Abstract
L ACAN REMINDS US that maps must talk, while Baudrillard alerts us to the motivation behind this talking. In the Middle Ages, English cartographers felt justified in drawing their mappae mundi from what looks like a polar perspective, with Jerusalem in the center, and the land masses of Europe, Asia, and Africa arranged more or less equally around it. In the nineteenth century, on the other hand, as political and economic perspectives had displaced religious ones, English maps of the world placed Europe in the center, with the Americas on the left and Asia on the right. In general, the Renaissance linear persective as a form of geographical description continues to serve most of our political needs. It generally reduces curvature to a single plane and avoids discontinuities. One tool for understanding-and hence for participating in-the concept of a United States is a map where 48 states appear as individual units distinguished by lines and by dif-
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