Policies of subjectivity and carthographies: borders between the real and hyperreal in the contemporary city

Abstract

The cartography device makes power relations operate in diverse functions, such as locating, orienting, directing, formalizing, organizing, identifying, drawing and counting, such that these functions create the possibilities for these power relations to act in the production of the city. Cartographic knowledge, from this perspective, establishes productive forces, both through what it allows us to know about the city, subjects, practices, territories, daily life and a myriad of variables that surround them, and through the resulting power, in the form of an imminent and reciprocal updating of knowledge. Is it of interest to understand what productive force operates in cartographic or urban figurations? What defines their light and language schemes, i.e., their know-how? To question the assumption of representation, we point to an epistemological horizon drenched in borders, in passages from the following statutes: real, hyperreal and fictional. Cartographic representation is freed from the supposed ideals of scientific legitimacy, geometry and mathematics, in an operation attuned to what Foucault proposes as genealogy of power, in order to understand: what compositional devices are adopted in the cartographic production of contemporary cities? How are such devices related to the ongoing process of transmutation? How does such transmutation trigger repercussions in the historicity of urban understanding and experience?