By the 1990s, Fredric Jameson’s thought turned decisively toward the problem of space. If The Political Unconscious had shown how culture mediates historical time, his later works—especially The Geopolitical Aesthetic (1992) and Signatures of the Visible (1990)—asked how culture might help us orient ourselves in the immense spatial networks of late capitalism. Globalization, multinational corporations, finance, and media had produced what he called a “world system,” a vast and abstract totality in which individuals could no longer easily locate themselves. The challenge, then, was not simply to interpret this system, but to imagine it.
The Crisis of Representation
Under earlier stages of capitalism, individuals could still perceive the structures that shaped their lives: the factory, the city, the nation. In late capitalism, however, production and power are dispersed across digital flows and multinational circuits. As a result, we experience what Jameson calls a “crisis of representation.” We can feel the system’s effects—inequality, ecological damage, alienation—but we cannot visualize its total form. It is too large, too abstract, too complex. This crisis, he argues, is not just economic or political but aesthetic and existential: we have lost the maps that once helped us situate ourselves in the world.
Cognitive Mapping: A New Cultural Task
Jameson’s answer is the concept of cognitive mapping. Borrowed partly from urban geography and partly from psychology, the term describes the need for new cultural forms that can translate the global system into a symbolic image we can grasp. A “cognitive map” does not reproduce reality literally but helps us orient ourselves within it. For Jameson, this is the political mission of art in late capitalism: to provide the imaginative equipment necessary for collective understanding.
In this sense, cognitive mapping is both aesthetic and ethical. It asks artists, filmmakers, and writers to invent representations that can link personal experience to global structures—to make the invisible visible. A successful cultural work does not merely express confusion or fragmentation; it stages the process of trying to find one’s bearings within them.
Cinema and the Geopolitical Unconscious
Jameson finds cinema especially suited to this task. In The Geopolitical Aesthetic, he analyzes films like The Parallax View and The China Syndrome as attempts to map the invisible networks of power, capital, and surveillance that define the late twentieth century. Such films, he argues, perform a kind of “geopolitical unconscious,” dramatizing our collective anxiety about systems too large to comprehend. Even their failures—their incoherent plots or unresolved endings—reveal the difficulty of representing a world system whose totality exceeds our cognitive limits.
Mapping as Utopian Act
Cognitive mapping thus becomes a utopian project. It aims to restore the possibility of collective orientation and agency in a global system that thrives on disorientation. By teaching us how to “see” the totality, Jameson believes, art can renew the political imagination. The map, after all, is not the territory—but without it, we are lost. In a world where capital flows faster than thought, the task of mapping is nothing less than the task of thinking itself.
Learn more:
