Postmodernism
or,
The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
by Fredric
Jameson (1991)
original
site address: http://werple.net.au/~gaffcam/phil/jameson.htm
I
The last few years have been marked
by an inverted millenarianism in which premonitions of the future, catastrophic
or redemptive, have been replaced by senses of the end of this or that (the
end of ideology, art, or social class; the "crisis" of Leninism, social
democracy, or the welfare state, etc., etc.); taken together, all of these
perhaps constitute what is increasingly called postmodernism. The case for
its existence depends on the hypothesis of some radical break or coupure,
generally traced back to the end of the 1950s or the early 1960s.
As the word itself suggests,
this break is most often related to notions of the waning or extinction
of the hundred-year-old modern movement (or to its ideological or aesthetic
repudiation). Thus abstract expressionism in painting, existentialism
in philosophy, the final forms of representation in the novel, the films
of the great auteurs, or the modernist school of poetry (as
institutionalized
and canonized in the works of Wallace Stevens) all are now seen as the
final, extraordinary flowering of a high-modernist impulse which is spent
and exhausted with them. The enumeration of what follows, then, at once
becomes empirical, chaotic, and heterogeneous: Andy Warhol and pop art,
but also photorealism, and beyond it, the "new expressionism"; the moment,
in music, of John Cage, but also the synthesis of classical and "popular"
styles found in composers like Phil Glass and Terry Riley, and also punk
and new wave rock (the Beatles and the Stones now standing as the high-modernist
moment of that more recent and rapidly evolving tradition); in film, Godard,
post-Godard, and experimental cinema and video, but also a whole new type
of commercial film (about which more below); Burroughs, Pynchon, or Ishmael
Reed, on the one hand, and the French nouveau roman and its succession,
on the other, along with alarming new kinds of literary criticism based
on some new aesthetic of textuality or ecriture ... The list might
be extended indefinitely; but does it imply any more fundamental change
or break than the periodic style and fashion changes determined by an
older high-modernist imperative of stylistic innovation?
It is in the realm of architecture,
however, that modifications in aesthetic production are most dramatically
visible, and that their theoretical problems have been most centrally
raised and articulated; it was indeed from architectural debates that
my own conception of postmodernism - as it will be outlined in the following
pages - initially began to emerge. More decisively than in the other arts
or media, postmodernist positions in architecture have been inseparable
from an implacable critique of architectural high modernism and of Frank
Lloyd Wright or the so-called international style (Le Corbusier, Mies,
etc), where formal criticism and analysis (of the high-modernist transformation
of the building into a virtual sculpture, or monumental "duck," as Robert
Venturi puts it)' are at one with reconsiderations on the level of urbanism
and of the aesthetic institution. High modernism is thus credited with
the destruction of the fabric of the traditional city and its older
neighborhood
culture (by way of the radical disjunction of the new Utopian high-modernist
building from its surrounding context), while the prophetic elitism and
authoritarianism of the modern movement are remorselessly identified in
the imperious gesture of the charismatic Master.
Postmodernism in architecture
will then logically enough stage itself as a kind of aesthetic populism,
as the very title of Venturi's influential manifesto, Learning from
Las Vegas, suggests. However we may ultimately wish to evaluate this
populist rhetoric,' it has at least the merit of drawing our attention
to one fundamental feature of all the postmodernisms enumerated above:
namely, the effacement in them of the older (essentially high-modernist)
frontier between high culture and so-called mass or commercial culture,
and the emergence of new kinds of texts infused with the forms, categories,
and contents of that very culture industry so passionately denounced by
all the ideologues of the modern, from Leavis and the American New Criticism
all the way to Adorno and the Frankfurt School. The postmodernisms have,
in fact, been fascinated precisely by this whole "degraded" landscape
of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and Reader's Digest culture,
of advertising and motels, of the late show and the grade-B Hollywood
film, of so-called paraliterature, with its airport paperback categories
of the gothic and the romance, the popular biography, the murder mystery,
and the science fiction or fantasy novel: materials they no longer simply
"quote;' as a Joyce or a Mahler might have done, but incorporate into
their very substance.
Nor should the break in question
be thought of as a purely cultural affair: indeed, theories of the postmodern
- whether celebratory or couched in the language of moral revulsion and
denunciation - bear a strong family resemblance to all those more ambitious
sociological generalisations which, at much the same time bring us the
news of the arrival and inauguration of a whole new type of society, most
famously baptised "'Postindustrial society" (Daniel Bell) but often also
designated consumer society, media society, information society, electronic
society or high tech, and the like. Such theories have the obvious ideological
mission of demonstrating, to their own relief, that the new social formation
in question no longer obeys the laws of classical capitalism, namely,
the primacy of industrial production and the omnipresence of class struggle.
The Marxist tradition has therefore resisted them with vehemence, with
the signal except on of the economist Ernest Mandel, whose book Late
Capitalism sets out not merely to anatomise the historic originality
of this new society (which he sees as a third stage or moment in the evolution
of capital) but also to demonstrate that it is, if an thing, a purer stage
of capitalism than any of the moments that preceded it. I will return
to t is argument later; suffice it for the moment to anticipate a point
that will be argued in Chapter 2, namely, that every position on postmodernism
in culture - whether apologia or stigmatization - is also at orle an e
same time, and necessarily, an implicitly or explicitly political
stance on the nature of multinational capitalism today.
A last preliminary word on
method: what follows is not to be read as stylistic description, as the
account of one cultural style or movement among others. I have rather
meant to offer a periodising hypothesis, and that at a moment in which
the very conception of historical periodisation has come to seem most
problematical indeed. I have argued elsewhere that all isolated or discrete
cultural analysis always involves a buried or repressed theory of historical
periodisation; in any case, the conception of the "genealogy" largely
lays to rest traditional theoretical worries about so-called linear history,
theories of "stages," and teleological historiography. In the present
context, however, lengthier theoretical discussion of such (very real)
issues can perhaps be replaced by a few substantive remarks.
One of the concerns frequently
aroused by periodising hypotheses is that these tend to obliterate difference
and to project an idea of the historical period as massive homogeneity
(bounded on either side by inexplicable chronological metamorphoses and
punctuation marks). This is, however, precisely why it seems to me essential
to grasp postmodernism not as a style but rather as a cultural dominant:
a conception which allows for the presence and coexistence of a range
of very different, yet subordinate, features.
Consider, for example, the
powerful alternative position that postmodernism is itself little more
than one more stage of modernism proper (if not, indeed, of the even older
romanticism); it may indeed be conceded that all the features of postmodernism
I am about to enumerate can be detected, full-blown, in this or that preceding
modernism (including such astonishing genealogical precursors as Gertrude
Stein, Raymond Roussel, or Marcel Duchamp, who may be considered outright
postmodernists, avant la lettre). What has not been taken into account
by this view, however, is the social position of the older modernism,
or better still, its passionate repudiation by an older Victorian and
post-Victorian bourgeoisie for whom its forms and ethos are received as
being variously ugly, dissonant, obscure, scandalous, immoral, subversive,
and generally "antisocial." It will be argued here, however, that a mutation
in the sphere of culture has rendered such attitudes archaic. Not only
are Picasso and Joyce no longer ugly, they now strike us, on the whole,
as rather "realistic," and this is the result of a canonisation and academic
institutionalization of the modern movement generally that can be to the
late 1950s. This is surety one of the most plausible explanations for
the emergence of postmodernism itself, since the younger generation of
the 1960s will now confront the formerly oppositional modern movement
as a set of dead classics, which "weigh like a nightmare on the brains
of the living," as Marx once said in a different context.
As for the postmodern revolt
against all that, however, it must equally be stressed that its own offensive
features - from obscurity and sexually explicit material to psychological
squalor and overt expressions of social and political defiance, which
transcend anything that might have been imagined at the most extreme moments
of high modernism - no longer scandalize anyone and are not only received
with the greatest complacency but have themselves become
institutionalized
and are at one with the official or public culture of Western society.
What has happened is that aesthetic
production today has become integrated into commodity production generally:
the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming
goods (from clothing to aeroplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover,
now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position
to aesthetic innovation and experimentation. Such economic necessities
then find recognition in the varied kinds of institutional support available
for the newer art, from foundations and grants to museums and other forms
of patronage. Of all the arts, architecture is the closest constitutively
to the economic, with which, in the form of commissions and land values,
it has a virtually unmediated relationship. It will therefore not be surprising
to find the extraordinary flowering of the new postmodern architecture
grounded in the patronage of multinational business, whose expansion and
development is strictly contemporaneous with it. Later I will suggest
that these two new phenomena have an even deeper dialectical interrelationship
than the simple one-to-one financing of this or that individual project.
Yet this is the point at which I must remind the reader of the obvious;
namely, that this whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the
internal and superstructural expression of a Store new- wave of American
military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense,
as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture,
death, and terror.
The first point to be made
about the conception of periodisation in dominance, therefore, is that
even if all the constitutive features of postmodernism were identical
with and coterminous to those of an older modernism - a position I feel
to be demonstrably erroneous but which only an even lengthier analysis
of modernism proper could dispel the two phenomena would still remain
utterly distinct in their meaning antisocial function, owing to the very
different positioning of postmodernism in the economic system of late
capital and, beyond that, to the transformation of the very sphere of
culture in contemporary society.
This point will be further
discussed at the conclusion of this book. I must now briefly address a
different kind of objection to periodisation, a concern about its possible
obliteration of heterogeneity, one most often expressed by the Left. And
it is certain that there is a strange quasi-Sartrean irony - a "winner
loses" logic which tends to surround any effort to describe a "system,"
a totalizing dynamic, as these are detected in the movement of contemporary
society. What happens is that the more powerful the vision of some increasingly
total system or logic - the Foucault of the prisons book is the obvious
example - the more Powerless the reader comes to feel. Insofar as the
theorist wins, therefore, by constructing an increasingly closed and terrifying
machine, to that very degree he loses, since the critical capacity of
his work is thereby Paralyzed, and the impulses of negation and revolt,
not to speak of those of social transformation, are increasingly perceived
as vain and trivial in the face of the model itself.
I have felt, however, that
it was only in the light of some conception of a dominant cultural logic
or hegemonic norm that genuine difference could be measured and assessed.
I am very far from feeling that all cultural production today is postmodern
in the broad sense I will be conferring on this term. The postmodern is,
however, the force field in which very different kinds of cultural impulses
- what Raymond Williams has usefully termed "residual" and "emergent"
forms of cultural production - must make their way. If we do not achieve
some general sense of a cultural dominant, then we fall back into a view
of present history as sheer heterogeneity, random difference, a coexistence
of a host of distinct forces whose effectivity is undecidable. At any
rate, this has been the political spirit in which the following analysis
was devised: to project some conception of a new systematic cultural norm
and its reproduction in order to reflect more adequately on the most effective
forms of any radical cultural politics today.
The exposition will take up
in turn the following constitutive features of the postmodern: a new depthlessness,
which finds its prolongation both in contemporary "theory" and in a whole
new culture of the image or the simulacrum; a consequent weakening of
historicity, both in our relationship to public History and in the new
forms of our private temporality, whose "schizophrenic" structure (following
Lacan) will determine new types of syntax or syntagmatic relationships
in the more temporal arts; a whole new type of emotional ground tone -
what I will call "intensities" - which can best be grasped by a return
to older theories of the sublime; the deep constitutive relationships
of all this to a whole new technology, which is itself a figure for a
whole new economic world system; and, after a brief account of postmodernist
mutations in the lived experience of built space itself, some reflections
on the mission of political art in the bewildering new world space of
late or multinational capital.
VI
The conception of postmodernism
outlined here is a historical rather than a merely stylistic one. I cannot
stress too greatly the radical distinction between a view for which the
postmodern is one (optional) style among many others available and one which
seeks to grasp it as the cultural dominant of the logic of late capitalism:
the two approaches in fact generate two very different ways of
conceptualizing
the phenomenon as a whole: on the one hand, moral judgments (about which
it is indifferent whether they are positive or negative), and, on the other,
a genuinely dialectical attempt to think our present of time in History.
Of some positive moral evaluation
of postmodernism little needs to be said: the complacent (yet delirious)
camp-following celebration of this aesthetic new world (including its
social and economic dimension, greeted with equal enthusiasm under the
slogan of "postindustrial society") is surely unacceptable, although it
may be somewhat less obvious that current fantasies about the salvational
nature of high technology, from chips to robots - fantasies entertained
not only by both left and right governments in distress but also by many
intellectuals - are also essentially of a piece with more vulgar apologies
for postmodernism.
But in that case it is only
consequent to reject moralizing condemnations of the postmodern and of
its essential triviality when juxtaposed against the Utopian "high seriousness"
of the great modernisms: judgments one finds both on the Left and on the
radical Right. And no doubt the logic of the simulacrum, with its transformation
of older realities into television images, does more than merely replicate
the logic of late capitalism; it reinforces and intensifies it. Meanwhile,
for political groups which seek actively to intervene in history and to
modify its otherwise passive momentum (whether with a view toward
channeling
it into a socialist transformation of society or diverting it into the
regressive re-establishment of some simpler fantasy past), there cannot
but be much that is deplorable and reprehensible in a cultural form of
image addiction which, by transforming the past into visual mirages, stereotypes,
or texts, effectively abolishes any practical sense of the future and
of the collective project, thereby abandoning the thinking of future change
to fantasies of sheer catastrophe and inexplicable cataclysm, from visions
of "terrorism" on the social level to those of cancer on the personal.
Yet if postmodernism is a historical phenomenon, then the attempt to
conceptualize
it in terms of moral or moralizing judgments must finally be identified
as a category mistake. All of which becomes more obvious when we interrogate
the position of the cultural critic and moralist; the latter, along with
all the rest of us, is now so deeply immersed in postmodernist space,
so deeply suffused and infected by its new cultural categories, that the
luxury of the old-fashioned ideological critique, the indignant moral
denunciation of the other, becomes unavailable.
The distinction I am proposing
here knows one canonical form in Hegel's differentiation of the thinking
of individual morality or moralizing from that whole very different realm
of collective social values and practices. But it finds its definitive
form in Marx's demonstration of the materialist dialectic, most notably
in those classic pages of the Manifesto which teach the hard lesson of
some more genuinely dialectical way to think historical development and
change. The topic of the lesson is, of course, the historical development
of capita ism itself and the deployment of a specific bourgeois culture.
In a well-known passage Marx powerfully urges us to do the impossible,
namely, to think this development positively and negatively all at once;
to achieve, in other words, a type of thinking that would be capable of
grasping the demonstrably baleful features of capitalism along with its
extraordinary and liberating dynamism simultaneously within a single thought,
and without attenuating any of the force of either judgment. We are somehow
to lift our minds to a point at which it is possible to understand that
capitalism is at one and the same time the best thing that has ever happened
to the human race, and the worst. The lapse from this austere dialectical
imperative into the more comfortable stance of the taking of moral positions
is inveterate and all too human: still, the urgency of the subject demands
that we make at least some effort to think the cultural evolution of late
capitalism dialectically, as catastrophe and progress all together.
Such an effort suggests two
immediate questions, with which we will conclude these reflections. Can
we in fact identify some "moment of truth" within the more evident "moments
of falsehood" of postmodern culture? And, even if we can do so, is there
not something ultimately paralyzing in the dialectical view of historical
development proposed above; does it not tend to demobilize us and to surrender
us to passivity and helplessness by systematically obliterating possibilities
of action under the impenetrable fog of historical inevitability? It is
appropriate to discuss these two (related) issues in terms of current
possibilities for some effective contemporary cultural politics and for
the construction of a genuine political culture.
To focus the problem in this
way is, of course, immediately to raise the more genuine issue of the
fate of culture generally, and of the function of culture specifically,
as one social level or instance, in the postmodern era. Everything in
the previous discussion suggests that what we have been calling postmodernism
is inseparable from, and unthinkable without the hypothesis of, some fundamental
mutation of the sphere of culture in the world of late capitalism ' which
includes a momentous modification of its social function. Older discussions
of the space, function, or sphere of culture (mostly notably Herbert Marcuse's
classic essay The Affirmative Character of Culture) have insisted
on what a different language would call the "semi-autonomy" of the cultural
realm: its ghostly, yet Utopian, existence, for good or ill, above the
practical world of the existent, whose mirror image it throws back in
forms which vary from the legitimations of flattering resemblance to the
contestatory indictments of critical satire or Utopian pain.
What we must now ask ourselves
is whether it is not precisely this semi-autonomy of the cultural sphere
which has been destroyed by the logic of late capitalism. Yet to argue
that culture is today no longer endowed with the relative autonomy it
once enjoyed as one level among others in earlier moments of capitalism
(let alone in pre-capitalist societies) is not necessarily to imply its
disappearance or extinction. Quite the contrary; we must go on to affirm
that the dissolution of an autonomous sphere of culture is rather to be
imagined in terms of an explosion: a prodigious expansion of culture throughout
the social realm, to the point at which everything in our social life
- from economic value and state power to practices and to the very structure
of the psyche itself - can be said to have become "cultural" in some original
and yet untheorized sense. This proposition is, however, substantively
quite consistent with the previous diagnosis of a society of the image
or the simulacrum and a transformation of the "real" into so many pseudo-events.
It also suggests that some
of our most cherished and time-honored radical conceptions about the
nature of cultural politics may thereby find themselves outmoded. However
distinct those conceptions - which range from slogans of negativity, opposition,
and subversion to critique and reflexivity - may have been, they all shared
a single, fundamentally spatial, presupposition, which may be resumed
in the equally time-honored formula of "critical distance." No theory
of cultural politics current on the Left today has been able to do without
one notion or another of a certain minimal aesthetic distance, of the
possibility of the positioning of the cultural act outside the massive
Being of capital, from which to assault this last. What the burden of
our preceding demonstration suggests, however, is that distance in general
(including "critical distance" in particular) has very precisely been
abolished in the new space of postmodernism. We are submerged in its henceforth
filled and suffused volumes to the point where our now postmodern bodies
are bereft of spatial coordinates and practically (let alone theoretically)
incapable of distantiation; meanwhile, it has already been observed how
the prodigious new expansion of multinational capital ends up penetrating
and colonizing those very pre-capitalist enclaves (Nature and the Unconscious)
which offered extraterritorial and Archimedean footholds for critical
effectivity. The shorthand language of co-optation is for this reason
omnipresent on the left, but would now seem to offer a most inadequate
theoretical basis for understanding a situation in which we all, in one
way or another, dimly feel that not only punctual and local counter-culture
forms of cultural resistance and guerrilla warfare but also even overtly
political interventions like those of The Clash are all somehow secretly
disarmed and reabsorbed by a system of which they themselves might well
be considered a part, since they can achieve no distance from it.
What we must now affirm is
that it is precisely this whole extraordinarily demoralizing and depressing
original new global space which is the "moment of truth" of postmodernism.
What has been called the postmodernist "sublime" is only the moment in
which this content has become most explicit, has moved the closest to
the surface of consciousness as a coherent new type of space in its own
right - even though a certain figural concealment or disguise is still
at work here, most notably in the high-tech thematics in which the new
spatial content is still dramatised and articulated. Yet the earlier features
of the postmodern which were enumerated above can all now be seen as themselves
partial (yet constitutive) aspects of the same general spatial object.
The argument for a certain
authenticity in these otherwise patently ideological productions depends
on the prior proposition that what we have been calling postmodern (or
multinational) space is not merely a cultural ideology or fantasy but
has genuine historical (and socioeconomic) reality as a third great original
expansion of capitalism around the globe (after the earlier expansions
of the national market and the older imperialist system, which each had
their own cultural specificity and generated new types of space appropriate
to their dynamics). The distorted and unreflexive attempts of newer cultural
production to explore and to express this new space must then also, in
their own fashion, be considered as so many approaches to the representation
of (a new) reality (to use a more antiquated language). As paradoxical
as the terms may seem, they may thus, following a classic interpretive
option, be read as peculiar new forms of realism (or at least of the mimesis
of reality), while at the same time they can equally well be analyzed
as so many attempts to distract and divert us from that reality or to
disguise its contradictions and resolve them in the guise of various formal
mystifications.
As for that reality itself,
however - the as yet untheorized original space of some new "world system"
of multinational or late capitalism, a space whose negative or baleful
aspects are only too obvious - the dialectic requires us to hold equally
to a positive or "progressive" evaluation of its emergence, as Marx did
for the world market as the horizon of national economies, or as Lenin
did for the older imperialist global network., For neither Marx nor Lenin
was socialism a matter of returning to smaller (and thereby less repressive
and comprehensive) systems of social organization; rather, the dimensions
attained by capital in their own times were grasped as the promise, the
framework, and the precondition for the achievement of some new and more
comprehensive socialism. Is this not the case with the yet more global
and totalizing space of the new world system, which demands the intervention
and elaboration of an internationalism of a radically new type? The disastrous
realignment of socialist revolution with the older nationalisms (not only
in Southeast Asia), whose results have necessarily aroused much serious
recent left reflection, can be adduced in support of this position.
But if all this is so, then
at least one possible form of a new radical cultural politics becomes
evident, with a final aesthetic proviso that must quickly be noted. Left
cultural producers and theorists - particularly those formed by bourgeois
cultural traditions issuing from romanticism and valorizing spontaneous,
instinctive, or unconscious forms of "genius," but also for very obvious
historical reasons such as Zhdanovism and the sorry consequences of political
and party interventions in the arts have often by reaction allowed themselves
to be unduly intimidated by the repudiation, in bourgeois aesthetics and
most notably in high modernism, of one of the age-old functions of art
- the pedagogical and the didactic. The teaching function of art was,
however, always stressed in classical times (even though it there mainly
took the form of moral lessons), while the prodigious and still imperfectly
understood work of Brecht reaffirms, in a new and formally innovative
and original way, for the moment of modernism proper, a complex new conception
of the relationship between culture and pedagogy. The cultural model I
will propose similarly foregrounds the cognitive and pedagogical dimensions
of political art and culture, dimensions stressed in very different ways
by both Lukacs and Brecht (for the distinct moments of realism and modernism,
respectively).
We cannot, however, return
to aesthetic practices elaborated on the basis of historical situations
and dilemmas which are no longer ours. Meanwhile, the conception of space
that has been developed here suggests that a model of political culture
appropriate to our own situation will necessarily have to raise spatial
issues as its fundamental organizing concern. I will therefore provisionally
define the aesthetic of this new (and hypothetical) cultural form as an
aesthetic of cognitive mapping.
In a classic work, The Image
of the City, Kevin Lynch taught us that the alienated city is above all
a space in which people are unable to map (in their minds) either their
own positions or the urban totality in which they find themselves: grids
such as those of Jersey City, in which none of the traditional markers
(monuments, nodes, natural boundaries, built perspectives) obtain, are
the most obvious examples. 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. Lynch's own work is limited by the
deliberate restriction of his topic to the problems of city form as such;
yet it becomes extraordinarily suggestive when projected outward onto
some of the larger national and global spaces we have touched on here.
Nor should it be too hastily assumed that his model - while it clearly
raises very central issues of representation as such - is in any way easily
vitiated by the conventional poststructural critiques of the "ideology
of representation" or mimesis. The cognitive map is not exactly mimetic
in that older sense; indeed, the theoretical issues it poses allow us
to renew the analysis of representation on a higher and much more complex
level.
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 as "the representation of the subject's Imaginary
relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence." 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.
Yet Lynch's work also suggests
a further line of development insofar as cartography itself constitutes
its key mediatory instance. A return to the history of this science (which
is also an art) shows us that Lynch's model does not yet, in fact, really
correspond to what will become map-making. Lynch's subjects are rather
clearly involved in pre-cartographic operations whose results traditionally
are described as itineraries rather than as maps: diagrams organized around
the still subject-centered or existential journey of the traveler, along
which various significant key features are marked oases, mountain ranges,
rivers, monuments, and the like. The most highly developed form of such
diagrams is the nautical itinerary, the sea chart, or portulans, where
coastal features are noted for the use of Mediterranean navigators who
rarely venture out into the open sea.
Yet the compass at once introduces
a new dimension into sea charts, a dimension that will utterly transform
the problematic of the itinerary and allow us to pose the problem of a
genuine cognitive mapping in a far more complex way. For the new instruments
- compass, sextant, and theodolite - correspond not merely to new geographic
and navigational problems (the difficult matter of determining longitude,
particularly on the curving surface of the planet, as opposed to the simpler
matter of latitude, which European navigators can still empirically determine
by ocular inspection of the African coast); they also introduce a whole
new coordinate: the relationship to the totality, particularly as it is
mediated by the stars and by new operations like that of triangulation.
At this point, cognitive mapping in the broader sense comes to require
the coordination of existential data (the empirical position of the subject)
with unlived, abstract conceptions of the geographic totality.
Finally, with the first globe
(1490) and the invention of the Mercator projection at about the same
time, yet a third dimension of cartography emerges, which at once involves
what we would today call the nature of representational codes, the intrinsic
structures of the various media, the intervention, into more naive mimetic
conceptions of mapping, of the whole new fundamental question of the languages
of representation itself, in particular the unresolvable (well-nigh Heisenbergian)
dilemma of the transfer of curved space to flat charts. At this point
it becomes clear that there can be no true maps (at the same time it also
becomes clear that there can be scientific progress, or better still,
a dialectical advance, in the various historical moments of map-making).
Transcoding all this now into
the very different problematic of the Althusserian definition of ideology,
one would want to make two points. The first is that the Althusserian
concept now allows us to rethink these specialized geographical and cartographic
issues in terms of social space - in terms, for example, of social class
and national or international context, in terms of the ways in which we
all necessarily also cognitively map our individual social relationship
to local, national, and international class realities. Yet to reformulate
the problem in this way is also to come starkly up against those very
difficulties in mapping which are posed in heightened and original ways
by that very global space of the postmodernist or multinational moment
which has been under discussion here. These are not merely theoretical
issues; they have urgent practical political consequences, as is evident
from the conventional feelings of First World subjects that existentially
(or "empirically") they really do inhabit a "postindustrial society" from
which traditional production has disappeared and in which social classes
of the classical type no longer exist - a conviction which has immediate
effects on political praxis.
The second point is that a
return to the Lacanian underpinnings of Althusser's theory can afford
some useful and suggestive methodological enrichments. Althusser's formulation
remobilises an older and henceforth classical Marxian distinction between
science and ideology that is not without value for us even today. The
existential - the positioning of the individual subject, the experience
of daily life, the monadic "point of view" on the world to which we are
necessarily, as biological subjects, restricted - is in Althusser's formula
implicitly opposed to the realm of abstract knowledge, a realm which,
as Lacan reminds us, is never positioned in or actualized by any concrete
subject but rather by that structural void called le sujet suppos?
savoir (the subject supposed to know), a subject-place of knowledge.
What is affirmed is not that we cannot know the world and its totality
in some abstract or "scientific" way. Marxian "science" provides just
such a way of knowing and conceptualizing the world abstractly, in the
sense in which, for example, Mandel's great book offers a rich and elaborated
knowledge of that global world system, of which it has never been said
here that it was unknowable but merely that it was unrepresentable, which
is a very different matter. The Althusserian formula, in other words,
designates a gap, a rift, between existential experience and scientific
knowledge. Ideology has then the function of somehow inventing a way of
articulating those two distinct dimensions with each other. What a historicist
view of this definition would want to add is that such coordination, the
production of functioning and living ideologies, is distinct in different
historical situations, and, above all, that there may be historical situations
in which it is not possible at all - and this would seem to be our situation
in the current crisis.
But the Lacanian system is
threefold, and not dualistic. To the Marxian-Althusserian opposition of
ideology and science correspond only two of Lacan's tripartite functions:
the Imaginary and the Real, respectively.
Our digression on cartography,
however, with its final revelation Of a properly representational dialectic
of the codes and capacities of individual languages or media, reminds
us that what has until now been omitted was the dimension of the Lacanian
Symbolic itself.
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 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 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.
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