The Matrix - Simulacra and Dystopia
Uploaded by duprie37 on Sep 14, 2001
© 2001 by Daniel du PrieOurs is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where our bodies live. (Barlow, 1996)
You’ve been living in a dream world Neo. This, is the world, as it exists today: Welcome to the desert – of the real. (Morpheus to Neo in The Matrix)
From Plato’s "Charmides" to the Wachowski brothers’ "The Matrix" (1999), there is a tradition of writing in Western literature, which thinks about and imagines the city as either a utopia or a dystopia, or both. I believe that what such imagining allows us is to do is locate ourselves within a type of dialectic of the best possible or worst possible outcomes that our own historical conditions may lead us to. By imagining utopian and dystopic cities we are alerted to the ethical and moral implications that constantly changing social structures, always under continual sway by developments in technology, hold for communities in cities. Visions of dystopia and utopia function as allegories of contemporary society – of the particular historical moment of society in which a particular utopian or dystopic vision is produced. They historicise given moments by alerting us to and imagining the possible implications caused by technological change. Most of all, they historicise by reminding us of the fact that ours is just a given moment – things do not stay the same.
Jameson (1992: 11) notes that, “If everything means something else, then so does technology.” Particularly in an era where technological change is so very rapid, and where traditionally accepted notions about the position and function of the subject in a community or society have come under sustained attack, visions of dystopia and utopia ask just what technology might come to mean for us, in an age where living in diverse city communities challenges the dominance of any single meaning.
"The Matrix", like a number of contemporary science-fiction films (eg "Bladerunner", "The Terminator") deals with themes of conspiracy, paranoia, the loss of privacy and the dissolution of human society in favour of a technology that has become supreme in its own right. Their space of action is within the city. In both "The Terminator" and "The Matrix" humans have lost out to artificial intelligence, which, soon after having been invented, quickly becomes malevolent and takes control of itself at the expense of human society. The implication seems to be that two different sentient, intelligent...