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CTHEORY
THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 26, NO
3 *** Visit CTHEORY Online: http://www.ctheory.net
***
Article 133 03/09/16
Editors: Arthur and Marilouise Kroker
Making the World Safe for Fashionable Philosophy!
Joe Milutis
(ëèòåðàòîð è ìåäèà õóäîæíèê, ïðîôåññîð
Óíèâåðñèòåòà Þæíîé Êàðîëèíû)
Fashionable Philosophy on the Road to Revolutions
A colleague of mine recently expressed malaise after showing ~The Matrix~
accompanied by assigned readings from Baudrillard's _Simulations_.
According to her, students did not respond because the connections were
too apparent, and that the theory was, in a sense, redundant with the film.
But if Baudrillard is built into the structure of ~The Matrix's~ narrative
in the way Freud is built into the narratives of Hitchcock's films, where
was the undergraduate frisson that we remembered when reading, for example,
Freud's theories of sexuality while watching Marnie? After some thought, I
came to the conclusion that the difficulty rested in a fundamental misunderstanding
of how Baudrillard worked within ~The Matrix~, a misunderstanding that is
widely shared. Because while the filmmakers often attempt to acknowledge
their debt to Baudrillard, they get Baudrillard wrong. It's not that the
connections are too obvious. Rather the connections really don't connect
up and are superficial at best. It's as if the filmmakers read the first
five pages of _Simulations_, and misread them at that. However, is this
misreading a knowing one, one that sets viewers in interpretative
unbalance, a theoretical vertigo that makes the ~Matrix Reloaded~ (which I
will approach at the end of this essay), and ~Matrix Revolutions~ necessary
and compelling sequels?
Near the beginning of ~The Matrix~, Neo has hidden some data contraband
inside a copy of Baudrillard's _Simulations_. The book is a joke of
simulation in itself; bound in green cloth with gilt letters, it simulates
the authority of a classic but has no backing or substance. It is all
surface -- the inside has been cut out, is no longer essential. It is an
empty prop in more ways than one. But is it a key to the film?
Perhaps in the spirit of the logic of simulation, its presence merely
simulates that there is an inner bookish meaning in what may be, in the
end, a pure action film humdinger. A number of 90s films attempt the same
sort of alliance between theoretical knowledge and film narrative. For
example, in ~The Truth About Cats and Dogs~, we find a love interest
reading Barthes' _Camera Lucida_ over the phone to a woman he thinks is
Uma Thurman's character but who is in actuality her more brainy and ostensibly
less physically desirable friend, played by Janeane Garofalo. If you
remember, Barthes' book on photography is a meditation on the "punctum,"
the aspect of the photograph activated by subjective desire. The film
seems to equate Barthes' "the punctum... is a kind of subtle beyond
-- as if the image launched desire beyond what it permits us to see"
[1] with the more sententious "beauty is in the eye of the beholder,"
or some other triteness about inner beauty a la Cyrano de Bergerac. In a
similar way, in ~Permanent Midnight~, Elizabeth Hurley's character is
reading Heidegger, and I can imagine it is a way to announce that the film
is a reading of Heidegger's notion of "standing reserve." The
term designates stockpiled resources on hand that, while products of
technological progress, remain useless until they can reenter into the
system. ~Permanent Midnight~ is about talent as standing reserve, and what
happens while people wait for the call -- the nightmare of waiting
implicit in Hollywood work.
These books may signal merely the fashionability of their philosophies,
if it weren't for the fact that they seem also to be presented as keys. If
we were to read Baudrillard as a key to ~The Matrix~, one would have to
ask why we are still drawn to this authoritative fetish, even in the midst
of cyberville -- locus of the death of both the author and the book. What
kinds of interpretive traps do we get in by acknowledging the
authoritative, rather than fashionable, presence of this book?
First and foremost, to gloss Baudrillard, for him, the truth is not that
there is none, but that the question of truth or non-truth is an obsolescence.
The difference between true and false is dissolved in the logic of Capital,
as laws of the universe become subject to the 'primum mobile' of exchange:
The real is produced from miniaturised units, from matrices,
memory banks and command models -- and with these it can be
reproduced an indefinite number of times. It no longer has to be
rational, since it is no longer measured against some ideal or
negative instance. It is nothing more than operational. In fact,
since it is no longer enveloped by an imaginary, it is no longer
real at all. It is a hyperreal, the product of an irradiating
synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without
atmosphere. [2]
In the logic of the hyperreal, "matrices, memory banks, and command
models" generate the real, and this real is the world of the agents
in ~The Matrix~, not the imaginary, or transcendental "outside"
which the film determines is "the real world ." In fact, in
Baudrillard's conception, there is no outside, or "ideal instance"
from which to judge the simulation, and this lack of referentiality is the
very definition of the simulation. In the film, both the agents of Zion
and those of "the machine" are effectively outside, and
productively alienated from, the system where they do battle. In the case
of the machines, while the classic AI model of reality might hold within
it some idea of an agency that could conspire to enslave all humanity
and exploit its natural electromagnetic energies to power a theater of
an eternal 1999, more sophisticated theories of computer intelligence
recognize that reality is based on random evolutionary and connective
principles without pattern. In a sense, in these theories of emergence,
computers engender the universe of play of the postmoderns by never
approximating some ideal of knowledge, but by creating new knowledge based
on pressures and contingencies evolving through ever changing definitions
of the real . In Baudrillard's nightmare view, a new totalitarianism,
which cannot be resisted (since there is no stable "outside" to
its functioning), evolves out of the matrix of AI, nuclear and genetic
technology. But this vision is not the vision of ~The Matrix~.
The film posits, in a fairly traditional way, another world -- a transcendental
signified -- which guarantees the manifest world. In this way, ~The Matrix~
is less like Baudrillard and more like _Midsummers' Night Dream_ or some
other neo-Platonist fantasy. ~The Matrix~ keeps the reality principle in
tact by positing a place from which simulation can be judged and compared.
In many ways, computers have been sold to the public in the last 20 years
by maintaining this reality principle -- gesturing to the potential not
only for virtuality but also radicality and spirituality through home
computing. Apple's famous ~1984~commercial, directed by Ridley Scott,
posited the Macintosh as a way to rage against Big Brother. Through
choosing Apple, we would collectively explode the consensual hallucination,
as the young punky woman in jogging attire did when she hurled a
sledgehammer towards the television monitor. Later, computers would be
sold as spiritual technologies, as references to eastern religions
proliferated through computer ad copy -- a trend in which ~The Matrix~
marks an important cultural moment. But for Baudrillard, both radicalism
and metaphysics have become simulations in themselves. Charming evocations
of a past age, both leftism and spirituality (or at least their
caricatures) posit or guarantee another world behind the false one, to
which desires more righteous tend.
So if ~The Matrix~ is a moral tale positing that we should all try to
search for the true meaning of life behind false appearances, then Baudrillard's
~Simulations~ is definitely not the correct manual for this application.
More interestingly though, and to the credit of the filmmakers, is the
idea that perhaps ~The Matrix~ is a moral tale about the problems of
reading reality or film _via outmoded authoritative structures _such as
the book, and by association Baudrillard or even film theory. Does the
film intentionally get Baudrillard wrong? Have academics all over the
world, in adopting ~The Matrix~ for their classes, taken the Baudrillard
bait? It would seem that the main theme of this film, like an Edgar Allan
Poe story in hyperdrive, is decoding -- not only the decoding that goes on
in the plot, but the activity of audience decoding. If decoding a film
via poststructuralist classics is a dead end, how does this film create
an alternative?
The Electromagnetic Soap Opera
The first shot of the film is a blinking cursor, waiting for input. This
cursor announces that there will be nothing to see, only a string of text
operating at the level of the command line interface. This textual
substrait of the image is referred to throughout, as the green and black
of old-time computer screens imbue the image, in what can only be called
"raster-chic." Decoding this machine language, one would need a
form of what Woody Vasulka calls "machine semiotics,"[3] rather
than Baudrillard or perhaps Lacan (whose Real is also quite different than
that of ~The Matrix~. However, there seems to be some subtle alliance
between Lacan and Lewis Carroll or Jean Cocteau when Neo, before entering
the "real world" will get covered and consumed by a mirror-like
substance which, once he masters it, he consumes himself -- a Mobius
strip-like rewrite of the "Mirror Stage.") The film's constant
rain refers less to cloudbursts than to glitches at the level of this
primary code, since it makes one think of the rain of data from the
opening credits, ~The Matrix's~ signature visualization of machine
language. When a sprinkler system goes off inside the citadel of the
agents, it seems less like it is extinguishing a fire, and more like it is
extinguishing the image, as if data is malfunctioning to the extent that
the system of false images will break down, allowing us to see the code.
Even machine-gunned bullets hitting faux-marble columns seem more like
disaggregated pixels than actual violence, a disturbance of in the image,
a breaking through appearances to get at system knowledge. The true world
of ~The Matrix~, then, seems to be premised on a nostalgia for
pre-interface computing. The dialog itself sounds like text-based VR (MOO
or MUD-speak), a product of command-line computer culture, whose hackers
and programmers -- indebted to Dungeon and Dragons -- live the world of
flow-chart-like narrative choices: "Don't go down that road,"
"One of these lives has a future, the other does not," and the
famous red pill/blue pill choice. Given the way the text-based interface
is valorized in this film, Morpheus iconoclasm seems not merely to be
directed toward the iconology of a slick pixelless interface, but toward
cinema itself.
In tandem with this foregrounding of text and the semiology of the command
line is another system of meaning that challenges traditional textual
analysis -- the electromagnetic. ~The Matrix~ is a plausibly engineered
fictional world in that its Rube Goldberg of digital and electromechanical
technology is not mere mise-en-scene, adding to the film's hyperfuturism
shot through with retrofuturist charm, but is productive of the dramatic
tensions and narrative solutions of the film, i.e. infrastructure is
protagonist, and a misunderstood one at that. The matrix's Achilles heel,
it would seem, is that it is not purely digital, but is designed to feed
off natural bioenergy -- in effect, it is dependent on the human heart.
This feature places the film in the sub-genre I like to call "the
electromagnetic soap opera." This category includes any science
fiction motivated by the combination of electromagnetic science and Theosophical
mysticism, whose characters operate in worlds where invisibles blur in the
orgone haze of wavelength, plasma and 'prana', where forbiddingly complex
technospheres generate impossible scenarios which are nevertheless
explainable and controllable via the powers of the heart and the
understanding of true nature. ~Star Wars~, ~Johnny Mnemonic~, ~The 5th
Element~ , and most of Japanese anime (notably in the television series ~Neon
Genesis Evangelion~) engage in this technoscientific mysticism. Because
the matrix enslaves natural bioenergy, it would seem that the traditional
call to the pulsations of the heart would be suspect. In the history of
cosmological mysticism -- origins of the science of electromagnetism --
the powers of the heart are what provide direct access to more absolutely
exterior sources of energy (the sun, the heavens). They are also
what connects human to machine when God is replaced by a ubiquitous nexus
or energies, the pulse that modulates all materiality. Yet in the world of
~The Matrix~, the sky has been scorched, sundering the ethereal connection
between human and heaven. It is a spiritual as well as material pollution,
since natural energy no longer comes from the cosmos. Electromagnetic
energies no longer connect human electricity to deep space. Left without
even a Gnostic deity, or the pagan blessing of a sunny day, humanity is
constantly on the verge of becoming posthuman.
When Neo is plugged into the system, running off his own electromagnetic
energy, like all citizens of the matrix he is susceptible to the agents
and can be possessed by them. The transport chairs are networked through a
system of old-fashioned black rotary phones, ostensibly utilizing "old"
copper wire technology. Cell phones, in contrast, are associated more with
the agents (when they are used by the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar, it is
only for communication in moments of helplessness and as a device of
betrayal). On the one hand, the rotary phone represents merely a way
to get into the system that is unpoliced. On the other, copper wire is
posited as the means of transport, as if its ability to translate electrical,
analogue impulses rather than packets of zeros and ones makes it a vehicle
for channeling what is essentially human -- a humanity that is reduced to
its electrical ontology and thus exploited in an extreme way; Neo is twice
reminded of his "coppertop" status.
In the cosmology of computer languages, an electromagnetic pulse is initially
translated into ones and zeros, off and on -- and this translation marks
the primal alienation of the digital from the referentiality of the
analogue. Those ones and zeros of machine language -- the liveliness of
which is indebted to natural energetics in the same way a mill runs off
the energy of a river -- are then parsed into different levels of
programming language. Programming language is then manipulated by means of
the interface, at which point, one need not be conscious of the deeper
levels of system management. For ~The Matrix~, the agents (programmers)
come up against hackers who question the ways in which they've organized
these languages. "We couldn't find the programming language to describe
your perfect world." In a sense, like the soap opera, ~The Matrix~
tries to approximate this perfect world through obsessive telephoning. But
~The Matrix~ also resembles a particularly postmodern form of 'Naturphilosophie',
or rather a new etherealism. If the mill's exploitation of natural
resources through the process of industrialization once inspired writers
to imagine the river without its industry, so here, the exploitation of
electromagnetism in the 20th century (from radio, to television, and the
computer), has inspired a subgenre of science fiction that tries to
imagine the world of frequencies and waves without the technology that
enframes them. This electromagnetic etherealism far from positing distinct
worlds promises a continuum, a real which, rather than existing outside
of the system, more properly infiltrates all -- and code is its double, 1s
and 0s piggybacking each pulsation of the real.
When Morpheus says "Welcome to the real world," we are perhaps
convinced, instead of any continuum, of the divisions between real and
false that the film proffers. The whole color palette changes in the
Nebuchadnezzar, from the raster-green to a more Calvin-Kleiny blue, grey,
brown. In this way, the distinction is made between a world based purely
on code (green/black) and one which, while hooked into the world of code,
is exploiting the electromagnetic in a more industrial paradigm.
Throughout, we get the sense that Morpheus isn't entirely right on, that
he's like some 60s Marxist who has lost touch with the world but who is
nevertheless groovy, so we suffer him when he says things like "I'm
here to free our mind." His insistence on the Nebuchadnezzar as the
real world is perhaps just what Baudrillard calls a "reality effect."
There's always the even more "real" Zion, and at least one crew
member (Cypher) mutines against Morpheus' concept of the real. Neo's
messianic powers outright derive from a misreading or reinterpretation of
Morpheus' teachings. While Morpheus' Mosaic dogma posits an outside of the
system, Neo literally dives into the system by which he is enslaved (when
he dives into the body of the agent); when he emerges at the other end,
we are led to believe that the code is a reality that even the agents
don't understand. Up to this point in the film, the green and black colors
signify that the world is illusion, but paradoxically, when Neo sees the
green and black code everywhere, he has attained true knowledge (one could
say that, instead of approximating a Christian messiah, he is here a kind
of super-Jew -- Christ without the reality principle of the break from
Judaism, Christ without Christianity, Christ with Kabbala). Morpheus'
battle is that of the typical man versus machine. Neo's affinity for the
machine world unsettles the terms of this battle, and his colleagues
marvel "he's a machine."
In a sense, then, ~The Matrix~ sets up a philosophical argument, of which
the references to _Simulations_ are not the last word and the key, but
rather first steps towards another set of arguments -- which may, in the
end, turn out to be Baudrillard dialectically recharged. The very
color-coding of the film, created in order to convince viewers about the
divisions between the real world and the simulated one, is just a code, as
dubious as the code of the agents. The color red, color of false leads (as
in a "red-herring") is utilized in this scheme to denote
distraction of false reality. A woman appears in a red dress in the
construct to warn Neo of the deadly consequences of distraction, and
Cypher, the apostate, wears a red sweater in the Nebuchadnezzar. But it is
also through the agency of the red pill that anyone is ever able to get to
Morpheus' "real world." In this way, if we go beyond one layer
of color-coding in the film, another layer contradicts it or calls it into
question (if we wanted to remain within the postmodern model here, these
layers would not take us deeper and deeper but would exist simultaneously
as their own self-sustaining interpretive fictions, just as choosing not
to "overanalyze" a film exists in a world with its own 'physis'
just as does the world of the rigorous reading). For the film, it would
seem that our interpretations more than our actions are what carry us
along and determine our fate. Consider, for example, the multiple
interpretations of the message of the Oracle, or a crucial, casual misread
by Cypher at the moment when Neo is about to go "down the rabbit hole."
As the impact of the red pill starts to disrupt the input/output signals
through which Neo is wired to the mass-hallucination, Cypher says, "Kansas
is going bye-bye." Of course, in ~The Wizard of Oz~, Kansas is the
"real world" and OZ is the world of fancy, so Cypher's evocation
is completely upside-down. It would seem that the hull of the Nebuchadnezzar
is the very Kansas, with all its depression-era hardship, that has been
lost to the OZification of culture. Cypher is a character who is always
getting his dichotomies mixed up, and in the end finds himself on the
wrong side of them. It would seem, then, that the film equates evil with
unsubtle thought.
The comparison to ~OZ~, though, is instructive, not merely because of
the color palette change signifying transport from real to fantasy, nor,
as a colleague has pointed out, because of the production of the film in
Australia. Even ~OZ~ deconstructs its own reality principle implicit
in the color shift that announced color film to the world (in the same way
~The Matrix~ announced flo-motion and virtual camera work). Consider the
depiction of Dorothy's Kansas, a dust bowl idyll which now may seem as
fantastic as OZ if we appreciate Kansas' particular conjunction of
technology and culture specific to a time now lost but not, by far,
outside of the matrix of the machine. When we first are introduced to
Auntie Em, she is busying herself with a chick incubator, leading us to
wonder if in the biotech future there will be stranger reasons for
Dorothy's lack of mother. When Dorothy sings "Somewhere Over the
Rainbow" by a mechanical reaper, her enmeshedness in this machine's
reality undoubtedly also has a certain science fictional charm. (Similarly,
in the "real" of ~The Matrix~, the crew wears artfully detangled
sweaters that remind us of the computer's origin in the Jacquard loom, and
of the impossibility of disengaging ourselves from the warp and woof of
machine reality.) ~The Wizard of Oz~, while emerging from that homespun
American mystical vitalism described in its own epigram as a "kindly
philosophy" that "Time has been powerless to put ... out of
fashion," has a covert cynicism. Dorothy is an ingenue who cannot
fathom the constantly dire situation that history and circumstances have
placed her wards. While the film's dialogue ends on an upbeat note ("There's
no place like home!") the soundtrack strikes a sour note, as if to
point out that Dorothy's idea of home, as well as her fantasy, is at worst
delusional or cretinish at best a fragile fiction conceived to hold off
time and history -- the forces that will serve to potentially bankrupt her
wards (Almira Gulch, aka the Wicked Witch of the West, owns half of the
county, after all), and scatter their provisional family structure to the
wind.[4]
The Return to "The Desert of the Real"
In the raging campaigns against fashionable philosophy, more kindly philosophies
return with a vengeance, without distance or irony, and with implicit
anti-intellectual intent. But I would argue that they are only received as
such, because seemingly naive 'Naturphilosophie' can be a rather
sophisticated reaction to a reality that has outstripped even our most
sophisticated theorizations of it. For ~The Matrix~ and especially ~The
Matrix Reloaded~, it is the moment when interpretation must give way to
action. The charm of this action series, however, is the fact that action
is determined by the quality of interpretation. The simple impulse and
intuitive leap is qualitatively determined by a prior engagement with
complexities. People who stream into today's current "mind bending"
films might be willing to undertake only so many philosophical gymnastics,
which is why the complaint about ~Matrix Reloaded~ seems to be nearly
unanimously towards the long discursive segments of the film. No doubt,
these disquisitions are undertaken by fellows who were perhaps chosen for
their comic-book evocation of whiteness in this afrocentric sequel -- The
Head Councilor, The Merovingian, and The Architect -- and we are in this
way asked to question their ideas. But the benevolent Councilor starts to
clarify for viewers what Neo was already intuitively aware of by the end
of the first movie: that the machine is everywhere, there is no outside,
and that the issue is not one of true and false, human and machine, but
rather one of control. Here, we have, in a sense, had a Baudrillardian
homecoming. The strict boundaries between the dream world and the world of
reality are broken down in ~Reloaded~, compounded by strange intercutting
between matrix, Zion, and Nebuchadnezzar. The first sense we get of the
weakness of these barriers between worlds is when we see Neo haunted by
dreams of the matrix. One would have to ask, how does one dream about a
dream world (unless its real)? Recall Zizek's description in _The Sublime
Object of Ideology_ of the Lacanian notion of the dream:
[T]he Lacanian thesis [is] that it is only in the dream that we
come close to the real awakening -- that is, to the Real of our
desire. When Lacan says that the last support of what we call 'reality' is
a fantasy, this is definitely not to be understood
in the sense of 'life is just a dream', 'what we call reality is
just an illusion', and so forth. We find such a scheme in many
science-fiction stories: reality as a generalized dream or
illusion. The story is usually told from the perspective of a
hero who gradually makes the horrifying discovery that all the
people around him are not really human beings but some kind of
automatons, robots, who only look and act like real human
beings; the final point of these stories is of course the hero's
discovery that he himself is also such an automaton and not a
real human being... . The Lacanian thesis is, on the contrary,
that there is always a hard kernel, a leftover which persists
and cannot be reduced to a universal play of illusory mirroring.
The difference between Lacan and "naive realism" is that for
Lacan, the only point at which we approach this hard kernel of
the Real is indeed the dream. When we awaken into reality after
a dream, we usually say to ourselves 'it was just a dream',
thereby blinding outselves to the fact that in our everyday,
wakening reality we are nothing but a consciousness of this
dream. [5]
So it is that, while the rebels maintain a pose (or repose) of slumber
in their transport chairs, they do so without seeming to sleep ... as if
they work at rectifying a trauma, which remains in the Real.
There is no discovery of a truth in the ~Matrix~ movies, or rather, each
one has a truth, which continues to overturn another. The first ~Matrix~
offers in a sense a more childlike view of the world, while ~Matrix
Reloaded~ becomes cynical only to return to the childlike again (and Neo
will have to retain whatever childlike impetuosity he has retained from
the first film, in order to maintain a connection to his power). We could
also say that ~The Matrix~ pits mechanical social realism versus digital
hyperrealism, while ~Matrix Reloaded~ asserts a digital-mechanical
continuum (the opening code-rain of ~Matrix Reloaded~ becomes the gears of
an old mechanical punch-clock), and the ubiquity of programming (with
differences drawn between the poorly written and the upgraded). In this
new version, Morpheus becomes immediately suspect ... he's wearing the red
sweater of delusion, and the film shows how his vision is questioned by
his peers, clouded by desire, and finally exposed as its own dream. His
last line in ~Reloaded~ may be a call to reload the terms of racial politics,
but it also points to the irrational aspect of his righteous
single-mindedness about what is real: "I dreamed a dream and now that
dream is gone from me."
The revealed ubiquity of programming in the sequel overwhelms the possibility
of actual choice, but there is, once again, a return to the powers of the
heart from out of the Baudrillardian vertigo , and also a return to action.
The Oracle, who turns out to be a program herself, is an intuitive program,
of lesser mind than the Architect, but her intuitive nature makes her more
powerful than the Architect who knows too much. While Neo pains himself
over the choice of accepting her offer of a piece of red candy, it's just
candy, after all. The status ultimately accorded to interpretative keys
has perhaps been reduced in ~Reloaded~ to the status accorded the wizened
keyman -- "handy." It is, after all, Neo's connection to Trinity
which gives him his super powers. At the end of ~Reloaded~, Neo stops
the sentinels dead in their tracks with a surge of electricity from his
body. Prior to this moment, Neo's powers have only been actuated in the
virtual world of the matrix, but here, they are working in the supposed
"real," and from the heart as it were. Instead of the power to
hack and reprogram, this power to stop the sentinels is electromagnetic,
auratic -- a Theosophical burst of chakra energy -- encouraging one more
suspension of interpretation before the last episode.
The Matrix films reload a number of arguments. One can think of the Marxist
meme from the "Theses on Feuerbach" about philosophy versus action.
The Althusserian cunning of Agent Smith's greeting of "Mr. Anderton"
(he's always trying to convince Neo that he's only human) opens up rickety
anti-humanist debates. But the argument that remains most trenchant seems
to be the one which leaps out of the debate, or at least tries to.
Thinking about the green codes, I begin to think not only of emerald
cities and green witches, but I think of that famous definition of green
by the late and legendary experimental filmmaker, Stan Brakhage. He was
indubitably aware of his naivete when he asked readers to: "Imagine
an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by
compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of
everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an
adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to
the crawling baby unaware of 'Green?'" [6] Brakhage got a lot of
flack for this type of film theorization over the years of his long and
productive career. But his gambit, which was the gambit of Eisenstein
as well, was that something remained within the image, beyond the word,
exceeding the peremptory force of language. Hollis Frampton, in many ways
the anti-Brakhage, described the seductions of what he called "logophobia"
in this way:
Eisenstein was at once a gifted linguist, an artist haunted by the claims
of language -- and also, by training, an engineer. It seems possible to
suggest that he glimpsed, however quickly, a project beyond the
intellectual montage: the construction of a machine, very much like film,
more efficient than language, that might, entering into direct competition
with language, transcend its speed, abstraction, compactness, democracy,
ambiguity, power ... a project, moreover, whose ultimate promise was the
constitution of an external critique of language itself. If such a thing
were to be, a consequent celestial mechanics of the intellect might
picture a body called Language, and a body called Film, in symmetrical
orbit about one another, in perpetual and dialectical motion. [7]
Is this the machine where Neo finds himself? Between the powers of the
textual and the powers of the image, between analysis and emersion, the
past and fashion's flair, interpretation and change, is precisely where
Neo tries to find the future, or at the very least a 'tertium quid'. But
will the action hero be able to save the world once again?
Notes:
[1] Roland Barthes, _Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography_. 1980.
Trans. Richard Howard. (NY: Hill and Wang, 1981), 59.
[2] Jean Baudrillard. _Simulations_. Trans. Paul Foss, et al. (NY:
Semiotext[e], 1983), 3.
[3] Woody Vasulka and Charles Hagen. "A Syntax of Binary Images: An
Interview with Woody Vasulka." _Afterimage 6_, nos. 1/2 (Summer
1978), 20-31.
[4] After writing this paragraph, I thought I should finally read Salman
Rushdie's BFI Film monograph on ~The Wizard of Oz~, thinking that his take
might be similar. As one could imagine, Rushdie did take a cynical stance
towards the film's notion of "home," however merely as a
question of cosmopolitan taste. For those with good luck, good looks, and
a talent for living, there is indeed a home in ~OZ~. The dreary Kansas
should be left behind. However, I would insist on the unstable balance
between these two no-places. "No place like home" could
literally mean that home is nowhere, utopian. Kansas is already
post-natural, a place adrift like OZ, and the two places merely form two
extremes of what we would now call diaspora. See Salmon Rushie. _The
Wizard of OZ_. (London: BFI, 1992).
[5] Slavoj Zizek. _The Sublime Object of Ideology_. (NY: Verso,
1989), 47.
[6] Stan Brakhage. "Camera Eye -- My Eye." From _New American
Cinema: A Critical Anthology_, ed. Gregory Battcock. (Dutton, 1967),
211.
[7] Hollis Frampton. "Film in the House of the Word." From
_Circles of Confusion: Film/ Photography/ Video Texts 1968-1980_. (Rochester:
Visual Studies Workshop P, 1983), 85.
Joe Milutis is a writer and media artist. He is Assistant Professor
of Art at the University of South Carolina, where he teaches sound art
production. Current projects include, in addition to a book length
manuscript on the ether, an experimental episodic musical about memory,
repetition, and an interminable, totalitarian Christmas. Written work has
appeared in _Cabinet_, _Afterimage_, _Artbyte_, _Wide Angle_, and
_Experimental Sound and Radio_ (ed. Allen Weiss), among other places.
CTHEORY online
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