Editing worlds: participatory mapping and a

minor geopolitics
Joe Gerlach
Cartography and geopolitics have a troubled relationship. While maps have been complicit in the worst excesses of
colonial venturing and Cold War politicking, they have also been deployed as inscriptions of recalcitrance and
resistance. Yet regardless of the ends to which they have been deployed, mapping and cartography are creative,
aesthetic performances and sometimes outwardly experimental and artistic. To what extent then, might
contemporary forms of cartographic practice be producing spaces that are simultaneously creative and
geopolitical? This article employs the wiki-based OpenStreetMap as a fieldwork intervention in exploring how
online, virtual, crowd-sourced cartographies can be conjured as ethico-aesthetic projects (Guattari 1995) that
valorise creative processes in negotiating emergent problems, politics, events and spaces. It shows how
OpenStreetMap is at once a technology, a set of performances and a series of communities that allows users to
create and alter maps, thereby generating capacities to edit worlds. The article explores how these capacities
inflect geographical imaginations while being generative of a minor geopolitics. Minor in this context alludes not
to scale or tenor, but instead refers to the non-representational registers of cartography so as to spotlight the
unspoken, anticipatory geopolitics of mapping.
Key words

cartography; OpenStreetMap; minor; geopolitics; Guattari; Lima

University of Oxford, School of Geography and the Environment, Oxford, OX1 3QY
Email: joe.gerlach@ouce.ox.ac.uk

Revised manuscript received 14 August 2014

Belligerent dramas
The traditional dualist oppositions that have guided social
thought and geopolitical cartographies are over. (Guattari
2000, 32)

In the same way Ranci
ere (2009) highlights aesthetics bad reputation, so too might cartography be
aligned with a troubling history. Whereas the former is
accused of purloining the meaning of artwork, the
latter has been tainted for its representational tyranny
and profound involvement in a pernicious brand of
geopolitics characterised by colonial lusting, imperial
politicking and atomically propelled Cold War nightmares (Dodds 1993): imagine Halford Mackinder and
Henry Kissinger acting out manifold belligerent dramas over the spectre of a world map (OTuathail et al.
2006). What cartography lent to this crusading iteration
of geopolitics was a pseudo-scientific and institutional
rigour that it had hitherto lacked (Boria 2008). In the
mid-twentieth century, the heady alchemy of war, maps
and geography formed a powerful triumvirate (Dodds
2008) not only in discursive terms, but also in the
performance of politics itself: consider, for example,
maps conjuring the first, third, non-aligned worlds
and their attendant geographical imaginations.
Conversely, cartography has also been deployed

recalcitrantly against domineering politically sovereign

units in the form of counter-cartographies (see Bhagat
and Mogel 2008; Counter Cartographies Collective
et al. 2012; Nietschmann 1995; Paglen 2007; Peluso
1995). What both these hegemonic and counter-hegemonic actors have in common is a preoccupation with
the representational valence of maps, echoing Dittmer
and Dodds assertion that the study of the history of
popular geopolitics has been a concern over geopolitical representation and discourse (2008, 437).
Held ransom by both a truculent heritage and an
awkward raptness with representation, there has always
been the risk that cartographys analytical purchase
could deteriorate (Grossberg 2010). Small wonder,
then, that some geographers have presented with the
symptoms of a cartographic anxiety (Gregory 1994;
Painter 2008), a map-phobia (Wheeler 1998) or an
acute strain of carto-neuroses (Painter 2006), maladies
in which geographers . . . find maps, with their categories and symbols, downright inimical to their core
agendas (Wheeler 1998, 2).
By way of a reparative gesture to ameliorate the
sustained disillusionment with aggressive mapping, I
want here to add to a growing body of work in
geography that is attempting to recuperate maps and
cartography (see, for example, Crampton 2010; Elwood

The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of
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and Mitchell 2013),1 these curious abstractions and

performances in which the political and the aesthetic
are inseparable. To do so, this paper is structured in
four parts. First the paper interrogates Deleuze and
Guattaris (1986) notion of the minor, a semi-tonal
shift in conceptual and analytical register away from a
concern for the cartographic politics of representation
and toward a political apprehension of the affective
and virtual vectors of cartography. That is to say a focus
on the minor in cartography is necessarily an examination of the non-representational aspects of this
representational practice as a way of spotlighting the
often unspoken, anticipatory politics of mapping. Given
its normal usage, employing the term minor might
suggest a focus on the less important parts of a
particular object of interest. Yet in this case it is not
about the assignation of relative prominence or
insignificance. Instead it is about adding to our
definition of what counts as geopolitics, or more
specifically, adding to the reasons why cartography
might be construed as geopolitical. As such, the paper
expands on the notion of the minor to argue that
mapping is geopolitical, not just in its implication in the
practices of statecraft and of delineating sovereignty in
a major representational sense, but that it is also
geopolitical in the way in which it cultivates affects,
attitudes, bodily dispositions, collectives, sensibilities,
spaces and events that are transformative of the world,
but often in a register largely ignored.
Second, empirically holding fast to OpenStreetMap,
a signal example of crowd-source mapping (Lin 2011), I
question how these everyday, vernacular cartographic
practices (Gerlach 2010 2014) are generating spaces
simultaneously creative and geopolitical; all part of
what Felix Guattari (1995) terms an ethico-aesthetic
paradigm. Specifically, the article draws on cartographic fieldwork undertaken in Lima, Peru. In the
midst of a weekends collaborative mapping with
OpenStreetMap, I describe how this technology and
practice of representation is less a politics predicated
on capture, accuracy and resistance than it is closer to
being an abstraction of anticipation, of uncertainty, of
political indeterminateness: in other words, the underplayed minor key of cartography. This would constitute
a minor geopolitics that, while not denying that drawing
a line can cost lives (Carter 2009), acknowledges also
that the philosophy of representation is dissolving
(Anderson and Harrison 2010; Foucault 2002; Thrift
2007). Minor here indicates a politics that valorises
the affective potential of mapping in avowedly vernacular, prosaic and mundane if not experimental performances. Third, the paper addresses how thinking and
working through the minor is a technique with which to
attend to the possibility of editing worlds through
participatory mapping; a geopolitics preoccupied with
the capacity of bodily, distributed cartographies to

apprehend and harness urgent environmental, social

and geographical concerns. Fourth, and in conclusion,
the paper returns to the minor in conjunction with
Guattaris notion of refrain so as to examine the
contention that participatory mapping can be figured as
part of an ethico-aesthetic paradigm.
In sum, an appeal to a minor geopolitics in the
context of participatory mapping is not to ignore or
usurp a vibrant heritage of scholarship in critical
geopolitics that critiques and elucidates the intractable
relations between power, cartography and resistance.
Indeed, a focus on the minor register of mapping is
intended to develop a crucial conceptual contour in
geographys recent attendance to everyday and popular
geopolitics (Dittmer 2009; Dittmer and Dodds 2008;
Dittmer and Gray 2010; Dodds 2006; Fregonese 2012;
Ramadan 2013; Williams and Boyce 2013).2 Harnessing the notion of the minor continues to unpick the
dualism between participatory modes of mapping and
the more formal, institutionalised architecture of cartography, particularly where such practices rely on the
political investments of the everyday, the vernacular
or on a set of indigenous knowledges (see, for example,
Sletto 2009a 2009b). Moreover, a turn to the minor is
also a chance to pursue emergent forays into relational
and assemblage-led understandings of cartography that
pivot on an ontogenetic animation of mapping (see
Caquard 2014; Kitchin and Dodge 2007; see also
Dittmer 2014 for an examination of a post-human
geopolitics) in addition to attending to contemporary
theoretical contours of online geographies (see Leszczynski and Wilson 2013). Such theoretical works rely
either implicitly or explicitly on the cartographic
thinking of Deleuze and Guattari; philosophical lines
that disrupt the temptation to partition cartography as
a caricatured handmaiden of power. Likewise, Deleuze
and Guattari also offer a conceptual vocabulary to
think about cartography as a political mode of action,
but without restrictive ideological prescriptions; hence
it falls to geographers to consider what all this might
entail. What then, is distinct about a turn to the minor?
In short, the minor is profoundly anti-foundational; it
might spotlight the everyday or the mundane, but
without playing into the hands of a front-loaded scalar
politics that reduces it to localism, grassroots or a
subaltern politics.
The premise of the minor starts not with pre-existing
scales, meanings, borders, actors, positionality, or dubious emancipatory claims surrounding cartographys
supposed democratisation or participatory turn.
Instead, the minor starts with the somatic immediacy of
the geo; the bodily and embodied enactments of
everyday mapping. If one argues that all politics is
geographical, or entails some form of spatiality, then the
term geopolitics is something of a tautology. Why not
then inflect the tautology by highlighting how multiple

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grid-system. Bewilderment at a lack of consistency too:

gated, well-appointed houses astride crumbling, uninhabited tower blocks with twisted steel cables poking
expectantly into the sky. Now emerges a growing
realisation that some of these affective moments and
atmospheres will disappear in the graphic rendering of
the map. Yet at the same time there is a lingering hope
that, in the stories told alongside and with the map,
these vernacular cartographies (even Euclidean ones)
are not entirely redundant in the cultivation of a minor
geopolitics the opening up of multiple (dis)articulations about the world. What was created in this
mapping party was something of an eventful cartography that
manifests itself as a vibration resounding with infinite
harmonics in a vast series, like the rising of something new
that is at once public and private, potential and actual, and
marked by intensities. (Dosse 2011, 324)

Put differently, this mapping was a collective and

provisional diagramming of multiple desires and minor
political articulations, minus the superimposition of
institutional or representational norms.
Five of the mappers present at that days mapping
were open-source software activists belonging to a
small social-environmental collective. Combining university studies with countless hours of code programming and hacking, their aim was to disrupt the
licensing regimes underscoring the worldly welter of
digital programmes, protocols and practices. Under
the name, Saberes Nomadas (Nomad Knowledges),9
the activists had joined the OpenStreetMap event to
explore the possibility of incorporating open-source
mapping software into a fledging online platform they
were developing known as La Cuidadora (the carer
or the protector, translated roughly). La Cuidadora is
a digital diagnostic tool for users to geo-locate matters
of concern and hot situations (Latour 2004; Callon
1998) within Peru on a wiki-style map. Based on a
participatory mapping platform, La Cuidadora is able
to make sensible, through abstraction, anything from
localised environmental degradation to political corruption: oil spills, political violence, earthquakes,
kidnappings, floods, embezzlement of municipal funds
and other competing concerns rendered precariously
on a map. As an open-source interface any user with
access to the internet can update the map with textual
annotations; what matters here is that the map is
susceptible to change, modification and dis-sensus.
This is to suggest that while participatory mapping
programmes such as OpenStreetMap are constituted
by the tangle of code-space (Kitchin and Dodge 2011),
they are not pliable to a simple deconstructionist
analysis of veiled meaning or inherently emblematic
of a particular geopolitical order. Instead, OpenStreetMap, as an open-source tool worked through

La Cuidadora, ties in simultaneously the micro and

macro political via modest gestures of making things
visible that call attention to certain spaces and
situations via a suite of cartographic provocations.
What these provocations go on to effect in the world
remains unqualified, hence the minor import of
everyday mapping; repetitive, gestural, political articulations and desires propagated by the major structures of cartography.
Through this participatory cartographic practice, it is
possible to witness the collapsing of major and minor
cartography as a simultaneous major gazetting of
extant environmental concerns and also a minor
anticipatory surveying of a politics yet to come, an
unpredictable eruption of minoritarian events and
spaces (Woodward et al. 2010, 278). Such mapping,
alongside the serendipitously named Saberes Nomadas,
might be understood as a form of nomadic cartography,
echoing the mapping pre-figured by Bill Bunge in his
drifts through Detroit, movements through spaces of
despair and the excesses of Motown capitalism (see
Pickles 2004).
Put differently, this partial example of participatory
mapping in Lima is a technique in cultivating nomad
knowledges, generating saberes nomadas, and orchestrating middle-grounds for thinking and acting in the
minor register. Limas mapping event was not about
creating cartographic solutions or finding resolutions
to particular problems, but about a minor geopolitics
of multiplying concerns and speculations: as Connolly
remarks, an event starts out of apparent uncertainty
and foments a wider band of uncertainties as it
expands and morphs (2011, np). OpenStreetMap is a
strategy for mapping pathways that are not, as Deleuze
and Guattari suggest, bound by and vectored to preordained points. Instead, this form of minor mapping
deals in the construction of non-decomposable pathways (Massumi 2002), themselves speculative and
anticipatory rather than determined routes to fixed,
representational points. OpenStreetMap is demonstrative of this impulse, not least in the way it places
emphasis on the process of editing. Editing is of
course crucial to all forms of cartographic inscription,
but what is peculiar about OpenStreetMap is the way
in which the process of editing is a distributed,
collaborative, remote and sometimes confrontational
business; moreover, editing in this context is continual.
The map in other words, and to restate an increasingly
prevalent refrain, is always-in-the-making. Likewise,
the contention that maps and their crafting are
generative of different realities is not a novel one.
However, I want here in brief to address three ways in
which the editing of participatory cartographies is
simultaneously an editing of the world, such that the
minor geopolitical coordinates of mapping might
emerge.

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have no model; they are a becoming, a process (Deleuze

1995). Fractional and molecular (Doel 1996, 426), such
minor lines play into the becoming of spaces, the
emergence of geographies; orientations, directions,
entries and exits (Deleuze and Parnet 2006, 2). The
minor is concerned with the visceral, sensible intensities
of the body in the act of mapping.
Where do these minor lines take us? It is easier here
to advertise the nots in response to this question.
These lines do not take us to pre-determined destinations: indeed they might not lead anywhere whatsoever,
especially as the hope a fully formed destination exists
seems a stretch too far. Their texture and obduracy
cannot be relied on: like intensity, minor lines wax,
wane, condense and evaporate. An affirmation in the
guise of negation, minor lines will not tell you where to
go. What matters, as Katz remarks, is that the minor
remains, relentlessly transformative and inextricably
relational (1996, 489). Still, a conceptual disorientation
takes hold,3 and so I turn now to some empirical
coordinates in the form of mapping with OpenStreetMap.

OpenStreetMap
In the same way that Ingram (2011) points to the upsurge
in artistic interventions addressing contemporary geopolitics, so there has been a ground swell in cartographic
interventions, or what Thrift (2011 2012) identifies as a
renaissance in mapping, propelled by the growth of Web
2.0 applications, platforms and the availability of geolocational technologies.4 OpenStreetMap, a wiki platform for maps founded in 2004 by University College
London physics graduate Steve Coast, was one of the
beneficiaries of this deregulation of earthly to extraterrestrial signals (Ramm et al. 2010). OpenStreetMap
is at once a technology, a set of performances and a
series of communities that allows users to create and
alter maps, based on wiki protocols. There are over
1 732 974 registered users world-wide, and profiling by
Budhathoki (2010) suggests that membership is predominantly male, over 50 per cent of whom have formal
training in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The
underlying ethos of OpenStreetMap is to make geographical data free from licensing restrictions such as
those imposed by cartographic agencies like, for example, the UKs Ordnance Survey. In addition, the digital
community of OpenStreetMap users has an analogue
counterpart, and a large part of OpenStreetMaps
continued existence is down to cultivation as a hobbyist
pastime. But it is also a collective of actors looking to deal
creatively with spatial and geopolitical conundrums,
whether they are, for example, negotiating the planning
of bucolic cycle lanes in the United Kingdom or dealing
with the residual tremors of earthquakes in Haiti (see
Perkins 2008).

Much of the work done on the emergence of these

new cartographic practices, as with the growth in wiki
and collaborative, online forms of knowledge production, points to their ostensible democratising potential.
In sidestepping these grandiose accounts I want to draw
on fieldwork traces that point to a less obvious and
minor, politics of participatory cartography (see Haklay
2013 for a comprehensive dismantling of the delusion
of democratisation engendered by certain trends in
neogeography).
The trademark set-piece of OpenStreetMap is the
mapping party, an informal and sometimes impromptu
gathering of mappers. The cartographers congregate at a
location yet to be mapped by OpenStreetMap, and after
the obligatory show-and-tell display of handheld technologies, the mappers disperse and survey the area in
question with Global Positioning System (GPS) devices,
generating electronic breadcrumbs on the way; marking
waypoints and points of interest on the fly. Having
generated a series of GPS traces, these lived abstractions
are then uploaded onto OpenStreetMaps central
server, after which they are available for editing and
rendering as the map publicly available online. In an
effort to become an apprentice OpenStreetMapper, I
joined numerous mapping parties across the UK,
Europe and Peru over the course of three years.
Traversing these not-altogether-cognate sites, the miles
are clocked up rapidly, walking continuously, cyclically,
burning gestural traces into the tarmac, anticipating the
not-quite-thereness of the next step; the tiresome
repetition of repetition; checking that all streets, postboxes and bus stops have been accounted for; a bizarre,
stuttering choreography of stops and starts in the tangle
of suburbia; one that draws suspicion from onlookers, or
police arrests in the case of one unlucky cartographer.5
The act of surveying involves inhabiting and performing
the world through the cartographic proclamations of I
am here and that goes there. Once the surveying is
completed, hunched over laptops the GPS traces are
uploaded, and the business of editing begins. Editing, in
this instance, is to affect and be affected by the
immediacy of the mapping, in turn propelling the
processual emergence of worlds, cartographic and
actual, while also generating different subjectivities
and somatic dispositions toward the world (Kitchin
and Dodge 2007 2011). Put differently, this mundane
cartography involves not just the diagramming of the
distribution of power, but also relies on an experiential
distribution of the sensible; a geopolitics that hinges on
the sensate capacities of bodies to affect and be affected
by the spaces generated in the practice of cartography.
I turn then, to Lima, Peru. Undertaking fieldwork
with maps in Andean Latin America evokes some
awkward historical resonances. Following the collapse
of the Incan confederation, maps and cartography folded into Perus volatile heritage of Spanish

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colonialism and subsequent border disputes with Ecuador and Chile (see Radcliffe 2009). Perus cartographic
network remains dominated by the military, having no
civilian equivalent to the United Kingdoms Ordnance
Survey. This cartographic monopoly is then set against
the rapid emergence of crowd-sourced and participatory mapping in Peru, itself implicated in a complicated
cartography of affinities, contradictions, concerns,
pressure, viruses, environments, hackers and undercurrents in anything from anti-mining protests to campaigns for free, unrestricted software. Given Perus
cartographic history, one marked by the familiar
narrative of maps intertwined with territorial and
representational geopolitics, fieldwork afforded the
opportunity to examine the minor geopolitical implications of contemporary, participatory mapping practices. More prosaically, this fieldwork was a chance to
push against, to date, the largely Euro-centric preoccupations of OpenStreetMap and to figure how such
participatory mapping plays out in the context of a
country where its presence was seemingly minimal.
What follows is a short vignette of performing OpenStreetMap in Lima, followed by a series of reflections
on how editing the world might be understood as a
form of minor geopolitics.

Lost
In the district of Pueblo Libre,6 Lima, ten OpenStreetMappers find themselves hopelessly lost on a humid, overcast
August afternoon. Lime~
nos call this type of weather gar
ua;
an omnipresent, lingering fog generated by dry westerly
winds blowing in from the Pacific, colliding with the lower
western slopes of the Andes.
Melancholy.
Stood happenstance, the cartographers raise their GPS
devices as an offering to the sky, waiting for Navstar
satellites 22, 36 and 63, orbiting at 1.6 miles a second to fix
our bodies in Euclidean space; latitude, longitude and
altitude the basic geodesic primitives needed to map; yet
for these amateur cartographers, as for Plath, the skies
remain empty.7

The cartographers find themselves in the middle of

what was Perus first OpenStreetMap mapping party,
but the ethic of getting lost is a transversal and familiar
one. Again, walking, pacing, tracing and mapping; the
creatively mundane vectors of experience. Pausing to
draw breath at a traffic island, to halt the perspiring in
the melt of the sticky Lima air; a chance to hone what
Bissell and Fuller (2010) label a collective attunement
to being still a sedentary, but highly charged political
space time in which, as Doel (1999) suggests, the world
is not given in advance; a disorientating cartographic
event shot through with the kaleidoscopic political
concerns and anxieties of ten amateur cartographers.

Figure 1 Lost
Source: Authors Photograph

This modest cartographic gesture finds itself tied into a

whole host of major political concerns: highlighting the
contamination of the citys main river, the Rimac; the
impact of Perus extractive industries on labour regulation; the cultivation of a digital open-source and
hacking community. This motley assortment of political
demands finds its articulation through cartographic
means although, again, a cartography not of outright
representation but as an experiential point of inflection
as to how space can be diagrammed differently. Put
otherwise, There is in this story a political cartography
that exceeds subject thinking (Woodward et al. 2012,
13). OpenStreetMap is the lodestar of recent empirical
forays by contemporary geoweb and volunteered
geographic information research across a number of
disciplines including geomatics, computer science,
media studies and geography (see, for example, Dodge
and Kitchin 2013; Haklay and Weber 2008; Hristova
et al. 2012; Lin 2011; Mooney and Corcoran 2014;
Dodge and Perkins 2008). It works well as a demonstration of crowdsourced knowledge production
through new spatial media (Elwood and Leszczynski
2013). What the aforementioned multidisciplinary
studies have in common is a deliberate hesitation
about the potential and future orientation of OpenStreetMaps reason for being and/or its political vocation. A crucial intervention by Chris Perkins (2013)
highlights the way in which platforms such as OpenStreetMap oscillate between mutability and immutability in their constitution, process and function; that is
to say novel mapping practices can never be adjudicated as either fully replicating a cartographic orthodoxy, or conversely be understood as an entirely
emancipatory form of drawing maps. Indeed, Perkins
makes clear that alongside the promoting of an ethos of
opening up mapping, OpenStreetMap as a collective
assemblage also insists on maintaining specific disciplinary norms and practices, not to mention that the
visual outcome of the project is a regulated, and

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aesthetically unremarkable, map. To some extent, the

oscillation between mutability and immutability identified by Perkins is one echoed by the way in which the
politics of participatory mapping fluctuates between
major and minor tenors of political expression. The key
point here is that one should not confuse, or conflate,
minor politics with hyperbole around the emancipatory
potential of participatory mapping. On the contrary,
such liberal conjecture belongs to a major register of
representational politics, whereas the minor aspect of
mapping is more likely to go unrecognised as such. Yet
the affective push of cartography might prove to be
more significant than its representational properties.
How did such oscillations play out in Lima?
The mapping party begins, ironically enough, lacking
direction; there is no manifesto for the project, other
than a suggestion that it might be an attempt to act as
an apprenticeship in everyday cartography. Up until the
moment of getting lost on the streets of Lima, the
transactions between the participants have been digital,
conducted via the OpenStreetMap wiki; discussions
(arguments) about where to meet for the first time go
back and forth several weeks in advance. The group
agrees to meet in a cafe of a shopping mall on the edges
of Pueblo Libre. It turns out to be a bad choice, as
much for the lack of electrical power sockets as for
being difficult to reach for those mappers living on the
outskirts of Lima. One might point to a certain
political-economy present in the demographic of the
cartographers, and the lack of technical and logistical
accessibility for a number in the group.8 To be sure,
there is the representational issue of means and access
at work, but on a minor register, it was the incipient
awkwardness of these initial encounters that focused
collective attention on what the mapping should entail
and to what use it be put.
Early awkward anxieties aside, the mappers switch
their focus to the GPS devices. In switching-on these
devices, there is an obvious enrolment into a major
politics of military hardware, a superpowers defence
architecture and a Euclidean geo-location of our
position within particular territorial units; yet for all
this supposed cartographic security, it remains remarkably easy to become lost and disorientated. Owing to
the lack of assurances afforded by these navigational
devices, we turn to a less assured and stuttering form of
way-finding, a minor act of tracing through speculation
and improvisation. Meandering and walking repetitively in circles becomes something of a refrain
throughout the surveying. Among the glances to and
from the GPS devices, conversations between mappers
emerge, discussions around the once violent history of
cartography in Peru, a colonial tool of bordering and
repression; a re-evaluation, too, of how these present
mapping activities might open up new spaces of social
and political articulation.

The mapping party gains a minor, affective consistency and congeals through the movement of bodies
and the adhesive materialities of cartography: of paper,
pens, Euclidean norms, vectors and satellite algorithms.
Chiming with a Spinozan take on bodies reciprocal
interactions, a minor geopolitics of cartography
emerges in which the geo is as much constituted by
the body as it is by territory:
when a number of bodies of the same or of different
magnitudes are constrained by others in such a way that they
are in reciprocal contact with each other, or if they are
moved with the same or different degrees of speed in such a
way that they communicated their motions to each other in
some fixed ratio, we shall say that those bodies are
reciprocally united to each other . . . they all together
compose one body or individual, which is distinguished from
the others by this union of bodies. (Spinoza 1996 [1677], 42)

These reciprocal bodily movements and assemblages

forged in the cartographic space-time of Limas mapping party allow, both individuated and collective
political desires to be expressed simultaneously.
In the middle of mapping the indivisible streets of
Pueblo Libre, a historic minor cartographic tale
echoes. Set 185 miles east of Lima in the Chupaca
Province (the Heroic Province), the story captures a
moment of gestural minor mapping by the 16thcentury Incan confederation leader, Tupac Inca Yupangui. Here, the story, as told by Incan witnesses to a
council of Spanish conquistadores, recounted in Beyersdorff:
In the year one thousand five-hundred and ninety-seven, the
eighth day of the month of August . . . Tupac Incan
Yupangui, himself, had walked from the boundary. Seven
men in the witness report that we traced without trying,
without recounting. I know that in this way in this way
others also, boundaries, our landmarks, our uplands we have
staked. (2007, 158; translation in the original)

Circle back to Lima, present day; at rest, still,

waiting. In this way, through walking, through satellites,
through repetition, through minor cartography, our
boundaries, our landmarks, we have staked.
Having originally divided into two teams, we reconvene on a patch of rough, damp grass at the nominal
centre of our micropolitical universe. Between us we
had marked some 400 waypoints and collectively
clocked somewhere close to 200 kilometres of walking;
much of it circuitous, some of it in parallel with others,
some of it walked alone. In figuring out in the haze of
cartographic fatigue what we had achieved, or what we
had missed, we meditated on what we had seen, heard,
smelt and felt throughout the duration of our walks.
There was surprise at how many twists and turns had to
be made to capture everything and to account for
every road and pathway: a bizarrely labyrinthine drift
considering Limas urban topography is that of a classic

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grid-system. Bewilderment at a lack of consistency too:

gated, well-appointed houses astride crumbling, uninhabited tower blocks with twisted steel cables poking
expectantly into the sky. Now emerges a growing
realisation that some of these affective moments and
atmospheres will disappear in the graphic rendering of
the map. Yet at the same time there is a lingering hope
that, in the stories told alongside and with the map,
these vernacular cartographies (even Euclidean ones)
are not entirely redundant in the cultivation of a minor
geopolitics the opening up of multiple (dis)articulations about the world. What was created in this
mapping party was something of an eventful cartography that
manifests itself as a vibration resounding with infinite
harmonics in a vast series, like the rising of something new
that is at once public and private, potential and actual, and
marked by intensities. (Dosse 2011, 324)

Put differently, this mapping was a collective and

provisional diagramming of multiple desires and minor
political articulations, minus the superimposition of
institutional or representational norms.
Five of the mappers present at that days mapping
were open-source software activists belonging to a
small social-environmental collective. Combining university studies with countless hours of code programming and hacking, their aim was to disrupt the
licensing regimes underscoring the worldly welter of
digital programmes, protocols and practices. Under
the name, Saberes Nomadas (Nomad Knowledges),9
the activists had joined the OpenStreetMap event to
explore the possibility of incorporating open-source
mapping software into a fledging online platform they
were developing known as La Cuidadora (the carer
or the protector, translated roughly). La Cuidadora is
a digital diagnostic tool for users to geo-locate matters
of concern and hot situations (Latour 2004; Callon
1998) within Peru on a wiki-style map. Based on a
participatory mapping platform, La Cuidadora is able
to make sensible, through abstraction, anything from
localised environmental degradation to political corruption: oil spills, political violence, earthquakes,
kidnappings, floods, embezzlement of municipal funds
and other competing concerns rendered precariously
on a map. As an open-source interface any user with
access to the internet can update the map with textual
annotations; what matters here is that the map is
susceptible to change, modification and dis-sensus.
This is to suggest that while participatory mapping
programmes such as OpenStreetMap are constituted
by the tangle of code-space (Kitchin and Dodge 2011),
they are not pliable to a simple deconstructionist
analysis of veiled meaning or inherently emblematic
of a particular geopolitical order. Instead, OpenStreetMap, as an open-source tool worked through

La Cuidadora, ties in simultaneously the micro and

macro political via modest gestures of making things
visible that call attention to certain spaces and
situations via a suite of cartographic provocations.
What these provocations go on to effect in the world
remains unqualified, hence the minor import of
everyday mapping; repetitive, gestural, political articulations and desires propagated by the major structures of cartography.
Through this participatory cartographic practice, it is
possible to witness the collapsing of major and minor
cartography as a simultaneous major gazetting of
extant environmental concerns and also a minor
anticipatory surveying of a politics yet to come, an
unpredictable eruption of minoritarian events and
spaces (Woodward et al. 2010, 278). Such mapping,
alongside the serendipitously named Saberes Nomadas,
might be understood as a form of nomadic cartography,
echoing the mapping pre-figured by Bill Bunge in his
drifts through Detroit, movements through spaces of
despair and the excesses of Motown capitalism (see
Pickles 2004).
Put differently, this partial example of participatory
mapping in Lima is a technique in cultivating nomad
knowledges, generating saberes nomadas, and orchestrating middle-grounds for thinking and acting in the
minor register. Limas mapping event was not about
creating cartographic solutions or finding resolutions
to particular problems, but about a minor geopolitics
of multiplying concerns and speculations: as Connolly
remarks, an event starts out of apparent uncertainty
and foments a wider band of uncertainties as it
expands and morphs (2011, np). OpenStreetMap is a
strategy for mapping pathways that are not, as Deleuze
and Guattari suggest, bound by and vectored to preordained points. Instead, this form of minor mapping
deals in the construction of non-decomposable pathways (Massumi 2002), themselves speculative and
anticipatory rather than determined routes to fixed,
representational points. OpenStreetMap is demonstrative of this impulse, not least in the way it places
emphasis on the process of editing. Editing is of
course crucial to all forms of cartographic inscription,
but what is peculiar about OpenStreetMap is the way
in which the process of editing is a distributed,
collaborative, remote and sometimes confrontational
business; moreover, editing in this context is continual.
The map in other words, and to restate an increasingly
prevalent refrain, is always-in-the-making. Likewise,
the contention that maps and their crafting are
generative of different realities is not a novel one.
However, I want here in brief to address three ways in
which the editing of participatory cartographies is
simultaneously an editing of the world, such that the
minor geopolitical coordinates of mapping might
emerge.

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Editing the world

First, there is a well-rehearsed ontological argument to
be articulated: that to edit the world in this context is to
affect, and be affected by, the map and the practice of
mapping. To edit is to intervene in the material
generation of the map and in the performances of the
mapping process itself, while at the same time acknowledging their performative roles in engendering and
altering the worlds they help to inscribe (Pickles 2004;
Wood 2010). Put otherwise, to draw a cartographic line
of a pathway, for example, is not merely to represent an
external reality, but is a gesture and gesturing that can
alter a bodys relational encounter to that pathway.
Maps here are no longer the determinant agents of
bodily movements, but are susceptible themselves to reorientation through editing. An interesting choreography between map and user therefore emerges whereby
neither can any longer be considered or rendered in
discrete terms.
Second, to edit the world is to harness the experiential: to create and propagate a series of living
abstractions, even in the most prosaic, pedestrian and
everyday of practices. Abstraction here is not then
understood as a diagrammatic withdrawal from the
world as Lefebvre (1991) might suggest, nor is it a flight
to conceptual obfuscation. Instead, abstraction is
experiential, not artefact: seen in this way, abstraction
is an irreducible part of the ontogenetic character of
the worlds we inhabit (McCormack 2012, 72021;
McCormack 2013). Indeed, to edit the world is to
weave in and out of the interval between abstract and
experience, eventually dissipating that interval altogether (Manning 2009). Editing the world is also a
processual, ongoing exercise of abstraction, of cartographic experiences in the making. For OpenStreetMap, lines, icons and maps are conjured and edited
through experiences and via movement and encountering. Importantly, the experiential is one of the defining
characteristics of OpenStreetMap and many other
participatory forms of cartography. It is the nature of
its interactions and encounters that cultivate certain
atmospheres and assemblages. Indeed the production
of a vernacular-expertise itself depends on the availability and repetition of certain performances and
experiences that make space for particular subjectivities. In turn it is these vernacular, minor impulses that
fuel the creative, quirky and affective performances
that make OpenStreetMap distinctive in the history of
cartographic practice and orthodoxy. Minor subjectivities are formed through the emergence of cartographic
relations, acknowledging that something in the world
forces us to think. This something is not an object of
recognition, but a fundamental encounter (Deleuze
2004, 139). If these encounters are generative of minor
subjectivities, then there is also something to be said of

how cartographic encounter inflects the way in which

space is diagrammed and produced. That valorising
encounter could be a tactic in wrestling cartography
away from its Euclidean foundations, and orientating
mapping towards being a micropolitical intervention in
and for the everyday.
Third, to edit the world is to open up the virtual in
both its digital and temporal registers. Evidently,
OpenStreetMap is predicated on digitally virtual networks, but perhaps less obvious is how OpenStreetMap
might relate to the temporally virtual; the mode of
reality based on emergences, becomings and events
(Massumi 2002). One might argue that such mapping
practices are constantly working on the cusp, or
opening-up the virtual; continually crafting recombinant cartographies that are always in the making;
composed of human and non-human communities in
which anticipation and incompleteness are motivations
for cartographic creativity. All types of map evoke the
virtual, or a beckoning of futurity, insofar as the work
done by a map can never be pre-figured. Less a
pinpointing of geodesic certainties, mapping can also
chart a speculative, anticipatory atmosphere concerned
with how bodies might encounter and dispose themselves toward a map, and how mapping might then (dis)
orientate those bodies. However, by virtue of its wikiunderscoring the OpenStreetMap is perpetually at risk
and continually susceptible to alteration, so the virtual
potential of this type of crowd-sourced map is arguably
more significant than with traditional, paper-based
cartographies. This again highlights the ontogenetic
rather than ontological quality of mapping, undoing an
assumed correspondence between representation and
reality.

Minor traces
How then, might one draw together the minor lines
diagrammed at the start of this paper with the empirical
investments of OpenStreetMap? Recall, for now, Lima:
fieldwork traces in which lines, digital, gestural, pencil,
inscribed and ephemeral, play into the weave between
abstraction and experience. Major and minor lines
colliding through processual sequences of surveying
spaces themselves coming into being; humans and nonhumans, laying a trail of life (Ingold 2007, 81),
contributing to the very texture of space. Recall too
Deleuze and Guattaris manifesto for the minor: first,
that it deterritorialises. Deterritorialisation is a process
of coming undone, a disarticulation or, in this case, a
disorientation and exposure of bodies to new formations, assemblages and ecologies; to ways of thinking
and mapping otherwise. OpenStreetMap, in the act of
surveying, demands deterritorialisation and the unravelling of representational norms, and insists instead on
a form of improvisation and speculative way-finding.

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Through the mapping, through the exposure of software and code, cartographic worlds are pulled apart
and de-contextualised, so as to allow the process of
editing to begin; a practice of drawing lines, simultaneously altering the re-presentation of the cartographic
and the transformation of space; the ongoing negotiation between the major and the minor.
Immanent to this deterritorialisation is reterritorialisation. This is not the reinstatement or repetition of
something or an assemblage that has gone before, but
how the elements and spaces caught up in deterritorialisation recombine and enter into new relations
(Patton 2010). What is politically salient, and indeed
dangerous, about the oscillation between deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation is that cartographic
assemblages and events are combined and recombined,
never given in advance. Mapping then pivots on this
oscillation between deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation, between dissolution and sedimentation. It is
less the contours of a representational geopolitics and
more the legends of a minor geopolitics of affect and
the virtual.
Recall, too, Deleuze and Guattaris second injunction to the minor, and the connection of the individual
to political immediacy. Mapping Lima: the tangle of
terrestrial and celestial bodies; relays between humans
and satellites moving between the melt of the humid
city air and iciness of the orbital vacuum; a cartographic
event tied into the biographies and politics of ten
amateur mappers. Among these bodies, human and
non-human, was the witnessing and practising of major
political concerns: politics of identity, of environment,
the politics of capital P Politics in Peru. There was
also, however, an imperceptible politics to it all, a slew
of minoritarian impulses not readily detected by GPS
devices or walking papers. Anxieties, hopes, indifference, boredom, excitement; swirling affects, un-mappable virtualities. In the act of mapping, in the creative
space-times of cartographic experiences, bodies are
eminently and immanently political, drawn into the
geopolitics of editing space; lines etched not just on the
map, but throughout the body. In a Spinozian sense,
these experiential cartographies can augment and
diminish bodies capacities to affect and be affected
by other relationally entangled bodies, again putting
them at risk of ongoing deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. For Spinoza (1996 [1677]), a cartography of expanding affective encounters and capacities
might be one way to reach ever increasing perfection in
the service of God. For others less theistically inclined,
it might be another method for attunement toward
geographical sensibilities, an ethic for knowing and
inhabiting the world otherwise, and attending not to its
Euclidean identity but to its processual eventfulness.
In sum, the connection of individuals to political
immediacy arrives through the minor geopolitics of

vernacular mapping, a geopolitics in which the intervals

between the abstract, the body and experience are
dissolved. However, this dissolution is not always
apparent or straightforward. Maps and mappings can
play into a type of cartographic schizophrenia between
abstraction and experience. On the one hand, maps are
rendered deliberately to hold apart the two domains as
distinct. The lines drawn act as a narration of a past
experience, while relying on an assumed correlation, or
closeness, between the abstract and experience as a
guarantor of accuracy and verisimilitude. At the same
time these abstractions are lived, are experiential, just
as experiences can be abstract or abstracted. This is not
to furnish a dialectical relationship, not least because as
with other dualisms invoked by Deleuze and Guattari,
both abstraction and experience are immanent to one
another, and if the notion of relationality following
James (1996) is taken seriously, it becomes incompatible and indeed disingenuous to pull apart either
abstraction or experience from one another. A minor
geopolitics, then, acknowledges the political immediacy
and immanence of human and non-human bodies,
whereby the process of mapping is one technique for
inducting bodies into both experiential politics, and the
politics of experience. This minor geopolitics is also
implicated in the idea of participation itself, even if it
and what counts as participatory is taken for granted.
There is, albeit not obviously, a politics to participation
one that makes clear the links between an individual
and a political immediacy (in a minor sense). The point
here is to disrupt a liberal ethos of participation as a
pedagogical method (see Mountz et al. 2008), as a way
of constructing community through cartography (see
Parker 2006), or as a substitute for ethics (see Brun
2009). Participation in this context is more problematic
insofar as it is a process motored by actors that
themselves are not fully formed and whose roles are
never proscribed in advance, indeed, participation
precedes recognition (Massumi 2002, 231). Participation, then, has a speculative geography in which actors
fold in and fold out of both being participant and
becoming eventful. Participation here is more an induction into the affective than it is into the democratic
(Gerlach and Jellis forthcoming);
bodies do not merely find themselves in positions of relative
or interlocking distribution, but participate in the production
of the fields of force through which they aggregate.
(Woodward et al. 2010, 273; emphasis in the original)

One might counter that what OpenStreetMap does

is not much more than a simple mimicry of extant
cartographies, and therefore subscribes to a nominally
orthodox cartography. Yet what OpenStreetMap is
doing is less a practice of imitation and more a minor
process of singularisation, or more precisely, a performance of re-singularisation: that is, a self-organising

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process that at its most basic level concerns bringing

together ensembles of diverse components (material/
semiotic; individual/collective) (Genosko 2001, 129),
or, an open-ended process of transformation . . . the
destabilisation of established habits, procedures and
practices (Montgomery 2011, np). It is this performance of destabilisation that lies at the heart of
becoming minor. As Guattari in Genosko (1996, 128)
suggests, it is these processes that act as a point of
proliferation and of possible creation at the heart of a
constituted system. Put differently, OpenStreetMappers have to some extent asked of cartography what
Guattari (1995, 135) asked of the psychoanalytic
institution, namely, how do we work for its liberation,
that is, for its re-singularisation? It remains to be seen
if they can provide answers that are suitably transformative to the natures and practices of cartography. As
the popularity of vernacular mapping performances
grow, the staid, institutionalised cartographies such as
the UKs Ordnance Survey will likely also be forced
into a process of re-singularisation themselves, to
generate errant forms of cartography that stray the
Euclidean line: even in the most rigid bureaucracies,
there are always processes of singularisation, frictions
and uncertainties (Montgomery 2011, np). Turning on
the concept of a minor geopolitics, it will be the minor
mapping actors that attune themselves to processes of
institutionalisation, not those major actors that cling to
the institution as artifice. It will be these minor
mapping actors that become increasingly prominent
in future cartographies that work less through the
cognitive Euclidean line, but more through bodily,
affective, virtual and emergent spaces. Indeed, the
power of minorities rests with the multiplication of
connections among their elements and the forging of
lines of escape and errant territories (Genosko 2009,
140).
The minor geopolitics of participatory mapping
therefore enters into what Guattari (1995) labelled
the ethico-aesthetic paradigm. In pushing against
technocratic politics, Guattari valorises creative processes in generating different subjectivities and spaces.
The ethico-aesthetic project involves a distancing from
structure and instead looks to creative freedom to deal
with problems that emerge in the world. For Guattari,
cartography itself is an ethico-aesthetic act insofar as it
provokes an event of existence. In reference to the
ethical, Guattari states that the aesthetic project has
ethico-political implications because to speak of creation is to speak of the responsibility of the creative
instance with regard to the thing created (1995, 107).
The ethico-aesthetic credentials of OpenStreetMap are
espoused by their simultaneous commitment to an
ancient Euclidean science but in a way that pushes
creatively beyond the strictures of major cartographies.
Many other forms of artistic, counter, alternative and

radical map have attempted to be political, but often

fail at it because as Massumi remarks in relation to
artistic practices that try to do the same thing, they
construe being political as having political content,
when what counts is dynamic form (2011, 53). OpenStreetMap is geopolitical precisely because it is not
trying to be geopolitical! Its focus is less to do with the
representational valence of its rendered content and
more to do with ensuring the radical susceptibility of
the cartography to transformation, particularly in its
predication on somatic encounters and sensorium; the
very stuff of a minor politics. The ethico-political
injunction harnessed by participatory mapping, therefore, is to not stop completing, remaking, amassing,
redesigning in order to rearrange cartographic criteria
in the face of the urgencies of the present (Pelbart
2011, 76). Such an ethos of amassing and re-composition is replicated in other examples of experimental
mapping, beyond the case of OpenStreetMap, not least
by the likes of Kanarinka (2006) and Hackitectura (see
Counter Cartographies Collective et al. 2012; Herb
et al. 2009).

Refrains for the minor

By way of a conclusion to these minor lines, the paper
ends with a brief reflection on the refrains of mapping
to accentuate the semi-tonal shift in analytical register
at play here. In music, the refrain is the talismanic
referent point in a song or composition, a repetition to
which a tune is anchored, and often the cathartic
moment of vibratory crescendo and resonance in which
all singers and instruments enjoin. Maps might also be
understood as refrains in the following sense: as the
central point of reference in the practice of wayfinding;
the repetition of oscillations between cartography and
movement; a refrain attempts to maintain some semblance of orientation, focusing haptic and visual senses
in the practice of mapping. In doing the work of a
minor geopolitics, refrains can also be worked through
the thought-experiments of Deleuze and Guattari, and
in particular those of Guattari:
in life, one can only hold on to momentum. Subjectivity
needs movement, directional vectors, ritournelles, rhythms
and refrains that beat time to carry it along. (2009a, 69)

Refrains, ritournelles, ritornellos-affirmed as affective

blocks of space time (McCormack 2010, 213) in
rhythmic and plastic forms (Genosko 1996; Guattari
2013)-encompass methods and techniques for both
thinking through the processual natures of experience
(McCormack 2010) and for opening up enunciative
territories through their diagrammatic and sensory
functions (Guattari 1996). These enunciative territories
are expressions of desire and anticipation, or symbolic
imaginings, articulations or gestures toward the future

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without arriving there completely. Mapping is often

associated with the present-tense demarcation of
territory in the conventional sense of a political
proportioning of physical lands. In turn, this orthodox
linking of map and territory can occlude the minor
potential in mapping to cultivate enunciative territories. Such territories can be speculative as they can be
material. What matters is that these enunciative
territories can be spaces in which things, events and
politics accrue consistency. Limas mapping weekend
involved a sketching of what could or might be in terms
of assembling political events and community collectives; an enunciative territory in other words that
proliferates carto-political articulations rather than
circumscribing them. Limas opening of an enunciative
territory through participatory mapping is about propagating expressions, affects and desires that will go on
to gain a sensible consistency in its representational
purchase and through the way it draws lines of affinity
and lines of flight in reimagining space. Cartography in
its major tenor diagrams identities, borders and meanings. But in its minor tonality, the performances
involved in vernacular mapping expose bodies to
recombinant spaces and assemblages through refrains
of stopstarting, the holding aloft of GPS devices to
empty skies, disorientation, loss, reclamation, tracing,
some of which work, some of which dont; some of
which cross a threshold of consistency, some which
dont (McCormack 2010, 216). The generation of
enunciative territories via cartographic refrains does
not allude to any kind of representational moment of
coherence, but instead highlights the work done
through simultaneous deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation (Buchanan 1997). Enunciation, in particular in its geopolitical guise, as Guattari (2013)
contends, sometimes involves the loss of control, and
the proliferation of multiple, pre-personal forces: the
enunciative as an ontogenetic form in of itself just as
mapping can involve the loss of orientation and the
multiplication of spaces. These enunciations are also
relational, hence the collective assemblage aspect of
enunciation which is the third and final characteristic
of Deleuze and Guattaris minor.
Cartography, as a minor geopolitics, is a significant
shift in the analysis of mappings political rhetoric
insofar as it does away with the distinction between the
subject and the object (a distinction that cartography as
a major science continues to espouse) and instead
produces relations between particular possibilities of
acting or agency and particular possibilities of being
acted upon (Grossberg 2010, 190). Minor geopolitics
through mapping valorises bodily experience, acknowledging that the political is never fully formed, but
always in the making. In this sense, the notion of minor
politics sits closely with the idea of micropolitics. Both
the minor and micro have similar genealogies, and

conflating the two is not necessarily a contradictory

manoeuvre. However, what distinguishes the minor
from the micro is a particular insistence that minor
cartographies, performances and politics work immanent to major formations. A minor cartography then
works to deterritorialise major cartographies in every
sense of the term.
Mapping as a form of minor geopolitics might be
understood as an ordinary, hesitant set of practices,
shot through with doubts and phantoms (Thrift 2000,
382), and because of this level of susceptibility and
vulnerability, there will inevitably be minor lines that
wont. . . come out into relief (Massumi 2009, 6). That
said, it is important to recast geopolitics in this way to
amplify its underplayed minor key so as to first take
issue with geopolitics continued ocular preoccupation
and to diagram the affective logics that complicate
questions of power (Carter and McCormack 2010); and
second, to oppose a purely intensive usage of cartography to all symbolic or simply signifying usages of it
(Deleuze and Guattari 2004). In other words, this is to
use cartography not just as a means of vacuous,
symbolic representation, but as a means to catalyse
political situations and to navigate political events. To
re-iterate, the point of this paper has not been to
dismiss the way macro-geopolitics plays out through
cartography. It is, however, a demand that more
research attention be paid to the minor, micro and
molecular politics of mapping for, as Deleuze and
Guattari remark, good or bad, politics and its judgements are always major, but it is the molecular and its
assessment that makes or breaks it (2004, 244).
Such a demand is levelled because, un-tethered from
semiotic and representational mooring points, cartography takes on greater political vibrancy, becoming part
of a minor geopolitics, a cartography of affects, on the
level of daily relationships (Guattari 2009a, 46). This
would figure cartography (of all kinds) as assemblages
of desires, affects, virtual spaces, working transversally.
The explicitly geopolitical moment arrives not in the
visual distribution of power, but in the distribution of
the sensible (Ranci
ere 2009, 25), the orientation and
disorientation of bodies toward affective, virtual and
quotidian spaces, bound up in the performances of
lived abstractions. Out of this geopolitics comes a
creativity, not wrought from individual genius but from
mundane repetition, adaptation and the enunciation of
refrains, a form of cartographic improvisation centring
on what Guattari campaigned for; a multiplicity of
objectives within the immediate reach of the most
diverse social groupings (2009b, 158).
Ingold (2007) suggests that bodily, gestural lines
lines that go for a walk lines that infuse minor
geopolitical acts, have no business in the discipline of
cartography. However, by considering the varied methods involved in the performances of OpenStreetMap it

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is these very lines-affective, virtual and performativethat underline the vitality of contemporary cartographic practice. What remains politically exciting is
that we are still trying to come to terms with the kinds
of imaginative forays and extensions that such mapping
makes possible, for new types of maps do not tell us just
how to reach a destination (Amin and Thrift 2013).
Finally, it is because cartography continues to be allied
to and recognised as a form of statist aesthetic, the
totem of representation, that it becomes increasingly
urgent to assert that the influence and the affective,
political push of maps lies not in their visual tenacity,
but instead in their virtual capacities to create the
opposite dream . . . to create a becoming-minor (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 27).

Acknowledgements
This work is supported by the Economic and Social
Research Council (award number PTA-031-2007-ES/
F020023/1). Thanks to Gavin Bridge and three
anonymous reviewers for their incisive comments
and editorial support. For hosting seminars, thanks
to Universidad Nacional de San Marcos, Lima, and
the Department of Geography at the National
University of Singapore, and in particular thanks to
James Sidaway and Chih Yuan Woon. Likewise, many
thanks also to Alan Ingram and Harriet Hawkins for
organising the Arts and Geopolitics session of the
RGS-IBG Annual Conference 2011 at which this was
originally presented. Thanks to the OpenStreetMappers in Lima. Finally, Im indebted to Derek McCormack, Sarah Whatmore, Nigel Thrift, Andrew Barry,
Thomas Jellis, James Benn, Maan Barua, Ian Ashpole, Ed Margetson and Becky Catarelli for their
instructive comments via supervisory meetings, a viva
and filter-coffee fuelled discussions. Any mistakes
remain my own.

Notes
1 See Environment and Planning A 45(1), a special issue on
the subject of Neogeography.
2 See also the blog, Everydaygeopolitics (everydaygeopolitics.wordpress.com). Accessed November 2012
3 Disorientation as an affective disposition used to great
cartographic effect by 3Cs Counter Cartographies Collective (http://www.countercartographies.org). Accessed July
2009
4 Indeed the deliberate loosening of the United States
Department for Defences grip on GPS signals under Bill
Clintons administration in 2001 jumpstarted a massive
industry and cultural assemblage of digital orienteering
and dis-orienteering.
5 OpenStreetMapper Eriks Zelenka was arrested while
mapping in Reading, UK in 2011 after a phonecall to
the police by an unnerved local resident (see http://www.

7
8
9

wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-08/19/mappers-targeted-bypolice). Accessed September 2011

Pueblo Libre, a lower-middle-class municipality some
three miles south-west of the colonial city-centre and one
mile north east from the Pacific coast. The great Venezuelan leader of numerous Latin American struggles for
independence from Spain, El Libertador Simon Bolivar
resided in Pueblo Libre before becoming the first president of an independent Peru. Having been previously
called Magdalena Vieja, the district was renamed Pueblo
Libre (Free Town) in honour of Bolivar.
I talk to God but the sky is empty, taken from Sylvia
Plaths 1977 Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams.
For a useful illustration of the digital divide, see Graham
et al. (2012).
Saberes Nomadas website (http://nomadas.ourproject.
org/). Accessed August 2010

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