ABSTRACT
Part I: Archaeologies traces a new genealogy of poetic cartography, highlighting key epistemic moments, as opposed to a history of mapping that usually focuses on the modern period. This new genealogy starts from the ancient and medieval world (Anaximander, Marco Polo) and stretches to Romanticism, passing through the Baroque, to stress the differences in approach in each episteme. It will be shown how a history of cartography has to be considered in relation to a narrative of movement—a nomadic paradigm. This narrative component affects the aesthetics of mapping in an anti-geometricized and anti-formalist way. The experiential-subjective nature of wandering is at the core of ancient and new cartographic aesthetics.
Chapter 1 claims that maps and the “act of mapping” have the capacity to disrupt symbolic horizons concerning representations of space, constructing aesthetic, political, and subjective worldviews. The aim of this chapter is to lay the ground for an articulation of the differing spatial and subjective configurations that constitute modes of subjectivity (and intersubjectivity) based on the “geo-poetic imagination” and, more specifically, the cartographical imagination of mapping practices grounded in locality. A redefinition of mapping according to movement across space indicates the becoming-space of a narration that creates particular kinds of worldviews and subjectivities. Only a hermeneutic reorientation with respect to mapping and cartography can rescue them from their association with space as static in favor of space as a living place.
