Legends or keys are naturally indispensable to most maps,
since they provide the explanations of the various symbols used but this is
largely untrue. Legends are more often dispensed with than not, and they never
provide explanations of more than a fraction of the "symbols" found
on the maps to which they refer. The fact that legends accompany neither topographic
survey sheets nor the plates of most atlases makes this perfectly plain. That
legends do exist for these maps, someplace in the book, or by special order,
only serves to underscore through their entirely separate, off-somewhere-else
character exactly show how dispensable they are. Technically no symbol that is
not self-explanatory should be used on a map unless it is explained in a legend,
the fact is that NO symbol explains itself any more than the words of an essay
bother to explain themselves to the reader. Most readers make it through most
essays and maps because as they grew up into their common culture they learned
the significance of most of the words and map symbols. But this familiarity
with signs on the part of the reader never becomes a property of the mark; even
the most transparent sign is opaque to those unfamiliar with the code.
It is not, then, that maps don't need to be decoded; but that
they are by and large encoded in signs as readily interpreted by most map readers.
So why don't they? It's not, certainly, because they're self-explanatory. No
matter how many readers are convinced that blue naturally dictates water, or
that little pictograms of lighthouses and mountains explain themselves, signs
are not signs for, dissolve into marks for, those who don't know the code.
This will be difficult for many to accept, but once it is
understood that the role of the legend is less to elucidate the
"meaning" of this or that posting than to function as a sign in its
own right, this conclusion is even more difficult to evade.
An example from a wholly different
domain, an especially innocuous one, is given in Barthes's reading of a Latin
sentence, "quia ego nominor leo," in a Latin grammar: There is
something ambiguous about this statement: On the one hand, the words in it do
have a simple meaning: because my name is lion. And on the other, the sentence
is evidently there in order to signify something else to me.
Which is myth's way: the map is always there to deny
that the significations piled on top of it. I mean, it's only a map, and
general pretense is that it's innocent, a servant of that eye that sees things
as they really are. But as we have seen, outside of the world or maps states
carry on a precarious existence. Little of nature, states are much of maps, and
only when it is acknowledged how fragile is the existence or an unmapped state.
That it would be difficult to produce a state highway map without
highways I admit, but there is no injunction on the state to map its roads
anymore than there is for it to map the locations of deaths attributable to
motor vehicles, or the density of cancer-linked emissions from internal
combustion engines, or the extent of noise pollution associated with automotive
traffic. It would be gratifying to live in a state that produced
1.75 million copies of such maps and distributed them free of cost to
travelers, tourists, immigrants, and industrial location specialists, but
states find it more expedient to publish maps of highways.
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