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The [[Matrix]], or two sides of [[Perversion]]Slavoj [[Zizek]].[[Philosophy ]] Today; Celina; 1999; Volume: 43.

When I saw [[The Matrix ]] at a local theatre in [[Slovenia]], I had the unique 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?