I want to begin by recalling Deleuze and Guattari's distinction between maps and tracings. A tracing is, in their words, an "image of the world" that "reproduces an unconscious closed in upon itself" (D&G, 12).¹ A tracing thus tells us only what we already know: that we who are shaped by the world--who are the image of the world--we in turn have access to the world only by projecting onto it our own image. It is an image of what is; of fait accompli, rather than of an ongoing process: it contains no possibility for change, no prescription for action. It won't help us change the world. What we need in order to do that is not an arbitrary freeze frame of the world, reduced to one static state—something that aspires to a deterministic, Laplacean knowledge of initial conditions—but rather a fluid, flexible model of future possibilities; an emergent model through which we can organize our experience of the indeterminate. This is a true "map," to again use the words of Deleuze and Guattari, one that is "entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real [...] it constructs the unconscious [...] it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification" (D&G, 12). A tracing, in other words, is the representation of a territory; a map is something more like a mental model of that territory, which one can then continually update, extrapolate, expand—with which, moreover, one can change the territory.

I bring this up at length because it's my understanding that Chela Sandoval, in her Methodology of the Oppressed, is positing the Jamesonian version of "cognitive mapping" as a kind of tracing, a la Deleuze and Guattari, to which she is opposing the "differential movement" that will hopefully allow her to create maps for social change.² Like Deleuze and Guattari, she is privileging mobility over stasis: the mobility of differential consciousness over the perceived stasis of Jamesonian cognitive mapping, which is forever trying to recover a vanished vantage point, a transcendent point of ideological certainty. Instead, she proposes that the site of political struggle in what she calls the "neo-colonizing postmodern world" should be the eminently unstable, constantly changing (and therefore infinitely adaptable) immanent territory of what she calls "cyberspace." In this paper, I want to examine these assumptions more closely. Putting the question of the validity of Jameson's cognitive mapping aside, cannot Sandoval's "methodology of the oppressed" itself be read as a kind of tracing? More specifically (although here I'm anticipating myself), is there a way in which Sandoval's valorization of the methodology of the oppressed can also be read as a tracing of an "unconscious closed in upon itself," a way in which her argument unintentionally reenacts the tropes of imperialism, and reaches for transcendence?

Jameson opens a recent essay on globalization by outlining several different imaginable interpretations of the phenomenon of globalization as we now perceive it. The particulars of these extrapolations are of little interest for our purposes. Here I mainly want to draw attention to the particulars of what Jameson proposes we do with them. These interpretations of current trends seem, he says, to be irreconcilable; seem to contradict each other. But the point (or so he argues) of making these extrapolations—the point of noting the contradictions between them—is to try to bring us to the point where we can "uncover phenomena and find the ultimate contradictions behind them"—to find a vantage point from which we can see "the aerial view or the map of the totality in which things happen and History takes place" (Jameson, The Cultures of Globalization 76).³ Only then, from this vantage point untouched by the system, can we begin to think about how to change it, since in order to orient and direct our efforts we first need to find some way to visualize the whole. What Jameson wants is a Sinai or a Nebo, from which one may launch a social critique that, according to one's inclinations, might take either the form of utopian imaginings, or the form of a polemic— a peak from which one may either descry the Promised Land or condemn the Israelites worshipping the Golden Calf—but which, in any case, is a place outside the community, outside ordinary consciousness: a place from which one may still, without irony, hear the voice of God—or of Karl Marx.⁴

But this vantage point (which was still possible to access in the era of modernism) is now, according to Jameson, impossible to find, impossible even to imagine. Historicity is, according to Jameson, a "process of reification whereby we draw back from our immersion in the here and now [...] and grasp it as a kind of thing—not merely a "present," but a present that can be dated and called the eighties or fifties" (Postmodernism 284).⁵ It is precisely this reification—this "drawing back" or retreat—that is, according to Jameson (or according to Sandoval's reading of Jameson), no longer possible. Everything is controlled by the incomprehensible logic of postindustrial capitalism; there is nothing outside of the system, no sanctuary, no shelter, no position from which we can mount a resistance to oppression. We are all compromised, all implicated; every place is the same place, which is to say no place at all—we're all in Las Vegas; in Disneyland; in the Matrix; the Bonaventure Hotel; insert your metonym of choice.

This moment of claustrophobia is where Chela Sandoval makes her intervention. The mistake that Jameson—and with him, many of the other polemicists of postmodernism—make is, according to her, the mistake of a kind of wrong-headed (or at any rate mis-aimed) nostalgia; a kind of mental stasis. This is her reading of Jameson:

I [...] read much of Jameson's manifesto as eulogy, a funeral dirge for a lost time and place where it was once possible to map your position in social space and to consider from what Archimedean point you could court the possibility of action. This positioning is necessary for comprehending the place in the social order from which one is expected to speak. For a political conservative, liberal, radical, even anarchist (who moves against any order), such comprehensions are essential (Sandoval, 23).

According to Sandoval, the problem is the impulse to retreat—the assumption that one can visualize the whole only from the outside; that historicity requires an alienation from the here and now. Her assumption, implicitly, is that one creates social change not through the generation and studying of representations of the social terrain, but rather by living in it, by learning to navigate that terrain effectively.

In fact, in Jameson's longing for a time when retreat was possible and a fixed perspective or "Archimedean point," therefore possible to find, Sandoval identifies a sympathy—or even a complicity—with all the failings of modernism. Although she never makes this explicit, she seems to be arguing that the impulse to retreat from the system in order to critique it is in fact a kind of sublimation of the colonial impulse towards the expansion of the system. The Jamesonian version of cognitive mapping, in this context, becomes analogous to the obsessive scrutiny of the builders of empire, in which the boundaries of empire are drawn precisely so that one may know where to invade, where to concentrate one's firepower.

For the "we" who have become marginalized, alienated, interpellated, compromised, is—in what is surely the central insight of Sandoval's book—the first world bourgeois subject: precisely those who haven't, in the centuries since the Enlightenment, been marginalized, exploited, ventriloquized. According to Sandoval, then, the postmodern is precisely the era in which, finally, "the first world subject enters the kind of psychic terrain formerly inhabited by the historically decentered citizen-subject: the colonized, the outsider, the queer, the subaltern, the marginalized" (Sandoval, 27). The world—and the vantage point for cognitive mapping—that Jameson mourns, one might argue (as I think it evident that Sandoval does), existed (if it ever did) only for the first world subject, and was in fact able to exist only through the "historical decentering" of the "colonized, the outsider, the queer, the subaltern, the marginalized." The Jamesonian project of "cognitive mapping" is, for Sandoval, therefore flawed from the very beginning, as it is complicit with the very system that it strives to critique from its fictitious "outside": its processes "require older, outmoded forms of consciousness and ideology in order to function" (Sandoval, 30).⁶ The fact that, as we have seen, Jameson can only visualize historicity as a process of reification is for Sandoval indicative of Jameson's own limitations as a first world bourgeois subject.

What's at stake, then, in Sandoval's revision of Jamesonian cognitive mapping, is the de-colonization of our concepts of political struggle. And it is in this context that this moment of the "democratization of oppression" (Sandoval, 34) becomes for Sandoval a moment of hope. The oppressed, after all, have survived their centuries of oppression (or so she might say); they have developed a kind of methodology of consciousness that has allowed them to mount at least some sort of resistance. If we are all entering the space of colonization, under the neo-colonization of postmodern capital, then, in order to survive these conditions, according to Sandoval, we must learn, apply and develop the methodology of the oppressed, rather than look back nostalgically to the methodologies of the oppressors.

It seems to me, however, that Sandoval is here herself in danger of making the same mistake that, according to her, Jameson makes—to wit: the reinscription of "older, outmoded forms of consciousness and ideology." Sandoval is critiquing Jameson on the grounds that he longs for an illusory version of the modern—transcendence, the aerial vantage point. Modernity, she argues (as we've already seen) was always wounded and corrupted. The "outside" that Jameson longs for is, in other words, not the historically real "outside" inhabited by the oppressed. This, however, is dangerously close to saying that the methodology of the oppressed is, by the same token, legitimated because it comes from this true "outside"—which would then be another version of Jameson's error—the need to find some autonomous zone unaffected, uncorrupted by the system.

Arguably, in fact, Sandoval is essentializing the oppressed.⁷ After all, although she divides them into different categories on several occasions—"the colonized, the outsider, the queer, the subaltern, the marginalized"—what she is trying to give voice to is the methodology of the oppressed; of the historically decentered subject. At one point in her argument for example, she gives a long list of a "diverse array of scholars including Stuart Hall, Audre Lorde, Donna Haraway, Cornel West [...]"—the list goes on, through some seventeen names (Sandoval, 69). They are all, she says, commited to "this [as in this particular, this singular] mode of differential and oppositional consciousness" (Sandoval, 69). We are to adopt her methodology of the oppressed, after all, in essence because the decentered subjects of history are those (there is no differentiation among them) who were forced to live the postmodern avant la lettre, and who survived those conditions. In this context, however, the postmodern, as Sandoval describes it, begins to seem uncannily like code for a new frontier—for uncharted territories that we must settle—and "the" oppressed begin to look like the noble path-finding savages of, say, James Fenimore Cooper.

This is, admittedly, a contrarian reading of Sandoval, one that goes expressly against the strict letter of her argument. Political struggle, for Sandoval, needs to happen from within the system, through a process of assimilation, digestion, and re-appropriation (an appropriate image might be the land summoned out of the ocean, in the near future Tokyo of William Gibson's Virtual Light, by utilizing gomi—the detritus and junk of the postindustrial world). Political struggle in the postmodern world thus requires not a retreat to some unimaginable aerial vantage point, but rather an active immersion within the textures of the postmodern world. This is how I read Sandoval's claim that "differential maneuvering [...] is a sleight of consciousness that activates a new space: a cyberspace, where the transcultural, transgendered, transsexual, transnational leaps necessary to the play of effective stratagems of oppositional praxis can begin" (Sandoval, 63). In order to counter the workings of postmodern power, which she visualizes as working in a kind of "electronic pinball-game movement" over a "flattened, horizontal power-grid" (Sandoval, 73), she is proposing that we move in our own unpredictable leaps, thereby at least momentarily changing the oppressive power-grid into a liberatory "cyberspace." Her differential consciousness is, in fact, a kind of hacker exploit: one resists the system by using its own tools against it, utilizing a "mobile, flexible, diasporic force that migrates between contending ideological systems' (30). Immanence rather than transcendence, then, is the explicit bent of Sandoval's argument. However, I am trying to do something more than summarize Sandoval's claims. My interest is in the uncovering of her assumptions; of the contradictions within her argument—which is how I'm justifying the contrariness of my reading. Here, I think, it can be demonstrated that Sandoval is, perhaps despite herself, still working within a political model that requires a kind of transcendence.

Although, in the passage I've just quoted, Sandoval's "cyberspace" is implicitly a fractured, discontinuous assemblage or multiplicity, it is elsewhere in her text described as a single, homogenous space. For example: it is "this [i.e. this singular, this particular] realm between and through meaning systems [that is] a decolonizing 'cyberspace,' in which alternate realities provide individuals and communities increased and novel means of communication, creativity; productivity, mobility, and a different sense of control"; it is "a location, a location of resistance, existing [...] in the interstices between de-colonial processes, transnational capitalism, and the forms of consciousness that postmodern cultural conditions make available for appropriation" (Sandoval, 136, my italics). But where, then, in relation to the rest of the system is this "cyberspace"? If we read it as a fractured assemblage, we can say that it bears the marks of epistemic violence; that it is, in effect, a striated—institutionalized—space within the system. If, however, we read it as an idealized, single, homogenous domain—the site of resistance and liberation—it comes to sound more and more like Jameson's aerial vantage point—a space that can only be imagined into existence outside the system.

And if we take a closer look at the particulars of Sandoval's methodology of the oppressed, I think we can find a similar inconsistency. Instead of a Maginot Line of a fixed ideological stance, what Sandoval wants is a kind of flexibly organized guerilla network of resistance—resistance that can shift its tactics as demanded by the situation. She proposes to do this by utilizing five "technologies" that she identifies in the methodology of the oppressed: semiotics, deconstruction, meta-ideologizing, differential movement, and democratics. This is a kind of hermeneutic. Simply put, one uses semiotics in order to identify the components of ideology, the codes of power relations. One then denaturalizes these power relations, through deconstruction, and re-purposes or retrofits the codes that represent/constitute them through the process of meta-ideologizing, according to one's needs (differential movement), although always in the interests of egalitarian values (democratics).

Now, it's all very well to say that one needs to engage in a kind of continual nomadic guerilla warfare against the structures of power, especially since postmodern structures of power are themselves working, as Sandoval points out, in horizontal guerilla networks. This makes sense from a tactical viewpoint, and as far as tactical models go, Sandoval's seems as compelling as any. By tactics, I mean something like a plan for the improvement of effectiveness: something that helps with logistics, with organization, with survival—a way to play the game well.

At the end of her discussion of the methodology of the oppressed, however, she seems to be slipping into another register:

[the methodology of the oppressed] generate[s] ever new meta-ideological formations for the purpose not only of survival [...] but of bringing about new ethical and political standards in the name of egalitarian and democratic social change: the technology of "democratics" (Sandoval, 114).

In positing a teleology here; in imagining a future moment where new ethical and political standards are brought into existence, she's moving into the register of strategy, by which I mean something like a plan that envisions victory: a way to change the game—to rewrite the rules and start anew. Her formulation of that strategy however, seems rather vague, at best. Where does the "democratics" come from, if not from some kind of transcendental space? Whose "new ethical and political standards" are these, when and how exactly can we see them put into practice, and how exactly are they liberated from the "neo-colonizing forces of the postmodern"? Sandoval doesn't give us an answer to these questions. What in Sandoval's schema keeps one's liberatory "meta-ideologization" from being in turn meta-meta-ideologized—what keeps the "cyberspace" formed through the re-appropriation of the postmodern topography of power from being, in its turn re-re-appropriated? Sandoval does give us an answer to this—but it is, I'm afraid, not very satisfying: we must, she says, simply keep up the Sisyphean work of meta-ideologizing; we have to keep it "ever new." But this then seems to indefinitely postpone the establishment "of new ethical and political standards."

I read this vagueness as deliberate, ensuing precisely from the realization of the limits of tactical thinking—the unwelcome realization that, without strategy, in an exitless (transcendence-less, immanent) system, there's no way to secure whatever small measure of agency or power or subjectivity that one has managed to reclaim by using the methodology of the oppressed. For it seems to me that the very idea of strategy, of "beating" the game, necessitates a transcendental move, a moment of imagining something beyond the system. The idea of a victory, after all, implies an end to the game (an end to history)—and this is in itself a kind of "outside" in relation to the game; a location beyond its temporal horizons. Otherwise, one is inevitably still part of the machine, even if one can make bargains with the machine that work out to one's favor, in some small way.⁸ And in any case, one cannot, after all, remain a moving target survivor indefinitely; in the long term, as the saying goes, everybody dies—especially in a war zone.

1. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

2. Sandoval, Chela. Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2000.

3. Jameson, Fredric. "Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue." The Cultures of Globalization. Edited by Frederic Jameson and Masao Miyoshi. Durham: Duke UP, 2001. 54-77.

4. Elsewhere in "Notes on Globalization as A Philosophical Issue," Jameson makes a kind of isomorphism between ideology and religion particularly clear: "one ... laments the passings of the splendors of the modern ... not least the end of an essentially modernist field of political struggle in which the great ideologies still had the force and the authority of the great religions in earlier times" (The Cultures of Globalization 55, my italics).

5. Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic Of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991

6. In making this statement, however, Sandoval seems to be ignoring the following passage from "Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism":

This is not then, clearly, a call for a return to some older kind of machinery, some older and more transparent national space, or some more traditional and reassuring perspectival or mimetic enclave: the new political art (if it is possible at all) will have to hold to the truth of postmodernism, that is to say, to its fundamental object—the world space of multinational capital—at the same time at which it achieves a breakthrough to some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing this last, in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion. The political form of postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale (Jameson, Postmodernism 54).

7. In a way, then, I suppose I am applying Gayatri Spivak's argument, from "Can the Subaltern Speak?", to Sandoval. Perhaps tellingly, Sandoval doesn't mention Spivak at all in her book.

8. This formulation isn't my own, but I don't have a source for it—it's based on a recollection of something that Richard Dienst said in a seminar last year. He was quoting somebody; unfortunately I don't remember who.