Still Deconstructing the Map: Microfinance Mapping and the Visual Politics of Intimate Abstraction

J.B. Harley’s (1989) “Deconstructing the Map” opens with a map that speaks to us, using the language of modernist cartography to transform sea, sand, and rock into calibrated measurements recorded on a page, a “cold thing” calling out for our belief in its visual truths. From there he builds a now-familiar path for critical cartographers: a call to engage cartography not as technical practices for moving seamlessly from reality to representation but rather as situated expressions of power/knowledge produced at the intersection of the socio-political and technical (Foucault 1982). He urged us to engage cartography as a discourse whose rules for representing knowledge create openings and closures in what can be known and acted on (Foucault 1978), and to read maps as texts whose signs and symbols constitute culturally situated meanings (Derrida 1976). From these foundations, Harley traced the tight linkage of post-Enlightenment Western cartography to the epistemological hierarchies of science (objectivity, expertise, quantification, measurement, classification, and precision) and to political projects of hegemony, from colonization to the Cold War and beyond (see also Wood and Fels 1986; Haraway 1988; Sheppard 1993).

Harley’s theoretical frame has long been a productive two-step for critical cartographers. We tack between discursive and visual textual analysis of cartographic objects and their epistemological openings and closures, and analysis of their historical, geographical, and institutional situatedness. This approach has illuminated a wide array of additional cartographic epistemologies and visual politics, including artistic, humorous, and counter-cartographies (Kingsbury and Jones 2009; Dalton and Mason-Deese 2012). It has been usefully combined with other theorizations to consider the politics of performative or post-representational cartographies (Lin 2013; Caquard 2014). Elements of Harley’s framing also undergird closely related critical studies of GIS (Schuurman 2000), the geoweb (Leszczynski 2014; Perkins 2014), and “big data” (Kitchin 2013; Barnes and Wilson 2014).

For me, the enduring significance of “Deconstructing the Map” is that its central propositions still form a theoretical base from which to discern the visual and knowledge politics of maps and mapping. The interactive digital map of today is a very different object/praxis than the “cold thing” Harley examined. It is a live thing held in a palm, explored and modified in virtual space, sometimes moving and changing before us. Wilson’s (2014, 8) recent call to critical scholars bespeaks the persistence of our Harleyian roots, as he asks us to re-engage this map, and to examine digital mapping, “as an aporia, a difficulty, a perplexity” that actively assembles particular visions and makes others un-seeable. I take up this call here, as a way of both considering the visual politics of interactive digital maps and demonstrating Harley’s framework as a still-productive foundation from which to do so.

As I began new research on poverty and class recently, I thought I was leaving the map behind. Yet maps and mapping interfaces are seemingly everywhere in contemporary anti-poverty and development practices, from the World Bank’s e-Atlas of Global Development¹ to the reports in which local non-governmental organizations prove their “accountability” to funders. Maps mediate countless cell phone apps aimed at providing financial and information services in the Global South, and also microfinance Web sites through which privileged people (usually in the Global North) respond to the loan requests of impoverished individuals. Microfinance is part of what Roy (2010) calls millennial development – a new orthodoxy of poverty alleviation that is fraught with contradictions. Microfinance is seemingly intimate, as microlenders broker supposedly person-to-person connections in the form of small loans. It is simultaneously a globalized big business, in which investors seek to capitalize on impoverished borrowers as a new “asset class” (Roy 2010). Marketed through discourses of self-help, empowerment, and accountability, microlending programs closely monitor the behaviours and material resources of recipients. Increasingly, these practices involve digital technologies. Mobile devices track borrowers’ financial and other activities. Borrowers’ personal stories, needs, and activities are disseminated online. Individual donors can broadcast their loans via social media or monitor the loans made by others, and large investors can track...