The New Violent Cartography

Geo-Analysis after the Aesthetic Turn

Samson Opondo, Michael Shapiro

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136345081
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This edited volume seeks to propose and examine different, though related, critical responses to modern cultures of war among other cultural practices of statecraft. Taken together, these essays present a space of creative engagement with the political and draw on a broad range of cultural contexts and genres of expressions to provoke the thinking that exceeds the conventional stories and practices of international relations.

In contrast to a macropolitical focus on state policy and inter-state hostilities, the contributors to this volume treat the micropolitics of violence and dissensus that occur below [besides and against] the level and gaze that comprehends official map-making, policy-making and implementation practices. At a minimum, the counter-narratives presented in these essays disturb the functions, identities, and positions assigned by the nation-state, thereby multiplying relations between bodies, the worlds where they live, and the ways in which they are 'equipped' for fitting in them.

Contributions deploy feature films, literature, photography, architecture to think the political in ways that offer glimpses of realities that are fugitive within existing perspectives. Bringing together a wide range of theorists from a host of geographical, cultural and theoretical contexts, this work explores the different ways in which an aesthetic treatment of world politics can contribute to an ethics of encounter predicated on minimal violence in encounters with people with different practices of identity.

This work provides a significant contribution to the field of international theory, encouraging us to rethink politics and ethics in the world today.

Part I

Violence, literary and narrative cartographies

1 Maps and the geography of violence

Farah’s Maps and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

Russell West-Pavlov

I

In a well-known dialogue with a group of geographers, Michel Foucault suggested that

the formation of discourses and the genealogy of knowledge needs to be analysed, not in terms of consciousness, modes of perception and forms of ideology, but in terms of tactics and strategies of power … deployed through implantations, distributions, demarcations, control of territories and organisations of domains.

He then continued by evoking a future study of armies ‘as a matrix of organisation and knowledge’, including ‘the fortress, the “campaign”, the “movement”, the colony, the territory’ (1980: 77). Implicit in all these notions of spatial power, whether biopolitical or military, alongside statistics, medicine and such other ‘disciplines’, is the practice of cartography – a diagrammatics of power.

As Bernhard Klein observes, maps (diagrams) are an exemplification of ‘plotless texts’ (Klein 2001: 109, referring to Lotman 1977: 237–9). Like space itself, in Foucault’s famous formulation (1994: IV, 752–3), maps encode history, and in particular preserve in themselves the traces of the historical vicissitudes of nations – even when, or indeed particularly when, in the words of the protagonist of Naruddin Farah’s novel Maps (2000, originally published 1986), they seek to ‘make the fatigued voyager believe in the eternal nature of the state of things’ (Farah 2000; hereafter Maps 119). Reading Farah’s novel, whose central concern, as the title itself suggests, is the business of cartography in a time of war, against Conrad’s classic Heart of Darkness (1990; originally published 1899/1902, hereafter HD), this chapter seeks to explore the ways maps and their histories are implicated in processes of ethnic violence. The making of maps has a long history, connected with navigation, trade, the possession of land, but preeminently with the waging of wars (Lacost 1982). It is not by chance that the most popular leisure and tourist maps in Britain are the famous Ordnance Survey maps, originally conceived, as their name suggests, for the military. Here the usual objections to maps as representations – namely, that they are ideological projections of the gaze of power – loses its force. For here, discourse as a ‘violence that we do to things’, in Foucault’s (1972: 229–30) term, becomes nakedly harnessed to the real deployment and implementation of violence in the direct service of organized state or infra-state violence. Connected with ultra modern technologies of digital navigation, surveillance, imaging systems from aerial or satellite photography to infrared or laser optics and high precision weapons, cartography has been increasingly implicated in processes of violent coercion in an intra-and international context, and is employed in border surveillance via counter-insurgency to full-scale war (see for instance Weizman 2003).

Nuruddin Farah’s novel Maps implicitly takes cognizance of the fatal linkages between cartography, optical regimes and the nation. Through the novel’s play on temporality and cartography, Farah seems determined to undo the nexus of these technologies of control. At the heart of his novel, there is an epigraph taken from one of Joseph Conrad’s letters which Farah uses to mark a central shift in meaning and experience for his characters:

All is illusion – the words written, the mind at which they are aimed, the truth they are intended to express, the hands that will hold the paper, the eyes that will glance at the lines. Every image foats vaguely in a sea of doubt – and the doubt itself is lost in an unexplored universe of uncertitude.

(Maps 123)¹

As if performing what Conrad is saying, Farah’s deployment of the Conradian citation rips it out of context, casting off its textual moorings. Set into flight, the quotation ‘foats vaguely in a sea of doubt … in an unexplored universe of uncertitude’. In this way, it becomes usefully poly-referential. In the letter from which the epigraph is taken, Conrad’s concern is with the vertiginous process of writing under the conditions of modernist aesthetics, which resonates in an apposite way with Farah’s own very postmodernist interest in the act of writing. But by virtue of its own loss of context, the quotation can also be read as referring to the cartographic texts of the novel’s title. Maps, constituted of ‘words’, ‘lines’ and ‘images’, are transformed into mere ‘illusion’, thus losing any epistemologi-cal utility they might have had in ‘an unexplored universe of incertitude’. What this Modernist topos does is to reverse, in the aesthetic realm, the process of cartographic modernity which began with the calibration of time and space embodied in the chronometer invented by John Harrison in 1761 – a process that enabled the measurement of longitude and the precise mapping of the globe (Landes 1983: ch. 5). Modernity and its scion the nation-state were intimately bound up with developmental notions of the territorial nature of statehood, as much created as reflected by cartographic representation. Under the conditions of modernity, to become a state was to discover, or rather to posit, through the act of cartographic inscription, borders more often than not invisible on the ground. Colonization, nation-formation and later ethno-nationalist movements all depended upon the impositions of maps for their incipient sense of modern identity (Anderson 1991: 170–8). Conrad’s quotation throws Modernist consciousness back into a pre-cartographic moment before the creation of precise maps. It is the temporal dislocation at work here which indexes a spatial and interpretative confusion. For, as Delaney comments, ‘territory cannot be considered apart from two fundamental aspects of social being: meaning and power and the contingencies of their relationship…. Territoriality is also implicated in the creation, circulation, and interpretation of meaning … territory always signifes’ (Delaney 2005: 16–17). The developmental reversal that Conrad operates is thus also an epistemological reversal, overturning the assumption that maps represent a pre-existent reality. Conrad’s genetic inversion lays bare the way maps construct national identities and illustrates how ‘territory is not primary in relation to the qualitative mark; it is the mark that makes the territory’ (Deleuze and Guattari 2003: 315). The act of taking a map out of its historical context and reading it in another time has the power to destabilize the ambient notions of national contours and ethnic identity. As such, the decontex-tualization of Conrad in Farah’s Maps is a performative gesture: it figures the novel’s larger work of critiquing the dubious implementation of colonial maps in a contemporary context in the service of ethnic warfare.

In keeping with the novel’s eponymous concern with cartography, it is worth noting the location of this citation within the text’s own spatial parameters. The epigraph from Conrad comes at the numerical mid-point of the novel, at its geographical still centre between the two dynamic, fanking sections of the triptych-structure of the plot. The first section describes the protagonist’s journey from the ethnic-Somali enclave of Kallafo of his childhood to Mogadiscio (the text consistently uses the Italian colonial designation), while the third section depicts his adoptive mother Misra’s own flight from Kallafo after her being accused of betrayal of the Somali cause. The Conradian epigraph stands at the opening of the middle section, between these two journeys, in a period of adolescence spent in Mogadiscio. In this median episode, the protagonist, half-way between childhood attachment to his non-Somali adoptive mother, and an agonizing conflict between his existential debt to her and to a national ideal which she appears to have betrayed, is educated in an ideology of ethno-national identity, buttressed by the reading of maps.

Much like the ‘farthest point of navigation and the culminating point of [Mar-low’s] experience’ at Kurtz’s encampment (HD 141) or the centre of the storm in Typhoon, the Mogadiscio episode over which Conrad’s epigraph presides is awarded an ambivalent epistemological status within the novel. Like the midpoint of Conrad’s round journey, it ‘seemed somehow to throw a kind of light on everything about me … It was sombre enough … not very clear either. No, not very clear. And yet it seemed to throw a kind of light’ (HD 141). The central Mogadiscio episode epitomizes the acquisition of knowledge: the protagonist goes to Mogadishu to be schooled, and benefts from the additional instruction given by ‘a tutor by the name of Cusmaan’ hired to help Askar with his ‘studies’ specially his ‘reading of maps’ (Maps 149) – an eminently nationalist topos, inherited, with other indices of national identity, from the colonial era. Yet by virtue of the Conradian epigraph, this notion of education and increase of knowledge, in particular of a cartographic nature, is cast into question from the outset as they become part of an

illusion – the words written, the mind at which they are aimed, the truth they are intended to express…. Every image foats vaguely in a sea of doubt – and the doubt itself is lost in an unexplored universe of uncertitude.

(Maps 123)

The Conradian epigraph is brief, yet the crushing accumulation of negations and disturbances it offers present a weighty counterpoise to the tenor of epistemo-logical optimism which reigns, albeit briefy, over this segment of the novel’s plot.

Thus, Farah’s debt to Conrad, indexed explicitly only by the scathing epigraph placed at the opening of the central section, and implicitly by the ternary structure constituted by two journeys bracketing a still centre, is evinced most clearly at the nexus of cartography and epistemological scepticism. In Farah’s novel, maps are mobilized in the service of ethnic territorial warfare. To that end, cartographic texts are constantly making claims for their own truth-value. However, the narrative never ceases to subvert those claims, and this it does in three principle ways.

First, maps index an absence of meaning which, far from facilitating human agency, tends to pull the epistemological ground from under its feet. Conversely, and quite contradictorily, as I demonstrate in the second part of the chapter, maps simultaneously populate the landscape with an excess of already-assigned meanings which no less effectively truncates the agency of human subjects. In either case, cartography is diametrically opposed to the indices of truth customarily ascribed to it. Finally, and in appreciation of the politics and dynamics of literary geography and narrative cartographies, it becomes clear that though a geopolitical or ethno-national ‘cartography’ sets itself up as the guarantor of nationalist ethnic identity, Farah’s novel plays on other rhythms, voices, spaces and times which incessantly pose against the distanced, abstracting power of maps an existentially primary debt to a primal maternal cosmos.

Because this maternal cosmos is embodied by Misra, the adoptive mother from a different ethnic group to her son Askar, this cosmos figures both an absence of assumed copula between mother and ethnic motherland, and a plenitude of prior, determining meanings which exceed nationalist ideology. The novel is thus a sort of geographical anti-Bildungsroman, in which the process of attaining maturity supposedly entails moving away from the ‘geography of infancy’ (Maps 224) towards a putatively more realistic geography of ethno-nationalist cartography. However, this latter cartographic order, one which the naïve protagonist at first embraces wholeheartedly, is increasingly presented as impoverished and distorted, and responsible for ghastly bloodshed. For Farah, the untruthfulness of cartography – from the epoch of imperial colonization to that of postcolonial civil war² – transpires to be heavily implicated in the ‘cartography of violence’.

II

Hypo-cartography: writing and the heart of whiteness

Conrad’s epigraph only reveals its full meaning when the rest of the letter is read. Conrad, writing to Garnett in September 1899, spoke about the dilemmas of the act of writing itself:

My efforts seem unrelated to anything in heaven and everything under heaven is impalpable to the touch like shapes of mist. Do you see how easy writing must be under such conditions? Do you see? Even writing to a friend – to a person one has heard, touched, drank with, quar[r]elled with – does not give me a sense of reality. All is illusion …

(Conrad 1986: II, 198)

Poised before the blank page, the writer is deprived of any epistemological framework whatsoever and is plunged into uncertainty. This isolation of the writer, combined with the emptiness of the white page, culminates in a sort of epistemological vertigo which deprives the writer of any stable knowledge. It is important to know about this broader Conradian context, because it is the correlative of Farah’s strategy of showing that maps index an absence of meaning, which, far from facilitating human agency, tends to pull the epistemological ground from under its feet.

The dilemma lamented in this letter is the fip side of a cognate ex...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The new violent cartography: geoanalysis after the aesthetic turn
• PART I. Violence, literary and narrative cartographies
• PART II. Warring bodies and bodies politic
• PART III. Continuing violent cartographies and the redistribution of the sensible
• Index