Page 234 - Cyberculture and New Media

Alev Adil and Steve Kennedy 225
______________________________________________________________
not only articulates anxieties about the threat to the boundaries between self
and Other, animate and inanimate and most crucially reality and illusion, but
also marks an attempt to imagine a new kind of subjectivity.
There are marked and extensive similarities between Neo in The
Matrix and Schreber, whose memoirs form the basis of Freud’s
conceptualisation of paranoia. Both are penetrated by something which feeds
off them, both hear voices, both are convinced that they are ‘the One’.
Undoubtedly the dominant reading offered is that this new subjectivity is a
space of crisis, a pathologised, abject space. However we can also draw
useful parallels between Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of the Body-
without-Organs and Neo’s description of the Matrix. Deleuze and Guattari
tell us that “The field of immanence is not internal to the self, but neither
does it come from an external self or a nonself. Rather, it is like the absolute
Outside that knows no Selves because interior and exterior are equally a part
8
of the immanence in which they have fused.” At the end of The Matrix as
the screen shows a computer screen with binary code and the words ‘System
Failure’ Neo tells us “I’m going to show these people a world with you, a
world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries; where
anything is possible. Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you”.
It’s worth noting that while the narrative externalizes and configures
the Matrix as hostile, as an empty BwO the ending of the film is ambivalent.
Neo speaks from within the Matrix, the sequels promise us more, not less of
the virtual. Technology is visualized as a threat, the space of abject maternity,
a womb-space that feeds off rather than nourishing its collectivized subjects.
Yet it is also the topoi of spectacle, where we can eat steak and look
streamlined and sleek in black leather in contrast to ‘real’ where, denied
fantasy, we must subsist on gruel looking grubby and grizzled in homespun
hemp.” Extending Deleuze and Guattari’s categorization of psychoanalysis,
we can characterise the cinematic apparatus as a ‘priest’ of vision. Thus it is
no surprise that mainstream Hollywood tends to translate/repress the desire
for this new specularity and its attendant collective subjectivity as a
projection of persecution rather than as internal desire for collective illusory
sentience (although that reading is still present). This is because cinema’s
traditional medium of existence is threatened by the prevalence of this new
model of specularity.
The point here is not simply that cinema tends towards dystopian
representations of new technologies because as an’old’ technologically
situated practice it is under threat. Beyond this economically (and culturally)
determined discourse we can see older discourses woven though differing
media which shape the representation of technology on film. Rutsky
identifies two contrasting ‘impulses’ of technology which predate cinema: the
9
Frankenstein complex and the mummy complex. In the former technology
comes to life whilst the mummy complex elides technology and the