Cartography

I found Deleuze's description of Foucault as a cartographer to be quite interesting. It contrasts with an idea of Foucault as a sort of architect, a builder or creator of a edificial structure. I don't think that they downplay Foucault's genealogical aspect. Rather, genealogy becomes another part of an assemblege of analysis.

What constitutes for me this difference between cartography and artitechture is the place in which objects and subjects become situated within their particular structures and non-structures. An architectural genealogy would build, for an example, a house out of constituent elements. In the case of discpline, we would have the state, the laws, the penal system, and all that stuff. For a proper functioning house so to speak we would need all these elements in a specific combination. Once all these elements come together then we can analyze the structure as such. But, to extend the metaphor just one step further, we can only engage in the house as structure, by going through the front door and looking around.

Cartography precisely contrasts with this structural view. If Deleuze is correct, Foucault is precisely not building any sort of edifice. Rather, cartography is a kind of topographical imaging of elements that have no fixed places. Thus, topographical multiplicity is a geneaology of relational points that contribute to a mapping. When Delueze describes Foucault's Discpline and Punish, what becomes important is the relation of differening elements such as prisons, laws, states rather then their particular structural places. Additionally, it seems that these relationships are always shifting, simutanously working and being worked on by the mapping they produce. This in effect creates a cartography of discipline, or biopower, or govermentality, or whatever else.

Then new developements such as technology get placed into this cartography. Deleuze says that" Technology is therefore social before it is technical." I think it is interesting in the vein of Deleuze to think about how emerging technologies fit into the sort of Foucauldian assemblege that he describes. From an edificial viewpoint this would mimic already existing structural elements under the names of confession, servilliance, or power. I think that what Deleuze is saying is that from a Cartography emerging technologies can only be analysed through comparison in very superficial ways. What really happens is that emerging relational apparatus alter the very social mapping. This in effect would transmute Foucauldian cartographies.