Analogue maps to mini-map

Map theorist Christian Jacob has argued that the distributed compositional conventions of analogue maps produce a de-centred, mobile and disembodied gaze that destabilises the contingencies of the map reader’s physical positioning. The compositional place – or lack of – of the individual on the analogue map and the turn towards the centring and tracking of the maps user in GPS is a key change in contemporary cartography that must be mapped here to make sense of how the in-game cartography of competitive online FPS games shapes the player in new ways. For Jacob, analogue maps represent a situation in which:

The individual no longer has a place of his or her own; his or her identity is dissolved in the infinitely small, in the invisible, in contrast to the immensity of the continent. The individual vanishes into the collective, national, ethnic, and geographical entity. It is as if the individual were entirely in his or her panoptic or overlooking eye, outside the map, strangely detached from the contingencies of this world, as if the gaze on the world map no longer required a localized point of view, no longer had a centre. (2006: 338)

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In an implicit contrast with renaissance perspectival regimes of subject positioning (see Baudry 1974, Friedberg 2009, Panofsky 1997, Kubovy 1986), Jacob suggests the distributed composition of the map means that the map reader adopts a perspective that operates not by projecting the gaze into the centre of the three-dimensional space of the image, but by mobilising it. The map reader’s look meanders across the surface of the map’s abstracted geography, losing a sense of embodied place. For Jacob, freeing the gaze from the context of embodied visual perception as well as from contesting visual regimes of linear perspective also represents a release from the map user’s status as an individual, producing a deterritorialisation of the body.

This psychological transcendence of the individual creates a cartographic space for the

imagination to roam, as it lacks a centre or body with which to identify. In turn, the production of an incorporeal and mobile gaze raises the possibility of a form of reflection or nomadism.

Implicit in the act of reading an analogue map is the potential to put into play a mobile politics of location capable of resisting the rigid regimes of positionality such as that articulated by Harley’s notion of a ‘freezing of social relations’ (Harley 2001: 79). Kingsbury and Jones (2008) have argued for the Nietzschean ‘Dionysian’ vision of Google Earth in this vein, suggesting a connection between GPS-enabled cartography and a form of playful mobility in which the loss of individual subject positioning noted by Jacob relates to a form of free-floating identity

associated with Deleuzian nomadism. Therefore, Google Earth is not understood in terms of the gaze, or identity but as productive of an indeterminate meandering without route-finding or destinations, an ‘in-between [that]...has taken all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and a direction of its own’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 308).

However, the Jacob quote above also suggests this capacity for the map user to become

decoupled from their embodied position and lose their sense of individuality is not an end-point.

Rather, it is an opening to a colonisation of an ‘individual [that] vanishes into the collective, national, ethnic, and geographical entity’ (2006: 338). There is a politically motivated dialectic of mobility and fixity in analogue cartography’s subjectifying powers. The lack of a compositional centre results in a transcendent mobility attaching the gaze and psyche to forms of collective identification, like the borders of nation-states. Therefore, cartographic disembodiment is the opening for a form of transcendental identification, where distributed conventions of

composition produce the map user’s mobile gaze as the predicate for the projection into and

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alignment with political construction of the earth. When Baudrillard states that the ‘territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it’ (2004: 169), the power of the map to refashion the way that we imagine our geographic and political reality is underscored. However, what Jacob’s adoption of theories of gaze and identification suggests is that this production of the territory also makes the landscape commensurate with our sense of identity. In a context mediated by cartography, the map user no longer precedes the map, nor does their status as an individual survive it.

In terms of the FPS, the question that this mode of transcendent map reading raises is whether the mini-map also functions in a similar manner by contesting the affective and bodily dynamics operating to produce the individual in a state of gestural crisis. As the player moves along the Z-axis into the multiplayer map, the mini-map tracks their position on a two-dimensional plane across X and Y axes. In this way, it keeps the player in the centre so that it seems that the map orbits the player, much in the same manner as Google Maps tracks you as you navigate in the actual. The tendency to centre on the position of the map user and player represents a step-change in the compositional language of maps and must be accounted for when considering their power as images. The kind of transcendent and mobile gaze that dissolves the individual as described by Jacob seems very remote when you are playing a round of team deathmatch in Call of Duty or conquest in Battlefield. Instead, there is a fixing of the perspective upon the player that continually guides vision back to the centre of the image where the player’s cartographic avatar is situated. Instead of being dissolved, what appears to be happening here is a visual fixation of the map upon the individual, who is rendered as a cartographic symbol. Here,

‘accurate’ cartographic authority transitions from a symbolic production of territories to the creation of a cartographic symbol that represents the player’s presence in the game, a kind of symbolic avatar.

Therefore, the composition of the mini-map, rather than unmooring the gaze and producing an opening for identification with the politically shaped territories of the map, captures and redirects it to a cartographic representation of the player. Whatever the transcendent qualities of the cartographic gaze, here there is an equally powerful tendency towards feeding the player an image of themselves that is defined by immanence. Google Maps and the FPS’s mini-map seek to imagine the body as their primary territory.

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