The release of Inception (2010) marks another entry into the plethora of films of the last decade revolving around themes of simulation and meta-reality. The suggestion that our everyday lives, and the world that they inhabit, are in some way fake, constructed or are simply façades has populated the imaginations of American filmmakers and is seemingly an emerging genre of movie-making.

From the Wachowski Brothers’ action-packed film The Matrix (1999), to David Cronenberg’s enigmatic eXistenZ (1999), to Charlie Kaufman’s Baudrillard-inspired Synecdoche, New York (2008), filmmakers have largely been obsessed with the suggestion that the material world which we take for granted as being real and consistent is rather revealed to be a construct which can be bent, transformed and recreated based on characters’ actions, desires and fantasies.

While the subjective nature of our experiences has arrived as a driving problematic within American film, it has long been one of the central concerns occupying the traditions of Western philosophy, postmodern literature, and avant-garde cultural practices and continues to animate cultural production in these fields. From the parable of Plato’s Cave to Rene Magritte’s iconic non-representation of a pipe (Ceci N’est Pas une Pipe) and now in Christopher Nolan’s film Inception, it seems that this is a problem and a concern that will not dissolve anytime soon.

While Inception certainly takes part in this trajectory in American cinema, its contribution is markedly different than the aforementioned films in that it posits both a variety of different models for thinking about the production (and destruction) of our reality as well as suggests frameworks within which to consider our own fundamental relationship to cinema.

Reality and The Dream

The majority of the Inception takes place in dream-worlds. After sedating themselves and plugging themselves into a machine, multiple characters are able to occupy a shared dream-space where one person is tasked with manufacturing the dream-world, and the rest are able to live in it. While the dream-world is initially the product of one of the characters’ imaginations, it soon becomes transformed and filled by the subjectivities and desires of other individuals who enter the world of the dream.

What we end up with in this framework is a dream world that is always in a state of production and is never constant or static, as each person’s presence in the dream-world alters the entirety of the space as they move through it. The dream-worlds in Inception are layered and built atop one another, and we often are asked to consider a dream within a dream within yet another dream. In this structure, the events in one world send affecting ripples throughout the others.

While we are presented with an authoritarian computer controlled world in The Matrix (alluding to or evoking Michel Foucault’s and Jean Baudrillard’s theories of social control), and while we are shown a properly surrealistic world in eXistenZ, where the unconscious needs and wants of characters in the film dominate their experiences with the world(s) around them (drawing this time from the psychoanalytic texts of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan), in Inception we are presented with worlds which are always in-between and dependant, shifting and mutating as characters negotiate the space (which are perhaps more properly understood as borrowing from the works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari).

The plot of Inception presents us with a diversity of psychological and philosophical frameworks within which we can think about the film, and in the end we are presented with a geography of these different discourses that is at times harmonious and at other times contradictory. Nolan’s work both serves as a primer of these different fields of study while at the same time it moves to complicate the relationships between them.

Repression and Psychoanalysis

On the surface of the film we are clearly and forcefully presented with Freudian theories that then serve to drive the characters and move the plot. Early on we are told that the easiest way to get someone to accept an idea as their own (called ‘inception’ in the film) is to reduce it to its most basic and elementary form. In the plot of Inception, this is shown to be one of the character’s Oedipal complex, manifest in his troubled relationship with his father. The rest of the film revolves around a team of protagonists attempting to get this character to resolve this conflict in order to plant an idea in his unconscious mind.

The central protagonist, Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), is possessed by Freudian conceptions of repression. Slowly and steadily it is revealed that he is motivated not only by his desire to be reunited with his children and become a father himself, but also is haunted by the guilt associated with his wife’s suicide. In one memorable part of the film, Cobb and another character physically navigate through one of Cobb’s constructed dream-worlds which is manifest as a hotel with different surreal spaces inhabiting each floor. As the characters move through the building in an elevator, only when they descend to the basement (representing Cobb’s unconscious) do we get to see the trauma that occupies Cobb’s unconscious mind.

The psychoanalytic concept of repression is a consistent theme, as the buried experiences and traumas of Cobb continue to resurface in the dream-worlds until they are properly resolved. For example, in several scenes we get glimpses of Cobb’s children, whom he hasn’t seen in years, as encounters in the dream-world trigger his memories and cause them to come into material being. Cobb also unconsciously resurrects his wife in the space of the dreams, causing him to come face-to-face with a manifestation of his repressed trauma.

This is also jarringly clear in a scene where a locomotive from one of Cobb’s traumatic memories spontaneously appears and goes barrelling down the streets of another character’s dream-city, destroying cars and killing drivers along the way and derailing the protagonists from their objective. It is both the characters’ desires and repressed traumas that seems to construct and destruct the dream worlds and which causes us to become suspicious of the veracity and credibility of the events in the film. Through the inclusion of these events, Inception asserts the role that the unconscious and desire play in the process of the composition of our realities.

This back-and-forth between the planned and logical creation of the worlds and the spontaneous, unwieldy and frightening manifestations of the unconscious is done so successfully and seamlessly throughout Inception, that when we arrive in the final scene when Cobb is supposedly back in the ‘real’ world and outside of the dream-worlds, we are still left questioning the actuality of his experiences.

Simulacra and Simulation

Another theme that is consistently present throughout the film is that life is densely layered, and that any objective material reality is thoroughly obscured and buried through our relationship and interaction with it. Again, at the surface level this is most obvious in the cascades of dreams that the characters wander through, where it is easy to become lost as the viewer. During the climax of the film, through clever editing and good scriptwriting, Inception has us floating between at least five of these different worlds at once (one ‘real’ world, three dream worlds, and one ambiguously defined world). This leaves the audience questioning the relationship between all of the events in the different worlds and subsequently the authenticity of the real world at the top of it all.

Inception presents us with imagery that act as metaphors of this conception of reality. Nolan includes a scene early on where the characters find themselves standing between two large mirrors where they see their reflections echo into infinity on either side. The mirrors then shatter and vanish only to reveal a street that they begin to traverse. This alludes both to the structure of the film itself and to this idea of the multiple and layered reality.

Jean Baudrillard, in his text Simulacra and Simulation, offers us a metaphor in which we can think about the nature of our perception in relation to the film. He asks us to imagine standing on the surface of the world only to see a map of that same world begin to be drawn around us. Soon, the map becomes so large and complete with details that is the size of the world itself and we become lost and confused, unable to distinguish between the actual world and the map of it.

Inception seizes upon this metaphor and uses the maze as a way to describe our relationship not only to the world, but also to our expectations of it. In the film, the characters quite literally draw mazes of the dream-worlds beforehand in order to properly dream, imagine and inhabit them. Ariadne (Ellen Page), the character who is tasked with designing the dream-worlds for the characters to run around in, at one point draws one of the mazes as a series of concentric circles, leading us to assume that each dream (as well as all of the dreams combined), are layered mazes which are difficult to navigate and are without a clear path to a centre, or are in fact paradoxically without a centre at all. This idea that we only comprehend the spaces around us through a process of mapping them is a strand that runs through much of Inception. This suggests that it is not the material or ‘real’ world that informs us, but rather it is our own preconceptions and expectations of it that operate to generate the world and our experience of it in the first place.

The Desiring-Machine

Finally, Inception seems to operate within one last model in which we can navigate its mazes. In the tradition of Western philosophy, we are often asked to consider the world in terms of subjects and objects. The subject is the perceiving and experiencing being that takes in the world around them, while the object is what is being perceived and consumed by the subject. This kind of framework positions the subject as a consumer, digesting the entities (objects) around them. For example, we can conceive of this relationship very simply as a person (subject) looking a painting (object), where the subject experiences what stands before them via observing it. In this model, both the subject and object are relatively contained and static things, distanced from one another in this meeting.

Inception challenges us to disrupt and complicate this relationship by positioning both the characters and the worlds around them in states of production instead of in states of consumption. In Nolan’s film, neither the characters nor the worlds they inhabit are static or distinct, and instead we find relationships that are defined by their degree of entanglement and interdependence. In the dream-world, the space would not exist in any way without one of the characters at first dreaming it, and similarly, the character would not be able to dream if they weren’t already occupying a space.

Both the characters and the dream-spaces take on the characteristics of the others as the film progresses, and it becomes clear that the characters and the dream-worlds are complicit in each others’ production. This entanglement is included near the beginning of the film, as one of the dreamers’ full bladder causes a torrential downpour in the dream-city. In another scene, a car crash in one dream-world causes an avalanche in another. Both the characters and the spaces enter a relationship defined by interdependence and the borders that we would like to neatly draw between them become more and more difficult to place. This process is most strikingly apparent throughoutInception as manifest in the protagonist Cobb – where he ends and his dreams begin is profoundly obscure.

As mentioned at the beginning of the article, hereInception is very much taking part in the tradition of the works of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari who describe the type of relationship between Cobb and his dreams as rhizomatic, with multiple beginnings and ends and without clear separation. We are never clearly able to delineate the causality or linearity of the characters or the plot, and are instead invited to navigate them as we wish.

This is ultimately where all of the previous models collapse into one space of interdependence and production. While the Psychoanalytic and Simulacrative models described earlier in this article still operate on the surface of the film, their logics and reasoning become disrupted when Nolan asserts a dream-world in which everyone is always producing the world and themselves. Inception challenges us to consider the dream-world and the real world in the same way, that they are both always in a state of subjective-production which is dependant on our own process of creative perception and experience. This is perhaps the central thesis of the film, and one that leads us to question our own life in relationship to the life of the film.

Dreams and Cinema

When we think back upon the characters’ experiences of dreaming and of inhabiting dream-worlds,Inception is ultimately daring us to question not only the nature of our own everyday experiences, but also our experience of watching the film. Many of the aforementioned models that are operative in the dream-spaces of Inception are also found in the space of the theatre as we experience the film. Through the structure of the film and the deployment of a variety of techniques, Inception challenges the audience to become complicit in the production of the film itself.

The structure of Inception, and perhaps the structure of all film, already implies an involvement on the part of the audience in the process of producing the story. Through the use of the cut in editing and of various compressions in space and time, the mind of the viewer is always in a state of filling in the gaps. As we move between the different spaces and times of the plot, our own mind is generating arcing logics and filling in details in an attempt to create a cohesive whole. Through this process of production we are indeed making, as characters remind us several times throughout the film, a ‘leap of faith’ in order to make the film complete. In this way, Inception again asks us to produce instead of simply consume.

Just as Cobb’s dream-spaces are affected by his subjectivity, the space of the theatre is in many ways also the space of our own desires and subjectivities. In a dark room, the audience experiences the light of the projector presenting them with images and realities in an analogous way to how the characters in the film themselves dream. We are allowed to live experiences that are completely virtual both through our entanglement with the production of the film as well as through our innate desire to create and connect. Desire is not simply defined by a lack, as Freud and Lacan assert, but rather by a drive to connect and a drive to produce.

We are driven to connect with the images on the screen in the same way that we are driven to connect with the world around us, and through this connection we end up becoming immersed in the production of both the film and ourselves. As we sit in the theatre and help to produce the film in this way, Inception also helps to produce our own experiences and subjectivities through our encounter with it.

While going to see Inception, we are choosing to take part in the space of a dream in which we will be confronted and presented with images on the screen that appear spontaneously and apparently without origin, as if from the unconscious. Just as in the narrative of the film, we will be experiencing the space of another person’s dream, in this case Nolan’s. And, just as in the film, our own subjectivities, desires, memories and drives will alter and affect our encounter with Nolan’s film.

The last shot of the film finally serves to reinforce this productive framework within which we can encounter Inception. As the main character Cobb spins a top, which in the plot of the film acts to test whether the world he is in is actually reality or is just another dream, Nolan dares us to question the nature of our experience of the film. Cobb walks away from the spinning top not wanting to see the results of the test, yet the camera remains fixed on it leaving the audience experiencing it in all of its uncertainty. In this moment, which seems to hang forever, the film cuts to black and leaves us without a definitive answer as to the nature of Cobb’s world, and as we exit the theatre into the lobby we are left questioning not only the meaning of that last scene and of the film, but ultimately the nature of our own lives, encounters and experiences.

by Ian Alan Paul

“At stake here is the formation of a group or collectivity, or simply a practice, that does not become merely a smaller state machine, but also that does not dissipate (become chaotic). This is the production of a machine that can follow the vectors of deterritorialisation, can operate on the line of flight, but does not become a line of abolition or disappear into a black hole … In each case it is the production of an assemblage, a practice, or simply a life, that operates with different spatial and temporal coordination points to the state, we might even say operates in a different reality” (Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari, Simon O’Sullivan, p. 90)

The Sit/Lie law certainly isn’t new in this way – there are volumes of laws on the local, state and federal level that aim to regulate and criminalize certain kinds of anti-social behavior while encouraging the expression of other economically productive ones. The French philosopher Michel Foucault, in his famous lectures on biopolitics and writings about disciplinary societies, described what he saw as the new form in which states exercise power against their subjects. Foucault viewed discipline as a technology of power, a power that generates a bodily economies and politics. More specifically, disciplinary power conceptualizes a populace that is in need of control and regulation. In this way, power is exercised on the scale of the population rather than on the scale of the individual. Foucault describes a situation where power emerges from below, as citizens police each other to protect the larger social body at the cost of the individuals beneath it. Biopolitical subjects are both subject to and the subject of power.

Mayor Gavin Newsom, after moving to the Haight district of San Francisco, decided to propose the Sit/Lie law after going on a morning walk with his daughter where they witnessed a homeless man sitting on the sidewalk smoking crack-cocaine. When recalling his experiences, Newsom described the problem as “… a behavior issue” that requires new disciplinary and regulatory legislation. While overlooking the fact that smoking crack is already a crime which would get the user arrested, Newsom locates the source of the problem as resting inside of the man on the street and as affecting the whole of society, or the social body.  Rather than contemplate the systemic violences and barriers (upon which our contemporary society relies) that could push someone to end up smoking crack on a sidewalk, the encounter is reduced to an isolated exchange where one persons’ behavior disturbs the social, and the state is expected to intervene.

In biopolitical and disciplinary regimes of power, negative freedoms (the freedom from other people’s affects) trump positive freedoms (the freedom from larger structural violences such as racism, sexism or classism); the health of the society at large overrides the freedoms of the individual subject. The Sit/Lie law means to code and territorialize public space in this way, by placing certain social standards of a healthy community on all of those whom inhabit or traverse that space. In the case of Sit/Lie, simply inhabiting the public space while not performing a productive function (shopping, commuting, working) becomes criminal in itself. As San Francisco Police Captain Teri Barrett describes it: “The community is just fed up with the lack of civility and how it had changed in the last 10 years, they are very compassionate people, and they have had enough.”#

San Francisco, through the passage Sit/Lie, is beginning to resemble some of the ordinances instituted by Rudolph Giuliani, former Mayor of New York city, in the 1990s which aimed to ‘clean-up’ the city of homeless panhandlers, prostitutes and window washers. This rhetoric of cleanliness and hygiene is deployed by biopolitical regimes in promoting the health of the social body, and is used to justify whatever actions need to be taken to clear the city of ‘infection’, ‘trash’ and ‘disease’. This also creates a framework where the health of the city is something which is constantly being infringed upon and compromised, and as a result costs and measures are implemented to protect and defend that health.  Under biopolitical systems, health is never free.

We can look to laws such as Sit/Lie in this way, as they are designed to both extinguish ‘anti-social’ activity in public, while simultaneously encouraging other activity that would instead benefit the state. In the case of San Francisco, immobility and stasis (sitting or lying) in the routes of pedestrian traffic is articulated as being detrimental to the social and economic health of the city. Capitalism is an economy of speed and movement, and is dependent on the constant exchanges of currency and capital in order for it to perpetuate itself. Under capitalism, not participating in the economic activity of the system, or even worse, hindering others from doing so, damages the health of that system. It’s at this hinge that the values of the state, which are firmly aligned with the health of the market, become entangled with the values and health of the community or the social body.

If we carry the logic even further, we can think of Sit/Lie as another form of capitalist accumulation. The public, or the ‘commons’, historically has been a space that belongs to everyone and is governed by no one. By juridically capturing it, the state moves to transform and reterritorialize the sidewalk into a space of transit and economy. By generating policed and disciplined sidewalks in neighborhoods such as the Height or Mission districts, the city of San Francisco is attempting to create spaces which are both tourist and business friendly. David Harvey describes the state’s role in capitalist accumulation as “entailing the taking of land, say, enclosing it, and expelling a resident population to create a landless proletariat, and then releasing the land into the privatized mainstream of capital accumulation”.# The notion that the sidewalk could perhaps be used for other activities than shopping or moving, for example as a conversation-space, a contemplative-space, or even an art-space, are firmly refused by biopolitical regimes of power as they aim to both purge spaces of anti-social forces while ushering in productive ones.

People from San Francisco have already begun campaigns to resist the Sit/Lie law through the coordinated staging of sit-ins on the sidewalks of the city. Other groups plan on taking the law to court when it goes into effect this January.  Writing about this I cannot help but be reminded of the peasant riots that manifested themselves in England early in the 17th century in response to the private enclosing of the commons. Large groups of organized peasant farmers would pull up fences and fill in ditches which demarcated the lands of the gentry in an attempt to protect the common ownership of land. If the riots had been more intense, or if more peasants had participated across larger geographies, would private property have developed historically in the way it did? I couldn’t help but be reminded of this when writing about the sidewalks here and thinking of how far away we are from that transformative historical moment. It seems like the only public spaces that are left in San Francisco are the few parks and squares scattered around the city, and even those are increasingly policed by officers on dirt-bikes looking for unpermitted beer drinkers and other anti-social(ites). When the state moves to take away from what is common and what is ‘ours’, it’s important we fight to ensure that these spaces remain open and undisciplined.

Resistance in biopolitical societies manifests as generating a politics of the individual and of the personal. Biopolitical systems emerge when we begin to think of the community itself as a single organism, articulating all individuals within that community as simply constituents of manageable populations. When someone is cast as part of the ‘homeless population’, part of the ‘immigrant population’, part of the ‘anti-social population’, regulatory laws and police-actions come to be justified against those groups by erasing the diversity and heterogeneity within those groupings. By asserting the positive freedoms necessary for just society, we can move to not only dismantle the laws already constricting open and public spaces such as the Sit/Lie law, but we can also act to protect and generate new spaces which are open, free and democratic.

____________________

1.  “Sit-lie laws put spotlight on safety”, William M. Welch , USA Today, March 23rd, 2010

2.  Accumulation by Disposition, 2005, David Harvey

On July 15th, 2011, 667 people from 28 different countries participated in the online collective action “Border Haunt” that targeted the U.S.-Mexico border. Participants collected entries from a database that holds the names and descriptions of migrants that died trying to cross the border territory and then sent those entries into a database used to police the border. As a result, the border was conceptually and symbolically haunted for the duration of the one-day action as the border policing structure received over 1,000 reports of deceased migrants attempting to cross the border. “Border Haunt” was an artistic and political experiment that operated as an intervention against the current structures and policies which govern the U.S.-Mexico border while also prefiguring solidarities and resonances amongst the participants.

You can view documentation of the project by clicking here.

Press Coverage of the Border Haunt project can be found here:

“Deadly Conditions for Mexico-US Migrants” from Al Jazeera English.

 ”Interactive Art Project Lets Users Investigate Anonymous Border Deaths” from the Bay Citizen.

 
Predators (2011) is a digital video which counts the number of individuals killed by U.S. Military Predator Drones in Pakistan between January/2004 and October/2011.  From Wikipedia: “Former CIA officials state that the agency uses a careful screening process in making decisions on which individuals to kill via drone strikes. The process, carried out at the agency’s counterterrorist center, involves up to 10 lawyers who write briefs justifying the targeting of specific individuals. According to the former officials, if the briefs’ arguments are weak, the request to target the individual is denied. Since 2008 the CIA has relied less on its list of individuals and increasingly targeted “signatures,” or suspect behavior. This change in tactics has resulted in fewer deaths of high-value targets and in more deaths of lower-level fighters, or “mere foot soldiers” as the one senior Pakistani official told the Washington Post”

BorderMachines.net is the result of Ian Alan Paul’s MA thesis project at SFAI and was completed in May of 2011. This website looks to three contemporary artists working in border territories and seeks to establish a ground on which we can begin to think the undoing of borders. This site is organized rhizomatically and has many routes and paths through it, resisting formal closure or resolution. Beyond the textual content of the thesis, the project takes on a formal interdisciplinarity and is presented as a transmedia, where textual, performative and digital iterations all contribute to the project’s whole.

Click here to visit the project.

Security Screenings is a series of 6 lightboxes. The pieces are produced by aggregating images from google’s index of images on the web. The first 100 image results from searches of specific terms (September 11th, Afghanistan, Iraq, Security, Surveillance, Threat Level) are then composited into one image and are mounted in a light box.

For the Domestic Violence project, I collected images taken during the Iraq war and projected them onto suburban facades throughout California. The projections/interventions lasted 1 hour for each iteration. Photographs of the projections were then mounted in 22″ x 33″ lightboxes for exhibition.