D+G (A Thousand Plateus) : "The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an alleged 'competence'...schizoanalysis rejects any idea of pretraced destiny, whatever name is given to it, divine, anagogic, historical, economic, structural, hereditary, or syntagmatic" (12-13)
So, can there really be no assessment of competence in mapping (i.e. cognitive mapping)? I can imagine great fights over what should be included in maps, how they should be drawn, whether a representation has in fact become a tracing, etc. Perhaps D+G just mean that after we've perfected mapping, competence will cease to be a question. Does this fall under the category of hopeful statements without practical value?
Mapping Competence
By blankman - Posted on 5 November 2007 - 11:46am.
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The "competence" is due to the fact that the activity of tracing is that of fitting the world, geography, consciousness, into a pre-established structure - the psychologist places the tracing of the Freudian subject over the 'real' behavior of the patient. The tracing serves as a filter through which push reality. It is a matter of competence because the activity of the tracer can be evaluated in terms of greater or lesser degrees of alignment with the tracing-model, their ability to *reproduce* the tracing on whatever object they are analyzing, and not "competence" in the wide sense of skill or ability. Mapping, on the other hand, produces new relationships between the mapper and what is mapped: it is "performative." I think that a cognitive mapping that fulfilled the hopes of Jameson and Soja, that in mapping transformed the relationship between the subject and the sphere in which they operate, would by definition be a mapping in the Deluzean sense.
-aha