7 - Cartographies of the Postmodern
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
Summary
Abstract
One of Jameson’s key concepts is cognitive mapping – which can be understood as a modification of his concept of allegory. In a surprisingly affirmative reformulation of Althusser’s definition of ideology as the subject’s imaginary representation of its real conditions of existence, the term outlines the possibility of a political aesthetics under the conditions of an a-historical postmodernism. The Lacanian triad of the imaginary, the symbolic and the real also plays an important role in Jameson’s work. By means of the imaginary image function as well as the symbolic sign function of cartography, the subject can navigate its position towards the real of totality. Antonioni’s Blow Up is analyzed as a key film in the transition from modernism to postmodernism.
Keywords: Postmodernity, Cognitive Mapping, Cartography, Imaginary
After the methodological foundation of his theory of the political unconscious, Jameson’s work in the 1980s stands under the sign of the postmodern, of which he can be regarded as one of the most important thinkers. Since that time, the postmodern seems to have lost interest for the humanities and cultural studies. Jameson, however, never resorted to a simple set of pros and cons surrounding postmodernism as a variety of contemporary art production, but insisted on the historical diagnosis of a dominant cultural phenomenon, which has its objective conditions in a totality which is even more “total” than earlier capitalist formations, and which Jameson, taking inspiration from the Marxist economist Ernest Mandel, calls late capitalism. Late capitalism is the name for a systematic closure that subjects all structural levels and living spaces in society to an irreversible commodification. Following on from his earlier thesis, even art can, for Jameson, no longer be treated as an enclave beyond the grip of reification. If modernism had emerged as a reactive symptom to reification, this loss of artistic autonomy under postmodernism is exacerbated: not only has aesthetic production become an utterly integral component of general commodity production, but even the opposition between high and low is diffused in postmodernism, in favor of a bricolage of both elements, such that even the negativity of modernist art with respect to the commodity-form is ex post positively integrated.
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- Towards a Political Aesthetics of CinemaThe Outside of Film, pp. 205 - 232Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020