M is for Maze
As spatial form, mazes [1] are not only millennia-old but appear in cultures and religions across the world, often associated with the idea of growth and enlightenment, pleasure, and of course confusion (Eliot, 2018; Higgins, 2018). From decorative tile inlays used to inspire good, summon luck, or ward off evil or to experiences that test the faithful; from field or hedge mazes located at palaces to amuse aristocrats to more recent incarnations in the form of haunted houses, laser tag and paintball facilities; or, from videogames with intensely complex spaces to skill (or ‘shoot’) houses used to train combat soldiers in urban warfare, the maze remains a popular architectural form even if its religious dimensions are less present.
As a metaphor, mazes however remain a common means to describe and deride the complex – whether overly complicated government bureaucracy or, importantly, unknown spaces. Mazes, for example, were used to characterise enemy spaces within the discourse of the Global War on Terror rendering these spaces and those who inhabited them seem complex, unknowable, and by extension hazardous and dangerous. Within the memoirs of US soldiers, for example, ‘Fallujah is a sophisticated deathtrap… [a] maze of interlocking fortresses’ (Bellavia, 2007: 47-48); ‘The village was a maze’ or ‘I saw other teams and Afghan commandos disappear into a maze of compounds’ (O’Neill, 2017: 174). Or, in the popular illustration of Osama bin Laden’s imagined hidden fortress (see Figure 1).
Beyond metaphorical use, religious or for entertainment purposes, mazes have a long history as a security idea in a material or practical sense. Alongside walls and fences, mazes were built into the security designs of medieval fortresses; were part of the designs of World War I trenches in the form of blind alleys used to confuse enemy soldiers if overrun; were part of the development of tunnel systems as part of the Vietnam War, and more recently are a key feature of urban warfare (Giovanni Fontana, in Eliot, 2018: 13; Army War College (n.d.); Rottman, 2012).[2] Mazes are therefore another form of ‘defense in depth’ (Denman, 2020) that is distinguishable from the spatial politics of inside/outside (containment), flows, verticality, and network politics. In other words, mazes suggest that security involves ‘more complex, non-linear notions of space and time’ (Denman, 2020:232) alongside other spatial relations.
Why might this be so?
First, mazes are complex spatial structures that can best be understood as consisting of a pathway, physical and/or mental, of branching decision-points where the consequences of those choices are (initially and/or partly) unknowable, uncertain, and cumulative (Eliot, 2018; Higgins, 2018). In other words, the key design feature of mazes is to simultaneously limit but also overwhelm with choice. As someone navigates through a maze, though each choice depends on the last, the consequences of these choices are unknown until a ‘false’ choice is ultimately revealed or the maze is run. In other words, mazes are a geospatial practice that centres managing the initial unknowabilites of its complexity. Mazes can therefore be understood as a form of spatial ‘obfuscation’, the practice Finn Brunton and Martha Nissenbaum (2015) describe as centred on ‘the deliberate use of ambiguous, confusing, or misleading information to interfere with surveillance and data collection projects’ (2015: 1). In most cases, obfuscation is used as a form of concealment ‘to buy time, gain cover, and hide in a crowd of signals,’ producing sensory overload in the form of extreme information, sound or light, such as an excess of paperwork, a crowd, or a ‘flash-bang’ stun grenade (2015: 2). In the context of mazes, this sense of being overwhelmed based on unknowability or uncertainty can be pleasurable but, as in security discourses, it is discomforting, even dangerous.
Therefore, in contrast to inside/outside (containment) logics, for example, mazes rely on a surplus of information, especially when mazes appear in three-dimensions. Compared to networks, it is their unknowability and sequential ‘unveiling’ or revelation that matters. And, mazes may integrate elements of both – the walls of a physical maze, for example, rely on containing sight for example, but mazes also incorporate elements of networks, of their circulations and flows as part of their spatial ontologies: mazes, with their multiple constituent parts, points of entry and exit, and pathways, bear close resemblances to networks. Mazes however are explicitly about spatial properties associated with the hidden and the secret, the unknowable behind the next corner. As if there may only be one safe path through the network and that path can only be revealed one node at a time.
There are therefore important temporal elements to the spatial logic of mazes and with implications as discussed below. First, mazes are intended to be revealed as they are run. Second, and as a result, they tend to slow movement — choices require processing time so mazes stretch out time, which is both part of their pleasure and their potential pain. Third, mazes can also be understood to layer time. The dependence of each choice on the last one suggests that time is experienced not one moment at a time, but always in reference to the moment that came before. Or, to put it another way, rather than conceiving of time in a maze as exclusively linear in a sequential way, the time-space of a maze is recursive, closer to the video game experiences of time, where the same moment is played out over and over until mastered.
As such, successful ‘maze-running’ entails learning the secrets of a maze and their spatial-temporal complexities in all these forms. This may mean mapping the space but it may also mean learning how to move through the space. Either way, learning to navigate a maze involves taking wrong turns and backtracking or doubling-back to retrace steps. In other words, learning from experience alongside learning to move physically (or mentally) safely through a maze (for example to pause to peer around corners or to mark the maze: Ariadne’s thread for Theseus or Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs). Revelation (of the logic of the maze) is therefore not simple binary of unknown/unknown as is often (mis)conceived in relation to containment logics, transmission communication models and the compartmentalised view of knowledge, or associated with the revelation of the relative nodal points of a network, but through this unique recursive pattern of learning. Mazes, unlike networks or containment, centre an epistemology of process and journey rather than fixity (Andriessen and Van Den Boom, 2009). It is a knowledge that is ‘forged in movement’, or what Ingold calls ‘wayfaring’ (Ingold, 2010: 41) which is at the heart of the pleasurable aspects of the maze but also its terrors.
Finally, and returning to the metaphorical, the idea of the maze is therefore perhaps also a far better way of understanding how learning and knowledge acquisition transpires in reality than liberal models of knowledge would have us believe. Rather than models of learning that assume a linear or teleological sense of learning, where knowledge grows over time (Croissant, 2014) or is contained only to be revealed by ‘lifting a lid’, and where learning is often centred around the ‘heroic’ efforts of individuals in an objective way, learning is far more recursive, with dead-ends, uncertainties, erasures, and far more collective, structured, a productive of our social realities (Law, 2004; Hilgartner 2012; Hilgartner, 2014). For these reasons, mazes, as metaphor, but also as practice, best capture this learning process, and the roles not only of maze-runners but of maze-makers in the shaping of knowledge and ultimately of learning.
Further Reading:
Brunton, Finn and Helen Nissenbaum (2015) Obfuscation: A user’s guide for privacy and protest. MIT Press.
Eliot, Henry (2018) Follow This Thread: A Maze Book to Get Lost In, London: Penguin.
Higgins, Charlotte (2018) Red Thread: On mazes and labyrinths, New York: Random House.
Van Veeren, Elspeth, Clare Stevens and Amaha Senu (2024) ‘Secrecy games, power and resistance in Global Politics,’ Review of International Studies. Published online, 1-18. doi:10.1017/S0260210524000275.
References
Andriessen, Daniel, and Marien Van Den Boom. “In search of alternative metaphors for knowledge; Inspiration from symbolism.” Electronic Journal of Knowledge Management 7.4 (2009): pp.397-404.
Army War College, (no date) ‘The World War I Allied Trenches,’ Army War College [Online], https://ahec.armywarcollege.edu/trail/WWI/index.cfm, accessed 27 July 2023.
Bellavia, David (2007) House to house: an epic memoir of war. Simon and Schuster.
Berman, Marshall (1988) All that is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, Penguin Books.
Brunton, Finn and Helen Nissenbaum (2015) Obfuscation: A user’s guide for privacy and protest. MIT Press.
Croissant, Jennifer L. (2014) ‘Agnotology: Ignorance and absence or towards a sociology of things that aren’t there,’ Social Epistemology 28:1, pp.4-25.
Denman, Derek S. (2020) ‘On fortification: Military architecture, geometric power, and defensive design’, Security Dialogue, 51:2-3, pp.231-247.
Eliot, Henry (2018) Follow This Thread: A Maze Book to Get Lost In, London: Penguin.
Higgins, Charlotte (2018) Red Thread: On mazes and labyrinths, New York: Random House.
Hilgartner, Stephen (2012) ‘Selective flows of knowledge in technoscientific interaction: information control in genome research,’ The British Journal for the History of Science, 45:2, 267-280.
Hilgartner, Stephen (2014) ‘Studying Absences of Knowledge: Difficult Subfield or Basic Sensibility?’, Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective, 3:12, pp.84-88.
Ingold, Tim (2013) ‘The maze and the labyrinth: reflections of a fellow-traveller,’ in Christopher Watts (ed), Relational archaeologies: humans, animals, things, London: Routledge.
Law, John (2004) After method: Mess in social science research. Psychology Press.
O’Neill, Robert (2017) The Operator: Firing the Shots that Killed Osama bin Laden and My Years as a SEAL Team Warrior, Scribner.
Rottman, Gordon L. (2012) Viet Cong and NVA Tunnels and Fortifications of the Vietnam War. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Van Veeren, Elspeth, Clare Stevens and Amaha Senu (2024) ‘Secrecy games, power and resistance in Global Politics,’ Review of International Studies. Published online, pp.1-18. doi:10.1017/S0260210524000275.
This A-Z entry is an edited extract of a chapter submitted to the Space and Security volume edited by Faye Donnelly and Tilman Schwarze for Bristol University Press.
[1] Like researchers of mazes, I draw the distinction between mazes, which have multiple possible routes and dead ends, and labyrinths, which tend to have a single, although complex route, though the terms are often confused.
[2] Urban designers have also sought, in some cases, to anticipate this risk. The redesign of centre of Paris in the late 1800s by Napoleon and Georges Eugène Haussmann with its wide-open boulevards was driven in part by the desire to limit insurrection by presenting the capacity to build ‘mazes’ (Berman, 1988: 150). My thanks to William Walters for pointing out this historical example.