Social Science and Postmodern Spatialisations: Jameson’s Aesthetic of Cognitive Mapping

Abstract

At the end of Frederic Jameson’s widely disseminated 1984 article ‘Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’ there is a sudden and remarkable change in the tenor of his narrative. After a lengthy synthesis which celebrates social upheaval, fragmentation and relativism in the culture of urban America, he shifts to the spatial terminology of cognitive maps and proxemics favoured by an older generation of behaviouristic urban planners. Adopting the term of Kevin Lynch (1956), Jameson calls for a ‘new social mapping’ which will restore to wholeness our ‘cognitive maps’ of social reality:² 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’ (Jameson, 1984: 92).