Cognitive Mapping

One of the issues I have with Frederic Jameson’s popular concept of ‘cognitive mapping’ is that it seems to imply an extensional logic, similar to the sort of logic at play in category theory. The morphisms are external and self-referential in most maps, and they do not expose key zones of antagonism. This is why every time I use the expression ‘cognitive map’ I always feel the need to also add “… of zones of antagonism, rupture, contradiction, etc.”

To what extent does a cognitive map pose itself as a defence against antagonism, against the unconscious? In other words, how can a cognitive map — the history of the term implies that it is a semantic or linguistic web — engage in what Lacan called ‘full speech?’ Truthfully, cognitive maps lend themselves to precisely the sort of conspiracy theories that are now dominant in the American imagination. It seems to me that cognitive maps are mostly consistent with and not oppositional to the chaos of contemporary capitalist ideology. They seek order often through an avoidance of zones of antagonism or else they project delusional certainties that are untenable and ultimately disturbing and potentially traumatic for psychotic subjects.

Jordan Peterson’s antidotes to chaos are mostly cognitive maps. Donald Trump’s conspiracies about pedophile democrats is a cognitive map. And it is the same with algorithms today: algorithms are cognitive maps of neoliberal capitalism, and, as such, they are not inherently revolutionary. It is merely the vehicle of the subject’s fleeting attempt to get beyond the anxiety that is constitutive of our time.

Incidentally, the cognitive map is no different from naive conceptions of ideology, and of what sociologists in America, from C. Wright Mills, call the “sociological imagination.” We can see why today the sociological imagination is not at all a challenge to the structures of power today but is rather constitutive of that power. The sociological imagination is the means through which social science research is practiced as an arm of the state (and directly funded by the state).

It is time to go further with this concept.