Palimpsest

Abstract

Taking off from the recent volume Abysmal: A Critique of Cartographic Reason, I return once again to the power-filled question of how I understand how I understand. In that self-referential mood I set off on yet another search for the map-maker's primitives of fix-points, scales, and mappae. What I then find is that the fix-points turn into a set of questionable tautologies; that the scales struggle with the impossible translation between the singular I and the plural we; that the mappa of the taken-for-granted is a palimpsest in which decisive layers come from the early history of deductive reason, especially the introduction of the lettered diagram. Throughout, naming is the name of the game, the decisive instrument for making us so obedient and so predictable.