Abstract
The Matrix trilogy is both a philosophical machine and a powerful myth. Much of the mixed feelings or outright contempt with which it was received by many “intellectuals” is a direct result of the failure to understand this. This essay aims to show the kind of theoretical effects the film can achieve if one focuses on the main challenge The Matrix puts forth: the nature of the virtual. It uses the question whether there is an exit from “virtual reality” as a metaphor to understand virtual reality in opposition to the tantalising discourses on the
“virtualisation” of the real. It gives up metaphysics in favour of a genuine pragmatics of the virtual, which is oriented towards concrete procedures and operations. In a more literal sense, the essay analyses different pictures and notions of the virtual as they appear in the tradition of science-fiction movies. In many respects The Matrix can be viewed as a counterpoint or an indirect answer to the problems already raised by Tron in 1982. The contrast between these two films is very instructive: it exposes the evolving nature of the aesthetical and philosophical challenges posed by simulated environments. It also emphasises the originality of The Matrix’s approach to the by now classical science-fiction theme of a complete simulation of reality. In this respect this essay suggests two main hypotheses: (1) that the network has become the paradigm of the virtual (cf. the importance of telephones); (2) that the virtual must be considered in terms of time, rather than space (cf. the idea of “Bullet-Time”).
Together with a few other philosophers I suggested treating The Matrix as a
“philosophical machine” (cf. Badiou et al., 2003). It has become clear, however, that the question of how to operate such a machine is far from self-evident. In general, the “professional philosophers” were unable to overcome
* Translated by Stefan Herbrechter
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the confusion and the disappointment they felt about a film which, admittedly, is saturated with references to theory but which they treated first and foremost as an action movie, beautiful but inane at the same time: a cross between three well-known filmic genres: western, science fiction and kung-fu (cf. Knight & McKnight, 2003). Things become even more complicated by the fact that The Matrix is of course also a formidable commercial machine – a “franchise.” Most intellectuals probably would have condoned a semi-ironic reading of an unknown Taiwanese B grade film, but to dare to speak seriously of a blockbuster whose target audience are teenagers more or less steeped in video gaming, was probably asking a bit too much of them.
Much could be said about the reception the film and its “associated products” have had. But one should first of all point out that what is distinctive about the “Matrix” machine is that it anticipates the active usage to which it gives rise. In a sense it was perfectly predictable that philosophy would return to this film. The philosophers who therefore did reconnect themselves to it could not assume the convenient position of someone who parasitically and dexterously turns the user function of a cultural product designed for mass consumption against itself. The Matrix does not lend itself to this kind of appropriation; instead it is the film that turns philosophy against itself (“a Kung-fu film projected onto Plato’s cave,” as we said before), thus forcing philosophy to either try out new moves or else remain silent.
The film was in fact conceived as a piece of both aesthetic and commercial software that functions interactively: it does not call for a judgment (according to any criteria of “taste”), nor for an interpretation (a rather boring procedure used by believers in hermeneutics and decipherers of all kinds), but instead asks for active engagement. Philosophy, as it happens, figured prominently among the contributions designed to follow on from the film in order to consolidate its presence within the cultural sphere. The opening of a “philosophy” section on the Warner website containing a list of very respectable authors (even though exclusively from the ranks of
“analytical philosophy”), was a very clear indication of this.1 Besides, journalists were very eager to report that Baudrillard himself had been
“contacted” and asked to participate in the conception of the film (which proves the directors’ farsightedness), which was certainly not merely part of Warner’s marketing strategy. In any case, philosophy, from the beginning and probably as never before, was called upon by the film. It was this
1 See the “Philosophy” section on the official Matrix website (http://whatisthematrix.warnerbros.com) with contributions from Colin McGinn, Hubert and Stephen Dreyfus, David Chalmers, James Pryor, and others.
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situation that offered the opportunity to investigate the conditions that regulate any philosophical engagement with non-philosophical cues (During
& Maniglier, 2004).
Nevertheless, the question whether it is possible to write about The Matrix without more or less participating in its commercial strategy is of very limited interest. It generally only leads to lamentations about “cultural industries” and the “commodification” of philosophy which are the daily bread of public intellectuals. It is far more interesting to ask how philosophy was able to get caught out by a film, that is to say activated and put in motion by it. The task would then be to find in the very heterogeneity of these non-philosophical cues for philosophy the conditions for an experiment of a very specific kind.
This is what we wrote in this respect in the introduction to Matrix, machine philosophique (2003): “To connect to The Matrix, all the while continuing to do philosophy, is not to use a popular film as a pretext to dish up once more ideas already formed elsewhere in relation to other material. It means to engage with an operation that is already effectively at work. The Matrix: it functions. This must be the starting point which introduces a kind of gap into one’s own philosophical practice and which leads further than whatever could have been achieved without an encounter between the two.
The Matrix suggests theoretical trails through its own narrative and fictional constraints. One can exploit these and achieve philosophical effects through them provided one prioritises an interest in the functioning and the operations at work within the entire “machine” of the film rather than in its explicit or implicit philosophical content... .”
But why The Matrix rather than any other film, one may ask?
Precisely, because this film is a machine, and a machine of a specific kind, a sufficiently “textured” machine that provides a sufficient number of “holds”
(in the sense rock climbers would use the word “hold”) for theoretical operations of very diverse kind, namely in relation to metaphysics, aesthetics, technics or politics. To put it differently, there is only one reason that justifies that philosophers should write a book about The Matrix rather than about any B grade film, or any other “philosophising” film (like for example 2001, A Space Odyssey), and that is its popular success, or more precisely, the fact that The Matrix is a mass product that in effect functions (not only in terms of investment returns but also with respect to the very reception the film encourages), and which functions by provoking a massive philosophical – that is to say a necessarily heterogeneous – demand.
It is obvious that the film is philosophically not coherent, and probably does not even want to be. Phrases like “indigestible stew” or “theoretical wish-wash” have been used to describe it. But it would have been more exact
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to refer to it as a building site or an area of “bricolage,” in the sense that Lévi-Strauss used the term to describe myth. The Matrix is a heterogeneous machine which, like Deleuze’s machines, constantly breaks down – a machine that functions by disseminating its effects in all directions, even towards philosophy whose commonplaces it visits and whose reactions it invites. And myth, as Lévi-Strauss reminds us, provokes thought: it shows how a problem is constructed and transformed as it becomes part of a semiotic mechanism, by taking its material from diverse symbolic systems folded one onto the other, and by masking their incompatibility, and thus turning heterogeneity into an advantage, so to speak, by making it a precondition for its functioning.2 It is thus no longer a matter of explaining the “message” of the film, or of making explicit the “philosophy” it contains, but of discerning the principle on which it functions and to make this work in turn. The connections and operations that the film allows for have to be evaluated in relation to what they produce, in terms of the problems they permit to be posited anew, and with increased focus. For example, the problem of the virtual.
The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality – Or, How to Exit the Virtual?
This is a question that the film already formulates in its own way, both literally and allegorically. It will not have escaped anybody that the Matrix plot in fact has at its centre the metaphysical question of the essence of reality. The first episode strikes by its narrative coherence, which is reinforced by the messianic theme and the missionary spirit of the Nebuchadnezzar crew. The dividing line between reality and the virtual seems clear; one merely has to find an exit or pass, as in an old Western.
Matrix Reloaded, on the other hand, shares a number of characteristics with Star Wars, Borges’ literature of the fantastic, or Castaneda’s quest of initiation, by mixing vision and magic, shamans and demons, in a labyrinthine illusion. In addition to machines and digital police officers, one now has to reckon with an ex-agent transformed into a virus and a whole population of exiled programmes with frightening powers, who seem to have stepped out of an altogether different story: angels, ghosts, vampires, even werewolves. The Oracle’s words are less clear than ever, the prediction that turned Neo into a new prophet starts looking less probable, and finally all the boundaries begin to get blurred and, in particular the one that provided the
2 Patrice Maniglier has developed this hypothesis of the mythological structure of The Matrix (in “Matrix, machine mythologique,” in Badiou et al., 2003).
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core of the argument in the first film, which puts into stark contrast the collective illusion constructed by the Matrix against a rough and solid, but quite undesirable, reality. Below this dividing line one discovers an underworld or intermediate world with an absurd topology, full of short cuts and secret passageways. It is thus not enough to have slipped, like Alice, behind the looking-glass, but one also needs the right keys and to know who to trust. Agent Smith and Neo exchange their powers, the former downloading himself into the mind of a member of the resistance, and the latter stopping machines from a distance so that one starts to wonder whether Zion itself is not actually only a sub-sphere of the Matrix (or of a kind of
“Metamatrix”), specially conceived to uphold the illusion among the inveterate of a possibility to exercise their true freedom: a “blue” Matrix at the heart of the “green” Matrix – or the other way round. It is no longer reality against appearance: as the frontier between the two starts dissolving, it really feels like being caught inside a simulacrum. In this sense, the third instalment of the trilogy seems a little removed with regard to the daring speculative hypotheses suggested in Reloaded. The intermediate worlds and the intermediary spaces, like for example the underground station Mobil Avenue (an anagram of “limbo”), are left unexplored. The essential part of the plot is focused on the decisive attack on Zion and the final mechanical-political pact made between Neo and the machines. The war scenes and the political storyline almost make one forget the wonders of the metaphysical plot.
Whatever the relative merits of the three episodes, the plot was of course too simple and too naive in the eyes of those who took The Matrix literally and were thus expecting a direct problematisation of the questions concerning simulation. Of course, this “desert of the real” that Morpheus puts to Neo, citing Baudrillard (much to the pleasure of all those who managed to capture the allusion), was originally not supposed to designate any firm reality behind appearance, but rather the deserting or the sublimation of the real itself, or the indistinguishability of these two levels, the complete covering over of the real by its sign, which finally dismisses the real altogether. The reference to one of the pillars of “French Theory” was thus based from the outset on an outright misunderstanding. Even the second film could not find favour with the philosophers, for to suggest an indefinite stacking of simulations one inside the other still means to be inside ideology;
it means to acknowledge the pertinence of an idea of the Real, which would be like the reverse side or the horizon, the “real” yet unattainable limit of an infinite play of reflections.
In short, the accusation put to the film was to mobilise the prestige of a mise-en-scène full of special effects to transform into a visible fantasy what
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by definition cannot be said or shown: the inconsistency of “reality,” the point at which every system of symbols and rules turns out to be fundamentally insufficient, incomplete, hollow. According to the Lacanian axiom, the point of the Real is also the moment when representation goes astray. The mistake was thus to turn this situation into an action film and to insinuate a tangible and almost literal representation of it: the waste world behind the Matrix, criss-crossed by machines, and a subterranean Jerusalem as the rallying point of all the heroes of the “Real” (according to William Gibson’s phrase in his foreword to the Matrix script) – or else, but which actually comes down to the same, the vertigo of two simulations which echo each other. As a careful reader of Lacan and Philip K. Dick, Slavoj Žižek explains that it would have been more entertaining to multiply the realities themselves, rather than to stack up levels of virtuality in a nostalgic longing for the Real. He accuses the Wachowski brothers of not having understood that the Real is not a “true reality” behind simulation, nor its mirage at the edge of an infinite series of simulations, but the void as a result of which every reality seems incapable of enclosing itself and is bound to undo itself (Žižek, 2002). As for Baudrillard, who is known to have been quite concerned about the use the film makes of his ideas, he sees in the whole affair a misunderstanding at work which rather confirms his ideas about the implacably specular (and spectacular) logic that informs Hollywood industry.
The “simulation,” as he understands it, is in no way a specific register of illusion (nor a futuristic version of it – its fanciful “hypersimulation”), but the condition in which we already find ourselves when appearance has entirely replaced the real. From this point of view The Matrix cannot but appear to be an entirely imaginary representation of simulation (“the film about the Matrix that could have been produced by the Matrix,” as Baudrillard wittingly explains in a French magazine). This proves even truer for Reloaded and the entire virtual circuit it puts forward. Just like Disneyland in Baudrillard’s rhetoric, this excess of images and deception is another attempt not to make us despair of reality, to persuade us that it still exists.3 The final scene of Revolutions, which has provoked such diverse commentary, again seems to confirm this idea even though in a rather ambiguous way: one discovers that there is, after all, a new version of the Matrix, an “upgraded” one, with clear blue skies and a rainbow to boot.
3 I have tried to elaborate this in “Trois figures de la simulation” (in Badiou et al., 2003).
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The Pragmatics of Virtual Reality
But what does the film really show for those who are prepared to demonstrate a little good will and who are attentive to the unique montage that the story proposes? It suggests precisely that one should start by reformulating some of the questions that are otherwise too vast (e.g. Is a simulated life morally acceptable? Is there a difference between true “reality” and virtual
“reality”?), by moving them onto the terrain where they might actually be resolved in practice, that is to say in action, within the frame of a possible narration. The badly drawn concepts of “reality” and “virtuality” might then themselves be reworked in a way that makes them directly available for describing an event, a gesture or an operation.
For example: how to download an “avatar” of one’s body into the Matrix (i.e. the problem of the telephone)? What is the place of the real body in a machine of total simulation (i.e. the problem of the “bioport”)? What function does freedom of choice have in an interactive simulation (i.e. the problem of the Architect)? Etc.
Those who are most inclined to denounce The Matrix as a naive and literal illustration of the idea of simulation are also the very people who make the least operational use of this very idea. As a result of simulation being thought of beyond the simple opposition between reality and deluding appearance, it ends up being completely separated off the concrete mechanisms of simulation where its idea could effectively have some meaning: it almost does no longer function as a concept at all but rather as an encompassing ontological category that is supposed to summarise our relation to things in general. The scholastics would have called it a
“transcendental.” However, the film does not pose a problem of general ontology: the question is not to know what exactly the virtual is, what its nature or substance is, nor is it about finding the most general categories that allow one to characterise its inconsistency (or its lack of substance), but rather it wants to indicate processes, distinguish functional levels that are related to specific situations and problems. These can be technological (e.g.
what topology suits the virtual?), moral (e.g. what to do if reality is less desirable than its simulation?), political (e.g. how to prepare an alliance with the machines?), and even, why not, metaphysical (e.g. can the laws of nature be bent, and what distinguishes dream from hallucination?).
Let us come back to the question, How to exit the virtual? This question has a very concrete sense in the film; and, interestingly, it is connected to a technical concern, namely how to enter the Matrix. One could say that, paradoxically, it is by looking for an entrance that one manages to exit “the
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virtual,” to extract oneself from these floating discourses that make of the virtual an all-encompassing and thus inoperative category (“as big as a hollow tooth,” Deleuze would have said).
Through what passage does one enter the virtual? Which entry, which drop-off point? And, first of all, where is the Matrix? Does this question
Through what passage does one enter the virtual? Which entry, which drop-off point? And, first of all, where is the Matrix? Does this question