Metascience (2008) 17:215–224 Ó Springer 2008

DOI 10.1007/s11016-008-9179-0

SURVEY REVIEW

WHAT IS CARTOGRAPHIC RATIONALITY?

Jeremy Crampton, Stuart Elden (eds), Space, Knowledge and

Power: Foucault and Geography. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Pp. 390.
US$114.95 HB. US$39.95 PB.

Gunnar Olsson, Abysmal: A Critique of Cartographical Reason.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Pp. 584.
US$40.00 HB.

By David Turnbull

The excuse for reviewing these two quite different books together is
that despite their differences they are both approaches to the ques-
tion: ÔWhat is Cartographic Rationality?’ This is a key question for
both of them because Olsson and Foucault share a recognition of
the central importance of spatiality and geography to human cul-
ture. For Olsson, language and signs, the drawing of lines and
maps, lie at the heart of being human. His aim is to produce a
cartography of thought – because his broadest and strongest
claim is that human thought is essentially cartographic in nature.
Foucault famously claimed Ôspace is fundamental to any form of
communal life, space is fundamental to any exercise of power’, so
Ôgeography must indeed necessarily lie at the heart of my concerns’.
However, although both Olsson, and Crampton and Elden and
their authors aim to give us insights into the nature of cartographic
rationality, on behalf of Foucault, I think they actually fail to do
so, albeit for different reasons. To explain what they don’t deal with
requires a short excursus.
Although the term is not often used as such, the notion of there
being a form of cartographic reason or rationality is inherent in the
kinds of claims many analysts make and take for granted. For
example Wittgenstein said a philosophical problem has the form
ÔI don’t know my way about’ Stuart Hall claims if there is one
thing that best represents the ways in which we as humans
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perceive, represent, measure, know and understand reality, it is the

map. John Pickles takes up Olson’s famous claim in earlier work
that drawing a line is a fundamentally geographic and spatial act in
which identities are inscribed and the logos of Western thought is
founded (Pickles, 2004). From this, Pickles (pp. 4–5) gives specific-
ity to his understanding of cartographic rationality:
The world has literally been made, domesticated and ordered by drawing lines,
distinctions, taxonomies and hierarchies: Europe and its others, West and non-
West, or people with history and people without history. Through their gaze, grid-
ding and architecture, the sciences have spatialised and produced the world we
inhabit. And indeed this is perhaps the crucial issue: maps provide the very condi-
tions for the possibility for the worlds we inhabit and the subjects we become.

Back in 1990, Robert Rundstrom called mapping Ôthe funda-

mental process of lending order to the world’ (Rundstrom, 1990).
But, Ôwhile mapping in Rundstrom’s sense of mental mapping may
be a pan-human activity, different peoples lend order to the world
in different ways’ (Irwin, 1994). It is this basic point which leads
me to ask what cartographic rationality is; and I only really
became aware of my own lack of coherence on the question when I
set out to review these two books which seem to make the perva-
sive lack of clarity on the question even more apparent. While
forms of mapping may have their own ways of structuring our
perceptions of the world, are we really all subject to them in quite
the hegemonic way that Pickles claims?
While a great many authors assume or assert that we have car-
tographic rationality, what it actually means is both unclear and
very different in different authors’ understandings. For Robinson
and Petchenik, knowledge is spatial because they claim human
experience of the world depends on all things being somewhere and
sharing relative location. Some, like Olsson and Farinelli, following
Plato and Kant, take human thought and language to be essen-
tially and profoundly cartographic. There are strong and weak ver-
sions of this position. In the strong version all thought of all
humans is not only equated with language, but it is taken to be a
form of mapping, and in turn of course much turns on what maps
and mapping are taken to be. In the weak version it is language
that is held to be fundamentally spatial and temporal.
For others like Ong, the cartographic nature of thought is not a
universal, it’s one of the range of capacities or modes of thought
that are characteristic of civilised people (Ong, 1982). Primitive
 WHAT IS CARTOGRAPHIC RATIONALITY? 217
people in his view are incapable of mapping. Typically it is seen as a
cultural trait developed with writing and literacy, so it is co-pro-
duced with certain technical practices of representation. David
Olson for example in The World on Paper asserts that mapping and
the common frame of reference it provides for assembling local
knowledge allows for the possibility of theoretical science (Olson,
1994). However, some of the cultural trait theorists acknowledge
that it is not evenly distributed across a cultural group. For exam-
ple, women or the Ôlower orders’ are sometimes labelled as having
no such trait, or, at best, a sharply diminished cartographic facility.
But, what is also unclear in such accounts is where cartographic
rationally is located. Is it characteristic of specific forms of thought
like theoretical science? Is it particular to maps or to mapping re-
gimes, or is it somehow characteristic of or particular to a culture?
Or again is it somehow in the minds of some sub-group of a culture,
does it characterise, an episteme or an era?
Yet others recognise that prior to the sixteenth century map
making was not common even in the West and became a form of
thought as nation states and cities emerged. Mathew Sparke puts it
the other way round, arguing that cartographic rationality and the
nation state are effects of the abstract space created by maps and
atlases (Sparke, 2005).
But either way it is treated as a form of management and con-
trol that is understood as resulting from the main function of map-
ping. Essentially that function has been taken to be the
transformation of land into territory, often equated with the pro-
cess of colonisation. For Denis Wood (1992), like Harvey, Ômaps
are weapons in the fight for social domination’. But again some
analysts would allow that the introduction of mapping as a state
enterprise has been both varied and messy historically, being quite
different in adoption and in form across and within cultures. So,
for example, Harvey claims a cartographic revolution in Britain
circa 1600, because before then hardly any maps were printed and
the rationality of mapping was not embedded in the national con-
sciousness or in the minds of the state’s administrators. For exam-
ple there are, surprisingly from our perspective, no maps in the
Domesday Book, the first survey of England; but by the time of
Henry VIII maps were everyday tools of Government policy. And
it is here that Pickles locates his origin of cartographic rationality:
‘‘It is not only that maps have shaped identities and spaces, but
218 SURVEY REVIEW

also that the cartographic imagination has influenced the very

structure and content of language and thought itself’’ (Pickles,
2004, p. 12). After Bacon and Co., Ôto map was to think’. This is,
however, slightly at odds with the historical record, for carto-
graphic reason did not prevail in all areas. Estate mapping for
example didn’t become commonplace in Britain until the nineteenth
century and thematic mapping arguably didn’t really get a grip
until William Smith’s geological map of Britain appeared in 1815,
two hundred years after the putative revolution. Berry in her book
on Japan recognises this variability and asks the salient questions
‘‘why map some things and not others, when and why does it
become commonplace?’’ (Berry 2006, pp. 57–58). But nonetheless
she argues that in both Japan and Britain, albeit in different peri-
ods and for different reasons, there was a sudden switch, with the
acceptance of a cartographic logic: a Ôway of thinking’ based in
space that required the adoption of a spatial classificatory system.
But for me, this puts the inquiry on the wrong foot, tilting the
answer too far towards an internal map logic and leaving unex-
plained why the classificatory system was adopted, by whom and
what the other systems are, as used by non map readers.
How and why maps at the state level were and were not success-
fully introduced has varied widely, as recent studies of Siam,
Mexico, Japan and Russia have shown. Does this mean that there
are correspondingly different forms of cartographic rationality in
each case? (Kivelson, 2006). Winichakul has argued that what
counts as ÔSiameseness’ was co-produced with the introduction of
State mapping, so that identity formation may go with carto-
graphic rationality, but it is likely to take specific cultural forms
(Winichakul, 1994). Similarly in Mexico cadastral mapping had to
be abandoned because of the problematic forms of communal own-
ership, again suggesting varieties of, or even conflicting, rationali-
ties (Craib, 2004). However, cartographic rationality can vary in
other ways. Edney argues that differing forms of cartographic rea-
son go with differing forms of mapping and Lefebvre’s account
would suggest differing spatial representational complexes.
Evidently there is no single, clear, and readily determinable sense
of cartographic reason that all agree on. But I want to pursue the
matter since so many of us seem to think that Ômodern civilised’
people have either been subjects of a Ômapification’ process or that
somehow, albeit inchoately, there is a connection between how we
 WHAT IS CARTOGRAPHIC RATIONALITY? 219
think about space and the way we represent it – the gap between the
two constituting the abyss that Olsson explores.
The more important question is that raised by Painter and
Pickles: ÔWhat, are the possibilities for practices of mapping that
lead away from totalisation and open up understandings of place
alive to the possibilities of flow, connectivity and transgression; to a
logic of movement, desire, and possibility?’ (Painter, 2006; Pickles,
2006). This question frames the problem in more fruitful, performa-
tive terms, with the emphasis on practices of mapping, on connectiv-
ity, and on other ways of being. It opens up the two most important
questions: can we envisage new forms of mapping, for example
emergent mapping; and can we also bring to light the taken-
for-granted multiple forms of spatiality that are assumed in our
ways of knowing that Law and Mol have worked towards revealing?
They claim at least four forms, including: a network form in which
relations are frozen; a fluid form in which objects hold their stability
by shifting their relationships; a form they call fire, where constancy
is achieved by enacting simultaneous presence and absence; and a
global form that incorporates all four (Law and Mol, 2001).
Spatiality can be very different in other cultures. Wassman
(1994) for example finds the Yupno people of North Queensland
have an absolute spatial framework of four cardinal points deter-
mined mainly by the winds from the North. But each individual
also owns a short tune. When crossing a particular garden or
stretch of bush, the Yupno sing the tune belonging to the owner of
that land, thus showing their local knowledge and indicating
their status as a friend. The Yupno seamlessly move between three
different spatial reference systems or forms of spatiality.
The Ongee in the Andaman Islands have a mental map of
practical space that is not derived from remembering the images of
places in space but from remembering patterns of movement
(Pandya, 1990). Such examples confirm that people do not neces-
sarily utilise either just a relative egocentric system or an absolutist
one, or a field based geographic one; and that forms of spatiality
are multiple, constructed, performative, practice based and contin-
gent, from which it should follow that their forms of spatial and
experiential reasoning are not tightly linked to forms of rationality.
Pickles insists that exploring such radical mapping practices
should have nothing to do with making things visible. Presumably
he means that part of the effect of cartographic rationality to date
220 SURVEY REVIEW

has been its affirmation of representationalism or Ôocularcentrism’

and what is needed is a renewed emphasis on performativity and
the forms of spatiality based in bodily movement and practice –
Ôexperiments with the real’ in Deleuze’s terms. It also shows in part
an over-sensitivity to Doel’s claim that maps are literally obscene –
they gain power from the Ônot-seen’, from making people and their
interactions invisible (Doel, 2006). Doel is perhaps a little too nega-
tive in that, as Stengers points out, experimental success is depen-
dent on acts of disentanglement and forgetting. However, new
practices will also require new understandings, new visibilities along
with new practices.
But at the same time, representationalism – especially in its car-
tographic form – carries with it a regime of truth, as Foucault calls
it: a correspondence theory of truth, an epistemology and ontology
that transforms process into locations. As the philosophical histori-
an Bono puts it (pp. 167–168), the scientist in his/her Whiteheadian
analysis continually transforms open, contingent, and multiple – if
not infinite – interconnected spaces into discrete and painstakingly
mapped places in which process, agencies and events are made to
re-present themselves as isolated objects arrayed and ordered
according to a now specifiable and finite set of constraints, rules or
laws (Bono, 2005). I would argue that what we need to consider is
ways in which differing epistemes or regimes of spatial rationality
can be held in tension with one another, allowing for an emergent
theory of truth – one based in becoming, as Deleuze and Massumi
would put it, not in fixity.
However none of these issues attending cartographic rationality
are mentioned by Olsson or in the essays on Foucault.
For Olsson, the key problem is the Ôgap’: the abyss between
what goes on in our heads and what goes on in the world. It is un-
likely that there will ever be a more erudite or literary set of reflec-
tive essays on maps. Olsson’s sentences coruscate with clever
synthesis and cross-references. Aperçus flash through every para-
graph. Just as an example of the power and imagination of
Olsson’s style, he calls the index of the volume (p. 547):
(In)definite Descriptions. Lines of Power thrown onto mappae of imagination,
crumbled, stained with an odour distinctly their own. Ironic meanings (in)defi-
nitely described as a power that never sits still, language itself a swarm of path-
ways without beginnings and without ends. Merely an impression that counts, yet
another frequency distribution searching for its interpretation. Multiple stories
groping the way.
 WHAT IS CARTOGRAPHIC RATIONALITY? 221
If you liked Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon and find cartographic
inspiration in it, then Olsson may be for you.
But, my reaction is one of resistance. This causes me consider-
able consternation. Am I just a pedestrian literalist or is my resis-
tance to this vast avalanche of high-level reasoning legitimate? Isn’t
it a little unreasonable to take against one of the great minds in
geography and his delivery of a masterwork summarising a life-
time’s cartographic theorising, especially when John Pickles, for
example, in what I think is a brilliant book, History of Spaces,
finds him so inspirational. Nonetheless, I think more is to be
gained by reacting against it than by going with the flow.
Unsurprisingly it is the freight carried by the subtitle, A Critique
of Cartographical Reason, that starts the problems for me. On the
one hand I’m not sure I can tell you exactly what Olsson thinks
cartographic reason is. As we have already seen, he claims that all
reason is geographic, that it is essentially spatial in that it depends
on boundaries, on drawing a line, and hence reason itself is carto-
graphic. Throughout he talks about thought-in-action and makes
reference to performance and the act of drawing, of representing.
But, from my perspective his account is linguistic and representa-
tionalist, through and through. His sense of the historical and cul-
tural dimensions of cartographic reason is unclear. On the one
hand he argues that philosophy, being about reason and its limits
is, and always was, geographic, seeming to agree with Farinelli that
reason at least since Anaximander has been cartographic reason.
On the other hand, he also alludes to cartographic reason emerging
in the seventeenth century (Farinelli, 1998).
But for Olsson the self-created nightmare is the aforementioned
Ôgap’ – the abyss of the Abysmal title and therein lies the source of
the difficulties I have with him. The reason he finds an abyss
between the categories, a Ôgap’ between how we live in the world
and how we know it, is ultimately due to his framing of culture,
knowledge, and meaning as essentially linguistic, which leads him
ineluctably to the gap of representationalism – how can there be a
correspondence between our understanding and reality? I would
prefer to take the performative position of such authors as
Pickering, Latour, Stengers, Massey, and Whatmore, who in their
attempts to explain the ways in which we create coherence in the
face of uncertainty, all variously argue there is no Ôgap’ (Massey,
2003; Latour, 1999; Stengers, 1997). As Whatmore (2003) puts it:
222 SURVEY REVIEW

The way in which all the parties assembled in the research process, researcher and
researched, bodies and texts, instruments and fields condition each other and col-
lectively constitute the knowledge Ôevent’. This coproduction, this chain of prac-
tices is one of Ômapping into knowledge’. Science in practice is a process of
stringing things together without apriori distribution.

An example of the Ôgap’ (which Olsson falls into!), is his brief

mention of Harrison and his watches and his difficult encounters
with the Board of Longitude (p. 31). He accepts unquestioningly
Sobel’s fictional Ôheroic struggle with unreasonable bureaucracy’
version of the problem, but he acknowledges that the establishment
of a precise position in space depends on the techniques for deter-
mining the exact moment of a point in time. What he omits to
mention, as does Sobel, is that the Board had a real problem. How
could anyone know Harrison’s clock was accurate in the absence of
an independently accurate clock? This is surely where the illusion
of an abyss lies. There is no Ôgap’, there is no external mediation
outside our interactions with the world. All there can be is human
artifice and social negotiation, practice and movement, as we con-
tinuously build experimental bridges. If there were real Ôgaps’, we
could not get on with life, we couldn’t move because of the abyss.
The problem with Foucault is somewhat different. Elden and
Crampton claim they are going to give us a comprehensive overview
of Foucault’s engagement with geographical concerns, and that they
are going to open up a new range of themes and questions that
come out of those engagements. But, in reality, while Foucault has
provided a framework for at least two generations of analysts con-
cerned with power and knowledge, there is little exposition of spati-
ality in his analyses of governmentality and bio-power.
Margo Huxley in her chapter ÔGeographies of Governmentality’
gives us the best exposition that can be taken from the geographic
heart of Foucault’s philosophy. She ‘‘explores ways in which space
and environment can be seen as rationalities of government’’ (p.
185) and describes it as ‘‘basically relational where power is never
located, it always circulates, it’s the effect of networks or connec-
tions of relations seeking to explain society in terms of practices
historically constituted’’. She cites (p. 199) Gillian Rose:
Analyses of governmentality are studies of Ôregimes of truth’ concerning the con-
duct of conduct, ways of speaking the truth, persons authorised to speak truths,
ways of enacting truths and the costs of so doing. Of the invention and assem-
blage of particular apparatuses and devices for exercising power and intervening
upon certain problems.
 WHAT IS CARTOGRAPHIC RATIONALITY? 223
But the problem really is that although Foucault could have
legitimately claimed to be a geographer, especially in his emphasis
on assemblage, he actually said very little that would specifically
serve to open up the relations between knowledge and space and
the nature of cartographic reason. For the moment Pickles is the
best place to start.

Australian Centre for Science, Innovation and Society

University of Melbourne

Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies

Monash University

Centre for Science Studies

Lancaster University

Arts Faculty
Deakin University

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