baudrillard - matrix decoded (le nouvel observateur interview)

8/12/2019 Baudrillard - Matrix Decoded (Le Nouvel Observateur Interview)

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ISSN: 1705-6411

Volume 1, Number 2 (July 2004)

The MatrixDecoded: Le Nouvel ObservateurInterview With Jean Baudrillard1

Translated by:

Dr. Gary Genosko(Canada Research Chair in Technoculture Studies, Lakehead University, Thunder

Bay, Ontario, Canada).

and

Adam Bryx(Graduate Student in English, Lakehead University).

The simulacrum hypothesis deserved better than to become a reality.2

Le Nouvel Observateur: Your reflections on reality and the virtual are some of the key

references used by the makers of The Matrix. The first episode explicitly referred to

you as the viewer clearly saw the cover of Simulacra and Simulation.3Were you

surprised by this?

Jean Baudrillard: Certainly there have been misinterpretations, which is why I have

been hesitant until now to speak about The Matrix. The staff of the Wachowski

brothers contacted me at various times following the release of the first episode in

order to get me involved with the following ones, but this wasnt really conceivable

(laughter). Basically, a similar misunderstanding occurred in the 1980s when New

York-based Simulationist4artists contacted me. They took the hypothesis of the virtual

for an irrefutable fact and transformed it into a visible phantasm. But it is precisely that

we can no longer employ categories of the real in order to discuss the characteristics

of the virtual.

Nouvel Observateur: The connection between the film and the vision you develop, for

example, in The Perfect Crime, is, however, quite striking. In evoking a desert of the

real, these totally virtualized spectral humans, who are no more than the energeticreserve of thinking objects .

Baudrillard: Yes, but already there have been other films that treat the growing


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indistinction between the real and the virtual: The Truman Show, Minority Report, or

even Mulholland Drive, the masterpiece of David Lynch. The Matrixs value is chiefly

as a synthesis of all that. But there the set-up is cruder and does not truly evoke the

problem. The actors are in the matrix, that is, in the digitized system of things; or, they

are radically outside it, such as in Zion, the city of resistors. But what would be

interesting is to show what happens when these two worlds collide. The most

embarrassing part of the film is that the new problem posed by simulation is confused

with its classical, Platonic treatment. This is a serious flaw. The radical illusion of the

world is a problem faced by all great cultures, which they have solved through art and

symbolization. What we have invented, in order to support this suffering, is a simulated

real, which henceforth supplants the real and is its final solution, a virtual universe from

which everything dangerous and negative has been expelled. And The Matrix is

undeniably part of that. Everything belonging to the order of dream, utopia and

phantasm is given expression, realized. We are in the uncut transparency. The Matrix

is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to

produce.

Nouvel Observateur: It is also a film that purports to denounce technicist alienation

and, at the same time, plays entirely on the fascination exercised by the digital universe

and computer-generated images.

Baudrillard: What is notable about Matrix Reloaded is the absence of a glimmer of

irony that would allow viewers to turn this gigantic special effect on its head. There is no

sequence which would be thepunctum about which Roland Barthes wrote, this striking

mark that brings you face-to-face with a true image. Moreover, this is what makes the

film an instructive symptom, and the actual fetish of this universe of technologies of the

screen in which there is no longer a distinction between the real and the imaginary.

The Matrixis considered to be an extravagant object, at once candid and perverse,

where there is neither a here nor a there. The pseudo-Freud who speaks at the films

conclusion puts it well: at a certain moment, we reprogrammed the matrix in order to

integrate anomalies into the equation. And you, the resistors, comprise a part of it.

Thus we are, it seems, within a total virtual circuit without an exterior. Here again I am in

theoretical disagreement (laughter). The Matrix paints the picture of a monopolistic

superpower, like we see today, and then collaborates in its refraction. Basically, its

dissemination on a world scale is complicit with the film itself. On this point it is worth

recallin Marshall McLuhan: the medium is the messa e. The messa e of The Matrix


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baudrillard - matrix decoded (le nouvel observateur interview)

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