My dead white guys, or I have to retcon theory into the dissertation
But first, a preface of me complaining at the premise
A problem of being a grimy materialist researcher in academia is that for various reasons, academics will generally not find that work legible or credible if it doesn’t rely or build upon some existing theoretical framework, usually one made up by a dead white guy. Maybe you’re a Marxist, or a Foucault-dian, or a Deleuzian—you’re aligning yourself with some existing framing device or lens that serves as a kind of handhold or justification for a scholarly reader. (If you’re Deleuzian, for example, that’s a way to signal to the reader that the text is going to probably get incoherent and to hang onto your butts—annoying, but justified by having read an insane French guy’s insane French books.)
I bristle at the “who’s your dead white guy” thing partly because of the white guy-ness of it all: the only not-a-white-guy examples I can think of for the scholars with named camps are Walter Rodney and maybe Fanon, but I’m not sure that Fanonism is actually a thing. I also can’t think of many other anti-colonial scholars who get this treatment, like are people Glissantists or Saidians? Feminist scholars also don’t typically have these named contingents. People don’t declare themselves Harawayites or Faludians, they’re merely feminists of various waves/eras/contingents. It’s not a thing with women theorists in general, not just explicitly feminist ones: there are subspecies of Marxist thought for all the guys who expanded on him, but Luxembergist doesn’t seem to be its own thing.
But even if I could just suffix “-ist” or “-ian” behind any scholar I wanted to (Lowenhaupt Tsing-er?), it irks me that my ideas require shoehorning into basically a fandom to make sense to certain kinds of people with authority. The intellectual traditions I tend to be most drawn to (anarchism, feminism) tend to have a critique of hierarchy that makes them antithetical to the whole “please pick a specific guy to placate the person who can decide if you get tenure or not” thing. The dead white guy who probably has had the greatest influence on my intellectual trajectory, David Graeber, would probably be horrified at the thought of people calling themselves “Graeberites” or something.
And yet: I want to finish this degree program, and that means I have to do some theory alongside the empirical research. For all my complaints, it’s not really that I need to choose a Dead White Guy fandom for its own sake. It’s more that I’m not working on this stuff in an intellectual vacuum and should be in dialogue with other work on geospatial technologies. And man, people sure love to do theory around those—especially maps. People are freaks about maps.
Max Liboiron has a very generous take on citation as “reproductive technology”: they frame it as “a way to build and rebuild fields of knowledge”, something that is more about recognition and generosity and expanding thought than turf wars and intellectual fealties. This is something I’m trying to keep in mind.
Anyway, I guess my dissertation’s primary dead white guy is Bruno Latour
Of the dead French white guys of theory, Latour is for me maybe the least intimidating. I think it’s because he didn’t really take himself too seriously—like he was methodologically rigorous, but he also just wanted to make goofy little diagrams and follow scientists around and stuff.
Latour comes up a lot in theorizing around maps and cartography because he wrote a lot about them as part of his work in the sociology of science. Maybe the most famous is his use of maps to explain the concept of the “immutable mobile.” Immutable mobiles are information technologies that transform complex empirical discovery into modular artifacts. Latour’s apparent favorite case study for defining the immutable mobile is the story of French naval officer Jean-François de Galaup de Lapérouse going to Sakhalin, China, and getting a local resident to draw a map of the area in the sand of a beach. The map in the sand isn’t the immutable mobile—it’s the copy of the sand map drawn in Lapérouse’s notebook. The drawing is the “mobile” part; Lapérouse could take that drawing back to the king of France and say “OK, here’s what we know about Sakhalin” and the king could make decisions about invading or mining or whatever the king wanted to do.
The Lapérouse example is actually not a great one for explaining the immutable mobile, insofar as it describes basically one step (from local knowledge to drawing in a notebook). Most immutable mobiles—and maps—go through a whole long process of “science-doing” that makes them immutable (as in, inscriptions of scientific fact). That process isn’t necessarily legible in the end result—a print map of a precisely surveyed Sakhalin Island doesn’t come with a little label explaining all the surveying work or printmaking processes that went into its production. But it translates all of that work and knowledge into something that “works” at transmitting knowledge across different settings and scales.
The economic life of the immutable mobile
Something you might be thinking, or at least I started thinking: don’t immutable mobiles sound a little like commodities? Or, maybe commodities are immutable mobiles. Making a product into something legible, scalable, and recombinable is sort of central to increasing the velocity of production and circulation that defines doing capitalism. Think about commodity markets for metals or agricultural products—often described as “raw” commodities but actually products rendered into stable standardized forms through labor, be it the mining and smelting of ore or the artificial coloring of green oranges to fit consumer expectations of a ripe orange. All of the different grades of ore or types of oranges or whatever (sorry, I recently read a book about oranges) get flattened into a fungible commodity asset, which can itself be turned into futures and spot contracts and swaps. As “media”, these kinds of commodities may not be as information-rich as a map, but they can be used to create new financial instruments and trade agreements. It transmits value. (I don’t really want to go too hard into a dichotomy of knowledge and value or “knowledge economy” stuff right now, but rest assured I’m thinking about it.)
I’ve been thinking about this because of this recurring question I keep coming back to around the financial proposition for geospatial technologies—the “(how) do computer maps make money” thing. In the Lapérouse anecdote, the map is not exactly a commodity and more a service insofar as its knowledge collected for the king. But even that map was a vector for generating new value insofar as the king could say “let’s do an imperialism here” and put his finger on some part of the map. (However just to be clear, this never happened: Lapérouse died at sea before he could show the king his Sakhalin map.) Even in the framing of maps as instruments of state knowledge production and power, that tends to overlap with doing things to produce economic value.
I suspect Latour might not love this framing, but I also read somewhere that he was a pretty devout Christian and if he could deal with a guy actually being three guys and one of the guys is God, I think he could deal with the idea that an object that inscribes and transmits knowledge could also function as a commodity. Also, he’s dead.
But are computer maps immutable mobiles or something else (and does it matter)
The mainstreaming of consumer-facing digital mapping softwares via Google Maps and Google Earth seemingly introduced some wrinkles into the “maps as immutable mobiles” thing, insofar as interactivity makes knowledge contained in the digital map something that a viewer may not access in a linear, didactic way. A few academic papers have reckoned with this. One re-framing is to abandon the immutable mobile and use instead Star and Greisemer’s “boundary object” a term they use to describe knowledge-inscribing things “which are both plastic enough to adapt to local needs and the constraints of the several parties employing them, yet robust enough to maintain a common identity across sites.” They actually use maps as an example because while a map of a coastal area might lead one set of viewers to the beach, they might lead another set to an archaeological dig site. The distinction between boundary objects and immutable mobiles basically comes down to just how “immutable” their knowledge is, I guess?
Latour on computer maps does not exactly address the immutable mobiles question, but is interesting
Because Bruno Latour died in 2022 and was just a huge dork who kept working for an insanely long time, he did live long enough to see digital maps become a thing and co-wrote a paper about them that came out in 2010. He and his co-authors Valérie November (respectfully: absolutely amazing lady-detective name) and Eduardo Camacho-Hübner are kind of more riffing on how digital navigation technologies extend or change understanding of maps. (A facet of this paper that is kind of funny is that it was clearly written before smartphones; printing out digital maps is understood to be a necessary step in rendering them useful.
One claim made in the paper that I’m not totally sure I agree with is that digital methods make the “chain of production” underlying the map more legible:
Today, it is impossible to ignore that, whenever a printed map is available, there exist, upstream as well as downstream, a long and costly chain of production that requires people, skills, energy, software, and institutions and on which the constantly changing quality of the data always depends.
Maybe it’s just because I’ve been in the racket of infrastructure education for a little over a decade but I regret to report that it is absolutely possible to ignore the chain of production. People ignore them all the time! At a minimum I’d concede that people more or less understand these technologies are the products of complex processes, but they tend to make massively incorrect assumptions about those processes (anecdotally common ones: Google owns imagery satellites and generates satellite map views from those, location tracking on a digital device is exclusively GPS signal triangulation, getting map data is easy).
The distinction of digital navigation as opposed to digital maps is significant here because the authors want to make a distinction between maps as mimetic and maps as navigational, taking a kind of extended definition of “navigation” to essentially describe processes of information-acquiring:
…Not only maps but all scientific inscriptions may be framed in two orthogonal ways: the mimetic one (in fact a resemblance between an image and its virtual image) and the navigational one (a connection between one set of signposts and those dissimilar posts that precede and follow them. There is no doubt that in terms of gaining information, only the second one may provide objective knowledge. The first one is nothing but a narcissistic contemplation of one’s own image.
This starts to veer dangerously into the kind of “social construction of scientific fact” territory that people love to give Latour and other science studies a hard time over—like are they just lamenting the impossibility of the Borgesian ideal of an exactly perfect map, or going so far as to say that the “outside world” is itself a construction? But the point is more that despite the fact that maps are pretty obviously not perfect reflections of the physical world, they’re evaluated primarily on this mimetic level. They kind of attribute this to critical cartography leaning a little too much on art historian methods that in treating the map as a “text” but also the whole invention of “territory” as a thing states have. It gets a little into the weeds of theorizing space which I’ll spare readers of this blog who are probably fucking normal and don’t need to be subjected to that (though unfortunately my committee will absolutely expect me to do this, and I am dreading it lol.)
On a “how to apply theory to the actual dissertation” level: I find this distinction between mimesis and navigation interesting based on my own observation of the technical divisions between geospatial computing for analysis (e.g. “here’s all the buildings we need to go door-knock at for this election canvass” or “here’s all the voter districts we need to go canvass in”) and geospatial computing for navigation (“here’s the path you should walk to knock on those doors to take the fewest total steps”). They’re pretty different intellectual and technical lineages—analysis methods are more tied to graphics engineering and Euclidean geometry and routing algorithms come out of like, network theory. In the early years, companies doing one type of geo work often weren’t doing the other.
It’s also related to some thinking I’ve been doing around the title of the dissertation itself, which was kind of just a pun I figured I could extend on. Describing geospatial softwares as “placing technologies” is a way of framing them as technologies that put ideas about the world into place and as technologies that shape how people actually navigate the world and end up in a specific place. It’s also about me trying to situate—i.e., place—geospatial technologies in a broader historical, economic, social, political context.
The other dead white guy
The other dead white guy who’s kind of important to this dissertation is probably Karl Polanyi, mostly for being the guy who pointed out that basically there’s never been such a thing as a “self-regulating market” and that as long as “the economy” has been a reified thing people talk about it’s been preserved and enabled by state power. The state is kind of the banana stand of geospatial software—i.e., there’s always money in government contracting—but also the state subsidizes a lot of geo tech needs through setting up and releasing into the public domain a bunch of core geospatial data infrastructures. GPS is the very obvious one, government imagery satellites like Landsat or Copernicus are another. Beyond the long legacy of The State and maps or whatever, the basic premise of doing geospatial technology products for consumers actually depends a lot on the accessibility of government-funded and maintained tools.
In the era we’re currently living through in the United States where public services are basically being stripped and sold for parts, I expect that some of these geospatial infrastructures will go through the same processes or be abandoned outright. Cuts to the National Geodetic Survey are probably the first sign of trouble.
I’m at the stage of work where I really need to be writing more in boring academic prose mode than whatever I’m doing here, but I still don’t fully know what the fuck I’m doing on the theory front so this was helpful for venting and getting the garbage-draft version of these thoughts out.