Ideology maps the individual subject onto total class structures.

Evidence

I have always been struck by the way Lynch’s conception of city experience — its dialectic between the here and now of immediate perception and the imaginative or imaginary sense of the city as an absent totality — presents something like a spatial analogue of Althusser’s great formulation of ideology itself, as “the Imaginary representation of the subject’s relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence.” Whatever its defects and problems, this positive conception of ideology as a necessary function in any form of social life has the great merit of stressing the gap between the local positioning of the individual subject and the totality of class structures in which he or she is situated, a gap between phenomenological perception and a reality that transcends all individual thinking or experience; but which ideology, as such, attempts to span or coordinate, to map, by means of conscious and unconscious representations. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 890

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines cognitive mapping as the extrapolation of Lynch’s spatial city analysis to global class structure, aligning it with Althusser’s ideology formulation.
• XREF: Althusser’s ISAs/ideology formulation; connects to reader’s own drive to map their position in the world system. — connects to: Class mediates between subjective and objective languages of historical description. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 578; Class solidarity, not individual self-interest, structures ideological thinking — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 375; Classroom ideology presents education as a democratic space where all learners are equal — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 350 (+1 more)