What is the matrix?
Today a friend of mine challenges me to react to a discussion lead on the mailing list nettime (check their April archives), a highly recommended and refined place for intellectuals from all over the world to discuss and publish on very important issues.
These days their target was the movie ‘The Matrix’ just before the launch of the 2nd episode ‘The Matrix reloaded’. Its value or non -value in terms of philosophy, can it be used to teach philosophy to young students, or is this again a good Hollywood bargain? (check the ‘philosophical issue’ on the official website What is the matrix? ). My answer was: Who cares about philosophy? And by the way, why do they forget to mention race and gender ‘The Matrix’ is bringing in the pure male and white history of philosophy? Who does care if Platon, Socrates, Nietzsche, Baudrillard and their pairs are mistreated? And have become a mass culture product used to sell a movie. I give them all for the opening sequence with Trinity (see also: L’Eve virtuelle ou les paradoxes de l’héroïne cybernétique by Muriel Andrin ) Why don’t they care about what was new in the action movie compared to most of the others of the same type. Here the physical and mystical strenghth is replaced by a pure mental agency and gambling, during all this action movie, the protagonists are seated in look-liked dentist chairs, no more muscles, just brains and algorythms. I let all these philosophers down for this team of hackers made of women, teenagers, non white people, except the bad one of course (check Lisa Nakamura’s book: Race in Cyberspace). And the One, yes that’s the hurting point Keanu Reeves, empty persona we can fill in with any sexuality, any race, finally is to be a white man heterosexual one. Aren’t the philosophy teachers happy?
Just one more thing:
Something else, a thought. I did choose to answer here because we are among us, and not among pairs. But who are we? We are able to take ‘The Matrix’ seriously, but above all we have learned to take cinema for what it is, an industry which produces representations, and now i have in my icones’closet: Trinity, Morpheus, the Oracle, and i ENJOY it.