webs and maps

Derek has a useful metaphor developed about certain strands in his application of Derrida and Brand. I haven’t looked at Derrida in almost two years, and know less about Brand’s work. But Derek’s use of language and imagery help him create a cogent treatment.

I’m revisiting some old notes in an attempt to restart my qualifying exams. I came across a thread I had been following (through Hardt and Reich) into a space in which technical communicators learn to see their subjects not as collections of discretely compartmentalized units, but as “webs” of interrelated and overlapping elements – as cognitive maps giving topological shape to subjects. This is what brought to mind Derek’s work.

In The Geopolitical Aesthetic, Frederic Jameson describes cognitive maps as simplified structures and categories that people adopt to navigate and understand the vast surroundings and relationships in which they find themselves enmeshed.

“Cognitive maps as representations of our ideology (our [mis]understanding of our material and economic conditions). Our ideology naturally involves simplification because our material and economic conditions are beyond complete recognition. Like geographic features, our beliefs, understandings, ideas, prejudices, and blind spots navigate us.”

Implications for technical communicators: We have to rethink what is meant by analysis and interpretation. In common practice, much of our analysis and interpretation is structured, linear, and rule-bound procedure. For the modern technical communicator – the informationist -- analysis and interpretation means throwing out rules and seeing what understanding and possibilities emerge that were not visible before (extreme design/development methodologies?). As informationists, we have the purpose to look beyond preconceptions of how systems work and imagine new representations of the spaces in which they operate.