Through the looking-map
mapping as a milieu of individuation
pp. 111-140
in: Alessandro Sarti, Federico Montanari, Francesco Galofaro (eds), Morphogenesis and individuation, Berlin, Springer, 2015Abstract
Mapping is not merely making maps. As demonstrated by a rich literature, mapping is an ancient cognitive activity, and its complexity as a process explains how troubling has always been for scholars to define it starting from the map as an object: indeed, mapping is quite an absolute metaphor in Hans Blumenberg's terms. Its main role has concerned (and still concerns) the production and conveying of spatial information. Spatial information is one of the most vital kinds of information for gathering and keeping human groups together, as far as relationships in their widest sense are involved. The present essay aims at showing how mapping works in setting milieus of individuation (following the insightful work of Simondon). In drawing mainly on the Simondon's concept of invention (along with the most recent literature on mapping), it is possible to show that the mapping is the leading information infrastructure at the root of the production of spatial information, that this feature has been made possible by the chimeric nature of mapping (combining logic and analogy), and that the radical novelty of the Geo-Web is based on the would-be solution to a problem already existing in the earliest examples of mapping.
