Cognitive Mapping
Alberto Toscano & Jeff Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute
Zero Books, 312pp, £15.99, ISBN 9781780992754
reviewed by Alex Fletcher
In a world abounding with mapping devices of various kinds (from SatNavs to GoogleMaps and GIS) there is nonetheless a surfeit of social, political and economic disorientation. Visual art and literature (as well cinema and television) often explore cartographic forms as a means for manufacturing a fragile compass for orienting the increasingly complex spatial and social relations of contemporary global capitalism. Yet such cartographic prominence, as Alberto Toscano & Jeff Kinkle highlight in Cartographies of the Absolute, can also be merely a panacea for political disorientation, or worse, simply a symptom of a more sinister mapping, by governments and corporations, tracking or targeting our most personal movements in order to control and capture both people and profit. ‘Maps have become some of our dearest fetishes’, they write, ‘and some of what we consider to be our relations may just be social relations between maps (or antisocial and antihuman ones, as in drone targeting).’
Cartographies of the Absolute, the title of Toscano and Kinkle’s recently published book, is also the name for their more protracted research project and blog, archiving a sprawling collection of maps and mapping models – from the theoretical to the cultural and sociological. The title is borrowed from Fredric Jameson’s 1992 work The Geopolitical Aesthetic. The phrase is a philosophical variant on Jameson’s notion of ‘cognitive mapping’, borrowed from US urban planner Kevin Lynch’s 1960 book, The Image of the City, which argues that a well-planned city must have a certain ‘imageability’ and thus be mappable to its inhabitants. Jameson transcodes this with Althusser’s definition of ideology (the subject’s imaginary representation of their relation to the Real) as a way of posing the problem of depicting both social space and class relations in late capitalism. The adversity of spatial orientation in our capitalist world system is connected to the structural and hence visually imperceptible social relations of capital itself; a problem not only for visual and cognitive representation, but an impediment to any socialist project. Works that produce intelligible forms of cognitive mapping, according to Jameson, ‘enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole.’
The expression ‘cartographies of the absolute’ therefore encapsulates a certain paradoxical tension for Toscano and Kinkle’s project, bringing together the empirical endeavour of map-making and the philosophical (and theological) category of the ‘absolute’ (something which defies our mortal perception). This paradox is nonetheless real, and thus a productive problem for the authors to pursue. ‘Capitalism, after all,’ for them, drawing on Marx and Walter Benjamin, ‘is a religion of everyday life, an actually-existing metaphysics.’ Toscano and Kinkle, however, do not merely seek to explore the fetish character of capital – dwelling on commodity form’s ‘metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties’ – but attempt to dissect its cultural products as ‘a precondition for identifying any ‘levers’, nerve-centres or weak links in the political anatomy of contemporary domination.’ (There is even a section exploring the contradictions of a socialist cognitive mapping, as a transition to or within its Soviet phase, which turns out to be just as complex as envisioning capitalism’s opacities). Cartographies studies visual and narrative objects that reflect or refract the functioning of global political economy, ‘works that address the place of individuals and collectives within this “sublime” system.’ The book threads its way through a scattered array of diverse cultural forms and genres, gleaning their objects of analysis from critical art practices, Hollywood films and B movies, Guy Debord’s book covers, and HBO television series. Cartographies not only sketches common themes and trends that critically reveal something about our present – what they term ‘an aesthetics of the economy’ – but also scrutinises why many of the works discussed are ‘revealingly disappointing’.
It is particularly at moments of crisis, when the invisible connectivity of the system begins to unravel itself, that it becomes visible. For example, the idling container ships documented in the work of artist and theorist Allan Sekula. Sekula, in his photo-essay Fish Story (1995), takes the shipping container – just as Marx takes the commodity – to narrate both the concrete and abstract processes of capitals flows. The container as narrative emblem is also present in novels such as Gommorah (2006) and William Gibson’s Spook Country (2007), as well as season 2 of The Wire. This box form (what Toscano and Kinkle term a ‘poetics of containerization’) is used to trace the supposedly seamless commodity-chains of circulation which, when cracked open, often reveal human bodily suffering.
Another way of circumventing the problem of representing capital is by ventriloquising it. (In classical rhetoric this is named prosopopoeia, the ‘personation of characters.’) Cartographies takes two amusing examples from American post-73 crisis cinema: Sidney Lumet’s Network (1976) and Alan Pakula’s Rollover (1981). In these films characters channel the ‘unstoppable abstract force of capital, expressed, in an imagery of delirium’, telling us they are mere ‘conduits for a power so encompassing as to make a mockery of any agency’. Being ‘spoken by the speech of capital’ is also on show in the figure of the Oracle in artist Melanie Gilligan’s film series Crisis in the Credit System (2008). Yet, as Toscano and Kinkle argue, personifications of capital can easily slip into mere clichés, as in Isaac Julien’s Playtime (2013) – for them, Julien’s supposedly panoramic view, eschews a ‘complex seeing’ for the superficial and parochial view of the ‘artworld’. Cognitive mapping can also easily slip into conspiracy theory. As Jameson noted, conspiracy ‘is the poor person’s cognitive mapping.’ As Cartographies reiterates, faced with the complexities of global power, people turn to conspiracy theory as ‘an immensely oversimplified narrativisation of amorphous or anonymous global power dynamics’, which is explored through an analysis of Tom Tykwer’s The International (2009).
Two of the most perceptive and detailed case studies in the book – making concrete the intangibility of capital – are investigated via the ‘aesthetics of urban crisis’, intriguingly in a reading of werewolf horror film Wolfen (1981), and, in the more apparent but nonetheless insightful examination of The Wire (2002-8).
While the subject of narrative is typically located at the level of the individual character, causal agency in The Wire is located at the level of the socio-economic system (‘which we can provisionally identify as neoliberal US capitalism and its urban institutions’). As Toscano and Kinkle point out, when an individual character such as McNulty attempts to become a protagonist with causal agency, the systemic weight they experience becomes ‘palpable’. Yet, the inability of characters to ‘wrap their heads around’ the ‘relation between the street gang and the (real) abstractions of political economy’ is for Toscano and Kinkle ‘an epistemological limit shared by the show itself’. When searching the home of the pragmatic deputy of the drug organisation, Stringer Bell, detective McNulty pulls Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations from his bookshelf, exclaiming: ‘Who the fuck was I chasing?’ Cartographies of the Absolute gives us an incredible array of maps, models and compasses for constructing the complex seeing (or a ‘wire’ to tap into) that our present demands. For Toscano and Kinkle, representations of crises need not be crises of representation; study the book and begin to think how to chase the system and see and transcend its limits, not its mere symptoms and personifications.
Cartographies of the Absolute, the title of Toscano and Kinkle’s recently published book, is also the name for their more protracted research project and blog, archiving a sprawling collection of maps and mapping models – from the theoretical to the cultural and sociological. The title is borrowed from Fredric Jameson’s 1992 work The Geopolitical Aesthetic. The phrase is a philosophical variant on Jameson’s notion of ‘cognitive mapping’, borrowed from US urban planner Kevin Lynch’s 1960 book, The Image of the City, which argues that a well-planned city must have a certain ‘imageability’ and thus be mappable to its inhabitants. Jameson transcodes this with Althusser’s definition of ideology (the subject’s imaginary representation of their relation to the Real) as a way of posing the problem of depicting both social space and class relations in late capitalism. The adversity of spatial orientation in our capitalist world system is connected to the structural and hence visually imperceptible social relations of capital itself; a problem not only for visual and cognitive representation, but an impediment to any socialist project. Works that produce intelligible forms of cognitive mapping, according to Jameson, ‘enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole.’
The expression ‘cartographies of the absolute’ therefore encapsulates a certain paradoxical tension for Toscano and Kinkle’s project, bringing together the empirical endeavour of map-making and the philosophical (and theological) category of the ‘absolute’ (something which defies our mortal perception). This paradox is nonetheless real, and thus a productive problem for the authors to pursue. ‘Capitalism, after all,’ for them, drawing on Marx and Walter Benjamin, ‘is a religion of everyday life, an actually-existing metaphysics.’ Toscano and Kinkle, however, do not merely seek to explore the fetish character of capital – dwelling on commodity form’s ‘metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties’ – but attempt to dissect its cultural products as ‘a precondition for identifying any ‘levers’, nerve-centres or weak links in the political anatomy of contemporary domination.’ (There is even a section exploring the contradictions of a socialist cognitive mapping, as a transition to or within its Soviet phase, which turns out to be just as complex as envisioning capitalism’s opacities). Cartographies studies visual and narrative objects that reflect or refract the functioning of global political economy, ‘works that address the place of individuals and collectives within this “sublime” system.’ The book threads its way through a scattered array of diverse cultural forms and genres, gleaning their objects of analysis from critical art practices, Hollywood films and B movies, Guy Debord’s book covers, and HBO television series. Cartographies not only sketches common themes and trends that critically reveal something about our present – what they term ‘an aesthetics of the economy’ – but also scrutinises why many of the works discussed are ‘revealingly disappointing’.
It is particularly at moments of crisis, when the invisible connectivity of the system begins to unravel itself, that it becomes visible. For example, the idling container ships documented in the work of artist and theorist Allan Sekula. Sekula, in his photo-essay Fish Story (1995), takes the shipping container – just as Marx takes the commodity – to narrate both the concrete and abstract processes of capitals flows. The container as narrative emblem is also present in novels such as Gommorah (2006) and William Gibson’s Spook Country (2007), as well as season 2 of The Wire. This box form (what Toscano and Kinkle term a ‘poetics of containerization’) is used to trace the supposedly seamless commodity-chains of circulation which, when cracked open, often reveal human bodily suffering.
Another way of circumventing the problem of representing capital is by ventriloquising it. (In classical rhetoric this is named prosopopoeia, the ‘personation of characters.’) Cartographies takes two amusing examples from American post-73 crisis cinema: Sidney Lumet’s Network (1976) and Alan Pakula’s Rollover (1981). In these films characters channel the ‘unstoppable abstract force of capital, expressed, in an imagery of delirium’, telling us they are mere ‘conduits for a power so encompassing as to make a mockery of any agency’. Being ‘spoken by the speech of capital’ is also on show in the figure of the Oracle in artist Melanie Gilligan’s film series Crisis in the Credit System (2008). Yet, as Toscano and Kinkle argue, personifications of capital can easily slip into mere clichés, as in Isaac Julien’s Playtime (2013) – for them, Julien’s supposedly panoramic view, eschews a ‘complex seeing’ for the superficial and parochial view of the ‘artworld’. Cognitive mapping can also easily slip into conspiracy theory. As Jameson noted, conspiracy ‘is the poor person’s cognitive mapping.’ As Cartographies reiterates, faced with the complexities of global power, people turn to conspiracy theory as ‘an immensely oversimplified narrativisation of amorphous or anonymous global power dynamics’, which is explored through an analysis of Tom Tykwer’s The International (2009).
Two of the most perceptive and detailed case studies in the book – making concrete the intangibility of capital – are investigated via the ‘aesthetics of urban crisis’, intriguingly in a reading of werewolf horror film Wolfen (1981), and, in the more apparent but nonetheless insightful examination of The Wire (2002-8).
While for a show like CSI technology is the real protagonist, in The Wire, it is the urban fabric itself: the city is the critical prism through which to explore the vicissitudes of what The Wire’s creator, David Simon, has called “raw, unencumbered capitalism”.
While the subject of narrative is typically located at the level of the individual character, causal agency in The Wire is located at the level of the socio-economic system (‘which we can provisionally identify as neoliberal US capitalism and its urban institutions’). As Toscano and Kinkle point out, when an individual character such as McNulty attempts to become a protagonist with causal agency, the systemic weight they experience becomes ‘palpable’. Yet, the inability of characters to ‘wrap their heads around’ the ‘relation between the street gang and the (real) abstractions of political economy’ is for Toscano and Kinkle ‘an epistemological limit shared by the show itself’. When searching the home of the pragmatic deputy of the drug organisation, Stringer Bell, detective McNulty pulls Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations from his bookshelf, exclaiming: ‘Who the fuck was I chasing?’ Cartographies of the Absolute gives us an incredible array of maps, models and compasses for constructing the complex seeing (or a ‘wire’ to tap into) that our present demands. For Toscano and Kinkle, representations of crises need not be crises of representation; study the book and begin to think how to chase the system and see and transcend its limits, not its mere symptoms and personifications.