Negative Totalization

When Fredric Jameson, one of the speakers at the 1983 conference Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, passed away in the fall of 2024, eulogies poured in from many corners, both academic and mainstream, testifying to his status as a towering intellectual, dedicated mentor and teacher, and prolific critic of a vast array of aesthetic and cultural objects.In reading many of these reflections on his life and work, I wondered what Jameson himself might say about them.Attending closely to genre as the sedimentation of the past into the present, and especially to the role of genre in Marxist theory, his work is a reminder that any attempt to look back at things-one person's oeuvre, or the recent history of Western Marxist thought and its legacies, as is the case in this feature-must confront the very generic modes through which those attempts are made.This forum's collective reflection on Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture thus raises the immediate question-which Jameson's work, especially his emphasis on periodization, inspires-of how those reflections occur and what they might say about our own historical moment.I revisit here Jameson's talk from 1983, "Cognitive Mapping."An early iteration of what would become the oft-cited conclusion to Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1989), it remains an evocative account of one of Jameson's most well-known motifs.At the time (including at the conference itself), Jameson was engaged in what might be called the wider spatial turn in theory, periodizing the various stages of capital according to formal, spatial metrics, like the grid.While the spatial turn has certainly passed, "cognitive mapping" remains.But it is often mobilized in academic literary and cultural criticism to rather narrow methodological ends, at the expense of the riskier, more imaginative, indefinite quality of its