Assignment #2, Topic #5: Snow Crash and Cognitive Mapping
Various elements of post-Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson’s essay “Cognitive Mapping” correspond to concepts dealt with in Neal Stephenson’s cyberpunk novel Snow Crash. Most important is Jameson’s description of the difficulty in changing a worldview based in local, city-centric space to one arising from postmodern global space, the problem being that our view has not evolved at the same pace as the technologies and economic circumstances that determine our real conditions, and is therefore no longer adequate and perhaps even harmful. Jameson claims the new reality is “no longer accessible to immediate lived experience and … not even conceptualizable for most people,” and it is therefore necessary to map out this new relationship between humans and the world (Jameson 349). Just as “A city like Boston … its monumental perspectives, its markers and monuments, its … dramatic boundaries … [allow] people to have … a generally successful and continuous location to the rest of the city,” an appropriate aesthetic of cognitive mapping might allow us to conceive of the globalized world in terms that are practically effective, if not the whole truth (Jameson 353). Stephenson’s vision of a post-capitalist (or hyper-capitalist) society and its reciprocally modifying relation to a fictional, post-internet Metaverse is one dream of the evolution Jameson anticipates.
In “Cognitive Mapping” Jameson refers to Marvin Surkin and Dan Georgakis’ book Detroit: I do Mind Dying, “a study of the rise and fall of the League of Black Revolutionary Workers in that city in the late 1960s,” which movement, he notes, was singularly effective on the scale of the city, coming “within a hair’s breadth of … taking over the city power apparatus” (Jameson 351). But such a movement would have had to be equally successful at the state and federal levels in order to succeed nationally, which was its intent. The LBRW attempted to expand in this manner by visiting similar organizations in other cities and countries, and by receiving appropriate visitors of their own, but upon this point they failed. By appealing to an international stage, the members of the organization had become “media stars,” and thus passed into the public domain, losing their political power for autonomous action. As Jameson puts it, “Having acceded to a larger spatial plane, the base vanished under them … the representation … triumphantly survives in the form of a film and a book, but in the process of becoming an image and a spectacle, the referent seems to have disappeared” (Jameson 352). The problem, then, was that the only way they could reach a global stage was by effectively being actors upon it—by playing parts, and becoming symbols, which are indeed universally understood but do not necessarily mean the same thing, or have the same power, outside of the particular soil from which they spring.
In Snow Crash, on the other hand, the world has moved beyond that stage. The problem of communication, which the LBRW tried to solve by traveling, no longer exists: the Metaverse makes all places one, and distance is no longer a significant factor. Local reality has been superseded by a reality that is at the same time global and virtual. What was once city-centered space has indeed become global space, but Stephenson puts a twist on it: we have thought in cities, but in this future, rather than modifying their thinking to be global, humans have made the world a city. In fact, the Metaverse is a great, virtual metropolis, where all human existence is symbolic—but not of equal value. Stephenson explicitly compares the Metaverse to
The Metaverse, however, does not suffice. Jameson hopes that the coming totality will prove a good thing; Stephenson sees the culmination of the internet, the most likely road to this totality, as a chaotic place of excess and classism, where no truth can be found. Jameson mentions that “all forms of hierarchy have always been based ultimately on gender hierarchy and … the family unit,” and hopes that as Marxist theory and feminist theory evolve they will eventually meet and provide some form of resolution. Stephenson seems to mock the family aspect—in Snow Crash the main appearance of the family is in the form of “The Family,” or Cosa Nostra: the Italian Mafia, which now controls pizza delivery, and is run by the universally famous Uncle Enzo. Traditional families seem to have collapsed, and Y. T., one of the protagonists, is so lonely and alienated from her biological family that she immediately takes Enzo as something like a father figure upon being shown some slight kindness. On the other hand, gender difference is given a prominent if vague role: ultimately, Juanita, Hiro Protagonist’s love interest, takes on the role of the Sumerian goddess Inanna, while Hiro may represent Enki, her male counterpart, and their collaboration as female and male principles ends up saving the world.
Stephenson is still a science-fiction writer, and his work only serves to explicate ideas as complex as Jameson’s to a certain extent. However, Jameson himself might approve of Snow Crash: “even if we cannot imagine the productions of such an aesthetic, there may, nonetheless, as with the very idea of Utopia itself, be something positive in the attempt to keep alive the possibility of imagining such a thing.” The world of Snow Crash is not a utopia, but neither is it hell on earth; the progression towards globalization seems inevitable, but Stephenson and Jameson agree that it doesn’t have to be a thing of horror, indeed, it may allow us to reach into the “deep structures” of our minds and rework our reality to our advantage.
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