cultural comment

Fiction, Cyberspace and Reality: The Matrix

Once upon a time I, Chuang Tsu, dreamed I was a butterfly flying happily here and there, enjoying life without knowing who I was. Suddenly I woke up and I was indeed Chuang Tsu. Did Chuang Tsu dream he was a butterfly, or did the butterfly dream he was Chuang Tsu? - Thomas Cleary 1991 The Essential Tao

Everyday, political, social, historical, economic, etc., reality has already incorporated the hyperrealist dimension of simulation so that we are now living entirely within the aesthetic hallucination of reality. - JeanBaudrillard, 1993 p. 74

Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream, Neo? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world? - Morpheus to Neo, The Matrix

1i Introduction: The Internet, Reality and Virtual Reality

The growth of the Internet over the last decade has had a major impact on the lives of many people. The speed, efficiency and convenience of e mail is part of daily life for a huge number of people. Businesses conduct trade and advertising on-line, and millions of people use the world-wide web for research, education and entertainment. It is a form of cyberspace - the term coined by the science fiction writer William Gibson, which he defined as a 'consensual hallucination'. That is, in some respects it does not really exist - except in the imagination of millions of people. In practise, it is no more than a huge network of computers spanning the entire planet, which anyone can tap into if they have a computer, telephone line and modem. The other main component of cyberspace is 'virtual reality'. This is the three dimensional, spatial, and (sometimes) sensory representation of reality, created in sophisticated software. It partly overlaps with Internet cyberspace because virtual reality representations are a popular part of the latter, notably in the environments where people interact with each other with text-based conversations. These are sometimes known as multi-user dungeons or MUDs, and were available on the worldwide web from 1995-1996.

This paper considers the following factors:

a) The experience of cyberspace poses questions about the nature of human identity and what value it has for the individual, i.e. its psychological significance.

b) Additionally, some academics are enquiring into the nature of human reality and consciousness, considering the phenomenon of cyberspace as " a new laboratory of the spirit" (Rheingold 1991, p. 391). The experience of cyberspace relates to the psychology of hypnosis.

c) Central to this analysis is the question 'in what way is cyberspace 'real', if at all?'

d) The cultural or social 'context' of cyberspace is important in the same way it is for analysing a novel or film. I begin by referring to a film which illustrates any of these themes.

1ii The Matrix

The Matrix, directed by the Wachowski brothers, was released in 1998. It was a huge success. This was partly for its impressive visual effects and partly for its thematic content (and also because of the appeal of its main actor, Keanu Reeves). Web sites and web discussion groups were constructed by fans to discuss and analyse its themes. Reflecting the enquiring nature of this interest, the 'official' site is named www.whatisthematrix.com.

The directors employed the contemporary interest in cyberspace, blended with religious, mythological, mystical, philosophical and technological ideas. They claimed to express and portray 'serious questions' and central to this an enquiry about 'reality': Do you believe that our world is in some way similar to "The Matrix," that there is a larger world outside of this existence? Wachowski Brothers: That is a larger question than you actually might think. We think the most important sort of fiction attempts to answer some of the big questions. One of the things that we had talked about when we first had the idea of The Matrix was an idea that I believe philosophy and religion and mathematics all try to answer. Which is, a reconciling between a natural world and another world that is perceived by our intellect (www.dvdwb.com/matrixevents/wachowski.html).

The film depicts the aftermath of a war between super-intelligent computers and human beings. The 'humanoid' computers have subjugated humanity by a form of electronic illusion and Thomas Anderson/Neo is the hero who challenges and defeats them, alongside a group of rebels who have discovered they are not living in reality. Their awareness of this fact gives the rebels a status analogous to spiritual teachers, who claim to reveal higher or deeper levels of reality. Their struggles are therefore the pursuit of the truth about reality: the search for the true self, escaping the limits of conventional perception. Examples of this are the ability to see bullets being shot in apparent slow motion, so Neo is able to dodge them. Some writers explore the way the Internet and virtual reality can - arguably - reconfigure our sense of personal identity. This ranges from the simple pleasures of on-line friendship and networking (Rheingold in Ludlow 1996, chapter 31), to the notion of transcending the physical definition of the body: There is little coincidence that VR emerged in the 1980s, during a decade when the body was understood to be increasingly vulnerable (literally, as well as discursively) to infection, as well as top gender, race, ethnicity and ability critiques. At the heart of the media promotions of virtual reality is a vision of a body-free universe. In this sense, these new technologies are implicated in the reproduction of at least one very traditional cultural narrative: the possibility of transcendence whereby the physical body and it social meanings can be technologically neutralised (Balsamo in Featherstone and Burrows 1998, p. 229). This is a peculiar outlook, suggesting that the intellect and the disembodied experience of cyberspace can impact on the physical reality of the body. Clearly they cannot, in the same way that you will never see a thought eating a sandwich!

1iii Cyberspace Analysis Reflects Society

This way of thinking is sometimes endemic to cyberspace studies. It is not unique however; it has become commonplace to hear people speak in a manner which is entirely figurative, but with all the emotion and the imagination that two subjects are equivalent. An example is the tendency for some women to use the term 'rape' to describe an encounter when it is not forced sexual penetration they are referring to at all (it may not even be sexual violence). I suggest that it is a semantic confusion, based on a culturally-embedded and emotive ideology. In the world of cyberspace, these logical demarcations do not always exist. In The Matrix, Neo learns the physical techniques of Chinese kung fu (with the philosophical connotations of the related practices of Buddhism and Taoism) from human-implanted virtual-reality programming. The notion that what you believe affects physical reality is one of the threads of the film, reminiscent of Kwai Chang Caine overcoming the searing heat as he lifts the urn and leaves the Shaolin temple, in the 1970s television series Kung Fu.

2i The Heroic Quest and the Battle

Neo joins forces with the group of rebel-guerillas, to escape the illusory matrix. It is a precarious position for them because they challenge the status quo, so are constantly hunted down by the (humanoid) machines, like germs being attacked by antibodies. They travel at the speed of light through space and time over telephone lines, suggesting the liberating communication possible across the Internet, like a science-fiction model of hypertext transfer protocol.

The theme of 'man versus the machine' and 'artificial life versus reality' is very contemporary. It has been growing in significance over the last few decades, particularly with the recent growth of the Internet. If we see the theme referring to technology generally, rather than computers specifically, we can see it as a subject that has occupied people for as long as technology has existed: how it changes our lives for the better, or for the worse. However as computers become increasingly sophisticated and powerful, they impinge on our lives like no other form of technology.

Within the contemporary context portrayed in The Matrix, we see the archetype of the 'chosen hero', delineated by Joseph Campbell in The Hero With A Thousand Faces (Campbell 1968).This is referenced in the film as the rebels wonder if Keanu Reeves is 'the one', like a spiritual messiah - anagrammatically, the name for him in this role is 'Neo'. It is one of the tensions of the plot as we, like the rebels, do not initially know if he is 'Neo'. On one level, his struggle is against technological subjugation. In the beginning of the film, Neo is advised to 'follow the white rabbit', referring to the Alice in Wonderland stories. The actor Joe Pantoliano's character 'Cypher' is a word-play on the term 'Lucifer'. This name further relates to the word 'light'. In the Gnostic system, the world you experience (as light) is seen as an illusion perpetrated by the principle that is not 'spiritual'. In Christian dogma, this is the devil. You thus have the philosophical polarity of reality and illusion expressed in the characters, enacted in the form of a battle.

2ii Social Considerations of Cyberspace: Military

Military power has been closely linked to the development of the Internet (which was originally a military network) and virtual reality. Current simulation technology is derived from 'virtual training' for military personnel: A pressing need of the military was to find effective ways of training personnel in the use of sophisticated weaponry. This was particularly the case when it came to aircraft, which by the 1960s had become complex and expensive (Wise 2000, p. 18). Wise then proceeds to explain how the concept of 'reality illusions' dates back to ancient Greece, and that Descartes provided the mathematical construct of the 'x,y,z' co-ordinate system - where the 'x' and y' are the horizontal and vertical planes, and the 'z' co-ordinate is the plane of 'depth' or perspective. This construct underlies all computer simulation, from the basic to the most sophisticated. Television representation of the Gulf war against Saddam Hussein was both fascinating and horrifying as we saw missiles landing on targets, like watching a video game. In a similar way that people are concerned about the psychological effect of watching violence in films, this 'video game' suggested a computer-mediated warfare, disturbing because of the absence of direct human involvement. As a specialised form of cyberspace we can see that it has great military value, but worrying implications, because it portrays human destruction only in simulated form. This situation parallels the famous photograph of the naked young girl crying and running away from a napalm attack in Vietnam. The photograph has an immense iconic power and both this and the Gulf war 'video show' are technological-visual representation. Some 'cyberspace issues' are not, therefore, entirely new. They are embedded within cultural life and have to be seen as such.

2iii Social Considerations of Cyberspace: Personal

Some people are finding that the personal experience of cyberspace is so engaging that it becomes difficult to dismiss it as 'merely' computer-mediated, visual phenomena on a VDU. There is a famous story of a 'virtual rape' that occurred a few years ago in a multi-user dungeon called LambdaMOO. It was an upsetting experience to the woman concerned and to the other people who witnessed it, and the administrators of the online community did not know how to deal with the situation. Some of the latter was ideological - it was possible for the 'perpetrator' to be removed from the database, but that meant adopting a hierarchical and dictatorial form of administration, offensive to the community's "resident anarchists" (Ludlow ed. 1996: 385). The other uncertainty they had was exactly what the status of the 'crime' was, if in fact it existed at all. These ironies and semantic complexities were apparent when the 'rapist' (on screen name Mr Bungle) was reprimanded by the 'victim' (on screen name legba): Where virtual reality and its conventions would have us believe that legba (and Starsinger) were brutally raped in their own living room, here was the victim legba scolding Mr Bungle for a breach of 'civility'. Where real life, on the other hand, insists the incident was only an episode in a free-form version of Dungeons and Dragons, confined to the realm of the symbolic and at no point threatening any player's life, limb or material well-being, here now was the player legba issuing aggrieved and heartfelt calls for Mr Bungles' dismemberment. Ludicrously excessive by RL's lights, woefully understated by VR's, the tone of legba's response made sense only in the buzzing, dissonant gap between them (Ludlow ed. 1996, p. 380). We see here again a confusion of semantic levels and their interpretation; not, as I suggested earlier, an unusual occurrence in our ideology-driven and 'media-embedded' society. The Matrix is a film; the virtual rape was in the intermediary zone of cyberspace; there are also real-life examples of this phenomenon. Commenting on the fictional portrayal of violence, an American journalist cited the following cases in his writing:

Just as fictions are being discussed as if they were actions, actual crimes and atrocities are being discussed as if they were cultural events, subject to aesthetic considerations. Trial lawyers won a lesser conviction for lady-killer Robert Chambers by claiming his victim was promiscuous; columnists defended dick-chopper Lorena Bobbit, saying it might be all right to mutilate a man in his sleep, provided he was a really nasty guy. The fellows who savaged Reginald Denny during the Los Angeles riots claim they were just part of the psychology of the mob. And the Menendez brothers based much of their defence on a portrayal of themselves as victims, a portrayal of their victims as abusers. These are all arguments appropriate to fiction only. Only in fiction are crimes mitigated by symbolism and individuals judged not for what they've done but because of what they represent. To say that the reaction to fiction and the reaction to reality are on a continuum is moral nonsense (Klavan 1994, p. 99).

3i Simulation and Hypnosis

At several stages in the Wachowski brothers' film, we see the true form of the matrix: dense code in a phosphorous green colour, reminiscent of computers in the 1970s and 1980s. It is this code that generates the illusion, the latter similar to the Indian notion of maya. It is like a visual rendering of Jean Baudrillard's notion of simulation which, he claims, has taken the place of reality: The real is produced from miniaturised units, from matrices, memory banks and command models (Baudrillard 1986, p. 3) The great simulacra constructed by man pass from a universe of natural laws to a universe of force and tensions of force, today to a universe of structures and binary oppositions. After the metaphysics of being and appearance, after that of energy and determination, comes that of indeterminacy and the code (Baudrillard 1986, p. 63) We can therefore approach a film like The Matrix on a metaphysical level, a social-critical level, and also in terms of psychological philosophy. 'Nebuchadnezzar' - the name of the hovercraft in the film - was a biblical (Babylonian) king who experienced troubling dreams. In one dream he was instructed by God to destroy the people of Jerusalem because they were worshipping false prophets. In The Matrix, humans live in a world that is no more than a dream. The name 'Morpheus' (Laurence Fishburne's character) refers to the Greek god of sleep and dreams. In some philosophical and spiritual teachings, the 'illusory' nature of the world is depicted as a form of hypnosis or sleep. This is particularly apparent in the writings of PD Ouspensky, pupil of GI Gurdjieff, whose system was largely based on Sufism. Ouspensky used an analogy of sheep and a shepherd who does not tell the sheep they are captured and are being 'farmed', exactly like the humans are in The Matrix:

There us an Eastern tale which speaks about a very rich magician who had a great many sheep….this magician was very mean. He did not want to hire shepherds, nor did he want to erect a fence about the pasture where the sheep were grazing. The sheep consequently often wandered….and above all they ran away, for they knew that the magician wanted their flesh and skins and this they did not like. At last the magician found a remedy. He hypnotised his sheep and suggested to them that they were immortal and that no harm was being done to them when they were skinned that, on the contrary, it would be very good for them and even pleasant; secondly he suggested that the magician was a good master who loved his flock so much that he was ready to do anything in the world for them; and in the third place he suggested to them that if anything at all were going to happen to them it was not going to happen just then, at any rate not that day, and therefore they had no need to think about it. Further the magician suggested to some of them that they were not at all; to some of them he suggested that they were lions, to others that they were eagles, to others that they were men, and to others that they were magicians (Ouspensky 1987, p. 219).

Psychologically, hypnosis occurs partly as a result of sensory withdrawal. Another way of saying this is your sensory awareness is narrowed. Hypnotic induction techniques like staring at a circling object or putting your attention into your fingertips mean you become less aware of the sensory experience of your environment. The state of hypnosis is not confined to consulting rooms but occurs in places like a church, and on motorways. Young children often exhibit hypnotic fascination with the television. From this understanding, 'simulated' warfare is particularly disturbing because it can create a mild condition of hypnosis in the viewer and thus the technology distances people from its horror first in a literal and geographic sense, and then in a psychological sense (and part of the process of soldier-training is to desensitise them to the horror of killing). According to Ouspensky, psychological 'sleep' is the reason for war in the first place and the way to prevent it from happening is like the smoker 'waking up' to the unpleasant reality of his habit; it is a recognised technique to help people stop, by advising them to become fully aware of the process and what it does to their body. You become increasingly sensitive to reality, which is the opposite to technological simulation: How many times have I been asked whether wars can be stopped? Certainly they can. For this it is only necessary that people should awaken. It seems a small thing. It is, however, the most difficult thing there can be because this sleep is induced and maintained by the whole of surrounding life, by all surrounding conditions (Ouspensky 1987, p. 143).

3ii Conclusion

In The Matrix, the fundamental question is a choice between reality and a colourful and sensory virtual life. In real life, we see people becoming entranced with increasingly sophisticated computer games and virtual reality experiences. The 1999 PlayStation television advertisements represented this. The first depicted two teenagers living in a dark and shabby room, claiming they were heroes in the world of game simulation; the advice was not to 'underestimate' the power of the PlayStation. The second advertisement depicted a strange, alien-looking girl advocating 'mental wealth' over other kinds of life experiences. Her appearance is a combination of natural but unusual bone structure and eye shape, make-up and lighting. Disturbingly, when she is finished speaking she giggles like the young girl she is, showing that she is just 'playing a game for an advertisement'. Cyberspace has become part of everyday and popular culture. Sometimes this is no more than entertainment or 'virtual networking' on the Internet; at other times it has a disturbing effect because it is purely imaginary and can become almost hallucinatory. As simulation in the Baudrillarian sense, it can sometimes replace reality, where human values are located. As we see from the writings of Chuang Tsu, philosophical enquiry into the nature of human reality is an ancient endeavour. The benefits, seductions and dangers of contemporary cyberspace complicate the matter even further, but do not change the fundamental nature of the questions. Many of these are represented in The Matrix and in this respect the film does indeed portray 'serious questions' and can be used in the enquiry as part of the "laboratory of the spirit".

References

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Baudrillard J 1983 Simulations London:Semiotext{e}

Campbell J 1968 The Hero With A Thousand Faces USA: Princeton University Press

Featherstone M and Burrows R ed. 1998 Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk London: Sage Publications

Feng GF and English J (trans.)1982 Tao te Ching London:Wildwood House

Klavan 1994 Utne Reader Magazine Minneapolis: Lens Publishing Company

Ludlow P ed. 1996 High Noon On The Electronic Frontier MIT Press

Ouspensky PD 1987 In Search Of The Miraculous London: Arkana

Rheingold, H 1991Virtual Reality London: Secker and Walburg

Wise, R 2000 Multimedia London: Routledge