Thinking Outside the Bounding Box
November 3rd, 2010In his refreshingly multi-faceted project about the gradual evolution of what we now describe as “the public”, David Cayley dives into one pair of contributing factors that really caught my attention: the institutionalization, canonicalization and therefore social elevation of common vernacular tongues (like French and English) alongside the proliferation of popular cartography. The gist of the argument is that this combination of talking about talking and conceptualizing oneself as a member of a group defined by geography and language helped bring about the idea of self conscious human agency, belonging, and citizenship, providing a new affiliation infrastructure in place of the officially defunct system of monastic and parish based guilds.
I see the shadow of a similar change happening within the current world of Geography related to the contentious neologism “Neogeography” and all the agnostic advances and changes taking place under this monicker of ill repute. In the above mentioned episode there is a story about Joachim De Bellay and his poetry gang’s manifesto on renovating the shabby provincial French language into something capable of expressing grand poetic vision. In this manifesto (Défense et illustration de la langue française) a relatively new term “patrie” (fatherland) is heavily used and advocated but the entrenched defenders of the status quo retaliated with the sentiment, “Those of us with a country (pays) have no need for your fatherland (patrie).” Perhaps the recent deletion of Wikipedia’s page on Neogeography should be taken as a similar expression of defensive self preservation by a status quo uninterested in the elevation and expansion of location based practice? “Those of us with Geography have no need for your Neogeography.”
Part of the idea behind this French linguistic renovation was that a dualistic relationship to the language needed to be in place for it to be more fully understood, analyzed, and exploitable. The language had to be spoken and dissected, internalized and externalized. This could only be achieved if the language was made foreign again, self alienated, reread. I suspect the new organic world of the Neogeographic vernacular will likewise play a role in the rebirth of spatial expression into a form more capable of elegantly handling the increasing complexity of interaction between people, places, things, ideas, and time.
Viva la Neogeography! Shoutouts to @schuyler for getting that page back up, @ajturner and @dianneisnor for their prolific and glamorous use of the term and all the others involved in thinking outside the bounding box!
