From Representation to Becoming

An emphasis upon the map as representation, for example, is also often strongly associated with the quest for general explanation, with a progressive search for order, with Cartesian distinctions between the map and the territory it claims to represent. In recent years, there has been a move towards considering cartography from a relational perspective, treating maps not as unified representations but as constellations of ongoing processes (…) This kind of approach reflects a philosophical shift towards performance and mobility and away from essence and material stability.1

In Deconstructing the Map, JB Harley argues that the link between representation and reality has dominated cartographic thinking. According to him this link is issued from an understanding of maps engrained in a scientific positivism.2 In this context mapping becomes a process that translates reality. As Brian Massumi argues “translation is repetition with a difference.”3 The act of translating a reality into a map can therefore not be attributable to what it represents. Hence, representation ought to be perceived as a dynamic process: a new presentation -re-presentation- a process that makes the differential becoming visible. According to Deleuze and Guattari, becoming produces nothing else than itself. Accordingly, our map prototype does not aim at representing anything. It produces nothing else than itself: it does not specify or generalize but rather operates the level of the singular.

Our maps, as they are doubled with becoming can therefore be understood in terms of what Foucault called a diagram. As explained by Deleuze in a book he dedicated to Foucault “the diagram is not anymore the visual or auditive archive, it is rather the map, the cartography.”4 He adds that the diagram “is deeply unstable or fluent, constantly stirring matters and functions in order to establish mutations” and that “it never works to represent a pre-existing model, it produces a new type of reality, a new model of truth.”5 Accordingly, the diagram differs from a structure: it forms an unstable physical system that is in continuous disequilibrium. Hence, the truth of our maps is not related to the external reality of a represented object or territory. Rather it is a dynamic -or metastable- equilibrium that is immanent to the map itself. It would be correct here to say that the diagram refers to the generation of a cartography rather to the representation of a territory. (Metastability should not be confused with instability but rather in terms of the dynamism of the equilibrium, its potential to be reconfigured.)

In this perspective, we fully agree with Andrew Pickering who argues in his forthcoming book that a “representational understandings of inner workings can often be of little use in our interactions with the world”. He adds that “the detour through representation does not rescue us (…) from the domain of performance.”6 We, following Deleuze, are therefore more interested in “collective creations rather than representations.”7

Resisting to representation by insisting on generation means that our maps will create meaning instead of revealing it. Our aim is to generate maps that operate on the rhizomatic level. The rhizome negates hierarchy and predetermination. It functions as an open-ended and relational process; it does not obey to any kind of order, it has no centre from which its elements would be distributed, only milieus from which the elements emerge, derive, and recombine. Accordingly, rhizomatic maps make visible constellation of ongoing process.

We could also explain our maps in terms of Bruno Latour's concept of “the immutable mobile”. For Latour, the immutable mobile indicates an object which exists through diverse relations and which moves inside the network of these same relations. The object embodies a region, a space which moves and which exists as a form which is made immutable by the entanglement of the diverse relations which ensure his circulation in the network. The immutable mobile takes shape through partial and mutable fixations.8 It is hence in a metastable -and not a stable- equilibrium. It is a particular and generative event. In this perspective the immutable mobile can be understood as operating on the level of aesthetics: the immutable mobile draws tendencies, relational tendencies. Consequently our immutable mobile maps make visible the mobility, the movement immanent to the emerging knowledge/objects we are mapping.

We do not aim at negating the fact that some maps operate on the level of representation. We neither negate the validity and use value of these maps. However, we are not interested in data visualization, which for us deals with a form of stasis. We are rather concerned with the performative potential that digital technologies offer. We do not negate the fact that our maps have primitives, and that we don't map from scratch or tabula rasa. Our idea of generative mapping might in this case remain more on the discursive level but we believe that discourses can act as germs for creation and that they play an important role in the understanding of visual materials. Consequently, the information that pre-exists to our maps ought to be understood as in-formation, as a process that in-forms new formations.

1 http://makingmaps.files.wordpress.com/2009/08/rethinking_maps_introduction_pageproof.pdf

2 Harley, J.B. (2001) The New Nature of Maps. Essays in the History of Cartography. Johns Hopkins University Press p.152

3 Massumi, B. (1992) A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Deviations From Deleuze and Guattari. MIT Press.

4 Deleuze, G. (1986) Foucault. Les Editions de Minuit. p.42

5 Ibid. p.43

6 Pickering, A. (forthcoming) Sketches of Another Future: Cybernetics in Britain 1940-2000. University of Chicago Press

7 Deleuze, G. (1990-2003) Contrôle et Devenir in Pourparlers. Les Editions de Minuit. p.229

8 Latour, B. (1987) Science in Action: How to Follow Scientits and Engineers through Society. Harvard University Press.