Cartographies of the Absolute

263 Pages·2015·2.52 MB·English

by  Alberto Toscano

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT
CARTOGRAPHIES OF THE ABSOLUTE
Cartographies of the Absolute takes us beyond current fashions for
perspectivalism and flat ontologies, and beyond the tired (and often
quietistic) formulae that argue how capitalism’s modern complexities
must remain forever beyond human grasp. Bringing vital insights to a
range of aesthetic practices – and recognising the torsions, refractions
and ruses required to puncture the reified social forms before us –
Toscano and Kinkle elaborate a praxis of dissident totalisation to counter
capital’s limited horizons.
Gail Day, author of Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory
Culture, in the last decade, has had a simple duty: to be the dreamlife of
the bust. It has answered this call in ways uneven, tawdry, messed up,
beautiful – but it has finally not failed to make a veiled reading of this
obscene catastrophe. But how then to wake from the purling images,
how to leap from dream to map of the present? Here we need ideal
readers of culture’s readings, and none have come closer than Alberto
Toscano and Jeff Kinkle. Their bravura cleavings of spectacular
representation and the transformations of global capital become
themselves a kind of new knowledge, a kind of psychelocation from
which we might take an orientation and a sense of possibility.
Joshua Clover, author of the Totality for Kids and 1989
How this complex, chaotic, vicious system of exploitation called
capitalism has been rendered by TV writers, Hollywood directors, and
glamorous or struggling artists forms the theme of this book. From box
sets to boxes floating across the seas, from dialectical thinking to
diabolical reckoning: it is all here, laid out, picked out and unpicked,
absorbed and turned over. Rubbish practices are called out, whether
they originate in governments or the artworld. Cognitive mapping,
which may be the poor analyst’s conspiracy theory, gets its abstractions
made real. Read it and move more consciously and dialectically through
the globe.
Esther Leslie, author of Walter Benjamin and Synthetic Worlds: Nature,
Art and the Chemical Industry
A grand tour de force of western cognitive maps and a searching dérive
through anti-capitalist dimensions of theory, media and art – now
pulsing on the rotting flesh of the world system. With critical acumen,
serious political commitment and more than a modicum of erudite cool,
Toscano and Kinkle revisit Jameson’s landmark work on cognitive
mapping and, by drawing extensively on the Marxist critical tradition,
forward the life and death project of teaching readers to read in a
dialectical mode. Grasping the aesthetic as at once program and
battleground, they clearly manifest the necessity, the stakes, and the
fine-grained resolution of a radical critical practice.
Jonathan Beller, author of The Cinematic Mode of Production

First published by Zero Books, 2015
Zero Books is an imprint of John Hunt Publishing Ltd., Laurel House, Station Approach,
Alresford, Hants, SO24 9JH, UK
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Text copyright: Alberto Toscano & Jeff Kinkle 2014
ISBN: 978 1 78099 275 4
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book
may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publishers.
The rights of Alberto Toscano & Jeff Kinkle as authors have been asserted in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Design: Stuart Davies
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
Introduction. The Limits of the Known Universe, or, Cognitive
Mapping Revisited
PART I. THE AESTHETICS OF THE ECONOMY
Prologue. What Does the Spectacle Look Like?
Chapter 1. Capitalism and Panorama
Chapter 2. Seeing Socialism
PART II. CITIES AND CRISES
Prologue. Slums and Flows
Chapter 3. Werewolf Hunger (New York, 1970s)
Chapter 4. Baltimore as World and Representation (The Wire, 2002-
2008)
Chapter 5. Filming the Crisis (2008- )
PART III. MONSIEUR LE CAPITAL AND MADAME LA TERRE
Prologue. Cargo Cult
Chapter 6. The Art of Logistics
Chapter 7. Landscapes of Dead Labour
Conclusion
Notes
This book is dedicated to the memory of Allan Sekula
(1951-2013) and Harun Farocki (1944-2014).
Acknowledgements
This book has taken shape over several years and many people have
given us invaluable feedback, support and inspiration at various stages
of the process. Thanks especially to Brenna Bhandar, Gail Day, Benjamin
Noys, Steve Edwards, Evan Calder Williams, Go Hirasawa, Harry
Harootunian, Jason Smith, Christopher Connery, Matteo Mandarini,
Emanuel Almborg, Kate Sennert, Dan Fetherston, and Jane and Jeff E.
Kinkle.
Early versions of arguments and ideas that have found their way into
the book appeared in Infinite Thought, Dossier, Film Quarterly, Mute, The
Sociological Review, the Taipei Biennial journal and the forthcoming book
ECONOMY. Thanks to Nina Power, Rob White, Benedict Seymour,
Josephine Berry-Slater, Anthony Iles, Nirmal Puwar, Brian Kuan Wood,
Les Back, and Angela Dimitrakaki for their intellectual hospitality and
engagement. We are grateful too to our hosts and audiences at the
Auguste Orts gallery, the Tate Modern, University of Wolverhampton,
University of Alberta, Phaidon Bookshop, Simon Fraser University, the
University of Shanghai, and the Marxist Literary Group conference in
Vancouver. In particular we remain indebted to the Marxism in Culture
seminar and the Historical Materialism conference, where the earliest
versions of this project were delivered, for their unique combination of
comradeship and ruthless criticism of all that exists.
Alberto would also like to thank the several cohorts of students of his
Mapping Capitalism graduate course, for having engaged with these ideas,
and introducing him to artists and projects he was unaware of, some of
which have found their way into this book.
Finally, we are immensely grateful to Allan Sekula and Sally Stein,
Trevor Paglen, Patrick Keiller and Martha Rosler for allowing us to
reproduce their images in these pages, and to Trevor Barnes and Nik
Heynen for the Bunge cover image. The Paglen images are courtesy of
Metro Pictures, New York; Altman Siegel, San Francisco; Galerie Thomas
Zander, Cologne. We hope the inevitably limited quality of the
reproductions will be an added incentive for our readers to immerse
themselves in the inspiring contributions of these artists to an aesthetics
in and against capitalism.