Alberto Toscano - 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 capitalisms 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 capitals 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 cultures 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 analysts 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 drive 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 Jamesons 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

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

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

We operate a distinctive and ethical publishing philosophy in all areas of our business, from our global network of authors to production and worldwide distribution.

This book is dedicated to the memory of Allan Sekula

(1951-2013) and Harun Farocki (1944-2014).

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.

. Charles and Ray Eames, Powers of Ten, 1977

. Alan J. Pakula, All the Presidents Men, 1976

. Surrealist Map of the World, published in Varits, 1929

. Cover illustration, Les Lvres nues #9, 1956

. Cover illustrations for Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

. William Playfair, Time Series of Exports and Imports of Denmark and Norway, from his Commercial and Political Atlas, 1786

. Sidney Lumet, Network, 1976

. Allan Sekula, six photographs from Fish Story, 1989-1995

. Trevor Paglen, KEYHOLE IMPROVED CRYSTAL from Glacier Point (Optical Reconnaissance Satellite; USA 224), 2011

. Trevor Paglen, Code Names: Classified Military and Intelligence Programs (2001-2007), 2009

. Tom Tykwer, The International, 2009

. Dziga Vertov, A Sixth Part of the World, 1926

. Michael Haneke, The Seventh Continent, 1989

. Michael Wadleigh,