[Nietzsche Circle][Hyperion]

book review:

An Atlas of Radical Cartography

by Lize Mogel and Alex Bhagat, eds

reviewed by Stephen Boatright, City University of New York Graduate Center

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Published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, May 2010. Copyright © 2010 Stephen Boatright and The Nietzsche Circle. All essays, interviews, and reviews are shared copyright between author(s) and The Nietzsche Circle. All rights reserved. Please contact editors for any concerns or for usage rights.

A self-defined ‘primer’ on the geography of contemporary geo-politics, An Atlas of Radical Cartography is a collection of 10 maps and 10 companion essays about a wide breadth of issues ranging from migration patterns in the Americas and Europe to mapping informal settlements in India. The collection is particularly interesting in the ways in which the social, political, and spatial aspects of each contribution meld with those of the others, bleeding across physical and conceptual boundaries. Largely structured around geographically delimited ‘local’ issues, the maps and essays provide critical perspectives on a range of globally significant socio-spatial phenomena. As a collection, the atlas affords multiple points of entry for the reader to analyze the ways in which the diverse localities are linked and the varied processes inter-implicated and does this in a visually and intellectually stimulating way. The maps are as aesthetically diverse as the topics are broad, and similarly varied are the styles of the essays. Some of the essays are introductions and extensions of the maps, others take the paired map as a jumping off point for thinking more broadly about an issue, while others yet present conversations among activists, planners, and scholars. In sum, the Atlas succeeds in creating a space for ripening understanding and enriching conversation; however, it has one significant shortcoming, which is that due to the brevity of the essays the reader is often left desirous of further analysis and conceptual development.

Political activists, critical artists, and radical scholars comprise the collection’s intended audience, and for this motley group much information and inspiration can be gained; although, any reader looking for or in need of theoretical or contextual background will remain unsatisfied. The editors introduce the atlas with the caveat that the collection is intended as a ‘primer.’ Unfortunately, this reads as little more than an anemic excuse for a lack of argumentative development. Still, though, the palpable energy, personal investment, and creativity of the contributions make up for this shortcoming. The atlas was complied as a critical counter to the purported and assumed objectivity of maps, of information presented by hegemonic institutions to the public about migration, land use, global connectivity, capital flows, and border control. As the editors note in their introduction, “This Atlas is an atlas and not the atlas” (6). The political implications inherent in geography are often obscured and obfuscated in standard mappings, but following Henri Lefebvre they argue that, counter to the assumption of homogeneity and staticity, space is produced through the processes of capital accumulation, population management, and information control, among others (Lefebvre 1991). The maps by Trevor Paglen, the collective An Architektur, Lize Mogel, and Ashley Hunt are particularly striking for the ways in which they show how the local is multiply enfolded in the global. These maps and a few others have a level of coherence and self-contained explication that allow them to stand alone from the accompanying text, but not all of the maps are self-explanatory, a problematic that is explicitly, if somewhat prosaically, addressed. “Radical cartographies are, as Trevor Paglen writes, ‘a departure point … that can aid in analysis but cannot speak for themselves’” (11).

Upon the initial unfolding, the first map of the collection hardly seems radical. Produced by Unnayan, an activist community organizing group that worked to alleviate and counter the encroachments of municipal development programs, it simply looks like a standard real estate blueprint—a series of small, numbered buildings clumped together along the sides of large-scale industrial constructions—a railroad, a factory, a canal, a road. However, upon reading Jai Sen’s accompanying essay we learn that this seemingly mundane map is one of the few remaining from an extensive, decades-long project of organizing and mapping Calcutta’s ‘unintended’ settlements. A member of the group, Sen explains that the word unnayan means ‘development’ in Bengali and that the choice of this name was made with its myriad potential connotations in mind—industrial capitalist development, demographic development, community development. The urbanizing forces that attracted migrants to Calcutta and left them to fend for themselves in acquiring the most basic of services are often the same as those that deny official recognition to these settlements, a willful ignorance that allows for a legal rationalization for eviction and coercive social disenfranchisement. That the atlas begins with this map and essay is appropriate—it is pointedly local, intimately specific while also able to demonstrate how a range of geo-political scales are messily imbricated.

Still, graphically underwhelming is an odd way to start for a collection of maps complied by two professional artists, yet the very banality of Unnayan’s map grounds aesthetic beauty and wide-ranging concerns of the collection as a whole in the parsed down grit of the biopolitical quotidian. Unnayan’s map was produced to provide tangible proof to official bureaucracies of the real and permanent neighborhoods that existed throughout the city’s industrial and infrastructural interstices, entire neighborhoods whose existence was officially denied. Conscious of the ways in which geographical information is corralled by institutional powers so as to further enhance their hegemony, Unnayan decided to adopt the bureaucratic language of planning to speak not only against but to those governmental and corporate offices that sought to extend their epistemological denial of the existence of Calcutta’s unintentional communities into a physical effacement of their presence. In his essay Sen gives an honest assessment of the mixed results of Unnayan’s activities for housing rights, political empowerment, and community organization. In a way similar to the way that Mogel and Bhagat frame the atlas as a whole in their introduction, Sen offers his contribution to the reader as a point of activist departure and source for radical imaginings. This level-headed attitude towards activism and social justice is representative of the atlas as a whole and of the individual contributions.

The essay by Maribel Casas-Cortes and Sebastian Cobarrubias that accompanies An Architektur’s map of the detention center in Fürth, Germany, also introduces four other maps not included in the atlas collection. Each of these maps is concerned with graphically presenting data about the plight of ‘illegal’ migrants to Europe, but while severely limited in length, the essay does more than merely introduce five maps. Casas-Cortes and Cobarrubias describe the evolving, ‘fractilized’ structure of European border controls, e.g., the ways in which the ‘border’ manifests at frontier checkpoints, central-city train stations, and in suburban detention centers. An Architektur’s map is a well-chosen representative of the five discussed to be published as a part of the print atlas. In this map, scale, process, place, and person are clearly articulated, but significantly their interconnections are depicted in a manner that effectively produces a simulation of the bureaucratic complexity, cultural confusion, and foreign fear that greets the migrant at each successive confrontation with governmental population controls. Spaces, processes, and actors are given distinct representations, but using graphic overlay An Architekur manages to bring the reader into the despairingly labyrinthine apparatus that confronts people who seek asylum in Germany. One shortcoming of this pairing is that the other four maps described in the essay are included only as small, hardly legible images appended to the text and not as fold-outs like the other maps in the collection. This is partially compensated for by the inclusion of Internet addresses for pdf versions, although typing in their awkward URLs proves a bit tedious. Overall, this essay and the map of the Fürth detention center provide clear, critical if abbreviated, graphic, and textual examinations of one of the countless trans-local sites (Europe) in the non-centered, political fraught phenomenon of global migration.

The most challenging and stimulating map in the collection is Lize Mogel’s. A non-scaled, conceptual mash-up of the ways in which geographically distant places are multiply implicated that is juxtaposed with similarly mashed-up texts whose physical layout mimics the actual imbrication of the places and processes addressed. This piece succeeds in radically challenging the reader’s geo-historical orientation by cutting up and breaching the boundaries of space and narration. Further, the accompanying essay by Sarah Lewison adds more insight and detail in a way that parallels and strengthens Mogel’s map. Lewison speaks with and directly about the map with clarity of purpose and connection that regrettably is less present in several of the other contributions not addressed in this review.

The last map in the collection, A World Map: in which we see… by Ashley Hunt, is the atlas’s most graphically overwhelming and analytically underwhelming map. It is also the map most representative of the collection’s overall strengths and weaknesses. An honest attempt at reflecting the heterogeneity of contemporary capitalism, it strives to depict the connections between the myriad social phenomena that sustain capitalism by drawing from the ideas of a dozen philosophers and social theorists. It is bright, colorful, and confusing—characteristics that produce both its success and failure. Success for its compilation of the heterogeneous social relations implicated in actually existing capitalism—slavery, wage labor, bare life, the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, etc. However, the map’s shortcoming comes from Hunt’s desire to evade any sort of analytical coherence. “[T]he map seeks to undermine the intellectual tendency to see one’s analysis as total and absolute. Providing no beginning or end to the reader, there is no thesis or conclusion to finally be mastered. Any analysis drawn from it must be seen as imperfect and contingent, used only as a guide for thinking and always reconciled with local realities and history” (146). This may speak to a certain epistemological truth, but as an end to a counter-hegemonic collection of radical maps and essays, it comes off as an anemic disclaimer for a less than rigorous conceptual analysis. Fortunately, this map, the other contributions, and the collection as a whole do not apologize for their political and philosophical positions. Hunt’s project may be too grand and open-ended for its own good, but despite its failures and second-guessing the map’s attempt to map the emergent complexity of contemporary capitalism is audacious and inspiring—two words that accurately describe Mogel and Bhagat’s collection as a whole.

(published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, May 2010)

To download the entire essay, Open PDF: | “An Atlas of Radical Cartography.”

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