Fredric Jameson (1988) began his argument for “an aesthetic of cognitive mapping” (p. 347) by diagnosing a discontinuity between the “local” and the “total,” between individual perception and the abstract field of relations entitled “the social.” By turning to Althusser’s positive conception of ideology, as “the Imaginary representation of the subject’s relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence” (qtd. in Jameson, 1988, p. 353), Jameson then suggested that Marxism’s radical political project must also be a mapping project. In other words, the phenomenal experience of the subject has yet to be critically located in the social structures of our historical moment, a situation that is politically (and pedagogically) paralyzing. The cognitive mapping that he prescribed is crucial not only because it politicizes everyday life, but because it “attempts to span or coordinate” (p. 353) experience and oppression through representation, allowing us to imagine our own lives as a part of a social process.

Understanding any map as somehow scientifically removed from the ideological and material preconditions of its production is, of course, impossible, and virtual maps are no exception. Mapping is a social practice, and we see the Virtual University Geoblogging Project as presenting a number of opportunities for not only Jameson’s project, but also for composition pedagogy. To the extent that the justification for the Geoblogging Proiect must also begin by narrating a certain failure—the crucial disjunct between the forms of writing that students locate in their “everyday” and the inflexible academic forms that manifest in complex social theory—Jameson’s suggestions seem to extrapolate nicely into a program for “locating” students within their material and discursive contexts. Here, we would argue that the project of “cognitive mapping” functions in a geoblogging curriculum as a way of thinking through the politics inherent in writing: its technologies, its situational forms and the cultural practice of “composing space.”

Through its mash-up of geolocation, web-logging, and web-mapping, the Geoblogging Project uses various technologies to augment human interactions as well as contextualize uncritical assumptions about how those interactions operate. Undergraduate students typically think of digital technologies as mechanisms of isolation or insularity. Technologies provide comfortable, private spheres. They offer you your own customizable, virtual world. And, of course, they are things that everyone possesses. These three worldviews are starting points for public scholarship in the composition classroom. Geoblogs push students to become aware of how technologies impact them and their surroundings and allow them to explore how people and technologies engage in continuous intermediations of influence and exchange (Hayles, 2005, 30-33). That is, geoblogging in a composition course can connect students with communities within or even beyond the physical campus. As an archive, the Geoblogging Project lends itself to ethnographic research and the documentation of various civic and cultural activities. For example, as a part of a service-learning composition course, students could use the geoblog to help underprivileged communities not only access technologies, but also construct and store narratives from those communities that might not otherwise be historicized. Then, these narratives could become evidence for a project on, say, writing with the community. Or, a prompt could ask students to, in light of entries captured on the geoblog, write a paper that analyzes it as a space of privilege. That way, both the “captures” (e.g., photos, audio files, and videos) on the geoblog and access to the geoblog in and of itself could be opened up to questions such as for whom, by whom, how, and for what purposes. Through such prompts, students are given the opportunity to re-think their academic and techno-centered lives as part of a larger, more complex socio-cultural framework.

In this trajectory, we can see that “Who is working the geoblog?” is just as pertinent a question as “How is the geoblog working?” From this perspective, the archive stands radically open to multiple, resistant or contradictory “uses,” all of which can be productively harnessed as compositional “events.” The digital capture itself, as an isolated testimony to the particularities of “this” space and “this” time, is mobile in its own right. It has a life that is lived in texts, what Geoffrey Sirc (2001) has called “constructed situations” (p. 17), that are built to serve radically different purposes in their rhetorical structures and genre constraints. In her investigation of photography as a means of “connecting spaces of life” to discourses of urban decline, Helen Liggett (2003) argued that “the potential for image making as performative space is tied to admitting (and admitting to) viewers as active participants” (p. 121). Already active contributors to the archive and participants in the drama of representation that is the geoblog, composition students can be easily persuaded to move into and between a number of situational positions besides “the analyst.”

Consider the photograph tentatively titled “Good Questions on the HUB Lawn” and the various uses that remain open to such an image.

To begin the process, the photographer can add a caption to the image, arguing for its inclusion in the archive, what it brings to the map as an object or as a statement. The journalist can construct an article on “White Privilege Week” around it. The campus administrator can mystify it in a pamphlet advertising student activities. The student activist can build an anti-racist flier. The artist can confront it as a metaphor or a narrative or utilize it as inspiration for a song or a poem. Even simply re-titling this photo from any of those perspectives is already a practice in connecting emergent forms with acts of constructing space—in all of its social, political and ideological complexity.

In essence, this particular strategy makes use of technology to construct space through various modes of composition. The geoblog effectively makes “space” itself explicit as a process, one that operates through the production, accumulation and censorship of cultural perspectives and that offers opportunities to explore the epistemological and ideological limits that are built into those worldviews and their respective archives. In its status as an archive, it also furnishes students with material through which to experiment with different methods of spatial analysis. Consequently, academic reading can be repositioned in an exploratory function, a single step in a longer process of inquiry instead of a function that is both a beginning and an end unto itself. There is no “point-and-click” criticism here. The geoblog plainly reveals the cultural processes that produce space, not through the lens of high theory or cultural critique, but by encouraging the students themselves to produce their own spaces and to explore the various strategies that are available for this purpose. Theory emerges from both practice and an exploration of the possibilities that different types of writing contain within their multiple forms and rhetorical structures.

This way we can remind students that, with Web 2.0, they are often simultaneously here and there. With the increasing use of online social networks such as Facebook and YouTube, undergraduates tend to follow the logic of, “Insert yourself there.” Actual physical place is subordinated to virtual presence, network rank, and hit counts. The emphasis is on mobility, agency, and getting there, and the world seems flat and ready for the taking. The question is, then, what is a materialist approach to Web 2.0? How do we remind students of the “here” in their simultaneous “heres” and “theres”? Or, to use terms corresponding with Manual Castells’s work (1998), how do we help students recognize how “the space of flows of the Information Age dominates the space of places of people’s culture” (p. 349)? We argue that geoblogging, as a “reconstruction of place-based social meaning” (Castells, 1989, p. 350), is one way of answering these questions. Not that we want our students to think of their worlds as inflexible, built environments, but we do feel a responsibility, as instructors of composition, to stress that lived spaces, both on and offline, are not solely private spaces, and that the possibilities for everyday “encounters” are always impacted by actual circumstances.

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References:

Castells, Manuel. (1989). The information city: Information technology, economic restructuring, and the urban-regional process. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

Castells, Manuel. (1998). End of millenium. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

Hayles, Katherine. N. (2005). My mother was a computer: Digital subjects and literary texts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Jameson, Fredric. (1988). Cognitive mapping. In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 347-358). Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Liggett, Helen. (2003). Urban encounters. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Sirc, Geoffrey. (2001). Virtual urbanism. Computers and Composition, 18(1), 11-19.