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2019, Society & Space
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10 pages
1 file
AI-generated Abstract
This essay explores the evolving relationship between territorial sovereignty and the representations of space through visual campaigns by Japan and China. Analyzing the implications of maps and emerging technologies, it argues that traditional cartography is becoming obsolete as new human-machine assemblages redefine sovereignty, leading to a geopolitical landscape where the human element increasingly fades in significance. The dynamic concept of murmuration exemplifies the complexity and transformation of territorial control in the context of advanced computational technologies.
From the Mercator projection to GPS, maps structure our lived experience as much as they reflect "objective" representations of our surroundings. This seminar examines the geopolitical formations of and within Asia through the history of cartography from the seventeenth century to the present. In exploring both inland and maritime frontiers, we analyze how this technology has sought to exert scientific hegemony over alternate conceptions of space in Asian contexts in order to legitimize state power, be it imperialist, nationalist, or globalist. In so doing, we trace the deep history of contemporary border disputes on land and at sea. "Maps, Territory, and Power" satisfies the College's "International Perspectives" requirement because it considers the technology of cartography as a way to visualize the globe and as a way to construct "universal" claims to knowledge. It offers alternate possibilities of representing space and place through case studies from South and East Asia in particular. Along with broadening your intellectual horizons, this course will contribute to your education at Bowdoin by giving you the opportunity to: • Think about history-to appreciate the importance of change, continuity, causality, contingency, and context • Do history-to undertake original research, amass evidence, parse texts, and interrogate your sources • Tell history-to craft narratives that grapple with significant historical questions, advance a compelling argument, critique alternate viewpoints and theories, and present powerful conclusions to explain the past. MAJOR TEXTS The following books are also available electronically. All other texts have been uploaded to Blackboard.
APBR, 2020
Asia Pacific Business Review, 2019
Water International, 2014
National interest, enhancing the nation's wealth and welfare, and fostering development are factors cited for the awareness of the need of accurate and detailed topographic maps. These aspects are clearly spelt out in China's Law No. 75 of 2002. An overview of the status of mapping in China in the context of overall management of its trans-boundary rivers is presented. Public access to these graphics is restricted in this regional context; they are available only to bona fide users. The importance of maps in the context of the trans-boundary water discourse is discussed.
IIAS Newsletter 84, 2019
Edited section of the IIAS Newsletter 84. With contributions by Mario Cams (At the borders of Qing imperial cartography), Qin Ying (Mapping borders in times of uncertainty), Stephen Davies (Maritime maps as painted screens), and Gu Songjie (Mapping Manchuria. A brief study of the Territorial Map of Military Deeds in Shengjing, Jilin, and Heilongjiang). https://www.iias.asia/the-newsletter/article/china-connections-nl84
This article takes a look back at the historical and philosophical context of the International Map of the World, humans' first attempt at mapping the entire surface of the earth in detail on a uniform scale. Albrect Penck's initial idea for a thoroughly detailed topographic map of the world, proposed at Fifth International Geographical Conference in 1891 and securing the support, both symbolic and financial, of many of the world's governments by the first decades of the twentieth century, consisted of a uniform series of hypsometrically-colored topographical maps overlaid with human data (urbanized areas, railroads, and other infrastructure, primarily) and dividing the world into consistently-scaled quadrangles. Envisoned by some geographers and cartographers as a component of the peace, both following both the First and then the Second World War, the project would come to be administered by international and non-governmental organizations by midcentury, as primary governmental support for cartography at that time increasingly reflected territorial interests and claims over and above those in favor of employing concepts of geographical knowledge that were not explicitly political or territorial. The slow demise of the project can be understood to signify the ultimate difficulty of a project that disacknowledged the fundamentality of politically constructed boundaries by employing another scale, in this case, a geometric scale with systematically geographical content, to frame its maps.
2019
This talk begins with remembering the 1970s movement in North America, Taiwan, and Hong Kong to protect the liminal islands between Okinawa, Taiwan, and China, called Diaoyutai in Chinese and Senkaku in Japanese. Like the South China Sea dispute, the Diaoyutai/Senkaku islands are one of the most controversial liminal spaces that locks in the secrets of geopolitics and national sovereignty. Remembering the controversy and the activism around it provides us with a unique perspective into the making of post/colonial geography and post/Cold War complications. While the Diaoyutai/Senkaku islands are often framed as a territorial dispute between Japan and China, the history of activism around them articulates a "liminal island chain" as the frontline of democracy that links Okinawa, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, all of which are victims of colonialism and the Westphalian system that are now shaking towards uncertain futures. Taking the liminal islands as zones of indecisive sovereignty, border economy, and policed spaces, this talk addresses how Okinawa, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, despite their obvious differences, when put together, may generate a set of debates on nationalism as colonialism in which liminality as both metaphor and reality compels us to explore alternative visions. At a time when nationalism loses its appeal as a unifier, and nativism aligns with populism, it may be time to reflect on the geographical imaginations of islands and their relationship to one another.
This inclusion of sea-space in Chinese and Japanese representations suggest an incipient move towards cartographic extensions of the nationʼs body to non-terrestrial volumetric spaces. These new visualizations speak to statesʼ technological capacity to colonize spaces that until recently were http://societyandspace.org/2019/04/09/murmuration/# beyond effective political control. In becoming colonizable and exploitable, maritime territory, airspace, and the subterranean have now become representable and relatable. But in addition to their primary function as territorial claims, these maps also seek to foster affective attachment to these more-than-human geographies. The national outline (or "logomap"), naturalized through socialization and formal education as well as constant reiterative visual practices, has been a powerful tool for modern states (Anderson 1991). As the primary visual representation of the nation-state, it has also been especially effective to impart an affective orientation toward a bodily sense of national belonging (see Billé 2014).
Just as the logomap is visually arresting but ultimately a political fiction, the nation-state as a clearly defined and delineated volume is also a convenient oversimplification. The ground, the maritime, the subterranean, and the aerial are deeply intermeshed rather than discrete worlds. They are also spaces of flux. As a number of scholars have pointed out, the air is a geography of atmospheric flows (Zee 2017), while the oceanic is a threedimensional space characterized by turbulent materiality (Steinberg and Peters 2015: 247-248). Even the subterranean, generally assumed to be the realm of the inorganic and the immobile is in fact, on its own timescale, restless and forever in motion. On account of this very materiality, the assemblages that are constituted in and athwart these spaces display a level of complexity and dynamism that makes them difficult to conceptualize visually. A pertinent example of this transscalar multimateriality is the so-called "great Pacific garbage patch"-a plastic vortex of flotsam and jetsam whose contents and boundaries defy both spatial definition and visibility.
In recognition of these planetary realities, military objectives have increasingly been to find new ways to address state security beyond human geographies and through technologies that would extend, indeed supersede, human capabilities. In many ways, these are not recent developments: as Packer and Reeves show (2017: 262), as early as the 1890s new forms of technical media, such as photography for instance, were already being mobilized to finetune the capacities of artillery and create superior weapons. In its ever-evolving search for technological superiority, the U.S. military is adopting modes of information, communication, and mobility that gradually require less and less human input.
Organizational models based on biological architectures are increasingly being explored-in particular models such as swarms that give precedence to autonomy, emergence, and distributed functioning. Comparing favorably with human cognitive intelligence, the swarm requires no planning, central representation, or traditional modeling. As media theorist Jussi Parikka explains, swarms are organizations that are continuously both on the verge of materialization and dissolution, both radically heterogeneous and consistent (Parikka 2010: 59). The swarm, a technological-entomological amalgam in which human modeling takes second place, continually learns and refines its performance:
The microdrones began to flock and swarm, mutually aware and clocked to such high frequencies that even the most sudden moves, the most aggressive pitch and yaw, were stretched out into a slow steadiness that yielded impossibly complex and graceful murmurations. Their autonomy became precise, their agency social and explicit (Arkenberg 2016). http://societyandspace.org/2019/04/09/murmuration/# Flight of the Starlings: Watch This Eerie but Beautiful Phenomenon | Sh… © National Geographic, a film by Jan van Ijken Initially, some guidance was required to steer the flocks of drones, but the system soon became sophisticated enough to require only minimal instructions. The microdrones were now able to "activate, take flight, flock and murmurate towards the objective, often staying autonomous for days, resting on rooftops and power lines for solar recharge" (Arkenberg 2016).
Increasingly, it is in more-than-human geographies that battles for territorial sovereignty are being waged. Political appropriation of the maritime, aerial, and subterranean realms demands cutting-edge and ever more sophisticated human-machine assemblages, and this finetuning is gradually leading to assemblages skewed in favor of the nonhuman. Unmanned aircrafts are lighter, can stay in the air for up to fifty hours at a time, and can "partake in high-altitude and high-speed missions that are impossible for human pilots to safely endure" (Packer and Reeves 2017: 270). In assemblages where technology initially was a prosthetic extension, the human component now constitutes the weakest node, increasingly superfluous and obsolete.
The widening breach between human experience and the new realities of territorial management and sovereignty has a direct incidence on the relationship between cartographic representations and the territory. The promissory role of cartography, so crucial in earlier colonial forays where the map routinely preceded the territory, has now lost much of its force. Static portrayals of the nation-state such as the logomap are poorly suited to reflect territorial realities, and indeed seem increasingly irrelevant in a (near) future dominated by AI where decisions will be made in a fraction of the time, computing thousands of variables. Rather than reframing the spatial parameters of the nation-state, then, what the Chinese and Japanese maps do is index a territorial imagination resolutely lagging behind new techniques of territorial control.
The spatial complexity and mesmerizing beauty of murmurationcontinually morphing, dissolving, and recomposing-cogently illustrate the limits of human comprehension when it comes to emerging forms of territorial control. Yet it is these novel and volumetric geographies-and particularly the planetary-scale computation which Benjamin Bratton terms "the Stack" (2015)-that are set to have the most dramatic impact on our geopolitical realities. As computations distort and deform modern political geographies, they produce new territories in their own image, ushering in new models of geopolitical architecture in their wake.
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