Fredric Jameson’s discourse on “cognitive mapping”,
in my opinion,
forms a brilliant, seductive, intellectual web.

He captures the slippery and elusive
proliferation of images
in the postmodernist work
and figures them in a design
authored by the production modes of late capitalism.
While the design is not specifically authored
–that is by a subject—
and the design does not consist of languages
that hold specific, unequivocal referents,
a design,
however openly suggested and provocatively diffused,
remains a design,
an imposition of a map upon a territory.

I don’t make maps,
cognitive or otherwise,
I prefer to not establish boundaries,
avoid territorial claims,
or promote or deny immigration/emigration.

Map-making is always a political act—
disguised as the search for knowledge.

I read Jameson’s analysis of the Gehry house
an attempt either to control my perception
of that site or its photographs.
He infuses his perception into my perception;
and his analysis of Alien NATION
in which the aesthetic artifact
remains outside of the reader’s range of vision
a reification of the object
only in his terms.

The cleverness of his rhetorical strategy:

“For the reader this [the video itself] will remain an imaginary text; but the reader need not ‘imagine’ that the spectator is in an altogether different situation” (79).

As with the map,
I see the cognitive chart,
not the actual territory as mass:
the simulacrum
not the geography
itself experienced as
the traversing of space in time.

I fear that this process
constitutes a kind of
aesthetic totalitarianism.

I prefer an image of
a treasure map
allowing me to dig
but defers my discovery of the treasure infinitely.
Within my strategy,
one can continue to shovel it….