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    Abysmal: A Critique of Cartographic Reason
    Abysmal: A Critique of Cartographic Reason
    Abysmal: A Critique of Cartographic Reason
    Ebook533 pages13 hours

    Abysmal: A Critique of Cartographic Reason

    By Gunnar Olsson

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    About this ebook

    People rely on reason to think about and navigate the abstract world of human relations in much the same way they rely on maps to study and traverse the physical world. Starting from that simple observation, renowned geographer Gunnar Olsson offers in Abysmal an astonishingly erudite critique of the way human thought and action have become deeply immersed in the rhetoric of cartography and how this cartographic reasoning allows the powerful to map out other people’s lives.

    A spectacular reading of Western philosophy, religion, and mythology that draws on early maps and atlases, Plato, Kant, and Wittgenstein, Thomas Pynchon, Gilgamesh, and Marcel Duchamp, Abysmal is itself a minimalist guide to the terrain of Western culture. Olsson roams widely but always returns to the problems inherent in reason, to question the outdated assumptions and fixed ideas that thinking cartographically entails. A work of ambition, scope, and sharp wit, Abysmal will appeal to an eclectic audience—to geographers and cartographers, but also to anyone interested in the history of ideas, culture, and art.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateMar 15, 2010
    ISBN9780226629322
    Abysmal: A Critique of Cartographic Reason

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    • 5/5
      A remarkable book adressing nothing less than what it is to be human and how we try to find our way in a chaotic environment through language and maps. Not always an easy read, but always interesting, not to say challenging to what usually is taken for granted. Olssons book shows us how religion, science and art tries to explain the world through three different approaches and how this relates to patterns of power and submission.

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    Abysmal - Gunnar Olsson

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