Failing Orbit 6 – Blind Cartography 1

RAF No. 1, 2012





















The cartographer has the unenviable job of acting as both explorer and guide simultaneously.* They chart the strange and unfamiliar, recording it as definitive, for the reference of those who follow after. As the explorer beats back the thicket, they must present whatever is revealed as if they knew all along what was hidden there. Such is the rhetoric of mapping; objective and scientific, the cartographer thinly conceals the gap between information and (lack of) meaning. The map presents new knowledge in a legible and reassuring way. One maps the unknown, and the map’s function is to relieve the anxiety of not knowing. This becomes shockingly evident, for instance, when the calm and authoritative voice of the sat-nav leads one off-course; one cannot help but become frustrated by the impossibility of reasoning with such automated devises.

Exploration as practice (e.g. unconscious ramblings, scribbled notes, drafts, walks with a camera, etc), embraces the potential of failure to reveal something ‘more’ than careful planning could ever achieve. On turning left instead of right, one might discover (or miss) something new and previously unknown. Such rich possibilities are, of course, always accompanied by a palpable sense of anxiety.

Nevertheless, the documents created from such exploration, eventually become messages to others, delivered in clear tones, and intended to influence, convince and to beguile the Other. One achieves this, as all map-makers do, by removing oneself from the field, suppressing the very view-point that brought the world into being – a kind of miraculous conception, that omits all of the messy back-story. One adopts a fraudulent position of neutrality and authority. Thus, all human subjects are cartographers in a way; each day one present oneself as a coherent being, with social roles and responsibilities, only vaguely masking the anxiety that one is, in fact, a complete fraud, blindly feeling one’s way through the world.


* For an illuminating account on writing and mapping, read: Turchi, Peter. Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer (Texas: Trinity University Press, 2004). pp. 11-25.