Mapping Place / Troubling Space

In Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit argues, “the walking body can be traced in the places it has made; paths, parks, and sidewalks are traces of the acting out of imagination and desire… Walking shares with making and working that crucial element of engagement of the body and the mind with the world, of knowing the world through the body and the body through the world (2000: 29). In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari famously implore: “Make a map, not a tracing” (2007: 12). They claim that “What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that [the map] is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real” (12). But cannot a trace also be similarly engaged, as Solnit suggests, in “knowing the world through the body”? Krämer further troubles this distinction: “The map can only become an object of critical analysis when it is not at the same time deployed to facilitate movements in disorientating spaces” (2015: 191). In other words, once the map is no longer used for practical purposes, it appears as a trace.