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Apropos of [[psychoanalysis]], Theodor W. [[Adorno ]] claimed that [[nothing ]] in it is more [[true ]] than its exaggerations - and the same can be said [[about ]] The [[Matrix]]. This is one of the few [[films ]] which function as a kind of Rorschach [[test]], like the proverbial painting of God which seems always to stare directly at you, from wherever you look at it: practically every [[theoretical ]] orientation seems to recognize itself in it. My [[psychoanalytic ]] 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 in the World Wide Web...

What, then, is the Matrix? Simply what [[Jacques Lacan ]] called "big [[Other]]," the [[virtual ]] [[symbolic ]] [[order]], the network that [[structures ]] [[reality ]] for us. In a properly [[paranoiac ]] way, the [[film ]] externalizes this virtual [[symbolic order ]] in the really-existing Mega-Computer. However, the strength of the film resides not so much in this 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 the [[image ]] of the millions of [[human ]] beings leading a claustrophobic life in 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...

The [[truth ]] behind this [[fantasy ]] can be detected through its very inconsistencies. When Morpheus (the African-American [[leader ]] of the [[resistance ]] group who believe that Neo - Keanu Reeves - is the One who will liberate [[them]]) tries to explain to the still perplexed Neo what the Matrix is, he - he [[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."

So 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]]."

Here the film encounters its basic [[inconsistency]]: the imperfection of our world is at the same [[time ]] the [[sign ]] of its virtuality AND the sign of its reality. Linkied to this inconsistency is the inconsistency about [[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 a 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 should 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 stop bullets, he should also have been able to derealize blows that wound his body).

The final inconsistency concerns the ambiguous status of the liberation of humanity announced 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?

The lesson of these inconsistencies is that 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: 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 [[void]], since even my own personal experience can be stolen, manipulated, regulated by the machinical Other. One can see how the prospect of radical virtualization bestows on the computer the position which is strictly homologous to that of [[Cartesian ]] [[evil ]] God /genie malin/: 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... 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...

In an Adornian way, one should therefore [[claim ]] that the inconsistencies of the film are its [[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).

As to this ambiguity, see [[Paul ]] Virilio, The Art of the Motor, Minneapolis: Minnesota [[University ]] Press 1995.

==Source==* [[The Matrix: The Truth of the Exaggerations]]. <http://www.lacan.com/matrix.html>

[[Category:ZizekSlavoj Žižek]][[Category:Articles by Slavoj Žižek]]