Enter your postal code and press 'submit', and the web server of Her Majesty's Ordnance Survey will initiate a process that queries their 'Master Map' database of every topographical feature, every administrative boundary, road, river, church, pub and telephone box in the United Kingdom. The process retrieves the relevant data in Geography Modelling Language (GML), which describes both spatial data (0, 1 and 2 dimentional geometry), and non-spatial data (name, address, date), and relating each element to its unique topographic identifier (TIODtm). This data is then interpolated with pre-defined texual and graphical elements (a red shaded circular region in the centre, and a copyright notice in the bottom left hand corner), and rendered in a graphical format. The process transmits the data to your computer over the Internet along with contexual information that when read into the video memory of your computer and displayed on your screen as a web page layout, indicates that for £14.49 plus postage and packaging, you can have this map, with your house in the centre, delivered to your door.

John Harley, the academic famous for being the first to apply post-structuralist theories of power relations to cartography, would have found this product very disturbing. Disturbing not because this is an example his favorite theme: the instrumental use of maps to reinforce authoritarian hegemony of space, but because it reveals the misconception that underlies his critique. In 'Maps, Power and Knowledge', He draws on the work of Foucault and Derrida, citing their work as his primary inspiration for this tirade against the 'exercise of power through cartographic discourse'.^[1] However, as Barbara Belyea has pointed out, Harley didn't really get the substance of the argument^[2] that: 'Il n'ya pas de texte d'en dessous' [there's nothing underneath the text];^[3] . The map in itself, doesn't actually mean anything, or have any stable and objective relation to 'reality'. The vectors of power that Harley observed in cartographic discourse are so bound up with it that they are 'an impersonal, indistinguishable, unsubtractable aspect of that discourse.'^[4]

According to Harley, the human agent occupying the centre of the map, the one who orchestrates the design of the representation is the wielder of power. By this logic, the Ordnance Survey's 'OS Select' product becomes either a means of distributing this power amongst those represented (I get a bit of representative power for my £14.49), or a more subtle means of repression through the framing of this apparent choice. Although the location of Harley's 'deconstruction' may then shift to other systems of mapmaking, or meta-mapmaking (the orchestration of data collection and the economic and technical systems that deliver this product), it never really moves beyond a critique of mapmaking as representation of the subject, and the politics of that system of representation, to how mapping, as 'a universal expression of individual existance'^[5] actively constitutes and reconstitutes a subject.

"the ... maxims of common human understanding ... are these: (I) to think for oneself; (2) to think from the standpoint of everyone else; (3) always to think consistently." ^[6]

Kant's Critique of Judgement contains some useful clues about how to articulate Harley's problem with cartography. This passage sums up some of the major collisions between his dual assault on empiricist relativism and metaphysical truth. The first invective: to think for oneself, he expands into the maxim of "unprejudiced thought", by which a subject, emancipated from superstition and metaphysical truth, rejects a "passivity, [and] consequently [a] heteronomy of reason". The second, he characterises as "enlarged thought", the duty to observe the mental habit of shifting one's position to a "universal standpoint". So the third instruction "always to think consistently" becomes a bit tricky. How does Kant's ideal judge avoid a "heteronomy of reason", thinking for oneself in an 'unprejudiced' manner, and still manage to see things from everyone else's point of view; the 'universal standpoint'?

Kant seemed to have problems with this himself, struggling to achieve this "enlarged thought", while restraining 'prejudice' in his own writing. In a footnote to the Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, he goes into a revealing rant about his noisy neightbours:

"Those who have recommended the singing of hymns at family prayers have forgotten the amount of annoyance which they give to the general public by such noisy (and, as a rule, for that very reason, pharisaical) worship, for they compel their neighbours either to join in the singing or else abandon their meditations."^[7]

While he painstakingly maintains the appearance of objectivity and scientistic remove, Kant just can't contain his frustration at his neighbours' singing, and it leaks out all over the page, inspiring a minor tirade against music in general: '[scattering] it's influence abroad to an uncalled for extent' and obtrusively 'depriving others of their freedom'.

The structure of Kant's presentation also undermines the antimetaphysical vector of his critique. His constructivist method, endlessly defining and refining the categories of thought, is premised on the removal of the subject's a-priori grounds of judgement. As subsequent critique has often revealed^[8], if Kant were to remove his own a-priori grounds, on which he builds his categories, the whole philosophical superstructure of the Critique of Judgement would come crashing down around him.

So at the end of The Critique of Teleological Judgement, Kant finds himself faced with an uncomfortable choice: either to lever his own a-priori categories of thought out from under his completed theoretical superstructure; to admit, after putting on the finishing touches, that his intricately layered categorisation of thought might well be completely unfounded, or to allow some big metaphysical authority (God) back into the picture to prop it up. He opts for the latter, which is fair enough really:

In the struggle to reconcile the dogmatic 'always to think for oneself' attitude, with the temptation, or even the necessity to generalise and hypothesise about the world, to encompass both the specific and the universal, the limitations of Kant's discourse can be seen to correlate to problems in the parallel practice of cartography in the late 18th Century.

The process often referred to as the 'Cartographic Reformation' which occurred between 1670, and 1770, (close to when Kant produced The Critique of Judgement) involved the subsumption of the various modes of mapmaking (chorography, charting and topography)^[11] into the practice of mathematical cosmography, or at least, it became impossible to make clean distinctions between these methods in printed maps after 1770.

The Enlightenment's 'éspirit géometrique' saw the unification of these disciplines as mathematical cosmography. In order to meet the bureacratic necessities of Europe's burgeoning militaristic states, mathematical cosmography developed into the 'science' of systematic cartography: mapmaking that gathers its constituent data from the detailed survey of an entire country at a consistent scale, based on a prior-established control network of triangulation.

At the core of systematic cartography, still the dominant cartographic mode, Kant's 'universal' vs. 'individual' dilemma remains unresolved. In the drive to unify the specific and the general under one mode of representation, systematic cartography pins its a-priori, the possibility of representing universal 'truth' about a finite world, (with an identifiable, usually central origin), under a tremendous weight of specialisation, detail and a-priori categorisation.

And this is where Harley ran into difficulties with cartography and post-structuralism. His half-hearted attempt to remove the a-priori from cartography by applying the rhetoric of post-structuralism was half hearted because although he was sincerely passionate about the need for an alternative epistemology of mapmaking, one with a strong socio-political dimention, he, a bit like Kant, was too enamoured of his own system of representation to complete its epistemological reversal, and wrench the a-priori out from underneath it.

"There are four things that do not work with actor-network theory; the word actor, the word network, the word theory, and the hyphen! Four nails in the coffin." - Bruno Latour, 'On Recalling ANT'.^[12]

It is no accident that graphic representations produced by Actor-Network Theory (ANT) have many of the characteristics of maps. Lines and curves connect nodal points, flattened into in two dimensions; apparently using the same basic representational tools as cartography, but not necessarily to describe a set of geographical relationships. However, as Bruno Latour points out, the representational norms of geography are the antithesis of ANT's use of diagrams. In fact, he recommends that because of the unfortunate linguistic association of spatially bound networks such as sewage or telecommunications networks, with the indeterminate non-space of flows described by the term 'actor-network', the name of the discipline should be changed to 'Actant-Ryzome Ontlology", although he admits that this 'horrible mouthful' would make it far less trendy.

The hyphen between actor and network also seems to indicate that the two words are bound together tentatively, that a slight grammatical shift could divide the phrase into the Actor, who on his own, becomes a kind of hairy homunculus negotiating the Network, which then appears as a social network, through which the Actor asserts his will. In Latour's view, this misunderstanding has drastically reduced the potential impact of ANT on social studies.

Latour goes on to say that the actor-network is an inseparable conceptual unity, premised on the realisation that the 'actor' (or, actant) is not necessarily human. After dispensing with the anthropomorphic and spatial associations, the actant can be an object, an idea or an association of actor-networks. Although ANT can say nothing about the actants themselves, the relationships, transformations and affects of the actor-network can be observed, and (most importantly) can only be observed from within the actor-network. 'Literally, a network has no outside'.^[13] The activity of observing, creates a new actant: the observer whose act of observation connects and weaves new nodes into the actor-network. In that the actor-network can then seen as contingent and non-originary, reversing, or dispensing with attempts to define causes and effects, it begins to look very much like a more rigorously self-critical attempt at a 'universal standpoint'.^[14]

This over-simplification sounds reassuringly abstract and inapplicable, but it is worth noting that ANT is the legacy of the collision between 'scientific' empirical rationalism and post-structuralist theory, and has been usefully applicable when employed in the observation of physical, chemical and social processes.

The final problem Latour raises with the 'ANT', is that the word 'theory' is indicative of a totalising world view, which ANT does not attempt to supply. What it does address, which is better described by the word 'ontology', is the same problem raised by Kant's Critique of Judgement and systematic cartography : how to construct a form of judgement, with which a subjective, sovreign obervation of the world, and multiple, universal observations can be reconciled, without recourse to metaphysical truth. Attempting to distance ANT from radical relativism, Latour suggests a 'de-ontological' morality for ANT: "Either [ANT] multiplies the mediating point between any two elements -and it is good- or it deletes and conflates mediators -and it is bad. Either it is reductionist -and that's bad news- or irreductionist -and that's the highest ethical standard for ANT." ^[15] Obviously, ANT is ambitious, but only in that it seeks to establish a grounding principle, on which a world view, or, to be more consistent with ANT's reasoning, on which multitudes of world views can then be constructed, and reconstructed. Latour argues that ANT dispenses with the possibility of a totalising theory, and of totality in general.

"In itself ANT is not a theory of action no more than cartography is a theory on the shape of coast lines and deep sea ridges; it just qualifies what the observer should suppose in order for the coast lines to be recorded in their fine fractal patterns. Any shape is possible provided it is obsessively coded as longitude and latitude. Similarly any association is possible provided it is obsessively coded as heterogeneous associations through translations". ^[17]

Cartography not only shares ANT's map-like representational motifs, they are also both 'applied' practices, which sets them apart from the more commonplace application of post-structuralism in the humanities. By limiting their field of study to "popular cultures, fashions, religions, [and] political discourse",^[16] Latour argues that post-structuralist intellectuals were hipocritcally cliniging on to 'safe' ground, where their assumptions about 'hard science' and 'hard fact' could be disassociated from their self contained post-structural world of of humanities.

Latour is not claiming that cartography shares ANT's ontological uncertainty, or that latitude and longitude themselves are unproblematic scientific givens. In fact, he uses cartography as a foil for ANT precisely because it is so entrechedly scientistic, while being both constructivist and (at its base assumption of its own representational validity) metaphysical. The relationship he makes not only differentiates ANT from the laziness (on the one hand) and radical relativism (on the other) of post-structuralist humanities, it also shows that the tools it shares with cartography: mapmapking, diagramming, constructivism (not to mention Harley's legacy of a strong socio-policital element) are still useful. Whereas the worst extremes of cultural relativism use post-structuralist critique as doctrine, arriving at the paralysing conclusion that 'all is difference', ANT's application to scientific texts and practices indicate that rationalism and empiricism are still usefull as tools, and should not be disgarded because of their dubious epistemology.

Latour's example unintentionally chalks an outline around the missing half of Harleys critique: that cartography is potentially an ontological investigation. If it removes its a-priori assumptions, it becomes a kind of spatial ontology, one that is well equipped with both the tools and methods of constructivist research, and the de-ontological moral standard of 'irreducibility'.

Michelle Serres, a proponent and founding influence on ANT would probably avoid making Latour's qualitative distinction between scientific and humanities approachces to post-scrutctural critique. His multi-discriplinary method weaves the two together inextricably. He uses the disjunctures between the two epistemologies, and the translations between them as a fertile and productive area to build his arguments.

"[t]he junction between two sciences or two concepts... these spaces between are more complicated than one thinks. This is why I have compared them to the Northwest Passage ... with shores, islands and fractal ice floes. Between the hard sciences and the so-called human sciences the passage resembles a jagged shore, sprinkled with ice, and variable ... Less a juncture under control than an adventure to be had".^[18]

Serres referrs to this path, or series of paths between the 'archives' of science and humanities as the 'northwest passage', where translations are refracted, reconnected, divergent. In his commentary, Steven Brown spatialises Serres' metaphor of the passage more specifically, placing the 'Northwest Passage' in 'the twisting and convoluted coastlines that separate the great Atlantic and Pacific Oceans'.^[19]

However, Serres' metaphor becomes more intriguing when his 'Northwest Passage' is related to the putative 'Northwest Passage' from the account of the French colonial explorer Admiral deFonte, that the early 18th Century 'theoretical geographers'; Guillaume and Joseph-Nicolas Delisle and Phillipe Buache hypothesized into their maps of the interior of North America. In order to explain the incomplete, sometimes conflicting data of topological survey, navigational charts, a composite of Cree maps and irregular reports from explorers, they deducted a series of rivers and an inland sea; the 'Mer de L'Ouest', and plotted deFonte's 'Northwest Passage' through this imagined topography.

Buache's maps were published by the Académie Royale des Sciences in the 1750's, just at the cusp of the turn to empiricist ubiquity of the 'cartographic reformation', although at the time his methods were already coming into conflict with another 'discontinuous archive of knowledge', this one closer to home; the systematic cartography of Admirals Cook and Vancouver. Following the trend of the 'cartographic reformation', these hardcore empiricist explorers left blank spaces in the map of America where evidence had not been collected first hand by reliable, homogeneous sources.

"Historians of cartography might do well to emulate Buache's recognition and acceptance of archival discontinuity rather than simply condemning his maps as 'bizarre,', 'fantastic and inaccurate.' ^[20]

In her critique of Harley, Barbara Belyea points to a possible revision of cartographic epistemology, which could take its lead from Buache's pre-analytical cartography. Buache's Northwest Passage, built on the discontinuities between its constituent archives, offers a more compelling source for Serre's use of the same term to illustrate his methodology.

So how does Serre's archival discontinuity position the process of mapmaking, and provide a model for thinking about the map as an object, the product of this inscriptive process? He describes these objects, that solidify and define the human relations that weave their subjectivity through them as 'quasi-objects'.

'This quasi-object that is a marker of the subject is an astonishing constructor of intersubjectivity. We know, through it, how and when we are subjects and when and how we are no longer subjects. 'We'; what does that mean? We are precisely the fluctuating moving back and forth of the 'I', The 'I' in the game is a token exchanged and this passing, this network of passes, these vicariances of subjects weave the collection.' ^[21]

Serres focuses on the rugby ball as an extreme form of one of the 'quasi-object', or 'operator'; as it is passed from player to player, the ball takes on the indeterminate function of a 'joker', or a 'blank domino', that can change the course of play, and the roles of the players. As the ball is passed between the subjects, and between the teams, these actants (to use Latour's non-anthropomorphic terminology) take turns at being the 'I'. He observes the same mechanism in the children's game of 'tag' where each player takes a turn at being 'it'. In this shifting, convoluted dynamic, Serres describes the subjectivity of each actant being woven by the passage of the 'operator'. His focus, then, is turned to the affects that the operator enacts rather than the qualities of the operator itself, which he argues, cannot be apprehended as its status shifts and transforms its inter-actants. This method attempts to deal with the crisis of representation invited by the common philosophical after-dinner teaser: "describe a chair".

As an extension to this study, Serres turns to less extreme 'quasi-objects', objects that are not as indeterminate as operators, but which humanity creates to solidify social relations (such as chairs). Steve Brown uses the example of how the sword formalises combat, or the plate stabilises eating arrangements:

'Objects make stable human relations possible, but it is the putting of objects into circulation as quasi-objects which realises the human collective as such... The quasi-object does not so much reverse play as formalise it, often giving rise to concrete, highly deterministic social practices.' ^[22]

This is how Serres would view the map, as a formalisation of human relations, a representation with which each actant becomes a subject. This is the use of the map as a communicative tool; as successive actants engage with the map, each locates their subjectivity in its representational schema, the 'I' is shifted from person to person, between person and multitude, or from multitude to multitude. 'Analytical cartography', and the power relations Harley identifies in it, are an example of the 'deterministic practices' this use of the map may give rise to.

'[M]apmaking [is] not a universal expression of individual existance (like something we might call mapping), but an unusual function of specifiable social circumstances.'^[23]

Denis Wood draws on cognitive science to arrive at the same estimation of mapmaking as a formalisation of the social contract. He pushes through mapmaking to find the less determinite 'operator' that its subject-weaving function is based on. He describes this universal human process as 'mapping': not the inscription of experience, or the representation of a 'mental map' (which is mapmaking), but as the process of translation between information gleaned from the visual cortex, and motor experience of a space or activity which is common to all human activity ('just...getting around').^[24] Wood uses the term 'map immersed' to distinguish between mapmaking societies which are complex and variagated enough to require a system of hierarchisation and representation to continue growth, and non-map immersed societies, which have never needed to transcribe their mapping processes into maps.^[25] Whether this mapping process gets represented as mapmaking, and what form that mapmaking takes is dependent on the necessity of using the map as a communication device, and the social and cultural circumstances in which it emerges. So when looking at a map and attempting to describe it, Wood concentrates on describing its 'discourse function':

"[N]ot what does the map show or how does it show it, but ''what does the map do? what does the map accomplish?".^[26]

In the case of the Ordnance Survey's OSSelect system, Serres provides a useful way of answering this question. In his Hermes series, Serres defines a range of epistemologies and their respective objects and quasi-objects and assigns a mythic god to each one [see figure 1].

Fig. 1: Serres' genealogy of social universals.^[27]

The dominance and affects of these universals and their quasi-objects are defined by their ability to hold the collective together, to enact the subjective weaving process. Although Serres sees these these social universals are coexistant in a culture, he identifies 'Communication' as the ascendant universal, mediating and translating the affects of the other three with increasing insistance, and commerce, as the previous dominant universal, gradually losing its constitutive force.

In Serres' ascendant universal, that of communication, the world is marked with the sign of Hermes, and subjectivity is bound together by information, 'we become subjects by taking up a place within the global information networks'.^[29] So this is where the discourse function of the OSSelect map becomes clear. By punching in a post code, determining the selection of information that is pulled from the database,^[30] and locating ourselves in the centre of that informatic visualisation, our subjectivity 'takes up a place'. However, as a quasi-object, the OSSelect map is exemplary of a 'highly deterministic social practice', and the place taken up by subjectivities woven through it are fixed in a matrix of authoritarian social relations.

So this really gets us nowhere. Harly's semi-critique identified the socio-political dimention of mapmaking, but was unable to do anything about it because he had missed the central point of the post-structuralist critique he purported to emulate. After a whirlwind tour of the ontological missing link of Harley's post-structuralist cartography, we seem to have ended up in the same place, or if anything, an even grimmer place where not only social relations (which, the utopians predict, after a revolution or two, might one day change for the better), but subjectivity, being itself is bound into an authoritarian, informatic representation of the world.

To try and claw back some cheerfulness from this abject vision, here is an example of the kind of cartography that this more thorough critique facilitates. [See 'European Norms of World Production', Bureau D'etudes 2002]

Three maps: 'inklings of autonomy', 'organised civil society' and 'Normopathic Complex (Europe)' occupy both sides of the A2 print, handed out at the European Social Forum in Florence, November 2002. In an overwhelmingly intricate graphic grid, covered in symbols, and interlocking layers of densely packed text is the (relatively) simple logo of the cartographer: "UT: université tangente". This umbrella group of artists, activists and theorists have developed a cartographic practice that is as firmly stuck into the representation of social relations as the Ordnance Survey's. However, whereas the ideological and technical operations of the OS are invisible, sublimated in the transient experience of information as commodity (only £14.49), the Université Tangenté attempts to do the opposite. Having removed the geographical reference points of longitude and lattitude, this map weaves subjectivity from what is left of the Ordnance Survey's fabric: the informatic matrix of social relations that define 'you: the perfect European worker-consumer.'

If at first the pictograms and their various linear connections seem esoteric, or convoluted, a quick glance at the key reveals a fascinatingly nuanced symbolic structure that defines and then builds on its terminology very intuitively. A traffic light pictogram is deployed to indicate an 'ideological' element to a symbol. So the 'think tank' pictogram: a black sihouette of a head, outlining a faintly ridiculous white brain motif in its centre, has an ear sized traffic light smashed flat against its eyes, squishing its nose into its face. The dogmatic rigour of the map is consistently humerous and incisive in its representation.

The centrepiece of 'Normopathic Comlex (Europe)', the European Comission^[31] (a benign round-table motif surrounded with little heads and shoulders of delegates) is positioned according to the multivalence and density of its connections, but after following the lines to their connecting points, the irony of this pitographic becomes clear. Three arterial branches mainline the EC into the American Chamber of Commerce, the European Round Table of Industrialists and the Court of Justice of the European Communities (a real festival of traffic-related symbols here: a hexagonal black stop sign, run through with a white traffic light of ideology), while a smaller, but still vigorous vein feeds the P.R. agency Burston Marseller, whose other clients (among many ,and worse, Ceaucescu, Union Carbide and Exxon during their respective periods of infamy) float around its sheild/megaphone pictogram in a little cloud of disgrace. The sarcastic sneer with which to pronounce the title of the second map: 'organised civil society' becomes clear when from the same central starting point (the EC) a few hops via CONECCS (the European civil society "internal market") and the WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature) we arrive at the twin black shields of Disney and Shell, who, by observing its reciprocal connections to the WWF, we discover donated lots of money to the WWF, and was awarded the 'WWF prize for ecological business' in 1998.

Aside from the stark realism of 'Normopathic Comlex (Europe)' and 'organised civil society', the third map, 'inklings of autonomy' describes the meetings, rallys and publication networks of activist and anti-capitalist movements in Europe and throughout the world: 'anti prison', 'general strike', 'anonymity', 'anti-GMOs'. The circular, thought-bubble patterns that connect these inklings are inconsistent and provisional, leaving the more obscure initiatives like the 'Galactic Federeation of Worlds (GF)' floating off to the side of the map next to 'solidarity with extra-terrestrials', the GF are, however, still represented. In the attempt at insistent inclusion and multivalent connection, there is something of the 'irreducibility' called for by Latour's moral standard.

As Brian Holmes, one of the collaborators on 'European Norms' points out, 'Much remains to be done', ^[33] their practice is far from fully developed, but to salvage a faint hope for critical cartography, the Université Tangente's maps certainly provides vivid, exciting quasi-objects with which to weave our singular and multiple subjectivities.

Footnotes

[1] J.B. Harley, 'Deconstructing the Map', Cartographica, 26.2 (1989), p. 12.
[2] Although Foucault and Derrida have very different approaches, they are used together here in reference to Harley's dubious understanding of post-structuralism.
[3] Michel Foucault, L'Archéologie du savoir, (Paris, Gallimard, 1969), p. 157. Quoted in Barbara Belyea, 'Images of Power: Derrida/Foucault/Harley', Cartographica, 29.2 (1992), p. 2. Foucault's refusal to 'interpret' a text in L'Archéologie du savoir thoroughly undermines Harley's exegisis of maps as texts. Beyala shows how his invective to 'read between the lines of the map' reveals a conservative, empiricist basis to his belief in maps as representations of reality.
[4] Belyea, 'Images of Power: Derrida/Foucault/Harley', p. 3.
[5] Dennis Wood, 'The Fine Line Between Mapping and Mapmaking', Cartographica, 30.4 (1993), p. 50.
[6] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith, (New York: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 152.
[7] Ibid, p.196.
[8] Noteably, that of Emile Benveniste, whose 'Categories of Thought and Language' (in Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, (Florida: University of Miami Press, 1971) pp. 55-64.) critiqued the whole notion of taxonomical, empirical philosophy that he saw as the legacy of Aristotle's Categories. Although Derrida has subsequently accused Benveniste himself of exhibiting the same lack of reflexivity in his own writing that was the subject of his critique, Benveniste's text problematises Kant's taxonomy very effectively.
[9] Kant, Critique of Judgement, p.162.
[10] Ong, W. J, 'Commonplace, Rhapsody: Ravisius Textor, Zwinger and Shakespeare', in Classical Influences on European Culture 1500-1700, Ed. J.J.Bolgar. (London: Cambridge University Press, 1976). p. 107.
[11] Chorography was the professionalised, intellectual endeavor of early macrocosmic cartography. The 'science of princes' that still defines how we percieve to overall structure of the world and its continents. Based on generalisation, but using representation of roads, rivers, lines and regions, Chorography was the province of the state, the scholar and commercial cartographer. Early modern charting was the accumulation and representation of data gleaned from navigational portolani, diagrams of coastlines and trading routes predominantly used by the bureaucratic institutions of merchant and military navies. Only after 1569 did charting adopt Mercator's projection, and begin to privilege latitude and longitude as a technique for chorographic situation. Topography was the specific, detailed inscription of a survey, usually conducted by estate managers or engineers. It recorded boundaries of ownership, including representations of the activities and built environments of human inhabitants, and (in the interests of facilitating fiscal and political control) generalising as little as possible. The emergence of Topography was dependent on the commercial land markets of Renaissance Europe and the agricultural improvements that brought an end to subsistance farming. For a comprehensive summary of this process, see Matthew H. Edney, "Cartography without 'progress': Reinterpreting the nature and historical development of mapmaing", Cartographica 30.2&3, (1993), pp. 54-67.
[12] Bruno Latour, 'On Recalling ANT', in Actor Network Theory and After, John Law and John Hassard., (Eds.), (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers / The Sociological Review, 1999), pp. 15-25.
[13] Bruno Latour, 'On actor-network theory, A few clarifications', Nettime, (11 Jan 1998), http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9801/msg00019.html. Latour compares this non-spatial and non-temporal model to "Deleuze's lightning rod that creates by the same stroke the backgreound and the foreground" (Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répétition, PUF, Paris, (1968)) missing the fact that Deleuze lifted that figure directly from Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, which is really a more interesting example to use. More interesting because Nietzsche goes on from a criticism of the separation of an observed phenomenon from what it does (the lightning from its flash), to specifically critique notions of scientific causality. "?The natural scientists do no better when they say 'Force moves, force causes'". By Nietzsche's account these self-consciously 'objective' methods are always 'subject to the seduction of language'. By accepting Deleuze's dimmed 'lightning rod', Latour then misses the valuable connection that Nietzsche makes between this concept of semiotic separation of the thing from its cause and the moral implications of this error: 'Just as the common people distinguish lightning from the flash of light and takes the latter as doing, as the effect of a subject which is called lightning, just so popular morality distinguishes strength from expressions of strength, as if behind the strong individual there weree an indifferent substratum which was at liberty to express or not to express strength'. (Friedrich Nietzsche, "'Good and Evil', 'Good and Bad'", On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Douglas Smith, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 29.) Latour's 'moral standard' for ANT, (see note [20] below), is weakened by the omission of this connection.
[14] It may be useful to relate this model to Foucault's concept of the 'archive' he develops in 'L'Archéologie du savoir'. The 'archive' is an assemblage of symbolic units or 'énoncés', grouped according to their discourse functions within specific contexts. These non-determined structures of knowledge relate to ANT's method of analysis in the way Foucault uses them, analysing epistemologically distinct systems and their rules in relation to each other, tracing connections, vectors and flows between semantically discontinous 'archives'.
[15] Bruno Latour, 'On actor-network theory, A few clarifications', Nettime, (1998). This 'moral standard' is highly abstracted, and his notion of 'irreductionist' tendencies being constitutive of a high moral standard does show a weakness in Latour's later argument that ANT's application of post-structuralist theory in the realm of 'hard science' is more rigorous than its common application in the humanities, where, it could be argued, the problem of moral constitution is often more apparent (for example, in the constitution of human rights, which Latour's notion of 'irreducibility' only addresses tangentially).
[16] "The slogans of the the 60s and 70s 'everything is a text', 'there is only discourse', 'narratives exist by themselves', 'we have no access to anything but accounts' ... A major transformation of these slogans occured when semiotics was turned by ANT to scientific and technical discourses -and especially to scientific texts. As long as one studied fictions, myths, popular cultures, fashions, religions, political discourse, one could hold to the 'semiotic turn' and take them as so many 'texts'. Scholars did not seriously believe in them anyway and thus the intellectual distance and scepticism was easy to achieve while the double treasury of 'scientism' and 'socialism' was kept intact in their heart." Bruno Latour, 'On Recalling ANT', p. 19.
[17] Bruno Latour, 'On actor-network theory, A few clarifications', Nettime, (1998).
[18] Michel Serres with Bruno Latour, ''Conversations on Science, Culture and Time, trans. R. Lapidus, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), p. 70.
[19] Steven Brown, 'Michel Serres: Myth, Mediation and the Logic of the Parasite' (Loughborough University unpublished draft, 2000), see: http://devpsy.lboro.ac.uk/psygroup/sb/Serres.htm (04/02/2003).
[20] Belyea, 'Images of Power', p. 7.
[21] Michel Serres, The Parasite, (Baltimore: John Hopkins, 1981), p. 227. Quoted in Brown, 'Michel Serres: Myth, Mediation and the Logic of the Parasite'.
[22] Brown, 'Michel Serres: Myth, Mediation and the Logic of the Parasite'.
[23] Denis Wood, 'The Fine Line Between Mapping and Mapmaking', Cartographica, 30.4, (1993). p50.
[24] Ibid, p. 53.
[25] Echoing Serres' interdisciplinary method, Wood uses theories of growth dynamics from biological science to reinforce this assertion. Seeing maps and mapmaking as an indication of complexity and as a result of the requirement for growth on a social level, Woods' argument referrs back to Serres' concept of a subjective and social bond being 'woven' by a 'quasi-object'; in this case, a map. In The Book of Foundations, Serres describes the mythological foundations of Rome as a series of translations, narrative disjunctures centered around the 'scapegoat' - a 'quasi-object' that transforms the subjective and social relations of the multitude. In Serres' account, Romulus' body becomes a quasi-object when the Elders dismember and distribute it, which, in the act of murder and subsequent worship of Romulus as founder of Rome, stabilises the social bond of the multitude.
[26] Denis Wood, 'The Fine Line', p. 56.
[27] Brown, 'Michel Serres: Myth, Mediation and the Logic of the Parasite'.
[28] See Manuel Castells, 'The Rise of the Network Society', (Malden Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1996).
[29] Brown, 'Michel Serres: Myth, Mediation and the Logic of the Parasite'.
[30] It should be noted here that some cartographers have argued that databases of geographical information are maps themselves, see David Woodward, 'Representations of the World'. In Geography's Inner Worlds: Pervasive Themes in Contemporary American Geography, eds. Ronald F. Abler, Melvin G. Marcus, and Judy M. Olson, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), pp. 50-73.
[31] Hereafter referred to as EC in this text.
[32] Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991). p. 54.
[33] Brian Holmes, 'Maps for the Outside: Bureau d'Etudes, or the revenge of the concept' , Nettime, (04/12/2002), see: 'http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0212/msg00013.html (04/02/2003).



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