Paris, France. September 19, 2009.

The allegories of the map discussed so far – positionality, movement and practices – set out the modalities through which subjects come to place themselves in the power-ridden, discursively-constituted, practically-limited, materially-bounded identities. The subject assumes, in both senses of the word, an identity on the basis of commonality with others and yet that subject, in both senses of the word, assumes that they are an individual: unique, sovereign. The formation of the subject also takes place, and fails, within the fields of encounters with others – but this field is striated with simultaneous, different power relations. Some anecdotes will help illuminate these rather dense introductory remarks: each will be set within a context which sheds light on the question of mapping subjectivity in the spaces and between the conflictual and incoherent self and the incommensurable and indissoluble other. There are five case stories.

[The first case story.] A man is sitting on a park bench, he is alone. Nothing stands in the way of the man’s presumption that the park is there for him to look at. His eye can roam over the landscape without challenge, nothing disturbs his power to look at whatever pleases him. The man is at the centre of his world – he owns what he sees and, in this scene, his is also self-possessed because nothing disturbs his thoughts. This ‘megalomania’ is shattered, however, by the intrusion of another into the park. The lord and master of all he surveys has suddenly become off-centered, the lines of power have become reoriented: the man no longer controls the scene, lines of power converge on the intersubjectivity between the two people and between them and the scene of the encounter.

Excerpted from Mapping the Subject: Geographies of Cultural Transformation, written and edited by Steve Pile and N. J. Thrift. Published by Routledge, London, 1995.