Among the most memorable features of Harley’s writing is his fondness for words like all, every, no, never, inherent, quintessential, universal, ubiquity, and rule. Thus it is not just some but all maps that include a hidden component of symbols, ideas, and even fictions transcending what is merely physical or technical. In another dimension of generality, it is not just some particular place that these ideas relate to but the whole world and indeed the whole universe. Similarly, all maps are social, presumably in that they concern people in groups rather than as individuals; they als all political, presumably in the sense that they are social on a scale at which government institution can be expected to recognize their existence in some way. Another universal characteristic of cartography is not only to express social and political conflicts but also to take sides in them: thus every map is also ideological, deploying thoughts ans weapons in a confrontation which itself arises from essentially nonintellectual causes. And of course every map is rhetorical.
The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography
Introduction
Meaning, Knowledge, and Power in the Map Philosophy of J. B. Harley
by J. H. Andrews
Text and Context
John Brian Harley
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Brian_Harley
John Brian Harley (1932 – 1991) was a geographer, cartographer, and map historian at the universities of Birmingham, Liverpool, Exeter and Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He helped found the History of Cartography Project and is the founding co-editor of the resulting The History of Cartography. In recent years, Harley’s work has gained broad prominence among geographers and social theorists, and it has contributed greatly to the emerging discipline of critical cartography.
Alan K. Henrikson
https://kushima38.kagoyacloud.com/?p=1255
“There is no such thing as empty space on a map.” This declaration, though exaggerated, indicates Harley’s view that the “silences” on maps, as he distinctively termed them, could be as meaningful as the geographical and other data actually drawn or written on them. “Assuming the world to be a place where human choice is exercised,” Harley contended, “the absence of something must be seen to be as worthy of historical investigation as is its presence. So it is with cartography”.
Harley’s interest was in the stories that maps do not tell. His interest grew out of his encyclopedic knowledge of cartographic history and his extensive and eclectic reading in subjects outside the field, including postmodernist literary criticism and social theory.