Abstract
“Matrix” is the Latin word for “womb,” a casing, tissue or structure in which something originates and develops. In the movie The Matrix it takes the form of an “iron-clad” structure that molds and regulates all spheres of human life. At the metaphorical level, the Matrix most closely resembles the media, and, insofar as the media is the site at which the filmmakers envision social change, the media may well be the conceptual womb of revolution. The Wachowski brothers not only intimate that the television and motion picture media are the focus of their critique, but also suggest that the cultural norms and values projected by visual media can be re-envisioned on the screen to reflect the embrace of more inclusive and rational norms and values by democratic publics.
Current reality shows and science fiction movies reflect sociology’s growing influence on the television and motion picture industry. However, the traditionally modern demand for objectivity in the social sciences deters further immersion in the aesthetic experience of visuality that would open the discipline to influence by the film medium as another venue of publicly-mediated communication. Sociologists today are more likely to assess the impact of ocular culture on learning patterns, than consciously endeavor to learn from images projected on the movie screen. The Matrix film trilogy communicates the insight into social theory needed to prompt the sociologist into the subjective, cathartic experience of its symbolic content. One can easily read the imprints of works by Marx, Weber, Baudrillard, Foucault, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan and others between the lines and pictural images of this monumental oeuvre. Like the portrait whose eyes follow its observer at every turn, this production transcends the deluge of science fiction offshoots of Star Wars that encourage audience escape into the mundane experience of
* Special thanks to Harry F. Dahms, Lawrence Hazelrigg and Alexandria Sutherland.
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the everyday in an unfamiliar garb. It attains the depth of focus to draw viewers into critical reflection not only on the global dimensions of socio-political conflict, but also on the socio-politically hegemonic effect of the entertainment industry on undiscerning mass audiences. The production acts as a mirror for viewers to reflect on themselves both critically, as individual and collective constituents of a hyper-alienated culture that thrives in the imaginary space of the motion picture, and in the light of the filmmakers’
unstinting faith in human potential. And as this essay reveals, the trilogy illuminates new, aesthetically rational insights on social science and the normative fabric in which science as a social endeavor is embedded. The objective of this analysis of The Matrix is to shed light on the possibilities for diminishing the tension between linguistic communication and ocularcentrism that is inherent in the traditionally modern public sphere, by cultivating visual media that enliven the human capacity for thought and deliberation.
Radically Modern Resistence to the Postmodern Condition
“Matrix” is the Latin word for “womb,” a casing, tissue or structure in which something originates and develops. In the movie, the Matrix takes the form of an “iron-clad” structure that molds and regulates all spheres of human life. At the metaphorical level, the Matrix most closely resembles the media, and, insofar as the media is the site at which the filmmakers envision social change, the media may well be the conceptual womb of revolution. The Wachowski brothers not only intimate that the television and motion picture media are the focus of their critique, but also suggest that the cultural norms and values projected by visual media can be re-envisioned on the screen to reflect the embrace of more inclusive and rational norms and values by democratic publics.
As the quintessential question, “what is the Matrix?,” is answered in the first part of the trilogy, the actors are transported into a visual field much like a television set in which their appearance and surroundings are reconfigured in simulated form. The Matrix, we are told, “is all around us, even now in this very room. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.” This techno-ideological world resembles everyday life as it is fabricated in the 1998 Peter Weir film, The Truman Show. However, in the science fiction context of The Matrix, where the synthetic world has been constructed to conceal and transport from the
“real world” that was decimated by war, the state of alienation is totalizing to
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a degree that loses any humorous aspect. The world depicted is ocularcentric in nature; it is a world comprised of images that confine the general public, who remain unaware that their bodily form and sensuousness has been transformed into an object of exploitation in the exchange between man and machine. As the story goes, the real, sensuous form of the human body has been imprisoned in individual incubators in which they passively emit the power that sustains and regenerates the Matrix. The human imagination has been harnessed in its ontogenetically undeveloped state and revamped as the unconsciously indoctrinating dream world that is consumed in a vacuum. As the products comprising this domain accumulate, the reflexive capacity of the human eye and its sensuous vessel becomes integral to an automatic process of total assimilation. Each vacuous body operates in a uniform manner, unencumbered by the distinguishing features of human variation and subjective agency upon which the phylogenetic development of the human species depends. Harnessed within the Matrix, “reflexivity” reduces to the physiological reflex in the absence of a self with the capacity for conscious deliberation. The mind is subject to control by a complex network of computer programs, including well-disguised robotic forms.
The film’s depiction of the human condition can best be described in Marxian terms as one of alienation. Erich Fromm described the psychological features of alienation that are most closely associated with life in the Matrix as follows:
By alienation is meant a mode of experience in which the person experiences himself as an alien. He has become... estranged from himself. He does not experience himself as the center of his world, as the creator of his own acts, but his acts and their consequences have become his masters... [He] is out of touch with himself as he is out of touch with any other person. He, like the others, is experienced as things are experienced with the senses and with common sense, but at the same time without being related to oneself and to the world outside productively. (Fromm, quoted in Dahms et al., 1973: 19-21.) Fromm’s interpretation of alienation is congruous with the Wachowski brothers depiction of the human condition. This interpretation, however, reflects only a grasp of alienation that we consciously experience in the awareness that we are merely the products of our master’s creativity. It circumnavigates the more thoroughgoing critical analysis of alienation in its most pernicious form as a state wholly unrecognized by those captives of desire who are in its grip. Although a clear-sighted view of the distinct manifestations of alienation can be gleaned from the trilogy as a whole, the Wachowskis are intent enough on making a buck to coddle their public with a utopian rather than a dystopian interpretation of the preponderance of the
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lowly, hedonistic form of alienation in society. The Matrix enlists its audience in the revolutionary unshackling of contemporary culture from its bondage to the entertainment industry as it draws movie goers into the cathartic experience of self-liberation from the technologically engineered synapses of the managed “self.” In a similar vein, the filmmakers enlarge on the meaning of the Matrix in the light of a counter image – “the desert of the real” – building on the concepts at play in Jean Baudrillard’s most social theoretical text, Simulacra and Simulacrum (1995). Although the book appears on screen as an indication that Baudrillard’s critique of the media age has influenced the filmmakers, the Wachowski Brothers are not persuaded by his pessimistic association of the rise of mass society with the demise of the social impulse in a culture that is irreducibly hyperreal.
Indeed, the message conveyed by the Matrix runs counter to this postmodern view that the access to the “real,” objective domain of products and production has been wholly vanquished by consumer culture, and that the potential for critique has been lost with this grounding. However fragmented the form may be, the social is resurgent in the Matrix. The trilogy builds a radically modern counter-image of the human capacity to act autonomously as agents of social change. The Matrix system is not sufficiently closed to prevent the growth of an underground resistance that will eventually establish the relative independence of human from an army of machines. This movement is sustained by a coterie of fragmented peoples seeking mind/body unity who are engaged in the struggle to free others, such as Thomas Anderson, a computer hacker with the alias Neo who, it is believed, may be “the One” who will lead the revolution. The filmmaker’s image of “desert of the real,” as an unstable environment unamenable to change, may reflect postmodern conditions, but it is only a gateway to the subterranean community. The fragments of homegrown sociality constituting this culture transcend as they reconcile the contradictions of traditionally modern society. The identity of this community is not postmodern: it appears more a reflection of the Baroque culture of the seventeenth century. In borrowing from Bryan Turner’s interpretation of the similarities between postmodern and Baroque culture in the context of a defense of sociology which reveals inconsistencies in the modern/postmodern periodization, the identity of the Zion community appears to reflect more of the Baroque than of postmodern culture. As Turner describes, the Baroque “had a strong sense of the fragmented and constructed nature of the social, which developed an articulate notion of the anxiety and subjectivity of the self” (Turner, 1993:
83). In addition to these characteristics, the resistance community in The Matrix reinvigorates fragments of the political dimension of the social in a way that reinforces its radically modern as opposed to postmodern identity.
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In so doing, the Wachowski Brothers not only deflect the kind of disapproval from within the entertainment industry that an unequivocal embrace of Baudrillard’s pessimism about mass culture would invite, they also practically innovate on the ideal of a mediatized public culture as an approach to decalcifying mass culture from within. Eschewing cynicism and despair, The Matrix trilogy invigorates the consciously alienated to produce change on the media cultural terrain, irrespective of the majority who have chosen entertainment unto death.
In The Matrix Reloaded, viewers are drawn into the familial norms, customs and ritualistic cultural behaviors that add to the stability of the underground community. This part of the trilogy lays strong thematic emphasis on Zion and its collective effort to integrate and educate Neo. As the Wachowski Brothers structure and reinforce the contrast between the Matrix and the resistance, they delineate the terrain of conflict between the politically hegemonic system of control and the new cultural hegemony gaining strength in Zion. The emerging contrast suggests that, whether conscious or not, the directors’ approach to political culture parallels the work of Antonio Gramsci, whose early twentieth-century reflections distinguish between the relative weights of consent and coercion in equations for the political hegemony of a repressive state, on the one hand, and the progressive form of cultural hegemony that is embedded in democratic social movements, on the other. An unorthodox collection of traditions bind the community of Zion, which appears to rely heavily on express consent to legitimate itself as a democratic order. The work presents a sharp contrast between the deliberative practices of this community’s democratic councils and the systems of cooptation and coercion that curtail human agency and insure conformity in the Matrix. The former is the culture in which Antonio Gramsci’s “organic intellectuals,” who are the creation of a nurturing community that educates them, arise and assume revolutionary roles.
Combining political sermons and spiritual dancing with an emphasis on sensuous movement between the plural racial and cultural elements, the Wachowski brothers give the community its Baroque feel. Their hero, Neo, emerges out of this romantic nexus as a self-possessed leader who speaks the language of his community. The culmination of his maturation from an estranged worker in the computer software industry into “the One”
enlightened leader who has attained the practical wisdom to penetrate and instill human control of the cybernetic system of the Matrix, is the end product of a dialectical process, rather than a mysterious transfiguration. The cultural context out of which “the One” emerges is a reflection of the distance the Wachowski Brothers take both from religious orthodoxy and the insight Jean Baudrillard offered on the degree to which solidarity has been
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forsaken by desire in highly complex societies. In depicting “Mr. Reagan,”
the villainous traitor who informs on Zion, as an exceptional figure, as deviant from moral norms that are binding for the community, insofar as his desire for desire pervades, the filmmakers skew the audience’s perspective on the extent of alienation in reality. However much the idealism they project is geared toward insuring a captive audience, it is a foil to Baudrillard’s gravity, in which solidarity is pronounced as a loosely interconnected yoke reinforcing values that inspire sacrifice, asceticism, loyalty and commitment to more “fully human” ends. This solidarist element counters the effect of fragmentation as a degenerative process ongoing in postmodern society. It accentuates the Baroque features of the Zion community as a revolutionary community, rebounding from postmodern condition in its effort to reconcile the contradictions of modernity in a broader unity.
The Matrix’s potentially problematic want of realism is consequential in this analysis – raising the question as to what venues for self-reflexive critique by the public it creates. It thus must be returned to for an assessment in terms of both the distinction between a self-reflexive public and the reflexive viewer, and the quest of just how “captive” Matrix viewers are meant to be.
Revolution in Science and Technology
The idea of a revolution in science and the emergence of research programs in which the traditionally modern yields to reflexive perspectives on technological innovation is a theme that is almost as strongly underscored in The Matrix Revolutions as the need for political revolution. The production is itself revolutionary insofar as together with The Matrix Reloaded it is the first Hollywood motion pictures created for IMAX film technology. When shown in the IMAX theater, the distance between the disembodied eye of the viewer and the screen is bridged more fully than ever before. The enlarged, sharper image resembles a concave mirror that surrounds the audience. Unlike the flat, window-like surface of the traditional screen, the IMAX screen reflects back on the round eye, drawing in the viewers. In this way a new rudimentary form of reflexivity enters into the process of viewing film itself.1The Matrix
1 This innovation makes it possible to maintain the three-dimensionality of space on the “curved rather than planar space” on the screen. The perspective thus produced might be described as a synthetic perspective. By retaining the quality of three-dimensionality it restores the possibility of normal binocular vision which involves dynamic movement or jumps from focal point to focal point, instead of the artificially fixed gaze of one eye. This innovation opens up a new context in which we can more
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Revolutions not only upgraded spatial dimensions of the visual field, it brought people together as conscious participants by temporally synchronizing the opening show time, worldwide, to create a sense of solidarity between the viewers who choose to take in a film titled
“Revolutions.” The directors also reinforce viewer sensitivity to sound by accentuating the significance of interactive audio exchanges between actors who alternate as speakers and listeners. They portray telephone communication as a venue for emancipation that physically transports the resisters in and out of the Matrix. The unmediated exchange on the telephone generates the illusion of bi-directional communication between the Matrix as the technologically engineered site of the visual media and the real world in which the dissenters live. In the closing scene of The Matrix Neo communicates his opposition to the ocularcentric system in a phone call directly to the Matrix designers:
I know you’re out there. I can feel you now. I know that you’re afraid. You’re afraid of us. You’re afraid of change. I don’t know the future. I didn’t come here to tell you how this is going to end. I cam here to tell you how it’s going to begin. I’m going to hang up this phone and then I’m going to show these people what you don’t want them to see. I’m going to show them a world without you, a world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries, a world where anything it possible. Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you.
Together, the drama and technological innovations are introduced in The Matrix to give viewers the feeling of engagement, rather than passive absorption as captives in a totally ocularcentric experience. Although it would be pretentious to claim that any actual “participatory democratic”
dimension of the motion picture could be the offshoot of innovation in The Matrix, an important aim of the film is to awaken the inner voice and critical capacity of audiences. It is an inspiration to viewers who are willing to cultivate the art of deliberation as an individual process of democratic decision making that can be stimulated by the symbolic mediated forms of communication we find in the information media.
There is much room for ambivalence about the ocularcentric features of the Matrix and the visual media in general. It sensitizes us to the idea that by privileging vision we may deafen ears and mute voices, thereby closing off avenues for democratic will formation. However, it would be easily reconceive monocularity, doing away with the tendency to construe the singular point of view as transcendental or universal, to arrive at a relativist alternative to Cartesian perspectivalism (cf. Jay, 1993a: 116-119).
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counterintuitive for filmmakers to lapse into the ocularphobia that has become prevalent in some currents of philosophy. Some clarification is needed to differentiate these critical standpoints. The theme of ocularcentricity is more enduring than the problem posed by the current
counterintuitive for filmmakers to lapse into the ocularphobia that has become prevalent in some currents of philosophy. Some clarification is needed to differentiate these critical standpoints. The theme of ocularcentricity is more enduring than the problem posed by the current