I agree with Lloyd on our critical text this week– reading Jameson’s argument on “cognitive mapping” was difficult and pretty confusing until he connected the concept to the idea of spatiality through the example of the League of Black Revolutionary Workers in Detroits in the 70’s. In this, he argues that the League’s socialist revolution could not be carried into other areas of the world because of its unique approach to bringing socialism to Detroit by curtailing their efforts to the sociopolitical landscape of the city. This made the ideas he had explained earlier in the text, and their relation to Snow Crash, more clear to me – namely, his description of art as being “limited to a tiny corner of the social world” (349) and his “late capitalism” (350).

Jameson uses art, and our perception of it, to explain the inevitable discord between what we take from a piece of art, and what it was meant to leave us with. Regardless of what an artist means through his art, the displacement of the art outside of his control and mindset into another’s changes its meaning such that all spectators get something different from his art, especially if these spectators view the art in the context of his life or background. Jameson argues that all viewers are thus not seeing, and never will see, the truth of the art. Just as the League’s strategies could not spatially expand beyond the city to which they apply, art, or artists, can not truthfully share it’s meaning with those who did not make it. One sees this idea in Snow Crash through the Metaverse, specifically in its avatars’ facial expressions. Though the users of the Metaverse control the actions and voices of their avatars, much of the emotion and purpose of regular human activity is lost in its pixilated and robotically-moved world. Action, in general, is simplified: most public parts of the Metaverse are programmed so avatars walk through each other and the nonexistence of virtual death means destruction, physical violence, and even actions that would normally cause murder amount to nothing. As seen through the success of Juanita Marquez’s faces, the human search for a more reliable system of “cognitive mapping” via facial recognition led to the popularity of Black Sun’s facially-superior avatars. This trend shows how important physical recognition or connation is to humans, but also further highlights the futility of humans ever really understanding each other. Despite Juanita’s programming advances, many of the top-notch avatars are described as twitchy or less dimensional with the black-and-whites being the most vivid examples of this.