Abstract:
For Fredric Jameson the temporary absence of class consciousness from postmodern late capitalism is a crucial and problematic feature of the postmodern condition. His solution is ‘“cognitive mapping” of a new and global type’, which, he explains, is the attempt to learn how to represent ‘the truth of postmodernism -that is … the world space of multinational capital’. In 1984 he described cognitive mapping as ‘a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system’, requiring the invention of ‘radically new forms’ to achieve “ breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing [the world space of multinational capital]” In 1991 in ‘Postmodernism’, he anticipated ‘a process of proletarianization on a global scale’ and explains that ‘cognitive mapping’ is a code word for class consciousness ‘of a new and hitherto undreamed of kind’.
By the end of the 1990s the world was witnessing the first glimmerings in radical practice of such a politics of ‘cognitive mapping of a new and global type’ -class consciousness ‘of a new and hitherto undreamed of kind’. Though by no means the first of such events, the ‘Battle of Seattle’ against the meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) late in 1999 has been described as the ‘coming out party for a new global movement’. It was followed by significant mobilizations across the world. By July 2001 the 200 000 demonstrators in Genoa represented a doubling of the numbers that amassed in Seattle.
Details / PDF:
The full-text PDF of this article can be downloaded from Informit. You can purchase the article, or access Informit for free via a public library account, such as the State Library of Victoria.