Speculative Cartographies
(Published in The Toe Rag, Issue 03, June–Sept 2024)
“Maps are dreams: both describe desire”, Kathy Acker
I - DREAM (SPECULATIVE) MAPPING
A few years ago, I began taking a new medication. It had a long list of unwelcome side effects, but the only one which seemed to affect me immediately was the sudden onslaught of lucid nightmares. I’d always kept a dream diary, but now my entries were cinematic: abstruse visions with the narrative complexity of a good short film. At around the same time, I began reading Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School (1984), a hallucinatory novel composed of plagiarism, poetry and wildly fragmented prose, which charts the ten-year-old protagonist Janey’s journey from Merida, Mexico, to the New York City underworld. Blood and Guts speaks to the voices in our heads that flit between the facets of our identities, the ones which – given free reign – might have the capacity to develop into neurosis. After all, thought is less a linear progression than a great big barf of intermingling and interpenetrating experience: of movies, books, relationships, subconsciousness, and finally, reality.
Perhaps because of my state upon first reading it, my favourite part of Blood and Guts has always been its dream maps, which– though they appear within the book– stand as coherent works of art in their own right. Since Acker was so concerned with the “materiality of language” (see her essay Against Ordinary Language [1993]), it makes sense that she would allow her subconscious thoughts (dreams) the same spatial qualities as her novels. ‘Dear dreams, you are the only thing that matters’, Acker writes, and her cartographies are suitably complex hieroglyphic pictographs: cross-sections of her childlike unconscious, where thoughts need not be a continuum, nor part of a larger narrative, but simply to exist as their sometimes disturbing and often conflicting selves. Dream maps in any form are unconfined by various earthly restraints; whilst maps are traditionally rooted in time and environment, dream maps exist across it, stretching beyond both setting and individual.
Acker’s maps are the visual counterpart to her disjointed prose, which acts both as a topological reflection of deconstructed identity, and a metaphorical reflection of the unconstrained, unconditioned mind. In Dream Map 2, a phallic white worm chases the author towards death, pervaded by the presence of sexual violence and surrounded by references such as the 1959 film Black Orpheus, as well as voodoo and the yogic teachings of Swami Muktananda. ‘I’m a writer. I use this identity to protect myself,’ a burst of language punctuating the space reads. Another: ‘Who am I? I want to be the mermaid, the seducer of men, sex, but I’m not, I’m the squat fat woman with a cigar in her mouth’. These are Acker’s– or Janey’s, or my own– fears, perhaps all at once. After all, for Acker, ‘I’ is an amalgamation of mythology, culture, desire, fear and relationships, manifested in novel form; identity is as entwined with the collective as the individual themselves.
I grew up thinking of maps as objective mediators; destinations (answers) rather than sites of possibility. Maps were the thick curled paper booklets in the musty glovebox of my grandad’s car, they were checklists on school hikes in the Pennines, they were framed and yellowing and Welsh in downstairs bathrooms. I learnt of maps as scientific but not artistic, interesting but not imaginative. Acker’s maps taught me an anarchist approach to cartography, treading the line between reality and unreality, truth and lie (as does her fiction). She taught me that no map is fixed or factual; all maps are the historically contingent political fictions of their time and setting. In this sense, mapping has always been a medium in flux; something capable of stretching beyond just representation. Mapping is embedded in both the minute particulars of our own lives and the covert structures which govern them. Whilst we rely on the readiness of GPS cartographies to show us the way, the same technologies map our own bodily metrics. Acker’s maps acknowledged the body as producer, too, but less of data, and more of stories, complexity, empathy, and dreams.
Here dream mapping takes on an expanded meaning, dreams in their broadest sense– as in sleep, or as in ambition– being works of speculation. Acker’s maps are both products of her own experiences and evidence of a universal, human complexity. They are autobiography, fiction, mythology and sleep-vision at once. Though retelling one’s own dreams might commonly be seen as a surreptitious act of narcissism, the subconscious is never linear. It extends outwards beyond the individual, like a web (or a map). As I read more of Acker’s bibliography– such as the collage of biography and appropriated text in The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula (1973), or that of Great Expectations (1982)– I began to think of my own nightmares less as fearful reflections of my unknown subconscious. Instead, they became, like the protagonists in Acker’s novels and dream maps– manifestations of the universal divided self, that which overlaps with others and seeps between the rational and the nonsensical, the dreamt and reality.
Ten years before the publication of Blood and Guts, the artist Susan Hiller produced Dream Mapping (1974), a ‘paraconceptual’ experiment-cum-performance, in which seven participants slept for three nights inside the ‘fairy rings’ of Western European folklore, circles formed by the natural growth patterns of Scotch Bonnet mushrooms. In the morning, each sleeper transferred their night visions onto paper, and eventually all were transposed to create a collective notational system of dreaming. This system was inspired by by the art forms of Indigenous American and Australian Aborigine groups, in which dream maps are not visually literal representations, but rather what Hiller calls a ‘set of notes in visual diagrammatic form’. They form a visual language unconfined by country, or even world: one bridging spirit and human form.
Hiller and Acker had a mutual friend in the writer Paul Buck, who the latter met during the late 1970s, whilst Buck was the editor of the arts publication Curtains, which published writers such as Bataille, Blanchot and Derrida alongside the works of artists like Hiller. It is tempting to wonder whether Acker encountered Dream Mapping at the time. Certainly, the artist’s remarks surrounding her artwork ring true to Acker’s attitude to identity. ‘One person is many voices but there is no bounded unit who contains them,’ Hiller told frieze in 1995. ‘They could be seen as possibilities of being.’ Her maps, like Acker’s, are illustrations of the divided self: these possibilities of being, their overlaps manifested in spatial form. There is something reassuring about the self as a kind of mycorrhizal network, thoughts and bodies entangled with those of others, and the map as a form suited to understanding it.
In the same year that I started my medication, the artist Claire Barrow held an exhibition in Soft Opening’s Piccadilly Underground space, titled ‘Pig Latin Library’. It felt suited to its liminal setting; like dreams, train stations are sites of limbo (in between destinations). The show itself was a visual re-imagination of the artist’s dreamworld, of the Egyptian gods and stairways to heaven hung with dismembered limbs. Its title was a reference to a secret language shared between children; an invitation to engage with the innermost psyche of another and discover a world not so unfamiliar after all. A couple of years later, Barrow showed me a labyrinthian diptych painting titled Pipe 1 & 2 (2021): a nightmarish rendering of the artist’s birthplace and her new home, London. It was her recurring dream, bubblegum-coloured and violent, involving a hooded figure driving a princess to prison, and tangled blonde body parts falling onto whirring blades. Barrow told me that as a child, she had believed that her dreams were caused by signals from the phone tower which shadowed her childhood house in Stockton-on-Tees, County Durham. I spotted one on her canvas, glowing white and electric.
II - SPECULATIVE (DREAM) MAPPING
Whilst dream maps stretch beyond spatial realities, they are often (somewhat paradoxically) rooted in them. Acker’s novels and maps frequented cities, such as New York, San Francisco and London; after all, cities– like dreams, made of proverbial desires and fears – are sites of transition (again, limbo), of coming and going energy. In Philosophy For Spiders (2021), McKenzie Wark writes in relation to Acker: ‘Cities are places for fucking, not just by humans. Cities might look like giant dick-farms, with all those skyscrapers, but are also made out of pipes and tubes and tunnels. Cities too are penetrable and penetrating’. They are juxtapositions: facilitators of power and settings of resistance. Maps, and consequently cities, have been used throughout history as forms of colonial and territorial control; the identities of marginalised people have historically been overlooked by both. Enter speculative mapping, a radical creative methodology which physically makes space for what could have been and may have been, but what was erased from the archival tomes.
Speculation goes against the very nature of the map as answer, or map as fact. Last year I visited an exhibition at London’s Mimosa House, conceived by the artists Naomi Woo and Sophie Seita in conversation with a queer-feminist collective called The Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions, which situates the garden as a haven for anti-institutional, radical communities. In the show, titled ‘BingenTV’, speculative mapping situated queer histories, as ‘deviant’ forms of history, within the city itself. One wall was covered in a collage of photographs, documenting recent gatherings of the society alongside images of ‘suspected’ members, which include the likes of Mary Seacole, Derek Jarman and Adrienne Rich (note: suspected). It presented/charted/mapped a ‘parafictional’ vision of reality, described by the art historian Carrie Lambert-Beatty as “related to but not quite a member of the category of fiction as established in literature and drama. It remains a bit outside. It does not perform its procedures in the hygienic clinics of literature [the archive], but has one foot in the field of the real.” ‘BingenTV’ posits ‘parafiction’ as a reparative force, thereby inserting queer histories into the archive. This is the radical potential of the unofficial account, built upon the scholar José Esteban Muñoz’s assertion that “instead of being clearly available as visible evidence, queerness has existed as innuendo, gossip, fleeting moments.”
Nowadays, the archive is complicated by the digital, which, like the city, is so saturated with the production of information that its filtration is required to facilitate any kind of individual perspective. Though digital media exists outside of the material, it nonetheless retains spatial and speculative qualities and is therefore game for mapping. Our journeys (digital footprints) through it are – like those AFK (away from keyboard) – as important in the formation of identity as our physical experiences. And much like AFK society, in the same way that the internet forms a method of control for the majority, it can be a space of resistance for the minority: a community-building tool or a setting (as elucidated by Legacy Russell in Glitch Feminism [2020]), for the dissolution of binaries, particularly in terms of gender and sexuality. The internet is a world unto itself, complete with communities, economies and power structures; it can be mapped.
The artist Nina Davies literally implicates digital culture in reality; the physical environment, à la the speculative map. My first encounter with the artist Nina Davies's work was through a show called ‘Flop Era’ (2023), curated by Kawaii Agency– for the exhibition’s opening, at Filet space in East London, her journey was live-streamed directly from a selfie stick-mounted phone to the gallery via TikTok. As she travelled across London, the boundaries of Davies’s bodily movements were disrupted to become public rather than private: her journey became a performance. In Stepping Into Machine (2022), a camera traverses a fictional dystopian metropolis in which ‘techno-faith’ worship is prevalent, particularly the creepily robotic ‘bionic step’ dance (harder than it looks), which evokes a futuristic version of the 16th century European dancing plague. Like Acker’s dream maps, Davies’s speculative digital journeys straddle the lived and the performed; fact and fiction. Like our dream personas, our online personas are the product– at least somewhat– of our desires. Acker once said: “maps are dreams: both describe desire”. Maybe, like our dreams, our online existences are just as revealing as our movements AFK; perhaps within the confluence of the two, as Davies illustrates, lies our true individual and collective subconscious.
“Dreams call the vision world to break loose our consciousness”, Acker writes in Blood and Guts. The same might be said for speculation in its broadest sense, ranging from ‘parafiction’ to science-fiction. Dream mapping– or, in its expanded form, speculative mapping– consequently becomes a radical methodology of accessing our individual and universal fears and desires, in all of their complexity and non-linearity. The western canon has taught us that maps are terminus; they are where we end our route. Art – as it often does – revokes this. Maps are sites of possibility; they are dreams.
