Aesthetic of Cognitive Mapping

Analyzing Google Earth provides the opportunity to rethink the question of aesthetics vis-à-vis mapping. In Postmodernism, Jameson seeks to solve the problem posed by postmodernity: the inability to represent. This stems from the diffusion (of culture, of media) in the late stages of capitalism whereby the distance previously required for acts of representation disappears. There is no distance; postmodernity is a state of total immersion. Jameson’s solution is what he terms an aesthetic of cognitive mapping—an aesthetic that emerges out of the intersection of art and cartography. He envisions this project as a means by which to recoup lost political agency:

[T]he new political art (if it is possible at all) will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism, that is to say, to its fundamental object—the world space of multinational capital—at the same time at which it achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing this last, in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion (54).

If anything, Google Earth re-introduces the possibility of distantiation but that alone does not qualify it as the “as yet unimaginable new mode of representing” the space of capital.
Harkening back to the question of scale, de Certeau seems to suggest that scale is the condition of possibility for narrative practice. A shift in scale (up to the 110th floor) turns us into “readers.” From that view, the city below becomes a great “texturology” that can be “read” from above. This linkage of scale and narrative—that there is a scale at which narrative becomes possible—is, for de Certeau: “the source of [the] pleasure of ‘seeing the whole’” (92). The “totalizing eye” of the view from above creates a (seemingly) “transparent text” (92). Immersed at the level of the street, it is impossible to have this kind of transparency. For de Certeau, users of the text write a narrative they cannot read. Readability requires an evocation of the “God trick” in order to rise above the “text” itself. In terms of a political aesthetic, Smith notes that this typically manifests itself in recent attempts to “understand the constructed geographies of capitalism” (“Contours of a Spatialized Politics” 61). But if capitalism is the “author” of this spatial text, wouldn’t a “zooming out” provide the occasion for a sustained assessment of these very geographies?

As desires for transparency often arrive hand-in-hand with desires for control, de Certeau is quick to avoid “legibility” and “readability” in favor of the unmappable: that which resists representation. When Baudrillard wrote of the “satellization of the world,” it was to warn us of the threat of a global surveillance system, not to lavish accolades on the technological wonders of launching those one-ton beacons into the stratosphere. And the history of cartography should instantly guard against any naïve belief in the simple liberatory power of the map. Mapping, for de Certeau, replaces “practice” with “trace,” “action” with “legibility” (97). But the persistence of the “unreadable” and the unmappable, spatial practices occurring at the micro-level, below the radar of the “totalizing eye,” remain as anti-disciplinary movements (96). This bodes ill for our entire project as mapping out these unmarked sites might be a counterproductive move. Do we want these sites re-articulated back into the corporate database of Google Earth? Doesn’t their power, as alternative modes of existence, preclude them from grand totalizing gestures, re: any project that seeks to map?

Despite the warnings of de Certeau et al. (including our own paranoia with respect to this project), it would seem that Google Earth’s potential as a political aesthetic rests on its ability to visualize data. Bukatman argues that visualization—of data that would otherwise remain visually inaccessible—is the new aesthetic, and accordingly it has provided us with a “new realm of images” into which we can include the global image of Google Earth (109). Lyotard makes a similar claim for narrative, that it now consists of “arranging…data in a new way…connecting together series of data that were previously held to be independent” (51-52). If data is available, it can be mapped; therein lies Google Earth’s revolutionary potential. As we saw with the “fly over” function, the program visualizes the distances we cannot perceive at 500 miles an hour/32,000 miles in the air. Scholars currently at work documenting the various networks through which finance capital flows: the hands through which it is exchanged, the physical spaces through which it passes, the Ethernet it transverses, the accounts in which it rests, the blockages it encounters—seek to comprehend how this monetary system functions. Once this data set becomes available, its mapped visualization will provide a powerful means of grasping the totality of capital.

If visualization is the new aesthetic then layering, a structural tool key to Google Earth, might prove to be the means by which to create this aesthetic. Google Earth articulates sites through layers of data: roads, traffic flows, weather, historical maps, historical sites, military bases, uTube videos, photographs, crime statistics, etc. that can be added or subtracted over an area, resulting in a kind of virtual geology. Through this process of layering, a locality that is linked to multiple narrative networks emerges. And the compiling of data by the users of space: the numbers, images, models, and notes they post to the community, makes Google Earth an interactive map that functions as a collective political (and aesthetic) project. Our AltDurham is meant to be such a visualization, an attempt to render visible the actions of a vibrant community of artists, educators, farmers, business-owners, and volunteers working at the micro-level of the city.

References:

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. NY: Semiotexte, 1983.

Bukatman, Scott. Terminal Identity: The Postmodern Subject in Postmodern Science
Fiction. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.

De Certeau, Michel. “Walking in the City.” The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven
Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. 91-110.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham:
Duke University Press, 1991.

Lyotard, Jean. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff
Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, 51-52.