<<TRANSMATHOME

3.1 Cosmography

3.1.1

Intensive cartography is cosmography. It is cosmography in that it sets out the attributes of the intensive cosmos, and the faculty-affects that are the ‘corellates’ of   these attributes. However, it is also cosmography in that it sets out fields of zones or modes in ways which are intrinsically involved with questions concerning the attributes of the cosmos. The domain of planet Earth, and of human bodies and societies, comes into focus as a field of singular zones or modes (assemblages), which could be transplanted to (or discovered in) worlds other than Earth, and where each of these is understood in terms of the free becomings and re-territorializations involved, in a way where cases of potential for open-ended deterritorialization necessarily lead into the question of the attributes of the cosmos.  For instance, the analysis of  paired assemblages of power and sign-regimes  locates these ‘double-articulated’ social fields as stratificatory, and therefore as constrictive in relation to the going-into-effect of the zones pertaining to attributes. The laying out of zones involving the deterritorialization of the human  is in this sense attached to cosmography (at the same time as being cosmography through the modes not being simply terrestrial), in that deterritorializations are pathways of intensification that can lead toward overall breakouts from stratification (becoming-animal, becoming-child, becoming-music – these are names for pathways of this kind).

3.1.2

What major questions now need to be posed?  A first issue concerns the need for greater detail in relation to the idea of abstract machines, and this can be addressed by taking the example of abstract machines involving language as a central aspect. This question can be  followed by the question as to how an abstract machine can be ‘characterised’ or ‘figured’. Again, a further series of questions concerns  the nature of different kinds of writing in the domain of intensive cartography, and in particular concerns the question – ‘if over-coding is the misadventure of writing, then what happens to the distinction between philosophy and fiction?’. Finally, these last questions will involve a return to the question of time, and to a more detailed account of the way in which time is bound up with the faculty-affect of reason. If stratificatory reason is fixation on arrays and trajectories of punctiform, dominatory zones, with their cyclical or periodically structural functioning, then it becomes necessary to ask whether time (as opposed to times or emergences, and the waves or pulsations of repetitonal zones) is to be understood as an aspect of stratificatory reason.

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