map or gloss?

The following is being printed somewhere this month without the footnotes.
I've decided to put it here with the footnotes - since, in a way, the footnotes are the best part.
In fact, perhaps i would be better to only post the footnotes. In any case - the footnotes are included here in square brackets.

Mapping

1. Some sketching on the process of rendering terrain – an economic differential calculus of spatial ownership, and a consideration of space as an emergent conceptual entity (contention: there is no such a thing as space – space is a mobilization of territory, a unit in a geometry of power relations) (Counter-Contention: Space is a gestural location for the articulation of individual vs. institutional difference and determination – the occasion of a necessary border).

2. Mapping as a linguistic signature of a commitment to unfinished business (i.e. staying open for business; keeping the transactions going) – an anarchistic, democratic time-limited and shared-spatial relationship to territory, both geological and conceptual (given that the two can ever truly be separated). (Contention: mapping is ironically set against itself when it confronts the mapped).

Here are some mappings:

Mapping Mapping

If mapping can be said to be a means of cultural expression, then let this be said to be (a) mapping.
It’s not clear to me that any expression could be truly outside of cultural identification.
[1 I am responding here to the writing suggestions in the call for papers – to wit: “this publication is interested in projects that re-appropriate mapping as a means of cultural expression.” – In fact, this whole thing is responding to this call, and taking to heart its interest in “making visible the invisible,” which includes, as it happens, this qualification. ]
So the moment when that culture is identified could be said to be (another) mapping. In fact, it may be the case that mapping is in some way identical to description and analysis.
And what I would like to examine is the relationship between mapping in that sense of description/analysis, and ownership.
In this respect, this mapping is about mapping as (a process of) staking a claim(ing). And as such, it is a measured calculus of the difference (differentiation) between mapping and (the/a) map.
That is to say, it is an exploration of the economy of the production of territory (of location) from exploration and discovery to claiming, defining and defending.

Mapping Borders

Borders are interesting things because they are both visible and invisible.
[2 Here again I am harkening to the terrain laid out by the call. ]

They are, in a manner of speaking, emergent entities.
[3 This is one of my favourite analytic – or I should now say “mapping” – preoccupations. Recent research done under the rubric of Computational and Bio Sciences proffers that Life and Intelligence are emergent properties of networks – which I like to understand as things that are coming into being and are only constituted as being by virtue of contingent and conspiring elements – In other words, they are conceptual and ordained (by way of interest and investment – a consequence of conspiring agendas. This reminds me of the famous Nietzsche quote: “Truth is like an army of tropes”). Anyway, I have recently spun this observation and postulation into the subject domain of networks and suggest that networks themselves can be constitutive of forms of intelligence – That networks are themselves emergent, and being thus are progenitors of emergent forms of life and intelligence. This makes for a kind of biosemitiocs that I like to rethink as post-phenomenology. So if, as Frank T. Vertosick says “Life is a Network”, then it could follow that Network is Life – and then such claims as Mobile Networks are Life could be followed with qualification, i.e. What kind of life? (Contention, if life is emergent, then there is no life “as such” – all life is a “kind of life”). What I am leading to here, it must be obvious by now, are fundamental power relations of representation and of mapping (analysis) as a species of war machine. ]

Which is to say that they are contingent upon, and resulting from, a nexus of network relations and activities. They rarely have any absolute physical manifestation that you could truly call representative (i.e. they are largely suggestive and symbolic).
[4 I wish to register here the double sense of this word “device” as both a tool and a ploy (a ruse, a trick). I hope to tease that out further, but I may not have the time, so to speak. Nevertheless, I wish to register it here as generally representative (which is to say symptomatic) of a mapping procedure. And of course the Great Wall is not the only salient example; there is the Berlin Wall (now struck down, and claimed culturally in many diverse ways – including an appropriation by Roger Waters of Pink Floyd for his Brecht-like musical auto-biography produced on that site) and the high fence going up currently (in protest from the U.N.) between Israel and Palestine – which also reminds me of the fences between protesters and the various Global economic and power leaders and brokers under the rubrics of G8 and WTO). So, a lot of fences, and a lot of expressions of the fence – enough to count as a cultural currency, and to be subject to a cultural history. ]

The Great Wall of China is perhaps the best and closest example of a comprehensive (which is vague of me to say, I realise) physical manifestation of the proverbial “line drawn in the sand.” And its double function and orientation as a barrier and containment device (built as much or more to keep people in as to keep others out) is of interest here as well.
But the border between the United States of America (sic) and Canada, referred to sometimes as the longest undefended (which ought to be qualified)
[5 And it will be when I start to describe communication presence – the heart of wireless politics and ideology. ]

border in the world, is interesting for its (relative) lack of physical manifestation, and for how it infers a border by way of a system of co-managed turnstiles and gateways,
[6 I’m not really being fanciful here – this is more or less what we Canadians and Americans (sic) are faced with when crossing that border on foot, or in a automotive vehicle, or within an airport (only the train presents a different physical experience). They are official entry points, but as Mexico and Cuba and Canada can attest, there are many other ways of crossing (illegally, of course). What I would like to get at here, is the correspondence between these so-called geo-political manifestations of admission management and those being determined in the networks. ]

which are nonetheless equally effective in serving as a similar device for containment and as barrier.
Likewise, the more symbolic cultural borders we are familiar with, such as those between the so-called new (North American) and old (Europe) worlds, or between the so-called West (North America and Europe) and the East (Asia, the Middle-East and parts of North Africa), or with the fluid and mutable boundaries like those between differently defined Races, Religions, Creeds, Sexes and Sexual Preferences, are all subject to this dialectic.
Borders are like published analyses – like published maps – they are, in a certain way, sign-offs on discussed matter – defined (if not definitive) terrain – copyrighted and claimed as owned property, with appended specific stipulations for shared usage. They are defended, or need to be, because they are contestable.
All mapping, then, is a suggestion until it is defended and enforced by ownership – And even then, it is only so because it can, still, be contested. Politics is a management initiative of ownership and contestation – it is a management of borders.
The peculiarities of policy – it’s qualitative differentiation – can be said, therefore, to be locative in its principles of mapping. To use a colloquialism: “It’s all about mapping” (which might make it meaningless in itself).
(Contention: If the end-game of global dominance is “Full Spectrum Dominance” – that realization is tantamount to the end of all borders. No borders are necessary when you own the total domain. Borders, then, are the horizon of difference for those resisting the great corporate merger – the ultimate hostile take-over.)
[7 Once again I draw upon the call: Against the US-led ‘coalition of the willing’ (an extrapolation from the Iraq invasion - mjb) of which Latvia counts itself as apart –informed, as it is, by the US Strategic Command’s objective of “Full Spectrum Dominance” (where does this quote come from? – mjb) (that seeks the unilateral total domination of land, sea, air, cyberspace and outer space) (is that a paraphrase? Or an assessment? – mjb) – this publication is interested in project that re-appropriate mapping as a means of cultural expression (which of course brings me back to footnote 1 –mjb). And “Dominance” is a curious notion, and may be another thing that is, like many of the old modernist horizons, something that can only be reached for and never totally held. Which isn’t to say that a lot damage, pain and suffering doesn’t happen in the process – In fact, reaching for Dominance may be whole point, precisely for this reason – And likewise, “mapping” may be a more desirable mechanism. The idea may be to sustain a process of dominating. So, in this respect there wouldn’t be an end-game as such, and the current occupation for Iraq may be the object example of this. The difficulty in registering difference in using certain terms lies in their free-flowing currency as meaning – For example, it is not necessary to re-appropriate mapping (although this gesture is worthwhile to explore insofar as it conceives of itself as different as such) as cultural expression, because it is always that. The hard and necessary thing to see is that war, ownership, conquest, control and other activities attached to “Full Spectrum Dominance” are themselves mapping, and hence, a means of cultural expression – You might call it the culture of dominance, or dominating – And you would be hard pressed to find any culture without an interest in gaining ground. Maybe it’s a matter of gang wars, and who’s side are you on? Spin attempts to claim ownership of language – vernacular and meaning – and is itself a mapping of sense and sensibility – drawing lines in the comprehensive fields of perception and significance. Battles of interpretation over what someone meant by what they said and how it will play on others who have heard it, is evidence, I think, of the fundamental groundlessness of meaning. It is therefore only held by an enforced insistence – whether by repetition or by more deadly armaments. ]


Mapping the Spin

Information is funny stuff. In some of the science magazines I read, I've found it described as an actual substance that underlies the entirety of existence, as something that is more fundamental than the four fundamental physical forces: gravity, electromagnetism and the two nuclear forces. I think they've referred to it as a super-weird substance. Now, obviously, information shapes and determines our lives and the way we live them, yet it is completely invisible and undetectable. It has no actual form; you can only see its effects. Information is a kind of heat. I would suggest that as our society accumulates information, from its hunter-gatherer origins to the complexities of our present day, it raises the cultural temperature.
Alan Moore, Salon.com, 2004/07/22

This quote from the author of some seminal comic-based stories is intriguing to me because it poses an interesting and unique way of measuring limits and problems. No problem is overtly stated as such, nevertheless, the notion of raising temperatures is evocative of a number of things and its link with information helps to metaphorically render information as organic, and subject to thermodynamics. This is very interesting given a predisposition to situating information more commonly as cold and as abstract. It is a kind of neat operation using some familiar designations reminiscent of Marshall McLuhan
[8 http://www.mcluhan.utoronto.ca/mcluhanprojekt/hei%dfmedien2.htm ]

(I shan’t pursue that here, but I indicate it because even though it suggests an old distinction, it is a slightly different emphasis – it isn’t about the medium here, it is about what the content is.)
I also like it because once again it allows me to register and recognize a fascination with the invisible. The point here is that information can’t be seen, but it can be felt. And I believe it therefore suggests that information is, or can be, a viscerally experienced thing – And that the “hotter” it gets, the more symbiotic it becomes vis a vis culture. Because they are both here, it seems, subject to similar thermodynamic behaviour.
What is meant by cultural temperature? – I have no idea, really, and yet it does register with me in a visceral and suggestive way – like a post-hypnotic suggestion it triggers something that should make sense, even if upon close examination it doesn’t. It’s sublime vagueness seems a perfect illustration of the point it is trying to make – it is, after all, coming to me through the heat of information. Information is heat, therefore it heats you up in contact with it, and you are not just you – you are you in the context of many others you have similarities with and difference from – in other words, you are you only by virtue of there being cultures of you – and so to heat you up – a lot of you up, in any case – is to heat up your culture.
It’s retroactive sense-making – like explaining away the impossible with applied rational thought. It might be completely wrong, mind you – but does it matter if it makes good sense? That is the power of spinning. Feeling is as much or more (these days) believing. That’s faith, right?
[9 This reminds me of an interview with former President Bill Clinton in the July issue of Rolling Stone magazine where he qualifies President Bush’s (sic) intelligence as “an emotional intelligence.” And it is, I think, important to understand the political economy of faith in order to understand the efficacy of the Bush Administrations successful machinations. I’ve also read elsewhere about Bush’s social skills – and it has an eerie resonance – I’m not sure why – is it because it evokes a notion of a sociopath? ]

You know the one about how the prevailing maps of the world a lot of us are shown in western schools are a complete misrepresentation (i.e. a distortion) of the shapes and sizes of the actual land masses?
[10 See http://www.fact-index.com/g/ga/gall_peters_projection.html
and http://www.pacificislandtravel.com/nature_gallery/howtoreadamap.htm
and http://www.fortunecity.com/emachines/e11/86/maps.html
and also see The West Wing episode # 38 “Somebody’s going to emergency – Somebody’s going to jail. See: http://www.tvtome.com/tvtome/servlet/GuidePageServlet/showid-189/epid-30401
Finally this contentious article offers this juicy tidbit: “All maps distort distance, shape, area, or direction to present a map that meets the users' needs.”
From: http://geography.about.com/library/weekly/aa030201a.htm ]

The traditional Mercator projection distorts the actual landmass such that, for instance, Greenland looks larger than Africa. In an episode of The West Wing, a group of activist cartographers (could there ever really be any other kind of cartographer?) wish to propose that the state begin advancing a more accurate Gall-Peters projection map – not just as an appeal to verisimilitude, but rather because of the cultural implications and biases imbedded in the Mercator projection.
The Gall-Peters map is a map that was published by James Gall and then “presented” by Arno Peters over a hundred years later. It’s contentious to cartographers also because of its tendency, in an interest in presenting equal area, to distort shapes. The Mercator projection distorts area and better projects shapes. There is an interest to attempt a compromise. The basic problem is ability to project a map to begin with. The cartographers don’t speak about the problem as a political or cultural one, but it strikes me how close to the fundamental dilemma of particle physics it is (to wit: observation of quantum matter trades off of position vs momentum).
Anyway, the example is interesting and indicative, I think, of the persistence of spin on the one hand, and persistence of a methodology for tripping on the other. What is “tripping?” I propose it is what is done to spin to make it crash. Take this other quote from the same interview with Alan Moore, for example:

You've got Ronald Reagan -- the much eulogized, recently deceased former president -- who everyone seems to have forgotten was regarded as one of the most low and treacherous individuals by those in Hollywood that he sold out to the McCarthy hearings. This is someone whose response to the AIDS epidemic was probably responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths worldwide. This is someone who created Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, or at least set in motion the policies that would create these creatures. This was the architect of much of the world's present misery. Why did we elect him? Because he had been in a lot of films that some quite liked. We thought him an honorable man because in his films he played a lot of honorable men. I believe there are some who believed he had an outstanding war record. Even Ronald Reagan himself talked with misty eyes about the time he liberated concentration camps, which he may have done in a movie. But Ronald Reagan was out of World War II, fortunately for him, because of ill health. So all of his memories of military service came from movies. I've got to say that there are probably better people to elect than film stars.
Alan Moore, Salon.com, 2004/07/22

Tripping is a counter-spin. Tripping sends spin into a crash. Tripping ends in crashing. Ask any drug taker. Tripping is divergence. Tripping is transcendence. Etc. etc. But tripping always ends in crashing. And crashing is generally not pleasant. Even if you are a character in the famous J. G. Ballard story, crashing may be desired, but that does not make it something pleasant. Because crashing is the ultimate violence to momentum – Crashing is taking a position through violence. Because the crash stops hard the movement of a thing.
So if spinning is mapping – what is tripping to mapping? Tripping is exploration. Tripping abandons maps and takes too detailed notice of visceral and perceptual matters to be recognized as the activity of a cartographer. Tripping is outside of the mainstream – even if it is pervasive. Tripping is usually against the law. Tripping, as in “you be tripping” is an imposition – like power tripping, head tripping or ego tripping. Tripping is an upset. Depending upon what you are tripping on, your crash is tailored appropriately to it. Tripping is not really mapping, but tripping can be an application of re-appropriation.
What you need to re-appropriate, to reclaim, as it were, you once had but have now lost, or have had stolen from you. Tripping is like taking that thing back. Crashing on your trip is the mess you make of it, that thing by stopping it in motion. Afterwards is when you try to put it back together. Sometimes you cannot. Mapping is analysis. Tripping is exploration. Crashing is like war.

Mapping Networks

Networks are not places, they are connections. These connections can result in emergent forms. This is not an apparently deliberate operation. It is an organic consequence of networks. You may not be able to predict the measurement of this emergent form qualitatively or quantitatively. It is an event that may be corralled by interpretation. But insofar as it is subject to interpretation it is caught dynamically in play between spin and crash – or spinning and tripping.
What does it mean to claim and enforce ownership of those connections? It means an interest in claiming ownership, and hence control, of the emerging forms. It’s a form of power based upon political theories of recombinant genetics. Semiobiology-biotechnology as a metaphoric language of power. It’s still the age-old battle over the means of production; it has, however, focused itself upon information, and it is treating information as an organic, recombinant thing. The abstract communication conduits therefore are likewise treated as though organic. The ether itself is territory and all territory is corporeal and corporate.
It’s all about a system of gates and turnstiles and toll booths. It’s not really about what you believe, but rather, controlling the price of admission into whatever you desire – including some public space for expression of those beliefs, interests, etc. So dominance has to be made more specific here. It’s a trafficking scheme. And the organizational structure is modeled after the mafia as presented in such parables as the Godfather and the Sopranos.
It’s a subscription-based power structure, with a classic hierarchy of elites and serfs. Digital Medievalism meets Capitalism. You want it? Pay for it. You want a piece of it? Pay your tribute. You want to take it over? You had better be very well connected. You want power? – Get connected.
Which do you think could be more interesting now: – Mapping? Being Mapped? Being the Map? Spinning? Being Spun? Tripping? Being the Trip? Crashing? Being the Crash? Connecting? Being connected? Networking? Being the Network?



Mapping Resistance

This demands very specific terms suited to very specific instances. What is the immediate issue? I go back to the ominous prospect: “Full Spectrum Dominance.”
[11 The label full spectrum dominance implies that US forces are able to conduct prompt, sustained, and synchronised operations with combinations of forces tailored to specific situations, and with access to and freedom to operate in all domains - space, sea, land, air and information. Additionally, given the global nature of our interests and obligations, the United States must maintain its overseas presence forces and the ability to rapidly project power worldwide in order to achieve full spectrum dominance.
From: http://www.russfound.org/Enet/FSD.htm as a quote from the document Joint Vision 2020 http://www.dtic.mil/jointvision/jvpub2.htm ]

This is a very specific military strategy. It one were to understand its ramifications as evidence of a cultural strategy as well, i.e. as advancing into territory not commonly seen to be fit for or requiring military action (lifestyles, for instance – or common public spaces, or into established areas of privacy) by an militia not apparently armed in the traditional way, but rather with cultural weaponry (propaganda, spin, seduction, hypnosis, etc.), then it might be interesting to see if the vulnerabilities to the plan were equivalent.
The stated vulnerability that calls for the action in the geo-political sense is asymmetrical attack.
[12 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetrical_warfare ]

The defense against such an attack is not technology per se, but rather specialized personnel organizations and training to use specific technology – in other words experts and expertise. It’s quite an interesting engagement.
What would an asymmetrical attack in the figurative sense, say as a response to the invasion of privacy, look like? And what would the defense against such an attack look like?
You can imagine the latter to be evident, for instance, in the proliferation of so-called pundits (formerly known as reporters and commentators) who swarm around each address of policy, however obliquely, on the office channels of political information and communication (i.e. so-called “news” stations). Particularly in the USA (sic) where the conservative army of experts and expertise is relentlessly deployed to master the spin of meaning and to assess each movement of a politician like he or she were a horse gearing up for a race. (It’s like talking someone down from a bad trip, also. – Imagine someone doing that to someone who was having a good trip – might that not turn the good trip into a bad one?). Speed here is of the essence for it to be effective, that and an incessant repetition and over-reaching blanketing of the attack.
As for the former, however, it is not so evident. The term refers to terrorist nations and their propensity for targeting weaknesses in conventional countries. Which would mean striking civilian targets much like happen on Sept. 11 2001 in New York City. But how is that “asymmetrical” exactly? And how could anyone imagine a benign version of such a maneuver. I mean, could there be an asymmetrical move in chess?
[13 See http://members.tripod.com/vismath4/sims/ for an asymmetrical chess board – there could be a clue there.
See http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Chess_opening and search string “asymmetrical” for an asymmetrical chess move which “leads to lots of complicated positions” ]

The war versions are morally reprehensible to me.
[14 That is, of the terrorist variety. However, David and Golliath is a palatable version. And a log of Kung Fu – like Wing Chung for instance – are predicated on techniques for the weak and small to use against the strong and tall. Also Hannibal, or Asterix, or Bugs Bunny. ]

But I’m intrigued by the prospect of an asymmetrical argument, for instance.
Imagine if you will, asymmetrical mapping …
Or asymmetrical networking …
[15 The majority of internet services used by residential customers would be asymmetrical. This is due to the fact that when requesting content from a server the amount of data sent to the server is normally far less that the amount of information returned by the server.
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetrical Symmetry in Telecommunications. ]

That will be for me later …
But I will leave you now with this definition, courtesy of Encarta.msn.com specifying a mathematical logic meaning:

Asymmetrical:
5. logic mathematics not interchangeable: used to describe a relation between two things where the first has a relation to the second, but the second cannot have the same relation to the first.

Can you see the value in that?