opportunity of sitting close to the ideal spectator of the film -
namely, to an idiot. A man in the late 20ies at my right was so
immersed in the film that he all the time disturbed other spectators
with loud exclamations, like "My God, wow, so there is no reality!"...
I definitely prefer such naive immersion to the pseudo-sophisticated
intellectualist readings which project into the film the refined
philosophical or psychoanalytic conceptual distinctions.(1)
It is nonetheless easy to understand this intellectual attraction of
The Matrix: is it not that The Matrix is one of the films which
function as a kind of Rorschach test [ http://rorschach.test.at/ ]
setting in motion the universalized process of recognition, like the
proverbial painting of God which seems always to stare directly at you,
from wherever you look at it - practically every orientation seems to
recognize itself in it? My Lacanian friends are telling me that the
authors must have read Lacan; the Frankfurt School partisans see in the
Matrix the extrapolated embodiment of Kulturindustrie, the
alienated-reified social Substance (of the Capital) directly taking
over, colonizing our inner life itself, using us as the source of
energy; New Agers see in the source of speculations on how our world is
just a mirage generated by a global Mind embodied inthe World Wide Web.
This series goes back to Plato's Republic: does The Matrix not repeat
exactly Plato's dispositif of the cave (ordinary humans as prisoners,
tied firmly to their seats and compelled to watch the shadowy
performance of (what they falsely consider to be) reality? The
important difference, of course, is that when some individuals escape
their cave predicament and step out to the surface of the Earth, what
they find there is no longer the bright surface illuminated by the rays
of the Sun, the supreme Good, but the desolate "desert of the real."
The key opposition is here the one between Frankfurt School and Lacan:
should we historicize the Matrix into the metaphor of the Capital that
colonized culture and subjectivity, or is it the reification of the
symbolic order as such? However, what if this very alternative is
false? What if the virtual character of the symbolic order "as such" is
the very condition of historicity?
Reaching the End Of the World
Of course, the idea of the hero living in a totally manipulated and
controlled artificial universe is hardly original: The Matrix just
radicalizes it by bringing in virtual reality. The point here is the
radical ambiguity of the VR with regard to the problematic of
iconoclasm. On the one hand, VR marks the radical reduction of the
wealth of our sensory experience to - not even letters, but - the
minimal digital series of 0 and 1, of passing and non-passing of the
electrical signal. On the other hand, this very digital machine
generates the "simulated" experience of reality which tends to become
indiscernable from the "real" reality, with the consequence of
undermining the very notion of "real" reality - VR is thus at the same
time the most radical assertion of the seductive power of images.
Is not the ultimate American paranoiac fantasy that of an individual
living in a small idyllic Californian city, a consummerist paradise,
who suddenly starts to suspect that the world he lives in is a fake, a
spectatle staged to convince him that he lives in a real world, while
all people around him are effectively actors and extras in a gigantic
show? The most recent example of this is Peter Weir's The Truman Show
(1998), with Jim Carrey playing the small town clerk who gradually
discovers the truth that he is the hero of a 24-hours permanent TV
show: his hometown is constructed on a a gigantic studio set, with
cameras following him permanently. Sloterdijk's "sphere" is here
literally realized, as the gigantic metal sphere that envelopes and
isolates the entire city. This final shot of The Truman Show may seem
to enact the liberating experience of breaking out from the ideological
suture of the enclosed universe into its outside, invisible from the
ideological inside. However, what if it is precisely this "happy"
denouement of the film (let us not forget: applauded by the millions
around the world watching the last minutes of the show), with the hero
breaking out and, as we are led to believe, soon to join his true love
(so that we have again the formula of the production of the couple!),
that is ideology at its purest? What if ideology resides in the very
belief that, outside the closure of the finite universe, there is some
"true reality" to be entered?(2)
Among the predecessors of this notion, it is worth mentioning Phillip
Dick's Time Out of Joint (1959), in which a hero living a modest daily
life in a small idyllic Californian city of the late 50s, gradually
discovers that the whole town is a fake staged to keep him satisfied...
The underlying experience of Time Out of Joint and of The Truman Show
is that the late capitalist consummerist Californian paradise is, in
its very hyper-reality, in a way irreal, substanceless, deprived of the
material inertia. So it is not only that Hollywood stages a semblance
of real life deprived of the weight and inertia of materiality - in the
late capitalist consummerist society, "real social life" itself somehow
acquires the features of a staged fake, with our neighbors behaving in
"real" life as stage actors and extras... The ultimte truth of the
capitalist utilitarian de-spiritualized universe is the
de-materialization of the "real life" itself, its reversal into a
spectral show.
In the realm of science-fiction, one should mention also Brian Aldiss'
Starship, in which members of a tribe leave in a closed world of a
tunnel in a giant starship, isolated from the rest of the ship by thick
vegetation, unaware that there is a universe beyond; finally, some
children penetrate the bushes and reach the world beyond, populated by
other tribes. Among the older, more "naive" forerunners, one should
mention George Seaton's 36 Hours, the film from the early 60ies about
an American officer (James Garner) who knows all the plans for the D
Day invasion of Normandy and is accidentally taken prisoner by Gernans
just days before the invasion. Since he is taken prisoner unconscious,
in a blast of explosion, the Germans quickly construct for him a
replica of small American military hospital resort, trying to convince
him that he now lives in 1950, that America won the war and that he has
lost memory for the last 6 years - the idea being that he would tell
all about the invasion plans for the Germans to prepare themselves; of
course, cracks soon appear in this carefully constructed edifice...
(Did not Lenin himself, in the last 2 years of his life, lived in an
almost similar controlled environment, in which, as we now know, Stalin
had printed hor him a specially prepared one copy of Pravda, censored
of all news that would tell Lenin about the political struggles going
on, with the justification that Comrade Lenin should take a rest and
not be excited by unnecessary provocations.)
What lurks in the background is, of course, the pre-modern notion of
"arriving at the end of the universe": in the well-known engravings,
the surprised wanderers approach the screen/curtain of heaven, a flat
surfaced with painted stars on it, pierce it and reach beyond - it is
exactly this that happens at the end of The Truman Show. No wonder that
the last scene of the film, when Truman steps up the stairs attached to
the wall on which the "blue sky" horizon is painted and opens up there
the door, has a distinct Magrittean touch: is it not that, today, this
same sensitivity is returning with a vengeance? Do works like
Syberberg's Parsifal, in which the infinite horizon is also blocked by
the obviously "artificial" rear-projections, not signal that the time
of the Cartesian infinite perspective is running out, and that we are
returning to a kind of renewed medieval pre-perspective universe? Fred
Jameson perspicuously drew attention to the same phenomenon in some of
the Raymond Chandler's novels and Hitchcock's films: the shore of the
Pacific ocean in Farewell, My Lovely functions as a kind of "end/limit
of the world," beyond which there is an unknown abyss; and it is
similar with the vast open valley that stretches out in front of the
Mount Rashmore heads when, on the run from their pursuers, Eva-Marie
Saint and Cary Grant reach the peak of the monument, and into which
Eva-Marie Saint almost falls, before being pulled up by Cary Grant; and
one is tempted to add to this series the famous battle scene at a
bridge on the Vietnamese/Cambodgian frontier in Apocalypse Now, where
the space beyond the bridge is experienced as the "beyond of our known
universe." And how not to recall that the idea that our Earth is not
the planet floating in the infinite space, but a circular opening,
hole, within the endless compact mass of eternal ice, with the sun in
its center, was one of the favorite Nazi pseudo-scientific fantasies
(according to some reports, they even considered putting some
telescopes on the Sylt islands in order to observe America)?
The "Really Existing" Big Other
What, then, is the Matrix? Simply the Lacanian "big Other," the virtual
symbolic order, the network that structures reality for us. This
dimension of the "big Other" is that of the constitutive alienation of
the subject in the symbolic order: the big Other pulls the strings, the
subject doesn't speak, he "is spoken" by the symbolic structure. In
short, this "big Other" is the name for the social Substance, for all
that on account of which the subject never fully dominates the effects
of his acts, i.e. on account of which the final outcome of his activity
is always something else with regard to what he aimed at or
anticipated. However, it is here crucial to note that, in the key
chapters of Seminar XI, Lacan struggles to delineate the operation that
follows alienation and is in a sense its counterpoint, that of
separation: alienation IN the big Other is followed by the separation
FROM the big Other. Separation takes place when the subject takes note
of how the big Other is in itself inconsistent, purely virtual,
"barred," deprived of the Thing - and fantasy is an attempt to fill out
this lack of the Other, not of the subject, i.e. to (re)constitute the
consistency of the big Other. For that reason, fantasy and paranoia are
inherently linked: paranoia is at its most elementary a belief into an
"Other of the Other", into another Other who, hidden behind the Other
of the explicit social texture, programs (what appears to us as) the
unforeseen effects of social life and thus guarantees its consistency:
beneath the chaos of market, the degradation of morals, etc., there is
the purposeful strategy of the Jewish plot... This paranoiac stance
acquired a further boost with today's digitalization of our daily
lives: when our entire (social) existence is progressively
externalized-materialized in the big Other of the computer network, it
is easy to imagine an evil programmer erasing our digital identity and
thus depriving us of our social existence, turning us into non-persons.
Following the same paranoiac twist, the thesis of The Matrix is that
this big Other is externalized in the really existing Mega-Computer.
There is - there HAS to be - a Matrix because "things are not right,
opportunities are missed, something goes wrong all the time," i.e. the
film's idea is that it is so because there is the Matrix that
obfuscates the "true" reality that is behind it all. Consequently, the
problem with the film is that it is NOT "crazy" enough, because it
supposes another "real" reality behind our everyday reality sustained
by the Matrix. However, to avoid the fatal misunderstanding: the
inverse notion that "all there is is generated by the Matrix," that
there is NO ultimate reality, just the infinite series of virtual
realities mirroring themselves in each other, is no less ideological.
(In the sequels to The Matrix, we shall probably learn that the very
"desert of the real" is generated by (another) matrix.) Much more
subversive than this multiplication of virtual universes would have
been the multiplication of realities themselves - something that would
reproduce the paradoxical danger that some physicians see in recent
high accelerator experiments. As is well known, scientist are now
trying to construct the accelerator capable of smashing together the
nuclei of very heavy atoms at nearly the speed of light. The idea is
that such a collision will not only shatter the atom's nuclei into
their constituent protons and neutrons, but will pulverize the protons
and neutrons themselves, leaving a "plasma," a kind of energy soup
consisting of loose quark and gluon particles, the building blocks of
matter that have never before been studied in such a state, since such
a state only existed briefly after the Big Bang. However, this prospect
has given rise to a nightmarish scenario: what if the success of this
experiment will create a doomsday machine, a kind of world-devouring
monster that will with inexorable necessity annihilate the ordinary
matter around itself and thus abolish the world as we know it? The
irony of it is that this end of the world, the disintegration of the
universe, would be the ultimate irrefutable proof that the tested
theory is true, since it would suck all matter into a black hole and
then bring about a new universe, i.e. perfectly recreate the Big Bang
scenario.
The paradox is thus that both versions - (1) a subject freely floating
from one to another VR, a pure ghost aware that every reality is a
fake; (2) the paranoiac supposition of the real reality beneath the
Matrix - are false: they both miss the Real. The film is not wrong in
insisting that there IS a Real beneath the Virtual Reality simulation -
as Morpheus puts to Neo when he shows him the ruined Chicago landscape:
"Welcome to the desert of the real." However, the Real is not the "true
reality" behind the virtual simulation, but the void which makes
reality incomplete/inconsistent, and the function of every symbolic
Matrix is to conceal this inconsistency - one of the ways to effectuate
this concealment is precisely to claim that, behind the
incomplete/inconsistent reality we know, there is another reality with
no deadlock of impossibility structuring it.
"The big Other doesn't exist"
"Big Other" also stands for the field of common sense at which one can
arrive after free deliberation; philosophically, its last great version
is Habermas's communicative community with its regulative ideal of
agreement. And it is this "big Other" that progressively disintegrates
today. What we have today is a certain radical split: on the one hand,
the objectivized language of experts and scientists which can no longer
be translated into the common language accessible to everyone, but is
present in it in the mode of fetishized formulas that no one really
understands, but which shape our artistic and popular imaginary (Black
Hole, Big Bang, Superstrings, Quantum Oscillation...). Not only in
natural sciences, but also in economy and other social sciences, the
expert jargon is presented as an objective insight with which one
cannot really argue, and which is simultaneously untranslatable into
our common experience. In short, the gap between scientific insight and
common sense is unbridgeable, and it is this very gap which elevates
scientists into the popular cult-figures of the "subjects supposed to
know" (the Stephen Hawking phenomenon). The strict obverse of this
objectivity is the way in which, in the cultural matters, we are
confronted with the multitude of life-styles which one cannot translate
into each other: all we can do is secure the conditions for their
tolerant coexistence in a multicultural society. The icon of today's
subject is perhaps the Indian computer programmer who, during the day,
excels in his expertise, while in the evening, upon returning home, he
lits the candle to the local Hindu divinity and respects the sacredness
of the cow. This split is perfectly rendered in the phenomenon of
cyberspace. Cyberspace was supposed to bring us all together in a
Global Village; however, what effectively happens is that we are
bombarded with the multitude of messages belonging to inconsistent and
incompatible universes - instead of the Global Village, the big Other,
we get the multitude of "small others," of tribal particular
identifications at our choice. To avoid a misunderstanding: Lacan is
here far from relativizing science into just one of the arbitrary
narratives, ultimately on equal footing with Politically Correct myths,
etc.: science DOES "touch the Real," its knowledge IS "knowledge in the
Real" - the deadlock resides simply in the fact that scientific
knowledge cannot serve as the SYMBOLIC "big Other." The gap between
modern science and the Aristotelian common sense philosophical ontology
is here insurmountable: it emerges already with Galileo, and is brought
to extreme in quantum physics, where we are dealing with the rules/laws
which function, although they cannot ever be retranslated into our
experience of representable reality.
The theory of risk society and its global reflexivization is right in
its emphasis one how, today, we are at the opposite end if the
classical Enlightenment universalist ideology which presupposed that,
in the long run, the fundamental questions can be resolved by way of
the reference to the "objective knowledge" of the experts: when we are
confronted with the conflicting opinions about the environmental
consequences of a certain new product (say, of genetically modified
vegetables), we search in vain for the ultimate expert opinion. And the
point is not simply that the real issues are blurred because science is
corrupted through financial dependence on large corporations and state
agencies - even in themselves, sciences cannot provide the answer.
Ecologists predicted 15 years ago the death of our forrests - the
problem is now a too large increasee of wood... Where this theory of
risk society is too short is in emphasizing the irrational predicament
into which this puts us, common subjects: we are again and again
compelled to decide, although we are well aware that we are in no
position to decide, that our decision will be arbitrary. Ulrich Beck
and his followers refer here to the democratic discussion of all
options and consensus-building; however, this does not resolve the
immobilizing dilemma: why should the democratic discussion in which the
majority participates lead to better result, when, cognitively, the
ignorance of the majority remains. The political frustration of the
majority is thus understandable: they are called to decide, while, at
the same time, receiving the message that they are in no position
effectively to decide, i.e. to objectively weigh the pros and cons. The
recourse to "conspiracy theories" is a desperate way out of this
deadlock, an attempt to regain a minimum of what Fred Jameson calls
"cognitive mapping."
Jodi Dean(3) drew attention to a curious phenomenon clearly observable
in the "dialogue of the mutes" between the official ("serious,"
academically institutionalized) science and the vast domain of
so-called pseudo-sciences, from ufology to those who want to decipher
the secrets of the pyramids: one cannot but be struck by how it is the
oficial scientists who proceed in a dogmatic dismissive way, while the
pseudo-scientists refer to facts and argumentation deprived of the
common prejudices. Of course, the answer will be here that established
scientists speak with the authority of the big Other of the scientific
Institution; but the problem is that, precisely, this scientific big
Other is again and again revealed as a consensual symbolic fiction. So
when we are confronted with conspiracy theories, we should proceed in a
strict homology to the proper reading of Henry James' The Turn of the
Screw: we should neither accept the existence of ghosts as part of the
(narrative) reality nor reduce them, in a pseudo-Freudian way, to the
"projection" of the heroine's hysterical sexual frustrations.
Conspiracy theories, of course, are not to be accepted as "fact" -
however, one should also not reduce them to the phenomenon of modern
mass hysteria. Such a notion still relies on the "big Other," on the
model of "normal" perception of shared social reality, and thus does
not take into account how it is precisely this notion of reality that
is undermined today. The problem is not that ufologists and conspiracy
theorists regress to a paranoiac attitude unable to accept (social)
reality; the problem is that this reality itself is becoming paranoiac.
Contemporary experience again and again confronts us with situations in
which we are compelled to take note of how our sense of reality and
normal attitude towards it is grounded in a symbolic fiction, i.e. how
the "big Other" that determines what counts as normal and accepted
truth, what is the horizon of meaning in a given society, is in no way
directly grounded in "facts" as rendered by the scientific "knowledge
in the real." Let us take a traditional society in which modern science
is not yet elevated into the Master-discourse: if, in its symbolic
space, an individual advocates propositions of modern science, he will
be dismissed as "madman" - and the key point is that it is not enough
to say that he is not "really mad," that it is merely the narrow
ignorant society which puts him in this position - in a certain way,
being treated as a madman, being excluded from the social big Other,
effectively EQUALS being mad. "Madness" is not the designation which
can be grounded in a direct reference to "facts" (in the sense that a
madman is unable to perceive things the way they really are, since he
is caught in his hallucinatory projections), but only with regard to
the way an individual relates to the "big Other." Lacan usually
emphasizes the opposite aspect of this paradox: "the madman is not only
a beggar who thinks he is a king, but also a king who thinks he is a
king," i.e. madness designates the collapse of the distance between the
Symbolic and the Real, an immediate identification with the symbolic
mandate; or, to take his other exemplary statement, when a husband is
pathologically jealous, obsessed by the idea that his wife sleeps with
other men, his obsession remains a pathological feature even if it is
proven that he is right and that his wife effectively sleeps with other
men. The lesson of such paradoxes is clear: pathological jealously is
not a matters of getting the facts false, but of the way these facts
are integrated into the subject's libidinal economy. However, what one
should assert here is that the same paradox should also be performed as
it were in the opposite direction: the society (its socio-symbolic
field, the big Other) is "sane" and "normal" even when it is proven
factually wrong. (Maybe, it was in this sense that the late Lacan
designated himself as "psychotic": he effectively was psychotic insofar
as it was not possible to integrate his discourse into the field of the
big Other.)
One is tempted to claim, in the Kantian mode, that the mistake of the
conspiracy theory is somehow homologous to the "paralogism of the pure
reason," to the confusion between the two levels: the suspicion (of the
received scientific, social, etc. common sense) as the formal
methodological stance, and the positivation of this suspicion in
another all-explaining global para-theory.
Screening the Real
>From another standpoint, the Matrix also functions as the "screen" that
separates us from the Real, that makes the "desert of the real"
bearable. However, it is here that we should not forget the radical
ambiguity of the Lacanian Real: it is not the ultimate referent to be
covered/gentrified/domesticated by the screen of fantasy - the Real is
also and primarily the screen itself as the obstacle that
always-already distorts our perception of the referent, of the reality
out there. In philosophical terms, therein resides the difference
between Kant and Hegel: for Kant, the Real is the noumenal domain that
we perceive "schematized" through the screen of transcendental
categories; for Hegel, on the contrary, as he asserts exemplarily in
the Introduction to his Phenomenology, this Kantian gap is false. Hegel
introduces here THREE terms: when a screen intervenes between ourselves
and the Real, it always generates a notion of what is In-itself, beyond
the screen (of the appearance), so that the gap between appearance and
the In-itself is always-already "for us." Consequently, if we subtract
from the Thing the distortion of the Screen, we loose the Thing itself
(in religious terms, the death of Christ is the death of the God in
himself, not only of his human embodiment) - which is why, for Lacan,
who follows here Hegel, the Thing in itself is ultimately the gaze, not
the perceived object. So, back to the Matrix: the Matrix itself is the
Real that distorts our perception of reality.
A reference to Levi-Strauss's exemplary analysis, from his Structural
Anthropology, of the spatial disposition of buildings in the Winnebago,
one of the Great Lake tribes, might be of some help here. The tribe is
divided into two sub-groups ("moieties"), "those who are from above"
and "those who are from below"; when we ask an individual to draw on a
piece of paper, or on sand, the ground-plan of his/her village (the
spatial disposition of cottages), we obtain two quite different
answers, depending on his/her belonging to one or the other sub-group.
Both perceive the village as a circle; but for one sub-group, there is
within this circle another circle of central houses, so that we have
two concentric circles, while for the other sub-group, the circle is
split into two by a clear dividing line. In other words, a member of
the first sub-group (let us call it "conservative-corporatist")
perceives the ground-plan of the village as a ring of houses more or
less symmetrically disposed around the central temple, whereas a member
of the second ("revolutionary-antagonistic") sub-group perceives
his/her village as two distinct heaps of houses separated by an
invisible frontier...(4) The central point of Levi-Strauss is that this
example should in no way entice us into cultural relativism, according
to which the perception of social space depends on the observer's
group-belonging: the very splitting into the two "relative" perceptions
implies a hidden reference to a constant - not the objective, "actual"
disposition of buildings but a traumatic kernel, a fundamental
antagonism the inhabitants of the village were unable to symbolize, to
account for, to "internalize", to come to terms with, an imbalance in
social relations that prevented the community from stabilizing itself
into a harmonious whole. The two perceptions of the ground-plan are
simply two mutually exclusive endeavours to cope with this traumatic
antagonism, to heal its wound via the imposition of a balanced symbolic
structure. Is it necessary to add that things stand exactly the same
with respect to sexual difference: "masculine" and "feminine" are like
the two configurations of houses in the Levi-Straussian village? And in
order to dispel the illusion that our "developed" universe is not
dominated by the same logic, suffice it to recall the splitting of our
political space into Left and Right: a Leftist and a Rightist behave
exactly like members of the opposite sub-groups of the Levi-Straussian
village. They not only occupy different places within the political
space; each of them perceives differently the very disposition of the
political space - a Leftist as the field that is inherently split by
some fundamental antagonism, a Rightist as the organic unity of a
Community disturbed only by foreign intruders.
However, Levi-Strauss make here a further crucial point: since the two
sub-groups nonetheless form one and the same tribe, living in the same
village, this identity somehow has to be symbolically inscribed - how,
if the entire symbolic articulation, all social institutions, of the
tribe are not neutral, but are overdetermined by the fundamental and
constitutive antagonistic split? By what Levi-Strauss ingeniously calls
the "zero-institution," a kind of institutional counterpart to the
famous mana, the empty signifier with no determinate meaning, since it
signifies only the presence of meaning as such, in opposition to its
absence: a specific institution which has no positive, determinate
function - its only function is the purely negative one of signalling
the presence and actuality of social institution as such, in opposition
to its absence, to pre-social chaos. It is the reference to such a
zero-institution that enables all members of the tribe to experience
themselves as such, as members of the same tribe. Is, then, this
zero-institution not ideology at its purest, i.e. the direct embodiment
of the ideological function of providing a neutral all-encompassing
space in which social antagonism is obliterated, in which all members
of society can recognize themselves? And is the struggle for hegemony
not precisely the struggle for how will this zero-institution be
overdetermined, colored by some particular signification? To provide a
concrete example: is not the modern notion of nation such a
zero-institution that emerged with the dissolution of social links
grounded in direct family or traditional symbolic matrixes, i.e. when,
with the onslaught of modernization, social institutions were less and
less grounded in naturalized tradition and more and more experienced as
a matter of "contract."(5) Of special importance is here the fact that
national identity is experienced as at least minimally "natural," as a
belonging grounded in "blood and soil," and as such opposed to the
"artificial" belonging to social institutions proper (state,
profession...): pre-modern institutions functioned as "naturalized"
symbolic entities (as institutions grounded in unquestionable
traditions), and the moment institutions were conceived as social
artefacts, the need arose for a "naturalized" zero-institution that
would serve as their neutral common ground.
And, back to sexual difference, I am tempted to risk the hypothesis
that, perhaps, the same logic of zero-institution should be applied not
only to the unity of a society, but also to its antagonistic split:
what if sexual difference is ultimately a kind of zero-institution of
the social split of the humankind, the naturalized minimal
zero-difference, a split that, prior to signalling any determinate
social difference, signals this difference as such? The struggle for
hegemony is then, again, the struggle for how this zero-difference will
be overdetermined by other particular social differences. It is against
this background that one should read an important, although usually
overlooked, feature of Lacan's schema of the signifier: Lacan replaces
the standard Saussurean scheme (above the bar the word "arbre," and
beneath it the drawing of a tree) with, above the bar, two words one
along the other, "homme" and "femme," and, beneath the bar, two
identical drawings of a door. In order to emphasize the differential
character of the signifier, Lacan first replaces Saussure's single
scheme with a signifier's couple, with the opposition man/woman, with
the sexual difference; but the true surprise resides in the fact that,
at the level of the imaginary referent, THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE (we do
not get some graphic index of the sexual difference, the simplified
drawing of a man and a woman, as is usually the case in most of today's
restrooms, but THE SAME door reproduced twice). Is it possible to state
in clearer terms that sexual difference does not designate any
biological opposition grounded in "real" properties, but a purely
symbolic opposition to which nothing corresponds in the designated
objects - nothing but the Real of some undefined X which cannot ever be
captured by the image of the signified?
Back to Levi-Strauss's example of the two drawings of the village: it
is here that one can see it what precise sense the Real intervenes
through anamorphosis. We have first the "actual," "objective,"
arrangement of the houses, and then its two different symbolizations
which both distort in an amamorphic way the actual arrangement.
However, the "real" is here not the actual arrangement, but the
traumatic core of the social antagonism which distorts the tribe
members' view of the actual antagonism. The Real is thus the disavowed
X on account of which our vision of reality is anamorphically
distorted. (And, incidentally, this three-levels dispositif is strictly
homologous to Freud's three-levels dispositif of the interpretation of
dreams: the real kernel of the dream is not the dream's latent thought
which is displaced/translated into the explicit texture of the dream,
but the unconscious desire which inscribes itself through the very
distortion of the latent thought into the explicit texture.)
And the same goes for today's art scene: in it, the Real does NOT
return primarily in the guise of the shocking brutal intrusion of
excremental objects, mutilated corpses, shit, etc. These objects are,
for sure, out of place - but in order for them to be out of place, the
(empty) place must already be here, and this place is rendered by the
"minimalist" art, starting from Malevitch. Therein resides the
complicity between the two opposed icons of high modernism, Kazimir
Malevitch's "The Black Square on the White Surface" and Marcel
Duchamp's display of ready-made objects as works of art. The underlying
notion of Malevitch's elevation of an everyday common object into the
work of art is that being a work of art is not an inherent property of
the object; it is the artist himself who, by preempting the (or,
rather, ANY) object and locating it at a certain place, makes it the
work of art - being a work of art is not a question of "why," but
"where." And what Malevitch's minimalist disposition does is simply to
render - to isolate - this place as such, the empty place (or frame)
with the proto-magic property of transforming any object that finds
itself within its scope into the work of art. In short, there is no
Duchamp without Malevitch: only after the art practice isolates the
frame/place as such, emptied of all its content, can one indulge in the
ready-made procedure. Before Malevitch, a urinal would have remained
just a urinal, even if it were to be displayed in the most
distinguished gallery.
The emergence of excremental objects which are out of place is thus
strictly correlative to the emergence of the place without any object
in it, of the empty frame as such. Consequently, the Real in
contemporary art has three dimensions, which somehow repeat within the
Real the triad of Imaginary-Symbolic-Real. The Real is first here as
the anamorphotic stain, the anamorphotic distortion of the direct image
of reality - as a distorted image, as a pure semblance that
"subjectivizes" objective reality. Then, the Real is here as the empty
place, as a structure, a construction which is never here, experiences
as such, but can only be retroactively constructed and has to be
presupposed as such - the Real as symbolic construction. Finally, the
Real is the obscene excremental Object out of place, the Real "itself."
This last Real, if isolated, is a mere fetish whose
fascinating/captivating presence masks the structural Real, in the same
way that, in the Nazi anti-Semitism, Jew as the excremental Object is
the Real that masks the unbearable "structural" Real of the social
antagonism. - These three dimensions of the Real result from the three
modes to acquire a distance towards "ordinary" reality: one submits
this reality to anamorphic distortion; one introduces an object that
has no place in it; one subtracts/erases all content (objects) of
reality, so that all that remains is the very empty place these objects
were filling in.
The Freudian Touch
The falsity of The Matrix is perhaps most directly discernible in its
designation of Neo as "the One." Who is the One? There effectively is
such a place in the social link. There is, first, the One of the
Master-Signifier, the symbolic authority. Even in the social life in
its most horrifying form, the memories of concentration camp survivors
invariably mention the One, an individual who did not break down, who,
in the midst of the unbearable conditions which reduced all others to
the egotistic struggle for bare survival, miraculously maintained and
radiated an "irrational" generosity and dignity - in Lacanian terms, we
are dealing here with the function of Y'a de l'Un: even here, there was
the One who served as the support of the minimum of solidarity that
defines the social link proper as opposed to the collaboration within
the frame of the pure strategy of survival. Two features are crucial
here: first, this individual was always perceived as one (there was
never a multitude of them, as if, following some obscure necessity,
this excess of the inexplicable miracle of solidarity has to be
embodied in a One); secondly, it was not so much what this One
effectively did for the others which mattered, but rather his very
presence among them (what enabled the others to survive was the
awareness that, even if they are for most of the time reduced to the
survival-machines, there is the One who maintained human dignity). In a
way homologous to the canned laughter, we have here something like the
canned dignity, where the Other (the One) retains my dignity for me, at
my place, or, more precisely, where I retain my dignity THROUGH the
Other: I may be reduced to the cruel struggle for survival, but the
very awareness that there is One who retains his dignity enables ME to
maintain the minimal link to humanity. Often, when this One broke down
or was unmasked as a fake, the other prisoners lost their will to
survive and turned into indifferent living dead - paradoxically, their
very readiness to struggle for the bare survival was sustained by its
exception, by the fact that there was the One NOT reduced to this
level, so that, when this exception disappeared, the struggle fore
survival itself lost its force. What this means, of course, is that
this One was not defined exclusively by his "real" qualities (at this
level, there may well have been more individuals like him, or it may
even have been that he was not really unbroken, but a fake, just
playing that role): his exceptional role was rather that of
transference, i.e. he occupied a place constructed (presupposed) by the
others.
In The Matrix, on the contrary, the One is he who is able to see that
our everyday reality is not real, but just a codified virtual universe,
and who therefore is able to unplug from it, to manipulate and suspend
its rules (fly in the air, stop the bullets...). Crucial for the
function of THIS One is his virtualization of reality: reality is an
artificial construct whose rules can be suspended or at least rewritten
- therein resides the properly paranoiac notion that the One can
suspend the resistance of the Real ("I can walk through a thick wall,
if I really decide it...", i.e. the impossibility for the most of us to
do this is reduced to the failure of the subject's will). However, it
is here that, again, the film does not go far enough: in the memorable
scene in the waiting room of the prophetess who will decide if Neo is
the One, a child who is seen twisting a spoon with his mere thoughts
tells the surprised Neo that the way to do it is not point is not to
convince myself that I can twist the spoon, but to convince myself that
THERE IS NO SPOON... However, what about MYSELF? Is it not that the
further step should have been to accept the Buddhist proposition that I
MYSELF, the subject, do not exist?
In order to further specify what is false in The Matrix, one should
distinguish simple technological impossibility from fantasmatic
falsity: time-travel is (probably) impossible, but fantasmatic
scenarios about it are nonetheless "true" in the way they render
libidinal deadlocks. Consequently, the problem with Matrix is not the
scientific naivety of its tricks: the idea of passing from reality to
VR through the phone makes sense, since all we need is a gap/hole
through which one can escape. (Perhaps, an even better solution would
have been the toilet: is not the domain where excrements vanish after
we flush the toilet effectively one of the metaphors for the
horrifyingly-sublime Beyond of the primordial, pre-ontological Chaos
into which things disappear? Although we rationally know what goes on
with the excrements, the imaginary mystery nonetheless persists - shit
remains an excess with does not fit our daily reality, and Lacan was
right in claiming that we pass from animals to humans the moment an
animal has problems with what to do with its excrements, the moment
they turn into an excess that annoys it. The Real is thus not primarily
the horrifyingly-disgusting stuff reemerging from the toilet sink, but
rather the hole itself, the gap which serves as the passage to a
different ontological order - the topological hole or torsion which
"curves" the space of our reality so that we perceive/imagine
excrements as disappearing into an alternative dimension which is not
part of our everyday reality.) The problem is a more radical
fantasmatic inconsistency, which erupts most explicitly when Morpheus
(the African-American leader of the resistance group who believe that
Neo is the One) tries to explain to the still perplexed Neo what the
Matrix is - he quite consequently links it to a failure in the
structure of the universe:
"It's that feeling you have had all your life. That feeling that
something was wrong with the world. You don't know what it is but it's
there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. /.../ The Matrix
is everywhere, it's all around us, here even in this room. /.../ It is
the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the
truth. NEO: What truth? MORPHEUS: That you are a slave, Neo. That you,
like everyone else, was born into bondage ... kept inside a prison that
you cannot smell, taste, or touch. A prison of your mind."
Here the film encounters its ultimate inconsistency: the experience of
the lack/inconsistency/obstacle is supposed to bear witness of the fact
that what we experience as reality is a fake - however, towards the end
of the film, Smith, the agent of the Matrix, gives a different, much
more Freudian explanation:
"Did you know hat the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human
world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy? It was a
disaster. NO one would accept the program. Entire crops /of the humans
serving as batteries/ were lost. Some believed we lacked the
programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe
that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering
and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum
kept trying to wake up from.Which is why the Matrix was re-designed to
this: the peak of your civilization."
The imperfection of our world is thus at the same time the sign of its
virtuality AND the sign of its reality. One could effectively claim
that the agent Smith (let us not forget: not a human being as others,
but the direct virtual embodiment of the Matrix - the big Other -
itself) is the stand-in for the figure of the analyst within the
universe of the film: his lesson is that the experience of an
insurmountable obstacle is the positive condition for us, humans, to
perceive something as reality - reality is ultimately that which
resists.
Malebranche in Hollywood
The further inconsistency concerns death: WHY does one "really" die
when one dies only in the VR regulated by the Matrix? The film provides
the obscurantist answer: "NEO: If you are killed in the Matrix, you die
here /i.e. not only in the VR, but also in real life/? MORPHEUS: The
body cannot live without the mind." The logic of this solution is that
your "real" body can only stay alive (function) in conjunction to the
mind, i.e. to the mental universe into which you are immersed: so if
you are in a VR and killed there, this death affects also your real
body... The obvious opposite solution (you only really die when you are
killed in reality) is also too short. The catch is: is the subject
WHOLLY immersed into the Matrix-dominated VR or does he know or at
least SUSPECT the actual state of things? If the answer is YES, then a
simple withdrawal into prelapsarian Adamic state of distance would
render us immortal IN THE VR and, consequently, Neo who is already
liberated from the full immersion in the VR shouls SURVIVE the struggle
with the agent Smith which takes place WITHIN the VR controlled by the
Matrix (in the same way he is able to stopbullets, he should also have
been able to derealize blows that wound his body). This brings us back
to Malebranche's occasionalism: much more than Berkeley's God who
sustains the world in his mind, the ULTIMATE Matrix is Malebranche's
occasionalist God.
Malebranche's "occasionalism" undoubtedly was the philosopher who
provided the best conceptual apparatus to account for Virtual Reality.
Malebranche, a disciple of Descartes, drops Descartes's ridiculous
reference to the pineal gland in order to explain the coordination
between the material and the spiritual substance, i.e. body and soul;
how, then, are we to explain their coordination, if there is no contact
between the two, no point at which a soul can act causally on a body or
vice versa? Since the two causal networks (that of ideas in my mind and
that of bodily interconections) are totally independent, the only
solution is that a third, true Substance (God) continuously coordinates
and mediates between the two, sustaining the semblance of continuity:
when I think about raising my hand and my hand effectively raises, my
thought causes the raising of my hand not directly but only
"occasionally" - upon noticing my thought directed at raising my hand,
God sets in motion the other, material, causal chain which leads to my
hand effectively being raised. If we replace "God" with the big Other,
the symbolic order, we can see the closeness of occasionalism to
Lacan's position: as Lacan put it in his polemics against Aristoteles
in Television(6), the relationship between soul and body is never
direct, since the big Other always interposes itself between the two.
Occasionalism is thus essentially a name for the "arbitrary of the
signifier", for the gap that separates the network of ideas from the
network of bodily (real) causality, for the fact that it is the big
Other which accounts for the coordination of the two networks, so that,
when my body bites an apple, my soul experiences a pleasurable
sensation. This same gap is targeted by the ancient Aztec priest who
organizes human sacrifices to ensure that the sun will rise again: the
human sacrifice is here an appeal to God to sustain the coordination
between the two series, the bodily necessity and the concatenation of
symbolic events. "Irrational" as the Aztec priest's sacrificing may
appear, its underlying premise is far more insightful than our
commonplace intuition according to which the coordination between body
and soul is direct, i.e. it is "natural" for me to have a pleasurable
sensation when I bite an apple since this sensation is caused directly
by the apple: what gets lost is the intermediary role of the big Other
in guaranteeing the coordination between reality and our mental
experience of it. And is it not the same with our immersion into
Virtual Reality? When I raise my hand in order to push an object in the
virtual space, this object effectively moves - my illusion, of course,
is that it was the movement of my hand which directly caused the
dislocation of the object, i.e. in my immersion, I overlook the
intricate mechanism of computerized coordination, homologous to the
role of God guaranteeing the coordination between the two series in
occasionalism.(7)
It is a well-known fact that the "Close the door" button in most
elevators is a totally disfunctional placebo, which is placed there
just to give the individuals the impression that they are somehow
participating, contributing to the speed of the elevator journey - when
we push this button, the door closes in exactly the same time as when
we just pressed the floor button without "speeding up" the process by
pressing also the "Close the door" button. This extreme and clear case
of fake participation is an appropriate metaphor of the participation
of individuals in our "postmodern" political process. And this is
occasionalism at its purest: according to Malebranche, we are all the
time pressing such buttons, and it is God's incessant activity that
coordinates between them and the event that follows (the door closing),
while we think the event results from our pushing the button...
For that reason, it is crucial to maintain open the radical ambiguity
of how cyberspace will affect our lives: this does not depend on
technology as such but on the mode of its social inscription. Immersion
into cyberspace can intensify our bodily experience (new sensuality,
new body with more organs, new sexes...), but it also opens up the
possibility for the one who manipulates the machinery which runs the
cyberspace literally to steal our own (virtual) body, depriving us of
the control over it, so that one no longer relates to one's body as to
"one's own". What one encounters here is the constitutive ambiguity of
the notion of mediatization(8): originally this notion designated the
gesture by means of which a a subject was stripped of its direct,
immediate right to make decisions; the great master of political
mediatization was Napoleon who left to the conquered monarchs the
appearance of power, while they were effectively no longer in a
position to exercise it. At a more general level, one could say that
such a "mediatization" of the monarch defines the constitutional
monarchy: in it, the monarch is reduced to the point of a purely formal
symbolic gesture of "dotting the i's", of signing and thus conferring
the performative force on the edicts whose content is determined by the
elected governing body. And does not, mutatis mutandis, the same not
hold also for today's progressiver computerization of our everyday
lives in the course of which the subject is also more and more
"mediatised", imperceptibly stripped of his power, under the false
guise of its increase? When our body is mediatized (caught in the
network of electronic media), it is simultaneously exposed to the
threat of a radical "proletarization": the subject is potentially
reduced to the pure $, since even my own personal experience can be
stolen, manipulated, regulated by the machinical Other. One can see,
again, how the prospect of radical virtualization bestows on the
computer the position which is strictly homologous to that of God in
the Malebrancheian occasionalism: since the computer coordinates the
relationship between my mind and (what I experience as) the movement of
my limbs (in the virtual reality), one can easily imagine a computer
which runs amok and starts to act liker an Evil God, disturbing the
coordination between my mind and my bodily self-experience - when the
signal of my mind to raise my hand is suspended or even counteracted in
(the virtual) reality, the most fundamental experience of the body as
"mine" is undermined... It seems thus that cyberspace effectively
realizes the paranoiac fantasy elaborated by Schreber, the German judge
whose memoirs were analyzed by Freud(9): the "wired universe" is
psychotic insofar as it seems to materialize Schreber's hallucination
of the divine rays through which God directly controls the human mind.
In other words, does the externalization of the big Other in the
computer not account for the inherent paranoiac dimension of the wired
universe? Or, to put it in a yet another way: the commonplace is that,
in cyberspace, the ability to download consciousness into a computer
finally frees people from their bodies - but it also frees the machines
from "their" people...
Staging the The Fundamental Fantasy
The final inconsistency concerns the ambiguous status of the liberation
of humanity anounced by Neo in the last scene. As the result of Neo's
intervention, there is a "SYSTEM FAILURE" in the Matrix; at the same
time, Neo addresses people still caught in the Matrix as the Savior who
will teach them how to liberate themselves from the constraints of the
Matrix - they will be able to break the physical laws, bend metals, fly
in the air... However, the problem is that all these "miracles" are
possible only if we remain WITHIN the VR sustained by the Matrix and
merely bend or change its rules: our "real" status is still that of the
slaves of the Matrix, we as it were are merely gaining additional power
to change our mental prison rules - so what about exiting from the
Matrix altogether and entering the "real reality" in which we are
miserable creatures living on the destroyed earth surface?
In an Adornian way, one should claim that these inconsistencies (10)
are the film's moment of truth: they signal the antagonisms of our
late-capitalist social experience, antagonisms concerning basic
ontological couples like reality and pain (reality as that which
disturbs the reign of the pleasure-principle), freedom and system
(freedom is only possible within the system that hinders its full
deployment). However, the ultimate strentgh of the film is nonetheless
to be located at a different level. Years ago, a series of
science-fiction films like Zardoz or Logan's Run forecasted today's
postmodern predicament: the isolated group living an aseptic life in a
secluded area longs for the experience of the real world of material
decay. Till postmodernism, utopia was an endeavour to break out of the
real of historical time into a timeless Otherness. With postmodern
overlapping of the "end of history" with full disponibility of the past
in digitalized memory, in this time where we LIVE the atemporal utopia
as everyday ideological experience, utopia becomes the longing for the
Real of History itself, for memory, for the traces of the real past,
the attempt to break out of the closed dome into smell and decay of the
raw reality. The Matrix gives the final twist to this reversal,
combining utopia with dystopia: the very reality we live in, the
atemporal utopia staged by the Matrix, is in place so that we can be
effectively reduced to a passive state of living batteries providing
the Matrix with the energy.
The unique impact of the film thus resides not so much in its central
thesis (what we experience as reality is an artificial virtual reality
generated by the "Matrix," the mega-computer directly attached to all
our minds), but in its central image of the millions of human beings
leading a claustrophobic life in a water-filled craddles, kept alive in
order to generate the energy (electricity) for the Matrix. So when
(some of the) people "awaken" from their immersion into the
Matrix-controlled virtual reality, this awakening is not the opening
into the wide space of the external reality, but first the horrible
realization of this enclosure, where each of us is effectively just a
foetus-like organism, immersed in the pre-natal fluid... This utter
passivity is the foreclosed fantasy that sustains our conscious
experience as active, self-positing subjects - it is the ultimate
perverse fantasy, the notion that we are ultimately instruments of the
Other's (Matrix's) jouissance, sucked out of our life-substance like
batteries. Therein resides the true libidinal enigma of this
dispositif: WHY does the Matrix need human energy? The purely energetic
solution is, of course, meaningless: the Matrix could have easily found
another, more reliable, source of energy which would have not demanded
the extremely complex arrangement of the virtual reality coordinated
for millions of human units (another inconsusrency is discernible here:
why does the Matrix not immerse each individual into his/her own
solipsistic artificial universe? why complicate matters with
corrdinating the programs so that the entire humanity inhabits one and
the same virtual universe?). The only consistent answer is: the Matrix
feeds on the human's jouissance - so we are here back at the
fundamental Lacanian thesis that the big Other itself, far from being
an anonymous machine, needs the constant influx of jouissance. This is
how we should turn around the state of things presented by the film:
what the film renders as the scene of our awakening into our true
situation, is effectively its exact opposition, the very fundamental
fantasy that sustains our being.
The intimate connection between perversion and cyberspace is today a
commonplace. According to the standard view, the perverse scenario
stages the "disavowal of castration": perversion can be seen as a
defense against the motif of "death and sexuality," against the threat
of mortality as well as the contingent imposition of sexual difference:
what the pervert enacts is a universe in which, as in cartoons, a human
being can survive any catastrophe; in which adult sexuality is reduced
to a childish game; in which one is not forced to die or to choose one
of the two sexes. As such, the pervert's universe is the universe of
pure symbolic order, of the signifier's game running its course,
unencumbered by the Real of human finitude. In a first approach, it may
seem that our experience of cyberspace fits perfectly this universe:
isn't cyberspace also a universe unencumbered by the inertia of the
Real, constrained only by its self-imposed rules? And is not the same
with Virtual Reality in The Matrix? The "reality" in which we live
loses its inexorable character, it becomes a domain of arbitrary rules
(imposed by the Matrix) that one can violate if one's Will is strong
enough... However, according to Lacan, what this standard notion leaves
out of consideration is the unique relationship between the Other and
the jouissance in perversion. What, exactly, does this kean?
In "Le prix du progres," one of the fragments that conclude The
Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer quote the
argumentation of the 19th century French physiologist Pierre Flourens
against medical anaesthesia with chloroform: Flourens claims that it
can be proven that the anaesthetic works only on our memory's neuronal
network. In short, while we are butchered alive on the operating table,
we fully feel the terrible pain, but later, after awakening, we do not
remember it... For Adorno and Horkheimer, this, of course, is the
perfect metaphor of the fate of Reason based on the repression of
nature in itself: his body, the part of nature in the subject, fully
feels the pain, it is only that, due to repression, the subject does
not remember it. Therein resides the perfect revenge of nature for our
domination over it: unknowingly, we are our own greatest victims,
butchering ourselves alive... Isn't it also possible to read this as
the perfect fantasy scenario of inter-passivity, of the Other Scene in
which we pay the price for our active intervention into the world?
There is no active free agent without this fantasmatic support, without
this Other Scene in which he is totally manipulated by the Other.(11) A
sado-masochist willingly assumes this suffering as the access to Being.
Perhaps, it is along these lines that one can also explain the
obsession of Hitler's biographers with his relationship to his niece
Geli Raubal who was found dead in Hitler's Munich appartment in 1931,
as if the alleged Hitler's sexual perversion will provide the "hidden
variable," the intimate missing link, the fantasmatic support that
would account for his public personality - here is this scenario as
reported by Otto Strasser: "/.../ Hitler made her undress /while/ he
would lie down on the floor. Then she would have to squat down over his
face where he could examine her at close range, and this made him very
excited. When the excitement reached its peak, he demanded thatr she
urinate on him, and that gave him his pleasure."(12) Crucial is here
the utter passivity of Hitler's role in this scenario as the
fantasmatic support that pushed him into his frenetically destructive
public political activity - no wonder Geli was desperate and disgusted
at these rituals.
Therein resides the correct insight of The Matrix: in its juxtaposition
of the two aspects of perversion - on the one hand, reduction of
reality to a virtual domain regulated by arbitrary rules that can be
suspended; on the other hand, the concealed truth of this freedom, the
reduction of the subject to an utter instrumentalized passivity.
(1). If one compares the original script (available on the internet)
with the film itself, one can see that the directors (Wachowski
brothers, who also authored the script) were intelligent enough to
throw out too direct pseudo-intellectual references, like the following
exchange: "Look at 'em. Automatons. Don't think about what they're
doing or why. Computer tells 'em what to do and they do it." "The
banality of evil." This pretentious reference to Arendt totally misses
the point: people immersed in the VR of the Matrix are in an entirely
different, almost opposite, position in comparison with the
executioners of the holocaust. Another similar wise move was to drop
the all too obvious references to the Eastern techniques of emptying
your mind as the way to escape the control of the Matrix: "You have to
learn to let go of that anger. You must let go of everything. You must
empty yourself to free your mind."
(2) It is also crucial that what enables the hero of The Truman Show to
see through and exit his manipulated world is the unforeseen
intervention of his father - there are two paternal figures in the
film, the actual symbolic-biological father and the paranoiac "real"
father, he director of the TV-Show who totally manipulates his life and
protects him in the closed environment, played by Ed Harris.
(3) On whom I rely extensively here: see Jodi Dean, Aliens in America.
Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspasce to Cyberspace, Ithaca and London:
Cornell University Press 1998.
(4) Claude Levi-Strauss, "Do Dual Organizations Exist?", in Structural
Anthropology (New York: Basic Books 1963), p. 131-163; the drawings are
on pages 133-134.
(5) See Rastko Mocnik, "Das 'Subjekt, dem unterstellt wird zu glauben'
und die Nation als eine Null-Institution," in Denk-Prozesse nach
Althusser, ed. by H. Boke, Hamburg: Argument Verlag 1994.
(6) See Jacques Lacan, "Television", in October 40 (1987).
(7) The main work of Nicolas Malebranche is Recherches de la verite
(1674-75, the most available edition Paris: Vrin 1975).
(8) As to this ambiguity, see Paul Virilio, The Art of the Motor,
Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press 1995.
(9) The notion of this connection between cyberspace and Schreber's
psychotic universe was suggested to me by Wendy Chun, Princeton.
(10) A further pertinent inconsistency also concerns the status of
intersubjectivity in the universe run by the Matrix: do all individuals
share the SAME virtual reality? WHY? Why not to each its preferred own?
(11) What Hegel does is to "traverse" this fantasy by demonstrating its
function of filling in the pre-ontological abyss of freedom, i.e. of
reconstituting the positive Scene in which the subject is inserted into
a positive noumenal order. In other words, for Hegel, Kant's vision is
meaningless and inconsistent, since it secretly reintroduces the
ontologically fully constituted divine totality, i.e. a world conceived
ONLY as Substance, NOT also as Subject.
(12) Quoted from Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler, New York: Harper
1999, p. 134.
10617 words
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Inside the MatrixŤ - International Symposium at the Center for Art and
Media, Karlsruhe
In cooperation with EIKK and Bluebox e.V. � October 28, 1999
The Matrix, the Two Sides of Perversion - Philosophy Today; Celina (nettime) (Dec., Vol. 43)
