Christian Abrahamsson and Martin Gren (eds) GO: On the Geographies of Gunnar Olsson, Ashgate, Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT, 2012, 412 pages, 26 illustrations. £ 58.50, hardback, ISBN: 978-14-09412-37-3.

See Jeremy Crampton's most recent Society & Space contributions: Being Ontological: Response to “Postructuralism and GIS: Is There a ‘Disconnect’?”, Being Ontological: Response to “Postructuralism and GIS: Is There a ‘Disconnect’?” and The Risks of Security

This book, appropriately enough, offers a linguistic challenge. Which preposition is correct: is this a book on, by, for, or toward Gunnar Olsson? Is it amidst, between or outside him? As these most spatial of relational words suggest, there are a variety of ways of conceiving of the work of Gunnar Olsson, but no single way of summing it up. As we shall see, prepositions will reappear in his work.

Structurally, the book is a dialogue; an approach the two editors take in the book’s "Preamble" in which they enter into a conversation with each other. A dialogue presupposes a relationship, a simultaneous separation and connection: "an existence in the limit between Buber’s I and thou," as Abrahamsson says (page 3). Following a very thoughtful and useful introduction by co-editor Gren, the book reprints works from Olsson interleaved with contributions from other writers, reflecting upon, or engaging with Olsson’s work. Some, but not all: the deaths of Allan Pred and Peter Gould precluded their involvement in the project (Gould for one was a frequent epistler, and I wonder if some of that could have been included here).

There are four sections: "Equal Signs," "Chiasms," "Maps," and "Cartographic(al) Reason." Before these begin however, Gren offers an extended ‘mapping’ of Olsson’s contributions. It is a critique but not a criticism (the editors worry they’ve been too easy on Olsson, probably correctly), but it is an immensely useful one, at once both generous and insightful. Like any map it is partial to its own interests. Gren provides an overview of Olsson’s career, starting with his arrival at Uppsala University in 1957 to his emeritus status in 2000 and beyond. Early on, Olsson was a member of the so-called "space cadets,"—a "general in the Regiment of  Quantitative Geography," as Michael Dear says in Chapter 6 (page 91). His dissertation was on spatial interaction models and a 1967 piece from his time at Michigan is included as Chapter 3. But problems quickly arose; if it was possible to map (represent) human behavior, Olsson found it increasingly problematic to infer human behavior from its representation (the so-called "inference problem"). This issue of course is at the heart of the rethinking that was to take place in geography and cartography in the 1980s, but already appeared in nascent form to Olsson as the problem of cartographical reason (a phrase he took from Franco Farinelli, whose piece concludes the book).

Swedish "social engineering" (page 10) of the 1960s and 70s, which relied on this inference from model to predictive behavior, was debilitating for Olsson. As Björk ruefully sings, "I thought I could organize freedom/How Scandinavian of me!" The spatial models served only to fix inequalities, rather than treat them. As Michael J. Watts remarks (Chapter 10), social engineering was a "tragedy in the guise of social democracy" (page 147). Some of these doubts appeared in the nascent journal Antipode in 1974 (Chapter 7), and are discussed in more depth by Tom Mels in Chapter 8, and by Olsson himself in an interview with Trevor Barnes in Chapter 16. During Olsson’s time at Michigan (1966-1977) his concerns increasingly turned to language and representation, rather than space per se. Gren offers a good way to understand Olsson’s position; he neither accepted "modern certainty [nor] … postmodern ambiguity" (page 12), but rather tried to occupy the position of the "excluded middle."

The net of language speaks of itself; it is self-referent. Gren tells of meeting Olsson for the first time at his home in 1989 as a student; looking at him through half-closed eyes, Olsson asks him "Do you know what self-reference is?" (page 4). Olsson took up this insight in his "Chiasm of thought-and-action" (Chapter 13 here, originally published in 1993). This is a difficult piece that attracted critiques  for offering a patriarchal vision of a world "stilled by symbolicism" (Sparke, 1994: 207; see also discussion in Jansson, Chapter 12). If language speaks of itself, Olsson argues, then it is doubled. Gren characterizes the problem of thought-and-action as two different ontological realms, the physical and the mental. Braided through them are two epistemologies. Olsson’s 2007 book, Abysmal, alludes to this in its title, i.e. abyss-mal "a thin, and not neutral, permeable abyss" between language and world (page 14), which separates and connects, like the divided and bridged halves of the brain. Olsson also plays with other images, a mandala, an eye, pyramids, and of course the "Saussarian Bar." Olsson signs his first name in the form of a little face that makes up the eyes and nose with the marks “-/-”. Thus Olsson’s mise en abyme (literally, "placed into abyss."

Working with his former student Ole Michael Jensen under the assumed name "Gunnael Jensson" he concluded Abysmal with a series of photographs of "Mappa Mundi Universalis," an art installation the two performed in 2000 (see Chapter 20) which brought "some of the best moments of my life" (Olsson, 2007: 411). Central to this exhibition is a glass pyramid mounted on Kalmar granite, and containing a series of lines (crossing, but not intersecting; Doel makes much of this in his chapter "Double crossed"). Jensen and Olsson label these in complex ways that draw on the themes of that book, and lead us to the following "Revelation":

In the practice of cartographical reason, man is once again put back at the center of the universe. No longer a noun, not even a verb. A pre-position, a place assumed in advance! (page 329). Jensen provides an updated account of the crystal palace of the pyramid in Chapter 22. Olsson is here grappling with issues that have attracted many others. Along one axis identity, along another, difference, and along the third, intentionality or desire. As he argues in Abysmal, "In deed I take prepositions (literally pre-positions) to be the most power-filled and most culture dependent parts of speech, impossible to master in a foreign language" (pages 442-43). For Olsson, he is "bumping his head on the ceiling of language" (Olsson, 1979) as it were, and his work cannot therefore be easily mapped onto any particular approach (although, as here with Wittgenstein, various inspirations are apparent). Where the lines cross, the limits of the possibilities of human living are brought together, especially as provided by the Prison House of Language. As Doel remarks, "[f]or Olsson, then, the wor(l)d is not “out there”—awaiting Human discovery and meaningful expression—but “in here”’ (page 367). Olsson is thus trying to derive ontology, or, in Heidegger’s words, an "ontological difference" between beings and being as such.

In 1977, as the Michigan geography department was  being closed down, Olsson returned to Sweden, taking up a position at Nordplan. Watts, recalling this time in his contribution, calls this closure an act of "abiding shame" (page 146) to the university and says he refused to speak there for two decades afterward. He describes an Olsson lecture there:

He paced rather like a caged panther in a zoo: he gestured and pondered. It often felt like being taken on a deep dive: oxygen was depleted, we became light-headed, suffocation seemed to approach … Always a performance, but also a sermon (page 149).

Before he arrived in Sweden he "made a slow farewell tour back to Sweden" (page 245) during which the young Trevor Barnes heard him speak in London (Chapter 16). Here again he paced ‘like some caged animal’ but the pacing had a point: "he was performing the various tensions in life itself" (page 245).

Over the next five years Olsson published two books that were to prove influential in many ways, not least on my own thinking. I encountered the second of these first, namely A Search for Common Ground, co-edited with Peter Gould (Gould and Olsson, 1982). My undergraduate tutor at the time had received the book one morning in his capacity as a book review editor, and showed us, not without some incredulity, Olsson’s essay “-/-” (see Chapter 9 here). As it was clear we were being warned off, I did what anyone would do, and got the book out of the library as soon as it came in. It is still a remarkable essay, thirty years later—another performance. The book itself, however, was equally remarkable, particularly the spirit of dialogue it evoked (it was, as I recall, based on meetings held at Santa Barbara; see Reg Golledge’s brief personal reminiscences in Chapter 4). The second was the edited book with Stephen Gale (also an alumnus of Michigan) (Gale and Olsson, 1979).

Gren identifies the 1980s as the period when Olsson turned explicitly to his latest shaping of his enquiries, making up Section Four of the current book. This is the critique of cartographic reason. Again, although this was much in the air in the 1980s (Brian Harley, David Ley, John Pickles) as geographers took their cultural turn, Olsson’s own approach was always at a certain angle. Michael Dear’s contribution, in which it is clear how much he admires his friend, nevertheless notes that Olsson "has lost some of his bearings" and perhaps entered a "self-willed exile" (page 98). And it is true that Olsson’s critiques of cartographical reason have not made much headway in critical cartography and GIS (and vice versa). This is a loss. At first sight, it is not easy to envisage on what ground they could meet. Compare for example, pages 200-1 of the current book, which is a reproduction of his 1993 article "Chiasm of thought-and-action" with the recent "rethinking of maps" as "ontogenetic" (Kitchin and Dodge, 2007). The Joycean exuberance of Olsson’s paper, leavened with Saussurian semiology and the Moebius circuit of sign/signifier/signified seems too ambiguous to be appropriated. For Kitchin and Dodge on the other hand, maps barely exist, they have no ontological security, and are "fleeting" and "brought into existence" by practice. What matters are not maps (or rather maps as representations), but mapping (indeed maps are mappings):

Maps rather are understood as always in a state of becoming; as always mapping; as simultaneously being produced and consumed, authored and read, designed and used, serving as representation and practice (Kitchin, Perkins and Dodge, 2008: 17).

Yet there could be a fruitful dialog here. Olsson would not insist, I take it, on the static map, even if he does not employ the language of practice, mobility, et al. Gren’s introductory chapter invites us to see Olsson’s critique of cartographic reason as a spiral that can bend back on itself, as a mission to map human territory but that eventually comes back in new ways on its original form, only to change it. The reader may well agree with Watts in identifying "a paradox at the heart of Olsson’s teaching … he is an utterly compelling and a commanding presence but I sometimes understood almost nothing …" But it is this paradox that is the "Hegelian point" (pages 149-50). By opening up a dialectical engagement with this ungraspable Olsson could move forward.

Both Jansson and Philo pick up on this impossible reason, like the trickster who is just crazy enough to tell the truth (think of the Fool in Lear) (Jansson in Chapter 12). Philo (Chapter 19) suggests that Olsson is a practitioner of Deleuze and Guattari’s "schizoanalysis" in the sense that Olsson is "searching for another language" (page 289). Olsson’s experiments to step beyond limits risk madness, either being (labeled as) mad, and/or making room for madness in his own work, Philo argues. Are there productive possibilities that are enabled by a deliberate lostness, of being dislocated? If so, as Philo carefully notes, "placelessness is truly terrifying" (page 302) and we may need to re-anchor and to "re-place [ourselves] materially and (all being well) psychologically in the everyday world of [our] 'fellow citizens’" (page 302).

Olsson became emeritus in 2000, and it was perhaps this space that allowed him to produce Abysmal, a critique of cartographical reason. For Gren this critique plays out in two articulations. First, the earth is not just mapped but "translated and transformed" into maps. Second, these mapping impulses were extended to human thought-and-action (or existence) itself. For Farinelli, this means that history is the "concrete realization on the earth, in the city, of the order of the map, or pinax" (quoted on page 28). Farinelli has argued that it was only with the coming of the first map that Heidegger’s crucial "ontological difference" could be posed, that is, the difference between beings (entities, of which we may derive ontical knowledge) and being (of which we may derive knowledge of how entities can be known as entities) (Farinelli, 1998). Or to put it another way, the question of how the map will "frame" the territory:

These practicing geographers [such as Kant and Wittgenstein] were all involved in making boundaries and making demarcations, especially between the intelligible and the sensible, the real and the imaginary, or that which belongs to the humans and that utterly different which lies outside (page 29).

For Gren, perhaps alluding obliquely to Baudrillard, this means that the map "preceded the territory" (page 28); this does not mean that the map bears no relation to the territory, but rather that we already have an understanding, a rationality, that allows, forbids (but doesn’t require) our way of being. For Doel, the key moment in Abysmal is when Olsson faces up to the impossibility of this task, knowing that he must work within an incomplete system, the Prison House of Language or Saussurean Bar (signifier/signified). We cannot have one without the other, just as we cannot have identity without difference.

A critique of cartographic reason obviously plays on Kant’s critiques of pure, practical and judgmental reason (Farinelli’s contribution to this book is about Kant, and in fact does not mention Olsson). All that is needed for this are three steps; a point, a line "better known as a scale or coordinate net" and a plane onto which the picture may be projected (Olsson, 2007: 126). These are incomplete however because they have no content (or data as a GIS practitioner would say), thus we need to bring in the signified to  the Bar. This is the "taken-for-granted" or our sense of culture. Thus what comes into sight as taken-for-granted is cartographical reason itself (page 33), which again will need a critique "of what it means to understand what it means to be human" (page 35).

This is an enjoyable book and a good introduction to Olsson’s work, without perhaps ever claiming to "capture" it. 

References

Farinelli F (1998) Did Anaximander ever say (or write) any words? The nature of cartographical reason. Philosophy and Geography 1(2): 135-44.

Gale S and Olsson G (1979) Philosophy in Geography. Dordrecht, Boston, D. Reidel Pub. Co.

Gould P and Olsson G (1982) A Search for Common Ground. London: Pion.

Kitchin R and Dodge M (2007) Rethinking maps. Progress in Human Geography 31(3): 331-44.

Kitchin R, Perkins C and Dodge M (2008) Thinking about map. In: Dodge M, Kitchin R, and Perkins C (eds) Rethinking Maps. New Frontiers in Cartographic Theory. New York: Routledge, pp 1-25.

Olsson G (1979) Social science and human action or on hitting your head against the ceiling of language. In: Gale S and Olsson G (eds) Philosophy in Geography. Dordrech: Reidel, pp 287-307.

Olsson G (2002) Glimpses. In: Gould P and Pitts FR (eds) Geographical Voices, Fourteen Autobiographical Essays. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, pp 237-68.

Olsson G (2007) Abysmal: A Critique of Cartographic Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sparke M (1994) Escaping the herbarium: a critique of Gunnar Olsson’s ‘Chiasm of thought-andaction’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 12(2): 207-