Post(mortem) Cartographies: Re-framing the cartographic exhaustion in the age of mapping’s excess

This chapter discusses the proliferation of the ‘map trope’ as the favoured representational and navigational tool for contemporary spatial narratives and analyses. However, it contextualises such excess within the broader exhaustion and death of cartography (Wood, 2003) observed in the field of geography. In so doing, the author distinguishes different forms of critique or ‘postures’ (Agamben, 2015)—which can be alternatively couched in terms of ‘exhaustion’ or ‘excess’—through which the resurgence of mapping theories and practices is generally debated in the field of critical and cultural geography. To illustrate such theoretical clashes, two caricatures are recruited, that of the ‘exhausted geographer’, who restlessly criticises maps and their power even though acknowledging their representational limits, and the ‘the geographer of the excess’, who considers mapping more enthusiastically and investigates it as a more than representational tool and other than a uniquely political means of spatial control and order. The author attempts to set a dialogue and a comparison between diverse exhausted and excessive positions on mapping in order to advance a different medium of a theory which explores—both speculatively and practically—contemporary mapping through an affirmative but nonetheless critical lens.