Ruth Watson, January 1997 ©
In the leisure section of my weekend paper was a story about a maze made of corn, the "amazing
maize maze". It's huge, and hordes of people go there just to get lost. Corporations send group
managers on team building exercises to deal with getting lost together. Are these people so sure
of the world they use a maze to reactivate their sense of wonder, exploration, or to calculate their
odds? You can call for help, but most prefer to use every faculty they have as their guide, without
resorting to a map. A map is only one kind of guide, that in a maze would only spoil the fun.
Contemporary mapping doesn't concern itself so much anymore with helping us find where we are, it seems to assume we already know. Today's explosion of mapping chooses other fields: genetic mapping, economic mapping, cognitive mapping, brain mapping. Amongst guides, mapping is the one that admits, whether happily or not, to an abstract relationship to the terrains it describes. This inbuilt flexibility, not unrelated to a history of disingenuousness, makes mapping preeminent, the schemer of schemata. Now the map can ask itself: where does it want to go today?
Generally speaking, contemporary mapping is less concerned with references to journey, to place (preferring the freer floating 'site'), to goal, or finiteness. Despite appearances, it remains fundamentally agnostic on the existence of treasures. It is more comfortable with nexus, connection, point of view and mode of navigation, repetition and endlessness. All is not lost: the investment in categorisation, listing and ownership, cornerstones of our concrete world, is unchanged but contemporary mapping has fewer rules about how or when or where or with whom. Like the english language, it's a slut of a system. (This isn't out of character, though: the history of cartography is littered with versions of the Lands of Love).
So if you were to use these new maps, where do you go? The human genome transcript mapping project, which will give the locational makeup of each gene sequence within the DNA of human cells, is already generating discussion about eugenics. Insurance companies are poised to assume prejudice at the same time this work is developing life-saving solutions. It's the space race of the 90's, and researchers could be subject to legal action in the future if they were not to engage in the current race to patent. Mortality is a big issue, but the more elusive quality of life could do with a few new maps too- there can be no final atlas on the Lands of Life. The corny maze mentioned before is patterned in the shape of an Elizabethan sailing ship, but since we don't know all the shapes of our world, a little team building exercise on the direction of our mapping might not go amiss.
mail to: r.watson@nchecr.unsw.edu.au
