2025-2026 Ghalya Saadawi's seminar: What is Mapping Totality?

The seminar from Confluence to Confluence

Seminar participants second year: Sarmistha Bose,Ilja Schamle, Keit Bonnici, Stellar Meris, Tara White, Zhuang Leng, Rana Kelleci, Sophie Dandanell

Seminar participants first year: Oliver Turvey, Ella Tegenbos, Salome Erni

What is Mapping Totality?

INTRODUCTION:

We continue to live in an era of speculative private rivieras on mass graves. During a genocide in Palestine that has killed and maimed and dispossessed hundreds of thousands, it's prime time for real estate, and Adam Tooze tells us that the Israeli financial markets, “their currency, debt and equity lead the world in terms of appreciation”. Part of Zionist lies of late – in line with international economic and political institutions – has been to peddle the idea that it’s complicated. This is a double-edged sword. Because for them, their ilk and allies, it is pretty complicated. Their capital and ideologies are tied up in all sorts of interests, instruments, and investments. Students who follow-the-money, based their demands and protests primarily on divestment, tracing the billions in endowment proceeds to Israel. The relation between their tuition and the investment portfolios of their university, which began to act like hedge funds, became all too apparent. They connected that colonialism under Balfour and Sykes-Picot was associated with antisemitism in Europe and to subsequent Zionism becoming the Irgun and Stern gangs. They are making historically necessary and inevitable connections on various scales, fathomable and unfathomable.

What is obscene when we watch art continue business-as-usual is precisely this normalisation with barbarism. Representation is in crisis because crisis means genocide under late-stage imperialism; representation is in crisis because art is in crisis, or the inverse? The imperative for the elaboration of a cultural language and practice adequate to what Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle would call the highly ambitious task of depicting social space, time, and class relations in our epoch of late capitalism, is evident.

Throughout 20th 20th-century modernism, from the flaneur, to the surrealists, to the Situationist International, to the black power movements, the question of the city and one’s experience in relation to it (within propertied and political relations) became foregrounded.

Later, spatial politics as a field began to produce theories and aesthetics of connection and systematicity, via engaging with state violence and material witnessing, as well as mapping time and of space (albeit also as Fredric Jameson would point out, a Marxian view of such space grounds it in Taylorization, Fordism and the labour process rather than in that shadowy entity Foucault called power). Today, likely, research architecture and forensic architecture stand as pinnacles of this.

In a presentation in the mid-1980s, in the full swing of the Reaganomics of neoliberalism, poststructuralist post-Marxism, and a temporarily defeated moment in Left strategy, the late Fredric Jameson begins a lecture titled “Cognitive Mapping” (collected in the Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture volume and later in the Gepolitical Aesthetic) by saying:

“I am addressing a subject about which I know nothing whatsoever, except for the fact that it does not exist. The description of a new aesthetic, or the call for it, or its prediction, these things are generally done by artists whose manifestos articulate the originality they hope for in their own work, or by critics who think they already have before their eyes the stirrings and emergences of the radically new.”

In a prelude to cognitive mapping, there is, first, a long history of ‘mapping’ in the avant-gardes and conceptual art of the 20th century to contend with and, second, an inability to be neutral in view of the social totality under capitalism. Thus, any analysis of the cultural logic of this stage of late capitalism (neoliberalism, globalisation, capitalism’s stage of imperialism, call it what you will), needs to ideological as well as historical.

Meaning, you would have to explicitly admit not only to a social totality (its particulars notwithstanding), but also that this totality – the unfathomability of its very temporal and spatial dimensions – alienates us from that very totality.

Anecdotally, David Harvey teaches his introduction to Capital Volume 1 undergraduate classes by asking: Tell me the story of what, where and how you got your breakfast. Or that for an understanding the cotton you are wearing, you must study Mississippi, Manchester, Surat and Kalkuta, all the way to present-day mass farmer suicides over Monsanto debts and monoculture seeds.

“The truth,” Jameson would add, “of that limited daily experience of London lies, rather, in India or Jamaica or Hong Kong; it is bound up with the whole colonial system of the British Empire that determines the very quality of the individual's subjective life. Yet those structural coordinates are no longer accessible to immediate lived experience and are often not even conceptualizable for most people.” And thus, to say that individual experience is authentic, it cannot be true; and that if a cognitive model of that reality is true, then it escapes ‘authentic’ individual experience. Thus, theories of ideology and urban alienation and unmappability meet.

For the analysis to be ideo-historical, it requires attention to time. A theory of temporality. And with it of space. Or, what he called a spatial analysis of culture and politics. How is the political spatial would be to ask how to produce revolutionary socialism in a country from its city, from a community to a region, from a country to internationally. The question of totality was a political one before it was aesthetic.

From forensic architecture investigations to research architecture projects to films on finance to institutional and infrastructural critique and beyond, we consider how some of these may operate as cognitive maps, ‘cartographies of the absolute’, and offer us answers to what is mapping totality and its aesthetic – that may or may not yet exist.

Readings: 

Jameson, Fredric. “Cognitive Mapping.” In Marxism and The Interpretation of Culture. Edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1987.

_____ “The Aesthetics of Singularity.” The New Left Review 92 (March/April 2015): 101-132.

_____ The Geopolitical Aesthetic. Cinema and Space in the World System. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.

Kinkle, Jeff and Alberto Toscano. Cartographies of the Absolute. London: Zero Books, 2015.

Kinkle, Jeff and Alberto Toscano. “Filming the Crisis: A Survey.” Film Quarterly 65 No. 1 (2011): 39–51.

Vishmidt, Marina. What is Infrastructural Critique: Contemporary Art between Reproduction and Abolition. Edited by Larne Abse Gogarty, Danny Hayward, Kerstin Stakemeier. (Forthcoming)

Toscano, Alberto. “The Mirror of Circulation: Allan Sekula and The Logistical Image.” Society and Space, July 31, 2018. https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/the-mirror-of-circulation-allan-sekula-and-the-logistical-image

Hartle, Johan and Samir Gandesha, ed. Aesthetic Marx. London: Bloomsbury, 2017.

Hartley, George. The Abyss of Representation: Marxism and the Postmodern Sublime. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.

Fuller, Matthew and Eyal Weizman. Investigative Aesthetics. London: Verso Books, 2021.

James, C. L. R., and Grace Lee Boggs. Facing Reality. Detroit: Correspondence Publishing Committee, 1958.

James, C. L. R. The Future in the Present: Selected Writings. Brooklyn, New York: Lawrence Hill Books, 1977.

Hobsbawm, Eric. Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day. New York: The New Press, 1999.

Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London: Verso Books, 2018.

Benjamin, Walter. “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century.” In The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Schuppli, Susan. Material Witness: Media Forensics Evidence. Cambridge, MA; London: The MIT Press, 2020.

Bernes, Jasper. “Logistics, Counterlogistics and the Communist Project.” Endnotes 3.

https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/logistics-counterlogistics-and-the-communist-prospect

Mezzadra, Sandro, and Brett Neilson. “Extraction, Logistics, Finance. Global Crisis and the

Politics of Operations.” Radical Philosophy 178 (April 2013): 8–18.

Katzenbach, Christian and Lena Ulbricht. "Algorithmic Governance." Internet Policy Review 8, 4 November 29, 2019. https://policyreview.info/concepts/algorithmic-governance.

David Rieff, "Where Hunger Goes: On the Green Revolution." The Nation, February 17, 2011: 1-9. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/where-hunger-goes-green-revolution/.

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, (2011): 1-44.

Kish, Zenia, and Justin Leroy. “Bonded Life: Technologies of Racial Finance from Slave

Insurance to Philanthrocapital”. Cultural Studies 29, no. 5–6 (September 2015): 630–51.

Chua, Charmaine. “Indurable Monstrosities: Megaships, Megaports, and Transpacific

Infrastructures of Violence” in Futureland Reader, 2018. Lecture of same text

(Sonic Acts). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdkvAXcZD7U.

Suggested film and video:

League of Revolutionary Black Workers: Stewart Bird, Rene Lichtman and Peter Gessner, “Finally Got the News!” 1970

Alan Sekula and Noel Birch, “The Forgotten Space”, 2010

Astra Taylor, “You Are not a Loan”, 2020

Melanie Gilligan, “Crisis in the Credit System”, 2008

Stefanie Black, “Life and Debt”, 2001

Patrick Keiller, “Robinson Trilogy”, 1994, 1997, 2010

Charles Ferguson, “Inside Job”, 2010

Adam Mackay, “The Big Short,” 2015

Mark Karlin, “Between Times”, 1993

Adam Curtis, “Shifty: Living in Britain at the End of the Twentieth Century “ 2025; “Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World”, 2021

FA and RA projects, investigations and films TBD

Patricio Guzman, “Nostalgia De La Luz / Nostalgia for the Light”, 2011

Daniel Goldhaber, “How to Blow up a Pipeline”, 2023