The Matrix - Simulacra and Dystopia
<center>© 2001 by Daniel du Prie</center>
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<br>Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where our bodies live. (Barlow, 1996)
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<br>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)
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<br>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.
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<br>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.
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<br>"The Matrix", like a number of contemporary science-fiction films (eg "Bladerunner",
<br>
<br>Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where our bodies live. (Barlow, 1996)
<br>
<br>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)
<br>
<br>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.
<br>
<br>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.
<br>
<br>"The Matrix", like a number of contemporary science-fiction films (eg "Bladerunner",
References: in Text</b> <br><li>Barlow, J.P. ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace ', available at http://www.eff.org/~barlow/library.html <br><li>Durham, S. (1998) Phantom Communities: The Simulacrum and the Limits of Postmodernism Stanford: Stanford University Press. <br><li>Jameson, F. (1992) The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System Bloomington: Indiana University Press. <br><li>Levery, D. L. (2001) ‘From Cinespace to Cyberspace: Zionists and Agents, Realists and Gamers in the Matrix and eXistenZ ' Journal of Popular Film and Television 28 (4): 150-162. <br><li>Miller, E. D. (2000) ‘The Matrix and the Medium 's Message ' Social Policy 30 (4): 56-61. <br> <br><b>Bibliography</b> <br><li>Jordan, T. (1999) Cyberpower: the culture and politics of cyberspace and the Internet London: Routledge. <br><li>Schmid, W. T. (1998) Plato 's Charmides and the Socratic Ideal of Rationality Albany: State University of New York Press.