… ‘the surface of the map functions like an operating table, a staging ground or a theatre of operations upon which the mapper collects, combines, connects, marks, relates and generally explores.’ (Cosgrove, 1999:213)
..
In contrast, postmodernism lost this teleological viewpoint, and is anti-meta narrative or meta-theory. That is, it no longer adheres to the fact that there could be a theory through which all things are connected. The autonomy changed to heteronomy – or as Michel Foucault described: ‘heterotopia’ – the coexistence in ‘an impossible space’ of a large number of fragmentary worlds’.(Harvey, 1990:48)
…
As Denis Cosgrove said:
‘maps are […] troubling, in that their apparent stability dissolves without much prompting – their are realised as being provisional, partial, liminal, uncertain’

‘it is the spatialities of connectivity, networked linkage, marginality and liminality, and the transgression of linear boundaries and hermetic categories – spatial ‘flow’ – which mark experience in the late twentieth century world […] culturally connections between phenomena formerly considered distinct and relatively fixed […] have been shown to be contingent and unstable: for example the connections between workplace and community, ethnicity and nationality, diet or religious practise or identity.’ (Cosgrove 1999:4-5)