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Cognitive Mapping
Fredric Jameson defines cognitive mapping as a process by which the individual
subject situates himself within a vaster, unrepresentable totality, a
process that corresponds to the workings of ideology.
Jameson begins by comparing this ideological process of cognitive mapping
to a physical process of locating oneself geographically:
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 this traditional city, then, involved the practical
reconquest of a sense of place and the construction or reconstruction
of an articulated ensemble which can be retained in memory....
There is...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....
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. (Jameson 51-52)
Work Cited
- Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
Related Ideas on this Site
See Also
- Peter Morville's column on the Ethics
of Information Architecture (including labels, classification, granularity).
- Cynthia and Richard Selfe's article "Politics
of the Interace: Power and its Exercise in Electronic Contact Zones,"
which originally appeared in College Composition and Communication,
1994, 4(45), p. 480-504.
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