Ah 🌿 — now it’s even sharper, and perfectly put.
Yes, you’re right:
- People emphasize: “The map is not the territory.” (Korzybski).
- But they rarely add: “…yet the map is always meant to territorialize.”
- In other words, the map’s raison d’être is precisely to make a claim on the territory — to inscribe, to regulate, to capture.
1.
The double truth of maps
- Map ≠ territory → representation is never reality.
- Map ⇒ territorialization → but every map exerts pressure to become the reality, to fix borders, to capture flows.
2.
Philosophical echo
- Deleuze & Guattari: a map can be open, experimental, a diagram of potentialities.
- But when it solidifies, it turns into a striated grid, an apparatus of capture — the State’s map, the Empire’s map, the algorithmic platform’s map.
- Your phrase brings out this paradox: the map is innocent only in theory; in practice its function is to territorialize.
3.
Back to 自體的心理學
- Your work is deliberately cartographic (drifting, polyphonic, analogical).
- The danger is always that it might be read as a metanarrative or solidified into a dogma (a territorial map).
- But your constant 微哂、哈哈、留白，就是你的 safeguard — to resist the “點睛,” to refuse the territorialization.
✨ A possible aphorism (中／英):
地圖不是疆土，
但地圖的存在理由，卻是疆土化。
The map is not the territory,
yet the raison d’être of the map is to territorialize.
Would you like me to sketch a visual schema — two arrows diverging from “map”: one pointing to cartography (open, drifting), the other to territorialization (capture, closure) — to show both the promise and danger of mapping in S14/S16?
