Page 197 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Contemporary Cultural Theory

truth” of postmodernism’ (p. 49). A fully contemporary version
of what the young Lukács had meant by class consciousness
would therefore need to apprehend precisely this moment of
truth. But in a culture so commodified, so subject to the logic
of the simulacrum, what becomes of class consciousness? At one
level, the answer is obvious. If its emergence requires that the real-
ities of class structure become representable, then the widening
rift between sign and referent will tend to produce formidable
structural inhibitors to its development: ‘For a society that wants
to forget about class...reification...is very functional indeed’
(p. 315).
Since the emergence of class consciousness has been struc-
turally pre-empted, the capacity to map or model ‘the system’
either disappears altogether or must temporarily lie elsewhere.
That elsewhere is located somewhere between critical theory and
a hypothetically postmodern political art. For this was Jameson’s
solution to the temporary absence of class consciousness from
postmodern late capitalism: to posit the need for an ‘aesthetic of
cognitive mapping’, through which to learn how to represent ‘the
truth of postmodernism—that is... the world space of multi-
national capital’ and so ‘again begin to grasp our positioning as
individual and collective subjects’ (Jameson, 1991, p. 54). Cog-
nitive mapping, he explained, is in reality a ‘code word’ for class
consciousness ‘of a new and hitherto undreamed of kind’,
which has not yet come into being. Hence the sense of his
own work as the anticipation in theory of what might eventually
become class consciousness—as an experiment ‘to see whether
by systematizing something that is resolutely unsystematic, and
historicizing something that is resolutely ahistorical, one couldn’t
outflank it and force a historical way at least of thinking about
that’ (p. 418).

Jameson and Adorno
At this point, Adorno’s special significance for Jameson becomes
apparent. For despite its American idiom, Jameson’s rhetorical
and theoretical strategy is clearly reminiscent of the Frankfurt
School. Adorno and Horkheimer had initially imagined their

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