Dark Writing: Geography, Performance, Design

Writing Past Colonialism

by Paul Carter

We do not see empty figures and outlines; we do not move in straight lines. Everywhere we are surrounded by dapple; the geometry of our embodied lives is curviform, meandering, bi-pedal. Our personal worlds are timed, inter-positional, and contingent. But nowhere in the language of cartography and design do these ordinary experiences appear. This, Dark Writing argues, is a serious omission because they are designs on the world: architects and colonizers use their lines to construct the places where we will live. But the rectilinear streets, squares, and public spaces produced in this way leave out people and the entire environmental history of their coming together. How, this book asks, can we explain the omission of bodies from maps and plans? And how can we redraw the lines maps and plans use so that the qualitative world of shadows, footprints, comings and goings, and occasions--all essential qualities of places that incubate sociality--can be registered?



In short, Dark Writing asks why we represent the world as static when our experience of it is mobile. It traces this bias in Enlightenment cartography, in inductive logic, and in contemporary place design. This is the negative critique. Its positive argument is that, when we look closely at these designs on the world, we find traces of a repressed movement form. Even the ideal lines of geometrical figures turn out to contain traces of earlier passages; and there are many forms of graphic design that do engage with the dark environment that surrounds the light of reason. How can this dark writing--so important to reconfiguring our world as a place of meeting, of co-existence and sustaining diversity--be represented? And how, therefore, can our representations of the world embody more sensuously the mobile histories that have produced it?

Dark Writing answers these questions using case studies: the exemplary case of the beginnings of the now world-famous Papunya Tula Painting Movement (Central Australia) and three high-profile public place-making initiatives in which the author was involved as artist and thinker. These case studies are nested inside historical chapters and philosophical discussions of the line and linear thinking that make Dark Writing both a highly personal book and a narrative with wide general appeal.

328 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Paul Carter was born in England in 1969. His father's military career had the family moving all over the world, re-locating every few years. Paul has lived, worked, gotten into trouble and been given a serious talking to in England, Scotland, Germany, France, Holland, Norway, Portugal, Tunisia, Australia, Nigeria, Russia, Singapore, Malaysia, Borneo, Columbia, Vietnam, Thailand, Papua New Guinea, Sumatra, the Philippines, Korea, Japan, China, USA and Saudi Arabia. Today he lives in Perth with his wife, baby daughter and two motorbikes.

Reviews

[Quinn Monette · Rating 2 out of 5]

A roundabout way of not exactly saying land back. Talks about openings and possibilities without venturing even a gesture towards what those might look like, or engaging with people who do that kind of thing. Draws pretty exclusively from the European philosophical canon--an odd choice not to include other thinkers given he's mostly talking about indigenous dispossession in Australia, though a worthy attempt to write out alternatives or counter-tendencies in the colonial intellectual sphere. I'm not totally convinced it's the best direction for the project. The writing can be playful and frustrating. I'm left wanting something a little different.