• De la #cartographie et des #cartes...

    The developrnent of European c.rtogr.phy pl.yed. role in the rn.king of this notion of space (Sparke, 2005). In truth, ’cartography apprehends space as pure quantity, abstracted from the qualities ofmeaning and experience ... Such abstraction, ob;ectification, and differentiation are characteristically modern. Cartographic space is analogous to the modern apprehension of time, a qu.ntity [that can bel measured .. .’ (Biggs, 1999: 38()-387).
    If so, as Farinelli (1994) points out, the history of this notion of space is even lengthier and can be traced, together with the invention of cartography, back to pre-Socratic philosophers such as Anaximander and to Roman cartographers, like Ptolemy. Their legacy disappeared from the Western imagination with the Roman Empire, only to return at the beginning of the fifteenth century with the Italian renaissance, the revaluation and revival of Antiquity, and the rediscovery of Ptolemy’s geography. Later on, the development
    of state geography (Farinelli, 1985) and ’the interplay of cartographie
    and statistical surveys ... established “society” as a field of action,
    and population (as] defmed by the state territory’ (Hakli, 2001: 414).
    Moreover, the explosion of scientific inquiry through the Enlightenment added to the view that ’ the world could be controlled and rationally ordered if we could only picture and represent it rightly’. As pointed out by Alliès (1980) and noted by Antonsich (2009: 796), a contribution to this conceptualisation of space was also ofIered by the ;urists of Europe’s absolutist monarchies who needed to ’abolish the heterogeneity of places and make them (and the difIerent people who lived within them) equal under the law’.
    The process had many spatial consequences. The fust is the crystallisation of reality, which is multidimensional and naturally changing, into something flat and static. The second is its simplification: on a map something is there or not there, included or excluded, whereas language allows much more detail. Moreover, maps enjoy the power to divide political spaces, fixing local, national and international boundaries. They function as logomaps,
    defining national terri tories in easily recognisable sliapes (Anderson,
    1991). They inscribe names, shapes and signs, turning those portions of space into symbolic landscapes (Sturani, 2008). Together with statistics, they connect space to state government. Thus, the geo-metrification of the world though its cartographical representation sacrificed its fluidity and variety in exchange for the possibility of dividing and dominating it.

    Tiré de #Dell'Agnese 2013 :
    http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118278857.ch8/summary

    cc @reka

    • Et plus loin dans le même texte, sur l’#ex-Yougoslavie :

      In international relations, this assumption brings sorne practical efIects. For instance, during the war in ex-Yugoslavia in the 1990s it could have helped us to understand that the reason for the conflict was not te be found in the violent characters of the local populations, or in supposedly ’ancestral hatreds’, as many media commentaters and political analysts argued at the time (dell’Agnese and Squarcina, 2002), but in the antagonistic interests of groups and individuals. This emphasises how identities which were interpreted and temporalised as ’ancestral hatreds’ need to be understood as part of contemporaneous, ongoing relations (Massey, 2005: 119- 120).
      A relational understanding of space would havesuggested that the solution to the conflict lay not in the creation of partitioned territories but in the weaving of more positive interactions.

      #guerre #territoire #réseau #guerre_civile #territoire_relationnel

      Plus loin, sur le #terrorisme :

      Today, a similar understanding could make us aware that, if someone decides to become a terrorist, it is not simply because they were born inside the wrong territory, but because their interactions with the context - no matter the scale - went wrong. This means, frrstly, that we will not defeat terrorism by waging war against it, that is, by bombing other people’s terri tories. In fact, by following that strategy
      we will make things worse, since the qualities of our relations and interconnections with the inhabitants of those terri tories will deteriorate. Secondly, it suggests that we cannot defend ourselves by building walls, since terrorism, being a relational problem and not a territorial one, can develop inside any kind of relational context. Thirdly, it implies that, since we are not living in separated societies but in interconnected systems of relations, or, bener, in a global/local system of power-geometries, as Doreen Massey (1993a) would say, we are always part of the context, and for this reason we have to take our own responsibilities seriously.