HOME  INTRODUCTION  MATERIALS  DOCU      ATLAS - B u r e a u   d ' é t u d e s 1. Maps and Organigrams The geographical MAP is an analog device: it claims to be a copy of the surrounding world. In this way it helps us to orient ourselves, to find our way when we are lost, disoriented, when we don't know where we are. It transforms space into a language which, once learned, allows you to locate yourself in what it resembles. The ORGANIGRAM, on the other hand, is a figurative rendering of social space, with its actors (institutional, economic, social, religious, personal) and its constitutive relations and interactions (administrative, strategic, friendly, financial, religious, political, etc.). The figurative rendering of ALL the planet's social relations, as they can be grasped through the information documenting them, would ideally produce a MAP of world social space. Such a map, sketched on the basis of the relations constituting social space, can help to locate ourselves, to know where we are and what's going on, indeed, to decide what to do. 2. Governmental Cartography The position of overlook adopted by the geographical map is permitted by physical space, which can be flown over. Can the same be said of the world's social space? To see social space from above would allow you to act like a general, positioning and shifting his troops, triggering affects, representations, perceptions (infowar, psywar). Constructing strategies, carrying out coordinated tactical actions. To do this, social actors would have to attain a state of fixity, or at least sufficient permanency to be comparable to things. But unlike things, social actors are moved by diverse forces, physical ones of course, but above all psychological and informational forces. The map-organigram of planetary power attempts to discover and describe the view from above that makes it possible for a world government, or a given sector of such a government, to organize coercion and to pursue its aims thanks to or despite the chances offered by history. It renders flows which can change direction or vanish. 3. Cartographies in Acts Press services, like governments and transnational firms, define orders of priority and importance for world events. Debate in public space (and particularly the figure of the riot) is a struggle against the monopoly on the representation of reality, on the production of legitimate information. What kinds of antagonisms are opened up by a cartography of the system of domination, by an identification of hegemonic strategists and strategies? It is not only a matter here of defining targets and sketching out necessary strategies or alliances, the empty zones of possible movements. In other words, it is not a matter of mimetically adopting the dominant GAZE. One antagonism consists in leaving behind the GOVERNMENTAL (or if you prefer, spinal) approach to cartography. Social space is shot through with antagonisms; therefore several maps confront each other with their batteries of arguments. These multiple worlds need to be accounted for, through multiple and crisscrossing viewpoints. Each map does not have the same way of determining what makes or unravels meaning. Thus the multitudes are cartographies in acts, operators of generic definitions, manifestations of planetary affects that continually overflow all the attempts to measure and symbolize them.