Jameson\u2019s conception of cognitive mapping sought to foreground \u201cthe cognitive and pedagogical dimensions of political art and culture.\u201d3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism<\/em> (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 50.<\/span> However, along with its role in representing and teaching the \u201cunlived, abstract conceptions of the geographic totality,\u201d it was further tasked by Jameson with incorporating the \u201ccoordination of existential data (the empirical position of the subject).\u201d4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Ibid., 52.<\/span> This suggests a more complex demand, including the need to take into account one\u2019s own implication in the constitution of totality\u200a\u2014\u200aand the role of mapping as well. This brings into play a whole host of other practices that may or may not look like maps in the traditional sense, which I hope to address as we trace the relevance of cognitive mapping in the present.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jameson\u2019s descriptions of postmodern aesthetics still ring uncannily true for artworks produced from and for globalized networks today, when aesthetic production \u201chas become integrated into commodity production generally.\u201d5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Ibid., 4.<\/span> Jameson\u2019s concerns resonate with the work and ideas associated with the currently popular post-Internet label, for instance. Art that identifies its existential conditions with those of commodities, that is reduced to its circulation, and that concentrates on the superficiality of the photograph\u200a\u2014\u200athese are all motifs specified in the pages of Jameson\u2019s essay. Despite the continuities, we need to recognize the further advancement of certain aspects only nascent in postmodernism\u2019s heyday. Key features of Jameson\u2019s diagnosis of the postmodern era\u200a\u2014\u200aits spatialized character, its schizophrenia, its historical disorientation\u200a\u2014\u200ahave become only more exaggerated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Initially, perhaps, it seemed like a problem of perception; we simply could not \u201cgrasp our positioning.\u201d6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Ibid., 54.<\/span> It was impossible to comprehend how this sublime bogey-economy could encircle the globe. If cognitive mapping were only about making the global visible, as some optimistic technologist thinking goes, then one might conclude that we were already getting close. (What is a self-driving car, after all, if not the ultimate resolution to the dangers of spatial bewilderment, pace<\/em> Jaron Lanier.) In the present world, however, maps surround us and give us, in real time, all the information we need to know our place in the world. Consider, for instance, Jameson\u2019s nervousness about photographic flatness when, in the work of Warhol and photorealist painters, its potentially realist use was drained of affect. Today there develops a cluster of problems having more to do with photography\u2019s reference to an \u201coriginal\u201d than with its exemplary non-originality. When circulation is written into images, devices decode location through image recognition and metadata without much fanfare, easily pinpointing fleshly identities. The multiple indexical registers of digital photography enhance their pedagogical potential to some degree. But with the omniscience granted by technological prostheses, we tacitly agree to, or have little choice in, the fact that the mapping is being done to us, rather than by us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Artwork tasked with producing literal maps has been taken up by generations of artists, especially those beginning in the post-war era.7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - See a brief survey in Ruth Watson, \u201cMapping and Contemporary Art,\u201d The Cartographic Journal<\/em> 46, no. 4 (November 2009): 293\u200a\u2014\u200a307. Watson\u2019s insight about the intimate relationship between maps and war is particularly worthy of further inquiry.<\/span> Artists have made use of maps\u2019 communicative graphics and data incorporation as extensions of art\u2019s sites, as conceptual pathways, or as subversions of the voice of authority. An incredibly varied range of artworks has ensued. Though it isn\u2019t the purpose of this article to enumerate and analyze all examples of such work, it would surely be interesting to consider each according to Jameson\u2019s use of the term \u201cmapping.\u201d In light of the current topic, one could point to lineages of practices that produce maps to highlight global power relations, such as the flow charts of the late Mark Lombardi (United States) and the Bureau d\u2019\u00c9tudes (France), or works that use GPS technologies to track a multiplicity of actions, such as the installations of Esther Polak and Ivar van Bekkum (the Netherlands) and the tactical media project Transborder Immigrant Tool (United States). Challenging power motivates many artists who work with references to cartography, given its proximity to historical and governmental forces such as militarism and colonialism. These are indeed difficult to put into perspective, as they stretch toward science in their pedagogical appeal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Further to its aforementioned uses in the surveillance apparatus, in our time the scientific sphere of cartography sits uncomfortably close to the terms of the knowledge economy. Art practices that support serious engagement with the field of cartography can at times enjoy certain protections and privileges within university faculties and state agencies. This doesn\u2019t mean that knowledge and strategy are condemned tout court<\/em> as privileged\u200a\u2014\u200aif we keep in mind that ideology was crucial to Jameson\u2019s conception of cognitive mapping.8<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 8 <\/a> - \u201cIdeology has then the function of somehow inventing a way of articulating those two distinct dimensions [\u2018existential experience and scientific knowledge\u2019] with each other.\u201d Jameson, Postmodernism<\/em>, 53.<\/span> In his calls for a return of the pedagogical function of aesthetics, Jameson did not intend only the scalar translations that demonstrate our relativity as beings in a world, nor did he seem to be suggesting an approach such as tactical media, whose interventions were claimed by some as superior to the ideology-soaked dissident practices of yore.9<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 9 <\/a> - See Gregory Sholette\u2019s criticisms of tactical media in Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture <\/em>(London: Pluto Press, 2011), 35.<\/span> Diagrammatic simplification and avant-gardism in technologically excitable work would some\u00adtimes seem to cut away ideology as so much long hair. For Jameson, bearing the long hair of ideology is essential to getting your bearings.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n To bear us along, the textual clippings that Jameson posits as archetypal to postmodernism have to regain a certain degree of narrativity.10<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 10 <\/a> - \u201cThe former work of art, in other words, has now turned out to be a text, whose reading proceeds by differentiation rather than unification\u201d (Jameson, Postmodernism, <\/em>31). Unfortunately, this is not the place for the highly important investigation into \u201ctraditional\u201d narration practices in various cultures as relational mapping models.<\/span> In evoking Brecht and Lukacs, Jameson clearly has the history of Realism in mind, but realist narratives are not without their problematic detours. Think of the scandal around the theatrical monologue The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs<\/em> (2010), author Mike Daisey\u2019s \u201ccreative\u201d account of Foxconn, and the real experience of the global supply chain. When it was discovered that Daisey had embellished his supposedly non-fictional account with characters and events in order to inject more human content into it, it aroused disgrace from the journalistic community. But surely this theatricalizing of transnational capital would be permitted as pedagogical realism from certain angles? The pedagogical style still counts; the ligament between propaganda and cognitive mapping may get taut, but the two are discrete. Compare The Agony <\/em>to Allan Sekula and No\u00ebl Burch\u2019s The Forgotten Space<\/em> (2010), which explored the central but unimaged role of the sea in the space of globalization by documenting a range of seemingly disparate moments in the social and historical development of the international shipping industry. Although uncovering the human costs of globalization was the task of both works, the former narrative took liberties for emotional impact, whereas the latter gave evidentiary vision (fragmentary, but admittedly syndicalist at heart) to the banal material and labour conditions of outsourcing. Both may have presented ideologically driven stories connecting human gestures to boundless systems, but by concealing ideology with a forced sentimentality, Daisey was pulled closer to the language of advertising.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The artwork since Jameson\u2019s Postmodernism<\/em> that had most centrally taken up the question of ideology would surely include practices associated with institutional critique. Artists such as Hans Haacke\u200a\u2014\u200awhose work Jameson singled out for dealing with a \u201ccrisis in mapping\u201d11<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 11 <\/a> - See Fredric Jameson, \u201cHans Haacke and the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism\u201d in Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business<\/em> (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 38.<\/span> \u2014\u200amade their inroads by charting the latent ideologies of ostensibly neutral institutions. They were reorienting in that they shed the layers of naturalization that power accumulated, but they were always specific. Therefore, rather than conveying totality, they hinted at it by pointing to its fragmentation into numerous \u201csemi-autonomous\u201d institutions. As critique becomes demanded by art institutions and, according to critic Suhail Malik, contemporary art takes on the form of a permanent gaseous entity absorbing all the black pucks of negation launched into it, the relationship between critical art and its institutional support gets a little convoluted. Following the line deeper into the institution\u200a\u2014\u200aseen as the exclusive jurisdiction of critique\u200a\u2014\u200amovement toward the outside is precluded as naughty idealism.12<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 12 <\/a> - \u201cAnarcho-realism\u201d is the term that Suhail Malik uses for this in his series of talks called \u201cOn the Necessity of Art\u2019s Exit from Contemporary Art\u201d held in 2013 at Artists Space in New York (also the topic of a forthcoming book): http:\/\/artistsspace.org\/programs\/on-the-necessity-of-arts-exit-from-contemporary-art.<\/span> Once we reach the point that this very inward turn is conceived as the only exit, the global meaning of cognitive mapping takes on very small proportions indeed. However, following Jameson\u2019s earlier diagnosis of the conjoining of aesthetic and commodity production, if everything is cultural and commodity, the inside-outside dichotomy is not so easily maintained. This doesn\u2019t mean that consumerism becomes the only game in town, as espoused by discourses in market-reflexivity and suggested by neologisms such as \u201cepistemology of search.\u201d13<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 13 <\/a> - Isabelle Graw\u2019s High Price: Art between the Market and Celebrity Culture<\/em> (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010) offers a consistent example of the former; the latter term is David Joselit\u2019s in After Art<\/em> (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013). On the links between financial power and art, Joselit also advises, \u201cThe point is not to deny this power through postures of political negation or to brush it under the carpet in fear of \u2018selling out.\u2019 The point is to use <\/em>this power.\u201d<\/span> What it means is that we are still on the lookout for a transitional space that allows us to move between spaces, between our particular \u201cempirical\u201d situation and the horizon of the global. The question of autonomy thus arises again, as a space that is produced politically and intentionally, rather than as the space reserved for aesthetic contemplation. It cannot be completed practically, or it would result only in the atomism that, as Jameson warns, protects something as vast as late or neoliberal capitalism from being even conceived and mapped. Starting from totality, on the other hand, \u201chas come to carry overtones of conspiracy and paranoia with it.\u201d14<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 14 <\/a> - Jameson, \u201cHans Haacke,\u201d 56.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n Depuis Postmodernism<\/em>, les \u0153uvres qui ont accord\u00e9 une place significative \u00e0 la question de l\u2019id\u00e9ologie se rencontrent en particulier dans le champ de la critique institutionnelle. Des artistes comme Hans Haacke \u2013 dont la singularit\u00e9, selon Jameson, \u00e9tait de r\u00e9pondre \u00e0 une \u00ab\u2009crise de la cartographie15<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 15 <\/a> - Voir Fredric Jameson, \u00ab\u2009Hans Haacke and the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism\u2009\u00bb, Hans Haacke: Unfinished Business<\/em>, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1986, p. 38.<\/span>\u2009\u00bb \u2013 se sont fait connaitre en dressant la carte des id\u00e9ologies qui sous-tendent certaines institutions officiellement neutres. Leurs d\u00e9marches ouvraient de nouvelles perspectives en d\u00e9shabillant le pouvoir de ses couches de naturalisation progressives, mais leur objet demeurait sp\u00e9cifique. Ainsi, au lieu de repr\u00e9senter la totalit\u00e9, elles y font allusion en r\u00e9v\u00e9lant sa fragmentation sous l\u2019apparence de multiples institutions \u00ab\u2009semi-autonomes\u2009\u00bb. La critique \u00e9tant d\u00e9sormais recherch\u00e9e dans le milieu des institutions artistiques, et l\u2019art contemporain ayant pris la forme, selon le critique Suhail Malik, d\u2019une entit\u00e9 gazeuse absorbant continuellement tous les \u00e9l\u00e9ments n\u00e9gatifs qui le remettent en question, la relation entre l\u2019art contemporain et son soutien institutionnel devient quelque peu alambiqu\u00e9e. Si l\u2019on poursuit cette voie au sein de l\u2019institution \u2013 consid\u00e9r\u00e9e comme la juridiction exclusive de la critique \u2013, tout mouvement vers l\u2019ext\u00e9rieur est proscrit pour id\u00e9alisme malsain16<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 16 <\/a> - \u00ab\u2009Anarcho-r\u00e9alisme\u2009\u00bb est le terme que Suhail Malik utilise pour d\u00e9signer cette id\u00e9e, dans sa s\u00e9rie de conf\u00e9rences intitul\u00e9e \u00ab\u2009On the Necessity of Art\u2019s Exit from Contemporary Art\u2009\u00bb propos\u00e9e en 2013 par l\u2019Artists Space \u00e0 New York (sujet d\u2019un prochain livre), <http:\/\/artistsspace.org\/programs\/on-the-necessity-of-arts-exit-from-contemporary-art>.<\/span>. Lorsqu\u2019on atteint le stade o\u00f9 cette d\u00e9marche autor\u00e9f\u00e9rentielle devient l\u2019unique porte de sortie, le champ de la cartographie cognitive s\u2019en trouve singuli\u00e8rement r\u00e9tr\u00e9ci. Cependant, d\u2019apr\u00e8s le diagnostic de Jameson \u00e9voqu\u00e9 plus haut sur l\u2019assimilation de la production esth\u00e9tique avec la production de biens, si tout est culturel et commercialisable, la dichotomie int\u00e9rieur-ext\u00e9rieur n\u2019est pas si ais\u00e9e \u00e0 maintenir. Cela ne signifie pas que le consum\u00e9risme devienne le seul sc\u00e9nario possible, comme pourraient le faire croire les discours sur la r\u00e9flexivit\u00e9 du march\u00e9 de l\u2019art, ou l\u2019emploi de n\u00e9ologismes \u00e9voquant par exemple une \u00ab\u2009\u00e9pist\u00e9mologie de la fonction recherche17<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 17 <\/a> - Isabelle Graw d\u00e9veloppe ce type de discours dans High Price: Art between the Market and Celebrity Culture<\/em>, Berlin, Sternberg Press, 2010\u2009; la seconde expression est de David Joselit dans After Art<\/em>, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2013. Au sujet du rapport entre l\u2019art et le pouvoir financier, Joselit souligne\u2009: \u00ab\u2009Il ne s\u2019agit pas de d\u00e9nier ce pouvoir par des gestes de n\u00e9gation politique, ou de s\u2019abstenir d\u2019en parler par crainte de faire chuter sa cote. Il s\u2019agit d\u2019utiliser<\/em> ce pouvoir.\u2009\u00bb<\/span>\u2009\u00bb. Cela signifie que nous sommes encore en qu\u00eate d\u2019un espace transitionnel qui nous permette de circuler entre les espaces, en l\u2019occurrence celui de notre situation \u00ab\u2009empirique\u2009\u00bb particuli\u00e8re et l\u2019horizon de la globalit\u00e9. Nous retrouvons donc ici la question de l\u2019autonomie, sous la forme d\u2019un espace cr\u00e9\u00e9 politiquement et intentionnellement, et non d\u2019un espace r\u00e9serv\u00e9 \u00e0 la contemplation esth\u00e9tique. Sa r\u00e9alisation concr\u00e8te est impossible, ou elle aboutirait \u00e0 un atomisme qui, nous avertit Jameson, nous emp\u00eache tout simplement de concevoir ou de cartographier un ph\u00e9nom\u00e8ne aussi vaste que le capitalisme tardif ou n\u00e9olib\u00e9ral. Prendre la totalit\u00e9 comme point de d\u00e9part, en revanche, \u00ab\u2009v\u00e9hicule d\u00e9sormais des connotations de conspiration et de parano\u00efa18<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 18 <\/a> - Fredric Jameson, \u00ab\u2009Hans Haacke\u2009\u00bb, op. cit., p. 56.<\/span>\u2009\u00bb.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The experiential mapping practices of the Compass Group\u2019s Continental Drift project comprise \u201ca collective and mobile project of inquiry\u201d that aims to \u201cexplore the five scales of contemporary existence: the intimate, the local, the national, the continental and the global.\u201d19<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 19 <\/a> - Claire Pentecost, \u201cNotes on the Project Called Continental Drift\u201d in Deep Routes: The Midwest in All Directions<\/em>, ed. Rozalinda Borcila, Bonnie Fortune, and Sarah Ross(Compass Collaborators, 2012), 17.<\/span> As navigations and narrations of these scales\u200a\u2014\u200aliterally, by collectively walking, riding, discussing particular spaces\u200a\u2014\u200aContinental Drift itineraries become engines for affects, texts, and photographs, but are also forms of production themselves. Inherent in such processes are the transgression of art\u2019s boundaries, and pedagogy conceived as self-education. If collective space seems reminiscent of the secessionism of which Jameson warned institutional critique was at risk (inside the art institution),20<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 20 <\/a> - Jameson, \u201cHans Haacke,\u201d 49.<\/span> the mobility of Continental Drift means a passage between scales, an active crossing of disciplinary boundaries, and sure, a certain amount of getting lost. As Brian Holmes, contributor to Compass, asked, \u201cBut what would it really take to lose yourself in the abstract spaces of global circulation?\u201d21<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 21 <\/a> - Brian Holmes, \u201cDrifting Through the Grid: Psychogeography and Imperial Infrastructure,\u201d Springerin 3<\/em> (March 2004), http:\/\/www.springerin.at\/dyn\/heft_text.php? textid=1523&lang=en<\/span> Losing yourself is, to some degree, part of the process of founding this necessary transitional space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Traduit de l\u2019anglais par Emmanuelle Bouet<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"86_DO02_Eddy_Polak-Waag-Kee_AmsterdamREALTIME\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/86_DO02_Eddy_Polak-Waag-Kee_AmsterdamREALTIME-scaled.jpg\")
AmsterdamREALTIME<\/em>, 2002.
Photo\u2009: courtesy of the artists<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"86_DO02_Eddy_Compass](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/86_DO02_Eddy_Compass-Group_Continental-Drift-scaled.jpg\")
Continental Drift<\/em>, Chine, 2011.
Photo\u2009: Claire Pentecost<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"86_DO02_Eddy_BE_Governing](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/86_DO02_Eddy_BE_Governing-by-Networks-scaled.jpg\")
Governing by Networks<\/em>, 2004 & Infocapital Exchangers<\/em>, 2003, from the publication Atlas of Agendas – Mapping the Power, Mapping the Commons<\/em>, 2015.
Photos\u2009: @ Bureau d\u2019\u00c9tudes<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"86_DO02_Eddy_BE_Governing](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/86_DO02_Eddy_BE_Governing-by-Networks-2-scaled.jpg\")
Governing by Networks<\/em>, 2004 & Infocapital Exchangers<\/em>, 2003, from the publication Atlas of Agendas – Mapping the Power, Mapping the Commons<\/em>, 2015.
Photos\u2009: @ Bureau d\u2019\u00c9tudes<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n