Is "Map" to "Geography" as "Map" is to "Ideas"?

Steve Steinberg, guest blogger on BoingBoing this week, asks why maps don't work. Or, rather, why metaphorical maps don't work. Traditional maps, those that show geographical data, work most excellently, " especially," Steinberg notes, "if your objective is to slaughter a distant indigenous civilization." But the success of such maps in portraying the relationships between geographical features has led us to try the same thing for other domains of knowledge, from blogs to language to the Middle-East peace process. Although some of these maps can be strange and beautiful in their own right, they rarely do what they are supposed to do, provide a clear guide to an unknown region.

I've called these "metaphorical" maps because they all use the idea of a map as an organizing structure. Now, maps themselves are already metaphors, representing the rock and soil features of the world around us (or far away from us, as the case may be) in terms of ink and paper. Thus, metaphorical maps are twice metaphorical, forcing us to think of the relations between blogs or words or nations as if those nebulous ideas were things "out there", in the landscape, and then forcing us to imagine that the images in front of us represent those ideas and the relations between them in the same way that a traditional map represents places and the distances between them?

Now, it seems as if this kind of doubly-metaphorical spatial thinking comes more or less naturally to us. I can't say whether it is a universal trait or just something we have developed as a product of modernity, but in either case, most people tend to think this way. For instance, we discuss how "far apart" colors, sounds, tastes, or other qualities might be; we decide whether certain ideas move "forward" or "backward"; we "move" through history, time, choices, and any number of other processes; we break our intellectual life up into "fields"; we describe our families in terms of "distance" of relation; and so on. I don't think this is simply a factor of the English language--the French, for instance, used "avant-garde", an explicit spatial metaphor describing the troops at the front of an army's formation, to describe the relation of artists whose work challenged contemporary assumptions about art to those in the mainstream. So fully are spatial metaphors integrated into our thought processes that it becomes really hard to talk or write without using them, often unconsciously--think of the literal meanings of most of our prepositions, for example.

And maybe that is why most non-geographical maps fail. We are already so used to thinking of ideas in spatial terms that their spatial representation doesn't really tell us anything new. Or maybe it's because, unlike geography, the relations between ideas are always shifting, and more than that, are rarely the same for any two thinkers. We have a set of (near-)universally agreed-upon conventions for gauging the physical relationship between things in the landscape, and a set of conventions for how to translate those measurements and assessments into graphical forms on a page. But there is, of yet, no agreed upon way of experiencing or expressing the relations between ideas. How far apart are Derrida and Kierkegaard? How do I get from "cheese" to "elevator shaft"?

Such maps may be useful, in their way--I'm not arguing against that. But, to borrow Steinberg's language, they don't ultimately reveal much about their topic. Some time ago, a map of "Weblogs -- Left to Right" was passed around. I don't know exactly wat the map was based on, but it doesn't tell us much about the blogs included. What does it mean that blog "a" is closer to blog "b" than it is to blog "c"? What do "right" and "left" mean in this kind of arrangement? Despite the name, "WEblogs -- Left to Right", the center is--as in most maps--what is really important. Maps of the world almost always have the country in which they are designed at the center (hence all the awkward placements of Alaska and the Soviet Union you remember from the wall atlas in grade school). The center of the map is a sort of position of privilege, telling us much more about the makers of the map than about the relation of whatever happens to occupy that place to the rest of the "world" being mapped.

I don't want to suggest that these maps are useless--but they do fail to do all that we might expect them to do. Sometimes they highlight interesting relations between ideas we might not have thought of as related (though just as often, if not moreso, they fail to reflect relations that are clearly there). They can be a useful step in attacking a problem--but are all too often presented as an end-product in their own right. Finally, given the way we think, I'm not all that sure that they can be avoided. Mapping seems to be the prefferred way of thinking about and representing data of all sorts, at least in Western culture. Ultimately, I have to ask, what better choices do we have?