This separation between experience and the system within which we operate results in increased alienation — we feel adrift in a world we don’t understand. In this regard, Jameson notes that the proliferation of conspiracy theories is partly a cultural response to this situation. Conspiracy theories act by narrowing down the agency behind our world to a single figure of power (whether it be the Bilderberg Group, Freemasons, or some other convenient scapegoat). Despite the extraordinary complexity of some conspiracy theories, they nevertheless provide a reassuringly simple answer to ‘who is behind it all’. They, in other words, act precisely as a cognitive map.

The significance of cognitive mapping is partly that it provides a means to navigate a complex system. Jameson goes so far as to claim that ‘without a conception of the social totality (and the possibility of transforming a whole social system), no properly socialist politics is possible’. With globalised capitalism having become unbound from any phenomenological coordinates, this possibility for a socialist politics has become increasingly difficult. As political scientist Susan Buck-Morss argues (in her essay, ‘Envisioning Capital: Political Economy on Display’), at the heart of the problem is that ‘the economy is not found as an empirical object among other worldly things. In order for it to be “seen” by the human perceptual apparatus it has to undergo a process, crucial for science, of representational mapping’. Like many other objects of science, the economy evades any sort of direct perception. The health of an economy is not a physical entity in the world; instead it is a complex and constructed piece of information, dependent on both material processes in the world as well as socially and politically charged choices about how to measure and calculate it.

What is needed for cognitively mapping the economy is therefore the construction of an entire sociotechnical system for observing, measuring, classifying and analysing it. Instead of direct perception of the economy, perceiving it as a complex system is more akin to a symptomology. In the exact same way that a doctor examines a patient’s symptoms to determine the nature of their disease, so too are various economic indicators used to try and discern the underlying health of the economy. There’s the mainstream symptoms most are familiar with (things like GDP, jobs numbers, interbank interest rates, etc.) along with more arcane symptoms that its practitioners swear by (such as electricity usage, shipping costs, etc.).

In that regard, the key means to understanding the economy is through technical tools such as computer algorithms, simulation models, econometrics and other statistical analyses. It is these sorts of cognitive prostheses that allow for the perception of otherwise invisible systems like capitalism. We have to take seriously here media theorist Friedrich Kittler’s point (from his book, Optical Media) that ‘perceptible and aesthetic properties are always only dependent variables of technical feasibility’. The continued expansion of technology is both a call and a means to expand our cognitive mapping of economic systems.

In contemporary society, the technical infrastructure for this project is rapidly increasing. We are embedded within a massive network of various sensors and databases that record more and more of our existence. Mobile phone patterns are tracked via GPS, online behaviours are recorded throughout every step, social media conversations are mined for their semantic content, and movements like the Quantified Self community are turning these technologies inwards to the body. And commensurate with this expansion of information is the rise in intellectual and technological means to analyse big data. Social network analysis is providing new insights into how memes, behaviours, desires and affects diffuse throughout our personal connections. Agent-based modelling is giving rise to new insights about how organised behaviours emerge from the chaos of individual actions. And predictive algorithms use past actions as the basis for strikingly accurate predictions about future behaviours. All of these sociotechnical assemblages can be mobilised to increase perception and understanding into the functioning of neoliberal economies.

But what is needed is more than just a mathematical representation of these complex systems. In a question and answer session after his cognitive mapping presentation, Jameson is asked a particularly important question about where aesthetics fits into the concept of cognitive mapping. His response is useful for understanding where art can make a political intervention,

The question of the role of the aesthetic as opposed to that of the social sciences in explorations of the structure of the world system corresponds, for me, to the orthodox distinction (which I still vaguely use in a somewhat different way) between science and ideology. My point is that we have this split between ideology in the Althusserian sense — that is, how you map your relation as an individual subject to the social and economic organisation of global capitalism — and the discourse of science, which I understand to be a discourse without a subject. In this ideal discourse, like a mathematical equation, you model the real independent of its relations to individual subjects, including your own. Now, I think that you can teach people how this or that view of the world is to be thought or conceptualised, but the real problem is that it is increasingly hard for people to put that together with their own experience as individual psychological subjects, in daily life. The social sciences can rarely do that, and when they try (as in ethnomethodology), they do it only by a mutation in the discourse of social science, or they do it at the moment that a social science becomes an ideology; but then we are back into the aesthetic. Aesthetics is something that addresses individual experience rather than something that conceptualises the real in a more abstract way.

Aesthetics, under this conception, is what sensibly mediates between individual phenomenology and our cognitive maps of global structures. Yet here I think we can parse Jameson’s conception of aesthetics into two parts by drawing a distinction between the aesthetics of the technical sublime and the aesthetics of interfaces. That is to say, between data as impenetrable noise and data as cognitively tractable. The act of building mediators between these is precisely one of the most important areas where political art could be situated today.