MAtRiX
Ken Macleod about Matrix
“(…) I thought of something I hadn’t before – the real reason why
in the film the machines use the humans as a power source, as
‘batteries’, something I have long derided. On a literal level it is of
course ridiculous. But symbolically it makes literal sense: we are the
source of their power. Surplus value comes only from living labour, not
from machines.
Look at the title and see whose name is spelled out in it: The MAtRiX.
Comrades, this is no accident! “
June 7th, 2003 at 20:08
spectres and capital:
quote1.Marx
A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.
Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as communistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?
Two things result from this fact:
I. Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.
II. It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the spectre of communism with a manifesto of the party itself.
http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html
quote2. Derrida Spectres from Marx
The treatment of the phantomatic in The German Ideology announces or confirms the absolute privilege that Marx always grants to religion, to ideology as religion, mysticism, or theology, in his analysis of ideology in general. If the ghost gives its form, that is to say, its body, to the ideologem, then it is the essential feature [le propre], so to speak, of the religious, according to Marx, that is missed when one effaces the semantics or the lexicon of the spectre, as translations often do, with values deemed to be more or less equivalent (fantasmagorical, hallucinatory, fantastic, imaginary, and so on). The mystical character of the fetish, in the mark it leaves on the experience of the religious, is first of all a ghostly character. Well beyond a convenient mode of presentation in Marx’s rhetoric or pedagogy, what seems to be at stake is, on the one hand, the irreducibly specific character of the spectre. The latter cannot be derived from a psychology of the imagination or from a psychoanalysis of the imaginary, no more than from an onto- or me-ontology, even though Marx seems to inscribe it within a socioeconomic genealogy or a philosophy of labour and production: all these deductions suppose the possibility of spectral survival. On the other hand and by the same token, at stake is the irreducibility of the religious model in the construction of the concept of ideology. When Marx evokes spectres at the moment he analyses, for example, the mystical character or the becoming-fetish of the commodity, we should therefore not see in that only effects of rhetoric, turns of phrase that are contingent or merely apt to convince by striking the imagination. If that were the case, moreover, one would still have to explain their effectiveness in this respect. One would still have to reckon with the invincible force and the original power of the “ghost” effect. One would have to say why it frightens or strikes the imagination, and what fear, imagination, their subject, the life of their subject, and so forth, are.
http://www.angelfire.com/on/pisd/archive/FromSpectresofMarx.htm