Abbas Niran B. - Mapping Michel Serres

NIRAN ABBAS

When one looks at a certain object only as representing another, the idea one has of it is a sign.

Antoine Arnauld, Logique de Port-Royal, 1872

To map is to take the measure of a world in such a way that the measure may be communicated between people, places, or times. The measure of mapping is not restricted to the mathematical; it may equally be spiritual, political, or moral. Acts of mapping are creative, sometimes anxious, moments in coming to knowledge of the world, and the map is both the spatial embodiment of knowledge and a stimulus to further cognitive engagements. This is how I read the philosopher and writer Michel Serres, as a nomadic, exploratory mapmaker and storyteller who engages with what remains hidden. Mapping is neither secondary nor representational, but doubly operative: digging, finding, and exposing on the one hand, and relating, connecting, and structuring on the other. For Michel Serres, the philosopher's role is not to develop an ontology or epistemology. Knowledge is not about something; rather it is how ideas and concepts interact.

The surface of the map functions like an operating table, a staging ground or a theater of operations upon which the mapper collects, combines, connects, marks, masks, relates, and generally explores. The analogous-abstract character of the map surface means that it is doubly projective; it both captures the projected elements off the ground and projects back a variety of effects through use.

The essays in this book embrace the concept of mapping as an active agent in Serres's work. The contributors underline the various processes and effects of what mapping means, but also what mapping does. The concept of mapping's most productive effects provide a finding that is also a

This quasi-object that is a marker of the subject is an astonishing constructer of intersubjectivity. We know, through it, how and when we are subjects and when and how we are no longer subjects. We: what does that we mean? We are precisely the fluctuating moving back and forth of the I. The I in the game is a token exchanged. And this passing, this network of passes, these vicariances of subjects weave the collection. (P, 227)

As Steven D. Brown points out, We become subjects through the way in which we are caught up in the circulation of that which will make us it the moving back and forth of the I. Humans, Serres claims, are distinctive because they make things into objects that act as stabilizers of social relations (e.g., the plate stabilizes eating arrangements, the weapon formalizes conflict). We owe our present sociality to this invention of the object:

Our relationships, social bonds, would be as airy as clouds were there only contracts between subjects. In fact, the object, specific to Hominidae, stabilizes our relationships, it slows down the time of our revolutions. For an unstable bond of baboons, social changes are flaring up every minute. One could characterize their history as unbound, insanely so. The object makes our history slow. (