The phenomenon of restructuring appears to be a symptom of our times. The term invokes a consolidated set of actions reorganising the structure of an entity, often to make it operate more effectively. In the case of Goldsmiths, restructures have been neatly packaged as “action plan[s] to secure a bright future for the university, where we continue to provide the best possible teaching and research opportunities and enable a lasting legacy of progressive social change.” [1]  In other words, something must be sacrificed in the present for the sake of a so-called brighter future.

In light of proclaimed financial difficulties and the inability to meet its debt burden, Goldsmiths has introduced its latest and widespread restructuring programme entitled “Transformation Programme”, seeking to significantly reorganise its financial structure in an attempt to mitigate against the risk of effective insolvency. Translated from technocratic jargon, what this actually means is the loss of 132 academic employees out of a total of 769 positions. [2] This comes just two years after a previous spout of attempted restructuring schemes at the university, such as the “Recovery Programme”, which saw the Student Centre dissolved and Departmental Professional Services staff dismissed to form three School Hubs. [3] And prior to that, the “Evolving Goldsmiths Programme”, premised on job cuts and the establishment of a new highly paid Senior Management Team. These measures comprise the university’s repertoire of actions when facing financial risk: cut jobs to reduce costs, and in doing so, reorganise the composition of the entire institution and the life of those who depend on it in one way or another. 

Feeling the Restructure

The Transformation Programme has caused a common feeling of uncertainty among students and staff alike. The unexpected and unclear job cuts and redesign of the organisational structure have left the majority of the university unsure about what the future holds. For students, will their programmes of study continue? Will their departments even still exist? For staff, how would those marked as ‘at risk of redundancy’ cope with such a sudden rupture in their careers? To what extent does the label of “redundancy” affect people’s selfhood, or how they perceive their labour and passions? The resulting feelings of fear, confusion and anger have become part of a collective sense of insecurity that characterises our present due to the effects of multiple crises with various intertwined global conflicts.

But these feelings also lead us to the formation of a sense of community. As MA students, it can be difficult to feel immersed in the university, with full time students attending only two classes a week. We spend little time at a small range of the campus and seldom interact with the wider space or people. As a collective, we belong to MA Contemporary Art Theory in the Visual Cultures department, one which will likely cease to exist in its current form after the Transformation Programme is complete. Considering all these complex intertwining parts, we felt the urgency to provide a retelling of the lived experience at Goldsmiths, from the ground level, not only in opposition to the limited and bureaucratic information currently shared about the Transformation Programme, but also to prove that there is an element of the university that contains more than replaceable names or buildings marked on a map. We aim to instead provide a cognitive mapping of sorts to show what is threatened to be lost, and why it is vital to resist it being so.

We are concerned with the Transformation Programme insofar as it constitutes a restructuring of feeling. By mapping the forces contemporaneously at work in this process at Goldsmiths, as an educational-infrastructural space, we also seek to commence a possible cartography of a wider, perhaps ‘global’, stream of transformations, concerning the insidious incursions of late-neoliberalism and the practices of resistance and utopia arising not only in response to it but as practices of creation in their own right. Therein, our practice of cognitively mapping restructures of feeling has a twofold function: to trace the recursive brutality of domination as it seeks to solidify itself, through both intentional strategy and inevitable consequence, at the level of (infra)structures of feeling; and to give shape and form to emerging, novel configurations of counter-assembly or simply sustainment, practices which seek to generate a future of possibility(s) and something Other, operating as a ‘utopian’ restructure of feeling. We hope that this resource will produce modes of understanding the restructuring of feeling of the present, at both specific or contextual and structural levels in the sense Jameson implies regarding the implementation of cognitive mapping: a multitudinous project concerning, ultimately, the mapping of the disparate (but structured) multiplicity of forces active in the genesis of our concrete conjuncture, in order to orient ourselves and affect it. [4]

Theories of Feeling

Those familiar with the work of Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, or Ruth Wilson Gilmore may be well versed with literature on structures of feeling: a concept introduced by Raymond Williams that elucidates “an active and pressing” presence in the social atmosphere that is not yet fully articulated. [5] Throughout the project we offer a survey of the mobilisation of affect within and beyond the confines of Goldsmiths, revealing the disguised operation of power, but also locating the felt instantiations of resistance that have emerged in response. The accumulated material manifestations of such modes of resistance are what Ruth Wilson Gilmore describes as “Infrastructures of Feeling”. [6] This offers the foundation from which alternative arrangements of social relations that tend towards liberation and freedom can begin to take shape. As we look to past examples where students and staff have fought for a university that is a place of freedom (particularly in the archive), we can begin to trace these trajectories and connect them to wider struggles that extend beyond the confines of the university itself and into wider social structures. 

The accumulated feelings transform the “space into a place as it acquires definition and meaning.” [7] The physical space of the university each contains its unique historicity and memory. Rediscovering the infrastructure of feeling within the university space through place-making becomes a way of resistance to the current Transformation Program, creating pockets of solidarity and freedom. Yi-Fu Tuan in his book Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience, explains that “place is a special kind of object. It is a concretion of value, though not a valued thing that can be handled or carried about easily; it is an object in which one can dwell.” [8] The place-making of Goldsmiths is a collective one; it attaches itself to each individual member’s emotions but also creates a temporal and spatial accumulation of complex feelings. The names of each building, the architecture, and small places that we inhabit in our daily lives now represent something different than what is used or intended for. Mapping the place and those related to it, is a way of understanding who have been neglected in the process, to trace what makes the university and to observe what is excluded.

We have collectively applied an infrastructural lens to the restructuring of Goldsmiths to question how power, hidden and visible, not only in turn restructures our feelings, but also how forms of resistance can reshape this restructuring again. Thus, in light of both Jameson’s call for cognitive mapping and Gilmore’s conception of infrastructures of feeling, we have generated a new method focused on mapping (infra)structures of feeling caught amidst the flux of the present, of tracing their vicissitudes, dynamic transformations, and ‘restructuring’. Therefore, rather than simply synthesising Jameson and Gilmore we might say that this undertaking is a restructuring of feeling of cognitive mapping itself: the production of a new collective mode of understanding the current conjuncture, of holding it together, and of acting and affecting it collectively, according to the fluxing uncertainty constituting our mode of collectivity. 

Inventing a Structure

With this in mind, we have created an interactive digital map of Goldsmiths, appropriating the official cartography of the university and remapping it with annotations. By moving through the architecture of Goldsmiths, we have developed thoughts on how a so-called restructuring of feelings takes place in and across these spaces, emanating from them, but also extending them and radiating into other spaces.

In the course of this, various texts have emerged, which result from our different perspectives and partly international backgrounds. They can be found on the map by small purple markers and can be read under the heading ‘Essays’ on this page. With the cartography of these essays, we invite you to take an individual walk through the university, which understands the various markers on the map as stations.

On the interactive map, locations are marked by purple, grey, and yellow markers. Those in purple are associated with texts which are either linked to the map, or can be found in the Texts section. Grey markers signify further annotations which provide additional context or information. The yellow markers invite the reader to take actions that not only intellectually grasp the place of the university, but also enable one to inhabit it through interventions.

In addition to the contributions that are directly linked to the map, you will find a glossary of terms on this website that define the theoretical network we have spanned over the map in order to be able to move within it.

We have also created an archive, and begun to collect contributions, projects and texts that have already been created in the spirit of our project. In this way, we do not see our project as singular, but rather as part of a continuous resistance that understands the space of the university as something that has been repeatedly defined in the past and future as a resistance against and in its structure.

The map was created as part of a seminar in Spatial Biopolitics of the Master in Contemporary Art Theory at Goldsmiths University of London in the academic year 2023/2024. However, this serves only as a starting point: we also warmly invite anyone to contribute to the map, glossary, and archive, helping it to evolve, by using the Collaborate form. 

Digital Mapping

The decision for this project to take the form of a website was first of all led by the practicalities of creating an annotated map, comprising an interactive interface and a variety of media-formats. Furthermore, as a media artefact itself, a form which suspends and exhibits itself within the user’s environment, a website also had a number of other strategic advantages. Firstly, a certain weightlessness and portableness, allowing for a greater world/website spatiotemporal integration and interactivity between the user’s quotidian and the website’s content; where the user can carry a diverse multimedia archive around campus or anywhere they go. Secondly, durability, or the ability to withstand time: a ‘lossless’ entity forming a permanent, solid, and non-degrading, yet continually evolving, archival body of knowledges, feelings, and practices, suspended amidst infrastructural flux. And thirdly, a way of utilising a dominant form of communication in our global contemporaneity, in order to subvert its horizons of possibility and to experiment with its formal capacities as an aesthetic and/or pedagogical object and mode of activism.

Please take your time to explore the interactive map, containing texts, instructions, and multimedia materials marked at specific locations, the additional materials on the archive, and experiment with the ways this digital artefact can be implemented into the spatiotemporality of your daily life.

[1] Goldsmiths’ Student Union, Evolving Goldsmiths 2020,  https://www.goldsmithssu.org/activism/campaigns/evolving-goldsmiths/ [accessed on 20 May 2024].

[2] Sally Weale, ‘Cultural and social vandalism’: job cut plans at Goldsmiths attacked, 27 March 2024, The Guardian,  https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/mar/27/goldsmiths-university-of-london-redundancy-plans#:~:text=The%20UCU%20says%20the%20scale,be%20implemented%20by%20September%202024. [accessed on 21 May 2024].

[3]  Goldsmiths’ Student Union, Background and Context: Why the Transformation Programme?, https://www.goldsmithssu.org/goldsmiths-transformation/background/ [accessed on 20 May, 2024].

[4] Frederic Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988).

[5] Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 132.

[6] Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. 2022. Abolition Geography: Essays towards Liberation. Eds. Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano. London New York: Verso, 490.

[7] Tuan, Yi-Fu. 2001. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 136.

[8] Ibid, 12.