Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

by Mark Fisher

If Memento is a kind of impossible object, then its impossibility is generated not via an anything-goes ontological anarchy but by the setting up of rules which it violates in particular ways – just as the effect of Escher’s paintings depend upon unsettling rather than ignoring the rules of perspective.

What are Nolan’s films about, after all, but the instability of any master position? They are full of moments in which the manipulator – the one who looks, writes or narrates – becomes the manipulated – the object of the gaze, the character in a story written or told by someone else.

‘The most important emotional thing about the top spinning at the end is that Cobb is not looking at it. He doesn’t care.’ Not caring whether we are lying to ourselves may be the price for happiness – or at least the price one pays for release from excruciating mental anguish.

The differences in the way that the concept of shared dreaming is handled in 1977 and 2010 tell us a great deal about the contrasts between social democracy and neoliberalism.

In an influential blog post, Devin Faraci argues that the whole film is a metaphor for cinematic production itself: Cobb is the director, Arthur the producer, Ariadne the screenwriter, Saito ‘the big corporate suit who fancies himself a part of the game’, Fischer the audience.

The scenes in which the team prepare for Fischer’s inception might have been designed to bring out the depressing vacuousness of the concept of the ‘creative industries’. They play like a marketing team’s own fantasies about what they themselves are doing: the view from inside an Apprentice contestant’s head, perhaps.

In any case, Inception seems to be less a meta-meditation on the power of cinema than a reflection of the way in which cinematic techniques have become imbricated into a banal spectacle which – fusing business machismo, entertainment protocols and breathless hype – enjoys an unprecedented dominion over our working lives and our dreaming minds.

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.

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?

As Eva Illouz argues, discussing the very conversion of psychoanalysis into self-help that Inception dramatises, ‘if we secretly desire our misery, then the self can be made directly responsible for alleviating it…The contemporary Freudian legacy is, and ironically so, that we are in the full masters in our own house, even when, or perhaps especially when, it is on fire.’

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.

The assumption that brutal policing and racism were relics of a bygone era was part of the reactionary narrativisation of the recent riots: yes, there was politics and racism back then, but not now, not any more…

The lesson to be remembered – especially now that we are being asked to defend abortion and oppose the death penalty again – is that struggles are never definitively won.

The exchange reveals that it is not possible to securely delimit ‘merely technical’ issues from political questions. The producer’s anxieties about lighting quickly shade into concerns about the proportion of non-whites in the audience. The matter-of-fact tone of the discussions make this sudden peek into the reality studio all the more disturbing – and illuminating.

Now, every corporation, no matter how exploitative, is required to present itself as Green.

Environmental catastrophe provides what a political unconscious totally colonised by neoliberalism cannot: an image of life after capitalism.

A cretinous anti-intellectualism presides, cheerled by expensively educated hacks in the pay of multinational corporations who reassure their bored readers that there is no need to rouse themselves from their interpassive stupor.