Looking Back
I sincerely never thought I would reach a point at which I not only felt gratified by my final map product, but also satisfied and enlightened by the process of mapping (or counter-mapping) my final Sandy project. Yet, here I am discovering some retrospective revelation in this whole process. I realized this semester that I am not necessarily a spatial thinker, certainly not a design thinker, and not really an “out of the box” thinker. So it was interesting to use a map to expand my previously conservative (inhibited) way of conceptualizing narrative through thematic arguments and connections to test out hypotheses.
Early in the semester my notes read “geography is not just a tool but a way of thinking” and I have realized great truth in that. The experience did help push me towards these new ways of thinking for which I am grateful, especially as I begin to imagine this as an installation piece for SXSW, (for which the next step is creating a paper prototype!)
In my final argument research I came across a few quotes that help me sum up my experience.
“We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein.”
(Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias, MICHEL FOUCAULT)
I think this is a very poetic way to think about the palimpsest that is time, history, story and memory. Maps as palimpsest can uniquely complicate and expose this simultaneity. And while it proved sometimes difficult to wrap my head around these seemingly contradictory juxtapositions of “data” points that are distinct yet enmeshed, autonomous and yet always contingent, ultimately there seems no other way to conceive of time and place. Collective memory make and haunt a place by creating a living history, as I discovered in my Map Critique of City of Memory and continued to explore in my own map.
Mapping has helped me imagine the fabric of our world today as comprised of all these tiny little fibers that collectively, relationally and discursively create place. Below is another quote that resonated with me as I came around to the place as palimpsest argument,
“The past has become part of the present in ways simply unimaginable in earlier centuries. As a result, temporal boundaries have weakened just as the experiential dimension of space has shrunk as a result of modern means of transportation and communication.
In times not so very long ago, the discourse of history was there to guarantee the relative stability of the past in its pastness…built urban space—replete with monuments and museums, palaces, public spaces, and government buildings—represented the material traces of the historical past in the present…One learned from history”
(Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory, Andreas Huyssen).
The quote recalls the discussion of temporality in the Drucker and Nowviskie article from earlier in the semester. The article compared absolute time with relational time, and explored the “discursive temporality” of time as something non-linear, not inevitable and actually quite subjective.
So much for the classic grade school “hamburger model”, I think I’ll be drawing up a post-it note prototype map before my next paper!