ABSTRACT
33Mapping is perhaps the most analysed of the three modes of governance, heuristically drawn out in this book as illustrative of the ontopolitics of the Anthropocene. While the critique of, and distance from, modernist governance assumptions is clear in the other two modes, Mapping as a mode of governance has a more conceptually mixed trajectory, which takes discourses of Mapping from neoliberal critiques of classical liberal modernist assumptions through to the contemporary philosophical concerns of computational assemblages and object-oriented ontology. This chapter thereby analyses the development of Mapping as a mode of governance, starting with a brief engagement with the neoliberal critique of modernist assumptions of the human subject and of rationalist claims to knowledge and the development of this framework of thinking in the field of systems ecology and philosophically through the approach of assemblage theory. The next chapter analyses in more depth the debates around Mapping as a mode of governance in the international sphere, in which the epistemological limits to intervening in non-linear processes are at the heart of policy concerns.
