Jameson

Jameson also makes it clear that there is not one ideological dominant in any period. In this, Jameson follows Raymond Williams' useful distinctions among "residual" ideological formations (ideologies that have been mostly superceded but still circulate in various ways); "emergent" ideological formations (new ideologies that are in the process of establishing their influence); and "dominant" ideological formations (those ideologies supported by what Louis Althusser terms "ideological state apparatuses"; e.g. schools, government, the police, and the military). Jameson insists on the value of such a model because "If we do not achieve some general sense of a cultural dominant, then we fall back into a view of present history as sheer heterogeneity, random difference, a coexistence of a host of distinct forces whose effectivity is undecidable" (Postmodernism 6).

By determining the dominant of our age in his book, Postmodernism, Jameson hopes to provide his reader with a "cognitive map" of the present, which then can make possible effective and beneficial political change. The problem with our current postmodern age, according to Jameson, is that "the prodigious new expansion of multinational capital ends up penetrating and colonizing those very precapitalist enclaves (Nature and the Unconscious) which offered extraterritorial and Archimedean footholds for critical effectivity" (Postmodernism 49). Any effort to contest dominant ideology threatens to be reabsorbed by capital, so that "even overtly political interventions like those of The Clash are all somehow secretly disarmed and reabsorbed by a system of which they themselves might well be considered a part, since they can achieve no distance from it" (Postmodernism 49). Given such a situation, Jameson argues that what is needed is a "cognitive map" of the present, one that reinjects an understanding of the present's real historicity. Jameson compares the situation of the individual in postmodern late capitalist society to the experience of being in a postmodern urban landscape: "In a classic work, The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch taught us 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: grids such as those of Jersey City, in which none of the traditional markers (monuments, nodes, natural boundaries, built perspectives) obtain, are the most obvious examples" (Postmodernism 49). The notion of a "cognitive map" enables "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" (Postmodernism 51). Jameson expands this concept of cognitive mapping to ideological critique, suggesting that his task is to make sense of our place in the global system: "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" (Postmodernism 54).