Re: <nettime> The Matrix Rules

[kuni <kuni@mail.uni-mainz.de>]

Replicant wrote:
> 
> --- "Dr. Future" <richard@dig-lgu.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> >It is supposedly the culmination of tendencies first noted over thirty > >years
> >ago in writings like Debord's "Society of the Spectacle" where "everythin
> >that was directly lived has passed away into representation".
> 
> This concept was expressed even earlier - in 1909, by E. M. Forster in his
> seminal short story "The Machine Stops".
> 
> >From http://www.transparencynow.com/mach1.htm :
> 
> "As in any well-functioning totalitarian society, the inhabitants of this
> automated prison believe they live this way by choice, having long since
> developed an aversion both to the surface of the earth and to direct
> experiences, unmediated by the machine."
> 

imhop expressions of this concept as such tend to be replicants (or
better: revenants) of one of our good ol' classics in the field of
political theory as well as in the field of aesthetics and media theory: 
plato's "hoehlengleichnis" ("cave parable"??? sorry, but don't know the
english title translation).  

but anyway, even regarding the possibility that not only objects but also
texts seen in the rear-view mirror of so called intellectual history might
seem closer to each other than they really are, the problem with 'matrix'
is not that none of the ideas suggested in "The Matrix" are strictly new,
(indeed it is in the very heart of the concept of the story that there's
no new idea to be imagined anyway, neither by it's characters, nor by the
public watching the movie), but that the boring old ideas and images being
brought up again and again are either reactionary and conservative by
themselves or set on stage in a reactionary and conservative way.  

and well: i'd really wonder if one could consider the often self
referential form. as a quality by itself anyway. but especially regarding
commercial hollywood cinema the so called self referential form has become
a kind of radical chic of conservativist self understatement you will find
in most of it's productions (and again especially and therefore especially
penetrant in those that have been sold during the last, say, ten to twenty
years). 




#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net