Immersive Cartography and Post-Qualitative Inquiry

A Speculative Adventure in Research-Creation

David Rousell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000361285
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Warming & Climate Change
• Index: Biological Sciences

Immersive Cartography and Post-Qualitative Inquiry introduces immersive cartography as a transdisciplinary approach to social inquiry in an age of climate change and technological transformation.

Drawing together innovative theories and practices from the environmental arts, process philosophy, education studies, and posthumanism, the book frames immersive cartography as a speculative adventure that gradually transformed the physical and conceptual architectures of a university environment. The philosophical works of Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari are touchstones throughout the book, seeding the development of concepts that re-imagine the university through a more-than-human ecology of experience. Illustrated by detailed examples from Rousell's artistic interventions and pedagogical experiments in university learning environments, the book offers new conceptual and practical tools for navigating the ontological turn across the social sciences, arts, and humanities.

Rousell's wide-ranging and detailed analysis of pedagogical encounters resituates learning as an affective and environmentally distributed process, proposing a "trans-qualitative" ethics and aesthetics of inquiry that is orientated toward processual relations and events. As a foothold for a new generation of scholarship in the social sciences, this book opens new directions for research across the fields of post-qualitative inquiry, art and aesthetics, critical university studies, affect theory, and the posthumanities.

1
Cartography

What does it mean to create a map that you can walk into? How does a cartography become immersive? These questions puzzled me as I worked in my art studio in the first year of my PhD studies, immersed in an ever-increasing amalgam of found objects, materials, tools, and books. At the time I had only a vague idea of how my PhD project might look. I sensed that it had something to do with ecology, aesthetics, learning environments, the Anthropocene, and Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) rhizomatic concept of mapping. I also felt that I did not already know or possess the concepts and techniques required for the cartography that was unfolding. These would need to be unearthed, assembled, broken, reinvented. I entered a period of open-ended experimentation that was somewhat terrifying, both in its lack of discernible boundaries and in the isolation of studio work which often carried on late into the night.

My studio was in a semi-industrial area of a regional Australian town where craft and trade workshops mingled with artist studios and small businesses of various kinds. I began walking daily around the neighbourhood, collecting objects, materials, ideas, conversations, and experiences as a way of thinking-with cartography as an emerging series of encounters with the world. The studio began to pile up with stuff collected from these walks: rocks, branches, and old glass bottles from the nearby riverbed; old windows from a derelict house; offcuts of plywood, MDF, and particle board; sheets of glass; used cans of paint; some rusty tools. I started to get to know many of the folks who lived and worked in the area. They would offer me their junk, and I would try to answer their questions about this art/research/mapping project of which I didn’t really know the shape. As I collected fragments of things and conversations I also began to feel the sense of a map connecting differential elements and domains. A map that didn’t really have an image or a form, but more of a sense or feeling of elements in motion.

Immersive cartography began to stir in certain chance encounters that started to surface as the walls of my studio became increasingly porous. On one occasion, a local carpenter offered me a series of plywood cubes that had been sitting at the back of his workshop. These cubes sat in a corner of my studio for some time as I carried on with various other experiments. Often the corner of my eye would flicker towards them with a sense of suspicion about their ambiguous role in all of this. One night I started arranging them on the floor of the studio, playing with different spatial possibilities and configurations for placing them into relation with other things. I began to envision the potential for creating a constellation of relational objects, in which the cubes would somehow operate as pivot points within a cartographic network of movement and sensation. I was intrigued by the possibility that the cubes could become operative, agentic, and cartographic, that they could somehow become immersive in their capacity to map and reconfigure physical and conceptual movements from the ground up. This was a pivotal shift in perspective in what became my doctoral project States and Territories, laying the seeds for the approach to inquiry that I call immersive cartography.

Beginning in the middle

The map expresses the identity of the journey and what one journeys through. It merges with its object, when the object itself is movement … Every map is a redistribution of impasses and breakthroughs, of thresholds and enclosures, which necessarily go from bottom to top.

(Deleuze, 1997, p. 61–64)

Immersive cartography emerged through an open-ended process of inquiry that focused on the problem of how a cartography could become immersive. In labouring over this problem in and around my studio for nearly a year, immersive cartography gradually emerged in the midst of a problematic field of relations, erupting from the middle of a milieu of social and aesthetic encounters. The cubes found their way into my studio through this open series of encounters with the surrounding social environment, in other words, through a process of adventure. I didn’t think up or imagine the cubes as ideal forms, nor did I wish or “intend” them through my own imagination or volition. Instead, I lodged myself on a “stratum” of the social environment, kept moving, and waited for new threads of inquiry to emerge (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 161). By situating the cartographic inquiry simultaneously in place and in movement, I kept the door open for the cubes to enter as a kind of “gift” from the milieu. Perhaps these are the opening propositions for an immersive cartography:

Begin in the middle.

Explore your milieus.

Experiment with making maps of them.

Stay in place and keep moving at the same time.

In an essay entitled What Children Say (1997), Deleuze suggests that this cartographic approach is similar to what children are always doing: “exploring milieus, by means of dynamic trajectories, and drawing up maps of them” (p. 61). The child’s cartography does not function to represent a static territory or predetermined structure (of concepts, meanings, or associations), but rather moves-with-and-through the dynamic milieus of life-living: milieus of subjectivity, of sociality, and of environmentality. In French the term “milieu” takes on a triple meaning, and can refer simultaneously to a social environment, a medium or matrix for transformation (as in chemistry), and the state of existing “in the middle” or midst of an environment or situation. For Deleuze, the milieu is also phrased as a trajectory, which is to say, a vector of intensive and extensive movement. “The trajectory merges not only with the subjectivity of those who travel through a milieu, but also with the subjectivity of the milieu itself, insofar as it is reflected in those who travel through it” (1997, p. 61).

This attunement to the movement of subjectivity through the milieu establishes a resonance between Deleuzian cartography and the cartographies of Indigenous and First Nations peoples (Cole & Somerville, 2017; Rosiek, Snyder, & Pratt, 2019; Rousell & Williams, 2020). Within many Indigenous onto-epistemologies, figurations of place (Deloria & Wildcat, 2001; Tallbear, 2014; Tuck & McKenzie, 2015) and country (Barrett, 2015; Somerville, 2013) implicate a dynamic and inextricable manifold of relations among subjective, social, and environmental milieus. While immersive cartography emerges from a Western genealogy of thought associated with process philosophy, it shares with many Indigenous cartographies a commitment to think and work through the milieu, immersed in an ecological field of relations which are not yet realised into classifiable units (subjects or objects) or stratified territories. The milieu is considered both a spatio-temporal manifold through which bodies travel, and a felt transition of spacetime through which a body is qualitatively lived. The task of an immersive cartography is to map onto these movements, to both condition and follow the transitions of conceptual and physical movement through a cartography of milieus.

Consider how children assemble a complex and dynamically shifting cartography of milieus as they move through different environments and situations. Houses, bedrooms, parks, hospitals, schools, and neighbourhoods are all milieus that children pass through and build cartographies from. Deleuze (1997) even suggests that “parents are themselves a milieu that children travel through: they pass through its qualities and powers and make a map of them” (p. 62). Yet this parental milieu is only one node in a more intricate and heterogeneous cartography of more-than-human milieus which are not derivations or extensions of the parent (Rousell & Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, 2018a). Deleuze argues that children never stop “moving about” in a cartographic milieu in which the parents “simply play the role of openers and closers of doors, guardians of thresholds, connectors or disconnectors of zones” (p. 62). This cartography breaks with the dominant image of the parent in psychoanalysis, and with Freud’s Oedipal complex in particular, by foregrounding the child’s passage through milieus which exceed the personal human subject in every dimension. There is no universal narrative which can account for this cartography, because each passage of the child through the milieu constitutes a distinctive singularity (Murris, 2016). The passage cannot be categorised or universalised according to a transcendent model, firstly because no two passages are the same, and secondly, because each passage changes the milieu through which it passes. The cartography becomes a multiplicity comprised of singularities: a map of lived events of passage (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 A mapping of trajectories and places of passage across Southern Cross University’s Lismore campus. Hand-drawn by the author, as part of the States and Territories project

Like Deleuze’s cartography of childhood adventures, immersive cartography always begins on the ground, with events in the milieu, with the singularities of passage. It proceeds and evolves as past experiences and future potentials become distributed, conjugated, and constellated in new ways through ongoing processes of mapping and re-mapping, composing and re-composing, inventing and re-inventing the present. Rather than orientating towards preconstituted subjects bounded by narratives of identity, immersive cartography orientates towards the felt experience of passage through a more-than-human milieu, where the term “experience” is not contained within the assumed primacy of “human experience”. Immersive cartography is concerned with how experience is collectively composed in and through the ongoing passage of bodies through milieus. “People” are milieus through which one travels, like any other. With each passage the texture of the milieu is experienced differently, angling a different inflection on the subjectivity of the milieu as a felt quality of movement.

Extensive and intensive mappings

Immersive cartography always begins with an open-ended series of experimental processes that take the relation with/in the milieu as primary. In the first year of my PhD, the ingression of the plywood cubes into my studio environment provoked the development of a cascading series of conceptual mapping techniques that foregrounded the more-than-human milieus of educational spaces. I relocated my walking and mapping practice to the Lismore campus of Southern Cross University. I was lured to this regional university campus by the dynamic complexity of its socio-ecological milieus, where pockets of subtropical rainforest, creek beds, water dragons and koalas mixed with biochemistry labs, art and media studios, and teacher education clas...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword by Maggie MacLure
• Introduction: A speculative adventure
• Chapter 1: Cartography
• Chapter 2: Aesthetics
• Chapter 3: Ecology
• Chapter 4: Pedagogy
• Chapter 5: Data
• Chapter 6: Affect
• Chapter 7: Justice
• Afterword: Propositions for an immersive cartography
• References
• Index