A Dream of the Perfect Map – Calvino’s Invisible Cities

The cartographer’s dream is that of a perfect map: a map that perfectly represents a territory, a dream of Divine knowledge; a map that has haunted the ideology of representation throughout history; a map so detailed that it coincides with real space. In a short parable, ‘Museum, on Exactitude in Science’, Borges describes the mysterious gild of cartographers which charts such a map. Although Borges’ narrative finishes with a nostalgic conclusion about a superfluous and forgotten discipline, the cartographer’s dream of a perfect map has never ceased: it has merely varied throughout history. For medieval cartographers the perfect map included the physical cosmos and the spiritual one. In Dante’s time the European ‘mappa mundi’ depicted one single landmass, the Northern Hemisphere, with Jerusalem in the middle and the world is variously shown as dominated or held by God. In the Psalter mappa mundi, which is surmounted by an illustration of the Last Judgement, God holds a little dark red ball, the size of a golf ball – the world. Its size reminds us of the world’s shrinkage due to the advancing technology of transport and communications of the 20th century. Borges’ mystical Aleph on the other hand contains the whole cosmos within its confines (no bigger than the globe held by God on the Hereford map). In a sense the Aleph is a goal of cartography, its theology. Instead of God’s gaze into the unknown distance (as on the Hereford map), Renaissance cartographers imagined the Ptolemaic human gaze looking down on the Earth. The cartographer’s ‘organ of sight’ began to shift from the inner eye of the soul to the physical eye of the body: the idea of the globe as a whole observed by a ‘roving human eye’ is connected to the Renaissance idea of perspectivism. In many respects Renaissance concepts of space laid the foundations for the Enlightenment project. Maps were stripped of spiritual space, of their angels and their monsters; cartographers were involved in the production of abstract and functional systems based on mathematically rigorous depiction. By conceiving space as abstract, homogenous and universal, perspectivism and mathematical mapping enabled the era of great discoveries and colonization. Since then, the world has become more and more enmeshed in different maps, in different spaces, including that without volume, a new immaterial space of digital being. By constantly increasing digital connections of one site with thousands of others, cyberspace branches out in many directions at once, creating a labyrinthine web. Its expansion parallels the latest theory of cosmology, of an ‘inflationary’ period, during which the whole cosmos swelled from a microscopic point smaller than a proton to the size of a grapefruit in a fraction of a second. Paradoxically, we live in an ambiguous spatial construction: on one hand there seems to be a perfect map of the Empire that covers the territory (modern science masters both micro and macro worlds ever more precisely); on the other hand social theory reflects an overwhelming disorientation and confusion, characteristics of an existence within ‘the ruins of the Map’. However, both premises of Borges’ parable appear to be confusing. The map that covers the territory would confuse a traveller: does one navigate the actual or the virtual? Is the perfect map that would be a substitute for reality possible? Do we live in the ‘Tattered Ruins of that Map’? Maybe the map does not mirror the real, but precedes the territory and opens new, as yet undiscovered spaces. Or, better still, we should invent new maps. Borges’ parable teems with many readings describing postmodern cartography’s attempt to map the territory, or reality, and at the same time show the impossibility of such an endeavour

Post-Mao new poetry and 'Occidentalism'

© Springer The definitive version may be found at www.springerlink.comIn their attempts to come to grips with the accelerated process of reform and globalization, Chinese intellectuals, poets, and critics have employed a discursive pracetied which could be called Occidentalism, the reverse of Said's well-known Orientalism. The purpose of this essay is to examine the manifestation of this change through the discursive practices employed by post-Mao new poets of the mid-1980s in relation to their projection of Western modern and postmodern thinking. In particular, I wish to focus on the Chinese poetic transformation of certain aspects of existentialism, Structuralist linguistics and the post-structural critique of language as implemented by these poets.Xianlin Son