on some maps

stephanie white

What is the project behind any map – the imperial project? the anti-colonial project of the surrealists? the destabilisation project of Trumpism? The exact project is revealed by the relationship of the map to land.

There are times for accuracy, the 1:1 measure, and times for hyperbole, distortion, the polished narrative.

Trumpworld Map was drawn by Kuper from a series of verbal proclamations and performances meant to destabilise power relations – there is no geography, only potential transactions, and it is to T’s advantage to discredit the target before buying it. This is not geography. As shown in Kuper’s map there is a miasma of weakness, poverty, illness and underdevelopment, ripe for the picking.

Classic colonial theory, from Spivak to Said – the very things one fears are projected onto the other to justify annexation; i.e. other races are conniving because you fear being connived. Sexual appetite is exaggerated in the other, rape of women, sodomy, incest, precisely because these things are both suppressed in, and feared by, the coloniser. It is through a failure of imagination that the worst of one’s own culture is projected onto whole societies, cultures, peoples who have no relationship at all to such fevered imagining.

This particular denigration of the other, so close to the coloniser’s dark self is what allows colonisation: You are weak, vice-ridden; We are strong, therefore it is natural that we will take over your underused land.

What were the most egregious qualities that would justify a new American Empire destabilising the global world order? They are T’s personal fears and preoccupations: meddlers ingrates

Puerto Ricans

Jews

Arabs commies hoaxers little men security threats (that’s us) foes and the ultimate scatological preoccupation, shitholes

Anon. 'Le Monde au Temps des Surrealistes'. Brussels: Variétés, 1929

Le Monde Au Temps Des Surrealistes

And why, between 2016 and early 2022 when it all got uglier than one could believe possible, did everyone keep saying 'wow, this is, like, surreal'. Surrealists were at least witty. And knew what a map was.

But, but. When André Breton wrote Surrealist manifesto in Paris in 1924, he was part of a fractious group of postwar artists and poets, surrealists all. Breton demanded notice, shocking with such phrases as ‘The simplest surrealist act consists, with revolvers in hand, of descending into the street and shooting at random, as much as possible, into the crowd.‘1

Seeing this enacted over 600 times in the United States in 2022, one might think of Breton as a disruptor, chaos the goal as surrealist actions purposely have no reason or logic. When Louis Aragon protested, Breton added, in 1925, ‘Surrealism is … a cry of the mind turning back on itself, and it is determined to break apart its fetters, even if it must be by material hammers!’2

Almost all the surrealists of early 1920s’ Paris had been conscripted for World War I; Breton worked with the shell-shocked, at the front Paul Éluard wrote 220 letters to families of men who had been killed. In the face of such useless destruction and futile loss of life, the state machinery that had caused such stupidity was to be destroyed, as Breton proposed, by a psychic automatism – ‘dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.’ 3

Melancholic, tubercular Paul Éluard, surrealist war poet, abruptly left Paris in 1924, circuitously travelling to Indo-China using the 1922 map Les cinq parties du monde: planisphère comprenant toutes les possessions coloniales, chemins de fer, lignes de navigation, principales lines télégraphiqes, câbles. On his return to Paris, he drew the map above, which appeared in a special surrealist issue of Variétés, published in Brussels in 1929.

Conventional maps attempt veracity; Éluard, witnessing the simultaneous wealth and brutality of colonialism, dispenses with scale in favour of distortions that loom large, or very small, in the mind. This is a map of a world blighted by the machinery of possession. The parts that loom large are largely authocthonous, un-colonised, unconsidered. The parts that are so diminished are the hopelessly corrupted capitalist empires, which used their colonised indigenous troops as cannon fodder in the Great War. p

1 Marguerite Bonnet, André Breton, naissance du surréalisme. Paris: Librairie José Corti, 1975

2 B ureaus de Recherches Surréalistes,15, Rue de Grenelle. In Maurice Nadeau, The History of Surrealism, Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1989

3 A ndré Breton. Surrealist manifesto. Paris: Editions du Sagittaire, 1924