“Snapshots of a Moving Target”: Harley/Foucault/Colonialism

Anniversaries are occasions for personal recollection and wider reflection. In this short essay I shall proceed from the former to the latter and do so with Brian Harley’s recourse late in his career to the work of Michel Foucault and interest in colonial encounters. I seek to make two points: first, that Harley’s readers (including myself) found his use of Foucault and a wider body of social theory both exhilarating and baffling. Harley assembled an impressive toolkit with which to prise open what he termed “the power of maps.” But I and others were not sure how all of his tools worked. I aired this difficulty with Harley during a fleeting (although for me formative) encounter I had with him, on which, the vagaries of memory notwithstanding, I report below. Second, upon reflection, I suggest that if we want, today, to get a measure of the critical stimulation Harley provided, then his last essays need to be placed in a wider late-1980s theoretical context – one that probed the visual and spatial character of modernity.

The only time I met Harley was in a hotel bar at the Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting in Toronto in April 1990, the year before he died. I was at the start of my doctoral research at the University of British Columbia on Native–European contact in the Pacific Northwest, and Harley was in the thick of a tremendously innovative period in his career. He had apparently asked to meet me, having been told by one of his Old World historical geography acquaintances, Derek Gregory (who had recently moved to Vancouver), that I was an expert on Foucault. I wasn’t – by any stretch of the imagination – and it was I, of course, who was learning loads from Harley, inordinately more than he could ever possibly glean from me. Over the previous few years he had published a string of what became iconic essays in the promulgation of a critical history of cartography – “Maps, Knowledge, and Power” (Harley 1988a), “Silences and Secrecy” (Harley 1988b), “Historical Geography and the Cartographic Illusion” (Harley 1989b), and “Deconstructing the Map” (Harley 1989a) – and his untimely passing in 1991 cut short a spurt of conceptual exploration that transformed understanding of the nature of maps and was integral to a wider “cultural turn” then going on in human geography (Barnes and Duncan 1992). Harley was arguably the most gifted, and certainly the most adventurous and productive, of a growing number of historians and geographers concerned with maps who disputed the empiricism – “science” – and assumptions about progress that had long imbued their area of study, and proposed that social theory provided an analytically richer and ethically sounder platform on which to base a history of cartography and theory of map production. Harley proceeded from the premise “that cartography is seldom what cartographers say it is [. . .] an unquestionably ‘scientific’ or ‘objective’ form of knowledge creation,” and these four essays brought an eclectic body of social, literary, and artistic theory, including the work of Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Erwin Panofsky, to the study of maps and fashioned what he hoped would be “an epistemological shift in the way we interpret the nature of cartography” (Harley 1989a, 1).

I recall from that Toronto day a deeply inquisitive (and in some ways starry-eyed) yet humble and studious figure, hunched over his drink, who talked with excitement and ease about social theory but also seemed pessimistic about the prospect of new forms of automated cartography and geographical information systems yielding anything other than an ethically and hermeneutically impoverished cartography that played into the hands of the state and the growing tentacles of modern surveillance. Matthew Edney’s (2005, 89) description of Harley’s academic persona during the 1980s captures what I thought I got on that April afternoon: “something of a snapshot of a moving target,” a man in metamorphosis. During the hour or so we spent together, Harley did not stay on any one subject for long – except, that is, on Foucault. He asked a lot of questions about Foucault and, once he discovered what my PhD was about, about...