Cognitive mapping in the terror zone: an elegy for Colombia
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Cognitive mapping in the terror zone: an elegy for Colombia Forrest Hylton 1 Published online: 13 August 2020 # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
“History is a way of learning….Only by grasping what we were is it possible to see how we changed, to understand the process and the nature of the modifications, and to gain some perspective on what we are. The historical experience is not one of staying in the present and looking back. Rather it is one of going into the past and returning to the present with a wider and more intense consciousness of the restrictions of our former outlook. We return with a broader awareness of the alternatives open to us and armed with a sharper perceptiveness with which to make our choices. In this manner it is possible to loosen the dead hand of the past and transform it into a living tool for the present and future….This enrichment and improvement through research and reflection is the essence of being human, and it is the heart of the historical method.” William Appleman Williams, History as a Way of Learning
Introduction At some point, I became an itinerant academic, so my books are in boxes again. I cannot easily refer to Frederic Jameson’s now-forgotten call to find better ways of describing, explaining, and representing new configurations of commodity production, social reproduction, and new collective experiences of time and space that come with them, under “late capitalism.” The term is borrowed from a massive tome of the same name by the Belgian Trotskyist economist, Ernest Mandel, by which I assume Jameson meant neoliberalism and the rule of the real estate, finance, and insurance oligarchy. (I could Google it, but it’s not necessary.) High theory from the North Atlantic academy in the 1980s—much less the infinitely more commodified 2010s—is not going to guide us, except insofar as it suggests we need better guides. Because For Robert Eschelman (1973–2020)
* Forrest Hylton [email protected]
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Departamento de Ciencia Política, Universidad Nacional de Colombia-Medellín, Calle 59 A No. 63-20 Bloque 46-Of. 218, Medellín, Colombia
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F. Hylton
of the cultural turn, the current political conjuncture, and an unprecedented capitalist crisis precipitated by the century’s first global pandemic, this remains as true today as it was when Jameson formulated his once-famous phrase. I’ll try to do that—cognitive mapping—through thick description of everyday life under quarantine in my neighborhood. With the help from a posthumously published collection of EP Thompson’s essays, called Making History, and Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, in the conclusion, I discuss theory and method in history and anthropology, which need each other now more than ever, but cannot find each other in the current darkness. I also reflect on space in relation to power, along with the hot topic of scale. How to think about my neighborhood, Carlos E Restrepo, in relation to the city, Medellín; the metropolitan region, Valle de Aburrá; the Pacific and Caribbean lowlands in Urabá, Antioquia (of which Medellín
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