J. B. Harley (1932–1991)

J. B. Harley is what you could really call a cartographic postmodernist. Like many po-mos, he makes some good points, but then preceeds to beat them to death and ram some Marxism or other unpalatable mush down your damned throat. Are maps just illustrations or are they texts that can be interpreted like any other document in history? Harley makes a great case for the latter, and I agree. Then. We are told to basically infer what we want as good postmodernists or infer via the damned Foucault (may he burn in Hades) and Derrida that we can imbue these map-texts with all sorts of power relationships and such. Thus, for example, a seventeenth-century plan of Paris shows the homes of all the well-to-do but none of the poor peasantry's homes. If I read it as a text, I could say that the poor are unimportant in society - yes this map has become another document in my evidence. But Harley would have us go one step further and say the map is full of power-knowledge and meant as a tool to keep the peasantry down. Crap. A poor person would never read it, can't, how could it keep him down? Still, he does show how to read (or, deconstruct) a map, and it is good. The last chapter, however, is crap. It is basically a "Cartographic Manifesto" metaphorically advocating that "cartographers of the world, unite" and stop helping those in power and being dupes to the Man. Again, crap.… (meer)