Do get in touch if you’ve got any thoughts or ideas on this session.

For Félix: Transversal Geographies

Convenors: JD Dewsbury (University of Bristol), Thomas Jellis (University of Oxford), Joe Gerlach (University of Oxford)

“I believe I am neither an intellectual nor a revolutionary. I’m just pursuing something I started long ago” (Guattari, 2009a: 177)

“Just as an artist borrows from his precursors and contemporaries the traits which suit him, I invite those who read me to take or reject my concepts freely” (Guattari, 1995: 12)

Pierre-Félix Guattari (1930-1992) in a familiar self-deprecating gesture declared himself an ‘idea-thief’ (Guattari, 2009a: 23), yet it would be misplaced to regard his theoretical, and practical, work as straightforward appropriation. Instead, Guattari, through his ‘visionary cartography’ (Berardi, 2008), was incessantly productive in the cultivation of transversalising ideas: concepts and folding-points of inflection that segue into thinking, writing, becoming and doing differently. Recent newly constituted editions of his writings (Guattari, 2009a; 2009b; 2011; forthcoming; Guattari and Rolnik, 2008) – primarily though Semiotext(e) – attest to the growing interest and demand for translations of his work. Moreover, Guattari has come to be appreciated across a number of disciplines, not just in philosophy (Holmes, 2009; Stengers, 2010) but also in sociology (Genosko, 2002) and cultural studies (Grossberg, 2010; Murphie, 2004), in what has been described as the ‘Guattari Effect’ (see Alliez and Querrien, 2008; Alliez and Goffey, 2011). However, Guattari has received only muted attention in geography (Katz, 1996; Dewsbury, 2000; McCormack, 2003; 2005; Saldanha, 2010), and his work is often conflated with, or occluded by notorious collaborations. Nonetheless, in this session we hope to encourage a sustained engagement with Guattari’s ideas, exploring how they might resonate with contemporary issues in geography, and, as a result, open up our practices towards alternative ways of making connections between science-society-ethics-aesthetics-politics.

Specifically, we welcome papers attending to:

-  therapeutic spaces

-  eco-logic and ecosophical approaches

-  diagramming and the diagrammatic

-  schizoanalytic cartographies

-  autonomist movements and collective assemblages of enunciation

-  modelling and modelisation

-  micropolitics; minoritarian and molecular revolutions

-  ethico-aesthetics, and the proto-aesthetic

-  refrains, ritornellos and habit

Please send abstracts or expressions of interest to JD Dewsbury (jd.dewsbury@bristol.ac.uk), Thomas Jellis (thomas.jellis@ouce.ox.ac.uk) or Joe Gerlach (joe.gerlach@ouce.ox.ac.uk) by 15 September 2011.

Thank you to the Independent and Guardian for printing my letters on the issue.

Gerlach, J. (2010) Vernacular mappings, and the ethics of what comes next. Cartographica. 45 (3), pp165-168.

I’m not sure if anyone would agree, but I like thinking about these mapping events as micropolitical gestures which encourage yet more micropolitical moments and spaces. The map rendered by OpenStreetMappers continually appears on the edge of becoming, and its wiki-functionality means that there is no inherent security to the map; an icon which features on the map tomorrow could be gone by tomorrow, or multiplied in a week. Part of this thinking contributes to questions about the ostensible divide between virtual and the real worlds; between the digital and the fleshy – the more I’m involved with OSM, the more I’ve felt these divides crumble. OpenStreetMap is intensely corporeal, from the first walk around a town with a GPS unit in hand to the final edit on a laptop in a pub/cafe/train station/home; these are shared bodily events, no matter how many fibre optic appendages we attach to ourselves. It doesnt stop there. Being part of the wiki-community can also be intriguing, baffling, alarming and occasionally hurtful; dealing with how to create and navigate wikis, learning wiki-etiquette, moderating flame-ups (mailing-list bitch fights); in short OSM is a maelstrom of affect – something I’d like to map myself, but I wouldn’t know where to start. Sometimes making a map feels like a labour of love, but it might be this which captivates so many users.

N.B. there will be updates on the mapping party on this blog, and at identi.ca – an open-source twitter. Check out the OSM Peru Group here.

Pains me as it does to mention Starbucks, I keep seeing this short, but affecting, refrain everywhere. Why is it that we have to rely on monstrous coffee-chains to be doing the PR work of geographers?

Elsewhere I met some very interesting people across OSM and academia, namely Yuwei Lin (conducting research into some of the motivations for involvement with OSM, amongst other open-source research), Muki Haklay, one of the few academics to be doing empirical work on OSM, Harry Wood, a leading light of OSM in London and OSM’s humanitarian response unit – and also Mikel Maron who has lead a project to generate an OSM map of Kibera, Kenya. Mikel’s project is impressive in its scope and ambition, but what really struck me was that he was acutely aware of the potential risk that OSM activities, unchecked, can lead to the re-inscription of problems and inequalities that OSM sought to overcome in the first place. Really interesting.

Just a word on the feeling of the conference, I’m amazed by the amount of people on their laptops during the conference talks – there is definitely a geekish element to it all, and unashamedly so – but it’s funny to see people tweeting during a talk “I’m learning about x, y & z, by Dr x, y & z”… when they’re doing anything but. Or perhaps I’m being overly-dismissive and they’re adept at multi-tasking. On the other hand, with the amount of wi-fi, Tweeting, Facebook-ing, and flickr-ing going on, however seemingly disruptive, it does make the conference feel live, electric, and dare I say, virtual.

Tomorrow sees the opening of the general conference, so there will be more input from the OSM ‘community’. Looking forward to it. The breaks are very long, but such is the Spanish way, and after some initial reservations with a 2.5 hr lunch break, I’m quite enjoying them – hasta manana!

Also – you can view the conference by live streaming, and catch constant updates by Twitter – just visit this page, here!