Speculative Cartography: From the Scientific General to Aesthetic Particular
Speculative cartography is that it be as far away as possible, that it has no pretention of accounting for concrete cartographies. This is its difference from a scientific activity. Science is conceived to propose the semiotization which accounts for practical experience.1
Guattari, G. in discussion with Charles J. Stivale
A recurrent critique in the history of cartography is that maps reveal, represent and/or communicate the truth. Kitchin and al. claim that the foundational ontology in the realm of cartography is that “the world can be objectively and truthfully mapped using scientific techniques that capture and display spatial information."2 In the same vein, JB Harley argues, in Deconstructing Maps, that the first rule of cartography is that it is defined “in terms of a scientific epistemology” and that “the object of mapping is to produce a “correct” relational model of the terrain.”3 We wish to resist to this tendency of understanding maps as scientific productions and to conversely inscribe our respective projects in an aesthetic tendency. In doing so, we follow Guattari's aesthetic paradigm, a paradigm whose operations extricate “futuristic” and “constructivist” fields of virtuality, as opposed to a supposedly scientist neutrality. In fact, we do not aim at providing any scientific explanation of the movements, connexions and relationalities we wish to map. Rather, we pursue the objective to create maps that can be continuously remade, reconfigured, reread. Consequently, our maps will not hold any potential for being misread: they will not reveal knowledge according to a predetermine existence. They will instead make visible the moving tendencies immanent to the moving processes we will map.
We define the production of aesthetics maps as a creative activity that holds the potential to avoid representational mechanisms by making visible the becoming, the movement, the becoming movement, the movement in becoming. According to Simondon, aesthetics is never determined: it is a tendency. Following his definition, our maps will seek to perform the tendency of the movement/relationalities/connectivities of the process/phenomenon we will map. In this respect, we hope that every encounter with the map will create its own relationalities, its own consistency of connexions, that is to say its own reality. Call it singular mapping.
1 http://webpages.ursinus.edu/rrichter/stivale.html
3 Harley, J.B. (2001) The New Nature of Maps. Essays in the History of Cartography. Johns Hopkins University Press. p.154