‘Briefly, I want to suggest that the new space involes the suppression of distance and the relentless saturation of any remaining voids and empty places, to the point where the postmodern body—(…) wandering through a postmodern hotel, locked into rock sounds by means of headphones (…)— is now exposed to a perceptual barrage of immediacy from which all sheltering layers and intervening mediations have been removed.

(…)

I have always been struck by the way in which [Kevin] Lynch’s conception of city experience—the dialectic between the here and now of immediate perception and the imaginative or imaginary sense of the city as an absent totality—presents something like a spatial analogue of Althusser’s great formation of ideology itself, as “the Imaginary representation of the subject’s relationship to his or her Real conditions of existence.” Whatever its defects and problems, this positive conception of ideology as a necessary function in any form of social life has the great merit of stressing the gap between the local positioning of the individual subject and the totality of class structures in which he or she is situated, a gap between phenomenological perception and a reality that transcends all individual thinking or experience; but this ideology, as such, attempts to span or coordinate, to map, by means of conscious and unconscious representations.’

— Frederic Jameson, 1988, ‘Cognitive Mapping’, in: Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press), pp. 351-353.