Postmodern social representation demands an interposed media term as its placeholder.

Evidence

What must be stressed methodologically, in the operation of mapping as it emerges from Georgakis and Surkin’s interesting text (or from the only full-dress analysis of cognitive mapping at work in a cultural artifact that I have myself succeeded in completing) is that in the present world-system, a media term is always present to function as an analogon or material interpretant for this or that more directly representational social model. Something thereby emerges which looks like a new postmodern version of the base-and-superstructure formula, in which a representation of social relations as such now demands the mediation of this or that interposed communicational structure, from which it must be read off indirectly. … These are, then, not really theories, but rather themselves unconscious structures and so many afterimages and secondary effects of some properly postmodern cognitive mapping, whose indispensable media term now passes itself off as this or that philosophical reflection on language, communication, and the media, rather than the manipulation of its figure. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 891

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the analogon/Sartrean placeholder concept as the mechanism of postmodern cognitive mapping — a media term standing in for a social model that cannot be directly represented.
• XREF: Connects to the base-and-superstructure formula revival — relevant to the reader’s map of their own position in the world system and to understanding how style functions as economy’s appearance. — connects to: Media presence itself becomes the model that precedes and drains meaning from events — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 187; Collage and montage serve as the primary form of postmodern discourse. — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 346
• QUESTION: If postmodern ‘theory’ is itself an afterimage of cognitive mapping rather than genuine theory, does that make the falsifiability test the reader wants to run even harder? Worth chasing.