Diagramming the Political Space
摘要
Even the highly abstract dimensions of politics can be made understandable—and be manipulated—through the construction of spatial models and diagrams. An early example was the analogy between politics and cosmological systems. Since the French Revolution, the left–right scale has gradually become the dominant spatial representation of the main axis in politics (Chap. 8 , Section “The Rise of the Left–Right Political Scale”). However, the history of left–right scale in twentieth-century Sweden reveals how two contradictory spatial models can coexist simultaneously, until circumstances finally force one model to dominate over the other (Chap. 8 , Section “The Inversion of the Swedish Political Scale”). Revolutionary ideologies, such as communism, feminism, and LGBTQ, have, despite their radical political outlook, made use of traditional diagrammatic forms and principles in order to convey their messages and views of the political situation (Chap. 8 , Section “Revolutionary Diagrams: Breaking the Barrier”). Often, they have done so by constructing diagrams that visualizes the political barriers that they are attempting to break through, which encourages views of the political field as a dichotomy rather than as a continuum.