Denis Wood: The Power of Maps

The recently released Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas considers Boylan Heights, a neighborhood in Raleigh, North Carolina, in grand detail, mapping everything from radio waves to Halloween pumpkins. Denis Wood, the leader of the collaborative mapping project that resulted inEverything Sings, has for several decades been one of the most exciting and approachable writers about maps, mapmaking and the history of cartography. His Ce N’est Pas Le Monde was probably the first comic book ever given as a paper at the Association of American Geographers annual meeting. This February, fellow radical cartographer Tim Stallmann talked with Denis Wood at his home in Raleigh about the nature of maps and the history of the Boylan Heights mapping project.

This spread shows two pages from Ce N’est Pas Le Monde, a comic produced by Denis Wood and John Krygier to advance their argument that maps can be understood semiotically as collections of propositions of the form "This is there." The answer to the question, on the next page, is obvious—"They're maps!" Image courtesy of Denis Wood.

Let’s start with a something that’s been nagging me lately. What is a map, anyway? What would you say a map is?

I usually answer that question by pointing to the nearest obvious map! I don’t define maps. A map points to the world. It points outside of itself to the world, and then it points to something else—the subject of the map, and it says that that subject is linked to that place in the world that it’s pointing to. That linkage carries juridical, economic, and other kinds of authority. The map links things to places, so that [through maps] you become linked to a school, to a tax code, to a set of laws that prohibit this or permit that at different ages, you become linked to a system of conscripting for the army, et cetera.

You could record all this information in tabular form, obviously. Prior to the 15th century, in fact, much of this information was kept that way. It’s kept that way as we move into the 16th and 17th centuries as well, but increasingly it takes map form.

I’ve argued that it takes map form because what we know as the modern state is taking shape, and the modern state has uses to make of the map that it doesn’t have to make of other forms of tabulation. Primarily, that is that the map gets wrapped up in the geo-body of the state.

That’s something you discuss in Rethinking the Power of Maps, the way the fact that the modern nation-state has specific borders makes it particularly suited to being mapped, and how the mapped outlines of states become icons for state power. In addition to the iconic nature of national maps, what is it about the map as a medium that makes it so compelling? Why this shift from tabular data records to maps?

Well, the other side of it is you’ve moved to another medium. You’ve moved to a medium that is coterminous with painting. [Maps are] a flat surface, you move lines around. Painting and drawing, mapmaking, other forms of graphics, printmaking—these constitute a whole slither of technologies that inevitably drift from one onto the other. So painting drips onto mapmaking, and drawing drips onto mapmaking, and mapmaking drips onto painting. . . . Needless to say, all the things that you bring from painting are going to find themselves in some way on a map.