Notes on Fredric Jameson's "Cultural logic of late capitalism,"

On "social cartography": notes from Fredric Jameson's essay on postmodernism
by Azly Rahman


I begin my essay with the essential points raised in the conclusion section of Jameson's famous essay particularly on the idea of social cartography. Jameson is inviting us to engage in a critical examination of the most fundamental aspects of our location in this ontological vocation of things, i.e. how we interact and act in the space we inhabit---our personal and communal and national as well as global spaces. Metaphoring this call for praxis with the notion of social cartography, Jameson believed that this is an important step to understand the how the self ought to be positioned in this apparently paralyzing state of postmodern beingness. He writes about this cartography in his conclusion:

...An aesthetic of cognitive mapping - a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system-will necessarily have to respect this now enormously complex representational dialectic and to invent radically new forms in order to do it justice. This is not, then, clearly a call for a return to some older kind of machinery, some older and more transparent national space, or some more traditional and reassuring perspectival or mimetic enclave: the new political art-if it is indeed possible at all-will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism, that is, to say, to its fundamental object-the world space of multinational capital-at the same time at which it achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing this last, in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion. The political form of postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale. (paragraph 110)

Jameson's dissection of the logic of late capitalism (dialectical materialism) Essentially and hence, Jameson's argument goes like this: That postmodernism. From a "periodizing thesis" point of view cannot hold if we are to understand this "fashionable" terminology of social change as yet another stage in the development of capitalism. One can look at the styles of postmodernism through architecture, the visual arts, literature, and the range of aesthetic populism and call it an extension of modernism or a maturated version of high modernism. However, Jameson offered another lens to look at this seemingly periodized change in cognitive-social moment in our history from a critical perspective fashioned after an analysis of the base-superstructural dimension of change.

Jameson spoke of the death and horror underlying the change wrought by postmodernism that is, under the shibboleth of liberal democracy and free market lies the withering of the individual and the triumph of materialism and the reigning of an Orwellian version of authoritarianism.

The individual, a product of the powerful forces of social change in the invisible hands of those who owns the means of material production whether hegemonized or not, becomes cogs in the wheels of this newer, smarter, and more highly systematic and digitized form of machinery of oppression. Hence Jameson elaborated extensively of the idea of the erosion of the moral, spiritual, cognitive, and emotional strength of the individual; a process of erosion which is consequenced upon the thematic forms of depthlessness Jameson spoke of as "waning of affect", "death of the subject", incongruency of the inside and the outside, the prevalence of the separation of the inside and the outside, and a range of other themes of alienation, disjuncture, and fragmentation characteristic of the self corroded by the ebbs and tides of technological and materialistic life.

Jameson extended his analysis to the way the themes of alienation are presented in the variety of visual experiences and the architecture of thinking which dominates the so-called postmodernist movement. Rather than these presentations becomes lessons in what has gone wrong with civilization, where we are heading pathologically, and what kind of horror underlies the we have built our civilization upon, Jameson writes that these themes are in fact presented as styles of the high modernist and postmodernist movements. There is hence no moral lesson to be learned form the lessons in social decay.



Jameson offered a way out of this condition of oppression although not exactly clear whom he is addressing his suggestions to. He writes about socio-cartographing oneself in this architecture of socio-cognitive oppression. This is to be done by first looking at one's own location in the weltanschauung or worldview constructed by forces of multinational capital. This ought to be the beginning of, borrowing the Brazilian educator's words, understanding of one's "ontological vocation" in which, through the power of critical consciousness or conscientization and through Subjectivizing one's objective condition, the path to freedom can be found.