As I was finishing my coffee and scrolling through tweets this morning, several by @snbeach led me to Seth Godin’s brief note on maps and compasses. I work at a college where compass skills are a required part of our core curriculum, and students quickly learn to lead themselves several miles over forested ridge line by map and compass in the middle of the night (how about *that* for a metaphor!).
Naturally, Seth Godin’s note got me to thinking about the relevance of maps to teaching, learning, and scholarship. The map is always “yesterday’s map,” and although tools exist to help make it always today’s map (various Google Earth mashups among them), we are perhaps still too preoccupied with mapping unknown terrain, with delineating boundaries and borders, and with anticipating and making assumptions about our destinations.
When it comes to teaching, how different are we, really, from, for example Mercator’s nearly fictional 1595 map of the Arctic? Do we not still draw continents and islands where we might wish them to be?
A nearly century-long reparte between Lewis Carroll, Jorge Borges, and Jean Baudrillard about maps and territory has been an oft-cited entry into the confusion of cartography, culture, and topography. I think it has much to say, too, about the implication of networks of communication and knowledge building in the emerging pedagogies of an ecology of knowing.
1893
Lewis Carroll completes the second part of his final novel, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded. In the chapter, “The Man in the Moon,” Carroll narrates this exchange about the practicality and impracticality of maps:
“That’s another thing we’ve learned from your Nation,” said Mein Herr, “map-making. But we’ve carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?”
“About six inches to the mile.”
“Only six inches!” exclaimed Mein Herr. “We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!”
“Have you used it much?” I enquired.
“It has never been spread out, yet,” said Mein Herr: “the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.
1946
Jorge Luis Borges imagines an empire based on Carroll’s concept of a map the same scale as the empire:
“Of Exactitude in Science”
…In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography.
1981
In Simulacres et Simulation, Jean Baudrillard further extends this trope to suggest that all we have, finally, is the map, and the real exists only in “vestiges here and there”:
The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.
—Ecclesiastes
Abstraction today 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 a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra – it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire, but our own. The desert of the real itself.
If the map has come to replace the reality that we once sought to describe, what is the next step?
We can use a compass, sure, but I am more keen to follow my students as they forge new routes through the starlit woods and see what we can learn not from anticipating a destination, but from what we can find along the way.
Which came first? The map or the cartographer?
Well, the cartographer doesn’t depend on the map, but the map on the cartographer.