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Note 7. Maps, Dangers, Freedoms

For nomad thought there are extraordinary connections between the maps of geography, history, anthropology and psychology (geography/geology, human territography, and psychography). The assemblages are trans-temporal as well as multi-spatial - they are virtual as well as  actual, and have multiple actual instantiations – and therefore  the ‘historical’ study of their past/virtual aspects is a vital aspect of the process of drawing up maps of them. At the same time (and inseparably) the assemblages also in each case either involve a  conjunction in individuals of a field of kinds of action and of a regime of signs, or involve some degree of cartographic engagement (this is to be active rather than passive or acted upon). Which is to say that the assemblages are quite as much in people’s heads as they are out in anthropo-geographical space-time. When an extension of a regime of signs or its formation of power passes over a threshold in a person’s thinking (as in the case of Kant and the town-network regime) this is as much a functioning of the assemblage as is the emergence of  a new tribe, or a new state. The names of the assemblages are names for ‘points’ on a map of ‘lodging-places’ which are also dangers. As well as having ‘places’ the map has lines which show conjunctions, and the conjunctions can have directions (a both, where one of the elements is being left behind). The different kinds of conjunctions are combinations and variations of the dangers – a danger being a delirium, a de-intensification, a shifting block-functioning in relation to a deepening of engagement with the modes and attributes of the intensive cosmos. In this way a geographically alligned knowledge of present and past social fields leads to an intensive cartographic map which is simultaneously a ‘sociography’ and a ‘psychography’.

There are also maps of other kinds of dangers. In ‘Micropolitics and Segmentarity’ there is a delineation of four global modes pertaining to individuals, two of which have just been explained  – fear, clarity, power (implacably poised absorption into the domination of other forces) and death (the welcoming of death and dissolution). There is also the map of stratificatory forms of abstract machines – the abstract machine of order-words, the abstract machine of faciality, the abstract machine of stratificatory reason.

However, beyond the engagement involved in the maps of dangers there is engagement along the lines of a cartography of the attributes of the intensive cosmos, and of the faculty-affects which pertain to these attributes. This is engagement with fields of aspects of zones, where in each case the overall field is an attribute of the cosmos. This engagement generates  (and is guided by) maps which are directly or explicitly cosmographic (not that that there is any end to engagement with an attribute, let alone with the cosmos). Alongside this, there are processes  taking place in connection with a cartography of all abstract machines of deterritorialization – in perception, movement, music,  science, writing, painting, , and in the form of modes that cross-cut different fields. In fact the engagement here is the same as the engagement involved in the mapping of attributes: one multiple, densely meshed or cross-cutting engagement expressing itself in different kinds of maps. A question of seeing  the intensive elements of environments (colour, movement, vorticality, timbre, flow), and of seeing affects, zones, becomings, de-intensifications, lines of flight. At the same time, thinking along the lines of the surfaces and ‘voids’ of morphography is also definitionally part of this process. This is to bring back the question of topography (intensive  maps are meshed with extensive ones at the level of intensification, as well as at the level of dangers).  Engagement with terrains is a question of helping to discern where to go in order to follow a particular line of flight or freedom, a particular line of intensification.

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