Cinematic 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
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. Dziękuję.
Table of contents 1 Introduction 1 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
3.3 The Secret History of Everything 28
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
4.3 Aesthetics of Cognitive Mapping or Accelerationist Aesthetics? 47
5 Conclusion 51
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
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
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)
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
and precarious, hypothetical nature, forgoing presenting absolute truth claims. Instead, like Jameson in his formulation, they constantly underscore the inherently negative nature of the project at hand.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.
While the authoritative voice-over still provides overarching structure, longer impressionistic 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.
