional neurosis centers on the Rat Man’s circuitous attempts to settle a debt at the behest of his commanding officer. The Rat Man feels compelled to follow the “Cruel Captain’s” orders to the letter, despite the latter’s misidentification of the indebted party as “Lieutenant A” (whose position at the military post-office, which took delivery of the Rat Man’s spectacles on which payment is due, had been assumed by “Lieutenant B”). The Rat Man’s compulsion to square this circle – despite knowing full well to whom he owed money, and despite the fact that he could simply obey the spirit of the Cruel Captain’s order – remains undiminished by its impossibly contradictory nature. Whatever convoluted series of exchanges the Rat Man devises – Lieutenant A pays the postmistress, the postmistress pays Lieutenant B, he himself pays Lieutenant A

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(obeying orders), etc. – he inevitably leaves the original debt (in fact to the postmistress, as the Rat Man knew all along) intact. Lacan’s interpretation of this tortuous process alights on certain parallels – and subtle differences – between the relations situating the Rat Man and the constellation of terms constituting his father’s network of indebtedness (his decision to marry for money rather than for the love of a poor girl; an outstanding debt to a friend who paid off a socially embarrassing gambling debt). Echoing Freud’s earliest account of retrogressive screen memories, Lacan (1979 [1953], 412) advances understanding by characterizing the relations between the Rat Man’s and his father’s situations as “complementary in certain points and supplementary in others, parallel in one way and inverted in another.” In Deleuze’s (2004 [1972], 183) pithy summary, Lacan’s analysis proceeds “on the basis of a double series, paternal and filial, in which each put[s] into play four relational terms according to an order of places: debt/friend, rich woman/poor woman.” Deleuze here gives due credit to a formula distinct from the tripartite, Oedipal one. Lacan’s phrasing directly, if implicitly, appeals to Lévi-Strauss’s (1963 [1958], 228) canonical formula for myth: Fx(a) : Fy(b) ≈ Fx(b) : Fa-1(y) This formula expresses the reciphering of the terms of an irresolvable problem that transpose it onto new terrain in order to reach an imaginary resolution: “The inability to connect two kinds of relationship is overcome (or rather replaced) by the assertion that contradictory relationships are identical inasmuch as they are both self-contradictory in a similar way” (Lévi-Strauss 1963 [1958], 216). The Rat Man’s compulsions act out the reciphering of terms described in LéviStrauss’s formula, as, indeed, do Shelby’s, responding to the impossibility of bringing together two disjunct series: two generations of debt; two losses of life. As Maniglier (2012, 41) puts it, “it is not an isolated event that can be traumatizing, but rather the kind of twisted relations that it bears with another event, which it echoes, not by repeating it as in a formal homology but by transforming it in a way which then makes it impossible for it not to be endlessly repeated.” Obsessional neurosis effectively amounts to “a way of confronting an impossible situation by the successive articulation of all the forms of impossibility of the solution” (Lacan 1994, 330, in Leader 2003, 40). Insofar as neurosis amounts to an individual myth, nothing is ever resolved, only endlessly displaced, as the problem successively shifts gear, in an escalating series of escape attempts from a labyrinthine space. “Far from being separate from the others, each structure conceals an imbalance, which can only be corrected through recourse to some term borrowed from the adjacent structure” (Lévi-Strauss 1978 [1968], 358), such that the “variant-producing cycle … takes on the appearance of a spiral” (Lévi-Strauss 1981 [1971], 650). There are undoubtedly as many interpretations of Memento as there are permutations of the constellation of ideas it puts in play. The purpose of this chapter is not, however, simply to propose another reading. For when Engels described the bourgeoisie’s solution to the housing problem, in what retroactively appears as an anticipation of the understanding of obsessional neurosis crystallized in Lacan’s read-

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ing of the Rat Man case, he was far from describing an isolated nineteenth-century affair. In twenty-first-century global financial capitalism, the same basic mechanism has simply switched gears and dramatically altered the gearing ratio: “When one limit is overcome accumulation often hits up against another somewhere else. … The crisis tendencies are not resolved but merely moved around” (Harvey 2010, 117). From the Rat Man’s stone to the global crises of contemporary capitalism, moving problems around provides its own mythic solution. Yet despite this striking parallel, Deleuze and Guattari’s emphasis on schizophrenia seemingly deliberately sidelined obsessional neurosis as a means of understanding capitalism’s dynamics. Ultimately, perhaps, this is as it should be – for it is not without irony that, in drawing attention to the structural similarities of obsessional neurosis and capitalism, the present chapter should itself exhibit the mythic structure articulated by LéviStrauss: capitalism and obsessional neurosis are self-contradictory in similar ways. APPENDIX – ON MEMENTO’S STRUCTURE To grasp Memento’s structure, it is useful to borrow narratology’s “distinction between a sequence of events and a discourse that orders and presents events” (Culler 1981, 189), respectively termed fabula and sjuzhet in the lexicon of the Russian formalists (the corresponding French terms, histoire and récit, whilst more intuitive, lose the resonance with “subject”). The chronological sequence of events comprising a story (fabula) may always be considered independently of its discursive presentation or plot (sjuzhet). Memento’s chiastic sjuzhet comprises two alternating series of scenes: one, in color, presented in reverse-chronological order; another, in monochrome, presented chronologically (barring the occasional flashback). They intersect at a crucial juncture, where the colors of a developing Polaroid bleed almost imperceptibly into the surrounding scene. The reverse (color) series imparts something of Shelby’s experience of amnesia, although the end of each color scene incorporates a (lightly re-edited) overlap with the preceding color scene in the presentation (sjuzhet), orienting viewers to successive developments in the story (fabula). Following Klein (2001) and Kania (2009), it is conventional to number the black-and-white scenes sequentially, from 1–22; and to label the color scenes in reverse, from Ω to A, thus: Ω, V, …, A. Scene A/22 is where the two series intersect (via the “contagious” Polaroid). The opening scene, Ω, which includes a Polaroid “undeveloping,” is the only one actually shown in reverse (the soundtrack is not played backwards and certain close-up sequences are, albeit undetectably, not reversed). Memento’s fabula may be reconstructed by reordering the sequence of scenes comprising the film (and has been, as a hidden feature on certain DVD releases). Given that the monochrome scenes all precede the color segments within the diegetic chronology, the fabula may be rendered as 1, 2, …, 21, 22/A, B, …, Ω. The sjuzhet (narrative presentation), however, is ordered: Ω, 1, V, 2, U, 3, …, 20, C, 21, B, 22/A. If one imagines the fabula making a “hairpin” turn back on itself at 22/A (Nolan, in Mottram 2002, 33), and the two series interleaving in the manner

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of a dovetail shuffle (indicated by the arrows in the figure below), the derivation of the sjuzhet becomes evident. The implication of the retrospective splicing of the two series at Ω is that the chiastic fabula may be made to form an infinite loop, suggesting the Möbius spiraling of external and psychical reality, and Shelby’s entrapment in the eternal repetition of the same.

Figure 1: Memento’s Structure

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FILMS Memento. Director: Christopher Nolan. USA: Newmarket Capital Group et al., 2000.

ON AUTOPILOT: TOWARDS A FLAT ONTOLOGY OF VEHICULAR NAVIGATION Sam Hind and Alex Gekker The following chapter tackles the entrenched ontological divide between the map and the territory, both as a theoretical construct in (post-)modern philosophical thought and in its capacity to inform various cartographic endeavors. In this chapter, we wish to demonstrate how such a dichotomy is not necessary for, and might even be harmful to, our conceptualization of those two objects and the relations between them. We do so by turning to the ongoing convergence (Jenkins 2006) of driving and media practices, previously separate types of human activity that are becoming increasingly connected through two related phenomena: social driving and automated cars. The relation between driving and media consumption is not new. Winfried Schulz (2004), for example, uses listening to the radio while driving as an example of what he calls the amalgamating effect of media. According to Schulz, when media consumption becomes ubiquitous, previously separate activities habituate into new patterns. These change the structure and meaning of each: driving a car in silence might become strange to a commuter, for instance, or radio stations, previously an independent and dominant force in the media institutions landscape, become reliant on a particular kind of a driving listener, changing content and schedule to accommodate her or him. The transformation we see in front of us, courtesy of the introduction of software and network-based media into the daily lives of users, also changes the way space is consumed and experienced (de Souza e Silva 2006; Kitchin and Dodge 2011). For drivers, this change alters what Nigel Thrift (2004a; 2004b), via Patricia T. Clough (2000), has called the “technological unconscious.” The consolidation of digital screens, mapping software, and car manufacturing, in the same hand (Zillman 2015), further changes the political economy of driving. Thus, we argue here that through the hybridization of media-aided navigation and actual movement, the map and the territory, or rather the map-territory occupy a single ontological plane. To explain our position, we first briefly chart the perceived ontological divide between map and territory envisioned by modern and postmodern theory. Then we suggest a solution that eliminates the need to bifurcate or prioritize either one by turning to the concept of flat ontology. Finally, we exemplify our vision through the discussion of recent developments in social navigation and automated driving.

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ONTOLOGICAL DIVIDE “The map is not the territory” (Korzybski 1994 [1933], 58), the semioticians’ famous maxim, inspired Baudrillard’s rallying postmodernist claim on how “the territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it.” (Baudrillard 1995, 1). Within the fields of geography and cartography, particularly sensitive to the ontic realities of mapping, these totalizing metaphors, and straightforward map-territory translations, have been subject to sustained critical inquiry (Crampton 2002). Theorizations of such have focused on historical discourses (Harley 1989), the divide between active and passive consumption of space (De Certeau 2011), the role of narratives and habits (Ingold 2000), “hidden” power agendas (Wood 2010) and, perhaps more than anything else, the fluid, emergent properties of various maps in multiple contexts (Dodge et al. 2009). While many of these critical approaches follow Del Casino and Hanna’s (2006) reproach of reductive binaries (say, between map-makers and map readers), one stable distinction remains at the heart of the cartographic inquiry: the ontological divide between the map and its territory. It is our contention that the map/territory divide will continue to exist but perhaps not for much longer. This “crisis of cartographic reason,” diagnosed by Franco Farinelli (2003; 2009), is explored by Giorgio Avezzù in his contribution to the current volume. In our chapter, we take such a crisis as a point of departure to argue that with the advent of the driverless car, we are beginning to see the outlines of a new world in which navigation and movement are subsumed into the vehicle such that map and territory are indistinguishable. Here, we take up Jörg Beckmann’s (2004, 90) then-speculative need to “reconsider the notion of the car-driver hybrid” in light of its possible replacement by an “auto-pilot” in which navigation and movement are both automated. Yet, in order to make a case for an ontological combination, we must first detail this perceived divide abstracted from the case study of the automated vehicle. For Korzybski (1994, 58), “the map is not the territory” affirms that a relationship exists between one and the other, but mistaking one for the other inevitably results in practical if not epistemological problems. However, in full, the maxim reveals slightly more on the matter: “A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness” (Korzybski 1994, 58). Thus, the utility of the map is drawn from its representational power, that is to say, from its structural similarity with the territory. In practical terms, if this similarity did not exist it would result in a multitude of possible problems, as Korzybski (1994, 58) notes in reference to an erroneous map of Europe: If, speaking roughly, we should try, in our travels, to orient ourselves by such a map, we should find it misleading. It would lead us astray, and we might waste a great deal of unnecessary effort. In some cases, even, a map of wrong structure would bring actual suffering and disaster, as, for instance, in a war, or in the case of an urgent call for a physician.

Thus, in Korzybski’s terms, putting undue faith in the (“incorrect”) map in order to navigate the (“correct”) territory would have deleterious effects.

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But for Baudrillard, the maxim should be understood historically as a statement on, and only for, the postmodern world. His inversion, suggesting that “The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it” (Baudrillard 1995, 1) is one that signals the end of, in Baudrillard’s mind, a modern conceptualization of territory in favor of a postmodern hyper-reality. As David B. Clarke suggests in his contribution to this book, “Baudrillard offers a strategic reversal that serves as a poetic vehicle, mobilized to disarm any lingering faith in the rational kernel of the real.” Our aim here is to offer a contested view, one of amalgamation instead of dissolution. Challenging Baudrillard’s diagnosis, we wish to pinpoint the symbiotic relations that territory and maps exhibit in the digital age. In the supposed hyper-reality that Baudrillard constructs, there is no such thing as territory, no world outside of the map. But as he also affirms: “Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept” (Baudrillard 1995, 1). These various modes of abstraction, different in form, are all said to have been in relation to a “referential being” (Baudrillard 1995, 1) such as territory to which the map or any other abstraction is in servitude. Instead, we inhabit only a cartographic world of points, lines, and polygons. The conclusion of this argument, from an ontological perspective, is that there is no such remaining divide between map and territory because the territory is erased completely. Baudrillard’s initial clause that “The territory no longer precedes the map” invites one to reason that he has simply spun Korzybski’s maxim around, that instead, “the map precedes the territory.” In this, it is the map that assumes priority as the “referential being” rather than the territory. Taken on its own, this would have left the territory intact, albeit switching its ontological status from being the map’s superior to being the map’s inferior. This view would postulate that a postmodern realignment of map and territory merely shifts “actual suffering and disaster” (Korzybski 1994, 58) to the plane of the map. However, as is made clear in Baudrillard’s second clause, the territory no longer “survives” the map. In Baudrillard’s hyper-real battle to the death, it is the map that claims ultimate victory, not in reversing the ontological state between the two but in banishing it completely. In his work on hyper-reality, Baudrillard treats the map as a sign without a referent. However, it is important to note that in his view this is a recent development, a result of a map-territory struggle and not an a priori ontological state. As he emphatically continues: …if one must return to [Borges’s] fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself. (Baudrillard 1995, 1)

The “real,” says Baudrillard, is becoming (if it has not already become) deserted. Unlike in Borges’s tale where the 1:1 scale map of the territory becomes torn, shredded, and unusable, it is the territory itself that is left to “rot across the extent of the map.” The territory, thus, is becoming obsolete. Baudrillard’s crisis, needless to say, is not Farinelli’s. Whilst Avezzù, in his chapter of this book, suggests that the crisis identified by Farinelli describes a world “withdrawn into a space… beyond representation,” we see Baudrillard’s crisis as depicting a world entering

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into a space only of representation. Each diagnoses the ailment, but prescribes a radically different cure. The debate carries the echoes of new media scholars’ fascination with remediation, or the presupposition that newer forms of mediated expression are built upon and draw from previous media (Bolter and Grusin, 2000). If Baudrillard’s perspective is that the map is merely the remediation of territory, subsuming the essence of its previous form, then Farinelli’s stance is closer to the provocation of Alexander Galloway (2012, 21) to whom: A computer might remediate text and image. But what about a computer crash? What is being remediated at that moment? It can’t be text or image anymore, for they are not subject to crashes of this variety. So is a computer crash an example of non-media?”

Similarly, here we refute the notion of the map as an example of non-territory. In an era of big data, this ontological dilemma has begun to rear its head again in a different guise. On this occasion, it is not the map that necessarily forms the centerpiece. Instead, it is data. In the preface to the fifth edition of Korzybski’s book, Science and Sanity, Robert Pula suggests that “By ‘maps’ we should understand everything and anything that humans formulate” (Korzybski 1994, xvii) and thus that Korzybski’s original statement is designed to speak of knowledge production in general rather than cartography in the strictest sense. “Languages, formulational [sic] systems etc.” are, moreover, “maps and only maps of what they purport to represent” (Korzybski 1994, xvii). Thus, the “data revolution” (Kitchin 2014) is of interest because of how the production of knowledge has radically changed in the last five years. The data produced through social media (Twitter, Instagram, Facebook), fitness trackers (Fitbit, Strava), digital platforms and devices (sat-navs, ridesharing apps), and heretofore “dumb” components (Nest thermostat) combine a mixture of active and passive forms of data generation. These call into play, like never before, what Emma Uprichard (2013, n.p.) calls the “four big Vs”: velocity, variety, veracity, and volume. While much of this is actively provided by digital users in the form of social media ‘updates’ (tweets and posts, etc.), a significant proportion is also generated automatically by the devices themselves (sat-nav routes, thermostat temperature adjustments). In both cases, the data produced is used variously to update the technologies involved, to monitor and track user interaction, and to “add value” to and “capitalize on the Big Data sets already being generated” (Thatcher 2014, 1772) and that form omnipresent and never-ending “data fumes” (Thatcher 2014, 1770). Critically, much of this data has a “geolocated” element to it consisting of actual coordinates, selectable place-names, or other such spatial characteristics and proxies (propinquity, orientation, etc.). Companies selling such devices understand the value of this “geodata” (Leszyzcynski 2014) and the wider “geoweb” (Crampton et al. 2013). For instance, by examining the (often, very) personal use of self-tracking by enthusiastic communities, companies aim to extract and refine the types of data that will be most relevant to broader publics (Nafus and Sherman 2014). Thus, whilst the suggestion is that data rather than maps form the continuing thrust of the ontological divide, this data is nonetheless cartographically-mediated and/or orientated. Due to the speed and ‘liveness’ of much of this data (velocity),

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the breadth of data sources and types (variety), the perceived accuracy of geodata (veracity), and the sheer size of collected user data (volume), this emplacing of everyday activity matters. It is also not to say that the map itself has been erased as a medium. In fact, it is very much alive. Nonetheless, it takes multiple digital forms. Of greatest significance is the rise in mobile mapping and navigation, whether in the form of sat-navs (TomTom), location-based games (Foursquare, Pokémon GO), or travel platforms (Uber, Citymapper). All are reliant upon mobile devices and the complex relations they create between bodies in space (Foxman 2014). As a result, the cartographic aspect of this knowledge production continues to be significant, not only in the world-at-large but also with respect to the ontological divide between map and territory. The shift made from being on the map to being in the map – courtesy of the GPS-generated “you are here” dot – is crucial, for example, in understanding how (digital) map and territory have become, through multiple ontological moves, even closer together in recent times (Wilmott 2016; Lammes 2018). This is important for how we are to understand the rise of automated driving later in this chapter. Firstly, automated vehicles do not navigate in the way humans navigate using the kinds of maps imagined by Korzybski and Baudrillard. As such, understanding the role of ‘data’ more generally in this ontological debate is critical for how one considers the transformation we detail here. Secondly, “geodata” becomes critical for how one understands the enduring spatial, geographic, and cartographic elements of the relationship. In other words, how data acts in the world. Thirdly, mobile navigation has brought about a shift in the ontological relationship between the map user, the map, and the navigational act itself. In other words, that navigation itself has become fully-absorbed into the machine. FLAT ONTOLOGY The problem with the ontological divide offered by Korzybski (1994) is that it prioritizes and elevates the territory over and above the map, relegating the map to a lower order. Further, this lower order is only ontologically possible with reference to the “referential being” (Baudrillard 1995, 1) that is the territory. In this, the territory becomes the referent with the map itself merely a representation of such. Thus, following this logical thread, one would say that the “misleading” nature of an “incorrect map” that Korzybski (1994) identifies, culminating in “actual suffering and disaster,” would only be possible on the territorial plane, that is to say, in the “actual” world far away from the ontological plane of the map. In this, the map is compartmentalized aside and beneath the world itself. By extension, any changes wrought in the “map world” rather than the “actual world” amount to nothing at all. Or, more accurately, any changes wrought in the map world result in “not-actual suffering.” In such a view, a child scribbling on a map (a change in the “map world”) would have no effect; unless the drawings hampered navigation to an “actual world” emergency.

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Here, of course, is where we take issue with Korzybski. Assuming a non-representational position (Thrift 2007; Anderson and Harrison 2010), expounded by Del Casino and Hanna (2006, 44), “ it is better to theoretically consider maps and spaces are co-constitutive.” As they continue, “Maps that people simultaneously make and use mediate their experiences of space” (Del Casino and Hanna 2006, 44). Thus, in a digital world intensified by the rise of big data, this simultaneous process of both ‘making’ and using maps becomes one thoroughly imbricated with space and by extension, territory. Therefore, if the map is thoroughly constitutive of the “actual world,” then the kind of “actual suffering” supposed by Korzybski similarly occurs across the plane of the map as well. Consider how GPS-enabled cartography has transformed warfare, and consequently, state practice in the late 21st century (Gregory 2004; Amoore 2009; Graham 2010; Rankin 2011), or the sprawling global network of crisis mapping, where professionals and volunteers use participatory geographic information systems (PGIS) to aid logistical decision-making in the aftermath of natural disasters and disease outbreaks (Bittner et al. 2013). Further, for Kitchin and Dodge (2007), a cartographic object is a “set of points, lines and colors that takes form as, and is understood as, a map through mapping practices” (emphasis added). In other words, “maps are transitory and fleeting, being contingent, relational and context-dependent” (Kitchin and Dodge 2011, 337). Moreover, in Kitchin and Dodge’s continuing thesis, the map’s ontological security is never presumed or determined a priori but is “a co-constitutive production between inscription, individual and world; a production that is constantly in motion, always seeking to appear ontologically secure” (Kitchin and Dodge 2007, 337). This echoing of the “co-constitutive” relationship between map and territory is critical for the non-representational position that implicitly rejects Korzybski’s maxim. This “co-constitution,” as suggested by both Del Casino and Hanna and Kitchin and Dodge, argues that both map and territory exist on the same ontological plane, contingent and in relation to the other. Baudrillard also provides us with another ontological riddle by suggesting that “it is no longer a question of either maps or territories” (1995, 1; emphasis added). Unlike Korzybski, who suggests that suffering can only happen in the actual world without map, Baudrillard inverts this: suffering can only happen in the cartographic “actual world” without territory. Here, we also take issue with Baudrillard’s thoroughly post-modern claim. At no point does the world exist solely as a free-floating signifier, abstraction, or simulation. Nevertheless, Baudrillard pre-empted Del Casino and Hanna’s (2006) call to go “beyond the ‘binaries’” by completely eradicating any semblance of reality beyond a hyper-form of such. Baudrillard’s claim, therefore, rested on an intensification of artificiality and a triumph of human imagination – of the map over, and in the absence of, territory. The non-representational position refutes such a move. Firstly, although the statement that “[t]he map…emerges through a set of iterative and citational practices” (Kitchin and Dodge 2007, 337–38) might still stand in a Baudrillardian hyper-reality, the same is equally true for territory itself. In other words, the terri-

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tory similarly emerges through a set of iterative and citational practices (cf. Elden 2007, 2013). Secondly – and this is the distinctive feature that refutes Baudrillard – the map and territory are resolutely “co-constitutive.” That is to say, therefore, that a) both exist, b) both exist in relation to each other, and c) both exist relationally to other possible objects. In other words, both map and territory express an emergent, but crucially, co-constitutive existence. Having identified these flaws, we are now better placed to consider the possibility of a “flat ontology” (Bryant 2010, 2011; DeLanda 2013) that neither denies the existence of either map or territory nor relegates either to a separate ontological plane. We intend here to put to work Sallie Marston et al.’s (2005, 424) call for “a flat alternative” to scalar geographical relations that prioritize both hierarchies (global to local, etc.) and binaries (map to territory, etc.). For DeLanda, the original proponent of the flat ontological position, this means that everything in the world exists on the same plane with no entity existing above or below the other. Further, for DeLanda, there are only “individuals” in the world – human, non-human, organic, or inorganic. Thus, within this world, “atoms have no more reality than grain markets or sports franchises” (Harman 2008, 370). Nevertheless, this is not the same as supposing all entities have equal power in the world. Whilst there exists only a singular ontological plane across which all entities operate, they do not operate with equal force. As Ian Bogost (2010, para. 6) eloquently puts it: “All things equally exist, yet they do not exist equally.” Some of these things exercise a power greater (or lesser) than others. In Bryant (2010), this urge to relegate or promote entities to lower or higher ontological levels or orders is explored a little further with the help of Graham Harman (2011a; 2011b). Both attend to the issue of either undermining or “overmining” objects that have a tendency to plague an object-oriented ontology they wish to explore. Bryant (2010, para. 5) suggests that “a flat ontology is an ontology that refuses to undermine or overmine objects,” unlike either Korzybski’s representational relegation or Baudrillard’s hyper-real elevation. Thus, maintaining a commitment to neither undermining nor overmining an object is integral to advancing a flat ontology of vehicular navigation if one is to avoid slipping back into either position. As Bryant (2010, para. 6) outlines: “Undermining is that operation by which the thinker attempts to dissolve the object in something deeper of which the object is said to be an unreal effect.” Or, in Harman’s words, “objects are unreal because they are derivative of something deeper” such that they become “too superficial to be the truth” (2011a, 24). In other words, the map, as a cartographic object, is reduced to being a mere representation, an “unreal effect,” or simply a “derivative” of the territory. Through this undermining, the map is not able to function as anything other than “bare epiphenomena” (Bryant 2010, para. 6). Whilst undermining objects is relatively straightforward, as Bryant contends, “overmining” requires a little more thought. “Although undermining is obviously a more familiar English word,” Harman suggests, “overmining is a far more common philosophical strategy for dissolving objects” (2011a, 24). As Harman (2011a, 24) continues:

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Sam Hind and Alex Gekker The other and more familiar option, anti-realist in character, is to say that objects are unreal because they are useless fictions compared with what is truly evident in them – whether this be qualities, events, actions, effects, or givenness to human access. Here objects are declared too falsely deep to be the truth.

Thus, by overmining an object one assumes that it possesses a near-infinite depth of resources readily conjurable only in relation to its possible effects as accessed empirically. Or, more plainly, an object is only determinable by and through this “human access.” A flat ontology, argues Bryant (2010, para. 8), “refuses any overmining of objects that would treat objects as mere effects of actions, events, language games, intentions, signifiers, signs, sensations, economic forces, etc.” This is the position taken by Baudrillard, who simultaneously eradicates the territory-as-object completely whilst dissolving the map-as-object into an objectless hyper-reality. It is these twin acts of undermining and overmining that occur independently in both Korzybski and Baudrillard. In the former, it is the territory as an entity that is “overmined,” whilst the map, as another such entity, is undermined. In Baudrillard, the territory is undermined to expulsion from the world entirely, whilst it is the map that is overmined to a hyper-real absurdity. Assuming neither position is necessary for describing the automated driving world coming into existence. A flat ontology thus contends that neither map nor territory is elevated to a higher, more prestigious, ontological plane. Neither is the map-as-object in servitude to the territory-as-object, nor is the territory-as-object dissolved entirely into the map. This satisfies Marston et al.’s (2005, 424–425) criteria for a flat alternative as it does not “reproduce bordered zones that redirect critical gazes towards an ‘outside over there’ that, in turn, hails a ‘higher’ spatial category.” Instead, following DeLanda (2013), Bryant (2010; 2011), and Harman (2011a), both the map and territory have the possibility of existing equally on the same plane. But further, following Bogost (2010), even with this planar equality, each object still has the possibility of exerting different degrees of force. Consider again the child’s scribbles on the map. In a flat ontological world, they equally exist as the to-be navigated territory, but do not necessarily exert lesser or greater a priori force. This would depend on an evaluation of the scribbles; pencil, crayon or marker pen? In the margins or over contour lines? With creative fury or through absentminded boredom? These features determine the additive force of a cartographic element in the world. In this chapter, however, we must go a step further by suggesting that not only do these two objects exist on the same ontological plane while still exerting different degrees of force, but that also, in the specific case of automated driving, both combine as one object: the map-territory. In supposing that this new conjunctive object that we call the “map-territory” exists, neither map nor territory continue to exist independently but instead operate as a wholly new phenomenon. This goes beyond Marston et al.’s (2005) call by proposing an entirely new entity. What is important to note here, however, is that as a result of such a move, the possibility of under- or overmining either the map or the territory as independent objects is removed (with neither existing as such). Instead, the possibility of under-

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or overmining the map-territory arises, existing as it does as an embryonic, conjunctive object. In other words, one does not lose the possibility of supposing that the map-territory exists as a mere representation, unreal effect, or derivative of another source object. Neither does the map-territory attain immunity from being treated as an effect of actions, events, or language games. If each case is proposed, the flat ontology of the map-territory is fatally compromised. Moreover, this approach pushes the non-representational argument as offered by both Del Casino and Hanna (2006) and Kitchin and Dodge (2007) even further, such that map and territory are no longer even “co-constitutive” but one and the same. Whilst the former supposes that both still exist as independent but wholly relational, symbiotic entities, the latter contends that there is now no distinction, only a novel constitution in the form of the map-territory. The significance of this is that it radically transforms our understanding of two activities. In the first instance, it changes our understanding of navigation into so-called “social navigation,” a term coined by the Waze start-up company, to be discussed shortly. Secondly, this approach dramatically alters our understanding of how the act of driving is performed. With the embryonic emergence of automated driving, the map and territory fuse together as map-territory. This is made possible by shifting navigational capacities from the human and into the car-machine. In the next section, we detail the rise of social navigation and the work it has done in altering the public perception of driving from an individual to a collective activity. We focus on how, through the inscription of the software with both active and passive tracking affordance, Waze restructures the driving map to not merely reflect, but manifestly transform, the road. Through this assemblage of users, cars, and software the map-territory is updated in real time so that each action taken in physical or digital space has far-flung consequence to drivers within and outside the immediate Waze network. Following this, we turn our focus to the nascent phenomenon of automated driving and self-driving cars. We examine how such cars further deepen the collapse of the map into the territory, and vice versa, by side-stepping human agency in the driving process. We argue that such restructuring occurs due to automated vehicles acting as sensors through which the map is generated while simultaneously using such maps – far more detailed to be useful to humans – as a necessary way through which to consume the territory. SOCIAL NAVIGATION “To a certain extent, the rule of engagement is that you, as a driver, will show me yours, and I will show you everyone else’s” (Levine 2011)

Two years before it was purchased by Google for $ 1.1 billion in June 2013, the then-president of Waze, Uri Levine, was presenting on a London stage to a crowd of like-minded tech entrepreneurs and press. In trying to explain Waze, a relatively anonymous Israeli start-up, he evoked an image of the likes of Wikipedia, Face-

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book, and Twitter coming together in the automotive world. The promise, he said, was to convince mobile phone users to share their personal data, especially relating to critical parameters of speed and direction, in the hope of producing a combined dataset of total driving activity, that could optimize driving and, crucially, be monetized. Users of the platform would gain valuable insights about potential shortcuts and upcoming road issues, with Waze famously promising to “shav[e] five minutes off of [drivers’] regular commute by showing them new routes they never even knew about” (Waze 2016a). Levine was keenly aware of the technological potential of his company: By that time, Waze had become a mainstay in Israel, gaining popularity to the extent that the Israeli military boasted about developing its own “version of Waze” that “displays traffic information on roadways… [and] can plan routes for officers and pinpoint hazards along the road for others. Enemy positions are highlighted in red, while friendlies are in blue” (Israel Defense Forces 2012). A year after the Google-Waze purchase, one of the authors was conducting ethnographic work in Israel. During an interview with a sales agent for a mapping organization, the topic of Waze came up. After discussing the resistance of their clients’ worker union to implementing technologies that might track them, the agent likened it to the common reaction of Israeli taxi drivers to passengers’ requests to turn on Waze: (Sales Director, Female, in her late 30s) Those… taxi drivers… they always the ones who resist the most. [imitating a male voice] “Drop that Waze thing, I know best” – [in her normal voice] but they just blocked off the main street… [imitating the driver again] “Drop that Waze, I’ve been on the road for 20 years!” … [talking regularly] But not everything is under your control, man, you know? I gave [control] up so gladly. I don’t go anywhere anymore without Waze.

This anecdotal exchange showcases the map-territory as a unified object. Here, combined, are the politics of driving, gendered perceptions of navigation, the threat to habituated practices by new technologies, and the shift in what it means to drive and be driven. On top of passive data collection, “social navigation” allows drivers to actively transform the driving world through various extended navigational acts such as reporting hazards, flagging issues, and altering traffic flow (Hind and Gekker 2014). Waze has been continuously integrating driving-friendly (i.e. voice operated) ways to actively report real-time traffic information to fellow drivers. Moreover, from its inception, the app included certain aspects of social media that promote such practices. Namely, drivers can select an alias and choose from a set of avatars to be visualized to other users by on the app interface. Users can also see other users’ reports and leave them “thanks” (see Figure 1) that are quantified in a similar manner to Facebook’s “likes” or Twitter’s “favs,” generating attention feedback loops that prompt users to return time and again to the app (Grosser 2014). Each driver has the option of actively marking the road while driving to indicate various impediments. The uses vary from the convenient, such as indicating the location of speed traps or police checkpoints; to the life-threatening, by reporting major accidents or infrastructure damage. Some user updates are temporary: an incident leading to a closed lane, a vehicle stopping on the road shoulders; other

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Figure 1: Waze “thanks” screenshot

contributions are permanent in nature, like the change of a street from one-way to two-way traffic. The app can predict planned impediments by tapping into the data streams of local municipalities and police agencies for forthcoming events, but its main benefit is the ability to harvest the collective “data fumes” (Thatcher 2014, 1770) of its user base in order to react – through rerouting – to cascading traffic changes arising from unprecedented situations. When considering this merger of social and navigational practices through the digital map’s interface, the overmining or undermining of the territory becomes impossible. A marker left on a map by a Waze user is neither a signifier nor a referent. By passively and actively leaving traces on the map, the user progressively constructs social identity, activity, and relations on the platform. Altering the map on one’s mobile screen sends a signal that joins hundreds of other signals, ultimately resulting in a re-calculation of the traffic conditions in the area (as conceived by Waze servers and routing algorithms). It might result in the suggestion of another route for the next app user who queries a guidance on the map, effectively making the marker directly responsible for immanent territory change through software (Thrift and French 2002; Kitchin and Dodge 2011) Waze enlists its users into a different spatiotemporal state that habitualizes their minds and bodies to follow a certain economic rationale promoted by its developers. These inscriptions also have an immediate effect on drivers not using the app, as its popularity and ubiquity in some geographic areas produces cascading spatial

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effects beyond its user base. In other words, Waze has engendered “new forms of social action” (Dant 2004, 61) beyond the platform itself. A simple example would be the transformation of traffic conditions for non-app users, both short- and longterm. On a limited scale, a change in the map might create alternative directions for Waze drivers that, depending on their numbers within the regional driving populace, alters traffic congestion for others. Even more illustrative to our case, however, is the way Waze can alter spaces over time. As previously mentioned, one of the app’s main goals is to “show [drivers] new routes they never even knew about” (Waze 2016a). This is mostly done by rerouting the driver onto side streets, avoiding more substantial congestion along the way. However, such rerouting might have profound effects on the inhabitants of those “hidden” paths and on the nature of neighborhoods, which Waze deems “shortcut-y” (see Weise 2017; Lopez 2018). Local knowledge becomes widespread through the app, which detects local users succeeding in overcoming traffic in creative ways and suggests similar routes to other users. Such occurrences happened through several large urban blocks, primarily in the US. An indicative report from the Washington Post (Hendrix 2016, para. 1–2) clarifies the scale of the issue: “It used to be that only locals knew all the cut-through routes, but Google Maps and Waze are letting everyone know,” said Bates Mattison, a city councilman in the Atlanta suburb of Brookhaven, GA. “In some extreme cases, we have to address it to preserve the sanctity of a residential neighborhood.” When population growth began to overwhelm a set of major intersections in his district, there was an increase of 45,000 cars a day on some residential streets, as app-armed commuters fought their way to nearby Interstate 85. In response, the city is posting signs to restrict left or right turns at key intersections. The apps didn’t create the traffic, Mattison said, but they gave drivers options they wouldn’t have known about otherwise.

Thus, we see a creative disturbance of the map-territory by thousands of Wazers and users of Google Maps, which now integrates functions similar to Waze’s (Levy 2016) while also being available as one of the pre-installed applications on many mobile Android devices (Etherington 2015). Their collective work, performed under the aegis of the “sharing economy,” often results in precarious and exploitative labor that benefits the platform holder (Terranova 2000; Scholz 2008). Waze is in a prime position to capitalize on this spatial and behavioral data, as exemplified by its recent moves into city management (Bradley 2015) and ride sharing (Nicas 2016). Beginning with a pilot in greater Tel-Aviv, Israel and the Bay Area, USA, Waze’s carpooling services aim at combining its expertise of social navigation with the rise in app-based ridesharing services like Uber or Lyft. By promoting “green” consumerism – “saving the planet (and some money) by riding together to work” (Waze 2016b) – the app allows drivers to pick up commuters from their area, provided both the origin and end point of the journey are in certain proximity. The drivers then receive automatic compensation from the passengers, calculated by the app and presented as gas money. This move from personal social navigation to the community level becomes even more interesting for the ontological status of the

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app’s map, as Waze cooperates with several local municipalities such as Rio de Janeiro (Ungerleider 2015). The project offers local governments free traffic data, as collected by the company via users, in exchange for receiving the municipality’s own traffic, like garbage truck routes or traffic light schedules, data that is otherwise unavailable. This results in the combination of traffic management automatization with active social media participation. The act of notifying others of mood and actions, as is possible in Waze, is elevated to the level of reporting active and passive data to other drivers, commercial entities, and even local governments. AUTOMATED DRIVING Automated driving radically alters our understanding of the map/territory relation, as it fully-integrates the act of driving into the machine itself. Thus, no longer is the automation of driving presented as an optional feature or “add-on,” but as a very real part of everyday driving. Moreover, the map may not even comply with our traditional perception of what constitutes a map, as such a “map” might be largely unreadable to a human yet indistinguishable from territory to the automated car navigating by it (see Stilgoe 2017a). Autonomous cars require detailed maps, as current sensors and processing assemblages are insufficient to give the response time necessary to operate such vehicle in real-life conditions (Miller 2014). But such maps are constructed with the use of meticulous Lidar sensing using specialized equipment and/or by tracking existing drivers and extrapolating the road from those drivers’ data (Gitlin 2014). Autonomous car developers are more concerned with pinpointing what might confuse the machine vision of a driving computer than with other elements human users prioritize. This is because, as Steve Coast (2015, n.p.), the founder of OpenStreetMap, notes, “Armed with cameras, GPS, radar and sonar, a car can just capture all the data and (pretty much) make a map automatically, for free.” With “[t]he costs…now so low and [t]he incentives…so high” (Coast 2015, para. 2–3), mapping for autonomous driving is the newest cartographic frontier, with a variety of digital companies (Google, Uber), automotive corporations (Daimler AG), and engineering firms (RDM Group) leading the way. This also leads to the rise of previously unimaginable actors, such as the formerly Nokia-held HERE company, now co-owned by rival auto-manufacturers Audi, BMW, and Daimler. In October 2015, Tesla launched a software update for its Model S vehicle. Included within this was the company’s Autopilot feature, comprising a suite of functions designed to automate particular driving activities (see Figure 2). “Autosteer,” for instance, “keeps the car in the current lane and engages Traffic-Aware Cruise Control to maintain the car’s speed,” and “Auto Lane Change” will “move [the vehicle] to the adjacent lane when it’s safe to do so.” The “Automatic Emergency Steering and Side Collision Warning” function “further enhances Model S’s active safety capabilities by sensing range and alerting drivers to objects…that are too close to the side of Model S,” while “Autopark” will allow the vehicle to “park itself by controlling steering and vehicle speed” (Tesla 2015). Needless to say, the

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Figure 2: Tesla Autopilot display

update prioritized a range of automatic functions designed to allow the driver to cede control to the vehicle. There are two points to be made about Tesla’s Autopilot feature. Firstly, the press release couched such developments in similar terms to Waze. Rather uncannily, Tesla suggested that the software update “increases the driver’s confidence behind the wheel with features to help the car avoid hazards and reduce the driver’s workload” (Tesla 2015, n.p.). Further, “While Model S can’t make traffic disappear, it can make it a lot easier, safer, and more pleasant to endure” (Tesla 2015, n.p.). Waze is equally concerned with ensuring drivers avoid hazards, whilst the (in)ability to “make traffic disappear” is an issue touched upon in the Brookhaven congestion case described by the Washington Post. Perhaps where social navigation and these automated driving features differ, however, is that whilst Waze ensures that traffic is rerouted to some degree, Tesla’s Model S removes the cognitive load that driving through (or avoiding) traffic involves. The second point to note about Tesla’s Autopilot function is that these developments would not be possible without Tesla’s “high-precision” mapping. As suggested in a Mashable article published the same day as the software update, whilst “GPS mapping in cars has existed for years…[it] currently only scratches the surface of the data needed for an autonomous self-driving car” (Perkins 2015, para. 3). This mapping requires a detail heretofore unknown. As the press shot in Figure 3 illustrates, there is a marked difference between current, consumer-grade levels of road mapping and desired ones. This gap is the difference required for human drivers and non-human vehicles. The reason for this shift in detail is that, with the vehicle becoming both automated driver and navigator, the smallest road qualities become of critical importance, both spatially and temporally. Whilst sat-navs for human driver-navigators commonly contain a level of detail down to roads, routes, junctions, and lanes, automated vehicles require specific measurements between, say, motorway lanes. Without such, vehicles are liable to drift into other lanes or, worse still, hit central reservations (median strips) or other cars. The observation made by Dodge and Kitchin (2007, 268) that “GPS-based navigation…can be used to monitor the real-time location of a vehicle to the nearest few metres” no longer suffices for the driverless vehicle, which requires a far greater level of

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Figure 3: Tesla’s ‘high-precision’ mapping desires

geographical precision. Further, driverless vehicles need not only to monitor and react to shifting, emergent objects – people, animals, or road works, for example – but also, simultaneously to render these things cartographically so the vehicle can adjust speed and direction appropriately. What is particularly interesting in Tesla’s approach to this cartographic quandary is that it intends to use the vehicles purchased by people around the world to literally drive this mapping endeavor. In Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s terms, this amounts to a “fleet learning network” (Perkins 2015, para. 6), a kind of machine-learning process through which individual vehicles contribute to, and ultimately create, a shared cartographic database of “high-precision” road data (see Stilgoe 2017b). Once again, this is similar to the way in which the Waze database is generated and constantly updated by the users of the platform. Each individual driving with the app is simultaneously uploading cartographic data to Waze. The technical difficulty of building and maintaining such maps joins other challenges in operating driverless vehicles, including the public perception of their safety (Miller 2014) and the regulatory challenges relating to damage and insurance (Kollewe 2016). The map-territory of the automated vehicle resists the compartmentalization of the human map, as it simultaneously exists as an approximate representation of the physical space and the pre-requisite for its existence. What is critical to understand here is that navigational duties are becoming fully integrated into the driving machine. Considered alone, the launch of the various “auto” features by Tesla in 2015 are less significant. The Autosteer feature is a step-change for cruise control technologies that have existed for over 50 years. Moreover, drivers are still required to “remain engaged and aware when Autosteer is enabled” and “must keep their hands on the steering wheel” when operational (Della Cava 2018, para 28–29.). That the feature is also listed as being in beta phase despite roll-out is both indicative of automated driving’s slow development, and somewhat worrisome from a vehicle safety and insurance perspective. But when considered together, these automated features reduce the number of actions and activities required of the driver. In a Tesla Model S equipped with these

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various functions, the driver neither necessarily controls the steering, speed, nor lane position on motorway routes; nor locate a parking space or performs a parallel parking maneuver. In fact, as a popular dash-cam recorded video shows, in some dangerous situations, the human driver is inferior to the car, with its multitude of sensors and undivided attention to the road (Brown 2016). While Waze generated a shift from users (sometimes blindly) adhering to navigational commands to participating in the creation of a new driving commands, developments by Tesla and others in respect to automated driving technologies are shifting this back towards the vehicle. The crucial difference is that Tesla’s driving technologies are contributing to the physical act of controlling the vehicle’s speed and direction. Thus, navigation and driving are slowly merging into a single act that is fully absorbed into the machine, at least, provisionally. As Tesla suggest in reference to their Autosteer feature, perhaps this integration is in a “beta” phase, something also acknowledged by the German transport minister, Alexander Dobrindt, who suggested that Tesla should refrain from using the term “autopilot” so as “to prevent misunderstanding and incorrect customers’ expectations” (Anthony 2016, para. 2). Nonetheless, it is a concrete reality that the act of driving now performed by the vehicle becomes fully dependent upon navigational commands also supplied by the vehicle while being contingent on data supplied by myriad other driver-car units. Further still, driving maneuvers are fed back into an ever-generative cartographic database of roads, junctions, lanes, and hazards via what Musk calls a “fleet learning network” comprised of sensor-equipped vehicles tasked with performing road maneuvers in the first place. These integrated elements drive a new cartographic relation between map and territory, merging them into a single map-territory entity. On this ontological plane, the individual-as-driver has a reduced input in either the act of navigation or the act of driving. There, driving is performed simultaneously on the map and the territory, imbricated through movement of bodies, vehicles, and data. CONCLUSION In this chapter, we have argued that social navigation and automated driving have, in stages, brought about a new ontological reality challenging old divides. As such, we contend that the map and the territory have combined as one: a map-territory. We have done so by re-examining the shifts in semiotic relation between the map and the territory brought about by the digitalization of the map and the automatization of driving. We took a historical approach to the changes in our habits of mediated interaction with maps, first, by centering Korzybski’s view of the map as undermined by territory, then, by showcasing Baudrillard’s overmining of the map by the hyper-reality of mediated landscapes. We then suggested that the shift to digital maps and mobile devices required reconstituting the relation between the two into a single entity defined by a flat ontology: the map-territory. We have exemplified

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this shift through a focus on contemporary practices of social navigation and automated driving. Today, we witness an ongoing progress in computing, ergonomics, and design alongside social practices that elevate connectedness and uninterrupted datastreams. Simultaneously, traditional economic models are becoming subsumed within the attention economy (Stiegler 2010; Crogan and Kinsley 2012) that privilege ongoing user engagement over immediate, extractive, monetary gains. When examining these processes through the prism of mediatization, the continuous amalgamation of media practices with other daily activities makes sense, as it allows users and audiences to find new opportunities to engage with content. The goal, one might say, is to eliminate the barriers to uninterrupted media consumption. Listening to the radio while driving provides such an opportunity but is a limited one. The computational industries (Berry 2014) could instead strive for freeing up cognitive resources while driving and cementing the link between vehicular navigation and screen time. We hope that our construct of the map-territory allows for a deeper understanding of changes in media, cartography, and navigational practices. By being attuned to such changes and looking beyond the bifurcation of either “real” or “virtual” worlds, scholars can trace the multitude of economic, social, and technological shifts that occur in these fields. REFERENCES Anthony, S. (2016): Tesla must not use the term “autopilot,” Germany says. Ars Technica, October 17, 2016. http://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/10/tesla-must-not-use-the-term-autopilot-germanysays/ (accessed October 20, 2016). Amoore, L. (2009): Algorithmic War: Everyday Geographies of the War of Terror. Antipode 41 (1), 49–69. Anderson, B. and P. Harrison (2010): Taking-Place: Non-Representational Theories and Geography. Farnham. Baudrillard, J. (1995): Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor. Beckmann, J. (2004): Mobility and Safety. Theory, Culture & Society 21 (4–5), 81–100. Berry, D. (2014): Critical Theory and the Digital. London. Bittner, C., G. Glasze, and C. Turk (2013): Tracing Contingencies: Analyzing the Political in Assemblages of Web 2.0 Cartographies. GeoJournal 78 (6): 935–948. Bogost, I. (2010): Materialisms. Bogost, February 21, 2010. http://bogost.com/blog/materialisms/ (accessed October 20, 2016). Bolter, J. D. and R. Grusin (2000): Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA. Bradley, R. (2015): Waze and the Traffic Panopticon. The New Yorker, June 2, 2016. http://www. newyorker.com/business/currency/waze-and-the-traffic-panopticon (accessed October 20, 2016). Brown, J. (2016): Autopilot Saves Model S. YouTube, May 4, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=9I5rraWJq6E (accessed October 20, 2016). Bryant, L. (2010): Flat Ontology. Larval Subjects, February 24, 2016. https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/02/24/flat-ontology-2/ (accessed October 20, 2016). Bryant, L. (2011): The Democracy of Objects. London. Cava, M. della (2018): Your fancy new car steers and brakes for you; so why keep your hands on the wheel? USA TODAY, April 17, 2018. https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/2018/04/13/your-

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fancy-new-car-steers-and-brakes-you-so-why-keep-your-hands-wheel/491467002/ (accessed June 21, 2018). Coast, S. (2015): Tesla Maps and the Exploding Future of Map Data. Steve Coast, October 15, 2016. http://stevecoast.com/2015/10/15/tesla-maps-and-the-exploding-future-of-map-data/ (accessed October 20, 2016). Clough, P. T. (2000): Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology. Minneapolis. Crampton, J. (2002): Thinking Philosophically in Cartography: Toward A Critical Politics of Mapping. Cartographic Perspectives 12 (1), 12–32. Crampton, J. et al. (2013): Beyond the Geotag: Situating ‘Big Data’ and Leveraging the Potential of the Geoweb. Cartography and Geographic Information Science 40 (2), 130–139. Crogan, P. and S. Kinsley (2012): Paying Attention: Toward a Critique of the Attention Economy. Culture Machine 13, 1–29. Dant, T. (2004): The Driver-car. Theory, Culture & Society 21 (4–5), 61–79. De Certeau, M. (2011): The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA. Del Casino, V. J., Jr., and S. P. Hanna. (2006): Beyond The ‘Binaries’: A Methodological Intervention for Interrogating Maps as Representational Practices. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 4 (1), 34–56. DeLanda, M. (2013): Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. New York. Dodge, M. and R. Kitchin (2007): The Automatic Management of Drivers and Driving Spaces. Geoforum 38 (2), 264–275. Dodge, M., R. Kitchin and C. Perkins (2009): Mapping Modes, Methods and Moments: A Manifesto for Map Studies. M. Dodge, R. Kitchin and C. Perkins (Eds.): Rethinking Maps: New Frontiers in Cartographic Theory. New York, 220–243. Elden, S. (2007): Governmentality, Calculation, Territory. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25 (3), 562–580. Elden, S. (2013): The Birth of Territory. Chicago. Etherington, D. (2015): Waze Becomes One Of Google’s Pre-Installation Options For Android Devices. TechCrunch, March 3, 2015. http://social.techcrunch.com/2015/03/03/waze-becomes-one-of-googles-pre-installation-options-for-android-devices/ (accessed October 20, 2016). Farinelli, F. (2003): Geografia. Un’introduzione ai modelli del mondo. Turin. Farinelli, F. (2009): La crisi della ragione cartografica. Turin. Foxman, M. (2014): How to Win Foursquare: Body and Space in a Gamified World. M. Fuchs, S. Fizek, P. Ruffino and N. Schrape (Eds.): Rethinking Gamification. Lüneburg, 71–90. Galloway, A. R. (2012): The Interface Effect. Cambridge. Gitlin, J. (2014): Prepare for the Part-Time Self-Driving Car. Ars Technica, October 29, 2016. http://arstechnica.com/cars/2014/10/prepare-for-the-part-time-self-driving-car/ (accessed October 20, 2016). Gregory, D. (2004): The Colonial Present. Oxford. Graham, S. (2011): Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism. London. Grosser, B. (2014): What Do Metrics Want? How Quantification Prescribes Social Interaction on Facebook. Computational Culture: A Journal of Software Studies, November 9, 2016. http:// computationalculture.net/article/what-do-metrics-want (accessed October 20, 2016). Harley, J. B. (1989): Deconstructing the Map. Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization 26 (2), 1–20. Harman, G. (2008): DeLanda’s Ontology: Assemblage and Realism. Continental Philosophy Review 41 (3), 367–383. Harman, G. (2011a): On the Undermining of Objects: Grant, Bruno, and Radical Philosophy. L. Bryant, N. Srnicek and G. Harman (Eds.): The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Melbourne, 21–40. Harman, G. (2011b): The Case for Objects. Object-Oriented Philosophy, January 24, 2011. https:// doctorzamalek2.wordpress.com/2011/01/24/the-case-for-objects/ (accessed October 20, 2016).

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Hendrix, S. (2016): Traffic-Weary Homeowners and Waze Are at War, Again. Guess Who’s Winning? Washington Post, June 5, 2016. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/traffic-wearyhomeowners-and-waze-are-at-war-again-guess-whos-winning/2016/06/05/c466df46-299d11e6-b989-4e5479715b54_story.html. (accessed October 20, 2016). Hind, S. and A. Gekker (2014): ‘Outsmarting Traffic, Together’: Driving as Social Navigation. Exchanges 1 (2), 1–17. Israel Defense Forces (2012): Tzayad: IDF’s Version of Waze. IDF Blog, April 20, 2012. http:// www.idfblog.com/2012/04/20/tzayad-idfs-digital-army-program/ (accessed October 20, 2016). Ingold, T. (2000): The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London. Jenkins, H. (2006): Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York. Kitchin, R. and M. Dodge (2007): Rethinking Maps. Progress in Human Geography 31 (3), 331– 344. Kitchin, R. and M. Dodge (2011): Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life. Cambridge, MA. Kitchin, R. (2014): The Data Revolution. Thousand Oaks, CA. Kollewe, J. (2016): Insurer Launches UK’s ‘First Driverless Car Policy’. The Guardian, June 7, 2016. http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jun/07/uk-driverless-car-insurance-policy-adrian-flux (accessed October 20, 2016). Korzybski, A. (1994 [1933]): Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. Brooklyn, NY. Lammes, S. (2018): Destabilizing Playgrounds: Cartographical Interfaces, Mutability, Risk and Play. D. Cermak-Sassenrath (Ed.): Playful Disruption of Digital Media. Singapore, 87–97. Leszczynski, A. (2014): On the Neo in Neogeography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104 (1), 60–79. Levine, U. (2011): Making Money with Apps: Business Models that Work. YouTube, December 19, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=piUQozKr0g8& (accessed October 20, 2016). Levy, A. (2016): Google Maps Integrates Waze Traffic Updates. Bloomberg, August 20, 2016. http:// www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/b/134a9a0a-8924-43a6-8d81-46b4699cba9c (accessed October 20, 2016). Lopez, S. (2018): On one of L.A.’s steepest streets, an app-driven frenzy of spinouts, confusion and crashes. Los Angeles Times, April 4, 2018. www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-lopezecho-park-traffic-20180404-story.html (accessed June 25, 2018). Marston, S. A., J. P. Jones III and K. Woodward (2005): Human Geography Without Scale. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30 (4), 416–432. Miller, G. (2014): Autonomous Cars Will Require a Totally New Kind of Map. WIRED. December 15, 2016. http://www.wired.com/2014/12/nokia-here-autonomous-car-maps/ (accessed October 20, 2016). Nafus, D. and J. Sherman (2014): This One Does Not Go Up To 11: The Quantified Self Movement as an Alternative Big Data Practice. International Journal of Communication 8 (0), 1784–1794. Perkins, C. (2015): Tesla Is Mapping out Every Lane on Earth to Guide Self-Driving Cars. Mashable, October 14, 2015. http://mashable.com/2015/10/14/tesla-high-precision-digital-maps/ (accessed October 20, 2016). Rankin, W. (2011): After the Map: Cartography, Navigation, and the Transformation of Territory in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA. Scholz, T. (2008): Market Ideology and the Myths of Web 2.0. First Monday 13 (3). March 3, 2008. https://firstmonday.org/article/view/2138/1945 (accessed March 18,2019). Schulz, W. (2004): Reconstructing Mediatization as an Analytical Concept. European Journal of Communication 19 (1), 87–101. Souza e Silva, A. de (2006): From Cyber to Hybrid: Mobile Technologies as Interfaces of Hybrid Spaces. Space and Culture 9 (3), 261–278. Stiegler, B. (2010): Taking Care of Youth and the Generations. Stanford, CA. Stilgoe, J. (2017a): Seeing Like a Tesla: How Can We Anticipate Self-Driving Worlds? Glocalism: Journal of Culture, Politics and Innovation 3, 1–20.

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Stilgoe, J. (2017b): Machine Learning, Social Learning, and the Governance of Self-Driving Cars. Social Studies of Science 48 (1), 25–56. Terranova, T. (2000): Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy. Social Text 18 (2), 33–58. Tesla (2015): Model S Autopilot Press Kit. Tesla Motors, October 13, 2015. https://www.teslamotors.com/en_GB/presskit/autopilot (accessed October 20, 2016). Thatcher, J. (2014): Living on Fumes: Digital Footprints, Data Fumes, and the Limitations of Spatial Big Data. International Journal of Communication 8 (0), 1765–1783. Thrift, N. (2004a): Remembering the Technological Unconscious by Foregrounding Knowledges of Position. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22 (1), 175–190. Thrift, N. (2004b): Driving in the City. Theory, Culture & Society 21 (4/5), 41–59. Thrift, N. (2007): Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. London. Thrift, N. and S. French (2002): The Automatic Production of Space. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 27 (3), 309–335. Uprichard, E. (2013): Focus: Big Data, Little Questions? Discover Society, October 1, 2013. http:// discoversociety.org/2013/10/01/focus-big-data-little-questions/ (accessed October 20, 2016). Ungerleider, N. (2015): Waze Is Driving Into City Hall. Fast Company, April 15, 2015. http:// www.fastcompany.com/3045080/waze-is-driving-into-city-hall (accessed October 20, 2016). Waze (2016a): Free Community-Based Mapping, Traffic & Navigation App – About Us. Waze, January 1, 2016. https://www.waze.com/about (accessed October 20, 2016). Waze (2016b): Waze Carpool. Waze, January 1, 2016. https://www.waze.com/carpool (accessed October 20, 2016). Weise, E. (2017): Waze and other traffic dodging apps prompt cities to game the algorithms. USA Today, March 6, 2017. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/03/06/mapping-software-routing-waze-google-traffic-calming-algorithmsi/98588980/ (accessed June 25, 2018). Wilmott, C. (2016): In-Between Mobile Maps and Media: Movement. Television & New Media 18 (4), 320–335. Wood, D. (2010): Rethinking the Power of Maps. New York. Zillman, C. (2015): Self-Driving Cars: BMW, Audi, Daimler Buy Nokia’s Maps Business. Fortune Magazine, August 3, 2015. http://fortune.com/2015/08/03/bmw-audi-daimler-self-drivingcars/ (accessed October 20, 2016).

MYTHICAL SPACE: EGYPT IN WORLD WAR II TV DOCUMENTARY FILMS Eva Kingsepp This chapter explores the relations between popular history, myth, and space and place in a sample of 17 TV documentary films about the 1942–1943 North Africa Campaign (henceforth abbreviated NAC) of World War II, with a particular focus on the decisive battles of El Alamein.1 According to myth, this is the famous Duel in the Desert, metonymically Rommel vs. Montgomery, characterized by old-fashioned chivalry and even fair play. I argue that not only do the films reproduce a dominant, mythical metanarrative; in addition, this is based on otherwise politically incorrect conventions echoing a long Western tradition of Orientalist and colonial practices, something that I find problematic from an intercultural communication perspective. As the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are primarily represented in a way close to Marc Augé’s (1995) concept non-place, that is, in terms of usefulness to the Western powers, related to actual as well as symbolical movement and transition, this both excludes land and people from their history and identity and symbolically returns them to the status of colonial subjects. However, I suggest that this might not exclusively be a result of neo-Orientalist thinking, but also an effect of the geographic location in what I call mythical space. The concept is founded in what Edward Said (1994, 13) calls the worldliness of texts in that space and place representations are affiliated not only with their material settings, but also the cultural context connected to them, including collective memories and myths. In this study, the films are only seemingly concerned with the historical events of World War II. However, these can neither be isolated from the different memory cultures related to them, nor from the myths and legends associated with the war as well as the region itself, including the heritage of ancient Egypt and of the Abrahamitic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam), as well as more general Orientalist influences (Said 1979). Another aspect to consider when examining films from WWII is MENA’s postwar history, including the wars with Israel, that has had a considerable impact on representational practices, not the least in Hollywood (Shaheen 2001). Thus, the narrative is not only adapted to the media form – the discourse of factual television as well as of their genres and subgenres, in this case, popular history in general and military history – but also to deeply 1

This study is part of a more massive postdoctoral project where I apply a contrapuntal reading (Said 1994) of narratives about the NAC in Western popular history and Egyptian memory culture, the latter as expressed during periods of fieldwork in Alexandria and Cairo 2013-2015. Thus, there are several aspects in this chapter that have been examined more in-depth but are not included here.

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rooted maps of meaning, classification systems of signs reflecting a dominant cultural order. In Stuart Hall’s (2006 [1980], 164) words, [a] “raw” historical event cannot … be transmitted by, say, a television newscast. Events can only be signified within the aural-visual forms of the televisual discourse. At the moment when a historical event passes under the sign of discourse, it is subject to all the complex formal “rules” by which language signifies. [T]he event must become a “story” before it can become a communicative event. At that moment the formal sub-rules of discourse are “in dominance,” without, of course, subordinating out of existence the historical event so signified, the social relations in which the rules are set to work or the social and political consequences of the event having been signified in this way.

Accordingly, media texts about history are usually telling more about their own time than about the past represented in them (Chapman 2008; Kingsepp 2008; McAlister 2005). However, in this case, I want to proceed from the temporal to the spatial dimension and explore the discourse from this at first glance seemingly neutral perspective. How does the geographical setting of the narrative affect the representations? Another central concept is mediatization, media’s influence on society and culture in high modernity. Media’s powerful function in the creation of shared frames of reference is well-known, not the least regarding imagined communities on different levels, including the national (Anderson 1991). In high modernity, however, “the expanding geography that media contribute to does not have the same degree of cohesion as the national media systems of the past” (Hjarvard 2008, 131). Despite this, previous research indicates that not only national but also much globally broadcasted popular history about World War II on TV networks such as Discovery and the History Channel tend to follow the well-established metanarratives of national Western (especially the US) memory cultures. Today there are indications in popular memory culture that the dominating conception of it is less that of a war involving large parts of the world than of an epic battle between Good and Evil. This mythical framework, established already in wartime discourse and propaganda, has been prominent in popular culture and popular history as it offers seemingly endless opportunities for creating suggestive, often spectacular narratives that regardless of genre continue to attract new generations of viewers, readers and gamers (Kingsepp 2008; see also the contributions in Abbenhuis-Ash and Buttsworth 2010). However, a rarely researched topic is that of how non-Western perspectives are being dealt with in Western popular history about World War II, which is where this study contributes to filling a significant knowledge gap. In what follows, I will first give an account of empirical material and methodology, followed by a presentation of the main theoretical concepts, beginning with space, place, and non-place. This leads to travel, tourism, and the traveler’s – who in European travel literature is typically white, male and Western – gaze on the landscape, especially in non-Western lands. Mythical understandings of European identity are put in relation to a perspective of Orientalism as well as ideas about progress and time. This part concludes with a summary of relevant aspects regarding spiritual transcendence as connected to ritual theory. The rest of the chapter will

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deal with the case study and those of its findings that relate to space, place and especially non-place. After an initial presentation of how the desert and villages/ towns/cities are represented, I will turn to a more in-depth discussion about the possible interpretations and their cultural meanings. METHODOLOGICAL AND THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK As I am interested in discursive processes in the present, the criteria for selection of films for this study has been based on their presence in contemporary mainstream culture by posing the question, what is readily available to viewers searching the Internet for documentary films about the NAC and the battles for El Alamein? While some titles were already familiar from a previous research project, others were found using the same strategy as members of this particular audience: searching the Internet (Kingsepp 2008). I used combinations of the search terms “WWII,” “Second World War,” “North Africa,” and “El Alamein,” resulting in over 20 titles, of which some were not possible to view online, download, or purchase.2 Two were not selected for this study as their temporal focus on present-day life near the former battlefields at El Alamein significantly differs from that of the others. Films about the main characters or specific operations instead of the events as a whole, as for example Generals at War: The Battle of El Alamein and Dead Men’s Secrets: Secrets of the Desert War were also put aside.3 TV documentary films are commercial products, and in the Western world, the Second World War is one of the most lucrative topics. Thus, even if a film was originally produced for a local audience, there is still a potential for further reach, especially if it is available in English. There is also a significant amount of recycling in the WWII documentary business, as old films are often being re-packaged and sold under new names, for example on sites like amazon.com. However, today it is YouTube that offers the best possibilities for viewers interested in WWII, as there one can easily find not only (more or less legally uploaded) familiar titles, but also older ones, including films that were previously hard to get. All films in this study, including several of those from the 1940s, are or have been available on YouTube, except the independent Maori Television documentary El Alamein: A line in the sand, which can be streamed from the company’s website.4 Ten films in the study were identified as UK productions, one UK/US, and one is a UK/US/Canada co-production.5 Two are US, while two are Canadian and 2 3 4 5

It is not uncommon in WWII documentaries to either mention the NAC very briefly or exclude it from the narrative, an observation based on the extensive film studies part of my Ph.D. project (Kingsepp 2008). The main topic in both Curse of the Sands (Al Jazeera World, 2012), available on the Al Jazeera English YouTube channel, and a part of Jag ser underbara ting (Swedish public service TV, 1993), is the issue of landmines left from the war still injuring and killing local civilians. http://www.maoritelevision.com/tv/shows/anzac-2013/S01E001/el-alamein-line-sand As it is often difficult to find accurate information about WWII documentaries, especially as their titles are often changed when a new company buys the rights, the list at the end of this chapter is not complete. Further, in some cases, the country of origin is unclear.

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French; one, as just mentioned, is a Maori production from New Zealand.6 The numbers indicates that national memory is, not surprisingly, an important factor regarding production of popular history texts, as from a British perspective it is understandable that this story about their great military victory in World War II is considered important, especially as most mainstream popular history is dominated by the US narrative where D-Day in June 1944 is the one big turning point of the war (cf Chapman 2008, 13). Still, a popular history text intended for both a national and a global audience needs to communicate in such a way that it fits into a more general discourse while simultaneously also containing elements addressing the home audience (cf Hall 2006 [1980], 167). As my focus in this study is on transnational popular memory culture, I will concentrate on this generic metanarrative and only point to particularities when doing so adds fruitful aspects to the overall discussion. Analysis Methods Methodologically the study is a semiotic analysis, based on an initial content analysis where all significant visual and verbal elements in the films, in particular, those relating to land and local population, were charted. This first phase also included noting the absence of possible signifying elements, which is where a comparison with the 1940’s material was made. As this, and other, archival footage is available for documentary filmmakers through for example the Imperial War Museum, the comparison indicates what has been rejected by the filmmakers. In the second stage, a number of signs and symbols were selected for the semiotic analysis: frequently occurring signs indicating important symbolic connotations, and signs relating to questions of worldview and ideology. For this chapter, the transcripts of all films have been recoded and categorized using NVivo, a procedure that added further reliability to the analysis (Berger 1991; Rose 2016; Saldaña 2016; Selby and Cowdery 1995). The analysis is based on Barthes’ (1954) classic model with three levels of meaning: the denotative, connotative and mythical. According to him, myth in modernity is a political utterance not regarded as ideology but as common sense, the truth. In the present context, the performative aspect of mass-mediated popular history about World War II furthers the establishment of the ideological meanings inherent in the texts. Although Hall (2006 [1980], 167) speaks of codes instead of myth, he explains how the latter works: “[c]ertain codes may … be so widely distributed in a specific language community or culture, and be learned at so early an age, that they appear not to be constructed … but to be ‘naturally’ given.” Hall’s codes provide a close connection to Orientalism, especially in its popular form (Berg 1998; McAlister 2005; Porter 2013; Shaheen 2001). While Barthes’ 6

A couple of Australian films are not included, as they were found long after the study was finished. The History Channel/ZDF production Der Jahrhundertkrieg (2002) was taken out of this chapter as it was not clear whether it is available in English. I have not been able to trace any regionally produced documentary films about the NAC, or WWII, in Egypt.

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concept of ‘myth today’ relates to a secular society, there are parallels to myth in a traditional sense, as authoritative stories about gods and men, good and evil, and other existential and ethical issues. Barthes’ (1954) writings on myth include a critical reading of a seemingly innocent cover of Paris Match in which he finds a representation affirmative of French colonialism. This brings us to the next part of the chapter and the main theoretical concepts used in the present analysis. Space, place, non-place While scholarly studies of popular history often tend to deal with representations of events and people, Edward Said (1994, 69) reminds us that space, place, and topography provide essential clues to our understanding of the past, as “the theoretical mapping and charting of territory … underlies Western fiction, historical writing, and philosophical discourse.” This mapping is to be understood in relation to, again following Said (ibid.), “the authority of the European observer … Then there is the hierarchy of spaces by which the metropolitan centre and, gradually, the metropolitan economy is seen as dependent upon an overseas system of territorial control, economic exploitation, and a socio-cultural vision; without these stability and prosperity at home – home being a word with extremely potent resonance – would not be possible.” Thus, in the representations of other places and other cultures, our own is always invisibly co-present as a comparison (Hall 1996, 186). Films and other visual media are especially influential in the creation of what has been called the cinematic world (Escher 2006; Escher and Zimmermann 2005). Media representations, especially in popular culture but also more generally, tend to follow well-known conventions that through intertextuality and repetition become culturally established. While this can be regarded from an aesthetical point of view, there are also parallels to the use and function of stereotypes, especially regarding non-Western contexts. It is against this background that we should understand television and documentary films about the Second World War. The mapping aspect is especially visible in the military history subgenre, where maps are frequently being used for illustrating positions, movements, strategies, and possible scenarios. While this kind of representation is fundamentally rational and based on an abstract simulation of territory, actual physical space can simultaneously be related to in a heavily symbolic manner, as indicated by the choice and use, or exclusion, of visual signifiers, for example, names of towns and cities. Further, the graphic design in itself, as well as other parts of the multimodal composition often used in a film, can also carry significant connotations (Kress and van Leeuwen 1996). Thus, I would suggest that the mapping aspect has an important function not only for visualizing military strategy and movement but also for the implicit communication of certain value systems. Places are intimately connected to narratives: they are situated in space and time, thus interpreted in relation to these concepts. Places often perform an essential role in mythical narratives relating to national and cultural identity (Bhabha 1990; Said 1994). Much has been written about how place and space relate to each other,

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and, in the words of anthropologist Marc Augé (1995, 80), how narratives transform “places into spaces and spaces into places.” A place, according to Augé (1995, 82–84), is a space imbued with references to events, myth, and history – a place where people are born, live and die, where things happen to them and to others who visit the place long enough to experience being fully present in it. Thus, a place in this meaning has a profound social quality that distinguishes it from space, which in comparison is abstract and does not carry any particular meaning unless being subject to scientific inquiry (cf Pratt 2008). However, Augé argues that in contemporary society – which he characterizes as hyper- or super modern – there is also another type of place which is produced by hypermodernity: the non-place. As opposed to places of identity, of relations and of history (Augé 1995, 52, 77–78), non-places are, he suggests, “spaces formed in relation to certain ends (transport, transit, commerce, leisure), and the relations that individuals have with these spaces” (Augé 1995, 94). Non-places are defined by their instructions for use: they contain mediating signs, with words, texts, and images that link the individuals to their surroundings. However, there is nothing in these spaces that link the individuals together. On the contrary: “[a]s anthropological places create the organically social, so non-places create solitary contractuality” (Augé 1995, 94). As will be discussed later, this emphasis on solitary individuality in spaces related to transfer offers unexpected dimensions to the analysis, linking the fluidity and boundlessness of hyper-modernity to elements of the traditional and even the transcendental. Travel, landscape, and the gaze The function of non-places as hubs for transportation naturally connects them to tourism and travel; in this respect, they can be likened to the central role of media in symbolically connecting us to the world around us. Already before the era of mass media as we know it today, European travel literature played a crucial role in shaping Western knowledge about the rest of the world (Hall 1996; Pratt 2008). Mary Louise Pratt (2008, 50) uses the image of Adam alone in his garden to illustrate how writers, especially those based in natural science, tended to describe their surroundings: “[t]he landscape is written as uninhabited, unpossessed, unhistoricized, unoccupied even by the travelers themselves. The activity of describing geography and identifying flora and fauna structures an asocial narrative in which the human presence, European or African, is absolutely marginal.” This is a view, voice, and perspective following an intellectual tradition of detached, rational observation that is supposedly an instance of being Western, thus modern, developed, as compared to the non-Western (Hall 1996, 186). The mythical character of the concept the West is crucial here, as it falsely suggests a homogeneous entity and an unbroken “essential continuity and coherence across vast stretches of time.” Importantly, this idea also requires presuming that “the West as a civilization had some essence, some core, which had always remained basically unchanged, intact and unsullied by contamination from ‘outside’ sources” (Lockman 2004, 56). This mythical Western identity – which is essentially European identity – thus contains

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many qualities that lack a historical foundation, of which one is that of chivalry and fair play in battle (Porter 2013, 76-78). Today this illusive self-image, supported by the likewise mythical idea that democracy and respect for human rights are essentially Western values, is reflected in the concept hi-tech, clean warfare without civilian casualties. As discussed by Baudrillard (2001 [1995]) in his famous essay The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, when such purified imagery is all that is offered in news media’s representations of a particular military operation, the result is a simulacrum that philosophically does not have any connections to the real world. What exists is what the media shows us, be it travel literature or factual television. The perspective of the detached observer is also part of a colonial discourse in which the non-European lands are regarded as pure nature, thus symbolically free for exploitation, as if they had been waiting for the civilizing mission of white Europeans (Berg 1998; Pratt 2008). It is through their eyes that foreign space becomes landscape and place, as they inscribe their own experiences and history on it. Likewise, it is their rational evaluation of space that categorizes it as suitable for this or that use, thereby excluding all other possible perspectives, including that of the local population. Like place, the concept landscape is a social construction. In a learned performance, the viewer selects from the land before her/his eyes and edits and constructs a physical environment in which reality is fused with images and representations, a process just like that of filmmakers and other creators of media texts. Philosophically, when we speak of the landscape, there is an ontological distance between us and the referent: it is not pure nature but instead a crafted cultural image, potentially carrying symbolical meanings of which we are often unaware. This is reflected in the socio-cultural framing of the gaze: we see according to how, and what, we have learned to see. As tourists we see (and take photos of) sites, objects, and events according to our previous knowledge of the place and to our expectations of it, shaped by not only the tourist industry but also cultural texts in general (Urry and Larsen 2011). Similarly, and despite commonly being associated with objectivity, the implicit gaze in documentary film is directed through the highly selective perspective of the filmmaker (Nichols 1991). As we will see, there are several instances of especially visual intertextuality linking the films to imagery familiar from tourism marketing as well as other kinds of mediated representations of the region, including travel documentaries and fiction. As Urry and Larsen (2011, 119) note, tourist places are “inscribed in circles of anticipation, performance and remembrance,” they are “economically, politically and culturally produced through networked mobilities of capital, persons objects, signs and information.” Despite the common history and heritage of the Mediterranean region, much of the attraction of holiday resorts on its southern shores is based on their character of being exotic, fundamentally different, Oriental, Other. This is further supported by Orientalist representations in Western mainstream popular culture, which is especially visible in Hollywood’s dominant version of the cinematic world (Khatib 2006; Escher and Zimmermann 2001; Escher and Zimmermann 2004; Escher and Zimmermann 2005; Lukinbeal 2005). It has been argued that the mythical understanding of Europe’s cultural past

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diminishes and marginalizes the West’s “mixed ancestry,” especially regarding the Islamic world, an assumption supported by the present study (Menocal 1987, referred to in Lockman 2004, 33). Time, transcendence and mythical space In an anthropological perspective, Johannes Fabian (2014, 22–24) distinguishes between three major uses of time, each characteristic of a genre of discourse but not mutually exclusive. Of these, Typological Time indicates progress and sees time as intervals between socio-cultural events on a linear scale. However, this can also be interpreted as a measurement of a globally unequally distributed quality of states that are compared against each other, as in “preliterate vs. literate, traditional vs. modern, peasant vs. industrial, and a host of permutations which include pairs such as tribal vs. feudal, rural vs. urban” (ibid. 23). Fabian uses the phrase the denial of coevalness, defining it as “a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse” (ibid. 31; italics in original). The concept has proved useful in other analytical contexts as well, not the least in studies related to colonialism and orientalism, and in this study, it also offers a link to the realm of myth and spirituality. If progress in linear time is regarded as a narrow ontological structure with no place for parallel movement, a denial of coevalness symbolically causes a crack, indicating an anti-structure in temporality that – as we will see – can also be regarded as an opening to mythical space. The idea of pure nature also carries connotations to the archaic, primordial, and the original creation, suggesting a religious – or spiritual – dimension that should not be neglected even in a presumably secular context. Further, there are connections to the idea of the sublime as a form of experiencing transcendence, or at least something related (Doran 2015). In the present study elements suggesting the sublime can be found in representations of the landscape as well as on the battlefield, ideas that are also found in Kant’s thinking, where the might of Nature is an example of the Dynamical Sublime that excites fear and can only be appreciated when observed from a safe vantage. Kant associates the sublimity of war with heroic virtues and the nobility of the warrior aristocracy, a view that lives on well into the 21st century (Cardew 2012; Doran 2015; Mosse 1990).7 In the present context, the audience can safely appreciate the mediated sublimity of the desert as well as the thrills of war, a combination that I argue is unique for films about the NAC, as compared to other fronts during WWII where nature in general hardly plays any role at all. In his discussion of cinematic representations of the desert, Koebner (2009, 91) uses the term heroic landscape (heroischer Landschaft), which fits exceptionally well in the present context as it includes both kinds of sublimity discussed above. Koebner also acknowledges the unique quality of the desert as a 7

Kant’s discussion about the sublimity of war is found in his Critique of the Power of Judgement.

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death zone and a space of dream time, closer to the archaic than to the present: in short, a place of transcendence into the Unknown (ibid. 91; see also Kleiner 2009, 102; Deeken 2009). In the present study, I suggest the concept mythical space for certain places culturally associated with mythical events, narratives, people and symbols, thereby having a liminoid quality that distinguishes them from the ordinary. To experience mythical space, then, is to turn a blind eye to the rationality of mundane time and enter the realm of the heroic and the other worldly; this is also a characteristic of the fantastic genre (Jackson 1981). As mythical time is circular rather than linear, the view of the past as events in progression dissolves. Experiences in mythical space are outside time but still familiar, due to their symbolic foundations. Several cultures share this conception of the desert as being close to experiences of the sacral as well as the demonic, not the least the Abrahamitic religions Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The desert has also traditionally been regarded as a suitable place for practicing asceticism, providing a liminoid space characterized by its cosmic time, as “[i]n asceticism, human time is related to cosmic time by way of tradition and so points back to an origin and forward to an end” (Flood 2004, 12). Although the original reason for withdrawal into the desert was escaping the persecution of Christians during the first three centuries AD, it became a voluntary practice in asceticism, a self-chosen suffering for the faith (Empereur 2002, 54–57; Flood 2004, 146–47).8 In a more recent, post-secular version, pilgrims and spiritual seekers go to the desert in order to find knowledge, ultimately about oneself. Similarly, in 19th and 20th century popular Orientalist fiction this is where the (white, male, Western) hero goes in order to seek refuge from the demands of modernity, to get free from society’s constraints and put his masculinity to the test in wild and adventurous surroundings (Berg 1998, 39; Kleiner 2009; Koebner 2009). In this respect, the desert – like monasteries – provides a liminal space outside the mundane world, where the absence of societal hierarchies and structures makes a profound change, or initiation, possible. As Zygmunt Bauman (1996, 20–21) puts it: [t]he desert is the greenhouse of the raw, bare, primal and bottom-line freedom that is but the absence of bounds. What made the medieval hermits feel so close to God in the desert was the feeling of being themselves god-like: unbound by habit and convention, by the needs of their bodies and other people’s souls, by their past deeds and present actions.

Escape from the limiting, sometimes even suffocating bounds of the modern world is a familiar theme in fiction as well as philosophy. However, feeling close to God is not always the goal. In ritual theory, liminality is characteristic for the middle phase in transition rites, between initial detachment from the social structure or a

8

Saint Menas, one of the earliest Christian monasteries, was established in the North African desert some 50 kilometers outside Alexandria (Empereur 2002), and there is even a legend connecting the appearance of the saint himself just before the decisive battle of El Alamein. According to the version published in the blog MYSTAGOGY, “[t]his astounding and terrifying apparition so undermined German morale that it contributed to the brilliant victory of the Allies” (Sanidopoulos 2011).

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state of cultural conditions and the re-entering of it. As Turner (1975, 232) describes it, [d]uring the intervening liminal period, the state of the ritual subject /…/ becomes ambiguous, neither here nor there, betwixt and between all fixed points of classification; he passes through a symbolic domain that has few or none of the attributes of his past or coming state.

A central aspect of liminality is communitas, a sense of equality and comradeship with one’s fellow subjects that emerges with the breakdown of structures and norms. This includes the sense of time: while liminality as a phase in ritual is situated temporally, with a beginning and an end, the experience of communitas is characterized by a feeling of timelessness. This is also characteristic of pilgrimage journeys as well as the mystical practice of withdrawal (ibid. 238). However, in Turner’s (ibid. 292–293) words, this withdrawal is not from humanity, but from the structure when it has become too long petrified in a specific shape. /.../ What is being sought is emancipation of men from all structural limitations, to make a mystical desert outside structure itself in which all can be one, ein bloss niht, “a pure nothingness”, as the Western mystic Eckhart one wrote – through this “nothingness” has to be seen as standing in metaphorical opposition to the “something” of a historically derived structure. It has as yet content but no clear structure, only explosively stated anti-structure.

The longing for the unusual and the spectacular, combined with a withdrawal from the structure of every day, resulting in liminoid experiences: all these are also characteristic – or even defining – aspects of the tourist experience (Urry and Larsen 2011). Thus, although relating the non-places of hypermodernity to modern as well as pre-modern, traditional perceptions of space and place might at first glance seem unfitting, there are many ways in which these theories directly correspond to, or even can be put in a dialogue with, the empirical material. The clue here is distance, spatial as well as symbolic. Distance is necessary for pleasurable feelings of being away from the ordinary (as in tourism, actual or the mediated armchair version); it is present in the concept non-place, and it is a prerequisite for experiencing liminality, communitas and possibly transcendence. Simultaneously, distance requires a point from where it can be experienced. In the present study, this point is culturally – but not necessarily spatially – situated in the Occident: as the films in question are part of global media culture audiences all over the world can consume them. What do the representations in these films say to someone from the MENA region? Although this question will not be discussed here, it is still something that deserves to be taken into consideration. “THIS LAND WAS MADE FOR WAR”: NORTH AFRICA AS A CINEMATIC WORLD In the rest of the chapter, I will turn to the documentary films in the study and their representations of North Africa, and in particular, Egypt, due to the geographical location of El Alamein. A characteristic element in several films is the emphasis on

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military strategy, sometimes with an extremely narrow focus on weaponry, technology, and military equipment. Thus, the films are part of what Der Derian (2001) has called the military-industrial-media-entertainment network, and also of a broader discourse on war and media. However, these aspects will only be referred to when they connect to the narrative. The focus is on land, beginning with a largely descriptive section on representations of The desert and Towns and cities.9 This is followed by a more analytic section, in which these representations are related to the themes War as Hell, Duel in the Desert, and The Tourist Experience/Gaze. The Desert “This land was made for war.” The line is found in British soldier Jocelyn Brooke’s (1944; in Bierman and Smith 2003, 9) poem Landscape near Tobruk,10 and is also the opening sentence of the NAC episode in the renowned British Thames Television 26-part documentary series The World at War from the early 1970s. It was used already in Desert Victory, a 1943 combat documentary produced by the British Army that is not part of the present study but still deserves to be mentioned, as it has provided inspiration for a number of later filmic representations of the battles at El Alamein, documentary as well as fiction (Chapman 2008, 55). For example, in Greatest Tank Battles we are told that “in some respects the desert, generally flat and with few tarns or natural obstructions, makes ideal terrain for tank warfare.” Although Desert Victory has been influential in many ways, it would certainly be wrong to hold it responsible for the general idea that deserts are empty, thus perfect for clean war. However, it is prominent in the present metanarrative, which indicates its significance both in this particular context and more generally, not the least as it brings rhetorical associations to US military interventions in Kuwait and Iraq, as well as to the idea of virtual war (Baudrillard 2001; Chapman 2008, 90–97; Der Derian 2001). In Battlefields: El Alamein it is said that “Perhaps the most obvious thing about the desert was to the men who fought here the most peculiar: there were no civilians and almost no buildings to get in the way.” In Churchill’s Desert War it is stated that Churchill “fought with such tenacity to defend the Middle East in an otherwise empty desert,” and The Lost Evidence informs that not only did the clashing armies have to “advance and retreat over 500 miles of inhospitable, empty desert”, the deserts of North Africa also provide “the most extreme conditions you’ll ever find on this planet.” This is echoed in several other films: “The desert terrain was fearsome” (WWII Battleground), and the soldiers found themselves in “a struggle against nature as much as the enemy,” as “simply surviving here is an effort in itself” (Battlefields: El Alamein). There is no water or sanitation, the heat is unbearable and the nights very cold; there are not only horrific 9 10

Here I do not discuss the local population more than briefly, as this is in focus in another part of the project. The World at War also includes other references to the poem, indicating its familiarity to the British audience at the time of its production. Cf Mark Rawlinson’s scholarly essay on http:// jocelynbrooke.com/wild-soldiers/

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sandstorms but also the khamsin, the “hot, dry, unpleasant wind that the Arabs say can excuse murder” (Tankies). As an actor in itself, the desert is personalized and referred to as a deadly enemy, hostile to everyone (cf Escher 2006, 310). Last, but not least, there are all the “nasty critters that live in that kind of environment” (Patton 360 °): scorpions, snakes, and especially – as emphasized in several films – the swarms of flies pestering the life of the soldiers (A line in the sand, Battlefield, Greatest Tank Battles, Soldier’s Story, Lost Evidence, World At War, Battleground). In The World At War, more details are given: as the flies fed on corpses they spread a nasty smell when smashed. As one of the British veterans in El Alamein: The soldier’s story put it, “it was not comfortable.” These descriptions partly echo early European travel literature, with its detached observations of ‘pure nature,’ but also enhance the potential for viewer immersion. Further, the wild animals and insects carry connotations that, regardless if one is a religious believer or not, brings familiar imagery of Biblical pests, such as the clouds of grasshoppers darkening the skies of Egypt. Thus, the different signs work together in creating the desert as a fundamentally other place; it is indeed a death zone, but it is also – as we will see - a space of dream time (Koebner 2009, 91). Still, in some of the films, there are occasional signs of indigenous inhabitants other than vermin. However, they are almost univocally represented as props that together with camels, donkeys, and palm trees are filling the landscape with signifiers of the Orient. Importantly, their presence does not challenge the area’s presumed suitability as a battlefield. Greatest Tank Battles describes El Alamein as “a remote desert outpost on Africa’s north coast,” while most other films do acknowledge that there was at least some kind of local life. However, as said in Battlefield: El Alamein, although a “tiny coastal settlement,” it was just “an insignificant place.” In Churchill’s Desert War it is said that El Alamein was a “small halt on the railway line in the middle of nowhere,” while Battlefields: El Alamein describes it as “an unremarkable trading post. However, thanks to the fortunes of war, this small dot on the map gave its name to a famous battle.” This is echoed in Lost Evidence: “an insignificant railway stop called Alamein. However, it will give its name to one of the greatest battles in history.” There are more accounts of the same type, all suggesting that through its “insignificance” and “obscurity” (Battlefields: El Alamein) El Alamein was a suitable location for massive tank battles – despite the civilians that logically ought to be there - and that it only truly becomes a place through the Europeans. However, while it is correct that the number of inhabitants in and around El Alamein in the 1940s was rather limited, these people would probably not give any “thanks to the fortunes of war” or be happy about their home getting international fame as a war site. As with the denial of coevalness in colonial and Orientalist discourse, this depiction freezes it in time. Today El Alamein is a popular seaside resort for people in the region, but in the dominant version of the cinematic world, it will probably never be anything else than a desolate, shabby-looking railway station somewhere in the desert. A typical example: the closing scene of Battlefields: El Alamein consists of present-day footage shot on location near the old railway station at El Alamein; similar imagery of the run-down building is recurrent in several films (Churchill’s Desert War, A Line in the Sand,

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The Soldier’s Story, Greatest Tank Battles, Tankies, World At War). The narrator: “Today the desert is almost as empty as it was before the fighting.” The footage shows a woman and some children at a distance, herding goats. “The trains still chug up the railway line twice a day.” Footage of another woman wearing a burka hanging laundry, while two dirty children are watching. “There’s more irrigation … and a few more people.” Footage of people riding donkeys. Again, this is the Orient, where life goes on outside modernity. The only film that stands out in the sample by breaking this dominant mode of representation is the Maori TV production A line in the sand, where scenes from “the town of El Alamein as it is today” is included. In stark contrast to the quote above, this narrator states that the town “has grown from almost nothing to more than a million;” the footage shows modern houses as well as Egyptian street life with people in traditional garb mingling with people dressed in Western fashion, street vendors, occasional donkeys and lots of cars. One may wonder why this kind of non-stereotypical representation is only present in a minor production from an independent TV company representing an indigenous minority group in New Zealand, while the vast majority of films prefers to follow the well-established Orientalist tradition, expressing denial of coevalness in both explicit verbal statements and visual imagery. One explanation is that this quality of Egypt (and MENA) symbolically not being in modern time is a suitable, even necessary, requisite for the setting of this drama where mythical Western identity is displayed and confirmed, as will be further discussed in sections 2.4 and 2.5. To conclude: besides connoting wilderness and pure, hostile nature, a sublime and heroic landscape: all the signs used in representing the desert tell the viewer that this is an uncivilized place where no human beings would like to reside (and that “human” is the same as “Western” is here an implicit presumption). Following the dominant narrative shared by the vast majority of the films, North Africa is an empty region perfect for warfare. Importantly, this emptiness is not primarily a quality connected to nature, but rather of having been assessed and considered suitable for use, in this case, by the military. This empty usefulness of the desert – turning it into a potential non-place – seems to symbolically spread onto the whole MENA region, despite its very differentiated character regarding geography as well as landscape. However, one might ask: if this is an empty region filled with sand, what about the names of towns and cities on the maps? Towns and cities The most commonly mentioned North African towns and cities in the films are Tobruk, Tripoli, and Benghazi in Libya, and El Alamein, Cairo, and Alexandria in Egypt. These and a handful other names, including certain parts of the desert such as the Qattara depression, are both mentioned verbally and visually present on maps showing the movements of the armed forces, often by using arrows marked with national flags. Maps, with or without animation, are featured in all films. The function of the place names is solely that of indicating geographical locations in relation

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to these movements and the strategies behind them, as well as to military activities either taking place there or otherwise relating to them. This indicates that their quality is not that of anthropological places in Augé’s definition, but rather of non-places. That they are not represented based on their social and historical significance as places where people live is further supported by the frequent use of unspecified archival footage connoting a generic Oriental village, town or city, depending on the context. Thus, only the specialist viewer would be able to assess whether a specific scene shows, for example, Tobruk, or is in fact from another North African town.11 Further, while minarets and other buildings connected to Islam are common sights in the region, in this context they do not only geographically anchor the narrative in the Middle East, but also symbolically in the Orient, as the perspective is clearly that of a Western visitor whose interest lies in the experiences of other Western people, not of the indigenous population. As a veteran says in The World At War, “towns and cities were very few, and therefore we had no difficulties with the Arabian population. They didn’t disturb us.” This framing also contributes intertextually to locating the narrative in a broader genre of popular orientalism fiction. We have already seen how the town El Alamein is represented in the films. Turning to Cairo, the Egyptian capital is referred to as the headquarters of the British command in the region as well as the comfortable home of British expatriates. It is “the hub of Britain’s political and administrative power in the Middle East” (Churchill’s Desert War), threatened by first the Italians and then the Germans. Besides this, Cairo fills a significant touristic function as an exotic place to visit for soldiers on leave from the front. There are bars and prostitutes, and when not occupied with these, there are street vendors from whom one can buy souvenirs and inevitably get ripped off (Line in the sand, Soldier’s story, Tankies, World At War). Of course, one can also go for sightseeing to the pyramids at Giza, as illustrated by a snapshot of British soldiers on camels, led by two Arab men dressed in white galabeya, in front of the majestic monuments (Line in the sand, World At War). Those higher in rank spend their free time at the Gezira Club or other posh establishments (Churchill’s Desert War, World At War). All references to social life here are to the British, while the Egyptians are – again – reduced to props, as prostitutes, servants and other subordinates performing labor for the colonial masters.12 The view of the pyramids represents local history; the obvious tourist connotations enhanced through the presence of British soldiers in the images. They, and thereby we, the viewers, are visitors in a foreign land. However, they are not just tourists, as the context anchors their presence in a structure of power relations: they are the rulers not solely over this land and its inhabitants, but also over the narrative. When present-day footage of Cairo is included this has a distinctly Oriental flavor with a touristic appeal, with narrow alleys, bazaars, mosques and minarets, the latter as striking silhouettes against the setting sun (Battlefields, Churchill’s Desert War). The representations follow the model of Cairo as a cinematic city identified by 11 12

This is a common phenomenon in the WWII documentary genre, see Kingsepp 2008; cf Zelizer 1998. Egypt was formally independent during this time, although practically under British control both politically and militarily.

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Escher and Zimmerman (2005), characterized by its liminoid qualities and opportunities for personal transcendence. This Cairo is also something like a wormhole in time, going back to the days of the British Empire, uncritically represented by signs creating a colonial nostalgia (Kingsepp, 2018). In contrast to Cairo, Egypt’s second largest city Alexandria is solely represented in functional terms, mostly of transportation: as a principal port for the British Navy and for measuring the distance to the German troops: El Alamein, or the Germans, is/were so and so many miles away from Alexandria. One of the main protagonists in Warriors of WWII, Lieutenant Colonel David Stirling, is introduced while lying in hospital in Alexandria. In Churchill’s Desert War this is a city from which “the inhabitants” – that is, the Westerners – are fleeing as the Germans are approaching, while “shopkeepers” (seemingly a second class of inhabitants) are hanging up signs welcoming the enemy. Otherwise, Alexandria is almost entirely neglected, despite being directly affected by the war as a target of repeated Axis air raid bombings in 1941–1942. In Greatest Tank Battles: The Battle of El Alamein Alexandria is not mentioned or even marked on the map, which underlines its general insignificance for the metanarrative. This is further accentuated by the almost total absence in the sample of present-day footage from Alexandria. The only exceptions are Churchill’s Desert War, where the medieval citadel and colorful wooden fishing boats in the harbor provide a picturesque backdrop for the narrator, and Tankies, where the narrator is in one scene standing in a narrow street with a woman in abaya, the typical long robe-like dress worn by many women in MENA, visible in the background. As with Cairo (and earlier El Alamein), Alexandria is denied its modernity. In summary, while Cairo is a place for the British, but not for the Egyptians, the other towns on the North African coastline are not places for anyone, except when they are locations for specific military activities. Then they turn into places, but only insofar as they are related to military or tourist experience, and only from a Western perspective. While present on the maps and occasionally as part of the landscape, they are otherwise represented as non-places, without identity, relations, and history, and often even without human life. They are merely locations along the way to, or from, somewhere. Although many of the soldiers experienced a more personal relationship to certain places, the filmic representations of towns and cities do not contain elements that would encourage the audience’s feelings of immersion (cf Kingsepp 2006). Regarding Alexandria, its undisputed role in European cultural heritage is not even diminished through the present narrative – it is simply not there, and could not even have been there if essentialist ideas of a pure, mythical European identity are to be followed. War as Hell It is difficult to avoid the desert in films about events taking place in it. However, the way the desert is represented in the material indicates that it is not just about topography: there is something more to it. Its qualities as heroic landscape and

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mythical space are indicated by the presence of the themes War as Hell and Duel in the Desert, where the first has close affinities with spirituality and transcendence, while the second is characterized by anachronism: modern war is turned into classical myth. Hell is here to be understood in terms not only of extraordinarily horrific and painful experiences but of these also taking place in extraordinary geographical settings, enhanced through the landscape’s sublime beauty. Its dream time quality (cf Koebner 2009, 91) is suggested by the consistent use of frequent present-day footage (or computer-generated animation) of sunsets over the desert in as many as ten of the films; sometimes there is also a full moon, while several also show a starry night sky.13 The latter shows intertextual influences from Desert Victory, as many films are also re-using its footage with suggestive nocturnal scenes (actually re-enactments) from the dramatic beginning of the first battle at El Alamein (cf Chapman 2008, 55). However, the frequent solar imagery does seem to carry special meanings, depending on the narrative context and on the landscape together with which it forms a whole. If not seen over the desert (which is the most common), sunsets are featured together with the silhouettes of mosques and minarets, leading to visual associations to popular Orientalist narratives and Thousand and One Nights. Here I focus on the desert, suggesting a symbolism pointing towards spiritual and existential aspects of both the narrative and its geographical settings. The setting sun is not only light turning into darkness, but symbolically also life passing into death, which becomes especially prominent in an Egyptian context where the ancient Pharaonic solar symbolism is familiar also for Westerners (cf McAlister 2005, 125 ff). The sun also being a symbol of life and rebirth further indicates a religious, or at least spiritual aspect. This kind of poetic symbolism in a documentary about WWII is extremely rare in TV documentaries about other parts of the war. This uniqueness within the genre indicates a relation to the North African desert that I suggest is founded in its particular qualities: as heroic landscape and as mythical space. Not only does it offer a spectacular stage with deep religious connotations for this modern-time drama, but also, following Turner’s (1975) ritual theory, the two main requisites for making spiritual and social transgression possible: liminal/liminoid space and communitas, the absence of social structure. Further religious connotations are brought by what is referred to as the Devil’s Gardens, the minefields laid out at El Alamein. There are different versions of these areas in the films. While most of them do not mention anything about their present state, only two14, actually state, or, as in Churchill’s Desert War, hint that the explosives are still out there and that this might cause problems if someone dares to enter the former battlefield without proper guidance. Thus, the mines are symbolically left in a kind of bizarre open-air museum, of no harm as this is supposedly an empty

13

14

Battlefields, Churchill’s Desert War, A line in the sand, Gladiators of WWII, Greatest Tank Battles, War Diaries, World At War, War in the desert, Battleground. In some cases, it is hard to tell whether it is a setting or a rising sun; however, this does not alter the connotations. Moon: Churchill’s Desert War, Patton’s Last Stand, Battleground. Battlefield, Greatest Tank Battles

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desert where no-one lives or goes.15 This brings a feeling of the uncanny that, again, opens up for connotations to the otherworldly. In an article about old German WWII matériel still left in the vast wilderness of Finnish Lapland – yet another scarcely inhabited, desolate stage for a theatre of war – Vesa-Pekka Herva argues that German material heritage in the wilderness is arguably regarded as dangerous not only physically but also metaphysically, as the merging of matériel with nature effectively unsettles categories and boundaries that are dear to modern thinking (cf. Douglas 1966). The presence of “war junk” in supposedly natural environments challenges modern normative assumptions of how the world is (or should be) conceptually and materially organized, and what the world is (or should be) like. The sites where matériel is found are therefore of a puzzling character and uncertain identity – they are, in effect, liminal places which in turn are dangerous because they are places where worlds meet. (2014, 311).

Again, the heroic landscape/mythical space of the desert provides the setting for a close encounter with the extraordinary. This theme is made explicit in the mentioned dichotomies and enhanced further by the recurring pair spiritual versus secular, as represented by the symbolism of the minarets and mosques. Eventually, there is also nothingness versus being. Nothingness is here not only a quality attached to the empty desert and death in the secular sense of understanding; it is also associated with the archaic as the Urgrund, the void before the beginning of time, unreachable for our rational faculties and therefore nothing (Cardew 2012). This, again, is in accordance with popular narratives of the Orient – and its most extreme expression, the desert – as a place for death, rebirth and new beginnings. That the War as Hell theme in this case also demands hellish geographical settings is suggested in the second sentence from the narrator in the opening scene in The World at War: “This is no nubile, girlish land. No green and virginal countryside for war to violate. This land is hard. Inviolable.” These words establish the landscape as barren and – again – almost as created for eruptions of (masculine) violence. It is a land set aside from potential cultivation, thus from life itself; the choice of words indicate that this is an area for men only, where the essence of mythical masculinity can be set free without restricting boundaries. This is a mythical space ready for primordial and simultaneously highly modern explosions, as the chaos of fire and death is let loose. Furtherer, the absence of organic life makes a perfect playground for technological monsters, here especially in the form of tanks, but also other kinds of heavy war machines. The metanarrative, especially when relating to veterans’ accounts, is full of vivid descriptions of this man-made hell. Massive tank battles are by default no discreet performances, and similar accounts of the horrors of war are also found elsewhere in documentaries on WWII. However, I do suggest that the particular character of the present narrative combined with the desert as harsh 15

The image so frequently promoted about a clean war in an empty desert becomes full of mockery in a quite devilish way, as people are still killed or injured by WWII landmines in Egypt’s north-Western coastal region and the Western Desert. A 2006 UNDP report estimated the number of casualties after 1945 to around 8,000 (Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor 2007). From an Egyptian perspective, this is a very concrete reminder of the Second World War that is only rarely acknowledged in the documentaries.

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and sublime nature, including all its connotations to liminality and transgression, offers extraordinary dimensions to the War as Hell theme that is also highlighted in the veterans’ accounts. The contrast between life and death is further accentuated by the tourist-like references to swimming in the Mediterranean and experiencing exotic Cairo between the battles; all examples of place that is only becoming meaningful through their temporarily being used by the British. In this case, the British soldiers are also colonial masters (again, using these places), a theme that adds possible connotations of forbidden pleasure to a present-day Western audience (Kingsepp, 2018). Thus, there are several layers of interpretation that coexist simultaneously and creates a multidimensional experience similar to what Vivian Sobchack (1997) calls a palimpsest of historical consciousness, although here the historical events are mixed with elements from myths to a degree that lessens their significance as factual history. Duel in the Desert There is yet another dimension in the quote from The World at War, as according to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, inviolable means “too important to be ignored or treated with disrespect,” “secure from violation or profanation,” and “secure from assault or trespass.” To refer to a land under colonial domination, as the whole of North Africa including Egypt was during this time, in these terms suggests that there is something more in play than just the utopian concepts of clean warfare and colonial nostalgia. I would suggest that although the context is secular, there are still powerful connotations to this part of the world connecting it to biblical history, thereby adding to the sacred aura of the desert (cf McAlister 2005, 43–83). Together with the denial of coevalness, this opens up for qualities that are usually not found in mainstream narratives about WWII. In Western popular history, the North Africa Campaign is associated with “the duel in the desert,” a strikingly different quality as compared to other parts of WWII, especially the Eastern front, where the war is commonly characterized as exceptionally savage and brutal. The boundaries are clear between war and civil life; war is waged elsewhere, far away from civilization, which puts it in its “proper place.” The desert is a suitable playground for daring men pushing their lethal game of technological warfare to the extreme. However, in this example, clean warfare is not hell directed onto those who rightly “deserve” it (cf. Foucault 2008), as here the Germans are not “evil Nazis.” Both sides are represented as equal combatants, indicating that “clean” should here instead be read in terms of chivalry, rules of honor and fair play, traditional values closely tied to Western cultural identity but, as so often, based on myth (Porter 2013, 75–78; see also Bierman and Smith 2003). In this way, the North Africa Campaign fills a symbolic function of showing the “true European spirit,” without disturbing anomalies such as Hitler and Nazism. The Duel in the Desert theme is more or less present in the majority of the films, although primarily in the

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US productions its chivalric aspects are downplayed in favor of a more simplistic good guys/bad guys narrative.16 That this kind of anachronist behavior among Westerners occurs in the desert is no coincidence. The desert provides perfect liminoid conditions for extreme suffering while symbolically going back in time to the primordial moment of chaos and creation. Those who return will, following ideas about the transformative powers of war experience, be fundamentally changed as individuals (Mosse 1990). There are also connotations to medieval knights and the Crusades, a symbolism frequently used in Western politics and propaganda, not the least US President Bush’s “war on terror.” Although each of these interacting themes often has its own logic and sometimes also its own language, they are connected in a cultural fabric – or, better, a palimpsest – of connotations and symbolisms that need to be acknowledged. As disparate as they might sometimes seem at first glance, they nevertheless cooperate in the powerful function of discourse (Jäger 2004; McAlister 2005, 307). Tourist Activities/Gaze There is also another important dimension following the suggestive imagery of sunsets in the desert, as overlapping in this palimpsest are also the glossy images of travel magazines and films set in exotic places. This emphasizes the perspective of the tourist gaze to the analysis, with connotations not only to present-day vacations at North African swimming resorts but also to older postcards and travel literature from Egypt and the Middle East. While mosques and minarets are of course common in Muslim countries, my argument is here based on the particular mode of representation where aesthetically arranged footage of such elements together with for example palm trees, camels, and people in non-Western clothes, create a semiotic cluster signifying “Orientalness” (cf Barthes 1977).17 Documentaries are related to fiction not only in terms of being subjective representations but also aesthetically: they belong to the same corpus of cultural texts, in this case with a narrative setting in the MENA region (Escher 2006; Zimmerman and Escher 2005). The study indicates that the cinematic world in NAC documentaries is the same as in The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel, The English Patient and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, to just name three fiction films set during WWII that are still part of mainstream popular memory culture. From a visual culture perspective, Lawrence of Arabia also needs to be mentioned as there are many intertextual references, especially regarding representations of the desert but also British colonial life in the Middle East (cf Koebner 2009). However, these films also connect intertextually to other kinds of fiction set in the region. Emphasized by McAlister in her work on culture, media, and US interests in the MENA region, cross-refer16 17

Again, the Maori production stands out from the rest, as it does not just stay away from the Duel theme, but is also the only film where a postcolonial perspective is present in the narrative. Examples of this are found in Battlefields, Churchill’s Desert War, A Line in the Sand, The Soldier’s Story, Gladiators of WWII, Patton’s Last Stand, Battleground.

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encing and convergence between cultural texts, foreign policy, and constructs of identity form dominant discourse (2005, 307). As she puts it, [w]e can begin to see how certain meanings can become naturalized by repetition, as well as the ways that different sets of texts, with their own interests and affiliations, come to overlap, to reinforce and revise one another toward an end that is neither entirely planned nor entirely coincidental. If the end product is the successful construction of a discourse of expansionist nationalism, what we examine here is not a conspiracy, nor a functionalist set of representations in the service of power, but a process of convergence, in which historical events, overlapping representations, and diverse vested interests come together in a powerful and productive, if historically contingent, accord (ibid., 8).

In the present study, the tourist gaze is especially influential, as tourist-like activities are recurrent in the metanarrative. As mentioned, the soldiers go swimming in the Mediterranean in-between combats, and when on leave they go to Cairo and look at the pyramids or visit the Red Light district. They can be said to be in a triple state of exceptionality: they are “out of the ordinary” (Urry and Larsen 2011, 4) not just by being soldiers at war, which partly has a touristic aspect to it, including sightseeing and taking photographs (Zelizer 1998), but also by being situated in this particular environment. The occasional visits to Cairo that can in the intradiegetic context be associated with the contrast between leisure and war, life and death, (colonial) modernity and the timelessness of the desert, do get another dimension from a further intertextual analysis. As Escher and Zimmermann (2005) show in their analysis of Cairo as a cinematic city in fiction films, it has a distinct liminoid quality. Cairo is a place in-between, a space within the social wherein individual transition is possible from one stage in life to another, and the protagonist can find her/his true self, her/his way in life and important mission (Escher and Zimmermann 2005). As already mentioned, this ritual function is common in popular Orientalist texts. However, in the present context, the local population is excluded from communitas, remaining a subordinate, non-changing part of the structure. Again, the concept denial of coevalness is fitting to explain how this is possible: West and East share the same space, but not the same time. The attractive state of communitas is constituted by and for Western expatriates, as exemplified in Lawrence Durrell’s classic trilogy The Alexandria Quartet (1960), set in Egypt during the 1940s. It is also expressed in an interview with Durrell in The World At War, as he shares some memories of his comfortable life in wartime Cairo while working for the British Foreign Service. CONCLUSION As shown, the representations of North Africa in most of the films are characterized by the absence of social and cultural life, except for when performed by white Westerners (a category in which also white Australians are included). The desert is said to be empty, acknowledging the mythical status of the desert in Orientalist and colonialist narratives. Thus, in the meta-narrative we are dealing with non-places without history and social life in an ordinary meaning where their function is solely

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that of locations for departure toward a specific project in which a liminal quality is required. However, there is also an essentialist dimension with connotations to mythical space, opening up for activities such as killing humans as well as experiencing spiritual transcendence. From this perspective, the historical events do exist, understood as symbolic action in mythical time. The two dimensions, as well as the seemingly disparate concepts non-place and mythical space, meet and partly merge through their liminoid/liminal qualities: as a phase in-between, as one cannot dwell in liminality. It cannot be a place in an anthropological sense, as its function is connected to transition. Transition in a symbolical sense is also present in the audience/reader immersion in a narrative, an aspect where the process of mediatization becomes of utmost importance, as immersion requires feelings of familiarity provided by previous, often mediated, experiences. This is especially evident regarding war narratives. Located in-between a previous and a future stage of peace and structure, the state of war corresponds to the middle, liminal phase of ritual. Thus, it becomes quite logical that “this land was made for war,” due to the liminoid/ liminal qualities also traditionally associated with the Orient, including connotations to the Abrahamitic religions and to religious/spiritual practice in general. Neither is it surprising that the films make use of all kinds of possible intertextual references that can attract a wide audience and – as this is commercial business – generate profit on a large scale. However, the dominant representation of the land of the Others as empty and void in the films deserves further examination. In a discussion on the political society of the modern nation as a spatial expression of a unitary people, Homi Bhabha quotes Bakhtin’s words about “a creative humanization” of a certain locality, transforming it “into a place of historical life for people.” The origin of the nation’s visual presence, he continues, “is the effect of a narrative struggle” (Bakhtin 1986, 34, in Bhabha 1990, 294–295). The removal of signs of everyday life in North Africa not only extinguishes any local moral rights to the land; it also literally removes the people from it, making it a space free and open to all and any kinds of exploitation. Nevertheless, although there are indeed indications of a colonialist as well as a colonial nostalgia in many of the films, my overall conclusion is not that the emotional drive of the metanarrative would lie in a longing for the lost British Empire, or at least not in most cases. Instead, my suggestion is to regard most of these films as myth in a popular history framing, rather than vice versa. The close connection between history and myth is well-known; indeed, popular history representations of WWII are often characterized by a mythical form. As a story, it offers significant parallels to the pattern of the hero’s journey, a structural model in which the world is divided into two opposing parts, the everyday and the fantastic. In classical myths as well as in numerous popular narratives the hero receives a call to perform some critical deed – often saving the world – and ventures from the known and familiar through the unknown, chaotic and dangerous in order to achieve his goal. This pattern is found in rites of initiation as well as in reference to a soldier’s experience of war (Campbell 1949; Kingsepp 2008; Mosse 1980; Turner 1995). Here the non-places in North Africa are simultaneously steps along the route in the historical narrative and in a mythical hero’s journey. Moreover, the way from hell

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and back after literally having saved the world takes place in the very same geographic region as the Judaeo-Christian religious myths of origin, hardship, and suffering, death, and resurrection. To conclude: in the documentaries’ overlapping of heroic landscape with mythical space modernity becomes symbolically juxtaposed to tradition, thereby creating a possibility for temporarily reconnecting with hidden parts of itself, parts representing lost values associated with a mythical past. This is an important characteristic also found in other popular representations of WWII, but it becomes especially visible here due to the associations with chivalry, fair play, and clean warfare. The popular metanarrative about the NAC is a myth in its classical, traditional sense, telling a story of gods, demons, and humans, where the latter are pushed to the absolute limits of being. Thus, it is also a story of how modernity can find its lost values. This kind of narrative could hardly be told elsewhere but in the deserts of Egypt. REFERENCES Abbenhuis-Ash, M. and S. Buttsworth (Eds.) (2010): Monsters in the Mirror: Representations of Nazism in Popular Culture. Santa Barbara, CA. Augé, M. (1995): Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London and New York. Bakhtin, M. (1986): Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Edited by C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin, TX. Barthes, R. (1954): Mythologies. Paris. Barthes, R. (1977): The Rhetoric of the Image. R. Barthes (Ed.): Image, Music, Text. London. Baudrillard, J. (22001 [1995]): The Gulf War Did Not Take Place. M. Poster (Ed.): Jean Baudrillard Selected Writings. Cambridge. Bauman, Z. (1996): From Pilgrim to Tourist – or a Short History of Identity. S. Hall and P. du Gay (Eds.): Questions of Cultural Identity. London and Thousand Oaks, CA. Berg, M. (1998): Hudud: En essä om populärorientalismens bruksvärde och världsbild. Stockholm. Bhabha, H. (Ed.) (1990): Narration and Nation. London and New York. Bierman, J. and C. Smith (2003): Alamein: War Without Hate. London. Campbell, J. (1949): The Hero With a Thousand Faces. London. Cardew, A. (2012): The archaic and the sublimity of origins. P. Bishop (Ed.): The Archaic: The Past in the Present. Hove and New York, NY, 93–146. Chapman, J. (2008): War and Film. Trowbridge. Deeken, A. (2009): Land der Leere: Die Wüste im Dokumentarfilm. A. Escher and T. Koebner (Eds.): Todeszonen: Wüsten aus Sand und Schnee im Film. München, 36–56. Der Derian, J. (2001): Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network. Boulder, CO. Doran, R. (2015): The Theory of the Sublime from Longinus to Kant. Cambridge. Durrell, L. (1968): The Alexandria Quartet. London. Empereur, J.-Y. (2002): Alexandria: Past, Present and Future. London. Escher, A. (2006): The geography of cinema – a geographic world. ERDKUNDE 60 (4), 307–314. Escher, A. and S. Zimmermann (2001): Geography meets Hollywood – Die Rolle der Landschaft im Spielfilm. Geographische Zeitschrift 89 (4), 227–236. Escher, A. and S. Zimmermann (2004): Hollywoods wahre nordafrikanische Städte. G. Meyer (ed.): Die Arabische Welt im Spiegel der Kulturgeographie. Mainz, 162–167. Escher, A. and S. Zimmermann (2005): Drei Riten für Cairo: Wie Hollywood die Stadt Cairo er-

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schafft. A. Escher and T. Koebner (Eds.): Mythos Ägypten: West-Östlische Medienperspektiven II. Remscheid, 162–174. Fabian, J. (1983): Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York. Flood, G. (2004): The Ascetic Self: Subjectivity, Memory and Tradition. Cambridge. Foucault, M. (2008): Samhället måste försvaras. Collège de France 1975-1976. Hägersten. Hall, S. (2006 [1980]): Encoding/Decoding. M. G. Durham and D. M. Kellner (Eds.): Media and Cultural Studies: Key Works, revised edition. Malden, MA, Oxford, Carlton, 163–173. Hall, S. (1996): The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power. S. Halet et al. (Eds.): Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies. Malden, MA, Oxford and Carlton, 184–227. Herva, V.-P. (2014): Haunted Heritage in an Enchanted Land: Magic, Materiality and Second World War German Material in Finnish Lapland. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 1 (2), 297– 321. Jackson, R. (1981): Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. London and New York. Jäger, S. (2004): Kritische Diskursanalyse. Eine Einführung. Münster. Khatib, L. (2006): Filming the Modern Middle East: Politics in the Cinemas of Hollywood and the Arab World. London and New York. Kingsepp, E. (2006): Immersive Historicity in World War II Digital Games. HUMAN IT 8 (2), 61– 90. Kingsepp, E. (2008): Nazityskland i populärkulturen: Minne, myt, medier. Stockholm. Kingsepp, E. (2018): The Second World War, Imperial, and Colonial Nostalgia: The North Africa Campaign and Battlefields of Memory. Humanities 7 (4), 113. Kleiner, F. (2009): Orientalische Landschaft, amerikanischer Held: Zur Re- und Dekonstruktion amerikanischer Mythen in Hollywood-Wüstenabenteuern. A. Escher and T. Koebner (Eds.): Todeszonen: Wüsten aus Sand und Schnee im Film. München, 97–114. Koebner, T. (2009): Fluchtpunkt Wüste. A. Escher and T. Koebner (Eds.): Todeszonen: Wüsten aus Sand und Schnee im Film. München, 65–96. Kress, G. and T. van Leeuwen (1996): Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London and New York. Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor (2007): Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor: Egypt. http://www.the-monitor.org/index.php/publications/display?act=submit&pqs_ year=2007&pqs_type=lm&pqs_report=egypt&pqs_section= (accessed June 1, 2014). Lockman, Z. (2004): Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism. Cambridge. Lukinbeal, C. (2005): Cinematic Landscapes. Journal of Cultural Geography 23 (1), 3–22. Nichols, B. (1991): Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington and Indianapolis. McAlister, M. (22005): Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East since 1945. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London. Mosse, G. L. (1990): Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars. New York and Oxford. Porter, P. (2013): Military Orientalism: Eastern War Through Western Eyes. Oxford and New York. Pratt, M. L. (22008): Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York and London. Rawlinson, M. (no year): Wild Soldiers: Jocelyn Brooke and England’s Militarized Landscape. Jocelyn Brooke. http://jocelynbrooke.com/wild-soldiers/ (accessed September 15, 2016). Rose, G. (42006): Visual Methodologies. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi and Singapore. Said, E. (1979): Orientalism. New York and Toronto. Said, E. (1994): Culture and Imperialism. London. Saldaña, J. (32016): The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers. London and Thousand Oaks, CA. Sanidopoulos, J. (2010): The Miracle of Saint Menas in El Alamein in 1942. Mystagogy Resource Center. https://www.johnsanidopoulos.com/2010/11/miracle-of-saint-menas-in-el-alamein-in. html (accessed February 2, 2014).

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Selby, K. and R. Cowdery (1995): How to Study Television. Basingstoke. Shaheen, J. (2001): Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People. New York and Northampton. Turner, V. (1975) Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca and London. Urry, J. and J. Larsen (2011): The Tourist Gaze 3.0. London and Thousand Oaks, CA. Zelizer, B. (1998): Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory through the Camera’s Eye. Chicago and London. Zimmermann, S. and A. Escher (2005): “Cinematic Marrakech”: Eine Cinematic City. A. Escher and T. Koebner (Eds.): Mitteilungen über den Maghreb: West-Östliche Medienperspektiven I. Remscheid, 60–74.

FILMS I – The case study Apocalypse: La 2ème guerre mondiale, Episode 5/6, L’Étau. English title: Apocalypse: The Second World War. Isabelle Clarke, David Costelle. France: CC&C, 2009. Battlefield, Season 5, Episode 2, El Alamein. Canada/UK/USA: Polygram Filmed Entertainment, 1995. Battlefields, Season 1, Episode 1/4, El Alamein. David Wilson. UK: UN United Production Television, 2001. Battleground: North Africa and Italy, Episode 1/8, El Alamein. Country of origin and year of production unknown, probably UK. DVD copyright by Timeless Media Group 2008. Churchill’s Desert War: The Road to El Alamein. Robin Barnwell. UK: Fresh One Productions, 2012. El Alamein: A line in the sand. Cameron Bennett. New Zealand: Maori Television, 2013. El Alamein: The Soldier’s Story. Ian Bild, David Parker. UK: Available Light Productions, 2011. Gladiators of World War II, Episode 2/13, SAS. Charles Messenger. UK: BBC Worldwide/Nugus/ Martin Productions, 2002. Greatest Tank Battles, Season 1, Episode 3/19, The Battle of El Alamein. Paul Kilback. Canada: Breakthrough Entertainment, 2010. Patton 360°, Season 1, Episode 2, Rommel’s Last Stand. Tony Long. USA: Flight 33 Productions, 2009. Tank Battles: El Alamein to the Volga: The story of tank warfare during World War II. UK: Unknown production company, 1991. Tankies: Tank Heroes of WWII, Episode 1/2. Francis Whately. UK: BBC, 2013. The Desert War, a.k.a. War in the Desert. Original production company, country and year of production unknown. Current copyright: UK: Pegasus/Eagle Rock Entertainment, 2002. The Lost Evidence, Episode 3, Alamein. UK/USA: History Channel, 2006. The War Diaries, Episode 4, 1942 Desert War. UK: Unknown production company, 2008. The World at War, Episode 8/26, The Desert: North Africa – 1940–1943. UK: Thames Television, 1973. World War II in HD Colour, Episode 6/13, The Mediterranean and North Africa. UK: NM Productions, 2008/2009.

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II – Other films, including fiction Desert Victory. UK: Royal Air Force Film Production Unit/The Army Film and Photographic Unit, 1943. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. S. Spielberg, USA: Paramount Pictures, 1989. Lawrence of Arabia. D. Lean, UK: Horizon Pictures, 1962. The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel. H. Hathaway, USA: Twentieth Century Fox,1951. The English Patient. A. Minghella, USA: Miramax, 1996.

MAPS ON THE NET

MOBILE MAP APPS: TOYS OR TOOLS?1 Gertrud Schaab and Christian Stern INTRODUCTION As of 2016, globally two billion people own smartphones and use mapping and navigation services on a daily basis (Ladstätter 2016). People move around carrying all kind of handheld devices – smartphones, tablets, music players, GPS watches – which are equipped with sensing, computing, and networking capabilities (Mousa et al. 2015). Although Baelden and Van Audenhove (2015) state that in our IT networked society, web-based information and communication technologies (ICTs) have become part of daily life, however, they acknowledge regional variations in development and deployment. Interestingly, users in Africa seem to ‘leapfrog’ the wired networks and rely on mobile phones for accessing the Internet as it requires fewer ICT skills, less financial means, and does not require an electrified home. ICTs have changed the way of life around the globe. In the words of Salz and Moranz (2013, 34), “the world is becoming public, instant, and global.” Maps have been used for centuries to depict our environment and its numerous facets. According to Buchroithner (2016), the traditional paper maps were used to convey high-quality, trustful, and up-to-date geoinformation to communicate these facets and acted as long-term analog spatial data storage vessels. Cartographers still believe that by applying symbology conventions in the case of topographic maps, or by employing the general characteristics of graphic cues (i.e. graphic variables resulting in map types) for thematic maps, and through establishing an information hierarchy plus adding text primarily to provide geospatial addresses, effective maps can be produced either for orientation or for revealing geospatial patterns (Kraak and Ormeling 2003, Schaab et al. 2009). Due to their aesthetic design, legibility, and the high degree of accurateness, analog maps used to be considered an authority. However, today we experience an increase in the possibilities for modern communication, in the number of people being reached and of people contributing themselves geocoded information (Buchroithner 2016). This often results in quick-and-dirty elaborations, which Buchroithner (2016) refers to as ‘Micky Mouse cartography’ due to lack of knowledge or interest for proven cartographic principles and design rules. It is the Internet and the mobile devices which have made mapping much more accessible and available (Van Wegen 2015). For many, mobile maps are the most-used information of the mobile Internet (Reichenbacher 2012). This development coined the term of today’s

1

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‘geoinformation society’ where maps and other geomedia are used to structure information and to construct spatial meaning (Vogler 2016). In our chapter, we provide an overview of the evolution of mobile map app deployment in daily life. We combine and integrate multidisciplinary information and arguments and consider also those applications which go beyond what the openly, via geo-browsers accessible and well-known map platforms offer. Our investigation questions whether map apps are useful tools or mere toys. Our central question derives from a cartographic perspective to ask: What are the requirements mobile map apps must meet to become useful tools to their users? In section two we start by examining what mobile map applications encompass and why they have become popular. In section three we use and explain trendy terms associated with mobile and web-based maps and mapping. Starting with elaborating on participatory sensing (as the broadest term related to the development and deployment of mobile map apps) and heat map (having become popular in mapping), in section four we ask what users expect of maps nowadays. Having pointed to the cartographic challenges, in section five we look into the potential for mobile map applications as part of the map app economy. Finally, in section six we return to our central cartographic questions and the aim to deliver convincing mobile map apps: what can be stated as criteria, why does user-centered design matter, and what are commonly made observations followed by conclusions. MOBILE MAP APPLICATIONS Mobile applications range from life-simplifying tools to life-saving tools (Salz and Moranz 2013). There are those mobile apps linked to utilitarian services like Internet access or maps and those linked to hedonic services like games (Verkasalo et al. 2010). According to Salz and Moranz (2013), in our multichannel, multidevice, multimedia world ‘mobile’ convinces by its simplicity, ubiquity, and reach. Further, the ability to use the features of the device, to store larger content for viewing offline, to be faster and therefore to find things more quickly, are advantages over the mobile web. Mobility requires some form of spatial knowledge for orientation in space, way-finding, and navigation (Reichenbacher 2012). Besides, location-awareness offers plenty of location-based opportunities which is listed as one of four key trends for the use, spread, and diffusion of mobile map apps (Salz and Moranz 2013). As geographic information is increasingly consumed on mobile devices, maps are changing. Roth et al. (2015b, 1) therefore state that “maps today are more than an abstraction of the landscape interpreted from afar; they are interactive information repositories that contextualize and enrich the landscape in which the map user is ‘situated.’” So, what do mobile map applications (apps, services) encompass? The answer to this question does not appear to be clearly defined in academic literature. For example, Park and Ohm (2014) talk of mobile map services but limit their study on user acceptance to those geo-browsers which allow for requesting directions between two addresses. Ladstätter (2016) calls these applications openly accessi-

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ble map platforms. To be more complete, we distinguish between two different ways mobile map apps can be considered. The first is where mobile map apps are considered primarily for use on the move. Here the technology of global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), more commonly referred to as global positioning system (GPS) which originates from the US-installed system, is applied with the principal goal to support orientation and navigation. The best-known examples of these types of mobile map apps are the popular automotive navigation systems. Fischer et al. (2016) state that mobile maps are predominately applied to outdoor navigation and to solve daily-life spatial problems and tasks while being on the move. Second, map applications can take the role of an interface on mobile devices. An example of this type of application would be when you access it while sitting at home via an IP address or GPS signal allowing the device to become a location-aware personal media. Online maps act here as an interface for searchable information which is depicted in its spatial context (Vogler 2016). Due to the diversity of mobile devices, responsive design which is independent of the device becomes extremely important. Greater availability of geospatial data and the widespread adoption of smartphones have led to a range of tools and services. Parsons (2013, 182) refers to this as the “age of mapping abundance” and the “true era of ambient cartography” because for each information presented to an individual user the local context – often via a map depiction – can be provided, which has resulted in a changed perception of maps. Roth et al. (2015a, 263) describe the pervasiveness of interactive maps as the “renaissance of ‘geo’ throughout popular culture and across professions.” Technological developments like well-documented mapping application programming interfaces (APIs), web standards, and the diffusion of GPS devices have led to a new player, the crowd (Brovelli et al. 2015). Today, anyone can communicate via ‘social geocommunication,’ i.e. applying geomedia for producing their own selfmade map (Vogler 2016). Smartphones, as the tools deploying mobile map services, are built on a mobile computing platform and combine usually the functionalities of a phone, portable media player, digital camera, video camera, and a GPS unit (Salz and Moranz 2013). Their explosive growth in popularity can be explained by the increased connectivity of devices as well as the drop in costs of sensors (cf. Walravens 2015). While Brovelli et al. (2015) point to nine integrated sensors, there are more than twenty that can be integrated in a smartphone for staying connected, being locatable in space, for monitoring the environment or oneself, or for communicating with the device. Sensors that work to keep people connected include those that act as transceivers for mobile networks, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and near field communication (NFC). Sensors which help to locate a device in space include those that act as receivers for FM radio waves and GPS. Sensors that work to help one communicate with the device include touchscreen sensor, proximity sensor, light-sensitive sensor, hall effect sensor, fingerprint reader, microphone, and speaker. Sensors that help with monitoring the device’s and thus one’s environment include the accelerometer, camera (photo, video), magnetometer (digital compass), gyroscope, temperature sensor, hygrometer, barometer, infrared sensor (as proximity sensor and gesture

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sensor), and heart rate sensor. Other less common sensors that can be integrated into mobile devices include the stereo camera, time-of-flight camera, and iris scanner. With such a wide diversity of possible add-ons, one can see why smartphones are also referred to as sensor-enabled mobile devices. As sensors got smaller, more efficient, and less expensive, they have become more omnipresent in our daily life (Zeile and Exner 2016). Zeile and Exner (2016) argue that several features related to sensors are responsible for this development: the autonomous functioning of sensors, their miniaturizing, the possibilities of data processing on the device, the networking of the sensors, the potentials of mobile application and usage, and the deep embedding of mobile device technologies within society. Van Cutsem et al. (2014) point to a new class of mobile applications, which interact with peer applications running on neighboring phones. The implication of this new development, as well as the envisaged Internet of things (IoT), and the fact that personal information is increasingly used as a commodity and as an access fee to many online and social services, make it evident that privacy concerns matter (Walravens 2015), also in the context of mobile map apps. POPULAR WORDS TO EXPLAIN NEW DEVELOPMENTS AROUND MAPS AND MAPPING Popular terms to describe the new development in the realm of maps at the beginning of the Web 2.0 were ‘volunteered geographic information’ or ‘user-generated content’ which made geodata available to everyone without costs (Figure 1). ‘Neocartography’ was a consequence of the shift in mapmaking from the hands of a few professionals to literally any layperson. ‘Data democracy’ led the way to the ‘open data’ policies of today. However, the availability and access to ‘big data’ now poses new challenges. ‘Ubiquitous mapping’ of whatever, wherever, and whenever includes a whole range of new possibilities including ‘mapping emotions.’ Popular new map types include ‘heat maps,’ ‘slippy maps,’ and ‘MOMM’. Popular techniques in helping to provide new inputs for maps are ‘geoparsing,’ ‘geotagging,’ ‘geofencing,’ and ‘geotargeting.’ In regard to volunteered data collection or processing, the crowd (as in ‘crowdsourced’) is commonly referred to, but increasingly also the citizen (as in ‘citizen sensor’ or in ‘citizen science’) in order to express appreciation and trust. ‘Participatory sensing’ might be the broadest term for these activities which build so-called opportunistic mobile sensor networks. ‘Online virtual reality,’ a term that comes from the computer-game world, can also be deployed. Maybe surprisingly the term ‘gamification’ is used to reference the awarding of incentives to motivate data contribution by users. Concerns about the new developments and emerging possibilities seemed to be linked to terms like ‘mass-self communication’ and even ‘geoslavery.’ Nevertheless, what started in 1998 as a visionary concept of ‘digital earth’ by Al Gore has turned into the ‘geocloud’ and even the ‘smart city’ ambitions.

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Figure 1: A word cloud of 26 popular terms around maps and mapping (words are grouped by different shadings and hachures).

Web 2.0, in the context of this paper, briefly characterized as allowing user interaction and participation, enables web users to contribute massive amounts of user-generated content (UGC, Fu and Sun 2011). The term volunteered geographic information (VGI), the geospatial subset of data voluntarily created by citizens rather than by formal data providers, originates from Goodchild (2007). Every person being constantly on the move can act as an “intelligent sensor, perhaps equipped with such simple aids as GPS” (Goodchild 2007, 30). Neocartography refers to the consequence of empowering individuals not only to become data collectors, but also map producers (Cartwright 2012). Today, non-experts can employ cartographic techniques and tools for their own purposes. According to Brovelli et al. (2015), however, not just access but a full set of barriers are acting upon individuals, like educational inequality and the higher technology orientation of younger people, which limit to exploit the Internet’s full potential. Despite these inequalities, constant technological advances enable the general public to heavily contribute to geospatial databases of often time-sensitive data and thus shape open geospatial information dissemination and to stimulate collaborative use (Rice 2015). Generally, the motivation to contribute data or information is that it is seen as socially rewarding and enhances one’s personal reputation (Oksamen et al. 2015). However, based on various use cases, Brovelli et al. (2015) are more skeptical as they revealed a highly diverse pattern associated with participation, incentive, and data quality success. Nevertheless, they also point to the chance of a rich user experience. ‘Data democracy’ is a movement with roots in hacking culture, in which activists push for raw data to be shared openly for transparency in decision-making processes as well as for active citizen participation leading to a more open and

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flexible form of democracy. Besides, empowered intermediaries help to make raw data accessible to the wider public (Baack 2015). ‘Open government data’ (OGD) targets the availability and free use of data held by government bodies in an open, non-proprietary, machine-reading format, whether commercially, or non-commercially used. The primary drivers behind open data are the following: first, the considerations of transparency and accountability; second, participatory governance; third, the catalyst properties for innovation and economic growth; and fourth, the internal value for the public sector itself (Janssen 2012). Openness, accessibility, and reuse of data have, therefore, become a significant theme in local government innovation (Walravens 2015). ‘Big data’ is a collection of datasets that have become so large and complex that it is difficult to process using traditional tools. A significant contribution to the creation of big data is what Baack (2015, 2) calls the “ubiquitous quantification of social life” through mobile devices. Other sources of big data are remote sensing, software logs, cameras, microphones, radio-frequency identification readers (RFID), and wireless sensor networks. Typically, big data is collected without a specific purpose or not used for its original purpose and, therefore, does not meet the statistical requirement of a representative random-sample, but rather follows the principle of exhaustiveness in scope (Oksanen et al. 2015). Nevertheless, the reliability of information derived from heterogeneous and non-quality-assured sources, termed veracity, poses the biggest challenge (Ladstätter 2016). Both Janssen (2016) and Baack (2015) raise the concern that open government data and – even more so – big data might lead to an elite that can make use of the available datasets, thus causing information inequality and disempowerment of the citizen. Therefore, according to Janssen (2016), more education on the role of data and information in social life is required. Along these lines, Janssen (2016, 6) notes that the ‘right to information’ movement (RTI) could complement the technically skilled and media-aware open data movement, which surprises with “stunning visualizations and ‘cool’ apps.” Nowadays, people can create and use maps nearly anywhere and at any time to solve spatial problems. This is what is meant by ‘ubiquitous mapping.’ The wide availability of data, global ICT network, and intuitive software facilitates and stimulates the universal nature of mapmaking and map usage for spatial communication (Morita 2005). A term closely associated with ubiquitous computing is the ‘Internet of things’ (IoT). While human-provided data predominantly feeds the Internet, the data sources for IoT are sensor signals attached to objects surrounding us. It is only logical that sensors, and the IoT, has led to ‘real-time mapping’ (Becek 2014), which is also related to ‘ubiquitous mapping.’ A current, trendy example is the mapping of emotions. Griffin and McQuoid (2012) distinguish cognitive mapping applications related to emotional associations, use of psychological signs of emotional arousal to indicate reactions to environmental stimuli, and the role of emotions in map reading. The cartographic potential is judged to be tremendous due to advances in the understanding of the delicate topic by the neuroscientific community. ‘Heat maps,’ representing the intensity of a phenomenon (count or density) (Oksanen et al. 2015), have become popular on the Internet for displaying VGI data, often in real time, most often applying a rainbow color scheme. ‘Slippy maps’

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(e.g. Parsons 2013) is a colloquial phrase that describes multi-scale, pannable (MSP) maps. Peterson and Cammack (2015) fear that the term trivializes what might be the most critical development in online mapping. MOMM is short for ‘me on my map’ and is not an official term either (Peterson and Cammack 2015), but rather, the term tells us a lot about business nowadays pushing for user-centric solutions and thus also about our society. Four relatively new techniques for creating data input to a map are ‘geoparsing,’ ‘geotagging,’ ‘geofencing,’ and ‘geotargeting’ (Fu and Sun 2011). ‘Geoparsing’ assigns a geographic location to words and phrases in a document thus turning textual information, for example, on web pages into a geospatial database. A geoparser software identifies place names in the text document and uses a gazetteer to convert them into coordinates. Identifying the actual place name via context, grammar, and disambiguation for finding the correct location among duplicates are challenges for geoparsing. ‘Geotagging’ adds location information to digital media such as photos (the most common), videos, websites, and rich site summary feeds (RSS). The positioning in a spatial context facilitates search and applications of data mining. ‘Geofencing’ works by applying a virtual perimeter around a geographic object. When a mobile device enters or exits the virtual perimeter, a notification is automatically generated. Such alerts can help to improve customer service and optimize workflow. A well-known example of geofencing is the managing of mobile assets and workforces. In contrast, ‘geotargeting’ also makes use of the GPS receiver on a user’s mobile phone, but additionally deploys the public IP addresses of network clients. This way the physical address of a visitor to a website can be determined for delivering tailored content. Typical applications are precise advertising based on location or fraud prevention in e-commerce payments. Technically, geofencing and geotargeting are not new but have become extremely relevant due to the increasing demand for ‘location-based services’ (LBS) driven by the online society. More recently, ‘geoblocking’ was discussed in the news. It refers to making products in portals inaccessible to potential consumers based on their geographic location. Not all data collected using mobile devices can be called VGI, in most cases, the users are not aware which geodata they produce and what is scraped from their devices by service providers. Ladstätter (2016) argues that instead of ‘volunteered’ the term crowdsourcing is much better suited as it points to the harvesting of data produced by users of a platform. Originally the term described work performed by an undefined network of people (Brovelli et al. 2015) matching the saying of outsourcing tasks to the crowd (Fu and Sun 2011). This way needed services, ideas, or content can be obtained, here making in particular use of an online community. Motivation can be raised via crowdsourcing campaigns and usually stems from altruism, reputation, fun, and learning, but incentives – even money – and reward mechanisms can be offered (Mousa et al. 2015). Increasingly, not the crowd is referenced but rather the citizen. Citizen sensor describes a person who makes use of sensors and shares her or his observation and view employing a mobile device and web services. According to Sheth (2009, 80) “participation from all walks of life” is aimed at collating humans’ “collective intellect, knowledge, and experi-

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ences.” Sheth (2009) highlights the advantage of humans over machines which are poor at perception (cf. Zeile and Exner 2016). Zeile and Exner (2016) point out that with today’s extensive geosocial networks, the geolocation of for example Twitter or Facebook content can add valuable information. However, challenges of selectivity (of a user group), privacy issues, the potential for surveillance, and errors in map depictions of such data can occur (Zeile and Exner 2016). Even more popular than ‘citizen sensor’ is the term citizen science. Citizen scientists are amateurs who voluntarily take part in scientific data collection, analysis, and dissemination (Brovelli et al. 2015), this today by using customized smartphone apps (Zeile and Exner 2016). According to Resnik et al. (2015), who are more specific, laypeople can be involved in a variety of scientific activities including research design, data collection, subject recruitment, data analysis and data interpretation, and publication. Benefits are expected for the conducted research project as well as overall science and society, as citizens do not only act as a valuable resource but facilitate public engagement, education, and outreach (empowerment of citizens). However, as Resnik et al. (2015) discuss, in this process many ethical issues arise with data quality and integrity, data sharing and intellectual property, conflict of interest, and exploitation. Therefore, guidelines and effective communication are required when using citizen science participation in research projects. From a historical point of view (Brovelli et al. 2015), first came ‘participatory GIS’ (PGIS) in which non-governmental organizations and grassroots groups focused on making geographic information systems (GIS) available to less-favored societal groups. Next came ‘VGI,’ in which data collection is initiated by citizens. With ‘public participation GIS’ (PPGIS), the needs of organizations and communities that initiate data-collection campaigns and aim at achieving social change are targeted (see also Fu and Sun 2011). ‘Participatory sensing,’ finally, refers to data collection using modern mobile phones as scientific instruments. Participatory sensing is thus maybe the broadest and most neutral term. It involves three parties which interact to accomplish a sensing campaign (Mousa et al. 2015). The first is the campaign administrator who initiates the campaign, manages it, and sets-up the application server. The second involved is the participants, each selecting one or several tasks and using their own devices to capture observations. For participants, some data processing is usually included and the constructing and sending of a report required. The reports are processed and analyzed on the application server. Finally, the third party is the end users who in comparison can send queries to the server and receive visualizations of the request. Online ‘virtual reality’ (VR) allows users to immerse, navigate, and interact with a computer-simulated, real or imagined environment. VR technology is related to the concept of ‘telepresence,’ which adopts the concepts of vividness (technology’s ability to produce a sensor-rich mediated environment) and interactivity (user’s ability to modify form and content in real time) and can deploy avatars (Fu and Sun 2011). ‘Gamification’ should not be confused with serious gaming, where visualization technology of computer games designed for leisure and entertainment are applied in for example spatial development planning to improve communication between stakeholders (Witsenburg and Koster 2015). Instead, gamification

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deploys game-thinking and game mechanics (rewarding achievements) in non-game contexts to increase motivation by turning the experience of solving a problem into a game. By purely altering the perception of the users, long-term engagement and loyalty are gained (Zichermann and Cunningham 2011). ‘Mass-self communication’ describes the form of communication in the digital age built by the people (Castells 2007). It is termed mass communication due to its global reach. ‘Self’ points to the generator of content, the direction of emission, and the selection concerning reception. While mass media distribution is from one-to-many, with mass-self communication many communicate with many, which leads to an infinite diversity and largely autonomous origin of communication flows. Thus, the construction and reconstruction of meaning in the public mind has shifted from political institutions to the communication organized around the mass media. Castells (2007, 247) critically confesses that “a good share of this form of mass self-communication is closer to ‘electronic autism’ than to actual communication.” One could easily misinterpret mass-self communication with massive communication about oneself because many use the web and social media to promote themselves without consideration of the privacy implications. Alternatively, one could associate the term with communication with oneself on a massive scale, as mobile devices and their sensors are increasingly used for monitoring one’s body and activities. In this context, Dobson and Fisher (2003) warned of geoslavery as a new form of oppression characterized by location control. Dobson and Fisher (2003) envisaged a global threat with unparalleled social hazards in human history. Human tracking devices would introduce a new potential for realtime control extending far beyond privacy and surveillance. The potential for enslavement applications by individuals (as opposed to by governments in Orwell’s Big Brother) reminded Dobson and Fisher (2003) of the ethical dilemma faced by the nuclear science pioneers. The idea for a ‘digital earth’ started in 1998 as a visionary concept popularized by Al Gore, the former vice-president of the U.S. (Fu and Sun 2011). Gore envisioned a multi-resolution, three-dimensional representation of the earth with vast quantities of georeferenced data the citizen could interact with. Its usability would be suitable for a young child and thus allow potentially anyone to understand the earth and human activities on the earth. Fun and Sun (2011) noted that at the time of Gore’s speech, the idea appeared almost impossible to achieve because of the technological requirements. However, today’s virtual globes have in large parts brought Gore’s vision to the Internet for public use although not everything Gore envisaged is yet possible. Here, what is termed the ‘geocloud’ might provide further solutions. Cloud computing means data processing through distributed data centers. As such it enables convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources, this with minimal management effort or service provider interaction (Peterson 2013, citing the NIST Definition of Cloud Computing). The same author adds that this technology is the future of online mapping, therefore what used to be web mapping has become cloud mapping. Similarly popular as the term ‘geocloud’ has become the term ‘smart city.’ While Fu and Sun (2011) still point to the digital city concept as an analogy to digital earth, e.g. Ange-

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lidou (2015, 102) refers to integrated smart city strategies, which aim “to connect the physical space of cities with the economic and social sphere.” They help to manage a city’s assets, and their citizens to become more informed, participatory, and networked. However, Angelidou (2015) states that current approaches to smart cities is supply-driven offering efficient services rather than demand-driven where it still needs to meet the needs expressed by society and meet the goal of increasing the quality of life for urban citizens (Walravens 2015). PARTICIPATORY SENSING AND HEAT MAPS – WHAT DO USERS EXPECT OF MAPS NOWADAYS? Participatory sensing Participatory sensing appears to be the broadest and most neutral term related to the development and deployment of mobile map apps. Therefore, it deserves to be captured in more detail. Participatory sensing applications “exploit both the mobility of participants and the sensing capabilities of their devices to construct opportunistic mobile sensor networks” (Mousa et al. 2015, 49). This references the activity of citizen volunteers and the application of their own computational devices such as smartphones to capture data. People are willing to share their observations made with a server, which processes their data for monitoring, mapping, or analyzing incidents or phenomena of common interest (Mousa et al. 2015). According to Brovelli et al. (2015), projects differ in how the contributed geospatial data is made accessible. Some only allow access to those that contribute the data while others only allow access to those that manage the project. Other data are contributed to servers and shared with project users or shared to the general public for interoperable reuse. As such, sensing covers the cycle of operations involving observations, perception, and communication (Sheth 2009). The nature of the human multi-sensor, driven by curiosity, has led to a diverse data collection related to health, traffic, (noise and other) pollution, weather, activities, commerce, and sports, i.e. serving many of our daily life needs. The distinction can also be made between public centric sensing, which is for the collecting of data and observations about the environment, personal centric sensing when participants monitor themselves, and social-centric participatory sensing when the data is shared with friends. The latter can provide higher motivation for participants to contribute own resources (Mousa et al. 2015). Various strategies exist to ensure and foster user engagement including profiling the target user group, the identification of the best channels for advertising and promotion, events like mapping parties, and the gamification approach. Another strategy to foster user participation, minimize user training, and increase usability is a well-designed user interface. One should also not rely solely on GPS but provide a map interface for manual point entry, because acquiring coordinates can take significant time (inaccessibility of objects) or is sometimes just impossible (limited GPS signal) (Brovelli et al. 2015). As participatory sensing usually works without

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incentives or rewards and thus lacks strong motivations to comply with the tasks’ requirements, Mousa et al. (2015) stress the vulnerability caused by participants that misbehave. No restrictions are imposed about the experience, concern, trustworthiness, and interest of the participants and as such participants might report false, corrupted or fabricated contributions, either intentionally or unintentionally. Therefore, trust systems are required which monitor participant behavior in order to estimate honesty. This is still a new field of research because each of the currently available trust systems only treat a few of the many relevant issues (e.g., behavior, honesty, reputation, knowledge, experience). In the meanwhile, there are three methods for assessing crowdsourced data quality (Rice 2015): (1) the crowdsourced approach where the community monitors data inputted and corrects errors; (2) the social approach where a team leader or moderators validate the data; and (3), the geographic approach where fundamental geographic rules and relationships are applied to identify problems and errors. Heat maps Heat maps have become very popular on the Internet although Oksanen et al. (2015) note that a textbook definition for these maps is still missing. One might question if the heat map concept should be listed as an additional cartographic representation method. According to Oksanen et al. (2015), the heat map has its origin in the representation of the intensity of a phenomenon in spectrometry and applies a rainbow color ramp. The method is used in fields where large amounts of data are handled, for instance with the use of eye tracking (see Dickmann et al. 2015) or for VGI (tweets, geotagging). However, the use of a rainbow color scheme appears cartographically incorrect. As Bertin (1982, 220) explains, the pure color hues of the spectrum being of the same intensity lead to two possibilities for a visually ordered sequence. This means that color hue has to be superadded by color value (lightness) in order to reveal an intuitively graspable, meaningful pattern. The only exception mentioned by Bertin (1982) is its use in an isoline map colored-in according to value ranges because in this case, the visual grouping of colors from the two ends of the spectrum will never show up next to each other. Besides, in cartography the visualizing of absolute figures in an areal presentation similar to a choropleth mapping is considered wrong. Only when the enumeration units are of the same size is using the visual variables of color (hue) and value in combination permitted (see data standardization in Slocum et al. 2010). Content-wise, Oksanen et al. (2015) present an excellent example which is based on sports tracking data, where a privacy-preserving heat map accounting for user diversity is presented. In that map the trajectories were gridded to reveal density (not counts). Values below a certain threshold (representing users) were filtered to ensure anonymization (even more critical for moving objects data) and to correct for participation inequality or self-selection bias. The 90:9:1 rule, a property known for VGI and online communities, describes that 90 % are followers and only consume the information, 9 % contribute from time-to-time, while 1 % is

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constantly active in contributing information and thus account for most contributions (Brovelli et al. 2015, Oksanen et al. 2015). With the mostly uninvestigated topic of balancing between location privacy and data accuracy (Oksanen et al. 2015), the example employed regression modeling with in-situ bicycle count data to judge the calibration results. Two issues have to be considered when creating correct heat maps: 1) a correction for participation inequality and the balancing between location privacy and data accuracy; and, 2) the preference of user density over user counts plus the use of a unipolar, converging color scheme based on an increase in value. Heat maps could be called a specific map type, but if applied according to the proven cartographic rules, they anyway fall under isoline (isopleth; isarithmic) or chorodot / grid net maps (cf. Oksanen et al. 2015). Demands on map properties, traditionally versus nowadays A listing of relevant map properties can be found in “Die Kartenwissenschaft” (map science) by Max Eckert (1921/25). Although stemming from one of the very first scientific cartographic textbooks, the listing of relevant map properties remained valid well beyond the advent of digital cartography. Eckert (1921/25) summarized that maps should be correct, complete, suited, clear, and understandable, as well as readable, and nice (vol. 1, 1921, 55: “Von der Karte wird gefordert, daß sie richtig, vollständig, zweckentsprechend, klar und verständlich, lesbar und schön sei.”). Table 1 (top) lists these map properties and related considerations. Cartographic correctness focuses on the accuracy of geometric properties, the labeling, and the appropriate usage of symbology. However, a map always remains a projection of the three-dimensionally shaped surface of the earth on a plane. Completeness is related to the geographic extent covered and the map scale as well as the map content (i.e. scientific state-of-the-art knowledge). Therefore, a certain degree of cartographic generalization will result in relative completeness. Appropriateness hints to the best choices regarding map scale, map projection, map format, and map symbology, and fine-tuning the map to reflect the needs of potential users. Eckert (1921/25) clarifies that if appropriateness fails, the map becomes simply a commodity. In contrast, clarity is influenced by map design and aims at matching what the cartographer anticipated with what the map user can interpret. Readability and beauty are linked to the technical solution of a convincing interplay between map design and map topic. With readability and beauty, Eckert (1921/25) suggests that harmony is especially important. Almost 100 years later, after considerable changes in map making and the evolvement of a digitally savvy society, expectations about maps are very different. Without consulting the literature, what seems to be significant demands on map properties nowadays are juxtaposed in table 1 (bottom) and discussed in the following. Maps have become fashionable and trendy and can even contribute to one’s lifestyle. However, questions of lifestyle or social distinction can become more important than the actual (geospatial) accurateness. Maps are expected to be informative and entertaining. Often they are now of a narrative character and or succeed

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in individual addressing. In short, they have become part of infotainment and edutainment (cf. Schaab et al. 2009). The most up-to-date information is not just demanded for the news, but is also expected in maps. Looking at the wide range of traditionally served maps, the feasibility of this demand is, however, strongly questioned. Map users take it for granted that whatever digital gadget they use, maps are to be displayed in comparable high quality. This demand for platform independence is still a real issue with mobile devices. Map users have always been keen to locate themselves on a map, but today they expect to find themselves at the center of every map. This fact leads to questions about our society and how it depicts itself. Maps should be interactive and therefore can be considered digital toys. Map features ideally include a dynamic link to a database – thus, just think of the enormous potential arising from big data. Finally, all this is to be offered free of charge with the cartographers left wondering where the recognition for their work will come from. The Traditional Properties of Maps* Demands Related Considerations accurateness, but projection of the earth surface onto correct a plane but cartographic generalization dep. on map scale complete and topic, i.e. relative completeness best choices in regard to map scale, map projection, suited map format and map symbology influenced by map design; result of map making vs clear, understandable map reading readable interplay between map design and map topic nice Properties of Maps Today Demands Related Considerations fashionable, trendy part of lifestyle informative and contributing to edutainment entertaining most up-to-date doable? platform-independent raising expectations user-centric perception of the society? interactive considered as toys dynamic driven by databases (big data) free of charge esteem? * Max Eckert (1921/25): Die Kartenwissenschaft. Table 1: Demands on map properties, traditionally (top) versus nowadays (bottom).

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Table 1 reveals that the major demands regarding map properties have tremendously changed over the past 100 years. Map design seems to be less linked to readable and nice-looking maps but to useful or exciting interactive functionality. From a cartographer’s perspective, the design of mobile maps has to be welladapted to the resource limitations resulting from mobility (in particular display size) and to the user context. However, Reichenbacher (2012) concludes that the majority of these maps neither consider the mobile use context nor the small presentation area. Often the same maps are used for printed maps and as web maps. THE POTENTIAL FOR MOBILE MAP APPLICATIONS Despite cartographic challenges, but triggered by technological advancements and human curiosity to explore new possibilities, the economy is driving an ever-increasing number of mobile map applications. Therefore, it is helpful to look at the app economy and the potential for mobile map applications for understanding the role of maps and cartography in this field as well as their impact on society. In 2015, 2.6 of 7.4 billion people worldwide had a smartphone subscription, while mobile cellular subscriptions were estimated to reach seven billion (mobiForge 2016). It means that those having access to a mobile phone exceed the number of people who have access to clean drinking water (Salz and Moranz 2013). According to Google’s (n.d.) “micro-moments,” people check their phones on average 150 times per day. With mobile user’s share of online sessions increasing and a decrease in time spent per session, Google concludes that informed decisions are made faster than ever before. This raises the question about how much time is sufficient to read a map properly. However, the time spent engaging with mobile apps is doubling each year. In Germany where there is a high penetration of smartphones (79.5 % of the population compared to 46 % having a tablet) more than one-third of smartphone Internet users said they spent over an hour each day on the mobile web (eMarketer 2016). In 2016, more than 66 billion mobile applications worldwide were downloaded with free apps expected to make up 87 % of those downloads. However, an estimated 80–90 % of apps eventually get deleted (Salz and Moranz 2013). Salz and Moranz (2013) explain this with increasing interest in mobile privacy, also given the fact that 30 % of users have turned off location tracking (based on a study with 2,200 US-Americans). The app economy began in 2008 (cf. Walravens 2015), and in the first five years created 794,000 jobs in the EU28 and revenues of over € 10 billion per year. Based on these figures, 22 % of the global production of app-related products and services came from the EU (VisionMobile 2013). VisionMobile (2015) estimates that in 2015 there were 1.3 million app developers in the EU with 846,000 being full-time professionals. Contract app work has become the biggest revenue category in the EU with 40 % of developers being engaged in this revenue model. As of 2015, the EU was the leading region in this category, as EU enterprises are creating demand for commissioned apps. In VisionMobile’s 2013 report, the advertising revenue model had been leading in the global sample as the source for re-financing

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development costs. As of 2015, in the EU, little more than half (51.4 %) of the app developers make more than $ 500 (US) per month, beating the worldwide average slightly (VisionMobile 2015). The other half lives below the ‘app poverty line,’ and cannot rely on apps as a sole source of income even when developing multiple apps (Salz and Moranz 2013). Salz and Moranz (2013) call this the ‘app gold rush’ with also only a tiny handful of individuals making a substantial profit. They argue that most developers lack the necessary marketing skills or contacts to make sure their apps are discovered. Interestingly, only 24 % of the developers plan their application based on discussions with users (VisionMobile 2013). Making money from apps is possible but difficult because app stores typically take 30 % of the revenue generated by an app (Iversen and Eierman 2014). First, the largest share of the marketplace is divided between a limited number of app development organizations. Therefore, the best way to make money from app development is to get paid as a consultant or contract developer (Salz and Moranz 2013). Third, income depends on the revenue model (Iversen and Eierman 2014, Salz and Moranz 2013). Pay-per-download is used in case of business apps with future updates free. Ad-supported apps generate significant money only when the embedded advertisements are being clicked on frequently. In-app content purchase, virtual goods, and add-ons create the opportunity of regular revenue. Here, the freemium model aims at getting many users as fast as possible to the pay threshold. By letting users pay for a better experience, one hopes for ‘app stickiness.’ This model can be combined with an ad-supported strategy which eliminates ads as a bonus for in-app purchases. In the news and publishing fields, the subscription model is becoming a popular choice. Forth, mobile apps have to target their potential users, commonly categorized in six age classes (Salz and Moranz 2013): 1) 8–12 years: named ‘constantly connected;’ 2) 13–17 years, the digital natives; 3) 18–24 years, generation M (for mobile); 4) 25–34 years, the millennials or generation Y; 5) 35–54 years, generation X; and 6) 55+ years, the baby boomers. Moreover, as Salz and Moranz (2013) discuss, making money is also significantly related to a minimum number of payment steps and the amount of data that needs to be entered by the consumer. Fu and Sun (2011) explain the difference in business and operation models by pointing to the ‘long tail theory:’ There are as many users at the head representing the mass market as there are along the curve’s long tail representing the niche markets. Consumer applications serve the mass market with limited but commonly used functions, such as mapping, search, and routing. The emphasis with consumer apps is usability. They are often free of charge as app makers hope for profit from advertising sponsors due to a large number of users. Niche markets target specialized needs with business-specific and diversified solutions or functions. These stem from the organizations themselves and are often solved via the configuration and customizing of professional software. Here the emphasis is clearly on functionality. Considering the geographic information economy, traditionally three actors were active: governmental agencies, private companies offering not only geodata and geographic information but also services, and the industry relying on geodata from either of the first two to conduct their core business. According to Ladstätter

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(2016), within this setting, the platform providers seem to have taken over. Platform providers add value by making geographic information accessible which enables and supports interactions between user groups. In other words, the providers benefit from social networks, but Ladstätter (2016) criticizes missing discussion and legislation on how citizens can participate in the intellectual and economic results from crowdsourced geographic data to which they have contributed. Walravens (2015) describes examples of business models that involve public actors in the smart city context that might shed light on strategies and potentials for advanced mobile services offered by cities to their constituency. The city government can actively stimulate projects in co-creation with their citizens and by interacting with large companies. Depending on which policy goals are to be achieved and which public value is to be created, the services can be placed within a grid described by two axes: The x-axis presents the resulting service’s value being short-term and for individuals or being long-term and for the broad public. The y-axis presents the control by the city over the service aiming at increasing quality of life for the entire public through improved interactions with the government or aiming at benefits for the economy and therefore narrowing governmental involvement. Ladstätter (2016) concludes that the evolution of the overall geoinformation market is fascinating: It has taken just one generation to turn a niche market shaped by governmental agencies into a global mass market with the chance to become a winner of the ‘2nd machine age’ (the first being the industrial revolution). According to Salz and Moranz (2013, 250), “mobile technology has unleashed a torrent of appreneurs, democratizing business on a global scale.” It is the ‘open API economy’ that allows for building a product quickly and for little money, thus providing the grounds for entrepreneurs. Google’s geospatial technologist Parsons (Van Wegen 2015, 16) adds, that “maps are now in the hands of hundreds of millions of people and are used by a billion people a month in the case of Google Maps.” TOWARDS MOBILE MAP APPS BECOMING USEFUL TOOLS TO THEIR USERS Criteria for convincing mobile map apps APIs in connection with software libraries simplify the programming of mobile map apps, as one only needs to understand how to link existing resources and not have advanced programming skills. However, it requires the knowledge, consideration, and application of fundamental aspects of cartography otherwise, mapping is just the mere manipulation of data using online tools (Peterson 2013). Therefore, based on our own (admittedly non systematic) observations made, twelve criteria for convincing mobile map applications have been elaborated here. Mobile map apps should (1) provide a correct projection of the earth and its objects, (2) be up-to-date (if not looking for a comparison over time), (3) apply a degree of generalization suitable to the map scale, (4) be user-oriented (serving the users’ needs), (5) be of high utility (for the envisaged purpose), (6) provide advanced usability

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(convincing users in regard to its handling), (7) be easily readable (i.e. of clarity and easy to memorize), (8) offer a functional as well as an appealing map design, (9) integrate automatization but not on the expense of the other criteria, (10) work with fast response times, (11) use resources in a considerate way, and (12) ensure platform independence (see also Tab. 2, left side). From the technical point of view, Reichenbacher (2012) lists a number of methods which have been developed for improving map readability and reducing complexity, for adjusting geographic relevance, for a best-suited representation of map information, and a minimal but meaningful base map. This allows relevant information to be emphasized while the map features get minimized, which is important for map display on small devices and not a new topic of research. What remains a challenge is that different display types and sizes result in varying map representations of maps if rendered on server side. A newly developed solution is called ‘responsive maps’ which renders maps on the fly on the client machines. This has become possible due to the higher performances of browsers and devices. An additional advantage of this technique is that it enables readable annotations regardless of the orientation of the device (Fischer et al. 2016). Relevance of the user-centered design Despite advances with technical solutions, it is the user who will determine if a mobile map app will work for him or not. Therefore, the empirical testing of cartographic products is considered relevant today and should be part of the development process. Roth et al. (2015a) describe the user-centered design (UCD) by pointing to the three U’s for interface success: user, utility, and usability. The triangular relationship is often considered in three loops within an iterative process including user participation. In the first step, the needs of the user and their characteristics are determined. Second, in response the utility threshold, or the functional requirements are set. Third, the usability is improved dependent on the threshold before finally returning to the user for an evaluation of the preliminary product. By following several iterations, the tradeoff between usability and utility can be balanced. In comparison, the ISO standard on UCD lists four activities due to splitting between use context and the user (Atzl 2016). What is also very common is to make a distinction between the entwined issues of usability (the effective, efficient and satisfying usage in a specified context; being quantifiable) and the user experience (UX, a person’s perception and response resulting from the use; being subjective, triggered by expectation and motivation) (Atzl 2016). The living lab approach goes a step further by considering local context and the user-centric approach, proposed as a more participatory ICT4D framework (referring to application of information and communication technologies for international development) (Baelden and Van Audenhove 2015). Here, the end-users become co-producers while the technology is being shaped by social and cultural contexts to fit real-life needs.

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As the mobile map app users are often ICT and geographic information laypeople, Hennig (2016) points to the necessity to consider not only the users and their characteristics but also their competencies as well as their functional and non-functional demands. General map reading abilities, experience in online map functionality, and knowledge of geographic information-related technical terms cannot always be taken for granted. Therefore, she advises to stick to established online maps, to avoid technical terms, and to aim at intuitive usage. Traun (2016) argues for a well-considered reduction in content and graphic design, which is reached when nothing more can be deleted without deteriorating the actual map purpose. Thus, not every digital map would require a scale bar or a legend, nevertheless fulfilling its function in an optimal way. Parsons (Van Wegen 2015) sees the importance of both a simplification of products and services but also the need for more educated users. The difficulty of orienting with a map due to lacking experiences and thus of providing correct spatial input can be named as examples of required user skills. According to Hennig (2016) both abilities are a prerequisite for a spatially-enabled society. Observations and conclusions from a cartographic point of view Several observations were made while exploring mobile map applications when preparing this chapter (Tab. 2, right side). The WebMercator projection has become the quasi-standard of openly accessible geo-browsers and therefore readily rendered tiled map services used for all-purpose, multi-scale web mapping. For computation efficiency, the projection is suitable for tasks like finding directions between two places without being strictly conformal. The precision of the map coordinates is only relative, as WebMercator projects the ellipsoidal WGS 84 coordinates onto a sphere. However, what about WebMercator’s distortion in area and distance? For most thematic maps an equal-area projection is required otherwise communication and interpretation of spatial patterns are hindered, while the shortcoming of not being an equidistant map projection is seemingly solved by doing without a scale bar (for a summary see Stefanakis 2015, for a detailed discussion and distortion examples see Battersby et al. 2014 or Müller 2015). Slippy maps have become state-of-the-art, however, the concept can only be called the most important development in online mapping (cf. Peterson and Cammack 2015) if two conditions are met: the possibility to pan freely and to zoom between multi-resolution representations. Often applications do without the laborsome preparing of multi-scale geodata where a dataset each serves a specific scale range based on a scale-dependent degree of generalization. Cartography on small displays has been a field of research since about 2000. Nevertheless, one expert states, “most current solutions suffer from cluttered maps of high complexity” (Reichenbacher 2012, 179). Reichenbacher (2012) lists many solutions for clutter of maps on small displays. Although many of the techniques are also useful for thematic maps allowing for detection of patterns in geographic distributions, the focus of research is clearly on maps for orientation which support location-aware services.

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Mobile Map Apps Criteria for Convincing Map Apps Commonly Made Observations correct map projection WebMercator projection up-to-dateness zoomable but single scale slippy maps suitable cartographic generalization cartography not serving small displays user-orientation ego-centric view of the world high utility lousy map design advanced usability triggered by open data policy clear readability many info-/edutainment examples by non-experts functional and appealing map design wise automatization huge fluctuations in offers fast response time hypes leading to fatigue vs potential due to low costs considerate resource use true platform independence Tab. 2: Criteria for convincing mobile map applications (left side) contrasting commonly made observations (right side).

Having had discussions in cartography for a long time about the limiting European-dominated world-view, one wonders about the current development. Morita (2005, 2) refers to ubiquitous mapping via “ego-centric mapping functions,” while Parsons (2013, 185) points to the “huge potential in providing user centric solutions.” Critique of the again ego-centric view seems not to exist and tells us a lot about today’s society whose activities are driven by mobile map apps which place the user in their centers. Due to technological advances these days, potentially anyone can create a map. Even Parsons (Van Wegen 2015) of Google acknowledges pretty poor maps as a result. Long-established cartographic design rules often do not seem to matter anymore. According to Gartner (2014), experts in geodata handling adapt to new technology but lack design skills although there are people like Becek (2010) who have adopted the claim of cartography of combining art, science, and technology also for geomatics. The increasing availability of mobile map apps is for sure triggered by the open data policy, which influences the offering of many useful applications. Nevertheless, many apps in particular from the infotainment and edutainment area have been developed not by domain experts but by common users. Often the apps’ usefulness or relevance can be questioned. This might be a reason for the vast fluctuation in map apps on offer. Walravens (2015, 238) describes this vast fluctuation as a “state of flux of the sector [where] some mobile initiatives quickly scale while others disappear just as fast.” In the developed world a general experience is that hypes tend to lead to fatigue. Therefore, industry puts a lot of effort in creating and maintaining the demand. For the less-developed parts on our world commonly the vast potential arising from the widespread usage of mobile phones is pointed out. Here high-tech solutions have become

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available to many for relatively low costs. But inequality does not only exist in terms of access to ICT, to which the digital divide is commonly linked, but increasingly it is also related to the ability to exploit the full potentials, thus leading to more substantial inequalities and social divisions even in developed societies (cf. Brovelli et al. 2015, Walravens 2005, Baelden and Van Audenhove 2015). For mobile map apps to be more than just toys but to be useful tools for their users we anticipate three main areas in need of improvement. Concerning technology, there is ample demand for a map projection system to replace WebMercator (for a suggestion see Jenny 2012) which despite its insufficiencies seems to have become a standard. Regarding usability, we argue for a general demand for truly slippy MSP maps, i.e. those offering map representations suiting whatever map scale is zoomed to. Moreover, regarding implementation, strong demand exists for training and sensitizing the developers to succeed in effective map graphics. In other words, cartography matters and developers should attend not only to technological advances, but also be paying attention to cartographic principles. According to MacEachren (2013), the discipline is too small to meet all the needs. Cartographers have always played their role in an interdisciplinary working field. By contributing strategies of how best to represent the world, cartographers should aim at “hav[ing] an impact proportionally to today’s importance of maps” (MacEachren 2013, 169). Citing the CEO of Waze, Noam Bardin, Ladstätter (2016, 75) notes that “what search is for the Web, maps are for mobile.” Parsons, Google’s Geospatial technologist, (Van Wegen 2015, 15) notes that “there is probably geography DNA in almost every product or service that you use on your mobile phone or on the Web nowadays.” In the Cartographic Journal’s 50th anniversary issue Parsons (2013, 185), however, contemplated the future of maps not being the primary way of representing contextual relevant geospatial information anymore by referring to a “user centric future of no maps.” Instead, mobile voice services are expected to explode. Due to advances in artificial intelligence user’s mobile personal smart assistants are even likely to learn what its owner wants to know (Salz and Moranz 2013). In comparison to the nature of digital geo-information being considered shortlived, printed paper maps are foreseen to survive as a premium, luxury product (Parsons 2013, Van Wegen 2015) that convinces via the high degree of confidence it radiates, its beauty, the feeling of satisfaction it provides, as well as its environmental friendliness (Buchroithner 2016). Nevertheless, mobile apps will transform the daily lives of millions, with utility becoming the focus of innovation (Salz and Moranz 2013). In this regard, cartography has a lot to offer, hopefully not only by supporting map services, which generate and deliver a map representation to a single user based on their requests at any time but also by overcoming today’s cartographic uniformity of mobile maps (cf. Reichenbacher 2012).

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ANALYSIS OF A FILMED URBAN AREA THROUGH A GIS TOOL: MADRID MOVIE MAP1 Víctor Aertsen / Agustín Gámir / Carlos Manuel / Liliana Melgar INTRODUCTION The development of the spatial humanities began around 2000 (Bauch 2017) and can be defined as a rapidly growing research field in which geography and the humanities converge. This spatial turn within the humanities is caused by the alignment of different factors including (1) the proliferation of digital information, (2) the increasing availability and openness of geographic information systems (GIS) and, (3) the perception that these technologies can eventually increase the possibilities of what these disciplines can achieve in terms of producing new knowledge. Some authors suggest that the tension between the humanistic and the scientific or technological sides of the spatial humanities is productive (Vélez-Serna 2015). Some cartographers defend the alliance between the spatial humanities and GIS, advocating for a geohumanities research agenda that makes use of cartographic displays and visual mappings as a mode of inquiry and a creative way to communicate with different audiences (Dodge 2017). However, as Delyser and Sui (2012) point out, although massive databases are available to those who may not have previously considered using them, not all of the spatial humanities involve quantitative methods or GIS. For example, Conley’s (2006) Cartographic Cinema is concerned with how filmmakers operate like mapmakers and explores the extent to which mapping and filmmaking works as locational instruments, but Conley does not include any GIS techniques. On the other hand, there are some critical views about the productive alliance between theory and technology. Silveira (2014) writes that the spatial turn is placing too much emphasis on technology instead of the specific problems of a discipline. Borgman (2009, 10) points out that although encouraging a synthesis and synergy between qualitative and quantitative approaches in humanistic research is important, the direction of the investigation must be under the leadership of the researchers from the different fields in humanities who “need to be at the table as fundamental infrastructure decisions are being made.” When technology gets into the picture, most of the researchers working in spatial humanities are not seeking to produce mere visual presentations in which maps are the end product. Rather, humanities-based researchers are seeking to 1

This study is part of the research project El espacio geográfico de Madrid en el cine y su potencial turístico, financed by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (Ref. CSO2013-46835-R).

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apply digital methods that can take geographic research beyond its current possibilities. We should remember that the aforementioned spatial turn has led to increased attention on geographical space from points of view that transcend the traditional frame of the geographical discipline, focusing and reflecting on different spatial phenomena in fields as diverse as history, sociology, anthropology, psychology, the plastic arts, literature and media studies. It is precisely on the relationship of geography, film and media, and communication that this chapter will focus. Adams (2017, 366) has quantified in the last two decades more than 200 articles and books chapters that address media studies from a spatial point of view. Nevertheless, he considers that there is still some disorganization and absence of a paradigm that unifies these contributions (Adams 2017). There have been significant advances in historical, literary and media studies concerning spatial humanities, and some authors have theorized and showed its potential and utility. Our study contributes to this growing body of literature, mapping cinematic locations through a webGIS and using geospatial data to examine the cinema produced in a territory (Klenotic 2011; Lukinbeal 2012; 2018; Sharp 2018). While in the last decade there have been enormous advances in the methodologies and technologies associated with geoparsing, the processes by which unstructured information such as names or toponyms are automatically associated with normalized and georeferenced lists (Gregory et al. 2015), the analysis of audiovisual footage brings some significant difficulties that still have to be solved. Currently, the process of identification, classification, and georeferencing of contents from audiovisual sources is predominantly carried out manually, making it an arduous enterprise. At institutions such as the Common Lab Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (CLARIAH) digital tools are being developed that will allow different types of automatic analysis of audio-visual materials such as speaker identification, shot detection, face recognition, and color analysis. In recent years, multiple web platforms have implemented links that allow users to identify with spatial precision those urban places which have been used as film settings. However, the list of cities in which this is possible is small and there is certain heterogeneity when it comes to content and spatial areas. With regard to documentaries, the work of some national film libraries that include this information on their websites is noteworthy. The British Film Institute (http://player.bfi.org. uk/britain-on-film/map/) map of British cities includes information on thousands of feature and documentary films from the birth of cinema to the present. Similarly, the Danish Film Institute (see http://filmcentralen.dk/museum/danmark-paa-film) map of cities includes reference to 431 documentary films produced between 1899 and 1965. As far as commercial feature films are concerned, in addition to the British Film Institute, many interesting examples can be found on the Internet. The Cultural Atlas of Australia (http://australian-cultural-atlas.info/CAA/index.php) includes an interactive digital map with a representative sample of 150 outstanding contemporary films. Although the platform does not provide access to the movie clips, the link includes information rarely present on other sites such as identifying not only where a film was shot but also where the story was set. The work of Max Galka and

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Steve Melendez (http://metrocosm.com/filmed-in-nyc-3-years-517-movies-17241filming-locations/) shows a map of New York in which sections of the streets where issued film permits by the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting. This data set represents 517 films and 17,241 locations for the period between 2011 and 2013. A private initiative, Map Hook (see http://www.maphook.com/mapofsfmovies) presents several movie maps of different cities of the world. In the case of San Francisco, 1,586 filming locations with open data from the San Francisco Film Commission have been mapped. This initiative is offered as an application for mobile devices. In Canada, professors Sébastien Caquard and Jean-Pierre Fiset are developing a tool (see http://atlascine3.classone-tech.com/index.html, still in beta) that allows users to create their own maps of filmed stories. The page offers a dozen examples with a map for each film. This dynamic cartography tries to solve some of the problems of aligning the cinematographic and cartographic formats, including jump cut framing and audio-visual mapping (Caquard and Carwright 2014; Caquard and Fiset 2014). The spatial humanities have also been applied to the study of film exhibition and distribution patterns. In such cases, the focus has not been on the analysis of filmed content but rather on the reception and cinema-going patterns. An example of a cartographic approach to cinematic reception studies is the project Data-driven Film History: A Demonstrator of EYE’s Jean Desmet Collection. This project is a collaboration between the EYE Film Institute in the Netherlands, Amsterdam University, and the University of Utrecht. The project created a web map of 2,361 films (http://mappingdesmet.humanities.uva.nl/) associated with Jean Desmet, a famous film distributor and cinema owner in the Netherlands (1875–1956). Based on the alignment of data from three databases that contained different information regarding these films, the resulting map of the Netherlands shows the Dutch cities where a given film was exhibited. It also shows the number of movies that were presented in each city when Jean Desmet was alive. Users can search the website by year, production company, director, genre, formats, and color, amongst other things. Another exciting initiative related to cinematic web mapping is the incorporation of family videos into geomaps. On the one hand, this allows the emergence of an audiovisual material in which, in the context of a family experience, shows how the city was in the past and how it is in the present, which would not be otherwise accessible to the public. On the other hand, it helps citizens to identify and become more aware of their cities at a time when many municipalities are placing increasing importance on citizen participation. The Liverpool Mapping the City in Film project (https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/architecture/research/cava/cityfilm/map/), led by Julia Hallam and Les Roberts, includes a selection of embedded videos of digitized films of the city made by amateur filmmakers and others dating back to the 1930s (Hallam and Roberts 2013). A similar initiative in Italy is the National Family Film Archive, which began in the early 2000s with the mission to preserve amateur and family films. The archive, founded by Home Movies Association (http://www.homemovies.it/), has collected nearly 20,000 records in their original format (8mm, Super8, 16mm). These films are preserved not only by Italian families but also by companies, schools, parishes, and associations. In most cases, the

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films document the everyday lives of people who visually record their holidays, trips, events or landscapes. In this chapter, we introduce the Madrid Movie Map tool (http://geocine.uc3m. es/mmmap.html), in which a broad and delimited corpus of films and their locations are collated. This project provides a spatial reference for many features films of Madrid in addition to a series of utilities that allow for spatial and narrative analysis of those films. The Madrid Movie Map does not include documentaries, animation films, or shorts. In the following pages we describe the methodology used in the compilation of the information contained in this webGIS tool, a reflection on its possible applications, a spatial analysis of the distribution of film locations in the city of Madrid and, finally, an example of a GIS analysis of the film The Cold Light of Day. METHODOLOGY FOR A CINEMA-CITY WEBGIS In order to create a cinema-city webGIS of Madrid, the methodology proposed is organized into four phases: (1) a film corpus selection, based on the identification and selection of movie titles; (2) a scene and fine-grained clip selection, based on film viewing, scene identification and creation of clip files; (3) georeferencing and fieldwork, and (4) data processing and manipulation in the GIS. In the first phase, we identify those feature films supposedly filmed in the city through an exhaustive search of information in different bibliographic (books, articles), encyclopedic (databases, film guides) and journalistic (blogs, newspapers) resources. In the case of Madrid, this step resulted in the identification of more than 2,000 films. Because it is so extensive, the list of films has to be ranked so that it works with a selected number of feature, an activity that can be performed by following different criteria that is discussed below. The ranking of titles in our methodology is based on the premise that one of the most interesting insights of a cinema-city webGIS is the level of filmic representation of a city and its impact on spectators. We thus considered that titles had to be ranked in terms of their social visibility and according to an a priori geographical point of view. As such, we applied as the main selection criteria the scores the public gave to each film in two internet databases (IMDb and Filmaffinity). This hierarchy allowed us to work with a small number of significant films that used Madrid as its backdrop. For each of the chosen titles, we gathered relevant metadata from the films (director, release year, production company, genre films) to produce a ‘movies file’ for use in the GIS database. After we selected the corpus of titles to be analyzed, the second phase required viewing each of the films in order to select relevant outdoor scenes that could be georeferenced. We also attributed outdoor scenes that were public transportation (airports, train stations, metro) and discarded indoor scenes. Each of the outdoor scenes were stored in a folder and their file names were used to create a ‘scenes file.’ For the ‘scenes file’ we created relevant information as to when they occurred in the movie (start, end, and duration) and general visual and narrative qualities (night/

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day, static/dynamic). Keeping in this level the narrative integrity of each scene, we distinguished different kinds of scenes in terms of how they functioned from a narrative and spatial perspective. We classified scenes as being either situated (where the outdoor scene situates an indoor scene), fixed (where the scene develops in a fixed outdoor location), itinerary (where the narration moves through different locations), or as a montage sequence (where the scene includes a number of locations but no forward moving narrative action). Since some of these scenes included interior locations (situated) or different locations (some itineraries and montage sequences), we felt that we needed to refine the analytic filmic scale down from an entire scene to a single film clip. In our project, a film clip is defined as the smallest temporal unit of a scene that also contains spatial information that can be georeferenced. Classification codes used for the film clips included the duration, place description, type of take, geographic administrative boundary information, geographical coordinates, narrative place, and whether it was tourist landmark or not. The third phase of the methodology focused on working with our spatial knowledge of the city and different geovisual tools (historical maps, old photographs, Google Earth and Street View) to georeference the film clips. As of the time of writing this chapter, we have georeferenced 1,491 of 2,163 film clips initially identified, a success rate of 68.9 %. In order to increase this identification rate, we did fieldwork to rule out, correct, or check how much change a place had undergone since the movie. In order to present a summary view, we picked one representative frame from each film clip. When it was possible, we also developed a file of still photographs in order to compare them with their individual film frame, revealing some interesting urban transformations. In the fourth phase of our approach, we connected and stored the graphic materials (the scenes, the frames, and still photographs), and the tabular files (movies, scenes, and clips), in the GIS. Using the GIS we produced different cartographic products of the filmed city in different temporary periods, by certain types of genres, the filmography of a specific director, and the geography of a particular film. The GIS also provides spatial analysis tools that relate film locations with other geographic information such as urban growth, architectural milestones, and tourist relevance. Because the duration of each clip is a variable in the GIS, it is possible to weight the density of shooting by duration at locations. From our point of view, the weighting of locations by the duration of film shooting is of great importance. Figure 1 offers an example of weighting by duration. A future spatial analysis technique of the Madrid Movie Map being considered for develop is a density map that would show the narrative intensity of film clips by location. This methodology fits into one of the necessary relations between cartography and a film’s narrative pointed out by Caquard (2013, 136): mapping as an instrument to represent the spatio-temporal structures of a film’s stories. We are also aware that some questions are not entirely resolved by this methodology, as is the case with the representation of motion sequences or the linking of the different narrative intensities of the fragments to different filmed spaces.

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Figure 1: Filming locations in Madrid (1944-2015). Above: unweighted locations. Below: locations weighted according to the length of each clip

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The methodology described above revealed issues for future consideration as well. First, some difficulties arose from the translation of pictures in motion – in which it is not only the characters and vehicles that move but also the camera – into cartographic language, which is essentially static and, in the case of filmed locations, reduced to a point on the map. Specifically, we have detected problems in the following situations: a) aerial shots or elevated points; b) when the camera pans or travels; and, c) when the depth of field combines important foreground and background information in the same frame. It is foreseeable that the forms of dynamic web mapping that are being tested today will solve some of these problems in the future. Secondly, the process of georeferencing film clips was not entirely exhaustive due to the difficulty of identification. This is particularly the case in the following situations: (1) in places that have undergone intense transformation, something especially problematic with old movies that lack detailed information about their locations; (2) in places on the urban periphery that exhibit similar urban and architectural patterns across diverse environments. This last circumstance requires a higher capacity for scene recognition in centrally located spaces in the city, or those corresponding to unique environments from a formal point of view. Consequently, the authors acknowledge that the task of scene recognition, in the case of the peripheral areas of Madrid, requires more work for correct identification and further research as to how to best achieve accurate georeferencing results. POSSIBLE APPLICATIONS OF CINEMA-CITY WEBGIS The development of a GIS with a large volume of georeferenced movie clips gives rise to a series of applications and utilities. First, the present project may be extrapolated to any urban environment and thus this research provides a case study for future cinema-city WebGIS deployment. Second, because the Madrid Movie Map offers accessibility to a wide audience, it serves as a cultural resource and archive for the general public and researchers in various fields including geographers, ecologists, landscape technicians, historians, art historians, heritage experts, urban planners and architects, sociologists, film scholars, among others. In the last decades, the number of tourists visiting cities has increased substantially. In parallel with this increase has come the development of new forms of urban tourism. One of these is film tourism, a concept first proposed by Riley and Van Doren (1998), that includes those journeys whose primary motive is to travel through the most significant places where audiovisual content has been filmed. Although film tourism initially referred to only feature films, at present film tourism includes other audiovisual products such as television series. In this sense, GIS can be used by a city whose aim is to develop tourism strategies based on audiovisual products. The creation of the Madrid Movie Map makes sense in terms of increasing available use and access of information, due to the different search and filtering options that it provides (Figure 2). Thus, this tool can be a relevant for media stud-

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ies (or to respond to the simple curiosity of the amateur) that allows analysis of the spatial projection of the city filmed in a given period, by one or more directors, in a specific movie or a film genre, or even according to the type of shots (pending development). We consider that the georeferencing of the exterior shots shown in a particular film, or group of films, provides researchers with further avenues of analysis that in many cases may help unravel some of the narrative cues of the films in question, which will be exemplified later in this paper.

Figure 2: Screen capture from http://geocine.uc3m.es/mmmap.html

This material may be of interest to local administrations for several reasons. It can help in the development of different studies, projects or interventions in the landscape offering, for example, images of films that show urban scenarios that the administration plans to recover or rehabilitate but have undergone significant transformations since the time they were filmed. Besides, this material can contribute to cinematographic exhibitions which are dedicated to the representation of specific neighborhoods of the city, thus helping citizens develop a bond with their residential environment through cinema (Aertsen et al. 2018). The utility mentioned in the preceding paragraph refers, broadly, to the possibilities provided by this georeferenced visual material in detecting and evincing urban transformation (analysis of this utility can be found in Aertsen et al. 2015b). In this sense, and considering the historical parallelism between the significant modifications and extensions of urban spaces and the development of the film medium, cinema becomes a witness – often involuntary – of various spatial changes. Cinema comes to be the record of the extensions and urban expansions, character-

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ized by the emergence of new neighborhoods, and even more of the specific urban and architectural remodeling, affecting a block or a building. Movies become a privileged witness of no longer existing architectural elements because of the destruction of diverse elements of urban heritage. Films can also show changes in transport infrastructures, from airport facilities to railway stations, tram networks, as well as roads. These changes may include the elimination of traffic to the pedestrianization of certain streets. Other kinds of urban change can also be documented and georeferenced through cinema and GIS including those urban changes related to the conservation or rehabilitation of buildings, or the abandonment and degradation of buildings and neighborhoods. Changes in the uses of certain urban environments can also be witnessed in the film clips and referenced to specific neighborhoods including the occupation of buildings or the transformations of the vegetation of streets and parks, which in the case of Madrid has been very remarkable. Another remarkable value of the Madrid Movie Map is linked to its cultural weight, which connects with its historical value as an audiovisual archive. In this sense, the Madrid Movie Map acts as a cultural input that could undoubtedly be used in conjunction with other creative artifacts (photography, painting, literature or music) that help create successive and complementary layers of cultural heritage. The ludic and educative potential that these tools provide should also be highlighted. The pleasure involved in recognizing scenes which remain alive in the memory of individuals helps to reinforce affinities a citizen may hold for his or her urban area of reference, especially in the case of the more elderly sections of the population. Recognition may come about because the citizen has lived in the referred area (which may have undergone various changes) or has seen it shown in different films, especially those dating from particular periods in time. In the case of Madrid, the possibility of developing applications such as games of place-recognition through movie images is yet another of our considerations; as well as the direct involvement of the citizens of Madrid in the process of identification, and the consequent assignment of geographical coordinates, of those scenes that the research team hasn’t been able to georeference. We also consider that the visualization of such materials through games and other products that combine the cinematographic image and the geographic space can help stir public interest in films that are currently outside the commercial circuits but offer exciting pictures of the city. The regional film commissions or urban film offices that serve as intermediaries between film producers and the city, may use cinema-city WebGIS platforms to attract new cinematographic productions by showing a catalog of mapped scenes filmed in the city. This catalog acts in a demonstrative way, ensuring that the cinematographic resources of the city have already been previously tested satisfactorily. It also provides a link between GIS and movie tourism that can create local business opportunities: movie tourism routes, firms dedicated to measuring the impact that certain movies or television series have on the sale businesses (from stores, franchises, shopping centers) which have been or are going to be filmed. While regional film commissions may use very different strategies to attract audiovisual productions, there is no doubt that there is a universal appeal in the fact that the territory

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Figure 3: Evidence of urban transformation in the Glorieta de Carlos V (Atocha) from a frame of Operation Ogro (D: Pontecorvo, Italy, Spain: 1979), above, and the current image, below

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publicized for new audiovisual projects has been previously employed for similar purposes. In this sense, the possibilities of a GIS are apparent, since specific search engines can be activated in both urban environments and natural or rural areas (for example, by identifying properly georeferenced scenes of films corresponding to a given type of landscape). The information registered in the GIS could also act as a means of promoting the image of a city. The general interest in feature films allows certain well-targeted advertising campaigns to multiply the visual power of particular urban environments or landmarks; the link between narration and urban reality has, in many cases, a remarkable force of attraction on the spectator. For this reason, the inclusion in the GIS of successful films or films with visual relevance, linked to the urban environment through its precise location, is a simple way of disseminating an “urban brand.” This can be applied to the marketing strategies of relevant institutions or companies in urban or metropolitan environments; examples of campaigns in this regard have already been made, such as the well-known Underground Film Map of London (https://www.ltmuseumshop.co.uk/posters/transport/undergroundfilm-map-poster). However, the elaboration of videos or exhibitions (including scenes, photographs, film posters, etc.) with this kind of content may also be of interest in the brand marketing of infrastructures that have a wide presence in the city, such as airports, railway and metro stations. Finally, but concerning the two previous aspects, this type of tool has certain benefits from the perspective of tourism, offering the possibility to draw up cinematographic tours and create products à la carte. As is already the case in many urban areas, current communication technologies and locative media can be used to facilitate the creation and dissemination of materials that are of interest to culture and the tourism sector and which can be commercially exploited by both governments and companies alike. SPATIAL ANALYSIS OF THE DISTRIBUTION OF FILM LOCATIONS IN THE CITY OF MADRID If we observe the six maps included in figure 4, as the statistical parameters indicate, it may be seen that there is a clear tendency in Madrid to use peripheral areas of the city for filming. That is, there has been a considerable increase in the geographical range of visual imagery used by filmmakers over time in Madrid. However, this tendency, which dates back more than a half a century, has been accompanied by some significant peculiarities. First, the film locations are essentially limited to the districts that constitute the so-called central kernel of the city, since two-thirds of the films are concentrated in only six city districts (Centro, Arganzuela, Retiro, Salamanca, Tetuán and Chamberí) out of a total of twenty-one districts. Throughout the decades of the fifties and sixties, we can observe a clear preference for the most central spaces of the city (Figure 5). During the fifties (139 clips), the shooting sites are concentrated in the Centro district (consisting of about 54 %

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Figure 4a: Spatial distribution of the shooting locations in Madrid during the decades 1950 to 1969

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Figure 4b: Spatial distribution of the shooting locations in Madrid during the decades 1970 to 1989

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Figure 4c: Spatial distribution of the shooting locations in Madrid during the decades 1990 to 2009

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of the footage) as well as in some nearby and significant places such as the Parque del Retiro, Casa de Campo and Ciudad Universitaria which are the most central and relevant places of Madrid. Generally shot in black-and-white, this is a cinema that was neo-realistic in form (although not in content) and because of budgetary difficulties associated with filming in studios cinema in the fifties made great use of outdoor scenes (Deltell 2006). There is an increase in the number of clips (200) from the sixties and, although the previous locations are maintained, part of the Ensanche (Salamanca district) is more clearly added as a location for filming.

Figure 5: Frame from Los peces rojos (D: Nieves Conde, Spain: 1955).

The trend towards more disperse film locations continues during the 1970s (149 clips), however, a change in the spatial distribution of filming may be observed. The East-West layout of filmed locations that corresponds roughly to the ‘Monumental axis’ of the city, which is largely linked to the Gran Via and nearby areas, is replaced by a North-South axis that follows the urbanization and growth of the city in the north. The new functional districts that were developed in the north were filmed as a symbol of Madrid’s apparent modernity and cosmopolitanism (Figure 6). In this way, we observe a certain abandonment of the narrow streets of the historic center in the 1970s (which reduced its presence to 26.2 % of the shootings in this period), with the outstanding exception of the core of Gran Via. The distribution of the filmed sites during the 1980s (233 clips) implies a rediscovery of the historical center by a new generation of directors, such as Pedro Almodóvar and José Luis Garci (Figure 7). This period represented a political and economic transition and an increase in the number of clips shot in the Centro district (52.7 %). The Centro district provided the setting for numerous stories related to sociological phenomenon such as the “Movida” of Madrid. The presence of new highways such as the M-30, especially in its eastern sector, is also important, and

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Figure 6: Frame from Cría cuervos (D: Saura, Spain: 1976)

Figure 7: Frame from El crack (D: Garci, Spain: 1981)

explains the weight of districts such as Ciudad Lineal. The plot of some of the films from this decade show the tension between the city center, in which part of the plot develops, and the periphery, where some of the protagonists reside. In the decade of the nineties (205 clips) there is a trend towards spatial dispersion, as can be seen on the map (Figure 4) with the prominence of nodes such as Plaza de Castilla, new iconic buildings such as the so-called Torres Kio, as well as some streets near Parque del Retiro. In contrast, the presence of the central district and the Gran Via is reduced to 35.6 %. Finally, during the first decade of the 21st century, there is a substantial increase in the number of clips (333) and a continuation of the trend toward spatial dispersion.

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SPATIO-NARRATIVE ANALYSIS OF A FILM SHOT IN MADRID: THE COLD LIGHT OF DAY In addition to allowing a general spatial analysis of the cinematic representation of the city of Madrid, the information included in the database can be used to support the analysis of a specific film. For example, The Cold Light of Day is an actionthriller starring Bruce Willis, Sigourney Weaver, Henry Cavill, and Veronica Echegui, in which most of the story takes place in Madrid. It was possible to identify the location of 35 out of 48 film clips (72.9 % success) from this film. Although the rest of the scenes were filmed in the environments more or less recognizable, the technical quality of the image (short shots, night scenes, etc.) have prevented their location from being identified. Figure 8 shows a map of the film, where the points correspond to the places where the film develops its scenes.

Figure 8: Map of shooting locations in Madrid for the film The Cold Light of Day (D: El Mechri, USA, Spain: 2014)

Unlike other fictions in which the same diegetic places are repeated, The Cold Light of Day’s narrative does not repeat its locations (with one exception), which constantly leads the viewer through the city. In this sense, the film presents: (1) a narrative that establishes an unstructured displacement through the space of Madrid, with which the characters are related as if it was a labyrinth; and, (2) a spatial organization created with the intention of preventing the viewer from being able to establish any kind of spatial link during its development, in a kind of ‘game of misleading’ correlated to the story itself.

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The map shows that most of the locations are concentrated on what could be defined as the ‘Monumental axis’ or ‘tourist axis’ of Madrid. This axis diagonally crosses the center of the city and links Plaza Mayor, Plaza de Callao, Puerta del Sol, Plaza de Cibeles, and Puerta de Alcalá. This axis extends eastwards to Las Ventas bullring and westwards to the church of San Francisco el Grande. All these emblematic places are shown in the film. While the map in figure 8 refers to a contemporary film, it has a similar distribution to locations from the 1950s film locations shown in figure 4. This is not surprising given that figure 8 refers to a foreign film production. Unlike other international titles shot in Spain such as Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which integrates tourist locations in its drama (Aertsen 2011), in The Cold Light of Day none of the emblematic places of Madrid used as settings participate actively in the drama. However, this does not prevent the film from using them, revealing the desire of its creators to offer a tourist view of the city of Madrid as a bonus to the narrative. Although the characters only transit the city frantically, as the genre demands, the film proposes that the viewer visits it, thus meaning that the story functions as both a narrative itinerary in and a tourist itinerary through the city of Madrid. If one examines how pro-filmic places are inhabited and filmically connected it seems that many films adopt a tourist-friendly look to their visual organization. Emblematic places are not only represented as places where people live but are also shown as places where touristic experiences occur. There are several examples of how The Cold Light of Day combines narrative and tourist-like exposition. First, when the film follows a character resting in Plaza de Callao after an arduous chase, it is also inviting the viewer to calmly contemplate a central space customarily used by travelers as a junction between different commercial arteries of the city. Likewise, when the film highlights an encounter in the square of Puerta del Sol, the only meeting in the plot, it is sharing with the viewer a typical meeting point for visitors and residents of the city. In another example, an intense chase scene through the center of Madrid and precincts may also be seen as a visual suggestion to the viewer to cross the Plaza Mayor and wind his or her way around its columns and discover its surrounding streets. A syncopated montage that shows the cityscape from different perspectives during a car chase may also suggest a rapid photographic-type perspective of the Puerta de Alcalá. Finally, there is the climactic scene in the “arena” where various threads of the plot are brought to a head but which also converts the environment of the Las Ventas bullring into a visual protagonist. In several scenes in which the temporal continuity of the dramatic action indicate the continuity of the spaces transited, the film assembles places far apart in the urban reality of Madrid, establishing different spatial ellipses and concentrated topologies by which the distances that separate them have been drastically shortened (Aertsen et al. 2015a). This is the case, for example, in a scene which shows the protagonist being pursued and which cuts directly from one of the streets that surround the Plaza Mayor to the Parque del Retiro, and shortly after from there to the area of El Rastro. This phenomenon, together with those previously mentioned, participates in the creation of the ‘tourist look’ proposed by the film whereby

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specific landmarks are presented familiarly. Unlike reality, however, the distances that separate them are shortened, jumping from one to another without paying attention to the spaces in between. Additionally, for viewers familiar with the streets and buildings of Madrid, these spatial ellipses can reinforce their own filmic experience and suggest a kind of game in which the viewer reconstructs in his or her mind the changes in location experienced by the characters, thus participating in the spatial jumps proposed by the narrative and its accompanying sensation of rush and disorientation. CONCLUSIONS In recent years, developments in studies that link the humanities with geography have witnessed the progressive digitization and georeferencing of content. Consisting of the digitization of previously unstructured information, this process also affects areas such as literature and history and falls under the field of what Horak (2016) has called the spatial humanities, which uses audio-visual registries (fiction and documentary films) as primary data sources. What has been presented in this chapter is a study of the relations between geographic and cinematic space observed in a major European city, Madrid. The Madrid Movie Map is an ambitious project that, at the moment, has georeferenced more than a thousand spatial-visual fragments corresponding to 250 films. This lavish volume of information, inserted in a GIS, not only allows us to address different types of spatial analysis, but also facilitates the realization of partial studies, whether of a historical period, of a director, or of the spatial organization of the different fragments of a specific film, such as The Cold Light of Day. Unlike other cultural works such as literary texts, paintings or photographs, unraveling and rediscovering the “spatialization” contained in cinematographic works raises serious difficulties in the presentation of information, and not all of these issues have been entirely resolved. This is so much the case that on other occasions the authors of this chapter have chosen to present this project via video-essays, transforming the written text into speech and placing the maps into the moving image, a form which is increasingly more popular due to its communicative value. To show feature films or documentaries which have spatial and temporary dimensions involves developing cartographic adaptations in which the paper format is not the most appropriate. WebGIS sites such as the Madrid Movie Map that present both the spatial distribution of filming locations, as well as the clips themselves, offer a definite improvement over a printed map. However, as has been pointed out in this text, there are still some representational problems such as those that occur with film clips where camera movement takes place. In short, we consider that a tool of these characteristics is essential for the development of the following applications: 1) the recovery for urban purposes of images of already transformed spaces, given the capacity of cinematography to record the changes experienced by the city; 2) the reinforcement of the spatial imaginary associated with this city, whether by

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its inhabitants or its visitors; and 3) a complementary utility for any tourist activity that takes place in the city. REFERENCES Adams, P. C. (2017): Geographies of media and communication I: Metaphysics of encounter. Progress in Human Geography 41 (3), 365–374. Aertsen, V. (2011): El cine como inductor del turismo: La experiencia turística en Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona. Razón y Palabra 77 (2). Aertsen, V., A. Gámir and C. Manuel (2015a): Las relaciones espaciales en el cine: revisión conceptual y propuesta analítica. A. F. de Azevedo, R. Cerarols Ramírez and W. Machado de Oliveira Jr. (Eds.): Intervalo II: entre Geografias e Cinemas. Braga, 41–80. Aertsen, V., A. Gámir and C. Manuel (2015b): El cine de ficción y el estudio de las transformaciones urbanas: El caso de Madrid. M. A. Chaves Martín (Ed.): Ciudad y Comunicación. Madrid, 39–48. Aertsen, V., A. Gámir and C. Manuel (2018): La imagen cinematográfica de la Plaza Mayor de Madrid. Ciudad y territorio: Estudios territoriales L (197), 539–556. Bauch, N. (2017): Digital Geohumanities: Visualizing Geographic Thought. International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing 11 (1), 1–15. Borgman, C. L. (2009): The digital future is now: A call to action for the humanities. Digital Humanities Quarterly 3 (4). http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/4/000077/000077.html (accessed March 20, 2019). Caquard, S. (2013): Cartography I: Mapping Narrative Cartography. Progress in Human Geography 37 (1), 135–144. Caquard, S. and W. Carwright (2014): Narrative Cartography: From Mapping Stories to the Narrative of Maps and Mapping. The Cartographic Journal 51 (2), 101–106. Caquard, S. and J. P. Fiset (2014): How can we map stories? A cybercartographic application for narrative cartography. Journal of Maps 10 (1), 18–25. Conley, T. (2006): Cartographic Cinema. Minneapolis. Deltell, L. (2006): Madrid en el cine de la década de los cincuenta. Madrid. DeLyser, D. and D. Sui (2012): Crossing the qualitative quantitative divide II: Inventive approaches to big data, mobile methods, and rhythm analysis. Progress in Human Geography 37 (2), 293–305. Dodge, M. (2017): Cartography I: Mapping deeply, mapping the past. Progress in Human Geography 41 (1), 89–98. Gregory, I., P. Donaldson, P. Murrieta-Flores and P. Rayson (2015): Geoparsing, GIS, and Textual Analysis: Current Development in Spatial Humanities Research. International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing 9 (1), 1–14. Hallam, J. and L. Roberts (2013): Locating the Moving Image. New Approaches to Film and Place. Bloomington and Indianapolis. Horak, L. (2016): Using Digital Maps to Investigate Cinema History. C. R. Acland and E. Hoyt (Eds.): The Arclight Guidebook to Media History and the Digital Humanities. Brighton, 65– 102. Klenotic, J. (2011): Putting Cinema History on the Map: Using GIS to Explore the Spatiality of Cinema. R. Maltby, D. Biltereyst and P. Meers (Eds.): Explorations in New Cinema History. Approaches and Case Studies. Hoboken, 58–84. Lukinbeal, C. (2012): “On Location” Filming in San Diego County from 1985–2005: How a Cinematic Landscape Is Formed Through Incorporative Tasks and Represented Through Mapped Inscriptions. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 102 (1), 171–190. Lukinbeal, C. (2018): The Mapping of ‘500 Days of Summer’: A Processual Approach to Cine-

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matic Cartography. NECSUS, December 9, 2018. https://necsus-ejms.org/the-mapping-of-500-days-of-summer-a-processual-approach-to-cinematic-cartography/ (accessed March 16, 2019). Riley, R. and C. S. van Doren (1998): Movie induced Tourism. Annals of Tourism Research 25 (4), 919–935. Sharp, L. (2018): Embodied Cartographies of the Unscene: A Feminist Approach to (Geo)Visualising Film and Television. NECSUS, December 9, 2018. https://necsus-ejms.org/embodied-cartographies-of-the-unscene-a-feminist-approach-to-geovisualising-film-and-television-production/ (accessed March 16, 2019). Silveira, L. (2014): Geographic Information System and Historical Research: An Appraisal. International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing 8 (1), 28–45. Vélez-Serna, M. A. and J. Cauguie (2015): Remote Locations: Early Scottish Scenic Films and Geo-Databases. International Journal of Humanities and Art Computing 9 (2), 164–179.

FILMS Cría cuervos. Director: Carlos Saura. Spain: Elías Querejeta Producciones Cinematográficas S.L., 1976. El crack. Director: José Luis Garci. Spain: Acuarius Films S. A., Impala, Nickel Odeon, 1981. Los peces rojos. Director: José Antonio Nieves Conde. Spain: Yago Films, Estela Films, 1955. Operation Ogro. Director: Gillo Pontecorvo. Italy, Spain: Vides Cinematografica, Sabre Films, 1979. The Cold Light of Day. Director: Mabrouk El Mechri. USA, Spain: Summit Entertainment et al., 2012. Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Director: Woody Allen. Spain, USA: The Weinstein Company et al., 2008.

ONLINE NEIGHBORHOOD MAPPING: THE CASE OF SIENA’S ONLINE ECO-MUSEUM Tobias Boos In his famous book “Imagined Communities,” Benedict Anderson lists “three institutions of power” (Anderson 2006 [1983], 163) that he sees at work in the formation of nation-states: the census, the map, and the museum. Using the example of Asian states at the beginning of the 20th century, Anderson shows that these institutions have the power to objectify the collective identities of young nations by installing a common truth-system. While the census uses surveys to produce supposedly impartial data on the population living within a specific area, maps delimit this area and connect it with both the data and a particular political regime. Museums show artifacts in specific timelines, thus connecting history with that specific population and its region. Consequently, these institutions of power can be crucial political tools for building connections between a specific history, area, and population (Anderson 2006 [1983], 163–185). In light of the many social and technological changes that occurred during the 20th century, museology and cartography radically altered their views of both museums (Davis 2011, 62–67) and maps (Pickles 2004, 7–11). Nevertheless, they remain institutions of power that are important not only in the formation of nations but also of communities more generally. This study will employ contemporary theoretical approaches to cartography and museology to analyze how communities shape their collective identity online through a case-study of an eco-museum in Siena, Italy in which a map of the city functions as an index for the exhibition. An eco-museum is a museum that exhibits a population’s reflections on their social and “natural” environment and involves the residents in the process of curating the exhibition. Siena’s online eco-museum is run by the city’s neighborhoods, the contrade,1 and by analyzing the map, their mapping impulse on the World Wide Web (WWW) will be explored. I refer to “mapping impulse” as a way in which neighborhoods and communities make their worldview public and define their collective identity. The investigation demonstrates that on the WWW there are online places that can be thought of as concrete space-time configurations and which are interwoven with offline places. The neighborhoods do not present their identity arbitrarily but employ specific practices of representation, placing, and remembrance. Furthermore, it is argued that from a phenomenological perspective the online mapping impulse can be conceived of as a process of “coming-to-the-

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Contrade is the plural of the Italian word contrada, which can be translated as “street” or “area.” These and all other Italian words will follow the rules of Italian grammar.

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world” (Sloterdijk and Heinrichs 2006, 174), one that is achieved through unfolding space and time online. The first section of this chapter discusses recent scholarly literature on new museology and critical cartography. It shows that a phenomenological approach provides concepts such as “dwelling” and “coming-to-the-world,” meaning that human beings must actively build the world they dwell, to understand contemporary lifeworlds, concepts which are compatible with new approaches in those two fields of research. I refer to dwelling as a mode in which human beings become entangled in a meshwork of relations between humans and non-humans (including technology), and the past and the present. Following this, the applied methods and analysis strategy are outlined. The chapter’s main focus is the case-study, which is comprised of two sections; the first section draws a genealogy of Siena’s eco-museum and the second interprets the content of the webpages. It will describe the context in which Siena’s eco-museum emerged in order to demonstrate how the neighborhoods and communities inhabit the WWW, thus unpacking time and space online. The conclusions will outline the implications of the theoretical and empirical findings and discuss how communities construct their collective identity online. THE MAPPING IMPULSE: UNFOLDING SPACE AND TIME IN THE ECO-MUSEUM Although Anderson (2006 [1983]) formulated the idea that the census, the map, and the museum are crucial institutions in the formation of the nation-state more than 30 years ago, recent studies (Caquard 2014; Montanari 2015) show that museums and maps continue to be deeply involved in how communities emerge and are important in maintaining communities’ collective identity. But how we think about museums and maps need to be revised in order to analyze the new museums and maps that have emerged in globalized and technological contexts. In our case, the core of Siena’s online eco-museum is a map of the city’s sites selected, described and visualized by the seventeen neighborhoods of Siena’s inner city. These neighborhoods should be thought of as communities whose members share common interests and a strong sense of belonging together (Tönnies 1991 [1887], 7–10). As such, the museum and the map fuse in this online eco-museum. In line with Crampton (2009, 840) and Kitchin and Dodge (2007, 340), it will be useful to think of museums and maps as always in the state of becoming, or, to use the concept of Sloterdijk, they are part of the coming-to-the-world (Sloterdijk and Heinrichs 2006, 174), i.e., of humans co-habiting the contemporary, technologically tamed world, both with each other and with other things. Before the 1960s, the role of museums was to collect artifacts and exhibit some of them, selected by experts, in special buildings to educate the “public.” However, during the 1960s scholars and social activists challenged this view and began to argue that museums should not only educate people and store artifacts but also serve the people living in the region in which they are situated (Davis 2009, 485; Maggi 2009, 71–72). This means that, in order to generate a sustainable social

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impact, the visitor and/or local population should be involved in the creation and maintenance of the museum. It was on the basis of these ideas that George Henri Rivière and Hugues De Varine, two French academics, founded the new museology, which is a new “suite of ideas about the purpose and function of museums” (Davis 2011, 263). The word “eco-museum” was coined by De Varine in 1972 (Davis 2011, 65) and refers to one type of museum following the directives of new museology. Eco-museums are meant to provide an institutional setting in which the local population can reflect on their relationship with their environment, one that comprises physical, economic, social, and cultural elements and processes. Therefore, the prefix “eco” not only refers to “nature” but also to social surroundings (Davis 2011, 82). Eco-museums can vary considerably in their institutional form and thematic orientation. They may or may not be bound to a specific building or even be located purely online, but they must always be created and maintained in close collaboration with the local population who become “the expert” (curator) of the museum (Montanari 2015, 371). The eco-museum, which enables communities to preserve their collective identities as well as their physical, economic, social, and cultural resources in situ, thus stands for a moral account of museology and a tool to empower local people. In the 1970s, eco-museums were uncommon, but today they are a well-established phenomenon in countries such as France, Canada, and Italy (Maggi 2009, 71–72). Cartography followed a similar scholastic development as the museum in the post-WWII era. In the 1950s, Arthur Robinson founded the now-traditional approach to cartography, which was based on the paradigm that maps should improve through increasing their capacity to reflect nature (Crampton and Krygier 2006, 20). This view started to be challenged as early as the 1970s when cartography began to suffer from the “crisis of representation” (Pickles 2004, 13). It was not until the late 1980s, however, that an effective deconstruction of the model of the map as a reflection of material and social “reality” occurred. Scholars such as Brian Harley (1989) and Denis Wood (1992) showed that structures of power are also at work in supposedly “objective” maps, and it was this birth of critical cartography that provided the theoretical thinking for many recent empirical examinations. Studies in this tradition, such as those on vernacular mapping (Gerlach 2014) and counter- and community-mapping (Peluso 1995; Cook 2003; Wood 2005; Parker 2006; Brayn 2007), show that maps can have different forms and rely on very different social conventions, ones that change in relation to the cultural settings in which they are made, read, or used. These articles recognize that maps are not only the bearers of power structures that influence the social world, but that they also create worlds. They are always in a state of becoming and must be thought of as practices of mapping rather than as fixed maps. Additionally, recent research has revealed that the practice of mapping is no longer the exclusive realm of experts. Technical innovations such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) (Elwood 2010, 352; Poorthuis and Zook 2014, 313), which are embedded in the WWW, enable communities and groups of people following similar interests to make their own maps. Therefore, maps have to be thought of as practices that position individuals and groups in their social and

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material environment. Maps always emerge in specific social, cultural, economic, political, material, and technological environments, and are part of a sphere of connected practices (Crampton 2009, 840; Caquard 2014) and things (Pickles 2004, 50). A map is what Pickles (2004, 88–90) calls bricolages, meaning that it is “a construction that always drew upon disparate information sources” (Pickles 2004, 88). Consequently, a map emerges out of differing views of the world, different techniques of mapping, different technologies, and relying on previous maps. To sum up, current conceptions of eco-museums and maps indicate that the influence of experts in establishing these two institutions of power has decreased and that ordinary people are increasingly able to articulate their interests through them (Crampton and Krygier 2006, 25; Corsane et al. 2008, 2–3). They are both meant to be applied in order to create or strengthen a collective identity among a group of people, including their multi-dimensional surroundings. Consequently, through the practices of creating museums and of maps, communities unfold specific space-time configurations and create places in which they can live, thereby positioning themselves in the globalized world (Pickles 2004, 6–7; Davis 2009, 489; Montanari 2015, 370–371). Furthermore, the importance of new technologies such as the WWW and portable devices has risen in recent years, and this has changed the ways in which people engage with these institutions. Studies on cyberspace (Graham 1998; Zook and Dodge 2009; Kellerman 2010) have shown that such places have also emerged on the WWW. Communities and groups of people have started to dwell the WWW, creating places such as websites and mashups in which two or more services are combined to create new content (Zook and Dodge 2009, 358). But not only are these places combinations of various digital data, they usually also have numerous connections to offline places and are increasingly intertwined with them, as studies on augmented reality (Graham et al. 2013; Wilson 2013) and concepts such as “DigiPlace” (Zook and Graham 2007) and “geoweb” (Elwood 2010) suggest. There is no longer, or perhaps never was, a clear distinction between physical and virtual places. Places where people live are emerging more and more frequently from a mix of code, material, social, and cultural relations (Graham et al. 2013) and must be conceptualized in new ways. A deep understanding of the relationship between space, time, people, and technology has been expounded in recent works on phenomenology by developing the concepts “coming-to-the-world” and “dwelling.” Peter Sloterdijk (1998, 1999, 2004), a modern-day philosopher, departs from Heidegger’s formula of being-inthe-world and turns it into coming-to-the-world, suggesting that people have to create the worlds they live in. They dwell these worlds which means that they live in them alongside other humans and things, weaving a net of meaningful relations. Consequently, dwelling consists of practices of getting familiar with already inhabited worlds, decentralizing the self, positioning and placing identities and things (Sloterdijk 1998, 336–337; Sloterdijk and Heinrichs 2006, 174–175). By accentuating processes of becoming, Sloterdijk makes the Heideggerian worldview more dynamic and connects the existential phenomenology with constructivist ideas. He argues that being is an event (Sloterdijk 2004, 214), stressing the fact

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that we have to move into the worlds in which we can live (Sloterdijk 2004, 55–88). We are not just thrown into a common world, as Heidegger (1986 [1927], 135) suggests. Our means of coming-to-the-world is dwelling it. From human beings’ practices of dwelling emerge places, which result from taking a specific position and experiencing space and time (Pickles 1985, 164). Because we live in a changing and already inhabited world, experiences always involve dealing with the past. What and how we remember the past is deeply connected with present situations and, therefore, in continuous flux. Lowenthal (1985, 411) has highlighted that the past is continuously happening in the present, while places, too, like societies and cultures, change over time and are never fixed (Casey 1996, 26–27). A place is not a fixed point but a specific space-time configuration (Casey 1996, 36–38) in which a special nexus of emotional ties integrates material, social, cultural, and technological elements. In this view, space is not the abstract counterpart of place, but rather space and time unfold in places. Space and time are the ways in which we experience the world and, therefore, are simultaneously both concrete and abstract (Pickles 1985, 158–164; Casey 1996, 44). Because places emerge out of dwelling the world, they are social and cultural and contain references to the material world. They are part of the coming-to-the-world of human beings, and as such also of communities living in particular places (Pickles 1985, 169–170). The theoretical thoughts and empirical hints outlined above suggest that human beings dwell the world by placing themselves in relation to other people, things, and the past through creating relationships and meanings. Humans living close together, i.e., communities, identify with specific practices of dwelling the world that then constitute their collective identity. Hence, collective identities are constructed through various practices and are also permanently in the state of becoming, presuming that no fixed core of being, of either collectives or individuals, exists. Dwelling the world means applying practices of 1) placing, taking positions that create a specific space-time configuration, 2) remembrance, the means of how to recall the past or remembering things and events (Halbwachs 1966 [1939]), and 3) representation, the manner in which a collective identity, achieved by encountering different social, material, and technological outsiders, is created. All these aspects of practices occur simultaneously and are interwoven, separated only by scientific perspectives. The styles of dwelling the world are closely connected with what has been called mapping (Sloterdijk 1998, 98). Dwelling, like mapping, is the practice of relating things to each other and of taking different perspectives on objects, as well as of taking specific positions in the physical, social, cultural, economic, and political contexts. Dwelling is a bricolage of various types of information that rely on different histories. These histories and relations are objectified by communities that imagine them to be the only possible reality. By objectifying histories and relation systems, the members of a community install a special truth-system that differs from community to community (Sloterdijk 2004, 37; Sloterdijk and Heinrichs 2006, 36–37). The coming-to-the-world of people seems to have what Alpers (1983) called a “mapping impulse,” which for her is a specific way of describing the world that communities living at a particular time

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possess (Alpers 1983, 168). Lukinbeal (2010) and Castro (2009) see the same connection in the way films are made and how they work. They show that there are specific elements in the way the mapping impulse unfolds, and these depend on the cultural and technological environments. As the online eco-museum is run by particular communities and consists of a map of the inner city of Siena, an analysis of the eco-museum’s mapping impulse or impulses will highlight the way(s) communities dwell the engineered world, constructing relationships between themselves, their places, and various technologies. THE APPLIED METHODS AND STRATEGY OF ANALYSIS The online map of the eco-museum, available at www.ecomuseosiena.org, must be understood as one aspect of the coming-to-the-world of Siena’s neighborhoods. They dwell the WWW by creating a place and, therefore, of taking a position in local and global contexts by weaving meaningful links between material, technological, and social elements. As maps are always in the process of becoming and are multidimensional, a variety of methods are applied to create data and different sources of information are used to reconstruct the way the contrade dwell the WWW. In the following section, the genealogy of the eco-museum will be sketched in order to understand the context in which its exhibition has been interpreted. These interpretations will constitute the second section of the analysis. Based on the assumption that the map is a bricolage of different elements and their specific histories, I will reconstruct the recent genealogy (Pickles 2004, 90; Kitchin et al. 2013, 484–485) of Siena’s eco-museum by analyzing qualitative interviews conducted during a four-month period of fieldwork in Siena in 2015 and academic field studies on the matter. Though I interviewed 20 people during my stay in Siena, I have selected eight of the most informative interviews for inclusion in this analysis. To guarantee anonymity, the names of the interviewees have been omitted, and a combination of the acronym IP (Interview Partner) and a number included instead. I have included two qualitative interviews with experts (IP_1 and IP_2) who are academics involved in the establishment of Siena’s eco-museum. These experts were asked questions regarding the evolution of the eco-museum, its technical and technological bases, as well as the socio-cultural context in which the museum emerged. To provide insights into the practices of creating the content of the exhibition, the aims and opinions of the contrade regarding the eco-museum, and the daily lives of the neighborhood’s members, four archivists (IP_3 to IP_6) who are in charge of producing the content of the eco-museum and two people in high positions within the contrade’s associations (IP_7 and IP_8) are also included in the analysis. In the second stage, the practices of placing, remembrance, and representation are reconstructed and the museums’ content interpreted in correlation with the interviews. In order to understand the similarities and differences inherent in the webpages, I carried out a qualitative content analysis of them (Mayring and Hurst 2005). To do so, I developed a table of their themes, the kind of information included

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(text, videos, photos, and audios), the sources of the information used to produce the content, the main locations and times mentioned, and who were their authors. Other important features of the eco-museum recorded in the table are the number of hyperlinks and where they led to. Hyperlinks give hints as to the “underlying structure” of the eco-museum (Maeyer 2012, 2) as, by providing these, the paths the user of the WWW may take in order to seek further information are defined. Offering a link to certain information or not should, therefore, to be considered as a practice of placing, remembrance, and/or representation (Park 2003, 53). Following the qualitative content analysis, I interpret the resulting statistical data in its social-cultural-material-technological context alone to understand their meanings (Mayring and Hurst 2005). THE GENEALOGIES OF THE ECO-MUSEUM OF SIENA: THE SOCIAL, MATERIAL, AND TECHNOLOGICAL CONTEXT The eco-museum of Siena is an online-museum founded in 2014, but its origins go back to the first years of the new millennium. As shall be seen, this rather short history has been one of a social-cultural-material-technological co-evolution (Graham 1998, 172), mixing various elements and histories. After the de-centralization of the political administration of Italy in the 1990s, local actors such as civic associations and municipalities took the opportunity to claim financial resources for themselves in order to support various local initiatives such as housing projects and museums. Several northern Italian provinces passed regional laws to support such work. It was in this environment that the first eco-museums emerged in Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany, and Piedmont (Maggi 2009, 71–72). Inspired by these, local politicians and academics from the province of Siena tried to establish an offline eco-museum that focused on its countryside as part of an effort to strengthen the regional identity of the inhabitants, to preserve local knowledge on the region’s traditions, and to increase tourism. Despite initial efforts, it took until 2010 for the project to begin in earnest. At that time, the director of the Fondazione Musei Senesi (FMS), an association that had been running the museums of the province since 2003, had the innovative idea of establishing several online eco-museums that would be related to the seven regions of the province: Val d’Elsa, Chianti Senese, Area Urbana (Siena), Val di Merse, Crete Senesi e Val d’Arbia, Val di Chiana, and Val d’Orcia (IP_2). The FMS decided to create the eco-museums based on GoogleMaps and, in concert with the local population, to identify points of interest and the immaterial heritage of the region (Meloni 2014, 74). In order to identify the content of the eco-museum’s exhibition, FMS chose to adopt the “parish map” technique, which had been developed towards the end of the 1980s by Common Ground, a group of British academics founded by the human geographer Sue Clifford (IP_2). Making a parish map involves arranging a series of meetings between experts and the inhabitants of a parish to discuss what content a map should include, after which it could be manufactured as a paper map or printed on T-shirts (Wood 2005, 159).

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After a series of talks and negotiations, the director of FMS managed to secure funding for an initial eco-museum, which was to become the Val di Merse (IP_1) eco-museum. Searching for a suitable grid of categorization, FMS chose to use the system offered by the parish, Castelnuovo Berardenga, situated in the region of Chianti, which had been created by a local cultural anthropologist and was initially designed around 2012 to index their stock on local oral history (IP_2). In the meantime, two experts from the eco-museum of Piedmont who were experienced in using the parish map technique were invited to give lectures to disseminate their knowledge and thus help lay the groundwork for the establishment of local commissions of experts who would later create the eco-museums. The first of these commissions was composed of the director of the FMS, the mayor of Monticiano – the biggest parish of Val di Merse – and two cultural anthropologists. Together, they adjusted the catalog system and coordinated the survey (parish map) (IP_2). After identifying the content to be included, experts (local academics) carried out the fieldwork, which involved producing and collecting text, photos, videos, and audio recordings. To standardize the means of data collection and production, they used a simplified version of the file-card Scheda per i Beni Demoethnoantropologi Immateriale (BDI), designed by the Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione (ICCD) of Italy. This form is designed to be filled in with descriptions of the topic and of the material to be included, as well as with additional information such as the coordinates (for geo-referencing), keywords, and the name of the author(s). At this stage, the researcher categorized the topic using the aforementioned system of categories through which the file-card is assigned to one or more categories. The category to which the topic is primarily assigned defines the color in which this card will be viewed later in the digital main map. After the fieldwork, the content of the file cards and additional material was transferred to a webpage designed using WordPress, and links between related pages of the museum and tags (keywords) were created. Furthermore, the various webpages that in the future would be referred to as digital file cards in order to differentiate them from other webpages within the overall website were linked to dots created in the main map of the eco-museum (Meloni 2014, 72–73); the visitor accesses these digital file cards by clicking on the relevant dots. The website is administered by the FMS, which edits and controls the content and keeps the museum up to date technologically (IP_1). From the results of surveying, categorizing, and geo-referencing, DigiPlaces (Zook and Graham 2007) were constructed to connect selected places within the region to online information and, at the same time, place them in the online map. Today, all seven of the eco-museums of the province of Siena have the same basic structure and the information is displayed in Italian only. The main part of the museum is a map mashup based on GoogleMaps, the legend of which – in the form of a bar on the left-hand side – is divided into three parts: “Category,” “Chronology,” and “Search.” The first of these can be used to select the category of the content shown in the map, which is based on the adopted category system of Castelnuovo Berardenga and which has been converted into a digital grid by software engineers. Each of the five categories has a different color – “Landscape” (green),

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“Material Cultural Heritage” (purple), “Immaterial Cultural Heritage” (dark blue), “Everyday Life” (red), and “Senses” (light blue) – and is divided into subcategories. The digital file cards assigned to more than one category change color in relation to the visitor’s selection. The “Chronology” allows the digital file cards to be searched using specific time periods. The last layer, “Search,” allows the user to search for special topics using keywords. The eco-museum of the town of Siena, which was the last to be established in the province, differs from all the others in both how the survey was carried out and the manner of its administration due to the particular context in which it was created. After Siena’s candidature to be named European Capital of Culture 2019 (IP_3) had passed the first round in 2013 (it was subsequently rejected in 2015) and in light of the success of the province’s other eco-museums, the prefect of the province of Siena2 was enthusiastic about creating such a museum in Siena to highlight its cultural importance, technological progress, and civic activism (IP_2; IP_3); the primary aim of so doing was to increase the possibility of Siena being named the 2019 European Capital of Culture. In order to achieve quick results, the prefect and the director of FMS contacted the Magistrato delle Contrade di Siena (IP_3), the umbrella association of the seventeen neighborhood associations of the inner city of Siena. The Magistrato is composed of the seventeen heads of the neighborhoods, the contrade, who are elected by their members. The members of the contrade identify themselves with the quarter they belong to and conceive of themselves as a community. The contrade have the legal status of a civic association, and each of them has their own club house, a constitution, and symbols such as a flag, hymn, special colors, and emblems (Warner 2004). As such, securing the support of the Magistrato for the project would procure the backing of seventeen local communities, each counting 800 to 2,500 members. The contrade are also powerful organizations socially, as they arrange many social and cultural events within Siena, particularly through their role as the main protagonists of the palio, an internationally famous horse race that takes place at the Piazza del Campo twice a year. The palio is of special importance because by referring to this event the contrade have developed a rich symbolism and their strong sense of solidarity. The palio has been broadcast on the national television channel since the 1950s and attracts tourists from all over the world, and as such, the activities of the contrade are also of interest globally (Boos 2016). The Magistrato agreed to assist, but with the condition that they would be wholly responsible for the surveys and for administering the website. The prefect and FMS accepted this, and the Magistrato handed over the surveying process to the contrade, providing each of them with access to the application WordPress. The project was launched in the first half of 2014 (IP_1). Consequently, no experts supervised the survey. In the first stage, establishing the eco-museum, the leaders of each contrada assigned the identification of the content and the coordination of the survey to one member who was usually the contrada’s archivist. Next, the FMS organized a series of workshops to show the people in charge of doing the survey how to make a parish map using the simplified 2

The prefect represents the central government in the assigned province.

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BDI, how to transfer the information into digital file cards, and how to carry out the geo-referencing. After this, in a series of assemblies, the members of each contrada were taught how to build the eco-museum, and interested members were invited to identify the content to be placed on the map. In general, the completed file cards, along with the material to be enclosed in the webpages, were given to the person in charge of doing the transfer to WordPress and connecting the digital file cards to a dot in the main map. After the transfer, the leader of the contrada checked the digital file card (IP_3, IP_4) and sent an e-mail to the FMS to activate them. Thus, the content of the file cards is controlled by the authorities at two separate stages: by the archivist when making the digital transfer and by the leader when revising the content. The FMS thus played no role in content creation or revision (IP_1) and compared to the other eco-museums in the province, that of Siena has had the least outside interference. But this also meant that no groups within Siena participated in the mapping project apart from the seventeen contrade who were supporting Siena’s efforts to attract European funding (IP_1). Although the eco-museum was established by the contrade and administrated by their umbrella organization, the surveying process included techniques such as the parish map, the BDI, and the catalog system that were developed by different groups at different times. Knowledge and advice were passed to the communities via local experts and experts from Piedmont. As has been highlighted, the Siena eco-museum emerged in a specific political context, thus bringing together various socio-cultural-technological time-lines and modes of development. The contrade use an online platform established in different meetings between local and national academics, the FMS and engineers (IP_2), and rely on various kinds of technology (GoogleMaps and WordPress) and techniques (BDI and “parish map”) to create their maps. THE NEIGHBORHOODS ONLINE MAPS: THE EMERGENCE OF ONLINE PLACES Siena’s eco-museum is the only one within the province to which the online platform of the FMS – providing a list with links to the online eco-museums of the province – offers no link because it is administered solely by the Magistrato delle Contrade di Siena. Nevertheless, it has adopted the same website structure used by previous eco-museums. On the homepage (see Figure 1), the striking position of the emblem of the Magistrato in the top-left corner indicates that the contrade are running the museum. The FMS, together with the prefecture of Siena, are mentioned under the second menu item, “L’ecomuseo,” which explains the meaning of the word “eco-museum.” The other items of the main menu, situated on top of each webpage’s content, are “Come funziona,” which explains how to access and use the eco-museum, “Le 17 Contrade,” which presents a short account of the development of the contrade over the centuries and contains information on each of them (their colors, emblems etc.), “Mappa,” which contains the museum’s exhibitions and dots on a map that link to the digital file cards, and “Segnalaci…,” which invites every

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inhabitant of Siena to suggest new content for the exhibition. In practice, however, no such proposal has been made thus far because only a limited number of contrade members know how to produce content and only the contrade have access to the WordPress, which makes it difficult for people who are not a member of any contrada to submit their suggestions (IP_1). Furthermore, it seems that the majority of Siena’s population is not even aware of the eco-museum’s existence (IP_2; IP_4; IP_5).

Figure 1: The homepage of Siena’s eco-museum

The first impression evoked by the webpages of the eco-museum and the digital file cards is that Siena is comprised solely of the contrade, and that these are sovereign organizations and thus act independently from the commune of Siena. Furthermore, the constitution of each contrada claims it is independent from the city’s official administration, something which is recognized by the local political authorities. Other voices of the city, such as those of migrants, students, or the university, are

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not included in the eco-museum, something that is bemoaned by the interview partners who do not belong to the contrade (IP_1, IP_2) but also by members of the contrade (IP_4; IP_5). They think it would be good to be able to bring into contact various groups within the city in order to exchange ideas and create more tolerance within the population. That not all groups of a region, most of whom are minorities, are given a voice is a recognized challenge of eco-museums in general (Montanari 2015, 372). This initial impression of a narrow perspective on the city is confirmed by looking at the main map, which serves as an index to the exhibition. Only four of the 255 dots are located outside Siena’s medieval walls and thus outside the contrade’s city quarters. Even then, opening the content of these four sites reveals that in each, it refers to the contrada of the author. Consequently, information on the city outside its medieval walls and that does not refer to the contrade is non-existent. Opening the second level in the legend, “Chronology,” reveals that, apart from searching for a special time period, each contrada can be selected separately there. This is because, for every single contrada, a distinct access point has been created to administer their digital file cards, thus ensuring their sovereignty in creating and publishing content (IP_1). Consequently, the main map consists of seventeen maps and is, therefore, an aggregation of them at the higher level. At the lower level, each contrada has restricted their survey almost solely to their own city quarter. Only a few digital file cards are situated outside their own city quarter, and in all cases, the content of the cards refers to particular activities performed by that contrada that happen to take place outside their own quarter. Although during the training workshops members of the different contrade met, and some statements by IP_3 and IP_5 indicate that members of different contrade worked together in carrying out the surveys, there is not a single digital file card with more than one contrada as its author. Analyzing the legend, file cards, and authorship of the content leads to the conclusion that the logic behind the map and their practices of representation is that of a segmented community. Faced with potential local, national, or international visitors, the contrade present themselves as a unified contrade-complex, as one community. But on a subtler level, the second level of the legend, they are divided into seventeen single contrade, each working in isolation to achieve a common goal. A detailed look at the practice of linking the digital file cards confirms this. The 255 file cards connected to the main map contain different types of links. The cards contain 1,119 links directed to other sites of the exhibition, which can be called inner links, and 426 links directed to webpages outside the eco-museum, which will be called outgoing links. The inner links can be divided into 241 links that lead directly to related file cards and 878 links that are tags corresponding to the keywords of the cards. 239 of the 241 links connecting related cards join file cards of the same contrada, meaning only two connect content created by two different contrade. This shows that the contrade essentially established no direct links with each other. Their connections are indirect, via tags linking all the pages that have

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common keywords. Thus, even the structure of the website’s inner links is that of a segmented community3. Most of the 426 outgoing links lead to Facebook, as this link is included in the template of the digital file cards the contrade use. All 255 cards contain this kind of link. 97 links are directed to webpages of the contrade outside of the eco-museum – every contrada launched their own website at the end of the 1990s – and 74 to different institutions and organizations such as local journals, and to videos on YouTube that contain information on the contrade. In total, only the 74 links are deliberate connections to sites outside the contrade-complex which, in comparison to the 1,119 inner links, is a very small number; furthermore, even these primarily contain further information on the contrade. The large number of inner and the limited number of outgoing links suggest that the eco-museum is part of an emerging digital region of dense connections that also comprises the webpages of the contrade, information on them found in journals, and videos about the contrade embedded in YouTube, as well as their Facebook pages. Links with other communities or groups, such as the commune of Siena, the local university, national or international organizations, and local groups, are very rare. Nevertheless, the global level is inherent in the contrade’s online places because it bases on the WWW, and therefore is accessible all over the world. The WWW and applications such as GoogleMaps are technologies based on common mostly hidden algorithms and codes (Zook and Dodge 2009, 358). Applications available all over the world were used to build the digital file cards (WordPress) and the map (GoogleMaps), or to store content (YouTube). The contrade used these to establish their digital places, meaning that they have only limited control over their style of dwelling the WWW because they use such technologies that they cannot wholly design or change. Some of the interviewees also expressed their dislike of the fact that commercial information is provided by the map of the eco-museum (IP_4; IP_6). Each contrada made between seven and 30 digital file cards and mainly assigned them to one, but in one case to four, categories. In total, the 255 cards are categorized 333 times. The most prominent category is “Immaterial Cultural Heritage,” with 126 cards, followed by “Material Cultural Heritage” with 116, “Everyday Life” with 40, “Landscape” with 36, and “Senses” with fifteen. The predominance of immaterial cultural heritage can be explained by the fact that all contrade have an offline museum in which they exhibit artifacts related to their contrada. Therefore, most contrade do not exhibit the same elements online that they do in their offline museum (IP_4). Influences on the content of the eco-museum’s exhibition are related to both the offline museums of the contrade and the archives that each also possess, in which they store graphics, bulletins, journals and articles, and scholarly works on the history of Siena, the contrade, and the palio. Thus, the authors of the digital file cards had a large range and quantity of source material from which they could take information. In total, 162 people are mentioned as 3

Analyzing the official websites of the contrade, not including the webpages of the eco-museum, Boos (2017) comes to a similar result.

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authors, most of whom worked alone. As well as a real person being named as the author, the contrada responsible for the card is also always named. All cards include a piece of text that constitutes the main corpus, which is accompanied by a gallery of photos in the top-left corner, and the section of the main map in which the dot is placed is in the top-right. Furthermore, the authors also included videos (44), photos (1372), audio files (five), and PDFs (42). Photos and videos of offline artifacts highlight them and bring them into the eco-museum. Apart from a description of the topic, information on the authorship, and the sources used, all the cards provide information under the rubrics “Location,” “Date/period,” and “Contrada.” To produce these cards, the authors relied primarily on books and articles by local academics and on journals that were available in their own contrada’s archives or in those of the municipality. In cases of works of art, internet archives were also consulted. In this way, the authors create history, as understood in line with Lowenthal (1985, 187), to be an empirically testable and reflected story. By indicating the sources, the authors confer credibility to their writings. The authors also interviewed contrade leaders and older people, who told stories about life in the neighborhood in the past, presenting their memories as reference points for other members who come to know the recent past of their contrada through the videos of eyewitness testimony. Consequently, the authors create the content of the exhibition by recalling the past, itself achieved through the creation of history by combining text with online artifacts (photos, graphics, videos, etc.) and the exposition of the memory of people supposed to be reliable. Such is a repeated practice of remembrance, as well as being one by which the contrade is placed in a specific timeline, playing a crucial role in the establishment of a common truth-system and to convey credibility to the visitor. The content of the cards provides mostly information about that specific neighborhood: its history, relations with the city as a whole, its victories in the horse race, their special places, their relations with the other contrade, the activities of their members, and the celebrities who are important for their community. Reading the content of the cards, it is striking that in each of the seventeen maps the contrada in charge appears as the thematic center. As all file cards give the neighborhood as the author and as the area in which the information is situated, it presents topics that are related to their neighborhood. Additionally, in almost all cases, they connect different places and the past with their own community and seem to create a specific space-time configuration online, thus building online places. As the eco-museum has the logic of a map, the author is forced to set a dot and to place the cards within the map even though it may be an immaterial heritage. Only 38 cards do not mention a specific street, and in these cases, only the name of the neighborhood is listed under the rubric “Location.” If the content is part of immaterial heritage, it is positioned at related places, such as the club house or the neighborhood’s main street. Thus, in all cases, the main street has the highest density of dots. This corresponds with the testimony of all interview partners who belong to a contrada, as they said that they identify strongly with their neighborhood’s area, and especially to their main street, squares, and club house, where many social and cultural events take

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place. Relating different offline and online places with events are often-applied practices of placing and remembrance. Two-hundred-and-forty-seven file cards are related to specific dates or timespans, most of which cover a long period, thus implying that they are inscribing onto the WWW their perspective of their past from the thirteenth century onwards. Only in one case is no reference to time made, and in another seven it relates purely to a contemporary event or is suggested the presented topic has a long history in general. This implies that the contrade are trying to highlight their long history by making connections from the past to the present. All interview partners from the contrade agreed that the history of the contrada to which they belong gives sense to their life, and without it, what they do would mean nothing. By highlighting their activities within the city and through their deep sense of history, they are claiming to be the most important social organizations in the city, and by presenting their history as an ancient one that gives sense to their present life they stabilize the past, thereby connecting the fluid and changeable past with the present, which is another practice of remembrance. Through the eco-museum, and despite providing the information in Italian only, the contrade present their neighborhood to a potentially broad public. In addition, it has the educational function of providing information on the past and history of each contrada to its own members (IP_4; IP_7; IP_8). Being aware of the potential global audience, they present an idealized image of their neighborhood in the eco-museum, evoked by the exhibition of the success stories of the contrade, the most emblematic buildings, interesting stories, photos of their victories, and festive events. The contrade do not show anything related to instances of violence or of horses dying during the races, which occurs occasionally, nor about inner conflicts or their conflicts with other groups within the city. Their practices of representation and remembrance within the eco-museum seem to follow the logic of building an ideal image,4 highlighting their importance in Siena’s history and in the city’s current social life, thus placing them in local, national, and potentially global contexts. DWELLING THE WORLD WIDE WEB: NEIGHBORHOOD MAPPING AND THE MAPPING IMPULSE Being a social order of (inter-)national interest and with a potentially global audience, the contrade built an online eco-museum that exhibits significant information on Siena and its history. They realized that the WWW is part of the present-day world, and if they themselves did not create a position there, others could do so instead. Thus, the contrade started to dwell the WWW by unfolding specific spacetime configurations, so-called online places. These places emerge on the bases of a

4

The practice of producing an ideal representation online is shown by Miller and Slater (2001), using the example of the webpages of organizations and people from Trinidad.

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dense net of connected practices of placing, remembrance, and representation, in which their collective identity is continuously (re)constructed. The center of the practices of placing and remembrance is the single contrada, as it makes its own map that, together with the maps of the other contrade, is aggregated at the next level of solidarity, that of the contrade-complex. The neighborhoods follow the logic of a segmented community in which everybody works independently to reach the common goal of having a presence on the global stage. By building the eco-museum, they interact with their past, reflecting and interpreting it in the light of the present, keeping the past alive while also continuously altering it, both consciously and unconsciously. Through its online presence, the contrada exhibits its own interpretation of various offline places and of historical events in which it was one of the main protagonists. At the next level of solidarity, the individual parts of the contrade-complex demonstrate these interpretations using a similar, idealized style, one characterized by a profound sense of history and place. Being the only authors and the main characters of the eco-museum, the contrade control what and how events are remembered. The online places have many connections with offline places and events and are a mix of off- and online interactions. As such, online and offline places are interlinked in several ways. First, online places provide information on thematically-related offline places, and vice-versa. Secondly, offline places, such as the offline museum of the contrade, influence the selection of content, while offline archives contain the information that was used to build the online eco-museum. Thus, onand-offline places are related and partly constitute, but never correspond exactly to, each other. Different layers of the outside of the contrade, from the local to the global levels, are present in the eco-museum through the templates used by the contrade, as they impose codes and styles of presentation such as the color of the categories or the presentation of commercial sites within the city. Additionally, the global context resonates in the background of the content of the exhibition because the potential global audience causes and/or reinforces the aim of creating an ideal image of their collective identities, one they wish to present on the global stage. In this way, through the eco-museum, the contrade not only claim a position in local social contexts but also in the globally-linked world by employing controlled practices of placing, remembrance, and representation. In light of this, it seems that dwelling the WWW is part of the-coming-to-theworld of communities, especially when they are involved in international affairs. Today, coming-to-the-world also includes building places from whence to “speak” on the WWW. The case of Siena’s online eco-museum demonstrates, along with studies on community mapping and augmented reality, that online places in which people dwell have characteristics that follow a mapping impulse, meaning a particular way of weaving a web of relations, i.e., of describing and defining one’s own collective identity in relation to various Others. Tracing the genealogy of Siena’s eco-museum has shown that it emerged out of particular political, technological, social, and cultural contexts. Different actors, such as engineers, politicians, and anthropologists, as well as the local population, took part in the creation of the tech-

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nological and technical environment of the mashup “eco-museum,” relying on inventions from different parts of the world. It is a bricolage of different techniques, technologies, and logics of representation, although it seems to the visitor to be a homogeneous exhibition made exclusively by Siena’s neighborhoods. The production of maps, the building of museums, and the carrying out of surveys, once the exclusive domain of experts mainly employed by and in the interests of constructing nation-states, have today become part of the practices of various communities that use them to form and maintain their collective identity. Via these “institutions of power,” they take a position in the unfolding space and time of the WWW. Creating online places thus becomes part of the coming-to-the-globalized-world, something that is important for communities in their efforts not to be usurped by outsiders and thereby lose the power to define their own collective identity. ACKNOWLEDGMENT The Inneruniversitäre Forschungsförderung of Johannes Gutenberg-University, Mainz, funded my four-month period of fieldwork in Siena in 2015. I would like to thank all the contradaioli who supported my investigation and the authorities of the following contrade: Nobile Contrada dell’Aquila, Nobile Contrada del Bruco, Contrada della Chiocciola, Contrada Sovrana dell’Istrice, Contrada della Lupa, Nobile Contrada del Nicchio, Nobile Contrada dell’Oca, Contrada della Selva, and Contrada della Tartuca, as well as the Magistrato delle Contrade di Siena and the Consorzio per la Tutela del Palio di Siena. Special thanks goes to Dr. Pietro Meloni, Prof. Fabio Mugnaini, Dr. Valentina Lusini, and Dr. Daniela Salvucci from Siena University, as well as to the Dipartimento di Scienze Sociali, Politiche e Cognitive of Siena University and the Fondazione Musei Senesi for supporting my fieldwork. REFERENCES Alpers, S. (1983): The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. London. Anderson, B. (2006 [1983]): Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London, New York. Boos, T. (2016): Das „tiefe Spiel“ und städtische Vielfalt: Grenzziehungen städtischer Nachbarschaften in Siena. raumnachrichten. http://www.raumnachrichten.de/diskussionen/2019-tobiasboos-das-tiefe-spiel-und-staedtische-vielfalt (accessed April 28, 2016). Boos, T. (2017): Inhabiting Cyberspace and Emerging Cyberplaces. The Case of Siena, Italy. Houndmills and New York. Brayn, J. H. (2007): Map or be Mapped: Land, Race, and Property in Eastern Nicaragua. Berkeley. Caquard, S. (2014): Cartography II: Collective Cartographies in the Social Media Era. Progress in Human Geography 38 (1), 141–150. Casey, E. S. (1996): How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time: Phenomenological Prolegomena. S. Feld and K. H. Basso (Eds.): Senses of Place. Santa Fe, 13–52. Castro, T. (2009): Cinema’s Mapping Impulse: Questioning Visual Culture. The Cartographic Journal 46 (1), 9–15. Cook, F. M. (2003): Maps and Counter-Maps: Globalised Imaginings and Local Realities of Sarawak’s Plantation Agriculture. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 34 (2), 265–284.

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Pickles, J. (1985): Phenomenology, Science and Geography: Spatiality and the Human Sciences. Cambridge and New York. Pickles, J. (2004): A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping and the Geo-Coded World. London and New York. Poorthuis, A. and M. Zook (2014): Spaces of Volunteered Geographic Information. P. Adams, J. Craine and J. Dittmer (Eds.): The Ashgate Research Companion to Geographiesof Media. London and New York, 311–328. Sloterdijk, P. (1998): Blasen: Mikrosphärologie. Frankfurt am Main. Sloterdijk, P. (1999): Globen: Makrosphärologie. Frankfurt am Main. Sloterdijk, P. (2004): Schäume: Plurale Sphärologie. Frankfurt am Main. Sloterdijk, P. and H.-J. Heinrichs (2006): Die Sonne und der Tod: Dialogische Untersuchungen. Frankfurt am Main. Tönnies, F. (1991 [1887]): Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundbegriffe der reinen Soziologie. Darmstadt. Warner, A.-K. (2004): Die Contraden von Siena: Lokale Traditionen und globaler Wandel. Frankfurt am Main and New York. Wood, D. (1992): The Power of Maps. London and New York. Wood, J. (2005): ‘How Green is my Valley?’ Desktop Geographic Information Systems as a Community-Based Participatory Mapping Tool. Area 37 (2), 159–170. Zook, M. and M. Dodge (2009): Mapping, Cyberspace. R. Kitchin and N. Thrift (Eds.) International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. Oxford, 356–367. Zook, M. and M. Graham (2007): From Cyberspace to DigiPlace: Visibility in an Age of Information and Mobility. H. J. Miller (Ed.): Societies and Cities in the Age of Instant Access. Dordrecht, 241–254.

CROWDSOURCING, BOTTOM-UP WEB 2.0 AND CRITICAL WEB MAPPING OF VACANCIES: THE POWER OF DIGITAL MAPS AND URBAN MOVEMENTS ON CITY DEVELOPMENT1 Gregor Arnold NEW SPATIAL INEQUALITIES: RE-URBANIZATION, REVALUATION, AND VACANCIES? In Germany, people are increasingly migrating to cities and metropolitan areas. After the “crisis of the city”2 (Häussermann and Siebel 1978, 489–490), there is now growing talk of a “return to urban life” (Rauterberg 2013, 28), or even of a “renaissance of the city” (Läpple 2004, 74). As a result of these re-urbanization tendencies (cf. Osterhage and Kaup 2012; Brake and Herfert 2012), the most attractive cities are currently experiencing an increase in young people who want to study there and also an increase in older generations moving back to cities (cf. Brühl et al. 2005; Brühl 2005). These developments increase the pressure on inner-city areas. They set new incentives for urban restructuring, revaluation, and gentrification processes; consequently, rents are rising. Contrary to the current trend of moving back to city centers, newspaper articles portray a different image of metropolitan areas where building remain empty for years. For example, in Berlin, there is a general housing shortage despite “thousands of council houses” being vacant (Paul 2014). In Hamburg, as in other German cities, “more than 30 percent of highly-priced new flats are untenanted. The vacancy rate of luxury flats in major cities is increasing” (Haimann 2014). In Frankfurt am Main there is growing talk of high office vacancies with “approximately two million 1

2

This paper is a revised and updated essay that used a previously published paper (cf. Arnold 2015) as its basis. Due to the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ that arose in October 2015 at the latest, the actors around the Internet platform Leerstandsmelder.de (in English: vacancy detector) reorganized themselves and oriented their actions more strongly towards the topic of refugees and the opening of adequate accommodation. Due to these new situations and migration dynamics into Germany, network-like, new urban coalitions between the actors of Leerstandsmelder.de, the refugee-welcome movements and refugees emerged at a municipal level. The present revised version, therefore, focuses on how these new coalitions make vacancies visible, symbolically appropriate them through political events, protests, and interventions in urban space, and finally, try to open up vacancies for refugees through squatting. German quotations are translated into English. German titles are original quotes so that they can be found in the list of references.

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square meters of office space” being empty and half of that is “no longer marketable” (Schulze 2012). As a result, people have joined together in initiatives and organizations to draw attention to the paradox and deplorable situation of spatial-economic pressure and high rents on the one hand and empty buildings on the other. These initiatives and organizations have united under the slogan the Right to the City, and develop urban policy strategies to address inner-city vacancies (Fig. 1).

Figure 1: Compilation of vacancy and unused buildings Source: author (2014, 2015, 2016)

This chapter, therefore, deals with urban movements and collectives acting against revaluation, new spatial inequalities, and vacancies. Furthermore, it focuses on the digitalization and mediatization of our everyday lives. In this context, Rauterberg (cf. 2013, 45–57) speaks of an increasing entanglement, penetration, and stimulation of the Internet and the new media by urban life. Digital means of communication, messaging, and networking, as well as peer-to-peer products and crowdsourcing platforms, have become essential tools of urban intervention. Urban movement increasingly use information communication technologies (ICTs) to promote count-

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er-publicity and alternative views to spread different opinions quickly or to organize themselves efficiently (cf. Bennett et al. 2014; Loader, Vromen and Xenos 2014; Xenos et al. 2014; Sloam 2014; Castells 2009; 2012; Diani 2003a; 2003b; Oy 2002). In short, as Kreiml and Voigt (2011, back cover notes) write precisely on the back cover notes of their book, “web 2.0 creates numerous possibilities to make socio-political concerns a subject of discussion. Its open participative and networking structures make it ideal for civil society use.” For this reason, this chapter examines the procedures and strategies of urban collectives demonstrating against rising rents and making vacancies available for public use. It provides a case study of the crowdsourcing platform Leerstandsmelder.de, which focuses on mapping vacancies in Germany. I will explore how urban collectives and movement use the mapping and crowdsourced capabilities of geoweb 2.0 to influence the politics of governance, policies, and development strategies of urban vacancies. Following this, I focus on how crowdsourcing, bottom-up web 2.0, and the critical web mapping of inner-city vacancies are strategically used to influence the acquisition of urban space. METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH: INTERACTIVE CONTEMPLATION AND GROUNDED THEORY Escher and Becker (2013, 146) define the term field research as “an empirical method to collect cultural and social science data on-the-spot and in its everyday life context.” This is why Geiselhart et al. (2012, 83) attribute a great significance to field research in geography because it “has always been and will continue to be a profoundly empirical science. The researchers are in the field, and they observe.” In respect to the above-mentioned urban movement, Holm (2010, 76) states that “urban movement cannot be designed on the drawing board. They develop on the streets, in the city districts, and in everyday life.” Consequently, observing and participating in urban movement through field research – in the streets – is of utmost importance. Furthermore, Escher and Becker (2013, 148) discuss how participatory observation and field research are interdependent concepts requiring interactive contemplation, because “to replace field research, as a concept of participation, with a concept of interaction and to contemplate rather than observe in order to create a dialogue process of knowledge gaining at eye level.” It may be, therefore, insufficient for the acquisition of knowledge to occur through participation and observation. To gain more profound insights into the structures of urban movement and their strategies, it is necessary for the researcher to be an active member of an initiative. This was the methodology applied to this study because it was only through interactive contemplation, contribution, and involvement that I obtained a thorough understanding of the research object, its structures, processes, and contents. The participation in protests and demonstrations, the involvement in urban movement as well as the contact to urban collectives and groups play a great significance in the fact-finding process of this empirical research. I am an active founding

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member of a local Leerstandsmelder.de urban collective and thus, I am involved in the strategic considerations and decisions of the association. Second, I administrate the online platform Leerstandsmelder.de for the city of Mainz, which is part of a local, regional, and national network (cf. section 4.1). According to Füllner (2014) merging critical urban research with political activities offers numerous potentials. By doing so, the researcher “has access to the people and initiatives on the spot. This provides him with the possibility to recognize problem areas, research critical background information and correlations, understand political actions and derive new research approaches” (Füllner 2014, 87). In general, a circular research design based on grounded theory was used, focused on the various German cities where Leerstandsmelder.de is active. All the information gathered was used to develop problem-oriented interviews, which were then conducted with several urban collectives taking an interest in the vacancy affairs of the cities of Mainz, Stuttgart, Frankfurt am Main, Wiesbaden, Hamburg, and Berlin. By this means, the information and knowledge could be verified in a multistage evaluation process allowing for theoretical conclusions to be reached from the empirical data. Accordingly, the theoretical structure of this research was derived from seventeen interviews as well as from explorative, ethnographic research methods. Interviews were between thirty-five minutes and five hours, with an average of about two hours in length. Most of them were recorded, transcribed verbatim and anonymized. The first interview was conducted in February 2014 and the last in August 2016, which corresponds with the empirical data gathering phase of this research (cf. Arnold 2019). According to Strübing (2014, 9), grounded theory is capable of deriving a “theory based on empirical data.” There is a temporal overlap between the individual research phases, such as data collection, comparison of the empirical material, data evaluation, and theory formation. The “method of ongoing data comparison” (Strübing 2008, 18) allows for a theory to be derived by means of induction where “the basic idea of surveys based on the grounded theory is not to analyze phenomena through starting hypotheses. Rather, the focus is on the empirical data itself, which is used in a reflective process to derive a grounded theory by means of systematic techniques and analytic procedures” (Geiselhart et al. 2012, 84). THEORETICAL OUTLINES: VACANCIES, URBAN MOVEMENT / COLLECTIVES AND COLLECTIVE CRITICAL MAPPING IN THE WEB 2.0 Before discussing the internet platform Leerstandsmelder.de and the empirical examples, some terms like vacancy and urban movement have to be clarified. Second, the theoretical foundations and configurations of urban movements and their crowdsourcing possibilities in web 2.0 and geoweb mappings will be discussed in this section.

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The versatile phenomenon of vacancies It is generally impossible to find a clear and unified definition for the term vacancy, or as Clamor et al. (2011, 2) put it, “no unified definition for the term vacancy has been established.” Scheffler (2004) ascribes this lack to the versatility of the term, because “vacancy is not always the same.” Furthermore, many studies group vacancies into categories or list reasons for their existence rather than defining the phenomena (Clamor et al. 2011; Scheffler 2004). For Leerstandsmelder.de, vacancy is any unused, or empty building and sees them as a spatial resource. Leerstandsmelder.de generally follows Burg’s (2003, 11) understanding of the issue as the “term vacancy sums up all empty spaces in a defined area of research at a given point in time.” Social and urban movement and the Right to the City A distinction between social movements and urban movements needs to be made and their relation to the so-called Right to the City movements should be defined. For example, for Roth and Rucht (1987, 21) “[s]ocial movement is a mobilizing actor aiming to bring about, to prevent, or to reverse fundamental social change with a certain continuity by means of variable forms of organizations and actions on the basis of high symbolic integration and low role specifications.”

Elsewhere they conclude that a social movement occurs “when a network of groups and organizations based on a collective identity ensures a certain continuity,” whereby the objective is “to shape social change” (Roth and Rucht 2008, 13). In addition, Mayer (2014) explains that a distinction has to be made between social movements in cities and urban social movements. Although most movements can be found in cities, the scope of the social movement’ objectives reaches beyond the urban horizon and context. Mayer’s (2014, 25) distinction, that in terms of social movements, “the city is only the (passive) venue for political or social fights addressing a ‘bigger’ issue than just urban [or] urbanistic problems”, whereas for urban movements the focus is on “specific urban properties, such as central squares, public places or urban infrastructures, that act as mobilization trigger factors.” The difference is in the strategic orientation of the objectives and topics being addressed by the respective movement. By taking up the topics like urban lines of conflict, negotiation, and appropriation of space, urban movements make inequalities in cities a subject of discussion. Consequently, urban space is both the objective and the starting point of their actions, and it is a critical factor in their claims and positions. The so-called Right to the City movements, which references Lefebvre’s (1968) Le Droit à la Ville, are of particular relevance in the urban movement subject. These movements make “a general claim of non-exclusion from urban resources” (Holm 2011, 96) or “non-exclusion from the qualities of urban society” (Gebhardt and Holm 2011, 7). Holm (2010, 72) considers the Right to the City movement the “return of an urban policy opposition” with “the demand to collectively participate in future urban development.” He continues that “urban policy movements increas-

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ingly focus on the socio-economic issues concerning urban development again” (Holm 2010, 73) and they take up a key function by providing the possibility “to textually and practically link struggles which would otherwise be fought independently” (Holm 2010, 73). In general, the foundations of the Right to the City movement must be understood as a counter-concept to today’s new inequalities and exclusions from urban development. They may be regarded as a unification of groups and collectives that claim their ideas, demands, and concepts regarding urban space and its development, and tend to consider themselves opponents of current urban policies (cf. Gebhardt and Holm 2011; Holm 2011; Grell 2014). Mayer (2011, 53), whose research has concentrated on social and urban movements for decades, regards the Right to the City movement as “a new phase in the development of urban social movements in which new and broad coalitions throughout the city seem to have the potential to unify a variety of urban policy demands and thus they are a challenge to neoliberal planners, politicians and urban developers.”

In his article, The Right to the City, Harvey (2008) analyzes the radical, global political, and economic changes happening in cities, and sees them as the cause of a new wave of urban movements. In his opinion, these new urban movements constitute efforts to influence urban development and in his book Rebel City: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, Harvey (2012, 5) states, “to claim the right to the city … is to claim some kind of shaping power over the processes of urbanization, over the ways in which our cities are made and remade.”3 A critical feature of the Right to the City movement is that individual groups, actors, or collectives have mobilizing networks that co-characterize and co-support the movements. The Right to the City includes urban collectives with active, mobile, and flexible coalitions of people who take an interest in urban affairs and policies. These people work pragmatically and align their methods and their functioning with mutually defined objectives while being part of a greater network structure. These perspectives and the significance of urban collectives as social groups within urban movements will be taken up later in this chapter, especially picture the significance of these individual associations, organizations, initiatives, and groups in regaining influence and power in urban processes as those collectives are the administrators of the ‘local’ webpages that constitute the larger enterprise of Leerstandsmelder.de. The Right to the City movement is network-type collectives that cooperate within one another and is embedded in the trend of German-wide participative planning processes and public participation (Rosol and Dzudzek 2014). Even if urban movements mostly use subversive and rebellious means like squatting and other strategies to create political pressure, their crucial objective is to have a greater say in the decision-making process and to regain a more significant influence on local urban development (Grell 2014, 241–242). The role of Leerstandsmelder.de fits 3

It should be noticed at this point that in the course of all these discussions, approaches to a post-political and post-democratic city are considered as well, since power structures, suppression, insecurity, and diminishing democratic processes are closely linked to capitalist mechanisms of urban development (cf. Swyngedouw 2007; 2013; Mullis and Schipper 2013).

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within the Right to the City movement in Germany and apply critical mapping tools to the urban development process, since “recently, representatives of interactionistic, constructivist, and cultural scientific approaches, who are interested in less visible types of opposition beyond street protests, have joined the social theoretical approach of the new social movement.” (Lahusen 2013, 719)

The power of maps and collective critical mapping in web 2.0 New types of media, ICTs, and social networks have had a revolutionary impact on our ways of thinking, behaving, and working. Rauterberg (2013, 9) even proclaims that the digital age influences “the desire for [the] city” causing a dynamic progress and mutual accelerations, or as Hudson-Smith et al. (2009, 118) put it, “these changes are to such deep extent that we stand on the edge of a new geography based on a digitally connected world at whose core lies citizen-created data organized at an increasingly fine geographic scale.” Ubiquitously available data aided in the creation of web 2.0, a concept which brings together Internet communities and social network technologies. Since the focus of this chapter is on the appropriation processes of the Leerstandsmelder.de urban movement through collective critical web mapping, a short introduction to critical cartography and the power of maps will be given first, before discussing mapping practices in web 2.0. Critical cartography and the power of maps As an introduction to critical cartography and the power of maps, Harvey’s (2001, 220) much-cited statement explains that cartography and the making of maps play a fundamental role in information accumulation: “cartography is, plainly, a major structural pillar of all forms of geographical knowledge.” According to Bittner and Michel (2014, 64), maps are “powerful instruments to depict social and spatial issues,” and Belina (2013, 149) calls them the “most important means of depicting space.” Thus, the critical discussion about maps inherently focuses on the question of their power, their production, and their utilization. Bittner and Michel (2014, 64) define the field of critical cartography and critical urban mappings as follows: Critical cartography includes both the questioning of maps and their reflective application by means of using critical maps. Thus, critical cartography is both critique and critical practice. Critical urban mappings focus on the fact that cities are contested places in which negotiations on the social balance of power are partly determined by the way cities are visually depicted and thus regarded and (re)produced.

As a consequence, the social practices to produce maps have to be observed as well. Any discussion on the power of maps requires an examination of Harley (1988; 1989; 1996; 2008). In his legendary article Deconstructing the Map, Harley (1989) makes an important distinction between the internal and external power of maps. External power is determined by the fact that there is a link between maps

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and political power since the production of maps depended on a very few privileged actors: “Power is exerted on cartography. Behind most cartographers there is a patron; in innumerable instances, the makers of cartographic text were responding to external need. Power is also exercised with cartography. Monarchs, ministers, state institutions, the Church have all initiated programs of mapping to further their intentions. In modern Western society, maps quickly became crucial to the maintenance of state powers – to its boundaries, to its commerce, to its internal administration, to control of populations, and to its military strength. (…) Maps are still used to control our lives in innumerable ways” (Harley 1989, 12).

Harley (1989, 12) concludes: “All this is power with the help of maps. It is an external power, often centralized and exercised bureaucratically, imposed from above, and manifest in particular acts or phases of deliberate policy.” Maps are not powerful per se because of their material existence;4 rather, they obtain their power through social practices, and only by this means do they have powerful effects. Accordingly, Harley (1988, 278) states that they are “never value-free images.” Harley (1989) considers the internal power process of making geography by means of cartography, in which the map creates and (re)produces ‘realities’ by depicting or abstracting spatial structures or circumstances of given places. Their contents (often prematurely) become ‘true’ by their mere existence and “the apparent honesty of the image” (Harley 1989, 3). Maps create a powerful impact or better: Cartographers manufacture power: they create a spatial panopticon. It is a power embedded in the map text. We can talk about the power of a map … as a force for change. In this sense maps have politics. It is a power that intersects and is embedded in knowledge… Power comes from the map and it traverses the way maps are made. The key to this internal power is thus cartographic process (Harley 1989, 13).5

In his explanations, Harley broaches the issue of social structures that are, let’s say ‘hidden behind’ maps. Maps are social products: they are constructed representations of power, that communicate and visualize – often intentionally – distinct (world) pictures (Crampton 2001). Cartographers are powerful people in two respects: their profession gives them power, and the act of cartography is an act of appropriation and retention of power. Cartographers must, therefore, be regarded as politicians. These considerations can be summarized by Scott (1998, 87), who states that “the apparent power of maps … resides not in the map, of course, but rather in the power possessed by those who deploy the perspective of that particular map.” Scott’s statement takes us to the subject of new ICTs and the digitized and interactive world of web 2.0.

4 5

According to Belina (2013, 152) “maps do not have a social effect as artifacts as such they are merely printed paper or pixels on a screen.” For a detailed overview of the power of maps and critical cartography see Crampton (2001; 2010), Crampton and Krygier (2006), Dodge, Kitchin and Perkins (2009), Kitchin and Dodge (2007).

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Crowdsourcing and collective critical mapping in web 2.0 New technologies have caused a boom in literature and creative ideas about virtual geographical information systems. This boom not only introduced new terminologies, or so-called “potentially temporary buzzwords” (Tulloch 2008, 164) for georeferenced data systems, such as web mapping, volunteered geographic information, ubiquitous cartography, wiki-mapping, spatial media, the geospatial web, the geoweb, locative media, spatial crowdsourcing, geo-collaboration, map hacking or, more generally, neogeography (Elwood 2009; Crampton 2009; Parker 2014). The importance of the geoweb for public actors and political activist as tools to influence, shape, and change institutionalized knowledge can be observed. According to Elwood and Leszczynski (2013, 544), new spatial media “represent new opportunities for activist, civic, grassroots, indigenous and other groups to leverage web-based geographic information technologies in their efforts to effect social change.” Some have gone so far as to talk about the democratization of cartography (Gartner 2009; Bittner and Michel 2013; Belina 2013). This democratization is about taking the power of maps out of the hands of the few – the cartographers – and placing it with anyone with a computer or smartphone and the willingness to map. This democratization is accompanied by a new meaning and a recapturing of the map’s power.6 Hudson-Smith et al. (2009, 119) summarize the general tendencies and new possibilities as follows: “This re-emergence of the importance of geography within Web 2.0 technologies is becoming known as ´NeoGeography.´ Whereby people use Web 2.0 techniques to create and overlay their own locational and related data on and into systems that mirror the real world.” Thus, the Internet and the new technologies facilitate access to knowledge and, in this particular case, to maps and their production. To so-called neogeography,7 application program interfaces (APIs) allow the power of knowledge production to be distributed among numerous individual users. According to Parker (2014, 2–3), “essentially, neogeography is about people using and creating their own maps, on their own terms and by combining elements of an existing toolset. Neogeography is about sharing location information with friends and visitors, helping shape context, and conveying understanding through knowledge of place.” 6

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Concurrently, the mentioned fields of study not solely proclaim democratization of cartography, but also discuss new forms of power which can be found in these new structures since “controversial and powerful negotiations, visualizations and obscurations, inclusions and exclusions, come with these new practices and processes” (Bittner and Michel 2013, 111). Therefore, new questions about inclusion and exclusion as well as tendencies of digital gaps of access to and the knowledge of soft and hardware usage are raised (Bittner, Glasze and Turk 2013, 936). In the context of neogeography, Hakley (2013) speaks of a ‘delusion of democratisation.’ Turner (2006, 2–3) defines the term neogeography as follows: “Neogeography means ‘new geography’ and consists of a set of techniques and tools that fall outside the realm of traditional GIS, Geographic Information Systems. Where historically a professional cartographer might use ArcGIS …, a neogeographer uses a mapping API [application programming interface] like Google Maps … and geotags his photos.”

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Through new user groups, the sovereignty of interpretation, what is to be addressed on maps and how it is to be depicted, is no longer with individual cartographers or institutions but the power of cartography through production of knowledge as well as the production and visualization of geo-referenced information in web 2.0 maps is collectivized among a variety of prosumers.8 Bittner et al. (2013, 935) point in the same direction: With the geoweb comes a boom of new cartographic representations and practices which change the ways spaces are constituted, (re-)presented and appropriated. Commercial virtual globes like Google Earth, voluntary mapping projects like OpenStreetMap … are examples of how the geoweb brings a swathe of new information, new representations and new actors onto the screens of our everyday lives.

To summarize, mapping which is both collective and critical can be used in political practice and to change existing ‘realities.’ Maps serve as tools to share everyday experiences. By compiling collective knowledge, web maps make this knowledge available to everyone, undermining those power structures that are embedded in the shortening of content to ‘one simple truth’ or one view. This is why Streich (2014, 106) argues that “crowdsourcing has the potential to become subversive” because it can call into question hegemonic and dominant views on space. In this sense, crowdsourcing and web maps 2.0 express critical views so that oppositional and sub-cultural life can be created (Greth et al. 2013). Since maps are the result of abstracting social realities they can, “as a result of strategic considerations … be used in progressive politics and social movements” (Belina 2013, 155). Maps can act as media to question the balance of power, to reveal social power structures as well as social and urban inequalities or to visualize phenomena seemingly invisible to the public. Morawski (2014, 145) gets to the heart of it: “Maps can serve as tools for the practice of social movements and other oppositional actors by showing courses of action in terms of the utilization of space and the intervention into spaces.” Following this line of argumentation, the question is how web 2.0 mapping projects can be used strategically by urban movements and collectives against vacancies and what (political) impact can they have on urban processes through their possibilities of interaction.

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This term refers to the simultaneous act of producing and consuming an object. In our context, the boundaries between map production and map consumption dissolve. According to Glasze (2009, 188), the term prosumer is „a neologism, which is used to describe the merging of producers and consumers in web 2.0” (cf. Bittner, Glasze, Michel and Turk 2011, 61 (Textbox)).

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EMPIRICAL RESULTS: THE CROWDSOURCING PLATFORM LEERSTANDSMELDER.DE AND ITS STRATEGICAL USE OF URBAN COLLECTIVES The occupation of Hamburg’s Gängeviertel was the founding moment of the German-wide success story of Leerstandsmelder.de. Its technical realization and significance are analyzed here. Additionally, I examine the strategic use of Leerstandsmelder.de by these collectives and how the collective impacted local urban processes. Genesis, technical realization and significance of Leerstandsmelder.de In 2009, twelve buildings in Hamburg’s Gängeviertel district were occupied by protests because they were to be sold to a foreign investor. Protesters were generally against this neoliberal development as well as Hamburg’s entrepreneurial city policies (Ziehl 2013; 2014; Osswald 2015; Grabowski 2012; Arnold and Kashlan 2016; Arnold 2015; Derwanz and Vollmer 2015; Füllner and Templin 2011; Twickel 2012; Twickel and Hackbusch 2010; Füllner 2014; Höpner 2010; Koch 2011; Novy and Colomb 2013; Vrenegor 2012; 2014; Vrenegor and Haarmann 2012). One year later, in the course of this occupation and out of the Right to the City network of Hamburg and its creative spirit, the idea developed to create an instrument of collective critical mapping and online visualization of vacancies: “Activists from the Gängeviertel started the internet platform Leerstandsmelder.de to draw the public attention to the waste of resources, i.e. the current vacancies, and to support people in Hamburg willing to use these vacancies” (Ziehl 2013, 63). The self-description on the homepage states that the intention is to “promote the discussion on a sustainable use of vacancies and ideas for a reuse of the objects.” Utilizing crowdsourcing, “a collective and freely accessible pool of data and spaces is created [that is] independent of official urban information channels” (www.leerstandsmelder.de). This approach allows it to undermine institutionalized channels of knowledge and information or, as Ziehl (2013, 64) puts it: “In practice, Leerstandsmelder.de acts as a corrective. The platform supports the equality of information and is an important foundation in the struggle for the utilization of vacancies in the city.” Koch (2011, 110) explains the claim of Leerstandsmelder.de to be politically and institutionally independent and at the same time to allow for equality of information and participation in the urban development process, as follows: “It is all about transparency and participation independent of official urban sources of information.” In its ambitions and goals as well as in its founding moment, Leerstandsmelder.de resembles a subversive form of urban development and can be interpreted as an instrument of do-it-yourself urban development from below (cf. Osswald 2015, 13–14; Grabowski 2012, 187–188). For a long time, Leerstandsmelder.de only existed for the city of Hamburg. Today, the mapping tool is available for thirty-two German-speaking cities in Germany,

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Austria, and Switzerland, and is supported and maintained by local groups in these cities (Fig. 2). In these cities, the urban collectives and initiatives are often either part of a more significant urban movement (such as the Right to the City networks or other alliances) or sympathize with their urban policy demands and efforts to influence urban development. These urban collectives accompany and support the data entry and maintenance of their city’s Leerstandmelder.de. After registering and providing an online identity and an e-mail address, anyone can mark vacancies on an interactive map by entering information, such as the location of the building, duration of the vacancy, type of usage, as well as photo and comments. Thus, individuals can contribute to the collective knowledge and to the constructive handling of vacancies as well as access this information. To correct false entries, users can send remarks which are received by the respective local administrator since only they have editing rights (cf. Fig. 3). Due to its extensive coverage, the internet platform is of importance in terms of visualizing vacancies and unused spaces. It must be considered the most vital network with regards to the subject of vacancies. Furthermore, it is not only an online network but a network of urban actors and politically involved groups that exchange information on the German-wide situation to influence future developments.

Figure 2: Leerstandsmelder.de in 32 cities in Germany, Austria and Switzerland Source: www.leerstandsmelder.de (January 2019)

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Figure 3: Elements, functions, and simplified technical realization of Leerstandmelder.de Source: Arnold 2015, 158 (updated version)

Strategical use of Leerstandsmelder.de and its impact on urban processes This section highlights the interview conducted during field research and focuses on the motives and objectives of the urban collectives and observe their strategies in the usage of the internet platform Leerstandsmelder.de. The administration of Leerstandsmelder.de is covered by local urban collectives, but every city has its own characteristics and urban development issues. In other words, the local initiatives are confronted with different situations in general, and in particular, they must deal with different levels of vacancy. Further, the characteristics of vacancies vary from city-to-city in terms of demography, housing market policies, or regional economies and re-urbanization tendencies. Ziehl (2013, 64) states that local vacancy initiatives have different intentions with “some of them intending to generally destabilize neoliberal urban development policies, [while] others search [for] space for their own projects. And then there are those initiatives trying to find vacancies for third parties and act as agents between owners and users.” Whether politically motivated or not, all collectives deal with the phenomenon of vacancies and pledge for their opening and utilization in one way or another. As one interviewee states, We all felt like doing something, and there were also some previous ideas about vacancies that could be taken up, and then the topic was revived. Besides, we saw what great things were done by others [in different cities] and, speaking for myself, I wanted to do something practical. In general, we already had previous experience here in the city and a certain amount of frustration,

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Gregor Arnold which is there because many buildings are empty and still nothing happens. We knew that not much could be done about the vacancy situation, but we wanted to do it at least for our peace of mind. We use the city as a playground, so we wanted to do something in the empty spaces, like temporary events to somehow use vacancies in a positive way, but we did not intend to pursue a concrete objective through politics or the media. We did it for the fun of it. We did not want to stay out of political issues, but politics and urban development were never the primary objectives. Of course, we know precisely where the heat is on, and we thankfully take the credit when we can change something, but it was never our intention to crack the hard nuts.

Another member of the collective confirms that the collective was never interested in raising political opposition but rather wanted to intervene in the urban space and trigger the desire to deal with vacancies: It was not an ambitious goal to make a difference. Of course, we wanted to make the city a better place, but it is not like we are continually thinking of ways to bring the city forward and to remove vacancies. This is a side effect, and I think that even when we are not spreading big political messages, we can still be practical and thus political.

In contrast, collectives in other cities express the purpose that their most important motive was to participate in urban questions and to effect change in their local urban political economy. Because of enormous economic pressure and rising rents in inner-city districts, for some residents, the city’s attractiveness is declining, and their once familiar quality of life is deteriorating. This loss of personal satisfaction and the increase of urban inconvenience form a critical basis, which is responsible for the need for the temporary use of vacant buildings. As one person notes, The problem here is that, if you do not have much money, you cannot do anything and this perspective necessarily leads to the subject of vacancy. Whenever inequalities increase and urban development only follows economic reasons, then this leads to social dissatisfaction in the city for many people, and that is why vacancy plays an important role.

It can be stated that most collectives understand vacancy as a starting point and a potential for urban activities whether they are critical, politically motivated, or not. According to one respondent, We realized in our everyday lives that spaces in the city are empty and that, at the same time, a large variety of cultural associations and other loose groups out of the culture scene or social fields are looking for cheap rooms. This is also known from other cities, and we want to counter this undesirable development and make sure that on the one hand no more empty and yawning surfaces gape in the city and, on the other hand, that the residents find space to realize their ideas and projects. So, we brought together those looking for spaces and the vacancies.

Most collectives address the subject of rising rents as well as the spatial pressure of lack of affordable places to live in or use for cultural or civic functions. The increased costs of space in a city make it difficult for economically weak groups, initiatives, and individuals to participate in city life. For them, it is essential that citizens have access to livable spaces and, in particular, access to spaces in cities for non-commercial use. Urban collectives like Leerstandsmelder.de act as agents for other people looking for space. These collectives are third-party actors for cultural or social fields and differ in their form of participation and co-determination of urban affairs as well as in their political motivations:

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We want a vibrant city, which can be shaped by its residents rather than an urban development dominated by equity markets and real estate speculators. We wanted to do more than complain, we wanted to become active, and that is what we did. We wanted to get actively involved in the city development with our ideas, and therefore vacancies are a high possibility to provide associations and groups with affordable rooms so that they can get opportunities for their ideas even in expensive cities. We address owners and companies to make their vacancies available to people in search of spaces for a small flat-rate user fee [covering, e.g., electricity and heating]. Also, we address the city council and political leaders to do something finally. Unfortunately, they still haven’t realized the significance of the vacancy subject along with its potential and possibilities in a city with such high pressure on the accommodation and the real estate market. Otherwise, our topics and efforts would be taken more seriously. The ‘Leerstandsmelder’ is supporting our aim and arguments tremendous because rents are high due to spatial pressure and therefore the idea to open affordable room to the citizens in order to give them the possibility to realize their ideas is reasonable. Not everyone can afford these rents, but through the use of vacancies, at least some projects can temporarily be realized. By this means, the citizens can shape their city; they can participate and feel a closer connection to their city, too.

According to this statement, one fundamental conviction is that reasonably priced spaces should be made available also in expensive cities and that vacancies can take up this function. Collectives also pursue an approach of democratic rights of use as a fundamental value of the Right to the City movement. These ambitions can be attributed to the struggle against the intensification of economic processes. In their efforts, the urban collectives of Leerstandsmelder.de fight the extending and consolidating market values of urban space and its economic transformation and commodification. In consequence, and to focus more on the mapping platform Leerstandsmelder.de, the articulated economic tensions despite vacancies serve as an indicator for the mapping efforts of vacancies. As one interviewee noted, On my daily way to work, I pass two residential houses that have been vacant for years and right next to them, revaluation at its best is taking place, and I find it essential to visualize exactly this process because hardly anyone deals with this kind of problem. In principle, it is a scandal when people have to move out of a house because it has become too expensive and there is this spatial and economic pressure, and right next to this house, other houses are empty. This is crazy. It is therefore also a matter of drawing the public attention to these processes, and that is why now and then we listed these vacancies to know which ones might be available for a reasonable utilization. By this means, we also wanted to get an overview, since no one feels responsible for this topic and it is problematic if no one else, not even the city councils or local political leader, really know where vacancies are located and more importantly, how many of them there are.

In the course of discussions with several urban collectives, it became clear that the reason for supporting Leerstandmelder.de and for entering vacancy information reached beyond a mere visualization and location of vacancies. Public relations and raising awareness of the subject of vacancies despite increasing spatial pressure are essential motives: The ‘Leerstandmelder’ serves as an important component in public relations, in times of increased urban spatial pressure, vacancy needs greater attention. Not only will local residents become more aware of the existence of vacancies, but the topic can generally be carried into the social urban or political discourse. Additionally, the owners will also be reminded of their

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Democratic reasons and convictions form the motives for supporting the Internet platform since it draws attention to a problematic and very political urban issue. Leerstandmelder.de has become an essential tool of argumentation, it provides figures and visualizes vacancy, and thus it is used to increase the political pressure through public relation. According to one participant, ‘Leerstandsmelder’ has always been a medium to get into a conversation with people and yes, it shows the numerous vacancies here and there, it can point to the issues. Moreover, when a city council does not have the vacancies on screen and does nothing to act against them, then the ‘Leerstandsmelder’ can take an alarm function. The ‘Leerstandsmelder’ is a mapping tool but also a vehicle to provide arguments. Just think about on which basis decisions are taken, mostly on figures, data, and facts and those are collected by the crowd of the ‘Leerstandmelder’ and then presented to the city officials.

Through its collaborative characteristics, Leerstandmelder.de has the potential to make other urban initiatives take up the subject of vacancies so that new social groups who want to make a difference can be proactive and use the data provided to initiate change. Leerstandmelder.de can also generate interest in the issue of urban vacancies within specific cities and allows for a place to start political discussions about the subject. The good thing is that many well-informed people are working in the Right to the City but their work is fragmented. The Leerstandmelder.de movement is not about expanding the community, or about collecting more data on vacancies. It is about using the platform as a political tool because when the city council or the local real estate office says: ‘vacancy is a problem we don’t have.’ When this happens, and Leerstandmelder.de is deployed in the discussion, red dots pop up on a map with detailed information. As a consequence, Leerstandmelder.de moved the discussion of open spaces forward in real-time. A Leerstandmelder.de member describes transactions like this in an interview as follows: Of course, the ‘Leerstandsmelder’ as a map alone can’t make much of a difference and the way it is used depends on people’s different situations and locations, but it can make a difference when used appropriately, politically, and for the right purpose. In a booming town which has people moving in over the last years, where housing is scarce, rents are rising, and people are driven out, the ‘Leerstandsmelder’ becomes an essential tool.

Due to the many critical and political ways of use, Leerstandsmelder.de takes up a supporting role and critical function in the reactivation of vacancies. By now, it served for the opening of vacancy and the implementation of several temporary use projects as an information platform (Ziehl 2013). Alongside the acquisition of vacant and unused spaces, the urban space experience is transformed and reinterpreted. Of much greater importance is that the Right to the City movement and the locally incorporated collectives of Leerstandsmelder.de are engaged in producing democratic cities where every resident has the right to be heard, and every citizen

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Figure 4: Compilation of street protests and squatting of vacancy from and for refugees Source: author (2015, 2016)

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has the right to find rest, refuge, and shelter (Arnold and Kashlan 2016, 34). Concerning this matter, the activists of these movements expressed and positioned themselves during the ‘refugee crisis.’9 With one single voice for the opening of vacancies and their use as housing possibilities for refugees, a movement began. This appeal was spread through public relations10 and was supported actively in many major cities through street protest and squatting (cf. www.leerstandsmelder. de and Fig. 4). According to one Leerstandsmelder.de activist, We have designed a banner ‘100 vacant rooms: confiscate immediately for home seekers, students, and refugees’ because the current situation shows that these groups are looking for housing. The city council opened a gym for refugees. With our occupation of empty buildings, we expressed that this is unacceptable. For us we have put the banner on a residential building that has been vacant for years. The opening of vacant buildings for refugees takes far too long. It is cold and raining outside, and 150 people have to sleep together in gyms and tents, that is not a decent accommodation. There they have no privacy. There you have nothing. Of course, you should be grateful for any roof over your head, but in my opinion, this can be done better. With the occupation, we showed solidarity with the apartment-seeking groups and highlighted two acute problems. We not only have made visible and question why the property is empty for years, but we have also shown where the refugees and homeless could find affordable housing. In consequence, while it remains that private property is not confiscated for the accommodation of refugees, at least the city will now examine their properties and search for empty buildings and better accommodation facilities. These properties of the public authorities are of course mapped on the ‘Leerstandsmelder,’ the platform and our action have in a way contributed successfully for better accommodation of refugees.

Through subversive actions like street protests and squatting the entanglements of Leerstandsmelder.de with cities during the refugee crisis shows how the deployment of critical mapping within an urban democracy movement can become a platform of action and a voice of opposition and change. The Leerstandsmelder.de network has to be understood as an online platform as well as an urban ‘offline’ group of activists. These urban collectives reproduce their observations on spatial inequalities, social concerns, and their demands through web 2.0 mapping use this collective and critical knowledge as political leverage offline in the streets and communities in central Europe. In short, Leerstandsmelder.de as an online critical web 2.0 mapping and social media platform is used to influence and actively shape urban spaces.

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This term can be discussed intensively. According to many activists, urban movements, the crisis is not to be seen in the fact that in October 2015 many refugees migrated to Europe and Germany, but the crisis appears for them in the administrative difficulties that these migrants do not get assigned to adequate accommodation (cf. next footnote). “Thousands of people flee each month to Germany. Most have to live in mass shelters or even tents, while millions of square meters of space are empty. Now winter is coming, and many vacancies are suitable as accommodation, if they are prepared for it. We of Leerstandsmelder. de therefore call on you to document vacancy to promote their conversion to lodging for refugees.” (www.leerstandsmelder.de)

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CONCLUSIONS: ONLINE PROTEST FOR OFFLINE USAGE? This chapter provided a case study of Leerstandsmelder.de, an urban movement in 29 German-speaking cities with a critical geoweb platform, that seeks to correct the injustice of vacancy. These urban collectives fight against vacancy and participate in urban development as well as try to influence the policies and practices going on in a city’s political economy. A particular focus in this chapter was on crowdsourcing and the critical collective mapping of vacancies as well as the new possibilities of web 2.0. In this context, I investigated which effects the critical online mapping of vacancies have and in which way the respective collectives use the online platform Leerstandsmelder.de. In short, this chapter sought to show how, in one particular case, the geoweb and web 2.0 changed the appropriation of urban space. The efforts of the respective urban collectives must be viewed from different perspectives and backgrounds, which is also a reason why they position themselves differently in terms of their handling with vacancy and towards urban policies. In general, urban collectives criticize real estate vacancies and question both the potential and the possible use, whereby they have a variety of different motives and follow different strategies. Residents of growing cities are confronted with an increasing spatial problem and pressure of usage, resulting in rising rents. In consequence, vacancy is critically discussed and questioned and the use of vacancies serve to relieve specific social injustices and are regarded as inexpensive spaces for possible solutions to injustices. Since social and cultural initiatives and associations can hardly afford regular rents, unused rooms have necessarily become the last affordable open spaces in cities. Vacancies function as a potential for people to express themselves in a creative, non-commercial, affordable way, and they are used as a means and as a starting point to enhance urban life and intensify joint activities. Accordingly, such urban collectives specifically aim to influence social and cultural life, urban processes, and policies. Leerstandsmelder.de thereby helps, because, as a first step, the crowd of the platform reveals vacancies in the inner-city areas. Leerstandsmelder.de serves as a component of classical mapping, public relations, and information efforts by providing facts and figures on the unused spaces. In a second step, this knowledge can be used to create pressure on urban policies and administrations to introduce the desired measures to open vacancies and make them affordable, socially sustainable, and for ongoing public use. Then, Leerstandsmelder.de serves as a tool to encourage an urban policy discourse about inner-city resources and open spaces. Thus, urban social movements are sustained through Internet communities, too, by carrying their content-related issues into the digital networked space. Leerstandsmelder. de provides essential functions in the struggle against inner-city spaces and vacancies. This critical mapping tool is as a collective knowledge platform that resides in a position in between the market and that government. Social movements are communities that carry their content and related issues into media and virtual spaces. In the process of implementing their movement in virtual space, “they are actors and beneficiaries of this implementation” (Oy 2002, 72). Leerstandsmelder has embraced the new possibilities created by web 2.0 and carried their voluntary

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collective over into local urban policy discourses. The Leerstandsmelder therefore not only depicts the subject of vacant urban real estates, but also serves as an instrument for collectives and movements to strategically effect change in cities. New media technologies and digital means of communication such as peer-topeer networks, crowdsourcing platforms, and web 2.0 maps have become important tools of urban intervention. Those maps are the result of strategic considerations seeking to influence, act against, or prevent certain social urban developments or economic and political inequalities from transpiring. Thus, they provide and push forward alternative perspectives on urban space and can undermine power structures of urban policy and administration to shape and achieve urban social change. In particular, and as Georgiou (2013, 4) discusses in her book Media and the City, “social actors are markers of meanings of the city and of the media [because] very many struggles for symbolic and material resources in the city increasingly unravel at the meeting of the media and the city: when protesters use social media to gain local and global presence.” For her (Georgiou 2013, 4) “the visibility offered by the physical space of the city is no longer enough.” Following this argument, such local, bottom-up activist struggles and protests became much more visible and represented in and through media. With the usage of media as a communication tool, the demand for affordable space can be heard on a wider scale, and thereby the call for a Right to the City becomes simultaneously a lived-experience in-between media and the urban space society. As Georgiou (2013, 142) puts it, “the urban street is revived and extended to the global mediated street. It is in the continuity of the physical and mediated urban street that presence, as a strategy, as a tactic and as the inevitable politics of the other in the city, makes sense. The politics of presence depends on the merging of the grounded physicality of protests and conflict as much as on the sustainability of protest through its mediated representations.” Acknowledging that media is “the medium which ‘represents’ urban phenomena by turning it into an image” (McQuire 2008, vii), I consider urban collectives in the composition of the Right to the City movement that digitally promote counter-publicity. Accordingly, by producing, articulating and deploying the perspective of web 2.0 maps, urban actors bring up critical content or ‘realities’ in order to confront political leaders with their view on urban space and to influence urban processes on the spot. REFERENCES Arnold, G. (2015): Online-offline strategies of urban movements against vacancies: The crowdsourcing platform Leerstandsmelder.de as a collective and critical mapping tool. Observatorio (OBS*) Journal, Media City: Spectacular, Ordinary and Contested Spaces (Special Issue), 145–176. Arnold, G. and B. Kashlan (2016): Steht das leer? Partizipatives crowdsourcing als Basis für ein offenes Leerstandsmanagement von allen. Polis // Magazin für Urban Development, May 17, 2016. https://polis-magazin.com/2016/05/steht-das-leer/ (accessed June 4, 2016). Arnold, G. (2019, forthcoming): Leerstand in wachsenden Städten und Metropolregionen Deutschlands: Strategische Handlungen, Konflikte und Empfehlungen. Mainz.

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CHECKING IN: MAPS AND SOCIAL MEDIA

MAPPING THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION: FILM TOURISM, GEOGRAPHY AND SOCIAL MEDIA Mengqian Yang and Sébastien Caquard INTRODUCTION Film tourism also known as “film-induced tourism,” “screen tourism,” “movie-induced tourism,” or “set-jetting” relates to “on-location tourism that follows the success of a film made (or set) in a particular region” (Beeton 2005, 9). Due to the globalization of the film industry and the democratization of global travel, film tourism has become a hot leisure activity with important economic and social impacts. Blockbusters such as The Lord of the Rings, The Da Vinci Code and the Harry Potter movie series have attracted hordes of tourists to New Zealand, Paris, London, and Oxford respectively (Joliveau 2009; Cateridge 2015). Such tourists want to visit the places they saw in their favorite movies and walk in the steps of their heroes (Bolan et al. 2011). They also want to share their experiences with their friends and with the world at large using social media. Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Flickr, Youtube, Vimeo, and TripAdvisor are now extensively used by these Web 2.0 set-jetters to plan their trip and to exchange with others about their impressions and suggestions regarding the shooting locations they have visited. In the process, they leave a range of digital traces such as photos, comments, videos, and associated spatiotemporal data (i.e., where and when these traces have been collected and shared). In this chapter, we propose to examine how these digital traces can be mobilized to better understand social media’s potential for studying the spatial practices related to film-induced tourism at different scales. To do so, we collected some of the digital traces left on three social media platforms (i.e. Twitter, Flickr, and Tripadvisor) by film tourists inspired by the popular movie The Shawshank Redemption. This chapter begins with an overview of the relationships between social media and film tourism, followed by a presentation of The Shawshank Redemption as a case study to further study these relationships. We then propose a detailed description of the methodology, developed to explore the potential of the three social media platforms selected for this project. In the final section of the chapter, we present and discuss the results of our analysis, emphasizing the potential and limits of these three social media platforms to study film tourism at different scales.

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SET-JETTING AND SOCIAL MEDIA There is a long history associated with literary tourism that traces back to the seventeenth century (Connell 2012), when young, wealthy British people traveled across Europe to witness historical locations that they learned about in literature (Joliveau 2009). While this practice remained extremely marginal and reserved to the most privileged, it expanded to a broader segment of the population with the emergence of film tourism during the 20th century. By the turn of the 21st century, screen tourism increased dramatically under the dual influence of the global circulation of images through blockbuster films and the democratization of travel (Bolan and Williams 2008; Tzanelli 2004; Hudson and Ritchie 2006). Millions of people now travel every year to different destinations with the intent of visiting set locations (Macionis, 2004). The motivations behind film-induced tourism and its social, cultural and economic consequences have been extensively documented since the seminal research of Tooke and Baker (1996) in the United Kingdom and by Riley and colleagues (1998) in the United States, as reviewed by Hudson and Ritchie (2006) and Connell (2012). Researchers have approached film tourism from a variety of perspectives, such as studying the branding and marketing of places appearing in movies (O’Connor and Bolan 2008), investigating the reasons people engage in film tourism (Busby and Klug 2001; Cateridge 2015), exploring the relationship between reality and fantasy when visiting a shooting location (Cateridge 2015), and evaluating the impact of set-jetting on specific places and communities (Soliman 2011; Kim and Wang 2012). While these different aspects have been traditionally assessed using surveys distributed to set-jetters, the increasing presence of film tourists on social media has opened new possibilities to study this phenomenon. Social media is one of the most archetypal forms of the Web 2.0. Applications such as Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, Vimeo, Youtube, and TripAdvisor enable Internet users to both access as well as contribute information such as comments, text, photos, videos, and links. Social media are now used by the tourism industry as promotional vehicles and by tourists as the latest versions of words of mouth via comments as well as videos and photos that can be spread instantly throughout the entire digital world (Scott 2010; Månsson 2011). Taking photos has long been an essential part of the tourist experience. While the primary use of these touristic photos has been to support a narrative that will be presented “to friends and family once back home from a trip”, photos in the social media era add “a new dimension of performativity, which is particularly well-suited to the photography habits of the screen tourist” (Cateridge 2015, 329). Screen tourists are by definition interested in images associated to places, images they have seen in movies as well as images they might be able to take at the same location, not just to follow the path of their heroes, but also perhaps to take their place in the frame. In the social media era, film tourists store photos and video somewhere in the cloud and share them with comments via a range of social media platforms including platforms dedicated to tourism such as Expedia and Tripadvisor. Although the

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convergence of these different media and platforms contributes to the transformation of a shooting location into a popular tourist destination (Månsson 2011), the unpacking of their respective impact on tourist consumption “is like opening Pandora’s Box, with layers and layers of new challenges and/or possibilities. Consequently, there is a need for further research that delves into the box in order to explore these and other related phenomena from new perspectives” (Månsson 2011, 1649). In this project, we explore some of the possibilities offered by different social media platforms to study the spatial dimensions of set-jetting, with a focus on one particular case study: The Shawshank Redemption. THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION In 1982, Stephen King published a novella entitled Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, which tells the story of a young and successful banker, Andy Dufresne, who is wrongfully sentenced to life in prison for the double murder of his wife and wife’s lover. Andy is sent to the Shawshank Prison where he spends 27 years of his life before escaping and recovering his freedom. Although this novella did not attract much attention when it was first published, it took on another life in 1994 when it was adapted into a film by Frank Darabont, a young director who had previously worked with Steven King (Branch 2014). This movie, entitled The Shawshank Redemption, starring Tim Robbins (Andy Dufresne) and Morgan Freeman (Ellis “Red” Redding) was initially considered a commercial flop with just $ 18 Million at the box-office when it debuted. However, this relative lack of popularity was soon followed by a positive critical reception (Adams 2014), and the film moved on to be nominated for seven Academy Awards in 1994. It then continued long after its release to generate substantial income in an unprecedented way (Adams 2014), and its popular recognition has been formalized with Shawshank being rated the best film of all time by imdb.com (IMDB Charts 2015). The unconventional and long-term success of the movie has generated many popular activities, including film-induced tourism. Contrary to many Hollywood films, The Shawshank Redemption was not shot in a film-making studio. The director chose instead to shoot the film in a real prison: the Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, Ohio, USA, while the action is supposed to take place in a reformatory in Portland, Maine. The realism of the set might have contributed to the success of the movie by how well it evoked a deep sense of internment. The Ohio State Reformatory became deeply associated with The Shawshank Redemption and became a mythical destination for the many fans of the movie. Contrary to most of the blockbuster film tourists’ destinations such as New Zealand, Paris, London and Oxford, tourist attractions around the Mansfield Reformatory remain quite limited; tourists go there mainly because of the movie, even if the prison presents a certain architectural and historical interest. Also known as the Mansfield Reformatory, this historic prison opened in 1896 and remained in operation until 1990. According to the Mansfield Reformatory Preservation Society, the building interestingly combines three architectural styles:

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Richardsonian Romanesque, Victorian Gothic, and the Queen Anne style. Nonetheless, the Reformatory easily could have been demolished since its closing if it were not for the popularity of The Shawshank Redemption. It is now a major tourist attraction which has brought in $ 10 million in tourism to the Mansfield area in 2013 (Sciullo 2014). The unique setting of this reformatory in a non-touristic area, combined with the huge success of the movie over the years, made it a unique case study to explore the potential of social media to study the geographies of set-jetting. METHODOLOGY To assess the potential of social media to study the geography of film tourism, we have mined data from three social media platforms: Twitter, Flickr, and TripAdvisor (see Figure 1). Twitter is a social networking platform created in 2006 in which users can post, read, and share short messages (140-character maximum at the time of this study) as well as photos and videos. Twitter was selected for this project because its API (Application Programming Interface) allows the mining of Tweets – including geocoded Tweets – as well as data associated to the accounts from which these Tweets were sent (e.g., location of the account, number of Tweets posted with this account). Flickr is an image-hosting website that launched in 2004. This platform was selected for this project because of its popular image-sharing features, with 350 million monthly visitors from 63 countries (Flickr 2014), and because the Flickr API allows the mining of geotagged photos as well as the mining of the user accounts used to share these photos (which is not the case for other photo sharing platforms such as Instagram). TripAdvisor is a website that provides information and reviews about travel-related content by travelers and consumers. It launched in February 2000 and quickly became one of the most popular social media websites related to travel (Xiang and Gretzel 2009), with more than “320 million reviews and opinions from travelers around the world” (TripAdvisor 2016). TripAdvisor has been selected for this project because it offers extensive written reviews that can provide detailed information to study tourism activity within and beyond a specific site. Although these three platforms are based in the United States, they are used extensively beyond the U.S. throughout the Western world (e.g., in 2014, 80 % of the Twitter accounts were located outside of the United States according to Twitter Help). That said, our research has been restricted by our decision to focus only on comments and captions in English, which inevitably provides a distorted picture of the global geography of film tourism induced by The Shawshank Redemption. Nevertheless, this approach was deemed relevant for this project since our goal was to compare the potential of these three social media platforms for studying the geographies of film-induced tourism in general terms, rather than limiting our scope to the geography of film tourism induced specifically by The Shawshank Redemption.

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Figure 1: Research Design Process

Given the similarities between Flickr and Twitter, we used the same approach to collect data from these two platforms, while we developed another approach to mine data from TripAdvisor. Twitter and Flickr data were mined in three ways. First, a keyword search for “Shawshank” AND “jail” OR “prison” was used to capture comments associated to the fictional place, since these words refer to the name of the prison in the movie (and in the novel). A second keyword search for “Mansfield Reformatory” or “Ohio State Reformatory” was performed to collect data associated with the official Reformatory. A third query was developed based on location to collect geocoded Tweets and Flickr photos posted within 1 km from the Reformatory. For TripAdvisor, the data collection was done in one step through the retrieval of all the reviews mentioning either “Mansfield Reformatory,” “Ohio State Reformatory,” or “Shawshank Reformatory” since these three names were used in TripAdvisor comments to refer to the official reformatory. Although we tried to be as consistent as possible with the data collection process, it was not possible to avoid certain discrepancies in the collection timeframes. While the data from Flickr and TripAdvisor could be collected since the first relevant record identified (respectively 2004 and 2009), the Twitter search API did not provide access to all Tweets, but only to a selection of Tweets published

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within the previous 6 to 9 days of the mining date, depending on the volume of Tweets returned based on our criteria. To ensure we had enough data, we mined Twitter weekly for 27 weeks, between September 1st, 2013 and March 1st, 2014. From the textual elements collected from these three platforms (i.e., Flickr photo descriptions, Tweets, and TripAdvisor reviews), we extracted the geographical information using geoparsing methods. Geoparsing is the process of assigning geographic coordinates (longitude and latitude) to proper nouns place names that appear in a text using natural language processing and a gazetteer in order to turn text documents into geographic databases (Caldwell 2009). For this research, we used two complementary geoparsing tools: GeoDoc and CLIFF. GeoDoc is a geoparsing tool that helps to automatically identify place names in texts and anchors each name to a geographic location. It offers a web interface that allows the user to highlight the place names quickly and correctly (GeoDoc Guide 2014). CLIFF is an application used to parse news articles and to identify places mentioned as well as people and organizations. It has been developed to “focus on getting at what place an article is really about (as opposed to all the places it mentions)” (CLIFF 2014). Both applications were used to automatically identify coarse place names in all the textual material collected (e.g., countries, main cities), and attach geographic coordinates to these place names. Since these applications often fail to identify local place names such as parks, rivers, villages, and businesses, we complemented this automatic geoparsing process with a close reading approach of the material collected. All identified place names were then geocoded and mapped using different software such as ArcGIS, Carto(DB), and Atlascine (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Examples of the results mined from the three social media platforms

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RESULTS AND ANALYSIS The data collected from the three social media platforms are synthesized in Table 1, which also lists the five major questions that structured this research.

Table 1: Synthesis of the data mined from Flickr, Twitter, and TripAdvisor

(a) How are social media used to refer to the fictional place? On average, there were more than 100,000 Tweets per week containing the keywords “Shawshank” and “prison” or “jail.” However, the same keywords returned only 5,132 photos from Flickr over a period of 10 years (2004 to 2014) among which 19.4 % (911 photos) were geotagged. To have a comparable number of geotagged tweets, we restricted our data collection with Twitter to a two-week period (Feb 2nd to Feb 17th, 2014). During this period 232,006 Tweets containing these keywords were posted, among which 1,137 were geotagged. This is equal to 0.5 % of tweets collected, which is close to the 1 % average of geotagged Tweets measured by others (Stephens and Poorthuis 2015; Jurgens et al. 2015). These first results show that although there is much more data generated via Twitter than Flickr, unsurprisingly, there is a higher percentage of geotagged photos in Flickr than there are geotagged Tweets.

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Figure 3: Comparing the distribution of geolocated photos from Flickr (on the left) and Tweets (on the right) containing the keywords “Shawshank” and “Prison” or “Jail” at four different scales (Mapped with Carto(DB) using Flickr data at http://cdb.io/1MqENGp and Twitter data at http:// cdb.io/1MqCcMD)

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Figure 3 shows the first two sets of maps, which compares the distribution of the geolocated Flickr photos and Tweets that contain the words associated with the fictional place name. It is interesting to observe that both the geotagged Tweets and Flickr photos came predominantly from the United States and Europe, and more specifically from the North-East part of the United States and the United Kingdom. However, there are some interesting differences when we zoom in. First, in Europe, the amount of geotagged Tweets coming from the UK is overwhelming, at 67 % of all geotagged Tweets in our dataset. This was mainly because one Tweet containing the keywords “Shawshank” and “prison” was retweeted about 600 times in the UK, illustrating the need to consider the impact of retweeting on Twitter data. That said, even after removing the 600 retweets, the UK was still the primary source of Tweets in Europe which can be explained by the use of English keywords as well as by the fact that Twitter is much more popular in the UK than in any other European country. Second, in the United States, Tweets were more spread out spatially and followed roughly the demographic structure of the country (i.e., more Tweets in bigger cities), while Flickr photos were more concentrated in specific locations such as the Mansfield Reformatory (North East of Mansfield). While the geography of film tourists using Twitter to talk about the fictional reformatory follows the global geography of Twitter users, the geography of Flickr photos is much more influenced by the shooting location. (b) How are social media used to refer to the shooting location? On Twitter, the keywords referring to the shooting location (i.e., “Mansfield Reformatory” or “Ohio State Reformatory”) were way less popular than the keywords referring to the fictional place. This search only retrieved 933 Tweets over a period of 6 months, around 250 times less than the tweets collected in two weeks using the fictional place name keywords. On the other hand, with Flickr, we mined 9,234 photos, around 1.7 times more than with the fictional place name keywords, for the same period. This indicates that use of Twitter for talking about the official Reformatory was extremely marginal in comparison to its use for talking about the fictional place, while there was the opposite trend with Flickr. This makes sense as Flickr is much more place-dependent, since photos are more likely to be related to places, and since taking pictures is about connecting the fictional place with the shooting location. These results suggest that Twitter may be a more marginal social media platform than Flickr for sharing set-jetting experiences: a point which will be further discussed later on. Out of the 193 TripAdvisor reviews containing keywords associated with the Reformatory, 80 % mentioned the movie The Shawshank Redemption. Not surprisingly, this indicated that the movie and the Reformatory are deeply connected in the minds of tourists writing reviews about this site. Beyond the Reformatory, a total of 40 other places were mentioned in these reviews. These places included hotels and restaurants, as well as tourist attractions located around the Reformatory (2/3 of these places were located within 20 kilometers from the Reformatory). Although most of these places were only mentioned once in all the reviews, some of them such as Kingwood Center Gardens, Malabar Farm, and Mohican State Park were

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mentioned several times, suggesting the existence of a small network of local tourist activities around the Reformatory. (c) How are social media used at the set-jetting site (i.e., at the Mansfield Reformatory)? In terms of the data posted within 1 km from the Reformatory, there was, surprisingly, a proportionally similar number of geolocated Flickr photos as geolocated Tweets (an average of 23.4 Flickr photos and 23.8 Tweets per month respectively). Even if only one small fraction of the Tweets is geocoded as mentioned previously and that our data collection period was only six months, given the vast amount of data generated on a daily basis with Twitter, we would have expected to collect much more Tweets within 1 km of the Reformatory. Again, this result illustrates the lack of clear relationships between The Shawshank Redemption tourists and Twitter users.

Figure 4a: Satellite view of the Mansfield Reformatory (source: Google map). The Mansfield Reformatory currently includes a set of buildings surrounded by a park and two parking lots

If we look more closely at the spatial distribution of this data, it is possible to identify hot spots of where pictures have been taken around and within the Mansfield Reformatory. The primary hot spot appears to be inside the main building in the center of the Reformatory, in the west cell block and in the west diagonal (see Figure 4a, 4b & 4c). Two secondary hot spots can also be identified: one at the entry of the Reformatory and one on the Reformatory road. Both of these hot spots seem to offer excellent views of the Reformatory (see photo 5b). While these two hot spots appear in both Flickr and Twitter data (see Figure 4b & 4c), Twitter users do not Tweet as much from the Reformatory road. On the other hand, more Tweets than photos were posted from the parking lot located on the southeast side of the building. This illustrates that generally, photos tend to be more aggregated around precise locations, while Tweets tend to be more spread-out over the site.

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Figure 4b: Geolocated photos mined from Flickr near the Mansfield Reformatory (From Jan 30th, 2009 to March 31st, 2014)

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Figure 4c: Geolocated Tweets mined from Twitter near the Mansfield Reformatory (From October 1st, 2013 to March 31st, 2014)

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Figure 5a: West cellblock (photo by David Perl: https://www.flickr.com/photos/64712918@N06/7906487516)

Figure 5b: Overview (photo by Doug Butchy: https://www.flickr.com/photos/dougbutchy/7230572904/) (Note: Figure 5a & b are examples of pictures taken from two different hot spots)

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Photos from Flickr are associated to more specific elements that are relevant or interesting to photograph (e.g., a particular room, a perspective on a building), while Tweets tend to be more often associated to the site in general. We gather then that Twitter seems to be used to share the fact that the user is present at the site, while Flickr is mainly used to capture specific elements about the site. This observation is confirmed by how 95 % of Twitter users only tweet once from the site, while there is precisely the opposite trend for Flickr: 95 % of the Flickr users have uploaded more than one photo to the site. (d) Where are the set-jetters coming from? The data collected from these social media can also be useful to study the origin of the people visiting the Ohio State Reformatory. The Flickr API allowed us to extract the user ID for each picture posted and shared publicly, and to acquire the personal information shared by the owners of the accounts. This enabled us to identify the 134 accounts with which the 1,684 geolocated photos taken within 1 km from the Reformatory were uploaded. Among these 134 accounts, 93 had complete information about the origins of the account owners. With TripAdvisor and Twitter, however, we had to manually extract the origins of the users based on the profile of the account. We retrieved 100 complete Twitter accounts used to post geolocated Tweets within 1 km from the Reformatory and 128 TripAdvisor users. The analysis of these data reveals some geographic similarities between Flickr, Twitter, and TripAdvisor. First, most of the accounts are located in the United States, especially in the northeastern part of the country. Only a few identified accounts come from abroad: 8 from Europe (2 from Twitter, 3 from Flickr and 3 from TripAdvisor), 5 from Asia (1 from Twitter, 2 from Flickr and 2 from TripAdvisor), and 9 from other regions (2 from Twitter, 3 from Flickr, and 4 from TripAdvisor). Second, for the three social media platforms, the primary cluster for the accounts is in Ohio, where the Mansfield Reformatory is located. In other words, most visitors sharing their experience on social media come from the surrounding area of the Mansfield Reformatory (about 60 % from Ohio State). According to these data, the Mansfield Reformatory seems to primarily be a local or regional tourist attraction rather than a national or global one. Regarding the differences between the three platforms, the origins of the Twitter accounts are again more spread out than the origins of the Flickr and TripAdvisor accounts. This means that Twitter users, overall, come from further away than the visitors using Flickr and TripAdvisor. This difference is captured by the median distances between the locations of the registered accounts and the Mansfield Reformatory: 263 km for Twitter, 190 km for Flickr, and 185 km for TripAdvisor. (e) How can we use social media to follow the movement of set-jetters? As mentioned previously, digital traces left by social media users can serve to follow their movements. Tracking the movement of people within and around a touristic site could be useful for site managers as well as for local planners and decision-makers (Vu et al. 2015). To assess the potential of each social media platform, we randomly selected ten users with geotag-enabled accounts from each application, and then mapped the paths they followed based on the traces they left

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with each platform. Given the different types of spatial data generated from each platform, we developed three different methodologies to map these data. For each Twitter account selected, we mapped three Tweets: (1) the Tweet posted on the site of the Reformatory, as well as (2) the Tweet posted right before this Tweet and (3) the one posted right after. This method was chosen because 95 % of Twitter users only tweeted once from the Reformatory site, as mentioned previously. Among the ten selected accounts, four traveled from one place to the Mansfield Reformatory, and back to the original place (one from New-York City, one from Seattle, one from Kansas City, one from Cleveland). Two others were going back in the same direction but not exactly to the same city, which makes us think that they were coming back home as well, but may have taken a detour, or may have tweeted merely on their way back home. In the four remaining accounts, it seems that the Reformatory was a stopover on a journey between two destinations. These results illustrate both the limits and potential of Twitter to understand the overall journey of set-jetters better. Although it is not possible based on these data to affirm that these people only traveled to the Reformatory during their trip (e.g., there is a gap of 134 days between the 3 Tweets retrieved for the user from Seattle), it emphasizes that for most of these people, the visit to the Reformatory was definitely the only place that was worth Tweeting about during their trip in the area. Based on these results, if mined more systematically, Twitter data may be used to better understand how set-jetting activities are included in broader traveling plans. TripAdvisor was used to mine all the locations that appeared in the ten selected reviews to identify the proper noun place names mentioned in these reviews. To extract these place names, we used CLIFF and GeoDoc, as well as a close reading of each review. All the place names were then mapped. The results emphasize the potential of TripAdvisor to study set-jetting activities just beyond the site. Indeed, by connecting the Reformatory with the different places mentioned in the comments, it is possible to highlight some spatial relationships. For instance, there are places that several visitors mentioned in their reviews of the Mansfield Reformatory, such as Kingwood Center Gardens and Mohican State Park, suggesting the existence of a small network of tourist attractions around the Reformatory as mentioned previously. This method could be applied to a larger number of accounts to connect spatial patterns with TripAdvisor profiles and to identify some relationships between social media profiles and touristic activities. Finally, Flickr provides an excellent sense of the movement of set-jetters at the local scale. Since Flickr users produced more data on-site and since a rather high percentage of these photos is geolocated, it was possible to use the photos uploaded by the ten selected Flickr users to identify the path followed by these visitors on-site (see Figure 6). These maps show not only the spots where people like to take photos, as discussed previously, but also the connections between these places using timestamps. Based on these results, it seems that visitors usually start to take photos of the outlook of the building, and then enter the Reformatory. We can even follow the movement of these visitors within the buildings, highlighting the potential of geotagged photos from Flickr to chart the path of visitors at a very fine scale. Given the high level of precision of the spatiotemporal data associated with these pictures,

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and the high number of pictures usually taken, Flickr appears to be an excellent source of data to more precisely follow the movements of set-jetters on-site as well as the type of scene they tend to photograph.

Figure 6: Tracking the movement of Flickr users on-site. The map on the top shows the path of one visitor (the size of the symbol is proportional to the number of pictures taken from each location), and the map at the bottom shows the paths of the ten selected accounts (Interactive map made with Atlascine: http://tinyurl.com/z8pto6d)

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DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION The study of set-jetting activities has been traditionally done on-site through surveys. As illustrated in this paper, social media offer an alternative range of geospatial data that could be mined and mobilized to understand set-jetting movements and related touristic activities at several scales. Throughout the analysis of the data mined with these three social media platforms, we were able to identify their spatial complementarity for studying set-jetting. Twitter appears mainly relevant to study film tourism on a broad scale. While it is overwhelmingly used to talk about fictional places, it is marginally used to mention the official Reformatory, and its use on-site is very limited since a very small number of people were tweeting from the site, and 95 % of them posted only one tweet from the Mansfield Reformatory. Therefore, Twitter appears inappropriate for studying the geography of set-jetting at a local scale, but potentially relevant to look at general patterns of how people get to the site. Twitter offers interesting possibilities to study the geography of film tourism at a global or regional scale. TripAdvisor appears to be an exciting source of geographic data about people’s experiences related to the site as well as to other related touristic attractions. This source of data could be useful for studying set-jetting at a more regional scale and from a tourism-oriented perspective. However, mining textual data requires mobilizing geoparsing techniques, which can only be automated up to a certain point. Improving text-mining methods such as geoparsing and Natural Language Processing is a growing area of research that is attracting much interest given the increasing volume of text produced on a daily basis from social media (see for instance Gelertner and Mushegian 2011; Xu et al. 2013; Paterson and Gregory 2019). TripAdvisor data could then be mobilized to develop tourist profiles based on the digital traces they leave about activities and places they enjoy (or not). It could also be utilized to better identify tourism networks around set-jetting destinations and any other tourist destinations. Flickr appears to be much more relevant for studying set-jetting at the local scale and around a site of interest since about 95 % of the people uploading photos from the Mansfield Reformatory uploaded more than one photo and since about 29 % of these photos are precisely geolocated. Flickr appears highly relevant for following people’s movement, and more specifically, the movement of tourists, as was already highlighted in other studies (Girardin et al. 2008; Fischer 2010; Straumann et al. 2014), especially given that the process of mining data from Flickr is relatively easy. The precise timestamps, as well as the precise GPS coordinates associated with most of the photos provide useful data to track visitors on-site. Although the textual data available from Flickr is minimal, photos could be a vibrant source of visual information. It would also be possible to track users to see which other sites they have visited in order to refine our understanding of set-jetter activities. One of the main takeaways from this research is that the three social media platforms mobilized to study the geography of set-jetting appear complementary rather than redundant, and each of them offers opportunities to study set-jetting for

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different purposes at different scales. Although each of the social media platforms studied here provides a partial and somehow distorted picture of the geography of film-induced tourism, put together, these different pictures enable the sketching of a more holistic perspective on the phenomena under study. That said, we need to keep in mind that social media data are far from perfect as a data source. Among the different issues identified throughout this research, it is important to emphasize that mined social media data are often used out of their context of production, increasing the risk of misinterpretation. They are not consistent in terms of accuracy (e.g., the choice of a place name can vary from the vernacular name to the administrative name depending on the culture and origin of the person who mentions it); they represent the perspective of a tiny segment of the population (e.g., Flickr is used by a different demographic than Instagram, and not every traveler posts comments on TripAdvisor); they often lack completeness (e.g., Twitter only provides free access to a fraction of all the Tweets generated on a daily basis); the process of accessing the data changes constantly (e.g., Twitter has implemented a new procedure for mining its data in July 2018); and their use raises a range of ethical issues related to privacy and surveillance. It is also important to keep in mind that the persons who travel to the Mansfield Reformatory may not necessarily be the more active social media users. These limits prevent us from drawing any final conclusions on the geographies of film tourism induced by The Shawshank Redemption, but they also illustrate the complexity - and maybe the illusory power - of mobilizing social media to make sense of complex spatial phenomena. As pointed out by Adèle Van Reeth and Dimitri El Murr (2019), Twitter and social media may be considered a contemporary version of Plato’s cave. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks to Emory Shaw for his valuable editorial suggestions. REFERENCES Adams, R. (2014): The Shawshank Residuals. Wall Street Journal, May 22, 2014. http://www.wsj. com/articles/SB10001424052702304536104579560021265554240 (accessed June 17, 2016). Beeton, S. (2005): Film-induced Tourism. Clevedon. Bolan, P., S. Boy and J. Bell (2011): “We’ve seen it in the movies, let’s see if it’s true”: authenticity and displacement in film-induced tourism. Worldwide Hospitality and Tourism Themes 3 (2), 102–116. Bolan, P. and L. Williams (2008): The role of image in service promotion: focusing on the influence of film on consumer choice within tourism. International Journal of Consumer Studies 32, 382–390. Branch, C. (2014): The ‘Shawshank Redemption’ Check Stephen King Never Cashed. The Huffington Post, September 25, 2014. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/24/stephen-kingshawshank-redemption_n_5877810.html (accessed June 17, 2016). Busby, G. and J. Klug (2001): Movie-induced tourism: The challenge of measurement and other issues. Journal of Vacation Marketing 7 (4), 316–332.

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Caldwell, D. (2009): Geoparsing Maps the Future of Text Documents. Direction Magazine. http:// www.directionsmag.com/articles/geoparsing-maps-the-future-of-text-documents/122487 (accessed March 20, 2017). Cateridge, J. (2015): Deep Mapping and Screen Tourism: The Oxford of Harry Potter and Inspector Morse. Humanities 4 (3), 320–333. CLIFF (2014): Entity Extraction and Geoparsing for News Articles. (n.d.). http://cliff.mediameter. org/ (Accessed January 5, 2015). Connell, J. (2012): Film tourism – Evolution, progress and prospects. Tourism Management 33 (5), 1007–1029. Fischer, E. (2010): Locals and Tourists. http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkingsf/sets/7215762420 9158632 (Accessed January 9, 2019) Gelernter, J. and N. Mushegian (2011): Geo-parsing Messages from Microtext. Transactions in GIS 15 (6), 753–773. Girardin, F., F. Calabrese, F. D. Fiore, C. Ratti, and J. Blat (2008): Digital Footprinting: Uncovering Tourists with User-Generated Content. IEEE Pervasive Computing 7 (4), 36–43. Hudson, S. and J. R. B. Ritchie (2006): Promoting Destinations via Film Tourism: An Empirical Identification of Supporting Marketing Initiatives. Journal of Travel Research 44 (4), 387–396. Joliveau, T. (2009): Connecting Real and Imaginary Places through Geospatial Technologies: Examples from Set-jetting and Art-oriented Tourism. The Cartographic Journal 46 (1), 36–45. Jurgens, D., T. Finnethy, J. Mccorriston, X. T. Xu and D. Ruths (2015): Geolocation Prediction in Twitter Using Social Networks: A Critical Analysis and Review of Current Practice. Proceedings of the 9th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM). 188-197. Kim, S. and H. Wang (2012): From television to the film set Korean drama Daejanggeum drives Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese and Thai audiences to screen-tourism. International Communication Gazette 74 (5), 423–442. Macionis, N. (2004): Understanding the film-induced tourist. W. Frost, W. G. Croy, and S. Beeton (Eds.): Proceedings of the International Tourism and Media Conference, Melbourne: 86–97. Månsson, M. (2011): Mediatized tourism. Annals of Tourism Research 38 (4), 1634–1652. O’Connor, N. and P. Bolan (2008): Creating a sustainable brand for Northern Ireland through film-induced tourism. Tourism Culture & Communication 8 (3), 147–158. Paterson, L. L. and I. N. Gregory (2019): Geographical Information Systems and Textual Sources. L. L. Paterson and I. N. Gregory (Eds.): Representations of Poverty and Place. London, 41–60. Reeth, A. van and D. El Murr (2019): Fabuleux Platon! (1/4): L’allégorie de la caverne: vivons-nous dans l’illusion? France Culture, January 07, 2019. https://www.franceculture.fr/ emissions/les-chemins-de-la-philosophie/fabuleux-platon-14-lallegorie-de-la-caverne-vivons-nous-dans-lillusion (accessed January 8, 2019). Riley, R., D. Baker and C. S. V. Doren (1998): Movie induced tourism. Annals of Tourism Research 25 (4), 919–935. Sciullo, M. (2014): Former prison in Ohio draws captive audience, thanks to ‘Shawshank Redemption.’ Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, August 24, 2014. http://www.post-gazette.com/ae/movies/2014 /08/24/Former-Mansfield-reformatory-in-Ohio-draws-captive-audience-thanks-to-Shawshank-Redemption/stories/201408240010 (accessed June 17, 2016). Scott, D. M. (2010): The new rules of marketing and PR: how to use social media, blogs, news releases, online video, and viral marketing to reach buyers directly. Hoboken. Soliman, D. M. (2011): Exploring the role of film in promoting domestic tourism: a case study of Al Fayoum, Egypt. Journal of Vacation Marketing 17 (3), 225–235. Stephens, M. and A. Poorthuis (2015): Follow thy neighbor: Connecting the social and the spatial networks on Twitter. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems 53, 87–95. Straumann, R. K., A. Çöltekin and G. Andrienko (2014): Towards (Re)Constructing Narratives from Georeferenced Photographs through Visual Analytics. The Cartographic Journal 51 (2), 152–165.

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Tooke, N. and M. Baker (1996): Seeing is believing: the effect of film on visitor numbers to screened locations. Tourism Management 17 (2), 87–94. TripAdvisor (2016): Fact Sheet. https://www.tripadvisor.com/PressCenter-c4-Fact_Sheet.html (accessed June 17, 2016). Tzanelli, R. (2004): Constructing the ‘Cinematic Tourist’: the sign industry of the Lord of the Rings. Tourist Studies 4 (1), 21–42. Vu, H. Q., G. Li, R. Law and B. H. Ye (2015): Exploring the travel behaviors of inbound tourists to Hong Kong using geotagged photos. Tourism Management 46, 222–232. Xiang, Z. and U. Gretzel (2010): Role of social media in online travel information search. Tourism Management 31 (2), 179–188. Xu, C., D. W. Wong and C. Yang (2013): Evaluating the ‘geographical awareness’ of individuals: an exploratory analysis of Twitter data. Cartography and Geographic Information Science 40 (2), 103–115.

FILMS The Da Vinci Code. Director: Ron Howard. USA, Malta, France, UK: Columbia Pictures, Imagine Entertainment, Skylark Productions, 2006. The Lord of the Rings: The fellowship of the Ring. Director: Peter Jackson. New Zealand, USA: New Line Cinema, WingNut Films, 2001. The Shawshank Redemption. Director: Frank Darabont. USA: Castle Rock Entertainment, 1994.

THE GEOGRAPHY AND GAZE OF THE SELFIE Matthew Zook and Ate Poorthuis INTRODUCTION Self‐portraits have an important place in the history of artistic expression and have been in vogue for centuries. Thus, it is not particularly surprising that the selfie – the digital portrait of oneself, most often taken by holding a camera phone at arm’s length and subsequently shared through social media – has captured the global public imagination over the last decade. It was declared the Oxford Dictionaries’ 2013 Word of the Year (Oxford Dictionaries 2013) and has engendered an international research network with over 1,500 members (see http://www.selfieresearchers.com/). Given the deep embeddedness of selfies in various social media platforms – they receive more likes and comments than photographs without human faces (Bakhsi et al. 2014) – selfies cannot simply be reduced to images. Instead, we argue that selfies are fundamental to the production and consumption of social media culture, and much more significant than their 4 percent share of imagery might suggest (Manovich 2014). In part, the contribution of selfies to the production of social media culture is tied to their geographies. Early selfies were often taken via webcams on desktop computers (i.e., fixed in domestic space) and mostly focus on the photographer’s face. Smartphones have untethered the selfie from the home, and now the selfie can be as much about the photographer’s surroundings as it is about the photographer. What else is within the photo’s frame? Who else is included? From where was the selfie sent? This change in character is perhaps best exemplified by the popularity of the selfie‐stick. Quite literally, this stick, on which the camera or phone is mounted, enables the user to increase the field of view beyond the photographer’s face. The selfie expands to include the larger moment in space-time that the self is producing around itself. The significance of the geography of the selfie is further amplified by the fact that many selfies are explicitly geotagged. That is, users of social media platforms such as Instagram and Twitter specifically choose to tie a specific geographic location to the selfie they are sharing to their friends and followers. To better understand the selfie phenomenon, we ask ‘what is the geography of the selfie?’ using a dataset consisting of 8 million geotagged tweets sent from July 2012 to May 2016. Our analysis aims to answer this question using two contrasting and complementary, approaches analogous to the scopic regimes of cartography: projectionism and perspectivalism (Lukinbeal 2010, 2016). The ‘projectionist’ approach provides a view from above. This is the default and now-familiar view offered by much of conventional GIS. In this case, we use quantitative analysis and

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visualization to understand how the selfie is distributed globally, across space. The second step contrasts this with a perspectivalist approach that offers a situated view representing a gaze from somewhere; contrasting with the god’s-eye view of view from nowhere used in the first method. To achieve this, we conduct a qualitative, visual, analysis of the individual selfie images to understand better how selfies connect to specific scenes or geographic contexts and their role in the social production of space. SOCIAL MEDIA, THE SELFIE, AND GEOGRAPHY While the popular discourse about selfies tends to characterize them as narcissist, attention-seeking, and self-promoting (see Figure 1) – perhaps seen as archetypical for the me-generation – academic accounts take a much more nuanced approach. Rather than simply discount selfies as narcissism, scholars build on existing work on social media that identifies a key function of these platforms as the ability to “consume and distribute personal content about the self” (Elison et al. 2011, 19). This potential function is particularly useful for celebrities for whom attention is power and “the selfie provides something very powerful, from the most privileged perspective possible … that says, ‘Here is a bit of my private life.’” (Franco 2013). Selfies are deployed in a similar manner by other public figures, such as politicians who use them “to experiment with diverse prospects of self-presentation” and enforce or enlarge their political base (Farci and Orefice 2015, 1).

Figure 1: A selfie moment during Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign

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For the less-famous, selfies can play a similar role, allowing individuals to share a part of themselves that is regularly hidden (Wargo 2015) or explore novel practices and new facets of themselves (see Marwick 2013; Lyu 2016). Selfies are commonly used within the context of travel and tourism, leading Dinhopl and Gretzel (2016) to analyze selfie culture using Urry’s (1990) concept of the tourist gaze. They note that, while the traditional tourist gaze was pointed outwards, the technological possibilities and social practices around the selfie have enabled a shift to a more reflective gaze that includes both the tourist destination (i.e., the object) as well as the tourist’s relation to such a place (the subject). In fact, they posit that the traditional vistas and views sought by tourists may be subsumed in relative importance as “tourists themselves may become elevated as a touristic product” (Dinhopl and Gretze, 2016, 135–6). Other scholars echo this evolution of self-representation and have studied the selfie as an art form (Saltz 2014), a key product of the attention economy (Marwick 2015) and the ways that selfies are reworking notions of privacy (Busetta and Coladonato 2015). Simultaneously, computer scientists and visualization experts have focused on the more quantitative description and visual representation of selfies and those who make them – describing demographic characteristics such as age and gender (Souza et al. 2015) or selfie characteristics such as face tilt and mood (Manovich 2014). An exemplary project following this approach is the Selfiecity (Manovich 2014) that ‘investigates selfies using a mix of theoretic, artistic and quantitative methods’ with a team of information visualizers, data analysts, and web designers. Despite these early efforts, the challenge to understand the “role of the image content in online user behavior” (Bakhsi et al. 2014, 973) is by no means resolved. The diversity of this scholarship aptly demonstrates that, like any other socio-technical artifact, selfies are not a singular phenomenon; a conclusion also reached by Tifental and Manovich (2015) in their critical reflections on the aforementioned Selfiecity project. In this vein, we suggest that selfies are perhaps best understood as an ongoing conversation – a conversation between the photographer, the people, things, and places in physical proximity to the photographer as well as the multitude of people connected through digital means. Perhaps contrary to more conventional conversations, this one explicitly uses visual symbology and culturally determined gestures and practices. Once largely limited to fields such as cultural geography, the use of this type of cultural expression, or texts, are ever more visible in society. As Rose (2016, 2 ) argues, “everyone is reading cultural texts and coming to conclusions about their meaning and sharing their interpretations … [about] … the symbolism of specific cultural texts but also the production and circulation of those texts by specific forms of media institutions.” This academic formulation is aptly captured by the observation of celebrity James Franco (2013) – the so-called selfie king – who voices much the same sentiment about the presences of cultural interpretation in everyday digital culture: “A texting conversation might fall short of communicating how you are feeling, but a selfie might make everything clear in an instant … I want to know whom I’m dealing with. In our age of social networking, the selfie is the new way to look someone right in the eye and say, “Hello, this is

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me.” If the selfie is ‘worth a thousand words,’ we attempt to unpack what these words might mean in this chapter. Despite the prevalence of selfies, few scholars have explicitly studied the spatiality of the selfie. This is particularly noteworthy given the attention given to the geography of social media more generally, ranging from relatively trivial examples – such as the distribution of tweets about particular brands of beer (Zook and Poorthuis 2014) – to more noteworthy issues such as spatial segregation within cities and neighborhood identification and formation (Shelton et al. 2015). Scholars outside of geography – primarily sociology – also analyze the spatiality of social media, for example in the ways that time is flattened in favor of interfaces that “strongly emphasizes physical place and users’ locations” (Hochman and Manovich 2013) or the ways that its practice is used to “showcase patronage of exclusive and expensive places” (Boy and Uitermark 2015). More specifically related to imagery, Hjorth and Hendry (2015) outline an idea of “emplaced visuality” that places movement (and thereby space and time) at the center of how people utilize digital media. Even with these exceptions, there remains little systematic study of the geographies of this key practice and producer of digital culture. This chapter addresses this gap by explicitly focusing on the spatiality of the selfie. We do so by both using quantitative approaches – resulting in a view from ‘nowhere’ akin to traditional topographic maps – as well as a qualitative analysis of the selfies as cultural texts, yielding a view from ‘somewhere’ that can complement and complicate the quantitative mapping. METHODS & DATA Social media data differs from more traditional census and survey datasets in many key ways. There are specific advantages (e.g., social media generally have much higher spatial and temporal granularity) and significant downsides (e.g., social media data does not represent the entire population, and its content is unstructured and open to interpretation). Thus, research with social media must take care in the type of questions and the specific analyses conducted. For this reason, much of our previous research treats social media largely as a medium, or a mere proxy for activity or attention associated with particular criteria (e.g., the spatial variation of tweets containing the term grits, (Poorthuis et al 2016) rather than grappling with the content and purpose of the message and its connection to space. Analyzing the actual content of social media messages is a difficult task given the slang-heavy shorthand common within much social media, the reliance on images rather than text, as well as technical constraints of the medium itself, e.g., the 140 character limit on tweets. Despite these difficulties, it is worth pursuing, as social media data potentially offers insight on types of human behavior – a more vernacular geography – that hitherto have been extremely problematic to pursue. Precisely because social media allows individuals to document the everyday banalities of life, it is possible to study some practices – discourse with friends and

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family, interacting with the built environment, etc. – at a breadth and scale that was simply not possible otherwise. Of course, in addition to the textual messiness of such data, researchers must also confront the issue that social media is not an unfiltered or true representation of an individual’s life, as people may curate their representations on social media to achieve multiple aims. This chapter uses the Dolly database at the University of Kentucky 1– A global dataset of geotagged tweets from July 2012 to May 2016 (Poorthuis and Zook 2017) – to produce a corpus of selfies to analyze. To build this collection, we selected all tweets within this dataset that include the term “selfie” (in 20 different languages2); a total of 8.1 million tweets. While acknowledging that Twitter is but one form of social media and selfies are distributed via a number of other platforms – Facebook, Instagram, other messaging platforms – this approach has a number of advantages. First, and most importantly, it is an accessible source of selfies with global coverage. While this coverage is undoubtedly uneven, the broad contours of this bias are somewhat known, e.g., Twitter is not a widely used platform in China because of the Great Firewall, and therefore results can be interpreted in this light. Second, it is also possible to draw a random sample of all tweets within the aforementioned dataset to serve as a normalization variable. This allows us to gauge the frequency of selfies relative to all Twitter messages. Third and finally, it provides archived imagery that can be drawn upon for analysis. We are well aware of the short-comings and issues surrounding the use of Twitter data for social science research (cf. Crampton et al. 2013) and interpret our findings only as representative of selfie activity within geotagged tweets. Moreover, given the variety of media in which selfies are set, the fact that many of these media are private or are on platforms that do not allow access via an API (e.g., Facebook), it is simply impossible to create a wholly representative corpus of selfies. The approach used here, however, offers an important case study of the spatial practices of the selfie on a major social media platform. With a corpus of 8.1 million selfie-related tweets ready, we embark on an analysis of the geography of the selfie based on the approaches outlined in the previous section. In the projectionist – or view from above – approach, we analyze and visualize the geographic distribution of selfie production to examine what parts of the world are the most prolific producers of selfies. A specific advantage of drawing upon geotagged tweets is that each tweet is tied to a specific point in space with a set of lat/lon coordinates. This allows us to aggregate and normalize data at different scales and using different areal units. While standard definitions (e.g., countries) 1

2

The Dolly database – Digital OnLine Life and You – is an ongoing social media collection tool based at the University of Kentucky. It contains all geotagged tweets (approximately 1 to 2 percent of all tweets) sent since June 2012 to the present. The goal of Dolly is to allow social science researchers to use social media data – by narrowing down to relevant and usable datasets – without needing to acquire the skills of computer scientists. Although many languages use the English loanword, we also use the following other translations of ‘selfie’ in some of the world’s more popular languages (based on the 25 most spoken languages (SIL, 2015)): “selfie,” “cелфи,” “ ‫يفليس‬,” “autofoto,” “selfi,” “Selfy,” “ সেলফি,” “‫פלס‬,” “Sebić,” “Szelfi,” “Swafoto,” “自分撮り,” “自撮り,” “სელფი,” “셀카,” “selca,” “தாமி,” “เซลฟ,ี” “tự sướng,” “自拍”.

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are employed as useful containers for interpreting results (see Table 1), we can also use identically-sized units (e.g., the hexagons we use here), which aid in the visual interpretation of the maps in the next section. The geographic analysis of social media always necessitates a standardization or normalization step, lest we simply end up studying population density. In this study, we normalize the number of selfie tweets by the number of overall tweets at that same location to distinguish between relatively higher and lower levels of selfie activity. The exact metric we use here is the odds ratio (Bland and Altman 2000; Poorthuis et al. 2016) which can be interpreted as follows: locations that score 1 have precisely the number of selfie tweets one would expect given the total number of overall tweets in that location, while places with scores either more than or less than 1 have relatively more or less selfie activity than the norm. To guard against the issue of small sample sizes – a particular problem for sparsely populated areal units – we also use 95 percent confidence intervals to ensure that any concentrations of high selfie activity shown in the map are statistically significant. In the perspectivalist approach, we conduct a qualitative and visual analysis of the actual selfie images, using Rose’s (2012) critical visual methodology to understand how the visual and textual context of selfies (re‐)produces digital and material cultures. To do this, we first draw a random sample of 1000 selfie tweets from the corpus and confirm (via an automated script) that each selfie indeed (1) contains an image or photo; (2) is still publicly available on Twitter; and (3) is still publicly available (usually accessed via a URL in the text of the tweet) on a third-party service, such as Instagram, if applicable. Twitter users have the option of either deleting tweets or making them private, and the company itself can remove material. While it is often possible to access the image associated with a deleted tweet (as it is stored elsewhere), proper ethical research within social media respects the intentions of individuals. With this random sample of public tweets identified, the script automatically takes a screenshot of the selfie tweet including imagery, associated text, and context (replies, likes, etc.). Taking the first 50 tweets from this sample, both authors reviewed each screenshot to create a coding system that emerged organically from the screenshots. Our intent was to construct categories that could realistically be coded reliably, reflected the variety of intent and representation found within selfies, and could give meaningful insight into our research questions. Our categories include the following: number of people, age (30, multiple/unknown), gender (M, F, multiple, unknown), Place (none, banal, significant), Event (none, banal, significant), Posture (purposeful, accidental), tools (mirror, stick, collaging), self-image (fashion, health), meta (commentary, art, funny, solicitation). We very much recognize that this is not a definitive list of relevant variables, and that was not our goal. We also do not believe that our coding is unproblematic. Selfies are complex cultural objects that do multiple and contradictory work in the reproduction of society. The meaning or message intended by the creator is often difficult to discern beyond a fairly superficial level. Our intent, therefore, was to experiment with what was possible in interpreting these type of images (e.g., judging whether an event was significant also relied on our ability to read the language

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of the associated text) and subsequently (and more importantly) identify a broad set of meanings and work that selfies were doing in the production of digital culture. Having established our codebook, we then randomly selected another 215 selfies from the two countries with the most selfies in absolute numbers – the United States and Indonesia (see Table 1). We focused our sample on these two countries rather than taking a global sample in order to better understand specific regional practices – granted a somewhat quixotic goal given the large population bases of both – and also to identify possible differences between places. This echoes Souza et al.’s (2015) quantitative analysis of selfies, albeit their approach was based on an algorithmic coding of millions of selfies with the goal of explaining inter-country variation via cultural and socio-economic indicators. While we are intrigued by their finding that countries with lower measures of gender equality have fewer women posting selfies (which they interpret as meaning “selfies mobilize the power dynamics of representations and promote empowerment”), we have different aims. Responding in part to Rose’s (2016, 4) call to attend to the “thoughts, feelings, processes and practices which are then mediated by such technologies” and given the multiple issues with this data – ranging from its biased sampling to the imprecision of our coding – we are cautious in our interpretations, seeing them as suggestive of possible trends and differences that warrant more systematic study via qualitative and ethnographic techniques. In the subsequent sections, we present the results of both of these approaches. THE GEOGRAPHY OF SELFIE A cursory look at the straightforward mapping of the raw number of selfie-related tweets in Figure 2, reveals one immediate insight: as expected, the selfie phenomenon has spread far and wide across the globe. Selfies are found pretty much anywhere where Twitter as a platform is used. Selfies are not only sent from global urban centers but from places that range from the American Deep South to Tokyo’s metropolis and from around the entire Mediterranean to the South American Pampas. When we normalize the raw count in each hexagon a more nuanced (and somewhat more unexpected picture) emerges (Figure 3). Although in much of the Anglophone popular media selfies are portrayed as a favorite pastime of Western suburban teenagers, we find that selfies represent a much higher proportion of overall Twitter activity in other regions of the world. Central America, Eastern Europe, parts of the Middle East and South and South-East Asia contain a very high number of selfies relative to the total number of tweets. Zooming in from the global scale to a more regional scale in South-East Asia (Figure 4), it becomes abundantly clear that selfie culture is not a predominantly urban phenomenon. In all of the region’s countries in which Twitter is a popular platform, find prolific selfie production in cities such as Jakarta, Singapore, and Kuala Lumpur and the countries’ hinterlands. High odds ratios are found throughout the Indonesian islands of Borneo, Sulawesi, Java and Sumatra and the entire countries of Malaysia and the Philippines.

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Figure 2: Selfie-related tweets (count)

Figure 3: Selfie-related tweets (odds ratio)

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Figure 4: South East Asia

Similar trends can be seen in Table 1 containing both the raw number of tweets as well as the normalized odds ratio per country instead of hexagon. Based on the raw count, the top 15 countries hold a lot of the ‘usual suspects,’ including the US, UK, and France. However, the top 15 countries for the odds ratio measure is completely different and now home to many countries that are perhaps often considered to be at the periphery of global social media production and participation. Rank based on # of selfies

Rank based on Odds Ratio

1

USA

1

Bangladesh

2

Indonesia

2

Philippines

3

Turkey

3

Cambodia

4

Brazil

4

Slovakia

5

United Kingdom

5

Sri Lanka

6

Philippines

6

India

7

Malaysia

7

Vietnam

8

Spain

8

Mauritius

9

Italy

9

East Timor

10

Argentina

10

Lebanon

11

Mexico

11

New Zealand

12

Japan

12

Romania

13

Russia

13

Australia

14

Canada

14

Taiwan

15

France

15

Czech Republic

Table 1: Summary of country-level rankings

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To explore this issue further, and reflecting upon the work by Souza et al.(2015), we thought it useful to undertake a similar, albeit much simpler, country-level analysis of indicators that correlate strongly with the calculated odds ratios (See Table 2). We found that measures of gender equality performed best, and countries with high equality ratings (including women’s literacy) also had a higher than average production of selfies. These correlations were much stronger than income – a more typical relationship seen with information technology – suggesting that selfies are indicative of women’s empowerment at this scale. While we think it is unlikely that selfies are directly causing equality, the ability to engage with the practice of selfie seems consistent with larger societal trends, particularly as they emerge in digital cultures. Variable Correlation Gender equality rating (1=low to 6=high) 0.294 Mobile phones per 100 people 0.237 Literacy rate, adult women 0.227 Scientific journal articles published per capita 0.146 GNI per cap 0.062 Mobile, percent women poor 0.027 Mobile, percent women 0.005 Percentage of women who believe a husband -0.227 is justified in beating his wife

Sig. * ** *

**

Table 2: Country level correlations between Odds Ratio for Selfies and World Bank indicators (* = significant at 0.05; ** = significant at 0.01)

THE GAZE OF THE SELFIE Shifting our analysis from the quantitative view-from-above to a more qualitative, subjective view-from-somewhere allows us to better understand how selfies are involved in the production of those spaces. To ground this approach relative to previous work, we begin with a closer look at the aforementioned Selfiecity project (Manovich 2014). The dataset underlying this project was constructed by taking a set of randomly selected photos from Instagram and having multiple Amazon Mechanical Turk3 workers code whether the image was a selfie or not. The result can be seen in Figure 5. The selfies in the selfiecity project are surprisingly uniform. There are variations from city to city (in inferred gender, age, head tilt, and ‘smile 3

Amazon Mechanical Turk is an online service for connecting employers who need to have simple, repetitive, online tasks completed that are not well-suited for automation and workers able to complete them. Tasks are bid at a piece-rate and generally result in extremely low hourly wage rates.

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score’) but overall the result is a uniform grid of individual faces. It is this representation that is so popular as the archetypical version of the selfie: the ‘me, me, me’ devoid of any context, relations to other people, or connections to place. Our reading and analysis of selfies, however, generate radically different results.

Figure 5: Selfiecity (Manovich et al., 2014)

Through an analysis of images and associated text, we identify elements of the selfie gaze and how this practice contributes to the production and evolution of the digital cultures of everyday life. The examples we show here feature selfies of ourselves which are representative of our findings but are not the images we actually reviewed. While the selfies we used are publicly available, the nature of the images – focused on the self and private actions aimed primarily at the limited confines of a person’s social network – led us to exercise an abundance of caution in reproducing them here. We also did this to highlight the emerging practices and debates around responsible big data research as something that should be a part of any similar research (Zook et al. 2016). Although there are interesting and nuanced differences between selfie practices in Indonesia and the United States, it immediately stands out how different many selfies are from those represented in the Selfiecity. Most striking perhaps, is that many selfies (see Figure 6b) are not only about the self (see Figure 6a). Other people included within the selfie (‘we-fie’) are in many cases (60 %) people that are significant to the author of the selfie. With the selfie, not only is the self-represented but also relationships to other significant people to the self. This can range from a night out on the town with your best friend, to a baseball game with your father or the birthday of your great-grandmother. In addition to people, selfies also provided spatial context and connection to places, only 18 percent were lacking this. Although

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for the majority of coded images (60 percent in total) the connection to place was relative banal – the train station; the bar; at school, etc. – this represents an important documentation of everyday life. The final 20 percent of selfies were coded as representing a connection to a significant place, for example, a famous tourist destination or landmark (Figure 6c).

Figures 6a-d: Different ‘types’ of selfies

Some contrary to our expectations the comparison of selfies from Indonesia and the United States shows relatively congruous practices. While differences in dress are apparent – most notably the wearing of a hijab by women in Indonesia, which appeared in 30 percent of these selfies – there are ample examples in both countries of people taking either solitary or group pictures that show banal and significant places and events in their lives. In other words, the general impression that emerged from our coding was that the multi-faceted practice of selfies in both countries is

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remarkably similar, including the frequent flashing of the V-sign. In other words, selfies were used as part of complex and cultural-referenced conversations in which the relationships and spatial situatedness of the self-played key roles. Although we highlight some differences between the practices in both countries in this section, ultimately these practices as conversations are much more similar to each other than to the stereotypical selfie – self-indulgent vanity – described in popular media. It is important to note that other variables in our coding process reinforced the difficulty of interpreting digital cultural texts (Rose 2016), particularly when a language barrier was present. For example, categorizing an event pictured in a selfie as either banal or significant was more easily performed when we were able to understand the accompanying text. Simple strings like “birthday” or “reunion” or “graduation” quickly enable us to code a selfie as a significant event while similar strings in Indonesian were indecipherable. That said, even with English text, we are certain that our interpretation of some selfies is inconsistent with the intended message of the sender given the other dimensions of cultural difference. Despite these shortcomings, some differences in selfie practice are evident between the two countries as outlined in Table 3 (focused on the demographics of the individuals featured in the photos) and Table 4 (focused on practices). Selfies are significantly more a solitary practice in the United States, as over 72 percent of images in our sample were of a single individual. In contrast, selfies from Indonesia were more than twice as likely to feature more than two people, and only half of all selfies from Indonesia only have a single person visible. Likewise, we observed Category 1 2 Group Category < 30 > 30 Multiple/Unknown Category All Female All Male Mixed Unknown

Number of People in Selfie Indonesia USA Z-score Sig. 51.6 % 72.1 % -4.36 ** 25.4 % 18.1 % 1.81 23.0 % 9.8 % 3.7 ** Age Indonesia USA Z-score Sig. 90.6 % 64.7 % 6.44 ** 1.9 % 19.1 % -5.8 ** 7.5 % 16.3 % -2.8 ** Sex Indonesia USA Z-score Sig. 56.3 % 54.0 % 0.5 16.0 % 23.7 % -2.01 * 23.0 % 17.2 % 1.5 4.7 % 5.1 % -0.2

Table 3: Differences in Selfie Demographics between Indonesia and the USA (n=213 for Indonesia and n=215 for the USA)

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differences in the age of people featured in selfies but are cautious in this assessment as determining age based only on visible facial features is problematic. Nevertheless, the magnitude of this difference – 90 percent of Indonesian selfies were coded as featuring only individuals less than 30 while the same figure was 65 percent for the US – gives confidence that this is a real variance. A final category of difference was sex – also a difficult categorization based on our visual assessment – but we observe variation in that selfies featuring just males were significantly more prevalent in the US than Indonesia. While we do not wish to read too much into these differences, they are consistent with the broad understanding of how these countries’ digital cultures have developed. Indonesia has a much younger population than the US and has more recently joined the “information society/economy.” Thus, the younger demographic represented in selfie culture may simply be an artifact of the country’s development history, although this is far from certain. Likewise, the practice of more solitary selfies in the US might lead us to speculate that this reflects a more individualistic society in which selfies act as efficient one-to-one messages or one-to-many broadcasts in contrast to the more communal culture within Indonesia. However, these are preliminary and speculative hypotheses rather than conclusions. Table 4 shows that more significant events are represented in the US versus Indonesian selfies. We report this, however, primarily to demonstrate problems inherent in our coding rather than to present it as a fact. When this difference first emerged from our analysis, we went back to the already coded selfies and realized that our ability to judge whether a selfie shows a significant event is greatly assisted by the text within the tweet. Since we are unable to read a selfie tweet from Indonesia in a similar manner (neither of us speak Bahasa Indonesia), it is extremely likely that Indonesia is under-coded in this respect. Despite this difficulty in reading cultural texts across languages, we were able to identify other clear differences in cultural practices between the countries. The first of such practices is the use of the collage effect – in which several selfies are tied together or in which “stickers” are applied to a photo – was significantly more prevalent in Indonesia than the US (Figure 7a). These collages are often enabled by a myriad of third-party selfie applications and services, which allow the user to apply filters or in which new stickers can be purchased in ‘packs.’ While we are uncertain of the cause – is it tied to software, a marketing campaign, etc. – it clearly demonstrates how the conversations mediated through selfies can be augmented and deepened if the prevailing digital culture develops the norm of doing so. This ability is perhaps best illustrated by Snapchat’s – the ephemeral messaging platform – face ‘lenses.’ The application embeds powerful face recognition software, which then is used to add on masks to the users face, swap faces with a friend or augment the photo or video message in other ways. In a similar manner, the US has its own practice, which we name solicitation, that was not found at all in Indonesia. This practice evident in ten percent of US selfies in our sample consists of someone – often with celebrity status or at least with a large number of followers – sending out a tweet that says “[target audience] quote(or retweet) this with your [adjective] selfie.” The goals of these messages are

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multi-faceted and complex – including marketing, gathering prurient or funny images, etc. – but the commonality is an effort to gain attention for both the initial sender and the retweeters. Example include, “ladies quote this with your sexy selfie” or “fans retweet this with a selfie showing your fandom” (Figure 7b).

Figure 7: Examples of (a) collage effect in selfies and (b) solicitation of selfies

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Category none banal significant

Significant Event In Selfie Indonesia USA Z-score Sig. 71.8 % 48.8 % 4.86 ** 16.9 % 27.0 % -2.52 * 11.3 % 24.2 % -3.5 **

Category No Collage Collage

Collage Effect Indonesia USA Z-score Sig. 71.4 % 93.0 % -5.86 ** 28.6 % 7.0 % 5.86 **

Category No Solicitation Solicitation

Solicitation of Selfie Indonesia USA Z-score Sig. 100.0 % 89.8 % 4.79 ** 0.0 % 10.2 % -4.79 **

Table 4: Differences in Selfie Practices between Indonesia and the USA

The difference in practice exemplified by collaging and soliciting shows how the same technology can be used in widely different ways depending upon the cultural context in which it is embedded. We must also acknowledge that differences between the two countries are not the only ones that matter. For example, when we consider the differences in selfies featuring men or women (regardless of country) we note that a higher percentage of selfies featuring men (29.4 % vs. 16.5 %) have spatial context or connections to a place that we coded to be significant (versus banal or indistinct). While recognizing the potential for error in this coding, this difference suggests a gendered dimension of selfie practice in which women are more likely to use selfies firmly within the context of their everyday lives’ and thus featuring what we coded as connections to the quotidian. To be sure, this category itself is problematic as what might seem as banal to outsiders (such as ourselves) might actually have deep significance, e.g., the commonplace interior wall we see could be one’s best friend’s or grandmother’s house. Category none banal significant

Significant place in Selfie Female Male Z-score Sig. 20.3 % 12.9 % 1.51 63.1 % 57.6 % 0.89 16.5 % 29.4 % -2.55 *

Table 5: Differences in Featuring Significant Places in Selfies featuring Females or Males

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In this analysis, we are less concerned about the exact typologies and definitions we create, and more focused on showing some of the nuances and differences in the production and interpretation of digital culture and illustrating how these are dependent upon one’s gaze or subjectivity. It is certainly possible to be more systematic in creating a categorization and coding. In fact, many of the quantitative explorations of selfies that we touched on earlier are examples of such systematic approaches. Arguably, these approaches can miss substantial aspects of selfie culture exactly because of their a-priori categorization, and our work foregrounds the uncertainties and subjectivities of such classifications. Sometimes this uncertainty can be fairly well understood, i.e., unknown languages confound interpretation, while other times this remain much less certain, gauging the meaningfulness of a photo backdrop to its sender. But conversations – digital, visual or otherwise – are key parts of human experience and culture and thus are key topics for research. CONCLUSION In this chapter, we have explored the geography of the selfie from various perspectives. As our examples have shown, it is abundantly clear that selfies are indeed not just a symptom of the narcissistic ‘me’ culture of today’s millennial generation. Selfies form, for many people, an integral aspect of daily life. They are not just used as a means to represent or present the self to the outside world. Selfies are a means of conversing with one another and with the world. That conversation, of course, includes the self, but it also includes other people, places (banal and special alike) and events. In this way, selfies are like many other technology-mediated phenomena: they are part and parcel of the production and consumption of social space. Our quantitative analysis and ‘mapping’ of selfies in geographic space show that the intensity with which selfies are used differs greatly around the world. Perhaps surprisingly, selfies are a global phenomenon, relatively popular outside of the Anglophone world with Bangladesh, Cambodia and the Philippines as the top-3 selfie countries on Twitter (normalized by the total number of tweets sent from each country). While the mapping of selfies shows the pervasiveness of the practice around the world, the qualitative analysis of the actual selfies from our case studies of Indonesia and the United States shows both significant differences in the types of selfies sent as well as the connections that selfies build with local places. On a methodological note, the two approaches used in this chapter show the usefulness of combining qualitative and quantitative methods and the complementary fit between the projectionist and perspectivalist view of the world. These two perspectives are not mutually exclusive. Much like how 17th-century atlases included both projectionist maps and perspectivalist drawings of lands wide-andfar, taken together these two perspectives on selfie culture paint a much more complete and illustrative picture than a single perspective would be able to reflect by itself.

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CONTRIBUTORS Paul C. Adams is Professor of Geography at the University of Texas at Austin. He also holds a four-year Associate Professor II appointment with the University of Bergen, Norway. His publications address geographical aspects of media and communication, including place images in the media, geopolitical discourses, environmental discourses, digital surveillance, and cartographic imagery in the news media. He has authored, co-authored, or co-edited six books including Geographies of Media and Communication. Víctor Aertsen is Researcher and Technical Developer (Digital Cartography, Database Management, Web Development, Video Editor). He has a Ph.D. in Media Studies at the University Carlos III of Madrid, and holds degrees in Computer Science (University of Granada) and Human Studies (University Carlos III of Madrid). Since 2009, he has been working on research projects that deal with the relationship between Geography and Cinema. At the present time, he works for the City of Madrid Film Office. Gregor Arnold worked in Frankfurt in the fields of urban planning. Since 2011 he has been a research assistant at the Institute of Geography of the JGU in Mainz. He wrote his doctoral thesis on the strategic approaches to vacancies in growing cities and metropolitan areas in Germany. Now, Gregor Arnold works as project manager for urban redevelopment at DSK Mainz. His research and professional activities focus on media, social and cultural geography as well as city planning and urban renewal. Giorgio Avezzù is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of the Arts of the University of Bologna, with a project about data for audiovisual content analysis and recommendation. He has written articles on VOD recommender systems, aesthetics, and semiotics of film, media archaeology, and some geographical aspects of contemporary cinema. He also co-edited the special issue ‘Mapping’ of Necsus: European Journal of Media Studies (Autumn 2018), and is the author of a book on geography and film. Tobias Boos holds a Ph.D. in Social and Cultural Geography and his research areas include the geographies of the Internet and new media, diaspora studies, urban festivals, critical cartography, and ethnography. He authored the books Inhabiting cyberspace and emerging cyberplaces. The case of Siena, Italy published in 2017 and Ethnische Sphären. Über die emotionale Konstruktion von Gemeinschaft bei syrisch- und libanesischstämmigen Argentiniern. Published in 2013.

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Contributors

Sébastien Caquard is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography, Planning and Environment at Concordia University (Montreal). His research lies at the intersection between mapping, technologies and the humanities. In his current projects, he seeks to explore how maps can help to better understand the complex relationships that exist between places and narratives (http://geomedialab.org/). David B. Clarke is Professor of Human Geography at Swansea University and Co-director of the Centre for Urban Theory. His research focuses on cities, cinema, consumer culture, and value. Key publications include The Consumer Society and the Postmodern City; The Cinematic City; Jean Baudrillard: The Disappearance of Culture; Jean Baudrillard: from Hyperreality to Disappearance; Jean Baudrillard: Fatal Theories; The Consumption Reader; and Moving Pictures/Stopping Places: Hotels and Motels on Film. Marcus Doel is Professor of Human Geography at Swansea University in the UK. His books include Poststructuralist Geographies: The Diabolical Art of Spatial Science (Edinburgh University Press), Violent Geographies: Killing Space, Killing Time (Sage), Jean Baudrillard: Fatal Theories (Routledge), and Moving Pictures/ Stopping Places: Hotels & Motels on Film (Lexington). He has published over 100 other works, and has written extensively on poststructuralism, cinematic cities, and media geographies. Agustín Gámir, Doctor in Human Geography by the University Complutense of Madrid. He has taught at this university (1988-1992) and at the universities of Salamanca (1992-2001) and Carlos III de Madrid (2001 to date). He is the author and co-author of almost fifty works, of which twenty-five correspond to articles published in scientific journals. In the last decade, he has directed and co-directed several research projects in Geography and Cinema that have materialized in specific publications. Alex Gekker is a Lecturer in New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. He completed his Ph.D. at Utrecht University, working on the relations between mapping, digital interfaces, and power. He is interested in ways socio-technical systems are designed to influence users, and his research touches upon quantification and datafication of society, the experience economy and interface critique. In the past, he has worked in variety of media positions, as journalist, editor and spokesperson. Sam Hind is Research Associate in Locating Media, at the University of Siegen, Germany. He is co-editor of Time for Mapping: Cartographic Temporalities (Manchester, 2018), and co-author of Playful Mapping in the Digital Age (Institute for Network Cultures, 2016). He has published in the Living Maps Review, The Cartographic Journal, and Mobilities. He completed his Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Warwick in 2017 and was previously Research Assis-

Contributors

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tant on the Playfields project. His main research interests include digital navigation and playful methodologies. Eva Kingsepp, Ph.D. in Media and Communication studies, is Associate Professor at the Department of Geography, Media and Communication, Karlstad University, Sweden. Her main research focus is on the relationship between media and cultural memory, especially as expressed in popular culture. Recent publications include “The Second World War, Imperial, and Colonial Nostalgia: The North Africa Campaign and Battlefields of Memory”, in Humanities 2018, 7(4), 113, and ”Experiencing and performing memory: World War II videogames as a practice of remembrance”, in Finney, Patrick (ed.), Remembering the Second World War. London: Routledge, 2017. Chris Lukinbeal, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor and the Director of Geographic Information Systems Technology programs at the University of Arizona. His books include The Geography of Cinema, Mediated Geographies and Geographies of the Media, and Place, Television, and the Real Orange County. He also has published on film and media geography, landscape studies, and cartography. He is an editor of the book series, Media Geography at Mainz and an Associate Editor for Geohumanities. Carlos Manuel, Doctor in Geography (Univ. Autónoma Madrid). He teaches at Univ. Carlos III Madrid since 1998. His former investigations were focused in Spain Forests History, and Landscape Analysis. In the last ten years, his research deals with the relationship between Geography and Cinema. He has published more than forty works, including several books. Secretary of the Asociación de Geógrafos Españoles (2007-2011). Since 2016 he is a member of the Board of Directors of the Spanish Colegio de Geógrafos. Liliana Melgar Estrada holds a Ph.D. in Information Science and currently works as a postdoctoral researcher at Utrecht University and The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. Her research focuses on the requirements for supporting scholarly work with digital information in the humanities, with a special focus on audiovisual collections. She is a researcher at CLARIAH, the Dutch national infrastructure for digital humanities research. Ate Poorthuis is an Assistant Professor in the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at Singapore University of Technology and Design. His research explores the possibilities and limitations of big data, through quantitative analysis and visualization, to better understand how our cities work. He is also the co-founder of The DOLLY Project, a repository of billions of geolocated social media, that strives to address the difficulties of using big data within the social sciences. Dr. Poorthuis holds a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Kentucky and a BSc and MSc from the University of Amsterdam.

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Contributors

Gertrud Schaab (Prof. Dr.-Ing.) teaches cartography, GIS and remote sensing related courses at Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences at Bachelor level as well as in the international Geomatics Master. With her research, she aims at combining all three, mainly in support of nature conservation with a focus on Eastern Africa. Christian Stern (Dipl.-Ing., FH) belongs to the academic staff and strongly supports all endeavors of deploying GIS. Together they started teaching of mobile map apps about three years ago. Laura Sharp, Ph.D. Geography from the University of Arizona, is a GIS Analyst with the City of Tucson. She specializes in GIS and cultural, social, and economic geography and has published on film geography, popular geopolitics, and social media geography. Laura’s research has focused on the spatial distribution of on-location filming in Los Angeles, especially the socio-technical arrangements that make location filming possible and how these arrangements affect the people who live in Los Angeles. Denis Wood is a former design teacher at North Carolina State University, geographer, independent scholar, and author of books on maps, their power and subjectivity, including the influential The Power of Maps, which originated as an exhibition Wood curated for the Smithsonian. More recent publications include The Natures of Maps with John Fels; Rethinking the Power of Maps; Making Maps, third edition, with John Krygier; Everything Sings, and Weaponizing Maps with Joe Bryan. Mengqian Yang received her master degree from Concordia University in 2015. She currently works as a data engineer in Suzhou Industrial Park Surveying, Mapping and Geoinformation Co. Ltd. (Suzhou, China). Her research interests include Geo-data visualization, social media data, and big data mapping. Matthew Zook is a University Research Professor of Digital and Economic Geography in the Department of Geography at the University of Kentucky. His research focuses on the production, practices and uses of big geodata and the ways algorithms, space, and place interact in finance as well as everyday, lived geographies. He is currently the managing editor of Big Data & Society and a co-editor of the AAG’s new journal, GeoHumanities.

David Harvey

Spaces of neoliberalization: towards a theory of uneven geographical development 2nd edition 2019. VI, 115 pages with 2 b/w illustrations 978-3-515-11521-6 softcover 978-3-515-11522-3 e-book

In this second edition of essays David Harvey searches for adequate conceptualizations of space and of uneven geographical development that will help to understand the new historical geography of global capitalism. The theory of uneven geographical development needs further examination: The extreme volatility in contemporary political economic fortunes across and between spaces of the world economy cries out for better historical-geographical analysis and theoretical interpretation. The political necessity is just as urgent since social inequalities have increased in recent decades. Fiscal crises have cascaded across much of the developing world with devastating results from

Mexico to Indonesia, Russia and Argentina. Simultaneously, the different oppositional movements to neoliberalism create both opportunities and barriers in the search for alternatives. Harvey shows that this search needs to be supported by a deeper theoretical understanding of the roles of space and uneven geographical development in shaping the world around us. contents Introduction: Hettner-Lecture 2004 in Heidelberg | Neo-liberalism and the restoration of class power | Notes towards a theory of uneven geographical development | Space as a key word

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Tine Trumpp

Urban Cultural Heritage Governance Understanding the Interlinkages of Imagination, Regulation and Implementation in Delhi, India megacities and global change / megastädte und globaler Wandel – vol. 25 2019. 217 pages with 8 tables, 24 colour illustrations and 9 b/w illustrations 978-3-515-12338-9 softcover 978-3-515-12347-1 e-book

As a result of current urbanization dynamics the cultural heritage of Indian cities is under enormous pressure and threatened by decay. At the same time it makes a central contribution to social and societal identity of these cities and has a major influence both economically and aesthetically on the competitiveness of cities in international and national contexts. The responsibility for safeguarding urban cultural heritage, however, does not lie with public authorities only, but is embedded in the complex structures of public and private, individual and collective stakeholders acting at different levels with their respective interests. This study shows that social and professional discourses on urban cultural heritage and its protection highly influence conservation efforts. To overcome the sectoral perspective that dominates the existing research on ur-

ban cultural heritage in the Indian context, it draws on an analytical governance approach. This approach makes it possible to identify three governance orders and thus to make visible the interconnections between imagination, regulation and implementation. contents Introduction: Studying the Governance of Urban Cultural Heritage in Delhi – Focus and Relevance | Contextualisation: Urban Cultural Heritage – Evolution of the Concept | Theoretical Reflections: The Governance of Urban Cultural Heritage | Material and Methods | Situating the Case Study: Delhi – Contemporary Megacity with an Eventful History | Empirical Analysis: Urban Cultural Heritage Governance in Delhi – an Inventury | Discussion and Synthesis: Urban Cultural Heritage Governance in Delhi | Final Conclusions: Safeguarding Delhi’s Cultural Heritage

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Jason Dittmer (ed.)

Comic Book Geographies Media GeoGraphy at Mainz - Vol. 4 227 pages with 28 colour illustrations and 19 b/w illustrations 978-3-515-10269-8 softcoVer

Comic Book Geographies is a volume that brings together scholars from the discipline of geography and the field of comics studies to consider the multiple ways in which space is both constitutive of, and produced through, comic books. Senior scholars contribute their thoughts alongside a range of fresh talent from both fields, providing for a potent mix of perspectives. Together, these chapters reframe debates about comic books by highlighting their unique spatialities and the way that those spatialities are shot through by a range of relationships to time. Examples are drawn from a wide range of geographical contexts, from post-9/11 American superhero comics to the Franco-Belgian

tradition and from comics intended for mass consumption to the spoken-word performances of Alan Moore. As a truly interdisciplinary engagement, with scholars coming from geography, literature, history, and beyond, Comic Book Geographies brings together perspectives on comic books that have too long been working in isolation. contributors Daniel Merlin Goodbrey, Jason Dittmer, Oliver Dunnett, Tony Venezia, Shaun Huston, Catriona MacLeod, Juliet J. Fall, Edward C. Holland, Julia Round, Michael Goodrum, Marcus A. Doel

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Helen Morgan Parmett

Down in Treme: Race, Place, and New Orleans on Television Media GeoGraphy at Mainz – Vol. 5 2019. 216 pages with 6 b/w photos and 2 b/w illustrations 978-3-515-12181-1 softcoVer 978-3-515-12182-8 e-book

Termed ‘Hollywood South’, New Orleans is the site of a burgeoning cultural economy of film and television production. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, this production plays an important role in the city’s rebuilding. Down in Treme: Race, Place, and New Orleans on Television takes the HBO series Treme, filmed on-location in New Orleans, as a case study for exploring relationships between television production and raced and classed geographies in the rebuilding of post-Katrina New Orleans. Treme demonstrates how city efforts to attract film and television production collide with the television industry’s desire to create new forms of connection for increasingly distracted audiences through the production of “authentic” connections to place. Down in Treme explores what is at stake in these collisions for local culture and struggles over the right to neighborhood and city space. By putting post-broadcast television studies, critical race theory, and urban studies into conversation, Down in Treme provides

a poignant case study that enjoins scholars to go beyond the text to consider how media industries and production practices intervene into the contemporary media city. contents Introduction | From Frank’s Place to Treme | Media, Cultural Policy & Urban Planning before and after Katrina | Location, Location, Location! Sites & Spatial Practices in Location Shooting | From the Screen to the Street: Treme Tourism | It’s HBO: Affective Economics of Place | Conclusion the author Helen Morgan Parmett is an Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre and affiliate faculty in the Film and Television Program and the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program at the University of Vermont, where she holds the Edwin W. Lawrence Forensic Professorship of Speech.

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Cartography is one of the oldest forms of media. With cartography and media, meaning, ideology, and power are habitually arbitrated across and through space and time. Media has an underlying mapping impulse – a proclivity to comprehend itself and be rendered comprehensible through metaphors of topologies, networks, and flows that lead to the constant evacuation of spaces in order to produce places of communication. Both media and cartography are never static, but instead, are ongoing scopic and discursive regimes that continually make and remake how we understand and interact with our

world. Developments in mobile computing have not only increased the pace, flow, and interaction of media across space, but also the ubiquity, and thus the taken-for-grantedness, of mapping. Owing to the practices of the neogeographers of the Geoweb, media requires geographical situatedness in which and for which media can take place. Media’s Mapping Impulse is an interdisciplinary collection that explores the relationship between cartography, geospatial technologies, and locative media on the one hand, and new and traditional media forms such as social media, mobile apps, and film on the other.

www.steiner-verlag.de Franz Steiner Verlag

ISBN 978-3-515-12424-9

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