“Immersive cartography is an innovative approach to inquiry that em-

ploys multiple theoretical and disciplinary perspectives to create the

“new.” In his engrossing book, Rousell produces the kind of 21st-century
experimental work that is possible once we leave behind the 20th cen-
tury’s pre-existing social science research methodologies that shut down
thought and simply repeat what already exists. Researchers who feel con-
strained by dogmatic approaches to inquiry will be energized by immer-
sive cartography’s daring and its rich possibilities for creativity”.
– Professor Elizabeth A. St. Pierre, Department of Educational Theory and Practice,
University of Georgia, USA

“David Rousell’s book articulates an exciting new direction for research

across the arts, education and critical posthumanities. This is a ground-
breaking book which offers a unique vision of what scholarship and peda-
gogy in the posthuman university might look like. Drawing on process
philosophy, Rousell radically opens questions of art, learning, and the
multiplicity of creativities that animate life within an expanded field of
more-than-human relations, affects, and concerns. An excellent resource
for undergraduates, graduate students, researchers, educators and scholars
working in and across the fields of arts, education, critical posthumanities
and postqualitative methodology”.
– Professor Pamela Burnard, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge, UK
IMMERSIVE CARTOGRAPHY AND
POST-QUALITATIVE INQUIRY

Immersive Cartography and Post-Qualitative Inquiry introduces immersive cartography

as a transdisciplinary approach to social inquiry in an age of climate change and
technological transformation.
Drawing together innovative theories and practices from the environmental arts,
process philosophy, education studies, and posthumanism, the book frames immer-
sive cartography as a speculative adventure that gradually transformed the physi-
cal and conceptual architectures of a university campus. The philosophical works
of Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari are touchstones
throughout the book, seeding the development of concepts that reimagine the uni-
versity through a more-than-human ecology of experience. Illustrated by detailed
examples from Rousell’s artistic interventions and pedagogical experiments in uni-
versity learning environments, the book offers new conceptual and practical tools
for navigating the ontological turn across the social sciences, arts, and humanities.
Rousell’s wide-ranging and detailed analysis of pedagogical encounters resitu-
ates learning as an affective and environmentally distributed process, proposing a
“trans-qualitative” ethics and aesthetics of inquiry that is orientated towards pro-
cessual relations and events. As a foothold for a new generation of scholarship in
the social sciences, this book opens new directions for research across the fields of
post-qualitative inquiry, art and aesthetics, critical university studies, affect theory,
and the posthumanities.
David Rousell is Senior Lecturer in Creative Education at RMIT University,
Australia, where he works in the Creative Agency Lab and Digital Ethnography
Research Centre. His research is invested in the reimagining of educational cultures,
theories, and environments through new empirical approaches drawing on the rela-
tional arts and process philosophy.
IMMERSIVE
CARTOGRAPHY AND
POST-QUALITATIVE
INQUIRY
A Speculative Adventure in
Research-Creation

David Rousell
First published 2021
by Routledge
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trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent
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Names: Rousell, David, author.
Title: Immersive cartography and post-qualitative inquiry : a speculative
adventure in research-creation / David Rousell.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2021. | Includes
bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2020043727 (print) | LCCN 2020043728 (ebook) | ISBN
9780367418342 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367418359 (paperback) | ISBN
9780367816445 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Social sciences--Research--Methodology. | Group work in
research. | Qualitative research. | Interdisciplinary approach in education.
Classification: LCC H62 .R684 2021 (print) | LCC H62 (ebook) | DDC
300.72/1--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020043727
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ISBN: 978-0-367-41834-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-41835-9 (pbk)
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Typeset in Bembo
by SPi Global, India
CONTENTS

Acknowledgements x
Foreword by Maggie MacLure xii
Introduction: A Speculative Adventure xiv

1. Cartography 01
Beginning in the middle 02
Extensive and intensive mappings 05
Towards a cartography-art 09
The third map of virtualities 11
Technique and technicity 14
The movement of concepts 21

2. Aesthetics 26
The composition of sensation 27
Territory and milieu 29
Framing the Earth 31
The detachable percept 33
A logic of feeling 36
Collaboration after humanism 37
Exchanging particle signs 38
Molecular collaborations 41
Becoming a work of art 43

3. Ecology 45
What is ecology? 47
An ecology of practices 50
viii  Contents

Cosmopolitical societies 51
Becoming-ecological in Bundjalung National Park 53
A cosmic event 59
A thousand ecologies 60

4. Pedagogy 62
An ecological aesthetics of learning events 63
Anomalous pedagogies and undercommons study 65
An architecting of experience 66
Rephrasing the learning self 70
Learning to be affected 71
Non-compliant learning environments 73
Harbouring the elements 74
An ecology of sensation 76

5. Data 79
The metabolics of data 80
Feeling the data 81
A society of feelings 83
The data event 85
An influx of otherness 89
Data abduction 91
The occurrent diagram 92

6. Affect 95
Whitehead’s affect theory 96
No simple location 99
Memories of the future 100
Reco(r)ding what moves you 102
Biomorphic belongings 103
Life in the interstices 105
Geomorphic affects 106
Living and non-living concerns 111

7. Justice 113
Two variations on the concept of event 114
Three variations on the concept of immanence 116
Doing little justices 119
“We can eat the clones” 122
 Contents  ix

Non-human qualities of life 124

The creation of rights 125
The micropolitical sphere 127
Inconclusion 128

Afterword: Propositions for an Immersive Cartography 130

References 134
Index 145
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This adventure would not have been possible without the support and engagement
of many communities. I would first like to respectfully acknowledge the Widjabal
people of the Bundjalung Nation, who are the traditional owners and custodians of
the lands on which the primary research for this book was conducted. I acknowl-
edge the significant role that past, present, and future elders play in the dynamically
shifting life of the Northern region of New South Wales, Australia, and that the
ownership of these lands and territories has never been ceded by Aboriginal people.
I would also like to acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation, as the
traditional owners and custodians of the lands in Melbourne, Australia on which I
currently reside. As a transnational migrant, visitor, and guest on these lands, I am
indebted to the abiding knowledge and hospitality of Aboriginal peoples who have
sustained the cultural and environmental life of these regions for over 50,000 years.
To the extent that an adventure is speculative (with an unknown destination,
outcome, and value), the capacity to undertake an adventure is also a privilege.
A speculative adventure involves the privilege of time, of being supported and
engaged in taking risks, of getting lost, and being able to lose yourself in the process.
Throughout the adventure that constitutes this book, I have had the privilege of sup-
port from many colleagues, family members, friends, and mentors. My PhD super-
visors Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles and Lexi Lasczik offered extraordinary
guidance and support in the development of immersive cartography and beyond. It
has been a pleasure to continue adventuring together across numerous places and
times over the years. I would like to thank Elizabeth St Pierre and Anthony Weston
for their detailed and incisive reviews of my PhD thesis, which have continued to
provoke new imaginings of what immersive cartography might become. I would
also like to extend my gratitude to over 200 students and staff at Southern Cross
University who offered their time, creativity, and insight to participate in the proj-
ect that forms the basis for this book. Your participation and hospitality allowed
 Acknowledgements  xi

immersive cartography to grow in the cracks and intersects between the visual arts,
philosophy, cultural studies, media studies, education, environmental science, chem-
istry, design, engineering, and law.Thank you for your contributions and willingness
to experiment wildly!
Since completing my PhD in 2017 I have been fortunate to work with extraor-
dinary groups of colleagues and mentors, and participate in numerous conversations
around shared interests which have influenced the directions of this book. I would
like to especially thank Maggie MacLure, Liz de Freitas, Laura Trafi-Prats, Michael
Gallagher, Kate Pahl, Gabrielle Ivinson, Sam Sellar, Christina MacRae, and Ricardo
Nemirovsky for sustaining a dynamic and adventurous environment during my
postdoctoral research fellowship in the Manifold Lab at Manchester Metropolitan
University. I continue to learn from the experiments in thinking, technics, and
sociality that took shape during those three years. I would also like to thank Erin
Manning, Catharine Cary, and Ana Ramos for their hospitality and mentorship
during my postdoctoral residency at the SenseLab in 2019. Since moving to RMIT
University in early 2020, Anne Harris, Kelly Chan, and the Creative Agency Lab
have also provided invaluable support and mentorship during the completion of
this book project. I would specifically like to thank the members of the Posthuman
Creativities and SenseLab Melbourne reading groups, who continue to challenge
and extend many of the ideas that populate this book.
I would like to especially thank my parents Leslie and Charles Rousell, and my
brother Jonathan Rousell, for your generous and challenging insights into questions
of subjectivity, feeling, and relationality that lie at the heart of this book. Finally, I
would like to dedicate this book to my wife Cindy and our two children Forest
and River. Without your love and inspiration I would never have fallen into this
adventure in the first place. Thank you for sharing a life together!
FOREWORD BY MAGGIE MACLURE

It would be difficult to overestimate the turbulence that has agitated the field of
qualitative inquiry. The nascent field of “post-qualitative inquiry” has emerged in
the wake of the manifold ‘turns’ in late twentieth-century philosophy and theoris-
ing – turns variously named material, posthuman, affective, speculative, aesthetic,
environmental, digital. At least in theory, this huge infusion of (predominantly
Western) philosophical thought and transdisciplinary influence has transformed
the conceptual architecture and methods of qualitative research. It has deposed the
sovereign human subject who stands outside and above events in order to know,
interpret, and evaluate them, in favour of immanent ontologies, more-than-human
relations, and speculative practices. It has messed with dominant understandings of
time, space, causality, and subjectivity. It has challenged the hegemony of language
as the dominant mode of research engagement, importing the dynamism of sensa-
tion, affect, and the virtual. Of course, this infusion of ideas is not one but many, and
one of the pleasures of this book is its assured exposition and synthesis of complex
concepts and philosophical influences as it unfolds its “speculative adventure”. The
significance of the work of Whitehead and of Deleuze and Guattari is particularly
elegantly elaborated.
It’s not just about clarity and depth of exposition, however. What is distinc-
tive is the way in which the book mobilises speculative and process philosophy in
and for the doing of inquiry. The work goes beyond promissory statements about
future transformations to the field, to fashion a (non)space where thought, action,
politics, aesthetics, ethics, and technique mutually unfold and elaborate one another.
This reflects a new stage of maturity in post-qualitative inquiry, I think. In the
passage from ideas to what would have been called “empirical” investigation the
complexity of concepts has often tended to drain away, losing nuance and purchase
as they are torn from the frameworks that give them their force. Exciting concepts
(one can think of rhizome, diffraction, becoming, and prehension for instance) have
 Foreword by Maggie MacLure  xiii

often tended to be thinned out and watered down as they are “applied” within
the mundane methodologies of conventional qualitative research. In line with the
most interesting and challenging contemporary work, this book refuses to “apply”
concepts to practice as if these two domains were separate, and instead reconstitutes
them within an immanent ontology that transforms what it is to think, to know, to
be human, to choose, to act, to collaborate, to live.
Of course, the attempt will also, inevitably, fail. It is our fate as academic writers,
for the moment at least, to never fully escape the backward drag of Enlightenment
humanism and the colonial prerogative that it accords to the supposedly sovereign,
speaking subject: namely, to interpret the world for less well-informed others. The
ambition to remain within events in order to unfold their speculative potentials will
always be tempered by the temptation to rise above events in order to interpret
them. The desire for immanent modes of non-hierarchical collaboration and dis-
tributed agency will run up against the micropolitics of expertise and institutional
power that lend greater weight to the voice of the academic researcher than to those
of the participants. And we will never be able to shed the burden of the English
language, whose syntax closes down on difference and immanent relationality by
imposing dichotomies of subject and object, cause and effect, active and passive,
before we even begin to write.
This does not in the least detract from the achievement of this book, which is to
demonstrate that sometimes, something will open up. And sometimes, something
will get through.
INTRODUCTION
A speculative adventure

As I began my PhD studies in early 2013, I found myself in the midst of a dizzying
array of methodological and theoretical turns in qualitative inquiry. I was entering
the world of social and educational research at a moment when the very notion
of methodology had become a problem that exceeded worn-out debates between
qualitative and quantitative paradigms. The very foundations of qualitative inquiry
were being dismantled by scholars who took seriously the implications of the affec-
tive (Ellsworth, 2005; Hickey-Moody, 2013), posthumanist (Murris, 2016; Snaza &
Weaver, 2015), post-qualitative (Lather, 2013; MacLure, 2013a, b; St Pierre, 2011),
and new materialist turns (Bozalek & Zembylas, 2016; de Freitas & Sinclair, 2013)
in education and the social sciences. At the same time, the material and affective
conditions of inquiry were being reconfigured by an intractable series of accelerat-
ing changes and transmutations of life at planetary scale. Saturated by the events of
global climate change, mass extinction, forced migration, bio-genetic engineering,
and computational mediation of life processes, it was no longer a question of what
methodology I would “choose” for my doctoral project, or even which method-
ology might best “fit” my research questions, skills, and interests. Rather it was a
question of how I would navigate the complete dissolution of qualitative method-
ology as the planet’s mental, biological, sociocultural, technical, and environmental
ecologies became increasingly entangled and deterritorialised (Guattari, 1989/2008;
Hörl, 2017).
My initial vessel for navigating this tumultuous ocean of complexity was a little art
studio in the town of Mullumbimby, in regional New South Wales, Australia. This
studio and its surrounding environment became a creative laboratory for experi-
menting with speculative concepts and practices that grew into what I’ve come to
call “immersive cartography”. This book follows a series of artistic, theoretical, and
empirical movements that contributed to this development of immersive cartog-
raphy as an adventure into research-creation. One of the propositions that initially
 Introduction  xv

drew me to research-creation, and the approaches developed by Erin Manning and

Brian Massumi (2014) in particular, is its refusal to cleave the activities of thought
from the activities of sensing, feeling, moving, making, and living. In attending to
the tendencies, differentials, and potentials that emerge through divergent modes
of creative activity, research-creation is invested in the proliferation of techniques
that re-invent themselves through the expression of a living process (Loveless, 2019;
Manning & Massumi, 2014; Truman et al., 2019). Technique, in this sense, describes
an intersect or “nexus” where bodily practices and theoretical concepts co-emerge
through a particular set of conditions. Technique becomes immanent in the expres-
sion of a singular event that “can only work itself out, following the movement of
its own unrolling process” (Manning & Massumi, 2014, p. 89). Akin to the mutu-
ally disruptive patterns of ripples generated by stones thrown into a body of water
(p. viii), each rippling out of a process moves, and is moved by, another process
rippling out. Each specific articulation of technique contributes to a particular aes-
thetic patterning of events, a rippling out of the creative inquiry process that cannot
be determined in advance.
My particular interest in research-creation emerged from my practice as a
visual artist working with techniques of aesthetic and social mapping, along with
my readings of the speculative philosophies of Alfred North Whitehead, Gilles
Deleuze, and Felix Guattari. The first year of my PhD studies involved experi-
menting with an open-ended series of speculative concepts and practices in the
studio, while gradually mapping these practices outwards into an expanding field
of socio-ecological milieus. By the end of that first year, a matrix of concepts
and practices had grown out of the studio and spread into a university campus in
Northern New South Wales, Australia. This book continues to follow the move-
ments of philosophical concepts, artistic practices, and pedagogical experiments
as they rippled across a plurality of learning environments, while sketching the
contours of immersive cartography as a living constellation of techniques that
continue to unravel and evolve.

The speculative adventure

A coloured shadowing: an intertwining of fields of emergent experience not

yet defined as this or that. Not defined as this or that, yet their qualities already
interact.
(Manning & Massumi, 2014, p. 4)

In the quote above, Manning and Massumi (2014) describe an environmental

awareness in which differential fields of relation converge to produce new patterns
of aesthetic experience. They note how this awareness entertains the aesthetic con-
ditions of an environment prior to its separation into discrete cognitive elements
and perceptions. This might also be a way to introduce immersive cartography as a
creative approach to inquiry: an open series of interpenetrating fields of experience,
xvi  Introduction

“not defined as this or that, yet their qualities already interact” (p. 4). By the time
you become aware that “this” or “that" has influenced the inquiry, the qualities of
those heterogeneous fields have rippled out in ways that produce a new cartography
of experience. The ripples have “play[ed] off each other, lending their qualities to
each other, composing a single field of mutual action, of co-fusion and changing
contrast: a co-motion” (p. 4). A different passage of experience is already in germ.
With the passage of experience comes a new cartography of relations, an emergent
fielding of sociality. The environmental field of inquiry has shifted, perhaps only
slightly, taking on a different aesthetic tonality and transitional potential for feeling.
Foregrounded in this awareness of the environment is not the “what” or the “who”
of inquiry, but the how of inquiry. The emphasis is not on the individual elements
of the cartography, but on “the immediacy of their mutual action” as a qualitative
texture “belonging to the compositional field” (p. 5).
As a confluence of disparate fields of social inquiry and creative activity, immer-
sive cartography is invested in a project of remapping social environments and insti-
tutional spaces as “compositional fields” of experience, rather than predetermined
social structures. By focusing on aesthetic experience and the intensive environmen-
tality of social relations, immersive cartography seeks to retain an openness to the
qualitative intensity of the social environment prior to its parsing out into catego-
ries, codes, and definitions. This “radically environmental” (Hansen, 2015) orienta-
tion to social research makes it nearly impossible to describe immersive cartography
as a methodology or a set of methods (St Pierre, 2019a). Instead, I would describe
immersive cartography as a speculative adventure into inquiry, an adventure that
pushes research to the threshold where concept becomes practice, life becomes art,
and thought becomes creation: research-creation.
Within this cartographic exploration of research-creation the concept of “adven-
ture” takes on Whitehead’s (1967a, p. vii) double meaning, connoting both the
“slow drift” of sociality towards alternative modes of co-existence, as well as the
risky adventure of thought that is required when “framing a speculative scheme of
ideas”. And yet, immersive cartography is also an adventure of artistic experimenta-
tion which maps the differences that creative practices can hold in the reimagin-
ing of social worlds. Immersive cartography is an adventure that unfolds through
artistic, social, and conceptual experimentations with research-events-in-the-making.
To embark on this adventure is to commit to an inquiry that will inevitably be
overtaken and submerged by the very processes it engages: an immersion in/as the
process of inquiry.
This book offers a kind of "induction” into immersive cartography as an
approach to inquiry that is submerged in the rippling confluences and cross-
currents of s­peculative philosophical concepts and artistic techniques. Drawing on
four years of research-creation across the learning environments of a regional uni-
versity campus, it situates immersive cartography within a broader project of rei-
magining the university in times of climate change and the transmutation of life
under conditions of accelerating social, technological, and environmental upheaval.
Across the book’s various chapters, immersive cartography is exemplified by an
 Introduction  xvii

engagement with pedagogical experiments that open the aesthetic and ecological
seams of the university’s institutional fabric, seeding new potential for research and
pedagogy that resists the reduction of experience to the bounded human subject.
In this respect, immersive cartography is invested in an ongoing project of develop-
ing a more-than-human aesthetics, pedagogy, and ecology of inquiry, a project that
includes myriad forms of animal and vegetal life as well as biochemical, geological,
computational, and quantum modes of existence that participate in the formation of
complex ecological societies.Throughout this book, immersive cartography is char-
acterised through its attentiveness to diverse ecologies of learning in specific con-
texts, ranging from scientific laboratories to art studios, national parks, creek beds,
classrooms, galleries, habitats, and homes. It proposes that learning is an adventure
that happens anywhere and everywhere and is by no means reducible or answer-
able to the “human”. From global climate change, to the ganglia of a mollusc, to
the “most trivial puff of existence in far off empty space” (Whitehead, 1978, p. 28):
learning occurs.

Steps towards a new empiricism

The emergence of immersive cartography during my PhD studies can be situated
within the broader turns to posthumanism and feminist new materialisms in the
social sciences, and the associated dissolution of qualitative methodologies in social
research (Jackson & Mazzei, 2013; MacLure, 2013; St Pierre, 2013). The devel-
opment of immersive cartography has made its own peculiar turns within these
broader movements, evolving through a close engagement with Whitehead’s (1978,
1967a) speculative empiricism; the geophilosophy of Deleuze and Guattari (1987,
1994); Manning and Massumi’s (2014) speculative pragmatics of research-creation;
diverse genealogies of practice in the environmental arts and aesthetics (Bruno,
2014; Irwin, 1985; Kwon, 2002; Lacy, 1994); post-qualitative and new materialist
approaches in social research (MacLure, 2013; Lather, 2013; St Pierre, 2013;Truman,
2019); and the increasingly broad spectrum of work associated with the critical
posthumanities (Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2010; Braidotti, 2013; Chen, 2012). In navi-
gating the frictions and resonances across these different fields, immersive cartogra-
phy responds to recent calls for “new empiricisms” (Clough, 2009; de Freitas, 2016;
St Pierre, 2019a) capable of forging more nuanced, sensitive, and undisciplined
modes of empirical research within a dynamically shifting posthuman condition
(Braidotti & Bignall, 2018).
Elizabeth St Pierre (2019a) has argued that any “new” approach to social research
is necessarily shaped by its engagement with the contested philosophical history of
empiricism, central to which is the problem of how a common world of experi-
ence is sensed, apprehended, felt, thought, and known. Empiricism is historically
concerned with the relations between bodily sensations and conceptual thought,
with varied histories and genealogies of empiricism providing a range of often com-
peting and incompatible accounts of the interplay between internal and external
relations (Whitehead, 1967b). St Pierre (2019a) argues that modes of social inquiry
xviii  Introduction

committed to “producing the new” need to engage with alternative genealogies

of empiricism that break with the inherited assumptions of logical positivism and
social constructivism. These two empirical paradigms continue to exert a vice-like
grip over the social sciences and are typically considered opposing ends of a spec-
trum between quantitative and qualitative research. Despite their obvious differ-
ences, both of these paradigms of inquiry share a fundamental bifurcation between
thoughts and sensations, between a “really real” natural world and its mediated
interpretation through the cognitive structures of human minds, societies, and cul-
tures. Where positivism denies the veracity of any knowledge that is unquantifiable,
social constructivism claims that all knowing is subject to humanistic interpretation
and structural power relations. Yet both positions rest on what Whitehead (1964)
called the “bifurcation of nature” into objective facts and subjective interpretations,
a cut that habitually slices empirical experience up into categorical chunks and
hierarchical shares. Within the splintered disciplinary fields of the contemporary
social sciences, the widespread acceptance of this bifurcation has resulted in a pre-
carious “settlement” between quantitative and qualitative research, where each side
has conveniently accepted the bifurcation and (in some cases) agreed to leave each
to their own (for the most part), despite retaining an unquestionable metaphysical
precedence or “firstness” of the quantitative over the qualitative (Koro-Ljungberg,
MacLure, & Ulmer, 2018).
Immersive cartography turns to Whitehead’s speculative empiricism in an
attempt to assemble an “unbifurcated” approach to social inquiry that refuses to
sever experience into subjective and objective shares. In resisting the bifurcation of
nature inherited from Cartesian dualism, Kantian correlationism, Hegelian dialec-
tics, phenomenological intentionality, and other binary philosophies, Whitehead’s
speculative empiricism embraces the plurality of worlds that are actualised, with
each passing moment, through the incipient relationships between discrete occa-
sions of experience. Speculative empiricism hinges on the creative activity of becom-
ing as the constructive process of reality itself, such that the identities of “knower”
and “known” always presuppose the creative activity of becoming as an immanent
process (Whitehead, 1978, p. 56). No experience is considered “more” or “less”
empirical than any other, because every experience partakes in the general activity
of becoming that drives the “creative advance” of the world into novelty (Massumi,
2011, p. 2).
In Whitehead’s (1978) Process and Reality, empiricism is not just a theoretical
“-ism” or genre of philosophy. It is also what is fundamentally at stake in inquiry,
in art, in education, in society, in life. “The question of experience takes on a non-
conceptual meaning. It concerns the experience of the reader, and the manner in
which Whitehead’s concepts, such as experience, alter experience itself ” (Stengers,
2018a, p. xiv). Speculative empiricism begins with how you are participating in
the felt experience of the world with each passing moment. From the immediacy of
experiential participation in the world’s creative activity, Whitehead’s empiricism
takes flight into the “thin air” of speculation in an attempt to account for the condi-
tions through which such participation becomes possible, before “landing” with a
 Introduction  xix

renewed sense of the speculative nature of experience. Your experience (including

your idea of “experience”) is no longer what it was before you took the flight. A
new sense or “feeling” of experience has emerged. Whitehead (1978) asks: what are
the speculative conditions necessary for empirical experience (the body, thought,
space, time, life, society, the universe) to feel how it does? What speculative scheme
of concepts can adequately take account of these conditions of empirical experi-
ence? And what pragmatic difference can this scheme of concepts make in living
practices of thinking, feeling, inquiring, learning? Whitehead’s speculative empiri-
cism asks these questions not only of humans but of all things that exist. His specu-
lative scheme proposes that whatever exists is attributable to one actual occasion
or “drop” of empirical experience or another, and thus occasions of experience
are the only causal reasons for existence (p. 24). Within this speculative account of
experience, “to exist” is to participate in a world of creative activity, a world that is
constituted anew, in each moment, through the relational interplay between occa-
sions of experience as they come into mutual expression.
While Deleuze and Guattari share with Whitehead an intensive engagement
with concepts of becoming, affectivity, immanence, multiplicity, and event, their
single-authored and collaborative oeuvres offer a range of philosophical (and non-­
philosophical) twists and lines of flight that dynamically converge, diverge, and
sometimes reconverge with Whitehead’s empiricism.Where Deleuze’s (1994) prop-
osition for a transcendental empiricism orientates towards an immanent plane of
pure “difference in itself ”, Whitehead’s (1978) speculative empiricism begins with
the radical plurality and immanent creativity of pluralistic occasions of experience.
And while Whitehead and Deleuze both develop their theories of immanence in
conversation with Spinoza’s monist philosophy, Whitehead’s is an unusual monism
in which the notion of a “single substance” is always multiple, organic, creaturely,
relational, affective, creative (Whitehead, 1978, p. 19). Whitehead therefore leans
more towards a pluralist monism than Deleuze or Spinoza, who tend to foreground
the “univocity” of nature as a plane of pure immanence. For instance, where Spinoza
posits affective modes as the manifold expressions of God (or Nature) as a sin-
gle substance, Whitehead retains only the modes themselves as “sheer actualities”
without any single, underlying substance. For Whitehead all modes of existence are
“actual occasions” that are self-causing and immanently creative, rather than having
a final causation derived from a single underlying substance (such as God, Being,
or matter). Instead of considering the “many” (e.g. bodies) as the manifold expres-
sions of the “one” (e.g. matter), for Whitehead (1978, p. 21) it is always a question of
how “the many become one and are increased by one” through events. Each actual
occasion of experience unifies a disjunctive diversity of potentials within the con-
crescence of a singular “feeling”, thus adding itself to a “common world” of nature
and continuing its “creative advance” into novelty.1
The degree of compatibility and coherence among these speculative thinkers
remains the subject of current debate and inquiry within Deleuze and Guattari
studies (Robinson, 2009; Williams, 2010) and the current revival of Whitehead’s
philosophy in the humanities and social sciences (Gaskill & Nocek, 2014; Hansen,
xx  Introduction

2015; Manning, 2012; Massumi, 2011; Robinson, 2009a; Savransky, 2016; Shaviro,
2014; Stengers, 2011)2. Despite significant differences in their speculative schemes
and political implications, there is a sense that Whitehead shares with Deleuze and
Guattari a tenacious commitment to produce a new plane of empirical thought
(Shaviro, 2009), as well as a “free and wild” creation of concepts in response to the
obligations their particular plane of thought lays out (Stengers, 2011). This book
builds creatively on these speculative bodies of thought in proposing immersive
cartography as an alternative trajectory in educational and social research, emphasis-
ing the role of practical experimentation and the artful invention of technique in
approaching the ethical and aesthetic imperatives for social transformation in the
current epoch.

Beginning at the end of the world

While immersive cartography takes the “free and wild” concepts of process philoso-
phers as primary sources for cultivating new trajectories of creative inquiry, its most
intense shock to thought does not come directly from philosophy, but from the rap-
idly mutating conditions of earthly life. As I have argued elsewhere (Rousell, 2015,
2016, 2018), the combined material forces and affective intensities of global climate
change, mass extinction, and the computational reconfiguration of planetary life are
reshaping the ontological conditions for thought and inquiry in the 21st century.
Global climate change provides one of the most salient examples of this posthuman
ecologisation of life, in which the agency and status of the “human” is being forcibly
reassembled by a confluence of social, technical, and environmental transmutations
(Braidotti & Bignall, 2018). The massively distributed and uncontainable event that
is “climate change” is kicking back with a force that radically exceeds human scales
of space, time, and agency, demonstrating an ontogenetic force of life that is, quite
literally, other than human (Haraway, 2016). Indissociable from the rapid onset of
climate change is the inhuman force of global capital, as a planetary-scale capture
of bodies and powers that has even seeped into the most intimate, vital, and affec-
tive dimensions of earthly life (Massumi, 2018). Driven by this global expansion
of capital into life processes, the cumulative sensing and computational capacities
of 21st media networks have become powerful agencies and elemental compo-
nents of environments (Hansen, 2015). Mobile phones, satellite navigation systems,
digital sensors, the mining of rare-earth minerals, and the ubiquitous data cloud are
increasingly linked to metabolic processes enmeshed with the Earth’s biosphere and
ecological systems (Gabrys, 2016). Bodies, cultures, technologies, and environments
permeate and interpenetrate one another with increasing granularity, as the porous
membranes of skin, cell, and touchscreen become “fluid mosaics” for the continu-
ous “trafficking” of molecular, biochemical, and semiotic flows (Frost, 2016, p. 27).
In all of these ways and many more, immersive cartography begins at the end of the
world as determined solely through the lenses of human experience and human his-
tory (Braidotti, 2013; Colebrook, 2014; Morton, 2013). At the very moment that the
irreversible onset of the climate emergency is confirmed through advanced satellite
 Introduction  xxi

imaging, geo-chemical testing, and computer simulations, the sense of a phenom-

enological “world” that is intentionally managed and inhabited by human subjects
also dissolves into thin air (Morton, 2013). Numerous scholars in the social sciences
and humanities have inscribed these changing conditions of earthly life under the
contested figuration of the “Anthropocene”, a term that has come to define the
geologic scale of human impact on the ecological functioning and trajectory of the
planet as a whole (Ellsworth & Kruse, 2012; Turpin & Davis, 2015; Morton, 2016).
While the “Anthropocene” concept emerged from the Earth sciences in the early
2000s (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000; Maslin & Lewis, 2015; Steffen et al., 2015), the
term has been increasingly taken up in academia and the public domain over the last
ten years. Amidst this rapid vernacularisation of the Anthropocene concept, many
have hesitated to adopt a term so saturated with “Anthropos” and its aftertastes of
dominance, patriarchy, supremacy, heteronormativity, individualism, and exception-
alism (Colebrook, 2014; Demos, 2017; Todd, 2015; Yusoff, 2019). Alternative terms
have been introduced which variously emphasise a range of other-than-human
agencies which are currently shaping the current epoch. Moore (2017), for instance,
introduced the term “Capitalocene” to describe the total subsumption of the Earth
by the inhuman force of global capital, while Haraway (2016) has foregrounded
the chthonic and symbiogenic powers of the Earth in figurations associated with
the “Chthulucene”. Others have emphasised the ubiquitous technical mediation
of life processes through the onset of a “Technocene” (Hörl, 2017), or “Datacene”
(Rousell, 2018); descriptions that figure within broader discussions of a general
“ecologisation” of technics at planetary scale (de Freitas, Rousell, & Jäger, 2019;
Gabrys, 2016; Parisi, 2017).
Recent work in decolonial studies further critiques the Anthropocene and
related figurations as artefacts of Western (mis)thought, to the extent that the proc-
lamation of the Anthropocene erases colonial histories of environmental racism and
subjection through the invocation of a universal humanity equally responsible for
ecocide (Demos, 2018; Horton, 2017; Todd, 2015; Rousell et al., 2020). A num-
ber of recent studies theorise an inextricable series of links between the logics
of extraction that underpin the planetary-scale genocide of Indigenous peoples,
the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the mass destruction and contamination of ecological
systems, and the extractive mining and burning of fossilised minerals (Karera, 2019;
McKittrick, 2011; Saldanha, 2019; Tuana, 2019; Yusoff, 2019). Yusoff (2019) argues
that the geologic extraction and displacement of so-called “natural resources” such
as water, mineral, and oil deposits are indissociable from the extraction and dis-
placement of living bodies as “fungible” matter3 through the historical genocide
of Indigenous people and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The predatory operations
of capitalism, colonialism, scientism, racism, and environmental exploitation are
theorised within an extractive logic of human domination and mastery, which at
the level of the epoch has become a geologic-scale project of planetary subjection
(Demos, 2018; Rolnik, 2017). From this perspective, the vision of the Anthropocene
as a “new geologic age” of planetary stewardship is fatally flawed, resting on an
xxii  Introduction

image of a universal humanity that fails to bear the trauma of a brutal colonial past
and its afterlives in the present.
As Todd (2015) further argues, the naming of the epoch as Anthropocene propa-
gates the figuration of a universal human “race” equally vulnerable and equally
responsible for global environmental crisis. Even as climate change disrupts anthro-
pocentric claims of human separation and mastery over nature, its most severe
effects are currently impacting communities and environments which have histori-
cally faced capitalist-colonial violence and genocide, including Indigenous, Black,
Brown, Minority Ethnic, and non-Western communities, as well as children and
young people worldwide. Todd (2015) argues that this renders the Anthropocene
an empty signifier for an unnameable epoch in which the colonial-capitalist regime
achieves planetary dominance, while attempting to erase its own tracks with the
promise of a “humanity” in common.

An ethico-aesthetics of inquiry
The urgency of responding to the socio-ecological injustices of the current climate
emergency pushes immersive cartography beyond the material-discursive “nam-
ing” of the current epoch in order to address a fundamental crisis in subjectivity
and ethics, a crisis in how to live and sustain life outside the reductive grid of the
colonial-capitalist subject (Grosz, 2017; Guattari, 1995; Rolnik, 2017). Building on
Guattari’s (1995, 2013) proposal for an ethico-aesthetic paradigm that resists the
colonial-capitalist logic of extraction, immersive cartography is orientated towards
processual movements of aesthetic experience and its implications for a relational
ethics of co-existence. Following Guattari, this involves the formulation of an “eco-
logic” that is irreducible to the extractive logic of hierarchical sets and categories.

While the logic of discursive sets endeavours to completely delimit its objects,
the logic of intensities, or eco-logic, is concerned only with the movement and
intensity of evolutive processes. Process, which I oppose here to system or
structure, strives to capture existence in the very act of its constitution, defini-
tion, and deterritorialisation.
(Guattari, 1989/2008, p. 30)

Approaching social inquiry through an eco-logic of intensity brings a very different

framing to what it means to do empirical social research. In refusing any a priori
division of experience into categorical domains, an eco-logic attends instead to the
affective intensity of sociality as a more-than-human process of creative evolution
that moves “transversally” across differences. As a mode of inquiry that is attuned
and responsive to both the material and affective implications of planetary change,
immersive cartography seeks to cultivate an alternative ethico-aesthetics of inquiry
by sustaining two commitments to the “new” (St. Pierre, Mazzei, & Jackson, 2016)
in educational and social research: 1) an ethical commitment to actively reimagine
 Introduction  xxiii

and reassemble the social under conditions of environmental catastrophe through an

immanent ethics of lived events; and 2) an aesthetic commitment to pursue a risky
and intensified project of artistic and pedagogical experimentation that actively
disrupts and reconditions the potentials for social life and inquiry. It is this double
commitment to the transversal production of an alternative ethics and aesthetics
of inquiry that catalyses the conceptualisation of immersive cartography over the
course of this book.
Central to this transversal approach is a commitment to pursue modes of inquiry
that overspill the capture of language and discourse (Rousell, 2020). As discussed
in the first two chapters of this book, a cartography can be considered immersive
when it detaches from language, representation, metaphor, critique, measurement,
and rhetorical argument to create a new manifold, or “bloc”, of sensation (Deleuze
& Guattari, 1994). In immersive cartography, the creation of multi-sensory works
of art and media are proposed as open-ended processes of ethical and aesthetic
experimentation, producing maps that can be entered, altered, extended, intensified,
and reconfigured in ways that carve out new trajectories for thought and experi-
ence (Rousell, 2015, 2019a). It is in this sense that an immersive cartography can
be considered both infrastructural in its extension of material networks and techno-
ecological relations (Berlant, 2016), and atmospheric in the production of new space-
times of affective allure and intensity (McCormack, 2018).
This commitment to art as both infrastructural and atmospheric experimenta-
tion distinguishes immersive cartography from other “new” or “post qualitative”
approaches in the social sciences (see, for instance, Jackson, 2013; Mazzei, 2013; St
Pierre, 2013; 2017). And while there is an increasingly robust body of work employ-
ing innovative cartographic approaches in education and social research (Kuntz,
2018; Martin & Kamberelis, 2013; Masny, 2014; Ulmer & Koro-Ljungberg, 2015),
it is still rare for cartographic inquiry to operate substantively outside the framings
of discursive and textual regimes of inquiry. Artistic techniques often remain yoked
to the demands and obligations of language in the social sciences, constrained from
having a life of their own beyond the interpretive determinations of the research
apparatus (Bolt, 2013). Rarely is art taken up as a modality of collective experi-
mentation with non-discursive forms of social life, as the expression of an “activist
philosophy” (Massumi, 2011) always already capable of (re)potentialising the social
along novel micropolitical trajectories (Rolnik, 2017). Throughout the chapters of
this book, particular imbrications of artistic practice and philosophical thought are
proposed as material and affective interventions in the living fabric of the university,
with the aim of opening up new trajectories of social inquiry through a more-than-
human ethics and aesthetics of co-existence.

Reimagining the university

While this book focuses primarily on the development of speculative practices and
concepts for doing immersive cartography, it is also situated within a broader project
of reimagining the contemporary university through an ethico-aesthetics of inquiry.
xxiv  Introduction

The States and Territories project, which forms the basis for this book, was invested
in exploring how an “eco-logic” of creative experimentation might collectively
shift both the physical and conceptual dimensions of a particular university campus
in regional Australia. This links the discussions throughout this book with current
debates in the field of critical university studies, as a nexus of transdisciplinary schol-
arship committed to rethinking the university in times of accelerating social, tech-
nological, and environmental change (see, for instance, Barnett, 2011, 2014; Peters
and Besley, 2013; Phillips et al., 2011; Readings, 1996). Central to these debates are
questions of how enlightenment and neoliberal structurations of the university are
being variously dismantled, rerouted, and subverted by alternative imaginings and
enactments of university life, including through creative, pedagogical, empirical, and
philosophical modes of inquiry.
Many of these debates have oscillated between dystopian and utopian visions
of the contemporary university in relation to decentralised flows of global capital,
the digitisation of university life, and the mounting urgencies of the climate crisis.
Whelan, Walker, and Moore (2013), for instance, describe a dystopic “living death”
or “zombification” of the contemporary university, as the corporatised operations of
universities repeatedly dismember the “undead” concepts of civic responsibility and
public good that continue to haunt them. In contrast, Barnett (2014; 2017) outlines
the possibilities for what he terms “feasible utopias” for the university, pivoting on
the idea of an “ecological university” that operates across Guattari’s (1989/2008)
conceptual, social, and environmental registers, while actively resisting neo-liberal
models of corporate self-interest and predatory competition. In a similar recon-
structive vein, Peters and Besley (2013) argue that the contemporary digitisation
and decentralisation of the university holds significant opportunities for the emer-
gence of what they term the “creative university”. In conversation with Barnett’s
ecological rethinking of the university, Peters and Besley (2013, p. x), describe how
the creative university “might embrace a myriad of different descriptions based on
user-centred, open-innovation ecosystems that engage in cocreation, coproduction,
codesign, and coevaluation emphasising theories of collaboration, collective intel-
ligence, commons-based peer production, and mass participation in conceptions of
open development”. Akin to Barnett’s (2011) alignment of the ecological university
with a “responsible anarchism” of thought and inquiry outside governance, Peters
and Besley (2013) align their vision of the creative university with the “radical
openness” of pirate and open-source software movements, extending the creative
university beyond the normative bounds of the university campus and its neo-
liberal structures of social ordering and governance.
These imaginings of a radically open, creative, and ecological university resonate
with Braidotti’s (2013, p. 184) vision of the contemporary “multi-versity” as an
“exploded and expanded institution that will affirm a constructive post-humanity”.
Braidotti adopts the term “multi-versity” from Wernick (2006) to reimagine the
university as a nexus of posthuman knowledges and subjectivities that are intricately
enmeshed with the technological, social, and environmental milieus of the 21st
century. The multi-versity, in this sense, would reflect the posthuman conditions of
 Introduction  xxv

contemporary life in which situated subjectivities and social formations are radi-
cally entangled with global processes of climate change, biotechnological muta-
tion, transcultural mobilities, and mass extinction of plant and animal life. Braidotti
describes how the multi-versity would operate as a “community of post-identitarian,
posthuman subjects… a community without steady identity or fixed unity” (p. 181),
continuously reorientating towards a people and a politics to come. Rather than
the university being the site of universal knowledge production according to the
predetermined categories and classifications of the neo-liberal subject, the multi-
versity would operate as a meeting place for posthuman knowledge practices and
socialities already active in the living complexities of cities, towns, and regional
communities, including Indigenous and non-Western communities with rich his-
tories of ecological and cultural knowledge practices. Central to this process is the
proliferation of critical, creative, and transdisciplinary studies already underway in
what Braidotti terms the “Posthuman Humanities”, proposed as an open rubric for
the growing variety of fields associated with affect studies, posthumanism, the new
materialisms, science and technology studies, and decolonial and Indigenous studies,
among numerous other areas of inquiry.
Alongside these reimaginings of the university as a contemporary institution are
an emerging series of participatory learning platforms that break with formal edu-
cational models altogether.The University of Orange (2020), for example, describes
itself as a “community organization and free people’s urbanism school that builds
collective capacity for people to create more equitable cities”. Founded in the city
of Orange, New Jersey in 2007 by a collective of community activists, artists, aca-
demics, and urbanists, the University of Orange begins from the principal that “the
city itself is a university”. Offering an ongoing series of free public courses and
events in creative urbanism, placemaking, socially engaged art, and collective recov-
ery, the University of Orange provides an open access educational platform that uses
the city itself as a site of experimentation and learning. Another emerging example
of a radically open learning platform is the Three Ecologies Institute (2017), which
has grown out of the SenseLab at Concordia University. Initiated by co-directors
Erin Manning and Brian Massumi in collaboration with the SenseLab’s extensive
international network, the Three Ecologies Institute aims to offer “a transversal
space of encounter… where vectors of learning from different domains operating
in different modes cross paths and cross-fertilize”. The Institute is open to people
of all ages, from all manners and diversities of “lifeways”, with or without any level
of formal education, and is specifically orientated towards neurodiverse modes of
thinking, feeling, and perceiving the world.
Immersive cartography seeks to make a minor contribution to these varied rei-
maginings of the university by cultivating spaces for actively experimenting with
speculative practices that open up the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of learning
environments. In this respect, this book aligns with Guattari’s (1989/2008; 1995)
pragmatic imperative for creative and philosophical experimentation with alter-
native forms of educational life, while also orientating towards what Harney and
Moten (2013) term the “undercommons” of the university as a place of anarchic
xxvi  Introduction

study, aesthetic sociality, and refuge. Writing in the radical Black tradition of social
activism, art, philosophy, and poetics, Harney and Moten describe the undercom-
mons as “the downlow, lowdown maroon community of the university” (p. 26), a
space of prophetic organisation, subversive planning, and collective forms of study
that resist the “call to order” of formalised education and research (p. 112). While
this book engages primarily with process philosophy rather than the radical Black
tradition within which Harney and Moten are writing, their concept of the under-
commons offers a distinctive counterpoint for immersive cartography’s commit-
ment to the minor socialities and aesthetic intensities that grow in the interstices of
formal institutional structures. This reflects an investment not only in the posthu-
man futures of the multi-versity as a “consensual hallucination” (Braidotti, 2013,
p. 185) but also in the immanent sociality of undercommons study that thrives in
the ruins of the university through the improvised play of social life.

Immersive cartography and post-qualitative inquiry

To the extent that immersive cartography focuses on the cultivation of specula-
tive practices that elude the enlightenment categories and classifications that have
historically defined the university, it also finds itself emerging in the “afterward” of
qualitative methodology as an overarching paradigm for academic research in the
social sciences (Lather, 2013; Lather & St Pierre, 2013). Qualitative research has
historically positioned itself as the authoritative descriptor and interpreter of the
liberal humanist subject and its cultural formations, making research that deviates
from an essentialised image of the unitary subject largely incommensurable with the
concepts and methods of conventional qualitative methodology. This dissolution of
qualitative methodology has coincided with the ontological turn in the social sciences
(Rosiek & Gleason, 2017; St Pierre, 2019a; Zembylas, 2017), in which traditional
questions of epistemological rigour and veracity have been displaced by ontologi-
cal questions of metaphysical pluralism, impersonal forces, and more-than-human
life. In many cases this ontological turn has been provoked by new materialisms
(Coole & Frost, 2010; Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012) and critical posthumanisms
(Braidotti, 2013, 2019; Colebrook, 2014) that span an increasing array of fields,
including political ecology (Bennett, 2010; Protevi, 2013), feminist science and
technology studies (Alaimo, 2010; Barad, 2007; Haraway, 1988; Wilson, 2015), affect
studies (Massumi, 2015a; Seigworth and Gregg, 2010; Stewart, 2007), education
(Snaza & Weaver, 2015), art and aesthetics (Bolt, 2013; Manning & Massumi, 2014),
Indigenous and decolonial theory (Smith, 2013; Somerville, 2013; Smith, Tuck, &
Yang, 2018), and critical life studies (Weinstein & Colebrook, 2016). In resisting the
bifurcation of experience into binary categories and classifications of knowledge,
the ontological turn has generated spaces of refuge and experimentation with radi-
cal revisions of conventional qualitative methods in social research, ranging from
practices of affirmative deconstruction, or “working the ruins” of the university
(Lather, 2013), to the complete scrapping of qualitative methodology and its associ-
ated concepts (St. Pierre, 2016).
 Introduction  xxvii

Immersive cartography begins in the midst of these ontological undoings of

qualitative methodology and has evolved in conversation with St. Pierre (2011,
2013) proposal for “post qualitative inquiry” as a radical alternative to conventional
qualitative research. As an approach to social and educational research that takes a
philosophy of immanence as its point of departure, post-qualitative inquiry aban-
dons the entire apparatus of qualitative research methodology, and indeed, the very
concept of “methodology” itself. Drawing extensively on post-structuralist readings
of Foucault, Deleuze, and Derrida, St. Pierre (2019a, p. 4) describes how post-­
qualitative inquiry operates through the register of the “‘not yet’… that is every-
where but indeterminate, not yet created, not yet individuated and organized into
the definite—immanent”. Because post-qualitative inquiry operates in the imma-
nent register of events that are always in germ, St. Pierre (2019b, p. 4) argues that
post-qualitative inquiry “never exists, it never is. It must be invented, created differ-
ently each time”.
By overturning representational schema predicated on an enlightenment meta-
physics of hierarchy and depth, post-qualitative inquiry seeks to flatten “what was
assumed to be hierarchical”, such that all modes of existence are folded “together
on the surface” with nothing “foundational or transcendent – nothing beneath or
above, outside” (St. Pierre, 2013, p. 649).This immanent approach renders traditional
methods of qualitative “interviews”, “participant observation”, “data collection”, or
“coding” unthinkable, simply because there is no longer a stable, intentional “sub-
ject”, “thinker”, or “voice” that can be distinguished from the virtual cacophony
of forces and potentialities that are actualised through inquiry. For St. Pierre, the
entire history of “methodology” is exploded as soon as the concept of immanence
is introduced into inquiry, to the extent that “methodology” presupposes a static
essence or quality of being upon which a transcendent grid of intelligible methods
can be overlaid. Post-qualitative inquiry thus proposes an approach to social research
that is “methodology-free” (St. Pierre, 2019b), simply because there is no methodol-
ogy capable of containing the irreducible forces and intensities that constitute the
immanence of a life in process.
Rather than placing itself under the rubric of post-qualitative inquiry, immersive
cartography engages with St. Pierre proposal as one of many potential trajecto-
ries for social inquiry in the wake of the dissolution of qualitative method. While
immersive cartography shares with post-qualitative inquiry an intensive engage-
ment with Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of immanence, its syncretic engage-
ment with Whitehead’s process philosophy shifts its trajectory of inquiry towards
a distinctly speculative and non-anthropocentric approach to social research.
Where post-qualitative inquiry has drawn primarily on Deleuze’s transcendental
empiricism in conversation with post-structuralist thinkers such as Foucault and
Derrida, immersive cartography draws out a different series of theoretical move-
ments through Whitehead’s speculative empiricism and Manning and Massumi’s (2014)
propositions for research-creation. While there is now an extensive and robust body of
Deleuzian literature in the fields of education and social research (de Freitas; Masny,
2014; Cole; MacLure, 2013; Semetsky, 2009; Jackson, 2013; St. Pierre, 2011), the
xxviii  Introduction

return to Whitehead’s process philosophy has only just started to gain momentum
in these fields (see, for instance, Cole & Mirzaei Rafe, 2017; Cole & Somerville,
2017; Mazzei, 2020; Rousell, 2017, 2020; Savransky, 2016).This book contributes to
this small but growing field of interest in the implications of Whitehead’s thought
for contemporary social research, while exploring the potentials for alternative
encounters with Deleuzian concepts (of “cartography”, “process”, “event”, “sense”,
“becoming”, “immanence”, “a life”) through the speculative genealogy of process
philosophy (Robinson, 2009; Shaviro, 2009; Stengers, 2011).

Trans-qualitative inquiry
One of the key interventions that this turn to process philosophy instantiates in
immersive cartography is an emphasis on the qualitative texture of experience as a field
of relations which includes, but is not limited to, human experience. Whitehead’s
concepts of “feeling” and “prehension” place extraordinary emphasis on the pri-
macy of qualitative experience in the constitution of events, offering a deperson-
alised and depsychologised reading of the qualitative that has been extended and
intensified in the works of Massumi (2002, 2011, 2015; 2018) and Manning (2012,
2013, 2020). Building on this process-orientated engagement with the qualitative
and its implications for creative research and pedagogy, immersive cartography is
invested in a reimagining, rather than abandonment, of qualitative experience as a
speculative pivot point or “crux” for social inquiry.This engagement with the quali-
tative differs in radical ways from conventional qualitative methodologies, which
historically begin with the bounded interiority of an intentional human “thinker”
and “knower” as the agent of inquiry (St Pierre, 2019a). In immersive cartography,
the qualitative is associated with transversal and transindividual movements of expe-
rience within an ecology of immanent forces and felt relations, rather than with
any bounded entity. By unyoking the qualitative from its metaphysical binding to a
personalised identity and cultural narrative of “self ”, the qualitative is recuperated in
the felt transitions and intensities of feeling that precede and exceed the “personal,
pseudo-sovereign subject” in the expanded field of life (Massumi, 2018, p. 77). This
processual reimagining and recuperation of the qualitative is, in many ways, com-
plicit with St Pierre’s (2019a) post-qualitative turn to a Deleuzian “life” of imma-
nent concepts and virtual events. But in another sense, immersive cartography’s
commitment to experimenting with the transindividual flux of aesthetic experience
places a different inflection on what might be termed the “trans-qualitative” move-
ments and potentialities of social inquiry.
In immersive cartography, the notion of “trans-qualitative inquiry” invokes
a resistance to abandon the primacy of the qualitative in sensing the intensities
of felt experience, particularly when concepts of “feeling”, “sense”, and “experi-
ence” are no longer limited or modelled on human subjects, selves, or individuals.
Recently I have written with colleagues about the “trans-qualitative milieu” that
connects human lives with those of non-human animals and technologies (Rousell
& Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, 2018a), as well as the transindividual movement of
 Introduction  xxix

affective intensities within the charged atmospheres of various learning environ-

ments (de Freitas & Rousell, 2018; de Freitas & Rousell, in press; Rousell & Diddams,
2020). Throughout this book, the turn to the trans-qualitative necessarily involves
a reconceptualisation and recalibration of qualitative experience with respect to
questions of animality and multi-species’ co-existence, the relational technicities
of works of art and architecture, and the environmentality of experience within
complex sensory ecologies. Rather than disavowing the qualitative this book works
the transversal edges of its speculative limits, exploring trans-qualitative zones of
inquiry through engagements, for example, with environmental artworks as places
of passage (Chapter 1); the molecular relations between nudibranchs, plant cells, and
cups of tea (Chapter 2); an etho-ecology of molluscs and birds in the intertidal zone
(Chapter 3); the affective atmospheres of adaptive learning environments (Chapter
4); the data ecologies of clay, mobile devices, and ancient monuments (Chapter 5);
the affective concerns of trees, dust devils, and comets (Chapter 6); and the qualita-
tive intensities of mountains, wolfpacks, and river systems (Chapter 7).
Throughout these chapters, trans-qualitative intensity (or what Whitehead sim-
ply calls “feeling”) is proposed as a differential element of all entities and events,
ranging across scales and temporalities of experience from the sub-atomic to the
cosmic.4 By situating trans-qualitative intensities of feeling within a molecular
continuum of experience that “goes all the way down” to the smallest quanta of
existence (Massumi, 2018), immersive cartography draws on both Deleuzian and
Whiteheadian process philosophies to propose an approach to inquiry that refuses
preconstituted categories of personhood as the primary terms of relation. As
Massumi (2018, p. 61, emphasis in original) writes, from the process-orientated
point of view, “all subjects are transsubjective and transindividual”.5 Moreover, the body
is no longer taken as a stable envelope or “ground” for qualitative experience but is
itself recomposed as a nexus of trans-qualitative movements and bodyings of expe-
rience which resist any general categorisations of the “human” and its various sub-
categories (Manning, 2013, p. 208). By taking the creative activity of becoming and
the immanent specificity of differential relation as primary, the body is approached
through “the how of its emergence, not the what of its form” (p. 17). In Chapter 7,
this reorientation is expressed through a micropolitics of difference and a rethinking
of justice that resists hierarchical categorisations of the qualitative by “type”, moving
instead towards “a caring for the relating of things as such – a politics of belong-
ing instead of a politics of identity […] a pragmatic politics of the in-between”
(Massumi 2015, p. 18).
While “trans-qualitative inquiry” returns no matches on Google Scholar at the
time of writing this book, the term evokes a diverse genealogy of engagements with
the prefix “trans-” in posthumanist theory and numerous transdisciplinary fields of
“critical life studies” that refuse the humanist categories of identity and subjecthood
(see, for instance, Alaimo, 2010; Barad, 2015; Halberstam, 2018; Harris & Jones, 2019;
Weinstein & Colebrook, 2016).6 Writing in the field of transgender studies, Stryker
et al. (2008, p. 11) describe the “explicit relationality” of the prefix “trans-” and the
significance of the hyphen as a signifier “which remains open-ended and resists
xxx  Introduction

premature foreclosure by attachment to any single suffix”. More recently, Hayward

and Weinstein (2015, p. 196) have invoked the prefix “trans*” as an ontological term
that references the processual “eventualization of life” in resistance to fixed determi-
nations of gender and species as essential categories of being.7 Drawing together con-
cepts from transgender studies, quantum field theory, and numerous other domains,
Barad (2015, p. 411) assembles the concept of trans/materiality as a “wild exploration
of trans* animacy, self-experimentations/self-re-creations… in a radical undoing of
“self ”, of individualism”. In each of these posthumanist configurations, the prefixes
“trans-“, “trans*”, and “trans/” have come to signify sites of resistance not only to
binary categorisations of sex and gender, but more broadly to contractions of racism,
sexism, ableism, and speciesism that rely on a neo-liberal model of the individual
subject as the normative unit of capitalistic classification, narrativisation, and value.
While acknowledging these diverse prefixial engagements across multiple fields
of critical life studies, this book’s primary engagement with “trans-” is through
process philosophy and its more recent developments in the field of affect studies
(Manning, 2012, 2013, 2020; Massumi, 2002; 2015; 2018). “Transversality” is one of
the pivotal concepts to emerge from process philosophy, as developed by Guattari
(1995) in the early 1960s at the Clinique de la Borde, a “schizoanalytic” clinic
committed to experimenting with collective and non-hierarchical modes of group
subjectivity in the therapeutic process. Guattari’s concept of transversality aims to
account for the collective movement of subjectivity along vectors of experience
that run transversal (or diagonal) to the vertical and horizontal dimensions of an
institutional assemblage. Guattari (1995) describes how adjustments to a “coefficient
of transversality” can alter the collective awareness of institutional stratifications,
structural axes of power, and the lived relationality of social life. To illustrate this
coefficient of transversality, he describes how the adjustment of blinkers on horses
can expand or contract the range of transversal relations within the visual field of
sensation. As a greater range and intensity of transversal relations are made pos-
sible, heterogeneous and non-hierarchical movements of collective subjectivity are
released that scramble the categorical codes and stratified power relations of the
institution. As a pragmatic concept, the transversal is associated with creative prac-
tices of social, aesthetic, and political experimentation that facilitate an increased
movement and dispersal of subjectivity across scales, degrees, and levels of institu-
tional organisation (Genosko, 2008, p. 54). And yet, transversality also refers to the
“incorporeal ecosystems” or “virtual ecologies” of potentiality which elude institu-
tional capture, while “engender[ing] the conditions for the creation and develop-
ment of unprecedented formations of subjectivity that have never been seen and
never been felt” (Guattari, 1995, p. 91).

Laying out a plane of inquiry

By introducing immersive cartography alongside the current proliferation of
post-qualitative, new materialist, and posthumanist approaches in the social sci-
ences, this book follows a series of transversal movements in the cultivation of a
 Introduction  xxxi

more-than-human ecology and aesthetics of inquiry. Each chapter pivots around

a particular concept that played a catalytic role in the construction and enactment
of immersive cartography during the States and Territories project, focusing on the
concepts of “cartography”, “aesthetics”, “ecology”, “pedagogy”, “data”, “affect”, and
“justice”.With each of these concepts comes a litany of other concepts that become
obligated to play a role in navigating the adventure of social, artistic, and conceptual
experimentation undertaken in each chapter. One of the distinctive aspects of the
book is its attempt to situate this philosophical and creative movement of con-
cepts within the particular social and environmental milieus of a regional university
campus in Northern NSW, Australia. Rather than appealing to philosophy as a
transcendental “overseer” of inquiry, the book continuously returns to the question
of how this particular milieu of social experimentation might reroute and recharac-
terise a concept’s movement through an alternative trajectory of sensing-thinking-
feeling. Often concepts are instantiated, stretched, and rerouted in novel ways by the
adventures they undergo through experimentation in the field.When the adventure
stretches a concept to breaking point, alternative concepts need to be evoked or
invented in order to grapple with a particular problematic or complexity of rela-
tions. There are times when a concept is overtaken or even “broken” by a work of
art or a pedagogical experiment, and other times when the art or the experiment is
subtended and broken down by a concept.This creative/destructive “counterpoint”
(Manning, 2013, p. 207) between philosophical concepts and empirical experimen-
tations is often what pushes each chapter’s adventure into new territories.
Chapter 1 begins with the initial stirrings of immersive cartography in the first
year of my PhD study, and follows the evolution of cartographic concepts and
techniques as they began to proliferate across an expanding meshwork of social
and environmental milieus. It explores the problem of how a cartography becomes
immersive, and what it means to continuously begin in the middle, or “milieu”, of
inquiry. Through a close engagement with Deleuze’s account of a cartography-art
and the cultivation of intensive and extensive mapping techniques, this chapter also
develops a detailed description of how the States and Territories project came into
being, and with it, the assembly of a “cartographic network” of philosophical con-
cepts and creative experiments that extended across a regional university campus.
In Chapter 2, the problem of creating an immersive cartography is considered
within a more-than-human aesthetics, focusing on the specific role of artistic com-
position in developing a participatory ecology of inquiry. This involves an extended
discussion of Deleuze and Guattari’s engagement with art as the expression of ani-
mality, focusing on the compositional agency of percepts and affects in multi species
processes of “creative involution”. Examples of collaborative artworks created by
student participants in the States and Territories project help open this discussion into
a molecular account of creative ontogenesis, emphasising the more-than-human
qualities and relations that participate in the process of “becoming a work of art”.
Chapter 3 navigates a series of transitions into discussions of ecology through
an engagement with Whitehead’s speculative philosophy and Isabelle’s Stengers’
notion of “cosmopolitics”. Situating immersive cartography within a posthuman
xxxii  Introduction

ecologisation of life processes, the chapter addresses the problem of what multi-
species “fieldwork” might look like when the concept of ecology is expanded to
include the trans-qualitative movement of experience within a more-than-human
ecology of practices. A series of examples are drawn from fieldwork experiences
with environmental science students and lecturers in Bundjalung National Park,
building on Stengers’ cosmopolitical proposal to trace a series of tentative shifts and
disruptions within a multi-species ethics and aesthetics of co-existence.
In Chapter 4, the concept of “pedagogy” offers a springboard for conceptualis-
ing the affective and sensory dimensions of learning as a trans-qualitative process.
Building on a range of radical pedagogies from thinkers such as Elizabeth Ellsworth
and Erin Manning, an ecological aesthetics of the learning environment is devel-
oped through engagements across the fields of process philosophy, contemporary
art, architecture, and education studies. Specific examples are drawn from a series of
pedagogical experiments with pre-service teachers, who develop innovative con-
ceptual designs for adaptive learning environments orientated towards relationality
and non-compliance. Pivoting on ideas introduced by these groups of students, the
chapter turns to a speculative discussion of the atmospheric and digital dimensions
of contemporary learning environments.
Chapter 5 explores the wild proliferation of data in immersive cartography and
begins to develop the intensive focus on Whitehead’s speculative philosophy that
animates the remaining chapters of the book. The explicit turn to Whitehead in
this chapter opens up questions about the agency of data within complex ecologies
of relation, leading to the formation of the “data event” as a concept that refuses to
separate the datum from the event of encounter. This has significant implications
for how data are engaged through immersive cartography and includes a series of
abductive and diagrammatic techniques for working with data events in the final
sections.
Building on discussions of Whitehead’s concepts of “prehension”, “data”, and
“subjective form”, Chapter 6 delves further into Whitehead’s theory of feeling as
the basis for trans-qualitative studies of affect. Working with a small group of cul-
tural studies students to explore the felt transitions between memory and place, the
chapter draws on Whitehead’s notions of “society” and “life” to describe the inter-
stices and differentials between biomorphic and geomorphic modes of affectivity.
Extending considerations of qualitative feeling and concern to astronomical and
meteorological affects (such as the movements of comets and dust devils), the last
section of the chapter pursues a cosmological account of affectivity that does not
rely on human subjectivity or consciousness as its point of reference.
This inquiry into more-than-human affects and concerns continues in Chapter 7,
but with a focus on developing an immanent ethics through the figuration of “doing
little justices”. Chapter 7 explores the micropolitical potentials of minor acts of
justice across multiple speciations and temporalities of experience, drawing out
variations on the concept of immanence in the works of Whitehead and Deleuze.
Pivoting on Whitehead’s notion of “mutual immanence” to articulate the freedom
afforded by the immediacy of contemporary events, the chapter works through a
 Introduction  xxxiii

series of pedagogical experiments with pre-service teachers exploring the rights

and qualities of life for non-human animals, mountains, and rivers.The final sections
of the chapter turn to the role of micropolitics in immersive cartography, where
an indeterminate and incomplete politics of collective attunement is proposed as a
matrix for seeding new movements in activist philosophy, art, and inquiry.

Notes
1 Whitehead’s pluralist monism provides an alternative entry point for immersive cartog-
raphy’s engagement with questions of affectivity with respect to more-than-human life
and non-life. Specifically, it involves beginning with events as affective “vectors of feel-
ing” (Whitehead, 1978), rather than with biopolitical concepts of matter (Bennett, 2010;
Chen, 2012) as the grounds for animacy, difference, and the affective relations of bodies.
The incipient passage of affect, in Whitehead’s reading, always precedes materialisation
(or “objectification”), rather than being an innate function of matter’s self-relation (for
instance, in any “A to B” relation between bodies).
2 In her meticulous and innovative reading across Whitehead’s oeuvre, Stengers (2011)
notes his “politeness” as a thinker who strove to produce a speculative scheme that was
“adequate” to empirical experience rather than superior, critical, or universalising with
respect to other bodies of thought. She argues it is a mistake to approach Whitehead’s
speculative scheme as a “theory of everything”, suggesting instead to approach it as a
pragmatic machine which produces new potentials for thought in the specificity of par-
ticular events and relations of empirical experience.
3 In her book Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century
America (1997), Hartman uses the term “fungibility” to describe the colonisation of the
enslaved body as a commodity with exploitable properties.
4 This also puts immersive cartography into conversation with Alaimo’s (2010, p. 3) theo-
risation of the “trans-corporeal”, a concept that outlines a porous and permeable zone
of entanglement where “corporeal theories, environmental theories, and sciences studies
meet and mingle in productive ways”. Alaimo (p. 2) explains how the concept of trans-
corporeality offers a tool for mapping “the interchanges and interconnections between
various bodily natures”, where the prefix “trans” aims to open up “a mobile space that
acknowledges the often unpredictable and unwanted actions of human bodies, nonhu-
man creatures, ecological systems, chemical agents, and other actors” (p. 2).
5 Massumi adapts the term “transindividual” from the philosopher of technology Gilbert
Simondon. In his book 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value (2018), Massumi broadly
describes the transindividual in terms of “qualitative differentials spread throughout the
field of life” (p. 39). He maintains that transindividuality “isn’t a thing but a power. It is the
power of becoming of a subjectivity-without-a subject” (p. 99). Elsewhere in the book he
applies the term to describe specific modes of “collective attunement”. For example, he
argues that improvisation “is never a question of individual creativity. It is always a play-
ing out of a differential field… Improvisation, looked at in this way, is a transindividual
machinic subjectivity, or subjectivity-without-a-subject. It operates by synergy and the
fusion of a multiplicity of moves into the continuity of a transition. It expresses itself in
and as an emergent collectivity marshalling the power of a continuum whose fusional
taking-form cannot be reduced to the sum of its participating individuals” (pp. 114–115).
6 Weinstein and Colebrook (2016, p. 4) propose critical life studies as an open rubric for
a convergence of critical projects and studies for which the transmutation of life in the
xxxiv  Introduction

21st century has become a framing problem, including affect theory; new vitalisms, mate-
rialisms, and empiricisms; critical race theory; critical disability studies; critical animal
studies; trans and queer studies; posthumanisms of various kinds; science and technol-
ogy studies; post- and decolonial studies; material feminisms; critical climate studies; and
Anthropocene studies.
7 Connecting transgender and trans-species studies of processual experience under the
conceptual rubric of “tranimalities”, Hayward and Weinstein (2015, pp. 196–197)
describe how “trans*” signals:

Not the primacy of ‘the human’ (as both posthuman and Anthropocene inadvertently
reassert in their efforts to trouble human dominion) but the eventualization of life. If
trans* is ontological, it is that insofar as it is the movement that produces beingness.
In other words, trans* is not a thing or being, it is rather the processes through which
thingness and beingness are constituted. In its prefixial state, trans* is prepositionally
oriented—marking the with, through, of, in, and across that make life possible.”

It is important to note that these speculative engagements with “trans*” or “trans-“ are
widely contested in the field of transgender studies. Chu and Drager (2019, p. 104),
for instance, argue that the specificities of transgender studies, bodies, and subjectivities
should not be diluted or appropriated into “an addendum or a hyphen or an asterisk to
something else”.
1
CARTOGRAPHY

What does it mean to create a map that you can walk into? How does a cartography
become immersive? These questions puzzled me as I worked in my art studio in the
first year of my PhD studies, immersed in an ever-increasing amalgam of found
objects, materials, tools, and books. At the time I had only a vague idea of how my
PhD project might look. I sensed that it had something to do with ecology, aesthet-
ics, learning environments, the Anthropocene, and Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987)
rhizomatic concept of mapping. I also felt that I did not already know or possess
the concepts and techniques required for the cartography that was unfolding. These
would need to be unearthed, assembled, broken, reinvented. I entered a period of
open-ended experimentation that was somewhat terrifying, both in its lack of dis-
cernible boundaries and in the isolation of studio work which often carried on late
into the night.
My studio was in a semi-industrial area of a regional Australian town where craft
and trade workshops mingled with artist studios and small businesses of various
kinds. I began walking daily around the neighbourhood, collecting objects, mate-
rials, ideas, conversations, and experiences as a way of thinking-with cartography
as an emerging series of encounters with the world. The studio began to pile up
with stuff collected from these walks: rocks, branches, and old glass bottles from the
nearby riverbed; old windows from a derelict house; offcuts of plywood, MDF, and
particle board; sheets of glass; used cans of paint; some rusty tools. I started to get
to know many of the folks who lived and worked in the area. They would offer
me their junk, and I would try to answer their questions about this art/research/
mapping project of which I didn’t really know the shape. As I collected fragments
of things and conversations I also began to feel the sense of a map connecting dif-
ferential elements and domains. A map that didn’t really have an image or a form,
but more of a sense or feeling of elements in motion.
2  Cartography

Immersive cartography began to stir in certain chance encounters that started

to surface as the walls of my studio became increasingly porous. On one occasion,
a local carpenter offered me a series of plywood cubes that had been sitting at the
back of his workshop. These cubes sat in a corner of my studio for some time as
I carried on with various other experiments. Often the corner of my eye would
flicker towards them with a sense of suspicion about their ambiguous role in all of
this. One night I started arranging them on the floor of the studio, playing with
different spatial possibilities and configurations for placing them into relation with
other things. I began to envision the potential for creating a constellation of rela-
tional objects, in which the cubes would somehow operate as pivot points within a
cartographic network of movement and sensation. I was intrigued by the possibility
that the cubes could become operative, agentic, and cartographic, that they could
somehow become immersive in their capacity to map and reconfigure physical and
conceptual movements from the ground up. This was a pivotal shift in perspective
in what became my doctoral project States and Territories, laying the seeds for the
approach to inquiry that I call immersive cartography.

Beginning in the middle

The map expresses the identity of the journey and what one journeys through.
It merges with its object, when the object itself is movement … Every map is
a redistribution of impasses and breakthroughs, of thresholds and enclosures,
which necessarily go from bottom to top.
(Deleuze, 1997, p. 61–64)

Immersive cartography emerged through an open-ended process of inquiry that

focused on the problem of how a cartography could become immersive. In labour-
ing over this problem in and around my studio for nearly a year, immersive cartog-
raphy gradually emerged in the midst of a problematic field of relations, erupting
from the middle of a milieu of social and aesthetic encounters. The cubes found
their way into my studio through this open series of encounters with the surround-
ing social environment, in other words, through a process of adventure. I didn’t think
up or imagine the cubes as ideal forms, nor did I wish or “intend” them through
my own imagination or volition. Instead, I lodged myself on a “stratum” of the
social environment, kept moving, and waited for new threads of inquiry to emerge
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 161). By situating the cartographic inquiry simulta-
neously in place and in movement, I kept the door open for the cubes to enter as a
kind of “gift” from the milieu. Perhaps these are the opening propositions for an
immersive cartography:

Begin in the middle.

Explore your milieus.
Experiment with making maps of them.
Stay in place and keep moving at the same time.
 Cartography  3

In an essay entitled What Children Say (1997), Deleuze suggests that this carto-
graphic approach is similar to what children are always doing: “exploring milieus,
by means of dynamic trajectories, and drawing up maps of them” (p. 61). The
child’s cartography does not function to represent a static territory or predeter-
mined structure (of concepts, meanings, or associations), but rather moves-with-
and-through the dynamic milieus of life-living: milieus of subjectivity, of sociality,
and of environmentality. In French the term “milieu” takes on a triple meaning,
and can refer simultaneously to a social environment, a medium or matrix for
transformation (as in chemistry), and the state of existing “in the middle” or midst
of an environment or situation. For Deleuze, the milieu is also phrased as a trajec-
tory, which is to say, a vector of intensive and extensive movement. “The trajectory
merges not only with the subjectivity of those who travel through a milieu, but
also with the subjectivity of the milieu itself, insofar as it is reflected in those who
travel through it” (1997, p. 61).
This attunement to the movement of subjectivity through the milieu establishes
a resonance between Deleuzian cartography and the cartographies of Indigenous
and First Nations peoples (Cole & Somerville, 2017; Rosiek, Snyder, & Pratt, 2019;
Rousell & Williams, 2020). Within many Indigenous onto-epistemologies, figura-
tions of place (Deloria & Wildcat, 2001; Tallbear, 2014; Tuck & McKenzie, 2015)
and country (Barrett, 2015; Somerville, 2013) implicate a dynamic and inextricable
manifold of relations among subjective, social, and environmental milieus. While
immersive cartography emerges from a Western genealogy of thought associated
with process philosophy, it shares with many Indigenous cartographies a com-
mitment to think and work through the milieu, immersed in an ecological field
of relations which are not yet realised into classifiable units (subjects or objects)
or stratified territories. The milieu is considered both a spatio-temporal manifold
through which bodies travel, and a felt transition of spacetime through which a
body is qualitatively lived. The task of an immersive cartography is to map onto these
movements, to both condition and follow the transitions of conceptual and physical
movement through a cartography of milieus.
Consider how children assemble a complex and dynamically shifting cartogra-
phy of milieus as they move through different environments and situations. Houses,
bedrooms, parks, hospitals, schools, and neighbourhoods are all milieus that chil-
dren pass through and build cartographies from. Deleuze (1997) even suggests that
“parents are themselves a milieu that children travel through: they pass through its
qualities and powers and make a map of them” (p. 62). Yet this parental milieu is
only one node in a more intricate and heterogeneous cartography of more-than-
human milieus which are not derivations or extensions of the parent (Rousell &
Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, 2018a). Deleuze argues that children never stop “mov-
ing about” in a cartographic milieu in which the parents “simply play the role of
openers and closers of doors, guardians of thresholds, connectors or disconnectors
of zones” (p. 62). This cartography breaks with the dominant image of the parent in
psychoanalysis, and with Freud’s Oedipal complex in particular, by foregrounding
the child’s passage through milieus which exceed the personal human subject in
4  Cartography

every dimension. There is no universal narrative which can account for this cartog-
raphy, because each passage of the child through the milieu constitutes a distinc-
tive singularity (Murris, 2016). The passage cannot be categorised or universalised
according to a transcendent model, firstly because no two passages are the same,
and secondly, because each passage changes the milieu through which it passes. The
cartography becomes a multiplicity comprised of singularities: a map of lived events
of passage (see Figure 1.1).
Like Deleuze’s cartography of childhood adventures, immersive cartography
always begins on the ground, with events in the milieu, with the singularities of
passage. It proceeds and evolves as past experiences and future potentials become
distributed, conjugated, and constellated in new ways through ongoing processes of
mapping and re-mapping, composing and re-composing, inventing and re-invent-
ing the present. Rather than orientating towards preconstituted subjects bounded
by narratives of identity, immersive cartography orientates towards the felt experience
of passage through a more-than-human milieu, where the term “experience” is not
contained within the assumed primacy of “human experience”. Immersive cartog-
raphy is concerned with how experience is collectively composed in and through
the ongoing passage of bodies through milieus. “People” are milieus through which
one travels, like any other. With each passage the texture of the milieu is experi-
enced differently, angling a different inflection on the subjectivity of the milieu as a
felt quality of movement.

FIGURE 1.1  A mapping of trajectories and places of passage across Southern Cross
University’s Lismore campus. Hand-drawn by the author, as part of the States and
Territories project
 Cartography  5

Extensive and intensive mappings

Immersive cartography always begins with an open-ended series of experimental pro-
cesses that take the relation with/in the milieu as primary. In the first year of my PhD,
the ingression of the plywood cubes into my studio environment provoked the devel-
opment of a cascading series of conceptual mapping techniques that foregrounded the
more-than-human milieus of educational spaces. I relocated my walking and mapping
practice to the Lismore campus of Southern Cross University. I was lured to this
regional university campus by the dynamic complexity of its socio-ecological milieus,
where pockets of subtropical rainforest, creek beds, water dragons and koalas mixed
with biochemistry labs, art and media studios, and teacher education classrooms. As I
began walking the campus and exploring the intricacies of its environments in detail,
I experimented with placing the plywood cubes in particular locations and taking
photographs from each of their five surfaces. By using the positioning and orientation
of the cube within the milieu to geographically condition and frame the photographs,
I was attempting to detach my own perceptual agency from the production of the
images.Through an iterative process of walking and mapping, I gradually developed a
constellation of 12 locations that were distributed across particular learning environ-
ments of the university campus. I printed the photographs collected from each loca-
tion and adhered them to the surfaces of their respective cubes. The cubes were then
re-installed in the milieus of the campus overnight (see Figure 1.2). The next day, I
invited students and staff from across the university to walk the campus and map their
own trajectories and felt transitions as they found their way to each of the cubes.
Deleuze (1997) describes how these initial forays into immersive cartog-
raphy involved two kinds of mappings: a mapping of extensions, as external rela-
tions between bodies, space, time, matter, and form; and a mapping of intensities, as
“affective constellations” comprised of intensive relations, events, and becomings.
Extensive maps are associated with trajectories of spatial movement and relation,

FIGURE 1.2  Images from the initial installation of plywood cubes by the author in 2013
on SCU’s Lismore campus
6  Cartography

such as the movement from point A to point B, and the spatial relation between
A and B as representable on a map. Maps of extension tend to frame the edges of
what is thinkable, sayable, and doable with respect to a milieu, to the extent that
they purport to “show” a certain range of external relations between a particular set
of things in the world. Any photographic image could also be considered an exten-
sive map to the extent that it exhibits a recognisable set of geometric and semiotic
relations between objects represented in the image. Yet Deleuze suggests that the
external relations captured by extensive mapping are never as fixed or determinate
as a photograph might suggest. Rather, extensive mappings are inextricably drawn
along a trajectory of movement to the extent that they are physically mobile (exter-
nal relations change depending on location), elementally conditional (shifts in climate,
temperature, light), and iterative with respect to new technologies and data (such as
satellite imaging and data simulations). By preserving the factor of movement in
extensive relations, Deleuze disturbs any comfortable sense of distance and measure-
ment as purely numeric and quantifiable, highlighting the famous “fallacy of simply
location” that Whitehead (1967b) raises in his critique of positivism.
The irreducible factor of movement in external relations became apparent in a
series of mappings by a geography lecturer, who accepted my initial invitation to
map her own movements across the campus as she discovered each of the cubes.
Figure 1.3 shows examples of how this participant used mobile technologies to tag
the extensive locations of the cubes in specific regions of space and time, while also
leaving geo-tagged images of the cubes and descriptions of her activity at each site.
Even though this digital mapping of spatial relations appears to “fix” the cubes in
static positions, it also retains the extensive traces of the geographer’s movement
across the campus, as well as the extension of photographic imagery and written
descriptions which are both conditional and derivative with respect to digital tech-
nologies and the shifting milieus of the campus. Rather than fixing the cubes in
place, the geo-locative layering of extensions demonstrates how external relations
are always in movement and can be iterated continuously.

FIGURE 1.3 Geo-located text and image as extensive mappings of the cartographic net-
work by a participating geographer
 Cartography  7

Where an extensive map offers a particular image of the real with shifting condi-
tions, trajectories, and iterations, a map of intensity is more closely associated with
the singularity of a particular constellation of affects as felt transitions. Deleuze
(1997) situates intensive maps within relations of movement and transition from
one state of the body to another, a passage that is “internal” to the felt relations
of “becoming”. Deleuze explains how intensive becomings are concerned with
the distribution and redistribution of affects that produce “a body” as such, shift-
ing the bodily capacities for movement, sensation, thinking, feeling, and imagining,
along with “the cartographic activity of the unconscious” (p. 62). A body is moved
by a map of intensity, to the extent that the map charts the movement of desiring
forces which orientate and propel a body to think and act, in other words, that
make a body “become”. Intensity, in this sense, refers to the force of felt vitality that
constitutes a body through movement. Deleuze cites the cartographic paintings of
Aboriginal artists as exemplary of intensive mappings, as well as Jackson Pollack’s
unconscious action paintings and Fernand Deligny’s multi-layered tracings of the
gestures and articulations of autistic children as they moved across the French coun-
tryside. He suggests that, in each these varied examples, “it is the map of intensity
that distributes the affects, and it is their links and valences that constitute the image
of the body in each case – an image that can always be modified or transformed
depending on the affective constellations that determine it” (Deleuze, 1997, p. 64).
Where extensive maps open onto the infinite extension of knowledge and repre-
sentation through movement, intensive maps are open to lines of continuous varia-
tion in intensity that alter the potentials for how a body can sense, move, think,
do, become. This distinction is highlighted in a second mapping of the initial cube
installations by an undergraduate student from the visual arts department. This stu-
dent’s response to the invitation was to map the felt sense of movement as she tra-
versed the campus and found her way to each of the cubes. As she navigated across
the campus, she drew a continuous line of movement without looking or lifting her
pencil from the paper (see Figure 1.4). What emerges is a drawing that is also a map
of intensive movement and sensation. In contrast with an extensive map that con-
nects discrete points and locations, the line that composes the drawing is one of rhi-
zomatic entanglement that recursively weaves, loops, and knots its threads together,
merging the intensive movement of the body with that of the milieu.
Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 12) elaborate further on these distinctions
between extensive and intensive mappings in the early pages of A Thousand Plateaus,
where they compare the map of intensities or “carte” with the “tracings” of exten-
sive relations.

The map [carte] is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detach-
able, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed,
adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, a group, or social
formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived as a work of art, constructed as
a political action or as a meditation… the map has multiple entryways, as
opposed to the tracing, which always comes back “to the same”.
8  Cartography

FIGURE 1.4  Intensive mapping of the felt process of moving across the campus, hand-
drawn by a participating undergraduate art student

The “carte” is associated with the biological figure of the rhizome, which com-
prises an ever-expanding entanglement of lines of intensity, growth, and becom-
ing, the components of which can be detached, rerouted, and plugged into new
cartographic assemblages and trajectories. Like grasses, ginger roots, bamboos, and
the microbiology of the brain, intensive maps extend horizontally across a surface
 Cartography  9

without a hierarchical or transcendent order. The map of intensity proceeds along

lines of becoming that always begin in the middle of the cartography, in the milieu
“from which it grows and overspills” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 21). Intensive
maps are thus contrasted with “tracings” of external relations between “arbores-
cent systems” which always revert back to a line of extension and derivation from
an originary model. While arborescent tracings tend to calcify into “transcendent
models” in the governance of social order, signification, and knowledge production,
maps of intensity continue to operate through “an immanent process that overturns
the model and outlines a map” (p. 2). Once a map of intensities has overturned the
dominant ordering of a transcendent model, then there is the possibility of plugging
the tracings (images, photographs, descriptions, coordinates) back into the map of
intensive relations.
Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) rhizomatic conception of cartography presents
a significant rupture with common understandings of society, language, percep-
tion, and the unconscious as structural orders presupposed by the felt transitions of
experience. Because their cartography always begins in the milieu and proliferates
horizontally, there can be no fixed, underlying structure to support the development
of language or conscious thought, as in the structuralist theories of Chomsky and
Freud respectively. Instead, everything comes back to “the production of surfaces,
their multiplication and their consolidation” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 125). Rhizomatic
cartography is seen as a living process that constructs language, thought, and the
unconscious on the surface of experience with each passing moment, as an “abstract
machine” that “ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organ-
isations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences and social struggles”
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 7). By plugging maps of extension into maps of
intensity, works of art and social inquiry become “cartographic” in their capacity
to express singular lines of becoming that work in the cracks between structures,
models, and formations of social and subjective ordering.1

Towards a cartography-art
After the initial experiments with the cartographic network of small plywood cubes
described above, I received a grant through the VC’s Sustainability Fund at SCU
to create a more permanent network of installations on an expanded architectural
scale. The construction, mobilisation, and activation of these architectural instal-
lations became a core activity of the States and Territories project, establishing the
cartographic infrastructure for a collective re-imagining of the university’s learning
environments to address the need for transdisciplinary responses to climate change
and the rapid digitisation of educational systems and processes. In extending and
intensifying many of the initial gestures of immersive cartography developed in the
first year, I found myself walking the campus with a considerably larger and heavier
plywood cube strapped onto a sack trolley (Figure 1.5). As I pushed this trolley up
hills, down paths, along creek beds, and through buildings I experimented with situ-
ating the cube in different geographical positions. I spent considerable time in each
10  Cartography

FIGURE 1.5  Walking and mapping the intensive and extensive trajectories of an immer-
sive cartography

place sensing the atmospheric shifts in elemental conditions, the social movements
of human and non-human bodies, and the aesthetic fluctuations of photographic
imagery rendered from the five faces of the cube. I also experimented with numer-
ous material substrates for the architectural construction of the cubes, eventually
settling on toughened glass due to its diffractive optical properties and fluid viscosity
as a material that retains molecular movement even when cooled.
This initial process of artistic fieldwork generated ongoing encounters with
people from across the university disciplines, many of whom became involved
as active participants and collaborators on the project. Through these encounters
and conversations I started to get a sense of the transversal movements within and
between the disciplinary milieus of the campus, in areas ranging across the fields of
Indigenous studies, legal studies, biochemistry, ecology, cultural studies, visual art,
media studies, engineering, and education. Ideas began to circulate around how the
extensive coordinates of the cube locations could be activated as nodes of intensity
for a cartographic network that rerouted conceptual and physical movement across
the campus. Shared interests and affinities developed around the possibilities for the
network to open up territorial boundaries between disciplines, while also folding
the more-than-human milieus of the campus more intimately into everyday experi-
ences of teaching and learning. I also began to experiment with ways of situating
concepts as pivot points associated with each of the cubes and its social environ-
ment, along with the development of a digital infrastructure that would enable geo-­
locative connections between places and ideas as people moved across the campus.
What begins to emerge in this account of the States and Territories project’s evo-
lution is the sense of new pathways being carved into the fabric of the campus
environment. Each pathway threads together extensive mappings of the environ-
ment with intensive mappings of its felt potentials, a convergence of trajectories and
becomings. This is what Deleuze (1997) describes as a “cartography-art”, in which
sculpture “ceases to be monumental in order to become hodological” (p. 65), or
 Cartography  11

“labyrinthine”.The function of art is redefined as the creation of “places of passage”

that join extensive trajectories of movement with intensive passages of becom-
ing, such that the work itself becomes a laying out of paths, a collective voyage, an
intricate adventure.This notion of cartography-art contrasts with the “personal pro-
cess of memory and the collective ideal of commemoration” that dominates what
Deleuze terms an “archeology-art”. Instead of excavating and memorialising the
past, a cartography-art is orientated towards the creation of new external pathways
(literally, new movements) that are intricately connected to the intensive movement of
experience. To enter a work of cartography-art is to lose track of oneself and one’s
categorical “place” in historical time and discourse. The work of art becomes an
invitation to enter and extend a “cartographic network” by creating new pathways
and passages internal to the work itself (Rousell, 2015).

The third map of virtualities

In the acts of walking and mapping the campus described above, the contours of
a cartography-art gradually take shape through “places of passage” internal to the
work of art as an experiential assemblage that relays alternative trajectories of move-
ment across the campus.The sense of movement within the work of art, of an inten-
sity that moves in conjunction with the influx of a radically other “outside”, is how
I describe the feeling of immersion that saturates an immersive cartography. To be
immersed in the cartography is to find a (new) way even as you lose track of where
you are and what you are doing. Losing your way is also an invitation for others to
become immersed, to get lost, carve a new path, adding new passages to the laby-
rinth and layers to the map. The invitation to become immersed in the cartography
is also an invitation to alter the warp and weave of its incorporeal fabric, drawing
out the virtual potentials of the work along new trajectories of feeling, movement,
and thought. Deleuze describes this as the drawing of a “map of virtualities”, where
the virtual refers to pathways of potentiality that are intertwined with each process
and trajectory of actualization.

It is as if the real path were intertwined with virtual paths that give it new
courses or trajectories. A map of virtualities, drawn up by art, is superimposed
onto the real map, whose distances [parcours] it transforms… in each case, the
choice of a particular path can determine the variable position of the work in
space. Every work is made up of a plurality of trajectories that coexist and are
readable only on a map, and that change direction depending on the trajecto-
ries that are retained.
(Deleuze, 1997, p. 67)

Deleuze argues that there is “something unique” in how works of cartography-

art intertwine this third map of virtualities with maps of extensive trajectories
and intensive becomings. The paintings of Indigenous Australian artist Dorothy
Napangardi are exemplary in achieving this interlacing of virtual, extensive, and
12  Cartography

intensive mapping. Napangardi became a traditional custodian of the Karnta-

kurlangu/Kana-kurlangu Jukurrpa (Women’s Digging Stick Dreaming) while liv-
ing in Mina Mina as a young child. For over 40,000 years Aboriginal women of
the Tanami desert have used digging sticks to map the subterranean flows of water
and bush food under varying seasonal and climatological conditions. The Women’s
Dreaming carries the stories of how digging sticks (karlangurlu) emerged from the
Earth at Mina Mina “thereby equipping ancestral women for their travels along the
interlacing dreaming and dancing tracks” (Nicholls, 2003, p. 85). At the age of eight
Napangardi and her family were forcibly relocated to Yuendumu, a government
settlement around 400 kilometres from their ancestral country of Mina Mina. In
1987, while living in Alice Springs, Napangardi began painting the movement of
women’s dancing and the piercing of the desert in Mina Mina with digging sticks.
As mappings of intimate relations with country that resist her forcible displace-
ment as a child, Napangardi’s paintings offer dynamic and mobile cartographies of
women’s walking, dancing, mapping, and dreaming across Warlpiri country.
In her detailed analysis of Nagangardi’s work, Manning (2012, p. 188) describes
how her paintings carry a feeling of movement that directly vibrates the field of
sensation, “a moving image of the intensive passage from force to form” (p. 190). By
creating a surface for viscerally experiencing the passage of movement, Napangardi’s
paintings invite the viewer to “put yourself in the movement” (p. 189), as an invita-
tion to become immersed in trajectories and becomings internal to the work itself.
To “put yourself in the movement” is to enter a cartographic fielding of experi-
ence that is already in motion, a “mapping not of a territory but its passages, the
traces it leaves in the landscapes it uncovers” (Manning, 2012, p. 155). Napangardi’s
2004 painting Sandhills (see Figure 1.6) provides an example of how this feeling of

FIGURE 1.6  Dorothy Napangardi, Sandhills, 2004, synthetic polymer paint on linen, col-
lection of Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Used with permission. © Dorothy
Robinson Napangardi/Copyright Agency, 2020
 Cartography  13

cartographic movement is expressed across extensive, intensive, and virtual dimen-

sions. The painting offers an extensive cartography of movement through its survey
of passages across Warlpiri country, with women’s digging sticks operating as both
tool and technique for extensive mappings and markings of the Earth. As an intensive
mapping of women’s dancing and marking of Warlpiri country “as a creative vector
of experience”, the painting becomes an invitation to “put yourself in the move-
ment” through a mapping of future encounters, rather than a past that has already
occurred (Manning, 2012, p. 155). And as a virtual cartography, the painting becomes
an immanent surface for the Women’s Dreaming as a trans-spatial and trans-tempo-
ral nexus of living potentials that are interlaced with the intensive becomings and
extensive trajectories carried by the work.
While Napangardi’s paintings employ the surface of the canvas as an interface for
fielding these multiple vectors of movement, a different approach to cartography-
art can be found in the environmental artworks of Robert Irwin, who harnesses
the intensive qualities and extensive properties of movement, light, and colour as
elemental media for recalibrating environmental awareness and perception in three
dimensions. Irwin describes his works as conditional to a confrontation of trajec-
tories and intensities which “calls attentions to the pure potential of our circum-
stances as the whole piece” (1985, p. 77). His work often deploys the surfaces of
permeable screens to induce highly nuanced shifts in the aesthetic conditions of
environmental experience, aimed at inducing a heightened awareness of the event
of perception itself, or what Irwin terms the “perception of perception” (p. 92). By
including the “perception of perception” as a constitutive element in how the work
works, Irwin’s sculptural installations draw out intensive pathways that are condi-
tional to the environmentality of the site and the possibilities it holds for movement.
This approach is exemplified in Irwin’s permanent installation Two Running Violet V
Forms (1985) at the University of California in San Diego, consisting of a fine steel
mesh that cuts transversally through a grove of eucalyptus trees in the heart of the
university campus (Figure 1.7).The aesthetic qualities of the mesh shift dynamically
depending on the elemental conditions of the day, season, and year, at times provid-
ing a stark intervention into the grove of trees, while other times becoming only
barely perceptible. Extensive movements around, alongside, under, and through the
“V-Forms” are constitutive elements of the work, as are the intensive movements of
micro-perceptual awareness as recalibrated by the suspension of the scrim.The work
becomes a distributed cartography of trajectories and becomings, traversed by a map
of virtualities that reconditions the potentials for environmental awareness through
pathways internal to the extension of the work.
Yet another inflection in the cartographic arts can be found in the turn to
digital-environmental milieus through the integration of mapping technologies
associated with mobile and wireless communication, context-aware biosensors,
GPS navigation and tracking, and cloud-based datascapes. The work of artist
and engineer Natalie Jeremijenko exemplifies this use of digital technologies
to remap the potentials for environmental health and multi-species’ coexis-
tence through new media ecologies. In a work entitled Amphibious Architectures
14  Cartography

FIGURE 1.7  Robert Irwin, Two Running Violet V forms (1983), University of California
in San Diego. Source: Creative Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
File:Two_Running_Violet_V_Forms,_UCSD.jpg

(2009–2016), Jerimijenko designed an installation of floating glass tubes in sites

along Manhattan’s East and Bronx Rivers with the aim of “mapping a new ecol-
ogy of people, marine life, buildings, and public space”. The tubes contained a
range of sensors, transmitters, and lights that actively monitored the chemical
composition and quality of the water, the distribution patterns of fish, as well as
human interest and participation in the river’s ecosystem. The network of tubes
generated feedback loops of interaction between the fish inhabiting the river sys-
tems, human inhabitants of Manhattan, and their shared social environments and
interpenetrating milieus. A mobile application enabled people to send chromati-
cally encoded messages to the fish through a matrix of flashing lights, as well as
receive real-time updates on fish movements, swarms, and dispersals within the
local river environments. By designing affective interfaces for interspecies sensi-
bility across aquatic and terrestrial ecologies, Jerimijenko’s Amphibious Architectures
harnesses the power of the digital in activating a new map of virtualities within
the intensive and extensive movements of the city.

Technique and technicity

The environmental artworks discussed briefly above offer a spectrum of possible
ways that a cartography-art can draw out new maps of extension, intensity, and
virtuality. Napangardi’s paintings invite the viewer into a cartography of virtual
movement and social dreaming, while Irwin’s installations tend towards subtle
 Cartography  15

environmental attunements, and Jerimijenko foregrounds the potentials of a tech-

nically mediated proxemics. The work of each artist tells a very different story
about what a cartography-art can entail. Yet each artist can be seen to work car-
tographically to the extent that each extension of their work in space and time
is accompanied by a variation in intensity; each intensification is coupled with
an extension of the body’s capacity to sense, think, and act; and each transition
of intensity and extension is interwined with an incorporeal movement of vir-
tuality. As Deleuze (1997, p. 67) suggests, extensive trajectories of movement are
inseparable from intensive processes of becoming-other, and the virtual potential
of a cartography-art is to render the “mutual presence” of these trajectories and
becomings through creative techniques of making visible, audible, sensible, or
otherwise palpable. Whether through painting, installation, or digital augmenta-
tion, each of the artists cited above invents techniques that remap the possibilities
for a body to move through and with the mixed milieus of a more-than-human
ecology and sensorium.
The invention of technique is central to immersive cartography as an approach
to research-creation that implicates art in recalibrating the very conditions of
social inquiry. By focusing on iterative innovations of artistic technique rather than
method, immersive cartography works to reposition the cartographic arts as poten-
tially catalytic in relation to the various ontological, posthumanist, post qualitative,
and new materialist turns in educational and social research. As taken up in this
key, a cartography-art is not posed as the solution to a problem in/with the meth-
odologies of the social sciences (Rousell, 2019). Rather, it is posed as an affirma-
tive experimentation with the empirical conditions of the real that “overflows into
and makes possible new kinds of [social] science” (Grosz, 2017, p. 125). Immersive
cartography thus addresses the question of how cartography-art might come to rei-
magine social formations and institutions and, in return, how social inquiry might
work to follow and extend the intensive and extensive passages opened up by works
of cartographic art.
In this respect, immersive cartography can be considered an approach to research-
creation that rejects the constrictions of qualitative method while affirming a specu-
lative pragmatics of experimentation with cartographic techniques and technicities
of social reimagining. Manning (2015a) argues that predetermined methods arrest
or deaden the potentials of research-creation by “cutting into the process before
it has a chance to fully engage with the complex relational fields the process calls
forth… this renders experience still-born, for an event accounted for outside its
own evolution is an event that has been taken out of its liveness and organised
within the bounds of existing forms of knowledge” (p. 62).Where methods attempt
to predetermine and delimit what a practice might become, technique is what
“comes out of practice as much as it is what goes into practice” (Manning, 2013,
p. 33). Manning develops this notion of technique as intimately linked to the affec-
tivity of bodily capacities in relation to more-than-human milieus, in a manner that
acknowledges an ecology of technics well beyond the anthropocentric reductions
of human invention and use-value.
16  Cartography

There are techniques for hoeing, for standing at a bus stop, for reading a philo-
sophical text, for taking a seat at a restaurant, for being in line at a grocery
store… there are of course techniques in a seed’s germination, in the shift of the
Earth’s axis toward the Sun, and in the process of photosynthesis. And there are
techniques that build on techniques – techniques for painting include implicit
modes of seeing as well as techniques for manipulating light and texture; tech-
niques for dance include implicit understandings of equilibrium as well as tech-
niques for locating and moving rhythm and extension.
(Manning, 2013, p. 33)

When approached through an open grammar and vocabulary of cartographic

techniques, works of art can become propositions for “piloting” changes in the
perceptual, affective, and conceptual conditions of the social, changes which may
recalibrate the potentials for a social institution like a university to sense and rei-
magine itself “through the milieu”.
The piloting role of artistic technique became increasingly palpable with
the architectural installation of glass cubes in the second year of the States and
Territories project. Each installation constituted an ecological and aesthetic rup-
ture in the fabric of the campus, as the glass surfaces of the cubes began to
interface with the shifting elemental conditions of light, shadow, colour, and
movement within its field of relation. The physical installation of each cube also
opened onto a series of geo-located digital portals on the States and Territories
website, transforming each node in the network into an interface for multi-
sensory experimentation, mapping, and archiving (see Figure 1.8). This carto-
graphic network of interactive objects became the infrastructural basis for an
ongoing series of extensive and intensive mappings, including the construction
of analogue and digital interfaces that variously located the cubes in relation
to particular socio-ecological milieus of the campus. Figure 1.9 shows the dis-
tribution of the twelve cubes across the university landscape, with each cube
intervening in the varied conceptual and physical learning environments of the
university, ranging from chemistry laboratories to visual art and media studios,
teacher training classrooms, engineering labs, medicinal herb gardens, and rain-
forested pathways along ancient creek beds.
In addition to these physical interventions into the campus environment, the
cartography also reimagined the conceptual landscape of the university by geo-
locating specific philosophical concepts in relation to each of the cubes. Each
concept was selected to provoke responses to current challenges associated with
the posthuman condition, including the rapid onset of climate change, biotech-
nological advances, the co-creation of alternative futures, and the need for a
more sensitive and ecological engagement with the more-than-human world.
The concepts were also related to the “ecology of practices” situated within vari-
ous parts of the campus (Stengers, 2005a). For instance, the concept of “becom-
ing” was located adjacent to Gnibi College of Indigenous Studies; the concept
of “materiality” was located directly below the chemistry labs; the concept of
 Cartography  17

FIGURE 1.8  Details of four glass cubes permanently installed in learning environments
as part of the States and Territories project

FIGURE 1.9  Map showing the cartographic distribution of objects and concepts across
the learning environments of the university campus
18  Cartography

“design” was located in the School of Engineering; and the concept of “imagin-
ing” was located between the visual art, film, and music studios.
Over a period of two years, this cartographic network grew rhizomatically across
disciplinary territories as I worked collaboratively with over 200 students and 20
academic staff to generate dynamic techniques for mapping collective movements
across the arts, humanities, and sciences. In many cases the cartography entered
directly into events taking place within learning environments through guest semi-
nars and collaborative research activities as pedagogical experiments that pivoted on
the concepts associated with each cube. A range of these pedagogical experiments
were undertaken with students in environmental science, education, legal studies,
cultural studies, and other areas, eventually generating multimedia cartographies
that populated the archives of each of the twelve cubes across the campus. Several
of these experiments are described in the chapters of this book, demonstrating how
creative and critical contributions from university students and academics opened
up new lines of conceptual thought and experimentation within the cartographic
network. These pedagogical activities were conditioned by particular sites and situ-
ations as they crystallised around dynamic nodes of experimentation associated with
particular concepts and locations on campus.
The concept of “mapping”, for instance, took on new contours and poten-
tials as I spent a term working with 40 undergraduate visual arts students while
they created a series of cartographic artworks. As participating students devel-
oped their “cartographies of experience”, I invited them to map the shifting
developments of their material and conceptual practices using video, audio,
photography, journaling, and other arts-based techniques of their own inven-
tion. This material was then curated and assembled into a multi-sensory digital
archive linked to the “mapping” cube, enabling future students and the wider
public to engage with the cartographic movements of the project as it unfolded
over the course of that year (https://www.statesandterritories.org/mappings-
cs0p). This collaborative process of actively creating- and thinking-with oth-
ers is central to immersive cartography, since it enables the cartography to be
collectively taken up, extended, and intensified along alternative trajectories of
aesthetic encounter and becoming. This collaboration eventually formed a node
of experimentation that completely rerouted the curricular and pedagogical
structures of the existing studio arts program, and led to a public exhibition
of their works in the university gallery and other public spaces. Two examples
of students’ “cartographies of experience” are shown in Figure 1.10, including
a series of performance drawings aimed at mapping the repetitive movements
of perseverative thought (top), and an outdoor installation using recycled film
reels to map the loss of Aboriginal lifeways, knowledges, and language systems
through the cultural violence of settler colonialism.
In the final year of States and Territories I began to experiment with mixed real-
ity technologies to open up additional spaces and opportunities for the public to
engage and remix these cartographic data archives within the network (Rousell,
 Cartography  19

FIGURE 1.10  Details from works created by two visual arts students who created their
own “cartographies of experience” as participants in the States and Territories project

2019b). Using an augmented reality application called Aurasma, the surfaces of the
cubes were embedded with overlays of digital images, soundscapes, or pedagogical
cues that could be triggered as people walked the campus with a mobile device.
This also led to the co-creation of a series of mixed reality tutorial walks across
the campus, enabling lecturers and students to digitally resurface the cubes with
their own PowerPoint slides, images, videos, animations, and texts (see Figure
1.11). Ongoing co-productions and iterations of these walks actively shifted the
physical and conceptual trajectories of movement across the campus, as university
students, staff, and the wider community came to pass seamlessly through areas
previously bounded by disciplinary differences between the sciences, arts, and
humanities.
What emerges in this account of iterative extension and intensification of the
cartographic network is an open-ended process of thinking-with techniques that
build on techniques. In thinking-with techniques, immersive cartography resists
the constrictions of qualitative method while affirming a speculative pragmatics of
experimentation with artful technicities of social reimagining. Through the prolif-
eration of techniques that enable a trans-qualitative mobilisation and activation of
20  Cartography

FIGURE 1.11  Mixed reality overlays triggered on the surfaces of the cubes

the network, the cartography inquiry begins to take on a social “life” of its own.This
trans-qualitative proliferation of technique is intimately linked to the affectivity of
bodily capacities in relation to other bodies and milieus, as a technics of relational
coexistence rather than mechanistic problem-solving. By considering technique
within the context of more-than-human milieus of life-living, immersive cartogra-
phy invokes an originary technics operating well outside the boundaries of human
invention and use-value (Simondon, 2017).
By approaching technique from this more-than-human perspective, every
technique is intricately entangled with other techniques both human and non-
human, organic and inorganic, material and affective. Moreover, technique is
defined as a mode and manner of creative activity that gives expression to a field
of virtual potentials (Whitehead, 1967a). The field of affective resonance and
potentiality that surrounds a given technique is what Manning (2013, p. 34)
refers to as its technicity, drawing on the work of philosopher Gilbert Simondon.
“Technicity is the associated milieu of technique … [it] is never given in advance,
never conditioned before a process is underway” (Manning, 2013, p. 34–35). In
Simondon’s (2017) philosophy of technics, technicity refers to a virtual reservoir
of potentiality for invention that inheres to the individuation of technique in
space and time. A body, in this sense, exists as much in its potential technicity
as it does in its demonstrable presence or “ability” to act. This has significant
implications for how artistic techniques are taken up in immersive cartography,
to the extent that “a creative art or design practice launches concepts in-the-
making … [that] are mobile at the level of the techniques they continue to
invent” (Manning & Massumi, 2014, p. 89). The concept of technicity suggests
that immersive cartography is inseparable from the techniques that it helps bring
to life within events, and the concepts it “launches” into the mixed milieus of
the social.
 Cartography  21

The movement of concepts

The same pedagogical status of the concept can be found everywhere: a mul-
tiplicity, an absolute surface or volume, self-referents, made up of a certain
number of inseparable intensive variations according to an order of neighbor-
hood, and traversed by a point in a state of survey.
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, pp. 32–33.)

The previous sections of this chapter have focused on networks of extensive and
intensive mappings, the conjoining of trajectories and becomings through a car-
tography-art, and the associated milieus of techniques that continue to be invented.
In this final section I open a discussion on the pivotal role of philosophical con-
cepts within immersive cartography, building on the “pedagogy of the concept”
articulated by Deleuze and Guattari (1994). Immersive cartography involves an
investment in a living process of speculative experimentation with concepts that
take on their own particular character through the propositions and techniques
that the inquiry sets into motion. This approach is both speculative and pragmatic
in Massumi’s (2011, p.12) sense, where the speculative relates to “the character of
potential native to the world’s activity” and the pragmatic attends to “the taking-
definite-shape of potential in a singular becoming” through the composition of
a trans-qualitative ecology of experience. As a speculative-pragmatic investment
in the not-yet of the social, immersive cartography gathers together a series of
concepts that have been steeped in the particular places and times of my doctoral
project States and Territories. But how is it that a cartographic work of art, like the
cube network, can be said to launch concepts into the field of the social? In order
to address this question, we need to be able to think about concepts as forces that
move through events without being contained by particular physical arrangements
of space, time, and matter.
In What is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari (1994) describe how a concept
operates as a multiplicity that “surveys” a virtual territory or “neighbourhood”
with its own trajectories and intensive variations of movement. This notion of
survey [survol] is adapted from the French philosopher of science Raymond
Ruyer (2018), implying a sense of “absolute survey” or “overflight” of the con-
cept across a virtual territory. A concept is seen to possess a movement and a
milieu of its own, as expressed through the trajectories and becomings which it
both instantiates and undergoes across a virtual field or “plane of immanence”.
In Deleuze and Guattari’s account, concepts move constantly across the plane of
immanence and enter into mutually transformative relations with one another,
while retaining their own particular consistencies as concepts. This means that a
concept does not play by the rules of space and time as defined in classical phys-
ics. In other words, a concept does not have any “simple location” (Whitehead,
1967b). It is simultaneously present in the pull of the past and the lure of the
future, and can pop up anywhere in the world regardless of proximity or distance.
22  Cartography

In this respect, concepts can be seen to approach an “infinite speed” (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1994), and cannot be “contained” within a unitary subject as distinct
from its object of perception or thought. Concepts become impersonal, always
in circulation but never “owned”. They are indexed to the implicate order of
the sense-event (Deleuze, 1990), rather than the explicated order of the subject/
object division. By linking concepts to the virtual “sense” of events as actualised
through encounters and states of affairs in the world, concepts can be seen to
guide the movement and orientation of events as they unfold. For Deleuze and
Guattari (1994), each concept “shapes and reshapes [an] event in its own way”
(p. 34) while also playing a role in conditioning “the contour, the configuration,
the constellation of an event to come” (p. 33). Rather than being reducible to
the content or signification of an action or thought, the concept surveys and
conditions a milieu of “sense” through which thought becomes expressible in
lived events.
The philosopher Elizabeth Grosz (2017) describes how the ancient Stoic phi-
losophers referred to concepts as “lekta” or “sayables” that carry the sense of an event
in this way. She suggests that concepts are virtually sayable without being reducible
to what is said or to the subject who speaks. Rather than being yoked to particu-
lar points in space and time like physical bodies, concepts occupy a state of “self-
survey” where they form “nonlocalisable intensive relations” with other concepts,
while also participating virtually in the actualisation of worldly events, and indeed,
all forms of life (Grosz, 2017, p. 144). This suggests that concepts pre-exist life and
subsist after death as an incorporeal condition and orientating force for life’s powers
and capacities for transformation. This is not to say that concepts are disembodied
abstractions, but rather, that concepts live “virtually” through the body as the flow of
one “sense-event” into the next, a movement that is coextensive with, but irreduc-
ible to, the physical.

Thought itself… is movement, the movement of concepts, their speeds and

slownesses, positioned not only relative to other concepts but also to the world
in which these concepts exist and which they, in their own way, address.
(Grosz, 2017, p. 145).

For Grosz, concepts condition how bodies think the past, present, and future
together and otherwise, how they pose alternative propositions and valuations,
and how bodies live and coincide with their own potentials and with each other
differently. This incorporeal movement of thought is not reducible to physical
movement, whether of the animal body or the micro-movements of neurons in
the brain. Concepts do not simply erupt from the human brain, just as works of
art do not simply arise from the trained hands of the human maker. “Rather, they
are precisely the becomings of virtuals that are unused processes of actualisation
up to now… these virtuals are the direction, the future, to and by which things
and ideas bring themselves into existence and orient themselves” (Grosz, 2017,
p.  254). This directional movement of the incorporeal does not begin with
 Cartography  23

human consciousness but with the very origins of space and time, the origins
of the universe. “The chain of evolutionary emergence is unbroken not only
materially but also conceptually” (p. 250). Concepts and sensations co-compose
and complexify one another through linked rates of change across scales and
temporalities of existence.
Immersive cartography is concerned with mapping how concepts move in rela-
tion with places of learning, works of art, bodily encounters, and the fluctuations
of social life. One of the techniques that immersive cartography develops along
these lines is the emplacement and spatialisation of concepts in relation to par-
ticular objects, places, encounters, and propositions. The map shown previously in
Figure 1.9 illustrates how concepts were mapped onto the physical landscape of
the university campus in the States and Territories project. This “location” of each
concept was indexed by an order of neighbourhood or “zone of proximity” with
respect to particular social practices. For example, the concept of “becoming” was
mapped onto the cube situated adjacent to Gnibi College of Indigenous Studies
and community meeting place for local Aboriginal elders; the concept of “affect”
was mapped into a rainforested creek bed, where a cube was installed at a busy
pedestrian crossroads at the heart of the campus; and the concept of “ecology”
found its way into a garden bed where a cube was installed near the environmental
science laboratories. In each of these instances, the associated milieu of a concept
found a certain resonance and proximity within the neighbourhoods of particular
objects and social environments. In one sense this constituted a paradoxical attempt
to tether concepts to objects and locations, but this technique also worked prag-
matically to open concepts up to a process of thinking- and mapping-with mul-
tiple others. By emplacing and spatialising concepts as lures, they could be taken up
by artists, scientists, educators, writers, and engineers in dynamic and unpredictable
ways, proposing a kind of “worldising” of the concept through place, while also
inviting the concept to participate in a reconditioning of the local atmospheres and
durations of particular places.
In staging this open-ended and continuous interplay between concepts, envi-
ronments, sensations, and techniques, the States and Territories project worked
to generate new trajectories and intensive variations of conceptual movement
across the surfaces of the university campus. Each cube came to operate as a node
of attraction and inception for fielding the incorporeal movement of a concept,
which in turn came to orientate and condition the atmosphere of thinking-
feeling surrounding each cube and its associated milieu. This often involved a
process of bringing concepts and sensations together in particular ways, as in
the location-based Soundtrail application that was mapped onto the cartographic
network in 2016. Soundtrail was composed of multi-layered field recordings and
spoken word narratives from the university community created in collaboration
with undergraduate students in media studies and journalism (see Figure 1.12).
These location-based audio works were then assembled into a three-dimen-
sional “soundfield” specific to each cube and its associated concept. The sound-
field is activated as you enter a 20 metre radius of each cube, creating a sonic
24  Cartography

FIGURE 1.12  The Soundtrail application being tested and prototyped by media students
who participated in its development

cartography that you can literally step into and explore the contours of. As you
approach the “becoming” cube outside the Gnibi College of Indigenous Studies,
the voice of Bundjalung elder Aunty Irene Harrington fills your ears with sto-
ries of her childhood adventures in that very location. As she speaks to you of
Bundjalung country and sings a childhood song in the Widjabul language, Aunty
Irene connects Aboriginal cartographies of becoming with ecologies of experi-
ence that span multiple senses, bodies, cultures, spaces, temporalities, and modes
of existence.
Artist and theorist Andrew Goodman (2018, p. 21) describes how this kind of
relational cartography constitutes a “gathering ecology” that is always operating
“on the level of the virtual – a gathering of potential – as much as it is an actual
entanglement of relations”. By situating and mobilising the virtual movements
of concepts in relation to objects, bodies, places, and times, each cube gathers
an atmosphere of “shared potential” around concepts that open onto alterna-
tive modes of relation and engagement with the capacity to reshape institutional
environments. This shared potential involves the virtuality of the concept as it
comes to recondition the actual entanglement of relations on the campus, where
concepts and sensations “drift” together and apart through felt transitions of
experience (Goodman, 2018, p. 69). For an immersive cartography, it is always
a question of experimenting with techniques that bring concepts and sensations
into new configurations of felt transition and proximity. Whether through carto-
graphic works of art and writing, social activations, or pedagogical experimen-
tations, it is through techniques that concepts are felt to move through specific
events of encounter and reimagining. Following this pedagogical movement is a
way of grasping how a concept can both teach and learn cartographically, as a
movement of thought that hovers “like a mist” (Deleuze, 1990, p. 5) over a gather-
ing ecology of experience.
 Cartography  25

Note
1 The political and social implications of this cartographic philosophy are developed more
thoroughly by Guattari in his single-authored works, in which he outlines the dimen-
sions of schizoanalytic cartographies that map onto psychic and social processes (2011);
the production of new subjectivities through creative practice (1995); the creation of
new philosophical metamodelisations (1995); and an ecosophy (1989/2008) that operates
across mental, social, and environmental registers. For Guattari, these speculative cartog-
raphies are inseparable from the development and enactment of cartographic practices,
tools, and techniques that overturn, reroute or extend existing maps into new existential
territories. In offering a speculative and pragmatic trajectory for creative, empirical, and
philosophical research, such cartographies have the capacity to open up a “completely
different horizon of a processuality considered as the point of continuous emergence of
every form of creativity” (Guattari, 2013, p. 5).
2
AESTHETICS

Immersive cartography emerges at a time when the aesthetic qualities and intensities
of life are being recomposed on a planetary scale. Anthropogenic climate change,
the mass extinction of plant and animal life, and the chemical contamination of air,
food, soil, and water resources are transforming not only the external milieus of the
environment, but also the intensive qualities and aesthetic sensibilities that consti-
tute the felt experiences of life-living. This is a planetary epoch in which the very
composition of life is being reconstituted through biotechnological transformations
associated with genetic manipulation, ubiquitous computing, and machine learn-
ing, such that the boundaries between human and non-human, life and non-life,
natural and artificial, have been eroded if not completely dissolved (Braidotti, 2013;
Povinelli, 2016). This shifting sense of trans-qualitative porosity and relationality has
foregrounded the need for an expanded aesthetics capable of grasping the shifting
qualities of life under these changing conditions (Rousell & Williams, 2020; Shaviro,
2014). Immersive cartography takes up this task in the wake of a revival of interest in
aesthetics as the basis for speculative, posthumanist, and new materialist theorisations
of contemporary life (Debaise, 2017; Goodman, 2018; Grosz, 2008; Haraway, 2016;
Massumi, 2018; Parisi, 2009; Povinelli, 2016). This speculative turn to aesthetics has
in many cases been accompanied by a return to the process philosophies of Bergson,
Whitehead, Deleuze, and Guattari, whose works provide distinctive accounts of
“the implicit aesthetic genesis, order and creative organization of experience, with
experience…understood as enlarged and not simply equivalent to human experi-
ence” (Robinson, 2009a, p. 22). In situating an aesthetics of coexistence as the entry
point for cartographic thought and inquiry, immersive cartography is concerned
with the relational production of difference through the creative activity of becom-
ing as “ontogenesis”.
Taking up aesthetics in this speculative key enacts a play of resistance against
what Whitehead (1964) diagnosed a century ago as “the bifurcation of nature”
 Aesthetics  27

into objective quanta and subjective qualia. As discussed further in Chapter 3, this
bifurcation reflects the dualist legacy of Enlightenment science and the Kantian
“settlement” of mind-world correlation, a split that continues to pose an unassail-
able wedge between an empirical world of natural causality and a subjective world
of aesthetic appearances and qualitative impressions. In cultivating an “unbifurcated”
approach to art and aesthetics over the course of this book, this chapter devel-
ops a distinctly ecological aesthetics that resituates inquiry within a more-than-
human field of felt relations and co-compositions.This ecological aesthetics seeks to
take account of that which precedes, exceeds, proceeds, and importantly, implicates
human life as one of innumerable elements, forces, and modes of earthly exis-
tence. Drawing on more-than-human accounts of aesthetics proposed by Deleuze
and Guattari (1987, 1994), Massumi (2011, 2015a), and Grosz (2008), this chapter
involves a rethinking of art in terms of differential forces and intensities of life that
activate mutant tendencies and environmental sensibilities. It entails a focus on the
eventfulness of art as a relational mode of co-composition that operates on “a plane
of ‘life’ well beyond the human organism (and organic life in general)” (Colebrook,
2014, p. 220). By resituating art within the affective and perceptual milieus of the
animal world and, in the later sections, an inorganic “life” of molecular ecologies of
relation, the chapter aims to resituate art and aesthetic inquiry within an immanent
“life of events” (Grosz, 2017, p. 150).

The composition of sensation

In their extended discussion of art and aesthetics in What is Philosophy?, Deleuze
and Guattari (1994, p. 192) write that “composition, composition is the sole defini-
tion of art” (p. 192). This appeal to composition is not simply referring to how a
painting, for example, is formally “composed” on the surface of the canvas. Rather,
it is directed towards how a painting composes sensations on the surface of experi-
ence, at the immanent nexus of the animal body and its socio-ecological milieu.
This orientation decouples art from its conventional function of representation, and
resituates it within the real conditions of life’s mutant forces and capacities for com-
posing dynamic ecologies of sensation. In this speculative reading of art, sensation is
enlarged to encompass a much wider swathe of felt experiences which include, but
are not reducible to, sense perception. Art is recharacterised as an abstract machine
that reroutes the evolution of life towards creativity and the composition of new
assemblages operating across conceptual, sensory, affective, and social registers of
experience. In focusing on the animality of art’s compositional force, Deleuze and
Guattari reorientate the function of art toward creative experimentations with life’s
immanent potentials to innovate and evolve.
The capacity for art to literally “compose” sensation plays a special role within
immersive cartography, to the extent that art brings compositional techniques into a
zone of proximity with animal territories, milieus, and ecologies of sensation. Deleuze
and Guattari situate their ontology of art and aesthetic experience on what they
term a “plane of composition”. This plane is distinctive in relation to other planes of
28  Aesthetics

thought and production, including the philosophical “plane of immanence” and the
scientific “plane of reference”. Grosz (2008, p. 70) describes how the plane of compo-
sition functions as “the collective condition of artmaking: it contains all works of art…
all the events in the history of art, all the transformations, ‘styles’, norms, ideals, tech-
niques, and upheavals, insofar as they influence and express each other”. In this respect
the plane of composition extends back to the rock paintings, tool construction, and
mythological imaginaries of the earliest hominids and their pre-hominid ancestors.Yet
for Deleuze and Guattari (1994, p. 184), the aesthetic plane of composition does not
find its ontogenetic origins in human technics and imagination, but rather in the co-
evolution of animal bodies and their environmental milieus. It is in this sense that the
entire concatenation of historical and contemporary art practices, styles, forms, and
genres are considered singular instances and recurring refrains which correspond with
the composition of territorial assemblages in the animal world (Zepke, 2005, p. 65).
Art and aesthetic experience are considered territorial expressions of animality rather
than personal expressions of the human.
In binding art and animality as indissociable elements of art and animality as indis-
sociable elements of life (Massumi, 2015a p. 2), aesthetics is no longer considered the
privilege of the human who thinks, but is haunted by the rhythms and refrains of the
animal world and the creative capacities for life to generate new modes of existence
through the composition of sensation. “Art is the becoming-animal of the world”,
Zepke (2005, p. 183) writes. “It creates new forms of life outside of our stratifications,
our comfortable organicism, and opinionated thoughts”. Art comes to reveal the
inhuman animality that stirs at the heart of the human, rather than being emblematic
of any superior qualities or abilities that set humans apart from other animals. This
proposition transforms Darwinist narratives of biological evolution and adaptation
to account for the expressive mutations, improvisations and “creative involutions”
of ecological processes in relation to dynamic changes in shared environments and
milieus (Massumi, 2015a, p. 8). Art becomes a function of the non-human element of
territorial expression, as a “creative life of instinct” common to all living species (p. 8).
This element of expression “plays upon unpredictable relational effects” to produce
an “aesthetic yield” or surplus value of life’s creative force, resulting in a “composi-
tion animating the genesis of new forms with a life of their own” (pp. 9–10). In other
words, art stirs in the mutation of eco-evolutionary processes that are creatively com-
positional at the level of sensation, where evolution becomes expressive of symbio-
genic experimentation (Margulis, 1999), rather than random or accidental mutations
in pursuit of mere survival.
Building on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) account of “creative involution”,
immersive cartography engages with art and aesthetics in terms of the animality and
intensive expression of life as the creative production of difference. Art becomes a
process of generating experiments that cross into a nexus where “what is animal,
vegetable, mineral or human in us” become indistinct (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p.
174). An immersive cartography is thus concerned with destablising the human sub-
ject as assumed centre or arbiter of sensation and creativity, gesturing instead towards
the symbiogenetic processes that are the immanent conditions for human sensing,
 Aesthetics  29

FIGURE 2.1  Surface detail of one of the glass cubes installed on the campus of Southern
Cross University as part of the States and Territories project (2013–2017)

thinking, and making (see Figure 2.1). By acknowledging that mentality and sensa-
tion are by no means exclusive to human being, immersive cartography hinges on an
onto-ecological-aesthetics in which works of art express a creative desire to compose
new folds and refrains of sense and sensation, a desire exemplified in “the birdsong, the
olfactory dance of insects, the performative displays of vertebrates” (Grosz, 2008, p. 12).

Territory and milieu

Deleuze and Guattari’s aesthetics often appropriates concepts from the biological
and ethological sciences and retools them as philosophical instruments for prying
open the trans-qualitative functions and potentials of artistic composition. They use
the term “creative involution” to describe their particular take on “neo-evolution-
ism”, emphasising the creative agency of symbiotic “alliances” across species and
modes of existence, as “blocks of becoming… that bring into play beings of totally
different scales and kingdoms, with no possible filiation” (1987, p. 238). The term
“involution” foregrounds the factors of involvement and collaboration in the creative
evolution and endurance of life, rather than factors of filiation and descent. From the
perspective of creative involution, “the animal is defined not by characteristics (spe-
cific, generic, etc.) but by populations that vary from milieu to milieu or within the
same milieu; movement occurs not only, or not primarily, by filiative productions
but also transversal communications between heterogeneous populations” (p. 239).
This use of the term “milieu”, as discussed in the previous chapter on cartography,
draws extensively from German ethologist and biologist Jakob von Uexkull, whose
book A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men (1934/2013) introduces the
concept of the “Umwelt” or “lifeworld” of the living organism.Von Uexkull begins
his description of the Umwelt by comparing it to a soap bubble that surrounds each
30  Aesthetics

living creature, a bubble that is “filled with the perceptions which it alone knows”
(p. 319). These bubble worlds are invisible and yet empirically real. Von Uexkull
suggests that if we could somehow peer into these lifeworlds we would discover
“the world as it appears to the animals themselves, not as it appears to us” (p. 319).
In proposing that all living organisms inhabit an Umwelt of intensive experience
that modulates their relationship with the surrounding environment, von Uexkull
argues that every animal should be regarded as a “subject whose essential activity
consists of perceiving and acting” (p. 320).
The Umwelt or milieu of each living organism is associated with its capacities to
compose a lifeworld within a sensory ecology that it co-inhabits with other creatures.
Using the unassuming example of a tick, von Uexkull demonstrates how an organ-
ism composes milieus through relational modes and cycles of perceptual activity and
behavioural response. A tick lacks any sense of vision or taste, relying solely on smell
and photosensitivity to identify a series of three sensory-motor stimuli, or “receptor
signs”, which emanate from the bodies of warm-blooded mammals who serve as
her parasitic host.

Out of the vast world which surrounds the tick, three stimuli shine forth from
the dark like beacons, and serve as guides that lead her unerringly to her goal
… The whole rich world around the tick shrinks and changes into a scanty
framework consisting, in essence, of three receptor cues and three effector cues
– her Umwelt.
(1934/1992, p. 325, emphasis in original).

Deleuze and Guattari (1987) explicitly cite von Uexkull’s example of the tick in
their conception of milieus in relation to affective rhythms, motifs, and refrains that
pass through and rearrange the milieus of different organisms, species, and environ-
ments. Affective body capacities are transduced and transcoded through the percep-
tion-action interface, enabling flows of sensation between milieus in confluences
that are, more or less, harmonious:“Nature as music” (p. 314). However, Deleuze and
Guattari radically reconceptualise von Uexkull’s notion of the Umwelt by bursting
the bubble of the organism’s phenomenological lifeworld, which becomes for them
a kind of subjective trap or prison. Instead, they suggest that milieus are constantly
being composed, decomposed, and recomposed through the creative production
of territorial assemblages. Significantly, Deleuze and Guattari describe how milieus
always precede the composition of territories and indeed of the organism itself, to
the extent that the organism is composed through a stratified organisation of more
distributed geo-bio-chemical forces and earthly processes.

The living thing has an exterior milieu of materials, an interior milieu of com-
posing elements and composed substances, an intermediary milieu of mem-
branes and limits, and an annexed milieu of energy sources and
actions-perceptions.
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 313)
 Aesthetics  31

Each milieu is produced by the rhythmic repetition of an elemental component

which staves off the entropic chaos of an absolutely deterrorialised Earth. “The
milieus are open to chaos, which threatens them with exhaustion or intrusion.
Rhythm is the milieus’ answer to chaos” (p. 313). Rhythm is produced and com-
municated through the relations between milieus, a process of transduction and
transcoding of information that circulates in the mixed milieus, for example, of the
ocean and the shore; a train’s motor and its undulating terrain; the human body and
a flight of stairs. In each of these examples, it is no longer a question of how one
milieu discretely influences the other, but rather of how milieus co-compose and
interpenetrate a territory, at varying scales and rhythms of coexistence. This distinc-
tion between milieu and territory is emphasised in Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987)
account, and it is important not to confuse or conflate these two terms in order to
grasp their complex relationships:

The territory is in fact an act that affects milieus and rhythms, that “territorial-
izes” them. The territory is the product of a territorialization of milieus and
rhythms. A territory … is built from aspects or portions of milieus. It itself has
an exterior milieu, an interior milieu, an intermediary milieu, and an annexed
milieu. It has the interior zone of a residence or shelter, the exterior zone of its
domain, more or less retractable limits or membranes, intermediary or even
neutralized zones, and energy reserves or annexes.
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 314)

For Deleuze and Guattari (1987), territory is not (yet) understood as a “place”, but
rather as a composition of perceptions and actions that organises milieus in ways
that are rhythmically expressive. Through the process of territorialisation, the func-
tional and directional properties of milieus become “dimensional” and “qualitative”
(p. 315).Territories become “matters of expression” which mark out the dimensions
of a living domain or abode. This process is exemplified in the expressive colours
and movement patterns of fish, or the way that a “brown stagemaker (Scenopoeetes
dentirostris) lays down landmarks each morning by dropping leaves it picks from its
tree, and then turning them upside down so the paler underside stands out against
the dirt” (p. 315). There is a profound sense of artfulness that accompanies this
composition of animal territory, such that the process of territorialisation becomes
analogous to the process of making a work of art (p. 316). Both processes involve
the organisation of rhythms and milieus into trans-qualitative matters of expression
which mark out, frame, and arrange a certain region or “bloc” of sensation from the
chaos of the Earth.

Framing the earth

By reconceptualising art as the creative recomposition of earthly milieus, Deleuze
and Guattari bring human life and experience into profound relationship with the
lives of other animals, and indeed, the technologies that have come to populate life
32  Aesthetics

in the 21st century. “Whether through words, colours, sounds or stone, art is the
language of sensation” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 176). It is through sensation
that organism and environment achieve an immediate proximity and resonance in
the composition of new territories from existing milieus and refrains, or rhythms of
the Earth, in generating new fields of potentiality for life-living. The composition
of sensation is intimately involved with the constitution of an aesthetic territory, as
the framing or carving out of a space-time “in which sensations may emerge, from
which a rhythm, a tone, colouring, weight, texture may be extracted…” (Grosz,
2008, p. 12).The compositional power of art is such that new territories and refrains
are created from the chaotic milieus of the Earth (absolute disparity or difference in
itself), but also that these territories can be deterritorialised, fragmented, dissolved,
and cast back into the chaosmos from which they were temporarily composed.
“Framing and deframing become art’s modes of territorialisation and deterritoriali-
sation through sensation; framing becomes the means by which the plane of com-
position composes, deframing its modes of upheaval and transformation” (Grosz,
2008, p. 13). Territorialisation, in this sense, refers to the expressive process of fram-
ing the sensible forces of the Earth by marking out the physical, conceptual, social,
political, and technological architectures that can afford places for co-habitation
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 311). Deterritorialisation presents the other side of
this process as the cutting edge of any territorial assemblage that “releases” chaosmic
milieus and catalyses the ongoing production of new sensations, movements, prac-
tices, and modes of expression.
In What is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari (1994, p. 179) describe how works
of art frame the Earth’s milieus into territorial blocs of sensation, by means of “walls,
but also doors, floors, windows, French windows, and mirrors which give sensation
the power to stand on its own within autonomous frames”. Art becomes an archi-
tectural envelope for framing the Earth as an absolutely deterritorialised milieu or
“chaosmos”. As tied to practices of territorialisation, art comes to involve practices
of creative place-making that externalize the sensory milieu of the organism, in
which the “cutting of the space of the earth through the fabrication of the frame is
the very gesture that composes both house and territory, inside and outside, interior
and landscape at once” (Grosz, 2008, p. 13). From this geophilosophical perspec-
tive, the function of an artwork is to enframe the Earth’s chaosmic milieus within
dynamic architectings of experience, “ever approaching the form of the cube even
as they eventually come to deform it” (p. 14).
In the emergence of immersive cartography, the cube offered an initial aesthetic
figuration for creating a cartographic architecture capable of recomposing the sen-
sory, social, and environmental milieus of a university campus (see Figure 2.2). This
figuration of the cube as compositional framing device became a pivotal element of
the States and Territories project, as described in the previous chapter on cartography.
A series of twelve cubes were created by taking photographs from specific loca-
tions within the campus environment, printing the images on sheets of toughened
glass, and then reinstalling the images back into the precise locations where they
were captured. The return of the image back into its location of origin generates
 Aesthetics  33

FIGURE 2.2  One of twelve interactive cubes permanently installed on the Lismore cam-
pus of Southern Cross University, as part of the States and Territories project (2013–2016)

a rippling diffraction effect between the milieu of the image, the refractive milieu
of the glass, and the milieus of the surrounding environment as it exists in a state
of continuous variation and flux. As non-human objects with their own archival
histories and routes of inheritance, the cubes continuously produce new compo-
sitions that bring movements, colours, objects, bodyings, shapings, durations, and
atmospheres together in novel and unpredictable ways. Each cube alters the sensible
texture of the learning environment, recomposing “the vibratory waves of matter,
of the earth and ultimately of chaotic cosmic forces, into sensory forms that are
capable of functioning as a stimulus to the nervous system” (Grosz, 2008, p. 62). In
this sense, each cube functions as “a compound of percepts and affects” (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1994, p. 164) that subtly alters the intensive, extensive, and virtual cartog-
raphies of the campus environment.

The detachable percept

Within Deleuze and Guattari’s geo-aesthetics, percepts and affects are characterised
as elemental components of sensation that are distilled from the deterritorialised,
chaosmic forces of the Earth. Grosz (2008, p. 76) describes how percepts and affects
are plucked from the rhythms, milieus, and refrains of the geomorphic landscape
where they exist as pure potential, movement, and transition. As the raw materials
or elements of sensation, percepts and affects are completely detached and autono-
mous from “our human perceptions and affections”, as they essentially involve “the
‘unclasping’ of vision and experience from our human sensibility” (Zepke, 2005,
p. 178). Percepts are distinct from “perceptions” in the phenomenological sense,
34  Aesthetics

referring instead to the non-human elements of nature that make sensible “the
imperceptible forces that populate the world, that affect us, that make us become”
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, p. 169). A percept is contracted from the sensation of per-
ception itself, with each percept functioning as “its own event … a creative activity
culminating in the production of an event of change” (Massumi, 2011, p. 27).To the
extent that percepts are indexed to the creative activity of change taking place, art
involves a process of modulating and conditioning the event of perception in new
and dynamic ways.
The percept is also a critical component in the process of trans-qualitative accom-
modation or “creative involution” by which a living organism becomes perceptually
attuned to its milieu, even as the surrounding environment of that world becomes
attuned to the living organism (Grosz, 2008). As a creative element in processes of
environmental adaptation and response, the percept transforms the evolutionary
function that perception contributes to survival into a resource for “something else,
something more, for invention, experiment, or art” (p. 78). The evolution of animal
perception for the purposes of hunting, gathering, and predator evasion is rerouted
by art to serve the aesthetic purposes of curiosity, imagination, mutation, and the
“supernormal” production of difference (Massumi, 2015a). This process of creative
involution produces mutant sensations and sensibilities that do not conform to sim-
plistic reductions of “stimulus–response” or “natural selection”. Manning (2013)
describes this process in terms of the production of an aesthetic excess or “more-
than”, through processes of “speciation” which are irreducible to categorical differ-
ences between species. Massumi (2018) further characterizes this role of the percept
in producing a surplus value of life, which in turn reroutes life’s evolutionary processes
towards indeterminate and unforeseeable trajectories of ecological coexistence.
This creative involution of perception differs significantly from the concept
of “random mutation” advanced in neo-Darwinist accounts of evolution. Rather
than mutations happening by chance, artful mutations of sensation come to play
an agentic role in the developmental plasticity of animal populations and ecolog-
ical systems across species and generations of life (Protevi, 2013; West-Eberhard,
2003). Contemporary research in the ecological sciences is helpful here, with Susan
Oyama’s (2009) “developmental systems theory”, Lynn Margulis’ (1999) theory of
“symbiogenesis”, and Mary West-Eberhard’s (2003) “eco-developmental plasticity”
providing new models for understanding the creative involution of biosocial sys-
tems through networks of dynamic sensorial involvement across scales, species, and
kingdoms. These emerging ecological models suggest that environmental percep-
tion matters at the level of gene expression and the intergenerational evolution of
multi-species relationships. In particular, Protevi (2013, pp. 203–204) argues that
West-Eberhard’s studies show how “different developmental processes change the
pattern of expression of the genes”, suggesting that creative involutionary processes
can actualise an “untapped potential” for gene expression in response to perceptible
changes in the social and physical environment. Connecting these new ecological
models with the process philosophies of Whitehead and Deleuze, Protevi suggests
that the whole manifold of perceptual relations between organism and milieu are
 Aesthetics  35

being scientifically recharacterised in terms of symbiogenetic life processes that cut

across species, temporalities, and even the organic–inorganic divide.
By way of example, we might consider how one of the cubes created in the
States and Territories project reroutes the function of percepts as elements in the cre-
ative involution of the campus milieu. By repeating and diffracting elements of its
surrounding milieu, each cube detaches a series of percepts from the environment
and makes them responsive, expressive, and autonomous with respect to human
perception. This perceptual autonomy is perhaps most evident in the capacity for
the cubes to creatively imbricate a multiplicity of percepts drawn from the envi-
ronments within which they are embedded. For example, a disjunctive synthesis of
multiple percepts can be seen in the detail image shown in Figure 2.3, in which
the image of the duck lake (taken seven years ago) and the actual duck lake (in the
living present of the photograph) bleed together on the surface of the cube. This
image has not been digitally altered in any way. It is simply a photograph of what the
surface of the cube looks like on a given day.The effect is even more dramatic when

FIGURE 2.3  Detail of the cube’s surface diffracting the reflection of the lake with its
own image
36  Aesthetics

viewed in situ, or in this online video recording of water, ducks, trees, and human
movement passing across the surface of the cube: https://vimeo.com/200431518.
As the hours, days, months, and seasons change, so do the differential percepts of
light, precipitation, vegetation, and animal movement as they play across the surfaces
of the cubes. Regardless of whether any human is present or not, the movement
of percepts across the surface of the glass alters how the environment can actually
be sensed, felt, witnessed, apprehended. As an object that continuously modulates
perceptual affordances within its environmental surroundings, each cube operates as
an inorganic “bloc of sensations” that recomposes the sensible textures of the sur-
rounding environment as a sensory manifold. Each cube becomes a perceptual lure
and proposition for thinking-feeling-sensing the environment differently, in ways
that are not bound by the constraints of human cognition, perception, and reflexive
consciousness.

A logic of feeling
Where percepts describe elements of perception within Deleuze and Guattari’s
(1994) account of artistic composition, affects describe the qualities and intensities
of felt transitions, contrasts, confluences, and dissonances, including the expressive
forces of all types of elemental bodies and materials. Affects can be “metallic, crystal-
line, stony” (p. 167) or, in the case of the cubes,“glassy”.While the percept is indexed
to the appearance of stoniness, glassiness, or other perceptible element in the field of
experience, affects are indexed to the intensive transition or “becoming” which the
stoniness or glassiness induces. In this respect, percepts are tied to events of change
in the perceptual field, while affects evoke events of change in the felt transitions
of bodily activity. In his translator’s introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, Massumi
(1987, p. xvi) defines affect as “a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage
from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation
or diminution in that body’s capacity to act”. Affect is not only a question of how
bodies mutually affect one another, but also how the intensive quality of this rela-
tion changes what a body can do. This suggests that affect functions independently
from (and ontogenetically prior to) the knowing subject, as in the way that a piece
of art, or writing, or even a climatic event like a storm impresses itself on the body as
a felt transition that shifts the whole event into a different register. Affect is therefore
considered pre-personal, trans-qualitative, and autonomous in its capacity to operate
across bodies, territories, and milieus as a play of intensive forces and tendencies that
are untethered from human intentionality. Affect can be considered trans-qualitative
to the extent that it is felt in the passages between qualitative states as transitions of
experience that shift the body’s capacities into a different register of felt relation.
Recently, affect has also been more closely aligned with Whitehead’s (1978, p. 40)
aesthetic concept of “feeling”, as it relates to the process of “prehension” through
which actual entities come to “feel their actual worlds”. In Whitehead’s affect the-
ory, the concept of feeling incorporates both perceptual and affective transitions
in much the way that “sensation” comprises a compound of affects and percepts
 Aesthetics  37

for Deleuze and Guattari. “Affective tonality” is a concept that Whitehead uses to
describe the quality of an aesthetic form or character that inheres to an event of
encounter (p. 23). Reading affect through Whitehead’s concept of feeling, Manning
(2013, p. 26) describes affect as “the force, the lure through which a certain constel-
lation comes to expression”. Here the concept of affect is attributed to the prefigu-
rative force of a collective event’s unfolding, such that “the ecology or associated
milieu of the event [is] inseparable from its affect” (p. 27). The concept of affect
thus provides a critical link between the ecological and aesthetic registers of an
immersive cartography as creatively lived, to the extent that affect is operational
across extensive, intensive, and virtual dimensions of experience. These more-than-
human readings of affect are developed in more detail in Chapter 6, which engages
an extended series of discussions and experimentations with Whitehead’s theory of
feeling and its implications for immersive cartography.

Collaboration after humanism

The States and Territories project served in many ways as a creative laboratory for exper-
imenting with how the expression of this more-than-human aesthetics of inquiry
might reshape the sensory and affective ecologies of a university campus. Taking seri-
ously the symbiogenetic implications of the new ecological sciences, this also became
a question of how the ecology of the campus might mutate, evolve, and even “learn”
through shifts in events of perception and affectivity. Explorations of this question
took shape not only through the creation of the cube network, but also through a
series of intensive pedagogical experimentations with undergraduate art, media, sci-
ence, education, and engineering students that pivoted around particular conceptual
propositions. One of these experiments clustered around a rethinking of the con-
cept of artistic collaboration. This particular experiment aimed to explore the more-
than-human process of “becoming a work of art” collectively, displacing conventional
notions of the human artist as author or maker of the work. It involved working with
a group of fifteen undergraduate visual arts students as co-researchers over a period
of six months, primarily through a series of seminars, studio residencies and fieldwork
sessions, informal discussions, and an exhibition of works in the university gallery.
The students’ first encounter with immersive cartography was through a cen-
tral seminar series entitled Collaboration After Humanism. Each seminar in the series
introduced key theorists, concepts, and examples of artworks that reimagined the
process of creative production through a more-than-human ecology and aesthetics.
An online interface on the project website also gave students access to video record-
ings from the seminar, linking to relevant websites and readings, a discussion forum,
and a portal for submitting text, photos, audio and video into the project’s archive
on collaboration (see www.statesandterritories.org/collaboration). Following the
Collaboration After Humanism seminars, students began experimenting with diver-
gent processes of collaboration while using iPads to record material studio practices
and their conceptual thinking at various points during the semester. The students
also took on the curatorial process of producing an exhibition of their collaborative
38  Aesthetics

artworks, which asked them to negotiate an expanded political ecology associated

with a public encounter. As their collaborative art experiments unfolded over the
course of the semester, these practices yielded a large amount of video, audio, pho-
tographic, and textual material collectively generated by the students as co-research-
ers. These materials then served as the basis for a multi-sensory digital cartography
that mapped a variety of disjunctive elements emerging from this node of the proj-
ect. This digital cartography can be accessed in the archive hosted on the States
and Territories website (see www.statesandterritories.org/collaboration-archive). Two
vignettes from this cartography are shared here to both exemplify and proliferate
the more-than-human aesthetics developed earlier in this chapter, while also offer-
ing a glimpse into the transformative potentials of immersive cartography as a plat-
form for collective experimentation. The first vignette focuses on a collaboration
between an art student and her grandmother that explored irrational “pairings” and
disparate affinities between species, images, colours, generations, and perceptions.
The second vignette explores a collaboration between twin siblings and the cel-
lular structures of plants, which produces new insights into “molecular” ecologies of
relation that operate across multiple scales and temporalities of aesthetic experience.

Exchanging particle signs

Our Favourite Things is a series of collaged images and handwritten descriptions of
“things” created by a visual arts student in collaboration with her grandmother.
Their process involved riffling through old magazines and clipping out images of
things that captured their interest, appreciation, and enjoyment. “For some reason
our interests are drawn towards certain objects, animals, places, tastes, sounds, smells
and colours”, the student described in a video she made during the process. These
magazine clippings were then reassembled into a series of collages in which “things
are paired by default, humour, contrast, and then positioned to become blurred,
obvious, interesting, harmonious, and questionable”. Through this process, entities
that have no logical correspondence or causal relationship are “paired” in order to
produce strange hybrids and amalgamations: nudibranchs find affinity with cups of
tea; owls are paired with cats; clouds are paired with exotic fruits; and flowers are
paired with the colour green (see Figure 2.4). Some of the aesthetic qualities and
tendencies of these various couplings are also inscribed below the collaged images,
such that the nudibranch’s “feathery tuft and pair of tentacles” are paired with “3000
varieties” of tea and their propensity to be “enjoyed in company”.
While this collaborative process begins with a focus on what might be termed
“personal interest”, the act of cutting and pairing detaches these interests and places
them on a mutual plane of composition, allowing them to form new relations and
capacitate different kinds of events through what Manning (2016) terms a “dance of
attention”.This playful and often irrational process of pairing resonates with Deleuze
and Guattari’s account of “becoming-animal”, as a rhizomatic exchange of “corpus-
cular emissions” or “particle signs” across species. Drawing again on biological the-
ory, this exchange of particle signs between species is said to result in “the aparallel
 Aesthetics  39

FIGURE 2.4  Detail from Our Favourite Things, created by a visual arts student as part of
the States and Territories project

evolution of two beings which have absolutely nothing to do with each other”
(Chauvin, cited in Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 10).This process of aparallel evolution
is famously exemplified by the symbiotic relationship between a wasp and an orchid
as catalysed by a mutually deterrorialising process: the becoming-wasp of the orchid,
and the becoming-orchid of the wasp. Neither wasp nor orchid bear any resemblance
to one another, and neither does one imitate the other’s behaviour. Rather, they enter
into a machinic wasp–orchid assemblage as a becoming-animal that creates a new
type of collaborative reality, or what Manning (2013) terms a “speciation”.
The exchange of particle signs through speciation can also be linked to more
recent developments in postgenomic biology and developmental ecology (Protevi,
2013), as discussed in the previous sections on perception and affect. Rather than
genes being fixed and immutable biological components of a given socio-ecological
system, there is now evidence that epigenetic information is dynamically regulated
and even “exchanged” across species in response to changing sensory, social, and
environmental conditions (West-Eberhard, 2003). Margulis (1999) also highlights
the agency and exchange of microorganisms in the “holobiome” that interpen-
etrates and surrounds all living creatures, inventing the concept of “symbiogen-
esis” to describe the mutualistic exchange of biological information across species.
40  Aesthetics

This manner of symbiogenetic exchange is also exemplified through the type C

virus which has been found to affect both baboons and domesticated cats, or other
instances of bird or swine flus that “cross over” the species divide to infect human
populations. In these instances, the virus “can take flight, move into the cells of com-
pletely different species, but not without bringing with it ‘genetic information’ from
the first host” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 10).The term “particle signs” is used by
Deleuze and Guattari to describe how these genetic exchanges also carry elements
of signification and subjectification across organic and inorganic milieus. Thinking
with these biogenetic examples of particle exchange suggest that these artworks
involve not only a collaboration between the student and her grandmother, but also
a collaboration among a host of different forces and agencies that contribute micro-
perceptible qualities and “particle signs” to the composition.
In taking this eco-aesthetic perspective on the artistic process, elements as dispa-
rate as a cloud, a nudibranch, or the colour green can be seen to enter equally into
a process of collaboration through the “particles of sensation” that they emit and
contribute to a given composition. This is exemplified as the art student describes
her experience of collaborating with her grandmother as a process of “bringing
together both of our worlds, and placing them on the same page together”. She
describes how this process came to involve the interleaving of different sensory
manifolds, because her grandmother “has macular degeneration so she’ll just put
like a random blob in the centre of something”. One of the interesting features of
these works is the heightened sense of contrast that is produced through the layer-
ing of blurred and high-resolution imagery, generating a field of multiple perceptual
modalities that are enfolded on a single surface (see Figure 2.5). The art student

FIGURE 2.5  Detail image from Our Favourite Things, created by a visual arts student as
part of the States and Territories project
 Aesthetics  41

describes how the fuzzy sections of each collage render an abstract window into
“what it’s like for Nan to see an image [as] just like this distorted, grey blur”. She
suggests that there is a strange feeling of entanglement between different modes of
perception within the sensory manifold of the collaborative process as it appears
on the surface. The collage renders a vague sense of what it feels like to perceive the
actual world differently at the same time, as a disjunctive unity of elements that
attune and attenuate differently within a shared ecology of experience.

Molecular collaborations
While Our Favourite Things effectively stretches the concept of collaboration to
include the exchange of particle signs across differential perceptual manifolds, it
also raises the question of how the process of collaboration enables bodies to transi-
tion between different sensory modalities, scales, and temporalities. This question is
explored through a work called Cellularum in this second vignette, which became a
multi-scalar study of plant cells undertaken by an art student in collaboration with
her twin brother. The art student describes this as an iterative process of exploring
“the delicate nature of cell structures by making them large and then compressing
them down”. This involved a range of different artistic processes combining mul-
tiple types of printmaking, sculptural forms rendered from tissue paper, and optical
lenses that variously function to magnify or contract these elements depending on
the movements and orientations of the viewer.
The student describes this not only as an inquiry into the structures of plant cells,
but also as an exploration of “the relationship between and of us … the micro and
macro of us”. The molecular relationships between cells become entangled with
the affective and familial relations between herself and her twin brother, where the
“molecular” can be understood as a line of perceptual and somatic movement that
transitions seamlessly across the microscopic and macroscopic surfaces of events
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).The images in Figure 2.6 show how the work smudges,
blurs, and folds the thresholds between figure|ground and inside|outside into a
reticulated aesthetic surface, like an origami flower that keeps going out of focus
while retaining its molecular structure.
This vignette helps to develop a molecular understanding of aesthetic collabora-
tion that is not defined by any particular scale of analysis, but rather inheres to the
transitive movement of concepts and sensations across scales and intensities of expe-
rience. As Deleuze and Guattari write (1987, p. 275), “all becomings are molecular:
the animal, flower, or stone one becomes are molecular collectivities, haecceities,
not molar subjects, objects, or forms that we know from the outside and recognise
from experience, through science, or by habit”. They associate the molecular with
the fluid and open-ended movements of collective events and multiplicities that
are produced by the interweaving of different modes of existence and are therefore
irreducible to any fixed category of form, function, identity, or being. In this respect,
they contrast the molecular with the “molar”, which is associated with fixed cat-
egories such as those that define an age, sex, gender, race, species, domain, or other
42  Aesthetics

FIGURE 2.6  Cellularum (details), created by a visual arts student as part of the States and
Territories project

“type” of existence. Where the molar can be envisaged as a nested series of galaxies,
solar systems, planets, ecosystems, societies, animals, humans, cells, atoms, and sub-
atomic particles which (more or less) collaborate to produce experience, molecular
collaborations are able to pass seamlessly through any of these as a dynamic series
of movements, forces, and tendencies which are not reducible to scale or ontic cat-
egories of being.
Cellularum provides a dynamic example of this distinction, in which a molecular
collaboration can be understood as simultaneously incorporating the micro and the
macro within the arc of a collective form of life, such that the compositional ele-
ments and modes of an event can be magnified and contracted continuously with-
out losing its consistency as a creative process of becoming.The notion of molecular
collaboration therefore provokes a shift in how a “collective” or “community” can
be understood. In foregrounding molecular processes of relational movement and
becoming over any fixed category of being, the collective is no longer understood
as simply an aggregate or “group” of beings, even if that aggregate is democrati-
cally extended to include both human and non-human actants (as in the work of
Latour, 2004b). A molecular collective is perhaps better understood in terms of what
Brunner (2014) calls an “ecology of relation”, in which the units that compose the
collective are not individual beings but relations of “movement, tendency, or force
– a becoming” (p. 66). The collective that is composed and expressed through a
molecular collaboration is more so the result of a “field effect” arising from an ecol-
ogy of relation as it comes together, rather than the molar result of two or more
“actors” interacting to produce a shared product (p. 67).
As illustrated in a later iteration of Cellularum (see Figure 2.7), this molecular
collaboration came to generate a zone of indeterminacy that blurred the relations
between multiple bodies across scales and temporalities, again creating a series of
thresholds and smudges between multiplicities. When encountering this work, the
molecular movement across the micro and the macro is modulated by adjusting
 Aesthetics  43

FIGURE 2.7  Cellularum (details), created by a visual arts student as part of the States and
Territories project

one’s body and positioning in relation to optical lenses, which also become haptic
and transductive interfaces for sensation as a molecular collaboration that includes the
viewer in the composition of the work.

Becoming a work of art

The two vignettes sketched above provide examples of how immersive cartography
performs an ecological aesthetics, forming new alliances, resonances, and composi-
tions as the cartographic inquiry grows and evolves through dynamic compositions
of percepts and affects. This ecology is porous and continuously open to pluralistic
elements and modes of existence which enter into the composition of sensation.
The works described in these vignettes emphasise collaboration as a process through
which bodies, feelings, movements, environments, perceptions, colours, sounds, and
other elements enter into the production of a disjunctive synthesis, thus generating
new compositions of sensation and thought. Significantly, the collaborative produc-
tion of these works of art moved the cartographic inquiry in directions that were
previously imperceptible and inconceivable, altering the trajectory of thought and
mutating the material possibilities for what the cartography could become. These
collaborative artworks are expressions of tendencies that exceed the human subject,
in the sense that they are not reducible to any voice, identity, personality, or nar-
rative. Rather than offering objects that represent or interpret human experience,
these works work by generating more-than-human fields of experience through
which life can be felt, sensed, thought, and articulated differently.
Through the speculative analysis of these works, the process of “becoming a
work of art” can be understood in terms of a diagram or palimpsest that enables
mutant forms of life to become sensible on the surface of a collective event in the
making (Rousell & Fell, 2018). A nudibranch, macular degeneration, cups of tea,
the colour green, predation, optics, photosynthesis, kinship, plant cells, togetherness,
44  Aesthetics

practices of care. All of these elements and many more can actively participate in
the making of a work of art, which no longer appears as an object, but as an event
or an ecology of relation. In this case, the question of who or what participates is
secondary to the primacy of relation through aesthetic encounter.This focus on the
primacy of relation reorientates the aims of artistic practice towards the invention
of micropolitical alternatives for social life, opening up new horizons for “existing
not as a subject but as a work of art” (Deleuze, 1995, p. 95). This is necessarily an
ethical as much as an aesthetic shift in orientation, because it locates a minor politics
inside the work of art as an event with its own internal movements and intensities.
Immersive cartography thus presents a significant challenge to conventional
modes of qualitative inquiry in the arts and associated forms of arts- or practice-
based research, which pivot on the identity and creative authorship of the artist
(Jagodzinski & Wallin, 2013). To start with who you are, then figure out what you
want to make, and finally, reflect on what you want it to mean, is to suffocate the
work of art “under the crushing weight of several millennia of humanist thought”
(Snaza & Weaver, 2015: 1). This is to begin art with Being, and the humanist com-
pulsion to yoke creative activity to the letter “I”:

There are few starting points as lethal as the totalitarianism of Being. “I” is a
habit, and where it leads is toward the supremacy of the human. Being and the
human-as-supreme cannot be disengaged, and with the human at the centre,
the frame is unequivocably [sic] in place for the eclipsing of the complexity of
other ecologies, of other surfaces of experience
(Manning, 2013, p. 46).

The question for immersive cartography is not the who but the how of art, the unan-
swerable question of process which “brings us back to the protopolitical and the
dark precursor that is its movement of thought” (Manning, 2013, p. 46).The process
of becoming a work of art cannot be defined or contained by the bounded subject,
only in and through the practices, procedures, and techniques that precipitate new
ecologies of relation. This is not only a question of the immediacy of process, but
also how this processual ecology always exceeds what it leaves behind. “Processually
speaking, a making is always bigger than the made. The making includes, in germ,
the form of what will come to be, as well as the functions its being, once arisen,
will afford” (Massumi, 2013: xi). The process of making a work of art activates a
creative potential in its becoming, which is always a becoming with multiple others
who exceed the artist, both human and nonhuman. Immersive cartography isn’t
about becoming an artist. It’s about inventing techniques for becoming a work of
art, together.
3
ECOLOGY

What does it mean to think and inquire ecologically when human bodies, subjectivi-
ties, and technologies are coextensive with the environmental milieu? This question
has been pivotal in the recent explosion of ecological concepts across the social
sciences and humanities over the last two decades, particularly in fields respond-
ing to the onset of a “posthuman condition” typified by anthropogenic climate
change, mass extinction, and the ubiquitous technical mediation of life (Braidotti,
2013, 2019). Alternative figurations of ecology now perform central roles in debates
and transitions associated with feminist new materialisms (Coole & Frost, 2010;
Alaimo, 2010), critical posthumanism (Braidotti & Bignall, 2018), science and tech-
nology studies (Despret, 2004; Haraway, 2016; Stengers, 2011), and decolonial and
Indigenous studies (Cajete, 2006; McCoy, Tuck, & McKenzie, 2018; Todd, 2015;
Yusoff, 2019), among numerous other fields.The concept of ecology has also entered
into more everyday public discourses and imaginaries, as material-discursive flows
associated with the Anthropocene, climate change, extinction, and the technosphere
have become increasingly saturated within the popular domain (Colebrook, 2014).
What has been broadly termed the posthuman condition could also be termed
the ecological condition: a time in which ecology has become a primary figuration
through which life is governed, distributed, managed, studied, manipulated, sensed,
felt, experienced, and sustained. Erich Hörl (2017, pp. 4–5) describes this as the
emergence of a “general ecology” that is denaturalised, technologised, and deter-
ritorialised, aligning on the one hand with posthumanist aspirations for a radical
ontology and ethics of relationality and, on the other, with capitalist technologies
of power that operate through environmentally distributed mechanisms of control.
This ongoing ecologisation of thought, society, technology, and environment cuts
both ways and is irreversible, as Guattari (1989/2008) presciently argued in his essay
The Three Ecologies. While the posthuman ecologies of the twenty-first century have
the potential to produce new constellations of value and coexistence among diverse
46  Ecology

forms of life, there is equally the potential for these ecologies to become toxic, cruel,
predatory, divisive, parasitic, and genocidal.
This chapter aims to tease out several trajectories and implications for immer-
sive cartography amidst this current ecologisation of contemporary life. It shifts the
focus from the cartographic arts and aesthetics to a reimagining of social inquiry
and empirical fieldwork through what Isabelle Stengers (2005a) terms an “ecology
of practices”. By refusing to separate matters of ecological fact, value, and con-
cern from the field of environmental encounter, immersive cartography involves an
“etho-ecological” approach to studying the heterogeneous play of sociality made
possible through multi-species relations. Throughout the chapter, an alternative
approach to fieldwork takes shape through speculative practices that question what
it means to think in the presence of others (human and nonhuman) for whom that
very thought has ecological consequences (Stengers, 2005b). This entails not only a
consideration of how multi-species relations play out in the field as such, but a further
analysis of how an environmental awareness of multi-species relations can reshape
the very concept of ecology, altering the potential for sensing, thinking, and valuing
life within a more-than-human cosmology. This involves the invention of concepts
and techniques for resisting what Whitehead (1964) termed the “bifurcation of
nature” into primary and secondary orders and exploring the implications of how
an unbifurcated view of nature alters the “field” of ecological fieldwork. In doing
so, it builds on and contributes to recent work in environmental education research
that engages with the posthumanities (Malone, 2016; Payne, 2016; Piotrowski, 2019;
Rotas, 2015), speculative philosophy (Mcphie & Clarke, 2015), science and tech-
nology studies (Gleason, 2017; Taylor, 2017), and multi-species inquiry (Hohti &
Tammi, 2019; Lloro-Bidart, 2018; Tammi, 2019; Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2015).
Building on Isabelle Stengers’ (2005b) cosmopolitical proposal, I suggest that
fieldwork as an empirical practice cannot be disentangled from the aesthetics of
what it feels like to inhabit the field together, as well as the ethical values and con-
cerns that emerge through particular encounters among people, non-human ani-
mals, technologies, and milieus. Stengers (2005a) describes this type of approach as
etho-ecological, to the extent that it combines the ethological study of affects, val-
ues, concerns, and subjectivities with the ecological study of the differential relations
between bodies, places, technologies, knowledges, and ideas. In the later sections of
this chapter, I illustrate this approach to fieldwork through a series of accounts of
becoming-ecological in the field, drawing on events from a three-day field excursion
with ecology lecturers and their undergraduate students in the intertidal zones of
Bundjalung National Park in NSW, Australia (see Figure 3.1). These accounts focus
on the dynamic movements of ecological concepts and practices through multi-
species encounters in the field, while also following the ethical and affective shifts
which these movements engender. In the final section I expand this etho-ecology to
consider the potentials of a multi-species cosmopolitics, while considering the pos-
sibilities for a “cosmic event” (Stengers, 2005b) to reconfigure the relations between
an environmental scientist and the molluscs that have been her objects of study for
over two decades.
 Ecology  47

FIGURE 3.1  An ecology student observing tidal systems using an iPad as part of the
States and Territories project

What is ecology?
The body is just as much a part of nature as anything else there – a river, or a
mountain, or a cloud. Also, if we are fussily exact, we cannot define where a
body begins and external nature begins.
(Whitehead, 1968, p. 21)

Since its inception in the early 20th century, the scientific discipline of ecology
has been concerned with mapping the causal patterns of organism-environment
relations. Etymologically, the term ecology is derived from the Greek word oikos,
meaning “household” or “dwelling place”.The Merriam-Webster dictionary (2019)
provides two primary definitions of ecology in the modern sense derived from
Western empirical science:

1) A branch of science concerned with the interrelationships of organisms and

their environments; and
2) the totality or pattern of relations between organisms and their environment.

These two definitions suggest that ecology can equally refer to a particular set
of scientific (or non-scientific) practices for studying complex relations, as well as
the dynamic “totality or pattern of relations” that constitutes the field or object of
inquiry. Conventional or so-called “textbook” approaches to ecology have tended to
keep these two definitions discrete (Ingold, 2000). Ecology is typically understood
as a particular set of human knowledge practices that can either be used to quantify
48  Ecology

(as in environmental science) or qualify (as in environmental education, art, or litera-

ture) the complex relational patternings of a “really real” natural world comprised
solely of external relations. This sets up a structural relation of (more or less) cyber-
netic correlation between natural causal infrastructures and the knowledge systems
which strive to measure, model, interpret, imagine, and represent them. According
to this conventional arrangement, ecology (as a physical science of external rela-
tions) and the environment (as a field of “naturally occurring” external relations)
communicate across an insurmountable gap or bifurcation between an observable
world and the intensive experiences and social practices of human beings as observ-
ers, knowers, and interpreters of the world’s relational patterns (Whitehead, 1967b).
Stengers (2005a, 2010) offers a radically different account of ecology in the for-
mulation of what she terms a “cosmopolitics”, which resists the ontological break
between intensive and extensive systems of relations.1 For Stengers, ecology involves
“the science of multiplicities, disparate causalities, and the unintentional creation
of meaning” (2010, p. 34), and can be thought cosmopolitically to the extent that
ecology is inseparable from the political practices and affective associations that
constitute a plurality of “worlds” within a cosmic totality of nature. Stengers’ con-
cept of “cosmopolitics” thus refigures ecology within a total cosmological situation
of political encounters among disparate causal processes and events of worlding.
Immersive cartography draws on Stengers’ cosmopolitical philosophy to rethink the
very idea of “doing fieldwork” in the arts, social sciences, and humanities. It does
so by attempting to resist what Whitehead diagnosed nearly a century ago as “the
bifurcation of nature” (Whitehead, [1920] 1964), while also “following” the ways
that such bifurcations come to matter within situated events of inquiry and encoun-
ter. As a habit of dualist thought and hierarchical categorisation inherited from
the Enlightenment era, the bifurcation of nature imposes an unquestionable wedge
between two distinct “natures” or “orders” of reality: 1) the nature that is apprehended
and interpreted through sense-awareness; and 2) the nature that is the cause of sense-
awareness, as disclosed through scientific measurement and the progressive advance-
ment of empirical knowledge. In separating an objective world of natural causality
out from the perceptual world of qualitative experience, imagination, appearance,
and interpretation, the bifurcation of nature is “an attempt to exhibit natural sci-
ence as an investigation of the cause of the fact of knowledge” (Whitehead, 1964,
p. 31). This dualist bifurcation posits nature as equally “there” to be discovered by
the inquiring mind of the scientist and “here” to be interpreted by the imaginative
sensibilities of the poet. In the bifurcated view, the ontological separation of nature
and mind, facts and values, and matter and meaning provide equal support for the
most reductive positivism and the most humanistic idealism, which are conveniently
located on opposing sides of the bifurcation allowing poetry and science to flourish
independently of one another.
As Manning (2013) explains, Whitehead’s response to this problem is to develop
a speculative empiricism capable of accounting for how “nature thinks”.Within this
speculative scheme,“nature is not a passive element to be mediated. Nor is thought a
mediating activity. Nature creates thought – a thinking in the event” (p. 214, emphasis
 Ecology  49

in original). Whitehead’s speculative empiricism attempts to overcome the bifurca-

tion of nature by proposing that nature itself is composed of interrelated events, or
processes of becoming. “Everything perceived is in nature”, Whitehead writes. “We
may not pick and choose. For us the red glow of the sunset should be as much a part
of nature as are the molecules and electric waves by which men of science would
explain the phenomenon” (1964, p. 20). In resisting the bifurcation of nature, the red
glow of the sunset is both what it is objectively and how it appears subjectively, at one
and the same time. If nature, according to Whitehead, is what experience becomes
aware of (p. 28), then every occasion of becoming is always an “event here”, occur-
ring from its own relational perspective or viewpoint (p. 187) as a “concrete slab of
nature” that produces its own space, time, and causality (p. 53). Every event is con-
sidered an immanent perspective of the universe as a singular process of becoming.
And yet this singular, emplaced perspective, or nexus for each becoming belongs to
the whole of nature, as a total event or cosmological situation.

The event that provides you with a point of view belongs to the great imper-
sonal web of events. Your standpoint testifies to the whole of nature, is con-
nected to the whole of nature, even if it takes on the particular meaning that is
required by the interpretation of perception as yours.
(Stengers, 2011, p. 65).

As Whitehead explains, thinking and working across the bifurcation requires an

expanded sense of part-whole relations that connects each singular event with
nature as a cosmic totality. Without acknowledging this vague, metaphysical sense
of an open totality “brooding over its parts” (Whitehead, 1968), nature continues
to appear bifurcated because the rational mind interprets the external world as both
the final cause of its experience and the sensate object of its empirical claim to
knowledge.

The reason why the bifurcation of nature is always creeping back into scien-
tific philosophy is the extreme difficulty of exhibiting the perceived redness
and warmth of the fire in one system of relations with the agitated molecules
of carbon and oxygen, with the radiant energy from them, and with the vari-
ous functionings of the material body. Unless we produce the all-embracing
relations, we are faced with a bifurcated nature, namely, warmth and redness
on one side, and molecules and electrons on the other side. Then the two fac-
tors are explained as being respectively the cause and the mind’s reaction to
the cause.
(Whitehead, 1964, p. 22)

Stengers’ notion of a cosmopolitics attempts to account for Whitehead’s “all-

embracing relations” by bringing the cosmic totality of nature into direct contact
with situated political associations and ethico-aesthetic encounters among enti-
ties of all kinds. Cosmopolitics displaces metaphysical duality with an ontological
50  Ecology

pluralism. Rather than posing one “really real” world that can be finitely revealed by
objective measurement or infinitely interpreted through subjective valuation, the
abandonment of the bifurcation means that the number of ontologically real worlds
can begin to multiply. “There is not a single world revealed through a multiplic-
ity of perspectives; instead, there are a multiplicity of worlds each entwined with
one another, and made present by different sets of practices” (Robbert & Mickey,
2013, p. 2). Stengers’ cosmopolitics thus has significant implications for how ecology
might be thought and enacted through immersive cartography, particularly when
considering multi-species fieldwork practices that concern relations with nonhu-
mans as co-producers of empirical experience and knowledge.

An ecology of practices
In posing empirical research as a process of intervention and co-composition of
relational events, Stengers’ cosmopolitics emphasises “the ways in which all manner
of entities, non-human as well as human, assembled in the event of research affect
its conduct, exceed their mobilisation as compliant data and complicate taken-for-
granted distinctions between social subjects and material objects” (Whatmore, 2003,
p. 90). By this reading, all research is always already a collective assemblage that
involves “societies” of heterogeneous entities, both human and non-human, in the
production of new ecologies of concepts, practices, and forms of knowledge. Here,
the term “society” is used in the Whiteheadian sense that includes any and all expe-
riential assemblages that sustain a pattern of shared relations. As Stengers (2011)
notes, this means all inquiry is always already social inquiry (Stengers, 2011). This
places a significant emphasis on research as an immersive process of crafting the field
of inquiry, rather than one of discovering the field from a distanced or externalised
position. Knowledge production is only one of many possible ways of generating
associations and mobilising collective agency within a society. As Whatmore (2003)
notes, cosmopolitics converts the conventional epistemological question of “how
can we know the world”? into an onto-epistemological question: “how does the
world make itself known”? (p. 91).
Stengers’ (2005a) response to this question is to approach the field of empirical
inquiry as an “ecology of practices”, in which human and non-human practices are
always entangled in active processes of interoperational co-functioning. Stengers
(2010) uses an ecology of practices as a technique of inquiry when approaching
her studies with professional scientists; an ongoing project which has opened up
radically different understandings of the practices and milieus of the scientific dis-
ciplines.2 For Stengers (2005a, p. 186), the first step towards an ecology of practices
is to recognise the singularity of each practice as a particular mode of existence that
has its own effects in reality. A second step is to approach these practices through
their potential to fluctuate and vary in relation to changing social, political, and
environmental conditions. In other words, not to approach practices “as they are—
physics as we know it, for instance—but as they may become” (p. 186). A third step is
to recognise that “there is no identity of a practice independent of its environment”
 Ecology  51

(ibid.). In other words, all practices are onto-ecological in that they both condition
and are conditioned by the environments through which they come into existence.
An “ecology of practices” provides another conceptual tool for inquiry that works
through the milieu, as discussed in Chapter 1, where milieu takes on the Deleuzian
triple meaning of “through the middle”, a “medium” (as in chemistry), and “with
the surrounding environment”. In building on and adapting Stenger’s ecology of
practices, immersive cartography aims to cultivate a research environment in which
“all the parties assembled in the research process, researcher and researched, bodies
and texts, instruments and fields, condition each other and collectively constitute the
[research] event” (Whatmore, 2003, p. 95). Rather than a process of “collecting data”
about the world that somehow pre-exists the research event, immersive cartography
aims to generate new constellations of value and association through collective pro-
cesses enacted within an ecology of practices. Stengers (1997, p. 117) has described
this as “mapping phenomena onto knowledge”, in which the patterns of relation
generated through the research become “active witnesses” in the collective unfolding
of the research event. Knowledge is defined ontologically and pragmatically as the
process of how new patterns of association and value can be collectively produced.
This necessarily makes an ecology of practices a propositional adventure, in the
Whiteheadian sense, in which propositions introduce myriad factors that condi-
tion the unfolding of a research event: bodies, concepts, questions, gestures, artefacts,
machines, apparatuses, devices, maps, artworks, interfaces, diagrams, colours, sounds,
and more. In the States and Territories project, these propositional elements become lures
designed to provoke responses that could potentially change the terms and trajectories
of the research itself. Indeed, Stengers (1997) has described her primary criterion for
research as its capacity to entertain recalcitrance, non-compliance, unknowing, opac-
ity, and dissensus on the part of those (human and nonhuman) who participate in the
inquiry. In acknowledging that the research event can never be fully realised, codified,
or known, research is evaluated by its capacity to produce palpable differences that
exceed the limitations of human intentionality and expectation. These differences
leave the researcher lost for words, “in the face of some unexpected possibility” that
emerges through the collective process of the research event’s unfolding (Whatmore,
2003, p. 98). MacLure (2013b, p. 228) has described this as a sense of wonder that is
“suspended in a threshold between knowing and unknowing”, and which provokes
researchers to seek out and invent new practices and conceptualisations of inquiry.

Cosmopolitical societies
Through her conceptualisation and enactment of an ecology of practices, Stengers
(2005a) introduces an approach to fieldwork that is inseparable from an etho-ecology
that defines bodies, whether human or non-human, organic or inorganic, “by the
affects they are capable of ” (Deleuze, 1992, p. 627). Bodies are defined by their
affective values and capacities within a trans-qualitative field of engagement, such
that “an animal, a thing, is never separable from its relations with the world” (ibid.).
Stengers’ (2005a) methodological concept of an “etho-ecology” refuses to cleave
52  Ecology

facts from values, extending the possibilities for the research event to include not
only human practitioners, but any type of organic or inorganic entity that enters
into the field of relations that constitutes a “society” in common.
This more-than-human conception of society also introduces technical engage-
ments into the practices of immersive cartography. Stengers (2005a) describes these
in terms of “social technologies of belonging”, referring to a technics “which can
and must address practices from the point of view of what they may become able to
do and think and feel because they belong” (p. 190). Building on Stengers’ concept
of “social technologies”, immersive cartography is concerned with inventing tech-
nologies of relation that orientate fieldwork towards “an experimental togetherness
among practices, a dynamics of pragmatic learning of what works and how” (p. 194).
Within this speculative empirical approach, the questions and interventions of the
researcher are aimed at generating novel forms of togetherness among human and
non-human practices, through various techniques of fostering, negotiation, alliance,
diplomacy, and potentialisation (Stengers, 2005a).The role of social technologies is to
sustain the “kind of active, fostering milieu that practices need in order to be able to
answer challenges and experiment changes, that is, to unfold their own force” (p. 195).
In practical terms, this means that a chemistry lab is approached not only in
terms of the human practices that coordinate its functioning, but also the inorganic
practices of chemicals as they come into volatile contact and enter into various
compounds. Similarly, in an art studio the practices of artists are mapped alongside
the often recalcitrant tendencies of various materials and technologies that equally
enter into the ecological field of the creative process (see Figure 3.2). By approach-
ing these varied learning environments as Whiteheadian “societies”, an immersive
cartography does not seek to criticise, universalise, or categorise the different prac-
tices enacted in various disciplinary milieus, but rather, to foster and potentialise
new milieus of multi-species participation, alliance, and belonging. In the follow-
ing sections, I offer some examples of how this approach works through fieldwork
undertaken in the mixed milieus of an undergraduate environmental science course,
as part of the larger States and Territories project.

FIGURE 3.2  Litmus testing in the university’s chemistry lab (left); copper plates being
prepared in the printmaking studio (centre); and molluscs being handled during an eco-
logical field excursion (right)
 Ecology  53

Becoming-ecological in Bundjalung National Park

As introduced in Chapter 1, States and Territories was a large research-creation proj-
ect undertaken over four years involving the creation of site-specific artworks,
digital networks, and pedagogical interventions in learning environments ranging
across the arts, humanities, and sciences. Over time, the project crystallised into a
series of twelve “nodes” of inquiry that gathered around particular concepts, and
catalysed various collective experiments in learning environments. Here I focus
specifically on the shifting conceptualisations and enactments of the concept of
“ecology” through a series of fieldwork events involving environmental science
students and their lecturers. In this node of the project, I worked closely with a
cohort of 25 students in a course called Organism Ecology, which is a core introduc-
tory course for students undertaking a Bachelor of Environmental Science course.
I also engaged in open-ended conversations with the two environmental science
lecturers for this course, both of whom maintain ongoing research programmes
in the ecological sciences and biochemistry. Over the course of three months I
contributed to a series of lectures and tutorials as part of this course and accom-
panied the students and their lecturers on a three-day field excursion into the
intertidal zones of Bundjalung National Park on the Northern NSW coast. These
field excursions were documented by the students themselves, who used iPads to
visually map their encounters and experiences as they engaged with practices of
ecological data collection and analysis in the field. Selected data from this field-
work event has since been cut together and arranged within one of twelve digital
archives hosted on the States and Territories website (https://www.statesandterrito-
ries.org/ecology-archive).
Bundjalung National Park is named after the First Nations peoples of the
Bundjalung nation, a large conglomeration of over fifteen Aboriginal clans who
once occupied the coastal region stretching from the Clarence River in New
South Wales up to the Beaudesert region of what is now South East Queensland.
The Bundjalung nation incorporates an extraordinary plurality of cultural, lan-
guage, and spiritual practices and traditions which have coexisted in the region
for over 12,000 years. Bundjalung Country was encountered and claimed by
James Cook when his boat passed the region in 1770, with the European colo-
nial invasion of the region reaching critical mass in the mid-1800s following the
pursuit of valuable red cedar trees and the claiming of farmland. The invasion
resulted in mass deforestations of the coastal rainforest and the decimation of
Indigenous peoples and ways of life. The history of the area is marked by a series
of large-scale massacres of Indigenous people in the mid-1800s and early 1900s,
and there is evidence of attempts to erase these events from the public historical
record. The following vignettes are offered with the respectful acknowledgment
of the Bundjalung people, and specifically the Yaegl Nations, as the traditional
custodians and native title holders of the unceded land on which these research
events took place.
54  Ecology

The intertidal zone

We’re walking briskly along the beach against the wind, a loose group of around
25 undergraduate students, three ecologists, and an artist–researcher working our
way into the intertidal zone of Bundjalung National Park.The intertidal zone is the
nexus of many milieus. The milieu of the Pacific Ocean meets the milieu of the
Australian subcontinent to create a mixed milieu of tide pools that extend for miles.
The milieus of traditional Bundjalung country held by native title intersect with the
milieus of national parkland management and recreational use. As we walk one of
the ecology lecturers describes how the chemical compositions of these intertidal
systems are shifting due to climate change, resulting in a sharp increase in fatal shark
attacks along the coast that year. “We’re seeing more warm water species, more
tropical species than there were before, more sharks. I’ve been really surprised to get
a daytime PH down around 6.5 in some of these pools.The ocean should be around
8.2. That’s actually a very large change in the PH, it’s a significant increase in acidi-
fication”. We keep talking about the recent influx of shark attacks along the coast
that year. They’ve been drawn closer to populated coastal regions as the waters have
increased in temperature, with the local Green council now implementing strategies
to net, cull, or restrain the sharks in order to keep the beaches safe for human use.
One of the students says he thinks it’s unethical to treat the sharks this way just to
ensure that humans can use the water recreationally.
We make our way out onto a sprawling basalt shelf riddled with tide pools, sur-
rounded on all three sides by the roar of the Pacific.The students already know what
to do: they congeal into working groups and swarm across the vast expanse of rock
pools to collect their ecological data. The groups begin to lay out transects consist-
ing of 100 m lines of measured tape that extend across the rocky surface of the
intertidal zone. The students then use an algorithm on their phones to determine
a randomised numeric point along the transect to place their quadrat, a lightweight
square of white PVC tubing. Within this randomised section of the intertidal zone
as bounded by the quadrat, the students proceed to observe, count, identify, and
document what they call the “distribution patterns” of living organisms (see Figure
3.3). By laying a randomised grid over the intertidal zone, ecological differences can
be quantised in order to contribute to a larger database that calculates the distribu-
tion patterns in that area over the last two decades. Randomised computational
sampling is used as a strategy to remove human bias from the data collection process,
such that quadrats are selected “by nature” rather than by human choice. As one of
the ecology lecturers explains, “Every potential quadrat of space in this zone needs
to have equal chance of being chosen.We’re working with complexity certainly, the
distribution of these things is uneven, and we don’t know ahead of time what the
distribution patterns are”.
For these ecologists and their students, doing ecology involves the collection
of empirical data from a sufficiently randomised complexity pattern that attempts
to control for and bracket out the “haphazard” nature of human experience as it is
being lived in the intertidal zone. They are employing randomisation in an attempt
 Ecology  55

FIGURE 3.3  A transect laid out along the intertidal zone (left); a student laying down a
quadrat over a randomised section of the zone (right)

to neutralise or purify the milieu of any ethical concerns or aesthetic interests that
might taint their analyses of the intertidal zone. This means that some groups are
landing on tide pools and pulling multi-coloured gastropods out of their quadrats,
while other groups keep landing on bare patches of rock. Some of the groups who
land on bare rock feel frustrated and dejected, telling me they found “nothing alive”
all day and just had to keep recording zeros in their databases. I ask them if they
include themselves as part of the ecological distribution patterns they are looking
for. Do you count as an organism? They seem taken aback by the question. “We
don’t belong here”, one of them says. “So we’re not part of the distribution pat-
tern”. How do we distinguish between life and nonlife, belonging and nonbelong-
ing, within a randomised distribution pattern? Does the distribution pattern only
include organismic bodies that are visible inside the quadrat, or can we also consider
the imperceptible bodying of thought, feeling, sensation, relation?

The coastal woodland zone

The next day we leave the clamour of ocean winds and waves and hike into the
near silence of the coastal woodland zone. The students fold back into their group-
ings and begin to lay transects along a particular stretch of dry sclerophyll for-
est that spans several kilometres in length. At points randomised again using their
mobile phones, the students hike deeper into the woodland to establish a quadrat
for observing the abundance and diversity of birds in the forest. Where the coastal
fieldwork had involved a two-dimensional grid placed over the horizontal surface
of the earth, the woodland zone is gridded into 50x20 m cubic sections of forest life.
This introduces a third dimension into the analysis of the coastal woodland zone,
which one of the lecturers describes in terms of the “vegetation strata” that form
different “layers of vegetation communities” as the forest rises in height. A fourth
dimension is also added through the bounding of each quadrat by time, as we are
instructed to observe our cubic section of forest for exactly one hour. Rather than
56  Ecology

peering into the quadrat from above, as we were along the coast, we are now actively
inhabiting the quadrat under study and attuning our sensorial faculties to the sight,
sounds, and movements of the forest within a bounded duration of spacetime.
I sit quietly with a group of students with sets of binoculars and a guidebook
for identifying any birds that might appear. There is a feeling of quiet intimacy to
the experience as we become collectively attuned to the sensory manifold of the
surrounding forest. Our observation becomes increasingly animalistic: one student
perches, near motionless, on the overhanging branch of a eucalyptus tree; another
leans on the overturned grass against a weathered log; another makes his way back
to the log in a crouch, silently flapping his arms up and down to indicate a possible
sighting (see Figure 3.4).Yet the birds to be found in our randomised forest section
remain elusive, tentative, imperceptible. Haraway (2016, p. 114) writes that “what
scientists actually do in the field affects the ways ‘animals see their scientists seeing
them’ and therefore how the animals respond”. We can sense the birds are there, but
we can’t actually see them at all. Are they sensing us trying to sense them?
Suddenly one of the students gestures towards a branch about 15 m away. I sud-
denly notice the small, dark shape of a bird sitting there, watching us, apparently
motionless, for one, two, maybe three minutes. We try to make ourselves invisible,
silent, imperceptible, part of the landscape. Then the bird takes flight and we strain
our eyes through the binoculars in a frenzied attempt to identify its marking. “It
could have been this guy”, one of the students whispers as she gently strokes a
picture of a hooded robin in the guidebook. “Very possible. But we have lots of
birds. Birds originated in Australia because we had all the flowering plants, and the
eucalypts. Down at this kind of latitude where it was all warm and sunny the plants
changed from pine trees to more flowering plants. So then all the birds… just spread
the seeds”. Her soft musical voice and subtle movements are becoming birdlike,
leading us beyond the simple question of “how many birds are here”? to weave a
story about the origins and lives of birds within the deep time of the Earth’s prehu-
man history. This moves the ecology of the event beyond the arbitrary constraints
of ecology as a scientific discipline, as we begin to sense the deep time of Australian

FIGURE 3.4  Students quietly observing the birdlife in their randomised cubic section of
the coastal woodlands zone
 Ecology  57

bird-flower becomings and speciations across multiple durations of spacetime. Our

thoughts are carried away by the student’s voice, backwards, but also somehow for-
wards, to another ecological time and place. A time here but not here, a time before
and after us.

Back at camp
In the evening we go back to the campground to upload the data collected during
the day, make dinner, and hang out. The students sleep in tents and have their own
party going over there, but I stay in the bunkhouse with the ecology lecturers and
teaching assistants. I stay up late talking with one of the ecologists who had taken
a particular interest in my project and wanted to learn more about the different
concepts, practices, and understandings of ecology that I was throwing into the
mix with her students. We talk for some time about her biochemical and ecologi-
cal research with molluscs over the past 20 years. One of her studies had led to the
discovery of chemicals produced in the bodies of bivalves that have shown promise
for treating cancer symptoms in human bodies. Another study had involved the
extraction of chemical data from molluscs to determine fine-grained evidence of
climate change, including increasing levels of ocean acidification and changes in
nutrient gradients. An etho-ecological question bubbles to the surface, so I ask it:
after so many years of working with molluscs in all of these complex and intimate
ways, what do you think it would actually be like to be a mollusc?
There is a long pause as the ecologist readjusts her posture and gazes up and to
the left at a vague space above my shoulder. She begins to tell me about the neu-
rological functioning of various species in the Mollusca family, focusing on their
ethological capacities to think and feel. “Molluscs don’t have a coordinated brain”
she says, “they have ganglion that can actually form and deform connections quite
quickly”. Then she seems to make a shift in her trajectory and begins to speculate
about the possible connections between her own experience and that of a mollusc.
“So if I was a mollusc I guess I would appreciate not being stressed, because they
don’t prethink things, they don’t think about the future, it’s the immediate situation
they are responding to. I guess if I was a little bivalve that just sat there and opened
my shell, if the food was there I’d be happy”. She begins to perform the movements
of a bivalve with her arms, eyes, and mouth rhythmically opening and closing. “If
the food’s not there and environmental conditions are bad then I would close up my
shell, shut down, and hang out until it gets better”. She wraps her arms around her
body and slumps closed. “Then I might open up again, and then ‘oh no something’s
come along and eaten me! I’m dead’. Sounds like an easy life to me”!
The lecturer describes the mollusc’s experience of affective immediacy in a way
that resonates with Manning and Massumi’s (2014, p. 12) evocation of an environ-
mental awareness that is attuned to the “immediate field of experience”. Such an
awareness involves an “actively relational thinking” that does not separate the body
from the environment, thus achieving a direct bodily expression of the environ-
mental field of immediacy itself (p. 10). The affective immediacy of the bivalve’s
58  Ecology

FIGURE 3.5  A mollusc being handled by one of the ecology lecturers after being plucked
out of a tide pool in the intertidal zone

environmental awareness is attractive to the ecologist as an alternative to the reflex-

ive feedback loops of human cognition. Even though the bivalve produces stress
hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline when handled by humans (see Figure 3.5),
the ecologist suggests that the bivalve has an “easy life” because the immediacy of its
experience precludes it from questioning why it is being stressed, and the potential
implications of this stress for its future well-being. This means that the gastropods
experience stress every time the ecologists and their students pluck them out of the
tide pools, but that they forget about this stress as soon as they’re placed back into
their watery habitats.
The ecologist goes on to consider the experience of more intelligent organisms
in the Mollusca family such as the octopus, which she differentiates by “their abil-
ity to learn, the ability to reflect on what’s happened in the past and predict what
might happen in the future”.While the octopi are considered “more intelligent than
dogs” she worries that they are often mistreated by humans who “throw rocks at
them or use them for bait” because they fail to realise that they are highly sensate
animals capable of experiencing trauma. In thinking-feeling through the subjective
experience of molluscs as sentient creatures, the lecturer begins to reconsider the
treatment of molluscs in her own practice as a marine biologist and ecologist. She
begins to describe how the molluscs are regularly harvested en masse and made to
suffer under experimental conditions and protocols. In many cases, the molluscs
have given their lives in the name of incremental scientific progress and the slight
possibility of improving human well-being through scientific discovery. Her eyes
become glassy; she glances around to make sure no one else from the field trip is
 Ecology  59

around. “I actually feel really bad for the molluscs”, she whispers to me. “Often
they are treated very badly. But I would never say that to anyone in the scientific
community”.

A cosmic event
Each of the vignettes above offer singular insights into the plurality of ways that
ecology is enacted and experienced as a practice, including practices associated with
transection, randomisation, and the quantification of relational differences. Yet the
fieldwork also highlights the ethical, aesthetic, and affective dimension of ecological
practice that Stengers (2005b) foregrounds in her notion of an etho-ecology. Along
with the study of external distribution patterns, ecology is characterised as a practice
of sensing how an intensive field of multi-species relations is inhabited differently,
and yet together; how this field becomes attuned to an emergent and collective sub-
jectivity; and how these trans-qualitative patterns of multi-species experience shift
with each thought, movement, feeling, and sensation.The vignettes do this work by
slowing down and staying with the habitual patterns and protocols of the ecological
sciences in order to see what else might emerge in the field. The question of “what
else”? gestures towards those elements of experience that exceed the observable
and perhaps even the sensible, but nevertheless haunt these vignettes as accounts of
thinking-with a multi-species ecology of practices.
In her essay The Cosmopolitical Proposal, Stengers (2005b, p. 995) invokes the
figure of the “idiot” as the one who “demands that we slow down, that we don’t
consider ourselves authorised to believe we possess the meaning of what we know”.
The idiot questions the conceit of a subject and a species that claims to know the
meaning of itself and its world. While not necessarily opposed to the knowledge
and expertise of the expert, the idiot suggests there is perhaps something else to
consider, something that has not yet been thought. The idiot helps us learn to laugh
at the authority claimed by theory (scientific, political, social, or otherwise), and
shirk off the anaesthetics of disciplinary rationalisation, habit, and external necessity.
As a critical turning point in the vignettes above, “what’s it like to be a mollusc?”
emerges as an idiotic question, in the Stengersian sense. This question sets specula-
tive lures and trajectories for thinking- and feeling-with molluscs, slowing down
the chatter of what we think we know and forcing us to think-with alien genres of
sentient life. Opening and closing, letting the nutrients and toxicities flow in and out, feeling
the formations and deformations of the ganglia. By coalescing a cosmopolitical consis-
tency of thought, the idiotic question converts a logical and ethical opposition into
a contrast, releasing a trans-qualitative process of becoming-ecological that perhaps
attains the status of what Stengers terms a “cosmic event”:

We don’t know what a researcher who today affirms the legitimacy or even the
necessity of experiments on animals is capable of becoming in an oikos that
demands he or she think “in the presence of ” the victims of his or her decision.
Locally, if the ecological demand results in an ethological transformation, an
60  Ecology

articulation will have been created between what was deemed to be contradic-
tory: the necessities of research and their consequences for its victims. A “cos-
mic event”.
(Stengers, 2005b, p. 997)

An event becomes cosmic when it reclaims and resensitizes practices within the
totality of milieus through which they come into being, affirming the dissensual
plurality of practices within events. In approaching fieldwork as an immersive car-
tographer, the figure of the idiot plays itself through me as it mutters and stammers
strange questions in my ear; questions that reroute the potentials for the research
event to unfold. But if the event becomes cosmic it is not of my engineering,
because I am just a gear in a much larger process of becoming-ecological, a process
of thinking in the presence of others who may equally become victims or benefi-
ciaries of an ecological thought.

A thousand ecologies
The contemporary world is caught up in a global process of rapidly accelerating
environmental change and the proliferation of a “thousand ecologies” and more
(Hörl, 2017). These explosions of posthuman ecologies and knowledges are never
neutral or exempt from the complex political and ethical contortions of bodily life
and the thick histories of the present (Braidotti & Bignall, 2018). This pertains as
much to an ecology of practices as it does to an ecology of thought, conjuring new
images of a destabilised Earth that is nonetheless “wrapped in a writhing ecology of
ideas and concepts” (Robbert & Mickey, 2013, p. 6). In establishing the contours of
a cosmopolitics for the contemporary moment, Stengers calls for the development
of “new sciences that better reckon with our being ‘earthbound’Terrans…and at the
same time realise that the Earth is strangely indifferent to human life” (de Freitas,
Lupinacci, & Pais, 2017, p. 553). It is in this vein that Stengers (2015) forewarns of
the “intrusion of Gaia” into human culture and politics, and the “coming barba-
rism” that will necessarily accompany this accelerated becoming-ecological of the
world. Not all processes of ecologisation are good or beneficial for life, particularly
in an age when distributed networks of capitalistic exploitation of the Earth and its
inhabitants constitute a dominant ecological force (Danowski & Viveiros de Castro,
2017).The aim of a cosmopolitics, and specifically the cosmic idiot, is to slow down
the process of becoming-ecological in order to force thought to think differently,
to experiment with alternative forms of collective life through practices which are
sensitised to the intensities, dangers, and potentialities of etho-ecological transfor-
mation. The cosmopolitical approach to fieldwork outlined in this chapter gestures
towards processes of slowing down and attuning to the question of “what else?”
might compose a multi-species coexistence that is yet to come.
One of the key implications of this approach to fieldwork for immersive car-
tography is its trans-qualitative engagement with the natural sciences as a starting
point for multiplying, rather than reducing, conceptualisations of ecology. In an age
 Ecology  61

of widespread distrust in science, erosions of democracy, and the affective modu-

lation of public sentiment through algorithmic means, critical and creative alli-
ances with the sciences have never been more pressing (de Freitas & Weaver, 2020).
Immersive cartography is not a rejection or even a critique of science as such, but
rather an acknowledgment that many other sciences are possible (Cajete, 2006; Stengers,
2018b). The account of ecology in this chapter finds strong parallels in recent shifts
within the ecological sciences themselves, as twentieth-century models of ecology
predicated on cybernetic systems theories give way to emerging theories of eco-
evolutional plasticity (West-Eberhardt, 2003) symbiogenesis (Margulis, 1999), and
developmental systems (Oyama, 2009), as discussed in the account of ecological
aesthetics in Chapter 2. In each of these cases, female scientists have proposed radi-
cal new accounts of ecology that integrate significant advances in the postgenomic
biological sciences and computational modelling, and in varied ways propose more
porous, collaborative, and unbifurcated accounts of ecological relationality. In forg-
ing transformative alliances with the sciences, immersive cartography does not seek
to “transcend the particularity” of the modern scientific disciplines, but rather, to
work with each discipline’s “specific, dangerous, and never innocent ways of weav-
ing relations” (Stengers, 2018b, p. 156) in pursuit of regenerative lines of ecological
thought and inquiry.

Notes
1 Stengers originally trained as a chemist, and has been a key thinker in the interdisci-
plinary field of science and technology studies (STS) since the field’s inception in the
1970s. Her approach to reimagining the philosophy of science is significant in its use of
empirical fieldwork as a philosophical technique, an approach that builds on the process-
orientated and pragmatic philosophies of Whitehead, James, Deleuze, and Guattari. It is
important to note that Stengers’ concepts of “cosmopolitics” and “ecology of practices”
share an unbifurcated understanding of nature with many Indigenous, First Nations, and
non-Western cosmologies. Relatively recently, studies of Indigenous and First Nations
cosmopolitics have been developing across the Americas, Africa, Europe, and the Asia-
Pacific region (see, for instance, de la Cadena, 2010; Bold, 2019).
2 Over the last three decades, Stengers has researched and published with Nobel-
prizewinning scientists such as the chemist Illya Prigogine and the biologist Barbara
McClintock.
4
PEDAGOGY

This chapter turns to the pedagogical implications of immersive cartography as

an approach to reimagining educational institutions and learning environments.
It considers how the environmental artworks and digital interfaces created in the
States and Territories project came to foster alternative pedagogical trajectories,
while also looking more closely at how concepts of learning and engagement
were collectively refigured through various nodes of the project. Immersive car-
tography locates pedagogy in the environment, rather than the person, where it
takes shape as a transversal movement of concepts, bodies, and sensations within
a mobile architecture of experience (Manning, 2013). In following these peda-
gogical movements through engagements with relational art, philosophy, and
architecture, this chapter develops an “ecological-aesthetic” theorisation of ped-
agogy as a transindividual movement that ripples through and rearranges a field
of relations. In resituating pedagogy within this “expanded field” of felt relations
and virtual events (Massumi, 2017), processes of learning and engagement are
necessarily extended to encompass a more-than-human ecology and aesthetics
of inquiry.
In what follows, I begin with a speculative philosophical discussion of the eco-
logical and aesthetic dimensions of learning events and the movement of pedagogy
as a transversal vector, drawing on Massumi’s (2011) process-orientated account
of qualitative-relational differentials. I then look more specifically at anomalous
pedagogical movements associated with relational works of art and architecture
as non-compliant “places of learning” (Ellsworth, 2005), linking creative pedago-
gies of affect and sensation with theories of transitional space (Winnicott, 1989),
the architectural body (Gins & Arakawa, 2002), and an education of the senses
(Deleuze, 1994). In the later sections of the chapter I turn to a series of pedagogi-
cal experiments with groups of pre-service teachers, focusing on the implications
of non-compliant learning environments in fostering alternative conceptualisations
 Pedagogy  63

of engagement as viral, elemental, and transitive. This involves a rethinking of peda-

gogy as an environmentally distributed process, with engagement taking shape as a
trans-qualitative feeling, intensity, and tonality of experience that circulates through
twenty-first century learning environments.

An ecological aesthetics of learning events

Immersive cartography is concerned with the collective reimagining of learning
environments of all kinds, ranging from university campuses to school classrooms,
gallery exhibitions, museum displays, and everyday public spaces. As described in
the previous chapters, immersive cartography approaches this reimagining through
a cartographic orientation towards processual events or “becomings” which are
simultaneously ecological and aesthetic, relational and qualitative, extensive, inten-
sive, and virtual. This has significant implications for how immersive cartography
approaches the pedagogical transformation of institutions which typically locate
pedagogical agency in the personal expertise of the lecturer, teacher, curator, or art-
ist. In exploring the implications of process philosophy for rethinking concepts and
experiences of teaching and learning, immersive cartography seeks to resituate the
notion of pedagogical force or agency within events that are ecological-relational and
aesthetic-qualitative in nature.
Massumi (2011, p. 5) provides a processual entry point for grasping the differen-
tial between the ecological and the aesthetic as interconnected “poles” or “dimen-
sions” of a learning event. Building on the radical empiricisms of Whitehead and
James, Massumi describes how the ecological pole of the event pertains to “the
relational dimension of the event’s occurring…under the aspect of its immediate
participation in a world of activity larger than its own” (p. 3). We might think of
the ecological dimension of the learning event as a kind of “bare activity” of cre-
ative agitation located in the corporeal relations among bodies and their associated
milieus (p. 3). This would suggest that the ecological dimension accounts for the
intricate relations between physical bodies in the midst of a learning environment
as a living assemblage, ecology, or society of occasions. The ecological dimension
could also be elaborated through what Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 90) call
the ma====chinic assemblage of bodies, which they describe as “a precise state of
intermingling of bodies in a society, including all the attractions and repulsions,
sympathies and antipathies, alterations, amalgamations, penetrations, and expansions
that affect bodies of all kinds in their relations to one another”. In this respect, the
ecological comes to orchestrate the “machinic” elements of a learning event, but
in a way that is inseparable from the aesthetic elements associated with the trans-
qualitative, the experiential, the expressive, and the cultural.

That the event is ecological does not mean that it is “natural” as opposed to
cultural. It takes in elements classifiable as natural (the physiology of the human
body, the physics of light and materials) in a way that effectively fuses them
with cultural elements. The coming-together draws on the nature-culture
64  Pedagogy

continuum.What are normally considered elements of cultural mediation enter

as directly into the ecological nexus as any other element.
(Massumi, 2011, p. 165)

Where the ecological encompasses the corporeal agitation of life as a physical pro-
cess of extension, the aesthetic accounts for the modes of expression that intersect
and co-compose this ecological process as a conduit for trans-qualitative intensi-
ties of experience. Massumi (2011) describes how this qualitative-relational nexus
presents a differential continuum between two dimensions of an event, rather than a
dichotomy or binary opposition. The relational-qualitative (or ecological-aesthetic)
differential “concerns coincident differences in manner of activity between which
things happen. The coming together of the differences as such – with no equalisa-
tion or erasure of their differential – constitutes a formative force. It is this force
that provides the impulse that the coming experience takes into its own occurrence
and appropriates as its own tendency” (p. 5, emphasis in original). To the extent that
the ecological (relational) and the aesthetic (qualitative) are always coextensive, each
influences the form-taking character of a learning event to such a degree that they
cannot be cleanly prised from one another.
Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 87) offer a similar argument in their discus-
sion of content and expression in A Thousand Plateaus, where the “functional inde-
pendence” of these two axes of an assemblage is embedded in “the form of their
reciprocal presupposition, of the continual passage from one into the other”. By
considering the ecological and the aesthetic in terms of a continual passage, inter-
mingling, and relay, immersive cartography situates the event of learning in the
nexus of what relationally actualises (ecological content) and how this actualisation
is qualitatively experienced (aesthetic expression). This means that there is no pre-
determined structural relationship or hierarchy between the ecological content of
learning and its aesthetic expression. Rather, there is always an ecology of the aesthetic
and an aesthetic of the ecological. The ecological and the aesthetic dimensions enter
into the composition of the learning event coextensively, and “between them, they
co-compose a singular effect of unity resulting from how it is that they came differ-
ently together” (Massumi, 2011, p. 5).
If the ecological and aesthetic dimensions of a learning event form a kind of fab-
ric or meshwork of felt relations, then pedagogy could be described as a “transversal
vector” that passes through and rearranges the movement of subjectivity across this
textured surfacing of experience. As discussed in this book’s introduction, the con-
cept of transversality was developed by Guattari (1995) to account for the collective
movement of subjectivity along lines that are transversal (or diagonal) to the vertical
and horizontal dimensions of an institutional assemblage. Through transversality,
pedagogy can be reconceived as a decentred and non-hierarchical line or vector
that operates as a bridge across differential strata, axes, and dimensions of individual
and collective experience. However, to reconceive pedagogy through tranvsersal-
ity also involves taking account of the incorporeal or “virtual ecologies” associated
with felt potentials for movement, rather than with predetermined actualities or
 Pedagogy  65

matters of fact (Genosko, 2008, p. 75). Guattari’s concept of transversality thus helps
to link the pedagogical with the virtual, as “a space in which becomings are truly
creative – radically open and simply not what is now actual” (p. 51). This suggests
that the transversal movement and force of pedagogy is what instantiates changes
in the virtual trajectory and organisation of a learning environment in response
to changes in internal and external milieus. Guattari refers to this as the “local
coefficient of transversality” which instantiates a transition or “take-over – if only
partial – of local politics” through a collective process of individuation (1995, p.
215). The transversal vector effects a micropolitical mobilisation of pedagogy that
results in an increased or decreased power to think and act, along with an “aesthetic
yield” of creative potential that germinates new processes of growth and becoming
(Manning, 2015b, p. 63).

Anomalous pedagogies and undercommons study

[Pedagogy] is a monstrous gift from the outside of all we presume to know.

(Ellsworth, 2005, p. 174)

By re-theorising pedagogy as a transversal force or vector that passes through and

rearranges the textures of learning environments, immersive cartography seeks to
develop an eco-aesthetic theory of learning through radical pedagogies of affect
and sensation. In her book Places of Learning: Media, Architecture, Pedagogy (2005),
Elizabeth Ellsworth offers a similar rethinking of pedagogy through an analysis of
contemporary works of art that pivot on the affective relations and movements of
bodies. Ellsworth (2005) is interested in “anomalous pedagogies” that work through
relations of difference, uncertainty, disjunction, non-compliance and alterity, and are
found primarily in experimental works of contemporary art, architecture, media,
and design, as well as certain museum exhibits. These kinds of pedagogies are
described by Ellsworth as anomalous when they are “peculiar, irregular, abnormal
and difficult to classify”, moving in elliptical orbits that swing far out from ordinary
educational discourse (p. 5). She describes, for example, the anomalous “pedagogi-
cal hinge” at work in the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, where artefacts and
narratives of the Holocaust emerge and recede from semidarkness in a movement
akin to the operations of traumatic memory (p. 42). By obscuring its content from
intelligibility according to its own internal rhythm, the environment invites view-
ers to actively expend the visceral and affective effort required to engage with the
unfathomable histories of trauma.
Ellsworth’s pedagogical theory draws extensively on Deleuzian concepts of
affect, sensation, and intensity as discussed in Chapters 1 and 2, while also introduc-
ing the concept of “transitional space” developed in the work of child psychiatrist
D.W. Winnicott. For Winnicott (1989), transitional space describes a differen-
tial process that puts internal and external milieus into relation through playful
inquiry and experimentation with an environment’s potentials. Akin to Deleuze’s
66  Pedagogy

discussion of childhood milieus as elaborated in Chapter 1, the element of play is

central to Winnicott’s concept of transitional space, as it is only through playful
experimentation that the transversal passages and movements between intensive
and extensive milieus can be expanded, explored, and sustained. Ellsworth (2005)
argues that immersive art and design practices can help stage the conditions for
transitional space by operating through a logic of sensation that environmentally
redistributes the possibilities for bodily participation and affective engagement.
Pedagogy becomes an artful, curatorial process when it sets up the conditions for
the emergence of new ecologies of movement and sensation through environmen-
tal play. This also suggests that the outcomes of anomalous pedagogies can never
be specified or knowable in advance, but are necessarily left open, speculatively
and pragmatically, to the affective play of relational movement in the emergence of
the learning environment as an open architecture. This openness to difference and
non-compliance with expectation is crucial to understanding “how learning creates
its own value” (Manning, 2019, p. 48). The value generated through an anomalous
pedagogy cannot be imposed from the outside, because this value is produced in the
“how” of the emergence of the pedagogical event taking shape.
Anomalous pedagogies may have more in common with what Harney and
Moten (2013) term “study” than with many formal educational practices and envi-
ronments associated with “learning”.Working in the radical Black tradition of social
aesthetics, resistance, and creative improvisation, Harney and Moten locate study in
the “undercommons” of everyday sociality and places of learning that take shape on
street corners and factory floors, improvised jam sessions and ad hoc conversations.
They describe study in terms of speculative practices that are already saturated in
the free play of social life in the undercommons, practices of study that actively resist
the “call to order” imposed by any formal pedagogy, curriculum, policy, theory, or
logistics. To engage in study, in the sense proposed by Harney and Moten, is to rec-
ognise that pedagogy is always bubbling away in the midst of a “general antagonism”
that is already happening anywhere and everywhere. Study is pedagogically active in
the undercommons before the teacher enters the classroom, before the artist installs
work in the gallery, before the musicians enter the music hall and start playing.When
the teacher enters the classroom and calls it to order, this kind of undercommons
study often needs to be extinguished in order to allow formal “learning” to begin.
What Ellsworth terms “anomalous pedagogies” resonates with Harney and Moten’s
figuration of study in the undercommons, as a place of improvisations, resistance,
non-compliance, and fugitivity from the call to order. Resisting the call to order of
the classroom and the teacher who teaches, anomalous pedagogies hold open the
possibility to “enter into the social world of study” (Harney & Moten, p. 109).

An architecting of experience

How to operate at the level of collective invention in the tense of the not-
yet, at the very edges where thought and practice meet? How to orchestrate
a collective bodying – a society, in the Whiteheadian sense – that crafts its
 Pedagogy  67

process from the very ecology that constitutes it, that merges technique with
the more-than of its potential?
(Manning, 2013, p. 35)

In the States and Territories project described throughout this book, the archi-
tectural installation of glass cubes and locative media interfaces was designed
to reroute flows of movement and sensation across the campus and gather new
ecologies of relation within an open pedagogical architecture. Manning (2013,
p. 102) describes this pedagogical approach in terms of a “mobile architecture”
that is “less a structure than an agile surfacing that makes felt the force of incipi-
ent form”. Rather than pursuing an architecture orientated towards objects as
structural devices or tools, the States and Territories project was interested in the
summoning of pedagogical events through a cartographic “architecting of experi-
ence” (p. 25). By orienting inquiry towards the architecting of experience, immer-
sive cartography maintains a concern with “what pedagogy does, rather than what
it means or how it means” (Ellsworth, 2005, p. 27). For Ellsworth, what pedagogy
does is a question of how an architecture of experience is encountered, activated
and mobilised “in ways that modulate intensity, rhythm, passage through space,
duration through time, aesthetic experience, and spatial expansion and compres-
sion” (p. 42). To the extent that the cubes retexture the sensorial and affective play
of relation across the campus, they seek to activate a shared potential as pedagogi-
cal lures for experience within a relational architecture of movement and sensa-
tion (see Figure 4.1).
Immersive cartography is concerned with how experience moves within a
relational architecture that is qualitatively different from a mechanistic “interac-
tion” with architectural spaces and objects. The term “relational architecture” was
coined by Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer to describe artworks
that emphasise how the built environment can be made “to expose the body and

FIGURE 4.1  Pedagogical activations of the cubes during the Walking the Meshwork sym-
posium (left) and undergraduate teacher education units (right)
68  Pedagogy

FIGURE 4.2  Articulated Intersection, 2011, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer. Source: Art in the
City, Creative Commons Generic License 2.0

society’s receptivity to instability, fluctuation and reimagining” (Fernandez, 2007,

p. 87). Lozano-Hemmer (2005) describes how relational architecture involves a
distinct shift from a vocabulary of “interactivity”, in which architecture is meant
to facilitate particular human–object interactions, to one of “relationality” where
architectural agency is more atmospheric and incipient. Figure 4.2 shows an archi-
tectural installation by Lozano-Hemmer called Articulated Intersection (2011), which
invited members of the public to move the trajectories of spotlights across the city
of Montreal using pneumatic levers. This enabled the public to reshape the senso-
rial texture of the city through light and movement as an improvised modulation
of the city’s architecture that does not follow a predetermined model of interaction.
Massumi (2011) suggests that this kind of relational architecture is distinguished by
its capacity to “take the situation and ‘open’ the interactions it affords”, generating a
relational process “that pries open existing practices, of whatever category, scale, sit-
ing, or distribution, in a way that makes their potential reappear at a self-abstracting
and self-differing distance from routine functioning” (p. 52–53).
While the language of interactivity has been used to describe an architecture that
“reacts” to human occupancy and use, Lozano-Hemmer’s notion of relational archi-
tecture opens the built environment to a more atmospheric, ecological, and emer-
gent series of relations that exceed predetermined intentions or mechanistic designs
(Böhme, 2017; Goodman, 2018). Bodies, technologies, spaces, and times are under-
stood as mutually affecting and co-constituting, as in the conceptual figurations of
experimental architects Gins and Arakawa (2002) who propose the “architectural
body” as a processual unit of relational experience.Within the architectural vocabu-
lary of Arakawa and Gins, “landing sites” provide the processual infrastructure for
an event that “lands” the architectural body in a way that “simply bypasses subject-
object distinctions” (p. 22). The landing site potentialises a situation in which “the
 Pedagogy  69

architectural surrounds, by virtue of how they are formed, pose questions directly to
the body” (p. xx). In this way, the landing site operates more so as a “proposition for
landing” than a “site” in the conventional sense, to the extent that the landing site
holds open “the conditions for the propelling of the event’s actualisation” (Manning,
2013, p. 11). A landing site sustains the pedagogical architecture for a relational
encounter between bodies, objects, and environmental surrounds, but does not
determine in advance who or what will be landed on which term of these relations.
This keeps the architecture speculative and pragmatically open for the pedagogical
event to take shape in new and unpredictable configurations.
In the States and Territories project, the cubes can be understood as landing sites
to the extent that they pose pedagogical questions directly to the body. As land-
ing sites, the cubes can be considered “preoperative” or “preconditioning” in the
sense that participation precedes cognition (Massumi, 2011, p. 32), and prehension
precedes operation (Manning & Massumi, 2014, p. 23). In other words, the cubes
provoke certain pedagogical preconditions for bodies to engage with noncognitive
and nonrepresentational modes of experience operating at the level of a felt imme-
diacy of relational movement. Massumi, 2002 (p. 27) argues that reflective cognition
arises after the body has already “landed” an experience that opens up “a condition
of possible experiences of thinking”. In the affective lure and encounter with one
of the cubes, cognition becomes merely an afterthought. In this sense, it is only
through the pedagogical landing of movement, affect, and sensation that a body
actually learns anything new. In the landing, novel thoughts, feelings, and experi-
ences become available as an increased power for the body to think and act. Yet each
landing is only provisional, giving way necessarily to a cascading series of landings
which take shape choreographically, across the cartographic network. An example of
this can be seen in Figure 4.3, which shows detail images of landings choreographed
by a visual arts student while taking part in the States and Territories project.
By rethinking pedagogy both architecturally and choreographically, learning
becomes a process of transferring conceptual, physical, and affective momentum
from one experimental process to the next, like rock hopping along the slippery
banks of a creek bed, making tracks in fresh sand, or doing parkour across the ter-
rain of the city (de Freitas, 2011). Each choreographic landing is pre-accelerated

FIGURE 4.3 It’s my perception (details), performance and photographs, undergraduate stu-

dent artwork produced through participation in the States and Territories project
70  Pedagogy

by the force of the movement that precedes it (Manning, 2013), while opening
onto the next processual leap in the immediacy of its enactment. As reconsidered
through immersive cartography, pedagogy becomes a choreographic process that is
distributed across the learning environment as a relational architecture of experi-
ence, replete with affective lures and virtual potentials that pre-accelerate the envi-
ronmental conditions for learning to take shape. This again emphasises the primacy
of relation as the choreographic force of pedagogy that inheres to an immersive
cartography: to move and be moved, to think and be thought, to feel and be felt, to
experience and be experienced. All of these can be attributed to the force of peda-
gogy as a choreographic field that orchestrates the conditions for “an architecting of
spacetimes of experience” (Manning, 2013, p. 81).

Rephrasing the learning self

Learning happens through us, with us. We are bearers of thought in the sense
that it is carried along. We move in this carrying, and this carrying moves us.
(Manning, 2019, p. 47)

In developing an eco-aesthetic pedagogy of emergent architectings and landings

of experience, immersive cartography distances itself from a number of critical tra-
ditions in the social sciences and education. In particular, immersive cartography
maintains an anomalous orbit that skirts social constructivist and phenomenologi-
cal orientations towards learning that rely on a cohesive individual subject identity
and its cognitive representations as the units of study. As Ellsworth (2005) argues,
such interpretive orientations “are underwritten by assumptions that there is an
identifiable self, a locatable point of view or subject position from which mean-
ings are made and through which experience is organised and held together” (p. 7).
Specifically, the phenomenological image of the body as container for a bounded
interiority is seen to capture learning within the infinite feedback loop of a “per-
sonalised” identity politics, in which “the personal subject is prefigured or “prere-
flected’ in the world, in a closed loop of ‘intentionality’” (Massumi, 2002, p. 191).
Like the call to order of the classroom, the call to identify, personalise, intentionalise,
and narrativise oneself as a “learner” has the effect of inhibiting and devaluing the
collective “study” that is always already happening in the social field (Harney &
Moten, 2013).
How then does immersive cartography account for the individuation of a sens-
ing body that learns? How does learning coincide with a body in movement, but
without any clear determination of where the body begins and ends? In propos-
ing an alternative account of learning steeped in theories of affect and sensation,
Ellsworth (2005, p. 5) develops the concept of the “learning self ” to describe the
singular experience of learning as a material-affective process of becoming. The
learning self is not attributed to a fixed or static body, but rather, to a body in motion,
always open to “the possibility of qualitative transformation – of thinking and being
 Pedagogy  71

something unprecedented” (p. 121). This focus on movement situates the learning
self within the bodily experience of “change taking place”, as a zone of indeter-
minacy that smudges the boundaries between body and environment, inside and
outside, self and other. When moving with the transitions and becomings of the
learning self, the body “is blurred by its own indeterminacy and by its openness to
an elsewhere and to an otherwise” (Ellsworth, 2005, p. 122).
In Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994, p. 177) conceptual vocabulary, the learning self
constitutes a double articulation of becoming characterised by “concepts of sensa-
tions” and “sensations of concepts”. In the zone of indeterminacy between concepts
and sensations, the self is no longer a preconstituted and stable category of being, but
“a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities” (Deleuze & Guattari,
1987, p. 249). As Ellsworth (2005, p. 35) notes, the learning self that emerges in
the nexus between concepts and sensations is “at the same time unmistakable and
unprecedented … [it] never emerges in the same way twice. In its newness, it is
comparable only to itself. It is singular, without model and without resemblance”.
This suggests that every instance of learning is a new event that also constitutes
a new self. The self that emerges is not the locus of a personalised identity, but a
sensing body in motion that is entangled with legions of other bodies. The body
becomes what Whitehead (1978) calls a “living society”. Manning (2013, p. 27)
writes that “there is no body that isn’t always already collective, always already active
in the relational interweaving of more than one … ecology in the making”. By
rephrasing the learning self as the trans-qualitative movement of a body implicated
in multiple ecologies of experience, immersive cartography strives to depersonalise
and artfully environmentalise pedagogy as a process that cannot be reduced or con-
tained by the individual subject.

Learning to be affected

To have a body is to learn to be affected, meaning ‘effectuated’, moved, put into

motion by other entities, humans or nonhumans. If you are not engaged in
this learning you become insensitive, dumb, you drop dead.
(Latour, a, p. 2, emphasis in original.)

How does a body sense, accumulate, and integrate a repertoire of learning expe-
riences over time? In a paper building on feminist science studies by Vincienne
Despret and Isabelle Stengers, Latour (2004a) argues that the very endurance of a
body lies in its capacity to “learn to be affected” by other bodies. Learning to be
affected involves a pedagogical encounter with the outside that shifts the body into
a state of affective passage through increasing degrees of sensitisation. In immersive
cartography, this can be understood as a process of discerning qualitative-relational
patterns of contrasts and differentials, a pedagogical process that constitutes its own
occasion as an ecological and aesthetic event. As Whitehead (1978) suggests, a body’s
encounter with the outside might very well be an encounter with a past occasion
72  Pedagogy

of its own experience. Consider the feeling of riding a bike, and how this feeling
subsists in the body even after years of not riding. Without this ability to sustain its
immediate inheritance of vital feeling, a body would be incapable of enduring and
would simply drop dead, fall apart, or otherwise cease to endure. A body needs to
keep on learning.
“Learning to be affected means exactly that: the more you learn, the more dif-
ferences there exist” (Latour, 2004a, p. 8). The body becomes more articulate as it
learns to be affected by an expanding palette of differentials in its immediate envi-
ronmental field, creating new modes of subjectivity “in the same way that an artist
creates new forms from the palette” (Guattari, 1995, p. 7). Latour gives the example
of learning to register the subtle chemical differences between an extensive series
of pure fragrances used in the perfume industry. An odour kit is developed which
gradually introduces the smeller to the contrasts between smells as a process of pro-
gressive sensitisation. At first the smeller registers little to no difference between the
smells. But as they repeat the process, the smeller becomes increasingly sensitised
to the patterns of contrast between odours, affording new possibilities for sensory
experience and articulation. The differences between the smells are actively multi-
plying as the smeller becomes attuned to them. Learning to smell, learning to speak,
learning to write, learning to think, all become modes of engaged practice that
capacitate experience through increased affectivity: the production of difference in
and through an ecology and aesthetics of inquiry.
Deleuze (1994) offers a resonant account of learning as the production of dif-
ferential sensation in Difference and Repetition. Here he describes learning to swim
not as a process of cognitive modelling, or resemblance, but a process of learning to
be affected in a topological relationship with the body of the water.

The movement of the swimmer does not resemble that of the wave… When a
body combines some of its distinctive points with those of a wave, it espouses
the principle of a repetition which is no longer that of the Same, but involves
the Other – involves difference, from one wave and one gesture to another, and
carries that difference through the repetitive space thereby constituted.
(Deleuze, 1994, p. 23).

In Deleuze’s example, the learning self becomes continuous through an engaged

repetition that carries difference from one movement, breath, and splash of the water
to the next. This constitutes a violent apprenticeship of the senses as the swimmer’s
body struggles to conjugate its coordinates in relation with those of the water.These
“distinctive points” of connection between body and water become virtual nodes
where concepts and sensations intermingle. The very idea of the ocean, of learning
to swim, is in itself an incorporeal, and yet material, component of this learning
process. Body, water, and conceptual ideation come together in mutual co-determi-
nation, producing a continuity of durational experience that stretches over the repe-
tition of the learning process as a series of discrete topological occasions. Each stroke
is also a word, an experimentation, a subtle correction, a threshold between selves, a
 Pedagogy  73

singularity. The swimmer carries difference from discontinuity (having to attend to

each movement in response to the water) to fluid continuity (consistency of move-
ment and thought). Eventually, an endurable arrangement of relations is produced
through the rhythm of the stroke. But how? If learning is a sensation that must be
felt before it can be thought, then “we can never know in advance how someone
will learn… there is no more a method for learning than there is a method for
finding treasures” (Deleuze, 1994, p. 165). This makes education a sensory appren-
ticeship with nature as immediately experienced in the fielding of environmental
awareness. An education of sense and sensation that can never be predetermined,
only proliferated through diversifying modes of collective attunement that carry
difference, as coextensive with the plurality of existence.

Non-compliant learning environments

When learning is non-compliant it opens the future to difference.

(Ellsworth, 2011, p. 308.)

These philosophical discussions of pedagogy provide important theoretical pivot

points for immersive cartography, as an approach to inquiry orientated towards the
movements of concepts and sensations through collective forms of social inquiry
and pedagogical experimentation. In the States and Territories project, these alter-
native theorisations of pedagogy were extended through a series of experimental
workshops with undergraduate primary education students exploring non-com-
pliant concepts of pedagogy. The workshops were initialised with a seminar that
introduced the students to thinking about engagement through concepts of “anom-
alous pedagogies” (Ellsworth, 2005),“mobile architectures” (Manning, 2013), and an
“education of sense and sensation” (Deleuze, 1994). These alternative conceptions
of pedagogy were then discussed in relation to innovative examples of pedagogical
designs in contemporary art, including the architectural work of artist Maya Lin,
social practice works by feminist community artist Suzanne Lacy, and a walking-
based encounter with several of the nearby cubes which had been installed on the
university campus.The students were then given large sheets of paper and invited to
design a learning environment for “non-compliant engagement” through a peda-
gogy of sensations and architectings of experience. This activity wasn’t limited to
the design of a classroom but was equally open to incorporating design elements
from landscape architecture, museums, galleries, or any other kind of public space
or social practice. Rather than asking what participants knew about pedagogy or
how to “engage” learners, it asked them to co-compose a speculative cartography of
how learning environments might be imagined otherwise. The following vignettes
offer compositional accounts of these empirical experimentations undertaken with
the education students based on video data recorded with iPads. Edited sections of
the students’ videos can also be viewed in the “engagement” archive on the States
and Territories website: www.statesandterritories.org/engagement-archive. Each
74  Pedagogy

vignette provides the basis for further theoretical analysis as conceptualisations of

learning and engagement mutate and evolve with the empirical accounts of the
participants’ responses.

Harbouring the elements

The students seem to be choreographing an improvised design process as they
gesture and articulate their ideas for a non-compliant learning environment col-
lectively. They talk about how learning is modulated through architectural spatiali-
sations and perceptual configurations which exceed the human body, emphasising
how subtle changes in the sensory environment of the classroom and its surrounds
shift the conditions through which learning can take place. Rather than arrang-
ing bodies in clusters or individual desks, they visualise an open learning area as a
kind of performance space. One student traces a graceful curve with a paint pen
as he describes a transitional architecture that moves “from a flat to a curve… then
you open it”. Another student describes how the open curvature of this spatial
inflection helps learners to perceive and interact with other bodies on a common
footing, rather than privileging certain positions in the classroom over others. The
students include not only human bodies in this architectural assemblage, but also
the “learning equipment, apparatus, books, computers, and everything”. They go
on to emphasise the “sense of feel” of contrasting material surfaces. “You’d have til-
ing, you’d have carpet, portions of the wall would be brick, timber, so that you’ve
got inside and outside. Here you’d have a messy area, for colour and mess. At this
end you might have polished granite just to give it another sense of feel”. Perhaps
the material surfaces of the classroom become like the odour kit discussed in the
previous section, sensitising bodies to difference in ways that convert perceptual
oppositions into patterns of contrast. The thermodynamic differentials of the learn-
ing environment also come into play, as the students discuss the relative warmth
or coolness of the environment in relation to its internal and external dynamics. A
student talks about feeling the warmth of the sun outside and finding ways to bring
that warmth inside. Creaturely comfort, freedom of movement, and metabolism
become affectively associated with social feelings of belonging conducive to learn-
ing and engagement.
The students extend this notion of thermodynamic sensitisation through the
architectural body of the classroom itself, proposing a rotational learning environ-
ment that shifts and adapts architecturally in response to seasonal and climatic varia-
tions. “So you could have a classroom that could be moved from its foundations…
being able to seclude one space and open another… a movable nomadic class-
room…composed of modular parts that could actually change the architecture, the
space and the situation of it”. They discuss ways in which this environment might
“turn” to face the sun or have walls that retract and open up completely under
favourable weather conditions. Like any other living society or assemblage, they
describe how the classroom itself can “learn to be affected” through a sensorial
attunement and responsiveness to its immediate environmental milieu.
 Pedagogy  75

A student goes on to describe this rotational learning environment in terms

of “that whole idea of being able to harbour the elements”. In the Oxford English
Dictionary, the verb “to harbour” operates across a range of productively divergent
definitions, including:

1 ) to keep a thought or feeling in one’s mind;

2) to give a home or shelter to; and
3) to carry the germs of a disease or contagion. (Oxford Dictionaries, 2016).

By introducing the concept of “harbouring” into the inquiry, these students

open the question of how a learning environment can work simultaneously as a
place of confluence, refuge, and trans-qualitative infection of multiple elements both
physical and incorporeal. All learning environments must harbour light, food, water,
and other energy sources in order to survive, like any other living ecology or society
(Whitehead, 1978).Yet a learning environment also harbours ideas, colours, sounds,
memories, movements, perceptions, and other intensive qualities and elements
which are equally important to its pedagogical consistency as its physical elements.
Furthermore, as a learning environment stretches to harbour a greater diversity of
elements, both physical and conceptual, its virtual dimensions are also enriched
and extended. This includes the pedagogical capacity for a learning environment
to harbour the virtual movements of concepts, in the trajectories of pedagogical poten-
tials, which are no less real than its actual (visible, sensible) elements. As such, the
students’ diagrammatic rendering of an adaptive architecture positions the learning
environment as that which harbours a multiplicity of elements, a plurality of modes
of existence both aesthetic and ecological, actual and virtual, conceptual and sensu-
ous, all of which are capable of adapting and evolving in response to the changing
conditions of the environmental field.
Thinking through the third definition of harbouring as “contagion” also gestures
towards a rethinking of pedagogical engagement as a rippling, transcorporeal agency
that spreads through the learning environment like an infectious disease. Stacey
Alaimo (2010, p. 2) describes transcorporeality as a concept that “opens up a mobile
space that acknowledges the often unpredictable and unwanted actions of human
bodies, non-human creatures, ecological systems, chemical agents, and other actors”.
This suggests that transcorporeal phenomena such as climate change and nuclear
radiation might enter into the classroom not only as discursive topics, but as material
forces which pass through and infect the molecular structures of bodies. Learning
about climate change or nuclear waste means learning to be affected by climate change
and nuclear waste as transcorporeal agents. To engage with climate change is to feel
its transcorporeality seep through the porous thresholds of classroom walls and into
the cells of your body like a disease. “Harbouring the elements” offers an atmo-
spheric proposition for a trans-qualitative theory of learning, where “atmosphere” is
defined as simultaneously climatological and affective (McCormack, 2017). Within
this atmospheric matrix, trans-qualitative affects of beauty, fear, hope, love, insight,
intuition, boredom, malice, resentment, or inspiration pass through the porous
76  Pedagogy

bodies of learners like proteins passing through the membrane of a cell, or sunlight
through a classroom window. Each trans-qualitative passage affects every body that
harbours in the environment, more or less. The elements of human voices and ges-
tures become entangled with the elemental play of coloured light and shadow across
the classroom wall, as the classroom turns its own atmospheric body to harbour the
warmth of the sun, like a plant reaching for the sky.

An ecology of sensation
A second group of students also focus on adaptive environments in their peda-
gogical design, but with a greater emphasis on the agency of the digital as a matrix
for simulation. They envision a digitally adaptive learning environment that is
entirely covered in sensors that are responsive to touch, voice activation, gesture,
and bodily movement. The digitised environment allows bodies to experiment
freely with any number of simulated situations and speculative scenarios, includ-
ing (and especially) those which might be dangerous to engage with in physical
space. One student gives the example of opening the car door while driving and
“feeling this pressure… and all this wind”, or touching a spider that “would rear
up and put its fangs out”. Another describes how young children could play and
even walk on simulated water, “like walking on lily pads, the water would move,
and you could see the ripples”. In this design, the simulated learning environ-
ment becomes equally capable of “harbouring the elements” as a physical learn-
ing space, while ratcheting up the potential to experiment with non-compliant
behaviours that might otherwise be considered unmanageable or unsafe. This
group of students describes how learners can choose their own adventures, build
and destroy possible worlds, chase down divergent lines of flight, re-enact his-
tories, and engage statistical simulations of ecologies and climatic variations in
algorithmic space.
Like the walls and ceilings of renaissance cathedrals with the invention of multi-
linear perspective, one student describes how the walls of the learning environment
can be “punched out” into a space of infinite regress. She associates this vision of
spatio-temporal simulation with holism, describing the mediated learning envi-
ronment as a dynamic unity that is irreducible to its constituent elements. Such
posthumanist media ecologies can be read as a peculiar mixture of biophilic organi-
cism and technogenesis (Manning, 2012), in which the screen or sensor becomes
a biosocial interface for touching the body of an animate other. Like light passing
through the window of the classroom in the previous vignette, Wi-Fi signals pass
through the surfaces of buildings, skin, and forests alike, respecting no boundary
between body and environment, infecting all they pass through with imperceptible
lines of digital code. Luciana Parisi (2009) argues that this redistribution of sensa-
tion across the biotechnological surfaces of living bodies and digital media is more
than a computational network that simply processes “information”. Rather, Parisi
conceptualises twenty-first-century media networks as “technoecologies of sensa-
tion” which achieve a kind of “symbiosensation” as a collective nexus of perceptual
 Pedagogy  77

feeling and response that operates “between organic and inorganic matter” (p.
192). Dynamically mediated streams of sensory data become diffuse, elemental,
and atmospheric rather than remaining tied to individual bodies and personali-
ties (de Freitas, Rousell, & Jäger, 2019). As a hallmark of this posthuman condition,
this group’s design emphasises how sensory data takes on an environmental agency
within twenty-first-century media ecologies, a depersonalisation of data that inter-
sects with an atmospheric account of learning, sociality, experience, and subjectivity
(Anderson, 2009; Hansen, 2015).
One of the drivers of such an atmospheric reading of twenty-first-century learn-
ing environments is the recognition that digital technologies do most of their work
outside the narrow bandwidth of human perception. In many cases, the technical
operations that digital technologies use to sense, calculate, and mediate environ-
ments do not correspond with human sense perception or cognitive capacities at all.
Hansen (2015) describes how twenty-first-century media technologies operate at
micro-temporal processing speeds that take place ‘above and below’ the thresholds
of human consciousness and sense perception. Human lives are increasingly reliant
on these technological networks “to perform operations to which they have no
direct access whatsoever and that correlate to no already existent human faculty
or capacity” (p. 5). However, Hansen (2015, p. 2, emphasis in original) suggests
that the micro-temporal operations of these media networks are not opposed to
human experience, but rather, serve to “actualise a properly elemental conception
of the human … a radically environmental perspective encompassing human activity
as one element among others”. Rather than being mere prosthetic extensions of
human embodiment and perception, Hansen argues that digital media technologies
physically and directly transform the learning environment by altering its “causal
infrastructure” and reconfiguring the conditions through which human sense
experience becomes possible (p. 38). This is because media technologies “impact
the environment – including our bodily environment – before impacting … our
higher-order sensory and perceptual faculties” (p. 38). For both Parisi (2009) and
Hansen (2015), media technologies are seen to environmentally mediate, reconfig-
ure, and co-produce the sensible conditions through which learning takes place in the
twenty-first century.
With this atmospheric diffusion and intensification of data also comes the reali-
sation that digital environments are commodified, regulated, and policed as much
as, if not more than, physical spaces, a function of what Deleuze (1992) calls the
“control society”.Through the control society, potentials for non-compliant “study”
afforded by digital media environments become defanged, overcoded, bounded, safe,
normative, marketable, algorithmic, commodified, personalised. Subjectivity is frag-
mented into a multiplicity of digital partial selves, or what Deleuze terms “dividu-
als”, rendering data points that are easily co-opted and even “mined” by algorithmic
governance through corporate and state regimes. This is exemplified in the current
mining of personal data through social media platforms such as Facebook, which
extracts millions of data points from user behaviour (both on and offline) in order
to construct dynamically personalised marketing profiles.
78  Pedagogy

In the vignette discussed here, the students’ figuration of a fully simulated learn-
ing environment (where the body effectively “dissolves” into the digital) raises criti-
cal questions regarding the current deployment of sensor technologies and artificial
intelligence as agencies of distributed surveillance and control in contemporary
educational contexts (Williamson, 2015; de Freitas, Rousell, & Jäger, 2019). The
Intel corporation, for example, is currently deploying smart classroom technologies
that track student’s facial expressions and biometric responses through interfaces
embedded in the learning environment itself. Machine learning algorithms are then
used to create personal data profiles of students which can be immediately accessed
by teachers, who are “armed with a dashboard providing real-time engagement
analytics” (Intel, 2019). In this climate of algorithmic capture and governance of
learning at the level of sensation, the students’ design of a “totally” mediated learn-
ing environment raises critical questions. What are the political and ethical implications
of an environment that digitally senses and reconfigures its relations with children’s bodies?
How does the current neo-liberal drive for digital interactivity enable particular kinds of dis-
tributed control within mediated learning environments? What kinds of data literacies and
sensibilities might make the distributed control of the learning environment more transparent
and actionable for children?
It is significant that these designs for a digitally simulated environment are ori-
ented towards a pedagogy of non-compliance, rather than following reductive
models of interactivity as the manipulation of objects or environments by a pre-
constituted subject (de Freitas, Rousell, & Jäger, 2019). This can be seen in the
student’s phrasing of the digital environment as propositional to playful encounters:
“What happens if I step here, or touch here?” Even more importantly, the students
describe a point at which “this barrier goes down and this simulated, immersive,
mediated space opens out onto this beautiful outdoor space”. Here the digital envi-
ronment gives way to a “mixed reality” architecture where the pedagogical imbri-
cation between the technical and the ecological becomes seamless. Perhaps it is in
the promise of these mixed milieus that anomalous pedagogies can shift the terms
of digital engagement from a static architecture of interactivity towards a mobile
architecture of relational non-compliance.
5
DATA

In attending to the complex intermixing of conceptual, artistic, and pedagogical

experiments throughout this book, immersive cartography has been developed as
an approach to inquiry that is “open and connectable in all of its dimensions …
detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification” (Deleuze & Guattari,
1987, p. 12). This has been elaborated through conceptual figurations of an ecology,
aesthetics, and pedagogy that operates through a relational fielding of experience, as
exemplified in the creation of a “cartographic network” of relational architectures,
interfaces, and collective experiments. Examples from the States and Territories proj-
ect demonstrate how creative mapping techniques can proliferate wildly through
an immersive cartography, seeding new trajectories for collective movement and
altering the experiential fabric of a complex and heterogeneous institution such
as a university. The force of the digital has also been described as accelerating and
intensifying this process of proliferation and transformation, increasing the density
and intensity of relational potentials, and enabling objects, such as the cubes, to
become pedagogical pivot points in an intricate network of data sensing, exchange,
archiving, and mobilisation. Over the course of four years, this cartographic net-
work enabled an extraordinary range and quantity of data to be generated and
archived through the cubes and associated digital interfaces, ranging from physical
artworks, walks, and artefacts to digital films, photographs, sound works, web pages,
texts, maps, and syllabus and assessment briefs. Yet this accelerated proliferation of
data also raised critical questions about the very nature of cartographic inquiry over
the course of the project: How is data being sensed, metabolised, and operationalised in
and through the cartographic process? What are the cartographic forces and potentials of this
data? How might immersive cartography edge toward a non-anthropocentric “social science” of
data ecologies and felt intensities?
These questions shift immersive cartography beyond the normative registers of
artistic practice, which rarely follow the ongoing “data life” of a work of art through
80  Data

its proliferation of experience beyond the immediate encounter. They also push
immersive cartography outside the conventional boundaries of philosophy and
the theoretical humanities more broadly, which often tend to keep inquiry within
the domains of language and text. Perhaps it is immersive cartography’s continued
attention to the wildness of data, to its mutant proliferation through lively experi-
mentation, that maintains its most overt connection with what might be termed a
“social science”. Yet whatever alliance immersive cartography has with the social
sciences also involves a radical undoing of historically anthropocentric connota-
tions of “the social”, as well as a posthumanist decoupling of the social production,
circulation, and sensation of data from any privileged status of “the human”. In
acknowledging the more-than-human sociality and potentiality of data, this chapter
turns to Whitehead’s speculative empiricism as a necessary intervention into the
cartographic inquiry process introduced via Deleuze in the previous chapters. In
many ways this follows the arc of my thinking as immersive cartography grew and
developed: while Deleuze’s (and Deleuze and Guattari’s) concept of “cartography”
set States and Territories into flight, I eventually turned to Whitehead’s concept of
“data” in order to develop a granular sense of how the cartography was working,
and what it was continuing to produce. Inevitably, this turn to Whitehead via data
ended up revising the entire theoretical apparatus of immersive cartography, leav-
ing no concept or technique untainted by its influence. Like Deleuze, Whitehead is
interested in the dynamic interplay of felt relations in the formation of experiential
assemblages and societies of all kinds. Whitehead’s project is distinct, however, in
positing data as both a fact and a factor in the “feeling” of events ranging from the
sub-atomic to the cosmic.1

The metabolics of data

In a book chapter entitled D…a…t…a…, Data++, Data, and Some Problematics,
Koro-Ljungberg, MacLure, and Ulmer (2018) map a shifting cartography of data in
the ongoing evolution of qualitative research in the social sciences. They describe
how conventional qualitative methodologies have historically treated data as “inert,
lifeless, and disorganized”, serving as a kind of “brute” research commodity waiting
to be “‘collected’,‘processed’, and vivified—awakened to meaning through the min-
istrations of researchers and their specialist, methodic procedures” (p. 463). They go
on to describe a reversal of this historical arrangement in the “threatening, pumped-
up presence” of Big Data (p. 463), a situation which sees the interpretive faculty of
the researcher submerged by a “digital deluge” of algorithmic data operating out-
side of human perception and subjectivity proper (de Freitas, 2016; Hansen, 2015).
In elaborating a third contemporary moment for data, Koro-Ljungberg, MacLure,
and Ulmer (2018) note how new materialist trajectories have injected data with a
renewed animacy and vital agency in qualitative inquiry (Jackson & Mazzei, 2013),
while post qualitative researchers have worked to erase “data” as a lingering rem-
nant of positivism’s hold on conventional qualitative research (St Pierre, 2013). This
double movement of data as a subject of vital agency and erasure is exemplified in
 Data  81

Koro-Ljungberg’s account of a graduate student who “loved to eat data”. In this

paradoxical example, the student’s performative act of devouring qualitative inter-
view transcripts produces its own series of lively data reproductions and simulations
(Koro-Ljungberg, MacLure, & Ulmer, 2018, p. 473).
This brief account of the shifting adventures of data in qualitative inquiry pro-
vides a contextual entry point for the Whiteheadian engagement with data in this
chapter. In particular, Koro-Ljungberg’s example of “the boy who loved to eat data”
foregrounds the metabolic nature of data that Whitehead ascribes to each and every
occasion of experience. Data is metabolic for Whitehead in the sense that data
describe those elements of the world that are sensed, grasped, appropriated, and
processed through experience. Food, water, light, and oxygen are metabolic data for
experience, but so are books, buildings, and other living creatures. “Experience”,
in the radically empirical sense that Whitehead inherits from William James, is
not confined to “human experience” but is considered an irreducible element of
all events and relations across scales and temporalities. Whitehead’s notion of data
includes anything you’ve ever encountered, and everything you are encountering
right now. Put simply, wherever there is process there is also relation, and wherever
there is relation, there is data, and wherever there is data, there is experience. At the
limit, the entire settled world as it exists with each passing moment is considered
“data” for whoever and whatever is experiencing it.

Feeling the data

Whitehead invents the concept of “prehension” to describe how a disjunctive diver-
sity of worldly data are felt together in a single occasion and, in this felt togetherness,
achieve a dynamic unity of emergent experience. The choice of the word “prehen-
sion” implies a certain “grasping” or “reaching out” for data; what Manning (2013)
has characterised as an act of “taking account”. Through the process of prehension,
the “many” (which are the data of the world disjunctively) become “one” (within
a singular unity of feeling) and are “increased by one” (as the production of a novel
occasion) (Whitehead, 1978, p. 21). Each occasion of experience grasps and feels
the data of the actual world differently, thus adding itself to the data of the world
that it feels. Like the student who ate his interview data, prehension is a process
of metabolising heterogeneous elements of the world in a way that produces new
contrasts and intensities of experience and, in turn, becomes data from which new
experiences can arise.

Each actual entity is conceived as an act of experience arising out of data. It is

a process of “feeling” the many data, so as to absorb them into the unity of one
individual “satisfaction”.
(Whitehead, 1978, p. 40).

Within Whitehead’s speculative scheme, each occasion of experience both feels data
and becomes data for subsequent occasions to feel.This means that “data” can refer to
82  Data

a wild and heterogeneous multiplicity of elements that make up the actual world of
an occasion of experience.When speaking of the data that you are prehending right
now, for example, the manifold of data for this occasion would likely range across
the spectrum of sensory data, genetic and biochemical data, spatial and temporal
data, social and environmental data, gravitational and thermodynamic data, reflex
and habitual data, recollection and memory data, dreaming and unconscious data,
semiotic and text-based data, digital and computational data, and so on. Even previ-
ous occasions of your own experience are likely figuring as data in the process of
reading this book right now.
Whitehead doesn’t necessarily make these distinctions between different “kinds”
of data, but I think it’s helpful to consider the wild plurality of data that make up
our everyday ecologies of experience. Consider how your current ecology of data
might differ from that of a stone, for example. The stone’s data ecology might be
substantially attenuated compared to yours. But it would still include its own prior
states of mineralogical formation, layers of sedimentation, gravitational and thermo-
dynamic forces, and meteorological events such as wind and rain. This contrasting
of data ecologies is also a way of grasping certain affective relationships between
you and the stone, in the sense that you share certain feelings for data in common.
One of the most prosaic examples of this “data sharing” is that you and the stone are
both physical bodies affected by gravity and thermodynamics. Indeed, gravity is data
that every earthly body can feel. The feeling of space and time in relation to mass
and velocity shapes the durational existence of a stone as much as a person.You and
the stone share gravitational data, but you can also share more data if you can see the
stone, pick it up, throw it, smash it, or otherwise handle the stone in various ways.
By handling the stone you are able to share more data through a nexus of prehen-
sions, or prehensions of prehensions. Deleuze (1993, p. 78) offers a discussion of this
“nexus of prehensions” in his reading of Whitehead in The Fold:

The eye is a prehension of light. Living beings prehend water, soil, carbon, and
salts … but the prehended, the datum, is itself a pre-existing or co-existing
prehension, such that all prehension is a prehension of prehensions, and the
event thus “a nexus of prehension”.

The nexus of prehension is what Whitehead (1978) calls an event: a multiplicity of

singular occasions of experience that become continuous through the mutual pre-
hension of data. Elsewhere Whitehead (1967a) describes this as the “mutual imma-
nence” of contemporary occasions, which expresses the basic fact of coexistence.
The encounter between you and the stone is a nexus of contemporary occasions
through which a mutual prehension of data is relationally “shared” as a differential
vector, or movement, of feeling. The event is not just “something that happens”
but a dynamic movement of experience that reshapes the conditions for the next
movement underway.
In describing prehension as a “vector of feeling”, Whitehead (1978) empha-
sises how prehension involves aesthetic feeling, causality, purpose and valuation as
 Data  83

modes of constructive functioning that feed past occasions into the future (p. 19).
Each vector of feeling exhibits both a physical and conceptual pole, or what he also
terms a “public” and a “private” dimension. Physical prehension involves “public”
extensions in space and time, and conceptual prehension involves “private” inten-
sities of feeling that orientate and “clothe” the bare movement of physical exten-
sion. Consider an occasion of looking up at the moon outside your window. This
occasion involves a physical vector of relation between you and the moon that is
physiologically constituted and “publicly” measurable with respect to differentials
in speed, proximity, and mass, the passage of photons into the retina, and so on. And
yet Whitehead’s speculative scheme also includes a conceptual, or “private” dimen-
sion of each vector that is strictly internal to the felt qualities of the occasion itself.
Hence, the intensity of your encounter with the moon cannot be reduced to mere
sense-perception of external data, nor can it be reduced to a measurable quantity
such as distance between bodies or magnitude of light. Rather, it is the clothing of
these extensive factors with the intensive factors of affective attunement and feel-
ing that “colour” the data with a particular tonality and character of felt relational-
ity. Shaviro (2014, p. 155) describes this as a process of aesthesis, in which bodies
make “aesthetic contact at a distance”, achieving a proximity of mutual relation
regardless of measurable distances in space and time. “Feeling the data” becomes
an aesthetic operation that is shared across all forms of life, and even extends to
non-living things and inorganic forms of existence, from the astronomical to the
sub-atomic.

A society of feelings
A further exemplification of this “vector-character” of prehension is shown in
Figure 5.1. Vectors of feeling are rendered as lines within the data ecology inhab-
ited by an art student while participating in the States and Territories project. Hand,
eye, clay, face, body, screen, table, and camera are all rendered as prehensions of one
another; feelings that may or may not be considered conscious. Within Whitehead’s
(1978, p. 241) speculative scheme, “consciousness is an element of feeling” which
arises in the relatively “high-grade” actual occasions that compose the lives of what
he terms the “higher animals”, including humans. Thus, within a given ecology or
society of occasions, “an actual entity may, or may not, be conscious of some part of
its experience” (p. 53). The concept of prehension urges us to acknowledge a much
broader spectrum of experience without necessarily appealing to human mentality
as the primary or determining factor. In this respect, “an occasion of experience
which includes a human mentality is an extreme instance, at one end of the scale, of
those happenings which constitute nature” (Whitehead, 1967a, p. 184). The clay in
Figure 5.1, for example, might enjoy a relatively dense and contracted experience
over time with little chance of becoming conscious in any anthropomorphic sense.
Yet the clay still prehends data such as moisture, atmospheric changes, and the pres-
sure of hands as data that can be mutually felt by humans, only differently. Similarly,
the camera of one of the tablet screens is prehending the artist’s material process as
84  Data

FIGURE 5.1  An art student mapping her studio processes with vectors of feeling shown
as prehensions of prehensions

data, while another tablet is simultaneously being prehended (as data) by the artist
as the basis for her experimentations with clay.
This example demonstrates how prehension is always a process of mutual inclu-
sion and reciprocal affectivity that constitutes a social nexus, or what Whitehead
calls a “society” of actual occasions. A society is not simply a “network” of extensive
relations and information exchange because each prehension also contributes an
aesthetic intensity to the social nexus as an event. Actual entities don’t just “connect”
and “relate” superficially within the social nexus, because they mutually include and
appropriate aspects of each other’s existence through the shared prehension of data.
The hand prehends the clay, just as the clay prehends the hand; the screen prehends
the artist, just as the artist prehends the screen. As I discuss in more detail in Chapter
6, each of these prehensive feelings alters the affective fabric of the society in which
it participates. The concept of prehension thus undermines any attempt to draw a
fast boundary between “quantitative” and “qualitative” data, because the prehension
of any data whatsoever shifts the aesthetic tonality of the social nexus of which it is
a determining factor.
The concept of prehension performs an ontological flattening of anthropocen-
tric hierarchies that would otherwise position human consciousness as mentally
superior, more important, or exceptional in relation to the non-human participants
or “creatures” of a given society. Mentality, in Whitehead’s sense, is an aspect of
all processes and events, and does not simply “emerge” from a sufficiently com-
plex material order, as emergentist accounts of embodied cognition have suggested.
Rather, Whitehead suggests that mentality is transferred “by the flux of energy”
 Data  85

from occasion to occasion, such that the occasions in question inherit their energy
from the past and transmit this energy differently into the future (1967a, p. 185).
Experience arises through the prehension of data, and the energetic transference of
this prehension of data into the next occasion. Mentality, in this sense, is not for-
mally distinguished from the vibratory pulses of energy that physicists have followed
at the atomic and sub-atomic levels (see Barad, 2007). Perhaps it is in this “quantum”
sense that the clay can be said to “prehend” the hand of the artist: the clay prehends a
flux of energy as a differential of entangled forces and feeds this energy into a future
yet to be determined. In this example, the clay’s prehension of the hand becomes
a vector of feeling, with the clay as its “subject”, and the hand as its “data”. I am
belabouring this point in order to demonstrate how prehension is not simply a dif-
ferent word for the phenomenological perception of an internalised human subject
capable of seeing, hearing, or touching an object outside the self. Prehension is not
the anthropomorphic extension of human mentality, consciousness, or life to non-
human animals, objects, or things. Neither is it simply a line of sight or connec-
tion that can be reduced to mere number or measurement, because even the most
abstract geometric relation still achieves a qualitative intensity of feeling “in the final
synthesis in which each occasion completes itself ” (Whitehead, 1978, p. 186).

The data event

As elaborated in the sections above,Whitehead’s theory of prehension offers a spec-
ulative-empirical account of data as “that” which is felt in each and every occasion
of feeling. Similar to the examples of the stone and clay offered in the previous
section, objects can operate as propositional “lures” in the complex passage from an
inchoate multiplicity of data towards an “objective datum” of determinate feeling
(Whitehead, 1978, p. 25).The lure of an object is propositional insofar as it offers the
potential for feeling, and this places a virtual dimension of prehension in continu-
ous and intimate contact with the physical presence of any object.Yet the question
remains as to how objects can also become the subjects of their own events without a
human consciousness or mind as the mediating or discerning factor. This problem
has particular relevance for an immersive cartography that activates objects, such as
the glass cubes in the States and Territories project, as lures for physical and concep-
tual feeling. It is this problem that motivates the development of the “data event”
as a concept for grappling with the complex dynamics of data ecologies that are
encountered through an immersive cartography.
Whitehead offers an initial approach to this problem in his discussion of objects
in The Concept of Nature (1964, p. 93), where he writes that “the ingression of an
object into an event is the way the character of the event shapes itself in virtue of the
being of the object”.Whitehead uses the example of Cleopatra’s Needle to demon-
strate this eventfulness of objects, an ancient Egyptian monument that has resided
on London’s Victorian Embankment since the nineteenth century. To this day the
Needle appears as a seemingly motionless object that has also accrued a substantive
history since being sculpted from a single chunk of granite in approximately 1450
86  Data

BCE. But for Whitehead the Needle is much more than simply an inert object to
which things have historically “happened”. Indeed, the Needle is actively “hap-
pening” at each moment as an ingredient in the stream of events “throughout its
neighbourhood” (p. 93). By “neighbourhood” I understand Whitehead to mean
both the situation and the environment of the object in question, but the borders
of this neighbourhood are “indefinite”, because at the limit, each object is also
an ingredient in the whole of nature. In this respect, the enduring object that is
Cleopatra’s Needle can be discerned as a “certain stream of events which maintain
permanence of character” within the more widely distributed dynamics of events
that characterise London, as a “region” or “chunk” of nature that is daily lived. “Day
by day and hour by hour we can find a certain chunk in the transitory life of nature
and of that chunk say, ‘There is Cleopatra’s Needle’” (p. 107).This recognition of the
Needle is somewhat misleading because the recognisable character of a stream of
events that the Needle expresses is inherently transitory and vague. This makes the
object somewhat abstract, in the sense that we cannot know for certain where the
Needle begins and ends. “Is the soot part of it? Is it a different object when it sheds a
molecule or when it enters into a chemical combination with the acid of a London
fog?” (p. 109). We can begin to see how objects lose their concrete definition and
become fuzzy and atmospheric when they are indistinguishable from the stream of
events “throughout their neighbourhood”.
It is on this point that Deleuze (1993) offers one of his most overt and substan-
tive engagements with Whitehead’s philosophy in The Fold. “The Great Pyramid is
an event”, Deleuze (p. 76–78) writes. “At any given moment the pyramid prehends
Napoleon’s soldiers (forty centuries of history are contemplating us)”. The Great
Pyramid is not simply an object to which history has happened, but an event that
contributes forty centuries of history to the ontological weight and texture of any
encounter with it. When we encounter the Pyramid we are prehending forty cen-
turies of its own prehensions (or prehensions of its prehensions, as in the case of a
photograph of the Pyramid). Drawing on the work of Bernard Cache, Deleuze (p.
19) describes enduring objects such as the Great Pyramid or Cleopatra’s Needle
as objectiles, combining the terms “object” and “projectile” to invoke “the sense in
which objects are not fixed points in a spatial location, but rather spatio-temporal
processes over time” (Bryant, 2009, p. 1). Instead of conforming to a hylomorphic
“spatial mold” which imposes form onto matter, the objectile exists in a state of
continuous modulation and variation with respect to duration, matter, and form
(Deleuze, 1993, p. 19). It is in this sense that the objectile acquires a virtual dimen-
sion beyond its physical form, such that sounds, colours, and textures become “flex-
ible and taken in modulation” (p. 19).
We can try a small experiment to demonstrate this if you happen to be sitting
in a lit room while reading this book. Try turning the lights off and watching the
appearance of surrounding objects shift as your eyes adjust to the darkened envi-
ronment. This experiment works even better if you have a dimmer, so that you can
progressively adjust the light levels in the room. The objects in the room endure,
but their qualitative appearance changes with the shifts in the elemental conditions
 Data  87

of light, shadow, colour, and hue.2 This qualitative shift in the “neighbourhood” of
the room’s objects can be understood as part of their actual existence, in the sense
that the objects themselves are inseparable from the subjective forms which they
both characterise and make perceptible. “Thus art is possible. For not only can the
objects be prescribed, but also the corresponding affective tones of their prehen-
sion” (Whitehead, 1967a, p. 216). I use the concept of the “data event” to describe
this aesthetic ingression of objects into the subjective form of a research event,
which is to say, in the constitution and modulation of prehensive feelings that arise through
inquiry.The act of turning off the lights and noticing the shift in affective tonality in
the room is a relatively simple example of what I am calling a “data event”.
In the States and Territories project, data events were generated through a carto-
graphic network that established a dynamic architecture for collectively reimagining
a university campus through the artful installation of objects. The nodes of this net-
work took the form of glass cubes that physically diffracted its surfaces with those
of its “neighbourhoods”, while also opening onto a series of digital interfaces, walks,
and pedagogical experiments that pivoted around each of these objects as “objec-
tiles”. My speculative analysis of the project’s unfolding included ongoing attempts
to follow the adventures of the cubes as they came to actively participate in the
generation of these multi-sensory data events. I spent many hours simply observing
and documenting how the cubes “behaved” within their social environments or
“neighbourhoods”. I was interested in studying the vague and fuzzy surfaces where
each cube merged with its environment, and how the concrete existence of the
cube seemed to renew its identity as an object through its shifting relations with
other bodies in its field of proximity.
Like Cleopatra’s Needle, each cube is never the “same” actual object because
it is always contributing to the affective tonality and character of a new stream
of events. This can be understood in quite physical and concrete terms, in the
sense that the cube is losing and gaining molecules with each passing moment
(Whitehead 1964, p. 167); dust particles, dirt, moisture, insects, bacteria, finger-
prints, and plant matter collect on its surfaces, and are cleaned off by campus
grounds workers or the hands of students brushing by. The physical appearance of
the cube is also changing constantly with the rippling flows of diffracted imagery
across its manifold surfaces. As I gaze into the play of imagery across the cube’s
surface I can see the traces of human bodies moving across the field, the tracking
of the sun across the sky, the dance of leaves on the overhanging eucalypts, the
movements of insects across the surface of the glass. Even the most subtle adjust-
ment in my physical body also produces dynamic shifts in the cube’s sensible quali-
ties. Micro-perceptual movements of the eye can also “switch” the foregrounded
and backgrounded elements in the image in a hallucinatory manner. This means
that completely different images are produced every time I photograph one of the
cubes, depending on weather patterns, the movement of bodies, and the atmo-
spheric play of photons across its surfaces. Each photograph constitutes a transmu-
tation of feeling-with the object as a data event in the making, where the physical
reality and appearance of the object fuse on the surface of the image. “In this way,
88  Data

FIGURE 5.2  Diffractive surfacings produced by taking photographs of the cubes’ surfaces
under constantly changing light, weather, and seasonal conditions

there is an intimate, inextricable fusion of appearance with reality… a fusion pro-

ceeding throughout nature” (Whitehead 1967a, pp. 212–213).
The images in Figure 5.2 offer examples of how the cubes’ surfaces are constantly
fielding changes in weather patterns, seasons, times of day, the movements of human
and non-human bodies, and the play of colour, light, and shadow, among many
other elements. These surfacings defy any attempt at a coherent documentation of
the cubes as passive objects. Rather than being static or inert, each cube is actively
happening with each passing moment through the creative involution (Deleuze &
Guattari, 1987) of events it makes possible: “a renewal, a novelty, a fresh creation”
(Shaviro 2009, p. 18).This is not to suggest that the cube is “alive” or “thinking”, but
rather that it is “made” of prehensions, and thus carries a novel “touch of mentality"
through the data events in which it participates. We might then say that each cube
prehends its surrounding environment through the data which registers on its sur-
faces, and the bodies that enter its neighbourhood of prehension. Like the Pyramid
in Deleuze’s example, whenever I look at one of the cubes I am facing a new
encounter with the cube’s prehensions, which includes the stream of data events of
which that cube is an ingredient. In this sense, each cube operates as what Deleuze
and Guattari (1987) term an “abstract machine” that continuously produces new
contrasts of data and prehension regardless of human intervention or intentional-
ity. Not only are the cubes objectiles that reshape the sensuous contours of events
on the campus, they also become propositional lures for a stream of data events that
would not have occurred otherwise, as pedagogical “attractors” for a data event “that
inflects a given spacetime with a spirit of experimentation” (Manning, 2013, p. 92).
 Data  89

An influx of otherness

A feeling bears on itself the scars of its birth; … it retains the impress of what
it might have been, but is not.
(Whitehead 1978, pp. 226–227)

Every encounter with the cube offers potentials for prehension that are proposi-
tional to a data event in the making: a lure for feeling. What I’m calling the data
event is a commingling of such lures and respondent prehensions in which data are
felt as the accretion of experience through vectors of feeling. And yet the data event
will always exceed its perceptible actualisations. Rather than being the phenomeno-
logical object of my own intentionality, each data event exceeds my intentions and
refuses to correlate with my thought. The data event forces me to think precisely
because it is always new to thought, and for this very reason, it can never be fully
felt, perceived, or known in its entirety. No matter how advanced or “high grade”
the techniques at our disposal, some data are always left out, remaining unseen,
unexhausted, spectral, negatively prehended (Whitehead, 1978, p. 226). In other words,
a data event “never fully actualises” because there are always virtual elements of the
event that remain imperceptible, subsisting as an unexhausted aesthetic remainder
or surplus of potential (Manning, 2013, p. 25). In this way, the data event is con-
tinuously haunted by virtual data that remain outside of its frame of reference and
perceptibility (Blackman, 2019).
Each of the data events in States and Territories occupies multiple spacings, body-
ings, and timings, each has textures and folds with interior and exterior surfaces,
and significantly, each has elements which are imperceptible, left out, negatively
prehended. Most of this chapter has been dedicated to the role of data in positive
prehensions, or feelings, but negative prehensions also take on an important role in
Whitehead’s speculative account of the constitution of feeling. Negative prehensions
describe those aspects and potentials of the world that are excluded from exerting a
“positive contribution” to the constitution of feeling.Whitehead suggests that these
excluded possibilities for feeling still bear a mark on events, as “scars” that retain an
impress of what the feeling “might have been, but is not” (1978, p. 226–227). In this
sense, both positive and negative prehensions contribute to the tonality of a feel-
ing but are distinguished by the formal inclusion or exclusion of certain objective
data. “For each negative prehension has its own subjective form, however trivial and
faint. It adds to the emotional complex, though not to the objective data” (p. 41).
The implications of negative prehension for immersive cartography can be
exemplified through an artwork called Always a Hole. This work was produced
by an undergraduate visual art student who participated in the “Cartographies of
Experience” node of the States and Territories project, which I discussed briefly in
Chapter 1. In a video piece that forms part of the mapping archive on the States
and Territories website, (www.statesandterritories.org/mappings-cs0p), the student
describes how the event of learning to play the guitar became an entry point for a
90  Data

FIGURE 5.3  Detail from Always a Hole, an artwork produced by an undergraduate visual
art student through her participation in the States and Territories project

speculative remapping of her parents’ lives as local musicians in the 1970s. She devel-
ops this cartography by painting images onto record sleeves using old photographs
of her parents to construct a reimagined history. “There’s always a piece missing”,
the student says. In each of her paintings the hole of the record sleeve provides a
formal device that cuts out certain elements of the image, disrupting the viewer’s
perception of what lies inside and outside the frame (see Figure 5.3). “I’ll never be
able to go back and see what they were really like, and I’ll never even be able to
get the whole story of what their music sounded like. But I can see just enough to
get a glimpse backwards. I guess it has been like mapping the past in that way, try-
ing to get back things that you can’t ever actually map”. The hole in the image still
“participates” in the event, only negatively. The hole in the record allows it to play
on the turntable. The hole in the guitar allows sound to resonate through its body.
The interstices that are left out are still prehended, as unmappable gaps or intervals
that still characterise feelings. “This whole history of these people that I have no
idea what they were like”, the student continues. “Somehow half the circle’s been
cut out. Even though I can’t connect with the past any more than I have, the work
creates all these new connections”. The records as maps of what her parents lives
might have been.The guitar as an objectile that fields possible prehensions, allowing
data to be felt in new ways.The hauntings of unrealised potentials are affirmed like a
negative of the image, as a contributory element of a virtual ecology that eludes, and
yet conditions, the actual. The data event: a relational composition of propositional
lures for feeling which yet remains incomplete, scarred by negative prehensions.
While Always a Hole may appear to focus on human experience, Manning (2015b
p. 60) argues that the relational field activated by such works “touches on an ecol-
ogy that is more than human. The work participates in a worlding that potentially
redefines the limits of existence”. Acknowledging the role of negative prehension
in the constitution of data events emphasises how human experience is haunted
by more-than-human ecologies of data. Always a Hole foregrounds how the objec-
tive datum always exceeds human experience because it is given only in its virtual
 Data  91

potentials, in the interstices and vacuoles where data events lurk and play.When you
encounter an artwork as the objective datum, you might also catch a little glimpse of
the larger stream of data events to which it belongs and contributes. Maybe you feel
a haunting sense of this event resonating through just one of it manifold surfaces, as
you make your own ingression into the stream of events in its neighbourhood. This
intensive surface effect is enough to produce something new from inside the data
event, to recalibrate the limits of existence through the occasion’s subjective form.

Data abduction
In thinking the data event as a series of propositional lures and prehensions (both
positive and negative), the nature of analytic practice in immersive cartography shifts
from a linear account of time and causality towards an “event-time” of intuitive play
and experimentation (Massumi, 2015). Data analysis becomes a process of fielding a
“dance of attention” (Manning, 2013, p. 96) through events in which the data them-
selves are also attentive, as lures for feeling that “glow” with immanent potential
(MacLure, 2013b).This also enables the data event to effect a time slip between past,
present, and future, such that data begin to resonate with the elements of memory
(pastness) and potential (futurity). Videos or photographs taken over a period of
several years thread vectors of previous spaces and times into a speculative analysis
of the passing present. Data are encountered within distributive processes that are
already in motion, rather than as “preorchestrated constellations” simply waiting to
be interpreted by the “processual experience” of the researcher (Manning, 2013, p.
92). Analysis is no longer about a preconstituted self (as researcher) methodically
making “sense” of data in ways that produce new matters of fact or interpreta-
tions. Rather, the data contributes its own force to the making of the research
event through prehension, such that the protagonist of the analysis is neither the
researcher, the participants, nor the data, but the trans-qualitative movement of the data
event (how the data is differently felt). This is one of the surprising implications of
the vector-character of prehension: it means that data which are distant in space and
time (such as the moon outside your window, or a childhood moment captured in
a photograph) can be felt here, in the passing present, simply by prehending them.
Data analysis is opened up to an intuitive process of feeling the data as a dynamic
unity of trans-qualitative experience, regardless of spatial or temporal proximity.
In immersive cartography, the analysis of data becomes a matter of allowing
thought to be captured or “abducted” by data events that are already in motion.
This means that analysis proceeds through an abductive logic of felt relationality,
which differs from both inductive and deductive types of reasoning (Massumi,
2015b). Where inductive and deductive reasoning aim to capture and classify
the research event by interpreting its data, abduction involves an affective attun-
ement to the data as event that produces new movements of thought. Resisting
the use of systematic, methodical, and reductive logics, abduction attends to the
immediate, the speculative, and the dynamically indeterminate nature of inquiry.
Massumi (2015b, pp. 10–11) describes this as a process of being “drawn in by
92  Data

the situation, captured by it, by its eventfulness, rather than you capturing it …
It might force you to find a margin, a manoeuvre you didn’t know you had, and
couldn’t have thought your way into. It can change you, expand you”.
Abductive reasoning is a process of feeling your way through the data, allowing
the data to transmutate the living event of its analysis in ways that open onto new
potentials for thought. This opens the data event to an influx of otherness which
modifies and adjusts the process of inquiry to “other influences, in completing it with
other values, in deflecting it to other purposes” (Whitehead, 1967a, p. 181, emphasis
in original). By allowing the “otherness” of data to shift the physical and conceptual
trajectories and coordinates of the cartography, analysis becomes an intuitive process
that resists conventional notions of a theoretical or methodological framework as
“tool” of “lens” for interpreting data. Rather than employing theory as a tool or
lens, immersive cartography allows itself to be captured by concepts and techniques
that merge with the body as an organ of experience. The discussion of Always a
Hole in the previous section demonstrates the nature of this approach, in which the
analysis of the artwork reshapes the contours and nuances of “data event” as a concept
through the foregrounding of negative prehensions as spectral data. This mutually
“abductive” process of shaping and reshaping encounters between concepts and
data is what I describe, in the final section of this chapter, as “diagrammatic”.

The occurrent diagram

One of the difficult problems that immersive cartography attempts to confront is
the abductive analysis of conceptual movements of thought in relation to the physi-
cal sensations of bodies, places, and times. I developed the concept of the data event
as one possible way of addressing this challenging problem, drawing on Whitehead’s
speculative empiricism to account for both the physical and conceptual dimensions
of prehension. In this final section, I (re)turn to Massumi (2011) and Deleuze and
Guattari (1994) to think further into the conceptual side of prehension through
the figure of the “diagram”. While the materialisation of the cube network in States
and Territories attempts to physically situate concepts in particular “neighbourhoods”
of a university campus, the incorporeal movements of concepts cannot be teth-
ered to any “simple location” in space and time (Whitehead, 1978). Deleuze and
Guattari (1994, p. 32) describe how concepts inhabit incorporeal territories on the
plane of immanence, as “intensive variations according to an order of neighbour-
hood, and traversed by a point in a state of survey”3. While I discuss the plane of
immanence in more detail in Chapter 7, it is helpful here to imagine how a concept
surveys a particular domain of consistency within a region or “neighbourhood” of
a plane of thought. We might then consider instances of confluence, or “nexus” to
use Whitehead’s term, where certain conceptual neighbourhoods enter into relation
with certain spatio-temporal neighbourhoods, mixing conceptual ideas with physi-
cal states of affairs. The conceptual figure of the diagram appears at the limit point
of this mixture, when there is no longer any way of distinguishing between content
 Data  93

and expression, sense and sensation, extension and intensity (Deleuze & Guattari,
1987, p. 141).
In immersive cartography, diagrammatic analysis becomes an abductive process
of attending to the liveliness of concepts through the affective forces, modulations,
and augmentations which they both instantiate and undergo as they converge with
states of affairs and the prehension of data. Each diagram grows from the middle
of the conceptual territory and its associated milieu, with the entry of a concept
into the research event as an incorporeal materiality that inf(l)ects everything that
occurs. The diagram does not appear as a form, nor does it express itself through
signification as a visual image, object, text, or artefact. It is a formless and asigni-
fying movement of thought. But it is still there, lurking in the midst of the pro-
cess of thinking, making, activating, fielding, and writing an immersive cartography
through the movements of concepts. This inherent ambiguity also means that the
diagram can never be entirely finished, resolved, or complete because the analysis
is always beginning, and can be extended infinitely (Deleuze, 1992, p. 51). In this
way, diagramming necessarily involves analytic techniques that operate at the very
limits of thought, moving forward along the incipient edge of the cartography as a
speculative analytic that is always opening onto the next threshold.
As a cartographic technique for mapping the movement of thought, diagram-
ming flirts constantly with the infinite possibilities afforded by analytic move-
ments in the immediate present. Evoking the Whiteheadian vocabulary referenced
throughout this chapter, Massumi (2011, p. 15, emphasis added) describes diagram-
ming as “a technique of extracting the relational-qualitative arc of one occasion of
experience – its subjective form – and systematically depositing it in the world for
the next occasion to find, and to potentially take up in its own formation”. In this
respect, objects such as books, images, or artworks can be considered “inter-given”
elements of events through which diagrammatic techniques relay “potential from
one experience to another” (p. 15). The diagrammatic process of relaying potential
is at work in many of the techniques developed in the States and Territories project,
ranging across the siting and installation of the cubes, the mappings of pedagogi-
cal experiments with students and lecturers, the abductive analysis of data events,
and the writing of the chapters for this book. The influence of the diagram can
be sensed at the limit of each of these processes, on the “cutting edge” of deter-
ritorialisation (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 142) where the whole project teeters
on a knife-edge between sense and chaos. Considered from the knife-edge of a
processual “genesis of things”, the entire adventure of undertaking an immersive
cartography can be understood as “its own occurrent diagram” (Massumi, 2011, p.
15). For an immersive cartography, it is always a speculative and processual question
of what the diagram will come to do, how it will move the data event towards a
new affective tendency, attunement, and capacitation of inquiry that was previously
unavailable. The diagrammatic role of the data event is to open up these new lines
of “creation and potentiality” by playing a “piloting role” in the production of new
“continuums of intensity” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 142).
94  Data

Notes
1 As with any of Whitehead’s concepts, “data” cannot be defined or evoked in isolation
from a veritable litany of other speculative concepts. Whitehead offers a concept of data
that is radically non-anthropocentric, relational, and responsive to posthumanist con-
cerns, while also situating data within an intricate theory of feeling that aligns in many
ways with contemporary work in affect studies (Bennett, 2010; Stewart, 2007; Manning,
2013; Massumi, 2015a,b; McCormack, 2018). Yet there can be a challenge in mapping
Whitehead’s concept of data onto contemporary movements and concerns, to the extent
that his concept of data is so inextricable from the complex cosmological scheme of
which it forms an integral part. Whitehead shifts the ontological, and indeed the meta-
physical, status of data to such a degree that it is nearly impossible to even speak of
Whiteheadian data without explicating many other aspects of his speculative scheme.
2 In Whitehead’s speculative scheme, elements such as colour, shape, luminance, and hue
are referred to as “eternal objects” that make ingressions into events through prehension.
3 This notion of “survey” (survol in French) is adopted from the philosopher of science
Raymond Ruyer, who used it to describe the survey or “overflight” of subjectivity across
a transpatial and transtemporal domain of virtuality.
6
AFFECT

A body affects and is affected: a deceptively simple philosophical proposition

articulated by Baruch Spinoza (see 2001, p. 141) over 300 years ago. Yet this con-
ceptual starting point continues to provide a fertile matrix for a growing field
of affect studies that engage the body through articulations of process, relation,
intensity, and potential (Bennett, 2010; Clough, 2009; Seigworth & Gregg, 2010;
Stewart, 2007). Massumi’s (2002, 2015b, 2018) work has played a significant role
in the ongoing evolution of affect theory, offering a distinctive and comprehen-
sive conceptualisation of affect that continues to extend the genealogy of onto-
genetic thought found in the works of Spinoza, James, Whitehead, Simondon,
and Deleuze. Massumi (2002) argues that bodies affect and are affected through
a field of relations which are not yet realised into determinate actualities. Affects
are defined as relational potentials for felt transitions that shift bodies into new
registers of experience.These affective potentials are registered in terms of changes
in bodily capacity, which render new possibilities for “affects” of the body: liter-
ally, different potentials for what a body can do within an “ecology of powers”
(Massumi, 2018).

One always affects and is affected in encounters; which is to say, through events.
To begin affectively in change is to begin in relation, and to begin in relation is
to begin in the event.
(Massumi, 2015b, p. ix)

Massumi (2015b, p. 48) writes that “to affect” and “to be affected” are two sides
of the same event, because affect always operates in the quivering differential of
relations among two or more occasions of experience. There is no affect which is
not affected, no cause which is not a cause for other causes. This reading of affect
disrupts conventional understandings of cause and effect, because each affect is its
96  Affect

own cause for events of encounter and passage. Affects are self-causing, because they
co-implicate bodies in an event’s relational unfolding as a dynamic movement of
experience. The intensive force of this particular relation moves the event “from one
experiential state of the body to another” (Massumi, 1987, p. xvi). This trans-quali-
tative movement across states intensifies experience by virtue of how the relation is
differently felt. Not just extensive relations or “connections” between bodies, but felt
relations, living relations. Not just a network of interconnected things, but an aesthetic
ecology of experience that loops back on itself to recalibrate the potentials for what an
ecology can become.

Whitehead’s affect theory

Immersive cartography builds on Massumi’s dynamic and ongoing concep-
tualisation of affect as an invitation to rethink bodily feeling and relation out-
side of anthropocentric and humanistic hierarchies of experience. In doing so,
it moves from a strictly Spinozan reading of affect into complex engagements
with Whitehead’s theory of feeling, which engages affect as “essentially a transi-
tion” from one occasion of experience to another (1978, p. 221). In Whitehead’s
philosophical vocabulary, “feeling” is another word for what he terms “prehen-
sion”. As discussed in Chapter 5, prehension describes the ways that actual enti-
ties “take account” of the actual world as a multiplicity of potentials for feeling.
Whitehead describes two primary types of feeling which are always implicated
in any occasion of experience. Physical feelings are the feelings of causality, or how
bodies affect and are affected by entering into mutual complexes of co-determin-
ing relations. “Thus a simple physical feeling is one feeling which feels another
feeling” (Whitehead, 1978, p. 236). Conceptual feelings involve a sense of valuation
and orientation towards potential events and relations, as well as what Whitehead
terms “eternal objects”, such as colours and numbers that make “ingressions” into
experience. Conceptual feelings are characterised by what Whitehead calls “appe-
tition”, as both an “urge towards the future” and a “principle of unrest” which
creatively conditions and mixes with the physical feelings associated with self-
preservation and endurance. “For example, ‘thirst’ is an immediate physical feeling
integrated with the conceptual prehension of its quenching… thirst is an appetite
towards a difference – towards something relevant, something largely identical, but
something with genuine novelty” (p. 33). The entanglement of conceptual and
physical feelings produces a wild variety of “hybrid” prehensions through which
mental and physical relations become indissociable. Understanding feeling through
Whitehead’s philosophy therefore necessitates a leap of the speculative imagination
because, as Massumi (2011) writes:

… you have to be open to the possibility of rethinking the world as literally

made of feelings, or prehensive events… That could be mystical. But then again,
it could be a question of technique.
(p. 85, emphasis in original)
 Affect  97

Massumi’s appeal to technique emphasises how Whitehead’s affect theory is con-

sistently orientating towards the immediate conditions of worldly experience, and
how this experience literally “makes” the world. To the extent that engaging with
Whitehead’s affect theory opens a seam where the conceptual and the physical con-
verge, it is within this gap that lived techniques of experimentation can be particu-
larly useful. Let’s try using some simple techniques to develop a sense of Whitehead’s
affect theory.Take a brief account of the immediate surroundings in which you find
yourself reading this book. Consider this “social environment” as a field of experi-
ence that hasn’t yet been divided up into subjects and objects. Let your awareness
fall on a particular thing, then pick it up and feel its weight in your hands. Consider
the occasion of “you picking up this object” as a feeling that brings this particular
experience into concrete actualisation within the social environment.The feeling of
something catching your awareness, you picking it up, and then letting it enter your
field of experience: these are all prehensions. Prior to you picking it up the prehen-
sion of the object (as datum) was yet to be determined, but now these factors have
been determined in the concrescence of the event as a dynamic unity (Whitehead,
1978, p. 26). The objects that you didn’t pick up also participate in the constitution
of this event, in the form of what Whitehead calls “negative prehensions” which still
mark or “scar” the event in their absence.
For your part in this experiment, you have played the role of a subject and
“superject” that is precipitated in and through the complex of feelings rendered
through this event.Whitehead describes how the subject becomes a superject through
the singular unification of this complex of feelings. As you reach for the object a
“new you” is emerging fresh from that very occasion, a superject arising from this
actual process of feeling this datum (picking up the object) in just this way. This
whole actual experience of you feeling the object as the datum for prehension is
what Whitehead calls the “subjective form” of the occasion. This is the form that
affectively emerges from how the datum is prehended in the fielding of the experi-
ence. Whitehead (1967a, p. 221, emphasis in original) summarises this theory of
prehension in a series of five factors that constitute a feeling, or ‘affect’:

1 ) the ‘subject’ which feels;

2) the ‘initial data’ which are to be felt;
3) the ‘elimination’ in virtue of negative prehensions
4) the ‘objective datum’
5) the ‘subjective form’ which is how the subject feels that objective datum.

Whitehead’s complex account of the constitution of feeling introduces some

important nuances into the concept of affect as taken up in immersive cartography.
First, it emphasises the role of objectification or “concrescence” which transitions
from an initial multiplicity of data into the determination of one particular objec-
tive datum to be felt. In this respect, concrescence describes how affective feeling is
constitutive of the objective conditions of the actual world. We have demonstrated
a simplified version of this process of concrescence in our example of selecting and
98  Affect

picking up an object. Prior to picking up the object there was a wild multiplicity
of data that could have been felt in that occasion. In the grasping of one particular
object, the process eliminated a welter of “real” potentials and effectively “fused” the
disjunctive multiplicity of data into a dynamic unity of feeling. It is important to
note that this example is simplified because we are using a physical object as a kind
of shorthand for Whitehead’s notion of “objective datum”. As a constituent compo-
nent of a particular feeling or affect, the objective datum cannot be simply reduced
to the physical object you picked up. Indeed, the datum also contained myriad ele-
ments of the surrounding social environment (including many other positive and
negative prehensions), as well as the elements of an entire actual world as it existed in
the moment when the feeling was felt.
Now that we’ve considered some of the implications of objectivity in this short
experiment, let’s turn to the affectivity of the subject. Whitehead cautions that his
use of the term “subject” can be misleading, as it differs markedly from common
usages of the term in the history of philosophy. He suggests that the subject should
be renamed a “superject”, or a “subject-superject”, in order to emphasise the cre-
ative production of a new subjectivity through every felt occasion of experience.
The feeling of “you” reaching for the object also regenerates “you” as a subject of
feeling. For Whitehead (1978), this production of a renewed subjectivity is essen-
tially the “purpose” of the subject (p. 222).

What is in question is precisely the emergence of the subject, its primary con-
stitution, or its re-emergence and reconstitution. The subject of an experience
emerges from a field of conditions which are not that subject yet, where it is
just coming into itself.
(Massumi, 2015b, p. 52)

In other words, the subject’s purpose is to “come into itself ” as a new subject or
“superject” arising from the process of feeling. Whitehead uses the concept of “sub-
jective aim” to describe this creative urge towards self-production through feeling,
and the concept of “satisfaction” to describe the resolution or terminus of this urge.
In reaching towards the data of its actual world, the subject “aims” the process of
feeling towards its “satisfaction” in the novel emergence of a superject. This gives
us a more granular understanding of the “vector character” of feeling introduced in
Chapter 5. Certainly there was a physical vector involved when you reached for that
object. But there was also a conceptual or mental feeling involved, in the sense of an
emergent tendency that guided the mode and manner of the feeling’s actualisation
into the future.
Whitehead’s fifth factor in the constitution of feeling therefore becomes
a crucial element, which is the subjective form that characterises the mode and
manner of a process of feeling. The subjective form refers to the relational pat-
ternings, qualitative contrasts, and intensities that arise from the constitution of
feeling, an intermingling and transmutation of the patterns of the objective datum
through the subject-superject in formation (Whitehead, 1978, p. 233). In the
 Affect  99

case of “high-grade” feelings such as those enjoyed by “higher animals” includ-

ing humans, consciousness arises in the subjective form of the actual occasion as
the formation of “appearances” in conscious perception (Whitehead, 1967a, p.
211–212). Whitehead argues that the mistaking of appearances for reality accounts
for a gross distortion of the world through consciousness, because such appear-
ances tend to represent the world to consciousness as “physical matter passively
illustrating qualities”, and thus devoid of the affective feelings which consciousness
enjoys. In this sense, it is in the realm of subjective form where conscious shifts
and transmutations of attention and aesthetic experience can be made in the pas-
sage of feeling from inchoate multiplicity to determinate satisfaction. This makes
the notion of subjective form a somewhat “atmospheric” concept, as emphasised
when Whitehead uses the term interchangeably with the “affective tonality” of a
feeling. And yet it is precisely this atmospheric “tone” of the occasion that opens
the event to different inflections of feeling. Even if you reach for the same object
again, it won’t have the same qualities of feeling as a similar reach had before.
It’s not just that time has passed, it’s also because the whole subjective form has
changed through a different qualitative tone in the constitution of feeling. In this
respect, the affective tonality or “feeling-tone” of subjective form is what “clothes”
each event with its own particular colouring, character, and style, as a feeling that
will never be felt in quite the same way again.

No simple location
In addition to rethinking subjectivity and objectivity in immersive cartography,
Whitehead’s affect theory also has particular implications for grasping the con-
structive functioning of space and time, not as primordial categories or containers
for experience, but as conditionings of experience as felt. If feeling is essentially
relational and always in transition, then space and time are also conditional to how
an experience is physically and conceptually felt. This is to reject what Whitehead
(1967b, p. 58) calls the “fallacy of simple location”, which insists that “bits of mat-
ter” can be located absolutely in definite regions of space and fixed points in time.
Rather,Whitehead suggests that space and time be considered “basic forms of affec-
tivity; they cannot be preassumed but need to be constructed in and through the
process of experience” (Shaviro, 2009, p. 60). Spacetime becomes relative to vectors
of feeling, in the sense that each process of feeling inherits the past and projects itself
into the future, transitioning “from a beyond which is determinate and pointing to
a beyond which is yet to be determined” (Whitehead, 1978, p. 230). Feeling is also
what connects space and time back to the body, where the body is posed “not as a
stable category but as a creative vector of experiential space-time” (Manning, 2012,
p. 12).The body becomes the site for the mutual sensitivity of conceptual and physi-
cal feelings that channel spacetime through a vector of experience. This also means
that classical categories of spatio-temporal distance and proximity are destabilised.
That which exists “over there” beyond the body can be felt “right here”, inside the
bodily complex of relations, as the constructive functioning of a process of feeling
100  Affect

that is indeterminate, and yet conditional to the world’s becoming. Just look up at
the moon and you feel it here, gazing up at the sky.
Vectors of feeling not only connect bodies across spatial distance, they also con-
nect memories of past occasions across time. Massumi (2015, p. 62) describes three
vectors of memory in this context: 1) the unconscious memory of the immediate
past pressing itself on the present as bodily habit or tendency; 2) a backwards-
looking recollection of the past in the lived duration of the present; and 3) a “felt
memory of the future” in which the present is shaped and modulated by a futurity
towards which it tends. These vectors of memory flow in different temporal direc-
tions (past to present, present to past, future to past) and are intermixed constantly
in the nexus of affective modulations and transductions that constitutes the body.
Guattari’s (1995) concept of “transversality” is thus helpful in considering how these
differential vectors of felt relation transect and transmutate the body through the
various attenuations or capacitations to think and act.

The capacitation of a body as it gears up for a passage towards a diminished or

augmented states is completely bound up with the past of the body… so there’s
a reactivation of the past in passage towards a changed future, cutting transver-
sally across dimensions of time, between past and future, and between pasts of
different orders. This is the in-between time or transversal time of the event.
(Massumi, 2015b, p. 49)

Akin to the “learning self ” discussed in Chapter 4, the body becomes an affective
transition or smudge between occasions, as threaded transversally from one block of
becoming to the next. In the transition between states, affect registers as felt sensa-
tion on the nervous system and is encoded in the body as memory. Your present
memory of your own past is an affective encounter with an actual entity other than
you, which at the same time constitutes the subject you have just become. Affect
potentialises how you remember a place, a person, a time, an experience. Each act
of remembering becomes a discrete instance of feeling the actual world differently,
of building a body, a subject, of making space and time. The body becomes a fielding
of affects that capacitates new potentials for experience from moment to moment.
Each recording of experience is also a recoding, a recalibration of the potentials to
sense, think, and act.

Memories of the future

“I’m sitting here right now with you, in the train station in Kassel, watching the people
pass by.” Janet Cardiff ’s (2012) voice speaks breathily through the speakers in
the lecture theatre. The voice permeates the acoustic space in stereo sound like
water filling up the room. At the same time it feels like she’s whispering inti-
mately in your ear. “This video will be like an experiment. We’re like those prisoners
stuck in Plato’s cave… we watch the flickering shadows on the screen. Try to align your
 Affect  101

movements with mine”. We feel ourselves stand up and walk with Cardiff ’s voice
and her movements, but our bodies are still sitting in our seats.The atmosphere
shifts with our felt experience of moving through a train station in Kassel,
Germany. Some of the students are completely engrossed; others are fiddling
with their own phones.

These are notes from a node of the States and Territories project that introduced
Whitehead’s affect theory into a series of pedagogical experimentations with stu-
dents in a course called Doing Cultural Studies. This was a first-year, core introduc-
tory unit for students undertaking a Bachelor of Arts with a major in Cultural
Studies and was designed to enable students to encounter several key concepts and
approaches utilised in the field. The experiments began with a guest seminar fol-
lowed by a mediated walking activity exploring the concept of affect in relation to
memory, movement, and place. In the seminar, I screened the Alter Banhoff Video
Walk by media artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller (2012) as an example
of affective experimentation with memory and place using location-based media. 1
In Cardiff and Miller’s work, participants use a mobile tablet and headphones to
explore the memories and sensations hidden in the affective architecture of a train
station in Kassel, Germany.The tablet screens the cinematic images and sounds cho-
reographed by the artists in the train station, which are designed to be experienced
as an alternative overlay or window as the viewer walks through the station itself.

“Memories are like a different form of travelling,” Cardiff ’s voice intones from
somewhere behind us. “It’s like filling a suitcase that we pull behind us, and we open
and close when we need to”. As we hear these words a woman pulls briskly into
the frame of the tablet, dragging a red suitcase behind her. We feel like we are
walking with her, directly behind her, but we are still sitting in our chairs in the
lecture theatre. The environment is pulled with us as we travel along vectors of
feeling, even while staying in place. Multiple spaces and times “there” are being
vectored through the collective sensation of our experience “here”, in the lec-
ture theatre.We transition through the relational architecture of the Kassel train
station, a cast of characters passing in and out of the tablet’s frame: a band of
street musicians, a ballerina, a barking dog, a survivor describing the body parts
strewn on the ground after the World War II bombings. Memories feel like
ghosts that haunt the present affectively, passing back and forth across the rela-
tional surface of experience. Feelings pulling at the fabric that stitches bodies to
places and times, recorded and recoded every moment as they are felt anew. On
the screen of the lecture theatre the tablet penetrates the surface of a glass case
containing stories of those who died in the bombings: an image within an
image within an image…
Now our view is repositioned on an overpass looking down on the trains
gliding in and out of the station like crepuscular creatures seeking prey.We see
a lone figure moving purposefully towards a waiting train on the platform.
“That’s me in the white coat down there.” Cardiff's hypnotic voice is still right
102  Affect

here, in the intimacy of the present, but somehow her body is over there,
inhabiting a memory of the future. “I remember lying in the hotel room that night,
alone, watching a German black and white movie,” she continues. “I turned off the
sound, and just watched the actors.The images of trains and soldiers kept me company
as I fell asleep…”

You are standing on the platform watching yourself boarding a train.You remember
the experience you had the night before you boarded the train. You were going
somewhere, but now you are back here where you started, in the middle. You
encounter yourself threaded together by vectors of feeling: memories of a future
that you only ever encounter in the past.

Reco(r)ding what moves you

Following the guest seminar, I asked the students to engage their affective expe-
riences of memories as potentialised through movement and place. I called this
experiment Reco(r)ding What Moves You, and it took shape through a series of six
propositions:

1) Gather together at the affect cube near the rainforest remnant, each with an
iPad or smartphone.
2) Start recording video on your devices at exactly the same time and begin walk-
ing in different directions.
3) As you’re walking, let the environment trigger memories of experiences which
affected or moved you.
4) Record yourself telling the stories of your memories as you walk, focusing on
how things affected you at the time.
5) Return to your starting point and exchange your experiences. How did the
process reanimate different places and times? How did different vectors of feel-
ing affect your recollection of different memories?
6) Edit the videos together two at a time. Explore how different vectors of feeling
became entangled within the nexus of an event’s unfolding.

Several of the students were resistant to engaging with this activity, some choos-
ing to opt out completely, while others chose to complete parts or aspects of the
activity. Several expressed concern about recording themselves using video, or the
effort involved in walking across the campus. In the end only six videos were com-
pleted, including three student videos that inhered strictly to the invitation, two sta-
tionary student videos completed without walking, and one video created by myself
in synchronisation with one of the students.The results of this experimental activity
were edited into a series of video works, which can be found in the affect archive
at http://www.statesandterritories.org/affect-archive. In the following vignettes,
these video experimentations are recomposed through a speculative analysis which
 Affect  103

tracks how the concept of affect encounters a series of ruptures and problematics
provoked by the participants’ videos.Through this speculative analytic process, non-
anthropocentric concepts of life, sociality, belonging, and concern become neces-
sary to account for the affective relationships that compose living and non-living
ecologies of relation.

Biomorphic belongings
Two students are walking side by side, each with an iPad recording simultaneously.
As they walk they invite their encounters with the surrounding environment to
field a spontaneous series of memories. Later the two films are spliced side by
side, making it difficult to distinguish between the two bodies as they walk and
converse (see Figure 6.1). Walking down into the creek bed, the students describe
how “this memory in particular is to do around waterfalls… the memory that
triggers this in particular is bushwalking”. A trail of memories cascades from this
account: the cold rush of a waterfall, walking a trail in dresses and high heels, walk-
ing at the beach, walking near grandma’s house. The students pause at the base

FIGURE 6.1  Video stills captured by two students walking side-side while recording
simultaneously with iPads
104  Affect

of a gnarled fig tree with buttressed roots. “I remember being a kid and climbing
up trees as a child… so many scratches and bruises, a few scars, and I broke my
shoulder from falling out of a tree… And going out on rainy days, and squashing
in the mud on a pushbike, and getting mud all over you”.
Rather than serving as an object of recognition, reductive categorisation, and
capture, the tree calls forth prehensive feelings of sensations experienced while
climbing trees as a child.The environment is no longer a passive container of recog-
nisable objects, but an active field of relations that allows the pastness of memory to
field potentials for future experience.The doubling of the participants’ simultaneous
experiences foregrounds this trans-qualitative sociality of the learning environment,
in which multiple vectors of memory and sensation are always becoming entangled
with one another. As one student remarked, “Emily was hearing my experience of
seeing this particular environment”.
This vignette raises questions about how an environment operates affectively, as
a multiplicity of feelings that are felt differently by multiple bodies. In other words,
it asks us to reconsider what it means to belong to a society of felt relations, where
the term “society” is no longer the exclusive province or privilege of human life.
Whitehead (1967, 1978) characterises societies as experiential assemblages of actual
entities that share common characteristics of belonging, feeling, value, and concern
(1978, p. 34). In short, a society is a nexus of one or more actual occasions that share
in any type of “social ordering”. Social ordering is an emergent process that carries
particular gradations and fluctuations of feeling from one event to another and is
in this sense opposed to the notion of a predetermined system, structure, or form.
A society can equally refer to a human body, a classroom, a horse, an acorn, or any
other living or non-living nexus of occasions that holds itself together and endures
over time.

Thus an army is a society of regiments, and regiments are societies of [humans],

and [humans] are societies of cells, and of blood, and of bones, together with
the dominant society of personal human experience, and cells are societies of
small physical entities such as protons, and so, and so on. Also all these societies
presuppose the circumambient space of social physical activity.
(Whitehead, 1967a, p. 206).

The concept of a “living society” pertains to a particular type of society in which

“a life” is a common factor, regardless of scale or species. People, wolves, eucalyptus
trees, amoebas, and cells are all living societies, but so are cities, ant colonies, and
coral reefs. All living societies share at least one common characteristic: they require
food of some kind to survive, and this necessitates the “robbery” of other living
societies within a social environment felt in common (Whitehead, 1978, p. 105).
The biomorphology of a tree, for instance, is a living society that holds together
various components of root, bark, branch, and leaf in order to both feed off and
sustain the social environment of the forest in which it grows.
 Affect  105

Whitehead urges us to think about the human body as a living society co-
inhabited by a wild variety of animal cells and bacteria brought together by social
feelings held in common, including, but in no way restricted to, genetic code.
We might think of these as “biomorphic belongings” particular to living societies.
In the students’ video experiment described above, “my life”, “my memory”, “my
experience”, “my body”, “my feet”, “my boots”, “my childhood”, “my grandma’s
house” could all be considered biomorphic belongings that characterise the felt
experience of a life held in common, or the constitution of what Whitehead calls
a “living person”. Yet these biomorphic belongings are not possessions, or objects
of recognition, but feelings or affectivities that continuously renew the existence of
the living person with each passing moment.

Belongings are not only multiple but fluid and constantly entering into new
assemblage. Between “that belongs to me” and “I belong to,” the distribution
never ceases being produced anew, while a subject, amazed to have been able to
experience this, that and that, never stops occurring and concluding.
(Stengers, 2011, p. 325)

The tree that triggers a memory of childhood might also hold together similar
belongings, albeit in a relatively different register or mode of possession: my leaf, my
branch, my roots, my soil, and so on. Just like a human or any other living creature,
the tree is both an individual within a society of felt relations, and a society com-
posed of singular occasions of feeling.

Life in the interstices

All the life in the body is the life of individual cells. There are thus millions
upon millions of centres of life in each animal body… life is a characteristic of
‘empty space’ and not of space ‘occupied’ by any corpuscular society.
(Whitehead, 1978, p. 105–108)

Whitehead makes an important distinction between living societies as “corpus-

cular” assemblages that occupy space and time and life as a characteristic of empty
spaces or interstices between occasions of experience.“Life lurks in the interstices of
every living cell, and in the interstices of the brain” (Whitehead, 1978, p. 105–106).
The interstice is that which retains life’s potential for creativity of response amidst
the structural impositions, constraints, and obligations of a social environment held
in common. As empty spaces of potential that are “sheltered” or “harboured” by
a living society, interstices retain the sheer originality of life as a self-generating
process that is distilled into the recognisable form of a person, a family, a home, a
city, a nation. Stengers (2011, p. 328) describes this as a process of life’s “percola-
tion”, which propagates “from interstice to interstice until the flow itself becomes
106  Affect

recognisable, describable, socialised, no longer interstitial but the thread of a living

person”. A living person involves the continuous transmission of one occasion of
experience to the next within an affective architecture of biomorphic belongings.
In the vignette above, we might grasp a sense of the interstices in the student’s use
of the conjunctive “and” that both interrupts and conjoins her narration of personal
experience: “and climbing up it as a child/and broke my shoulder/and going out on
rainy days/and squashing in the mud on a pushbike/and getting mud all over you”,
and so on.
Whitehead describes how the interstitial empty spaces between cells, thoughts,
feelings, memories, and occasions of experience are also knitted together into a
non-social nexus: an interstitial meshwork of potentialities that remain untamed
and uncodified by social order. Stengers (2011, p. 328) refers to this non-social
nexus as a “culture of interstices”, which opens a living society “to an outside
whose intrusion suspends habitual social functioning”. A culture of interstices is
uncommonly dispersed across a near infinite array of intervals or gaps between
bodies, events, thoughts, feelings, sensations. We might think of interstices as dis-
persed nodes or vacuoles of felt potential crucial to the functioning of life as a
trans-qualitative process. Interstices are like virtual reserves or affective remain-
ders of experience that refuse to conform to instinct, genetics, norms, habits, or
any predetermined structuration of the social environment or milieu. And to the
extent that interstices are harboured by a living society in “common”, this com-
monality is never determined in advance of its realisation in one living society or
another.

The common is never there in advance of the field it proposes, it is a coming-

to-expression of the associated milieu of life-living. Here, in the milieu of life-
living, new forms of life emerge that are not beings so much as dynamic
shapings of experience in the making.
(Manning, 2013, p. 203)

The interstice is that which refuses the pull of conformal belonging, and in so
doing, harbours the potentials for alternative belongings to take shape through the
trans-qualitative milieu of life-living in the social field. But a culture of interstices
also harbours the creative force of life’s potential to be “socialised”, retaining life’s
urge for originality even within the social orders that hold a cell, a body, a person,
or a society together.

Geomorphic affects
At the same time as the students recorded the videos described above, another stu-
dent and I recorded our own videos with iPads as we walked in separate directions.
This student was an international exchange student from Japan who was studying
English as a second language. We both started filming at exactly the same time and
location as the previous vignette, cuing our iPads and walking from the “affect”
 Affect  107

FIGURE 6.2  Still frames captured from video recordings by the author and a student
walking with iPads simultaneously

cube situated in the creek bed near the campus learning centre. Again the two
videos were edited together side by side, allowing the two streams of audio and
visual movement to blend and disrupt each other’s vectors of memory and affective
intensity (Figure 6.2). At first the student is following behind me. I can see myself,
from behind, in his video at the same time as I see my own video proceeding fur-
ther down the trail. We each begin speaking about ten seconds into the video. As I
walk down along the edge of the creek, I find myself recalling a memory of hiking
into a canyon with my brother in Hawaii. The student has at that point broken off
along a different pathway heading to the sports field and begins to describe feel-
ings of belonging associated with playing soccer. He describes how soccer connects
him with other students through a shared activity which doesn’t involve English
language. As the video experiment continues, my account of uncanny geological
encounters in the canyon becomes strangely entangled with the student’s account
(in italics) of playing soccer.

We went to the island of Kauai/I’m heading to the oval/It’s incredibly

biodiverse/where I play soccer/some of the wettest and driest places on
earth/every Monday and Friday/hiking down into Waimea canyon/thanks to this
108  Affect

soccer activity/you can see all the strata/I could make a lot friends/layers of the
earth/Vietnamese friends, Brazil/geologic sedimentation/of course Australian
friends/rainbow colours/and I realise that soccer connects the world/very
beautiful/it’s a beautiful day today/you can feel this energy/I have a strong feeling/
coming off these cliffs/when I play soccer/it’s almost like/when I lose the game/the
cliffs are radiating time/I feel very sad/a very strange encounter/and when I win
the game I feel so proud

These two narratives diverge and interfere with one another, generating a mutant
affectivity that resonates across the living societies of the soccer field and the non-
living societies of the canyon’s ancient cliffs. As evoked by the student, the soccer
field is a space governed by movements, forces, intensities, potentials, affects, ten-
sions, and social belongings held in common. He describes the game of soccer
as a source of joy, power, pleasure, sadness and pride for which “language is not
necessary”, allowing him to establish extra-linguistic relations with “Vietnamese
friends, Brazil, and of course Australian friends” that extend from local events across
the world. As Massumi (2002, p. 72) writes, the soccer field can be considered “a
force-field activated by the presence of bodies within the signed limits” of goals and
ground. Every soccer game is a relational fielding of potential, or what Massumi
calls an “event-space” that transects with other fields of potential relative to the
players, the audience, the weather, or the game’s transmission into other locations
via conversational or media networks. The soccer field is not just any space, but a
particular species of event-space that proliferates as a coded, regulated, social tech-
nology of belonging that holds together a specific range of potential affectivities
across space and time. Using the concepts developed in the previous vignette, soc-
cer can be seen to coordinate a set of biomorphic belongings that are sustained
through the social rules and conditions that sustain the game itself. Soccer is also
sustained by the collective investment of trans-qualitative affects, energies, attention,
and technologies into its ongoing proliferation within the political economy of
neo-liberal capitalism.
The student’s evocation of the affective dimensions of playing soccer high-
lights the thresholds of biomorphic belongings that depend on compliance with
certain social orderings, obligations, rules, and norms, including those associated
with language, as well as the sense of sadness and joy that can issue from the field
of relations that soccer holds together. My simultaneous account of descend-
ing into a remote canyon with my brother offers a counter-narrative which
emphasises the geomorphic affects that implicate living bodies with inorganic and
non-living societies. In recollecting the memory of the canyon I describe how
encounters with other humans felt alienating and strange, while the geomor-
phic responsiveness of the non-living environment generated a profound sense
of belonging. I recall how a family attempted to steal our camera as my brother
and I swam in the river, while the multi-coloured surfaces of the canyon seemed
to radiate with a more-than-human concern. On returning to the edge of the
canyon, my brother and I stopped to acknowledge the Indigenous ancestors and
 Affect  109

FIGURE 6.3  Image of a Martian dust devil captured by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover
Spirit on 5 August 2005. Source: NASA, Creative Commons license: https://commons.
wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dust_Devil_on_Mars.jpg

natural history of the canyon, and in that very moment a spiralling whirlwind
of dust and rocks swept up out of the canyon and swirled for several minutes
just a few feet away from us. Often known as a “dust devil”, this phenomenon
has been described as an “atmospheric vortex” that forms when an updraft of
hot air rises from the Earth and begins to spiral. Under particular conditions,
the gradients of horizontal and vertical temperature differentials produce suf-
ficient intensity to funnel particles of dust, rock, and dirt into the dust devil’s
convective vortex (Rennó, Burkett, & Larkin, 1998). Dust devils are known to
occur relatively rarely in the arid regions of Earth and, as shown in Figure 6.3,
have also been observed remotely at a scale of up to 6 km on the surface of
Mars (Ferri et al., 2003)2. The uncanniness of witnessing a dust devil take shape
as we acknowledged the canyon’s Indigenous custodians evokes the possibilities
of geomorphic belongings between living and non-living societies of minerals,
strata, weather patterns, and molecular atmospheres.
110  Affect

In a museum the crystals are kept under glass cases; in zoological gardens the
animals are fed… The crystals are not agencies requiring the destruction of
elaborate societies derived from the environment; a living society is such an
agency.
(Whitehead, 1978, p. 105)

One way that Whitehead’s philosophy differs from many contemporary affect
theories is through its differential attribution of affective sociality to both living
and non-living social assemblages. Whitehead emphasises how humans and other
living organisms are entirely dependent not only on consuming other life, but
on the non-living and inorganic systems that sustain their bodies and the envi-
ronments in which they function. Biological modes of belonging always entail a
form of metabolic dependency that disintegrates other forms of life in order to
maintain constructive functioning: “life is robbery” (Whitehead, 1978). And yet,
“living bodies can be pursued down to lifelessness. Also the functionings of inor-
ganic matter remain intact amid the functionings of living matter” (Whitehead,
1967a, p. 207). The example of a soccer game bears this out, as the game requires
complex patterns of metabolic consumption and exchange in order to sustain
itself. Every soccer game partakes in a much larger biosocial metabolism, as a form
of robbery that feeds on other forms of life in order to perpetuate itself, while also
coordinating untold inorganic societies in the perpetuation of its social order and
sheer “endurance” across space and time.
The account of the hike in the video experiment above foregrounds the ways
that non-living societies such as mountains, creek beds, canyons, strata, dust devils,
and other geologic phenomena can channel “vectors of feeling” without con-
suming life in order to endure. Whitehead’s affect theory gives us the tools for
encountering a dust devil, for example, as a society that exhibits both a mentality
and a concern for its own passage without being “alive” in the neo-vitalist sense
(see, for instance, Bennett, 2010). Such non-living societies don’t actually need liv-
ing societies to exist (dust devils don’t eat), whereas every living society is depen-
dent on the complex molecular structures of non-living and inorganic societies as
part of its “common” biochemical substrate. The concept of geomorphic belong-
ings emphasises how living societies share these earthly affects in common with
non-living societies. Consider how every physical body that exists on the Earth is
metabolising gravity as a common “share” in geomorphic belonging. Each body’s
physical relation to gravity is social to the extent that it connects to a reticulated
totality of relations in which gravity affects bodies differently. The feeling of space
and time in relation to mass and velocity shapes the durational existence of a
soccer ball as much as a canyon. The geomorphic relation between one earthly
body and another is also shaped by gravity in ways that are objectively calculable
and yet qualitatively indeterminate. We might even consider how gravity is oddly
shared between life on Earth and dust devils spinning across the surfaces of Mars.
Consider the flight of a bird, the curve of a dancer, the arc of a soccer ball, the
spin of a vortex, or the lurch of a glacial mass falling into the sea. Without the
 Affect  111

geomorphic affect of gravity none of these movements could take the forms and
trajectories that they do.

Living and non-living concerns

Whitehead’s affect theory invites us to extend concepts of sociality, feeling, mental-
ity, and belonging to all actual entities and events, while maintaining a distinction
between life and non-life. Living societies can only endure by consuming other
living societies. Consider the extraordinary reliance of a massive living society such
as the population of China or the United States on the brutal robbery of the bio-
sphere, as well as the destabilisation of inorganic societies such as the climate system.
But non-living societies such as earthquakes, volcanoes and severe weather systems
are perfectly capable of destroying living societies without even “needing” to do so.
In a similar way that geologic strata function as archives for the affective memories
of a landscape over deep time, we might say that the climate “remembers” the car-
bon emissions of living societies and reacts in a manner that exhibits a non-living
“concern” through its own processes of enduring self-enjoyment. The same could
be said for the perverse concerns of financial capital, a non-living society with its
origins in the living which now enjoys its own monstrous, inhuman trajectory
in the insatiable commodification of planetary life (Massumi, 2018). The implica-
tions of these inorganic concerns are further complicated by the reliance of human
societies on other non-living societies of their own construction, such as energy,

FIGURE 6.4 An example of a cosmographical affect, or non-living vector of feel-

ing: C/2014 Q2 is a long-period comet first observed on 17 August 2014. Source:
John Vermette, Creative Commons License: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
File:C2014_Q2.jpg
112  Affect

computational, and transportation infrastructures. Thus the affective relationships

between living and non-living societies are typified by a trans-qualitative disequi-
librium in the current epoch, in which the matters of concern for many types of
social order are largely incommensurable. Biomorphic and geomorphic belongings
are out of whack, with competing rather than complementary concerns.The Earth’s
climate isn’t likely to share the same concerns as the living societies that depend
on it, and yet many personal, corporate, and governmental societies demonstrate a
paucity of concern for the reliance of their own living societies on climatological
conditions, and the non-human lives of plant and animal societies with a shared
dependency on the relative stability of the climate system.
Whitehead (1967a, p. 176) describes how his concept of “concern” is imbued
with a Quaker sense that is “divested of any suggestion of knowledge”. This notion
of concern does not begin or end with the human subject, but with the event. It
describes a “regard not of the subject for the object, or of one individual for another,
but of the occasion for its own unfolding” (Manning, 2013, p. 205). A concern for
the event, in the event. What concern is expressed by the dust vortex that appears as
two brothers pause at the edge of a canyon? Perhaps, in this moment, a gesture of
concern for the event is met with a gesture of concern in the event, a concern “for
its own unfolding”. We need only look up at the night sky to prehend entire galax-
ies of non-living concerns pulsing vectors of feeling across the sky (see Figure 6.4).
A universe of cosmographical affects subject to their own inscrutable, unknowable
concerns.

Notes
1 Cardiff and Miller’s Alter Banhoff Video Walk (2012) can be viewed here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOkQE7m31Pw
2 According to Ferri et al. (2003), images from the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) camera
“show an extensive network of dust devil tracks globally distributed around the planet
and changing seasonally”. Their research suggests that “strong local vortices (dust devils)
are more efficient in entraining dust from the surface into the atmosphere than hori-
zontal winds”, leading them to hypothesise that “dust devils may be the primary dust
entrainment mechanism on Mars”.
7
JUSTICE

This book has charted the processual development of concepts and practices for
philosophical adventure, artmaking, and social inquiry in response to the increasing
complexities and uncertainties of contemporary life. By stretching into the trans-
qualitative field of more-than-human affects, societies, and concerns, immersive car-
tography makes its own minor perturbations in response to the epoch’s disturbed
and polyphonic call to adventure. Each of this book’s chapters has taken shape
through speculative concepts and techniques that disrupt the habituated institutional
assemblages of the university and its disciplinary territories, while also mapping
the possibilities for alternative cartographies of social and pedagogical movement
that elude institutional capture. This final chapter focuses on the elaboration of an
immanent environmental ethics that subsists, interstitially, in the life of events that
unfold through an immersive cartography. In resisting universalising moral codes or
prescriptions for action, I linger with the concept of immanence in an attempt to
co-implicate aesthetics, ecology, pedagogy, and ethics within the minor interven-
tions and actualisations of an immersive cartography.

To the extent that the orders of the world are immanent rather than transcen-
dent, we must seek an immanent ethics to adequately address ways of living,
styles of life, made possible in and of this world. Such an ethics is not a function
of judgement, of moral right or law, but of action, of values not given but made.
(Grosz, 2017, p. 255)

Drawing on Grosz (2017), I suggest that an immanent ethics is always a function of

becoming as the creative activity that animates lived events: “a valuing that acts”. By
thinking in this processual key, the construction of an immanent ethics constitutes
an adventure of both sense and sensation, an art of thinking and living that reorien-
tates and revalues events within a more-than-human ecology of experience.
114  Justice

Beginning with an open series of engagements with the concepts of becoming,

immanence, and event in the philosophies of Whitehead and Deleuze, the chapter
proposes the concept of “doing little justices” as a way of enacting micro-ethical
interventions into everyday learning environments and patterns of creative activity.
“Doing little justices” is a concept of immanence to the extent that it proposes an
ethics in the folds of an environmental fielding of experience that exceeds human
perception and understanding. To do a little justice is to stage a collective experi-
ment within the places and times of “mutual immanence” where events coincide in
the passing present (Whitehead, 1967a, p. 197). Akin to what Manning (2016) refers
to as a “minor gesture”, a little justice can be as small as a movement, a word, an
image, or an idea that brings care and attention to the fragilities, entanglements, and
uncertainties of contemporaneous environments and the experiential assemblages
that exceed the human at every scale. A “little justice” is what Deleuze and Guattari
(1986) might call a minoritarian proposition, playing out in the minor keys that lurk
in the interstices between the majoritarian political structures and discursive agen-
das of environmental justice writ large. Where majoritarian, institutional, or State
regimes present a “constant and homogenous system”, a minoritarian ethics oper-
ates through “subsystems… seeds [and] crystals of becoming whose value is to trig-
ger uncontrollable movements and deterritorialisations of the mean or majority”
(106). By working at the micropolitical level of lived relations as crystallisations of
events that ripple across temporal and spatial layers, “doing little justices” describes
moments where bodies becomes sensitised towards new values, contrasts, and pos-
sibilities for multi-scalar environmental awareness and coexistence.1

Two variations on the concept of event

In the immanentist philosophies of Whitehead and Deleuze, the ethical is encoun-
tered through the immanence of an event, an encounter with the creative force of
becoming that reorientates experience in relation to an unknown and unthink-
able “outside”. For Deleuze (1990, p. 151), the concept of event takes on a double
structure, occurring “here”, in the moment of its actualisation as a state of affairs,
while also preserving its virtual movement as a transtemporal and non-locatable
becoming, always capable of “side-stepping each present, being free of the limi-
tations of a state of affairs”. Whitehead accounts for the event in different but
related terms, with each actual occasion constituting a creative process of becom-
ing, and the event a relational “nexus” or confluence of actual occasions through
which experiential assemblages or “societies” are composed. Each event is a par-
ticular actualisation or “concrescence” of virtual potentials, while also expressing
the force of an immanent, creative activity that both animates and exceeds its
concrete actualisation. One of the implications that both of these accounts share
is that “the event never fully actualises” (Manning, 2013, p. 25). For Whitehead
there is always a life of pure potentials that subsists and carries over from event to
event, while Deleuze and Guattari (1994, p. 156) write of a life of events that is
impersonal, incorporeal, “unlivable: a pure reserve”.
 Justice  115

Although their accounts differ in both subtle and significant ways, both
Whitehead and Deleuze propose that immanence inheres in the creative modes and
manners of becoming through which events come into being (Robinson 2009b).
Each emphasises the singular–plural nature of reality, but lean differently towards a
“pure” monism and a “pluralist” monism, respectively. These ontological differences
are noticeable in their concepts of immanence. Deleuze (2001) poses a “pure” plane
of immanence that is indivisible, impersonal, and immanent only in itself as a virtual
field of potentials. The plane of immanence is populated by pure potentials or vir-
tualities that “survey” the plane in a state of absolute movement and infinite speed.
Pure immanence is expressed in the figuration of a virtual life, what Deleuze terms
“a life” which coexists on the plane of immanence and in the singularities of life’s
coming to expression within a transcendental field of actualisation.

A life contains only virtuals. It is made up of virtualities, events, singularities.

What we call virtual is not something that lacks reality but something that is
engaged in a process of actualisation following the plane that gives it its particu-
lar reality. The immanent event is actualized in a state of things and of the lived
that make it happen. The plane of immanence is itself actualized in an object
and a subject to which it attributes itself… Events and singularities give to the
plane all their virtuality, just as the plane of immanence gives virtual events
their full reality.
(Deleuze, 2001, p. 31)

To the extent that virtual events traverse the plane of immanence at infinite speed,
the process of actualisation involves a slowing down of events in order to parse
and separate elements out onto a plane of transcendence, rendering bodies and
things discernible. This allows subjects and objects to appear as distinct transcendent
forms, even though they are always direct “products” or “expressions” of the plane
of immanence which is presupposed by this separation.
In contrast with the continuity of becoming (or absolute movement) posed by
Deleuze, Whitehead’s (1978) cosmology proposes a becoming of continuity that attri-
butes immanence to each and every actual occasion as its own creative process of
becoming. “The word Creativity expresses the notion that each event is a process
issuing in novelty” (Whitehead, 1967a, p. 236). “Creativity”, in this respect, can be
considered Whitehead’s alternative to the concepts of “plane of immanence” and “a
life” offered by Deleuze and Guattari (Stengers, 2011). Rather than posing a single
plane of immanence that permeates and preconditions all actualisation, Whitehead
locates immanence in the creative activity that initiates the potentials for novelty
through a process of disjunctive togetherness. Disparate events come together in
novel ways, fuelling a process of “creative advance” through which the potentials for
new events are continuously produced. “The many become one, and are increased
by one” (Whitehead, 1978, p. 21). But creativity retains a neutral, impersonal imma-
nence in each actual occasion, “without any character of its own” (p. 31). The par-
ticular character or singularity of creativity is, in this respect, rendered through its
116  Justice

expression by actual occasions. Each actual occasion is “at once a creature of creativ-
ity and a condition of creativity”, such that “creatures” (as the actual occasions that
issue from creativity) “constitute the shifting character of creativity” (p. 32).
While the differences between their conceptual vocabularies complicate any
attempt at synthesis, it does appear that immanence takes on a more dispersed and
“creaturely” figuration for Whitehead than for Deleuze. Whitehead is concerned
with how events creatively co-condition a mutual existence by becoming ele-
ments in each other’s becomings, a complexification of immanence that takes into
account the patterning of transtemporal relations among past, present, and future
events. In this respect, Whitehead attributes the emergence of complex experiential
assemblages (such as bodies, societies, and ecosystems) to the creative patterning of
interconnected events within the “vibratory continuum” of nature as an immanent
totality, or “common world” of co-constructive experience.

Three variations on the concept of immanence

The causal independence of contemporary occasions is the ground for free-

dom in the Universe… There is complete contemporary freedom.
(Whitehead, 1967a, p. 198)

In pursuing an immanent ethics of environmental learning, thought, and inquiry

through immersive cartography, I would like to continue a little further with
Whitehead’s pluralistic account of immanence as a concept that takes on multiple
variations and operational functions, while keeping in sight possible connections
with Deleuze and Guattari’s plane of immanence in developing ethical implications
later in the chapter. It is in Whitehead’s later work Adventures of Ideas (1967a) that he
comes to posit a typology of expressions and instantiations of immanence in elabo-
rating the relations between contemporaneous and non-contemporaneous events.
While Whitehead (1967a) upholds a monist immanence of creativity as a principle
that pervades all events and their relations, he also affirms a plurality of variations on
the concept of immanence within this speculative scheme. These variations can be
attributed to his physico-mathematical theorisation of multiple time systems, which
distinguishes between three temporal fields of immanence: an immanence of the
past in the present constituting an “inherited immanence” (p. 188); an immanence of
the future in the present, or what might be termed an “anticipatory immanence” (p.
192); and a “mutual immanence” that is attributed to the contemporaneous relations
between two or more occasions within a given time system (p. 197). In this chapter,
these distinctions become useful to the extent that they attend to the complex ethi-
cal implications of the concept of immanence as expressed through the differential
relations between multiple times, spaces, events, bodies, environments, and societies.
The notion of “inherited immanence” is helpful in thinking through the ethi-
cal implications of inherited affects, concerns, social orderings, and conditioning
environments as discussed in Chapter 6. Not only do living bodies inherit and
 Justice  117

express the “social order” of genetic codings and characteristics from the past, they
also inherit feelings, memories, thoughts, experiences, interactions and, significantly,
environmental and social patterns of organisation that are intricately interwoven
with their contemporary lives. On the one hand a body inherits its own “corpo-
real history” (145), or “life-thread of occasions” as a “special strand of unity within
the general unity of nature” (Whitehead 1967a, 187). Consider how in each pass-
ing moment you inherit the conditions of your own bodily, affective, and mental
states as they existed a tenth of a second ago, or a day ago, a year ago, a decade ago,
and so on. And yet in a certain speculative and metaphysical sense, you also inherit
the immanent totality of the entire settled world, and indeed, the whole Universe
as it exists at any given moment. A general ethical implication to be gathered from
the notion of “inherited immanence” is that multiple occasions of the past always
directly condition the present occasions in which ethical encounters occur, and
through which ethical activities are carried out.The present capacity to act is always
conditioned (more or less) by everything that you (and by extension, the whole
world) has ever experienced in the past.
Related to the notion of an inherited immanence, the concept of “anticipatory
immanence” describes an objectively real presence of the future within the passing
present. Whitehead (1967a) offers a number of quotidian examples to illustrate the
everyday instantiation of this concept, including the existence of legal contracts,
social policies, anxieties, and railway schedules. “The future is immanent in the
present… as a general fact belonging to the nature of things” (p. 194). Without the
future as a real ingredient in the present, Whitehead argues, the entire edifice of the
contemporary world would fall apart. This anticipatory immanence is expressed
in a relay between the future and the present, such that “the present bears in its
own realized constitution relationships to a future beyond itself ” (p. 191). The pres-
ent contemplates, anticipates, and is drawn towards a future that exhibits the “real
potentiality” of actual occasions as they are in the process of becoming through
prehension. The future thus takes on “an objective existence in the present”, to
the extent that each occasion “feels” the future as “an object of prehension in the
subjective immediacy of the present” (p. 194). This process of feeling and sensing
the future participates in what Whitehead terms the “creative urge” towards the
“satisfaction” of each occasion, as driven by the “appetition” and “subjective aim” of
the event. Here Whitehead adapts the concept of “terminus” developed by William
James to elaborate on the pull of the future on the present, making it possible, as
discussed in Chapter 6, to postulate a third type of memory, or “memory of the
future”. Every occasion inherits its reality from the past and projects its reality into
the future. For Whitehead (p. 193), this process of “swinging over” from a memory
of the past (inherited immanence) to a memory of the future (anticipatory imma-
nence) is attributed to “the intervening touch of mentality”, which introduces novel
conceptual feelings into each event.
Whitehead writes that the past and future are both held in common by all occa-
sions, together constituting the objective conditions of the present as a causal infra-
structure. Only in the present are actual occasions considered mutually independent
118  Justice

or “private” (which is to say “monadic”) with respect to their own processes of

immanent self-creation.

It is the definition of contemporary events that they happen in causal indepen-

dence of each other… The vast causal independence of contemporary occa-
sions is the preservative of the elbow-room within the Universe… Our claim
for freedom is rooted in our relationship to our contemporary environment.
Nature does provide a field for independent activities.
(Whitehead, 1967a, p. 195)

This brings us to the concept of “mutual immanence” which refers to the relations
between two or more occasions of experience which are contemporaneous within
the present. It is within the field of the present that particular ethical implica-
tions arise, as it is the present that offers “causal independence” or “elbow room”
which grants “complete contemporary freedom” to events (Whitehead, 1967a,
p. 195). Only in the passing present is there a “selection” of data for prehension,
but this selection is always conditioned by the wider “contemporary environment”
that includes the causal weight of the past and the potentialities of the future. It is
through this contemporary “selection” that a disjunctive set of actual occasions are
unified through mutual immanence, becoming social elements of each other’s actual
worlds. “Any set of actual occasions are united in the mutual immanence of occa-
sions, each in the other. To the extent that they are united they mutually constrain
each other” (p. 197). In other words, a mutual immanence inheres to any nexus of
encounter between contemporaneous events in the world, and this mutuality of
social relation entails both an enabling unification (each in the others) and a con-
straint (entanglement with others).
As discussed in Chapter 6, the novel coming together of actual occasions is
what Whitehead terms a “nexus”, with “living societies”, “non-living societ-
ies”, and “living persons” constituting subtypes or “speciations” of the broader
notion of nexus. Each society exhibits a particular social order (what Deleuze
and Guattari might term a “stratum”) that is variously inherited, mutated, or dis-
solved depending on the capacity for endurance and adaptability of each society
within its social environment. Considering that different expressions of social
order occur at all scales from the quantum to the planetary, Whitehead (1967a)
uses the term “epoch” to describe the pervasive social orderings of a given time.
“The structure of the epoch of the Universe… exhibits successive layers of types
of order, each layer introducing some additional type of order within some lim-
ited region which shares in the more general type of order of some larger envi-
ronment” (p. 195). In other words, the social relations constituted by the mutual
immanence of occasions go all the way up and all the way down. Lodged within
the multi-scalar social orderings of the contemporary epoch, bodies are both
enabled and constrained by the mutual immanence of their contemporary rela-
tions with others, as vectors of physical and conceptual feeling or affectivity that
constitute a mutual coexistence.
 Justice  119

Whitehead (1967a) suggests that it may be easier to grasp the empirical (and thus
the ethical) implications of this polytemporal theory of immanence by considering
relatively short time spans. For instance, “time-spans of the order of magnitude of a
second, or even fractions of a second” (p. 192). Consider how a sense of the immedi-
ate past and future participates directly in the present as the feeling of time passing
with a particular quality of experience. The immanence of one second ago bleeds
into the immanence of a second to come, even as you read these words. The “con-
temporary freedom” of mutual immanence is thus “mixed”, perhaps even “diluted”
by the causal weight of the past and its creative advance into the future. The past is
obstinately pressing itself on each event, even as the future draws it towards what
it will have become. Somewhere in this process there is a fleeting window of con-
temporary freedom, but the window is always passing: maybe just one step, or one
half-second, out of reach. Whitehead’s “elbow room” of mutual immanence thus
bears a relation with the fugitive sense of freedom grasped for in meditation, or
the improvisational practices of free jazz or live art. Every moment becomes an
opportunity to reach towards the mutual immanence encountered within the epoch
in which we find ourselves. This implies an ethics of reaching for immanence with-
out ever really grasping it, but in doing so, foregrounding the creation of new vivid
values and contrasts of experience-in-the-making.

Doing little justices

How can we live in the world, act in the world, make things and oneself,
while also creating values that enhance oneself and one’s milieu, not through
pre-existing values but through acting, making, and doing that generate new
values?
(Grosz, 2017, p. 255)

Encountering immanence through Deleuze and Whitehead’s philosophies opens up

alternative possibilities for conceiving of justice as a “minor concept” that inheres
to an immediate event of encounter, as conditioned by the past and the future as
elements of the passing present. While any attempt to construct a universal image
of justice is thwarted when considered through this immanent ethics of events, the
notion of “doing little justices” seeks to establish a variation on the concept that is
commensurable with an ontogenetics of creative becoming. To do a little justice is
to become attuned to this situation of mutual immanence, to acknowledge in some
small way its entangled route of inheritance as well as its real potentiality, and to
act in a way that creatively anticipates the necessity of a future that only becomes
possible through mutual coexistence. To do a “little justice” is to grasp at the sense
of contemporary freedom of mutual immanence described above, to reach towards
the interstices and vacuoles of potential that inhere within events.
Like many of the other concepts discussed throughout this book, this reimag-
ining of the concept of justice was undertaken as part of the States and Territories
project and involved a series of pedagogical experiments with university students
120  Justice

FIGURE 7.1  Photographs of the cube located in a garden bed adjacent to the School of
Law and Justice at Southern Cross University’s Lismore Campus

and academics in the philosophy of law and primary education.The cube associated
with justice is located within a sloping section of landscaped garden in between the
School of Law and Justice and the School of Engineering (see Figure 7.1).The cube
is surrounded by a corridor of moss-covered trees, flowering plants, and an unusual
assortment of lichens and fungi that have proliferated along the ground in this par-
ticular area. This environment changes dynamically over the course of the year, as
various trees and plants flower and drop their leaves and the patterns of coloured
light and shadow shift with variations in moisture, sunlight, and weather conditions.
This cube is also situated in a rather dynamic social milieu, as the School of Law and
Justice has become an international centre for research in the areas of wild law and
ecological jurisprudence. It is within these emerging areas of study that speculative,
posthumanist, and new materialist theories are beginning to exert an impact on
legal philosophies, practices, pedagogies, and policy frameworks (see, for instance,
Pelizzon & Ricketts 2015).
The experiments associated with “doing little justices” began with a series of
conversations with academics in the School of Law and Justice, and the discovery
of a shared interest in thinking justice outside conventional formulations of the
bounded human subject. This conversation was then extended to a group of post-
graduate students studying the philosophy of law, who participated in a seminar
exploring the concept of “doing little justices” that I had been developing around a
series of four propositions:

1) justice as a performative gesture through which ethical encounters are enacted

within a relation of mutual immanence (Manning, 2016; Whitehead, 1967a);
2) justice as a multiplicity that works across differences and is intensively differenti-
ated (Braidotti, 2013);
3) justice as a process that moves and transitions through affective relations and
tonalities (Massumi 2015a,b); and
4) justice as a speculative thought experiment that produces new forms of togeth-
erness among diversely situated societies, bodies, practices, technologies, and
modes of existence (Haraway 2016; Stengers 2005a).
 Justice  121

In my initial work with the philosophy of law students, we connected these four
propositions with environmental and socially engaged artists and artworks, including
the works of Suzanne Lacy and Meirle Ukeles. We discussed these artists’ feminist
interventions into social and environmental ecologies through community-based
emplacements, installations, and performances in public spaces and institutions. We
thought about how these actions constituted “little justices” that reached towards an
ethics of events, encounters, and occasions of experience rather than transcendent
principles or moral ideals. We also talked about everyday events in our own lives
that might be thought of as “little justices”. Emerging from these discussions was
the idea that “doing a little justice” could be as simple as becoming aware of the
social environment as a processual multiplicity, and learning to attune and respond
to subtle variations within this more-than-human ecology of experience.
This initial development of the concept of “doing little justices” formed the basis
for a second series of seminars and collaborative activities, this time with a group
of 29 primary education students undertaking a Bachelor of Education course
called Foundations: Human society and its environment. This is the core unit associated
with the teaching of geography and social studies within the Australian National
Curriculum, and which deals (in small part) with topics associated with sustain-
ability, climate change, civic values, and geopolitics. For this series of seminars and
activities, I focused more closely on “game changers” that the contemporary epoch
brings to bear on questions of justice in the primary school classroom. These game
changers included:

⚫⚫ the detonation of the first atomic bomb in 1945, and the embedding of radio-
nuclides within the Earth’s geologic strata;
⚫⚫ the Great Acceleration of human enterprise since 1950, including the tripling
of human populations within a single lifetime and the loss of 40% of the world’s
animal life;
⚫⚫ the default legal categorisation of non-human animals as “possessions” rather
than “persons”;
⚫⚫ the Whanganui river in New Zealand being granted the rights of a “person”
in 2012, as connected with the river’s living ecology and Māori history, law,
and culture;
⚫⚫ the current impacts of climate change on the habitats of human and non-
human animals alike, including the submergence of Pacific islands, glacier
melts, and the forced migration of human and non-human communities; and
⚫⚫ the rapid acceleration of biotechnology, artificial intelligence, robotics, epi-
genetics, cloning, and nanotechnology.

After discussing the ways that these events might impact on understandings of
justice at the level of educational encounters, the students were invited to create a
series of videos that expressed their attempts to grapple with these issues. Specifically,
they were encouraged to consider the rights of humans in connection with the rights
of other animals, mountains, and rivers; the impacts of climate change on notions
122  Justice

of social and environmental justice; and the question of how an education that did
not insist on human superiority and dominance might look.The students worked in
groups with iPads and were encouraged to use the various environments of the uni-
versity campus as the settings for their video productions.They were also made aware
that these videos would be publicly archived within the States and Territories website
and be available for future students to encounter and engage with through the jus-
tices cube. 2 The following vignettes engage two of these videos in conversation with
the concepts of mutual immanence and minor acts of justice described above.

“We can eat the clones”

A group of four students conduct a lively, speculative, and often hilarious discussion
in which they entertain the possibilities of granting the rights of a “person” to non-
human animals. They begin by asking if a non-human animal could or should have
the right to suffrage. What constitutes an animal’s right and capacity to represent its
own political interests and concern? This leads them to consider the possibility that
animals might already participate in democratic elections, through the emergence
of “a leader within their own kingdom through natural selection”. The predatory
and symbiotic relations among living species is, in this sense, indexed to the abil-
ity to adapt to changing environments and perhaps even to “lead” a process of
eco-evolutionary accommodation. Specifically, the students speculate that so-called
“apex predators” such as lions could be “elected” into positions of power through a
process of natural selection and ecological ordering of social relations. This leads to
further questions around the capacities for animals to communicate and coordinate
relations across species, and how modalities of gesture, scent, sight, or sound contrib-
ute to the formations of political ecologies. For instance, they wonder how a “bat
could talk to a dolphin” since they both use sonar to communicate and navigate.
This is a rare example of “aparallel convergent evolution”, as discussed in Chapter 2,
in which species co-evolve symbiotic or cognate bodily capacities without having
any direct contact with one another.
The students go on to suggest that the rights of humans are no more important
than those of other animal species, but that humans are obligated with the responsi-
bility of protecting the rights of other animals because they have the capacity to do so.
They apply this proposition equally across species: “I guess once any animal becomes
the top on the food chain, then it becomes their responsibility to take care of the rest
of it”. This offers an interesting question regarding the increased responsibilities of
apex predators such as wolves, which have been shown to foster ecological rehabilita-
tion when reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park as well as the nuclear fallout
zone at Chernobyl.While these examples of “rewilding” may at first glance reinforce
a hierarchical image of organisms arranged along the ecological food chain, from
another perspective they gesture towards the immanent ethics of an ecology of prac-
tices that is dynamically modulated and reassembled by the social orderings of wolves
as “living persons” who think and affect environmental changes, both individually
and collectively. Rather than simply filling an empty position in the ecosystem that
 Justice  123

is preinscribed for an apex predator to manage the social order, the wolves introduce
an entire concatenation of biological, social, and mental processes into the ecosystem
in a way that effects a trans-qualitative transformation of the system’s functioning.
The reinvigoration of the ecosystem through the dynamic activities of the wolves
can be considered a prime example of doing little justices, even though this justice is
partially predicated on the wolves’ capacity to consume other animals.
While the students’ discussion flirts with the fraught ethical implications of a
social Darwinism as applied to human and non-human animals, it also gestures
towards a political ecology in which life processes and social processes are intricately
intertwined and dynamically modulated. This can be connected to recent move-
ments in the ecological sciences discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, in which new theo-
ries of eco-evolutionary plasticity are being posed in order to account for epigenetic
variation and exchange across ecological generations and species (Frost, 2016;West-
Eberhard 2003). These theories are generating new theoretical and computational
models of ecology following advances in the postgenomic life sciences, allowing for
the dynamic interplay between shifting environmental conditions and interspecies
“symbiogenesis” across genetic, molecular, cellular, organismic, ecological, and plan-
etary scales (Margulis, 1999). Protevi (2013) argues that the impact of epigenetics
has introduced a dimension of virtuality into the ecological sciences, which could
also be considered an introduction of immanence into ecology, particularly with
respect to Whitehead’s multi-temporal account of immanence discussed earlier in
the chapter. Frost (2016), for example, stresses the transgenerational plasticity of bio-
social patterns and variations across multiple temporalities, such that animal bodies
are always both contemporaneous and non-contemporaneous with their immediate
ecological environments.

As a product of the many generations preceding it, an organism’s habitat-respon-

sive development and growth is noncontemporaneous with its current habitat.
Those histories, as they manifest in cellular structures, protein activities, and
organismic processes, set the organism apart from its habitat in the sense of pro-
viding the possibilities for and the constraints on the biological responses that the
habitat can evoke or induce… it is this corporeal history, this noncontemporane-
ity, that gives a living organism its “itness” even as it composes and recomposes
itself continuously in response to and through engagement with its habitat.
(Frost, 2016, p. 145)

In recalibrating our understanding of the organism–environment relation along a

“differential temporal horizon” (Frost 2016, 152), the new ecological sciences can be
seen to introduce the factors of inherited, anticipatory, and mutual immanence into
the study of eco-evolutionary development through time. The differential interplay
between contemporaneous (mutual immanence) and non-contemporaneous (inher-
ited and anticipatory immanence) relations also emphasises the impact of techno-
logical advances and capacities on the mutations and reorderings of multi-species
ecological systems. In this vignette, the students speculate that human technologies
124  Justice

have become so advanced that they have alienated humans from the more-than-
human societies which are their living conditions. “We have ways to get around it;
we have spaceships, we have genetic modification, we have crops that we can grow in
space … we have genetic material from cattle and sheep. We can fuckin’ clone them
and eat the clones”.Technology, in this respect, upsets any sense of a “natural” ecology
that can be sustained through better management practices executed in linear time.
As a result of their certainty regarding the techno-scientific superiority of humans,
the students conclude that “animals need the environment more than we do, but the
environment doesn’t need us at all”. For these students, human technological capa-
bilities generate increased ethical problems, obligations, and responsibilities to sustain
the ecological systems that support other animals, even as they recognise a profound
alienation as the rapid evolution of techno-scientific invention detaches human lives
from a sense of mutual coexistence with other living creatures.3

Non-human qualities of life

In another group, three students begin with a more laconic discussion of the rights
that might be accorded to geographical entities such as mountains and rivers. “A lot
of the rights are similar”, they say. “Access to food and water, rights to reproduc-
tion, free borders for animals and water. The right to socialise with whomever you
please … qualities of life and freedom.” While the students do not elaborate on the
implications of these rights, they do suggest that mountains and rivers could exhibit
a certain “desire” for sociality, as well as the desire to maintain open and porous
boundaries for the movements of lifeforms and geochemical resources. They sug-
gest that the Murray River should have the right to flow across political boundaries
between states without “persecution” and allude to the river’s right to maintain its
own catchments without excessive drainage by farmers. It is interesting that they
use the “proper name” of the Murray River to designate its status as a living person.
The students even refer to the river as just “Murray”, in the same congenial sense
that they might refer to a personal friend or family member. They go on to argue
that animals, mountains, and rivers should have equal rights to “qualities of life”,
and should not be “enslaved for their materials, or for what they’re producing”.
Furthermore, they identify climate change as a phenomenon that is “escalating and
building up and getting mixed with other problems … decreasing the qualities of
life” by contributing directly to “diseases, lack of food, lack of free space really”.
These considerations also lead the students to question the mass slaughter of
animals as a result of the rapid growth in human population and enterprise. “Would
we like it if we killed them, I mean, if they killed us?” one student asks. This slippage
in the students’ questioning highlights the habitual normativity and overwhelm-
ing statistical frequency of humans killing other animals, as opposed to the relative
infrequency of humans being killed by other animals. Perhaps more disconcertingly,
the slip also foregrounds the zone of necropolitical indiscernibility between “us”
and “them”: if humans are animals, then doesn’t killing and eating animals entail a
perverse form of cannibalism? “Would we eat meat if we didn’t have that kind of
 Justice  125

mentality?” another student asks. “Maybe we would, but we would eat less. Only
for survival you would. Which is what it was traditionally. Hunting down what you
could for you and your family to survive”. It is interesting that the students describe
the act of eating meat as the function of a particular “mentality”, rather than a
biological function necessary for the acquisition of energy and nutrients. Such a
carnivorous mentality makes the industrial farming of non-human animals both a
habituated and an “agro-logistical” necessity,“and therefore liable to be repeated and
prolonged like a zombie stumbling forward” (Morton, 2016, p. 58).
This example can also be considered through Whitehead’s multi-temporal figu-
ration of immanence, to the extent that a carnivorous mentality is linked to the
“inheritance”,“appetition”,“selection”, and “satisfaction” of a living society. From the
perspective of an inherited immanence, eating animals is a habit contracted not only
from one’s personal history of experience but also from the non-contemporaneous
accretions of social and environmental conditions stretching deep into the past. A
sense of anticipatory immanence also comes into play with the appetition that lures a
living person towards the consumption of meat. Not synonymous but connected with
physical appetite, Whitehead’s concept of appetition involves the orientation of the
mental pole of an event towards particular conceptual prehensions. In this example,
the conceptual idea of eating meat becomes a lure not only for personal consumption
but also for the industrial scale farming and commodification of animal bodies. It is
only in the nexus of mutual immanence that the “selection” of eating or not eating
an animal comes into play, because this is the only temporality in which “you” and
“the animal” exist contemporaneously, but independently. While the choice to eat
the animal is immanently conditioned by the factors of inheritance and anticipation,
ultimately it is the fleeting grasp of the passing present that holds the potential for
“doing little justices”. Like Bartleby the Scrivener’s mantra in Dickens’ famous short
story, only mutual immanence offers the fleeting interval to say, “I would prefer not
to”, a rejection of choice that Deleuze (1997, p. 71) describes as “devastating because
it eliminates the preferable just as mercilessly as any nonpreferred”.

The creation of rights

The ethical value of an action is what it brings out in a situation, for its
transformation, how it breaks sociality open. Ethics is about how we inhabit
uncertainty, together.
(Massumi, 2015, p. 11)

These two vignettes provide brief glimpses into modes of thinking provoked by
concepts and practices of doing little justices. In shifting the discourse from legal
jurisprudence to an applied ethics of teacher education, the question of human
and non-human rights became a pivotal point for an immersive cartographic
inquiry into questions of justice. This shift in register brings an immanent ethics
into productive tension with more normative conceptions of rights as relevant to
the lives and activities of “living persons”. Yet this turn to the normative does not
126  Justice

necessarily entail a reduction or reproduction of rights according to transcendent

or universal humanist ideals, but rather implies the continuous invention of norma-
tivity (or “normation”) through each particular encounter with the world. In his
L'Abécédaire interviews with Claire Parnet, Deleuze (1996) describes his fascination
with “jurisprudence” as the continuous production of the “rights of life”, which
always “unfolds case by case”. From this immanent perspective on jurisprudence,
the unfolding of life cannot be judged from the outside according to external cri-
teria. Rather, as Massumi (2015) suggests in the quote above, jurisprudence accom-
panies a lived ethics of the event that opens new constellations of value from within
the situation, a practice of “inhabit[ing] uncertainty, together”. In his discussion of
Deleuze’s notion of jurisprudence, Patton (2012, p. 15) argues that this manner of
immanent ethics is oriented towards the creation of rights rather than the extension
or application of axiomatic rights that somehow transcend events and occasions of
experience. He suggests that rights are created through jurisprudence in a similar
way that concepts are created through philosophical thought, a process he terms
“becoming-rights”. This makes the creation of rights inseparable from an axiologi-
cal pragmatics of life-living, a question of “doing little justices” by attending to the
minor movements and fluctuations of mutual immanence.
The creation of rights involves a pragmatics of responding to a living problem
that necessitates a “new” right, such as technological advancements in synthetic
biology that introduce new problems (such as cloning or biogenetic engineering)
which did not previously exist. The right to clone or engineer life is an example of
a becoming-right that, for Deleuze, can only be approached on a case by case basis,
attending to the singularity of the situation and what it requires.This sense of a pre-
carious and uncertain creation of rights colours many of the discussions by students
in the vignettes above. The first group of students mentions the co-evolution of
sonar in dolphins and bats as a response to the problem of environmental sensing and
atmospheric navigation, as well as the ecological food web as an example of rights
being created by apex predators. They also discuss cloning and genetic modification
as the creation of rights in response to the emergence of new socio-technical capac-
ities and speculative conditions for life, while questioning the assumed superiority
of human rights and capacities within this matrix. In the second vignette, students
gesture towards the creation of rights in the discussion of the Murray River’s right
to run free, as well as its right to pursue and sustain a vital quality and intensity of life
both within and beyond its associated milieus and ecologies of relation.This leads to
a discussion of the right to refuse the unnecessary consumption of animal products
through the cultivation of an alternative ethical mentality.
These speculative discussions of “doing little justices” through the creation of
rights radically question humanist beliefs that “individuals possess certain rights by
virtue of some rights-bearing feature of human nature, such as rationality, sentience,
or the capacity to act in pursuit of chosen ends” (Patton 2012, p. 21). To assert that
rights are created rather than given is not to reject the possibility of “civic” or “civil”
rights, nor is it an anthropomorphic position that seeks to extend transcendent
human rights to non-human agents or beings. Rather, to engage in the creation of
 Justice  127

rights is to acknowledge the immanent creativity of a continuous variation, redis-

tribution, and reassembly of experience in concert with the mutual construction of
an ethical problem which, at the limit, is simply the problem of life’s ongoingness.
Doing little justices asks us to rethink the very nature of what constitutes a civic
sociality through more-than-human processes of self-governance and self-creation
within an unequally distributed ecology of powers (Massumi, 2018). It suggests that
rights are actively created and lived at the level of a more-than-human micropolitics,
or what Felix Guattari (2011) termed a molecular politics that cuts transversally across
ecologies and modes of existence.

The micropolitical sphere

In proposing the figuration of “doing little justices” through the creation of rights
and a more-than-human politics to come, immersive cartography is invested in the
micropolitical potentials of critical and creative pedagogical experiments. Brazilian
psychoanalyst and cultural theorist Suely Rolnik (2017) makes a number of sig-
nificant distinctions between the sphere of macropolitics and what she terms the
“sphere of micropolitical insurrection”. Rolnik argues that macropolitical move-
ments depend on the reduction of subjectivity to the unitary human subject, a
position that severs subjectivity from the more-than-human ecologies which are
its living conditions for existence. For Rolnik, macropolitics (whether “right” or
“left”) positions the subject as subordinate to the power relations that govern a
given social order and political regime, aiming explicitly to redistribute power in
ways that are perceived to be more equitable, humane, profitable, or empowering
for individual subjects. She suggests that the macropolitical is strictly the domain of
the human subject, and is thus incapable of conceiving and enacting a more-than-
human political ecology. Because it is founded on the transcendent “cut” of the
humanist subject from the common world of nature, macropolitics inevitably leads
to a perverse alienation of subjectivity from its living conditions and vital force. In
other words, macropolitics fails to think environmentally because it is incapable of
thinking a “subjectivity-outside-the-subject” (Rousell, Hohti, MacLure, & Chalk,
2020). According to Rolnik, this reduction of experience to the human subject is at
the heart of the colonial-capitalistic abuse and commodification of life’s vital force,
or what she terms “the pimping of life”.

What distinguishes the colonial-capitalistic system is the pimping of life as a

force for creation and transmutation…The vital force of the entire biosphere is
expropriated and corrupted by that system: the land, the air, the water, the sky,
the plants, the animals, and the human species.
(Rolnik, 2017, p. 3)

Rolnik contrasts the macropolitical sphere with the sphere of micropolitical insur-
rection which is intimately connected with the vital affects and drives that affirm the
wild diversity of experience and subjectivity outside of the humanist subject. She
128  Justice

describes how micropolitics operates through a “potentialisation of life… by affirm-

ing life in its generative essence”, rather than through an “empowerment” of the
bounded subject which only attempts to redistribute power relations among fixed
determinations of identity (p. 9). This micropolitical affirmation of life’s generative
force can be linked to the discussion of “doing little justices” developed throughout
this chapter. Rolnik describes a river in Brazil that rerouted its flow underground
in order to evade toxic contamination on the surface, as well as trees that alter their
own flowering cycles to prevent sterility from the impacts of pollution and climate
change. These non-human examples of “doing little justices” in the micropoliti-
cal sphere demonstrate the creation of rights for multi-species flourishing, offer-
ing a more-than-human response and rebellion against the perverse abuse of life
by colonial-capitalistic regimes. Similar micropolitical tactics are now evolving in
Hong Kong protest movements that aim to “move like water”, with thousands of
anonymous protestors flowing across the city while evading macropolitical surveil-
lance, identification, and capture by an authoritarian regime. While the macropo-
litical is often more visible in its claims to an identitarian image, the micropolitical
tends towards imperceptibility, camouflage, and evasion, as an intricate and intensive
activism that gradually dissolves the grip of the capitalistic and colonial regime
both “within us and outside of us” (Rolnik, 2017, p. 10). As an investment in the
intensive power of the micropolitical, “doing little justices” becomes a practice not
only of rerouting physical bodies and material flows, but also the rerouting of desire:
a rechannelling of the vital drives, affects, and potentials for life-living. We might
think of these reroutings as little justices that cultivate a collective vulnerability and
ecological sensitivity to intensive fields of experience, as relational techniques for
“re-imagining the world in each gesture, each word, each relation, each mode of
existence– whenever life requires so” (p. 10).

Inconclusion
By thinking-feeling the concept of justice through micropolitical thought experi-
ments, this chapter has explored some of the ethical implications of an immersive
cartography that stages alternative modes of encounter between human and non-
human life. Yet the question remains as to the ongoing resonances and agency of
such work amidst the increasing complexities and derangements of the current
epoch. In the case of the second vignette, as described above, there appeared to be
a genuine reappraisal of the mass killing of animals as the inherited mentality of a
colonial-capitalistic social order. However, it is impossible to know the extent to
which such events continue to impact on the lives of these students now that they
have become classroom teachers, introducing their own pedagogical propositions
into the machinic entanglements of the education system. Perhaps, as Harney and
Moten (2013) urge, they affirm the minor acts of “study” that are always bubbling
away before and after the teacher enters the classroom and calls it to order. Maybe
they reach for the “elbow room” of mutual immanence that lurks in the interstices
between occasions of experience (Whitehead, 1967), allowing the “embryonic
 Justice  129

worlds” of micropolitical subjectivity to survive for just a bit longer before they are
inevitably captured by the colonial-capitalistic regime (Rolnik, 2017). It is impos-
sible to know because such acts can never be measured and can’t even really be
observed. Most of what happens micropolitically is imperceptible, but ethically and
aesthetically felt.This makes the articulation of a politics and an ethics of immersive
cartography all the more challenging, since it does not follow a linear causal logic of
causes and effects. Rather, it follows an affective eco-logic of events as expressions
of felt relation conditioned by the open totality of a social environment, situated
within the ecological and aesthetic ordering of the current epoch and yet mutually
implicated across intensive singularities of experience.
Within this logic of felt events and intensities, the process of exploring the mic-
ropolitical potentials of more-than-human rights and affective capacities consti-
tutes, in itself, an act of “doing little justice” that rearranges the real possibilities for
new aesthetic patternings of social order to take shape. Inevitably, this means that
immersive cartography cannot be reduced to a set of predetermined values, meth-
ods, or prescriptions for an environmental politics or ethics. Rather, the aim of an
immersive cartography is to seed the conditions for the invention of new values,
techniques, and qualities of life-living in the pursuit of unforeseen openings and
potentials for mutual immanence. It is in this sense that not knowing can become an
asset, rather than a hindrance, in the ongoing cultivation of an immersive cartogra-
phy. In forgoing the right to know with any certainty of judgement, the ongoing
project for immersive cartography is to take the risk of living and learning through
events as they pass from immanence into immanence.

Notes
1 The immanence of ethical relations across scales and modes of existence is also elaborated
in an extraordinary range of Indigenous and non-Western philosophies. See for instance
Tallbear (2014, 2017); Cajete (2006); Rose (2012); Rosiek, Snyder, & Pratt, (2019);
Williams et al. (2018); Smith (2015); Forster (2016).
2 Selected and edited versions of these videos can be found in the Justice’s archive on the
States and Territories website: http://www.statesandterritories.org/justice-archive . Whilst
the range of responses to this activity was diverse, an unexpected sense of agreement
emerged among all 29 students that the rights of a “person” should be extended to
non-human entities such as animals, mountains, and rivers. This question of the rights
of a “person” (whether in legal, ethical, psychological, or ontological terms) links to
Whitehead’s (1978; 1967) expanded definition of a “living person” to include all societies
which, more or less, exhibit a “personal order” within the more widely distributed strata
of ecological societies in the current epoch.
3 This group of students also contends that human rights such as freedom of speech and
freedom of movement should be extended to animals as “the right to roam free … with-
out trying to adapt animals better for our own needs”. As consistent with all of the groups
who participated in this series of experiments, the students argue for far more inclusive
rights for non-human animals than are commonly accorded under normative practices
in Australia or under international law.
AFTERWORD
Propositions for an immersive cartography

1. Map and extend a problematic field

Immersive cartography involves the invention of techniques for mapping and
extending a problematic field of inquiry through processes of research-creation. It is
not a problem-solving exercise, but a way of getting caught up in the problem itself
as a field that is productive for speculative thinking and creative experimentation.
One problem that immersive cartography always gets caught up in is the problem of
life, which is also the problem of how to live, and how to cultivate and sustain living
relations. This problem becomes the catalyst for a cartography that provokes life to
live differently, together, with each passing moment.

2. Work in the interstices of the institution

Immersive cartography lodges itself within the cracks of institutional infrastructures
as the living conditions for research-creation. It works by rerouting institutional
infrastructures and atmospheres through events of encounter, rather than attempt-
ing to impose critical interventions or judgements from the outside. Complicity is
taken as the precondition for change, along with a belief in the creativity of events
that make change possible. Change is considered immanent in the act of inquiry,
in what inquiry thinks and does, in what inquiry carries through particular com-
plexes of relations. By including more-than-human thought, sociality, learning, and
affectivity within the spectrum of experience that constitutes inquiry, immersive
cartography seeks to expand the questions that inquiry can ask with, of, and against
the institution.

3. Put concepts to work pedagogically

Immersive cartography follows the movements of philosophical concepts as they
come to intervene pedagogically in the shaping of events. Philosophical concepts
 Afterword  131

do not sit outside the creative and empirical activities of immersive cartography
as external framing devices or interpretive tools. Rather, concepts are intricately
woven into the ongoing unfolding of the cartography through the creation of art-
works, digital interfaces, participatory research events, and diagrammatic analyses
of thinking in action. When concepts are experimented pedagogically through a
collective process, there is an openness to variation that allows for unpredictable
movements in resonance with the provocations of each concept. Often the move-
ment of events will shift the tonality of the concept in ways that create friction with
particular theories or philosophical schemes. There may be a continuous interplay
with what feels like a misrecognition of the concept, where the concept seems
inconsistent or discontinuous with events. In immersive cartography, these frictions
are often the sign that new movements of a concept are beginning to stir and can
even be an indication that a new concept needs to be invented. Perhaps these move-
ments are examples of how a concept “teaches” and “learns”.

4. Make maps that you can walk into

Immersive cartography is invested in creating maps that you can walk into, reshape,
activate, and extend in any direction. It does this by working with space, time,
light, sound, and movement as elemental media for creating cartographic works
of art. These works strive to evoke feelings of conceptual and physical immer-
sion by involving bodies directly in the problem at the heart of the inquiry. They
are propositions or lures for immersive experience. When you enter an immersive
cartography, you are already participating in the proliferation of a problem and the
reshaping of its contours. There is an element of capture, but at the same time, an
element of atmospheric dispersal. You become part of the milieu, and the milieu
becomes part of you.

5. Work through the milieu

Immersive cartography is about learning to think and work through the milieu.This
is a life-long project because the milieus are always changing. To think and work
through the milieu is to always begin in the middle, immersed in an ecological field
of relations which are not yet realised into classifiable units (subjects or objects)
or stratified territories. Milieus are composed of the aesthetic tonalities of colours,
sounds, bacteria, plants, buildings, words, weather patterns, shadows, sensations, con-
cerns, technologies, movements, molecules, and furniture, among countless other
elements. By thinking and working through the milieu, immersive cartography
involves taking account of this multitude of elements, both human and nonhuman,
organic and inorganic, natural and cultural. This involves a process of attuning the
senses to the affective transitions of a research event as it shifts with each encounter.
It calls upon researchers to detach themselves from habitual patterns of control,
ownership, and domination over research events, and to cultivate practices of ethical
and aesthetic care for the milieu itself.
132  Afterword

6. Don’t separate the data from the event

Immersive cartography involves creative engagements with data as the lure and
potential for felt transitions of experience. In refusing the separation of data from
the experiential event of encounter, there is no position from outside the event from
which it can also be observed or interpreted. This has implications for how data is
conceptualised, produced, composed, and analysed in an immersive cartography,
including the capacity for data to operate pedagogically.With no clear line between
the production, collection, interpretation, and analysis of data, the analytic act hinges
on the affective resonances and intensities that constitute each series of encounters
with data. The data event diagrams the potentials for each encounter with data to
catalyse alternative cartographic trajectories and becomings.

7. Leave room for unexpected functions

Immersive cartography incorporates spaces of incompletion into its projects, with
the express aim of providing a pedagogical infrastructure for others to take up
and appropriate in unexpected ways. The idea is to create a pedagogical architec-
ture with multiple platforms and openings that can operate as propositional lures
for new kinds of functions and learning experiences to emerge. In the States and
Territories project, this involved collaborations that were continuously being initi-
ated, negotiated, and sustained with academics and students working in disciplines
across the arts, humanities, and sciences. Many of these collaborations led to further
teaching and research initiatives using the cartographic network as the basis for
ongoing pedagogical experiments and curricular innovations.

8. Cultivate the art of life-living

Immersive cartography involves the cultivation of a more-than-human ecology and
aesthetics of inquiry that hinges on the art of life-living. This can be described
as learning to live life as a work of art, as well as learning the art of life through every-
day encounters and aesthetic experiences. The art of life is a process of cultivating
environmental awareness through the aesthetic attunement, selection, and recom-
position of sensory elements in relation to bodily movement and perception. “For
example”, Whitehead writes, “the mere disposing of the human body and the eye-
sight so as to get a good view of the sunset is a simple form of artistic selection”
(1929, p. 200). Immersive cartography seeks to foster such pedagogical attunements
to the aesthetic values and patterns of sensibility that recompose the experiential
surfaces of learning environments of all kinds.

9. Speculate on more-than-human concerns

Immersive cartography is invested in developing speculative practices for exploring
the affective capacities and concerns of nonhuman and nonliving assemblages, or
“societies”, in the Whiteheadian sense.This often involves the extension of concepts
 Afterword  133

of qualitative feeling and concern beyond the normative registers of human experi-
ence, a speculative process of inquiry that could be proposed as “trans-qualitative”
in orientation. By attending to more-than-human relations of affectivity and con-
cern across scales, temporalities, and modes of existence, immersive cartography
aims to expand studies of learning into molecular, geologic, and cosmographical
dimensions.

10. Do little justices

Immersive cartography seeks to cultivate minor acts of justice and the creation
of rights through open-ended processes of experimentation in the micropolitical
sphere. It does not aim for consensus around issues, values, or ethical principles
with regard to social, political, or environmental discourses. Rather, it is orientated
towards creative and experimental processes that might, even for just a moment,
achieve a novel, fleeting, and uneasy sense of togetherness.
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INDEX
Pages in Italics refers figures
abductive reasoning 92
abstract machine 9, 27, 88
Adventures of Ideas 116
aesthetics: affective tonality 37; affects 36;
animality 28; aparallel evolution 39; art 28;
bifurcation of nature 26; Collaboration After
Humanism 37–38; composition of sensation
27–29, 29, 32; creative involution 28; dance
of attention 38; detachable percept 33–36,
35; deterritorialisation 32; diffraction 33;
eco-aesthetic perspective 40; epigenetic
information 39; eventfulness of art 27;
framing and deframing 32; genetic
exchanges 40; genetic information 40;
holobiome 39; involvement and
collaboration 29; milieu 33; molecular
collaborations 41–43, 42, 43; non-human
objects 33; Our Favourite Things 38, 39;
particle signs 40; particles of sensation 40;
process of territorialisation 31, 32; rhythm
31; speciation 39; symbiogenesis 39–40;
territorial expressions of animality 28;
territory and milieu 29–31; unbifurcated
approach 27
affective tonality 37
affects 36; biomorphic belongings 103–105;
definition 95; geomorphic affects
106–111, 107, 109; living and non-living
concerns 111, 112; living society 104;
social ordering 104; society of felt
relations 104; trans-qualitative movement
96, 104; Whitehead’s affect theory see
Whitehead’s affect theory
Alaimo, S. 75
Amphibious Architectures 14
Anthropocene xxi, xxii, 1
anthropogenic climate change 26
anticipatory immanence 116, 117, 123
Arakawa, S. 68
archeology-art 11
architecture: architectural body 62, 68, 74;
architecture of experience 62, 66–70, 73;
mobile architecture 62, 67, 73, 78;
relational architecture 67, 68, 70, 78
Articulated Intersection 68
art: art and animality 28; art of life 132;
becoming a work of art 32, 37, 43–44;
definition of 27; plane of composition
27, 28, 32; work of art 28, 31
atmosphere: affective atmospheres xxix, 101,
106; atmospheric media 65; atmospheric
vortex 109; see also dust devils
Aurasma 19
Barnett, R. xxiv
becoming-animal 28, 38, 39
becoming a work of art 32, 37, 43–44
becoming birdlike 56
becoming conscious 83
becoming-ecological 46, 53, 59, 60
becoming entangled 104
becoming of continuity 115
becoming-orchid of the wasp 39
becoming-rights 126
becomings of virtuals 32
becoming-wasp of the orchid 39
belonging xvi, xxix, 52, 55, 74, 104–111, 117
Besley, T. xxiv
bifurcation of nature xviii
Big Data 80
biomorphic belonging 103–106, 108
Braidotti, R. xxiv, xxv
146  Index
Bundjalung National Park, ecology: actively
relational thinking 57; coastal woodland
zone 55–57, 56; intertidal zone 54–55,
55; Mollusca family, neurological
functioning 57, 58; Organism Ecology 53
Capitalocene xxi
capitalism xxi
Cardiff, J. 100, 112n1
cartographic network 79
cartographies of experience 18, 19
cartography-art xxxi, 9–12, 14, 15, 21
Cellularum 41, 42, 42, 43
Chthulucene xxi
Cleopatra’s Needle 85–87
Colebrook, C. xx, xxi, xxvi, xxix, xxxiii, 27, 45
Collaboration After Humanism 37–38
collaborative process 18, 38, 41
complicity 130
The Concept of Nature 85
concrescence xix, 97, 114
concern xviii, xxix, xxxii, 46, 50, 55, 64, 67, 94n1,
102–104, 108, 110–113, 116, 122, 130–133
consensual hallucination xxvi
consciousness 83–85
constant and homogenous system 114
The Cosmopolitical Proposal 59
cosmopolitics 46, 48–50, 60, 61n1
creative activity xviii, xv, xvi, xix, xxix, 20,
26, 34, 44, 113–115
creative mapping techniques 79
creativity 27, 28, 105, 115, 116, 127, 130;
creative activity xviii, xv, xvi, xix, xxix,
20, 26, 34, 44, 113–115; creative advance
xviii, xix, 115, 119; creative involution
xxxi, 28, 29, 34, 35, 88; creative urge 98,
117; creatures 30, 39, 58, 75, 81, 84, 101,
116, 124; creaturely xix, 74, 116
data: Always a Hole 89, 90, 90; The Concept of
Nature 85; constitution and modulation of
prehensive feelings 87; data abduction
91–92; data events 85–88, 88; data sharing
82; metabolics of 80–81; negative
prehensions 89; objectile 86–88, 90;
objective datum 85; occurrent diagram
92–93; ontological flattening of
anthropocentric hierarchies 84; prehension
81–85, 84, 89; process of aesthesis 83;
proliferation of 79; public and private
dimension 83; qualitative shift 86–87;
quantitative and qualitative data 84; spatial
mold 86; speculative analysis 87; States and
Territories project 87, 89; stone’s data ecology
82; vector of feeling 82; wildness of data 80
Datacene xxi
data diagrams 132
data event xxxii, 85–93, 132
Deleuze, G. xv, xvii, xix, xx, xxvii, 1, 3, 6, 7,
9–11, 15, 21, 22, 26–32, 34, 36, 37, 40,
41, 61n1, 63, 64, 71, 72, 77, 80, 86, 88, 95,
114–116, 119, 125, 126
Deligny, Fernand 7
developmental systems theory 34
digital deluge 80
disjunctive synthesis of multiple percepts 35,
35
Doing Cultural Studies 101
“Doing little justices,” 114, 119–122, 120
dust devils 109, 112n2
eco-developmental plasticity 34
ecology: bifurcation of nature 46, 48, 49; in
Bundjalung National Park see
Bundjalung National Park, ecology;
cosmic event 46, 59; The Cosmopolitical
Proposal 59; cosmopolitics 48–50;
definitions of 47; dynamic movements
46; “etho-ecological” approach 46,
51–52; general ecology 45; human and
non-human practices 52; knowledge
production 50; litmus testing 52, 52;
ontological pluralism 49–50; posthuman
condition 45; of practices 50–51; qualify
48; quantify 47; States and Territories
project 46, 47; textbook approaches 47;
thousand ecologies 60–61; trans-
qualitative process 59
ecology of powers 95
“ecology of practices,” 16
ecology of relation 42
Ellsworth, E. 65, 66, 70, 71
empiricism xviii, xvii, xix, xxvii, xxxiv, 48,
49, 63, 80, 92
engagement 62, 63, 66, 73–75, 78
energy 84, 85
environmental awareness xv, 12, 13, 46, 57,
58, 73, 114, 132
ethico-aesthetics of inquiry xxii–xxiii
event xii, xiii, xiv, xv, xix, xx, xxv, xxvii,
xxviii, xxix, xxxii, 4, 5, 13, 15, 18, 20–22,
24, 27, 28, 34, 36–38, 41–44, 46, 48–53,
56, 59–60, 62–69, 71, 80–82, 84–93,
94n2, 95–97, 99, 100, 102, 104, 106, 108,
111, 113–119, 121, 125, 126, 128–132
evolution of animal perception 34
experience xv–xx, xxii, xxiii, xxvi,
xxviii–xxx, xxxii, 1, 4, 9–13, 15, 18, 19,
21, 24, 26–28, 30–33, 36–38, 40–44,
48–50, 53, 54, 56–59, 62–64, 66–73, 77,
79–83, 85, 89–93, 95–102, 104–106, 113,
114, 116, 117, 119, 121, 125–133
expression xv, xix, xxiii, xxxi, 20, 28, 31, 32,
34, 37, 43, 57, 64, 78, 93, 106, 115, 116, 129

experimentation xvi, xx, xxiii–xxvi, xxx,
xxxi, 15, 16, 18, 19, 21, 24, 27, 28, 37, 38,
65, 66, 72, 73, 80, 84, 88, 91, 97, 101, 102,
130, 133
extensive and intensive mappings: affective
constellations 5; analogue and digital
interfaces 16; arborescent systems 9;
conditional and derivative 6; digital
mapping 6; of felt process 7, 8;
installation of plywood cubes 5, 5;
multi-layered tracings 7; plugging the
tracings 9; rhizomatic conception 9;
socio-ecological milieus 5; transcendent
models 9; unconscious action paintings 7;
walking and mapping 9, 10, 11
extensive cartography 12
feeling: conceptual and physical feelings 96,
99; lure for feeling 36, 37, 59, 67, 69, 70,
85, 88–91; prehension xxviii, 81–93, 94n2,
96–98, 117, 118, 125; vectors of feeling
xxxiii, 83, 84, 89, 99–102, 110, 111, 118
The Fold 86
Foundations: Human society and its environment
121
freedom, xxxii 74, 116, 118, 119, 124,
129n3
“free and wild” concepts xxi
Frost, S. 123
gathering ecology 24
geomorphic affects 106–111, 107, 109
Gins, M. 68
global climate change xvii, xx
Gnibi College of Indigenous Studies 16, 23, 24
Goodman, A. 24
Grosz, E. 22, 27, 28, 33, 113
Guattari, F. xvi, xvii, xix, xx, xxii, xxv, xxx,
1, 7, 9, 21, 22, 25n1, 26–32, 36, 37, 40, 41,
45, 61n1, 63–65, 71, 80, 88, 100, 114,
116, 127
Hansen, M.B. 77
haptic and transductive interfaces 43
Haraway, D. xx, xxi, xxvi, 26, 45, 56, 120
Harney, S. xxv, xxvi, 66
holobiome 39
Hörl, E. 45
immanence xix, xxvii, xxxii; anticipatory
immanence 116, 117, 123, 125; inherited
immanence 116–118, 123, 125; mutual
immanence 33, 82, 114, 116, 118–120,
122, 123, 125, 126, 128, 129
immanent ethics xxiii, xxxii, 113, 116, 119,
122, 125, 126
Index  147
immersive cartography: atmospheric and
infrastructural xxiii; immersion 11;
intensive, extensive, and virtual mapping
xxxi, 5–12, 14, 16, 21, 33, 37, 63
incorporeal xxx, 11, 15, 22, 23, 64, 72, 75,
92, 93, 114
indigenous and decolonial theory xxvi
inherited immanence 116, 117, 123, 125
Intel corporation 78
intensity xvi, xxii, xxiii, xxix, xxx, 7–11, 14,
15, 36, 63, 65, 67, 79, 83–85, 93, 95, 107,
109, 126
interactivity 68, 78
Irwin, R. 12
Jeremijenko, N. 13–15
justice: actualisation/concrescence of virtual
potentials 114; anticipatory immanence
116, 117, 123; aparallel convergent
evolution 122; apex predators 122, 123;
“becoming-rights,” 126; cloning and
genetic modification 126; constant and
homogenous system 114; contemporary
environment 118; corporeal history 117;
creative urge 117; creativity 115;
differential temporal horizon 123; “Doing
little justices,” 114, 119–123, 120, 126,
127; eco-evolutionary accommodation
122; epoch 118; human and non-human
rights 125; immanent ethics 113; impact
of epigenetics 123; inherited immanence
116, 117, 123, 125; jurisprudence 126;
macropolitics 127; micropolitical sphere
127–128; minor gesture 114; mutual
immanence 114, 116, 118, 119, 123; nexus
118; non-human qualities of life 124–125;
physico-mathematical theorisation 116;
plane of immanence 115; polytemporal
theory of immanence 119; rights of life
126; social Darwinism 123; States and
Territories project 119; stratum 118;
subjectivity-outside-the-subject 127;
symbiogenesis 123; terminus 117;
vibratory continuum 116
Koro-Ljungberg, M. 80, 81
learning: affective and sensory dimensions
of xxxii, 37; human and non-human
learning 20, 26, 50, 52, 131; learning
environments xv, xvi, xxv, xxix, xxxii, 1,
5, 9, 16, 17, 33, 52, 53, 62, 63, 65, 66, 70,
73–78, 104, 114, 132; learning self 70–72,
100; learning to be affected 71–75;
learning to swim 72; light and shadow
16, 76, 88, 120; radically environmental
theory of xvi, 77
148  Index
life: art of life 132; definition of; life in the
interstices xxxii, 105–106; living societies
71, 74, 104–106, 108, 110–112, 118, 125;
problem of life 127, 130
location-based audio works 23
Lozano-Hemmer, R. 67, 68
MacLure, M. 51, 80
Manning, E. xv, xvii, xxviii, xxix, 12, 15, 20,
34, 37–39, 48, 57, 67, 71, 114
map of virtualities 11–14, 13
Margulis, L. 34, 39
Massumi, B. xv, xvii, xxvii, xxviii, 27, 34, 36,
57, 62–64, 68, 91, 95–97, 100, 108, 126
materiality concept of 16
matter xxi, 5, 21, 33
matter of concern 111
matter of expression 31, 34, 48, 65, 77, 86,
87, 91, 99, 110, 111
McClintock, Barbara 61n2
milieu xv, xxiv, xxviii, xxxi, 2–6, 9, 10,
13–16, 20–23, 26–37, 40, 45, 46, 50–52,
54, 55, 60, 63, 65, 66, 74, 78, 93, 106, 119,
120, 126, 131
Miller, G.B. 101, 112n1
minor gesture 114
mixed reality 19, 20
more-than-human xi, xvii, xxii, xxiii, xxvi,
xxxi, xxxii, 3–5, 10, 15, 16, 20, 27, 37, 38,
43, 46, 52, 62, 67, 80, 90, 108, 113, 121,
124, 127–130, 132–133
Moten, F. xxv, xxvi, 66
“multi-versity,” xxiv–xxvi
mutual immanence 114, 116, 118, 119, 123
Napangardi, Dorothy 11, 12; see also
Sandhills painting
nature: aesthetic order of nature 63;
bifurcation of nature xviii, 26, 46, 48, 49;
common world of nature 20, 116, 127;
passage of nature 11
negative prehension 89, 90, 92, 97, 98
neighbourhood: conceptual neighbourhood
92; neighbourhood of an object 1, 23, 87
the new xviii, xxv, 37, 123
new materialisms xvii, xxv, xxvi, 45
non-human xxviii, xxxiii, 10, 26, 28, 33, 34,
42, 46, 50–52, 75, 84, 88, 111, 121–126,
128, 129n2, 129n3
non-living 83, 103, 104, 108–111, 112, 118
novel togetherness 43, 52, 81, 115, 120
novelty xviii, xix, 88, 96, 115
online video recording 36
ontogenesis xxxi, 26, 119
ontological turn, xxvi
open-ended experimentation 1
Organism Ecology 53
Oyama, S. 34
parental milieu 3
Parisi, L. 76
Parnet, Claire 126
Patton, P. 126
pedagogical experiments 18
pedagogical implications: anomalous
pedagogies 65–66; Articulated Intersection
68; bare activity 63; choreographic
landing 69; control society 77; differential
continuum 64; eco-aesthetic pedagogy
70; “ecological-aesthetic” theorisation 62;
ecology and aesthetics of inquiry 72;
ecology of sensation 76–78; harbouring
75; interpretive orientations 70; landing
sites 68–69; learning self 70; living
society 71; local coefficient of
transversality 65; machine learning
algorithms 78; micropolitical
mobilisation 65; mixed reality
architecture 78; mobile architecture 67;
non-compliant learning environments
73–74; places of learning 62; Places of
Learning: Media, Architecture, Pedagogy 65;
preoperative/preconditioning 69;
pre-service teachers 62; radical
empiricisms 63; relational architecture
67; States and Territories project 67, 69, 69,
73; thermodynamic sensitisation 74; A
Thousand Plateaus 64; transcorporeality
75; transitional architecture 74;
transitional space 65, 66; trans-qualitative
intensities of experience 64; trans-
qualitative theory 75; transversal vector
64; virtual ecologies 64; virtual
movements of concepts 75; Walking the
Meshwork symposium 67, 67
perception of perception 13
Peters, M.A. xxiv
philosophical concepts 16, 21, 130–131
photosynthesis 16
Places of Learning: Media, Architecture,
Pedagogy 65
plane of composition 28
plane of immanence 115
Pollack, Jackson 7
polytemporal theory of immanence 119
positivism xviii, 6, 48, 80
posthuman condition 45
“Posthuman Humanities,” xxv
post-qualitative inquiry xxvi–xxviii

prehension xxvii, xxxii, 36, 81–93, 84, 96,
97, 117, 118, 125
Prigogine, Illya 61n2
propositions xiv, xix, xxvii, 2, 16, 21–23, 28,
36, 37, 51, 69, 75, 95, 102, 114, 120–122,
128, 130–133
problematic field of inquiry 130
Protevi, J. 34, 123
psychoanalysis 3
qualitative texture of experience xxix
qualitative xi, xii, xiv, xvi–xviii, xxvi, xxvii,
xxix, 15, 19, 27, 31, 36, 44, 48, 62–64, 70,
71, 80, 81, 84–87, 93, 98, 99, 133
qualitative transformation 70
quantitative xiv, xviii, 84
quantum physics xvii, xxx, 85, 118
random mutation 34
Reco(r)ding What Moves You experiment
102–103
refractive milieu 33
relation: felt relation xxviii, 7, 27, 36, 62, 64,
80, 83, 91, 96, 100, 104, 105, 129;
relationality xxix, xxx, xxxii, 26, 45, 61,
68, 83, 91
re-mapping 4
research-creation xiv, xv, 15
responsible anarchism xxiv
rhizomatic cartography 9
Rolnik, S. 127
Ruyer, R. 21, 94n3
Sandhills painting 12, 13
schizoanalytic cartographies 25n1
sense xvi, xix, xx, xxiii, xxiv, xxviii, 1, 2, 6, 7,
10, 11, 15, 16, 20–24, 26–33, 40, 41, 43,
47–51, 56, 59, 62, 66, 69–74, 77, 78, 80–89,
91, 93, 96–100, 104, 106, 108, 110, 111,
113, 117, 119, 122–126, 129, 131–133
sensation xvii, xviii, xxiii, xxx, 2, 7, 12, 23,
24, 27–36, 40, 41, 43, 55, 59, 62, 65–67,
69–73, 76, 78, 80, 92, 93, 100, 101, 104,
106, 113, 131
Shaviro, S. 83
Simondon, G. 20, 95
social constructivism xviii
socio-ecological injustices xxii
socio-ecological milieus 16, 27
Soundtrail application 23, 24
spacetime xxiii, 3, 56, 57, 70, 88, 99
speculative cartographies 25n1
speculative empiricism xvii, xviii, xxvii, 48,
49, 80, 92
Index  149
speculative practices xi, xxiii, xxv, xxvi, 46,
66, 132
speculative-pragmatic investment 21
Spinoza, B. xx, 95
States and Territories project xxiv, 2, 9, 10, 16,
17, 19, 21, 23, 32, 33, 35, 38, 46, 47, 51,
52, 67, 69, 69, 73, 87, 89, 119
Stengers, I. 46, 48, 50–52, 59, 60, 61n1,
105, 106
St. Pierre, E.A., xvii, xxvii, xxviii
A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and
Men 29
Stryker, S. xxix
study xxvii, xxxi, 87
subjective form xxxii, 87, 89, 91, 93, 97–99
subjectivity xxii, xxx, xxxii, 3, 4, 59, 64, 72,
77, 80, 98, 99, 127, 129
subjectivity-outside-the-subject 127
survey (survol) 21, 94n3
symbiogenesis 34, 39–40, 61, 123
symbiosensation 76
technicity 14–20
technics xxii, 15, 20, 28, 52
technique xv, xvi, xx, xxiii, xxxi, 1, 12,
14–21, 24, 25n1, 27, 28, 46, 50, 52, 67,
79, 80, 89, 92, 93, 96, 97, 113,
128–130
Technocene xxi
technology xxv, xxvi, 45, 46, 108, 124
techno-science 124
theories of immanence xix
theory of “symbiogenesis,” 34
A Thousand Plateaus 7, 36
Three Ecologies Institute xxv
Todd, Z. xxii
trans/materiality xxx
trans-qualitative inquiry xxviii–xxx
trans-qualitative mobilisation 19
trans-qualitative porosity and
relationality 26
transversality xxviii, 64, 65, 100
Two Running Violet V Forms 13, 14
unbifurcated approach xviii, 27
undercommons xxv, xxvi, 65–66
university: creative university xxiv;
ecological university xxiv; university
campus xv, xvi, xxiv, xxxi, 5, 13, 17, 23,
32, 37, 63, 73, 87, 92, 122; university
learning environments 5, 9, 17;
zombification of the university xxiv
university landscape 16, 17
The University of Orange xxv
150  Index

value xxx, 28, 34, 45, 46, 48, 51, 52, 66, 92, Whitehead’s affect theory: affective tonality
104, 113, 114, 119, 121, 125, 126, 129, 99; appetition 96; conceptual feelings 96;
132, 133 concrescence 97; consciousness 99;
vectors of feeling 83, 84, 89, 99–102, 110, corpuscular assemblages 105; culture of
111 interstices 105–106; eternal objects 96;
virtual cartography 12, 33 fallacy of simple location 99; location-
Von Uexküll, J. 29, 30 based media 101; non-social nexus 106;
objective datum 98; pedagogical
Walker, R. xxiv experimentations 101; percolation 105;
Walking the Meshwork symposium 67, 67 physical feelings 96; Reco(r)ding What
Weinstein, J. xxx Moves You experiment 102–103;
West-Eberhard, M. 34 satisfaction 98; spacetime 99; speculative
Western genealogy 3 imagination 96; subject and “superject,”
What Children Say 3 97, 98; subjective form 98; transversality
Whatmore, S. 50 100; vector character 98; vectors of
Whitehead, A.N. xv–xx, xxvii, xxviii, 6, 26, memory 100
34, 36, 37, 46, 48, 49, 61n1, 63, 71, Winnicott, D.W. 65, 66
80–82, 84–86, 94n1, 95, 111, 114–119,
125