Perhaps the ability to demarcate borders is one of the abilities that define Power?
https://en.uit.no/forskning/forskningsgrupper/sub?p_document_id=344750&sub_id=363591 Has a fair few links to texts to do with borders and maps. I have not read most of these texts. However checking the short blurbs, I think its interesting to note that, at least historically – if not intrinsically – cartography has a link with maintaining, applying and extending the power of:
dominant regimes?
forces that fancy challenging the dominance of a given regime.
Hence it might be argued that:
The use of maps as tools for operating representation lends itself for power interests?
To question the Power centric view of Maps and representation, I should read more of:
http://www.euborderscapes.eu/fileadmin/user_upload/EUBORDERSCAPES_State_of_Debate_Report_1.pdf (eg a claim borders are some basic human need..)
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/media-library/sites/spais/migrated/documents/fotiadis0609.pdf is about the power of cartographic representation?
A deconstructive view of cartographic power? http://lazarus.elte.hu/~zoltorok/oktat/Kuhn/Deconstructing%20the%20Map.pdf
I note that Foucault is being evoked via questions of which rules allow X and not Y.
(..though deficiencies, I think, in these questions is the un questioned assumption of rules..?)
+
(perhaps should question rules frictions/transmissions with axioms?)
As in the Critical Cartography articles’ postulations:
Maps and mapping is not “neutral” – unsure by “neutral” – but they claim cartographic activities to be of a political nature. Ontologically spontaneously political – rather than political element as an add on?
(ie we need water hence X will use it for power – eg build a settlement near water. Vs Y knows how to build roads in a way tanks can move on them, etc.. (perhaps not the best of examples?)
The suspicious bit:
I suspect that these notes come following or in some kind of transmissions with the operational – post-human-centric, post-manifestational – interests that might come to the notion of doing entities/languages/clusters/waves/etc. that are their own Beings.
Say a map is infact an organism that lives by cartographic processes. That Is its food and production. What kind of aesthetics this will have? By making mapping frictive outside of the human realms, perhaps maps could be free of our centric power at least.
Why do that?
Possibly for its possible. However I can excuse by saying things am unsure of bulshit value of – to do with corruption, the un acknowledged transmissions that are used to keep power and can always fail it?