Inside the Matrix in the desert of the unreal (source: www.ilmanifesto.it ) How to escape the traps of philosophical reading of the film by the Wachowski brothers. The two episodes of The Matrix are the representation of this conflict and talk to the left. Exercise 'resistance' premises, or openly rebel alliance with the capital lit up the network? Input and output
While the first part was dominated by the urge to exit the Matrix, the the second makes it clear that the battle must be won within
Slavoj Zizek
There's something inherently stupid and naive to take seriously the basics "philosophy" of the Matrix series and discuss their implications: the Wachowski brothers are obviously not of the philosophers but only two people who flirt with some surface terms 'postmodern' and New Age harness so confused. Matrix is \u200b\u200bone of those films that function as a sort of Rorschach test, setting in motion the universalized process of recognition, like the proverbial painting of God that always seems to look directly at you, from whatever angle you look at it: practically every orientation seems to recognize in it. My Lacanian friends tell me that the authors must have read Lacan, the Frankfurt School scholars see in the Matrix the extrapolated embodiment of Kulturindustrie, the social Substance (Capital) alienated-reified directly take over, colonizing our own inner life by using it as a source of energy, New Age enthusiasts see in it the source of speculation about how our world is just a mirage generated by a global Mind embodied in the World Wide Web, not to mention the pervasive presence of Jean Baudrillard ... This series comes to the Republic of Plato: The Matrix not repeat exactly the device perhaps Plato's cave (humans as prisoners, tied to their places and forced to watch the shadow of (what they mistakenly believe to be) reality - in short, precisely the position of spectators in the cinema? This search for the philosophical content of The Matrix is \u200b\u200btherefore a temptation, a trap to avoid. Such pseudo-sophisticated readings that cast in the film the refined philosophical or psychoanalytic conceptual distinctions are much lower, due to a dive as innocent as that to which I have witnessed seeing the Matrix in a theater in Slovenia. I had the unique opportunity to sit close to the ideal spectator of the film - namely, an idiot. A man nearly thirty years to my right was so immersed in the film that bothered as long as the other spectators with exclamations like "My God, wow, so reality does not exist! So we are all puppets! "
However, the interesting thing is to read the Matrix movies is not as consistent but contain a philosophical discourse, because they, in their own inconsistencies, the antagonisms of our ideological and social predicament. What, then, Matrix? Simply what Lacan called "the Other," the virtual symbolic order, the network that structures reality for us. This dimension of the "big Other" is one of the constitutive alienation of the subject in the symbolic order: the Other pulls the strings, the subject does not speak, "is spoken" by the symbolic structure. In short, this 'Other' is the name of social substance, of all that because of where you were not ever completely dominates the effects of his actions, or because of which the final outcome of its activity is always something other than that to which he had sought or expected. And the inconsistencies in the film narration perfectly reflect the difficulties we face in breaking the constraints of social substance.
When Morpheus tries to explain the still perplexed Neo what the Matrix, he connects it to an error in the structure of the universe: "All my life you have the feeling that there is something wrong in the world. Do not you know what it is but it's there, it is a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. " Here, the film meets his greatest inconsistency: the experience of lack / of 'inconsistency /' s barrier should demonstrate that the reality we experience is experienced as a fake. However towards the end of the film Smith, the agent of the Matrix, gives a different explanation, much more Freudian: "Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? A world in which none suffered, where everyone was happy? It was a disaster. No one accepted the program. /.../ As a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. "
The imperfection of our world is at the same time as the sign of his being virtual and the sign of its being real. It could be argued successfully that the agent Smith (do not forget: not a human being like the others, but the direct virtual incarnation of the Matrix - the Other) is the figure of the analyst within the universe of the film: its lesson is that the experience of an insurmountable obstacle is the necessary condition for something we humans perceive as reality - the reality is ultimately that which resists.
Linked to this inconsistency is the ambiguous status of the liberation of humanity announced by Neo in the last scene. Neo's intervention, creates a "system error" in the Matrix, while Neo is aimed at those who are still stuck in the Matrix as the Savior who will teach you how to free yourself from the constraints of the Matrix: they can overcome 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 virtual reality supported by the Matrix and merely bend or change its rules: our "real" status is still that of a slave to the Matrix. We, so to speak, we only have more power to change our mental prison rules - so what do you say to get out of the Matrix to enter the "real reality" in which we are miserable creatures who inhabit destroyed the surface of the earth? So the solution is perhaps a postmodern strategy of "resistance" which is to "subvert" or "crowd out" the system of power continuously, or a more radical attempt to destroy him?
There is another memorable scene in which Neo must choose between the red pill and the blue one, the choice is between Truth and Pleasure: between a traumatic awakening in the Real and the persistent illusion regulated by Matrix. He chooses Truth, unlike most despicable character in the movie, the informant-agent Matrix between the rebels who, in the memorable scene of the dialogue with Smith, the agent of the Matrix, collects a piece with a fork a juicy steak and says, "I know it's only an illusion virtual, but I do not care because its taste is true." In short, he follows the pleasure principle that it is preferable to stay in the illusion, even though we know that it is only an illusion.
However, the choice of the Matrix is \u200b\u200bnot so simple: what, exactly, Neo offers to humanity at the end of the film? Do not direct a revival in the "desert of the Real," but a free-floating in the multitude of virtual worlds: instead of simply being a slave to the Matrix, you can leave learning to bend its own rules - you can change the rules of our physical universe and so learn to fly freely and may violate other laws of physics. In short, the choice is not between the bitter truth and illusion pleasant, but rather between the two modes of illusion: the traitor is intended illusion of our "reality," dominated and manipulated by the Matrix, while Neo offers humanity experience the universe as a playing field where we can play a multitude of games, moving freely from one to another, changing the rules that determine our experience of reality
In Adorno's sense, one should say that these inconsistencies are the moment of truth of the film: they signal the antagonisms of our late-capitalist social experience, antagonisms pairs on ontological principles such as 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 strength of the film is nevertheless detected at a different level. The exceptional impact of the film is probably not due to its central thesis (what we experience as reality is an artificial virtual reality generated by 'Matrix', mega-computer that is connected directly to the mind of all of us), but its central image of the millions human beings leading a claustrophobic life in an incubator filled with water, kept alive to generate Energy (electricity) for Matrix. So when (some) people "awaken" from their immersion in virtual reality controlled by the Matrix, this awakening is not opening in the great space of external reality, but first the horrible realization of this condition of this fence, where each of us is actually only a fetal body, immersed in the prenatal ... This is the absolute passivity forclusa fantasy that sustains our conscious experience as active subjects, self-determine - is the final fantasy and perverse, the notion that we are ultimately instruments of the jouissance of the Other (Matrix) to which our matter is sucked Battery life as we were. This brings us to the true libidinal enigma: why Matrix need human energy? The purely energetic solution is, of course, meaningless: the Matrix could have easily found another, more reliable energy source that did not require the solution of extremely complex virtual reality coordinated for millions of human units. The only reasonable answer is: the Matrix feeds on human jouissance. So, back again to the fundamental Lacanian thesis that the Other itself, far from being an anonymous machine, needs a constant influx of jouissance. Herein lies the correct insight of The Matrix: in its juxtaposition of the two aspects of perversion - Firstly, the reduction of reality to a virtual domain regulated by arbitrary rules that can be suspended by the other, the hidden truth of this freedom, the reduction of the subject matter of a completely reduced to a liability instrument.
Matrix Reloaded offers - or rather, play with - a number of ways to overcome the shortcomings of the previous episode. But in doing so, he remains trapped in its new inconsistencies. The film's ending is open and uncertain not only fiction but also in relation to the vision of the universe on which it rests. The fundamental tone is that of suspicion and further complications that make the problem simple and clear ideology of liberation from the Matrix that supports the first part. The ecstatic ritual of the community in the underground city of Zion can not but recall a fundamentalist religious ceremony. Doubts are cast on the two key prophetic figures. The visions of Morpheus are true, or is a paranoid madman ruthlessly imposing his hallucinations? Neo does not even know if he can trust the Oracle, a woman who foresees the future: she is manipulating Neo with his prophecies? It is a representative of the positive aspect of the Matrix, in contrast with agent Smith in the second half, it turns into an excess of the Matrix, a virus that crazy trying to avoid being destroyed by multiplying? And what about the cryptic statements of the architect of the Matrix, he who wrote his software, his God? He informs Neo that in fact is living in the sixth updated version of the Matrix: In each of them is born a Savior, but his attempt to free humanity has turned into a catastrophe of enormous proportions. So Neo's rebellion, far from being a unique event, is only part of a larger cycle of trouble and repair of the Order? Towards the end of The Matrix Reloaded, so everything is called into question: the question is only whether any revolutions against Matrix can do what they advocate or whether they should end up in an orgy of destruction, but if they are not called into account, if not planned, by the Matrix. Then, even those who are freed from the Matrix are actually free to make a choice? The solution is to risk open rebellion, however, resigned to the local games of "resistance", while remaining within the Matrix, or even to engage in inter-class collaboration with the forces of 'positive' in the Matrix? It is here that ends Matrix Reloaded: an absence of "cognitive mapping" that perfectly reflects the plight of the Left today and his struggle against the system.
A fold is further provided at the very end of the film when Neo, simply by raising his hand, magically stop the vicious squid-like machines that attack humans. How could he do this in the "desert of reality, "not in the Matrix where, of course, he can do wonders, freeze the flow of time, defeat the laws of gravity and so on.? This unexplained discrepancy refers to the solution that "everything that exists is generated by the Matrix," that there is no ultimate reality? Although the temptation to "postmodern" - to find an easy way out by claiming that all this confusion that exists is the infinite series of virtual realities that are reflected one another - is to be rejected, there is a correct insight in this complicated the pure and simple division between the "real reality" and the universe created by the Matrix: even if the battle takes place in the "reality real, "the crucial battle must be won in the Matrix. This is the reason why you should (re) enter into his fictional universe virtual. If the collision had occurred only in the "desert of the real," we would have yet another boring dystopia on the ruins of mankind's struggle against the evil machines.
To put it in terms of good old Marxist opposition structure / superstructure: we should take into account the irreducible duality of, on the one hand, material processes of socio-economic "objective" that occur in reality as well as the other side of the political process real-ideological. And if the domain of politics is inherently "sterile," a theater of shadows, but nonetheless crucial in transforming reality? So even if the economy is the real site and politics is a theater of shadows, the main battle to be fought in politics and ideology. Consider the disintegration of communist power in the late `80: While the main event was the actual loss of state power by the Communists, the crucial break occurred at a different level: in those magic moments in here although formally the communists were still in power, people are suddenly no longer afraid and no longer took seriously the threat, so even if the battles 'real' with the police continued, all in some so they knew that "the game" was "finished" ... Matrix Reloaded The title is so very appropriate: if the first part was dominated by the urge to exit the Matrix, to be free from his grip, the second part makes it clear that the battle must be won within the Matrix, you need to return to it.
In Matrix Reloaded, the Wachowskis have consciously raised these issues, putting in front of all the complications and confusions of the liberation process. This will be put in a difficult situation: they now have before him an almost impossible task. To succeed, the future third part, The Matrix Revolutions, will produce nothing less than the appropriate response the dilemmas of revolutionary politics today, a model for the political act that the Left is desperately looking for.
(Translation Marina Impallomeni)
