HTS Tutor: Thiago Soveral
11/12/2020
Cartographic Permanence: A time based reading of the Nile and its representations
Ferial Massoud Year 3 Term 1
[fig 1] Map purporting to be the Nile’s exact flow (see title).
“Si je devais gouverner ce pays, pas une goutte d’eau ne se perdrait dans la mer.”*
- Napoléon Bonaparte, Egyptian Campaign, 1798 - 1801
*If I were to govern this country, not a drop would be lost at sea.
If anything, Napoleon’s words are a testament to an enduring concern
with hydropolitics. The 1798 occupation of Egypt which accompanied his
words places water at the core of his imperialist ambitions. Water was then,
as it is today, a colonised subject, one deemed crucial to fully grasp, analyse, map out, and control. The Nile contains the history of its subjugation in its representations: it is a subjugation begun on paper, in the map. Napoleon embarked on his Egyptian Campaign along with myriad cartographers, capturing the Nile in a frenzy. However, the maps produced during the expedition are but one instance of the Nile’s extensive mapping effort.
National archives attest to the Nile’s captivity, as maps abound from Roman times to today, in Italian, German, and French, Arabic, Turkish or English.
In each language, the Nile is imagined and produced in ink. Ultimately, the
needs of empires for the Nile were many, from a mode of transportation, to
producer of food for less fertile regions. Yet in all their inaccuracies, the maps rationalised the Nile, mythifying it through a strategic mode of discourse,
transforming it into a productive subject of the state. Looking through the
maps, I became interested in the rapprochement between the representation itself and the framework which produced them. The particular maps of the Nile produced by the French and the British in the 19th centuries indeed
point to a particular European context, one in which the age of Reason was
cementing its claim on thought, and producing a particular experience of the
world. Predicated on scientific advancement, it imposed a teleological reading of the world, favouring progress as driver of change. Rationality produced
a particular temporal framework which, I argue, can be read in these maps. What exactly is the nature of this temporality? By operating according to a specific cartesian logic, cartography reproduced its particular definition of
time, predicated on a rigid, underlying permanence. The colonial agenda of
the map, however, is made clear by the Nile itself: the constant shifting of the river’s can be read as a rebellion to the imposition of permanence. The Nile, instead, sets its own clock.
The particular cartesian framework of the Nile’s mapping served
to reengineer the river according to a specific temporality, a temporality
predicated on permanence. Indeed, in drawing itself, the map considers a
series of rational parameters, according to which to construct a “space on the
basis of a finite number of stable and isolatable elements.”1 On a fundamental level, the map creates a clean space, in direct opposition with the messiness of the Nile, eliminating the ecological links between a multiplicity of fluid elements. Instead, a series of clean objects with no overlaps are defined,
in the search for these rational parameters. Bergson describes this process of isolation and identification as the search for fundamental objects: “we
represent the changes of a material object as the movements of its parts, which do not change. And if these parts were to change, we would then fragment
those. We would break them down to atoms or then to even smaller entities,
pushing the division as far as necessary, to the point at which there is no more
change.”2 Therefore the analytical approach of the map reduces events to their
smallest indivisible entities, beyond which there is no more division possible, and therefore, no more change possible. Indeed, inherent to this series of
isolated objects is a temporal supposition: one in which change reaches a
limit. The process supposes a fundamental, stable, state. In the realm of the
map, underlying the constant changes of our world, there exists an absolute
permanence, manifest in the mapped objects, and tending towards the infinite. The map emerges out of this psychology of permanence: in selecting the
elements to represent, it organises the landscape according to a specific set of
entries, collected in the legend or the key of the map. The legend becomes the
marker of this permanence, representing a moment as fixed, imposing a “false appearance of stability.”3
Where does this process of decomposition stem from? The cartesian,
analytical framework depends on a rational understanding of the parts of the object under scrutiny. In this framework, the analysis therefore constructs
a particular, readable order of the world. Where Descartes writes “I think,
therefore I am,” he suggests that analysis precludes existence: being becomes a product of thinking. In the map, the object under study, the Nile, is
similarly constructed through analysis. A gap lies between this constructed
representation and the Nile as it stands, owing to the “fiction of knowledge”4 that an analytical framework helps write. Indeed, the very methods of
analytical enquiry shape the representation. Predicated on an ideal geometry, the map sets up an “analytic arrangement of space, […] the application of
1 Michel De Certeau, ‘Practices of Space’ in Blonksy, M. (ed.), On Signs, Baltimore: JHUP, 1985, P. 127. 2 Henri Bergson, L’Évolution Créatrice, Paris: Presse Universitaire de France, 1941, P. 8. 3 Laura Vaughn, Mapping Society: The Spatial Dimensions of Social Cartography, London: UCL Press, 2018, P. 8. 4 Michel De Certeau, 123.
physical measurement to the earth’s surface.”5 Indeed, in the 1890s, drawing
out the British cadastral maps of the Egyptian countryside, for example, relied on a method of triangulation, one whereby the entire country was “laid out on
a grid,” producing a range of “areal and linear distortions”6 as a result of faulty
astronomical observations of basic coordinates. As such, the Nile landscape was transformed into an analysed, rationalised territory, predicated on a
specific narrative, built according to a specific, ideal geometry. At its core, the fundamental being of the Nile on paper was but a product of this analytical impulse, the trendy era of Reason.
This redefinition of the Nile was by no means benign, nor was it
limited to the cartographic realm. In fact, in drawing out a new reading of
the Nile, a new reality was produced on the ground, one from which the Nile
emerged as rationalised, engineered entity. The analytical nature of the maps, born out of a scientific thirst for extraction and productivity, defined the Nile through its possibilities. The French Hydrological Maps of the 1888, were
speculations on future possibilities for an efficient riverine system, and served as starting point for the network of barrages and canals, drainage systems
and bureaucratic control that the British would help fine tune.7 The Nile was transformed from a live body, part of a synergistic system in which the ebbs
and flows of the river were navigated and negotiated by the populations along the river banks, to a controlled, centralised, body of water with an essentially
productive role. The system of canals developed throughout the 19th century,
[fig 3] The Dam as Stroke of Ink
as well as the the Aswan Dams, constructed upstream, at the doors to
Egypt, in 1898 and 1961, broke with past understandings of the Nile, which
instead became subject to the needs of the state. The dams allowed irrigation authorities to release water into the canals to respond to downstream needs,
but also for inter-year storage of water in Egypt. Water was then allocated on
an economic basis, the flood gates open or closed according to a logic of water management devised by the state and its debtors. Indeed, the reengineering
of the Nile had produced perennial cropping for cash crops for export. This required a new, accelerated, yet carefully dosed water rhythm, one which a series of state controlled levees and flood gates, could produce. The maps, in engineering the Nile valley into a manufactured geography, shifted the temporality of the river. Whereas its rhythm was previously born out of a particularly East African ecosystem, the construction of dams and canals
imposed a temporality calibrated to statist needs, to the rhythm of production of a capitalist food chain. Shifting the scale of control, the river could not
5 H.G., Lyons, The Cadastral Survey of Egypt, 1892-1907, Cairo: National Printing Department, 1908. 6 Karl Butzer, Early Hydraulic Civilization in Egypt: A Study in Cultural Ecology, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976, P. 50. 7 Nicholas Hopkins, ‘Irrigation in Contemporary Egypt’ in Rogan, E. (ed.), Agriculture in Egypt, From Pharaonic to Modern Times, London: British Academy, 1999.
The construction of the dams fundamentally transformed the hydrological system of the Nile Valley. In reducing the annual floods, the dam shifted control of the Nile’s flow to the state for more intensive, perennial irrigation, which allowed for year long cropping ultimately destined for export. Farmers were forced to abandon subsistance farming in favor of cash crop production. The relationship of riverine communities to the river was thus destroyed, in favor of a state globalising ambitions. The discrete line makes invisible the violence produced by the major engineering work.
escape this new definition, born out of a reductive map. As such, the map
becomes not a description of the Nile, but rather a speculation, responsible
for the formulation of an engineered network, predicated on the assumption of static permanence. In this framework, the Nile was nothing, if not a
rationalised network. Yet the failure of the irrigation projects, the depletion [fig. 2.1] Fragment from the Geological Map of Egypt
of the the soil’s fertility as a result of the dams,8 point to the fact that these
engineering works, and the maps out of which they emerged, were lacking.
Where to locate the error in the map? The different temporality
produced by the maps was manifest in the disconnect between the
representation and the reality on the ground. De Certeau indeed argues that
the map is incapable of recording the “immediacy of existence.” Only traces of past passage can be recorded, but the constant changes happening in the present moment exists beyond its representation. Instead, the action, such as the river’s flow, is “transposed into points that create a totalising and
reversible line on the map.”9 In an attempt to record events objectively, the
map therefore produces a particular sequencing, organises them according to a linear logic: the past, present, and future. Merleau-Ponty would even use
the analogy of the river, explaining that the map supposes transfer of a fixed
material: the elements come from somewhere to go somewhere, and in doing so remain whole. The represented elements shift in coordinates, within the [fig. 2.2] The legend as timeline
confines of the map, but remain objects of underlying permanence. Simply
they are “set in the non-time of a projective surface.”10 As such, the conditions
for permanence of objects emerge, both in the temporal linearity they produce, and in the totalising impulse, one in which from our high vantage point,
looking down onto the map, we can supposedly grasp the entire story of the landscape.
Instead of this temporal rigidity, the Nile exists in a constant state of
flux, recorded both in the geological landscape and in the architectural traces [fig. 2.3]
of its passage. What are the boundaries of the “Nile?” The riverine floodplain which for thousands of years characterised the valley acts as manifestation of the moveable landscape. Indeed, the annual flooding of the Nile covers
Overlapping territory and time: geological maps become timelines of construction of the landscape, as beds of rocks and sedimentation are spatially mapped in terms of the era of their formation. The legend becomes a fragmented reading a continuously evolving material.
its banks for several kilometres with layers of alluvial muds. Can those also be considered as elements of the “Nile?” The river exists as body of water
but also as its negative imprint. The layers of sedimentation, the movements of matter that the water provokes produce a rhythm of interdependence,
defined not as objects with defined boundaries, but as a system in constant
transformation. The Nile - its floodplains, its sedimentary deposits, its waters, 8 Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity, Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press, 2002, P. 44. 9 Michel De Certeau, 127. 10 Ibid, #123.
its salts, its bioclasts, exists only as continuous flux. The river system is part
of a temporality ill defined by the map, which cannot capture the complexity of the system in a few objects, in a legend, in an arrangement of lines. In so
doing, examining the Nile as relationships and motion, rather than through the limitations of the legend, produce other possibilities on the ground, different ways of living with the river.
What is the challenge the supremacy of cartographic time? De
Certeau proposes that the subjectivity of experience becomes a form of
resistance to the totalising map. He writes that “it displays three characteristics that immediately distinguish it from the spatial system: the present, the
discontinuous and the ‘phatic.’” While he formulates this argument for an urban context, proposing walking as reclamation of subjectivity, the point still holds. The immediacy of movement, the unplanned trajectory of the
Nile creates a “‘text’ they [or here, the water] write without reading.”11 The
constancy of change which characterises the Nile remains unrecorded in the map, yet, it exists in the unmapped. It relies not on the analytical, but rather
before it: the Nile cannot be “read.” It cannot be transposed onto a timeline, given its discontinuities, its mesh-like logic which evades linearity. The
interconnected network12 defies the analytical because it exists as a system
with parts impossible to isolate and define. As such, beyond the possibilities of the map, the Nile, in all the complexity of its shifting banks, waters,
sediments, and muds, holds the potential to defy time as we know it, and produce a difference sort of temporality.
Where does the map end? Beyond the limits of state control, it
loses interest in analysis of conditions on the ground. Despite the complex
[fig 3] Mapping the Cataracts
hydrological network of barrages, dams, canals, levees, constructed on paper in the last two centuries, the accuracy of representation abruptly ends in the place the people take over control of the water. One example is particular
telling of this breakage with the map: the network of canals developed out of the maps to divert the river for irrigation is organised into three levels. From
the main Nile channel, water is diverted by a set of levees into primary canals,
then into smaller, secondary canals, and from there into tertiary canals referred to as misqas. Misqas, the tertiary canals, are built according to specifications to supposedly limit over watering: levees control the arrival into the misqas,
which must also deliver water below field level as an incentive against overirrigation. However, while the first two levels of canals are state owned and
operated, the state’s control ends there. The misqas, from which the farmers
ultimately draw water, are not subject to similar state control. Not only that,
but they are never represented on the map. In evading the map, can they evade its temporal definition? Lifting systems were implemented to dispatch the
water to the fields from the misqa, and took the form of diesel pumps or water 11 12
Michel De Certeau, 124. Ibid, #124.
Elements in the map’s legend exist as isolated moments in the landscape, defined objects which exist outside of time, outside of the network of events and materials which shape them. In describing them as such, the map creates a fiction of permanence, inscribing these moments into an infinite landscape.
wheels, among other less used methods. This moment of lifting is critical in the riverine system: existing beyond the map, it participates in the creation
of specific social organisation elaborated in those localities. Unmapped, and
therefore, unaccredited for by the state or “formalising” authorities, the misqa and its necessary lifting points are the place where the farmers regain control over the landscape. Challenging the temporality of the map, they create one based on subjectivity. [fig 3.1] Speculative Engineering
The act of lifting and the social organisation it requires produces
a specific temporality, calibrated to local time. Indeed, the flow of water
permitted in the misqa is divided amongst its users, according to the plots of
land along the canal. The volume of water, however, is understood according to ‘time.’ Indeed, each farmer is attributed a time-share in the flow, allowing
them to lift water from the misqa using water pumps, and into their field. The 10,080 minutes week is divided according to the number of feddans.13 This determines the weekly period of time each farmer is entitled to. Variations
exist, considering elements such as the type of crop, season or crop stage. The irrigation week begins at dusk prayer on Friday. All the farmers on one misqa set their clocks to that call, and the week’s irrigation can begin. Time can be further subdivided or reshuffled. Indeed, farmers can form irrigation units,
which collect the number of minutes attributed to each field and redivide water [fig 3.2] Site of Speculation
access among them, based on their needs. Time therefore takes on a radically different meaning: from a set system to which one must calibrate one’s life, it becomes malleable, exchangeable. The rhythm of the crop becomes the calibrator, to which the minutes of the clock can be adjusted. Minutes are
reduced to a transactional good, which does not regulate but rather translates a need, a measure of volume. It gains monetary value as it loses its intrinsic value. However, while the importance of this new relationship to time
should not be underestimated, more important is to flesh out the underlying The map produces territory beyond the confines of the drafting table: in the legend, full engineering projects become possibilities. Here, the Gebel Gileily Canal project appears as a proposal. The map has drawn out the conditions of its possibilities, ignoring to represent the potential harm such a canal might cause. Instead, the map produces a smooth, total landscape, ready for manipulation.
relationship to time that emerges from this system. In manipulating the
standard of time as they do, corrupting its meaning, time loses its purported objectivity, its layering capacities. Instead, time, deconstructed, distorted, becomes the subject of local needs. Unmapped, it is radically redefined,
stretched, compressed, calibrated, according to local subjectivities. Time as universal consensus loses all meaning.
The subjectivity of the unmapped, or the unmappable defined by de
Certeau, therefore finds its realisation in the misqa. Indeed, the canal and its
modes of operation exist beyond the totalising map. Instead, it is an immediate experience, manifest in the constant negotiation of the water and its lifting
points. The constancy of change, to accommodate different crops, different
needs by various farmers, different water levels, exists as a challenge to the
map, and the fundamental permanence it relies on. In stark contrast with the 13
The unit of measure of land in Egypt.
analytical nature of the maps, which freeze time to produce a static reality, the unmapped segments of the Nile produce a different understanding of time. In both, time is embedded in meaning, yet time’s principle characteristics change: instead of permanence and linearity, time becomes the product
of particular subjectivities. As a network of intentions, it is defined by the
constant movement of activity, “of life in continuous deployment.”14 Perhaps
then the word time becomes irrelevant. Instead, it signifies transition - not
from one state to another, but rather an indivisible transition in which no one moment could be isolated and identified, precisely because the moment is
constantly disappearing. Instead, there is only change. A frenzy of activity,
impossible to escape. As Merleau-Ponty describes it, time is instead “un flux qui ne se quitte pas.”15
While the map produced a specific ontology, in which being was the
product of reason, the “unmapped” challenges that ontology. Phenomenology resists any possibility of a prelude to the immediacy of existence: in coming after experience, analysis cannot be the fundamental truth it purports to be.
Science, therefore, is but a secondary expression, translation or interpretation of being, hence leading to the engineered landscapes, through a fraught
rationalisation of territory. Instead, existence precedes this analytical impulse,
precedes any sort of reflection. Merleau-Ponty insists on the study of essences as the core of being: existence is defined in the attempt to regain a “naive”
contact with the world,16 naive referring to this unmediated state, an existence
devoid of assumptions, frameworks. As such, this immediacy challenges the analytical definition of time. Instead, time and meaning become one: they
relate to a particular subjectivity in constant flux.17 Bergson aptly synthesises time and subjectivity by writing “un moi qui ne change pas ne dure pas,”18
asserting yet again the continuity of change which defines existence. Being, it appears, is defined by this continuous flux. At the core of being, whereas the cartesian ontology defined existence on a stable foundation, permanent and
impervious to change, phenomenologists reversed the definition, identifying in being only one constant: that of impermanence. The result is the opposite
of the engineered landscape produced by the maps. As the negotiation of the third canal illustrates, the unmapped instead produces an adaptive landscape of resistance.
Therefore, life itself produces the antithesis of the map. If the
unmapped is the locus of resistance to cartesian permanence, then the map is
in fact, as De Certeau argues, a totalising projection, born out of a rationalised production of territory. Modernity, contained in those maps, is predicated 14 15 16 17 18
De Certeau, 85. “A state of flux, impossible to escape.” Ibid, #487. Ibid, #7. Ibid, #489. Bergson, 4.
on this division of culture and nature, understood as reason imposed on
spontaneity. Yet, what is to be gained from divide? As Latour explains, the “mise-en-parenthèse”19 of nature allows for its engineered exploitation. It
inserts itself into a colonial quest for extraction of raw materials, the latter isolated then used as industrial fodder. In this framework, these materials,
here, the Nile’s water, exist beyond the subjectivities of the land. A landscape such as the Nile valley is synthesised and translated onto a flat sheet of paper which outlines what it can provide for extraction and productive use. From
the high vantage point of the map, the onlooker is desensitised to the complex
subjectivities on the ground. The distancing produces the opposite of empathy: the two different time zones, that of the map, and that of the unmapped, will
never overlap, but rather continue to exist parallel to one another. By mapping out a particular clock, the cartographer, it seems, only legitimises the colonial endeavour.
19 Bruno Latour, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes, Paris: Éditions la Découverte, 1991, P. 140.
Bibliography:
1.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phénoménologie de la Perception. Paris:
Editions Gallimard, 1945.
2.
Bergson, Henri. L’Évolution Créatrice. Paris: Presse Universitaire de
3.
Latour, Bruno. Nous n’avons jamais été modernes. Paris: Éditions la
4.
Mitchell, Timothy. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics,
France, 1941.
Découverte, 1991.
Modernity. Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press, 2002.
5.
De Certeau, Michel. ‘Practices of Space’ in Blonksy, M. (ed.), On
Signs. Baltimore: JHUP, 1985.
6.
Hopkins, Nicholas. ‘Irrigation in Contemporary Egypt’ in Rogan,
London: British Academy, 1999.
7.
Butzer, Karl. Early Hydraulic Civilization in Egypt: A Study in
E. (ed.), Agriculture in Egypt, From Pharaonic to Modern Times.
Cultural Ecology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976.
8.
Vaughn, Laura. Mapping Society: The Spatial Dimensions of Social
Cartography. London: UCL Press, 2018.
9.
Lyons, H.G., The Cadastral Survey of Egypt, 1892-1907. Cairo:
National Printing Department, 1908.
[Fig 1]
[Fig 2]
[Fig 3]
[Fig 4]
Image Credits: [Figure 1]: Carte Exacte du Cours du Nile. Bellin, 1740-1749. [Figure 2]: Map of the Nile Valley Showing Reclamation Works and Other Interests. New Egyptian Co, Limited, London, 1926.
[Figure 3]: Geological Map of Egypt. Survey Department of Egypt, Cairo, 1910.
[Figure 4]: Carte Hydrographique de la Partie Méridionale de la Haute Egypte. Mr. Linant de Bellefonds, Dépot de la Guerre, Paris, 1854.