that “mapping as a power-knowledge also functions as productive power to constitute objects, identities and practices that are part of (and constitutive of) our world” (Pickles 2004, p. 114). Mapping is therefore of interest as much for its contribution to the territorialization of state power as for its participation in the adoption and dissemination of hegemonic concepts of territoriality. Such analyses lead several authors to think of the map as a condition for the territoriality of the modern state (Winichakul 1994; Kitchin and Dodge 2007; Debarbieux 2019), and for that of modern societies as a whole. Pickles himself puts it this way, “Maps and mappings precede the territory they ‘represent’” (Pickles 2004, p. 5).
This kind of thinking has led Joe Painter to speak of “cartographic anxiety” in order to refer to the need of states (but also any other political entity) to have a territory whose very nature can be shaped by maps: “I want to suggest that dominant understandings of concepts such as ‘territory’ and ‘region’ have been structured in important ways by cartographic reason, and therefore that related practices of territorialization and regionalism are generated, in part, by cartographic anxiety” (Painter 2008, p. 346). At this point, the interpretation of the map as an instrument of power has seen its epistemological character coupled with an ontological one: it participates in an ontogenesis of the state and the corresponding society. In this book, Franco Farinelli’s chapter on the role of mapping in the spatial production of modern societies (Chapter 2) and Bernard Debarbieux’s chapter on the cartographic production of modern states (Chapter 5) attempt to explain and illustrate this perspective.
However, this thesis only holds if it is supported by a detailed analysis of the system of signs of which a map is constituted, or even by a theory of political representation. That the map requires an organized system of signs is a given, even before the invention of the map legend, at the end of the 17th century (Harvey 1993). The constant improvement of this system was the main preoccupation of those who, from Bertin to MacEachren, strove to optimize the map’s capacity to communicate information. However, the analysis only takes on a critical and political dimension when one looks at the selection and prioritization of mapped objects and the political effects of these choices. Harley himself distinguished between the “external power” of maps and mapping – the power exercised over them through political commissioning, or exercised with them, through their political, administrative, religious or legal use – and the “internal power” of maps and mapping (in the same way as one might speak of the power of words), namely, their performative character and their political effects, engendered, among other things, by the choices made in representation (Harley 1989, pp. 12–13).
The analysis of the maps produced following the voyage of Christopher Columbus, accompanying the colonization of the American continent by Europeans, is emblematic of the identification of this “internal power”, including the invisibilization of the Indigenous populations and the concern taken to visually offer a space to be conquered (Harley 1992). It is to this “internal power”, mainly linked with the choice and arrangement of signs, that the often-used expression “power of maps” refers (Wood 1992). In fact, it was long before 1992 and the peak of critical cartography, represented by the highly controversial celebration of the 500th anniversary of the “discovery” of America, that some people were busy subjecting the map to the prism of theories of representation. Already, in the 1970s, Louis Marin’s detailed analysis of the components and general layout of Jacques Gomboust’s 1652 map of Paris, including the text boxes, was a true statement of method. For Marin, this portrait of Paris is an “effect machine” among other effects, particularly effective in the simultaneous institution of what it designates (the city) and of the one who commands it (the King of France) (Marin 1973, 1980, pp. 47–54). Around the same time, Raffestin used the work of another representation theorist, Hillary Putnam – who claimed that “objects do not exist independently of conceptual frameworks” (Putnam 1984, p. 64, author’s translation) – to remind us that the cartographer does not describe the real as it is, but constructs a system of objects that reflects an intentionality (Raffestin 1988).
Beyond English-speaking geographers and cartographers, it is those on the European continental mainland who seem to have taken the analysis of the “internal power” of the map the furthest. We can cite the works of Ollson (2007) and Farinelli (2009, see also Chapter 2 of this book) on “cartographic reason”, in particular, the recourse of modern cartography to Euclidean geometry and its social and political effects. In this same vein, in the work of Casti (1993, pp. 79–101, 2005), and the research group she has built around her at the University of Bergamo, Italy, the analysis draws more specifically on critical semiology. At the same time, Jacques Lévy and his team have, since the 1990s, been engaged in a symmetrical exercise, this time an epistemological one: by postulating the existence of a “cartographic turning point”, Lévy has been proposing avenues of map analysis regarding the political dimension of societies, while at the same time distancing himself from Euclidean metrics (see Chapter 1).
I.1.3. Toward process- and practice-centered approaches
At the same time, other theoretical and conceptual viewpoints have come to nourish a political analysis of the map. Many authors have pointed out that the reduction of the analysis of mapping to the question of representation has its own limits; they have advocated an analysis that takes into account the processes and practices of cartographic production (mapping) as much as the map as a product or artifact (Del Casino and Hanna 2006; Kitchin and Dodge 2007). Kitchin and Dodge (2007) have emphasized the need to question the “ontological (in)security” of maps, as they emerge through practices of territorialization. Pickles has sketched out the features of a pragmatics of the map by asking how it functions in practice. Drawing on the work of Michael Curry, he suggests that the map is “not a representation of the world, but an inscription that does (or sometimes does not do) work in the world” (Pickles 2004, p. 67). This hypothesis is reminiscent of the proposals of the sociology of science and technology, which, whenever concerned with the map, emphasizes the cognitive and political advantages that the map provides through its materiality, and through the circulation and accumulation of knowledge that it makes possible as an “immutable mobile”, i.e. a stable object which travels, carrying along its own content and power of influence (Latour 1987, 2005; Turnbull 2000; November et al. 2010).
In fact, these “more-than-representational” or “processual” approaches had already been raised 20 years earlier by Robert Rundstrom, who had pointed out that textual or representation-centered approaches could hardly be applied to societies with an oral tradition (1991). This was followed by the famous book series The History of Cartography – in particular the introduction to Volume 2.3 on African, American, Arctic, Australian and Pacific societies (Woodward and Lewis 1998, pp. 1–10), which constitutes a reference for several chapters of this book – that reaffirmed this necessity by relying on the anthropological plurality of the act of mapping. The political dimension of this development is twofold: on the one hand, in epistemological terms, it put an end to what Harley himself had called “scientific chauvinism” (Harley 1987, p. 4) in cartography; in other words, it challenged the Western hegemony over the definition of what a map and what cartographic knowledge is. On the other hand, this “more-than-representational” interpretation deepened the analysis of the expressions of power; this is no longer limited to the study of the map’s commissioners’ intentions or to their social and political effects; it also deals with the relationships of power as they unfold in mapping processes and practices.
Such a conceptual expansion allows us to fully grasp the challenges of the digital and online turning point of mapping, in particular, the non-representational dimensions of digital geographic information, as well as its circulation and dissemination. “In fact, maps are no longer maps,” says an article in the French newspaper
