1. Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text 1 (1979): 147–48.

2. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (1984): 53–92. This essay significantly revises and expands upon ideas Jameson had published the previous year under the title “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (New York: The New Press), 111–25. Originally published by Bay Press in 1983.

3. Borrowing from the economist Ernest Mandel and his monumental work, Late Capitalism, Jameson identifies three distinct stages of capitalist development: (1) market capitalism, which refers to the growth of industrial capital in national markets during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; (2) monopoly capitalism, which entails the imperialist development of world markets organized around nation-states, but depending upon the exploitative asymmetry of the colonizing nations and the colonized—who provided raw materials and cheap labor—in the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries; and (3) multinational or consumer capitalism, which describes the exponential growth of a global marketplace of images and information that concentrates power in the hands of multinational corporations rather than nation-states in the present moment. Jameson, “Postmodernism” 78.

4. Jameson understands postmodernism in primarily historical, rather than stylistic, terms (“Postmodernism” 56, 85). It is “a periodizing concept whose function is to correlate the emergence of new formal features in culture with the emergence of a new type of social life and a new economic order” (“Postmodernism and Consumer Society” 129).

5. As Mike Featherstone explains, “postmodernism has dropped out of sight and is no longer a fashionable term, indeed for many it is decidedly demodé.” Mike Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, 2nd ed. (Los Angeles: Sage, 2007), xiv.

6. Sean Homer, “Fredric Jameson,” in Postmodernism: The Key Figures, ed. Hans Bertens and Joseph Natoli (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 185.

7. Jameson, “Postmodernism” 92.

8. Jameson, “Postmodernism” 92. Cognitive mapping is a fundamentally rhetorical concept; as pedagogy, it urges us to see the world one way rather than in others and, as politics, it urges to act one way rather than in others. It also shares rhetoric's central concern with place and, indeed, the classical rhetorical concept of topos derives from the Greek τóπoς, meaning “place.”

9. Ian Buchanan, Fredric Jameson: Live Theory (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006), 73. Stressing a similar point, Kenneth Burke writes, “The conventional forms demanded by one age are as resolutely shunned by another.” Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement (Los Altos, CA: Hermes Publications, 1931), 139.

10. Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (New York: Verso, 2009), 72.

11. Entropic satire is a subspecies of satire that has proliferated “exponentially” in postmodernism. It is a “relatively recent phenomenon” or form of humor that is rooted in the loss of certainty; its “primary characteristic is its own awareness of its status as essentially decentered discourse,” which is to say, discourse lacking in prescriptive authority. Consequently, entropic satire shifts the burden of social corrective from narrator to audience. Patrick O'Neill, The Comedy of Entropy: Humour/Narrative/Reading (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), xiii, 143.

12. David Mattin, “The Bothersome Man (Den Brysomme Mannen),” BBCI—Films, May 22, 2007, http://www.bbc.co.uk/films/2007/05/21/the_bothersome_man_2007_review.shtml.

13. Rustom Bharucha, “Contextualizing Utopias: Reflections on Remapping the Present,” Theater 26 (1995): 36–37.

14. Tanner Mirrlees, “Cognitive Mapping or, the Resistant Element in the Work of Fredric Jameson: A Response to Jason Berger,” Cultural Logic: An Electronic Journal of Marxist Theory and Practice 8 (2005), http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/mirrlees.html.

15. Colin MacCabe, “Preface,” in Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), xiv.

16. For an excellent overview of this concept, see Robert M. Kitchin, “Cognitive Maps: What Are They and Why Study Them?” Journal of Environmental Psychology 14 (1994): 1–19.

17. Fredric Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 353.

18. Jameson, “Postmodernism” 83. For an overview of this problem, see Tyson E. Lewis, “Too Little, Too Late: Reflections on Fredric Jameson's Pedagogy of Form,” Rethinking Marxism 21 (2009): 444.

19. Elaborating on the consequences of this context, David Harvey explains, “We can no longer conceive of the individual as alienated in the classical Marxist sense, because to be alienated presupposes a coherent rather than a fragmented sense of the self from which to be alienated … . If, as Marx insisted, it takes the alienated individual to pursue the Enlightenment project with a tenacity and coherence sufficient to bring us to some better future, then the loss of the alienated subject would seen [sic] to preclude the conscious construction of alternative social futures.” David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1989), 53–54.

20. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 412.

21. According to Jameson, “the three historical stages of capital have each generated a type of space unique to it.” Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping” 348.

22. Jameson's grid is, in many respects, homologous with Marshall McLuhan's notion of visual space. For McLuhan, visual space is linear, rational, continuous, homogenous, and static. Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan, Laws of Media: The New Science (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 33.

23. Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping” 349. As Mark Taylor has elaborated, “Grids graph Cartesian space, which is supposed to be completely rational, maximally efficient, and perfectly transparent.” Mark C. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 27–28.

24. Douglas Kellner, Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics Between the Modern and the Postmodern (New York: Routledge, 1995), 232. George Hartley, The Abyss of Representation: Marxism and the Postmodern Sublime (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 138.

25. In art and literature, “The term ‘realism’ very often implies that the artist … has tried to include a wider and more representative coverage of social life in his or her work, and in particular that he or she has extended the coverage of the work to include ‘low life’ and the experiences of those deemed unworthy of artistic portrayal by other artists.” Jeremy Hawthorn, Studying the Novel: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (London: Hodder/Arnold, 1992), 49.

26. “In its most strict meaning ‘modernism’ refers to a many-sided conception of art that originated in the avant-garde movements … The basic features of modernism can be circumscribed as follows: an esthetical self-awareness and a stylistic purism or formalism; the defense of the autonomy of art and the principle of ‘l'art pour l'art’ [art for art's sake]; … simultaneity and montage; a rejection of ‘realism’ in favor of the paradoxical, ambiguous and uncertain nature of subjective reality; emphasis on the alienation and the demise of the integrated personality.” Antoon van den Braembussche, Thinking Art: An Introduction to Philosophy of Art, trans. Michael Krassilovsky, Rutger H. Cornets de Groot, and Dick Van Spronsen (Springer, 2009), 283.

27. Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping” 349.

28. Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping” 349.

29. Hartley, Abyss 139.

30. Kellner, Media Culture 232.

31. Hartley, Abyss 139.

32. Jameson, “Postmodernism” 87.

33. Sue-Ellen Case, The Domain-Matrix: Performing Lesbian at the End of Print Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 43. Jameson's hyperspace is roughly analogous to McLuhan's notion of acoustic space. For more on the homology between Jameson's hyperspace and McLuhan's acoustic space, see Steven Shaviro, Connected, or What It Means to Live in the Network Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 188–89.

34. Mirrlees, “Cultural Mapping.”

35. Buchanan, Live Theory 109.

36. Jameson, “Postmodernism” 89. “‘To teach, to move, to delight’: of these traditional formulations of the uses of the work of art, the first has virtually been eclipsed from contemporary criticism and theory. Yet the pedagogical function of a work of art seems in various forms to have been an inescapable parameter of any conceivable Marxist aesthetic.” Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping” 347.

37. Though Jameson's conception of the Real as “simply history itself” or the social totality is based upon his reading of Jacques Lacan, it does not align precisely with Lacan's conception. For more on Jameson's view of the Real, see Fredric Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory, Essays 1971–1986, vol. 1 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 104 and Adam Roberts, Fredric Jameson (New York: Routledge, 2000), 80. For more on Lacan's view of the Real, see Christian Lundberg, Lacan in Public: Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012), 25–33.

38. Fredric Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping” 355.

39. While Jameson recognizes that the Real is unrepresentable, he does not think the Real is unknowable. Jameson, “Postmodernism” 91. Some scholars are critical of the distinction between representing and knowing, arguing that “Jameson's insistence on cognitive mapping seems to be … an attempt … to submit the Real to some new symbolic system.” Hartley, Abyss 233.

40. Robert T. Tally, Jr., “Jameson's Project of Cognitive Mapping: A Critical Engagement,” in Social Cartography: Mapping Ways of Seeing Social and Educational Change, ed. Rolland G. Paulston (New York: Garland Publishing, 1996), 407.

41. On this point, see Steven Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect (Washington, DC: 0-Books, 2010), 5.

42. Aesthetic activity is, according to Debra Hawhee, “always and everywhere rhetorical—that is, productive of effects—and crucially, these effects are produced on and through the live and lively bodies in the audience.” Debra Hawhee, Moving Bodies: Kenneth Burke at the Edges of Language (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), 13.

43. Fredric Jameson, “Class and Allegory in Contemporary Mass Culture: Dog Day Afternoon as a Political Film,” College English 38 (1977): 845.

44. Jean-François Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, trans. Anthony Hudek and Mary Lydon (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

45. Brian L. Ott, “The Visceral Politics of V for Vendetta: On Political Affect in Cinema,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 27 (2010): 42.

46. Best argues that because “sensation is social, or historical” then “affect is a social and collective event.” Beverley Best, “‘Fredric Jameson Notwithstanding’: The Dialectic of Affect,” Rethinking Marxism 23 (2011): 72, 80.

47. Shaviro, Post-Cinematic 2.

48. Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic 114.

49. See Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (New York: Verso, 2005), xiii and Fredric Jameson, “The Politics of Utopia,” New Left Review 25 (2004): 36. Though Jameson never explicitly identifies the utopian impulse as a dimension of cognitive mapping, we are compelled that the two cannot be understood independent of one another. “These two concepts,” argues Buchanan, “should not be seen as … separate enterprises; they are at the core of Jameson's thought and practice as a critic.” Buchanan, Live Theory 106. Similarly, Best explains, “The goal of the exercise [cognitive mapping] … is common to all utopian thought in the Marxian tradition.” Beverley Best, “The Problem of Utopia: Capitalism, Depression, and Representation,” Canadian Journal of Communication 35 (2010): 498.

50. Robert T. Tally, Jr., “Radical Alternatives: The Persistence of Utopia in the Postmodern,” in New Essays on the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, ed. Alfred J. Drake (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 115.

51. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future 23.

52. Marlana Portolano, “The Rhetorical Function of Utopia: An Exploration of the Concept of Utopia in Rhetorical Theory,” Utopian Studies 23 (2012): 115.

53. Burke variously defines form as “the psychology of the audience” and “an arousing and fulfillment of desires,” adding that “A form is a way of experiencing; and such a form is made available in art when, by the use of specific subject-matter, it enables us to experience in this way.” Burke, Counter-Statement 31, 124, 143.

54. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, vol. 1, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995). See also Douglas Kellner and Harry O'Hara, “Utopia and Marxism in Ernst Bloch,” New German Critique 9 (1976): 24 and Krishan Kumar, “The Ends of Utopia,” New Literary History 41 (2010): 562.

55. Buchanan, Live Theory 115.

56. Roberts, Fredric Jameson 88. Elaborating on this view, Jameson writes, “Utopia is not what can be positively imagined and proposed, but rather what is not imaginable and not conceivable. Utopia, I argue, is not a representation but an operation calculated to disclose the limits of our own imagination of the future, the lines beyond which we do not seem able to go in imagining changes in our own society and world.” Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (New York: Verso, 2009), 413.

57. Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic 3.

58. Fredric Jameson, “Progress versus Utopia; Or, Can We Imagine the Future?” Science Fiction Studies 9 (1982): 151.

59. Jameson, “Class and Allegory” 845–46.

60. Haley Roe, “The Bothersome Man,” digyorkshire.com, November 18, 2010, http://www.digyorkshire.com/HighlightDetails.aspx?Article=1008&AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1. James Bowman, “Lost Between Heaven and Hell,” The New York Sun, August 24, 2007, http://www.nysun.com/arts/lost-between-heaven-and-hell/61224/. Annika Pham, “The Dark Side of ‘the Ikea Life’: Interview with Jens Lien,” Cineurope, March 14, 2007, http://cineuropa.org/ffocusinterview.aspx?lang=en&treeID=1352&documentID=74956.

61. Leonard Feinberg, Introduction to Satire (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1967), 226.

62. Pham, “The Dark Side.”

63. Noel Murray, “The Bothersome Man,” A.V. Club, August 24, 2007, http://www.avclub.com/articles/the-bothersome-man,3331/.

64. Feinberg, Introduction to Satire 86, 105.

65. Burke described “perspective by incongruity” as a “methodical misnaming.” Kenneth Burke, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 69.

66. Our use of the word genre here corresponds to what Burke calls “conventional form.” Burke, Counter-Statement, 139. In this view, genres are based not on shared substantive and stylistic features, but on what they do for audiences, on the action they perform in response to recurring situations. See Carolyn R. Miller, “Genre as Social Action,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (1984): 151.

67. This phrase is borrowed from Shaviro, Post-Cinematic 5.

68. Homer, Frederic Jameson 182.

69. “Normally the first shot of a film is an establishing shot, situating the audience in a defined space that the characters inhabit.” Robert Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Stone, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 32.

70. Jameson, “Postmodernism” 65–66.

71. Brian L. Ott and Diane M. Keeling, “Cinema and Choric Connection: Lost in Translation as Sensual Experience,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 97 (2011): 369–71.

72. Jonathan McCalmont, “Review: The Bothersome Man (2006),” Ruthless Culture, April 14, 2009, http://ruthlessculture.com/2009/04/14/review-the-bothersome-man-2006/.

73. Simon Malpas, The Postmodern (New York: Routledge, 2005), 120.

74. “Films: The Bothersome Man,” AFFR, http://affr.nl/films/the_bothersome_man.html.

75. See Bowman, “Lost Between”; Leslie Felperin, “The Bothersome Man,” Variety 403, no. 2 (2006), 39; Jen Johans, “The Bothersome Man,” Film Intuition, May 7, 2007, http://reviews.filmintuition.com/2007/05/bothersome-man.html; Mattin, “Bothersome Man”; and Roe, “The Bothersome.”

76. Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, trans. Michael Taylor (University of Chicago Press, 1974), 12.

77. Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. M. T. H. Sadler (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1977), 37.

78. Barbara M. Kennedy, Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), 115.

79. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 231. Jameson makes a similar argument about Vincent Van Gogh's painting, “A Pair of Boots,” in which he interprets “the most glorious materialization of pure color in oil paint … as a Utopian gesture, an act of compensation which ends up producing a whole new realm of the senses.” Jameson, Postmodernism 7.

80. Jameson, “Postmodernism” 61.

81. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 27–28.

82. Shaviro, Post-Cinematic 3.

83. Shaviro, Post-Cinematic 4.

84. The increase in affect in late capitalism may be related to the rise of electronic media, which privilege a kind of direct sensory involvement. See Joshua Meyrowitz, “Medium Theory,” in Communication Theory Today, ed. David Crowley and David Mitchell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 58.

85. Rebeca Conget (distributor), The Bothersome Man Press Kit (New York: Film Movement, 2006), http://www.filmmovement.com/downloads/press/BOTHERSOME_MAN_FM_Press_Kit_revised.pdf.

86. See Feinberg, Introduction to Satire 63–72 and Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 224.

87. For an extended discussion of the distinction between the grotesque and classical body, see Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 1986.

88. Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping” 355.

89. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future xiii.

90. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future xii.

91. “Marx demonstrated … that what is always immanent to capital is the structural possibility of its transformation—a potential way out of capital. Capital has built into it the possibility of turning into something else.” Best, “‘Fredric Jameson Notwithstanding’” 67.

92. Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness 142.

93. O'Neill, The Comedy of Entropy 143.

94. O'Neill, The Comedy of Entropy 142.

95. O'Neill, The Comedy of Entropy 142.

96. O'Neill, The Comedy of Entropy 143.

97. Kellner and O'Hara, “Utopia and Marxism” 30.

98. Best, “‘Fredric Jameson Notwithstanding’” 81.

99. Jim Aune, “Figuring with Fredric Jameson,” The Blogora (blog), Rhetoric Society of America, April 17, 2010, http://rsa.cwrl.utexas.edu/node/3639.

100. Buchanan, Live Theory 107.

101. Jameson, Postmodernism 416.

102. Buchanan, Live Theory 108–9.

103. See, for instance, Jameson, “Class and Allegory.”

104. For more on the aligning of form with affect and genre with emotion, see Joshua Gunn, “Maranatha,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 98 (2012): 365. See also Ott, “The Visceral”; Ott and Keeling, “Cinema”; and Christian Lundberg, “Enjoying God's Death: The Passion of the Christ and the Practices of an Evangelical Public,” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 95 (2009): 387–411.

105. Carole Blair, “Reflections on Criticism and Bodies: Parables from Public Places,” Western Journal of Communication 65 (2001): 288.

106. On the first view and its various iterations, consult Michael Calvin McGee, “A Materialist's Conception of Rhetoric,” in Explorations in Rhetoric: Studies in Honor of Douglas Ehninger, ed. Ray E. McKerrow (Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1982), 23–48; Dana L. Cloud, “The Materiality of Discourse: A Challenge to Critical Rhetoric,” Western Journal of Communication 58 (1994): 141–63; and Ronald Walter Greene, “Another Materialist Rhetoric,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 15 (1998): 21–41. On the latter view, see Blair, “Reflections”; Ott and Keeling, “Cinema”; and Greg Dickinson, “Joe's Rhetoric: Finding Authenticity at Starbucks,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32 (2002): 5–27.

107. Karl Marx, Selected Writings, ed. by Lawrence H. Simon (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1994), 211.

108. “Our History,” exxonmobil.com, June 24, 2011, http://www.exxonmobil.com/Corporate/history/about_who_history_alt.aspx.

109. “Our History”

110. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 1.