Olsson, Gunnar (1935-)

Gunnar Olsson served for a decade as professor of geography at the University of Michigan and for 20 years as director of the doctoral program at the Nordic School of Planning (Nordplan) in Stockholm, before returning to Uppsala University in the late 1990s. He has become one of the more influential deconstructive voices within poststructuralist geography. Idiosyncratically drawing on reactionary and rebellious ideas from geometry, philosophy, theology, cartography, semiotics, and aesthetics, the political implications of Olsson's work have been a constant source of academic controversy.

Olsson completed his doctoral studies at Uppsala University in 1968. His early work dealt with distance and human interaction and was based on methods emanating from the quantitative tradition in geography. From the 1970s onward, Ols-son has been a key figure in the development of post-positivist geography. He soon acquired a reputation as a radical avant-garde writer, laying out his critique of power and modern reason in texts of intimidating difficulty. Notwithstanding this, a considerable share of this work can be said to have emanated from practical experience and an early dissatisfaction with the tight collaboration between (applied) geography and modern planning practices. In Olsson's native Sweden and elsewhere, geography played a vital role by supplying planners with what was conceived as useful scientific knowledge, maps and models. Olsson's interrogation sought to dissect the tak-en-for-granted ideas keeping the two together. In particular, he targeted the widespread postwar plan ning principle that specific modes of living and behaving would result from deliberately [Page 2078]de signed changes in institutional and spatial structures.

Olsson argued that this whole enterprise was based on false premises. Processes and forms did not necessarily correspond, and it remained impossible to predict the consequences of general schemes and actions. Instead of further advancing the modeling and mapping impulses of geography, Olsson identified an insurmountable gap between academic reflection and the pragmatic implementation of knowledge. Geography's peaceful association with planning and welfare capitalism had to be replaced by a self-reflexive, more radically humanistic geography, shifting its focus to living individuals and a trenchant scrutiny of power. Power could be seen as a game of onto-logical transformations, turning invisible relations into visible things, mindscapes into stone scapes, and vice versa. This theme led Olsson to the deconstruction of a whole series of frequently taken-for-granted practices and relationships, such as those between thought and action, individual and collective, certainty and ambiguity, language and phenomenon, expression and impression, stability and change, mind and body, and creativity and socialization.

Olsson's radical cartography of power earned considerable resonance internationally and was popularized for a Swedish audience in a collections of essays, Antipasti (1990). In the early 21st century, many of his earlier ideas were drawn together as a wholesale critique of cartographical reason in Western society—Abysmal (2007). For Olsson, a critique of cartographical reason concerns not simply the way in which mapping is socially employed as a material instrument of power and knowledge. A map is also a document of mistranslation, a story confronting us with absences and silences and hence with the limits of language and representation. Maps can be understood as signs closing the abysses between the five senses of the body and the sixth sense of the cultural taken-for-granted. More important than their ability to reflect reality, maps have an authoritative power to convince: They are exemplars of given- and taken-for-granted modes of thought and action. In this expansive sense, Ols-son's critique of cartographical reason gestures beyond mapping and geography and involves no less than an assessment of what he sees as the currently ruling mode of thought and action. It is concerned with the broader study of people as semiotic animals—a species whose individuals are joined and separated by the use of their signs, including maps—with the inner world of that which structures, authors, and controls, for instance, mapmaking and geography. The self-imposed task of Olsson's “heretic cartography” is to question the authority and power implied in such ostensibly prearranged givens and truths.

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