Looking “Beyond” Power?: J.B. Harley’s Legacy and the Powers of Cartographic World-Making

One repays a teacher badly if one remains only a pupil.

—Zarathustra in Nietzsche ([1883] 1961, 103)

As the contributions to this special issue attest, J.B. Harley’s theoretical ruminations in “Deconstructing the Map” (1989) and related works have cast a long shadow over subsequent studies of the social and political life of maps and mapping. For some scholars, the invocation of Harley’s “ghost” has provided inspiration to “rage against the new machine” of cartographic power in the present (Dodge and Perkins, this issue), whereas others have highlighted the need to follow Harley’s lead in cultivating a critical ethos to examine the history of cartographic practices (Edney, this issue). In many respects, Harley’s works seem as relevant as ever in the age of interactive digital mapping (Elwood, this issue; Lin, this issue). Yet, at the same time, it’s clear that many of the rhetorical acrobatics that Harley performed in “Deconstructing the Map” have long passed their expiry date – and that their “time is over, has been over, for some time” (Wood, this issue). If Harley’s later writings have become an “obligatory passage point” (Callon 1986, 196) for critical map studies over the past two and a half decades, it is all the more important that we repay this debt not by remaining Harley’s loyal disciples but rather by challenging the limits his thought has placed on contemporary theorizations of mapping, knowledge, and power (Harris, this issue; Rose-Redwood, this issue).

The articles in this collection have traced some of the limits to “Deconstructing the Map” and its continuing relevance to critical cartography. Instead of concluding this special issue with yet another programmatic manifesto for a post-Harleyian critical cartography,¹ I would like to close with a more intimate reflection of my own initial encounter with Harley’s “Deconstructing the Map” as a prelude to critically engaging with the other articles in this edited collection.

The first time I encountered J.B. Harley’s “Deconstructing the Map” was as required reading in the core geography seminar that all incoming graduate students took at Penn State University in fall 2000. Harley had died nearly a decade earlier, and “Deconstructing the Map” was included on the syllabus for GEOG 500 as one of the classics of geographical thought that constituted the heritage of the discipline. I don’t recall the seminar discussions we had of Harley’s work, but the essay itself must have left an impression on me, because I purchased a copy of Harley’s The New Nature of Maps (Harley 2001) shortly after it came out in paperback in 2002 and had also begun to explore other works on the history of cartography (e.g., Edney 1997; Linklater 2002; Pickles 2004).

When I took a seminar on science studies with historian of science Robert Proctor during the first year of my doctoral program, I decided to write a seminar paper on what I called the “surveyor’s model of the world,” which was eventually published in Cartographica two years later (Rose-Redwood 2004).² It was my first full-length, peer-reviewed publication in a scholarly journal, and in it I contrasted the triumphalist narratives of the history of surveying and mapping as portrayed in introductory surveying textbooks with the more critical accounts of the history of surveying and mapping inspired by Harley’s later writings. And while I cited Harley’s “Deconstructing the Map” only as part of a long string of citations in a footnote, it’s clear in retrospect that his work had a considerable influence on my efforts to demonstrate how the traditional account of the history of surveying sought to, as I put it at the time, “legitimize the state while at the same time denying the significance of power [. . .] because it sweeps all scepticism under the carpet of patriotic appeal and trigonometrical exactness” (Rose-Redwood 2004, 46). This is pure Harleyian verbiage, whether or not I was consciously aware of it at the time.

Over a decade has passed, and that article I wrote hasn’t been...