[...] method
from a half-named sense of the unknown
absolute quest of power
with
in our exhibition, we are working the gridded/allegorized cartographic discourse/consciousness through appeal to spatial rhetoric
(reworking) the new form of a self-produced “geography” of writing (emerging in 16th century)
-we are perhaps inclined with the figure of Rhizome (from Deleuze and Guattari), the unifying lines and connections that produce an image of...
-schizoanalytic cartographies, Guattari on
-we say (in our work with Olearius)
...an attempt to create in an ever recurring, mobile, and modular structures that endow themselves with renewed form
plastic and lexical attributes
confused pictorial and lexical properties
pictogram is mobile, it moves between one register of cognition and another, it resembles the rebus
pictogram mobilizes wit
-a pictogram attached to the place that it both represents and remotivates
fragments of remembered writing
the labor of interpretation consists exactly in opening onto surprise
ideograms, mimetic figures, miming the objects
that disrupts and affirms the sate of things
a stenographic form that telescopes language and extends into space as it signals a point where memory and national identity are being schematized
a childhood experience
the subject uses the illusion of a given spatial and historical order to create an imaginary world of impressions that tie his or her body to a mobility of space and place
signature, affixed to the edges in the spandrels between a map and its borders, is both ungrounded and necessary
authenticating effect
a sense of self-distance and power are obtained in the enactment of a signature
Conley argues that
statecraft
(Iran, Germany, Princess Bubblegum from Adventure Times)
-Princess Bubblegum naturalized story
Princess Bubblegum
the cartographers create a “cultural entity” that, it is claimed, is only represented in the maps
(also) “it becomes increasingly difficult to find a stable signified to which the whole thesaurus of exotic signifiers may be referred”
topophilia
(i have been trying to reverse the movement of) transition from cosmography to topography
cartographic truth
motivation and demotivation of proper names and their implied referents
Allegories of the Continent
The syllables wound through our lives, threading together by force of repetition things that were distant, discontinuous and unreal. Living stone. This is how empire makes the world meaningful to its subjects, how it weaves itself into the everyday.
...empire made us part of a history that was somewhere else made by people who were not us. At the same time, when it came to Africa, we knew who we were. Sunday school missionary stories built the color line into our imaginations. That was part of their job, to create us as subjects of empire, give us our place in the order.
The book aims to be both a study in genre and a critique of ideology. Its predominant theme is how travel books written by Europeans about non-European parts of the world created the imperial order for Europeans “at home” and gave them their place in it. I ask how travel writing made imperial expansion meaningful and desirable to the citizenries of the imperial countries, even though the material benefits of empire accrued mainly to the few. Travel books, I argue, gave European reading publics a sense of ownership, entitlement and familiarity with respect to the distant parts of the world that were being explored, invaded, invested in, and colonized. Travel books were very popular. They created a sense of curiosity, excitement, adventure, and even moral fervor about European expansionism. They were, I argue, one of the key instruments that made people “at home” in Europe feel part of a planetary project; a key instrument, in other words, in creating the “domestic subject” of empire.
the rise of natural history
codifications of reality
the emanating glow of the civilizing mission
the cash flow of development
(it habitually [...]