Ruminatrix
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Thursday, May 15, 2003
Vat-language
Adam Gopnik's New Yorker piece on the movie Matrix Reloaded has already been referenced on the tree. I don't mean to steal a link here and have yet to see the movie -- but Gopnik's essay isn't really a movie review and has little to say about the sequel. (Anyway, isn't the middle third of any trilogy likely to have inherent weaknesses?)
His subject is the metaphor of the Matrix as a political and cultural motif of this wired age. He mentions Zizek, Baudrillard and Phillip K. Dick. (I read Phillip Dick's novels voraciously as a college student and loved his prophetic vision, the dark humor, which hasn't really been touched on in any of the movie versions. Later I found out that Dick's amphetamine-fueled writing binges severely aggravated a tendency to acute paranoia. Back then I would have found that very cool.)
Others, including the philosophers Hilary Putnam and James Pryor, have also been fascinated by the "who-controls-reality" question -- though Gopnik ignores the Situationist Guy Debord, who coined the notion of the "society of the spectacle," which surprised me.
For Gopnik the Matrix is an image of our current powerlessness to change our society, of constraint on human agency on the outside world. He quotes James Pryor:
"If your ambitions...are relatively small-scale, like opening a restaurant or becoming a famous actor, you may very well be able to achieve them. But if your ambitions are larger -- e.g. introducing some long-term social change -- then whatever progress you make toward that goal will be wiped out when the simulation gets reset..."Matrix-like social control is evident in the "vat-language" (the term is Putnam's) exhibited by our monopolized media (especially TV), of corporate public relations-speak and advertising. It subverts language, makes us feel unable to feel that we can act upon the world, to change reality.
The other matrix is the one we are linked to right now, through code. The Web (a synonym for matrix after all) does have a liberating/exploratory potential, and enables us to stay remotely linked. But it does have a more malign aspect -- the "enforced" passivity of being consumers, viewers, watchers of the spectacle, the way it makes us fear being "unplugged", "out of the loop" if we leave.
To me The Matrix (the movie) was a wry vision of the entertainment industry itself, its ability to create shock and awe out of makeup and cardboard and plywood and computer graphics, all with the goal of getting the customers not to care very much about anything other than "what's on next?" or "where can I buy that?" Nothing illustrated this better than all the discussion of The Matrix's "ground-breaking" stop-motion special effects, which were almost instantly integrated into a series of TV ads for the Gap clothing stores, showing the seamless interface of entertainment and retailing.
Maybe local actions are the only ones which can be undertaken today. As I write, I hear that the 33% fare increase on New York's network of subways and buses -- which had been pushed through against public opposition by bureaucrats using fixed budget numbers -- has been overturned in the courts. Small victory, but a step in the right direction.