A piece of text that stood out to me in Harley’s “Deconstructing the Map” is a dictum of Korzybski’s, “The map is not the territory”. This confused me at first. I had never really put that much though into what a map really is, other than a resource to get around. If I didn’t have a definition for what a map is, I definitely couldn’t tell you what a map isn’t or what it could be. I then realized that Korzybski’s statement is rather obvious. When I looked more into Korzybski, I saw another quote by him that really clarified the original dictum, “A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.” Maps are a person’s reaction to place. Harvey includes in his piece the idea that “maps, like art, far from being ‘a transparent opening to the world,’ are but ‘a particular human way of looking at the world.'”
Korzybski brings up an interesting point but Harvey is trying to go deeper, “deconstruction goes further to bring the issue of how the map represents place into much sharper focus.” He ends the piece with,”Post-modernism offers a challenge to read maps in ways that could reciprocally enrich the reading of other texts.” This is a very relevant sentence to me. My timeline group will be using many maps as forms of media, and this is one of our major goals. I’ve realized that a map is more than just useful, it can be incredibly meaningful.