Target: Map -> Action (Proposal)

"…In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless… In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars…"

Human Rights activism has a narrative problem that is two-fold. First, as Thomas Keenan writes, "there is more than enough light [shining on human rights violators], and yet its subjects exhibit themselves shamelessly, brazenly, and openly." This failure to "mobilize shame" can be attributed to several things; the failure to create a universal rational subject, the existence of different systems of logic (one that reaches the conclusion that one should not be ashamed of violence and destruction), the assumption that human rights is in fact a correct logical conclusion; all of which seem unsatisfying and far too totalizing. The second issue is that, in attempting to shine light on the dark spaces created by violence and rights violations, NGOs can shock the viewer into a state of paralysis; such is Lisa Parks' complaint concerning the Crisis in Darfur layer in Google Earth, whose method of providing data and dates transforms the genocide into something that has happened as opposed to is happening. An addition (yet closely related) issue concerns the location of the U.S. in all of this (and not just the U.S. of the Bush years); "There a serious defect in the soul of Americans where we can’t rise to something new. Every nation has its peccadilloes, faults, and guilt. But that is in the past. Can’t we say that this is a new age, and the United States, especially after the collapse of Communism, has a whole new moral role?" (Robert Drinan, quoted from http://www.cceia.org/resources/transcripts/838.html) The use of "guilt" in this quote is rather remarkable, as is his assumption that, for American, these faults (evident in such acts as the overthrowing of El Salvador's Democratic government in the name of business interests, or the participation in Operation Ajax) can be overcome by the promise of the new. But what shape can that "new" take, especially when it seems as if the sorts of "shaming" the U.S. tries to accomplish in the international arena often serve as justification for military actions (Somali and Iraq being the two most obvious examples)?

The question outlined by these issues is this: how can abstract notions of human rights be actualized globally and justly? What sort of agency do we (the citizens/persons so important to the language of human rights) have to act for justice across the globe, or, if this global scope is impossible, locally? My attempt at outlining a method for solving these questions will examine the map, and the ways in which the totalizing map of Google Earth, whose use for matching, point for point, those injustices which have occurred (and, implicitly, have ended), has proved Useless, can be used to create a clear space, a need, for action. This involves both a bit of graph theory and the idea of a map that contains its own actualization, whose metadata (the geometry etched across the surface of the "natural" portion of the map) is continually updating and, instead of presenting a target that has already been "hit," presents a delineated field which can be acted upon through the insertion of the viewing subject. The ExtrACT project will provide impetus for the theory, serving as a test case whose various successes and failings can provide inspiration.

I will, of course, be drawing from Keenan, Parks, de Certeau, and Jameson; Appadurai, Tsing and LiPuma might make brief appearances, but will not play central roles, nor will their appearances entail exact mapping of their theories onto my project.

Meta: Map -> Target

Unfortunately, I was unable to attend much of the conference due to various things such as classes and radio shows. I did make it for two sessions though: Lisa Parks and Trevor Paglan, and a very collaborative session on new archive/analysis procedures. Since my planned essay is essentially a critique of Parks, I'll comment on her presentation.

For those not present, I'll provide a brief summary. At the center of her lecture was the idea that, in a post-nuclear time, the world has been imagined as a target. Satellite images allow us to view the world from above, leaving the surface to gain a somewhat totalizing view. The satellite can obtain images from anywhere; the images obtained are transformed into targets, targets of things such as surveillance, destruction, or development (a quick note: it seemed in her speech as if these were *the* three possibilities for targeting, but from speaking with Parks afterwards, it seems as if she wants to leave this more open, that these three methods of targeting are only part of a realm of methods). When the U.S. military has released images from Iraq or Afganistan displaying the aftermath of a bombing, the arrows used to draw our attention, guide our interpretation are, in a way, the same arrows used to guide the bombs before the final image was taken.

Afterwards, I asked her a question: if the satellite image is produced in the creation of a target, what do we make of composites of these targets (such as Google Earth), where the user is suddenly left with a multiplicity of targets with no arrows to guide interpretation, a gaze from above that is no longer singular? Parks briefly responded by noting that the satellite image does not so much represent the creation of a target, merely the potential for a target. To translate a bit: Google Earth is not a composite of 'targets,' specifically, but rather an extension of a field of potentiality across the entire surface of the Earth. Any point, any image can become a target, but is not already one.

But there's still something in my question that remains unanswered: how does this potential become actualized? Or rather: what sort of function can we identify to map a potential to a target of force (or rather, to map targets of force over the field of potentials)? While Parks spoke of "reversing the target" to point back towards the viewers (think of Laura Mulvey's article on foregrounding the gaze of the camera and the audience), something that certainly works for appropriating military images (images that are already targets), the totalizing gaze of Google Earth (which cannot exclude, only distort) and metadata interface allowing users to bind together groups of locations based on an interpretative operation form a gap in Parks' lecture, something assumed but not explored. The way in which targets can be generated by the creation of groups of metadata, which must be discovered before they can add arrows and markers to the Earth, and may be generated by anyone and are all presented equivalently, complicates (but does not necessarily negates) Parks' target reversal. Because Google Earth sells itself on completeness (you can locate all of your old houses in the images, even take a look at "empty" spaces of ocean), the effects of this overwhelming field escapes the control of the military and governments, despite their ability to persuade Google to distort sections of the map, creating new methods of actualization and counter-actualization. This is something I think Parks provided a framework for but perhaps did not explore: borrowing from her lecture, specifically her analysis of military satellite photos released to the public, we may say the target is not created by the image, but rather by the metadata, the arrows guiding interpretation. What is interesting about reaching this point in this fashion is that it is no longer just the military who creates targets; the creation of targets is very much the "actualization of the map" de Certaeu speaks of, the method through which we may identify locations to physically (or intellectually) interact with (or rather, act on as they act on us). I will begin to address these issues in my final essay. Look for the proposal Wednesday.



On another note, I feel like people have already accomplished significant feats of target reversal. One example: Chris Csikszentmihályi spoke of a project where deaths in Baghdad during the occupation were mapped onto Boston, where the artist moved about wearing a backpack containing a computer comparing locations, spewing out leaflets in memorial of those civilians killed collateral to the war when her location matched the location of a death. Without reading the pamphets, I can't testify to the ability of the work to affect a broad spectrum of civilians implicated in the project, but the idea itself is a very moving use of (reverse?) mapping, the confusion of center and periphery.

Pleasures of Analysis

What I find interesting is this need, or rather obsession with the secret and its discovery. What is fueling this desire “to know”? It is perfectly reasonable to assume that the prohibition and censorship of information is repressive for the individual and even for democracy as Galiban writes. However, this focus on the necessity to know, led me to Foucault’s discussion of discourses of sex and the interplay of knowledge and pleasure in the chapter “Scientia Sexualis” of the History of Sexuality Volume I:

“We must ask whether, since the nineteenth century, the scientia sexualis… has not functioned, at least to a certain extent, as an ars erotica. Perhaps this production of truth, intimidated though it was by the scientific model, multiplied, intensified, and even related its own intrinsic pleasures… We have at least invented a different kind of pleasure: pleasure in the truth of pleasure, the pleasure of knowing that truth, of discovering and exposing it, the fascination of seeing it and telling it, of captivating and capturing others by it, of confiding it in secret, of luring it out in the open – the specific pleasure of the true discourse on pleasure” (Foucault, 71).

Although Foucault is specifically talking about the science of sex and its examination and analysis as eroticizes productions, could we think of this interplay in terms of one’s desire to know more generally speaking? Not only the desire to know, but to know that which is hidden? If so, then would this pursuit and obsession with ‘the truth’ or the full disclosure of knowledge come through in sexualized terms? Could knowledge be seen as a means to satisfy a desire, a pursuit for totality?

If desire can be seen, in psychoanalytic terms, as the loss of a full phatasmatic presence, then how can we read Paglan or Galison in this context? Are their projects both caught up in an obsession of knowledge, of a failure or rupture in an ‘incomplete’ knowledge?

Aaron, in his post, pointed to Paglan’s approach to the functioning of gaps in knowledge as symptomatic of a desire for an infinite knowledge:

“To map this cognitively, anything blank is a gap in knowledge, not so much a darkly held secret to be probed. To suggest that, despite how we might imagine the world as a geographical plane, there can be such a thing as infinite knowledge to be aware of the gaps within is, sadly, hubristic.”

It no longer seems to be a question of what is prohibited per se, but rather, the fact that it is prohibited as well as who is prohibiting from whom. Returning back to the idea of desire— if desire is redirected through prohibition and in these cases, secrecy and blank spots of information, do these desires become redirected, not toward the what, but the who? Is this who eroticized? Rather, do the very power relations become sexually charged? Turning specifically to Paglan’s project – does Paglan’s pursuits turn into a ‘pleasure of analysis,’ where there lies a certain pleasure and power dynamic in the very production of mapping?

Monica Garcia