The ego’s loss of mastery now stems from corporate forces, not the unconscious.

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. Inception’s ‘militarised subconscious’ converts the infernal urgencies and languid poise of the old unconscious into panicked persecution and a consolatory familialism: pursued at work by videogame gunmen, you later unwind with the kids building sandcastles on a beach. This is another reason that the dreams in Inception appear so undream-like. For, after all, these are not ‘dreams’ in any conventional sense. The designed virtual spaces of Inception’s dreams, with their nested ‘levels’, evidently resemble a videogame more than they recall dreams. In the era of neuromarketing, we are presided over by what J G Ballard called ‘fictions of every kind’, the embedded literature of branding consultancies, advertising agencies and games manufacturers. All of which makes one of Inception’s premisses – that it is difficult to implant an idea in someone’s mind – strangely quaint. Isn’t ‘inception’ what so much late capitalist cognitive labour is about? — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 532

Categorization

• XREF: Resonates with the ch18 claim about destruction of the concept of the public; with Adorno’s manipulative-type fascist personality (no private interior since capital floods the psyche). — connects to: Shift from government-run to commercial dream tech indexes social democracy’s eclipse. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 521; Globalised capital has colonised the depths that Freud called the unconscious. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 531; Inception’s dream architecture mirrors the vacuousness of creative-industries ideology. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 526 (+3 more)
• SEED: Essay angle: ‘inception’ as the literal name for late-capitalist cognitive labour — neuromarketing, branding consultancies - making the film’s premise quaint.

Broader Connections

• Mastery over nature becomes mastery over other humans, weakening the individual. #expands (0.82)
• Corporate wrongdoing stems from diffused responsibility rather than individual guilt #contradicts (0.78) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 377
• Subordinates sometimes harm their own group out of rational self-interest, not malice. #contradicts (0.73)