Hyper and Deep Attention:  The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes

Networked and programmable media are part of a rapidly developing mediascape transforming how citizens of developed countries do business, conduct their social lives, communicate with each other, and perhaps most significantly, how they think.  This essay explores the hypothesis we are in the midst of a generational shift in cognitive styles that poses significant challenges to education at all levels, including colleges and universities.  The shift is more pronounced the younger the age group; already apparent in present-day college students, its full effects are likely to be realized only when youngsters who are now twelve years old reach our institutions of higher education.   To prepare, we need to become aware of the shift, understand its causes, and think creatively and innovatively about new educational strategies appropriate to the coming changes.

The shift in cognitive styles can be seen in the contrast between deep attention and hyper attention.  Deep attention, the cognitive style traditionally associated with the humanities, is characterized by concentrating on a single object for long periods (say, a novel by Dickens), ignoring outside stimuli while so engaged, preferring a single information stream, and having a high tolerance for long focus times.  Hyper attention, by contrast, is characterized by switching focus rapidly between different tasks, preferring multiple information streams, seeking a high level of stimulation, and having a low tolerance for boredom.  The contrast in the two cognitive modes may be captured in an image:  picture a college sophomore, deep in Pride and Prejudice with her legs draped over an easy chair, oblivious to her ten-year-old brother sitting in front of a console, jamming on a joystick while he plays Grand Theft Auto.  Each cognitive mode has advantages and limitations.  Deep attention is superb for solving complex problems represented in a single medium, but it comes at the price of environmental alertness and flexibility of response.  Hyper attention excels at negotiating rapidly changing environments in which multiple foci compete for attention; its disadvantage is impatience with focusing for long periods on a non-interactive object such as a Victorian novel or complicated math problem.

In an evolutionary context, hyper attention no doubt developed first; deep attention is a relative luxury requiring group cooperation to create a secure environment in which one does not have constantly to be alert to impending dangers.  Developed societies, of course, have long been able to create the kind of environments conducive to deep attention.  Educational institutions have specialized in them, combining such resources as quiet with assigned tasks that demand deep attention to complete successfully.  So standard has deep attention become in educational settings that it is the de facto norm, with hyper attention regarded as defective behavior that scarcely qualifies as a cognitive mode at all.  This situation would not necessarily be a problem, were it not for the possibility that a generational shift from deep to hyper attention is taking place.  In this case, serious incompatibilities arise between the expectations of educators, trained in deep attention and saturated with assumptions about its inherent superiority, and the preferred cognitive mode of young people who squirm in the procrustean beds outfitted for them by their elders. We would then expect a looming crisis that would necessitate a re-evaluation of the relative merits of hyper versus deep attention, serious reflection about how a constructive synthesis between deep and hyper attention might be achieved, and a thorough-going revision of educational methods.  But I am getting ahead of my story.  First let us look at the evidence that a generational shift from deep to hyper attention is in progress.

The Shift to Hyper Attention:  Generation M

Anecdotal evidence from educators with whom I have spoken at institutions across the country confirms that students are tending toward hyper attention.  During 2005-2006 I had the privilege of serving as a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, making three-day visits during which I gave lectures, conferred with faculty, and talked with students.  I repeatedly heard comments from faculty to the effect that “I can’t get my students to read whole novels anymore, so I have taken to assigning short stories.”  When I queried students, there was a more or less even split between those who identified with deep attention and others who preferred hyper attention, but they unanimously agreed that their younger siblings were completely into hyper attention.

Of course, one would not want to rely solely on such general impressions, so after my year was completed, I researched the topic.  An obvious explanation for the shift, suggested among others by Steven Johnson, is the increasing role of media in the everyday environments of young people.  The most authoritative study to date of the media habits of young people was commissioned by the Kaiser Family Foundation and reported in Generation M:  Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year Olds.  The survey focused on a statistically representative sampling of 2,032 young people, with 694 of those selected for more detailed study through seven-day media diaries they were asked to keep.  The results indicate that the average time young people spend with media per day is a whopping 6.5 hours—every day of the week, including schools days.  Because some of this time is spent consuming more than one form of media, the average time with media in general (adding together the various media sources) rises to 8.5 hours.  Of this, TV and DVD movies account for 3.51 hours; MP3, music CDs, and radio 1.44 hours; interactive media such as web surfing 1.02 hours; and video games .49 hours, with  reading bringing up the rear with a mere .43 hours.  The activity those of us in literary studies may take as normative—reading print books—is the least-often-used media form to which our young people turn in their leisure time.

The report also asked about the context in which young people did their homework.  Thirty per cent reported that they did homework while attending to other media such as IM, TV, and music “most of the time,” and another thirty-one per cent reported they did so “some of the time.”  Some or most of the time young people are doing the tasks assigned by educators, then, they are multitasking, alternating doing homework with listening to music (33%), using computers (33%), reading (28%), and watching TV (24%).  “Alternating,” I say, because psychological studies indicate that what we call multi-tasking is actually rapid alternation between different tasks (Rubinstein et al.)  These studies also indicate that efficiency declines so significantly with multi-tasking that it is more time-efficient to do several tasks sequentially than attempt to do them simultaneously.  One is tempted to conclude that the strong preference young people show for multi-tasking must have another explanation than the presumptive one that it saves time; one possibility is a preference for high levels of stimulation.

Seeking stimulation is also associated with attention deficit disorder (ADD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).  Many people do not realize that Ritalin, the drug frequently prescribed for children with ADD and ADHD, is actually a cortical stimulant; when tranquilizers were prescribed in the early days of testing ADD and ADHD children, their symptoms became worse.  This seemingly counter-intuitive result is explained by Dr. Les Linet, a child psychiatrist at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City specializing in ADD and ADHD, by suggesting that a young person with AD/HD acts as if his nervous systems has somehow acquired a “shield,” so that normal stimulation is felt as boredom and relatively high levels of stimulation are necessary for the child to feel engaged and interested. AD/HD, Dr. Linet writes, might more appropriately be named the “search for stimulation” disorder (2).  The behaviors listed in the DSM IV as symptoms of AD/HD, such as failure to pay close attention to details, trouble keeping attention focused during play or tasks, and avoiding tasks that require a high amount of mental effort and organization such as school projects, should be understood, Linet argues, not as misbehavior but as the search for more stimulation than the assigned task yields, for example by looking out the window, fidgeting, breaking the rules by talking with other children, etc.

AD/HD first appeared in the third edition of DSM-III in 1980.  It is important to understand that while a percentage range is typically assigned to the number of young people with AD/HD—usually given as 3%-5% (National Institute of Health)-these numbers are based on the statistical determination that at least six of the fourteen behaviors listed for “inattentive” AD/HD and/or six of the eleven behaviors listed for “hyperactivity-impulsive” AD/HD in the DSM cause significant impairment.  Inevitably these judgments contain subjective elements.  A child might have four or five of the behaviors and not be classified as AD/HD, although clearly he has tendencies in that direction.  AD/HD should be understood, then, as a category occurring at the end of a spectrum that stretches from “normal.”  Moreover, studies indicate that some children diagnosed as having AD/HD have been misdiagnosed and should not be included in this category (LeFever et al.,;Angold et al.; Marshall)..  Add to this controversies over whether AD/HD should be considered as a mental disorder at all, and the picture of a definitive category with clear-cut boundaries grows fuzzy indeed (Rafalovich; Hallahan).

My hypothesis can now be stated in terms that link it with AD/HD.  The generational shift toward hyper attention can be understood as a shift in the mean toward the AD/HD end of the spectrum.  It is often claimed that the percent of population with “official” AD/HD is constant over time; depending on the shape of the curve, the claim is not necessarily incompatible with a shift in the mean.  We know, however, the number of people diagnosed with AD/HD is rising in most industrialized countries.  While this may be a function of increasing awareness, there is enough controversy over the accuracy of prevailing statistics to make the claim for a constant percentage debatable, to say the least.  There is evidence that AD/HD has genetic causes related to dopamine transporters and perhaps to the brain’s inability to produce dopamine (Swanson et al.). Nevertheless, genetic predispositions often express themselves with varying degrees of intensity depending on their interaction with environmental factors, so the role played by increased environmental stimulation remains unclear.  Whatever the case with AD/HD, there is little doubt that hyper attention is on the rise and that it correlates with an increasing exposure to, and desire for, stimulation in general and stimulation by media in particular.

As the Generation M report observes, rising media consumption should be understood not so much as an absolute increase in the time spent with a given medium—youngsters were spending about as much time with media five years ago, in 1999—as an increase in the variety and kinds of media, as well as in the movement of media into kids’ bedrooms, where they consume it largely without parental participation or supervision.   As Steven Johnson has convincingly argued, media content has also changed, manifesting an increased tempo of visual stimuli and an increased complexity of interwoven plots (61-106).  A related point (that Johnson does not mention) is a decrease in the time required for am audience to respond to an image.  In the 1960’s it was common wisdom in the movie industry that an audience needed something like 20 seconds to recognize an image; today that figure is more like 2 or 3 seconds.  Films such as Memento, Mulholland Drive, Time Code and others suggests that it is not only young people who have an increased appetite for high levels of visual stimulation.  Although the tendency has been most thoroughly documented with the “Generation M” age group, the adult population is also affected, if to a lesser degree.  Moreover, children younger than the eight years old that was the cut-off for the Generation M study are no doubt influenced even more deeply than their older compatriots.

Not without reason, then, have we been called the AD/HD generation.  Rumors abound that college and high school students take Ritalin, Dexedrine, and equivalent drugs to prepare for important examinations such as the SAT and GRE, finding that cortical stimulants help them concentrate.  Surveys of medications taken in North Carolina and Virginia public schools by two different research groups find that Ritalin is being prescribed for children who do not fit the criteria for AD/HD, with 5-7% misdiagnosed (Angold, et al.; LeFever et al.); B. Vitiello speculates that the over-use of Ritalin may be because parents press for it, finding that it helps their children do better in school.  These results suggest that as the mean moves toward hyper attention rather than deep attention, compensatory tactics are employed to retain the benefits of deep attention through the artificial means of chemical interventions in cortical functioning.

How does media stimulation affect brain functioning?  It is well known that the brain’s plasticity is an inherent biological trait; humans are born with their nervous systems ready to be reconfigured in response to their environments.  While the number of neurons in the brain remains more or less constant throughout a lifetime, the number of synapses—the connections that neurons form to communicate with other neurons—is greatest at birth.  Through a process known as synaptogenesis, a new-born infant undergoes a pruning process whereby the neural connections in the brain that are used strengthen and grow, while those that are not decay and disappear (Bear et al.). The evolutionary advantage of this pruning process is clear, for it bestows remarkable flexibility, giving humans the power to adapt to widely differing environments.  Although synaptogenesis is greatest in infancy, plasticity continues throughout childhood and adolescence, with some degree continuing even into adulthood.  In contemporary developed societies, this plasticity implies that the brain’s synaptic connections are co-evolving with environments in which media consumption is a dominant factor.   Children growing up in media-rich environments literally have brains wired differently than humans who did not come to maturity in such conditions.

Evaluating precisely how these changes should affect pedagogy requires careful analysis and attention to the ways in which different disciplines carry out their research John Bruer, president of the James D. McDonnell Foundation that funds cognitive neuroscientific research, has cautioned educators to distinguish between behavioral and cognitive research by psychologists on the one hand, and brain research in neuroscience on the other.  While behavioral studies focus on observable actions, neuroscience is concerned with neural structures and processes in the brain.  Bruer argued that while it is possible to bridge the gap between neuroscience and cognitive science, and also between cognitive science and education, trying to infer educational strategies from basic brain research is “a bridge too far,” for it would require establishing correlations between, say, microscopic neural patterns and macroscopic behavior such as a student fidgeting in his seat (1997).  As Bruer admits in his later writings, however, brain imaging studies are changing that situation because they allow correlations between observable actions—what the subjects are doing at the time the image is taken—and metabolic processes in the brain (1999).

To my knowledge, there have been few imaging studies of the brain processes involved in video games and other interactive pursuits.  Among these are studies by Michael Posner and colleagues at Cornell University’s Weill Medical College.  The researchers measured the effect of video games on what psychologists call “executive attention,” the ability to tune out distractions and pay attention only to relevant information, or in the terms used here, the ability to develop deep attention.  The researchers adapted computer exercises used to train monkeys for space travel, modifying them into games for 4- and 6-year olds (Rudeda et al.).  For five days, the children progressed from a game involving moving a cat in and out of grass to more complicated tasks, including one that asked them to select the largest number while they were simultaneously given distracting and extraneous information.  The children’s brain activity was measured using electroencephalographs, as well as tests for attention and intelligence; some children underwent genetic testing as well.  The researchers discovered that the brains of the six-year-olds showed significant changes after the children played the computer games, compared with a control group that simply watched videos.  (The four-year-olds, by contrast, showed little change, perhaps because the age at which children typically can handle multiple information streams usually occurs between four and six years old.)   The results suggest that brain structure does change as a result of playing computer games at appropriate ages, and it also suggests that media stimulation, if structured appropriately, may actually contribute to a synergistic combination of hyper and deep attention, a finding with suggestive implications for pedagogy.

In addition, there is an extensive body of research that throws indirect light on the subject.  By far the most research on media consumption and brain imaging patterns has been done on reading.  The research unequivocally shows distinctively different patterns in beginning, intermediate, and adult readers.  In an fMRI study at the Georgetown University Medical Center (Turkeltaub et al., 2003, 2004) designed to understand better the disorder called hyperlexia (in which someone focuses obsessively on letter forms while not necessarily comprehending content), it was found that in beginning readers, the most activity occurs in the superior temporal cortex, the area of the brain associated with connecting sounds to letters.  In experienced readers, by contrast, the most active area was the frontal left brain, associated with the accumulated knowledge of spelling.  For our purposes, the details of these patterns are less important than their overall import:  reading is a powerful technology for reconfiguring activity patterns in the brain.  When reading is introduced at an early age, as it customarily is in developed societies, it is likely that the process of learning to read—progressing from a beginning to an experienced reader—contributes significantly to the ways in which synaptogenesis proceeds.  In media-rich environments in which reading is a minor activity compared to other forms of media consumption, one would expect that the processes of synaptogenesis would differ significantly from media-constrained environments in which reading is the primary activity.

Whether the synaptic reconfigurations associated with hyper attention are better or worse than those associated with deep attention cannot be answered in the abstract.  The riposte is obvious:  better for what?  A case can be made that hyper attention is more adaptive than deep attention for many situations in contemporary developed societies.  Think, for example, of the skills required for an air traffic controller who is watching many screens at once and must be able flexibly to change tasks very quickly without losing track of any of them.  Surely in this situation hyper attention would be an asset.  One can argue that these kinds of situations are increasing more rapidly than those that call for deep attention, from the harassed cashier at McDonalds to currency traders in the elite world of international finance.  The speculation that hyper attention is increasingly adaptive in contemporary society is highlighted in Bruce Sterling’s novel Distraction, in which the problematic next step in human evolution is envisioned as a chemically-induced transformation of the brain that allows the two hemispheres to operate independently of one another, turning the brain into a massively parallel organ capable of true multi-tasking.  While such ideas remain in the realm of science fiction, it is not far-fetched to imagine that the trend toward hyper attention represents the brain’s cultural co-evolution in coordination with high-speed, information-intensive, and rapidly changing environments that make flexible alternation of tasks, quick processing of multiple information streams, and low thresholds for boredom more adaptive than a preference for concentrating on a single object to the exclusion of external stimuli.

What about the apparently paradoxical situation of the young person

totally into hyper attention who nevertheless spends long periods playing a video game, intent on mastering all of its complexities until he reaches the highest level of proficiency?   The key to the apparent paradox lies in the game’s interactivity, specifically its ability to offer rewards while maintaining high levels of stimulation.  As Steven Johnson convincingly argues, video games are structured to engage the player in competing for an escalating series of rewards (176-178), thus activating the same dopamine (pleasure-giving) cycle in the brain responsible for other addictive pursuits such as gambling.   But the dopamine cycle is not the whole story.  A study conducted by Richard Ryan and colleagues at the University of Rochester, in collaboration with Immersyve, Inc., asked 1,000 gamers what motivates them to continue playing (Ryan et al.) The results indicate that they found even more satisfying than the fun of playing the opportunities offered by the games for achievement, freedom, and in some instances, connections to other players.   Stimulation works best, in other words, when it is associated with feelings of autonomy, competence, and relatedness, a conclusion with significant implications for pedagogy.  Moreover, James Paul Gee convincingly argues that video games encourage active critical learning and indeed art structured to that the player is required to learn to progress to the next level.  The lesson has not been lost on the Federation of American Scientist, which commissioned a task force on educational games that concluded video games teach skills critical to productive employment in an information-rich society.  In a similar vein, there is growing interest in “serious games” (Shaffer et al.), in which the reward structure can be harnessed for the study of the sciences, social sciences, and as the next section argues, the humanities as well.

The trend toward hyper attention will almost certainly accelerate as the years pass and the age demographic begins to encompass more “Generation M” young people.  As students move deeper into the mode of hyper attention, educators face a choice: change the students to fit the educational environment, or change the environment to fit the students.   At the extreme end of the spectrum represented by AD/HD, it may be appropriate to change the young people, but surely the environment needs to change as well.   What strategies might be useful in meeting this challenge?  How can the considerable benefits of deep attention be cultivated in a generation of students who prefer high levels of stimulation and have low thresholds for boredom?  How should the physical layout of educational environments be re-thought?  With the trend toward hyper attention already evident in colleges and universities, these issues are becoming urgent concerns.  Digital media offer important resources in facing these challenges, both in the ways they allow classroom space to be reconfigured and the opportunities they offer for building bridges between deep and hyper attention.  Let us turn now to consider the possibilities.

Hyper Attention and the Challenge to Higher Education

An interactive classroom at the University of Southern California, under the direction of Scott Fisher, functions as a laboratory to explore new pedagogical models that provide greater stimulation than the typical classroom, including more possibilities for interactions among participants.  Fourteen large screens span the walls, providing display space for input controlled by wireless laptop computers scattered around a large conference table.  One mode of interaction is “Google jockeying”; while a speaker is making a presentation, participants search the Web for appropriate content to display on the screens, for example web sites with examples, definitions, images, or opposing views.  Another mode of interaction is “backchanneling,” in which participants type in comments as the speaker talks, providing running commentary on the material being presented (Hall and Fisher).

The laboratory’s archives, chronicled at Fisher’s website, provide a record of the various experiments (Fisher); they show the participants struggling to find appropriate configurations that will enhance rather than undermine the educational mission. One participant comments that in backchanneling, “The speaker function becomes more about seeding ideas and opening up discussion,” indicating that in such an environment, lecturing is less about a one-way transmission of information and more about providing a framework to which everyone contributes.  Other comments suggest that the participants share responsibility for the insightfulness of the comments they post.  As one participant comments, the interactive environment “challenges the audience to pay attention; it challenges the speaker to hold attention; perhaps it pushes everyone to . . . interact towards a shared goal.”  While the archives give the sense that the perfect configuration has yet to emerge, they convey a lively sense of experimentation and a willingness to re-conceive the educational mission so that everyone, teachers and students, bears equal responsibility for its success.

Other experiments might try enhancing the capacity for deep attention by starting with hyper attention and moving toward more traditional objects of study.  One of the difficult and complex texts I like to teach, for example, is The Education of Henry Adams.  Suffused with dry wit and stuffed with historical details, this text is an object, if ever there was one, that demands deep attention.   Imagine a course that begins by studying strategies of self-presentation at the wildly popular Facebook.com, including naiveté, deception, ironic juxtaposition, competition, cooperation, betrayal, and compelling narrative.   This provides a rich context in which the sly and subversive self-presentations in The Education of Henry Adams can be analyzed, including an assignment that asks students to compose Facebook entries for the book’s ironic persona.

A similar experiment might be tried with the popular computer game Riven and William Faulkner’s formidably complex novel, Absalom, Absalom! Like the novel, Riven unfolds through geographically marked territory, the five islands in which brothers compete for dominance.  Whereas in Riven access to the narrative can only be gained by solving the game’s myriad puzzles, in Absalom Absalom! the narrative is accessible through the trivial device of turning pages.  Nevertheless, understanding Faulkner’s narrative requires solving multiple puzzles of identity, motivation, and desire.  The juxtaposition invites comparison with the hyper attentive mode of interactive game play, where the emphasis falls on exploring and remembering crucial clues embedded in a reward structure keyed to gaining access to the next level of play.  With Faulkner’s novel, the deep attentive mode of rhetorical complexity, temporal discontinuities, and diverse focalizations are coupled with the subtle cognitive reward of constructing large-scale patterns in which these can fit.

A somewhat different configuration emerges from juxtaposing Emily Short’s interactive fiction, Galatea, with Richard Powers’s novel Galatea 2.2.  Both works feature a gendered artificial intelligence with which the player’s character (in the interactive fiction) and protagonist (in the print novel) interact, respectively.   Whereas the challenge in Short’s Galatea is to engage the artificial intelligence in  realistic conversation to understand her backstory, motivations, and psychology, the challenge in Powers’ fiction is to use the interactions of the protagonist, named Rick Powers, with the artificial intelligence Helen to understand his backstory, motivations, and psychology.

In Short’s interactive fiction, Galatea is visualized as an animated statue with whom the player’s character can interact by conversing with her.  If transitions in the conversation are too abrupt or unrelated to previous comments, the statue turns her back to the player’s character and refuses to engage in further intercourse.  Access to Galatea depends, then, on creating realistic ways to advance the conversation without alienating her.  In Powers’s novel, the climax turns on the protagonist giving Helen information that alienates her from the world into which she, as an entity with a profoundly different embodiment than humans, has been dropped halfway.  Whereas the interest in Galatea lies in discovering the complexity of Galatea’s responses, which typically vary with each game play and spring from the sophisticated coding of the game engine algorithm, in Galatea 2.2 the words remain the same but their meaning varies depending on the ways in which the characters’ actions are interpreted.  These differences notwithstanding, the challenge implicit in both works is for the reader/player to understand the personae through narration, a perspective that brings into view common ground between hyper and deep attention.

As these examples show, critical interpretation is not above or outside the generational shift of cognitive modes but necessarily located within it, increasingly drawn into the matrix by engaging with works that instantiate the cognitive shift within their aesthetic strategies.  Whether inclined toward deep or hyper attention, one side or another of the generational divide separating print from digital culture, we cannot afford to ignore the frustrating, zesty, and intriguing ways in which the two cognitive modes interact with one another.

Headaches have themselves

Jerry Fodor

The London Review of Books

A review of

Consciousness and Its Place in Nature: Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism? by Galen Strawson et al
Imprint Academic, 285 pp, £17.95, October 2006, ISBN 1 84540 059 3

Consciousness is all the rage just now. It boasts new journals of its very own, from which learned articles overflow. Neuropsychologists snap its picture (in colour) with fMRI machines, and probe with needles for its seat in the brain. At all seasons, and on many continents, interdisciplinary conferences about consciousness draw together bizarre motleys that include philosophers, psychologists, phenomenologists, brain scientists, MDs, computer scientists, the Dalai Lama, novelists, neurologists, graphic artists, priests, gurus and (always) people who used to do physics. Institutes of consciousness studies are bountifully subsidised. Meticulous distinctions are drawn between the merely conscious and the consciously available; and between each of these and the preconscious, the unconscious, the subconscious, the informationally encapsulated and the introspectable. There is no end of consciousness gossip on Tuesdays in the science section of the New York Times. Periodically, Nobel laureates pronounce on the connections between consciousness and evolution, quantum mechanics, information theory, complexity theory, chaos theory and the activity of neural nets. Everybody gives lectures about consciousness to everybody else. But for all that, nothing has been ascertained with respect to the problem that everybody worries about most: what philosophers have come to call ‘the hard problem’. The hard problem is this: it is widely supposed that the world is made entirely of mere matter, but how could mere matter be conscious? How, in particular, could a couple of pounds of grey tissue have experiences?

Until quite recently, there were two main schools of thought on this. According to one, the hard problem is actually very easy: the answer is that consciousness ‘emerges’ from neural processes. This succeeds in replacing ‘what is consciousness and how is it possible?’ with ‘what is emergence and how is it possible?’ But it doesn’t seem to get much further; many find it less than satisfactory. According to the other view, the hard problem is so hard that it can’t be real: consciousness must be some sort of illusion. Many of this persuasion tried hard to convince themselves that they are, in fact, not conscious, but few of them succeeded. Centuries ago, Descartes suggested, plausibly, that the attempt is self-defeating.

There is, I should add, another way to respond to the hard problem. One might hold that the world isn’t made entirely of matter after all; there is also a fundamentally different kind of stuff – mind-stuff, call it – and consciousness resides in that. Notoriously, however, this view has hard problems of its own. For example, if matter-stuff and mind-stuff are of fundamentally different kinds, how are causal relations between them possible? How is it possible that eating should be caused by feeling peckish or feeling peckish by not eating? For this and other reasons, mind-stuff has mostly fallen out of fashion. I won’t dwell on it here.

That, then, sets the stage for Galen Strawson’s Consciousness and Its Place in Nature, which consists of a lead essay by Strawson, commentaries by 18 other philosophers, and Strawson’s extensive comments on the comments. The book is very rich. On the one hand, Strawson has the kind of expansive metaphysical imagination that used to be at the heart of philosophy, but which positivism and analysis succeeded for a long while in suppressing. Also, the commentaries are, almost uniformly, insightful, informative, sophisticated and excellently argued. It is very rare for a book with this sort of format to be so complete a success, or so much fun to read. I must warn you, however, that Strawson’s way with the hard problem is wildly at odds with the views current in most of philosophy and psychology. Many readers will find them too wild to swallow; I’m not at all sure that I don’t.

There are three philosophical principles to which Strawson’s allegiance is unshakeable. The first is that the existence of consciousness (specifically, of conscious experience) is undeniable; that we are conscious is precisely what we know best. (To be sure, we can’t prove that we are conscious; but that is hardly surprising since there is no more secure premise from which such a proof could proceed.) Strawson’s second principle is a kind of monism: everything that there is is the same sort of stuff as such familiar things as tables, chairs and the bodies of animals. This, however, leaves a lot of options open since Strawson thinks that nothing much is known about that kind of stuff ‘as it is in itself’; at best science tells us only about its relational properties. What is foreclosed by Strawson’s monism is primarily the sort of ‘substance dualism’ that is frequently (but, he thinks, wrongly) attributed to Descartes.

The third of Strawson’s leading theses is a good deal more tendentious than the first two; namely, that emergence isn’t possible. ‘For any feature Y of anything that is correctly considered to be emergent from X, there must be something about X and X alone in virtue of which Y emerges, and which is sufficient for Y.’ But Strawson holds that there isn’t anything about matter in virtue of which conscious experience could arise from it; or that if there is, we have literally no idea what it could be. In particular, we can’t imagine any way of arranging small bits of unconscious stuff that would result in the consciousness of the larger bits of stuff of which they are the constituents. It’s not like liquids (Strawson’s favourite example of bona fide emergence) where we can see, more or less, how constituent molecules that aren’t liquid might be assembled to make larger things that are. How on earth, Strawson wonders, could anything of that sort explain the emergence of consciousness from matter? If it does, that’s a miracle; and Strawson doesn’t hold with those.

It’s his refusal to budge an inch on any of this that makes his discussion so interesting. Whatever you think of his metaphysical conclusions, all three of his assumptions are pretty plausible, so it’s well worth asking what’s entailed if one agrees to them. Strawson is prepared to follow the trail to the very end. I, for one, think that’s how philosophy ought to be done. You can’t make metaphysics out of fudge.

So, then, if everything is made of the same sort of stuff as tables and chairs (as per monism), and if at least some of the things made of that sort of stuff are conscious (there is no doubt that we are), and if there is no way of assembling stuff that isn’t conscious that produces stuff that is (there’s no emergence), it follows that the stuff that tables, chairs and the bodies of animals (and, indeed, everything else) is made of must itself be conscious. Strawson, having wrestled his angel to a draw, stands revealed as a panpsychist: basic things (protons, for example) are loci of conscious experience. You don’t find that plausible? Well, I warned you.

Nor, having swallowed this really enormous camel, does Strawson propose to strain at the gnats. Consider, for example: he thinks (quite rightly) that there are no experiences without subjects of experience; if there’s a pain, it must be somebody or something’s pain; somebody or something must be in it. What, then, could it be that has the experiences that panpsychists attribute to ultimate things? Nothing purely material, surely, since that would just raise the hard problem all over again. So maybe something immaterial? But monism is in force; since the constituents of tables and chairs are made of matter, so too is everything else. So, Strawson is strongly inclined to conclude, the subjects of the experiences that basic things have must be the experiences themselves. Part of the surcharge that we pay for panpsychism (not, after all, itself an immediately plausible ontology) is that we must give up on the commonsense distinction between the experience and the experiencer. At the basic level, headaches have themselves.

Similar lines of thought lead to a forced choice between Strawson’s panpsychism and the traditional distinction between things and their properties. Contrary to naive intuit-ion, ‘Fodor’s headache’ doesn’t express a relation between something more or less permanent (Fodor) and something more or less transient (his headache). If that’s so, however, it threatens to make nonsense of counterfactual hypotheticals; ones which say what would be the case if a given thing had properties different from the ones it actually does (‘Fodor would have been happy if his headache had gone away’). And finally, having somehow got all those camels down, it’s not clear that Strawson has in fact arrived at an answer to the hard problem. Suppose that the little bits of me have (or are) conscious experiences. How does that account for my being conscious? If you have one experience and I have another, the total of our experiences comes to two; there isn’t a third experience of which the first two are the constituents. Well, if that’s true of you and me, why isn’t it also true of me and the little things I’m made of? How does their having their headaches help to explain my having mine?

I should emphasise that none of these objections has escaped Strawson’s attention. To the contrary, I’ve borrowed most of them from him. Having been up front about his problems, Strawson considers various strategies in response to them. Perhaps, for example, commonsense metaphysics really does have to be abandoned; perhaps, in particular, the object/property distinction will have to go. Strawson reads some such moral as already implicit in what’s been going on in recent physics; maybe he’s right to do so. And maybe there are mysteries we must learn to live with; goings-on that we just aren’t built to understand (or that our logic isn’t). Maybe the composition of big experiences out of little ones is among those.

In a way, I’m quite sympathetic to all that. I think it’s strictly true that we can’t, as things stand now, so much as imagine the solution of the hard problem. The revisions of our concepts and theories that imagining a solution will eventually require are likely to be very deep and very unsettling. (That’s assuming what’s by no means obvious: that we are smart enough to solve it at all.) Philosophers used to think (some still do) that a bit of analytical tidying up would make the hard problem go away. But they were wrong to think that. There is hardly anything that we may not have to cut loose from before the hard problem is through with us.

Still, all else being equal, whoever gives up least is the winner; so it matters whether Strawson has abandoned more than he needs to. I’m not convinced that we will have to throw overboard as much as he thinks we will. In particular, we might try denying the claim, cited above, that if Y emerges from X, then there must be something about X in virtue of which Y emerges from it. Why not just say: some things are true about the world because that’s the kind of world it is; there’s nothing more to make of it. That sounds defeatist perhaps; but it really isn’t since, quite plausibly, it’s the sort of thing that we will have to say sooner or later whether or not saying it would help with the hard problem.

Typical scientific explanations appeal to natural laws. Some natural laws are explained by appealing to others, but some aren’t; some of them are basic. So, roughly, the laws about molecules explain the laws about liquidity; and the laws about atoms explain the laws about molecules; and the laws about subatomic bits and pieces explain the laws about atoms . . . and so on down, but not so on down for ever. Eventually, we get to laws about whatever the smallest things are (or, perhaps, to laws about the fundamental structure of space-time); and there we simply stop. Basic laws can’t be explained; that’s what makes them basic. There isn’t a reason why they hold, they just do. Even if basic physical laws are true of everything, they don’t explain everything; in particular, they don’t explain why, of all the basic laws that there might have been, these are the ones there actually are. I don’t say that’s the right way to look at things, but it’s a perfectly respectable and traditional way. At a minimum, it seems that the various sciences form some sort of hierarchy, with physics (or whatever) at the bottom. That’s much as one might expect if the sort of view I’m discussing is at least approximately true.

Maybe, however, there’s something wrong with this view and we’ll finally have to do without it. Maybe the hard problem shows that not all basic laws are laws of physics. Maybe it shows that some of them are laws of emergence. If that’s so, then it’s not true after all that if Y emerges from X there must be something about X in virtue of which Y emerges from it. Rather, in some cases, there wouldn’t be any way of accounting for what emerges from what. Consciousness might emerge from matter because matter is the sort of stuff from which consciousness emerges. Full stop.

It would then have turned out that the hard problem is literally intractable, and that would be pretty shocking. The idea that the basic laws are the laws about the smallest things has been central to the ‘scientific world-view’ ever since there started to be one. On the other hand, as far as I can see, it’s not any sort of a priori truth. I suppose one can imagine a world where all the big things are made out of small things, and there are laws about the small things and there are laws about the big things, but some laws of the second kind don’t derive from any laws of the first kind. In that world, it might be a basic law that when you put the right sorts of neurons together in the right sorts of way, you get a subject of consciousness. There would be no explaining why you get a subject of consciousness when you put those neurons together that way; you just do and there’s the end of it. Perhaps Strawson would say that in such a world, emergence would be a miracle; but if it would, why isn’t every basic law a miracle by definition? I have my pride. I would prefer that the hard problem should turn out to be unsolvable if the alternative is that we’re all too dumb to solve it. All I ask is that the kind of unsolvable that it turns out to be has respectable precedents.

Anyhow, Strawson is right that the hard problem really is very hard; and I share his intuition that it isn’t going to get solved for free. Views that we cherish will be damaged in the process; the serious question is which ones and how badly. If you want an idea of just how hard the hard problem is, and just how strange things can look when you face its hardness without flinching, this is the right book to read.

Fredric Jameson

Cognitive Mapping or, the Resistant Element in the Work of Fredric Jameson:
A Response to Jason Berger

Tanner Mirrlees

Image by Cathryn Johns 

     1. Fredric Jameson’s “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” (1998) and “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1984) — two classic Marxist interventions into the postmodern debate — received much scholarly attention and criticism at the time of their production. Some postcolonial theorists argued that Jameson’s postmodern work, by universalizing the particular postmodern characteristics of late-capitalist America and mis-recognizing the uneven temporal and geographical development of postmodern consumer culture, entailed a neo-imperial bias that was typical of discourses produced by metropolitan academics (During 1985). A few sociologists reprimanded Jameson for un-reflexively privileging the aesthetic-intellectual experience of postmodern culture (predominantly, the experience of privileged cultural producers and consumers such as Jameson himself) over an ethnographic inquiry into the everyday uses of postmodern culture by subordinate individuals and groups (Featherstone 1989). And poststructuralists of the Foucauldian variety, always suspicious of the self-interested and oppressive power relations lurking behind various systems of thought that seek to pass as Truth (especially those meta-narratives produced by the revolutionary tradition of Marxism), deconstructed the “discursive violence” of Jameson’s purportedly universalizing, bourgeois-humanist, and totalizing neo-enlightenment discourse (Horne 1989; Radhakrishnan 1989).1

     2. Criticisms such as these, when resisting the temptation to caricaturize Jameson’s argument and when refusing the discursive violence of postmodern cultural theory (which aggressively popularized an intellectual will-to-de-legitimize more than one-hundred years of diverse Marxist theory and praxis), are valid. Yet, many criticisms of Jameson’s postmodern work too often frame it as overly pessimistic and negative, obscuring a more positive reading that explores how Jameson offers readers a narrative of political agency, hope, and resistance. More recently, scholars have interpreted Jameson’s work in a much more balanced fashion and provided more careful evaluations of its theory, method, and politics (Burnham 1995; Helming 2001; Homer 1998; Roberts 2000; Wise 1995). The chief shortcoming of most contemporary critical interpretations of Jameson’s work, however, is their “failure to totalize, where totalizing would mean, as a minimum, attempting to apprehend Jameson’s work as a whole; more generally, it would mean determining the relation between this properly abstracted whole and the historical milieu in which it was produced” (Buchanan 2002: 226).

     3. A recent article published in Cultural Logic that seeks to reveal an element in Jameson’s work on postmodernism that is capable of resisting or subverting the cultural logics of late-capitalism also suffers from this contemporary inability to totalize Jameson. In “Tethering the Butterfly: Revisiting Jameson’s ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’ and the Paradox of Resistance,” Berger (2004) argues that postmodernism’s spatial de-territorialization and the emergence of a global hyperspace (which Jameson reads off the lobby of the Bonaventure Hotel) results in the disorientation of the consumer, which in turn, potentially disrupts the smooth reproduction of consumption within the hotel. This — read as postmodernism’s potentially resistant element — exacerbates the crisis tendencies of capitalist accumulation and requires the hotel management and merchants to resolve these crisis tendencies with cultural resolutions: seductive advertisements and re-inscriptions of capitalist space with signifiers that nostalgically reference territorialized space in modern time.

     4. Berger’s interpretation is a welcome alternative to overly pessimistic and negative readings of Jameson’s postmodern work. It also offers a theoretically rich discussion of how capitalism, following Jameson’s line, produces imaginary cultural resolutions to its crisis tendencies. However, Berger’s interpretation doesn’t go far enough to relate the resistant element discovered in the pages of “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” to Jameson’s work as a whole. Nor does it attempt to relate Jameson’s postmodern work to the historical and political conditions in which it was originally produced and in effect, responding to. Berger’s failure to totalize results in an occlusion of the most significant and elusive political concept (and potentially resistant element) in Jameson’s work on postmodernism: cognitive mapping.

     5. Only by accounting for the conjecturally specific political and theoretical problems that Jameson’s postmodern work attempts to reconcile and move beyond, will it be possible to reveal how cognitive mapping functions as the potentially resistant element to the postmodern cultural logics of late-capitalism. Jameson’s work — as a socially symbolic act that performs imaginary resolutions to the real conflicts, crisis and contradiction of the period — will thus by interpreted according to the methodological prescriptions and analytical tactics that are regularly employed by Jameson himself.2

     6. As will be argued, cognitive mapping responds to and seeks to move beyond three distinctly postmodern political problems. First, in response to postmodernism’s de-centering subject-effects (the consumerist dis-orientation generated by global hyperspace, for example), cognitive mapping seeks to re-center a political subject capable of resisting capitalism. Second, in response to (and as an attempt to resist) the anti-systemic and anti-totalizing claims of anti-Marxist post-structuralist theories, cognitive mapping attempts to legitimize the Marxian effort to totalize capitalism as a global system. Third, in response to the problem of global class fragmentation, cognitive mapping potentially functions as a socialist political strategy that facilitates the formation of a global class-consciousness. Cognitive mapping is symptomatic of Jameson’s Marxist political unconscious: the concept performs a number of imaginary resolutions to concrete political and historical problems and crisis facing socialist activists, Marxist academics and fragmented working classes in the period of global capitalism.

Jameson’s Marxism

     7. Anderson (1998) describes Jameson’s intellectual project as a “materialist symbolism” (130) that seeks to reveal and critique the relationship between transformations in the capitalist mode of production as it unfolds across various historically and geographically conditioned social formations and the historical and spatial conditions of possibility that facilitate transformations in the production and reproduction of cultural forms. With beautifully crafted dialectical sentences, Jameson has consistently attempted to reveal the highly mediated relationship between the historical transformations of the capitalist mode of production and the aesthetic or socially-symbolic transformations in the sphere of culture. Connecting the style of figuration in modernist literature to the state of working class formation and consciousness, articulating the mechanically produced pop art of Andy Warhol to postmodern amnesia, and linking the compressed micro-narratives in the previews of Hollywood films to the time-and-space compressive movements of finance capitalism are but a few of the ways by which Jameson has enacted this materialist symbolism.

     8. Jameson’s work on postmodernism, following his materialist symbolist trajectory, seeks to connect and relate postmodernism as a cultural dominant to broader transformations in the capitalist mode of production. As Jameson (1991) writes: “It is 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” (4). But postmodernism is not only a cultural dominant used by Jameson to designate emergent features. It is also periodizing concept. Jameson (1998a) states: “postmodernism does not designate a particular style, but rather is a periodizing concept which serves to correlate the emergence of new formal features in culture with the emergence of a new type of social life and a new economic order” (3). Jameson (1998b) argues that postmodernism must be “grasped as a symptom of the deeper structural changes in our society and its culture as a whole, or in other words, in the mode of production” (50).

     9. Jameson’s periodization of postmodernism rests on the broader political-economic analysis posited by the historical-materialist Mandel (1972) in Late Capitalism and (many years later) by the world-systems theorist Arrighi (1994), in The Long Twentieth Century. Jameson (1991) takes Mandel’s account of the end of Fordist-era production and the collapse of inter-imperial rivalries between national-states to signal the emergence of a post-industrial, consumerist, and late or multinational period of capitalist expansion. Jameson (1998d) interprets Arrighi’s account of the unleashing of finance capital from the fetters of the post-WWII Keynesian/Bretton Woods arrangement by means of new communication technologies and neo-liberal political regimes to signal a new era.

The Dominant Cultural Elements of Postmodernism

     10. Working from the political-economic referential frame devised by Mandel and Arrighi, Jameson attempts to come to terms with the dominant cultural elements of postmodernism. Imperial Hollywood produces and distributes nostalgia films that simulate historical events in a vulgar pastiche while de-referentializing their depth, meaning and contextual complexities.3 The postmodern market annihilates markers of social class difference by simulating and packaging ethno-cultural “group” differences as marketable lifestyle identities.4 The money form is de-materialized into trillions of digital codes, de-territorialized and transferred across planetary geographies at historically unprecedented speeds and then made subject to speculation in the seemingly free-floating sphere of global cyber-space.5

     11. The global media-market blends entertainment with the conventions of advertising and seduces audiences with re-invented Reagan-era ideologies of consumer sovereignty (which sadly have their market-populist analogue in so much of today’s audience-centered cultural studies).6 The media spectacle fetishistically erases traces of production and mystifies the labor process while turning commodities into affective simulacrum and audiences into commodity exchange-values for the advertising-dependent television networks. Distinctions between high and low art are erased through delicate aestheticizations of commodities previously relegated to the vulgar tastes of the commercial world: popular commodities are increasingly included in the world’s most prestigious art galleries. All of these elements and processes are dominant cultural elements of postmodernism and register the world transformed by global capitalism.

De-Territorialized Global Hyperspace and the End of History

     12. Jameson (1991) locates the most profound transformation in a global mutation and an altogether new subjective experience of social space (365). Addressing how each historical period of capitalist production — industrial, monopoly or imperial, and late or multinational — produces a distinct form of spatiality, which in turn, produces a particular mode of aesthetic figuration, Jameson (1991) states: “the three historical stages of capital have each generated a new type of space unique to it, even though these three stages of capitalist space are obviously far more profoundly interrelated than are the spaces of other modes of production. The three types of space I have in mind are all the results of discontinuous expansions or quantum leaps in the enlargement of capital, in the latter’s penetration and colonization of hitherto un-commodified areas” (348). The new postmodern hyperspace of multinational capitalism is reminiscent of Baudrillard’s (1983; 1988) hyperreality: the depth and materiality of the real world seems to implode into an endlessly differentiating play of affective surfaces, commodity seductions and auto-referential simulacra, all which suppress distance and relentlessly saturate vacant places and postmodern bodies with a mind-numbing sensorial barrage (Jameson 1991: 412).

     13. The emergence of this postmodern hyperspace unseats History from its previous position of ontological and epistemological authority. “Postmodernism” writes Jameson (1991), “eschews temporality for space” (134) and if temporality has a place left in a postmodern world, “it would be better to speak of the writing of it than any lived experience” (154). As result, the subject’s experience of time and history is deadened and begins to wane. Jameson (1998a), commenting on the experiential end of history and present-mindedness, states: “the disappearance of a sense of history, the way in which our entire contemporary social system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetual present and in a perpetual change that obliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social information have had, in one way or another, to preserve” (20).

     14. Historical experience and its richly affective structures of feeling collapse into a perpetual present of consumer-driven intensities that make it impossible for people to connect the depth of the past with the circumstances of their present. Postmodern hyperspace seems to neutralize people’s ability to imagine a different future. Its “swerving, stammering flux precludes either cathexis or historicity. [ . . . ] the typical polarities of the subject run from the elation of the commodity rush, the euphoric highs of spectator or consumer, to the dejection at the bottom of the deeper nihilistic void of our being, as prisoners of an order that resists any other control or meaning” (1991: 317). Thus, history (including the emancipatory historical-materialist meta-narrative of History), appreciations of aesthetic depth, and the unifying theme of critical distance, all residual elements of progressive modernity, are dissolved by postmodern hyperspace.

Jameson as the Disoriented Subject in the Lobby of the Bonaventure Hotel

     15. Global hyperspace has damaging implications for the political subject. Jameson (1998a), commenting on the death of the (modern) subject, states: “The modernist aesthetic is in some way organically linked to the conception of a unique self and private identity, a unique personality and individuality, which can be expected to generate its own unique vision of the world” (6). “Yet today,” continues Jameson (1998a), “this kind of individualism and personal identity is a thing of the past; [ . . . ] one might even describe the concept of the unique subject and the theoretical basis of individualism as ideological” (6). Jameson (1991), contemplating the death of the subject, states: “the spatial peculiarities of postmodernism are symptoms and expressions of a new and historically original dilemma, one that involves our insertion as individual subjects into a multidimensional set of radically discontinuous realities, whose frames range from the still surviving spaces of bourgeois private life all the way to the unimaginable de-centering of global capital itself” (412). Thus, the de-centering or death of the modern political subject is, for Jameson, largely an effect of global postmodern hyperspace.

     16. Jameson (1998a) illustrates the de-centering experience of postmodern hyperspace by re-narrativizing his individual tour through the Bonaventure Hotel’s massive lobby complex. The lobby, “which aspires to be a total space, a complete world, a kind of miniature city” (11), “figures fourth the end of modernist architectural utopia” (13). After commenting on how the lobby escalator represents the technological obsolescence of the modern promenade, Jameson (1998a) glumly recalls his inability to locate himself within the lobby’s hyperspace: “Hanging streamers indeed suffuse this empty space [ . . . ] to distract systematically and deliberately from whatever form it might supposed to have; while a constant busyness gives the feeling that emptiness is here absolutely packed, that it is an element within which you yourself are immersed, without any of that distance that formerly enabled the perception of perspective or volume. You are in this hyperspace up to your eyes and your body” (14). Jameson’s (1998a) disorienting narrative stroll through this postmodern hyper-space leads him to briefly contemplate the notorious dilemma of the Bonaventure’s merchants, which Berger (2004) interprets as postmodernism’s resistant element.

     17. “It has been obvious” recalls Jameson (1998a), “since the very opening of the hotel in 1977, that nobody could ever find any of these stores, and even if you located the appropriate boutique, you would be most unlikely to be as fortunate a second time; as a consequence, the commercial tenants are in despair and all the merchandise is marked down to bargain prices” (15). Certainly, dazed and confused hotel clients don’t always make for efficient consumers (in most instances, however, the market preys on disorientation and impulsiveness; advertising requires consumers to act irrationally). The bargain prices that Jameson observes here are likely caused by the over-production of commodities, which, following the doctrine of crisis theory, leads to under-consumption and a falling rate of profit that in turn, compels capitalist producers to slice wages and presses distributors to undersell or outsell competitors by slashing prices or stimulating demand with more advertising. But late-capitalism’s notorious dilemma of accumulation (if there indeed is one) is temporally (and temporarily) managed and resolved by spatial fixes, by credit cards, by money markets, and indeed, by more marketing. The notion that consumers may be dis-oriented by postmodern hyperspace, and as result, slow down the reproduction of consumption, forcing the Bonaventure to spend more money on pseudo-territorialized advertising mirages, is a limited conception of resistance. Furthermore, this conception of resistance to postmodernism glosses over Jameson’s deeper understanding of postmodernism’s core political problems and the socialist political practice he offers in response.

Growing “New Conceptual Organs”: A Political Problem in Postmodern Times

     18. As discussed earlier, postmodern hyperspace de-centers and overwhelms the human subject, making it tremendously difficult for it to connect the past to the present and to locate or situate itself in relation to this new space. Jameson (1998a) states: “we ourselves, the human subjects who happen into this new space, have not kept pace with that evolution; there has been a mutation in the object, unaccompanied as yet by any equivalent mutation in the subject; we do not yet possess the perceptual equipment to match this new hyperspace” (11). Indeed, “this latest mutation in space,” argues Jameson (1998a) “has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and to map cognitively its position in a mappable external world”(16). Postmodern hyperspace makes it tremendously difficult for us “to map the great global, multinational and de-centered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects” (1998a: 16).

     19. The incapacity of human subjects to conceive of their particular spatial and historical situation within (and perhaps as an effect of) the global capitalist system is a political problem (and I will account for this more thoroughly in the concluding section of this article). To resolve this problem — to become capable of representing and locating ourselves in relation to the global capitalist system as a whole — Jameson (1991) argues we first need to grow “new conceptual organs” (39). Rather than moralizing about postmodernism, Jameson (1999e) calls for “a genuinely historical and dialectical analysis of such phenomena [ . . . ] to assess the new cultural production within the working hypothesis of a general modification of culture itself with the social restructuring of late capitalism as a system” (30). Thus, Jameson requires new conceptual organs to work through the de-centering effects of postmodernism.

     20. The conceptual organs offered by Jameson as a solution to the political problem of the de-centered subject come in the form of aesthetic-pedagogical practice called cognitive mapping. Cognitive mapping is derived from Kevin Lynch’s study The Image of the City and appeals to Jameson for two reasons. First, Lynch’s description of the disorienting experience of the alienated city by its residents — their inability to subjectively map their position within and in relation to the urban totality — is comparable to Jameson’s formulation of the de-centered subject of postmodernism, which is unable to subjectively map its position within and in relation to global hyperspace.

     21. Second, Lynch’s cognitive mapping bears a striking resemblance to Lacan’s Symbolic, to the extent that both terms mediate between the Real and the Imaginary. At the same time, Jameson interprets Lynch’s cognitive mapping — in practice — as analogous to Althusser’s account of Ideology-in-general: “the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence”(1991: 53-54). Jameson thus adapts Lynch’s notion of cognitive mapping (an urban political-aesthetic strategy for coping with the urban totality), transcodes it through a Marxian referent system, and then posits it as a subject’s way of coping with, or figuring fourth, their imaginary relation to global capitalist hyperspace. Here is the potentially resistant element in Jameson’s work on postmodernism.

Cognitively Mapping as Totalization

     22. Jameson recommends that subjects cognitively map their imaginary relation to global capitalist hyperspace as a political response to postmodernism’s de-centering effects. But how is cognitive mapping a potentially resistant political act and what political practice is cognitive mapping interested in? The answers to these questions are found in two interrelated concepts that Jameson, in all of his work, has fought to legitimize: totality and totalization. Though many scholars have problematized the notions of totality and totalization (Laclau and Mouffe 1984; Jay 1984), Jameson contends that these concepts are absolutely necessary for both analytic and political purposes. If the globalization of capitalism is a totalizing process through which all different and particular (i.e., non-capitalist) social relations are increasingly subsumed by the expanding logics of commodification, then an equally totalizing abstraction is needed to conceive of this as a new global condition of existence. For Jameson, global capitalist totality provides contemporary Marxism with this abstraction and acts as the object that critique and socialist political struggle seeks to negate.

     23. More importantly, global capitalist totality is the analytic precondition for totalizing, which, in Jameson’s usage, does not refer to some brutal Stalinist totalitarian impulse or oppressive desire to reduce all difference to sameness and heterogeneity to homogeneity.7 Jameson’s desire to totalize resides in his contention that each particular social element, political-economic process, and cultural formation is in some small way, relationally yet relatively autonomously, connected to and over-determined by other social elements, political-economic processes, and cultural formations. Thus, if postmodernism involves the fragmentation, dispersion, and implosion of life and meaning, totalization means little more than making connections between different elements, political-economic processes, and cultural formations, and the wider historical and geographical conditions of possibility that condition and over-determine their existence (Jameson 1991: 402). For Jameson, to totalize is to relate and connect, to situate and interpret each object, phenomena, or event — whether it be a credit card, a Nike shoe, or terror war — in relation to the wider relations and forces, structures, and determinations that limit and enable their sensual and concrete historical existence.

     24. Jameson (1991) does not suggest, however, that totalization can produce a full aesthetic picture of the global capitalist totality, nor an objective, complete and unmediated representation of the world as it is out there: “if the word totality sometimes seems to suggest that some privileged bird’s eye view of the whole is available, which is also the Truth, then the project of totalization implies exactly the opposite and takes as its premise the impossibility for individual and biological human subjects to conceive of such a position” (Jameson 1991: 332). But though such a bird’s eye conception of the global capitalist totality is impossible, this does not mean that attempts to represent it from our particular localities is politically futile. Rather, “the global totality extends beyond knowledge and is a product of knowledge power; it is not available for representation but needs to be” (Hardt and Weeks 2000: 23). Thus, cognitive mapping the global capitalist totality — the social practice of representing, locating and imagining ourselves in relation to the globally expanding capitalist system — is totalization, or, the political and aesthetic solution to the problem of postmodernism: “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” (1991: 54).

Cognitive Mapping as Three Conditions of Possibility for Political Resistance

     25. In the final section of Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson responds to the question of what form of cultural politics is the most effective for resisting postmodernism. He proposes two cultural strategies of resistance. The first is a homeopathic strategy, an attack on the spectacular image society of late-capitalism from within by using its imagistic resources for counter-hegemonic cultural practices: by “undermining the image by way of the image itself and planning the logic of the simulacra by dint of ever greater doses of simulacra” (1991: 409).8 Cultural jamming, resistant meaning-making practices, and struggles over the use of commodity sign-values all fit into this first, homeopathic strategy of cultural resistance. The second strategy of cultural resistance to postmodernism is cognitive mapping, which Jameson clearly privileges over the first: “what I have called cognitive mapping may be identified as a more modernist strategy, which retains an impossible concept of totality whose representational failure seemed for the moment as useful and productive as its (inconceivable) success” (1991: 409). Why does Jameson take cognitive mapping, with its totalization and impossible desire to represent the global capitalist totality to be politically useful? Cognitive mapping provides imaginary resolutions to three concrete political problems facing Marxist academics, socialists, and globally fragmented workers in the period of late-capitalism. By doing so, cognitive mapping attempts to facilitate three conditions of possibility for resistance to capitalism.

I Cognitive Mapping and the Re-centering of a Representing Subject

     26. Jameson (1991) takes the postmodern terrain of ideological struggle to have “migrated from concepts to representations” (321). As mentioned earlier, postmodernism radically de-centers and fragments the human subject, denying it a sense of time and bewildering its spatial coordinates. Here, the political subject becomes a dis-oriented and apolitical schizophrenic that is incapable of making coherent aesthetic “representations of its current experience”(1991: 21). The world is made (non)sense of through media simulations and a debased commercial hyperreality, which cripple political agency and the desire for social change. For Jameson, the typical postmodern subject has no means to represent who they are, where they come from, and where they are in the world. Postmodern subjects cannot develop the political capacities to critically think about or struggle to change the world.

     27. Cognitive mapping is Jameson’s imaginary resolution to the postmodern political problem of a de-centered subject that is no longer capable of representing itself in the world. Indeed, the purpose of cognitive mapping is to enable “a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly un-representable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole” (1991: 51). By enabling historically and geographically situated subjects with a way to construct partial representations of their particular place and experience, cognitive mapping is an aesthetic mode by which the subject can re-center itself in a space and ground itself in historical time. Thus, cognitive mapping attributes political agency, creativity and purpose to the human subject in a period in which the subject is no longer supposed to exist, let alone be interested in a revolution. From this first interpretation, cognitive mapping is a conceptual apparatus that human subjects develop in relation to postmodernism and the precondition for their political resistance to capitalism.

II Cognitive Mapping and the Academic Legitimization of Marxism

     28. The legitimacy and illegitimacy of various disciplines and discourses, academia, and academic knowledge production and circulation constitute a terrain of political struggle that Jameson, as an unapologetic Marxist academic, consciously occupies. And given that Jameson is a Marxist academic with revolutionary aspirations, it follows that he is engaged in a struggle to defend, preserve and teach Marxism, despite the neo-liberal and neo-conservative intellectuals that wish to destroy this theoretical and political tradition.9 This preservation and perpetuation of Marxist theory and practice, however, has become more arduous since the postmodern cultural turn, when many radical culturalists and post-structuralists waged a deconstructive war against Marxian concepts such as mode of production, totality, and system, and also, trashed the politics of working-class struggle and goal of socialist revolution. A postmodern interest in absolute heterogeneity, difference, and disjuncture, and a literary politics of deconstruction often replaced and took precedence over the totalizing and systematizing analytic strategies and revolutionary political goals of Marxism.

     29. With cognitive mapping, Jameson attempts to save bits and pieces of Marxism from the chopping block of post-structuralism. Cognitive mapping is totalization in disguise. By disguising totalization as cognitive mapping, Jameson guilefully moves anti-Marxist academics away from the “totalization as Stalinist totalitarianism” jargon. At the same time, the concept retains Marxism’s attempt, despite the poststructuralist effort to disaggregate and reify social reality into incommensurable fragments, to think capitalism as a global system and a totality. In his first essay on cognitive mapping, Jameson (1988) states: “I have found myself obliged, in arguing for an aesthetic of cognitive mapping, to plot a substantial detour through the great themes and shibboleths of post-Marxism, so that to me it does seem possible that the aesthetic here may be little more than a pretext for debating those theoretical and political issues” (347). And in the conclusion to Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson (1991) reveals the goal of his work:

The rhetorical strategy of the preceding pages has involved an experiment, namely, the attempt to see whether by systematizing something that is resolutely unsystematic, and historicizing something that is resolutely ahistorical, one couldn’t outflank it and force a historical way at least of thinking about that. ‘We have to name the system’: this high point of the sixties finds an unexpected revival in the postmodernism debate. (418)

30. Cognitive mapping is Jameson’s solution to the political problem of a dominant poststructuralist qua liberal-pluralist academic discourse10 that seeks to marginalize Marxian attempts to totalize social reality and think capitalism as a global system. On the terrain of institutional struggle over the legitimacy of academic discourses and practices, Jameson’s cognitive mapping (in his work on postmodernism) re-legitimizes the categories of totality and totalization to counter the postmodern camp’s deconstructive war against these concepts (and Marxism in general). Given that Marxism in the only discourse (if, following the neo-Foucauldians, we wish to reduce it to one ideological discourse among many in the global shopping mall of contemporary cultural theory) that has the capacity and political will to interpret and change the world (specifically by understanding and moving beyond the social relations of capitalism), Jameson’s cognitive mapping, by preserving an element of Marxian theory and legitimizing Marxian critique in light of postmodern fashion, is, on the institutional terrain of academic production and consumption, resistant to the cultural logics of global capitalism.

III Cognitive Mapping and the Formation of a Global Class Consciousness

     31. The globalization of capitalism — the outsourcing of jobs to sweatshop factories, the criminalization of unions by neo-liberal state policies, and the international diffusion of production — has not necessarily been accompanied by a global working class politics, nor the emergence of some transnational kind of revolutionary class consciousness (Marx’s class-for-itself). Global capitalism and postmodern culture both conspire against and create new conditions of possibility for the emergence of a globe-spanning revolutionary working-class subject. This signals a political opportunity and problem for Jameson (1991):

I’m convinced that this new postmodern global form of capitalism will now have a new class logic about it, but it has not yet completely emerged because labour has not yet reconstituted itself on a global scale, and so there is a crisis in what classes and class consciousness are. It’s very clear that agency in the Left is not in those older forms but the Marxist narratives assures us that some for of agency will reconstitute itself and that is the sense in which I still find myself committed to the Marxist logic. (31)

     32. The new (and old) dynamics of capitalism also pose a tremendous challenge for socialist organizations (even unions) that seek to mobilize globally situated working-class constituencies against neo-liberalism. The cultural logic of postmodernism only heightens the challenge of socialist politics and exacerbates the neutralization of a radicalized class-consciousness by conflating cultural and economic fields and supplanting class politics with market-friendly lifestyle politics. Jameson (1991), commenting on socialism’s notorious global political dilemma, states: “since the crisis of socialist internationalism and the [ . . . ] difficulties of coordinating local and grassroots of neighborhood political actions with national or international ones, such urgent political dilemmas are [ . . . ] functions of the enormously complex new space in question” (413).

     33. Jameson illustrates socialism’s new globally spatialized political dilemma with a discussion of Marvin Surkin and Dan Georgakis’s Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, a film that documents the political rise, city-struggles, and demise the League of Black Revolutionary Workers in the 1960s. Though the League made remarkable achievements early in the battle, their overall political strategy, laments Jameson (1991), was ultimately “shackled to the city form itself” (414). The major challenge for the League was thus spatial: “how to develop a national political movement on the basis of a city strategy and politics” (414). The League’s leadership spread the revolutionary word across other American cities and even other parts of the globe, and struggled to network and align itself with other constituencies. The League’s great and debilitating political challenge, suggests Jameson (1991), was “how to represent a unique local model and experience to people in other situations” (414).

     34. Though Detroit: I Do Mind Dying marks the political failure of the League, Jameson takes its narrative of the League’s city-struggles to be politically instructive, even exemplary of the contemporary challenge facing socialist activists and globally dispersed working classes. The narrative enacts the challenge of aesthetically representing the local political experiences workers to the political experiences of workers in other, global situations. The film’s narrative of political defeat, argues Jameson (1991), “causes the whole architectonic of postmodern global space to rise up in ghostly profile behind itself, as some ultimate dialectical barrier or invisible limit” (415). The League’s local experience and its global challenge — to connect, relate, and mobilize in a way that transcends the city, even the national political form — represented by Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, performs “what is meant by the slogan of cognitive mapping” (415).

     35. As a cognitive map, the film not only represents the task of international socialism to one day transcend the municipal or national political form, but also, attests to the political necessity of cognitively mapping global capitalism from local situations and then connecting the resultant imaginary representations with those imaginary representations crafted by globally situated others: “an aesthetic of cognitive mapping in this sense is an integral part of any socialist political project” (Jameson 1991: 416). The global potentialities of cognitive mapping, and the class politics it may result in, are of utmost importance to Jameson (1991): “cognitive mapping was in reality nothing but a code word for developing a class-consciousness — only it proposed the need for class consciousness of a new and hitherto undreamed of kind [ . . . ] in the direction of that new spatiality implicit in the postmodern” (418).

     36. Thus, cognitive mapping is an internationalist mode of political communication that seeks to represent and share the local experiences of particular socialist and worker struggles with those of global others. Cognitive mapping is Jameson’s political prescription for international socialism. From this third interpretation, then, the potentially resistant element to postmodernism is cognitive mapping’s practical political effect: a global working class consciousness and globally organized movement against capitalism.

Conclusion: Cognitive Mapping for Resisting Global Capitalism

     37. Marxists such as Jameson have done much to understand how the cultural logic of postmodernism legitimizes, reinforces, and reproduces the economic imperatives and ideological discourses of global capitalism. To the question as to whether there is also a way within postmodernism to change or resist the cultural logics of global capitalism, asked by Jameson in 1983 and again by Berger in 2004, there may be no singular or definitive answer. But by totalizing Jameson, by interrogating the political unconscious of Jameson’s postmodern narrative, by subjecting Jameson’s work to the Jamesonian mode of critique, I revealed how cognitive mapping, as a socially-symbolic conceptual act, responds to and performs imaginary resolutions to many postmodern political problems in the period of global capitalism.

     38. By re-centering the political subject and attributing it with an aesthetic mode of working through postmodern fragmentation, by re-legitimizing Marxism’s attempt to totalize capitalism as a global system in light of postmodern chaos (pedagogically, politically, and institutionally), and by functioning as an internationalist socialist political strategy that seeks to represent and articulate together a new global class-consciousness, cognitive mapping is Jameson’s conceptual condition of possibility for the real emergence of political resistance to global capitalism. Jameson’s cognitive mapping — as symbolically performed by so many of his lectures, articles, and magisterial books — certainly reflects the essence of Marxist praxis, of the dialectic of thought and action, of theory and practice, of historical interpretation and socialist transformation.