I realize that I failed adequately to answer Bremselhacker's call for a more thorough analysis of "vulgar economic determinism" (VED) and its relation to "strong" and "weak" symbological narrative, despite some implications of my claims about Nolan's construction of the "subconscious" which in retrospect have rather clear relevance. So let me try to concisely redress that omission by describing strong and weak symbology with reference particularly to the situation of VED in both.
(As an aside, although I believe this is fairly clear from preceding contributions to this forum, it is probably worth saying that by the term VED I understand the content of late capitalist ideology's interpellation of its subjects - i.e, to be a subject of VED is to understand oneself as a generally rational actor most of whose behavior is motivated by the desire for economic gain within a free market economy.)
If we consider Inception and Avatar as examples of weak symbological narrative and contrast them with the stronger forms familiar to us all (Pyramid, The Gaudi Key, Dan Brown's entire oeuvre, etc.) I think a coherent dialectic emerges. This incorporates the relative presence in the narrative of VED which B'hacker had already pointed out, but also involves the position of the I designated as "S" in my review of Inception and which I agreed with B'hacker is homologous with that of the consumer of symbological narrative (henceforth "the reader").
In strong symbological narrative the reader is absent from the narrative, and VED does not appear explicitly except as a corollary of cacognosis (although classical cacognostics are never solely motivated by VED). By contrast, VED is given as the default position of the reader, which is suspended by the narrative and re-instated by the cop-out. For instance, in Pyramid the reader is initially interpellated, via Catherine's conversations with Professor Kent (most noticeably the famous "Electric Juicer Discourse") as in every significant respect a conventional consumer, participating in the circuits of capital as they presently exist in Western Europe and North America. This position is apparently problematized (by the seemingly impending revelation of information which will fundamentally compromise its basic assumptions) in the body of the novel; but via the denoument (AKA the flagrant cop-out) the bourgeois subjectivity of the protagonists is re-instated having been invested through the drama with a vague air of transcendental significance but unchanged in its particulars. Catherine Donovan is exactly the same free-range chicken loving, pseudo-environmentalist member of the petite bourgeoisie at end of Pyramid; she just feels a little more spiritual about recycling. David Brooks offers us a neurosymbological version of this in his recent article, already discussed in this forum, in the biography of his allegorical character "Harold," who returns from a confrontation with the cutting edge of neuroscience newly enabled to decide between different flavors for fru-fru gelato.
By contrast, in weak symbological narrative the reader is foregrounded in the narrative, VED is the primary animating motivation. In both Avatar and Inception the reader is invoked as neurosymbologically analogous to the subjects of alterior experience - Jake Sully in Avatar and Maurice Fischer in Inception, in the way I described in the previous post.
Now, what is notable about VED in Inception specifically is that the only character in either the waking or dreaming world who is not solely motivated by VED is Maurice Fischer, who remains in the "S" position for the entire film. Importantly, it is clearly implied that he is a subject of VED when he does not occupy S, in that he is the heir of the energy dynasty which D/E hope to break up on behalf of Saito. This corresponds well to our understanding of strong symbological narrative, in that if we are to understand Fischer as analogous to the reader we would expect him to be suspended from determination by VED during the course of his experience of the narrative, in the case, his dream.
Recall that in my previous post I argued that S's subconscious, qua normative regulatory agency, is determined by a logic internal to itself. This is made evident when Fischer is made to realize that he is dreaming and, rather than being able suddenly to control his "projections," he becomes the object of their aggression. Based on the foregoing, I advance the hypothesis that the logic of the subconscious in Inception is, very precisely, VED. This also explains the fact that D/E are characterized by the consubstantiality of their subconscious and conscious minds; they are characters in symbological narrative, and thus they are part of the vocabulary by which VED is expressed. They can no more contradict it than a word in this sentence can suddenly become Chinese.
S, on the other hand, stands for an actual interpellated subject capable of construing their worlds in other ways than those prescribed by VED. And this is precisely what I meant in saying that the subconscious "attempts to make the subject of "fun" more like the subject of symbology." Maurice Fischer's subconscious is activated by his attempted divergence from VED, and it reconstrains him to its logic by force.
This allows me to phrase the strong/weak dialectic somewhat more concisely. Strong symbological narrative backgrounds both the reader and VED in order to undertake the ideological operation whereby the subject is re-consolidated in the complex of "obviousnesses," which was apparently suspended during the action of the narrative, by means of the cop-out, i.e. ideological re-containment. Weak symbological narrative foregrounds both the reader and VED in order to dramatize the operation of ideological re-containment. Strong symbology enacts the reader's re-containment ot VED; weak symbology narrates that operation to the reader.
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