Late capitalism replaces the Freudian unconscious with corporate-authored dream spaces

Evidence

The old Freudian paradigm made this a problem too, of course – but there the issue was the fact that the ego was not master in its own house because the subject was constitutively split by the unconscious. In Inception, the ego is still not a master in its own house, but that is because the forces of predatory business are everywhere. Dreams have ceased to be the spaces where private pyschopathologies are worked through and have become the scenes where competing corporate interests play out their banal struggles. … This impersonal misery may be what Inception is ultimately about. The ostensibly upbeat ending and all the distracting boy-toy action cannot dispel the non-specific but pervasive pathos that hangs over the film. It’s a sadness that arises from the impasses of a culture in which business has closed down any possibility of an outside – a situation that Inception exemplifies, rather than comments on. You yearn for foreign places, but everywhere you go looks like local colour for the film set of a commercial; you want to be lost in Escheresque mazes, but you end up in an interminable car chase. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 532

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Fisher’s hauntology project and the death of the private sphere under marketing — resonates with J G Ballard’s ‘fictions of every kind’ and notions of cognitive capitalism. — connects to: Globalized capital has colonized the once-alien depths of the unconscious — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 531; Late capitalism makes people identical with their jobs, colonizing sleep and dreams — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1629; Capitalist realism operates like a dream sustained by our own desires — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1797 (+1 more)
• DEFINE: Clarifies the hauntological reading of Inception: the absence of an ‘outside’ to business is the film’s real subject.

Broader Connections

• Late capitalism makes people identical with their jobs, colonizing sleep and dreams #corroborates (0.86) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1629