Tooling up for Complexity - Participatory Mapping: New Data, New Cartography - page 4

1.1.1. Between graphic reason and unreason
Although Jack Goody did not work with maps, he put
forward the cognitive effects of writing. He proposed defining
writing as an “intellectual technology”:
Especially when I speak of writing as a
technology of the intellect, I refer not just to pen
and paper, stylus and tablet, as complex as these
instruments are, but to the training required, the
acquisition of new motor skills, and the different
uses of eyesight, as well as to the products
themselves, the topics that are stacked on the
library shelves, objects that one consults and from
which one learns, and which one may also, in
time, compose. [GOO 00, p.133]
Here, he refers to writing as an ecosystem which relates
its most material manifestations (book, paper, pen) to its
most abstract consequences (formation, cognitive effects).
Within this heterogeneous mix, the formalizing effect of
writing has an impact on the cognitive and intellectual work,
which is encompassed by the notion of “graphic reason.” The
latter is set up through what Goody names intellectual
technologies, which are the table, the list and the formula
and have taken part in the “Domestication of the Savage
Mind” [GOO 77]. Goody describes the characteristic of the
list as follows:
The list relies on discontinuity rather than
continuity; it depends on physical placement, on
location; it can be read in different directions,
both sideways and downwards, up and down, as
well as left and right; it has a clear-cut beginning
and a precise end, that is, a boundary, an edge,
like a piece of cloth. Most importantly it
encourages the ordering of the items, by number,