Scaling a local political model to national movement is a spatial problem of representation.

Evidence

But what would happen if you conquered a whole series of large key urban centers in succession? This is what the League of Black Revolutionary Workers began to think about; that is to say, they began to feel that their movement was a political model and ought to be generalizable. The problem that arises is spatial: how to develop a national political movement on the basis of a city strategy and politics. At any rate, the leadership of the league began to spread the word in other cities and traveled to Italy and Sweden to study workers’ strategies there and to explain their own model; reciprocally, out-of-town politicos came to Detroit to investigate the new strategies. At this point it ought to be clear that we are in the middle of the problem of representation, not the least of it being signaled by the appearance of that ominous American word “leadership.” In a more general way, however, these trips were more than networking, making contacts, spreading information: they raised the problem of how to represent a unique local model and experience to people in other situations. So it was logical for the league to make a film of their experience, and a very fine and exciting film it is. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 887

Categorization

• DEFINE: Jameson reframes ‘representation’ spatially here — how a unique local model gets represented to other situations — a concrete instance of the general theory-geography connection.
• SEED: Angle: modern equivalents that hit the same wall — e.g. municipalist movements (Barcelona, Jackson, MS) or city climate accords that stall on national/federal discontinuity, framed through Jameson’s ‘problem of representation.’