The Devil as Cognitive Mapping

In this essay I show how the Devil has and continues to be one of the most pervasive symbols of the workings of capitalism and its historical penetration into communal and everyday life. First, I briefly sketch the historical transformations in popular and literary images of the Devil throughout post-medieval Western history, connecting these to specific historical transformations of capitalism as a historical social system. Second, I draw on Michael Taussig's work on the role of metonymic symbols in the social representation of capitalist practices and on Fredric Jameson's notion of cognitive mapping to show how we can conceive of the repeatedly observed appeal of the figure of the Devil in those terms. Finally, I examine recent representations of the Devil in Hollywood film to show that the Devil continues to be an intuitive symbolic resource to “map” the global, consumer-based capitalist system in late modernity.

Keywords

• Devil,
• Cognitive Mapping,
• Commodity Fetishism,
• Capitalism,
• Fredric Jameson