The Ecosystem of Utopias as an Art Form of Late Capitalism: A Response to Fredric Jameson (original) (raw)

In his 1988 essay "Cognitive Mapping," Fredric Jameson ponders, without solution, what shape the aesthetics of late capitalism might take (476). If we accept his premise that cultural repressions (ideologies and their consequences) return in coded form within the art of the age, much as personal repressions are condensed into the manifest content of dreams (470), then the identification of our era's particular aesthetic would help us to diagnose and perhaps treat our cultural neuroses -or, in Marxist terms, to identify and interrogate the ideologies that ensnare us in order to achieve relative autonomy (Althusser 456). This is a problem with some urgency, given the alienation of virtually all subjects from the ever larger and more complex multinational structures we inhabit. It is a question not merely of cognitively mapping our place in the world but of continuing to peel back layers of misrecognition (Lacan's méconnaissance) to render visible the sorts of injustices that thrive in anonymity. Thus, cognitive mapping is situated within the larger utopian project of socially conscious scholarship. Jameson suggests that Bertolt Brecht's concept of the "alienation effect," or A-effect, will play a significant role in late capitalist art (Jameson 468). The A-effect, initially an acting technique but more broadly a life technique, resists the tendency of realist theater to tranquilize the audience into passive, uncritical acceptance of a play's assumptions (Brecht 443, 446).