Intermission: Et Tu, Neo?
"I'm going to show them a world without you. A world without rules or controls, borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible."
This essay is part of an ongoing series by The Nostomodern Review on Modernism and its future in the 21st Century and beyond. Each essay forms parts of the Nostomodernist project: a quasi-scholarly attempt at reevaluating what it means to be Modern in contemporary times, to possibly reconcile the gap between Modernism and its supposed successors, and to speculate on new trajectories within the current era of history via a mythic reading of Modernity itself.
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“Dodge this.”
Deleuze and Guattari used Greek myths in Anti-Oedipus; Camus used them in The Myth of Sisyphus. Adorno and Horkheimer used Sade’s Juliette in Dialectic of Enlightenment, and Nietzsche and Sartre wrote philosophical novels in Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Nausea respectively. For philosophers—we hence infer—there is no shame in using literature to do philosophy.
In particular, Borges’ short story, On Exactitude in Science, is used in Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, and also in The Wachowskis’ The Matrix. But if using The Matrix as a set piece feels overplayed—as an inescapable element of popular culture since the early 2000s—perhaps the reason is its metaphysics.
Take a look at Schopenhauer and Kant’s aesthetic theories in The World as Will and Representation and Critique of Judgment respectively. In the former, Schopenhauer ranks art hierarchically—architecture is at the bottom; music is at the top; landscaped gardens are ranked higher than artsy fountains—with lower forms embodying the basest representations of possible Ideas.
But borrowing from Derrida’s method of deconstruction, consider this hierarchy like others such as Plato’s divided line, and overturn its opposition—reduce it to immanence. In other words, ask yourself why music is postured over architecture? Why is something held over something else; and in this case, why is literature held over cinema, and hence why should we not use The Matrix to discuss philosophy?
“Do you think that's air you're breathing now?”
The Matrix has been written about enough—it cites a lot of things as well. Try throwing these at a wall: Putnam’s Brain, Descartes’ Demon, and Plato’s Cave-Dwellers—throw Zhuangzi at it too.
But when Morpheus says, “The Matrix is everywhere,” what does he refer to? The Matrix as a locale in a digital space, substituting for billions of occupants the simulacra of a previous world? Or the Matrix as a sociohistorical space in captivity—“to return is to return differently”—à la reconstructed but still different?
The Matrix was first released on 22nd April, 1999. Do you remember the United States before September 11, 2001? Do you remember Windows 98, the impeachment of Bill Clinton, or Columbine High School? The Matrix is a simulation of 1999—“the peak of your civilization”, as Smith says. It is not only a simulation of an environment but a simulacra of culture—and quite pertinently—of American culture at the edge of the second millenium. But unlike moviegoers in 1999, we are at least 22 years removed from that point—a simulacra of a simulacra of a simulacra.
Morpheus goes on: “It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. 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…That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind.”
“A prison for your mind”, he says. One cannot help but think he means something else, something other than the pure architecture of the Matrix itself. Indeed he may point to a second idea: a social Matrix more than a physical one. The digital panopticon of the Matrix, this labyrinthine watchtower—we may sometimes forget—is also a sociocultural space: we must live here too.
Even if one percent of its inhabitants reject the Matrix subconsciously—sensing that something is amiss, that their nature here is imprisonment—the other ninety-nine percent accept it; that is to say, they live like we do, albeit in 1999. To them, this is the Real too.
Or is it? A simulation is never the simulated; or as Alfred Korzybski says, “A map is not the actual territory”. To map the reality of 1999, the Matrix would need to replicate 1999 itself, including its consequences. In so doing, the Machines would require an infinite knowledge of the world as it was in that year, and if the Machines are determinists, then the Matrix—as a perfect simulation—would have to repeat the late 20th Century a second time ad infinitum.
If so, is replication what we mean by perfect simulation or are we simulating for what we cannot replicate? And if we replicate, is it still a replication of the big Other or can perfect clones even exist? If two perfect clones stood side-by-side, would there be any difference between them? Think about this: 1999 happened once—can it really happen again?
“The Matrix is a system, Neo.“
But “to return is to return differently”, no? Only there is no return to 1999 but only its immediate reterritorialisation; or as Agent Smith reiterates, “as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization.”
The Matrix is almost satirical. Yes, it contains markings of the late 1990s, such as its geography and technologies, but it lacks historicism or the traditions leading up to it. Despite the recreation of the material conditions, the Year 1999 of the Matrix is its own time and place. Territorialised in new meanings, rewritten within a shell, and let loose to its own history: who is to say that the Matrix is not some kind of Real in of itself?
As Žižek says in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, “the choice between the blue and the red pill is not really a choice between illusion and reality. Of course Matrix is a machine for fictions, but these are fictions which already structure our reality: if you take away from our reality the symbolic fictions that regulate it, you lose reality itself. So what is the third pill? Definitely not some kind of transcendental pill which enables a fake fast-food religious experience, but a pill that would enable me to perceive not the reality behind the illusion but the reality in illusion itself.”
There is a reality in fiction; there is a reality in artifice. To call the Matrix a simulation is inaccurate: it is a new world on its own. And if it were let loose upon itself, it would build a new history in its own time.
There are two Matrices: one machine and the other human. To use a similar analogy, even within the Cave and its shadow symbols, there is still a reality there.
“This is the world as it exists today.”
If so, then what is our reality? If we consider the 21st Century as a social Matrix, as an intangible fiction, or as Morpheus says, “a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch”, then what form does it take? Whereas the Matrix aped the signifiers of the late 1990s, what shadows form on our walls in turn?
Perhaps for the free humans of Zion, there is a Real world which exists. But even Zion is a Matrix in kind—a particular social being, a reterritorialised body. Its citizens are unable to escape its conditions, the trappings of their birth, and the spiral of their society. Every action, whether rebellious or coerced, is made in reaction to a certain plane.
For example: as Mark Fischer says, “we are inevitably reminded of the phrase attributed to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.”
Is this our social Matrix in the 21st Century? In other words, are these our shadows on the wall? Perhaps we have never left the Cave; we have simply rotated the shadowmakers, or going further, the shadows are the Cave itself. This is beginning to err on the side of the philosophy of language; but to conclude the point, I would like to muddle the distinction between simulation and replication a little more.
Are we not simulative in a way? Yes, our shadows will change over time, but in the same way the Matrix has simulated a reality, are we not simulating the shadow hands of late Capitalism everyday too? Are we not guilty of some level of progenation; that is to say, by participating in the spectacle, are we not responsible for its replication from one day to the next?
If simulation is the best alternative to replication—an imperfect process—then simulation can be an act of replication in of itself. If replication is the act, and simulation the result, then the notion of simulation is replicated each day; that is to say, the idea of simulation is replicated each time we make shadows. Although the result may be imperfect, the attempt in of itself is replicated each time.
Perhaps the question is thus not the shape of the shadows, but the act of shadowmaking itself. What compels us to make shapes? What drives us to try?
We rest here for now; perhaps, we will return in the future—differently.
But in other words, The Matrix is still a fun movie. Go watch it again.
Copyright © Thomas J. Pellarin, 2021. All rights reserved.