Maps as Secret Keepers — Psych!
Essentially what Soja is doing here is emphasizing the idea that bodies are both spatial and temporal – they do not exist separately or as one or the other. I can appreciate the text here because Soja is striving for a coexistence of not only spatiality and temporality but sociality as well, suggesting that all three work together to define the human being and experience. What resonates with me most about this work is the idea that geography (like history) is both real and imagined – these places are created through social relationships in a specific space but they can also be imagined in the idea of a place, or images, etc. This for me is what solidifies this idea that human life is both real and imagined “simultaneously and interactively” (18). If the human experience is meant to be collective, than, both geography and justice can be seen similarly.
I like this idea of spaces created out of pure secrecy and the power that the government has when it claims spaces to be secret, or blank spots. So not only is marking a territory a symbol of power but having the ability to leave something blank or remove it from sight is a representation of power as well. Maps, as we saw last week, have the ability to not only make visible bodies invisible and vice-a-versa, but they have the ability to cover things up. When it comes to geography things can only be covered up like a “Band-Aid.” This idea is interesting, because not only is the map telling you something is there by hiding it, it’s essentially taunting you. “Secrets, in other words, often inevitably announce their own existence (17)”; this is something I can stand behind. I’d like to explore this concept further in some form of another in my research.
Harpold emphasizes the point of maps lying or being deceptive, insofar as maps can only represent as much as the media they are created for. Also, they are representative of the creator’s perspective as well (or to some extent their perspective). For example, Mercator’s map emphasizes the northern hemisphere (or so many see) as being larger than all the rest of the continents while Peter’s map was seen as propagandistic and just ugly. I also thought the idea that “users of maps depend on them to discover unities and identities across space and time that are meaningful first of all because they are mapped that way” – the map is a symbol and represents things that we can see but also cannot see. We cannot physically see boundaries but we assume they are there, we also cannot see identities directly unless they are mapped a certain way.