the Matrix

Partial and perverse

There's a certain sense in which, yes, this category draws it's name from a well-known contemporary movie franchise. It is not my favorite movie, by any means; in fact, I'm not quite certain I even think it's a good movie (that goes double for Reloaded). However, it is a fascinating movie. I rewatched the original (%in between my first and second viewings of the sequel%), and it still held an odd power, that careened recklessly between horror and awe. The awe was fairly straightforward: cinematic tricks, in action scenes and all that in-between stuff (incidentally, the lack of fun cinema in between fights was probably my biggest real complaint with Reloaded). The horror peaked in the most controversial scene of the movie, when leather-coat clad Neo and Trinity assault the skyscraper in which Morpheus is held, wiping away the security guards on the first floor. The scene is notorious for its visual parallels with Columbine. For me, though, the horror, and it's an odd horror, I'll admit, was because of something slightly different.

Essentially, this scene is the realization of earlier dialogue between Morpheus and Neo, regarding the ability of the Agents to jump into any convenient body. The point of the scene is: You cannot trust those who are still wired to the Matrix; thus, they are fair game. I find this unsettling because it's essentially an ideology of revolutionary violence that I would hope we would see through by now. That is to say, the movie legitimates terrorist violence, arguing that most of the people are pawns of the reality that the Matrix is feeding them. Only when people are freed, can they see how the world really is; the gauze unshields their view.

Stripped of the violence, this view of ideology as blinding people to the world is not particularly remarkable. I believe, for instance, that it has strong Christian parallels. It was most explicit, though, in some styles of Marxism, particularly when class consciousness and false consciousness are emphasized. (That is, the working class, before realizing it's potential solidarity and abilty to rule, exists in a state of false consciousness, contributing to a system that brutalizes it; upon realizing who really gets what, the working class achieves enlightenment: class consciousness.) It's also been touched on by some feminists who feel that, historically, only women are able to truly understand the relationship between the sexes in our society. Ditto for some philsophers of color and racism. (All of these, it should be noted, are exaggerated to illustrate the point.)

I tend to go with Foucault on this, though, and believe that all perspectives (ie, what the working class thinks of the employer-employed relationship) are "partial and perverse." (I believe I'm quoting Susan Hekman, "Truth and Method: Feminist Standpoint Theory Revisited.") That is to say, everyone's a little bit blind when they look at the world.

The Matrix, then, is an interesting instance of a view I reject (ie, that anyone can unplug and really see how things are). My matrix, the primary allusion I want to make, comes with much stronger post-something or other credentials: Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and in particular the afterword that he added to the second edition to tidy up his wide and loose use of the "paradigm" (he claims to have been told that he uses the word in 33 different senses). In his afterword, he looks primarily at two senses of the word. First, paradigms are exemplary instances of a scientific vision. They can embody the heart of the theory, as well as its methods (think Einstein's work in relativity for post-Newtownian, ie "Einsteinian," physics). Second, a paradigm can be the theory itself. This second sense he split off into a new twenty-five cent phrase: "disciplinary matrix."

My interest comes in a perversion of Kuhn's matrices (which, keep in mind, are just useful for tracking work done in science, as it done "normally" and as it enters periods of revolution, when one disciplinary matrix is traded for another). In the Introduction to Theoretical Perspectives on Deviance, which he edited with Jack Douglas, Robert Scott brought Kuhn's matrices down to the level of individual worldview, and slapped it together with Berger and Luckmann's Social Construction of Realityand Mary Douglas's ideas on taboo and pollution, from Purity and Danger. Scott's primary view is to show how categories of deviance (from actual law-breaking to social deviants, including, for instance, the blind) are conceptual categories that people apply to the world around them; the primary characteristic that's being categorized then takes on other characteristics, that are linked within the worldview ("morally inferior" for criminals; "helpless" for the blind). This is especially the case when we encounter something new, which we have not previously fit into a slot.

As I said, Scott's primary concern is explaining where deviance comes from. Personally, I think that this is a pretty reasonable explanation of how people generally negotiate the world around them. This category, then, is for my own adventures in developing my understanding of the world--building, that is, my own matrix. In that wonderful way that we post-somethingists do things, this will include my own attempts to grapple my understanding of how these worldviews (taken as a generic bunch) themselves work.

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