Deconstructing the map.

Harley (1989) challenges assumptions about the neutrality of maps as objective representations of space. Widely considered the founder of critical cartography, in this seminal article Deconstructing the Map, Harley (1989) argues “In particular, we often tend to work from the premise that mappers engage in an unquestionably ‘scientific’ or ‘objective’ form of knowledge creation…It is better for us to begin from the premise that cartography is seldom what the cartographer says it is” (p. 1) – this captures the ways in which maps do not only reflect but actively construct the world, how viewers see, interpret and understand its connections and disconnections. Maps encode (to use Hall’s term) particular ways of seeing – worldviews, ideologies, priorities, even silences; this means the cartographer is at the same time shaping and recording “knowledge”. Harley underscores how maps should be “read” as cultural texts – and that because of this context deeply matters. Understanding the historic, political and epistemic conditions under which maps are crafted helps us to understand just how to “read” or decode them (à la Hall once more).

Harley argues the rules of cartography relate more with the social order than the rules of science or reason and he outlines a path to locate those dynamics (not the how but the what). “Our task is to search for the social forces that have structured cartography and to locate the presence of power – and its effects – in all map knowledge” (p. 2). This approach underscores how every map reflects a set of epistemic decisions, commitments – choices of what to include or exclude, what to emphasize or occlude, what to center or marginalize… 

Harley helps sharpen the questions I ask when I view a map. Before accepting the map as “fact” I want to understand: what is this map doing? I also want to understand why this map was produced – and especially why was it produced like this: with this key, with these terms, ways of organizing and structing peoples and things. And finally, I want to understand what else might have been going on while this map was being produced – the context around the context. What I found is that these choices often reproduce the imperial gaze; I see power in the key, the projection, the scale, the borders drawn, the symbols used, the unmarked areas – the decisions to include and the unsaid, that not included, which also says something. I interpret deconstructing a map – then – as a way of exposing the ideological scaffolding, that which underpins the details of representing. Maps, like borders, seem objective (adhering to science, reason and geometry) but if we take away the presumption of “the truth” of maps, we are left with an artifact that reveals a social order, hierarchies, beliefs and values. 

Although my research is not primarily about cartography – and my maps are not as “deconstructive” as I would like, they were initial attempts. It sparked some creativity in me – and I want to experiment more in next research. Harley’s approach offers a conceptual link for understanding how borders are constructed, naturalized, internalized and (re)produced – how historical borders reverberate in contemporary contexts. Through the process of mapping Malta’s (and by extension, Schengen’s) regime of visas – that is constructing a visual transformation (inspired by van Houtum, 2010) of the bureaucratic, legal system of borders – I realized there was a concrete link between contemporary bordering practices and colonial ones, that is some of the same epistemic assumptions have yet to be deracinated from borders, bordering and regimes of borders. Through rendering this regime of visas as a map, asymmetries, hierarchies and exclusions become starkly apparent. In this way, constructing a counter-map allowed me to deconstruct the border: to reveal how the regime of visas, regimes of mobility (Glick Schiller & Salazar, 2013) are shaped by power, hegemonic structures and spaces of power which continue to structure movement, access to movement and subjectivity/identity today.