Mapping Resistance

Discussion

Brian Holmes:

"Jameson saw the correlation of abstract knowledge and imaginary figures as key to understanding contemporary symbolic structures, and regaining the capacity to act within them. A range of recent mapping projects, all dealing with the forms of social organization, will serve as exemplars of this process. They can be arrayed within a circle marked by four cardinal points and traversed by two major oppositions."

See the graphic at http://brianholmes.files.wordpress.com/2007/04/compass.jpg, with 2 axes:

- vertical: power vs. swarm - horizontal: dissemination vs. constitution

"At the top of the compass, an initial group of maps offers critical depictions of hierarchically concentrated cultural, economic and military power. At its polar opposite, another group invokes swarms of self-organizing singularities. In the right-hand quadrant are diagrams of social networks in the process of constitution, represented either in their tendency toward the concentration of power, or in their moment of dispersion into all-channel meshworks. And in the left-hand quadrant, opposite these constitutive diagrams, we find the cartography of dissemination, which traces and effaces the footfalls of wanderers in the global labyrinth.

The cardinal examples of the first group are the flowcharts by Bureau d’Etudes, such as “The World Government” (2003), which can be seen as a culmination of the critical analysis of globalization carried out scholars and social movements since the early 1990s. This information map uses pictograms to represent over forty different categories of actors, linked into a continuous and contradictory network. At the center is a financial core, populated by transnational investment groups. Around these groups, in a structure of nested rings, are the most powerful nation-states, themselves subsumed under regional or strategic ensembles. Major industries, service providers and transnational organizations appear in direct or ambiguous relations to these blocs. The effect is one of arresting detail, compelling the eye to a seemingly endless iteration of links. But if you draw back, this extraordinarily complex map reveals rounded, almost cosmological forms, small enough to be seen in a single gaze.'

...

The shift from object to subject propels us from one pole of the compass to its opposite, from hierarchies of power to self-organizing swarms. Howard Rheingold has described this new organizational form, showing how “smart mobs” use mobile devices to coordinate actions in real time. But the momentary convergence of mobile, self-organized groups goes back at least to the Zapatista uprising, and was used extensively by the counterglobalization movements. The best examples of what might be called “swarm cartography” have come from activist groups in Spain. “Transacciones/Fadaiat” is a “geography of the geopolitical territory of the Straits of Gibraltar,” compiled in 2004 by independent media producers of the group “Hackitectura,” with collaborations from Tangiers and the Canary Islands. One side is a map of power: on a Mercator projection turned upside-down, it shows sea-going migration routes, refugee camps, destination zones, electronic surveillance systems, military installations, internment centers, etc. But the other side traces a complex meshwork of activist groups on both sides of the Straits, showing their interrelations, their meetings, their evolution over time. The aim is not only to represent, but above all to catalyze a future range of possible interventions by autonomous agents, from direct action protests to immigrant support networks, legal cases, satire, subversion and the production of dissident knowledge. A comparable project was completed in 2004 by activist groups in Barcelona, who created a sophisticated city map to help spark protests against the Universal Forum of Cultures, widely perceived as a mere prop for real-estate speculation along the waterfront." (http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2007/04/27/network-maps-energy-diagrams/)

More Information

Many other examples at http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2007/04/27/network-maps-energy-diagrams/