2026-2027 Ghalya Saadawi's seminar: Mapping Totality Part ll

The seminar from Confluence to Confluence

Seminar participants second year: Oliver Turvey, Ella Tegenbos

Seminar participants first year: 

Mapping Totality Part 2

INTRODUCTION:

How does each item in your breakfast arrive to you every morning; what is the history and trajectory of the cotton you wear everyday, are only two of many apparently innocent questions this seminar probes as it considers the totality of flows and social relations under this stage of late capitalism, with a view to artists and filmmakers who engage their work with these various scales of experience and abstraction.  

In last year’s seminar Mapping Totality Part l, we studied Fredric Jameson’s proposal for cognitive mapping, Toscano and Kinkle’s elaboration of this proposition for a Marxist aesthetic in Cartographies of the Absolute, Eyal Weizman on Forensic Architecture, and we watched numerous films and videos. It was an attempt to think the space and time of capitalist totality with a view to aesthetic questions, following on Jameson’s prompt. It involved thinking postmodernism, pastiche, logistics, investigative aesthetics, and so forth. Now we deepen this path by both returning to the two key texts that support this call for an aesthetics of cognitive mapping and also looking at potential critiques; we explore more seriously the notion of totality itself with view to readers of Marx; we focus on logistics as the science of circulation, key to the valorisation of capital and to belligerent war today; and finally we see how the space/time made fathomable by “cognitive mapping” could help us link our study of logistics to the question of infrastructures: spatial, temporal and material.  

What does it mean to elaborate a formal language and practice adequate to the task of depicting social space, time, and class relations under capitalism? This course looks at cognitive mapping as a blueprint for how capitalism is made fathomable in film and art, with a view to political, economic and aesthetic alternatives.

Readings: 

The Promise of Infrastructure (2018). Edited by Nikhil Anand, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel. Duke University Press. 

Jasper Bernes (2015). “Capital and Community. On Melanie Gilligan’s Trilogy.” Mute Magazine. June 23, 2015, last accessed September 2026. https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/capital-and-community-melanie-gilligan%E2%80%99s-trilogy.html.

Deborah Cowen (2014). The Deadly Life of Logistics. Mapping Violence in Global Trade. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 

Martine Danyluk, Charmaine Chua, Deborah Cowen, Laleh Khalili. “Introduction: Turbulent Circulation: Building a Critical Engagement with Logistics.” Society and Space: Environment and Planning, Vol. 36, no. 4 (August 2018). n/p

Harun Farock (2009). Against What? Against Whom? Edited by Antje Ehmann and Kodwo Eshun. London and Berlin: Raven Row and Koenig Books.

Ciaran Finlayson. Perpetual Slavery. New York: Floating Opera Press and Columbia University Press, 2023  

Larne Abse Gogarty (2023). What We Do Is Secret: Contemporary Art and the Antinomies of Conspiracy. London and Berlin: Sternberg Press. 

____. (2025). “Inert Universalism and the Info-optimism of Legibly Political Art.” Selva, no. 4. Last accessed September 2026 https://selvajournal.org/issue/four.

Fredric Jameson. “Cognitive Mapping”. In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. 

___ (1986), “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism”. Social Text  no.15 (Autumn) 63-88.

Martin Jay (1984). Marxism and Totality: The Adventure of a Concept from Lukacs to Habermas. 

Eric Hobsbawm (1984). “Marx and History”. New Left Review I/143, January-February. 

Laleh Khalili (2020). Sinews of War and Trade. London: Verso Books.

Susan Buck Morss (1995). “Envisioning Capital: Political Economy on Display.” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Winter, 1995), pp. 434-467.

Allan Sekula. “Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary.” 

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

Susan Schuppli (2020). Material Witness. Media Forensics Evidence. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Marina Vishmidt (2025). Edited by Larne Abse Gogarty, Danny Hayward, Kerstin Stakemeier. Infrastructural Critique. Contemporary Art between Reproduction and Abolition. London: Verso.