The idea of cognitive mapping was rather abstract, until Jameson likened it to that of mapping one’s position in an actual city. He cited Kevin Lynch’s work, The Image of the City, where Lynch theorizes that “the alienated city is above all a space in which people are unable to map (in their minds) either their own positions or the urban totality in which they find themselves”.

Jameson cites the Althusserian redefinition of ideology as “the representation of the subject’s Imaginary relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence”. Jameson shows how this is just what cognitive mapping is needed for in the context of the urban problem, i.e. “to enable a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures as a whole”. When cognitive mapping is unachievable, in the urban setting, there is urban alienation, in the ideolological context, there is an inability to picture oneself as part of a totality, to picture that relationship between the Imaginary and the Real.

The way I understood it, Jameson theorizes that the years after 1960, labelled “postmodern” and shaped by “late capitalism”, or in the words of Mandel “the moment of the multinational network”, have been an era where cognitive mapping in a social context (as opposed to urban, as demonstrated above) has become impossible. Where the denizen of Jersey City experiences “urban alienation”, the citizens of the postmodern era, similarly, experience a different sort of alienation, one where they are unable to imagine their position in a social totality.

I felt I could see this to some extent in the novel, Snow Crash. First of all, the world here is definitely a depiction of late capitalism, to the point where multinational networks and corporations, such as Mr Lee’s Greater Hong Kong, have superceded governments and nations, even the great superpower of the United States (or in the cause of Mr Lee’s Hong Kong, the actual Crown Colony of Hong Kong, which he is quick to disclaim as being simply a part of the People’s Republic of China).

The characters and people in Snow Crash seem to be victims of this postmodern inability to cognitively map themselves in their social environment. After all, what else could we expect besides a healthy amount of disorientation, in a world where Hong Kong is both a corporation and a country, where a trillion dollars is loose change, and where a virtual reality exists that mirrors the real world, where people are judged by avatars that may not have the faintest similarity to their real image.