Introduction. Intermediality Is the Map as Much as the Territory

The publication of this issue, titled “Mapping (Intermediality),” marks the fifteenth anniversary of Intermedialités/Intermediality journal. Conceived both as an introduction and a companion piece, the present text thinks of itself as a meditative flânerie moving both through and across the intermedial map. My aim is, on the one hand, to grasp the intermedial potential of the map-as-object and, on the other, to map intermediality in all of its indiscipline. I have identified a series of keywords within the above-cited definition of the map to use as anchoring points for this methodological, geographical, and mediatic journey. In the spirit of the journal, these keywords have been transposed into verbal forms: opening, connecting, detaching/reversing/modifying, drawing/conceiving/constructing, meditating… Mapping intermediality, naturally, is to reflect on the territory of a method, as vast and unbound as it might be, but it is also to ask about the sui generis nature of the map. This double inquiry, then, focuses both on the map as material and media object, and on the map as “operator of mediation.” In the opening pages of A Thousand Plateaus (1980), where Deleuze and Guattari first catalog the constituents of the rhizome, the map—taken as both figure and structure, material object and concept—makes a first appearance, which has not gone unnoticed by those who are interested in material as well as conceptual territories. According to the two philosophers, the map is integrally part of the rhizome—that arborescence that knows neither hierarchy nor limits—and, just as the rhizome, the map is also a symbol of openness, of connection, of fertile (as opposed to sterile) repetition, of transformation. Yet, when considered more closely, this definition is profoundly intermedial: taken as a material object first and foremost (“connectable in all of its dimensions, detachable”), the map is always already falling prey to its own destruction (“torn, reversed”), but it is also able to make visible and further strengthen existing ties. Similar to the numerous intermedial objects that have been discussed in the pages of this journal, the map of A Thousand Plateaus is thus simultaneously a matter of materiality (as an object) and of sociality and even politics (it is “reworked by an individual, group, or social formation”). Deleuze and Guattari have been practicing intermediality without knowing it: not only does their map take for granted the mobilization of different media for the purposes of its own embodiment (“it can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a work of art”), but the map is also part of a social fact (it can be “constructed as a political action or as a meditation”). For about 20 years now, the Montreal version of intermediality, which took hold both in the pages of this journal and around the Center for Intermedial Research in Arts, Literatures, and Technologies (CRIalt), has situated itself at the very intersection between the body of media and their social exterior. From the outset, Intermédialités/Intermediality has positioned itself firmly on the side of humanistic study, in a relational context that goes far beyond that of a mere technicity of transmission—this is further illustrated by the use, since the journal’s inception and in accordance with the original idea of its founder, Éric Méchoulan, of titles that adopt a verbal form in French (infinitive verbs: naître, raconter, aimer, transmettre, jouer, bâtir, archiver, refaire…) and, since 2009, also in English (in that language, the verbs are translated in the present continuous tense: building, archiving, redoing…). Among the journal’s publications, some have explicitly aimed to contribute to a theorization of the intermedial method while, by virtue of the quality, inventiveness, and diversity of their case …