[D66] Cartographies of the Absolute

Sun Apr 12 10:45:12 CEST 2015

Cartographies of the Absolute
An aesthetics of the economy for the twenty-first century.

  * Alberto Toscano <http://www.zero-books.net/authors/alberto-toscano>
  * Jeff Kinkle <http://www.zero-books.net/authors/jeff-kinkle>

Can capital be seen? Cartographies of the Absolute surveys the disparate
answers to this question offered by artists, film-makers, writers and
theorists over the past few decades. It zones in on the crises of
representation that have accompanied the enduring crisis of capitalism,
foregrounding the production of new visions and artefacts that wrestle
with the vastness, invisibility and complexity of the abstractions that
rule our lives.
REVIEWS & ENDORSEMENTS

  * How much of capitalism can we see from the moon? This remarkable,
    unclassifiable book sets out to map the ways. Cartographies takes as
    its object representation as such, which it tracks through theories,
    models, visual works, films, novels, engineering projects and whole
    cities: it is an immense museum exhibition of artefacts material and
    mental which attempt, consciously or not, to convey the totalisation
    implacably at work everywhere in late capitalism. But this is also a
    profoundly theoretical work: indeed, it summons us to think new
    philosophical thoughts about this system and how to make it visible.
    We ought to emerge from it with a new conception of the tasks of
    criticism and the production of art itself. 
    /~ Fredric Jameson, author of Representing Capital and The
    Antinomies of Realism/
  * Cartographies of the Absolute is an essential guide to the most
    formidable and urgent questions about how we see, represent and try
    to understand the greatest forces shaping our historical moment.
    /~ Trevor Paglen, artist and author of Blank Spots on the Map: The
    Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World/
  * 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/

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DETAILS

  * Paperback £15.99 || $26.95
  * Feb 27, 2015. 978-1-78099-275-4.
  * *BUY* | AMAZON US
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    UK
    <http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cartographies-Absolute-Alberto-Toscano-Kinkle/dp/1780992750%3FSubscriptionId%3DAKIAIOJGEB6643FVTU7Q%26tag%3Dwwwobookscom-21%26linkCode%3Dxm2%26camp%3D2025%26creative%3D165953%26creativeASIN%3D1780992750>
  * eBook £6.99 || $9.99
  * Feb 27, 2015. 978-1-78279-973-3.
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SEE ALSO

  * PHILOSOPHY <javascript:void(null)>
      o -> Aesthetics <http://www.zero-books.net/index.php?id=98&i=9&p=2856>

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