It didn’t take humans long to figure out that there is more to the world than we perceive. This simple realisation gave birth to a number of persistent problems: Of approximation and distanciation, of selection, and of mapping. What else were Platonic contemplation, or Stoic harmonisation with the world all about, if not to cut out the “unnecessary” and “distracting” elements of our perceptual and conceptual apparatus, to adequately “map” the world onto our own selves, (or to map ourselves onto the world)? But this was only the beginning of the story, for the ideal of adequacy had to be embedded in its own normative frame, and a principle, in which the world and the self participated.
But what if we lose that frame, left with only a number of circuits and junctions, in which our attention is only guided by principles of attractions and repulsion; where it is the map itself, our brain, or our cognitive apparatus, which is in need of — mapping? It seems that we are left with the grains for the simplest formulation of a technology, a logic of turning points into lines to build up an apparatus, an apparatus for drawing lines from out of points. A framework for cutting what’s left of ‘nature’ at its joints, or assembling the flotsam on its surface. Or is it still appropriate to speak of surfaces? Once two points are held in a line, the other points that may have appeared equal in the distribution now appear as tangents. Once we have a bell curve, an upward tick, a sine wave cooking, what was once a uniform distribution is now cleaved into noise and line, regulated phenomena and accident. Our apparatus is now a bamboo spider scattering the significance of points all over the crooked plane. Instead of two entities, the world and our mind, seeking approximation, in-numerous circuits overlapping, creating sparks, sequences, grids, there is now an asymmetry: one entity and its outside. A colony and its context.