Cartography and Its Discontents

“Deconstructing the Map” is the most famous of the several essays that Brian Harley wrote between 1986 and his death in 1991 (most collected in Harley 2001). Those essays crystallized the growing dissatisfaction, evinced by scholars in many disciplines, with the common understanding of the nature and history of modern cartography. They have prompted scholars to look at cartography in new ways and so to ask new kinds of questions about maps; turning scholarly attention to new dimensions of modern cartography, they have also promoted a positive interest in pre-modern and non-Western mapping traditions. “Deconstructing” and the other essays have had immense influence, not only in the English-speaking world, but also in Europe and South America, and have attracted many newcomers to map studies. They stand as the culmination of a remarkable intellectual journey that took Harley from the atheoretical pursuit of historical geography, in which he mined old large-scale maps for their information about pre-industrial landscapes, to proclamations of the fundamentally political function of cartography through the application of postmodernist concepts (Edney 2005).

Yet “Deconstructing” also reveals the adverse effects of being liberated from empiricist strictures. Once he had accepted that he was allowed to theorize, Harley was like a kid in a candy store. Hopped up on the intellectual equivalent of refined sugar, he careened across a varied mix of concepts, some mutually contradictory, without fully developing any of them. A few commentators, starting with some of the original responses (in Dahl 1989), have criticized his incomplete appreciation, and application to cartography, of postmodernist approaches (esp. Belyea 1992; see Edney 2005, 2–3, 87–88; Wood 1993). The map historians to whom “Deconstructing” was primarily addressed rarely cite it, although they do continue to use other essays in which Harley drew extensively on Michel Foucault (notably Harley 1988).

“Deconstructing” originally received widespread attention because it is a highly effective polemic. It provides a provocative manifesto for reforming the inherent failures of cartographic scholarship.

It succeeds not because of the (in)coherence of its argument but because of its vibrancy. It presents a dramatic confrontation between us (good) and them (bad): we are historians of cartography, they are cartographers, and they have misled us. For example:

• • “For historians of cartography, I believe a major roadblock to understanding is that we still accept uncritically the broad consensus [. . .] of what cartographers tell us maps are supposed to be.” (Harley 1989a, 1; original emphasis)

• • “As they embrace computer-assisted methods and Geographical Information Systems, the scientistic rhetoric of map makers is becoming more strident.” (Harley 1989a, 2)

• • “The question becomes how do we as historians of cartography escape from the normative models of cartography?” (Harley 1989a, 2)

Setting the history of cartography on a correct footing, Harley argued, required a sustained critique of cartography’s claim to be a science grounded in measurement and geometry. Conversely, the adoption of an historical ethos would give cartographers a more realistic understanding of map-making than that offered by their claims to unalloyed rationality and objectivity. The essay’s rhetorical power derives from its rapid oscillation between these two arguments. Harley drove forward constantly along one line or the other. The differences between them inevitably blur to create, I think unintentionally, a potent vision of a single, unified, and universal practice of mapping that manifested early modern Europe’s new rationality and scientific spirit. Readers are simply swept along for the ride.

Despite the negative criticism, “Deconstructing” shows no sign of being abandoned by map scholars. Figure 1 displays the annual count of works citing both the original essay and its first republication (Harley 1992), as identified by the online database Web of Science. Academic databases are not, of course, comprehensive, and they are notoriously poor in indexing cartographic journals, so that the total of 375 citations is guaranteed to be low. (In March 2014 Google Scholar counted no fewer than 1152 citing works.) Even so, the chronological pattern of these citations is suggestive. Rather than tapering off, the still upwardly trending histogram suggests that the essay’s relevance has yet to peak.