Fredric Jameson by Robert T. Tally Jr

Author:Robert T. Tally Jr.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pluto Press

This is an astounding theoretical maneuver, as Jameson quickly shifts from the perceptual confusion of an individual in a scarcely legible lived space, which after all is a fairly common though no less angst-ridden experience known as “being lost,” to the far vaster, abstract space of a global system, which is nevertheless the absent cause or conditioning horizon of this discrete building in Los Angeles in which the individual subject feels “out of place.” A sort of existentialist crisis of representation, this cartographic anxiety requires the coordination of one’s individual perspective with some sense of the larger social totality.

Jameson’s proposed solution, an aesthetic of cognitive mapping, famously combines the concepts of “wayfinding” and “imageability” in the urban planner Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City with Althusser’s theory of ideology as “the representation of the subject’s Imaginary relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence.”48 In Lynch’s analysis, the anxiety an individual experiences in not being able to navigate the urban environment is heightened by the lack of clear landmarks or paths, so the pedestrian seeks to form a mental image of the city for use in moving about its spaces. Lynch contrasts the geography of Boston, with its Charles River establishing a kind of boundary and distinctive skyscrapers acting as guideposts, and Jersey City, which appears to lack those monuments that may serve as clear points of reference for one’s mental cartography. Lynch argues that the inhabitants of cities without clear geographical landmarks experience a pervasive sense of alienation, as they cannot form a clear, usable, image of the place through which they move. Mappability, or imageability, therefore, becomes a crucial feature of the well-organized city, and the city dweller who can most easily form a mental picture of this space will be best able to “use” it. As Jameson summarizes it, “Disalienation in the traditional city, then, involves the practical reconquest of a sense of place and the construction or reconstruction of an articulated ensemble which can be retained in memory and which the individual subject can map and remap along the moments of mobile, alternative trajectories.” But moving beyond the simpler navigation of a building’s or a city’s spaces, Jameson connects this cognitive mapping with Althusser’s theory of ideology, in which one may form a “situational representation” of the individual subject in relation to “that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole.”49 Cognitive mapping, while still grounded in the material and spatial relations of postmodern lived experience, is thus another attempt to represent that unrepresentable totality.

In what he refers to as a “digression on cartography,” Jameson illustrates the limits of the practice described by Lynch and argues for a much more broadly understood, global theoretical practice. One of the drawbacks of Lynch’s model, Jameson observes, is that it is really “precartographic,” describing what might be better identified as an itinerary rather than as a map. In his micro-survey of the history of mapmaking, Jameson points out that itineraries

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