ABSTRACT
In the essay ‘Cognitive Mapping’, published in 1988, cultural theorist Fredric Jameson sets out the possibilities for a new kind of Marxist aesthetic. By considering the pedagogical function of the work of art as providing a sense of orientation towards the larger and in itself unrepresentable social totality, Jameson attempts to rehabilitate the project of political change through the media of visual and spatial form. The inspiration for this view of the work of art as a ‘mental map’ for the process of political action springs from two very different sources: one directly political and the other urbanistic and architectural. The first is the statement from Louis Althusser that defines ideology as ‘the Imaginary representation of the subject’s relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence’.1 The second source is presented as an analogue to the first and comes from the work of architect and urban theorist Kevin Lynch on the process of spatial orientation in city centres.2 Jameson highlights the parallel between the two ideas in the opening chapter of his book Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism:
There is, for one thing, a most interesting convergence between the empirical problems studied by Lynch in terms of city space and the great Althusserian (and Lacanian) redefinition of ideology … Surely this is exactly what the cognitive map is called upon to do in the narrower framework of daily life in the physical city: to enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole.3
