Not a Schema: Notes on the Anxiety of Mapping

Abstract

A collective consideration of schema across the different fields and disciplines that intersect philosophy and architecture comes, inevitably it seems, to address also “map” and its making, as if an overlap and identity of “schema” and “map” might be not only possible but indeed obvious. Map and schema normally coincide. But do they? And if they do, how and when? And what are the tensions at stake in this supposed coincidence? The purpose of this text is to undo this presupposition, by exposing – through undoing – the complexity of the map, its ambiguous relation with becoming, and its state of intentional and necessary imperfection, to argue that the map is not a schema...