Table Of ContentWHAT 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
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Text copyright: Alberto Toscano & Jeff Kinkle 2014
ISBN: 978 1 78099 275 4
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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.
List of Illustrations
1. Charles and Ray Eames, Powers of Ten, 1977
2. Alan J. Pakula, All the President’s Men, 1976
3. Surrealist Map of the World, published in Variétés, 1929
4. Cover illustration, Les Lèvres nues #9, 1956
5. Cover illustrations for Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
6. William Playfair, Time Series of Exports and Imports of Denmark and Norway, from his
Commercial and Political Atlas, 1786
7. Sidney Lumet, Network, 1976
8. Allan Sekula, six photographs from Fish Story, 1989-1995
9. Trevor Paglen, KEYHOLE IMPROVED CRYSTAL from Glacier Point (Optical
Reconnaissance Satellite; USA 224), 2011
10. Trevor Paglen, Code Names: Classified Military and Intelligence Programs (2001-2007),
2009
11. Tom Tykwer, The International, 2009
12. Dziga Vertov, A Sixth Part of the World, 1926
13. Michael Haneke, The Seventh Continent, 1989
14. Michael Wadleigh, Wolfen, 1981
15. Michael Wadleigh, Wolfen, 1981
16. Walter Hill, The Warriors, 1979
17. Michael Wadleigh, Wolfen, 1981
18. The Wire, 2002-2008
19. The Wire, 2002-2008
20. Marcel L’Herbier, L’Argent, 1928
21. Leslie Cockburn, American Casino, 2009
22. Martha Rosler, Untitled (Cargo Cult), from the series, Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No
Pain, 1965-1974
23. Steve McQueen, Gravesend, 2007
24. Patrick Keiller, Robinson in Space, 1999
25. Jean-Luc Godard, Weekend, 1969
Today we have to realise that the worldwide and worldness, with their hazardous and
unforeseen features, constitute the ‘revolution’ itself, instead of concluding it.
Henri Lefebvre
Kant said he had no time to travel precisely because he wanted to know so much about so
many countries.
Hannah Arendt
A few other clues / we mull them over as we go to sleep, the skeletons of dollarbills, traces of
dead used up / labour, lead away from the death scene until we remember a quiet fit that
everywhere / is the death scene.
Amiri Baraka, ‘Das Kapital’
Everything comes down to Aesthetics and Political Economy.
Stéphane Mallarmé
Description:Cartographies of the Absolute takes us beyond current fashions for perspectivalism and flat ontologies, and beyond the tired (and often quietistic)
