Ecologies of Worlds

The central project of onto-cartography consists in the analysis or cartography of worlds. A cartography is a mapping. We must exercise care here, for while geography provides us with exemplary instances of cartography, not all cartographies are geographical. Anatomists, for example, are cartographers of the body, mapping relations between bones, muscles, nerves, and organs. As DeLanda argues, complexity theorists develop cartographies of attractors governing systems, along with potential bifurcation points in those systems (DeLanda 2005: ch. 1). As Deleuze suggests following Lautmann (Lautmann 2011), mathematicians are cartographers of “problem spaces” (Deleuze 1995: ch. 4). Linguists are cartographers of phonemes and other linguistic entities, while Marx – in his historical work – was a cartographer of social relations under a variety of systems of production. The list could be expanded indefinitely. Foucault presents us with cartographies of knowledge (Foucault 1994) and how power structures social relations (Foucault 1995). Cartography is a central project of geography, but not all or even most cartographies are geographical. Wherever there is a map – even where we don’t call it a map – there is a cartography. To map is to produce a cartography. While onto-cartography overlaps with cartographies as developed in geography, and while, as we will see, it necessarily contends with issues of time and space as is the case with geography, the object of onto-cartography is something other than the mapping of geographical, spatio-temporal relations. What onto-cartography maps are relations between machines or networks of machines composing a world.

However, in order to articulate the project of onto-cartography it's necessary to first clarify the concept of "world." A world is not a planet such as the planet Earth. Planets are machines within a world, components of a world, but are not themselves worlds. Similarly, worlds are not networks or systems of signs referring to one another, as in the case of Heidegger (Heidegger 1962: 91–148). Heidegger describes how a particular machine, Dasein, is structurally open to a world, but does not give an account of a world.