Still, I could claim that after all these were only trails to be followed, it mattered littlewhere they led; indeed, it was important that they did not have a predetermined

starting point and destination. They were merely lines laid down for you to pursue or todivert elsewhere, for me to extend upon or re-design as the case might be. They are, inthe final analysis just fragments, and it is up to you or me to seed what we can make of

them.1

Michel Foucault, “Truth/Power”

Introduction

I once had a professor explain to me what the perfect

research paper should be. It should be like a walk through a

dense wood, along a tense path that twists and turns, revealing

only bits of itself as you intently follow. At the end of the

trail, the end of your journey, there is a clearing; everything

is visible, perfectly clear. Elaborate metaphor, yes, but it is

suitable for the finished product of research produced within a

‘field of action.’ Research may at times (in the humanities) be

perceived as passive, yet there is nothing passive about the

action of experience, the encounter with and translation of

ideas.

1 Michel Foucault, “Truth/Power,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Prentice Hall, 1980), 78-79.

Perhaps the German word Erfahrung, used by architect Petra

Kempf to introduce her mapping project entitled You are the City,

better frames the concept of experience I wish to evoke in this

explanation of action. Erfahrung “. . .derives from the old

German irfaran, to go out, to travel and to discover.”2 As

researchers we trod the trail of pit-falls, mountains (it seems),

vast rivers, and thick forests, encountering beasts and dead-

ends, perhaps even getting lost, not knowing that we’d ever be

found. Erfahrung is the process of experience, the action of

“crossing” through various sensory encounters. 3 It is this/these

action(s) that create(s) knowing.

The product of the Erfahrung becomes a map that traces a

journey distilled and organized, “distorted by emphasis,”4 2 Petra Kempf, You are the City: Observation, Organization and Transformation of Urban Settings (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2009), 11.3 Jean Greish, “The Manifold Meanings of Experience and Idea of Truth,” in Dialog Between Christian Philosophy and Chinese Culture, eds. Paschal Ting, Marian Gao, and Bernard Li. (Washington D.C.: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 2004), 13. “It alludes to the experience of hostility and danger (periculum), to that of crossing a difficult passage, consisting sometimes of aauthentic breakthrough (Durchbruch: This German word plays an important role inMeister Eckhart’s account of mystical experience). However diverse the concrete experiences underlying all these expressions, they seem to gravitate around the same focal meaning: the idea of a perilous and dangerous crossing. Especially in German, the same radical links the word Erfahrung that designatesliterally a crossing, to the word Gefahr: danger or peril.”4 Gerald Roe Crone, Maps and Their Makers: an Introduction to the History of Cartography (London: Hutchinson, 1962), 26. In describing the famous Mappa Mundi (the world’s most intact medieval map) Crone uses “distorted by emphasis” to

eliminating all bumps and false turns. Our map is the

essentialized version of exploration into a territory we wish to

colonize. We hope to make the viewer’s reach the clearing,

without (or perhaps with) the odd bits that seemed to side-track

us. There is no other way but to see this map as the path of a

subject who has forged (who is forging) their way to claiming

territory. Inherent to map-making is the “drawing lines and

bounding of objects,”5 essentially, in humanities research, the

colonization of concept. Although the subjectivity of this

research experience (Erfahrung) might be obvious, when distilled

through ‘cartographic reason’ (appropriating John Pickles term)6

the subject might forget the cartographer has built on what has

come before.

The purpose of this cartography is to make a guide to a

destination. And, if the process of creation was dynamic, so

should its product be a ‘field of action’ for the subject to

experience rather than simply identifying it as already static

explain the disproportionate scale of certain Christian cities over Muslim andPagan regions.5 John Pickles, A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping and the Geo-Coded World (London: Routledge, 2004), 5.6 Ibid.

and chartered territory. This paper will argue that research is a

plane of exploration and its presentation is a form of

cartography (literally ‘chart writing’). Through the examination

of “action research,” art research as literal map-making, and the

effects of figurative cartography on the philosophical subject

through the process-oriented description of Deleuze and the

structural investigation of Foucault I will analyze the

possibilities and problems of research as a field of action.

To write is to struggle and resist7

Bridget Somekh defines ‘action research’ as a type of

research aimed at ‘social action’ using the workplace and the

researcher as someone who learns through ‘situational

understanding.’8 Research and discovery are related to the

researcher’s already held place in a work situation. The best

example is that of a teacher: someone who experiences knowledge

through experimentation in classroom projects that are not

enacted to produce any specific results, but rather generally

7 Gilles Deleuze, “A New Cartographer,” in Foucault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 44.8 Bridget Somekh, “The Contribution of Action Research to Development in Social Endeavours: A Position Paper on Action Research Methodology,” in British Educational Research Journal 21 (1995),

seek to improve the students’ learning. Although action research

is a term typically associated with the social sciences and case

study experimentation, aspects of its method suit the definition

of research in the humanities as a field of action.

Action research must include the researcher as a part of

their research, not as a distanced observer. The misconception

in most research activities is that the researcher is some sort

of removed by-stander, observing the ‘facts,’ recording them and

presenting them in an organized and coherent exposition.

Although this can be argued to be the case in some

scientific/social sciences research, it is rarely the case in the

humanities. Action research can never be impartial because the

researcher is the principal actor of the research; their

experience is the major component of the research. Their

experience is the outcome, which is a ‘situational

understanding’9 arrived at by being a part of the process of both

trial and error as well as exploration.

9 Ibid. Somekh is referencing educational theorist John Elliot’s term ‘situational understanding.’

Again, a ‘situation’ in the humanities is markedly different

from the type of ‘situation’ staged in the social sciences, yet

it is no less of a process. In both areas the participant shifts

with each new discovery; one might argue that they do more so in

the humanities because the situation can be more controlled by

the research than the open field of a workplace that involves

various other subjective participants. Much like an explorer, a

humanities researcher has some idea of where they want to go, but

not an exact idea if this place exists or what the route taken to

get there might look like. How far we travel into another’s

ideas, how much we tend to document/learn, pushes our

‘situational understanding’ of the subject matter.10 One might

start their research with a text on Foucault (just as the

research for this paper began) and then find ideas with the map

10 Ibid. Somekh makes a point of saying that too much exploration of the self in action research can empty the research of its relevant content: “Too much emphasis on the importance of the self in action research can distract the practitioner researcher from the substantive focus of the study. There is a tendency for some action research to become ingrown and 'content-less', so that self-exploration and personal growth seem to become the whole focus and purpose of the research. This may be effective as a form of therapy, but it isdifficult to justify calling it research.” Although this is a valid point, it is hard to say that in humanities research that the research can ever be at a complete remove from the researcher’s subjectivity.

of his text that lead to other places, books, authors, ideas,

websites.

There is no denying that the mental action of research is an

energy field of movements and associations. Gilles Deleuze’s

description of the painting process of Francis Bacon echoes the

experience of the action method of research: “. . .decomposition

and recomposition” producing “confrontation and resonance.”11 One

has to adapt to the changing thoughts and perspectives that

shift, distort, contort the original conception. The purpose of

research is to experience (Erfharung) and it is this action that

initiates reflection and discovery. 12 The openness and

flexibility of active research produces a greater ‘situational

understanding’ of the concept so that the research can better

present their ‘map’ for an audience to follow.

to write is to become13

11Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith, (London: Continuum, 2003), 57. Bacon intensely researched his subjects in-person physically, their personality as well as traces of them in photography.12 Elliot quoted in Somekh: “For Elliott, educational action research is a hermeneutic process of movement back and forth from the particularities of practice to the theories of interpretation, in which, as he puts it; 'Action initiates reflection' (Elliott, 1991, p. 23).”13 Deleuze, “A New Cartographer,” 35.

Of course the mind is a place of action: synapses firing,

cortexes activated, sensations provoked. The subject within the

site of research is in action. Like any act of exploration, part

of active research ‘in the field’ is marked by bouts of

uncertainty14 as we embark into discovery and encounter its dark

and unknown territories. If we knew for sure our conception was

perfect then we would need no research. The process of research

is, in some way, the unfolding of the self through the search.

Therefore you is always, already implied in the creation through

the action of research. John Rajchman in his introduction to

Deleuze’s Pure Immanence, eloquently explains Deleuze’s conception

of experience in creating the subject: “Shown through a ‘diagram’

that one constructs to move about more freely rather than a space

defined by an a priori ‘scheme’ into which one inserts oneself,

it involves a temporality that is always starting up again in the

midst, and relations with others based not in identification or

recognition, but encounter and new composition.”15 We can think

of this field of action as a diagram constructed of a

14 John Rajchman, “Introduction.” In Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, trans. Anne Boyman (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 17. “To think is not to be certain, but, on the contrary, to believe where we cannot know for sure.”15 Rajchman, Pure Immanence, 15.

constellation of concepts contained in the books we choose, the

institutions we visit, the sites we search. Even the researcher

who never deviates from a ticked list of sources had to explore

to find those sources. The action of research is fleeting and

temporal, but leaves the trace (or maybe breadcrumbs) of its

encounters. It is a ‘diagram’ that we construct from our

confrontations with established ideas and it is a diagram that

constructs us in the process of a new composition.16 It is not

that we can completely ‘identify and recognize’ ourselves in the

thoughts of others, rather it is in relation and encounter with

other thoughts that we create understanding.

The city is an obvious field of action and a possible,

actual site of research for any of the humanities; being in the

city though is analogous to being inside of a research project.

The interactions within the diagram of a city help to reinforce

the action inherent in perception/reception. In You Are the City

Kempf uses the city as site to explain ourselves. Cities are

sites of action and reaction: “. . .cities are made up of

16 Somekh explains how problematic the subject is in action research; being heavily embedded in situation, the researcher cannot usually be distanced fromtheir conclusion, making the process less and less scientifically objective.

structurally stable moments in which we are part of an

evolutionary system of temporal relations that ceaselessly

(re)connect points and intersect with our own set of

connections.”17 In the city the subject/researcher is the nexus

of the points of encounter and resonance. The subjectivity of

research is constructed from experience and then reconstructs

experience via writing. In these somewhat architectural terms,

we think of any setting of research (library, museum, discussion)

as having the same active components of the city that Kempf

defines. In the action of research we become our own geography:

moment by moment our vision is continually modified by our

discoveries.18

to write is to draw a map19

One may dismiss the comparison of the research method of

architecture and art (drawing, painting, conceptual) to that of

writing, but the parallels should not be discounted. Because

painting is more generally associated with praxis, it is seen as

17 Kempf, 5.18This idea of moment-by-moment our perceptions shift is a concept I have paraphrased from the study of Cubism, which will come into play later in the paper as a presentation of action research.19 Deleuze, “A New Cartographer,” 5.

active, yet there is a very evident praxis to writing one’s

research in the humanities. That is why I have turned to

theoretical architecture and cubist painting (two methods based

in very active research) to construct a way of understanding the

experience, confrontation and resonance that occur in the field

of humanities research.20

Whether we choose the city as literal site-field of research

or we use its diagram as metaphor, its interactive energy field

helps us to understand the dynamism and temporality of perception

through experience. Our physical (and mental) movements in space

highly influence our experience of research. As already been

explained before, the ability to convey experience with research

is one that is subjective: “As we move about the myriad of spaces

of the city, voluntary or otherwise, we can only experience and

define a city’s location by its stabilizing moments, a delicate

interplay between two states: that of locating ourselves and that

of dislocating ourselves.”21 Research is travel (Erfharung) and

movement through actual sites is similar to the action of moving 20 I had a very hard time finding any explanation of humanities research as a research of action; action in research seems to be solely associated with the social sciences.21 Kempf, 6.

through ideas; it is in the confrontation with these experiences

that we can begin to locate our argument. The presentation of

research as a result of action becomes a difficult task because

one must structure their argument on the ideas of others with

this perceived dislocation (with a voice of authority perhaps)

and further dislocate themselves so that the recipients of the

research have freedom to take it in their own direction.

Kempf’s conceptual architecture project Your are the City

comprehensively deconstructs the city, the generic city, through

what she calls the four operational forces that enable us to

‘invent’ our urban world: “Cosmological Ground; Leglisative

Agencies; Currents, Flows and Forces; Nodes, Loops and

Connections.”22 Each of the four operational forces is divided

into transparent diagrams (literal transparency sheets) that the

participant can use to construct their own subjective map. The

process here of what Kempf calls an “adaptable framing device”23

allows the participant, the receiver of the research, to

recompose a map that suits their own understanding of ‘the’ city.

22 Ibid., 1123 Ibid.

The project reveals what might not be apparent in the

presentation, but is always there, in any humanities research

project: the researcher deforms to form allowing the audience to

subjectively reform their perceptions via the lens of the mapped

thesis. In the end though, it is through her lens that we see

the city.

The method of Cubism, developed by Georges Braque and Pablo

Picasso is another method by which we can understand the action

of research and its translation into a field (map) of action. By

observing an object of research (still life, landscape, or human)

from multiple perspectives the artists break down their subject

by moment of action and reaction then composes it into a field of

perspectives, essentially, a recomposition of their

decomposition. It results in a surface of action as dynamic as

any map, which cartographic theorist John Pickles describes as a

“. . .discussion of fixed and relative location is a rich

evocation of, and dwelling in, a world of symbolic and

metaphorical forms. A map is literally ‘swimming’ with places,

relations, fluxes, meanings and potentialities. . .”24 The

24 Pickles, 6

subjective dissolution/reconstitution of the experiences with

form in cubism creates a plane of potentialities on which the

viewer can begin to make associations and relations of their own

through the filtered gaze of the artist.

Georges Braque called cubism “research into space.”25

Although, Braque was speaking about his exploration into the

literal spatial relationships that had been plaguing painting

since the beginning of modernism, he also presents us with a

problem for any researcher: translation of their experience,

their perceptions into a form in which their conceptions are

clearly read and understood by the observers of their

presentation. It was for Picasso “. . .the simultaneous

representation of entirely different viewpoints, the sum total of which

constitute the object.”26 Through dissolution and fragmentation

Picasso builds up a new surface that is entirely his own

perspective of the object, subjectivity based on prior facts.

Because there was action in praxis there is rhythm in the pace of

the presentation. Painters convey through form, writers convey

25 Arthur I. Miller, Einstein Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty that Causes Havoc (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 131.26 Ibid., 106

through the word: both are compositions. Both are subjective

filters through which the reader receives the object of research.

‘I am a cartographer.’27

In the history of map-making there has never been an

objective map. Maps reveal a political and/or theoretical

agenda. In ancient Rome maps were practical, made for strategic

warfare. In ancient Greece maps focused on science and natural

phenomenon.28 Although they are based on observation of fact,

there is an agenda dictated by a cartographer (chart writer) as a

result of their greater cultural/philosophical/ethnic/religious

context. In ‘action research’ the initiate places themselves and

their perception of the process of activism as the centre of

their situational understanding and eventual presentation of

their finding. In Kempf’s project she takes what she sees as the

general perceptions that construct an urban setting and sections

them as frames that construct the individual’s experience of the

city. In cubism the artist begins with an object of research and

then begins to look at it from different angles at different

27 Deleuze, “A New Cartographer,” 44.28 Crone, 25.

times giving their perception of sight primacy over any other

previous exploration of the object. In any of these (un)finished

products, the viewer is never experiencing what was initially

encountered, but instead a reconstruction of it, removed from the

original primary sources that have become ‘new co-ordinates for

praxis.’29

Research of action and its cartographic reasoning organizes

forms, finalizes functions and gives them new aims.30 The

process of research empowers both the encounter and the

individual researcher and (hopefully) plays out in the

presentation of the map that follows, but there are further

implications to the power of mapping research. As Foucault

explains: “Power is employed and exercised through a net-like

organisation. And not only do individuals circulate between its

threads; they are always in the position of simultaneously

undergoing and exercising this power. They are not only its inert

or consenting target; they are always also the elements of its

articulation. In other words, individuals are the vehicles of

29 Deleuze, “A New Cartographer,” 30.30 Ibid., 33.

power, not its points of application.”31The articulation of

research is an act of stringing all of the threads gathered in

the field of action; the articulation within the structures of

academia is a method of power.

Creating a map (even metaphorically) adds an ethical

component to its presentation. It is a document that is both an

interpretation and something to be interpreted. The researcher

is presenting a way to understanding, an edited path that guides,

by collecting facts and colonizing ideas that existed before to

create a new destination from what has already existed. The

entire system, as Deleuze’s explanation of Foucault’s diagram

tells us, is “no longer an auditory or visual archive but a map,

a cartography that is coexistence with the whole social field.

It is an abstract machine.”32 Cartographers have the power to

create worlds, or at least create a new dialog with existing

ones. The research of action gathers and distills encounters

from a subjective perspective creating a new “world’ of

associations. The only way that the action of research can be

31 Foucault, 98.32 Deleuze, “A New Cartographer, 34.

conveyed beyond the subject of the researcher is to reduce,

confine and serialize the information so it can be accepted and

understood by a broad audience.33

It is in Foucault’s explanation of the power of the diagram

that we can see how a structure that gathers together fragments

of encounters can become a source of authority:

Every diagram is intersocial and constantly evolving. It never functions in order to represent a persisting world butproduces a new kind of reality, a new model of truth. It isneither the subject of history, nor does it survey history. It makes history by unmaking preceding realities and significations, constituting hundreds of points of emergenceor creativity, unexpected conjunctions or improbable continums. It doubles history with a sense of continual evolution.34

When we research, it is essentially our goal to present/create a

unitary discourse. As we create our map, we take ownership of

the materials that we mine and combine. The process of

translating one’s encounters with data can happen in the present

for the researcher, but as they become preserved in presentation,

33 Ibid. “We need only insist that the multiplicity is reduced and confined toa tight space and that the imposition of a form of conduct is done by distributing in space, laying out and serializing in time, composing in space-time, and so-on. The list is endless, but it is always concerned with unformedand unorganized matter and unformalized, unfinalized functions, the two variables being indissolubly linked.”34 Ibid.

they immediately become past to the researcher and future to the

reader that leaves a trace of connection to your source. The

concept we seek to prove as truth colonizes ideas and places them

within a discourse that in one instance is dependent on the

fragments as authority, but on the other, appropriates them as

part of its whole, new authority.

Just as in any act of colonization, there is a danger of

misreading the encounter, appropriating and recoding something by

removing its original intent. This is perhaps the biggest danger

for the humanities cartographer: to be true to the original

context/content of the idea they have experienced. When creating

a map of knowledges, it is our job to know that these knowledges

can and should be questioned as a coherent structure. Through

the process of cartography encounters with primary sources cannot

be distilled so much that they are emptied of their original

intent so they might now only suit the intent of our map.

Conducting research and transforming it into argument is to

mimic the forms of authority that one might seek to call into

question by forging their own path. Yet, in research in the

humanities, there is little alternative to the presentation of

our encounters outside of the written textual map of “The Paper.”

In creating our map, “we are subjected to the production of truth

through power and we cannot exercise power except through the

production of truth.”35 There is an authority to the written

paper, produced by an institutionally sanctioned scholar. The

power of map-making/paper-writing lies in the fact that ideas

mined from scholars now become property of the idea that connects

them. Although the process of creating a map to truth is

subjective, our presentation must work within the perceived,

authoritative structure of impartial objectivity: a well-

referenced research paper. There is great responsibility that

our field of action is true to our individual vision, true to its

primary sources, and true to the institutional power-structure

that gives it authority. The ‘power-relations’ of the sources of

research set up a relation of forces.36 If a researcher creates a

map with just the right balance of accuracy and subjectivity they

35 Foucault, 94.36 Deleuze, “A New Cartographer,” 27.

create a field of action that has a great potential to spawn more

action, of course, dependent on who uses their map.37

Conclusion

I sit in the library most days, nose in a book, scanning for

documents online. Some days I visit the museum to ‘experience’

artifacts in person. Some days there are discovery, most days

there are dead ends and there are many moments when I have no

idea where I am going. But everyday I feel active, engaged,

stimulated to learn. It is action. Within the Erfahrung of

research I can rarely see an end; I see resonance. Finally, in

the process of making my map, I find that I have to re-create/re-

discover the path of how I got there; those twists and turns are

the fragments of action, encounter, perspective, and situational

understanding that make the perceived destination real. I try to

be true when creating my map both to my thesis and to my

encounters. To distill the wealth of action I have experienced

37Deleuze explaining the power of the encounter in relation to the genius of Paul Virilio, “A New Cartographer,” 42. If the “. . .force and originality of [their] own work testifies to the fact that encounters between independent thinkers always occur in a blind zone. On the other hand it is much more serious when less gifted authors swallow the critique whole, and either reproach Foucault for sticking to confinement, or congratulate him for having analysed it so well.”

is the most difficult part of the process: it is action that

exhausts nearly all expression. I hope it is coherent; I hope it

can be followed; but most importantly, I hope it leads someone to

my destination and beyond it. In his explanation of Foucault,

Deleuze offers not the limit of the map, but its possibility,

perhaps explaining why we need the research to make them: “And

from one diagram to the next, new maps are drawn. Thus there is

no diagram that does not also include, besides the points which

it connects up, certain relatively free or unbound points, points

of creativity, change and resistance, and it is perhaps with

these that we ought to being in order to understand the whole

picture.”38

The history of map-making is fraught with misappropriation,

colonization and simplification, but it is also filled with

excitement and wonder at the experience of new places and what

might lie beyond their edges. Cartographers have the power to

inspire through their factually distorted story-telling. They

quench curiosity and stimulate it at the same time. Chart

writing is not merely a form of graphing topology; it is the

38 Ibid., 44.

graphing of ideas. With the whole globe charted what form can

cartography take today? Any form research and writing is an act

of cartography: forging new paths from what already exists.

Because it was the place that I began my exploration of research

as a field of action, I will end with Deleuze by appropriating

the exact same ending of his famous essay on Foucault “A New

Cartographer:” “From this we can get the triple definition of

writing: to write is to struggle and resist; to write is to

become; to write is to draw a map: ‘I am a cartographer.’”39 I

see myself as a cartographer, words construct my map.

39 Ibid.

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