Cognitive mapping cancels out its own intended transcendence by re-spatializing.

Evidence

Unfortunately, in hindsight, this strength of the formulation is also its fundamental weakness: the transfer of the visual map from city to globe is so compelling that it ends up re-spatializing an operation we were supposed to think of in a different manner altogether. A new sense of global social structure was supposed to take on figuration and to displace the purely perceptual substitute of the geographical figure; cognitive mapping, which was meant to have a kind of oxymoronic value and to transcend the limits of mapping altogether, is, as a concept, drawn back by the force of gravity of the black hole of the map itself (one of the most powerful of all human conceptual instruments) and therein cancels out its own impossible originality. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 890

Categorization

• QUESTION: If the map metaphor self-destructs, does cognitive mapping as a political project remain salvageable, or is the concept itself the problem?
• XREF: connects to: Fixed spatial representations inevitably distort the fluid practical spaces they depict — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 1608; All systems of representation spatialize and thereby distort lived experience — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 1293; Cognitive mapping cannot literally be a map in the present era — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 875 (+2 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Fixed spatial representations inevitably distort the fluid practical spaces they depict — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 1608; All systems of representation spatialize and thereby distort lived experience — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 1293; Cognitive mapping cannot literally be a map in the present era — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 875 (+2 more)