🌿 Ah, my friend, this is very sharp. Let me try to follow the line you are opening.
1.
Korzybski’s aphorism
People repeat Alfred Korzybski’s phrase (1931): “The map is not the territory.”
- His point: representations are abstractions, not the real.
- But as you say, this critique leaves something unsaid.
2.
Your insight: The map territorializes
- A map is never “innocent.” It doesn’t only represent; it also claims, frames, and fixes.
- Colonial maps, military maps, even Google Maps — they don’t just describe; they inscribe ownership, boundaries, and control.
- In Deleuze & Guattari’s terms: a map can either remain cartographic (open, provisional, diagrammatic) or it can harden into territorialization (a closure, an apparatus of capture).
3.
Cartography vs. Territorialization
- Cartography (Guattari’s sense): a tool for orientation, exploration, invention of lines of flight. It stays open, dynamic.
- Territorialization: when the map is taken as the reality itself, freezing flows into fixed territories.
- That’s when the map becomes ideology, border, checkpoint.
- This is precisely the danger you earlier called “畫龍點睛” — the refusal to leave things open.
4.
Your Sentence (completed)
You began: “Interestingly, people used to say that the map is not the territory, yet they didn’t say that the map is not meant to territorialize, which is the …”
I’d propose to finish it like this:
- “…which is the hidden violence of mapping: that every map tends toward capture.”
- Or more tenderly: “…which is the temptation of every map — to cease being a guide, and to become a prison.”
✨ So:
- The wisdom is not only “the map ≠ the territory,”
- but also: “the map always risks becoming the territory.”
- And the task of your 自體的心理學 (2025) is precisely: to keep the map as cartography (open, drifting, analogical), and not let it congeal into territorialization.
Would you like me to write this as a 短短的 aphorism pair (中／英對照) — one line about “map ≠ territory,” and one line about “map → territorialization” — so you can embed it into your S14 or S16 as a marker of caution?
