The Unconscious is Structured Like the Stasi: an attempt to pin down the "subconscious" in Christopher Nolan's "Inception"

Bremselhacker's recent analysis of Nolan's Inception  has significantly extended the frontiers of our understanding of what we have been calling "neurosymbology," and its relationship to symbology generally.  He elaborates from the trenchant observation that "symbology is that discourse for which there can be no unconscious, properly understood," a number of immediately interesting implications both for the relations of desire available to the subjects of symbological narrative, and those which are presupposed for the reader/viewer of symbological narratives (i.e. the "subject of fun"). 

I was recently able to consult the work in question, for the first time, and have a few thoughts in both of these areas. 

First, regarding the potential effects of neurosymbological products on their consumers and apologists (the subjects of "fun,") I would like briefly to draw attention to a stunning confirmation of Bremselhacker's insight that Jonah Lehrer's account of the near-equivalence of dreaming and movie-watching represents the interpellation of the "subject of fun" as symb-pologist (A).  I am referring to the (aptly named) Joe Minnion's post on the film, charmingly entitled "Dream a Little Bigger: why Freud would have loved the blockbuster movie, Inception..."  Minnion, a "Sport and Performance Psychologist," roundly confirms the efficacy of this interpellation, with a charming twist. It will be recalled that the animating proposition of symb-pology (A) was initially stated as being, in essence, that is is the formal efficacy of the work which is the object of "fun," not its explicit  content:

"...symb-pologist A's basic move is to assume the symbological work's own disavowal of its ostensible driving commitment to the pursuit of some potent knowledge (about the Grail, suppressed matriarchies, ecology, etc.) - that is, the cop-out - at face value, and moreover, to position himself as a petulant defender of the work's right to engage in this disavowal. Implicit in symb-pologist A's discourse is what we might call a superego injunction to enjoy."

Thus, of Inception, symb-pologist A might say, "Sure, Nolan's understanding of the unconscious mind seems endearingly innocent of any acquaintance with psychoanalysis per se, but it's still a total mindfuck, dude!"  Minnion is a step ahead, however, and accomplishes this "basic move" in a surprising and innovative way.  He enjoins us to enjoy Inception's formal coherence with Freud's actual work on dream analysis:  "...a movie was made that is arguably a postcard tribute to [Freud's] beliefs about dreams. That movie is, of course, Inception." 

He achieves this startling feat through two still more basic moves.  First, he constructs Freud in terms which are clearly mythognostic and in fact strongly reminiscent of Brown's descriptions of Robert Langdon in his pedagogical flashbacks: "Not only does he joke with his students, he describes some of his theories as metaphors at best..."  Second, he restricts the discussion to the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, which he effectively reduces to a duo of characteristically neurosymbological precepts: 1) dreams enact wish-fulfillment, which reduces stress and increases fitness and 2) dreams keep you asleep, and "this sleep protection benefits our health."  Thus, by enacting symb-pology A (i.e. mythognostic symb-pology) and  by reading Freud as a mythognostic, he is able to claim that what is enjoyable about Inception is its formally effective citation of the Introductory Lectures. 

I take this as a dramatic and instructive example of what symbology makes possible.

Now to the implications of Bremselhacker's observation for the characters of symbological narrative (i.e. the subjects of symbology).  While his review focuses on the consequences of the "categorical denial of the existence of anything recognizable as the unconscious," I hope I will not be betraying a confidence if I quote his immediate reaction to the film (private correspondence), which was composed prior to that incisive and and perspicacious offering:

"Apparently, pace Lacan, the unconscious is structured like an action movie. (...) Ack."

Now, the unconscious of Inception is clearly not "properly understood" with reference to any post-Freudian formulation - Leonardo DiCaprio seemed to imply he had run into that problem when he told a journalist, of his attempts to prepare for the role of Dom Cobb:   

"I read books on dream analysis, I read Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. None of it was working. Then I realized this was Chris’ dream world. It has its own structure and its own set of rules. So I went to the source and started asking him questions."

However, I cite Bremselhacker's initial response because it reminds us that an unconscious is structurally required by the narrative, and it seems important to find out how, exactly, it is understood since the particulars may be relevant to further efforts to evolve a critical apparatus adequate to symbology. 

Aside from being, as it clearly is, "structured like an action movie," what other determinations shape the unconscious (Nolan prefers "subconscious," which I will use when referring to his formulation) in Inception?  Since Mr. DiCaprio has yet to return my phone calls, we will have to return to the text - fortunately, I think this will be rapidly illuminating. 

To lay some groundwork, it is worth distinguishing between the available subject-positions available to any actor in "Chris' dream world."  There are three: the "dreamer" (D) creates the environment which is "populated" by the subconscious of the "subject" (S), which the "extractors" (E) seek to interrogate.  There is no real difference between D and E (henceforth D/E) except their artistic involvement in the "utterly undreamlike dreamscape."  However, there is a critical difference between S and D/E: their relations to the subconscious which invests the dream.  I will need to qualify this formulation later, but to simplify for the moment this is essentially that D/E are conscious that the world they perceive represents the subconscious, and S is not.

The dream can potentially be populated by the subconscious of any of the actors, but only S's influence is obligatory, and it is so for all actors.  By contrast, it is made repeatedly clear that any incursion of the subconscious of D/E into the dream is strictly voluntary.  Consider the following excerpt from the screenplay:

Two AFRICAN PEDESTRIANS wander into view.

Arthur: Are those yours?

Eames shakes his head.  Cobb turns to Yusuf.

Arthur: Yusuf?

Yusuf: Yup. Sorry.

Cobb: Suppress them. We don't bring our own projections into the dream-we let Fischer's subconscious supply the people.

It might be objected that Cobb spends half the movie negotiating the intrusions of his dead wife, but, as Bremselhacker notes, "even the appearances of Mal...do not represent anything more than Cobb's consciously avowed feelings of guilt about his role in her death," and her existence in the dream is also seen to be voluntary when, through an act of efficacious self-consciousness, he hails her as a projection and thus dispels her.  The D/E subconscious is therefore strongly irrelevant to pretty much everything - they really are without anything which could be meaningfully called an unconscious.  The "subconscious" in Inception is only significant insofar as S populates the world of the dream for all actors, and it is to S we must look for the neurosymbological account of the unconscious mind.

S's subconscious populates the dream (which is determined architecturally by D/E but in no other significant sense,) with objects and "projections."  Both, qua elements of S's subconscious, are understood as signifiers, but they are symbological in the strictest sense; the objects are iconic representations of discrete pieces of information, and the projections are iconic representations of individual people.  Despite Minnion's claims, which are too annoying to rehearse here, the latter have nothing to do with any psychonalytic model of projection.  Rather, Nolan's projections are S's internal representation of named humans who exist in waking life, which can literally speak for the "subconscious," in ordinary, intelligible language:

Ariadne: Who are the people?

Cobb: They're projections of my subconscious.

Ariadne: Yours?

Cobb: Sure - you are the dreamer, I am the subject. My subconscious populates your world. That's one way we get at a subject's thoughts - his mind creates the people, so we can literally talk to his subconscious.

(...)

Ariadne: Why are they looking at me?

Cobb: Because you're changing things. My subconscious feels that someone else is creating the world. The more you change things, the quicker the projections converge on you.

Ariadne: Converge?

Cobb: They feel the foreign nature of the dreamer, and attack like white blood cells fighting an infection.

Thus, the "projections" are the reciprocal of the consciousness of subconscious desire which distinguishes D/E by its presence and S by its absence.  D/E can "suppress" theirs and have nothing to fear from them because they are totally self-conscious (i.e., they have no meaningful subconscious,) while S cannot suppress or otherwise control the products of his subconscious, which he mistakes for real objects and real people.

Cobb's last line in the above exchange is one of few explicit characterizations of S's subconscious - the subconscious, pace Sompyrac, is structured like an immune system.  Donna Haraway has resourcefully described the transformation of immune system discourse over the latter half of the twentieth century from constructions participant in the political economy of the postwar period to ones which come increasingly to reflect the investment of molecular biology by elements of postmodernity, on the basis that, as she put it in a 1989 essay,

"..the immune system is an elaborate icon for principal systems of symbolic and material 'difference' in late capitalism.  ...the immune system is a plan for meaningful action to construct and maintain the boundaries for what may count as self and other in the crucial realms of the normal and the pathological."

Let me dispel any suspicion that this is a capricious and purely rhetorical association.  Nolan has divested his "subconscious" of all associations with the psychoanalytic unconscious, by making it fully available in principle to total conscious awareness, populating it with objects and people which behave like and are subject, with a few trivial exceptions, to the same rules as their counterparts in waking life, and in gneneral making its discourse that of the fully realized self rather than the Other.  The one function which is residual to the subconscious in Inception is precisely "to construct and maintain the boundaries for what may count as self and other" for the subject of the dream, because to occupy the position S is to conflate reality with one's subconscious and to be vulnerable to manipulation by D/E.  The subconscious thus functions solely to maintain the distinction between S and D/E, and in properly trained subjects this function is developed to the point where Cobb can say of Fischer that "his subconscious has been miltiarized."  S's subconscious is structured like a repressive state apparatus.  Now, my simplified formulation above suggests that the difference between S and D/E derives from their awareness of the fact that they are dreaming, (i.e. their apprehension of their surroundings as manifestations of their subconscious, which, in the case of their own projections confers total control) this is not the case; when Cobb manipulates Fischer into believing he is in fact in someone else's dream and Fischer thus becomes aware of that the people and objects surrounding him are "projections," he does not gain control over them, and in fact his own subconscious behaves towards him as ithad previously done towards D/E.

That the subconscious can act as an immune system or RSA with reference to both S and D/E is highly significant if we recall the neurosymbological claim (explained with reference to John Lehrer in B'hacker, ibid.) that movie-viewing and dreaming are neurophysiologically (and thus, for Lehrer, ontologically) equivalent states.  Lehrer's equation (and Inception at large) clearly imply homology between S (in the movie) and the viewer, the "subject of fun."  Likewise, the difference between S and D/E's relationship to the subconscious implies a similar homology between D/E and the "subjects of symbology."  The position D/E is analogous to that of Nancy Kelly in Kingdom:

"All she thought, all her opinions, coincided perfectly with the version of reality that was presented in schools and universities.  She was dimly aware that there were other ways of seeing life and history, but she had never really had to imagine what that might mean"

To occupy D/E is to exist in perfect harmony with one's subconscious by transforming it into fully realized conscious desire, which is perfectly coterminous and coeval with conscious desire; that is, to be a character in a symbological narrative.  By contrast, to occupy position S is to be vulnerable to the addition and subtraction of components of one's self by D/E, i.e., to be in the position of the consumer of symbology.  Thus, by Lehrer's equation, both S (in the movie) and the viewer require the operation of "a plan for meaningful action to construct and maintain the boundaries for what may count as self and other."  To occupy S is to require revision, correction, redaction; to be a mutating cell on the verge of becoming a metastatic tumor; to be a potentially subversive subject of ideology.


An interestin consequence of this is that the 'meaningful plan' that the subconscious follows in directing regulatory action at both D/E and at S (when he attempts to achieve critical self-consciousness) is determined by an unarticulated logic internal to the subconscious itself.  D/E's consciousness of their subconscious' action confers absolute control over it, but the same is not true for S.  He may think he knows the boundaries of self and other, but his subconscious can resist his distinctions, if necessary by killing him.  The subject of symbology is transparent to and in full control of its subconscious because it is inconceivable that it could behave other than by the logic of symbology; it is precisely when the S, AKA the "subject of fun," attempts to depart from that logic, however, that he must be recontained by his subconscious RSA.


Thus, the Nolan's "subconscious" is structured in the manner best suited to ideological recontainment.  Its sole directive is the superego injunction to enjoy, which it prosecutes using the tactics of a police state.  Inception uses the subconscious to narrate, rather than to model or analyze, the action through which symbological narrative attempts to make the subject of "fun" more like the subject of symbology.