Page 233 - Cyberculture and New Media

224 Technology on Screen
______________________________________________________________
and represses the difference of the Other, and thus the threat of castration ;
the technological fetish recognises the impossibility of distinguishing
between the sentience that interacts with a medium and the sentience the
medium interpellates through both form and content. Cinematic
representations of technology speak (with much anxiety) of a realm of
representation and subjecthood which threaten the boundaries of spectacle
and voyeur, image and viewer, mechanical and organic. Rather than the
comfort of the gaze penetrating (and controlling) the phantasy space, new
media environments show us a world where it is impossible to distinguish
between the ‘real’ and technologically mediated. “Are we still in the game?”
Ted asks Allegra at then end of eXistenZ. The audience’s anxiety about the
ontological status of the narrative is as comprised as the protagonists’.
Films such as The Matrix and eXistenZ infer a new model of
specularity. The representation of new media environments, of virtual
realities conjures up a new viewing paradigm, a shift from a visual
voyeuristic model to a diffused paranoid model. Here the acoustic (hearing
voices) is as important as the visual, the panopticon is as prevalent as the
voyeur because seeing and being watched are contemporaneous, the vision
itself is organic, opaque and tactile. The game players plug into the game in
eXistenZ, the Matrix plugs into and feeds off humans, the precogs in Minority
Report are attached to the machines that screen their visions. The screen is
either nonexistent or an interactive social space as in Minority Report. The
conceptual boundaries between seeing and feeling, perception and reality,
past and present (memory and perception), the individual and the collective
are all problematised and breached. These films concern themselves with
phantasies of persecution and penetration. They present us with the return of
the (cinematic) repressed: our desire for a more immersive interactive
medium returns in the paranoid delusion of it as a threat . The inability to
distinguish between reality and illusion is a crucial component of paranoid
psychopathology. The impossibility of distinguishing between reality and
simulation is the central narrative anxiety of The Matrix and eXistenZ and
speaks to the central epistemological anxiety/desire of postmodernism. This
returns us to the central dilemma of the Cartesian meditations. The
supposition is that “there is an evil spirit, who is supremely powerful and
intelligent, and does his utmost to deceive me. I will suppose that sky, air,
earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external objects are mere delusive
7
dreams, by means of which he lays snares for my credulity.” The rational ‘I’
who thinks, whom Descartes proposes, is breached in paranoia; and
according to these films in new media environments. Paranoia operates not
merely as an individual pathology, a breakdown of reason, but as an
epistemological method of enquiry, an attempt to make sense of a
compromised subjectivity, in this context the new subjectivities engendered
by new technologies. Thus the paranoid gaze on/of technology in these films