Urban Imaginaries, Cognitive Mapping and Science Fiction

BLCU International Forum 2009 Global Media and Cultural Studies June 4-6 2009 Beijing Language and Culture University College of Humanities

Copyright 2009 Juergen Jessenig Licensed under Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND

I would like to begin my lecture with three questions: Where in the world am I? What in the world is going on? And what am I going to do? In my case answering these questions seems fairly simple: I am here and now in Beijing, attending a scientific conference and I am going to talk about urban imaginaries, cognitive mapping and Science Fiction. But let us reconsider these questions from a more general point of view. By doing so, we can identify three concepts which are, besides others, structuring our every-day life experiences. The first question Where in the world am I? is a question about space and time respectively. It is about locating oneself in this world and in this time and the according concept is space-time. The second question What in the world is going on? is related to the social circumstances. It is about positioning oneself somewhere in what I would like to introduce as the second concept: the social totality. Finally, the third question What am I going to do? is a question regarding what could or should be done. So the third concept would be agency. It is my assumption that space, the social, and agency should be conceived of as essentially interwoven. They are three sides of a triangle rather than independent and autonomous concepts. Space, the social, and agency depend on, influence and even constitute each other. Modifications to space also transform our social circumstances and constrain or liberate our possibilities to act. Simultaneously space is produced and modified by our actions, as is the social totality. And finally our social conditions affect our actions and the ways we construct, design and organise our spatial environment. It would be too ambitious to try to come to terms with the concepts of space, the social, and agency in detail here, and the fact that I have the floor for ten minutes demands some rigorous limitations. Therefore I will concentrate my considerations on the city as urban space and some associated thoughts and ideas I am working on at the moment. At the beginning of his book "Other Cities, Other Worlds" Andreas Huyssen (2008) illustrates how most cities have undergone major transformations in the past decades. His assumption that the processes of urbanisation have accelerated across the world
Urban imaginaries, cognitive mapping and Science Fiction | Copyright 2009 Juergen Jessenig Licensed under Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND -1-

can easily be confirmed by the fact that since 2007 more than 50% of the world's population are living in cities. According to the United Nations this percentage will increase to almost 70% in 2050. Huyssen argues that transnational capitalism with its effects on local and global economies has created new networks of cities, which therefore have grown closer to each other. The spread of global and regional cultural industries has made other cities part of the way we live and perceive the world. Cities function as highly important intersection points in the network of global flows of all kinds of material and immaterial entities like money, people, commodities and resources, cultural products and meanings et cetera (see Huyssen 2008). Huyssen also refers to the British geographer David Harvey who regards the developments of modernity to be responsible for what he calls a space-time compression, a decline of spatial and temporal distances, achieved by new communication technologies, faster modes of transportation and travel and imperial expansion. These developments radically altered our perception of the world. What Huyssen is missing in Harvey's argument though is the fact that at the same time the very real compression of space and time was accompanied by the simultaneous expansion of time and space in our imaginations (see Huyssen, 2008, p. 7). When returning to my initial questions with all that in mind, answering them seems not to be so simple anymore. Our surroundings are altering in frequencies and with amplitudes that make it hard to grasp the according developments. So where in this world are we? How can we imagine a social totality on a global scale and locate ourselves in it? What are we supposed to do?

Urban imaginaries, cognitive mapping and Science Fiction | Copyright 2009 Juergen Jessenig Licensed under Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND -2-

Regarding the spatial aspects, Kevin Lynch found an answer to these questions back in 1960. In his book "The Image of the City" he investigated how people accomplish to orientate themselves in cities, urban spaces much too big to be comprehensible as a whole for most of us. Therefore, according to Lynch, we build mental representations of the city that help us to locate ourselves within it, a practice he calls cognitive mapping. The concept of cognitive mapping is also crucial for the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson, though in some other sense (1988). Jameson's notion of cognitive mapping involves an extrapolation of Lynch's spatial analysis to the realm of social structure on a global or multinational scale. For Jameson it is a way in which the individual person enters an imaginary relationship to and locates itself in a social totality. Cognitive mapping is absolutely essential for Jameson, because "[...] the incapacity to map socially is as crippling to political experience as the analogous incapacity to map spatially is for urban experience" (Jameson, 1988, p. 353). From this it follows that our abilities to map constitute our abilities to act. Or as Huyssen puts it, concerning the city: "What we think about the city and how we perceive it informs the way we act in it" (2008, p. 3). Because the structures of a globalised world are not accessible to our immediate lived experience and are often not even imaginable for us, we need cognitive maps as mental representations of our environment. But how do we manage to map areas that clearly exceed our experiential possibilities? That's the point where the media are entering my thoughts. Huge portions of what we know about this world are brought to us by all kinds of media: newspapers, the internet, television, literature, the cinema, you name it. We are living in a mediated world, and the media help us to fill out the white spaces pervading our cognitive maps. They carry images and representations which circulate across the world and provide us with little pieces of information which we use when trying to get the big picture. I am trying to bring this all together in my current work in which I am concentrating on utopian and dystopian urban imaginaries in Science Fiction cinema.

Urban imaginaries, cognitive mapping and Science Fiction | Copyright 2009 Juergen Jessenig Licensed under Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND -3-

One of the most characteristic features of Science Fiction as a genre is what Darko Suvin called the Novum (1979). It confronts us with something new, something we are not familiar with, which causes a certain estrangement effect. Jameson (1982) argues that Science Fiction therefore has the potential not only to give us images of the future but also to defamiliarize and restructure our experiences of our own present. At the same time I think the present is the basis which Science Fiction and its narratives of alienation and discovery build on. But Science Fiction as a story about other worlds still is a story that comes from this world. The future images are extrapolations of our current cognitive maps of this world. But they go beyond them and in a kind of feedback loop have the potential to alter them. In other words: Once we start to imagine a world different to our own, we might discover that the one we are living in maybe does not have to be the way it is. Urban imaginaries have a long tradition in Science Fiction cinema, starting back in 1927 with Fritz Lang's Metropolis and continuing to this very day. An analysis of such an urban imaginary for me is of a twofold interest. First of course it allows us to draw some conclusions about the circumstances the specific imaginary derived from. Second, regarding what we have heard about the Novum and Science Fiction's ability to restructure our experiences of our own present, the analysis of urban imaginaries could try to disclose what kind of future possibilities they depict and how these possibilities might support the process of mapping or remapping our own present. I would like to end my speech picking up my initial questions again. I think it is important that we continue to ask where in the world we are, what in the world is going on and what we are going to do. By building cognitive maps of the present and developing urban imaginaries of the future we may achieve what is also the theme of next year's World Expo, taking place in Shanghai: Better City, Better Life.

Urban imaginaries, cognitive mapping and Science Fiction | Copyright 2009 Juergen Jessenig Licensed under Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND -4-

References
Huyssen, A. (2008). World Cultures, World Cities. In A. Huyssen (Ed.), Other Cities, Other Worlds. Urban Imaginaries in a Globalizing Age (pp. 1-23). Durham & London: Duke University Press. Jameson, F. (1982). Progress vs. Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future? Science Fiction Studies, 9 (2), 147-158. Jameson, F. (1988). Cognitive Mapping.In C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (pp. 347-357). Urbana & Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press. Lynch, K. (1960). The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Urban imaginaries, cognitive mapping and Science Fiction | Copyright 2009 Juergen Jessenig Licensed under Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND -5-