Microsoft Word - PLICHTA_THESIS.docxCinematic Cartographies Cognitive Mapping in Contemporary Cinema
Maria Plichta (11701862) James Rosskade 7-1 Amsterdam marysia.plichta@gmail.com +48608300695 Research Master’s Thesis Department of Media Studies Graduate School of Humanities University of Amsterdam 23rd of June 2020 Supervisor: dr. Abe Geil Second reader: dr. Sudeep Dasgupta
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Acknowledgments
While the solitary nature of thesis writing has been only exacerbated by the COVID-
necessitated disconnection from the environment of the university, it would not have been
possible for me to finish, or perhaps even start, without the support I have been lucky to receive.
First, I would like to wholeheartedly thank my supervisor, dr. Abe Geil, for his invaluable
feedback, overall support and bearing with my occasional inability to stick to deadlines
throughout this process.
I cannot adequately express my gratitude to my friends. I feel extremely obligated to name-
drop Helena and Ewa here; thank you for saving me more than once.
And, above all, to my parents — I count myself very lucky to have had your constant support,
even from afar. Dzikuj.
2 On Cognitive Mapping 5
2.1 A Synthesised Notion 7
2.2 A Speculative Aesthetic 9
2.3 A Postmodern Problematic 12
2.4 A Totalising Impulse 15
2.5 A Conspiratorial Affinity 18
3 Suspicious Archaeologies of the Present: Cognitive Mapping in Non-Fiction Film 21
3.1 The World According to Adam Curtis 22
3.2 Cataloguing Contemporaneity 24
3.4 Disrupting the Homogeneity of the Discourse 31
3.5 Recasting the Meaning of Propaganda 34
4 Subversive and Demystifying Parodies: Cognitive Mapping in Narrative Film 37
4.1 Spatialising Class Relations 40
4.2 Unattainable Solidarity 44
5 Conclusion 51
Works Cited 55
1 Introduction
‘This is so metaphorical!’, exclaims Ki-woo, one of the primary characters of Boon Jong Ho’s
Parasite (2019), after he and his impoverished family are gifted a ‘scholar’s rock’, which is
supposed to bring financial prosperity to its owners. In addition to the stone, practically useless
yet rife with symbolic meaning, Ki-woo’s well-to-do friend Min comes bearing something else:
a job opportunity, which Ki-woo seizes enthusiastically. What follows is a story of the
temporary upward mobility of the whole Kim clan, who follow Ki-woo’s (or Kevin’s, as his
new employers prefer to call him, keeping in with their affinity for anything Western) lead in
conning their way into full-family employment at the gleaming mansion of the wealthy Parks.
Initially, it seems their fortunes indeed turn for the better after receiving the symbolic stone.
However, before the film draws to a close, Ki-woo will lay on the floor of his employers’ home
in a pool of blood, having just been bludgeoned with the rock that was supposed to be a
harbinger of prosperity. Metaphorical indeed.
Another scene. Hypernormalisation (2016) begins with a bleak diagnosis presented in
Adam Curtis’ trademark monotone voiceover narration, which can be summarised as follows:
over the last four decades those in positions of power have given up on the idea of facing and
adequately addressing the overwhelming complexities of the ‘real world’ and have instead
chosen to build a simplified fake one, run largely by corporations and only managed and kept
relatively stable by politicians. The reassuring simplicity of this constructed reality has also
managed to entice even its supposed detractors into accepting it as fact, which leads to the lack
of any real change brought about by their opposition. Over the span of almost three hours, the
filmmaker weaves an intricate, at times puzzling narrative tapestry in order to illustrate how
this fake world came into being. He borrows and rearranges images from the past to dissect the
anatomy of the current political landscape; in other words, his larger project seems to be
creating a potential map of the overarching system of contemporary capitalism on a global
scale.
What is the reason for invoking these scenes from two widely divergent films? What
the thesis will attempt to show is that, despite their ostensible (and actual) differences, both
these works share an impulse to map contemporaneity, whether be it through Curtis’ sprawling
narrative compositions assembled from scrambled pieces of unearthed archival footage, or
Parasite’s first comic, then tragic depiction of the horrors of precarity. These objects,
supplemented by additional examples of Metahaven’s experimental non-fiction film The
Sprawl and Boots Riley’s genre-bending Sorry to Bother You will be approached through a
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unifying conceptual lens provided by Fredric Jameson’s proposed aesthetic of cognitive
mapping, with the diversity of the chosen media objects allowing an engagement with the
multimodality of the notion. In the subsequent chapters, I look at films — both fiction and
documentary — that, in my view, provide a viewpoint into the distant, immaterial webs of
sociopolitical relations and enable reflection on what Jameson described as ‘the study of
Capital itself as the true ontology of the present time’ (The Geopolitical Aesthetic 82).
The question of how these contemporary cinematic works can be read as a possible
engagement with Fredric Jameson’s notion of cognitive mapping is at the centre of the thesis.
As Jameson poses, there is an increasing epistemic gap between the phenomenologically
accessible individual experience and the overarching structure of the social totality due to its
increasing complexity. He then proposes cognitive mapping as a possible panacea for this
experiential rupture; the assumed aim of the proposed aesthetic is creating a heightened sense
of consciousness about the social totality. As this notion is essentially a speculative proposition,
the project might also provide insight into its possible strengths and weaknesses when applied
to the analysis of media objects. Additionally, this approach can also possibly enrich the
methodical repertoire of film studies, providing a framework for textual analysis that attends
simultaneously to the wider implications of the narratives (without reducing them to objects of
ideology) and to the aesthetic dimensions of the works, mediating between the two levels.
The thesis first retraces cognitive mapping’s conceptual lineage and proceeds to explore
different dimensions of Jameson’s proposed aesthetic, such as its totalising character, its
relationship to postmodernity and possible proximity to conspiratorial narratives. The aim of
this chapter is to provide an overview of the different dimensions of the concept, emphasising
both its potentialities and possible limitation. Crucially, cognitive mapping seems a concept
imbued with a latent potentiality, posing an invitation to both invent new modes of
representation and to read existing representations against this notion. Jameson’s refusal to
specify what the practice would necessarily entail on a formal level and its speculative status
both poses a challenge in engaging with this proposition and is a source of its attraction. The
intentional vagueness and openness can be perceived as strengths of this concept, which does
not delineate any strong borders or name a specific set of characteristics that a work of art must
necessarily exhibit in order to engage with the proposed aesthetic, which makes it amenable to
application to a wide range of aesthetic objects that undertake an effort to provide a figurative,
critical cartography of contemporaneity.
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Having sketched the theoretical background of the proposed practice, the second
chapter moves into discussion of its relationship to non-fiction filmmaking. Firstly, the
representational possibilities afforded by this mode are explored. Then, the chapter moves into
an analysis of the documentary practice of Adam Curtis, with Hypernormalisation as a focal
point, proposing a reading of the entirety of the British documentarian’s oeuvre as an
increasingly totalising effort at mapping the prevalent ideologies and the shifting nature of
power in contemporary Western societies. The investigation of emergent ‘cognitive maps’ in
documentary practices is supplemented in the next section through a closer look at the
interactive audiovisual work The Sprawl by the interdisciplinary artistic collective Metahaven,
which allows for an engagement with questions of how this practice might extend to the current
‘digital’ moment and shows an alternative model for cognitive mapping practices via a
reconfigurable, interactive map. Marked by an attitude of epistemic suspicion towards the
prevalent narratives, both the BBC-affiliated documentarian and the Amsterdam-based artistic
collective in their archive-based filmic practices assemble sprawling audiovisual maps of
contemporaneity that engage with the pedagogical impulse that underlies cognitive mapping
and simultaneously attempt something beyond addressing the representational task posed by
Jameson through an engagement with the inherent negativity of this practice, showing how
such emergent cinematic ‘cartographies’ will be necessarily ideological and contestable.
The final chapter delves into an analysis of the chosen examples of narrative
filmmaking, with Parasite as the primary object, supplemented with examples drawn from
Sorry to Bother You. The overarching aim of these readings is to reflect on how such examples
of contemporary fiction films grapple with representing contemporaneity in relation to
Jameson’s conceptual category, exploring the dimensions of the proposed aesthetic which they
might illuminate. Both these films offer narratives suspended between attentively portraying
the particularities of their characters’ predicaments and providing a viewpoint into the systemic
nature of the underlying conditions of their existence. In doing so, they engage in an effort
similar to that postulated in cognitive mapping, which is to bridge the rupture between lived
experience and the directly inaccessible overarching structure. If, as Jameson poses, cognitive
mapping is indeed ‘a code for class consciousness’, then Parasite and Sorry to Bother You
provide clues how this problematic can be represented in narrative cinema (Cognitive Mapping
350). Both films portray the uncertain predicament of characters whose lives are structured by
an inescapable precarity that forces them to scheme relentlessly to even gain access into the
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workforce, presenting visions of a world in which even sustained exploitation becomes a
privilege.
In conclusion, as cognitive mapping is, in Jameson’s formulation, essentially a
speculative aesthetic project, the readings of the films proposed in the thesis are of a similarly
speculative character, making no claim to definitiveness. The thesis, then, is an exploratory
project that investigates the ways in which the chosen filmic representations attempt to grapple
with the irreducible complexity of the current sociopolitical landscape and provide such
situational representations of contemporaneity Jameson was calling for.
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2 On Cognitive Mapping
The notion of mapping stands for an attempt to give symbolic representation to what exceeds
individual capacities to grasp directly in first-person (phenomenological) experience; to trace
coordinates of a specific territory, scale them down and represent them in a neat visual package,
with the intended purpose of enabling a heightened sense of awareness of one’s place within a
particular setting. Outside the strictly cartographic understanding of the practice as one of
creating graphic symbolic representations of the features of a part of the surface of the Earth,
or any other astronomical or imaginary place, mapping has also become a ubiquitous term for
a variety of techniques that aim to visualise and bring increased clarity to the intricate
relationality of a wide variety of objects and agents. The use of this term has gained prevalence
as a metaphorical tool to signify the process of tracing and plotting certain characteristics of
complex systems that are not amenable to direct, unaided perception.
Complex, abstract systems such as the megastructures of the social, political and
economic realms pose significant challenges for representation; with their causes and effects
distributed across vast scales of time and space, they tend to elude direct representation and it
is only possible to observe these immaterial entities symptomatically, through their dispersed
refractions, never as a totality. As Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams pose, ‘we lack a cognitive
map of our socioeconomic system: a mental picture of how individual and collective human
action can be situated within the unimaginable vastness of the global economy’ (44). In Fredric
Jameson’s view, it is precisely this growing gap between the increasingly fragmented
individual experience and the opaque complexity of overarching structures which necessitates
the emergence of artistic practices that could counter the incapacity to develop a deeper
understanding of the sociopolitical totality. In other words, the central aim is to bridge 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’ (Postmodernism 415-416). The overarching
goal of the proposed ‘aesthetic of cognitive mapping’ is, then, to endow the individual subject
with a heightened sense of their place in the globalised system (Postmodernism 51).
Cognitive mapping constitutes a recurrent thread in Jameson’s work. First introduced
in his widely influential article ‘Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism’ (1984),
Jameson expanded upon his initial call for an emergence of this aesthetic practice during a
conference on ‘Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture’ in 1988 and in subsequent
publications, such as The geopolitical aesthetic: Cinema and space in the world system’ (1991).
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In his introduction to the latter book, Colin McCabe argues that cognitive mapping constitutes
the most crucial element of the thinker’s philosophical system as it provides ‘the missing
psychology of the political unconscious, the political edge of the historical analysis of
postmodernism and the methodological justification of the Jamesonian undertaking’ (The
Geopolitical Aesthetic 14). The perceived importance of cognitive mapping in Jameson’s
thought, then, lies in its explicit elaboration of a question central to his work, namely that of
how the psychically enclosed, subjective individual relates to the socially dispersed objective
totality. At the same time, the notion of cognitive mapping is marked by a certain conceptual
fungibility, described varyingly by Jameson as ‘a desire called cognitive mapping’ (The
Geopolitical Aesthetic 3), ‘an aesthetic’ (Postmodernism 51), ‘a pedagogical political culture’
(Postmodernism 54), ‘a project for a spatial analysis of culture’ (Cognitive Mapping 348) and
‘a code word for class consciousness’ (Postmodernism 417-8). Amid these divergent
formulations, how can we begin to answer the question of what cognitive mapping actually
entails? The following section of this chapter will attempt an answer to this question by
retracing the theoretical lineage of the central concept.
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2.1 A Synthesised Notion
The concept of cognitive mapping was formulated through the synthesis of two preexisting
notions: Kevin Lynch’s use of the term and the definition of ideology as formulated by Louis
Althusser. In The Image of the City (1960), Lynch, an urban theorist, performed an analysis of
the physical characteristics of modern city spaces, arguing that in those that do not provide
easily distinguishable landmarks and coordinates (for example, grid cities such as Jersey City)
induce a psychological sense of alienation due to their spatial illegibility. However, in
Jameson’s view, ‘Lynch's problematic remains locked within the limits of phenomenology’
and mapping the immaterial structures of society requires a radical revision of such approach
(Cognitive Mapping 353). To do so, Jameson invokes Althusser’s definition of ideology, which
is presented as ‘the subject’s imaginary representation of their relation to the Real’
(Postmodernism 51). There is, then, a fundamental affinity between cognitive mapping and this
understanding of ideology: both strive to address the gap between subjective perception of
reality and its relation to the ‘Real’, which, for cognitive mapping, stands for ‘Real Existing
Capitalism’ as a hegemonic world system of contemporaneity. It is worth noting here that
Althusser follows a Lacanian understanding of the ‘Real’ as impossible to access directly in
sense experience. Thus, Althusser’s notion of ideology provides way to make a conceptual
extension from Lynch’s purely spatial analysis rooted in the phenomenological experience of
an individual subject. allowing for its transposition onto a murkier ground of the sociopolitical
global terrain.
In other words, Jameson extrapolates the argument posed by Lynch regarding the
alienating experience of not being able to cognitively map the physical totality of a city to the
realm of social structure, arguing that ‘an inability to cognitively map the gears and contours
of the world system is as debilitating for political action as being unable mentally to map a city
would prove for a city dweller’ (Toscano & Kinkle 34). This is precisely what imbues cognitive
mapping with a sense of urgency and importance: Jameson perceives it as a potential counter
to the sense of spatial and temporal confusion inherent to the postmodern subject that impedes
the possibility of any fruitful political action. A lack of practices for grasping the connections
between, as Toscano and Kinkle phrase it, ‘the abstractions of capital to the sense-data of
everyday perception’ actively impedes the possibility of realising political projects geared
towards political change (7); that is, for Jameson, a decidedly Marxist thinker, a possibility of
(re)instigating a socialist political project. In ‘The Politics of Abstraction’, Alex Williams
advances a similar claim, which is that a significant amount of the most important political
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issues of today’s world stem from the ‘seemingly intractable alienation from our everyday, on-
the-ground, lived experience’ as issues such as the global climate crisis and economic crises
necessarily elude individual perception due to their scale (7). For Williams, this alienation is
accompanied by ‘a powerlessness, whereby politics recoils in a kind of horror at the vertigo of
our abstract world’ (64).
An aesthetic of cognitive mapping is therefore a tool that can potentially imbue the
subject with a sense of their place in and a deeper understanding of the overarching system,
which can then enable the possibility of taking action against it. In short, the intention
underlying cognitive mapping is to counter the pervasive feelings of confusion and
powerlessness by undertaking what Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle aptly describe as ‘the
highly ambitious (and, Jameson suggests, ultimately impossible) task of depicting social space
and class relations in our epoch of late capitalism’ (33). In Cartographies of the Absolute
(2015), perhaps the most sustained engagement with Jameson’s notion so far, Toscano and
Kinkle take up Jameson’s project of the study of capital as a true ontology of the present time;
they do so through engagement with diverse examples of artistic works that, in their view,
attempt such situational representations of the functioning of global political economy, capable
of instigating a sense of heightened self-consciousness about the social totality.
Jameson proposed the emergence of cognitive mapping as a practice meant to counter
the aforementioned incapacity of individuals to mentally map their position in the complex
systems they find themselves in. This, crucially, is the central goal of cognitive mapping: to
endow the individual subject, implicated in a complex chain of relations spanning the globe,
with a new heightened sense of their place in the overarching system in order to diminish the
intrinsic sense of confusion. In Mark Tuters' formulation, cognitive mapping constitutes a kind
of ‘metaphorical remedy to Jameson’s metaphysical diagnosis of subjective disorientation
under conditions of late capitalism, which is expressed in an imperative to represent the hidden
totality of class relations through the development of a new aesthetic form’ (63). If the central
problem that emerges here is one of a representational nature, it might be worth turning to the
questions of why the establishment of a new aesthetic form is deemed necessary and whether
there are any clues as to what shape its products could take.
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2.2 A Speculative Aesthetic
In Jameson’s analysis, particular stages of capitalism are characterised by the emergence of
specific aesthetic forms that can give expression to the shifting subjectivities specific to each
period. With each subsequent historical stage of capital, the lived experience of an individual
subject coincides less and less with the reality of its own place. What this means is that the
increasingly globalised situation creates something akin to an experiential gap for the
individual subjects, resulting in a disorientation that arises due to a lack of understanding of
the relationship between the individual subject position and overarching structure. An example
Jameson gives of an aesthetic form that gives shape to this experience in the imperialist stage
is that of Virginia Woolf’s writing and how it ‘inscribe[s] a new sense of the absent global
colonial system on the very syntax of poetic language itself’ (Postmodernism 411), the formal
qualities of the work reflective of the confused subjectivity of an individual in London,
implicated in a complex chain of colonial relations that structure his existence yet remain
largely out of view.
The question that arises here is that of the shape the aesthetic form of cognitive mapping
can assume. As Jameson was not delineating a pre-existing body of works that he perceived as
falling under the proposed category but rather calling for an emergence of such representations,
there is no blueprint of the essential characteristics of this practice. Cognitive mapping is
something akin to a speculative aesthetic of sociopolitical milieus; Jameson opened his
discussion of the term with a frank admission that he is addressing a subject about which ‘[he]
know[s] nothing whatsoever, except for the fact that it does not exist’ (Cognitive Mapping
347). In essence, Jameson wrote something like a manifesto for an as-of-yet nonexistent
aesthetic practice; in his words, ‘an aesthetic, of which I have observed that I am, myself,
absolutely incapable of guessing or imagining its form’ (Cognitive Mapping 347). He
complicates matters further by emphasising that ‘all figures of maps and mapping’ should be
forgotten in order to ‘try to imagine something else’ (Cognitive Mapping 347). As Jameson
poses, achieving the aesthetic of cognitive mapping is a ‘matter of form’ (Cognitive Mapping
357). This insistence on the necessity of inventing formal strategies capable of giving shape to
the complicated relations between individuals and the overarching structures in which they are
situated points to the inadequacy of simply applying cartographic tools to the proposed
aesthetic, which is why Jameson underscores the need beyond literal maps. There is no
definitive answer as to what aesthetic approaches are considered better equipped to undertake
the representational task of cognitive mapping, but this openness to interpretation imbues
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cognitive mapping with a latent potentiality: it poses an invitation to both invent new modes of
representation and to read existing representations against this notion. Jameson’s refusal to
specify what it would necessarily entail on a formal level and the status of the practice a mere
potentiality and not an already realised, solidified practice both poses a challenge in engaging
with this proposition and is a source of its attraction. The intentional vagueness and openness
can be perceived as strengths of this concept, which does not delineate any strong borders or
name a specific set of characteristics that a work of art must necessarily exhibit in order to
engage with the proposed aesthetic.
There is an inherent tension between the assumed importance and ambition of this
practice and the likely impossibility of its realisation, which Jameson was clearly aware of;
writing of its potential products, he emphasised that ‘even if we cannot imagine the productions
of such an aesthetic, there may, nonetheless, as with the very idea of Utopia itself, be something
positive in the attempt to keep alive the possibility of imagining such a thing’ (Cognitive
Mapping 356). Any attempt to map an unrepresentable totality will be, by definition, just that:
an attempt, with incompleteness being an intrinsic quality of this effort. However, while the
production of a perfect map may forever remain out of reach, the value of the project lies in
the act of trying to think through the complexity, even if the final result remains limited to an
essentially negative operation, an inventory of representational dilemmas or failures.
Even so, in Jameson’s quite lofty formulation previously invoked in the introduction,
‘in the intent to hypothesise, in the desire called cognitive mapping — therein lies the beginning
of wisdom’ (The Geopolitical Aesthetic 3). The quote, posing cognitive mapping as a desire,
harkens back to the numerous formulations of the practice invoked in the opening section of
this chapter, in which I attempted to provide an overview of cognitive mapping’s lineage, the
assumed aims of the practice and its definitional malleability. For Jameson the project of
cognitive mapping is the most suitable form of epistemological inquiry for dealing with the
postmodern situation, as well as a tool for potentially enabling political activity (Tally 399). It
simultaneously denotes class consciousness (one suited for the globalised situation with its
inherently fractured spatio-temporality), a necessarily allegorical structureand an art form
imbued with a pedagogical impulse.
The practice of cognitive mapping, then, emerges as something of an exercise in a
speculative mode of thought that tries to think the complexity of the sociopolitical
megastructures not amenable to direct perception. It is posed as essential for the postmodern
situation, with Jameson postulating that ‘the political form of postmodernism, if there ever is
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any, will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a
social as well as a spatial scale’ (Postmodernism 92). Consequently, it is worth investigating
the enmeshment of the proposed practice with the notion of postmodernism and extend a
consideration as to whether it remains similarly pertinent under present conditions.
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2.3 A Postmodern Problematic
In Jameson’s work, cognitive mapping is firmly embedded within the context of
postmodernism, standing for the titular ‘cultural logic of late capitalism’ at the centre of his
prolific book. It is a term both widely influential and contested; as Baumbach, Young and Yue
write, postmodernism became something of a victim of its own celebrity, a term too often used
to signify either an inventory of aesthetic tropes specifically associated with the last decades of
the twentieth century, or a reductive concept of epistemological relativism (2). This has led to
a crucial misunderstanding stemming from a ‘failure to grasp the cultural logic that linked
aesthetics, knowledge, and political economy, that lead to the thing itself becoming conflated
with its symptoms’ (Baumbach et al. 3). Jameson’s thinking about postmodernity is rooted in
an economic base; it is intrinsically linked to the distinctive stage in the historical development
of capital, which is that of late capitalism1. For Jameson postmodernity both constitutes a
distinctive stage in the historical development of Capital and continues processes (such as the
globalising processes within the socioeconomic sphere, resulting in an increasing epistemic
gap between individual experience and the overarching structure) that predate its emergence.
Similarly, the developments of the recent decades are in part an extension of the postmodern
trajectory set forth by Jameson, yet at the same time, through their sheer intensity, might
constitute something of a new chapter in the periodisation of capitalism, which might
necessitate applying new theoretical conceptualisations explicitly acknowledging and engaging
with these developments.
If, under postmodernism, the subsumption of a formerly semi-autonomous cultural
sphere by capital took place, then this process has been taken to previously unforeseen lengths
in the decades since. The changes that have taken place largely follow along the lines of Herbert
Marcuse’s prescient prediction from 1969 that in affluent societies ‘capitalism comes into its
own’ by permeating ‘all dimensions of private and public existence’ (7). This escalating
permeation, visible in the extension of the commodifying logic into virtually all facets of
existence, is not merely indicative of an emergence of an updated form of capitalism, but its
proliferation into virtually all aspects of existence, encompassing our attention, our affects, our
cognition, and our social relations.
1 Jameson’s periodization of the stages of capitalist development is based on economist Ernest Mandel’s work Late Capitalism (1975). The stages are, respectively, market capitalism, monopoly capitalism and late, or multinational, capital. As Jameson notes, his own periodisation in the sphere of culture, which identifies the stages of realism, modernism, and postmodernism, is ‘both inspired and confirmed’ by Mandel’s corresponding model. (Postmodernism 35-36)
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Additionally, following Mark Fisher’s argument, the intensification of the
aforementioned processes may have caused the conditions that Jameson analysed to become
so aggravated and chronic that they have undergone change in kind. For this reason, Fisher
proposed the term ‘capitalist realism’ as an alternative way to conceive of the landscape of
contemporaneity, one characterised by the widespread internalisation of the neoliberal credo
that capitalism is the only viable economic system and, thus, there can be no imaginable
alternative. This peculiar ideology is one that doesn’t perceive itself as such, instead offering
itself in its self-obfuscating PR as a rational, meritocratic system of governance. Fisher
described capitalist realism as a pervasive atmosphere that affects cultural production, political-
economic activity, and thought in general. He argued this term may be better suited to
describing the current situation than postmodernism for a number of reasons, the primary being
that ‘what we are dealing with now is a deeper, far more pervasive sense of exhaustion, of
cultural and political sterility’, which in turn leads to a corrosion of social imagination (Fisher
7). There seems to be even more of a resigned impasse permeating social consciousness despite
a compounded awareness of capitalism’s drive towards destruction, clearly visible in the
ecological devastation its unceasing drive towards expansion causes.
Fisher termed this predicament a ‘frenzied stasis’, referring to a culture developing
without really changing, where politics are reduced to the administration of an already
established order; a state in which, despite the disingenuous discourse of rapid change, never-
ending progress and global development, what actually takes place is the increasing
homogenisation of politics and cultural production and a widespread resignation to the
seemingly unchangeable nature of the laws governing the sociopolitical reality. His proposed
periodising concept of ‘capitalist realism’ is just one among many theoretical interventions
aimed at giving a name to the recent developments, the examples of which include late
capitalism, neoliberalism, cognitive capitalism (Boutang), communicative capitalism (Dean),
attention economy (Terranova), semiocapitalism (Berardi) and hyperindustrial epoch
(Stiegler), among others. This multitude of theoretical developments cannot be productively
engaged with in the limited scope of this project; Fisher’s notion will be foregrounded as his
thought provides a framework well-suited to extending Jameson’s considerations to account
for the current developments. The late British theorist acknowledged the affinity between his
conceptualisation and Jameson’s analysis of postmodernity and there are shared key
sensibilities between the two thinkers. Both largely deal in cultural criticism, analysing diverse
cultural objects for traces of the wider sociopolitical realities in place. Both theorists are also
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preoccupied with a crucial Marxist category of class consciousness, seeing its rekindling as
crucial for the emergence of any form of emancipatory politics. Jameson admitted that
‘cognitive mapping is a sort of code for class consciousness’ (Postmodernism 418), while
Fisher saw the possibility of the radical overhaul of the current system as a formidable task,
but contended that it is ‘rebuilding of class consciousness that must be sought if we are to
remedy our situation’ (37). In both Fisher and Jameson there is mourning of our collective
cultural capacity to conceive of a world radically different from the one in which we currently
live, repeatedly expressed in Jameson’s preoccupation with the notion of Utopia and the
possibilities afforded by the (re)kindling of utopian imagination. Fisher’s Capitalist Realism,
while largely focused on illustrating the impossibility of an outside in an insular world which
suppresses socioeconomic alternatives and often even alternative imaginaries, ends on a
surprisingly optimistic note that echoes of Jameson’s utopian thinking, with the theorist
concluding that:
the very oppressive pervasiveness of capitalist realism means that even glimmers of alternative
political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately great effect. The tiniest event
can tear a hole in the grey curtain of reaction which has marked the horizons of possibility
under capitalist realism. From a situation in which nothing can happen, suddenly anything is
possible again. (81)
Under these new conditions characterised by a heightened sense of powerlessness and
a failure to conceive of any viable alternatives, the importance of mapping the overarching
system and imbuing the individual subject with a stronger sense of their place in it might be an
even more pressing task than it was when Jameson first articulated the concept. Still, the
totalising character of the proposed practice that attempts to map contemporaneity in its grasp-
exceeding complexity poses a formidable representational task. The following section explores
this totalising impulse underpinning cognitive mapping and, at the same time, reflects on the
inherent difficulty of this project, marked by tension that stems from the internal paradox
between the ambition of this endeavour and its likely impossibility.
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2.4 A Totalising Impulse
Jameson’s thought is characterised by an insistent focus on comprehending totalities, which
went against the dominant theoretical tendency of the late 1980s, marked by a largely negative
attitude towards such projects. Totalising thought tended to be equated with, or at least
considered dangerously proximate to, totalitarian political practices. Jameson refutes such
criticisms by pointing out ‘that the baleful equation between a philosophical conception of
totality and a political practice of totalitarianism is itself a particularly ripe example of what
Althusser calls „expressive causality”, namely, the collapsing of two semiautonomous (…)
levels into one another’ (Cognitive Mapping 354). Baumbach, Young and Yue extend this
criticism and condemn the misconception as one that impedes any attempt at a political critique
of culture; in their view, ‘precisely at a time when there is a pressing need for such critical
activity, we are busy disavowing the tools that might deliver it’ (2).
There is another consequence of the retreat from even attempting ambitious visions of
totality. As the utopian (in theory, in initial conception) projects of the 20th century are
(perhaps to a point rightfully) dismissed due to their eventual failures and descents into
nightmarish realities, the utopian impulse itself is dismissed and what remains is a widespread
resignation to the notion that what is, while imperfect, is vastly superior to the unthinkable
alternatives; a resignation to the inevitabilities of the present. Significantly, this sense has also
been fostered by the disappearance of alternative systems from the political scene. Following
the exit of Real Existing Socialism from the world stage after the dissolution of the USSR,
which is taken to stand for the impossibility (and undesirability) Real Existing Capitalism
cemented its hegemonic status as the only viable system.
This, however, produces a paralysis of both imagination and politics and leads to ‘the
systemic, cultural and ideological closure of which we are all in one way or another prisoners',
due to an atrophy of utopian imagination (Progress versus Utopia 153). Fisher echoes this
sentiment, calling for the reassertion, against the postmodern suspicion of grand narratives, that
there is a common denominator to problems that are perceived as isolated issues: capital. For
him, it is crucial to ‘begin, as if for the first time, to develop strategies against a Capital which
presents itself as ontologically, as well as geographically, ubiquitous’ (Fisher 77). This
diagnosis of the ontological ubiquity of capital echoes Jameson’s assertion that the study of
Capital itself is ‘the true ontology of the present time’ (Postmodernism 92), the inescapable
underlying base of social reality and something structuring individual lives in ways both
evident and unseen.
16
In Jameson, there is an acknowledgement of the impossibility of mapping a totality, yet
it remains something desirable. The theorist consequently emphasised the importance of
finding ways of thought capable of grasping the multiplicity of diverse relations in a late
capitalist society, considering ‘our dissatisfaction with the concept of totality is not a thought
in its own right but rather a significant, a symptom, a function of the increasing difficulties in
thinking of such a set of interrelationships in a complicated society’ (Cognitive Mapping 356).
If we follow Jameson on this, then his conclusion that a new type of aesthetic representation
capable of grasping this irreducible complexity is needed is indeed a natural one. Furthermore,
a totalising theoretical activity does not necessarily have to mean a misguided search for a
perfect, all-encompassing ‘theory of everything’. Even if we’re to follow Jameson’s and
Fisher’s lead in considering capital the ultimate ontological grounding of contemporary reality,
that does not necessarily have to mean a comfortable retreat into making it a satisfactory
explanation for everything and forgoing the concrete activity of meticulously tracing particular
patterns. As Toscano and Kinkle argue, the theoretical desire for totality does not preclude an
attentiveness to traces, objects and devices; they note that Jameson does not promote a vision
of capitalism as a totality possessing ‘an easily grasped command-and-control-centre’, which
is why it necessitates the development of ways of representing ‘the complex and dynamic
relations intervening between the domains of production, consumption and distribution, of
making the invisible visible’ (Toscano & Kinkle 119; 69). This is precisely the aesthetic
problem that Jameson responded to with his call for an emergence of cognitive mapping; it
might be one that cannot be fully overcome as the task of ‘making the invisible visible’ is
irrevocably marked by a paradox between the ambition of this endeavour and its likely
impossibility. It is worth paying attention to this seeming paradoxicality — is it internal to the
concept or specific to the ‘postmodern’ moment? As previously mentioned, Jameson points to
the writing of Virginia Woolf as giving shape of the fragmented experience of a subject in the
imperialist stage. Does that mean, then, that representation reflective of the gap between the
individual experience and overarching structure has been possible, but ceased to be so due to
the postmodern complexity? Or, perhaps, the impossibility of the successful realisation of the
proposed aesthetic is inherent to the concept, as it can only function negatively, analogously to
how in the Lacanian framing the Real can never be accessed directly. These questions, which
do not seem to be resolved in Jameson, present a double bind in which both conceptually, and
specifically to this moment, cognitive mapping emerges as a project of tracing its own
impossibility. However, regardless of whether it is actually impossible, or an adequate
representational form has not been determined just yet, perhaps ’successful’ cognitive mapping
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is one that constantly engages with this paradox of searching for coherence in the inherently
incoherent, acknowledging its own representational limitations and inescapably ideological
status.
What could be possible ways of engaging with both the perceived importance of the
practice and the improbability of its realisation? To come back to the question of totalisation,
Toscano and Kinkle contend that
it is only those who believe that theories of the totality conform to a Stalinist caricature of
“dialectical materialism” who would tax them with an “excess of coherence”. A social theory
of capitalism as a totality, and the imaginations and aesthetics that strive toward it, could only
be marked by such an excess if it neglected the incoherence, the trouble in its object, refusing
to acknowledge its own theoretical activity (123).
Capital functions as a totalising force, subjugating increasingly large swaths of social reality
to its logic. The possible countering of that necessitates engaging with this totalising character
through an equally ambitious theoretical activity, committed to the meticulous study of how
the materially existing relationalities fit into the larger social and political milieus. To bring
this back to the subject at hand — cognitive mapping and its purpose — the aforementioned
‘imagination failure’ is crucial in reiterating the perceived importance of this practice. As long
as what is keeps being naturalised and treated like a fact of life, it prevents alternatives from
even being imagined. Making the effort to grasp totalities, to draw connections between
seemingly divergent objects and actors, is, for Jameson, a necessary prelude to possibly
creating an opening in which the new could emerge. However, the desire to uncover the hidden
interrelatedness of things at time veers close to the conspiratorial logic encapsulated in the
‘everything connects’ dictum. The following section explores this apparent proximity between
the operations of cognitive mapping and those of conspiracy.
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2.5 A Conspiratorial Affinity
While the notion of totality in itself, as elaborated on in the previous section, is one that can
provoke suspicion in and of itself through its link to the disgraced political projects of the 20th
century, searching for invisible totalities can be perceived to, or perhaps genuinely, veer close
to a paranoid project of endlessly searching for actually nonexistent yet deeply desired
underlying coherence. The desire to find hidden interconnections and affinities between
seemingly unrelated objects and events does, to an extent, mirror the basic conspiratory premise
of everything being connected. This apparent affinity between the operations of cognitive
mapping and those of conspiracy stems from a shared underlying attitude of fundamental
epistemic suspicion. While paranoia and its cultural depictions are hardly a new phenomenon,
the present mode of hyperconnectivity seems to exacerbate this perhaps natural tendency of the
mind to search for coherence. Devoid of stable coordinates, a sense of distrust in official
narratives creates the perfect breeding ground for the proliferation of paranoid discourses,
which emerge, multiply, mutate and spread freely in the petri dish of the digital landscape.
Jameson acknowledges the possible proximity of the proposed operations of cognitive mapping
and conspiracy, writing that ‘conspiracy […] is the poor person's cognitive mapping in the
postmodern age; it is the degraded figure of the total logic of late capital, a desperate attempt
to represent the latter's system’ (Cognitive Mapping 356). Could this statement be reversed?
Perhaps, cognitive mapping is conspiracy done well.
An affinity between critical operations and paranoid perception is explored by Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick’s essay ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So
Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You’ (2002). While Sedgwick directly
attacks Jameson’s historicising approach, she offers an incisive analysis of critical practices
rooted in the what Paul Ricoeur refers to as ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, enumerating and
breaking down particular aspects of the paranoid position. There is an uncanny resemblance
between the paranoid operations as described by Sedgwick and those of cognitive mapping;
most of the claims she makes for both the strengths and limitations of the paranoid position can
be extrapolated to cognitive mapping. Sedgwick delineates the ‘protocols of unveiling’ that
became common currency of cultural theory. Among them, she lists ‘subversive and
demystifying parody’ and ‘suspicious archeologies of the present’ (124). These descriptors are
very fitting for the chosen cinematic examples and will provide framing for the subsequent
sections in which the central objects are analysed through the lens of cognitive mapping.
Sedgwick also aptly notes the peculiarity of a mode firmly embedded in epistemic suspicion
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yet seemingly naively placing faith in the emancipatory potential of knowledge to expose and
demystify. This leads her to pose the question of ‘what is the basis for assuming that it will
surprise or disturb, never mind motivate, anyone to learn that a given social manifestation is
artificial, self-contradictory, imitative, phantasmatic, or even violent?’ (124). Perhaps this is a
question to consider in regard to cognitive mapping: even if forms of representation that
elucidate the complexity of the sociopolitical spheres are invented, can any efficacy be claimed
for their operations? Jameson’s proposed aesthetic seems to put faith in the emancipatory, or
at least politically-enabling, potential of knowledge produced through the practice. Such belief
in the productiveness of demystifying strategies has increasingly been put into question. In
Publicity’s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy (2002) Jodi Dean poses that
while the politics of the public sphere have been deeply embedded in the notion of power as
‘always hidden and secret’ (173), the situation today clearly disproves this. Like Sedgwick, she
resists the idea that transparency necessarily produces positive impact on ‘all sorts of horrible
political processes’ it uncovers, arguing that ‘we know full well that corporations are
destroying the environment, employing slaves, holding populations hostage to their threats and
move their operations to locales with cheap labour’ (Dean 174). Alexander Galloway echoes
this negative assessment. In his view, a pursuit of uncovering the hidden workings of power
would be a noble one, were it not ‘demonstrably false: the photos from the Abu Ghraib prison
were released, or they were not (and nothing changed); we grieved and we protested in the
proper channels, or we did not (and still nothing changed)’ (Galloway 91). Even if that is the
case and no effectiveness can be claimed for the operations of cognitive mapping, it is worth
noting that Jameson’s proposed practice postulates something more than merely a
straightforward presentation of data exposing the sinister operations of power. Instead, it offers
to inscribe them in an aesthetic form, which might imbue the information presented with an
affective charge capable of instigating a deeper sense of understanding of the inequitable
conditions in place and a stronger sense of one’s place in a particular system, which might not
on its own be enough to bring about any sociopolitical shifts, yet might be their prerequisite.
What exactly constitutes the qualitative difference between artistic works perceived as
a valid effort in mapping contemporary developments and the works falling in the ‘degraded’,
conspiratorial category? In conspiracies, there are no gaps, no negative spaces, everything
makes sense and the explanation provided is perceived as ‘perfect’; they tend to be fantasies of
perfect coherence. In contrast, cognitive mapping is an inherently incomplete endeavour and
an essentially negative operation. The valid depictions tend to acknowledge their own fragility
20
Jameson in his formulation, they constantly underscore the inherently negative nature of the
project at hand.
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3 Suspicious Archaeologies of the Present: Cognitive Mapping in Non-Fiction Film
If, as posed by Jameson, the present conditions necessitate an emergence of an aesthetic form
capable of giving tangible shape to the functioning of globalised abstract systems and the
consequent challenge is to develop forms capable of providing such representations, non-
fiction filmmaking may seem a prime candidate for this task. As documentary scholar Bill
Nichols posits, non-fiction filmmaking has often been classified as falling under the category
of ‘discourses of sobriety’ that also include science, economics, politics, and history — in other
words, discourses that claim a direct access to the real and therefore are understood as having
the potentiality to represent its elusive truth (3-4). Similarly, Michael Renov also foregrounds
this relationship between the represented and reality, arguing that documentaries make a ‘direct
ontological claim to the real’ by presenting certain sets of truth claims (7). Considering whether
such direct ontological link can actually be claimed is outside the scope of this investigation;
my aim in invoking these arguments is to say that regardless of whether that indeed is the case,
non-fiction cinema is commonly considered as a privileged, or at least quite a natural, site for
such necessarily pedagogical representations that Jameson was calling for due to what is
perceived as its intimate link to reality.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s used the phrase that provides the title for this chapter to
describe one of the possible modes that ‘protocols of unveiling’ can assume. It is a strikingly
apt descriptor for the documentary examples that will be analysed in this chapter. Marked by
an attitude of epistemic suspicion towards the prevalent narratives, both the BBC-affiliated
British documentarian Adam Curtis and the Amsterdam-based artistic collective Metahaven
excavate the key developments of the recent years and recombine them to form sprawling
audiovisual maps of contemporaneity, in which seemingly unrelated events and actors coalesce
around a central theme. Both engage with the didactic task underpinning cognitive mapping by
creating totalising depictions of contemporaneity, while at the same time the formal techniques
employed fracture the seeming homogeneity of the discourse and imbue them with a reflexive
quality. However, looking at these works also illuminates the pitfalls of creating such
sprawling, all-encompassing narratives as they illustrate the possibility of descending into a
necessarily simplified version of what is being depicted. It is this twofold structure that makes
them particularly engaging examples to engage with under the conceptual umbrella of
cognitive mapping, as they attempt something beyond the formidable representational task
proposed by Jameson; they engage with the inherent negativity of this practice, showing how
such emergent ‘maps’ will by necessity be incomplete, ideological and contested.
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3.1 The World According to Adam Curtis
From serialised, episodic productions such as Pandora’s Box (1992), The Century of the Self
(2002), The Trap (2007) and All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (2011) to the
feature-length Bitter Lake (2015) and his most recent Hypernormalisation (2016), Adam Curtis
engages with and traces what he considers to be the key factors that contributed to shaping the
present. In his documentary work, he presents a bleak vision of the modern world, one haunted
by the past yet incapable of producing any coherent vision of the future, backward-looking and
trapped in a pervasive mood of bored pessimism. According to Curtis, we are living in a
stagnant age in which ‘no one can see their way past the sort of financial version of the free
market, and the culture reflects that’ (Obrist). This echoes Fisher’s diagnosis of a ‘pervasive
sense of exhaustion, of cultural and political sterility’ that is a main tenant of capitalist realism
and contributes to what he describes as ‘the slow cancellation of the future’ (7; 17). Fisher
borrows the phrase from Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi to extend the theoretical conceptualisation of
what he perceives as the pervasive sense of suspension in an endlessly protracted Now, which
results in an increasing stifling of both political and artistic imagination under neoliberal
capitalism. The oppressive pervasiveness of the current system seems to narrow the horizon of
the possible to an endless perpetuation of itself, with capitalist theology exalting itself as a
universal project of most optimal organisation of society and the relations of power and
production, striving to reach a state of absolute naturalisation and consequently,
depoliticisation — it is unarguable because it is fact, not ideology. This is exactly what Curtis
attempts to portray in his work. In Fisher’s view ‘capitalist realism can only be threatened if it
is shown to be in some way inconsistent or untenable; if, that is to say, capitalism’s ostensible
“realism” turns out to be nothing of the sort’ (16). This act of threatening seems to be Curtis’
main goal that he attempts to accomplish by putting into question the prevalent narratives,
exposing them as fictional constructs. The appearance of natural order is therefore undermined,
which, in Fisher’s view, could open the door for the possibility of change.
Encompassing a range of historical and sociopolitical topics, Curtis’ filmography
forms a coherent body of works marked by the systematic reappearances of particular themes
— most importantly, power and its shifting role and nature in contemporary societies, the
development of prevalent ideologies and the failures of utopian ideas. His documentaries
attempt to problematise the ways in which ideologies, politics and histories are understood.
What Curtis sets out to accomplish through his work that exists somewhere at the intersection
of journalistic practice and non-fiction filmmaking is, as Brett Nicholls succinctly put it in his
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article on the filmmaker’s oeuvre, ‘the creation of both a powerful articulation of the post-
political present and a compelling form of social theory’ (3). A sense of thematic and stylistic
continuity characterises Curtis’ work; an Adam Curtis Binge-Watching Experience is
characterised by a kind of hypnotic repetitiveness, in which similar ideas, similar music cues
and similar shots keep reappearing. This continuity possible to approach the individual entries
in his filmography as parts of a larger project. What project would that be? A possibly
productive approach to reading his work is to see it as an attempt to grapple with the irreducible
complexity of the current socio-political landscape, or, in other words, an exercise in cognitive
mapping, which stands for an attempt to endow the individual subject with a new heightened
sense of their place in the global system in order to diminish the sense of confusion intrinsic to
the contemporary subject.
This ambitious project of making sense of the ultimately unrepresentable space of
contemporaneity is remarkably similar to what Fredric Jameson saw as the goal of the aesthetic
of cognitive mapping, which, in his view, is to think the present time in history, thereby
increasing the individual’s ‘self-consciousness about the social totality’ (Postmodernism 51).
Curtis attempts to do so through constructing what has been aptly called by Brandon Harris in
his New Yorker profile of the documentarian ‘postmodern counterhistories’ that seek to bring
a new perspective to and recontextualise a multiplicity of diverse events and actors that have
shaped the world in the last decades. Jameson wrote of ‘the incapacity of our minds, at least at
present, to map the great global multinational and decentered communication network in which
we find ourselves caught as individual subjects’ (Postmodernism 44). In his work Curtis makes
an attempt to counter that incapacity and by bringing together seemingly disparate events,
figures and developments and reconfiguring them in a myriad of ways, he strives to create a
map of the neoliberal fantasy that, in his view, became commonly accepted as reality. In my
analysis, I will draw on examples from Curtis’ filmography to illustrate a thematic and stylistic
continuity present in his work that allows to approach it as an increasingly totalizing
engagement with mapping the overarching structure of the social and political realms. While
all of his works, especially seen as parts of a larger whole that attempts to grasp the irreducible
complexity of contemporaneity, can be seen as undertaking this effort, it is the filmmaker’s
most recent work, Hypernormalisation, that represents the fullest engagement with mapping
the totality of relations underpinning existing social and political structures, which is why it is
a productive strategy to approach this particular entry in Curtis’ filmography up close.
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3.2 Cataloguing Contemporaneity
Curtis has long been affiliated with the BBC, creating documentary works that delve deep into
a range of historical and socio-political topics primarily through a recombination a wide variety
of pre-existing footage, from news clips, surveillance footage and corporate training videos to
excerpts from Hollywood films and television shows. Creating an intricate web of past events
and developments, he strives to create an account of the current political situation. In
conversation with art critic Hans Ulrich Obrist for e-flux journal, Curtis explains the larger
project of his work in the following way: ‘What I do is construct an imaginative interpretation
of history to make people look again at what they think they know. I like to ask people, “Have
you thought of this?”. Like zooming up in a helicopter and looking at the ground, looking at
the world in a new way.’ Providing possible insight into the intricacies of the totality of social
structure is a crucial component of cognitive mapping as well, which is partly why the
filmmaker’s work can be considered a possible example of such practice. The argument about
the possibility of reading his work as an attempt to increase the ‘imageability’ of contemporary
social totality can be extended to his entire oeuvre which clearly shares a core thematic concern:
it is, as Sarah Keith summarises, ‘the development of ideologies and political power, and the
failures of utopian ideals’ (162). From The Power of Nightmares (2004), which traces the rise
of Islamism in the Arab world and neoconservatism in the United States, to All Watched Over
By Machines of Loving Grace (2011), focused on the perceived failure of utopian dreams of
technological advancement as a liberating force, his entire filmography can be read as an
attempt to unpack the underpinnings of currently prevalent ideologies and mechanisms of
power. This strongly argumentative tendency that shapes Curtis’ filmmaking method might be
explained by his short- lived academic career at Oxford in political science that he pursued
after completing his doctoral degree there. However, having found himself immensely
frustrated by what he saw as the constraints of academia, he began working in television instead
and these two somewhat contradictory formative influences have clearly contributed to shaping
his distinctive filmmaking style, characterised by a marked tension between its didactic,
argumentative quality and a variety of more experimental, reflexive techniques employed.
Curtis considers his early experiences of working as a television editor as invaluable in terms
of providing him with tools that he began using later to assemble his documentary narratives,
which he elaborated on in conversation with Obrist: ‘A few years later I worked out that one
of the ways you could tell stories about the workings of modern political power (…) is through
bolting it together with trash techniques. I put jokes in, silliness, self-referential bits about
25
modern culture, and storytelling and emotion—all things I learned through doing trash
television’. These varied influences have clearly shaped Curtis’ trademark merging of a
journalistic, argumentative narrative and what he describes here as ‘trash techniques’, which is
employed prominently in all of his work. The sense of both stylistic and thematic continuity
makes it possible to make a case for Curtis’ as a documentary auteur as his filmography is one
of surprising coherence and stubborn insistence on a singular vision, which is why it is
productive to approach it as a whole that undertakes the impossible project of unpacking the
complexity of contemporaneity. In his work, there is a clear progression from the episodic, case
study-based approach characteristic of his earlier, serialised work to the more expansive scope
and scale of his recent undertakings such as Bitter Lake and Hypernormalisation.
Curtis’ earliest work that garnered critical attention and clearly established his
documentary filmmaking method is the BAFTA-winning series Pandora's Box: A Fable From
the Age of Science (1993), which focuses on the largely negative effects that, in Curtis’ view,
were brought about by the increasing implementation of political and technocratic rationalism.
Similarly to much of his later works, the narrative structure of Pandora’s Box is established by
interweaving separate strands of inquiry that form the focus of each of the episodes, such as
Soviet communism and its failed attempt to turn humans into rational scientific beings based
on theories of social engineering, the application of game theory and systems analysis in the
Cold War period and the development of nuclear power. Similar concerns are at the centre of
another of his serialised works, The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom (2007),
which consists of three hour-long episodes that explore how a simplistic model of human
beings as self-seeking, almost robotic creatures led to today’s equally simplified idea of
freedom.
Contemporaneous understanding of freedom is the thematic axis around which the
individual episodes revolve and to express his pessimistic vision of its perceived diminishment,
in the opening episode of the series Curtis once again uses the application of game theory and
the manner in which mathematical models of human behaviour increasingly seeped into and
shaped economic thought to illustrate his arguments. In his view, this culminated in the
increasing neoliberalisation of politics, encapsulated in Margaret Thatcher’s famous
formulation that there is no such thing as society; in other words, how it led to the emergence
of the view of human beings as fundamentally self-interested beings, which laid the
groundwork for the emergence of a mathematically modelled society run on data, consequently
creating, in the filmmaker’s view, a cage that inhabitants of capitalist societies currently live
26
in. The themes of individual freedom, the changing nature of the concept and its manipulation
by those in power are also key thematic concerns at the forefront of The Century of the Self
(2002), Curtis’ four-part exploration of how the legacy of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic
theory has been used by governments and corporations in engineering the fears and desires of
the population, which was a crucial technique used to create and intensify consumerist attitudes
and contributed to the increasing commodification, which the documentarian sees as key
features of contemporary capitalist societies. Focusing on figures such as Freud’s nephew
Edward Bernays, who pioneered the implementation of psychological techniques in the field
of public relations, the series ends with a grim diagnosis that although we feel we are free, in
reality, we have—like the politicians— become enslaved to our desires. This notion of the
illusory, falsified nature of widely held beliefs is another key characteristic of the vision of
contemporaneity Curtis brings forth in his films. Perhaps the most controversial of his works
is The Power of Nightmares (2004) in which, over the course of three episodes, the filmmaker
draws a connection between the rise of the neoconservative movement in the United States and
the radical Islamist ideology and argues, which has been both a source of criticism and praise,
that the vision of the Islamist movement and organisations such as al-Qaeda as sprawling
networks of well-organised terror is a Straussian ‘noble lie’ invented by politicians and
perpetuated by the media to inspire unity and create support for military interventions in the
Middle East, as such creation of a mythical enemy was crucial in bringing citizens together
after utopian ideas ultimately failed and it proved impossible to provide a positive unifying
factor. This perceived failure is another link connecting the works of Curtis, which keep
coming back to the contemporary inability of politics to create visions of a better world, instead
resorting to keeping it relatively stable in a managerial way, which, as mentioned earlier, is the
main argument put forth in the filmmaker’s most recent effort that will be explored in more
detail later on, Hypernormalisation (2016). While in this film he extends that argument to the
entirety of Western politics, Bitter Lake, the predecessor of Hypernormalisation and Curtis’
first foray into feature-length filmmaking, applies it to the narrative that in his opinion has been
manufactured by politicians about militant Islam. In his telling, an irreducible complexity of
the relationship between the Middle Eastern and Western powers has been turned into a simple
binary tale of good versus evil.
Bitter Lake can also serve as an example of how, despite the apparent homogeneity of
style and subject matter, both clearly evolved with subsequent films. In terms of the former,
over time Curtis’ use of more experimental, expressionistic techniques increased significantly.
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sequences comprised of found-footage excerpts with no additional commentary are
increasingly prevalent. Alienating and hypnotic at the same time, they combine unedited
footage of violence and destruction with contrapuntal use of music that is one of the most
distinctive characteristics of Curtis’ filmmaking style. The more sprawling, freer structure
compared to his earlier efforts can be explained not only in terms of progressive evolution of
artistic style, but also by looking at the change in production context. The filmmaker’s earlier
works, despite the distinctive style and voice they exhibit, still had to fit into the narrow
constraints of the pre-established format of television documentary series. However, both Bitter
Lake and Hypernormalisation were created for the BBC’s iPlayer, an Internet streaming
service, which meant a greater deal of freedom afforded to Curtis in terms of both length and
structure of his work, which he gleefully exploited in the sprawling Hypernormalisation, a key
example of this widening of scope of the filmmaker’s recent works, which is evident just by its
impressive runtime of 206 minutes. Representing the filmmaker’s most ambitious undertaking
and fullest expression of his attempt to trace the mechanisms underlying contemporary
structures of sociopolitical domination, it is useful to look at the film in more detail to articulate
Curtis’ attempt to map the terrain of contemporaneity. While the film does not share the
episodic quality of most of Curtis’ earlier work, its length is comparable to that of a miniseries.
To provide structure, it is divided into nine chapters, covering a wide range of thematic ground
and including innumerable actors. It is possible to distinguish three main trajectories of inquiry,
namely the rapid rise of technology and its effect on the shifting balance of power in society,
the rise of individualist culture that Curtis connects to the failure of revolutionary ideas of the
1960s and the subsequent rise of neoliberal, consumerist capitalism and crucial economic and
political changes that enabled the rise of the banking sector as a key power player on a global
scale. As Nicholls notes, ‘Curtis, as per Althusser, catalogues the overdetermined present, and
the political intersection of forces that produces a complexity that seems impossible to manage’
(12). All the diverse strands introduced converge as they increasingly become pieces of a larger
story that Curtis is telling. What story is that? The next section explores this question and pays
closer focus to the specific techniques used that contribute to the creation of the filmmaker’s
particular vision of the world.
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Hypernormalisation can be read as a particularly interesting example of cognitive mapping in
practice due to its engagement with the contradiction inherent to this project between its grand
ambition and likely impossibility. While at the same time trying to provide a totalizing
overview of the landscape of contemporarily on the level of argumentation, the immense
difficulty in doing so is foregrounded and engaged with through the use of particular techniques
and strategies. Therefore, a productive strategy to disseminate the map that Curtis attempts to
produce in his work is to read the film on two levels: one of argumentation and one of affect,
in order to explore the tension between the journalistic and artistic qualities of the work. A
close reading of the film and the techniques and strategies used is performed to explain how it
strives to increase the ‘imageability’ of contemporary social totality both on a level of
argumentation and affect. The inherent tension between attempting to map a totality and the
impossibility of this project will be foregrounded in order to advance the argument that this
contradictory quality can also be found in Curtis’ filmmaking, marked by a sense of tension
between authoritative argumentation and reflexive strategies that undermine the seeming
homogeneity of the discourse.
To understand the filmmaker’s point of view as laid out in the film, it is useful to look
at the meaning of the titular term. Hypernormalisation in its original use was a term developed
by Alexei Yurchak in his book, Everything was forever, until it was no more: the last Soviet
generation (2005). In Curtis’ retelling, the term stands for the effect of what in the film is
presented the increasingly schizophrenic conditions of life in the last 20 years of the Soviet
Union, where everyone was aware the system was failing, but since no one could imagine the
alternative, they kept going along with it to maintain the pretence of the status quo, thus
becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy where widespread artifice is accepted as normal. The titular
term has been re-appropriated by Curtis as applicable to the contemporary situation in which,
as Fisher succinctly puts it, ‘capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizon of the thinkable’ (8).
How is the argumentative quality of the work created? At first glance, this film seems
to fit neatly into what Bill Nichols described as expository mode of documentary filmmaking,
which he defines as follows:
Expository documentaries speak directly to the viewer, often in the form of an authoritative
commentary employing voiceover or titles, proposing a strong argument and point of view.
These films are rhetorical, and try to persuade the viewer. (They may use a rich and sonorous
male voice.) The (voice-of-God) commentary often sounds 'objective' and omniscient. Images
are often not paramount; they exist to advance the argument. The rhetoric insistently presses
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upon us to read the images in a certain fashion. Historical documentaries in this mode deliver
an unproblematic and 'objective' account and interpretation of past events. (32)
Many of these qualities can easily be identified in the film. Both authoritative commentary in
the form of extensive voice-over narration delivered by the filmmaker and characteristic
capital-Arial intertitles are key features of Curtis’ filmmaking style that he employs with
consequence in each of his documentary productions to create a sense of continuity despite the
disjointed nature of the images, which are often combined and juxtaposed in bizarre ways. It is
that narration and the aforementioned chapter structure create the discursive level and a sense
of clarity; thus, it is largely on that level that the map of contemporaneity that Curtis is trying
to create emerges. As mentioned, the film begins with a clear articulation of an ultimately
subjective yet seemingly authoritative diagnosis that having failed to address the complexity
of the socio-political landscape, power figures have retreated into a simplified, make-believe
reality. Curtis’ voice fits neatly with Nichols’ description, his constant narration characterised
by a sense of omniscience and authoritativeness. Without it to provide a sense of continuity
and clarity to the argument being made, the film would be a montage of seemingly unrelated,
oftentimes bizarre flashes from the past with no sense of coherence. The employment of these
techniques leads to the emergence of what Jameson described as a necessarily didactic quality
of cognitive mapping works. As he wrote, the pedagogic function of art has been minimised
despite it being crucial for what he describes as any conceivable Marxist aesthetic. Toscano
and Kinkle succinctly summarise that ‘while such artworks and narratives would not be merely
didactic or pedagogical, they would by necessity also be didactic or pedagogical, recasting
what political teaching, instruction or even propaganda might mean in our historical moment’
(34). This didactic or pedagogical quality is clearly a feature of Hypernormalisation: it’s an
argumentative work that clearly strives to express a sort of ‘political teaching’. This has been
a feature of Curtis’ work that has been a subject to some criticism: he has been accused of
superimposing his own creative theory as journalistic fact and called out for his ‘propagandist’
tendencies, with critics pointing out the irony that he might be doing a very similar thing —
creating an oversimplified version of reality — to that which he subjects to lengthy critique in
his films. Jasper Rees remarked in his review of Bitter Lake that ‘in the end, Adam Curtis
sounds like just another prophet asking us to have faith in his vision, which is an irony’, with
a similar sentiment being expressed and taken further by Jon Boone, who compared the
filmmaker’s work to ‘a televisual equivalent of a drunken late night Wikipedia binge with
pretension for narrative coherence’. Is he guilty of precisely what he accuses others of doing,
which is reducing something incredibly complex to fit the narrow constraints of his vision?
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While this is a valid point, it also makes evident the struggle inherent to cognitive mapping:
the project of trying to create works that will somehow grasp the ungraspable and provide a
framework through which the entirety of the fragmented landscape of contemporary
sociopolitical reality can be made clear has the seeds of its own failure sown in it from
conception. What makes it a pressing project is that it could increase the imageability of
processes that can’t be easily visualised, but at the same time, it is exactly because it is so
difficult to visualise them that any attempt to do so may end up, by necessity, reductive in the
sense of giving a false sense of clarity to something that requires mapping precisely because of
its illegible, self-obscuring nature, which is perhaps the great challenge of cognitive mapping:
all attempts at such representation may inescapably be undermined by the necessity to simplify
in order to create narrative coherence.
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3.4 Disrupting the Homogeneity of the Discourse
Jonathan Rosenbaum argues in his article Negotiating the Pleasure Principle: The Recent Work
of Adam Curtis that the theses of the films in question are to a degree undermined by Curtis's
employment of similar persuasive, advertising-style techniques intended to elicit an emotional
response in the viewer to those being critiqued. Rosenbaum points to the tension between the
argumentative side of Curtis’ work and what he considers the ‘anti-intellectual methodologies
sometimes employed in terms of sound and image’ (72). However, this rupture between the
authoritative discourse being presented and the use of such techniques is productive in the sense
that it strongly contributes to the creation of the director’s particular vision of contemporaneity,
characterised by the experience of disjointedness and fragmentation that is expressed not
merely through rhetoric, but through the qualities of the images themselves. Any attempt to
make sense of the complexity of structures underpinning the entirety of the contemporary social
reality will be, by necessity, reductive: the incapability to grasp that complexity is precisely
what makes the attempts at unpacking it a pressing project, if one follows both Jameson and
Fisher in considering that to be essential to opening up the possibility of implementing actual
change to those overarching structures. Thus, in terms of form, Curtis’ filmmaking style with
its strong authoritative voice giving it a didactic quality, seems to be well suited to attempt
Jameson’s proposed goal of increasing the ‘imageability’ of the social and political reality.
However, as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, reading Curtis’ oeuvre in
relation to the concept of cognitive mapping is a potentially productive method not only
because the work itself quite explicitly makes an attempt to create the type of situational
representation of the totality that’s being proposed, but also because it makes evident the
struggle between attempting to do so and the impossibility of this project. There is a tension
between the filmic techniques and qualities of the images themselves that undermine the sense
of clarity being created through the argumentative side of the film. In other words, as Nichols
explains, ‘the formal properties of the film can be understood as problematising and
questioning representation itself. The authority of the journalistic narrative voice is disrupted
and truth claims are thus questioned’ (6). Therefore, it might be productive to brings these
disruptive techniques into focus, in particular the distinctive approaches to editing and sound
that are key stylistic features of Curtis’ filmmaking.
In her article Half of it is just finding the right music: music and the films of Adam
Curtis, Sarah Keith argues that the specific way in which sound is employed within Curtis’
work means that it ceases to be merely a passive accompaniment to on-screen events, instead
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actively directing the documentary narrative and consequently, she argues that in order to
understand Curtis’ authorial intent it is crucial to look closely at the way music is employed in
his documentary practice (162-3). Quite similarly to the way he makes use of images from
extremely diverse sources, the soundscapes of his films are marked by a sense of fragmentation
and contradiction. A surrealistic sense of irony is created through the incorporation of
extremely varied audial materials, from catchy pop tunes and excerpts of famous film scores
to industrial sounds to, a favourite of Curtis’, cartoonish ‘boing!’ sounds interspersed
frequently throughout the film. This playfulness stands in tonal opposition to the bleak
diagnoses being put forward, undermining the tone of documentary seriousness. At the same
time, the essayistic nature of the film and experimental strategies used allow the emergence of
reflexive qualities that problematise the idea of accurately representing social relations on such
a large scale in general. As mentioned, the inherently didactic quality of the mode of
documentary filmmaking that Curtis employs is also in line with a similar characteristic of
cognitive mapping works in general. These factors largely contribute to making his work
receptive to reading through the lens of Jameson’s concept at the centre of this project as they
are not merely an explicit attempt at the representational task it established, but also an
engagement with the simul