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opposed to symbolic operations by numbers. Non-referential mapping means setting objects into relations (the French physiocrat François Quesnay provided the first such map in his 1758 «Tableau Économique»). «Maps construct—not reproduce—the world.» [23] Let us then take the digital paradigm as an analytical basis, where mapping as a dynamic operation substitutes fixed archival classification.Is mapping a metaphor compared with mathematical topology? Let us go for the precise technical notion of mapping, which derived from cartography has been transferred to mathematical topology and now suffers from a metaphorical reentry.
Are we talking about mapping or about diagrams? [24] About cartographies or the rhizome (Deleuze/Guattari)? The Cartesian «cogito» is based on a grid—a grid that is the rationale of the modern state. The mapping impulse corresponds to the very occidental impulse of overview, surveillance, data control. Alphonse Bertillon [25] once sought to embed the photograph in the archive; Francis Galton LI sought to embed the archive
in the photograph. Both mapped out general parameters for the bureaucratic handling of visual documents. [26] Mapping serves power.
In «Hermes» (1964), Michel Serres describes the communication network «Penelope» as a combinatorial topology, with non-linear, non-hierarchical net-like diagrams involving feedback options. In Buci-Glucksmann´s text «The cartographic view of the virtual» [LI], what is so attractive and puzzling at the same time is a certain undecidedness whether to strictly differentiate or confound maps and diagrams. A diagram is not «already in itself a map or an overlay of maps,» but a genuinely different epistemological tool. The Leibnizian link between numerical continuums and morphogenetic forms fundamentally differs from representational tools like maps. Flashes and vectors, dynamic forces can be represented in painting (like Paul Klee did), but they can only be operative within the calculating machine—which brings us to the notion of «diagrammatic iconicity» coined by Charles S. Peirce (who himself was a practicing cartographer). Peirce divides an overall class of «Icons» into three sub-divisions: «Image,» «Diagram,» and «Metaphor.»
