Globalised capital has colonised the depths that Freud called the unconscious.
Evidence
The terrain that Inception lays out is no longer that of the classical unconscious, that impersonal factory which, Jean-Francois Lyotard says, psychoanalysis described ‘with the help of images of foreign towns or countries such as Rome or Egypt, just like Piranesi’s Prisons or Escher’s Other Worlds’. (Libidinal Economy, Athlone, 1993, 164) Inception’s arcades and hotel corridors are indeed those of a globalised capital, whose reach easily extends into the former depths of what was once the unconscious. There is nothing alien, no other place here, only a ‘subconscious’ recirculating deeply familiar images mined from an ersatz psychoanalysis. So in place of the eerie enigmas of the unconscious, we are instead offered an Oedipal-lite scene played out between Robert Fischer and a projection of his dead father. The off-the-shelf pre-masticated quality of this encounter is entirely lacking in any of the weird idiosyncrasies which give Freud’s case histories their power to haunt. Cod Freudianism has long been metabolised by an advertising-entertainment culture which is now ubiquitous, as psychoanalysis gives way to a psychotherapeutic self-help that is diffused through mass media. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 531
Categorization
- XREF: Directly ties to the book’s thesis that the alien/elsewhere has been closed down (Book of Ghosts); Lipton and the numinous-suppression of ch21. — connects to: The ego’s loss of mastery now stems from corporate forces, not the unconscious. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 532; Neoliberalism decomposed political collectivities through privatising the mind. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 536; Cobb’s generic heroism positions the audience as interpellated subjects of commercial fiction. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 527 (+5 more)
- QUESTION: Worth chasing: when did ‘subconscious’ displace ‘unconscious’ in popular vocabulary, and does that track the psychotherapeutic turn Illouz describes?
Broader Connections
- Late capitalism is the purest form of capital, colonizing nature and the unconscious
#corroborates(0.95) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 128 - Individual subjects are inserted into discontinuous realities from private life to global capital
#expands(0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 884 - The unconscious emerges from the loss of territory
#qualifies(0.70) — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 455 - The unconscious is a mourning-structure born of lost territory.
#qualifies(0.70) — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 455