I remember the exact moment I first heard 'the map is not the territory': going past Nuneaton town centre, of all places, in my brother's car, probably twenty years ago now.

The term seems to have originated with Alfred Korzybski, a 19th / 20th century straddler, a Polish scientist and founder of 'general semantics'. He seems to share some common ground with Hayek's 'Sensory Order' - that our nervous systems and language structure are the maps we must navigate by. The Wikipedia article above suggests he'd thought a great deal about what this meant for how we should act personally.

This jangles old untrodden brainbits about Wittgenstein's language games: mostly forgotten now and only half-understood at the time. Think I'd been reading about it, and rhizomes around the same time. Shortly after, I wandered off to Port Meadow in Oxford and watched flocks of birds. All very metaphorical. Language and flocking seemed to be the same thing in my addled head at the time. If Wittgenstein was right, and words have no meaning outside of their relation to others in a language game, then the way we communicate is just like a flock. It must stay tightly bound, but it can move dynamically through some unknowable reality that it defines for us. I can clearly recall thinking:

whoa, man: if language is a flock, and our reality is defined by language, and, like, a flock of birds only take up a tiny, tiny piece of sky... then what's waiting for us out there in the language-sky? Whoa.

I don't think I was stoned, but it was definitely a Thought Imbued with Profundity. It's a dodgy metaphor: there's no Cartesian space out there for language-flocks to move in. But, at the time, it did give me a nice sense: the tight bonds of language might keep us, as a symbolic community, set within a drop of collective knowledge, unable to apprehend an ocean of possible meanings, all of which could radically alter everything about being human on this planet. None of us can ever be isolated from that flock, though we might fly some way out and come back skwarking some madness or other.

(So: a flock of language birds trapped in a watery drop, within an infinitely vast ocean of meaning. Oh, and a penguin of death, that can kill us all in any one of 412 different ways. Why not, if we're mixing metaphors so hopelessly?)

Anyhoo: language and symbol is only one aspect of our sensory order - a part of the map, without which things like economies would be impossible. But we still need the base sensation - hi definition 5.1 streaming audio and video plus - for the map to connect to reality at all. And As Korzybski suggests, sometimes the 'usefulness' of the correlation between map and territory can let us down. Sometimes it can let us down very badly.

This leads nicely on to asking: what is the difference between institutional maps and our own? The ones our individual minds use and those that reflect institutional structures we make together? Hayek (afaik, and I k only a bit currently) doesn't seem to distinguish between them. This is how he can be so absolute about liberty: the world is too complex to be understood by a single mind - but what about sytems of minds?

J.C. Scott has a splendid story, tying maps to the Hayekian understanding of complexity. He says statecraft is a map: 'designed to summarise precisely those aspects of a complex world that are of immediate interest to the map maker and to ignore the rest.' In the hands of the state, these maps can transform as well as describe:

This transformative potential resides not in the map, of course, but rather in the power possessed by those who deploy the perspective of that particular map.

His allegory: German scientific forestry. It quantified the forests, concentrating only on assessing revenue potential, sending teams into forests with colour-coded bags of nails, marking certain sized trees, and counting the remaining nails. A cunning system, but one that doesn't record any other elements of the forest's eco-system, nor its human elements. But Scott isn't worried about that. It's 'the next logical step':

... to attempt to create, through careful seeding, planting, and cutting, a forest that was easier for state forecasters to count, manipulate, measure, and assess. The fact is that forest science and geometry backed by state power, had the capacity to transform the real, diverse, and chaotic old-growth forest into a new, more uniform forest that closely resembled the administrative grid of its techniques. [p.15]

It's an epic tale: the moral arrives a hundred years after the first planting, when yields begin to drop. (It took eighty years for the first crop.) Waldsterben (forest death) sets in. Scott goes on about the 'exceptionally complex processes' of the forest eco-system, and interference meaning 'serious consequences.'

Scott of course means to go on and attack 'High Modernism' of the Le Corbusier type in all its forms, and concludes much as Hayek does: change must come incrementally, and be allied with local knowledge - 'metis' - against the forces of abstraction.

But what of Korzybski's dichotomy? A map may summarise salient aspects of the territory, or it may have them wrong. When our personal maps go seriously awry, we may be in trouble (though equally, we might well do to develop a robust faith in those maps. There are plenty of situations in which everyone else might be wrong. This happens, rarely, to everyone, but we rarely trust ourselves enough - and if we do, there's usually an emotional cost.) But what about institutional maps? 'Institution' here might mean anything from the state to a small community's set of norms. (At least, that's the definition the World Bank uses: norms, including behavioural norms.)

In Scott's allegory, the map wasn't inaccurate - it was just that the territory later bit them in the bottom. So there's an easily visualisable feedback between the two, and it's this feedback that Hayek and Scott want us to make stronger. And why they want us to decentralise: to spread the risk of these potentially catastrophic map-territory pathologies.

Which is all very mundane, really, and one could easily get backed into a corner on it. If you're convinced that there's no way to make better maps, you're left in a radical Hayekian hole, where the only thing you're allowed to do is learn and re-learn the harsh, ultra-individualist rules of market interaction so you can survive as best you can in the wild, with only the map your own self gives you. (That's what Hayek claims we must do; more on that in another post.)

If you're not backing into a corner, clutching your worldview like a teddy, however, you might ask: hang on, don't we grow loads of trees now? Haven't we made better maps? But then, something awful happens: you realise that now you're in Business Management Theory territory and perhaps only one step away from seminars on 'who moved my cheese?'