Intro: place and subjectivity

This paper intends to highlight the mutual intersections of space and intersubjectivity in various forms, which can be traced back to the ‘spatial turn’ of poststructuralist theory (Warf and Arias 2009; Lévy 2015) combined with a hermeneutic reading of the phenomenon of ‘mapping’ and the cartographic sensibility manifested in recent developments in contemporary art. The aim is to bring to the fore the differing spatial and subjective configurations that constitute modes of subjectivity (and intersubjectivity) that are grounded in the “geographical imagination” (Pile 2008) and more specifically, the cartographical imagination of mapping practices grounded in locality. “These imaginations”—as Pile points out—“are ‘territories and boundaries’, ‘subject positions’, ‘spatial practices’, ‘between me and you’ and ‘outside in/inside out’. Each of these has something to offer any analysis of subjectivity” (2008, p. 206). To this list, I would add the following key terms, which will be addressed in the course of this paper: dwelling/thinking, sparing, safeguarding (Heidegger 2008), de/reterritorialization, becoming, and nomadic existence (Deleuze and Guattari 2011). As I do so, I will try to answer the question, still current today as it was in the time of its publication, “What kind of practices do we create when we use the concept of subjectivity? Where do we locate ourselves when we use the concept of subjectivity as a critical tool for analyzing the contemporary social and political situation?” (Blackman et al. 2008, p. 14; my emphasis). The “situatedness of subjectivity,” as the editors of Subjectivity recognized in its inaugural issue, cannot be ignored, if one is to engage with an analysis of what it is to be a subject in a post-Cartesian and pluralistic world. As the editors note, “Subjectivity, despite its fruitfulness for critical research, possesses no trans-historical validity and cannot lie beyond historical specificity” (Blackman et al. 2008, p. 14).

I would argue that subjectivity not only cannot lie beyond historical specificity, but similarly, it cannot lie beyond geographical specificity. As Edward Said aptly puts it, “Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings” (Said 1994, p. 7). A similar argument can be made about the cartographic documents that shape our geographical imagination: maps, as objects that have the capacity to disrupt symbolic horizons and contradict them in powerful ways, are not only about political borders, geographical boundaries, and the stories of the ‘winners’ of conflicts over land and property, but they also deal with the formation of the imaginary, with the movement of people and boundaries, with lines of flight and trajectories that in themselves are constituents of subjectivities. These aspects of cartography have not yet been sufficiently analyzed, and the cartographic image has suffered from a similar prejudice that space has been subjected to—namely, the idea that any discourse around place and space is inherently reactionary, as Jeff Malpas has effectively pointed out (Malpas 2012). Only a hermeneutic reorientation with respect to mapping and cartography can rescue them from their association with space as static and manipulable, in favor of space as lived place, as “place or topos as both bounded and open, as both singular and plural” (Malpas 2012, p. 10).

Hermeneutics is an apt methodology for this study, understood, as Gianni Vattimo puts it, as “fundamentally the philosophy of the irreducible alterity of the other” (Vattimo 2018a, p. 29; my translation), and as alliance, a non-neutral point of view, a “mode of practicing philosophy in a non-objective way,” where “truth is not reflectivity, the position of the subject is not that of the screen onto which realities draw themselves, and being is not the ‘given’ but the event…” (Vattimo 2018a, p. 128; my translation). This “ontological turn,” to use Vattimo’s own term, is of import to a reconsideration of mapping and the cartographic image, since the “weakening of subjectivity” that accompanies it, which Heidegger already identified in the Da-sein and Lacan locates in the subject reconceived from its alterity (Rovatti 2007, p. 85), can be found in the idea of mapping as a means to alterity. But whereas in traditional Wester cartography the “other” was located outside the subject (in the form of “other” worlds to be explored and conquered), in contemporary mapping aesthetic practices the “other” is not just located in the eye that overlooks, disembodied, the world from above, but also and most significantly in the eye that dwells and inhabits the body and the world that it occupies historically and critically.

In this context, my intervention focuses on the capacity of maps and what I call the “act of mapping” to disrupt conventional assumptions concerning the representation of space that constitute philosophical, aesthetic, and political worldviews.Footnote 1 In particular, I focus on the concepts of territory, dwelling, and mapping through an intertextual analysis of Deleuze and Guattari on the territory and the animal, and Heidegger’s late essay “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in search for a possible redefinition of mapping as assemblage or gathering point of the ‘fourfold,’ the meaning of which will be discussed in due course. In this search, I partly follow the concept of subjectivity articulated by Isabelle Stengers, who claims, “we can understand the efficacy of a concept as part of a milieu…in this sense subjectivity could never be understood for itself, rather it is always part of an assemblage in which it is used and in which it gains its craft to forge efficacious propositions” (Blackman et al. p. 15; my emphasis). One such assemblage could be a mapping practice, understood as a constellation of operations and cartographical practices grounded in topology, in order to arrive at a “different topological understanding of the subject” (Pile 2008, p. 213).

A concurrent reading of Heidegger, Deleuze and Guattari will also enable me to ‘urbanize’ or ‘deterritorialize’ Heidegger’s Da-seinFootnote 2 along modalities of being that include the nomadic, the stateless, and the durational, in opposition to the dominance of the “process of singular individuation and molecular becoming” (Blackman et al. p. 15) that is at the center of Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of subjectivity. “Following Deleuze and Guattari we could read subjectivity as decentered, as a part of an assemblage, an emergent conjunction and an evolving intertwining of self-ordering forces and diverse materialities” (Blackman et al. p. 15).

According to cultural geographer Nigel Thrift,

subjectivity needs to be understood as a geography. The “psychotopical” analysis that is necessary in order to understand subjectivity requires that more emphasis be placed on arts of experiment drawn from the battery of performing arts that exist on the borderline between the humanities and the social sciences. (Thrift 2008, p. 82)

Thrift's explicit reference to the experimental and performing arts calls for a serious evaluation of how contemporary art practices centered on topology, duration, and movement (Blackman et al. p. 21) contributes to the redefinition of subjectivity, and in particular, supports my argument according to which cartographies constitute kinds of subjectivity. The mapping of places is a form of mapping one’s self—not a self that is self-contained, defined along Cartesian axis, but rather a self that is defined by its relationship to others—whether other human beings or other machines and actors in the world, including non-human living beings and places. In fact, Thrift wishes as much:

Might it not be possible to think of subjectivity as artists have begun to think of being, as a series of ephemeral mental objects of concentration and dispersal in which ‘‘physical handwork, material industry, and intellectual labour stand in for the hidden work of crafting self-awareness out of environmental fluctuations” (Stafford 2007, p. 12)? (Thrift 2008, p. 86)

A couple of examples of artistic cartography will assist us in relating mapping, new subject formation and political impasse through the use of place, narrative, and myth. The work of Aboriginal artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye will be considered as a site to analyze the shifting framework in the notion of mapping, subjectivity, and memory within a collective experience of the land of her ancestors. Moroccan-French artist Bouchra Kahlili’s The Mapping Journey Project (2008–2011) will help us see the articulation between subjectivity and story-telling with maps, through the narrativization of the lived experience of African migrants in Europe.

With the aid of these physical manifestations of cartographic aesthetics, I will expose the nexus between topology and memory, and how that highlights specific instances of current political impasse. Mapping is thus seen as a process of conceptualizing space–time, informing a variety of aesthetic forms and practices, with ontological, epistemological, and political import. Conceived this way, a possible definition of ‘mapping’ indicates a way of organizing space interconnected with a way of temporalizing content, or in other words, the becoming-space of a narration that constitutes particular kinds of world views. It goes without saying that these world views constitute specific kinds of subjectivities—just like, to make an obvious example, the Cartesian ego cogito is informed and constituted by the concept of space as homogeneous extension that one can witness in early Renaissance linear perspective and coeval cartography (Jay 2011).Footnote 3

Within contemporary art practices in particular, it is posited that the emergence of ‘the cartographic’ as a ubiquitous theme is to be attributed to the power of mapping to expose a worldview paradigmatic of the post-modern era and beyond (rhizomatic, nomadic, horizontal, non-hierarchical, etc.), bridging the aesthetic, ontological and cognitive fields and crossing a variety of disciplines. This worldview challenges the dominant idea of space as an essentially Western concept with universalistic aspirations and impositions, which we can see reflected in the very notion of the Cartesian subject. It is further argued that artists deliberately deconstruct the rational appearance of the map to expose the architectonics of time through duration, which constitutes the space where mapping occurs as process, and to expose power dynamics and political impasse in a globalized world.

Territory and dwelling: mapping subjectivity

I will thus start by engaging with Heidegger, Deleuze and Guattari to uncover the cartographical imagination in their writings, in order to arrive at a possible definition of subjectivity situated between locality and movement. I shall focus especially on the essay by Heidegger that has become a staple in the discourse around place and locality, namely “Building Dwelling Thinking” (2008 [1951]) and on Deleuze and Guattari’s elaboration of nomadic space in A Thousand Plateaus (2011 [1980]) and What is Philosophy? (1994 [1991]). The attempt is to find a middle ground, a point of contact between two apparently radically different topological views that call into question what it means to inhabit space and how that affects our sense of identity and subjectivity.

Art, dwelling, territory, orientation (and its symbolic representation) and subject formation are intertwined in a complex relationship. According to Deleuze and Guattari, “Perhaps art begins with the animal, at least with the animal that carves out a territory and constructs a house (both are correlative, or even one and the same, in what is called a habitat)” (1994, p. 183). They further claim that this is a system of transformation of various organic processes (related to life, reproduction, nourishment, and so on), which “does not explain the appearance of the territory and the house; rather it is the other way around: the territory implies the emergence of pure sensory qualities” (p. 183). These qualities— “sensibilia”—move from the functional to the expressive, and in that sense they are transformational. These sensibilia are not inborn or independent from the territory but are co-dependent and interconnected with it. Furthermore, we shall draw a connection between these statements, the concept of ‘assemblage’ (also key in Deleuze), and the Heideggerian concept of the ‘fourfold,’ a specifically spatial one, in order to show their relationship to the figure of the map and the concept of mapping. I will explore this possibility in the following section.

for Heidegger (2008), building and dwelling are strictly interrelated: they both call upon the act of ‘thinking’, and being itself; being in and dwelling are etymologically connected. From the very beginning of his essay, he gives us the key argument: “to build is in itself already to dwell” (p. 348). In fact, to dwell is in essential relation to building, not simply as a means-to-end instrumental relation (to build in order to dwell), but as an existential relation: we build because we already dwell in the world. In essence, what Heidegger is saying, through a careful unpacking of the meaning of the word “bauen”—which shares a common root in Old German with both building and dwelling, is that to dwell—to inhabit—is not a behavior among many; it is what constitutes the essence of “man,” i.e., the way in which the human being is in the world, as a mortal on the earth. We shall see how this concept can be problematized (and has been, most notably by Levinas 1979), from the point of view of the migrant and the refugee; but we shall also see how the concept of dwelling does not necessarily exclude movement and migration.

Since dwelling is an existential condition that transcends particular contingent situations of inhabiting a place, this idea then would apply even to those who do not have a fixed or permanent abode, or those whose dwellings are impermanent. After all, we know that thinking itself is not localizable in any specific locus of the human body, against what traditional philosophies claimed at different moments in time.

Although he does not put it in temporal terms, it is clear so far that for Heidegger prior to the act of building—as erection of the edifice, of the house, etc.—there is the act of dwelling: the act of dwelling, of being in the world, is primordial. Does this thought relate to the idea that the territory precedes any settlement that we find in Deleuze and Guattari? In a certain sense, yes. However, there are also important distinctions to be made. Is the ‘territory’—the ‘thing’—really equivalent to ‘dwelling’—the act? And is the territory really a thing, or is it rather a state of being? The notion of the fourfold, which Heidegger developed a year earlier in the essay “The Thing” and takes up again in “Building Dwelling Thinking,” may shed some light on these and other questions that emerge from this comparison.

The act of dwelling, as a being in the world, “is the manner in which mortals are on the earth” (p. 350). We see already in this sentence two of the four ‘components’ of the fourfold (Das Geviert) that inhabit their ‘places’—mortals and earth; the other two being sky and divinities.

These four components are interdependent and forming an originary (i.e., primordial) unity: to dwell is to take care, to preserve this unity, to spare—as Heidegger reminds us with a further analysis of the ancient Saxon word wuon, and the Gothic wunian, both related to bauen, meaning to remain, to stay in place, and to set free, to spare (p. 351).

The notion of ‘sparing’ already appears in the essay “The Thing”, which precedes “Building Dwelling Thinking”: “[i]f we think of the thing as thing, then we spare and protect the thing’s presence in the region from which it presences” (Heidegger 2001, p. 179; my emphasis). The basic character of dwelling is safeguarding; mortals dwell in the way they safeguard the fourfold. There is also an ecological message at the core of this thought, which resonates with us in a particularly strong way at the present time: “[s]aving the earth does not master the earth and does not subjugate it, which is merely one step from boundless spoliation” (Heidegger 2008, p. 552). “Saving” here is a way of setting-free, of letting-things-be; “to look after the fourfold in its essence” (p. 553).

To look after, to look out: the vigilance of which Heidegger talks about can be found in Deleuze’s reflections on the animal, which, contrary to Heidegger, opens up the world dimension to the non-human living creature. “If someone would ask me what an animal is, I would answer “a being on the lookout” (Deleuze 2011). Through the figure of the animal, Deleuze (and Guattari) theorize a way of “making a world” by constituting a territory, which as we have seen, is almost an act of art making. Even in their poverty, within their limits, animals have worlds, Deleuze says, and that is what he finds moving and worth of consideration.

This notion of ‘territory’ goes hand in hand with another concept, designated by “an outwardly barbaric” word: the concept of ‘deterritorialization.’ “The territory only exists in relation to a movement from which it leaves … The notion with new claims is that there is no territory without a vector of leaving the territory, there is no leaving the territory, no deterritorialization, without a vector of reterritorialization elsewhere” (Deleuze 2011). Through these interrelated concepts of territorialization/deterritorialization, Deleuze effectively question the emphasis Heidegger puts on dwelling as the remaining in place, the staying in a place. This problematization of the notion of ‘staying in place’ is of particular interest for our argument, which claims that maps and cartographic representations help us decipher modes of subjectivity and being in the world that are as much based on movement and change as much as on rootedness and a sense of place, since it privileges the geologies, geographies, and cartographies of movement (Message 2010, p. 280) over the somewhat static verticality of history or the concept of time as chronological and sequential. Time here acquires a horizontal quality as movement across a field, which has important implications for mapping practices.

The ‘territory’ is not conceived as a static and well defined space; on the contrary, it is characterized by a mobile and shifting center which constitutes a “malleable site of passage” (Message 2010, p. 280) and which is related with attendant concepts of ‘assemblage’ and ‘nomadology.’ We could say that while Heidegger is concerned with an idea of rootedness, Deleuze and Guattari are more concerned with an idea of uprootedness and nomadism, and by the effects of movements on the earth and across borders rather than by the movement within the confines of an institutionalized space.

Nomadism presents its own form of building and dwelling, albeit in a less permanent form; the temporality of this form of dwelling is of a different nature, and yet it still involves a relationship with the earth, the sky, the mortals and divinities. By extrapolation, we posit that as ‘dwelling’—or the inhabiting, which does not exclude movement—precedes the building, so mapping—the drawing of the map, the territorialization of the territory—in its originary moment comes after or because of the dwelling/movement across a territory. Mapping is a product of that movement. Aboriginal “Songlines” provide a vivid example of this kind of mapping, as famously narrated by Bruce Chatwin: a maze of invisible lines crosses the Australian desert, created by the retelling of ancestral songs harking back to the mythical era of the Dreamtime, “singing the world into existence” (Chatwin 1987, p. 2). Part memoir, part fictional account, part treatise on nomadology, Chatwin’s book was one of the first works of European literature to bring Australian indigenous spiritual traditions to the Western consciousness. He coined a word, “Songlines,” to express in English language the cosmological world of Dreamtime and the “Footprints of the Ancestors” (also known as churinga, “Dreaming Tracks,” and “The Way of the Law”), which has been largely influential and has been even “embraced by many Indigenous elders to describe Chatwin’s flawed evocation of their indefinable cosmological/spiritual/religious beliefs and phenomena” (Daley 2017b).Footnote 4 As Elizabeth Grosz remarks, Chatwin “describes, from the point of view of a ‘European’ outsider, traditional Aboriginal people’s relation to their land, a relation that is indeed marked by possession or stewardship, even though it cannot be construed as private property” (Grosz 2008, p. 49).

We could say that what poetic cartography provides, of which Aboriginal “songlines” are certainly an example, is indeed an alternative model to the idea of mapping as a mode of colonization and possession, typical of Western modes of mapping. In the former mode, a different kind of subjectivity is manifested, predicated on the relationship between the body, the earth, and the community of the ancestors. Chatwin does not explain actual “songlines,” but he reports what his traveling companion, Arkady, told him: “‘A song,’ he said, ‘was both map and direction-finder. Providing you knew the song, you could always find your way across country.’” (cited in Daley 2017b). The book’s many sources include, significantly, a quotation by Heidegger: “The song still remains which names the land over which it sings”Footnote 5 (Chatwin 1987, p. 279).

It is not possible to reproduce here any of the original “Songlines,” which only exist in the oral tradition of the Aboriginals. There are artists belonging to that tradition, however, who have made visual representations of such story-telling in forms that share much with the cartographic image. One such artist is Emily Kame Kngwarreye, and in particular, her terrain paintings where ‘dreaming’ constitutes one of her chief inspirations,Footnote 66 such as Bush Yam Songlines, or Big Yam Dreaming (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1
figure 1

Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Big Yam Dreaming, 1995. Synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 291 × 802 cm. Copyright Emily Kame Kngwarreye, licensed Viscopy 08, National Museum of Australia. © Emily Kame Kngwarreye/Copyright Agency. Licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2020

Full size image

Famous for her expansive canvases portraying the desertic landscape of her native Utopia region in the Northern Territory of Australia, Kame Kngwarreye was “from a generation born early enough to have lived the traditional nomadic life of the desert. Like their forebears, they used ochre, clay and charcoal in rock paintings and body decoration, and feathers, grass and sand to make elaborate installations for sacred ceremonies” (Millar 2005). It is significant that her working process involves painting while sitting on top of large surfaces of canvas covering the pavement, in a manner that evokes a tracing/mapping of the earth on a scale of 1 to 1, as Jorge Louis Borges imagined in the short story “On Exactitude in Science” (Borges 1999).

Artists like Emily Kame Kngwarreye deal directly in their work with the Heideggerian concept of the ‘fourfold,’ as the point of gathering of earth, sky, mortals, and divinities—what we would call a ‘sacred space’ grounded in relationality, or “the event of gathering,” as Malpas calls it (2012, p. 8). In the concept of the ‘fourfold’ we find further analogies to the map and the process of mapping. We can think of it as a plane divided by intersecting lines, in which the four ‘areas’ are disposed around it, like in a Medieval T-O Map. Gianni Vattimo gives further corroboration to this hypothesis: “The fourfold can be understood as directions or cardinal points. They are not inner worldly [intramundane] beings, but rather dimensions of the opening of the world in which the worldly beings are located.” “Dimensions” here is not to be understood as measures, but as “constitutive directions in which the world extends itself” (Vattimo 2018b, pp. 126–127; my translation).

From the foundation of Rome to the Medieval maps of the oikumene, the four areas generated by the intersection of the main axes (cardo/decumanus) on a plane make space for the settlement of the human community in accord with the divinities above: the augurs of the Romans interpreted the will of the Gods by looking at the flight of birds over the designated land; in Christian maps, the center of the fourfold was the city of Jerusalem, the ‘holy city.’

These dimensions are not simply indicating ‘space,’ but the gathering that allows for a site to exist, in building form. Heidegger develops this idea in the second part of the essay “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in which he asks the question: “In what way does building belong to dwelling?” (p. 353). The example of the bridge is illuminating. The bridge gathers the earth as landscape around a stream: “[b]ridges initiate in many ways” (p. 354). The bridge is a thing—and “it is such as the gathering of the fourfold which we have described” (p. 355). It is here that a distinction between ‘space’ and ‘place’ could be made, through the concept of the ‘locale.’ The bridge does not merely take place within a locale, but it creates a locale through its presence: “But only something that is itself a locale can make space for a site” (p. 355). The locale is not already there before the bridge; out of the many spots along the river, a place becomes a locale because of the bridge.

What Heidegger is saying is that things in the world are not merely ‘given’ in a spatio-temporal relation; things always belong to an opening, which they articulate from the inside, and which they contribute determining and founding (Vattimo 2018b, p. 128). And yet, this interrelation between the bridge and the place in which it is located—this ‘making place’ capability of the bridge—is not arbitrary. As it becomes evident by looking at historical maps of a given site, certain spots are more favorable than others to make space for a bridge (or a civic building, a park, etc.); for example, by the proximity of the two banks, which narrow down in precisely that point, or by the slowing down of the currents, or by the location of settlements already in place. Is that not already a locale? Does the territory not already possess a quality of locality? For instance, the Lenape Native Americans used to cross the East River in the precise spot where the Brooklyn Bridge was then built in modern New York City. They built settlements there (a space of dwelling); they surely did so because of the favorable conditions of that particular location, from the natural resources to be found there to the interconnection to various paths.Footnote 7 We also know that those paths were created on previously existing trails that indigenous animals traced before humans settled in the territory (Homberger 1998). When one walks on the Bowery or Broadway in Manhattan today, one is walking on ancient Indian paths that were trails formed by deer, foxes, and other wild animals that roamed what was once a thick, dense tree forest.Footnote 8

The space (Raum) that, in Heidegger’s definition, is freed for settlement and lodging within a boundary (Greek peras), is in reality a space already inhabited by animals. It is here that the Deleuzian notion of “assemblage” may help expanding the limitations on which the concept of “fourfold” rests upon (or, dare we say, the boundaries in which it appears to be confined), by allowing us to draw connections between the notion of becoming-animal, the territory, and the assemblage on the one hand, and the “fourfold” on the other.

The first analogy is that assemblage—as “the process of arranging, organizing, and fitting together” (Livesey 2010, p. 18)—implies a gathering of sorts; and, “according to Deleuze and Guattari, there is both a horizontal and a vertical axis associated with assemblages” (Livesey 2010, p. 18):

On a first, horizontal, axis, an assemblage comprises two segments, one of content, the other of expression. On the one hand it is a machinic assemblage of bodies, of actions and passions... on the other hand it is a collective assemblage of enunciation, of acts and statements, of incorporeal transformations attributed to bodies. Then on a vertical axis, the assemblage has both territorial sides, or reterritorialized sides, which stabilize it, and cutting edges of deterritorialization, which carry it away. (Deleuze and Guattari 2011, p. 88).

The presence of an axis of enunciation reveals the role that language plays in forming the experience of things in the world, which is an essential aspect of the fourfold. But what is more pressing in this concept of assemblage, is the way these axes function as a metaphoric compass (or map) to produce what appears as a constellation of heterogeneous complex elements that deal with territories and forces associated with them, even though they may lack a specific location. These forces are special functions of the territory: “specific actions can find, define, and assemble territories, and the forces of deterritorialization and reterritorialization themselves develop new territories” (Livesey 2010, pp. 18–19). A second analogy with Heidegger’s argument—dwelling pre-exists building, and building creates the locale—is that here “[t]he territory is not primary in relation to the qualitative mark; it is the mark that makes the territory. … In this sense, the territory, and the functions performed within it, are products of territorialization” (Deleuze and Guattari 2011, p. 315).

What differs, though, is the radical heterogeneity of assemblages, their anti-dualistic quality (see also Harman 2011, pp. 82–94; and Harman 2007, pp. 131–135), and the lack of an order that still presupposes a hierarchy in the divinities-mortals-earth-sky interrelation; the openness of assemblages to being affected, effected, and infected by multiplicities; and the productive possibilities of becoming-animal. It is crucial to notice that Deleuze and Guattari are not interested in the animal as the “individuated animal” of the family pet, and neither animals with characteristics or attributes of the kind one finds in zoology; what interest them most is that “[a] becoming-animal always involves a pack, a band, a population, a peopling, in short, a multiplicity” (p. 239). The animal becomes an index of a mode “of expansion, propagation, occupation, contagion, peopling. I am legion” (p. 239). One could again notice a possible analogy between the act of ‘wolfing’ as opposed to ‘being a wolf,’ lousing vs louse, etc. with Heidegger’s focus on the ‘thinging’ of the thing, the ‘worldling’ of the world and so on; a similar emphasis on process and becoming may be at stake. Deleuze and Guattari hint at the possibility that there may be a ‘primordial’ multiplicity already “dwelling within us” that would draw us toward the multiplicity of the pack and “a fascination for the outside” (pp. 239–240). In any case, what matters in the context of our particular question—the question linking cartography, mapping, place, and subjectivity—is that the notion of multiplicity and assemblage has implications with respect to borders, boundaries, and the process of ‘bordering,’ which are essential terms in the discourse around the creation of space—and one could add, in the formation of subjectivity itself.

As Malpas explicates in relation to the essay “Building Dwelling Thinking,”

The issue of dwelling is closely tied up with the thinking through of what might be involved in such a topology, and equally, getting clear about the topology also means getting clear about what might be at issue in the notion of dwelling – and, together with this, of notions such as belonging and identity. (Malpas 2012, p. 3).

The main point here is that identity is thought as topological and relational in character. When Heidegger theorizes the fourfold in “Building Dwelling Thinking,” what matters is the relational aspect of the four elements, which come to be only through their ‘gathering.’ Malpas continues, “[u]nderstanding identity—and so also unity (since the two are closely tied together)—in this way means understanding identity as dynamic, that is, as something that is constantly being worked out, and as encompassing an essential difference and differentiation” (Malpas 2012, p. 8).Footnote 9 I would add to this interpretation that difference must leave room for complexity and multiplicity; the “essential difference” should be rethought as “difference in itself,” in a Deleuzian fashion, which does not rely on a relationship with sameness or with representation, but with multiplicity.

According to Deleuze and Guattari (2011, p. 245), “a multiplicity is defined not by the elements that compose it in extension, not by the characteristics that compose it in comprehension, but by the lines and dimensions it encompasses in ‘intension.’” A key component of their philosophy is highlighted, which stresses the relation between forces, rather than on things and their qualities. It is less about form than about “intensities,” which are contextualized in the ontology of the virtual and the actual—both characterizations of the real, where the virtual is the “past that can never be fully present,” a “pure past” (Deleuze and Guattari 2011, p. 300).

A similar notion of intensities appears in Deleuze’s formulation of subjectivity in his reading of Spinoza (Deleuze 1988), which not by chance is redefined in geographical and spatial terms, through longitude and latitude. The coordinates compose a so called “map of the body” defined by a plane of immanence (in which the term “plane” indicates the double valence of “plan” and “plane”), where “[a] body can be anything; it can be an animal, a body of sounds, a mind or an idea; it can be a linguistic corpus, a social body, a collectivity... The longitudes and latitudes together constitute Nature, the plane of immanence or consistency, which is always variable and is constantly being altered, composed and recomposed, by individuals and collectivities” so that “[t]here is no longer a subject, but only individuating affective states of an anonymous force” (pp. 127–128).

This becoming-other is intrinsic in multiplicity, and pushes at the borders of the territory: it “unfolds potentials developed in a singular individual at a crossroad of mutations” (Massumi 1992, p. 98), while “[t]he result of a productive assemblage is a new means of expression, a new territorial/spatial organization…The assemblage is destined to produce a new reality, by making numerous, often unexpected, connections” (Livesey 2010, p. 19).

This crossroad, the phenomenon of bordering, and Heidegger’s idea of a boundary as ‘horizon’ meet in the related and contrasted figures—modes of gathering or aggregating—of the fourfold and the assemblage. For Heidegger (2008, p. 356), in a celebrated sentence, “[a] boundary is not that at which something stops, as the Greek recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its essential unfolding.” The boundary is ‘Horismos,’ the horizon—hence not something fixed, definable: the horizon is not a line, and not a limit either; it is the meeting place of earth and sky: two singularities, one concealing, the other revealing; one projected in the future, the other safeguarding the past, as Harman (2007, p. 133) puts it, and therefore always shifting, always moving, always located beyond (in a map, the horizon has a symbolic and yet implicit function, coinciding with the plane of representation). Nevertheless, the horizon indicates a boundary, which ‘lets in’ space, and is gathered by virtue of a locale; “spaces receive their essential being from locales and not from ‘space’” (Heidegger 2008, p. 356). This is a crucial statement, since locale seems to imply a characterized site, not abstract ‘extended’ space; it is a space of intensities, to say it with Deleuze.

Crossing boundaries: art, mapping, and political impasse

At this point, it is worth asking, is mapping a type of ‘building dwelling thinking’? A map—as object, but also as act—is a technology, or, a technique of organizing, ordering, and setting a territory, and a way to orient ourselves. A map often comes before the building, in the sense of blueprint, plan, projection; it gives form to a dwelling, a present visualization of an idea that lives in the future. Or it may come after, as documentation of the built environment (that can be further built upon, destroyed, deterritorialized and reterritorialized again and again).Footnote 10

We learn from Heidegger, as we continue to ‘map out’ his reasoning until the end of the essay, that building is a mode of bringing forth “the thing as a locale,” and “bringing forth” is another way to say “to produce,” tikto in Greek, whose verb root, tec, is shared by techne, technique.Footnote 11 For the Greeks techne means “to make something appear, within what is present, as this or that, in this way or that way” (2008, p. 361). The meaning of the term itself, we learn in typical Heideggerian fashion, has been concealed, first in “the tectonics of architecture,” and more recently in “the technology of power machines.” And yet, neither the technology of building nor the mere letting-appear would adequately explain what building is: we have to think of it as a letting dwell (p. 361). This capacity to dwell, coupled with the peculiar search for a dwelling (this homelessness that we carry as we learn how to dwell) that takes many names in the animal and human world—errance, transhumance, transurbance, migration, journey, discovery, crossing, traversing, etc.—may be what is ultimately at the heart of the act of mapping. It is not possible in this paper to open up a discussion between the notion of homelessness and of being ‘at home’ in one’s place (of origin)—both central to Heidegger’s philosophy and the whole history of Western thought. What we can do is to point out how these apparently opposite positions with regard to dwelling and being in the world are in reality deeply interconnected (see Levinas 1979, 1997; Derrida 1999, 2001); the artwork is the site where this interconnection is most concretely demonstrated. A recent example is The Mapping Journey Project (2008–2011) by Morrocan-French artist Bouchra Kahlili, exhibited at the museum of the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 2018 and other venues, such as the New Museum in New York in 2014 (Fig. 2). This work shows precisely the process of finding one’s way ‘home away from home’ and of poetic creation as a site of dwelling, through the testimonies and narratives of African migrants crossing the Mediterranean and other borders into Europe, by tracing their routes on maps projected on large video screens. As the official web site claims, “[t]hrough her artworks, Bouchra Khalili articulates subjectivity and collective history, questionning (sic) the complex relationships between the singular and civic belonging, calling for a new collective voice to come into being.”Footnote 12

Fig. 2
figure 2

Bouchra Khalili, The Mapping Journey Project, 2008–2011. Installation View, New Museum, New York, 2014. Courtesy of the artist and Mor Charpentier, Paris

Full size image

In the installation we see a combination of spoken word, video projections, and narratives of a journey in search of a better future. The minimal yet layered devices the artists sets up as mode of spatial story-telling give us the distinct certainty that the stories are real testimonies of multiple journeys undertaken by a multitude of people, told in their own words, in their own languages, in their own voices. We see large maps of Europe and the Mediterranean basin (with the notable exception of a map of Palestine/Israel representing a journey from Ramallah to Jerusalem) projected on a number of screens arranged across a large room, on which various hands—always a dark-skinned hand—trace with a marker the labyrinthine routes that took the bodies to whom the hands belong across territories and borders. We never see the faces that tell the stories, we only hear their voices, see their hands that trace trembling marks across the map, and read the superscript that translates what the voices say into French or English. Khalili denies us the consolation of confronting the ‘face of the Other’ by showing us an anonymous humanity on the move through the process of “story mapping”—as she calls it with an English term (Khalili 2010)—which delegates the role of storyteller to the cartographic image: the map becomes the repository and the vehicle of the personal narratives that constitute an ‘archipelago’ of voices and floating identities. Here we truly have the visual manifestation of a “different topological understanding of the subject” (Pile 2008, p. 213).

Conclusion

In this paper I have offered an intertextual reading of Heidegger’s late essay “Building Dwelling Thinking” with some key themes in Deleuze and Guattari, in order to illuminate the affective relationship between territory, place, map/mapping, borders, and subjectivity, and to expand Heidegger’s notion of dwelling to include the nomadic and the transient, both from a human and non-human standpoint. I have shown how two contemporary artists have addressed the persistence of mythical and personal narratives in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries alongside the use of formal aspects of mapping and cartography, with the intent to shed light on current social and political issues related to place, dwelling, and homelessness. These works show the capacity of ‘maps’ (understood in a broad sense) and the ‘act of mapping’ to disrupt symbolic horizons concerning representations of space and the constitution of aesthetic, political and subjective worldviews. These worldviews are here considered as modes of subjectivity that help us move beyond an obsolete notion of the Cartesian subject, which remains one of the anchors of Western philosophical notions of subjectivity. We can fully concur with Steve Pile (2008, p. 215; my emphasis) as he affirms that,

at the very point that subjectivity seems to be impossible to know, exploring and mapping subjectivity become even more important. But these explorations and mappings no longer rely on creating maps of ‘‘the source’’ of subjectivity, as if one were mapping the source of a river. Instead, we are dealing with the concrete mutability, the mutable concreteness of the subject. That will require different maps, different forms of cartography. Those that will be most productive, in my opinion, are those that can capture the contradictoriness, both the hard-wired structuring of the soul and the adaptable, improvised and transformative work of the heart.

The “different maps, different forms of cartography” are precisely what the artists discussed in this paper pursue in their works; and in building these new cartographies, they enable us to see the ‘double becoming’ between dwelling as staying in place and dwelling as moving beyond, or across a territory. They do not pretend to solve the (insoluble) impasse which defines the way we live in the world; as it is the prerogative of art, they do not aim to resolve the contradictions, but let the contradictions emerge to our consciousness. We are both the builders of dwellings that appear on the map and the travelers across the map. We inhabit the map by way of moving in space. The map indicates both states—that of staying in place/in peace, and that of moving elsewhere, for shelter, need, or search for a better life. With Deleuze and Guattari, we could say that it is not our origins that define us as subjects, but where those points of origin take us, the kind of rhizomatic trajectory they draw on the map: “the Greeks had to become philosophers in the first place, just as philosophers had to become Greek” (1994, p. 96). The “double becoming” where deterritorialization and reterritorialization meet is the locus where the cartographic imagination resides as well; the “creation of a future new earth” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 2) calls for new representations, new spatial visualizations, in short, new cartographies and mapping practices that may shape a vision of the future while retaining the ambivalence and ambiguity of the unknown.