Political art today must invent radically new forms to represent global capital

Evidence

An aesthetic of cognitive mapping — a pedagogical political culture which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system — will necessarily have to respect this now enormously complex representational dialectic and invent radically new forms in order to do it justice. This is not then, clearly, a call for a return to some older kind of machinery, some older and more transparent national space, or some more traditional and reassuring perspectival or mimetic enclave: the new political art (if it is possible at all) will have to hold to the truth of Postmodernism, that is to say, to its fundamental object -the world space of multinational capital — at the same time at which it achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing this last, in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 173

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines cognitive mapping as a pedagogy endowing subjects with a sense of their place in the global system.
• SEED: This is the culminating prescription of the chapter — an angle: what concrete art/media forms could count as ‘cognitive mapping’ today (e.g., data visualization, satellite imaging, supply-chain documentaries)?
• XREF: connects to: Technically advanced art can only achieve politically mediated effects — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 171